AFTER THE PUBLICATION of his book The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, Frannie helped the Quakers raise money in America to purchase Douglass’s freedom. She also worked on his newspaper The North Star, in which he wrote: “Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color…” Frannie attended the first women’s rights convention in the United States, with Aunt Agatha, in 1848 at Seneca Falls, New York, where Douglass demanded that women be given the right to vote.
SOME SIX MONTHS after Frannie left the Sankaty Light—to take up his history—Isaac began to call again upon Mary Starbuck. Neither she nor I had any doubt that he was courting her. Mary had always had a shining serenity to her countenance, but now she began to shine with life renewed. When the proposal came, she accepted.
They were married in the Unitarian Church, to which Mary transferred her church membership, and I thought there was no emblem more appropriate than its golden dome, presiding over the beginning of their life together.
With the height of the lighthouse, her new home, Mary fell in love as much as I had done at age fourteen with my Lighthouse tower. She loved, too, the service to the light, and the fidelity that it required. She had had no desire to stay in the home that she had shared with the first Mr. Starbuck. The cottage was a house, I told Mary, with its low stone wall, that seemed married to the land. I told her that a lighthouse is married to the air.
I was truly happy for both Isaac and Mary (she had not even to change her last name, since it was already Starbuck), but now I felt much more alone, since my neighbor to the south was gone, and her house stood empty. Increasingly, Justice and I turned to our neighbor to the north, Robben Avalon, for company.
