Olio

APRIL–MAY 17, 1884

… we shall go up or down together …

     —Susan B. Anthony

Prince of Humbug, &c.

WE WERE SHOWN TO BARNUM’S WAGON by a roustabout carrying a monkey on his shoulder. No sooner had we climbed aboard than the abominable showman launched into a joke in dubious taste: “A bereaved husband kept the ashes of his beloved wife in a jar on the mantel, which he tended with the devotion of a monk for the Buddha. The next winter, this paragon of spouses sprinkled her ashes on the icy steps outside his house, so his new wife would not slip and fall!”

“Are you trying to be offensive?” rasped Susan. With her sharp face, she appeared as if she could split the incorrigible wag’s skull in two.

Barnum roared and in his high-pitched barker’s voice asked, “Why, Miss Anthony, don’t tell me you believe in wedlock—lawful or awful as the case may be?”

“My beliefs are my own business, Mr. Barnum!” she snapped back like one of Stephen Perry’s rubber bands.

“And may I inquire what position you take in the matter of free love?”

“The same as I always have: Someday women will make you men pay dearly for it.”

“You are a fire-eater, Miss Anthony, and I respect your fearlessness!” He doffed his shiny ringmaster’s hat and bowed deeply.

Susan laughed in spite of herself. “You are a devil, sir!”

“I am the Prince of Humbug, madam, and am heartily glad to discover in you a sense of humor! I had been led to understand that the woman’s movement was as humorless as a justice of the peace or a darning egg.”

“We need your help, Mr. Barnum, not your teasing.”

“Ladies, you have caught me at a bad time. The Ethnological Congress of Savage Tribes is soon to be convened in this very city, a spectacle that will set you hens clucking as if God Almighty had jumped on Washington City, wearing His biggest boots, and stomped those good-for-nothing mudfish till they cried ‘Olio!’ and enfranchised the entire female race! Coming soon to Madison Square Garden for a limited engagement will be …”

He consulted a printer’s proof of a four-sheet billboard fantastically illustrated and biliously colored, on which he had been making changes with a crayon. “Attend, ladies, to Barnum’s savage congressmen!” Like The New York Herald, Barnum couldn’t state a fact or a fancy in print or conversation without at least one exclamation mark.

“‘Bestial Australian Cannibals, Mysterious Aztecs, Imbruted Big-Lipped Botocudoes, Wild Nubians, Ferocious Zulus, Invincible Afghans, Pagan Burmese Priests, Ishmaelite Todars, Dusky Idolatrous Hindus, Sinuous Nautch Girls, Annamite Dwarfs, Haughty Syrians, Oriental Giants, Herculean Japanese, plus assorted Kaffirs, Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Ethiopians, Circassians, Polynesians, Tasmanians, Tartars, and Patans!!!’”

Dazzled by the vision, Barnum sought our approval. Susan knew how to use a man’s egotism against him, like a wrestler tossing a braggart on the hip of his braggadocio. “We will not forget your contribution to better understanding among the races, Mr. Barnum.”

Her faint praise satisfied him. “Miss Anthony, did you happen to see, in younger days, the ‘Racial Anomaly’ on display at my American Museum before the 1865 fire burned it to the ground?”

He did not wait for an answer but went on “at full chisel,” as Franklin liked to say. “I will never forget the handsome tribute printed in the Times: ‘Almost in the twinkling of an eye, the dirty, ill-shaped structure, filled with specimens so full of suggestion and of merit, passed from our gaze, and its like cannot soon be seen again.’ Two white whales captured off the coast of Labrador were boiled in their basement tank and one of my prized Numidian lions terrorized Manhattan until a fireman dispatched it with his ax. Waxwork figures of the illustrious melted, although the effigy of Jefferson Davis was saved from the flames—by a member of the Klan, no doubt. The actual Davis was arrested and later sold insurance. History is one smashup piled on top of another, the shards glued together with irony. Eventually, the paraffin Davis was kicked to pieces in Ann Street by nativist hooligans.” Barnum paused in his headlong flight of words and let his eyes sweep a wall covered with photographs of the famous and the freakish. “What was I going on about?”

“The Racial Anomaly,” I said, opening my mouth to speak for the first time since our arrival in the stuffy, malodorous wagon.

“Thank you. My brain grows more addled by the year. The Racial Anomaly was white—as white as you ladies are in your bathtubs—but he had been born a negro. He confided in me that he’d changed his color and the complexion of his very soul by eating a particular medicinal weed, which, alas, he never identified. Had it been in use earlier in the century, the weed could have prevented civil war and accomplished what Douglass, Garrison, John Brown, and the like did not: emancipated the negroes, who would have become indistinguishable from white men. Imagine, good ladies, if a weed could be found that would turn women into men!”

I sensed Susan’s exasperation as Barnum extolled the benefits of such an arrangement: “Overnight, your associations, conventions, indignation meetings, parlor debates, and hen parties would be superfluous. You could take up cussing and chewing tobacco. Think of the erstwhile women who could cast their ballots and send themselves to Congress, where they would sit and bray like the other jackasses!”

“Mr. Barnum.”

“Yes, Miss Anthony.”

“You talk the most awful bunkum!”

“Perhaps you’re right. I can’t imagine a world without sinuous Nautch girls.”

Foreseeing no end to the comic overture, I launched into an aria of tears.

“What’s the matter with her?” he asked.

“She has brought her troubles to you, sir, and you go on about braying asses!”

“You won’t find Barnum backward when it comes to chivalry.”

“Miss Finch believes you can be of help.”

“I’m a friend of Margaret Hardesty,” I said, drying my eyes.

“Ah, little Margaret! Had she been Eve, mankind would not have gotten itself kicked out of Eden.”

“Only because she could not have reached the fruit in the tree of knowledge,” said Susan. “Eve’s gift to humankind was curiosity.”

“A noble quality! Once again, Miss Susan, my hat is off to you.” He held it in his hands. “I admire quick wittedness in man, woman, or beast.” A rabbit poked its nose above the brim. “I appear to have expropriated Maxwell the Magician’s partner. By such follies, America grows.”

“And breeds a race of rats!” said Susan tartly.

“Speaking of rats, how fares that paragon of philandering, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher, after the scandalous revelation of his affair with Elizabeth Tilton? To think that, in ten years, he has advanced from abolitionist to adulterer. What next? I wonder. Anarchist perhaps, since he has a proclivity for unlawful acts beginning with the letter a. Please give my regards to Mrs. Stanton, whose tattle dropped the reverend into the stew of juicy tidbits whose savor the public cannot do without!”

Susan sniffed in disdain of the abolitionist who had armed John Brown and his would-be army of slaves with “Beecher’s Bibles,” rifles shipped to Brown in crates claiming, on their lids, to hold the Word of God. “Mr. Beecher’s infidelities have lighted a ‘holocaust of womanhood,’” she said, quoting Elizabeth, who had reviled the self-righteous fornicator whose first dalliance had been with a young woman copyist of his sermons.

I’m grateful to you, Mr. James, for having never once tried to outrage me.

“Clowns are the pegs on which the circus is hung,” said Barnum wryly.

I had been turning a shaving mug over in my hands while Susan and Barnum waged a war of wits. The mug was decorated with four cupids bearing an escutcheon dulled by dried lather. In a sudden fury, I smashed it on the floor.

Barnum flew into a rage. “Damn you, woman! That was a gift from the prince consort!”

Susan hid a smile in her glove as Barnum picked up pieces of broken china.

“If I were not inured to disaster, I’d order Stanley Carl to feed you to his lions!” He snarled like one. “It’s better to be insured than inured, but the premium is exorbitant for a man of my inflammatory history.” Fires had destroyed the American Museum, the Hippodrome, and Iranistan, his Moorish palace in Bridgeport, at the time the largest private home in America.

“I am very sorry, Mr. Barnum,” I said abjectly. “But I’m mad with worry!”

“Young woman, what is the trouble?” His tone had changed in an instant from irascible to paternal.

“My baby has been stolen!”

Laying aside the remains of the Prince Albert mug, Barnum turned to Susan, who nodded and said, “We need your help in finding him.”

Barnum scratched his cheek thoughtfully. Soap from the royal mug will never again do honor to your face, I said to myself. Susan apologized for the “wicked destruction of property,” and promised to send him a tin of Mrs. Stanton’s Washington Squares.

“I’d be afraid to eat them,” said Barnum, clutching his neck and sticking out his tongue in a pantomime of asphyxiation.

“Elizabeth is many things, but she’s not a poisoner.”

“What your friend is, my good woman, is an opportunist,” said the caliph of claptrap.

“You slander her, sir! And I am not your good woman!”

“Come, come, Miss Anthony! Her nose for money is almost as keen as my own.” He took a gigantic handkerchief from his pocket and blew his nose with such stentorian effect that Jumbo answered him in kind from his cage. “What is the going rate for speaking engagements?” Susan made no reply. “Answer, or I won’t lift a finger to help you.” He waggled his pinkie, so that we might admire the ruby ring that decorated it, a “gift from Jenny Lind.”

“One hundred dollars for a mixed crowd, fifty for women, and ten on the Sabbath,” I replied, though the question had not been put to me.

Susan glared; the heat of her gaze could have melted the bone buttons on my dress.

“As a statesman, she is downright greedy, but as a celebrity, she’s underrating herself.”

“Stateswoman!” interjected Susan. “Or statesperson, if you like.”

“Mr. Barnum, please!” I assumed an exaggerated attitude of abjection that Frank Ashton, the Posturing Man, would have applauded. Had Elizabeth been there to see her stenographer on her knees, she’d have sent me packing. “I beg you to help us find my baby, Martin!”

“Have you no husband to rely on that you must come to Barnum for assistance?”

“She has none to speak of,” said Susan with an inscrutable, tight-lipped smile.

“Lucky for you Barnum is a man of the world. Rise, dear girl, and tell me your troubles.”

After I’d related my sad tale, replete with tears and hand-wringing, he called from the window to a passing Wildman from Borneo: “Fetch Mr. Gallagher. You will find him asleep in his wagon.” Barnum touched the side of his nose and winked at us. “Our Mr. Gallagher drinks. He claims it’s a nerve tonic. The old soak! Barnum knows she-coonery when he smells it! He’s up on all the latest dodges.”

The Wildman from Borneo removed his false incisors, each one sharp as a chisel, and affably replied, “Righto, boss!” He winked at Susan and hurried to the old soak’s wagon.

While we waited for Gallagher’s arrival, Barnum took up a red crayon and worked on the banner headline for the Ethnological Congress billboard. Dissatisfied with one, he would write another, each attempt more bombastic than the one before.

Come See The Greatest Convocation Of Human Species!

Behold & Marvel At The Biggest Assembly Of

For The First Time Since The Confounding At Babel

“Whatever you do, do it ardently,” he counseled, slashing yet another sentence that failed to satisfy his demand for grandiosity.

Witness Prodigies That Defy The Limits Of Human Nature!

“Rodomontade is my favorite word—after money, of course. During a long career as a huckster of high jinks, I’ve learned that the more fantastic the first is, the more fabulous the second will be.” He scratched at the paper proof and tried again.

“Voilà! What do you think of this?” he asked Susan, jabbing his crayon at the product of his garish imagination’s restless milling:

BEHOLD BLOOD CURDLING & HEART STOPPING MONSTROSITIES

THAT DARE TO CALL THEMSELVES HUMAN!!!

“I hope that women will be represented,” she replied with unintended drollery.

“Naturally!” declared the sultan of spectacles. “Contrary to the opinion of some of my sex, I believe that women have the same right as men to call themselves human—or monsters, if it comes to that.”

“I’m pleased to hear it!” she grumbled.

“Now for the finishing touch …”

“Behold the finger of God commanding the people to go to Barnum’s and worship a creation second only to His own!”

What folly! I thought, not daring to speak my mind. I could only guess at the thoughts seething in Susan’s matriarchal brain. Fortunately, Mr. Gallagher made a timely entrance before another priceless souvenir could be dashed to pieces. Barnum folded up the press proof and put it in a drawer.

“Miss Susan B. Anthony, Miss Ellen Finch, may I present Special Officer Gallagher of the Pinkerton Agency, on permanent assignment to the Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome.”

Susan nodded warily. I shook his plump hand eagerly.

“Pleased to meet you,” said the portly Irishman, whose breath did nothing to refute the chief stereotype attached to his people.

“Mr. Gallagher! A child has been kidnapped, and we need you to find him posthaste!” The impresario of bull and bunkum used the same tone to motivate Homer Silvey and Al Cole, masters of canvas, to strike the circus tents, Miss Emma Jutau to slide down from the big top’s upper reaches by her teeth, or Billy Burke to warble his budget of songs.

Gallagher took out a notebook and a pencil, licked its lead, and asked, “Name?”

“Martin Finch II,” I replied.

“Age?”

“Five months.”

“Last seen?”

“Mrs. Crockett’s boardinghouse, Forty-second Street, Murray Hill.”

“Second floor,” interjected Susan.

“Any distinguishing features?”

“In the eyes of man’s law, he’s a bastard,” said Susan, her own eyes glittering like daggers.

I dared not speak.

“Through no fault of his own,” declared Susan.

“Do you suspect anyone?” His question was addressed pointedly to me.

“Mary Surratt,” I replied, ignoring his snide innuendo.

Gallagher stared down his red nose at me. “She that was hanged for helping kill Mr. Lincoln?”

“I saw her take my baby!” I insisted, although I was less certain than I’d been when I saw her climb out my bedroom window. Self-doubt dogged me through that troublous time.

“Miss Finch is in shock,” said Barnum, winking at the Pinkerton man.

Having wet his pencil again, Gallagher wrote “Temporarily deranged” in his book.

“But the child was taken!” averred Susan. “Mrs. Stanton and I can attest to the fact.”

“The Mrs. Stanton who believes in free love?” asked the special officer.

“She does not believe in free love! That’s a vicious lie put about by her enemies.”

“Gallagher, your job is to find the child, not to pass judgment on anybody’s turpitude!”

“Turpitude my eye!” shouted Susan.

I thought I would go mad!

“Right you are, Mr. Barnum, sir!”

“How will you go about it?” he asked, stroking his chin.

“By—consulting—Madame Singleton!” Officer Gallagher gasped, after having lost his breath to a string of hiccups.

Susan offered him a horehound drop.

“Excellent!” Rubbing his hands, Barnum turned to me and explained: “Second sight is twice as useful as plain sight, four times better than an oversight, and infinitely preferable to the hindsight in which we all indulge.”

Overwhelmed by absurdity, I fainted. I was happily oblivious until the sting of spirits of ammonia brought me to my senses. Susan carried a bottle of smelling salts in her bag, although she hated to use them because they affirmed a woman’s frailty.

“You should loosen her corset,” said Gallagher, taking an interest in my welfare.

“She’s not wearing one,” said Susan, always a stickler for the truth.

“In that case, I recommend unbuttoning her blouse.”

“That will be enough, Gallagher!” chided Barnum.

The officer shifted his gaze, which Susan later described as “prurient,” and desisted from taking a further inventory of my apparel.

“A rare sympathy connects Madame Singleton and me,” said the Pinkerton man, wanting to be seen in a better light and on a higher plain. “We imbibe the same spiritual atmosphere.”

Barnum, a teetotaler, acknowledged the efficacy of strong drink in special cases and kept a selection of ardent spirits in his cupboard. He handed Gallagher a bottle of gin. “Give her this, but don’t let her drain any more than the neck. The visions of a blind drunk are unreliable.”

“Great gifts can be a burden,” remarked Gallagher.

“Speaking of burdens, I’m worried about Jumbo. I think he’s got the grippe. Ladies, did you ever see an elephant sneeze? It’s not a pretty sight. Gallagher, have Madame Singleton consult her crystal. I paid ten thousand dollars for the animal, and if it’s likely to die, I might be able to palm it off on Bill Cody before it kicks the bucket.”

Jumbo survived the grippe but was struck by a locomotive in 1885. Barnum donated the skeleton to the Museum of Natural History, sold the great heart to Cornell, and had the hide stuffed by William Critchley. Jumbo continued to make money for the Prince of Humbug from customers wishing to view death on a colossal scale. I hoped that the gleam of avarice in Barnum’s eyes would never light on la petite Margaret. Let her likeness be shaped in paraffin, I prayed, but protect her from the ravages of taxidermy! God grant that she will one day reside at Mountain Grove Cemetery, whole and self-possessed in death as she was in life, beside her beloved general.

Not to be outdone by man or pachyderm, Elizabeth later willed her brain to Cornell, whose anatomists were eager to discover evidence of derangement.

Ardent Spirits

GALLAGHER, SUSAN, AND I were whisked to Madame Singleton’s in the antique phaeton Barnum used to make a spectacle of himself. Doffing his high hat to passersby as a trombonist blew a circus screamer, he would bellow greetings to the people of Manhattan or Brooklyn. Bells tied to their fetlocks, a pair of white horses pranced musically. Ersatz horns were strapped to their foreheads. That afternoon, Mr. Dode was not in the coachman’s seat. Perhaps he was still chasing Fischer’s hat. George Melville, bareback rider and “country innocent,” held the reins in his oddly pink hands.

“In the Middle Ages, the unicorn was a symbol of virginity,” said Susan pointedly. “It applies to only one of us.”

“How can you be certain of theirs?” I asked, indicating the sleeping special agent and the coachman.

“Like many of the blustery sort, Gallagher is all talk. As for Mr. George Melville, I have it on good authority that he is a eunuch.”

Susan was plainly enjoying herself. She smiled beneath her drab bonnet and waved her hand languidly at the crowded pavement like a queen of England. “Be glad Elizabeth isn’t with us; she’d turn the carriage into a traveling pulpit from which to lambaste her enemies. I doubt you could stand the attention and embarrassment.”

“How do you stand it?”

“I’ve stood it for going on thirty-five years and intend to continue till one of us is dead,” she replied in a voice to match her profile. “Elizabeth Cady Stanton is the most brilliant woman I’ve ever known and the most combative. She speaks her mind regardless.”

“Regardless of what?”

“Of the harm she sometimes does the cause.”

“I can’t imagine her doing anything to hurt the movement she and Miss Mott founded.”

“The clergy won’t stand for blasphemy, not even from Mrs. Cady Stanton.” She took a letter from her reticule and unfolded it. “Last night, I found this on my pillow.”

I recognized Elizabeth’s scrawl.

“Shall I read it?”

“Please do.”

Settling her spectacles on the bridge of her nose, Susan read: “‘A book’—mind you, it is the Bible she belittles—‘that curses woman in her maternity, degrades her in marriage, makes her the author of sin, and a mere afterthought in creation and baptizes all this as the Word of God cannot be said to be a great blessing to the sex.’”

Gallagher grunted in his sleep.

“I share her view of patriarchal Christianity, tyrannical marriages, and ruinous divorces, but nothing can change until we are made men’s equal under the law. Woman’s suffrage must come first, and for that to happen, we need the support of men as well as their wives.”

Swaying in the gutter, a tipsy roadmender brandished a shovel and shouted, “Votes for women!”

“Forgive me, Ellen. My nerves are shrilling. I dare say little Martin has a lot to do with my irritability. We must find the dear lamb.”

“Yes, we must!” I cried, glad that she had once more caught the tide of affairs that had taken us to Barnum and was at that moment carrying us in a fancy equipage toward the famous clairvoyant. “I won’t rest till I find my son!”

“Nor will I! Nor will Elizabeth, by God!”

I suppose I looked dubious, because she went on to say, “And if you think she’s too fleshy to be of much use, I can assure you that, underneath the fat, she’s tough as gristle. She will roll over our enemies like a juggernaut! Krakatoa is nothing compared to Elizabeth Cady Stanton in a rage!”

In such a voice did the prophet Ezekiel foretell the destruction of Jerusalem. She grinned. “Thus do I fire the thunderbolts hot from Elizabeth’s forge. So let us ‘hustle our bustles,’ as the vulgar say, though I would not be caught dead in one.”

We arrived at Barnum’s Hotel. The trombonist licked his lips and prepared to announce our arrival, but Susan hushed him. “I would rather not wake Mr. Gallagher from his detecting.” She took the gin bottle from his hands and, setting her bonnet with an emphatic tug on the brim, marched into the hotel.

I followed in her boiling wake, as if she had transformed herself by the heat of her rhetoric into a stream of lava. We flowed up the staircase and to the door of the psychic phenomenon, who, sensing our presence or else the bottle of gin, bid us enter. We did and were invited with a cordial wave of Madame Singleton’s hand to sit. She accepted our offering—a bribe in fact—graciously. I was delighted to see Margaret there. We exchanged pleasantries until Susan, her purposefulness bottled up like steam in a boiler, hissed, “There’s no time for frivolity!”

“Mr. Barnum would disagree,” said the psychic wryly. “Life is intolerable without it.” She patted the gin bottle affectionately. “Honey catches more flies than vinegar, my dear, though I can’t imagine why anyone would wish to catch them, unless it’s to pull off their wings.”

“We’ve come about my little boy,” I said, my eyes suddenly wet with tears.

“Yes, I know,” she said with a mysterious air. “He’s been kidnapped.”

Astonished, I asked, “How did you know? Did you see him in the crystal? Did you read of it in the cards?”

“I read it in a telegram.” She fluttered a gray scrap of paper in front of me. “From Mr. Barnum himself. I am to render whatever assistance I can.”

“Oh, thank you!” I cried, getting up from the chair to take her hand in gratitude. I noticed a large sapphire ring and wondered whether or not it was genuine.

Madame Singleton led me to a talking board. “Sit!” she commanded, her former gaiety in abeyance. I did, and she sat across from me, so that our knees touched. Margaret and Susan kept their places. “Madame Laveau!”

“Oui, Madame Singleton. What is your wish?” A woman dressed in black appeared. Piercing the veil that covered her face, I beheld the snake charmer, Mrs. Stoner, whom I had last seen sulking on the hotel porch during the spontaneous demonstration of physical culture by the artistes. After the séance, Margaret whispered to me that Napoléon, the viper, had died of indigestion. Barnum had made Mrs. Stoner, whose charms were fading, Singleton’s assistant and given her the Haitian name of Laveau, because voodoo is, as every sucker knows, a specialty of that backward island nation. Since she performed in a dusky sideshow tent, blacking up was considered unnecessary.

“Music, if you please.”

Mrs. Stoner turned the crank on one of Mr. Edison’s new machines, and eerie music welled up from its tin horn. It was not music so much as an atmosphere produced by a single mesmerizing note of a cello.

“Let there be night s’il vous plaît, Madame Laveau!”

The assistant pulled the heavy drapes closed and lit a candle, which she set on the table between Madame Singleton and me.

“Merci, Madame Laveau; that will be all.”

Mrs. Stoner went into another room, or so I hoped; I didn’t see her leave. I don’t care for snake charmers, but I would not wish vanishing on my worst enemy, who would turn out to be a man named Ethan Dorn of Tennessee. He could go to blazes.

“Have you ever attended a séance, Miss Finch?”

“No,” I replied nervously.

“There is nothing to be afraid of,” she assured me. “All that is required of you is to empty your mind of distractions and maintain a respectful attitude toward the spirits.”

Susan giggled. Madame Singleton silenced her with a glance, which could have frozen pond water or, if you prefer, brought it to a boil.

“I do beg your pardon!” said Susan, who was seldom humbled or apologetic. “I was recalling a joke of Mr. Barnum’s. It was one of those preposterous anecdotes that men guffaw over in taprooms and barbershops. Men are such ridiculous creatures! Madame Singleton, do continue, and if I feel an urge to laugh, I shall bite my tongue.”

The clairvoyant dismissed her with a shrug and turned again to me. “Place your fingers on the planchette, a darling French word meaning ‘little plank.’ I like to anchor the spiritus in a world of undeniable facts.” I anchored my fingers on the heart-shaped cherrywood, as though I were about to play a thunderous rendition of “Dies Irae” on the piano. “Lightly, Ellen!” I did as I was told.

As a rule, I am skeptical of spiritualism, placing it in the same category as the Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar, Mark Twain’s Petrified Man, and Joice Heth, the 161-year-old former slave alleged to have been George Washington’s wet nurse. She was the making of the rascal Barnum, who exhibited her at Niblo’s Garden to gawking crowds until she died, and then he packed the Saloon at New York City with fifteen hundred spectators—at fifty cents a head—to view her autopsy.

“I will now call my spirit guide, Miss Roux, who may, if she is in the mood to be helpful, tell us where your son is.” Madame Singleton closed her eyes and warbled, “Eugenia, are you there? One rap for yes, two raps for no.”

Rap.

“Hello, Eugenia! Is your cold any better, dear?” Rap, rap!

“Did you try honey and arsenic?” She looked up from the board and said, “Grandfather swore by honey and arsenic. In the end, it killed him. Naturally, Eugenia is quite beyond mortal peril, although the grippe can make eternal life a misery.”

Rap.

“She took the honey and arsenic,” said Madame Singleton. “Did you find it efficacious?”

Rap, rap!

“I am sorry to hear it. I wish Allcott’s Porous Plasters or Munyon’s Grippe Remedy were available in the next world.”

Rap, rap, rap, rap, rap!

“Sickness makes her peevish,” said Madame Singleton. “Are you feeling well enough to help this poor woman find her child?”

Rap and then rap, rap.

“Won’t you please try, Miss Roux? The child is very dear to me!”

“You must remember to speak through me, Miss Finch, or you will confuse Eugenia!”

I apologized and waited for Madame Singleton to put my question to Miss Roux, who this time answered with a single rap.

“Thank you, Eugenia,” said Madame Singleton. “Can you tell us where little Martin is at this moment?”

Rap, rap.

I tasted the gall of bitter disappointment and sighed piteously. Madame Singleton gave me a stern glance. By it, I knew that the conversation had reached a critical phase. I held back my tears and waited for the incubus to utter an encouraging rap.

“Eugenia, can you tell us anything at all that will lead this good woman to her child?”

Rap. Yes!

I felt my own spirits, which had been cast down, lift. With a jerk, the planchette began to move on its short, spindly legs. It staggered across a piece of pale blue cardboard imprinted with letters of the alphabet, grammatical signs, and Arabic numbers from two through nine.

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 - ,
Q W E . T Y I U O P
Z S D F G H J K L M
A X & C V B N ? ; R

The little board tugged at our hands, lurching this way and that—an animate object galvanized by mesmeric currents. Madame Singleton intoned each letter at which the instrument stopped, while I held my breath in expectancy. Twice I heard muffled exclamations issue from Susan’s mouth. Margaret kept quiet.

“Z—A—R—E—P—H—A —T—H.”

“Do you mean Zarephath, New Jersey?” asked the oracle.

Rap!

“Excellent, Eugenia! Now tell us where in Zarephath?”

“M—I—L—L—S—T—O—N—E …

R—I—V—E—R … G—R—I—S—T—M—I—L—L.”

“And who lives there, Eugenia?”

“A—L—M—A … B—R—I—D—W—E—L—L

… W—H—I—T—E.”

“Is there anything else you can tell us that will help them find the child?”

“K—K—K.”

“Do you mean the Klan?”

Rap!

“Those devils!” hissed Susan.

The planchette shot from under our fingers, as though in terrified flight from the horde of evildoers masquerading in white sheets and the conical hats that naughty schoolboys are made to wear by pitiless schoolmasters.

“It’s a wonder that Eugenia, who is delicate and impressionable, could bring herself to spell the vile monogram,” said Madame Singleton.

Then a voice croaked from the gramophone’s horn:

Over all the U.S.A., the fiery cross we display;

The emblem of Klansmen’s domain,

We’ll be forever true to the Red, White, and

 Blue,

And Americans always remain.

“You vicious brutes!” the medium shouted into the ether. She turned to us and raged, “They have pirated my séance!”

Martin is lost! I moaned.

As the voice began to croak another stanza, Madame Singleton poured gin down the gramophone’s throat. The voice slurred and shortly stopped.

“What a waste!” she lamented.

“What shall we do?” I cried.

Susan drew on her gloves like iron gauntlets. “To Zarephath!”

“Madame Laveau!” shouted Madame Singleton. “Open the drapes!”

Pillar of Fire

HOW SUSAN AND I GOT TO ZAREPHATH has never been clear to me. I recall a paddleboat, a chariot manned by the Gilford Brothers dressed in gladiatorial costumes, and a steam-powered airship shaped like a cigar. Bewildered, we found ourselves at a gristmill, the picturesque Millstone River chattering behind it. Susan pounded on the oak door as if her hand were iron-gauntleted. “It could have been heard by the stokers of Hell,” she later said, describing the sound to Elizabeth, who had been in Murray Hill, unaware of our assault on a bastion of prejudice and hatred. “If only I’d had my temperance ax!”

“Well?” asked a formidable woman, glowering in the doorway.

“Mary Surratt!” I exclaimed.

“I hope to serve the cause as bravely as that great martyr of the South did!”

“Are you Alma Bridwell White?” asked Susan, who had given me a look such as one bestows on the insane.

“I am! What business do you have here?” She stood like a bulwark not even a storm surge could topple. She would not have given way to the battering ram that had splintered the engine-house door at Harper’s Ferry, where John Brown had taken refuge. She snickered at our puniness.

She terrified me but not Susan, who, for all her age and seeming frailty, was hard-bitten and iron-backboned. “We have come for the child!” she demanded in a tone of voice useful for pronouncing doom or announcing the end of days—a voice that could rattle spoons in a drawer, crack lath and plastered walls, and set a dog’s teeth on edge. In such a voice did Antony “Cry ‘Havoc!’ and let slip the dogs of war.”

The sheer force of breath expelled by the suffragist’s powerful lungs had driven White backward, according to Newton’s Third Law of Motion. In an instant, Susan had sprung across the threshold, hissing like an outraged goose for me to follow. “Bolt the door behind you!”

I did as I was told and felt a shiver down my back, which was part fear and part violent joy. Susan had her strong hands around the enemy’s neck.

“Strangle her! Choke her to death!” I wished for Lilian Heigold’s stick, so that I might split White’s skull and examine the brain for a sign that she belonged to Satan’s legion or for a lesion that might explain her malice.

Mouth pursed in contempt, she neither begged for mercy nor cried out in fear. Her eyes shone with an indecent hatred.

“Ellen, find something to tie her with.” So calmly had Susan spoken, she might have been asking for a string to do up a parcel.

I found a ball of jute and bound White’s wrists and ankles while Susan kept her thumbs pressed to the woman’s throat. Those gnarled hands could have squeezed her Adam’s apple to a pulp. The red tip of her tongue clenched between her teeth, Susan had borrowed a mother’s fury and resolve. Only when White was trussed did the suffragist relax her grip. The effort had cost her; her arms began to tremble and her hands to shake. White laughed, and then it was my turn to be possessed by rage. I picked up the first thing that came to hand—a laundry paddle—and would have bludgeoned her had Susan not intervened.

“We’ll never find Martin if you knock her senseless.” She glared at White and asked, “What have you done with the child you stole from us?”

Again, White smiled. Then she brazenly sang:

So, I’ll cherish the Bright Fiery Cross,
Till from my duties at last I lay down;
Then burn for me a Bright Fiery Cross,
The day I am laid in the ground.

Susan put her foot on the woman’s chest. Unable to sing it, White wheezed the obnoxious refrain.

“Ellen, help me get her into a chair.”

Grabbing her by the hair, we persuaded the woman into a ladder-back and secured her. Maintaining an icy composure, she would not give us the satisfaction of watching her squirm.

“What did you do with the boy?” Susan’s sharp voice could have drawn blood.

“Your friend Mrs. Stanton and I want the same thing. Yes, Miss Anthony, I know who you are. I’ve seen your sour face on enough placards and pamphlets. After your arrest, I saw an engraved likeness of your face and recognized the resentment and stubborn devotion to a cause I see in my own.”

The woman had a face that could make cakes fall.

In 1872, Susan was arrested by “a young man in beaver hat and kid gloves (paid for by taxes gathered from women)” for having dared to cast her ballot in a congressional election. The twelve men who sat in judgment found her guilty of voting “while female.” In a typeface suitable to the boldness of the unlawful act and the spluttering outrage it caused among men, The Union and Advertiser declared, “Citizenship no more carries the right to vote than it carries the power to fly to the moon.” In a letter to the editor that he did not print, Susan countered, “If, as Jules Verne imagines, mankind will one day occupy the moon, women will dust, bake moon pies, suffer their wombs to be tugged by lunar tides, and be as disenfranchised there as they are on Earth.”

“I despise you and your hateful cause!” said Susan, baring her teeth.

“Ferocity becomes you, Miss Anthony. It brings out the color in your cheeks.”

Beside myself, I shouted, “Where is my son?” But she ignored me.

“It’s to Mrs. Stanton, I should be talking. She also believes in white supremacy and is offended by laws that would let ignorant niggers vote when educated women like us can’t.” She jumped over Susan’s objection. “Didn’t she say, ‘If a woman finds it hard to bear the oppressive laws of a few Saxon Fathers, what may she not be called to endure when all the lower orders, native and foreigners, Dutch, Irish, Chinese, and African, legislate for her and her daughters?’”

White’s claim was true; Susan couldn’t deny it. “What do you want with the child?”

“To use it as a symbol.”

“A symbol of what?”

White ignored the question and continued: “We want to restore the values and principles of the Founding Fathers, many of whom belonged to the Klan.”

“Nonsense!”

“History speaks in many tongues. It burns in me. My church is the Pillar of Fire and the Bright Fiery Cross.”

“Where is Martin Finch?” Susan could have burned a hole through White, so hotly did she glare.

“At the foot of the cross.”

Instantly, I recalled that Mary Surratt had foretold that I would meet my infant son there.

“And where might that be?” asked Susan with plenty of vinegar and nary an atom of honey. Nevertheless, we had caught the pest, and if she’d been a fly, Susan would have pulled off its wings.

“That, you will never find out!”

“Ellen, go find a bar of lye soap.” And to White, she said, “Prepare to be purified of your sanctimonious flapdoodle.” I found it in the kitchen. “Now put it in the serpent’s mouth.” I did, and the serpent spat it out. “Again!” ordered Susan. “This time, shove it halfway down her throat.” I did, and White began to choke as her saliva turned to suds. “Now she looks the rabid dog she is.”

Had I had a mirror, I would surely have seen my eyes glitter. Hatred casts its own lurid light—the hellish one that Milton in his blindness saw flickering on the lake of fire.

Susan yanked the soap from White’s mouth. The bigot choked on her foaming curses.

“Where is the child!” shouted Susan.

With little else but her tongue to show her disdain, she stuck it out at us.

We left her to stew in her own juices. Standing at the open back door, we listened to the water falling down the wheel and the creaking wooden gears and savored the odors of cornmeal, burlap sacks, and river. A cat sidled against my leg, sat a moment on my shoes to wash its face, and then flattened its belly on the ground in readiness to break its fast on a plump sparrow.

“I don’t know how to make the damned woman speak!” cried Susan.

We went into the room below the grain bin. Amid the noise of corn pouring through the tin spout, I heard the shower bath at Sing Sing. I described its construction and torments to Susan. She shut the spout and wrenched it from the hopper.

We carried White, still tied to the chair, and placed her below the spout. I opened it and watched as grain rained down on her.

“What now?” asked Susan.

“We wait for her skull to crack.” A falling kernel of dried corn does less harm than a biting fly, but a torrent of them can bring an elephant to its knees.

It wasn’t long before White began to fidget.

“Where is Martin?” asked Susan, having closed the spout.

She shook her head as a dog does to rid itself of fleas, but wouldn’t answer.

Once again, Susan let the grain fall, until White began to moan.

“Where is Martin?” I shouted above the clatter of pelting kernels.

And still she wouldn’t say!

I leaned the chair against the wall. The grain got up White’s nose; she gasped for air. She opened her mouth and gulped what would have seemed like cherry pits or gravel.

Close to raving, she shrieked, “Enough!”

Susan shut the spout. “Where is he?” And when she hesitated to answer, Susan had only to touch the lever to make White talk.

“In Memphis!” she cried, the Pillar of Fire all but extinguished in her mind. “Ethan Dorn’s house, on the corner of Second and Poplar!”

“Who’s Ethan Dorn?”

“Grand Cyclops of Tennessee.”

“Why did you take the boy?”

“To punish Stanton for championing miscegenation and free love. And to punish you”—she thrust her chin at me—“for having practiced it and given the world another bastard, and a black one at that.”

“Martin’s father is not a negro!” I shouted in a voice so forceful, a distant cobweb shook.

“Then how did the baby come to be a mulatto?”

I recalled the duskiness of the baby’s skin when Mary Surratt had unfolded the blanket and looked at his face. But surely night, which engulfed both the child and the woman, had lent its color to the scene!

“What does Dorn intend to do with him?” asked Susan, who dismissed the question of little Martin’s inheritance as a thing of no consequence.

“Sacrifice him at the foot of the fiery cross!”

She started to sing the racist anthem but got no further than “So, I’ll cherish the Bright Fiery Cr—” before Susan muzzled her.

“Could it be possible that I am the mother of a black child?” I asked.

“For God, as for Barnum, anything is possible.” “But how?”

“Perhaps He is a negro and engendered in you a black Jesus to save His people from the lynch mob, Jim Crow, and the Klan,” replied Susan earnestly.

A wasp had crawled into my nose—two wasps, one in each nostril. Oh, how they stung! I opened my eyes and peered into the dusty gray light moiling above the rafters.

“You fainted again, poor child,” said Susan, stoppering the glass bottle of smelling salts.

When I call to mind that afternoon at the gristmill, I see the Pillar of Fire as it has come to be in my fancy, with its foot in Hell and its capital underneath the pediment of the Mansion of Happiness. A host of fiery angels are going up and down inside it like fireflies trapped in a glass bottle. They make a noise that might be hymning or gibbering. Who knows how time deforms the truth.

Turkish Pantaloons

BEFORE WE KNEW IT, SUSAN AND I had returned to Mrs. Crockett’s boardinghouse. What is it? Everything we do not know, everything that was not in Barnum’s American Museum nor ever could have been. I’m no more certain today of how we traveled home to Forty-second Street than I am of the means of our arrival in Zarephath. Glimpses of the world that memory draws from the well of forgetfulness are never entirely our own. They are a rich stock of pictures seen, conversations overheard, or books read, stirred together with the bare bones of fact. I had been reading Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon shortly before I went to live at Murray Hill, and thus could have had airships on the brain.

Margaret was in the sitting room when Susan and I got home. She had told Elizabeth of our meeting with Barnum and the oracle of Broadway.

“Well?” asked Elizabeth brusquely. “Did you accomplish anything?” I could see she was feeling put out for having been left out of our travels in the hinterland.

“Pish, Lizzie! It was no picnic.”

“Forgive me,” she said with a blush that might have been of shame or the effect of choler. (She looked like a child who’d gotten into mother’s rouge pot.) “I forgot myself and the reason for your journey.”

“What happened?” asked Margaret impatiently.

Susan sketched an account of our foray, omitting the sensational bits.

“Then little Martin is in Memphis?” asked Elizabeth, looking to me for confirmation.

“Yes,” I replied. “At the home of the Grand Cyclops.”

Elizabeth shivered as Odysseus might have when he beheld the Cyclops on the island of Hypereia. Composing herself, she showed her legendary backbone in the presence of an enemy—be it one-eyed or possessed of a pair of them, hate-inflamed and peeping through two holes cut into a sheet. “Who will go with me to Memphis and rescue our boy?”

“I will!” I shouted with a mother’s fervor.

“I will!” exclaimed Susan, incited by her friend’s zeal.

“I will!” cried Margaret with an enthusiasm disproportionate to her size.

Elizabeth appeared doubtful. “Can you manage so harrowing a trip, my girl?”

“I’m not your girl!” snapped Margaret. “And I can!”

“Yes,” said Elizabeth, impressed by her pluck. “I believe you can.”

“Susan?”

“Yes, Elizabeth?”

“Get me my bloomers!”

Susan hesitated. “I don’t think they are quite the thing.”

“They are just the thing! They will show those nasty swine who have the gall to call themselves Christians and Americans that I mean business.”

Elizabeth turned to me and explained, “A woman looks Amazonian in bloomers as she strides about the town and countryside unimpeded by lengthy skirts. They are de rigueur for a woman on the barricades—I will not say ‘manning’ them.” She turned again to Susan. “You ought to wear yours, as well.”

“I cut mine up for rags years ago.” A Quaker, Susan had refused to exchange her delaine dress, relieved with pale blue ribbons, for the short jacket and Turkish pantaloons whose patterns Amelia Bloomer had published in her temperance magazine, The Lily.

Elizabeth had worn them, to her husband’s dismay and the irritation of her father, Judge Cady, until she grew tired of being teased.

Heigh-ho! the carrion crow
Mrs. Stanton’s all the go
Twenty tailors take the stitches
Mrs. Stanton wears the breeches.

“They give one a marvelous sense of freedom!” said Elizabeth as Susan went to get them.

We could hear her rooting in the trunk room before she returned with the martial apparel and handed it to her friend.

“I’ll put them on at once!” announced Elizabeth, who marched into her bedroom to the rustling of the black silk dress she often wore during her emeritus years.

“She’ll never get them on,” said Susan with enough vinegar to pickle an egg.

Elizabeth returned, chagrined. “I’ve decided not to wear them. If I happen to be lynched, I don’t want to be wearing pants. Unashamed of my sex, I will flaunt it for all to see!”

At that moment, Gallagher, the Pinkerton man, entered the room without knocking.

Elizabeth rebuked him, “Decent people do not barge, uninvited, into another person’s sitting room!”

“I’m a special officer and used to unlawful entry,” he said placidly.

“Elizabeth, allow me to introduce Mr. Gallagher, Mr. Barnum’s private detective,” said Susan. She’d spoken smugly, as though to gloat over her companion’s ignorance of the fact.

“I hope he wiped his big boots outside. Mrs. McGinty isn’t due till Tuesday.”

“What brings you here, Mr. Gallagher?” asked Susan, assuming authority for the special officer in Barnum’s absence.

“The boss has a private train ready to take you to Memphis.”

“How the devil did he know we’d be going to Memphis?” demanded Susan. “We just this minute made up our minds.”

“As to that, there are three possibilities. I detected it.”

“In your dreams!” jeered Susan.

“Madame Singleton divined it.”

“And the third?”

“I followed you and Miss Finch to Alma Bridwell White’s house and watched through the window as you tortured her. I needed no crystal ball to foresee your immediate descent on Memphis.”

“Susan, did you torture the bigot?” asked Elizabeth.

“I did.”

Elizabeth nodded her stately head in approval.

“I did, too,” I said, wanting to be praised. In that pandemonium, I forgot you, Martin.

“I commended you both to Mr. Pinkerton, who wishes you to know that he will hire you as special agents, if you’ve acquired a taste for the business. Ladies, the train is waiting. Mr. Barnum has ordered me to accompany you. My carriage is outside, a horse between the shafts that Alexander the Great would have envied. The horse, I was assured by the master of stables, is unadulterated Arabian and flies like Aladdin’s own carpet.”

“Wait till we change and pack our cases,” said Susan, whose clothes, like mine, needed to be brushed and aired. Gristmills are dusty and musty.

“We have no room for cases, ladies. Dress if you must, but the train can’t wait. Mr. Barnum’s influence is great, but that of Mr. Vanderbilt, who owns the railroad tracks, is greater. Margaret, I took the liberty of packing a few of your things. You’ll find them in the Pullman car. Now chop-chop, which is Malay for ‘vamoose!’”

Like the Almighty, I moved in mysterious ways at that time in my life. And so it was I seemed to awaken in Grand Central Depot, surrounded by—does one say a “clutter of clowns”? There were a dozen of them, including Billy Burke, Joe Kibble, and Charles Bliss. They fussed and frolicked, waiting to pile inside the car at the rear of the train, which they were to share. In addition, a caboose, a Pullman, and a parlor car made up the “Barnum Special,” which followed three freight wagons belonging to the railway.

“In Mr. Barnum’s opinion, twelve clowns should be sufficient to fluster a Grand Cyclops and turn a meeting of the Ku Klux Klan inside out and upside down,” remarked Gallagher, who had exchanged his derby for a cowboy’s Stetson and his Pinkerton badge for a sheriff’s tin star. “Personally, I’d have brought a pair of hungry tigers—and imagine what Jumbo could do to a picnic of snakes with his big feet! But Barnum knows best because Barnum is boss.”

“All aboard!” shouted the conductor, waving a flag to the engineer, who answered with three shrill blasts of the locomotive’s whistle.

Elizabeth, Susan, Margaret, Gallagher, and I hurried aboard as the clowns climbed into the “clown car.” At the last minute, a man stepped from a billow of coal smoke and jumped aboard the caboose.

Had God not gone silently about His creation, having no one to hear Him but the angels, who shrink at disharmony, the commotion could not have been any noisier than that inside the depot’s vast balloon shed: clattering trolleys, the clunk and clutch of machinery, the powerful exhalations of Baldwin locomotives, the thunder as their iron wheels fought for purchase on the tracks, the ratcheting of cars across rail ends, the hawking of newspapers and patent medicines on the smoky platforms, the shouting of farewells, cautions, and reminders, and the thud of a steam derrick digging yet another track bed. For always the great city must build and rebuild itself in reply to its manifest destiny.

The Ditch

“WE STOP IN CHARLESTOWN, where the freight cars will be shunted onto a siding,” said Gallagher, perusing a map. “From there, we go west on the Memphis and Charlestown tracks to the Grand Cyclops’s front porch.”

“How long will it take?” asked Susan, who ran her affairs according to schedules and itineraries, unlike Elizabeth, who since she’d stopped having babies ignored clocks and calendars.

“About eighty hours, barring the unforeseen.”

“Never neglect the unforeseen,” said Susan. “It’s one thing in life we can depend on.”

“Three days,” I said, dispirited.

“And nights,” said Gallagher cheerfully. “But thanks to Mr. Barnum’s generosity, you ladies will pass the unconscious hours inside a Pullman Palace car. I’ll sleep here in the parlor car, as is right and proper.”

“What about breakfast, lunch, and dinner?” asked Elizabeth.

“The boss has laid on a ‘plethora of comestibles,’ from oysters to strawberries, together with champagne for the tipplers and small beer for the Temperance Party.”

“Hooray!” crowed Elizabeth, patting her belly.

“Mr. B. has managed the affair quite well,” said Gallagher. “The tyke is as good as saved.”

“You’re an ignoramus!” said Susan tartly.

“Tsk, tsk, your temper is showing, Miss Anthony. It’s turned your face red as your shawl.”

Susan glared and bared her teeth at Gallagher. “To rescue baby Martin from those devils will take more than four women and a s—”

“Pinkerton man,” said Gallagher, finishing her sentence for her as he polished a bottle of Old Hickory with his Wild West neckerchief.

“Souse!”

“I do my best ratiocinating when staring into a glass of spirits,” he said amiably. “Clear or amber, it’s all the same to me. And do not forget the clowns, madam! They are formidable.”

“Twelve loons dressed in silly clothes!” When pressed, Susan was as hot and quick as a lighted fuse.

“George Bliss has wreaked havoc with his leaping.”

“Pish!” hissed Susan.

“Grandees and royal highnesses have lost their heads to Billy Burke’s songs.”

“Posh!” scoffed Elizabeth.

“In 1871, a dozen Carthaginians of New York died laughing at Joe Kibble’s comic capering.”

“Piffle!” jeered the pair of suffragists.

Undismayed by their skepticism, Gallagher asserted that the clowns would, in the words of the boss, “exfluncticate the vermin.”

Grave outcomes teeter between outrageous farce and appalling tragedy. What could be more preposterous than a mob of men dressed as hobgoblins, or more dangerous? What is more fabulous than the cross and more harrowing than to see it burning in a black man’s yard? Can you imagine a better subject for a tragicomedy than four women, a drunk, and a parcel of circus clowns confronting an invisible empire of bloodthirsty hellions? Hippocrates may have been right, and humankind does act according to the four humors. If that is true, then the lessons of the Sunday school, the homilies delivered from the pulpit, the transubstantiated bread and wine supped adoringly at the altar rail cannot soften the hearts of those with a disproportion of blood and bile in their natures any more than I can command my eyes to glitter in mirth or weep at the brutalities that one kind of being inflicts on another. Shall we pray for the fire that consumed the wicked of Gomorrah? Will He send it or a brigade of firemen?

“They’ll eviscerate and annihilate the ‘crackers!’” said Gallagher, pleased with himself.

We will succeed; we will not succeed; we will s—In time to the train wheels’ clicking over the rail ends, I intoned the hope of a happy outcome, followed by its negation. I might have been picking petals from a daisy to find out whether someone loved me or not. My mind, which had been rational and enlightened, was fuddled by superstitious notions. If I’d had a voodoo doll of Grand Cyclops Dorn, I’d have pierced its heart with a hat pin and then thrown it on the fire, as, once in a nightmare, I had fed mummified cats into a locomotive’s firebox.

Silence descended on the parlor car. Elizabeth was asleep; her chin rested on her bosom. I noticed dribble at her lip and felt ashamed for her and of myself for having stared. Susan was gazing intently into her palms, as if she could read her fortune there or discover the stigmata of a martyrdom she both feared and wanted. Margaret was drawing figure eights—or if you prefer, the symbol of eternity—on the plush seat with a fingernail. I felt the inertia of a limed bird after its surrender to the bird catcher’s stratagem, when it realizes in its tiny brain, flustered heart, and hollow bones that its life is no longer its own. I turned my tired eyes to the window.

I was mostly unaware of the scenery, though I can tell you about the ditch. It seemed an unending ribbon running parallel to the tracks just beyond the ballast stones. It flickered like a moving picture showing images of sky blue water fleeced with clouds and a stagnant fen green with scum. Hardscrabble trees grew beside it—blackthorn, willow, swamp ash, scrub pine, and sumac. Finding little nourishment in the stony ground, they were stunted, their leaves dusty or sooty from locomotive smoke. I don’t recall having seen a man or a woman along the way. I lie—I remember a tramp holding a pot, his arm thrust out at an impossible angle. I guessed it had been broken by a minié ball or an accident and left to mend on its own. What else? An old boot. Where, I wondered, is its fellow? And where is the man or woman who wore it? I remember a muskrat slinking into the weeds as the train thundered past, a cat and its empty eye socket, a dead dog lying half in, half out of the ditch water, and an egret standing on one leg, its white plumage miraculously unsoiled.

The land itself was beyond my ken. By land, I mean the America that had not yet been deeded to Cornelius Vanderbilt and his fellow barons. From my window, I could see nothing that didn’t belong to them. In my mind’s eye, which has the power to roam the farthest stars, I could picture nothing that they had not papered over with documents of ownership, bonds, and shares to keep them fat. Sitting in that railroad car, I felt detached from the wide world and blind to its beauty. I was a carrot waiting to be pulled up from the dirt into the light of day, to strike a mad figure. I was mad! I could say that my journey was an inward one; moreover, there might have been something in it touching on the theme beloved by writers of bildungsromans. This much I knew: I was riding on the Barnum Special, heading west to a place that existed, for me, only as a thought, an unpleasant one at that. And you were waiting for me there, dear son.

We marked time as people do who find themselves between events—great or not, it doesn’t matter. They occupy themselves with the same vapid amusements whether they’re waiting for the rain to stop or a battle to begin that is likely to deliver them into a surgeon’s hands, or an undertaker’s. We played cinch and jubilee in the desultory way of the bored. Our wits and appetites were dull. We played cards, ate and drank of Barnum’s plenty while savoring nothing, and read the newspapers that greeted us each morning with news of the towns we had passed in our sleep. (Did Gallagher say the journey would take three days and nights? Surely it took twice as long.) The clowns caught the papers on the fly, using the catcher crane arm attached to the side of their car. I would close my eyes and pretend to be asleep, but I could not shut out the sound a train makes rolling over tracks, the slap of pasteboard cards, the rustle of newsprint, and the music of Margaret’s small fingers wandering over the keys of a melodeon furnished by our benefactor. I overheard conversations that went by fits and starts and seemed of little import to the speakers. I mean, they had no stake in what was said, as if they were acting in a play—and not a well-made one.

“I bid hearts!”

“Did you? I had no idea!”

“Your mind is not on the game, Elizabeth.”

“My thoughts are scattered today. It is today, is it not?”

“It could not be otherwise.”

“Wonderful thing, a Pullman car.”

“Margaret, that note was sour.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I dislike the melodeon. The word promises a sweetness the music betrays. It can sound like a man at his last gasp.”

“Or a woman, to be fair to our sex.”

“The bid was spades!”

“You’re unusually peevish today, Susan.”

“My corn kept me awake all night.”

“That reminds me of ‘The Princess and the Pea.’”

“I hated fairy tales as a child.”

“My father resented me for having been born a girl.”

“Oh!”

“Does your corn pain you?”

“My corn? Elizabeth, I have a toothache! I never said a word about corns.”

“Oil of clove is just the thing for a toothache, but, alas, I have none.”

“I’ll ask Gallagher next time he’s awake.”

“Strange people, the Irish. My father detested them. The Cadys were finicky.”

“The notes are all wrong, Margaret!”

“I beg your pardon.”

“The Daughters of Lost Causes is hosting a costume ball at the Abbeville grange.”

“I would rather hear a kazoo played by a monkey than a melodeon!”

“Margaret, do you know ‘Watchman, Tell Us of the Night’? In younger days, I was an Episcopalian, for the sake of the children.”

“Organized religion is bosh.”

“Men say ‘bollocks.’”

“They call the place where we piddle a ‘cunt.’”

“Equally vulgar are twat and quim, although the latter could be the name of a fruit preserve.”

“Twat has an ugly sound.”

“Susan, never before have we uttered such indecencies! What is wrong with us?”

“The train is cursed. Margaret, will you never get it right?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“What are you thinking, Elizabeth? The last bid was hearts!”

“I feel giddy. I hope I’m not about to have a fit.”

“A rapture would be just the thing to help us pass the time.”

“What game are we playing?”

“Cinch! We’ve been at it for days.”

“Will this infernal ride never end?”

“How many days, do you think, from Heaven to Hell?”

“Does Sir Isaac have anything to say on the subject?”

“If it weren’t for the newspapers beside our plates each morning, I couldn’t say with any certainty that we were making progress.”

“I read this morning that Lilian Heigold was hanged for striking a man.”

“Whatever will poor Fred do now?”

“Become a widower, drink too much, and go fishing.”

“I wish I knew a few feminine arts.”

“Such as?”

“Knitting. I could watch the purl stitches growing under the needles and know for a fact that I was making headway.”

“Sometimes I wonder if the train is moving. One feels motion in the spine, the back of the neck, and on the posterior, which coarse people call ‘buttocks’ and butchers ‘hams.’ I feel no such pressure.” “We must not forget the child!”

“There is nothing we can do until the journey ends. Then you will see me act!”

“Elizabeth is an accomplished actor, or should I say ‘actress’?”

“I’ll make the dust fly and short work of our enemies!”

“That fly sitting on the plate of mackerel bones, does it feel movement?”

“There are more important questions to be asked.”

“Gallagher! Will the man never wake?”

“When he does, it will be with a regular katzenjammer.”

“I’m at your service, ladies. I was saving my energies for our assault on the capital of hatred and intolerance. And for your information, Mrs. S., I’ve not touched a drop since yesterday, when Phineas T. Barnum’s magical spring did the unthinkable and dried up.”

“Yesterday was when, exactly?”

“Why, yesterday, naturally!”

“How long until we reach Charlestown?”

“Charlestown came and went.”

“Nonsense! I would have noticed.”

“Mr. Barnum arranged things to minimize distractions.”

“Who is the man in the caboose?”

“There’s no one in the caboose, Miss Anthony.”

“When the train rounded a horseshoe curve this morning, the caboose came alongside us, and I saw a man sitting by the window.”

“I expect you imagined him.”

“He waved to me!”

“A trick of the eye caused by sunlight on dirty glass.” “The sky was overcast.”

“All the more reason to disbelieve your eyes.”

“I declare there is no making sense of it!”

I shook off my drowsiness and spoke for the first time since breakfast, “How did my baby get from Zarephath to Memphis?”

“After the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the blacks no longer needed the Underground Railroad. The Klan took it over and uses it to send agents north and smuggle contraband south. Martin was sent to Memphis in a crate of incendiary pamphlets printed by your husband to incite white violence against the negroes.”

“Franklin would never do such a thing!” Furious with Gallagher, I could have brained him with one of his empty bottles.

“Anarchists will do anything to achieve their ends.”

“I suppose Mr. Dode is at the center of this plot against Franklin,” I countered, as though wringing vinegar from a rag.

“If you’re referring to Mr. Fischer, he has uncovered a number of your husband’s un-American activities. He’ll swing for them, I assure you. For your information, madam, the Secret Service does not plot nor seek to harm innocent men.”

“And women?” asked Susan, incredulity ironing some of the wrinkles from her face.

Gallagher shrugged. “Show me an innocent woman.”

“Dreadful man!”

Gallagher picked his teeth with his sheriff’s star. Elizabeth, Susan, and Margaret fell to musing. I set aside the lies told about Franklin as unworthy of consideration and thought instead of the man in the caboose: So Susan saw him, too! Lulled by the lullaby of the rails, the party of malcontents shortly closed their eyes. I left them to their dreams or reveries and walked back to the clown car. Standing on its little porch, I put my ear to the door and heard not so much as the dying echo of a pratfall, a laugh, or the weeping in which clowns sometimes indulge when they think they’re alone. I opened the door. The car was empty. Only pots of greasepaint remained to prove that clowns had once been there. Where had they gone? I asked myself. Did they get off the train at Charlestown as we slept inside the enchanted space Barnum had created for us? Without their assistance—feeble as it would have been—what chance have we against the Klan?

I started for the parlor car, when I remembered the reason I had left it. I went to the door of the caboose and knocked. No one answered, yet I was aware of a presence on the other side.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

I could hear someone faintly breathing.

“Is it you, Mr. James?”

Whatever reply there may have been, it was drowned by the roaring in my ears.

Afraid, I rejoined the others. Their eyes were closed, their chins nesting in their collars. I would say nothing about the vanished clowns or the person whose labored breathing I had heard.

We pressed on to Memphis!

No Country for Circuses

ON THE EASTERN BANK of the Wolf River, ten miles shy of Memphis, the train balked. It had come to a gradual stop, as though the last lump of coal had given up the ghost in the firebox, its gritty atoms rising into the noonday air. Beneath the trees, a dusky light seemed to sway.

“What the devil is the matter?” demanded Gallagher, his red nose out of joint.

“Won’t budge,” replied the engineer, who hailed from New Hampshire, where words are not wasted on the obvious.

“Why not?”

“Don’t know.”

“Try again.”

The engineer shrugged in despite of all fools who refused to accept the vagaries of the mechanical world. He reengaged the valve gear, but the iron wheels spun helplessly, unable to get a grip on the rails, which might have been greased, for all the progress the leviathan made.

“Like I said, she won’t budge. She’ll go backward right enough.” He demonstrated, and the train rolled a few yards in the direction of Charleston.

“How very odd!” exclaimed both Elizabeth and Susan.

“Why in blazes won’t it go forward?”

“Don’t want to,” said the engineer. Years of locomotion had made him indifferent to the affairs of a universe governed by machinery and timetables. His attitude toward them was one of resignation, like that of a cowboy unsurprised by a cow’s-plat on his heel.

Exasperated, Gallagher kicked one of the ponderous wheels and then hopped on one foot while he held the other, like a man in a music hall sketch who has stubbed a toe. (What a funny piece of business Mr. Ashton, the Posturing Man, could have made of it!) “Damn it to Hell!”

The engineer chortled. He took out a bandanna and placed it daintily on the iron seat of the cab and, opening his lunch kettle, took out an apple and a turkey leg.

“This is no time to eat!” shouted Gallagher.

The engineer consulted his pocket watch, said that it was indeed time, wiped his greasy hands on an oily rag, and went about his lunch.

“What’re we to do?” asked Susan.

“We will go on!” said Elizabeth firmly.

“Don’t expect me to carry you when you can’t take another step!” said Susan irritably.

Elizabeth glowered and would have pounced had Gallagher not said, “In their big shoes, the clowns will never make it through these woods.”

“The clowns are gone,” I said.

“That settles it! We go back to New York.” He turned to the engineer. “When you are done stuffing your tripes, locomote us to Grand Central.”

The engineer began to reply, choked on a bit of apple skin, spat, and said, “Okay.”

“I hope you choke, you miserable son of Adam!” said Susan. If her words had been a razor, they would have shaved the engineer’s cheeks in a trice and then lingered deliciously at the bristles on his throat.

Gallagher spun round on his boot heels, which made a pleasant gravelly sound, and started toward the parlor car. “Ladies, shall we go?”

“Not without the baby!” thundered Susan.

“You can’t leave us here!” fulminated Elizabeth, as she had done for our sex since Seneca Falls, when she declared, “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpation on the part of man toward woman.”

“As Mr. Barnum’s agent, my obligation is to his property. In that you both insist that you are no man’s property, you are on your own.” He doffed his Stetson and then, smirking, settled it back on his head with an insolent snap of the brim.

“We won’t go back without the child!” vowed the suffragists. My heart in my mouth left no room for words. I could do nothing but nod vigorously in assent.

“Margaret, will you come?” asked Gallagher. “You’re a circus employee. Your duty is to Mr. Barnum.”

“No, I won’t!” She was standing on a hill of clinkers, an elevation that increased her physical stature, if not her moral one, which, being superlative, would not admit of enlargement.

“What can a midget accomplish against a Grand Cyclops?” Having drunk his courage dry, Gallagher was a man without gumption.

“What did David do to Goliath?” asked Margaret as she picked up a stone and threw it at the special agent. A red wound blossomed on his forehead.

“Mr. Barnum shall hear of this!” he cried, waving his fist. Then without another word, he climbed aboard the parlor car. The locomotive let off steam, jolted into reverse, and headed east—the caboose in the vanguard, carrying its mysterious passenger.

Can it be Franklin? I wondered. Did he become a fugitive from the law after committing some outrage against capitalism? I tried to imagine my husband on the run. No, Franklin is not the stuff of which anarchists are made. He’s in San Francisco, looking for a job.

We walked on beside the tracks, Margaret with a difficulty that the shortness of her stride and the sharp stones underfoot could not entirely explain. She seemed to droop the closer we got to Memphis. Elizabeth noticed her weariness and brought our little sorority to a halt.

“We should rest,” she said, obedient to the maternal instinct with which she was amply provided.

We sat on a sandstone column that had fallen into a field of jimsonweed, called “the Devil’s snare,” circled by thorn bushes, dark and bristling.

“Margaret, maybe you should have gone with Gallagher,” said Elizabeth gently.

Susan gave her no chance to respond. “I don’t trust him, and I don’t much care for Barnum or anybody else who employs one of Pinkerton’s men, who are nothing but thugs for hire!”

“I belong with my friends,” said Margaret simply. “Though I’m so tired, I could shut my eyes and sleep for days and days.”

“We’re not wanted here, especially you, Margaret, for the same reason the train balked,” I said. “With the suddenness of a revelation, I understood the cause of both her weakness and the locomotive’s recalcitrance. “This is no country for circuses.”

“You may be right,” said Elizabeth thoughtfully. “Margaret, perhaps you should wait here until we return with the child.”

“If I go on awhile longer, I’ll shake off this listlessness.” But she did not shake it off; we had not taken fifty paces before she had to stop. “I can’t take another step. Forgive me.” She closed her eyes and crumpled onto the ground like a half-empty sack.

Just then, a black man called to us from an opening in a dense woods of honey locust trees. He was tending a fire. A pot was hung from a notched stick above the flames. He was beckoning us with his hand. We helped Margaret to her feet and to his fire as her head bobbed back and forth.

“The little lady appears all in,” he said kindly. He was one of those negroes who could have been any age from sixty to one hundred. His bald head was as polished as a lucky chestnut. The veins on the backs of his hands reminded me of roots. His eyes were overcast by cataracts.

“Can you help her?” I asked, sensing that he could. He saw the trust in my eyes, which Shelby Ross had once called “pretty,” and smiled warmly.

“I came a long way for just that reason,” he said. He lifted the rattling lid from the pot, brought his face close to the potion—for such I knew it to be—and sniffed. “Almost done,” he said, covering the boiling mixture. “You ladies are crazy to have started on this undertaking.” He fingered the loose flesh at his throat. I noticed a scar that could only have been left by a rope. “You see plain enough I am old, but if I was to tell you that I’m the same age as Abraham was when he died, you would think I was crazy. It’s one thing to read about the old begetters in the Book of Genesis, but to sit next to a hundred-and-seventy-five-year-old black man waiting for a pot to boil has got to be dumbfounding.”

Elizabeth giggled—nervously, I thought.

The negro examined the contents of the pot, spooned some, blew on it, and, having tasted it, declared it done. He stirred the pot, filled a tin cup, and handed it to me. “Now you get this medicine down her before she dies of spite, for you all have come to the land of the spiteful, who are waiting at the end of the tracks to do the Devil’s work.”

“What is it?” I asked curiously. It smelled like something I—well, I could not have said what exactly, but it brought to mind an afternoon when I was a girl no taller than Margaret. My mother had taken me to visit an old woman living at Carroll Gardens, beside Gowanus Creek. An ancient negro, his trouser legs rolled up, was tonging for oysters. Sniffing the liquid in the tin cup, I smelled the creek, the mud bank, and the man when he came out of the brackish water and showed me the oysters in his sack, their rough shells the size of supper plates.

“It’s a remedy for an evil juju,” replied the healer and herbalist. “Slaves made their own medicines: red oak bark tea for purging, bloodroot for croup, foxglove for dropsy, chokeberry for bloody flux, jimsonweed for rheumatism, chestnut leaf for the lungs, rosemary for the blues, sassafras for bad blood, snakeroot for snakebite, boneset for fevers. There is a root can turn a black man white, though I never saw it done. A cup of this will get rid of the vapors that got into your friend’s heart. They sicken childlike folk whose hearts are gay.”

“How did you know Margaret would be here?”

“I know lots of things I have no reason knowing.”

“Do you know anything about locomotives?” asked Elizabeth, changing the subject from arcane matters to pragmatic ones.

“What in particular?”

“Why one would stop and refuse to go any farther?”

“Might not have been a real locomotive.”

“Nonsense!” said Susan waspishly.

“Might have been the idea of one. Somebody might have gotten tired of lugging it around in his head and just stopped thinking about it. Even an imaginary locomotive’s a heavy load. Did it disappear?”

“It rode off out of sight.”

“Yessir, it was a weight got off somebody’s mind. Now get the potion in her before it loses its goodness.”

I rested Margaret’s head in my lap and fed her a spoonful. Since she was fast asleep, the reddish liquid drained from between her lips. “Margaret, wake up!” I shook her, but she would not wake. Susan slapped her hard, leaving a red mark on her cheek. Stung into consciousness, Margaret swallowed most of the liquid before she closed her eyes again.

“She’ll sleep while the vapors come out.” The black man pointed a gnarled finger at Margaret’s breast. He covered her with a piece of sacking, felt her forehead tenderly, and said, “In a little while, she’ll be right again. But you ladies take care. You are walking into the lion’s den, like Daniel, and I have no root to brew to keep you safe from the hatred of men. Unless the Lord sees fit to close the lion’s mouth, I fear for you.”

Elizabeth laid her hand on the black man’s sleeve. “You’ve done a good deed today, my friend, and we’re beholden to you. I hope you, too, will be well and go well.”

“I go where I need to go,” he replied cryptically. He smiled and, having gathered up his few belongings, walked into the forest, until he disappeared from view. In my fanciful state of mind, it was a ghost I saw growing pale among the watchful trees.

Catawamptious

WE SAW NO ONE ELSE UNTIL we came to a field of okra, indigenous to West Africa, like the blacks who were picking it, watched by an overseer who glared at us as at a quartet of freaks. After an hour’s trudge, we reached the outskirts of Spottswood.

To have read one of Ned Buntline’s dime novels is to know Spottswood, since one half-dead hard-luck town is like another. Spottswood was dirt streets planted with a scraggle of “concerns,” few of which looked likely to take root. The men favored the saloon, the barber’s, the stable, and the hardware store. The women patronized Gould’s Emporium and the Baptist church, whose steeple had been blasted by lightning. Inside, someone was picking at a hymn tune as at a worrying scab. We went into a lunchroom next to the hotel, where strips of fly-beaded sticky paper hung from the ceiling. We were arrested while eating strawberry buckle. Susan and Elizabeth would not go quietly; they tongue-lashed the sheriff, who “took off the kid gloves—women be damned!” If Lilian Heigold had been there, she’d have split the dullard’s skull with her stick.

“I won’t be interfered with!” protested Elizabeth through the bars of our cell.

Susan, on the other hand, having had previous experience as a jailbird, was outwardly calm. “What charges do you have to bring against us?”

The sheriff took off his dented Stetson and mopped the sweatband and his bald head with an unsavory handkerchief. Having satisfied the demands of frontier hygiene, he put his hat back on and squinted down the barrel of his gun at four wanted posters that its butt end had tacked to the jailhouse wall. We saw our faces reflected in four crudely engraved portraits.

“We’ve no use for your kind in Shelby County!” he growled. “They may tolerate your shenanigans back east, but in Tennessee women know their place.” He sat in a chair and spun his spur with menace.

“I suppose you object to a woman’s right to vote,” said Susan with a prideful sniff.

“And of her right to a fair wage!” declaimed Elizabeth, as if she were in Philadelphia at the Athenaeum, instead of in the land of lynching.

“And to be protected from a husband who bullies and dishonors her!”

“And to divorce him!”

“And should she divorce him, to keep her property and her children!”

“And to marry whom she pleases, even if the man happens to be a negro!” A skillful orator, Elizabeth saved the most inflammatory issue for last.

Infuriated, the sheriff spat tobacco juice through the bars. Margaret had to jump to save her shoes. “We won’t put up with any of your New York City horseshit!”

“What do you intend to do with us?” asked Susan, giving another sniff of disdain, which her pinched nose amplified.

“Keep you here till the circuit judge gets around to visiting. In the meantime, I hope the good citizens of this town will overpower me tonight and drag you four to the nearest tree. I would pay to see it properly done.”

“Why have you arrested them?” asked Elizabeth, indicating Margaret and me.

He raised his fist to me and snarled, “This bitch whelped a black bastard, and in Shelby County, fornication and miscegenation are against the law.” He jabbed a finger rudely toward Margaret. “And that one there ran away from the Arkansas Asylum for Wayward Girls, where she was locked up on account of immorality and arson.”

“I am not a girl, nor am I immoral!” said Margaret grandly. “And I am certainly not an arsonist! I’m an attraction of P. T. Barnum’s Grand Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome. Having lost nearly everything five times to fire, he wouldn’t have hired me had I shown the least tendency toward pyromania.”

“If I were you, I wouldn’t mention that trickster’s name in Shelby County. We don’t take kindly to flimflam and bunkum.” The brute spat again. “For your information, midget, an agent of the Confederate Secret Service set fire to the American Museum to punish Barnum for being a bigmouthed nigger-lover and a Jew.” The sheriff put his face against the bars and hissed, “Let me tell you something: I believe in Hell, and you four bitches have stumbled into a place seven times hotter. So keep your puke holes shut while I go home and stuff mine with pork chops and hominy. And if I get a bellyache ’cause of you, I’ll personally see that you’re catawamptiously chewed up, as we say in Shelby County!” He grimaced, as though he’d taken a bite of Susan, whose sour face promised indigestion. He turned and went to his supper, locking the jailhouse door behind him.

The sheriff’s talk of Hell brought to mind the story of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. The king commanded that they be bound and thrown into a fiery furnace, which was stoked for their cremation to burn seven times hotter than usual. When he looked inside it, he saw the three Hebrews walking unbound amid the flames and, with them, a fourth man who resembled the son of God. Which of us, I wondered, would be the most likely child of the Almighty? Margaret, I guessed, because it would be just like Him to embody Himself in the most unlikely piece of creation, the better to astonish. (Try as I may, I can’t imagine any other god but Barnum.)

“The sheriff would make a dramatic illustration for the lecture platform,” said Elizabeth. “We could call him ‘Man at His Most Evolved.’”

“I’d rather see the so-and-so stuffed in a taxidermist’s window,” countered Susan acidly.

“What now?” asked Margaret.

“Time will tell,” replied Susan.

“If we can escape, should we go back or press on?” asked Elizabeth.

“Let’s put it to a vote.” Not even the threat of being chewed catawamptiously could weaken Susan’s devotion to woman’s suffrage. We were a democracy of four and would respect the wishes of the majority. Trembling, I awaited the result that would determine Martin’s fate.

We voted by acclamation: “On to Memphis!”

“Thank you, dear friends!” I cried. “And should it be the case that my son is a negro—”

“He could be a Tartar, for all I care,” said Elizabeth grandly.

Like a special envoy of the Omnipotent, the sheriff’s wife entered. Seeing bedclothes in her arms, we thought she had come to make up our cots. “Hurry!” she said, unlocking the cell door. “You might not get another chance!”

We were astounded by this turn of events.

“Why are you helping us?”

“I’m a suffragist—or I would be if I lived up north and weren’t married to a lout.”

“Does he beat you?” asked Elizabeth, who habitually canvassed women on their treatment by men.

“Yes, but there’s no time to show you my bruises. You must hurry, before he whistles for his pie.”

“He’ll suspect you,” said Susan worriedly.

“He’ll blame your escape on the negroes.”

“Come with us!” urged Elizabeth, taking the sheriff’s wife by the hand.

“I can’t leave my children. Now you really must go!”

We followed her out the back door. “Take these.” She gave us each a bedsheet and a pillowcase. “When you get to Memphis, put these on.” She gave me a pair of shears and said, “Tonight, they intend to sacrifice your son to the Imperial Wizard. Everyone will be dressed in Klan costumes. You’ll be able to pass unnoticed among the crowd. Look!” She pointed west, where night had begun to fall. The sky seemed on fire, as if the remnant light of Krakatoa shone. The evening sky had looked like this when Barnum’s museum, his Hippotheatron, and Iranistan, his mogul palace in Connecticut, were consumed. On such a night an age and more ago, Caesar’s centurions had set alight the Great Library of Alexandria, where catawamptious did not appear on the scrolls and codices written in all the languages of the literate world.

“Godspeed!” said Susan.

“We’re grateful!” said Elizabeth.

“Thank you, you dear good woman!” cried Margaret, close to tears.

I threw my arms around the sheriff’s wife and let my eyes rain. She shook herself free and pushed me toward the burning sky.

The Invisible Empire

I’LL NEVER FORGET THE FLOURY CHEEK of our jailor’s wife, who was, I suppose, making a pie as she struggled with her conscience. That courage can rise like dough in a bowl is heartening. I’m glad whenever I recall an atom of kindness from the oblivion that swathes our little lives as a bandage does tender flesh. I would not thank God to be reborn if His grant meant that I must relive that painful time. One does not care to be mauled twice by a tiger—not even in exchange for immortality.

On the outskirts of Memphis, we came upon a disused railroad shed. We went inside and, with the shears, cut eyeholes in the pillowslips and roughly tailored the sheets to fit our different forms. Margaret needed half a sheet; Elizabeth had to make do with one, an accommodation that exposed her lower extremities.

“Praise God you didn’t wear your bloomers!” remarked Susan, casting a critical eye on her friend encased in a linen shroud.

“You look like a malnourished ghost!” retorted Elizabeth, stung by the affront.

“This is not a beauty contest!” objected Susan, rearranging her sheet.

To hear them fuss, you would have thought we were in Mrs. Crockett’s boardinghouse and not in a tar-paper shack stinking of oil and creosote, surrounded by Klansmen awaiting the Holy Terrors to put an innocent mulatto child to the stake.

I accepted Susan’s idea that little Martin had been begotten by God’s special agent, an angel of color that the prophet Ezekiel had glimpsed in a dream, “whose appearance [was] like the appearance of brass.” But I struggled to answer the question, If I had the fabulous root that could turn black to white, would I brew a potion and give it to my child to drink, or would I let him be as God or accident had made him? To save the skin of one we love, what principle will we not betray, what treason not commit?

Disguised, we walked toward the heights overlooking the Mississippi River, where the city had fallen to Union gunboats during the War of the Rebellion. No sooner had it ended than Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Memphis man, founded the Invisible Empire. (Too late, he would repudiate it.) On the bluffs stood three tall crosses slathered with tar to make them flammable. The flanking pair had been set alight; flames rose into that region of the air where night birds fly. On one, Elizabeth’s straw-filled effigy hung; on the other, Susan’s. I could hear them crackle. The central cross had not yet been lighted. I knew that it was intended for my child. Holding flaming torches aloft, a satanic host of robed and hooded men waited expectantly for the appointed hour.

“They’ve made my effigy three times larger than yours!” complained Elizabeth.

Susan snorted and said, “Keep your mind on the business at hand, Lizzie.”

We passed fearfully through the mob, in spite of the anonymity conferred by our costume. Their eyes fixed on the crosses, none noticed Elizabeth’s shins. Not even Margaret stood out in the crowd, since the Klansmen had dressed their children as smaller versions of themselves. For all her fortitude, however, Margaret began to whimper. A Klanswoman stopped and spoke to her, “There’s no reason to cry, child. You’re among the chosen people. No harm can come to you.” She patted Margaret’s covered head and walked away, pulling a miniature Klansman sucking his thumb after her. I wished I had a gun, so that I could deflate her smugness with a bullet. Thus does hatred beget hatred, from age to everlasting age.

Night was falling fast, and the mob moved restlessly toward the hill. As we drew near, we saw that a platform had been raised in front of the central cross. With its row of chairs and a potted plant, it was like any other stage from which a harangue or a homily would be delivered (except that the plant was the highly toxic Heart of Jesus). At the center of the platform squatted a bulky object covered by a sheet. (The sheet was ensanguined—a word meaning “bloody,” I’d learned from Mr. James.)

Six men climbed the wooden stairs; five sat and the sixth, Ethan Dorn, the Grand Cyclops of the Memphis Klan, tore off the bloody sheet to reveal an altar. Arranged before him lay the symbolic instruments of his priesthood: a bucket of tar, a sack of feathers, a knife, and a noose.

“The frightful hour of the dreadful day, in the weeping week of the furious month, has come,” he intoned solemnly. “Goblins and ghouls from all over the realm—its dominions and provinces—have assembled tonight on this shining hill where Nathan Bedford Forrest laid the foundation for the Invisible Empire. He later fell into error, as prophets sometimes will, but we honor him as the founder of our holy order.

“Along with Grand Turk Butterfield, Grand Sentinel Wallace, Grand Ensign Rollins, Grand Magi Ford, and the venerable Grand Giant Collins, Grand Cyclops emeritus, I welcome you to this special wrecking, in which the gross product of an intermarriage—detestable in the sight of God and His Klan—will be cleansed at the foot of the fiery cross.”

A thousand ghouls and goblins began to sing the hymn whose refrain I’d first heard from Alma Bridwell White’s pukehole in Zarephath:

To the Bright Fiery Cross, I will ever be true;

All blame and reproach gladly bear,

And friendship will show to each Klansman I know;

Its glory forever we’ll share.

So, I’ll cherish the Bright Fiery Cross

Till from my duties at last I lay down;

Then burn for me a Bright Fiery Cross;

The day I am laid in the ground.

So mighty was the voice that rose from a thousand blasted hearts, it could have raised the dead negroes who’d been lynched, burned, or beaten from the shallow graves into which they’d been shoveled. The ghouls, hydras, furies, and terrors were in ecstasy, because there’s no sport like a blood sport and no living creature—not a fox or a wolf, a lion or an elephant—is more gratifying to slaughter than a man, preferably a black, yellow, or red one. With each new stanza, the hymn grew louder; each time the refrain was bellowed, the frenzy of the mob increased, and so did our terror. Shivers ran through us like electric shocks, but they were identical to the fits of rapture of the beings around us—I cannot call them “human.”

Grand Cyclops Dorn returned to his theme; his words came faster and more trenchantly. He was inflaming the mob as the Klan’s fallen idol Nathan Bedford Forrest had done when he incited the men of Fort Pillow to massacre five hundred surrendering black Union soldiers. “Behind me, you see the charred likenesses of two of the North’s most repulsive women. They promote the amalgamation of the races. They would corrupt the purity of our offspring with the tainted blood of Jews, coons, Polacks, papists, and dagoes.”

The mob sang lustily:

We’re busy working for our race,

Our families, and our homes;

We keep the niggers in their place

And the dago pope in Rome.

“I can tell you all with absolute certainty that we are doing the Lord’s work,” said Dorn.

The multitude answered its high priest in a single unmusical voice:

Oh, I’d rather be a Klansman

In a robe of snowy white

Than be a Roman Catholic priest

In a robe as dark as night.

“Do you think God would have allowed Africans to become enslaved if he had the least regard for them?”

“No, God be praised!”

“Do you think the Almighty has the least little bit of love for the negro race?”

“None at all!”

“Do you think He intended that there be a place called Orange Mound in the State of Tennessee, where negroes can live on land only white men know how to work?”

“No, suh, He most surely did not!” The infernal congregation had fallen into the call-and-response patter—the shouts of praise and indignation—heard in a black church.

“Do you think He’s pleased with His white children for allowing such a travesty?”

“Stick ’em in the ground and leave ’em to rot!”

His forearms resting on the altar, Dorn went on in a confidential tone: “Now if anyone from up North was to hear me …” Elizabeth went rigid inside her sheet and, I imagined, turned as white as it. “They would think me full up with braggadocio, which is what we country folk call ‘bullshit,’ having no use for dago words, French ones, or the palabras of the darkies who live on the wrong side of the Río Grande.”

“Burn the greasers!” screamed the crowd. “Turn them into human torches!”

“I would love to send the Twelve Terrors and a wrecking crew to lay waste to the nigger Mexicans who have the temerity to live smack up against our southern border!”

“Build a wall! Build a wall to keep them out!”

“I would personally set fire to anybody living within the sacred Realm of Tennessee who has the gall to talk spiggoty or any other ignorant lingo!” shouted Dorn. The mob’s thundering applause could have pulverized gallstones. “But we are here tonight to set another fire—”

“Hallelujah!”

“A fire of purgation that will show the Lord God that His chosen race won’t stand for miscegenation, won’t sit quietly by while the sacred blood of the white race is polluted by the black blood of the negro or negress, and will never tolerate bastardy!”

“Lord, show no mercy!”

He took the ceremonial knife and pointed it at Elizabeth’s burnt effigy. “If I had this perversity of nature in front of me, I would gut her and fill all the lamps in Memphis with her lard and have enough left over to waterproof a revival tent.” I could almost see Elizabeth’s hackles rise. “Elizabeth—Cady—Stanton!” He spat out her name like something vile on the tongue. “Elizabeth Cady Stanton is the author of all women’s mischief in this country. She is a godless, unwholesome demagogue who preaches a woman’s rights: her right to have an opinion and speak it publicly no matter how ridiculous, the right to vote for a president or a governor when her only experience with a ballot is casting it at the county fair for the best apple pie or homemade hat, the right to leave her husband on a whim and take his money, his property, and his children with her, and the right to sleep with negroes anytime she feels her loins itch!”

“God pour His holy fire on the whore!”

He pointed his knife at Susan’s effigy. “Now this person—I do not dare call her a woman—Miss Susan B. Anthony—the B stands for bitch!—is Stanton’s battleax, who graduated from loving negroes to women.” He spat again. (Southern men must get dry as sticks by the end of the day.)

“Please, God, throw her into the lake of everlasting fire!”

“Of the two, Susan [spit] B. [spit] Anthony [spit] is far worse because—all you ghouls, goblins, furies, dragons, and genii—she is unnatural.”

“Oh, Lord of Heaven and Hell, skin her, tan her, and turn her into leather pouches to keep our chaw in!”

“Susan B. Anthony is worse than any fallen lily, soiled dove, strumpet, or succubus. I can forgive the wayward girl who lets herself become some man’s creature; I could, like Jesus, forgive a woman taken in adultery so long as she is not my wife, but I will never countenance sodomy!”

“Burn the witch! Burn the witch! Burn the witch!”

“Unfortunately, these two abominations are far away from the pure hands of the righteous who would tear them limb from limb. They are living in the infamous American Babylon of the Hebrews and the Irish—New York City! But tonight we have the rotten fruit of their philosophy: the mulatto bastard of a woman who serves the high priestesses of the cult of emasculation, the woman who typewrites their obscene blasphemies and who learned her unfeminine skill at the so-called Young Women’s Christian Association, which is a coven for modern-day witches.”

My tongue tasted like a sour pickle, and I bit it to keep from crying out in indignation. One word—one syllable of disapproval—and I’d have been ripped apart by the ravening beast that is a mob. I’d have been catawamptiously eaten.

“Burn the bastard!” it chanted. “Burn the nigger brat!” “Grand Guard, it is time. Bring forth the sacrifice!” commanded Grand Cyclops Dorn in the voice of doom. “Burn, baby, burn!”

Six men dressed like the rest marched out the back door of a nearby house. Behind them, a Klanswoman carried Martin in her arms. He appeared to be asleep. She must have given him laudanum or gin, I told myself, for him to sleep through such a commotion. She and her escort brought my baby to the altar as the zealots sang:

Rally round the sacred altar
Purged of sin and baseless fear;
Ne’er shall Knights in armor falter,
Nor shall Craven enter in.

The Grand Cyclops put the child on the rough-hewn altar and, with a finger dipped in pine tar, drew the sign of the cross on his small brow. Next, he sprinkled feathers over him, and around his neck, he tied a noose fashioned from butcher’s twine instead of the hemp reserved for the fully grown. The ritual at an end, Dorn held the baby on high for the people to see. They roared their disapproval and shrieked their enmity. By the infernal blaze of their torches, they stamped their feet as one. Thunder rolled across the river into Arkansas. Joshua’s army of forty thousand Israelites had made such a noise on the Plain of Jericho. The ground shook as it had in 1812, when the earth buckled at the New Madrid fault line in Missouri and people trembled as far north as Cairo and as far south as Memphis—cities of the New World, visited by the ruthless gods of the old. Yes, hyperbole is necessary! How else am I to capture an experience that was out of all proportion to ordinary life?

Mark Twain would have said, “By exaggeration!”

Gallagher would have sneered, “By prevarication!”

Henry James would have asserted, “By convolution!”

Barnum would have boasted, “By mystification!”

Dorn raised his hand, and the crowd grew silent. “I now call upon the Imperial Wizard to make his presence known!” The crowd parted, and a large man astride an enormous white horse decked with flowers ambled toward the platform. His conical hat was twice as tall as any other, and his robes were scarlet. The ghouls and other lesser folk fell back at his approach, many of them trembling in awe. “Bow down to the Imperial Wizard!” shouted Dorn, who made his obeisance to the leader of the Klan.

Sitting his horse lightly, the Imperial Wizard nodded his noble head to his worshipful followers, from whom not a peep was heard. Not even the little Klan boys and girls dared to make a sound, for fear of incurring the Wizard’s high displeasure.

Dorn turned to the five dignitaries on the platform. “Light the sacred fire!”

They rose from their chairs and went to the central cross, which was also painted black with tar. No sooner had their torches touched the wood than it caught fire. The flames spread upward in a whoosh until the cross was engulfed. People as far away as Fulton could’ve seen the ghastly light in the sky and would have wondered at its meaning. The shrouded assembly kept a religious silence as the Imperial Wizard on his horse drew as near to the fiery cross as he could without scorching his canonicals.

“The Grand Council of Yahoos has tried this abomination,” blustered Dorn. “And it has found him guilty of the grievous sin of having been born black. Accordingly, the Grand Council sentenced Martin Finch, by the ‘one-drop rule’ of blood, to be given to the fires of retribution and be consumed therein. If his mother were here, she would be put to death, as well, for conceiving him in her white woman’s belly.”

Dorn took my darling babe from the altar and carried him to the cross, where a manger packed with straw awaited him. Meanwhile, the five potentates had assembled into a tableau in mockery of the shepherds who, in Bible times, had left their flocks and gone to glorify the baby Jesus in Bethlehem.

“Before you all and in the name of the Imperial Wizard of the Invisible Empire and of the white race, which God made in His image, I sacrifice this creature! Non Silba Sed Anthar: Not for Self, but for Others.”

“Not for self, but for others!”

Fists clenched, I rushed toward the monstrous Nativity. Elizabeth gasped, Susan moaned, and Margaret’s voice caught in her throat. Entranced by the flames, no one else saw me. Dorn was about to toss the child, like a stick of firewood, into the burning manger. I took the shears from underneath my robe and would have plunged them into his wicked heart had a Voice (the common noun is too paltry for so uncommon an utterance) not cracked the awful silence into splinters, like a window shattered by a stone.

“Let My Son Go!”

I don’t know how to convey the quality of that voice, which seemed to have no source other than the sky. It was loud—what a feeble word to say how it boomed and resounded round about us! In such a voice, God had called into being the firmaments, Earth, and all living things. With it, He had plundered Adam of a rib and made Eve, whose moist earth would bring forth all the generations of our kind, which must end in the cold earth of the grave. In such a voice, God had sent plagues against the stiff-backed Egyptians and charged the angel of death to visit them in their houses to break them of stubbornness. At its dread command, the Red Sea had parted, the tablets of the law cracked, and fire poured onto the heads of the Sodomites. In a voice like that which thundered above Memphis at the frightful hour of the dreadful day, in the weeping week of the furious month, Ahab had shouted his defiance at Moby Dick.

The stentorian Voice continued: “If Any Harm Befalls Him, I Will Destroy Your Houses, Slay Your Children, Sow Your Bodies with Corruption and Your Fields with Salt, Turn Your Wits with Fevers, and Damn Your Souls to Everlasting Pain!”

Dorn dropped the baby in the grass and ran. The white horse decked with flowers reared and threw the Imperial Wizard to the ground, which opened to receive him. The grand army of the Invisible Empire skedaddled into the forest.

I was about to scoop Martin up in my arms, when the Klanswoman who’d carried him from the house and given him to Dorn knocked me to the ground. Tearing off my hood, she cried out in recognition, “You!” I knew the voice and the eyes behind the mask; they belonged to Alma Bridwell White. She took the child and ran toward the burning cross, the tar snapping and the scorched wood swelling in the heat. She’d have given him to the fire had Margaret not snatched him from her grasp. White turned in fury; as she did, a fountain of sparks fell onto her robe, setting it alight. She spun crazily, as though a swarm of bees had settled on her; she swatted the flames and screamed. In a moment, she’d exchanged her white robe for one of fire, like the golden one Medea gave Jason. As Margaret, Susan, Elizabeth, and I watched, White ran to the bluff and jumped into the Mississippi. Once, I’d watched as boys poured coal oil on a crow and lighted it. White reminded me of that terrible sight, though I didn’t pity her as I had the blazing bird plummeting from the bridge into New-town Creek.

“Let’s go before they come back!” urged Susan.

We hurried along the heights and didn’t stop until we reached French Fort, lower down the river.

By the wall of the deserted garrison, we caught our breath and collected our wits like scattered parcels. Martin fretted in a sleep nourished by a potent distillation while we marveled at events and, in particular, the Voice, which had delivered us from evil.

“It could only have been God’s, for none other could have routed a multitude of hardened men and scarcely less hardened women,” reasoned Susan. “Only He is capable of so mighty an effect.”

Although Elizabeth was loath to surrender her religious skepticism, she couldn’t explain the “effect” by adducing either natural or mechanical causes to anyone’s satisfaction, including her own.

“I’ve heard it before, though not so hugely amplified,” said Margaret.

We looked at her dubiously.

“When?” asked Susan.

“From whose mouth?” asked Elizabeth.

“Mr. Barnum’s speaking through a megaphone when he addressed spectators in the seats farthest from the center ring; in barrel-vaulted train sheds amid the thunderous noise of departure when he bid farewell to onlookers; and in Gotham, Chicago, San Francisco, and London when he shouted greetings to passersby above the din of traffic, circus screamers, and excited elephants.”

Elizabeth and Susan were not convinced. They could believe in a god who can crack the foundations of the universe with a shout, but a mere man or woman—no. True, some can shatter glass with a long-held operatic note, but a party trick is hardly comparable to an admonition that can disperse a thousand fools.

I accepted Margaret’s explanation because it solved the mystery surrounding the person Susan had glimpsed and I had heard softly breathing inside the caboose. Human beings can’t tolerate a mystery and, in trying to solve it, will many times beget a greater one. Just so do we move from question to question while the world becomes more complicated instead of less, and we ourselves grow more puzzled and alone.

Little Martin opened his eyes and looked into mine with an intelligence and a frankness I had not seen there before. I thought I saw him wink, as if he knew a secret I did not, such as the mystery of his birth. There was no doubt about it: He was a negro boy.

Minstrelsy

A MILE OR SO BELOW FRENCH FORT, we came upon the ramshackle abode of Mr. Brister Warwick, a former slave. He greeted us with a shotgun aimed unequivocally at Elizabeth, who appeared to be our leader and was the surer target.

“Get your hands up!” he said with the meanness you sometimes find in people who’ve had all they can stand of cruelty and terror.

You see, we’d neglected to take off our improvised goblin suits.

“We’re not Klanswomen!” spluttered Elizabeth. With a gun barrel poking at her ribs, she could be forgiven her petulance. “We are northern suffragists traveling incognito.”

The man appeared suspicious. Who could blame him? In Shelby County, a night visit from folks dressed like ghosts did not bode well for a negro. To be fair, Shelby was not the only county in America where black people could be dragged from their homes in the middle of the night. Some folks think lynching is more fun than a circus, and admission is free.

“The Klan is after us,” said Susan, calmly disrobing. The rest of us quickly followed suit.

Facing two old women, a “slip of a girl,” as Franklin liked to say of me, a tiny woman, and a baby, Brister relaxed his grip on the rifle’s business end. “This have something to do with the ruckus I heard from upriver?”

“It does indeed,” said Elizabeth, who related the story of our anabasis and explained the reason we had come—a story that would have been smoother in the telling had it not been for Susan’s interjections. Margaret and I forbore to contribute to the babel. Little by little, Brister became convinced of our innocence. Whether he believed in the Voice is another matter. He offered to help us get out of Tennessee.

“Just before first light, I’ll row you across to Arkansas. Not that Arkansas is friendlier to northern busybodies than Tennessee, but any dogs they’ve set on you will lose your scent in the river.”

“We’re grateful to you, Mr. Warwick,” we said in our several ways, all of them sincere.

“You folks hungry?” We were. “I have salt meat and bread and some goat’s milk for the child.” He went into his kitchen shed and returned with our meager supper. Before we ate, he blessed it and commended us into God’s safekeeping.

“Get some rest,” he said. “I’ll give you some blankets to sleep on.”

“We brought our own bedsheets!” quipped Elizabeth, whose native cheerfulness supper had restored.

I made a nest for Martin in an empty apple crate and watched as he tumbled back into sleep. You’re better there, I told him in my thoughts. I couldn’t sleep, or maybe I did. Sleep or wakefulness, Tennessee or Arkansas were one and the same to me then. That night, I clung to certain facts: the child, the sour smell of goat’s milk on his breath, a blister on my thumb raised in cutting bedsheets, Elizabeth’s snores, Susan’s slumberous harrumphs, the glint of light on the barrel of the old negro’s gun, which he held in his arms as he dozed by the iron stove, and my memory of the Sholes & Glidden, which was fading.

6 - ,
Q W I U O P
Z     
A X & N ? ;

Brister took my hand. His felt like bark. Outside, the sky was dark, but I saw in his face and in Elizabeth’s as she held the candle to her watch that it was not to row us across the river that he’d disturbed our rest. He put his finger to his lips and whispered, “Listen!” I did and, in the distance, heard the baying of hounds that had been loosed on us. “Get your things! Hurry now!”

He went into the shed and returned with an empty feed sack containing bread, pears, and a jar of milk. He gave me a clean cloth. “If the baby starts to fuss, soak some milk with this rag and let him suckle it.”

He blew out the candles and led us quietly to the riverbank, where a skiff was tied to the branch of a cottonwood. “Hurry!” he said again. We got into the boat and made for the channel where the current flowed swiftly toward the Gulf. The only sounds were the softly groaning tholes, disgruntled bullfrogs stirred up by Brister’s oars, and the light slap of water against the prow. The crying of the dogs grew faint.

“An idea came to me in the night,” he said. “The Rufus J. Lackland tied up at Wyanock Landing yesterday, five miles downriver. She’ll be on her way again sometime this evening. If you manage to get aboard, you can get to New Orleans and then catch a train to New York.”

We took heart.

“I pray no harm will come to you, Mr. Warwick, for helping us,” said Susan earnestly.

Elizabeth muttered words I didn’t catch. Margaret grabbed his hand and kissed it. He pulled it away and went on rowing. Had there been light enough to see his face, doubtless I’d have seen his embarrassment—his black skin notwithstanding.

“Before we get to the landing, I mean to row ashore and get you two blacked up.” He pointed to Elizabeth and Susan.

“Whatever do you mean?” asked Elizabeth.

I couldn’t tell if she was dismayed, horrified, or thrilled.

“Klansmen are everywhere in these parts. At Wyanock, they could be on the lookout for you all. If I black up Mrs. Stanton and Miss Susan, you can pass for colored servants of Miss Finch and her little sister.” He turned to Elizabeth. “If you carry the boy, folks will think he’s yours.” What further confirmation of my son’s negritude could I ask for? Little Martin was black—but he was not a bastard.

“I bore seven children, and I don’t think it’s fair to be burdened with an eighth at my time of life!” she complained.

“I will play mother,” said Susan with the air of a martyr who plainly enjoys the role.

Brister bit the water with his oars, and the boat jumped toward New Orleans (as if four hundred miles of river weren’t in the way). A mile or so above the landing, he slewed the boat to shore. He led us into a stand of pines and made a fire. With a piece of char, he blackened Susan’s and Elizabeth’s faces, necks, and wrists. “Lucky for you two, your hair lost its color.” Susan’s was gray, Elizabeth’s white. He gave them each a bright rag to tie around their heads. Squinting at the result, he said, “Sisters, you look fine!” He reached into his sack and took out a shiny red dress. “Mrs. Stanton, put this on—and don’t pother! It belonged to my wife, who was taken in December. She was a big woman, like you.”

Elizabeth held the dress at arm’s length, as if expecting an uprising of moths. “Is this really necessary?”

“My Ida got married in that dress. She always said she wanted to be buried in it. I didn’t see her sister—a slack-jawed, lopsided Louisiana cane cutter—switch it for a calico shift. Poor Ida was already in the ground when I caught Beulah wearing it. I made her take it off in the yard to shame her.” Sensing Elizabeth’s reluctance, he said, “Ida didn’t die of something catching.”

“Oh, give it to me!” Elizabeth took the dress and walked a short way into the woods in search of privacy. I could tell she was annoyed. To be at the mercy of a man’s cunning, a negro man’s at that, or to be eyed up and down like a heifer at a cattle show—I couldn’t say which of the two she considered more humiliating.

“How do I look?” asked Elizabeth, coming out from behind a tree.

“Like the Whore of Babylon in blackface,” crowed Susan.

“So long as no one can recognize me.”

Brister gave each of the suffragists a pair of Ida’s Sunday gloves to hide her white hands.

We started walking toward the skiff.

“Hold on, ladies!” said Brister. “This is as far as I dare. The landing’s a mile off. Just stay on the towpath, and it will take you right to it. Get aboard the steamer soon as you can and keep out of sight till she gets under way.”

We said our good-byes. Margaret wept—circus people are sentimental. Susan shook the old man’s bony hand. Beguiled by Ida’s dress, Elizabeth kissed the old man’s grizzled cheek. Brister cleared his throat, climbed into his skiff, hoisted the patched and mended sail, and started back to French Fort.

“I feel like a croquet ball that is made to roll across the lawn by the tap of a mallet.”

“Lizzie, you do talk nonsense sometimes!” said Susan with enough bite to core an apple.

“I’m most myself in my black silk dress; in blackface and red sateen, who knows what I shall become?”

“And who were you in your famous bloomers?”

“I’ve outgrown them as one does the mistaken ideals of her youth.”

“Or for being overly fond of custard pies.”

“Plump women are more admired than sticks like you!”

“Admired by whom?” Susan had treed her as a hound dog does a raccoon. To answer with the word men would have betrayed woman’s sovereignty; other women could have made her seem reliant on the good opinion of her sex. To reply myself to Susan’s question would have revealed her vanity.

Like a coon up a tree, Elizabeth hid behind her black mask. “By the time we get home to Mrs. Crockett’s, I will be some other woman.” She sighed.

“Well, I hope she doesn’t snore!”

A steam whistle hooted in derision.

The towpath turned sharply toward the river, and the Rufus J. Lackland stood before us. During the war, she’d been a Confederate “cotton-clad.” With battering rams of railroad iron and her bow packed with cotton bales to absorb the shock, she’d sunk Union gunboats on the Lower Mississippi.

Notice of her departure was tacked onto a board:

Leaves on SUNDAY, 13th inst., at 6 P.M. MEMPHIS & NEW ORLEANS PACKET BOAT

The first-class passenger packet RUFUS J. LACKLAND, S. PHILLIPS, master, is now receiving freight & will leave as above. For freight or passage, apply on board. This boat connects at Napoléon with regular packets for the Arkansas and White rivers & stops at Greenville, Vicksburg & Natchez. Bills of lading signed at office of the agents up to 4 o’clock the day of departure.

Margaret and I walked up the steamer’s gangway. Elizabeth and Susan, who carried little Martin, followed at a respectful distance. Brister had warned us, “Don’t talk like educated folks, misses, or you will give yourselves away. And, Miss Susan, I noticed you often have a sour face on you. If a white person sees it, you will be thrashed. Miss Ellen, you have got to act haughty to make people believe in this mummery.” He’d addressed himself to Margaret last: “Child, try not to fuss and call attention to yourself.” I do believe he never realized that Margaret was a grown woman.

At the ticket window, I nearly lost my nerve.

“Don’t you have any baggage?” asked the purser.

“No, sir.” Instantly, I regretted having shown him deference. I was masquerading as a fine lady, though a northern one.

“Not even a ‘carpetbag’?” he asked, smirking.

“I do not.” I tried to look down my nose at him, but my eyes crossed.

“Why’s that?” he asked suspiciously.

“Our trunks were stolen,” I blurted.

“Plenty of thieving niggers hereabouts.”

Fortunately, the purser had not even glanced at “my negroes,” who were unworthy of his notice. I doubted if their disguises or Margaret’s subterfuge could have withstood his scrutiny. But then again, most of us see according to our expectations. He lectured a knot of sympathetic listeners who had gathered behind us on the innate depravity of the negro. Having emptied his duct of bile, he turned to me and said in a perfunctory voice, “That’ll be four-fifty.” Opening my purse, I was dismayed to find that my federal money had changed into Confederate notes. Their worthlessness notwithstanding, he stuffed them into his cash box.

We went below, locked ourselves in our cabin, and prepared to wait for six o’clock.

“It was all I could do to hold my tongue and not rip his out of his rotten mouth!” said Susan, furious at the treatment we’d received from “a puffed-up specimen of meanness, worse than the worst plug ugly.”

“He never so much as looked at me!” said Elizabeth in like temper.

“General Thumb would never have stood for it!” said Margaret, her green eyes moist with remembrance. “He would have stuck him with his sword stick.”

While the women continued to air their resentment, I fell into that loveliest of phrases—a “brown study.”

Questions of right and wrong are better left to parsons and judges, who are paid to answer them; however, I feel obliged to mention one question that clamored for an answer as I lay on my bunk with the baby in my arms. (Strange, that he was so well behaved! You might have thought him a cloth poppet.)

Should I keep the child, or find a decent black family to raise him?

I shook off my torpor and listened to the black-faced suffragists talk of trivial matters. Even noble minds will sometimes stoop to folly under nervous strain. I glimpsed my face in the mirror on the cabin wall and was heartened to see Ellen Finch looking back at me.

“It’s nearly time for the boat to be getting under way,” said Elizabeth, having glanced at her watch. “By ‘time,’ I mean what ordinary people experience going about their lives and not the fitful, skittish time we’ve been keeping ever since we left Grand Central.”

Life, for me, had been governed by a very different clock since my nightmare on the train from Sing Sing, the strange events at Dobbs Ferry, and the encounter with Alma Bridwell White in Zarephath. For me, time was neither straightforward nor dependable.

“I’m feeling peckish,” said Susan. “What about you, Margaret?”

“I could eat a horse!”

The shrill voice of the Rufus J. Lackland’s steam whistle announced her departure. The cabin floor shook as the stern paddles chewed water that had first begun to flow from Lake Itasca ages before a regretful God scuttled His creation, all save an ark of refugees, who would prove to be no better than their ancestors. The instant before the paddles took purchase and the steamer lurched forward, possibility held sway over all the universe. The Mississippi River could have reversed its course, ceased to flow, or dried up in its bed. The boat could have taken wing and flown to the antipodes or to Missouri, where people are said to be skeptical. Martin II could have turned white, and I become a Chinese or a Cherokee. But nothing out of the ordinary occurred except that the packet, as ponderous as a hippopotamus, turned inelegantly in the channel and headed for its first stop, Napoléon, Arkansas, at eighteen knots. Soon the river’s reaches would turn copper and tarnish into dusk. Late on the following night, we’d arrive in cosmopolitan New Orleans, where we would have less reason to be afraid.

We went up on the main deck, where supper was being served, and ate our fill of ham and oysters, rice and green beans, followed by ice cream and peach cobbler. I sipped a mint julep because it was expected of me, while Margaret drank lemonade and our two reluctant servants water. The male passengers nipped Kentucky bourbon, save for a traveler in Bibles, who took gin “because of its purity.” Had Gallagher been there, his red face would have inched ever closer to his plate until it rested on the remains of his supper, with only an imbiber’s snore to signify the presence of life or the absence of death, however one chooses to view the matter. As the boat steamed south, the sun was falling over Arkansas. Soon Tennessee would be overthrown by darkness. The Father of Waters would shine like quicksilver before it was quenched.

After supper, we yielded to the drowsiness that can steal over passengers on a riverboat, especially at night, when the day’s rude noise has faded and the stern wheel’s threshing and the water’s lapping on the hull produce an unearthly calm. Passengers become subdued, as if in the presence of something that could be called “holy” but is usually mistaken for the workings of digestion. Drunk with love on such a night, Solomon sang to his beloved, whose belly was “like an heap of wheat set about with lilies,” and Marc Antony, the Roman, became enamored of his Egypt as she floated down the Cydnus River, “her barge like a burnished throne.”

On such a night, Lincoln rode through the streets of Washington to Ford’s Theatre, happy that, at long last, peace was in the April air. On such a night at war’s end, the grossly overloaded Steamship Sultana sank off Memphis, and 1,200 Union soldiers liberated from Andersonville Prison drowned. They’d been packed into a boat meant to carry eighty-five passengers and crew. What Confederate captain Henry Wirz, the only officer, north or south, to be hanged for war crimes, had failed to accomplish, abetted by starvation, dysentery, and typhus, the Mississippi’s icy runoff, the prisoners’ enfeeblement, and the greed of Union officers Hatch and Mason did. (They were promised five dollars, COD, for every soldier delivered from captivity.) Time is often fragrant with desire, but more often, it is pregnant with disaster and stinks of death.

The lamps were lighted in the Lackland’s dining room. A blacked-up quartet sang “Old Aunt Jemima.” Believing the song ridiculed negroes, the white passengers joined in gleefully, unaware that Billy Kersand, a black minstrel, had written the lyrics to make fun of the crackers, who’d have gone to any lengths to keep their negroes in perpetual servitude. “God damn ‘Ape’ Lincoln and his blue bellies!”

My old missus promise me,

Old Aunt Jemima, oh! oh! oh!

When she died she’d set me free,

Old Aunt Jemima, oh! oh! oh!

She lived so long her head got bald,

Old Aunt Jemima, oh! oh! oh!

She swore she would not die at all,

Old Aunt Jemima, oh! oh! oh!

Next, the Lackland’s lord of the revels introduced a troupe of “Ethiopian delineators,” who portrayed three negroes in fancy dress, arguing over a watermelon during a performance of La Dame blanche.

When he pointed his baton at Elizabeth and Susan, they gasped in unison, fearing they’d been found out in spite of having enhanced Brister’s charcoal daubing with greasepaint purloined from the Ethiopians’ dressing room.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” began the showman as urbanely as a cotillion caller. “It has come to my attention that two sophisticates of the art of minstrelsy are here with us tonight. I refer to those comedic sisters in blackface who have performed humorous sketches of colored life for audiences throughout the South—Lizzie and Sue! Maybe they can be persuaded to regale us with one of their famous delineations.”

Uplifted by a tide of applause, Elizabeth and Susan were swept up and deposited onto the stage. By some mischievous wiggle of fate (as might be read by Madame Singleton), two white suffragists masquerading as black maids had turned into a pair of white minstrels in blackface.

“Ladies, be seated,” said the master of minstrelsy in a sequined voice as he assumed the role of a straight-faced Interlocutor flanked by Tambo and Mr. Bones. Helpless to do otherwise, Elizabeth and Susan sat in the “end men’s” chairs. “We will commence with the overture!” he announced as he tapped his baton on a jug of white lightning.

A fiddler, a trombonist, and a banjo player went to work on a ludicrous air until, at a sign from Mr. Interlocutor, it squeaked and wheezed to a stop.

“Esteemed passengers of the Rufus J. Lackland, it’s time for some monkeyshines!”

MR. INTERLOCUTOR: How are you this fine evening, Sister Bones? (No reply) Why, what’s wrong, Sister? You look down in the mouth.

SISTER BONES (Susan): I sorry.

MR. INTERLOCUTOR: What about?

SISTER BONES: I sorry I was born a slave in America.

Elizabeth, in the role of Sister Tambo, rattled a tambourine against her knee.

MR. INTERLOCUTOR: Why, didn’t you hear the news?

SISTER BONES: What news might dat be?

MR. INTERLOCUTOR: Mr. Lincoln emancipated the slaves!

SISTER TAMBO: He sure did! The massa hisself read the Emasculation Proclamation over da heads of da colored men. Then dey all lined up in da yard and got demselves emasculated.

SISTER BONES: I don’ know nothin’ ’bout dat. Our massa read us the Maceration Proclamation, and den we all got ourselves macerated.

SISTER TAMBO: I never heard ’bout no Maceration Proclamation befo’.

MR. INTERLOCUTOR (Ignoring Sister Tambo): So you were macerated.

SISTER BONES: Right down to da bones!

Susan clacked a bone castanet.

MR. INTERLOCUTOR: What did he do with all those macerated bones?

SISTER BONES: He carved little Nativity figures outta dem to set under his Christmas tree.

MR. INTERLOCUTOR: Your master must be a Christian gentleman.

SISTER BONES: He whips da Devil outta us for our souls’ sake.

SISTER TAMBO: What your massa do wid all da leftover dark meat?

SISTER BONES: He boiled it up with some greens and ate it.

SISTER TAMBO: Dass a awful way to treat colored folk!

SISTER BONES: Pshaw! He saved us da most nourishin’ part.

MR. INTERLOCUTOR: And what might the most nourishing part of a darky be, Sister Bones?

SISTER BONES: OUR HATRED!

Elizabeth rattled the tambourine and laughed hysterically while Susan clacked.

No one in the dining room could decide whether he’d been mocked or treated to a sophisticated “coon show” such as people saw in the big cities. Although nobody clapped, neither did anyone hiss, and the supper plates weren’t shied in remonstrance at the two smart aleck ladies in blackface.

Martin slept through the entire evening. To this day, I believe he was under a spell.

The next day, we were ignored by the other passengers, who glanced suspiciously at Susan and Elizabeth, who had rid their faces of greasepaint. The Lackland steamed toward Vicksburg, having stopped in the early-morning hours at Greenville, whose tolling bells had not disturbed our sleep. The Lower Mississippi offered a myriad of picturesque scenes, but we took no notice of them. We were like traveling salesmen for whom novelty had faded and, with it, curiosity. My interest—and the story’s—lay elsewhere. I will mention, however, the gentleman we met on the last day aboard the Lackland.

He was gaunt, his face drawn and of an unhealthy color. It was plain to see that he was gravely ill. He wore a woolen skullcap. I didn’t recognize him as the man whose photograph I’d seen in history books and, recently, on the wall of the Spottswood jailhouse, desecrated by brown spittle. Southerners despised him because during Reconstruction he had enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and scourged the Ku Klux Klan with federal troops.

“Ladies,” he said politely, although he did not rise from the deck chair on which he sat. He held a book of poetry in his gnarled hands. Despite the day’s heat, he wore a shawl around his frail shoulders. Had it not been for the beard, I would have mistaken him for a pinched and aged spinster. Squinting because of the glare on the water behind us, he looked at Elizabeth and Susan. “I heard about your performance. It took guts. Had I a proper hat on, it would be off to you both.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Susan. Although shrunken, the man had a gravity that could have made my womb wander. Acknowledging his authority, Susan bent her stiff back in a curtsy—perhaps the first and only one in her long, unyielding life.

“It’s kind of you to say so,” said Elizabeth. And then astonishment registered on her face. “Why, you’re President Grant!”

He smiled wanly. “The president—and also the man—that was. I’ve nearly finished both my terms. Forgive me if I don’t stand. I’m not up to snuff today.”

We called to a steward to bring three additional chairs. Margaret had stayed in our cabin, along with Martin. The steward’s having ignored our request, we dragged chairs across the deck ourselves and arranged them about the former president.

“I’ve been reading Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. He gave it to me last year, signed in his own hand. It’s not a book I enjoy, any more than I do Mathew Brady’s pictures. It was a bloody business! Sometimes I wish I had stayed home in Galena.” The general read a stanza from the book:

And horror the sodden valley fills,
And the spire falls crashing in the town,

I muse upon my country’s ills—

The tempest bursting from the waste of Time …

“A most bloody, barbarous business—necessary though it was. Not like the Mexican War or the war against the Mormons or the war that’s coming against Spain. America seems helpless not to engage in lunatic adventures.”

“Most of the horrors are still to come,” said Susan, eyes clouded like an oracle’s. “Thank God we won’t live to see them.”

“You look tired, Mr. President,” said Elizabeth maternally.

“I am worn to the bone, Mrs. Stanton. “Ladies, I have been picked clean. If not for Sam Clemens, I would draw my last breath in the poorhouse.”

“You know our true identities?” asked Susan, surprised.

“I would know your famous red shawl anywhere, Miss Anthony.”

He shut his eyes, and his breathing became labored.

“Can I get you anything?” I asked, for the man looked half-dead.

“No thank you, my dear. In a minute, I’ll be right as rain—unless the Massa comes and takes my breath away.”

“What has brought you here?” asked Susan gently.

“I want to see Vicksburg again,” rasped Grant in a voice ruined by too many cigars. “Once upon a time, I had plenty to do there.”

In 1863, Major General Grant laid siege to Vicksburg with a bombardment that lasted forty-eight days. His batteries shelled the town from across the Mississippi until hardly a house or building was left standing. Thirty-three thousand Confederate gray backs were encircled by 77,000 blue bellies. The townspeople lived in caves dug out of the hills’ soft yellow clay and ate rat meat after they had run out of cats and dogs.

“They sat in caves and ate boiled shoes served by slaves on linen tablecloths,” said Grant, eyes glazed in reverie. “We blasted Vicksburg all to Hell. Three thousand rebels died of scurvy, malaria, dysentery, and starvation.” The general shook his head, and we saw disbelief shadow his ravaged face. “People are beyond understanding. I expect not even the Almighty can make head or tails of us. We are His folly—His greatest one.”

“The Greatest Show on Earth!” I had the uncanny sensation that someone had spoken through me like a ventriloquist throwing his voice through a dummy.

The two women looked at me askance, but the general concurred: “You are right, young woman. We are performers in a spectacle.” He brooded a moment and then asked sadly, “Is it likely that our enemies will ever love us? In any case, I shall see Vicksburg again before I die.”

“What do you expect to find?” I asked. I spoke to this old man with a sincerity I had not felt since my child was taken from me. I don’t know why that should have been the case, unless I sensed that we two had been granted the dispensation sometimes given to the sick that allows them to see clearly.

“Something I lost, maybe,” he replied with a contemplative air. “Or something I might find that would make me less afraid.”

“What’re you afraid of?” asked Susan, trying to conceal a pity that would have offended him.

“The future, of course.”

“Yours?” asked Elizabeth.

Grant laughed painfully because of his throat. “Mine is all used up, or nearly so. You must excuse me, but I’m tired, and my voice is about to give out.”

“Forgive us,” I said, like an inquisitor to a man stretched on the rack, which the general’s deck chair did, in fact, resemble.

“Good-bye, ladies.”

We didn’t see him get off the boat at Vicksburg. We were below, in our cabin, when night fell across the Delta.

The Commodore

WE BELIEVED THAT WE’D BE SAFE in a city more interested in commerce than the lunacy of racist hooligans dressed in sheets. But we hadn’t counted on the fury unleashed at Memphis or the confederacy of dunces up and down the river, nor could we have known that the Spottswood sheriff had choked the truth out of his wife and denounced her to the Grand Cyclops. Brister Warwick had also given us away moments before the ghouls lynched and burned him at French Fort. Brister was no more to blame for our trouble in New Orleans than the rope around his neck was for his death or the match for his immolation.

No sooner had the Lackland lowered her gangway than Elizabeth and Susan were seized by three cigar-chewing zealots who had sworn before the Grand Turk and the Grand Cyclops to lynch the suffragists who had defiled the sacred regalia of the Klan, upset its secret conventicle, and stolen its child sacrifice. Keeping to the shadows, I followed them while Margaret hid little Martin inside a custom’s shed. The Klansmen soon found a beam on which to hoist the objects of their enmity. Excited by the prospect of seeing two loudmouthed northern women strung up, a crowd of wharf rats gathered and ignited a row of smudge pots, which cast a lurid light upon the scene. Eyes bright with malice, they sang:

Wheel about, and turn about, and do just so;
Every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.

Bound hand and foot and their necks in nooses, my friends were invited to speak their last words. I couldn’t help thinking of Mary Surratt on the scaffold, whose own valediction had been “Don’t let me fall.”

Elizabeth might have been on a lecture platform, facing an audience of reasonable men and women, so calm did she seem as she addressed the jeering mob:

We declare our faith in the principles of self-government; our full equality with man in natural rights; that woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself—to all the opportunities and advantages life affords, for her complete development; and we deny that dogma of the centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations—that woman was made for man.

She had neither begged for mercy nor protested against the indefensible act to which she herself was about to fall victim. I wept in admiration, forgiving her for the small acts of vainglory that had annoyed me.

Susan concluded the declaration, her stern voice like a hatchet: “We ask of our rulers, at this hour, no special favors, no special privileges, no special legislation. We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.” She’d spoken above the heads of the crowd she scorned to the men in Washington who even now, in 1904, have not unpacked their ears of chaff or their hearts of rubbish.

A Klansman replied, “Ladies, we mean to hang you the same way we would a man—with a rope. So you can’t complain of being treated unfairly.”

The crowd sniggered and then shrieked in enmity, “Hang the bitches! Hang the bitches! Hang the bitches!” I was amazed to hear the women shout as loudly against their sisters as did the men.

Offered filthy handkerchiefs, my two suffragists declined to be blindfolded.

“To Hell with you both!” snarled a man who, by his clothes, could have been a clerk in a law office or a minor customs official. He was ordinary—someone you could picture tipping his hat to a lady in the street more readily than knotting a noose for her neck.

“If we should find ourselves in Hell, we’ll wave our handkerchiefs as the devils drag you, kicking and screaming, to its most infernal region,” said Susan, visibly pleased by her remark.

“If in Heaven, we’ll pity you, since not a damned one of you fiends will make it past the gates,” said Elizabeth unflappably.

“Speak for yourself, Lizzie!” countered Susan with her usual acerbity. “I would not waste a tear to pity or a gob of spit to quench the thirst of these polecats!”

From my covert behind a stack of cotton bales, I shivered in fear for my two friends.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we will commence with the overture,” said a man who resembled the master of ceremonies on board the Lackland. In answer, a fiddler, a trombonist, and a banjo player lurched into the snide tune I’d heard on the river two nights before. The overture having concluded, he sat on a barrel head and resumed the role of Mr. Interlocutor.

MR. INTERLOCUTOR: Without further ado, Sister Bones, I wish you adieu. May you macerate eternally.

He put a noose around Susan’s neck and tightened it.

“We shall go up or down together,” she managed to say before rising into the night air (an intoxicating mix of jasmine, musk, and tar), her feet kicking in her high-buttoned shoes.

Possum up a Gum-Tree,
Up she go, up she go!

The voice that had vexed and stung congressmen, nabobs, and the remonstrants of her own sex may have gone silent, but the red shawl set at defiance the rampant beast that is a mob.

MR. INTERLOCUTOR: Without further aside, Sister Tambo, I bid you good-bye. May you choke on your words eternally.

Elizabeth inched upward as a man hauled on the rope. Two others from the mob lent a hand, and she was quickly lofted.

Pully hawl, pully hawl,

Scream and bawl, scream and bawl!

In the glow of the smudge pots, Elizabeth was gloriously illumined. Gilded by the light, her face showed her contempt and her triumph. Had Elijah’s fiery chariot descended from the heavens and carried her off to the Rapture, I would not have been surprised. Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, John Brown—you are one of them, my dear Mrs. Cady Stanton! You and Miss Susan!

“Non Silba Sed Anthar!” proclaimed the Klansmen in the pig Latin of their childish and murderous cult.

I was about to fling myself on the mob and cut down the dangling suffragists with Brister’s shears, when a noise like rain on a tin roof scattered the rats. Cautiously raising my head like a turkey at a turkey shoot, I peeked and saw a submarine lying against the pier, its Gatling gun raking the wharf with grapeshot. In an instant, I’d cut the hangmen’s ropes. Like two fish gasping in asphyxia, Elizabeth and Susan drew a rattling breath in unison and opened their eyes on the star-spangled sky of a Mississippi Delta night.

“How do you feel, Lizzie?” asked Susan.

“My neck feels longer!” she replied querulously, fingering it as a bassoonist would the keys of her instrument.

We were joined by Margaret and the child, and together we hurried to the submarine half-hidden in a cloud of steam.

“Quick, ladies!” urged a sailor leaning over the iron deck to hand us on board. “We must not give them time to drop their nets.” He helped us through an open hatch. Elizabeth caused an anxious moment, but with a final effort, she wriggled though the iron collar, tearing her sateen dress on the rivets. While the sailor screwed down the hatch cover, we descended a ladder into a gaslit interior. Was I surprised by this novelty? I’d lost the capacity for astonishment, not all at once, as a woman loses her virginity, but gradually, as she grows tired of her husband or her life.

Elizabeth called to a fine-looking sailor, “Young man, I am feeling peckish.”

“I’ll have a word with the cook, ma’am.” He doffed his white cap and smiled, his mouth full of handsome teeth.

“A hunger of the mind can only be appeased by a well-nourished brain,” she explained.

A gentleman wearing a Vandyke and gold epaulets on his blue flannel escorted us to a commodious stateroom decorated in a circus motif.

“Why, it’s Mr. Barnum!” cried Susan.

“Welcome to the Fiji Mermaid! Except for my stateroom, it resembles Nemo’s Nautilus to a tee. And please address me as ‘Commodore’ until we’re ashore again. Hello, my dear!” he said, kissing Margaret’s dainty hand. “Your friends send their love.”

“We’re happy to see you, Commodore!” exclaimed Susan, who once had been scornful of his vulgarity.

“How on earth did you know we were in New Orleans?” asked Elizabeth.

He laid his finger aside his nose. “Never underestimate Madame Singleton. She saw your plight.” With the same finger, he tapped his forehead. “You must look beyond the requisite tawdriness of her stock-in-trade. She’s a gifted medium. Until its demise, she was an honorary member of the British National Association of Spiritualists. The eminent ‘Poughkeepsie Seer,’ Andrew Jackson Davis, paid her homage in his book The Fountain with Jets of New Meanings.”

“What about the Fox sisters?”

“I was suckered.”

“Where are the clowns?” I asked.

“You can shoot a clown from a cannon, but you can’t entrust him with a submarine. The crew is comprised of eminent yachtsmen whose only weakness is a fondness for grog. The bottle will be passed at eight bells.” He glanced sharply at the suffragists. “Remember, you two, this is not a temperance hall.”

Barnum shot the cuffs of his uniform, cut by the son of the tailor who had sewn Cornelius Vanderbilt’s nautical attire when he had been known as the Commodore. The tycoon had owned a splendid yacht in his day, but he couldn’t take it with him onto the waters above the firmament or the lake of fire far below it. In the opinion of many, the ruthless skinflint deserved an eternity of brimstone and castor oil.

The underwater boat slipped toward the Gulf. Its steam boiler burbled like a teapot, the crankshaft thumped, the miraculously restored Prince Albert shaving mug trembled as the screw churned the water into froth, scattering the little fishes.

A fish that must have been prodigious rubbed against the Fiji Mermaid’s hull.

“What in the world was that?” asked Elizabeth, helping Susan to her feet.

“Moby Dick, I expect.” He gazed at the brass-bezeled instruments. His voice was tinged with sadness. “Melville, also, is smitten by phantoms.”

Barnum escorted us through his cigar-shaped domain. The decks, cabins, and passages appeared to multiply impossibly, and I was reminded of Bellevue Hospital after my encounter with a maniac. I mentioned it to the impresario.

“The architecture of the madhouse and the circus are quite similar.”

His answer startled me. “Is this a circus?” My glance took in a table heaped with charts showing the location of the world’s forgotten chimeras, monsters, and beasts.

“One or the other, or both.”

“Commodore, was the Voice that routed the Invisible Empire yours?”

“Yes.” I saw that the admission gave him pleasure. “A nice effect, don’t you think? It was produced by an augmenter. Edison ginned it up for me. It will be a tremendous addition to the Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome.”

“It was you I saw getting on the caboose at Grand Central!”

“Barnum, like God, is ubiquitous.”

In the wardroom where we assembled for dinner, Elizabeth inquired, “Commodore, how long will it take to reach New York?”

He smiled indulgently. “Who can say how long a dream lasts? But I must be in the city in time to lead the elephants across the New York and Brooklyn Bridge to assure the public of its integrity. That of the moral sort, I leave to theologians and philosophers. I promised those two great cities a parade, and the newspaper scribblers will turn out in droves to witness this latest coup de théâtre of Phineas T. Barnum and …” He looked me in the eye while he finished his boast: “the Greatest Show on Earth!” I had uttered those five words to President Grant on the deck of the Rufus J. Lackland. Barnum winked, as if we two were conspirators in a plot whose purpose would be forever unknown to me.

He wiped his lips on a napkin embroidered with the word Excelsior and said, “A terrible waste of life that could have been avoided if the mayors had let me test the bridge before it was opened to the public.”

He was referring to the stampede on Decoration Day, 1883; two opposing juggernauts of pedestrians in their thousands met midway on the span. Twelve people were trampled to death, and many others injured in the panic incited by a woman who screamed, “The bridge is falling down!”

Barnum rang his crystal goblet with a gold spoon smeared with sherbet and invited us to toast America. “The woebegone and the small-minded say that America is nearly finished; her imperial days are fast coming to an end. We had our moment, and the moment has passed. In the future, it will be said of us that we were alive in the age of America’s greatness and fortunate to have been so, for that age and that greatness are like a book closed forever and shrouded in dust.

“My reply to the skeptics and cynics, the defeatists and naysayers, is that America is only beginning, that a continent is waiting for us to conquer and bestride. Do you believe that the frontier is closed because a few scholars say that it is so—men who have ventured no farther than the margins of their books? Do you believe that the American character will content itself with land north of the Río Grande, when the whole of Mexico remains an unplucked fruit? We will take Mexico, and hardly stopping for breath, we will take all the territory south of it that is worth having. The more we take, the larger our appetite will become, until the land beyond the Great Lakes is absorbed into the nation’s growing body. Natural science tells us that the more massive an object, the more powerful is its sway over lesser objects. America will possess that massiveness, and she will exert a force far stronger than that of any foreign power. We will take Cuba. We will take the Philippines. We will take Hawaii and the other islands of the Pacific and the South Atlantic. We will take Japan and China. America is destined to be the Greatest Show on Earth. Our borders will be boundless, our wealth incalculable; and our end will come only when the Earth itself has perished. Ladies, I give you America!”

I could tell that Elizabeth and Susan were reluctant to drink to the health of a country so much at variance with their principles. Susan opened her mouth, no doubt to ask Barnum what place women would occupy in the glorious epoch, but she said nothing. I wish I could say that we refused to toast the America that Barnum, in his megalomania, foresaw. We were weary of argument. I wanted to take Martin home to Maiden Lane and wait for news of Franklin. I hoped he was on his way from San Francisco with the promise of a job and not in Sing Sing, taking an icy shower as punishment for a violent act of anarchy, or on a cold mortuary table in the Dead House on First Avenue. We emptied our glasses but forbore to break them against the bulkhead in emulation of the showman’s bravado. At that moment, our nerves would’ve given way at the sound of shattering glass.

Leaning back in the captain’s chair, Barnum confided in us his grand ambition: “I dream of a circus without tents or high wires, elephants or chariots, scientific fencers or contortionists, bareback riders or trombonists, peanuts or eccentrics—all but mon petit chou Margaret, who is indispensable to Barnum.” She nodded her head in acknowledgment. “A circus that originates in the brain of Barnum, whose thoughts Madame Singleton and Eugenia Roux would transmit to impressionable minds throughout the universe. Barnum would sit in his Moorish palace, which exists, though it was reduced to ashes almost thirty years ago, and astonish the world with a spectacle beyond the wildest dreams of Manius Valerius Maximus or Tarquin the Proud. The Rape of the Sabine Women at Circus Maximus was small potatoes compared to what Barnum can conceive.”

“Women have made little progress since the Romans lorded it over the ancient world,” said Elizabeth with something akin to dejection in her voice, rare for one of the great optimists of the age.

“Ah, but Barnum adores women, and in his dreams, he will exalt them!”

At the heart of the submarine, the great engine spun a silver thread of sound into a radiant cocoon bathed in Pythagoras’s music of the spheres. I closed my eyes and opened them. Had the ravaged oyster shells and the puddles of lemon sherbet in the spoons not been replaced by ham and eggs, I could’ve sworn that I had merely blinked. We women sat and rubbed our eyes and gazed in wonder at the table set for breakfast.

“I must have fallen asleep,” said Susan groggily.

“My watch stopped,” said Elizabeth, winding the stem.

“You were saying,” said Barnum, his head turned to Margaret.

“What news of my friends?”

He put down his fork. “Mrs. Stoner has a new snake. Miss Etta has a new trick. Poor Mattie Elliott dislocated her hip. Eugenia Roux’s cold is no better. Mr. Dode is in Bellevue, suffering from delusions.”

“And Gallagher?” asked Susan, showing her teeth.

“Sacked.”

“Good!” said Susan.

“He was overzealous in his duties.”

A boatswain’s whistle shrilled.

“We’ve arrived in New York Bay. Shall we go up on desk?”

We stood in the bow, grateful to breathe fresh air. I licked my lip and tasted brine. How delicious! I thought. We steamed past Castle Garden, where emigrants waited with their trunks to be admitted to a much greater and graver circus than any hippodrome, one that will require them to jump through hoops of fire, snatch a living with their teeth, and walk a tightrope high above the most desperate straits.

We disembarked at Canal Street and were free to take up our lives once more (as free as women could be, which was hardly at all). We had one last duty to perform for our benefactor: to ride in his parade across the Brooklyn Bridge. He’d saved us, and we couldn’t well refuse him. I remembered his prophecy of the American century to come as a dream that dissolved on the morning air.

On Saturday, May 17, 1884, P. T. Barnum, having exchanged his commodore’s uniform for that of a ringmaster, kept his promise to his public and led a menagerie from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Jumbo, together with twenty lesser elephants, and a caravan of camels sauntered across the Roeblings’ magnificent bridge, followed by Robinson’s Celebrated Band. Elizabeth, Susan, Margaret, and I sat regally on the backs of four Indian elephants. Elizabeth had bought a turban and commissioned a pair of Turkish pants for the occasion. From on high, she nodded graciously to the spectators, who cheered her lustily, as if, for more than thirty years, she had not been the object of their scorn. Less flamboyant, Susan wore her gray dress and scowled at the multitude from the shadow of her coalscuttle bonnet. Draped over the side of her elephant, a red banner demanded VOTES FOR WOMEN. Having shown great courage, my suffragists had a right to their eccentricities. Sober-sided Emerson had enjoyed pulling pranks, and in his day, clodhopper Thoreau would dance like a man visited by a fit of ecstasy.

Midway across the prodigious span of steel and stone, I seemed to see Herman Melville and Mr. James standing arm in arm.

As we crossed into Brooklyn, Edison photographed the spectacle from the roof of the old ferry house. Look closely at the picture, and you’ll see four women perched on lumbering pachyderms. Elizabeth Cady Stanton is singing the women’s anthem “Daughters of Freedom,” Susan B. Anthony is pretending to be displeased by Barnum’s folly, Margaret Fuller Hardesty is blowing kisses to the crowd, and Ellen Finch is gazing at little Martin asleep in the crook of his father’s arm.