Maggie’s evidence handed the Dickinsons a loaded gun. They had the ammunition to shoot down the Todds, but it would have been unthinkable to shame Austin in public. It sufficed that this gun was to hand in the course of the trial to come. Even before the trial opened it had an impact on Mr Bumpus who understood, better than Mabel, how questionable was a gift of land that a lover meant to take from his rightful heirs in order to content a mistress. As the trial approached the good Bumpus backed away when he could, wary of his reputation.
How far Mabel grasped the effect of Maggie’s disclosures remains doubtful. Later, when years had passed and facts had dimmed, Mabel would call Maggie a ‘fool’, an ‘Irish Paddy’, a nonentity who had told ‘a pack of lies’. She denied Maggie’s statement that she had played and sung to Austin at The Evergreens when his family was away. Mabel said she could recall only one occasion when she was there in the absence of the family, and Mattie Dickinson had locked the piano, so playing would have been impossible. A glance at the deposition filled her with such ‘disgust’ she did not care to read it.
Mabel resolved to sue Lavinia for slander and David Todd agreed. He was fond of Lavinia but, included as he was in the allegation of fraud, his blood was up. On 4 October 1897 Mrs Todd entered a suit against Miss Dickinson, asking compensation of $25,000. She alleged that it was Miss Dickinson’s design to bring her into ‘public disgrace and contempt’, as well as exposing her to prosecution for a crime punishable as forgery. This injury to her reputation troubled her mind and body.
To sue is a form of therapy in the initial stage because the rhetoric of advocacy offers the balm of self-justification. This kind of rhetoric makes it impossible to imagine another or nuanced point of view, as opposed positions get set in stone. Seven witnesses were lined up on Mabel’s side, two of them leading citizens of Amherst. They said that Lavinia had voiced her ‘slander’ to Mr Hills, in the hearing of his housekeeper Miss Seelye, and also to the respected headmistress Mary Stearns, who employed Mabel to teach art at her school. Mrs Stearns backed Mabel staunchly.
In the Amherst Slander Case, plaintiff and defendant were now reversed. Over the winter of 1897–8 the court decided to hear Mrs Todd’s action against Miss Dickinson before it heard the Dickinson action against Mrs Todd. The slander case came up on 28 February 1898, in the Superior Court of Hampshire County in Northampton. Presiding was Justice John Hopkins of Millbury. Partisan heat, fuelled by gossip, ran high and the Connecticut Valley was divided into opposed camps: Toddites versus Dickinsonites. The court was packed: no case had ever excited such interest, given the standing of the adversaries and the seriousness of the charges. Lavinia was present; Mabel not — for reasons unknown. Her husband represented her so far as the court allowed.
Mabel’s non-appearance calls up her vulnerability to reputation. The two related cases were going to be about her reputation. Austin’s part in their affair was not to be discussed and nor was his reputation ever disparaged even though he was the guiltier party in so far as he had damaged and split his family. And though overtly David Todd supported Mabel, he too was safe, his reputation preserved with his wife’s help. Mabel, then, had to stand alone to face judgement.
Mr Hills should have been a powerful witness in her favour but, pleading sick, he sent instead his housekeeper. Miss Seelye sported an opulent sealskin coat on the witness stand. Where did she get it? Her employer gave it to her, she said. There were hoots of laughter. A report of her employer’s private opinion echoed through the crowd: the Todds are ‘leeches, leeches, leeches’.
Once Lavinia’s adviser, and then Mabel’s man, Mr Hills saw fit to retreat. ‘He liked me’, Mabel believed, but when the time came he hesitated to appear on her side. Maggie’s deposition had done its work. A prominent banker could not be seen to side with an adulteress.
The same applied to a prominent lawyer. Though the records list Mr Bumpus of Boston as one of Mrs Todd’s counsel, he saw fit to fade from her scene: urgent business called him to Washington, which prevented his appearing for Mrs Todd at the trial.
A local lawyer, Wolcott Hamlin, replaced Mr Bumpus. He argued the importance of the absent Hills and made a plea for a continuance at a later date. Lavinia’s lawyers objected that Mr Hills was only one of seven witnesses and that he had not acted on their offer two days earlier to take a deposition in the presence of a doctor.
Judge Hopkins overruled the plaintiff’s motion. Mrs Todd was called, but as she failed to appear her case was dropped.
The land trial opened on the next day, 1 March, in the same Northampton court with the same judge.
Lavinia, aged sixty-five, was seated between Maggie Maher and her friend Miss Buffum. Mrs Stearns was seated beside Mabel. Each opponent had coopted a schoolmistress as her support. Called to the witness stand, Lavinia gave her age as ‘about sixty’. She wore yellow shoes and an ancient dark blue flannel dress with a belt, which she kept for best. The dress was pleated in the plain style of Emily’s white dress.
‘How is your health?’
‘My health is perfect.’ Putting back a long mourning veil, she did appear remarkably fit, with an air of readiness, even enjoyment. She still did her hair as in the 1850s, parted and coiled over the ears with the ends coming together in a knot at the back in the style of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. She made a point of these associations and meant to play up what she was: old-fashioned, distinguished ‘Miss Vinnie’, the late Squire’s remaining sister.
‘Have you ever been accustomed to give attention to your own business and the care of your own property?’ Mr Hammond, acting for her, asked.
‘Did you and your brother and sister sign a deed of that original [meadow] lot to Mrs Todd?’
‘Yes, sir. My sister was not living.’
Mr Hamlin, acting for Mrs Todd, objected. ‘I don’t see what relation this has to this matter.’ But it did, for Miss Vinnie had revealed two vital facts: one, that Mabel Todd had already received a plot of Dickinson land. Two, Miss Vinnie made it clear that Emily’s death preceded the transaction. Her lawyers had prepared this trail towards a trap as yet out of sight.
One eyewitness at the trial was Mary Jordan, an early Vassar graduate who taught English at Smith College in Northampton. She thought Miss Vinnie ‘ridiculous’, exactly as Vinnie had intended in her role as helpless dupe.
‘Miss Dickinson, is not this your signature [on the deed]?’
‘Yes — that is to say, it’s my autograph. I understood that someone in Boston wished my autograph, and thought that was what I was doing when I wrote it.’
‘Can you confirm that this case is about a release?’
‘Isn’t that business?’ Miss Vinnie asked in a wondering voice. ‘I know nothing of business.’
‘Did you not know that this was a contract?’ Offered the more familiar term, Miss Vinnie batted it back.
‘Isn’t that business, too? Father always attended to business.’
‘Miss Dickinson, did you never employ labor?’
‘No.’
‘Do you mean that you never hired servants?’
Miss Vinnie appealed to Judge Hopkins. ‘Does he mean Maggie?’
Judge Hopkins was seen to contain his mirth. Yet professional men respected gentlewomen like Miss Vinnie. The quaint unworldliness of the New England spinster was as she should be. Endearing. Unpretending. Her crape mourning veil reminded the court of her loss: her brother’s death had left her alone and unprotected.
Across the courtroom Mabel, in a stylish black hat surmounted with two white birds’ wings, thought Lavinia looked absurd. In her later years, reminiscing to her daughter, Mabel recalled Vinnie’s white, wrinkled face and wide mouth — too wide when she opened her mouth in wonder, showing too many teeth, some not her own. Mabel kept her lips even, as a lady should. She carried herself as tall as she could, like the New Woman of the day: a towering goddess whose upswept, puffed-out hair balanced a big hat, and whose arched bosom, like a straining bow, overhung a cinched waist. Taking her cues from Washington society, she didn’t see that Miss Vinnie’s indifference to fashion upstaged her. To a New England judge it declared a confidence in who she was, an authenticity and independence beyond the range of worldly cleverness.
Her junior counsel, Henry Field, remembered Miss Vinnie ‘distinctly’ in after years when he himself became a judge. He’d feared cross-examination might confuse her. ‘But not at all. On the witness stand she appeared perfectly natural and composed, not in the least bit disconcerted by an array of opposing Counsel and a Court-room filled with curious spectators.’ Thirty-four years later he reminisced to her niece:
On the witness stand she appeared to be just what she was, a gentlewoman of breeding, refinement, culture and perfect manners determined to tell the truth as she saw it.
As I recall it she was slight and delicate and on the witness stand made me think of one those little red porcelain miniatures in a gold frame.
Vinnie’s masterstroke was to express herself as the innocent she was assumed to be — and, to some extent, was, though not entirely in this instance. Her innocence recalls Emily Dickinson’s ‘Daisy’ role. Where Emily performed in her poetry and letters, her sister often did so for an audience of family and visitors. She was an accomplished mimic, and her satiric turns included the worthies of Amherst. She used to joke that she could deceive the elect with a look of her grey-blue eyes. ‘Why,’ she would say, ‘I can make anybody believe anything.’ In court Miss Vinnie was the put-upon gentlewoman, a part to play opposite a schemer, the role in which she cast Mabel. And Mabel did grimly recognise a fellow performer who ‘came in … a crape veil with a forlorn look, playing the part of the “surviving sister”.’
No, Miss Vinnie had never entertained any idea of transferring land, much less agreed to it. No, her brother had never asked her to do it.
David Todd testified to the contrary, that before Miss Vinnie had signed the deed she had inspected the site. From an east window in The Dell he’d spied her moving about by moonlight. She’d then come inside to say she’d agree to the transfer.
Miss Vinnie denied this in no uncertain terms. No, she did not inspect the site. Did the court believe that she would totter out in the bitter cold of December to take measurements by night? It was not her way to creep about in the dark. As townsfolk were aware, the Dickinson sisters did not venture out at night. She and her sister were known for their still, uneventful way of life. In this retiring role Miss Vinnie outplayed Mabel.
‘State all that you knew about the purport of Mr Spaulding’s call,’ the court asked.
‘I was told he came to see me,’ Miss Vinnie answered promptly. ‘I was asked if he could come and see me on account of his interest in my sister; he would like to talk with me about her.’
Speaking her lines, Lavinia warmed to the part. Those who witnessed her word-perfect performance said she was vivid, convincing. Every word told in her attack on Mabel Todd. Here in the courtroom is a woman who has been positioned as a willing dependant who’s resolved to be put upon no longer. She has done things for Austin because he was her brother, and dedicated her life to Emily, the adored. But now Austin is no more, Lavinia feels used by Mabel Todd. In her self-centred way, Mabel has taken the land as her due. She seems to have forgotten the consideration due to Lavinia who ‘did not like it’ when Mabel used her home for adultery, and who still resents Mabel’s failure to acknowledge her part in collecting Emily Dickinson’s letters.
The court asked Mrs Todd, in turn, about the purpose of her visit with Mr Spaulding. ‘The only object of your visit was to get the woman to sign the deed?’
‘To get her to sign the deed was what we went for. That is what she knew we went for … I got Mr Spaulding there for that purpose.’
Was anything said about that purpose before the move to the dining room?
Mrs Todd admitted that neither Mr Spaulding nor Miss Lavinia said a word about the deed before she herself introduced the subject in the dining room.
‘What was said?’
When Mrs Todd put the deed on the table and called Lavinia’s attention to it, Lavinia said ‘something like “Shall I sign it now?” I said, “Mr Spaulding is here. Perhaps now is as well as any time.”’
‘What did you say that for, if you knew that was what he was over there for — if you knew he came on purpose to sign the deed?’
‘I knew I was going out of the country for six—’
The lawyer repeated the question.
‘I suppose because then was the most convenient time.’ Mrs Todd evidently found this hard to explain. ‘She wasn’t like the ordinary run of people … I knew Mr Spaulding was courteous enough not to hurry her, because he told me he had always heard she was very queer. If she hadn’t wanted to be hurried I think he would have been willing to come again.’
Was Mrs Todd herself in any hurry?
‘I don’t think I was in a hurry. I wanted the deed before I left the country.’
Miss Vinnie’s counsel drove it home that she had not employed Mr Spaulding to witness the deed. It remained, then, distinctly questionable how he had come to make a business visit to the Homestead at night. Miss Vinnie repeated the refrain of her script: the lawyer’s visit had appeared to her in the light of a social call. While Mr Spaulding examined the china, ‘Mrs Todd drew this little roll from under her arm and asked if now I would sign this little paper,’ she told the court. ‘It was not open. It was simply handed to me where to sign, and I never thought anything about it.’
When Mrs Todd alleged that Miss Dickinson had agreed that the deed was to be ‘a secret from everybody a long time’, Miss Vinnie denied it emphatically. ‘No, sir, I never did anything of the kind.’
Where her opponent lied without hesitation, Mabel stuck as close as she could to the truth without disclosing her liaison. She was on the defensive, speaking more hesitantly than her wont, in contrast to Miss Vinnie’s assured delivery. ‘I think … it could have been …’, she said as she picked her way through qualifications.
She was too astute not to realise when the case slid towards the cliffedge of adultery, held back out of respect for Austin Dickinson and public propriety. Miss Dickinson dared to walk that edge in her reply to a question whether she had ‘invited’ Mrs Todd into her house.
‘I can’t tell. She always came,’ she said. ‘I can’t tell whether I asked her because she was in the habit of coming.’
Ned Dickinson, who had been in love with Mabel before his father came into play, sat with his sister behind their aunt. From behind he was in a position to guide her with a whisper in her ear. Though he could not forgive Lavinia (he saw the trial as ‘a good lesson to her’), Ned acted as Aunt Lavinia’s man. This was his chance for retribution.
To win the day it was necessary to erode Mabel’s claim on the land as compensation for her editing of Emily Dickinson. Taking her turn on the witness stand, Miss Vinnie denied flatly any such understanding. ‘She never talked with me about its being pay for copying my sister’s poems. There was never any talk of that kind between me and Mrs Todd.’
Her testimony scaled down Todd’s editorial role. ‘Mrs Todd asked the privilege of doing it,’ she recalled. ‘I wished [the poems] copied. Mrs Todd copied them. … We always used the words my sister tried first. She sometimes had others, and put crosses down for reference, but we always decided to use the first choice.’ The collaborative ‘we’ took a stand against Todd’s rightful ‘I’ claim to discriminating initiatives and professional expertise. Miss Vinnie conceded that she did not select the first volume of poems, but after that she had shared in the selection of poems for publication. ‘The second and third volumes were the ones I chose,’ she said. ‘I furnished the letters.’
But then Mabel went so far as to claim that ‘Emily’ had actually asked her to edit her poems.
Mr S. S. Taft of Springfield, a well-informed member of the Dickinsons’ legal team, cross-questioned Mrs Todd about her supposed closeness to the poet:
TAFT: You never saw Miss Emily Dickinson?
TODD: Except as I saw her flitting through a dark hall.
TAFT: You never saw her to speak to her?
TODD: She has spoken to me.
TAFT: You never saw her to speak to her?
TODD: I never spoke to her.
Vinnie and Ned had primed their legal team with Mabel’s habits of acquisition. Emily Dickinson’s death came up in court because the family was pointing to a pattern of behaviour: the fact that the Todds’ land claims followed a Dickinson death, first Emily’s, then Austin’s.
‘Was the original deed signed also by Miss Dickinson’s sister?’ Mabel was asked on the witness stand.
‘Yes,’ she lied.
Nothing was said explicitly about the family disagreement implied by Emily’s refusal to deed the first plot of land to Mrs Todd, yet the force of this act of inaction was kept to the fore through the tenacity with which the Dickinsons’ counsel fixed on a link between Emily’s death and the Todds’ acquisition. In the face of this pressure, Mabel’s testimony tried to fudge her acquisition of Dickinson land for The Dell. The Dickinsons had ‘sold’ it, she’d stated in the Defendants’ Answer. They had ‘bought’ it, she repeated in court.
Lavinia’s counsel pounced on ‘bought’. Clearly they were informed of Austin’s insistence on a gift, and informed too of Emily’s stand, forcing Mabel to wait until Emily died. Mr Hammond and his colleague Mr Taft cross-questioned the Todds persistently as to the value of the land, the question of payment and the precise date when they had obtained the first deed.
This is where Mabel faltered. Uneasy and on the defensive, she prevaricated. She claimed that she did not know whether the plot was ‘bought’ or not. It had been a transaction carried out between Austin Dickinson and her husband — nothing, then, to do with her. It was crucial to throw the court off the scent. Contrary to Mabel’s display of widow’s weeds two and a half years earlier, she now had to distance herself from Austin. Land must not be seen to be a gift of love. Quick to pick up the drift of the lawyer’s questions, but wary of lying outright, Mabel could not, it appeared, recall exactly when the plot was obtained (even though she herself, in filling out the deed for the second plot, had set down the precise date of the first deed, 8 June 1886, a mere three weeks after Emily Dickinson’s funeral).
Taft wanted to know if she had built her house ‘after the death of Miss Emily?’
‘I think the foundations were dug before she died. She died in May, 1886. I think it was dug in April.’
‘That [plot] came to you from the Dickinson estate?’
‘It did.’
‘How much did you pay for that?’ Taft pounced.
‘The deed says twelve hundred dollars,’ Mabel hedged.
Taft was not to be deflected. ‘Whether anything was paid or not, you don’t know?’
She stuck to her story. ‘The first I knew was when Mr Todd told me he had bought the lot and we should have a house there.’
‘The deed is in your name?’ Taft pressed her.
‘The deed is in my name. Mr Todd wished to have it so.’
David Todd, summoned to the witness stand, was compelled to come clean with the facts.
‘How much did you pay for your house?’
‘The deed …’ David hedged.
‘No,’ Taft cut in. ‘How much did you pay for it?’
‘Nothing.’
‘And you got it when?’
‘In …’ David hesitated. He could not bring himself to contradict his wife. He was willing to confirm her evidence that the land came their way in 1886. ‘I can’t give you the date within three months.’
‘After Miss Emily died?’ Mr Taft leant into this question as though he had the answer already. For David to deny this fact would be worse than futile.
‘I should say yes.’
The courtroom was crowded on 3 March when the Todds’ main witness, Mr Spaulding, took the stand. The scene in question turned on how the lawyer had cautioned Miss Vinnie. Mr Spaulding insisted that he had done so; she claimed to have heard nothing. The fact is that she was not sitting opposite him in a law office; there would have been little if any eye contact, with Mr Spaulding intent on the china; and his tone was likely to have been routine, rather automatic, believing as he did (from Mrs Todd) that the two women were agreed. His manner, Miss Vinnie said repeatedly, was social, not legal. Indeed, to the lawyer from Northampton these were not his clients; he was doing a favour to Bumpus of Boston, whose say-so, as conveyed by Mrs Todd, had reassured Timothy Spaulding that to witness the deed was a mere formality; and Bumpus at that date had known only what Mrs Todd had told him. Before he was enlightened by Maggie’s deposition, his recommendation of a local colleague had been a favour to an attractive woman.
Miss Vinnie’s counsel probed this web of favours when they asked Mrs Todd if Mr Spaulding, travelling from Northampton at her request, did this ‘without compensation’?
‘Mr Spaulding never sent any bill.’
One further fact revealed by Spaulding again took the court close to that cliff-edge of adultery. Asked what reason Mrs Todd gave him for not wanting the deed to be recorded at once, Spaulding mentioned ‘her estrangement with the family of Austin Dickinson’.
Taft’s summing-up savaged Mrs Todd for an hour: ‘pounded’ she felt ‘in the face’. The Republican, convinced, commended Taft’s ‘lucid’ solution to the problems the case presented. During the early afternoon of 3 March Taft put it to the court that since the testimonies were irreconcilable, the case should be judged on the conduct and character of the contenders: one, a picture of refined seclusion, unacquainted with business; the other, ‘very much a woman of the world’.
On 3 April Judge Hopkins delivered his verdict. The deed Miss Dickinson had signed without understanding was held to be void. The court ordered Professor and Mrs Todd to return the land to Miss Dickinson. The judge also ordered the defendants to pay the costs of the trial: $49.55.
Public opinion in Amherst on the whole favoured the judgment. Miss Vinnie may not have told the truth, townsfolk said, but she had a right to dispose of her property as she wished.
Mabel was astounded. ‘Something was done in ways other than in court,’ she suspected. The verdict ‘kills me daily’ she wrote in her diary later in the month. ‘I cannot seem to get out from under it.’ Lavinia had lied, while her own defence had been strong — so strong, she heard, that Harvard Law School used it to illustrate how a case weighted with truth and evidence on one side can go the other way. Mabel Todd felt with justice her right to recompense for the extraordinary effort of the last decade and the feat she had performed in bringing Emily Dickinson permanently before the world. In court, Miss Vinnie had deliberately minimised what Mrs Todd had achieved. Mrs Todd had ‘asked’ to do the work of copying. ‘She asked the privilege of it’ and Miss Vinnie thought Mrs Todd sufficiently rewarded. ‘I knew that she thought it would be for her literary reputation to do it, and it made her reputation.’ As far as Miss Vinnie was concerned, the largesse had been hers.
Mabel Todd had combated the copyist image with evidence of her evolving expertise on the Dickinson papers. She had explained to the court all she had done to order undated manuscripts, to transcribe a difficult and changing hand, to persuade and co-opt Mr Higginson, to struggle with printers who ‘could not conceive as possible Emily Dickinson’s use of certain characteristic words’ and, finally, to promote the first volumes of Emily Dickinson with talks and readings, each and every time to excited applause. All this Miss Vinnie had dismissed when she told the court, ‘the poems got there on their own legs’.
With Ned and Mattie literally behind her, Vinnie took the high ground, a Dickinson grandee waving away a presuming flunky. It was nothing less than a denial of the destiny Mabel Todd had fulfilled.
After the tongue-lashing from Taft on the last afternoon of the trial, Mabel left with head high and took herself off to tea with Mrs E. P. Harris, who was part of a circle who shared her outrage. Mrs Stearns and Mrs Washington Cable (wife of the Southern writer of local-colour tales) had supported her throughout the trial. Others criticised her for showing her face. The Todds responded in fighting mode. Early in May, they instructed their lawyers, Hamlin & Reilly, to take the case to the state Supreme Court. Who would lose in the long run was yet in question.
A Supreme Court judge called Field was another to back away from an adulteress. His excuse for resigning from the case was that Caro Lovejoy Andrews (Mabel’s cousin and David’s sometime bedmate) had told him so much that he could not judge independently. As it happened, his place was taken by one of the great legal figures of the American scene. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, son of the poet-doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Bostonian and Harvard graduate, was soon to be appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States. In September 1898 he presided over the Todds’ appeal at the sitting of the state Supreme Court in Northampton.
Holmes made two astute observations. One was that Mrs Todd was too busy. Miss Dickinson appeared passive in the face of Mrs Todd’s ‘multiple’ initiatives: getting the blank for the deed, filling it in, rounding up Mr Spaulding. The court noted the style of a social call arranged and managed in a manner too lulling to Miss Dickinson.
The other observation came from a lawyer’s feeling that a sensible landowner does not give away valuable land for nothing. There was a weakness in a defence depending on a say-so from Austin Dickinson, who could have acted himself at any time before his death. What Austin Dickinson had wished and what the present owner wished were not identical.
‘Seldom is there a case in which the reasons for a rule that weight should be given to the impressions produced by seeing and hearing the witnesses are so strong as in this case,’ Holmes reflected. He was alert to the subtleties of ‘temperament’ and states of mind. It was indeed a case in which the routines of the law came up against a situation as intricate as any in novels of Henry James, where the greatest force lies in what is hidden. The outsiders who comprised the Supreme Court had to consider a clash of irreconcilable testimonies: did ‘Miss Vinnie’ lie on the witness stand? Did Mrs Todd have the stronger case, as she had reason to believe? They had to elicit the truth from an unmentionable but pertinent history of adultery, a concealed family schism and shaded characters with their moral ambiguities.
Holmes had been close to Henry James during their youth in Boston in the mid-1860s. At that time, James had dropped out of his law studies at Harvard in favour of literature, with its more inclusive approach to truth than the binary right or wrong, guilty or not guilty of the courtroom. Holmes rose to what might be called the Jamesian challenge in this case, conceding, up to a point, his court’s limitations.
‘Habits of life’, he directed, must determine judgement, and these a local court was better placed to discern. The outcome, on 21 November 1898, was to uphold the earlier judgement. The Todds, finally defeated, had to return the land and, once more, pay the costs: $86.73.
‘Habits of life’ picked up Miss Vinnie’s coded words for adultery. Mrs Todd was ‘in the habit of coming’ to the home of the Dickinson sisters as a safe place for assignations. What did not happen in court — the force of unexploded facts — turned the case into a judgement of character. So it was that the character of Mabel Loomis Todd in the familiar story of adultery triumphed over a rare story: her rescue of Emily Dickinson.
‘I am perfectly crushed,’ Mabel said the day the verdict came. For all her outward aplomb she had been all year as sensitive as a leaf. She had felt like a ballet dancer who has to be light and graceful with a chain around her ankle. ‘I shall die standing,’ she told herself. ‘There will be no weak admission that persecution has killed me.’