Understand, dreadful reader, that the middle of the nineteenth century was an unquiet era. The urgent questions of abolition and women’s rights beat the air like wings; the ghosts who’d merely rapped and tapped for the Fox sisters appeared to be growing ever more numerous, forceful, and expressive. The old Calvinist doctrines, so eager to toss dead children like coals on the fires of hell, were shaken by new beliefs in universal salvation. Nowhere was this tempest of change wilder than in our region of western New York, and so for me Darius’s magic took on the character merely of one more gust—or so I told myself.
It was a different blast, a few months later, which brought me Margo’s invitation via my father’s hand. The trance speaker Nora Downs was to give a talk in our town’s small hall, Margo’s note said, as if we could possibly be unaware of an event so fervently discussed on every corner. Would I kindly accompany Gus and herself to see Miss Downs speak?
A pleasure in petty tyranny surely informed Margo’s selection of my father as her messenger. She must have known how much he, a good and rather rigid Methodist, would recoil from its delivery. Known too that he was not in a position to refuse her. When I read the note aloud, he could not meet my eye.
“The apostle Paul said women aren’t to speak so, in public. If this girl’s wrong to speak, I don’t see how it can be right for you to listen. I told old Mrs. Farrow that, and she said it’s not the girl doing the speaking at all, but the spirits using her to be their vessel. Well, what are the spirits doing out of the hereafter, then?”
This was an extraordinarily long and intemperate speech by my father’s standards.
“I can take what I hear with a grain of salt,” I reassured him—neglecting to mention that my salt would be of a very different flavor from his own. My reading was quickly leading me to that most unacceptable of ideas, materialism, and I no longer believed that the spirit survived the body, or at least not with its individuality intact. “We wouldn’t want to offend Margo Farrow.”
I still incline to the belief that the spirit should not survive, even if I’m not in a position to deny certain evident exceptions.
“Just be sure you don’t, don’t—” my father mumbled. I did not kiss him, only nodded as soberly as I could, since too much warmth would give away how my heart was racing.
They said Nora Downs was only fifteen, hardly any older than I was; scarcely literate, in which I flattered myself we were poles apart; the daughter of farmers. Yet she stood up in front of large crowds and spoke with the eloquence of angels. Extempore, at that: she would be informed of her subject only once she arrived in the hall.
I was desperate to see her, and I’d told Gus as much; after a brief chill following the episode with Darius, we were often together again. And he, in turn, had told Margo.
The next night I stood sweating between Gus and Margo under smoke-black beams; such was the crowd that they’d taken out the benches. Heads clustered thick as August blackberries in the airless murk. A man mounted the podium and announced that Miss Downs would speak on the virtue of obedience—a topic obviously chosen to trip her up. And with that, he yielded his place.
A flash of many colors broke from the shadows beside the stage. Miss Downs had not tried to cloak the indecency of her public appearance in dourly modest clothes, as the abolitionist women did. Instead she wore a dress brightly striped: cherry, dawn pink, feverish moss green. Her coffee-colored ringlets trailed long and loose around a pale face; her eyes were closed as if in rapture. Ribbons flaunted from her wrists.
Her neckline was so low that I felt a throb of agitation at the sight. Her shoulders shone, bare and vulnerable, in the light of an Argand lamp suspended over the stage.
This unlikely creature climbed the few steps with dreamlike slowness, all alone. Her eyes remained shut tight, but she did not grope or stumble when she reached the stage. Instead she advanced serenely and then turned and folded her hands atop the podium—and how could she find it with such an assured economy of movement in this strange hall, when she could not see?
The crowd gasped. A great many of those present took it as proof that spirits escorted her, and the rest at least wondered.
“The spirits have brought me here to speak on their behalf, so that what is known above can be known below, and guide the conduct of those who await their own ascension.” Her voice seemed too light and girlish to carry well, and yet it sounded close and intimate in my ear. Her lids fluttered like a dreamer’s, and the shadows cast by her long lashes quivered on her cheeks. “And above, as below, there is no virtue dearer, more essential to the happiness of all, than true and perfect obedience.”
The crowd’s reaction cleaved predictably between the customary recipients of obedience and those obliged to dole it out. Approving murmurs, grunts of anger. I suppose my dismay showed on my face, because Margo smiled at me sidelong and pressed my hand: as much as to say, wait.
“But how shall we distinguish true obedience from false? Therein lies the difficulty at the source of all the great and pressing problems of the day. There are many, too many, who insist that the Creator arranged humankind in a hierarchy, wherein each of us owes obedience to those above: wife to husband, slave to master, the poor to the rich. But tell me, was there ever a husband who made his own wife from the clay? None of you are Pygmalion. And if God did not delegate the creation of woman, neither did He delegate the command of her conscience!”
I felt my heart go still.
There was no greater blasphemy, Miss Downs continued, no fouler sin, than to exact false obedience. To do so was an assault on God’s will, a usurpation of his place.
And any obedience delivered from one human being to another was false. Surely no one dared propose that the all-powerful Creator was too feeble, too negligent, to speak directly to each human heart? We were each, equally, God’s holy revelation, the manifestation of His word; we must therefore be equally free to act on the truths we embodied.
If I had been drifting toward atheism, Miss Downs’ astonishing reordering of religion was nearly enough to drag me back. How neatly she turned divine authority against anyone who harnessed it in support of oppression!
It was not lost on me that Miss Downs was among those who stood to benefit, if the wisdom of her spirits was generally applied. So, of course, was I.
It was not lost on me that no one would have paid the slightest attention to her, if she had admitted to speaking for herself.
It was not lost on me that she played at passivity to hide her own fierce will.
The crowd listened now in silence, and if certain white men and women flushed with shame and fury, the larger part of those assembled—the dark-complexioned men, the tattered ones, most of the women of all hues and classes—took on a proud radiance.
An hour later, Miss Downs had established that obedience necessarily entailed the radical equality of all humanity. Then she went limp. Her head dropped forward and she rubbed at her eyes with her fists, like a sleepy child.
She looked from under her lashes with a shy smile. “Hello. Whatever have I been saying? I— Please excuse me, I think I had better sit down.”
A lady rushed to help her off the stage. There was a stir and flutter and the dimness went pale with handkerchiefs patting away the sweat beading on every forehead. It was some time before the press of bodies carried us into the open air, but then I was met by a night that seemed vaster, looser, than any I had known before, by stars so bright the air seemed to shake with their applause.
“What more proof do you need of spiritual inspiration?” a man said to his companion. I looked and saw that it was Dr. Lewis and his wife, who were every bit as prominent as the Farrows. “A poor, ignorant country girl who hardly knows what a word like equality means? It’s inconceivable that she delivered such a speech on her own!”
Gus cocked his head at that, considering, then shook it decisively. Margo smiled at him with such burning elation that I knew her, with a shock, for a complete convert to Spiritualism. But none of us spoke until we had crossed the unassuming town square and reached the quiet road that led to my family’s cottage, where we stopped and perched on a stone stile. The moon was gibbous and very bright, sketching our faces in silver.
“She’s a fraud,” Gus announced brusquely once there was no one in earshot. “That is, she isn’t what she claims to be. Did you see her absurdly overdone innocence, when she pretended to wake from her trance? I don’t see how anyone could fall for it.” He paused. “It’s possible she could be—something else, though.”
I knew he hadn’t yet told Margo of his secret apprenticeship, so I let the implication wisp away.
“A genius, then? To speak so well, untaught, with no preparation whatsoever?” Margo asked. She positively glittered. “And you, Catherine? Do you think that sweet girl could be a fraud, or is she a conduit for the spirits, as she claims?”
I hesitated to answer. I had, in fact, very definite views of what Nora Downs was, and what she was doing. But I didn’t know how to cast those views without impugning her character.
“I think the ideas she voices are her own,” I said at last. Gus snorted in triumph, and Margo arched her brows. “But that doesn’t mean her trance isn’t genuine—or that she isn’t truly inspired. She is, only by something in herself.”
I did not mention how much I would have liked to throw myself at Miss Downs’ feet.
(I was hardly alone in this. I would learn later that she batted away marriage proposals like so many mosquitoes. If I had been young in a later era, would I have recognized my feelings for what they were?)
I did not mention how, if there were any fraud involved in compelling the world to hear her, it was a sort I would have very much liked to perpetrate myself.
Nor that her deceit, if it was such, was nothing compared to the imposture of the men who daily claimed an undeserved superiority over the rest of humankind.
“I knew Catherine would see through her nonsense!” Gus crowed—though I had neither said nor meant such a thing. Margo gave me a long and searching look.
“So you never question your father’s beliefs, young Catherine? You’re quite sure the souls of the dead stay glued either to heaven or hell, like flies mired in honey, and can’t come anywhere near the living?”
In that time and place, in the person of a girl of fourteen, my true beliefs were inadmissible. I suppose it was owing to the influence of Miss Downs’ intoxicating openness that I admitted them.
“No. I don’t believe in the immortal soul at all! There are no angels or ghosts, and the only spirit we have is in the present moment! If there is to be a better world we must make it ourselves, now, and not wait for a heaven that will never come.”
I spoke with breathless passion, then stopped, appalled by my own honesty. I didn’t entirely trust Margo; if she repeated my incautious words I could expect to be roundly denounced, rejected by nearly everyone. My father too; he would be heartbroken. Margo gazed at me, brows hiked, but her mouth showed a twist of amusement.
Gus went uncharacteristically quiet. I knew him, felt his tension bowing the air beside me: it was not the silence that comes from having nothing to say, but rather from having too much. I meant to ask him later what was on his mind. When we were alone.
“A skeptic, then,” Margo said, smiling so slyly that I was nearly persuaded she would not betray me. “But what if you witnessed evidence of the spirit’s survival for yourself?”
To you, I imagine, the significance of Margo’s question may be obscure. But in western New York, in the year 1854, there was only one construction I could put on her words.
Margo was inviting me to a séance.
Assuming the séance would be held in the Farrows’ house, I could not imagine that Gus’s mother would tolerate my presence. I was about to say as much when running footsteps sounded on the dirt road, and all of us turned to see a small figure pelting toward us at frantic speed.
“Catherine!” Anna shrieked. “Oh, Catherine, you weren’t there, she asked for you but there wasn’t time to go and search—”
How long did it take, the revolution of my thoughts from denial to understanding? It was endlessly slow, and yet so fast the moon blurred into a stream of milky light.
Our mother was dead, and only moments after I had denied any hope of her salvation.