“Mr. Douglass is out of town lecturing,” said Dorcas Vashon when she told Victoria about the upcoming event. “His sons are hosting the Monday Night Literary Club. The speaker will be Henry E. Baker. His subject will be ‘Originality.’ ”
Victoria was disappointed that she wouldn’t see the great man again, but the prospect of being in his home had her in high delight.
“Baker is a recent graduate of Howard’s law school,” Dorcas Vashon informed Victoria as the carriage pulled up to Cedar Hill. “Top of his class he was. He works at the patent office. As I understand it, he is at work on a book about colored inventors.”
“Colored inventors?” Not in her lessons, not in a newspaper, nor in any book had Victoria learned of colored people inventing anything.
“Yes, my dear. People like the tailor Thomas Jennings of New York City. Fifty, sixty years ago he invented a method of cleaning clothes without the use of water. ‘Dry scouring,’ he called it. What we today call dry cleaning.”
Victoria smiled wide. “It never ends, does it?”
“What?”
“Learning.”
“Not if you are awake to the world.”
They were nearly at Douglass’s front door.
“If only Mr. Baker knew,” Dorcas Vashon added, “he might have a chapter in his book titled ‘Inventing Victoria.’ ”
Victoria smiled as they stepped inside Frederick Douglass’s hilltop house with his splendid view of the national capital.
“Now there ought not to be anything strange or unbelievable in the fact that in any given group of more than 10,000,000 human beings, of whatever race, living in our age, in our country, and developing under our laws, one can find multipled examples of every mental bent.”
Hear! Hear! thought Victoria as Baker lamented that so many people outside the race had “the fixed conviction that no colored man has any well-defined power of initiative, that the colored man has no originality of thought …”14
Why not? Victoria thought after the lecture. She drifted away from the East Parlor mingling. “Where is the library?” she asked one of the waitresses. Claire Branch had told Victoria that Douglass’s library was a sight to behold.
It was indeed. Its walls were hung with portraits of John Brown and a host of other famous people, some colored, some white. Most intriguing was an engraving of someone Victoria did not know.
A determined black man with so much purpose in his eyes.
Dressed in something like a toga.
A staff in his left hand.
Beneath his portrait was written Cinque
Below that: The Chief of the Amistad Captives.
Victoria made a mental note to find out who he was.
Beholding Douglass’s rolltop desk …
Letter sorter.
Paper cutter.
Blotter.
Inkstand and pen.
Victoria imagined the great man deep in thought, writing his speeches.
And the books! “Must be more than a thousand books in here,” she whispered as she looked around the room.
Slave Songs of the United States … Socrates, Plato & the Grecian Sophists … Lake Ngam … Narrative of William Brown, a Fugitive Slave … The Negro in the American Rebellion, His Heroism & His Fidelity … Buds and Blossoms from Our Own Garden … Moral Heroism; Or, the Trials and Triumphs of the Great and Good … The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Burns … Complete Works of William Shakespeare … The Odyssey of Homer … Looking Backward. He had two copies of the Columbian Orator.
“How much I would have missed out on!” Victoria whispered, reflecting on that mad moment in Baltimore when she fled the house with first-floor shutters askew.
How much I would have missed out on! she thought again during Madame Selika’s concert at Lincoln Hall. As she listened to the “Queen of Staccato,” so resplendent in her soft pink gown, Victoria wondered what the prima donna had worn when she sang at the White House. The first colored person to do so, she had read. Selika’s “Ave Maria” moved Victoria to tears. She also wept during a performance by the Fisk Jubilee Singers at First Congregational.
Then came the grand masquerade at Tallmadge Hall, where Victoria nibbled on croùtes de foie gras, mushrooms au gratin, and asparagus on toast, sipped champagne, swirled, twirled, glided among harlequins, dukes, knights, princes, Greek gods, an Indian chief, an Ali Baba, a mermaid, an Alice in Wonderland.
It was more than she could have dreamed of.
“What an ingenious costume!”
“Did you come up with this?”
“You look marvelous!”
The compliments overflowed and overwhelmed. Victoria had designed her costume herself with help from Madame Keckley: a petticoat of pale gold satin with an overdress made entirely of peacock feather tips and eyes and with a laced-up back. Victoria’s gilded Venetian mask, studded with glass beads of many colors, sported a peacock feather on one side.
When someone asked, “Why peacock feathers?” Victoria replied simply, “Renewal.”
She sat not one dance out.
If only the Sarah Paces of the world could see me now!