A YOUNG WOMAN living in a small house had few good places in which to keep her secrets safe from a suspicious family. Mercy Ford searched her sleeping chamber for a place to put the box she held. She had locked all of Charity’s letters within it, but such a simple mechanism was inadequate protection for the dangerous words the box contained. Mercy’s sister Thankful, who sometimes shared her bed, might discover the box; even worse, Mercy’s mother could come across it. Unwilling to burn the pages because of their sentimental value, Mercy poured out her distress in a letter to Charity:
I have fixed a little box and locked [your letters] all up in it and made them as secure as possible but if I should be taken away suddenly I don’t know how they would fare if not I shall commend them to you without opening it—them others I would not have exposd for nothing that ever I see but in looking them over I see I was chargd not to destroy them and I feel but a wish to keep them sacred but for the world would not they should be exposed as I fear if I should have them1
Gripped by panic, Mercy could hardly voice her fears in coherent sentences. On calmer occasions, she was capable of writing clear letters. But faced with the threat of her mother, who had grown increasingly suspicious of Mercy and Charity’s relationship, Mercy’s words jumbled altogether. Still, her message was clear: she desperately needed Charity’s help.
Charity knew a lot about the agony of exposure. Nearly five years earlier she had returned home to her parents after the spread of malicious rumors about her character made it impossible to live away any longer. Her parents offered her a home, but they could not stop the rumors from following her to North Bridgewater. The young women in her own village treated her like an “unwelcome guest” when she returned to town.2 Under the strain of serial mistreatment, Charity’s health collapsed. During the winter of 1800–1801, Charity suffered recurring bouts of a “paralitic disorder” so alarming that even her irritable stepmother tried to avoid their customary conflict. Laid low by despair and illness, Charity felt grateful for this unusual season of “domestic peace.”3
She felt even more grateful for the nurturing attention of the one old friend who refused to abandon her; that was Mercy Ford. Born in 1778, a year after Charity, Mercy grew up in the neighboring village of Pembroke. Although Charity had numerous relations in Pembroke (one neighborhood in town was known as Bryantville), the difference in circumstances between the Bryant and Ford families made the young women unlikely friends. While the Bryant daughters wrote poetry and the sons pursued professional careers, the Ford family’s limited resources forced Mercy and her older siblings to seek wage labor. Mercy’s brothers traveled all the way to the South American sugar colony of Guyana to make their fortunes, and both died there young.4 Mercy and her sisters were saved by their gender from this miserable fate; instead they worked in service for local families to earn their keep. Charity probably met Mercy when both girls were in their teens, while Mercy was working for a North Bridgewater family.
What drew Charity and Mercy together is not clear. Mercy’s work in service differentiated her from the independent teachers whom Charity befriended during her travels. Mercy’s mother ruled her life. She determined where and when her daughter could go, limiting the girl’s daytime visits with Charity to brief interludes between work obligations. Mercy’s letters to Charity apologized because “Momma said I must come home as soon as I could get there,” or “Mother said I could not come after today,” or Mother placed “strick orders for me to come back.”5 This maternal domination extended to work opportunities as well as friendships. When an employer invited Mercy to move to a different town, her mother would not hear of it. Mercy’s brother insisted that she “had an undoubted wright to do as I liked,” but Mercy had a hard time laying claim to that right. Like most young women of the period, she felt compelled to submit to the domination of more powerful parties.6
The common streak of independence that drew Charity and Maria Clark together cannot explain the connection between Charity and Mercy. Mercy, who wrote in the vernacular with frequent misspellings, did not share the skill for writing poetry that bound Charity and Lydia Richards. Nor did religion provide the glue for their early friendship, as it did for Charity and Nancy Warner. Later in life, Mercy became quite pious, and it is possible that the two girls initially met at church or a prayer meeting. But the girls’ early correspondence lacks the sustained attention to matters of faith that characterized letters between Nancy and Charity. Instead of an intellectual or spiritual connection, something more visceral drew the young women together.
After the first season of their friendship, the girls remained close during Charity’s years away. During the brief period in 1798 when Charity returned to North Bridgewater, she nursed Mercy through a long illness in the Bryant home. In the fall of 1800, when Charity came home again to convalesce herself, Mercy returned the favor. She spent hours by Charity’s bedside reading her poetry. Immobilized by sickness, Charity threw herself into writing. Laments about the suffering caused by gossip served as a common theme throughout many of her pieces. Even a birthday poem that Charity likely wrote for Mercy warned that gossip haunted the “steps of youth,” and “reputation by a breath is lost / While we on Life’s tempestuous tide are tost / Subjected to the scorn of idle fools.” The sentiments seem ill-suited to a day of celebration, but Charity sought to give her friend a present with lasting value: advice on the fragility of women’s reputation.7
The pain of having her own character exposed to public scorn inspired Charity with tremendous sympathy for other young women who became the targets of gossip. When Charity heard during the fall of 1800 that a former friend in Cummington had borne a child out of wedlock, she extended sympathy, not judgment, to the unfortunate girl. “I am indeed sorry for my poor Jane,” Charity wrote to her sister-in-law Sally. She had heard a relative talking about Jane, “and I must confess that it made my heart bleed to hear her [revel?] in the poor girls calamity, how strange it is that people can harbour such a spirit of malice and revenge!” Feeling sorry for both Jane, who was being frozen out by townspeople, and the “innocent babe,” who suffered under the same prejudice, Charity refused to join in the talk about them.8 And yet her defense of Jane committed the girl’s shame to paper, an interesting broach of the rule against writing gossip. This frankness stands in contrast to Charity’s elusive references concerning the gossip about herself and adds evidence that the talk about Charity centered on her suspicious relations with other young women. The “sin that could not be named” could not be discussed with the same clarity as an ordinary sin like fornication.
Charity did not judge Jane for her unwise choice in love. After the attacks on her own reputation she had come to scorn the small-minded folks who would “fain judge us by their riggid rules.”9 But during her convalescence, she was forced to acknowledge the power of gossip over the life of young women like herself. She emerged from this period of ill health resigned to remain living at home and to steel her reputation against further assaults by refraining from the promiscuous pursuit of new female friends that had gotten her into trouble before. Mercy, who for years had insisted in her letters that any person could have but one true friend, finally received the reward of Charity’s devoted attention. Charity sharply curtailed her correspondence with other women. She tried to live her life in private. Even her brother Peter complained that she had become “distant and reserved.” In frustration, he teased, “I wonder where you have buried yourself. I can hear no more of you than if you was on the other side of the Atlantic, or had made a visit to our antipodes.”10 His letter gave proof that Charity had found a winning formula for escaping gossip.
But as long as she lived at home, Charity could not escape her parents’ surveillance. Charity’s retreat from the public eye only disguised her “craving nature,” as Nancy once put it. Despite her public “reserve,” she remained, in private, the same passionate woman she had ever been. She did her best to confine those passions within the privacy of her relationship with Mercy, but eventually her parents and Mercy’s parents grew suspicious, so deeply suspicious that Mercy decided to take the precaution of locking away all of Charity’s letters.
The full story of Mercy and Charity’s friendship can never be told because the women burned most of their letters to each other following 1805. These things we know—their friendship was passionate, physically intimate, had secretive dimensions, and lasted in an attenuated form throughout their lives. Although the majority of the letters that might offer more particulars of their relationship were destroyed, the few that survive contain evidence that Charity and Mercy maintained a frequent and explicitly erotic correspondence that they struggled to protect from prying eyes.
For many years the women appear to have carried on two separate correspondences—one for public sharing and one for private pleasure. Few of the private letters remain, but there is evidence they existed from two incongruent systems of numbering that Mercy used on her letters to Charity (sending letters 9 & 11 during the same window of time that she sent letters 27 & 28). There are also references to private letters that pop up in the surviving public letters. For example, in one exchange Mercy wrote to Charity that she would try to send a letter by the hand of Mr. Leonard, who was traveling between Pembroke and Bridgewater. Yet, she dared not send a second private letter she had written. “I much fear it will not be a safe chance and I dare not send the other [letter] for it is so particular and it will do by no means for the world.” Mercy continued her public letter, giving ordinary news about the comings and goings of family members—Peggy had gone berrying with Capt. Sauer, sister Thankful had been away too long and angered their mother—but then returned to the subject of the private letter she wished to send. “I long you should have this other letter for it holds all—but it will never do,” she complained. In closing she promised that “you shall have it soon perhaps I shall come and bring it.” Mercy ended with an admonition to “write every day till then and I will if possible.”11 The next surviving letter in the correspondence is dated two months later. Any that came in between were destroyed.
In one of the few letters that survives from the young women’s private correspondence, written in 1801 soon after Charity recovered her health, Mercy gushed about the intensity of her feelings for her friend:
in what unknown reigeon shall I ever find thy equal. Surely to my heart there is none that can supply thy place—is there indeed such a friend besides on earth! So kind, so good so disinterested as my lovely sister! No surely I have found the perl then let me prize it—O my friend how shall I ever reward your goodness to me; with astonishment and wonder I view your unbounded goodness towards me! And to see it daily increasing strikes me silent—when I might think it could reach no further, and it could never be displayed more fully—to see it rise above every self gratification and to know my happiness was considered as the chief and only object, what must my heart be made of if it be not melted into unfailing gratitude … O my dear girl never die nor never do I expect to find that tender friendship in any other earthly object that I have proved in thee—well doest thou say many profess it but few know what it means—astonishing it is my dear to see how few know what it means—how can they profess it when they remain so far from what it realy is—when they know nothing of it but the name—my dear how much I want to see you I cannot tell you.12
Mercy’s words explode with passion and desire. She loved Charity with an intensity that she knew exceeded the ordinary dimensions of friendship. She called Charity her “sister,” to capture the inseparable bond that united them, but the letter suggests a more than sisterly connection between the women.
Mercy’s specific wording hints that a sexual relationship developed between the young women after Charity’s return from her travels. When Mercy wrote of having “found the perl” and of her desire to “prize it,” she intended to describe Charity as a treasure, but it is also plausible to read a sexual meaning into her language. At the time, pearl served as a euphemism for clitoris, rendering Mercy’s words a possible allusion to her desire to make love with Charity.13 So too, when Mercy described how Charity rose “above every self gratification” to pursue Mercy’s “happiness,” her words carried allusions to the practice of mutual masturbation; “self gratification” appeared in texts of the period as a synonym for masturbation.14 Mercy’s letter could be describing a sexual relationship in which Charity typically played the active or masculine role, as it was then understood, of pleasuring her receptive feminine partner. In both instances from the letter, Mercy’s language deployed euphemism, the convention of polite nineteenth-century letter-writers, to imply sexual acts. Her use of language bears a strong resemblance to courtship letters between opposite-sex couples of the time.15
In other letters, Mercy voiced her intense desire to spend nights in bed with Charity alone, strongly hinting at a sexual relationship between the two. While living at home, Mercy shared a bed with her unmarried sister Thankful—small houses, big families, and the high cost of furniture made bed-sharing common during the period. If a friend came over, she could have squeezed in alongside the two sisters. But Mercy wanted nights with only Charity. She complained when Charity missed an opportunity to visit while Thankful was away. “I depended on a good visit from you while T was at Bridgwater and we all alone.” Worrying that another opportunity would not present itself, Mercy wrote longingly “you know that is the way I always lay out for comfort is alone with you and such comfort I can never have here certainly—.” It may have been easier for the two women to spend evenings alone in bed at Charity’s house, since none of Charity’s sisters then lived at home. “I shall come if ever I can run away in the night,” Mercy promised. But that would not be easy. At the time, Mercy’s labor was badly needed at home. She was responsible for feeding the farm animals and cutting the wood that her widowed mother depended on. Charity would need to find a way to come visit her. Deprived of time alone together, Mercy promised that the two women would “take what we can git and be thankfull for it.” A stolen caress could not match a night alone, but it would be better than nothing.16
The erotic dynamic that can be deduced from Mercy’s letters to Charity resembles the sexual pattern described by Anne Lister in her journals. Charity, who was masculine in demeanor and intellectually ambitious like Lister, may also have resembled Lister in her sexual proclivities. Typically, Lister played the penetrative sexual role during her sexual encounters with women, focusing on bringing her lovers to orgasm with her fingers. Like many butch lesbians in the mid-twentieth century, Lister did not wish to be touched genitally during lovemaking, which is not to say that she did not take pleasure from her body. Lister brought herself to orgasm by rubbing against her lovers, but the underlying sexual dynamic in her encounters had Lister pursuing her lovers’ “happiness,” as Mercy might put it.17
In another parallel, just as Anne’s relationship with her romantic friend Marianne sparked the concern of Marianne’s parents when it appeared to be interfering with her courtship and marriage, Mercy and Charity’s connection grew alarming to their parents the longer that the two women remained single and devoted to each other. When Charity first returned to North Bridgewater, Philip and Hannah Bryant likely appreciated Mercy’s devotion to their ailing daughter. After Charity recovered her health, however, and the women’s devotion to each other persisted, their parents had reason for concern. As the two women entered their late twenties neither showing any desire to get married, but instead pursuing every opportunity to spend their time together, and alone, both Charity’s parents and Mercy’s widowed mother seem to have become suspicious of the connection. Mercy’s apparent disinterest in men (she never married and poked fun at one suitor picked out for her by family) could have alarmed Charity’s parents, while the vicious gossip that had once circulated about Charity gave Mercy’s mother plenty of cause to worry.18 By 1804, Mercy had become anxious about her mother’s suspicions. At the close of a letter in September, Mercy warned Charity “Dia daimee soft we are acourting by letters she believes.” The words “Dia daimee” are the way an untutored English speaker might transcribe the French words dis à d’aime, or speak of love. Speak of love softly, Mercy warned, because her mother was reading Mercy’s letters.19
It was Charity’s parents, however, who finally sought to break up the women’s connection, apparently refusing by the spring of 1805 to accept any more visits to their house from Charity’s oldest friend. Mercy became frantic at the forced separation. In desperation she wrote secretly to Charity, “I want to see you so much if it was not for the shame and know nobody there can want to see me I would walk up and see you———.”20 A few weeks later she wrote again of her desire to see Charity. “I had almost formed a resolution to come and see you last week but as I could but have seen you and no more I thought it would but aggravate my pain which was almost as I thought too great before.”21
Whatever had inspired the Bryants to blacklist Mercy was causing her equal trouble with her own mother. In despair, Mercy wrote of feeling that she was worth “nothing and less.” Her home life, she told Charity, had become insufferable. She discussed moving away to live somewhere on her own, beyond parental surveillance, but her mother warned her that “if I leave it I shall carry my evil heart with me and where shall I be any better with that.” It was at this point that Mercy wrote to Charity asking what she should do with Charity’s letters that she had saved. What “if I should be taken away suddenly” she asked. Mercy may have been considering ending her life.22
Charity found herself in just as impossible circumstances. By May of 1805, Charity reached the conclusion that she would have to leave home.23 Mercy begged Charity to pay her another visit before she left, while Thankful was away from the house. “I am all alone Don’t fail to come,” she insisted. Mercy urged Charity to stay in North Bridgewater; despite everything she hoped that the women still had a future together. “I hope you wont go it seems to me you will not,” she implored.24 But her hopes went unfulfilled.
Charity did not leave because she stopped caring about Mercy. She sustained that affection until the end of her life. Mercy was the only lover besides Sylvia whom Charity mentioned in the brief memoir that she wrote in 1844, where she memorialized Mercy as a “dear friend”—a brief notice, but in only seven hundred and fifty words to describe a lifetime of movement and experience, it counted for a lot.25 It is difficult to imagine that Charity would have left if she had any choice, but her father and stepmother must have insisted. How else to explain Charity’s decision to set off for her siblings’ homes in Pelham and Cummington at the beginning of 1806? When she had retreated from those towns half a decade before, the gossip concerning her had been so relentless that Charity saw no possibility she could ever return.
As late as 1804, Charity stood firm on her promise never to go back to Cummington or Pelham. Her brother Peter wrote urging Charity to put the past behind her and come for a visit. He promised, “you need not fear now to come out of Egypt for they are dead that sought your life—or to drop figure—I believe your enemies are ashamed of their conduct your character has stood the severest scrutiny and has come out of the fiery ordeal like gold seven times tried.”26 But Charity refused Peter’s invitation until she had no choice. She probably suspected that Peter was being overly optimistic when he promised that the gossip about her had passed. Charity’s sister Anna offered a more honest assessment in 1805 of what Charity would find when she returned to Pelham: “as you come along, be sure and step lightly over the hill, for it may be, it is enchanted ground,—at least it is venomous, and you may get stung by some of its serpents—I therefore recommend caution.” Five years after her sister’s last visit, Anna believed that the town’s forked tongues still threatened Charity’s well-being.27 Nothing less than a closed door in North Bridgewater could have forced Charity back to the towns where she had so much to dread.
Once, when Charity was young and full of hope, she had set out into the world guided by a passionate desire to forge relationships with other intellectual young women. When her desire caused her trouble in town after town, Charity tried to find satisfaction living at home with one true friend to share her pleasures. That life proved just as impossible to maintain under the scrutiny of her elders. Now Charity set off again, twenty-eight years old, with no home, no illusions about the possibilities that awaited her, and no reason to hope for the future.