Sarah
The wedding took place in a house on Spruce Street in Philadelphia on May
14 at two o’clock in the afternoon—a day full of glinting sunlight and pale
blue clouds. It was the sort of day that seemed sharply real and not real at
all. I remember standing in the dining room watching it unfold as if from a
distance, as if I was climbing up from the bottom of sleep, coming up from
the cool sheets to a new day, one life ending and another beginning.
Mother had sent a note of congratulation, which we hadn’t expected,
begging us to send a letter describing the wedding in detail. What will Nina
wear? she’d asked. Oh, that I could see her! Naturally, she’d conveyed how
relieved she was that Nina had a husband now and she hoped we would
both retire from the unnatural life we’d been living, but despite that, her
letter was plaintive with the love of an aging mother. She called us her dear
daughters and lamented the distance between us. Will I see you again? she
wrote. The question haunted me for days.
I gazed at Nina and Theodore standing now before the window about to
say their vows, or as Nina had phrased it, whatever words their hearts gave
them at the moment, and I thought it just as well Mother was not here. She
would’ve expected Nina to be in ivory lace, perhaps blue linen, carrying
roses or lilies, but Nina had dismissed all of that as unoriginal and
embarked on a wedding designed to shock the masses.
She was wearing a brown dress made from free-labor cotton with a
broad white sash and white gloves, and she’d matched up Theodore in a
brown coat, a white vest, and beige pantaloons. She clutched a handful of
white rhododendrons cut fresh from the backyard, and I noticed she’d
tucked a sprig in the button hole of Theodore’s coat. Mother wouldn’t have
made it past the brown dress, much less the opening prayer, which had been
delivered by a Negro minister.
When the Philadelphia newspaper announced the wedding, alluding to
the mixed-race guests expected to attend, we’d worried there might be
demonstrators—slurs and shouts and rocks whizzing by—but mercifully, no
one had showed up but those invited. Sarah Mapps and Grace were here,
along with several freed slaves with whom we were acquainted, and we’d
timed the wedding to coincide with the Anti-Slavery Convention in the city
so that some of the most prominent abolitionists in the country were in the
room: Mr. Garrison, Mr. and Mrs. Gerrit Smith, Henry Stanton, the Motts,
the Tappans, the Westons, the Chapmans.
It would become known as the abolition wedding.
Nina was speaking now, her face turned up to Theodore’s, and I thought
suddenly, involuntarily of Israel and a tiny grief came over me. Every time
it happened, it was like coming upon an empty room I didn’t know was
there, and stepping in, I would be pierced by it, by the ghost of the one
who’d once filled it up. I didn’t stumble into this place much anymore, but
when I did, it hollowed out little pieces of my chest.
Gazing at Nina, radiant Nina, I pictured myself in her place, Israel
beside me, the two of us saying vows, and the idea of such a thing cured
me. It was the truth I always came back to, that I didn’t want Israel
anymore, I didn’t want to be married now, and yet the phantom of what
might’ve been, the terrible allure of it could still snatch me.
Closing my eyes, I gave my head a shake to clear the remnants of
longing away, and when I looked back at the bride and groom, there were
dragonflies darting beyond the window, a green tempest, and then it was
gone.
Nina promised aloud to love and honor him, carefully omitting the word
obey, and Theodore launched into an awkward monologue, deploring the
laws that gave control of a wife’s property to the husband and renouncing
all claim to Nina’s, and then he coughed self-consciously, as if catching
himself, and professed his love.
We’d put the confrontation in Mrs. Whittier’s cottage behind us, not that
Theodore ever fully conceded his position, but he’d softened his rhetoric
after that day, as any man in love would. The abolition movement had split
into two camps just as the men predicted, and Nina and I became even
worse pariahs, but it had set the cause of women in motion.
I’d been present when Nina opened the letter containing Theodore’s
proposal. It had come late last winter during a long reprieve in Philadelphia
with Sarah Mapps and Grace, as we’d prepared for a series of lectures at the
Boston Odeon. Reading it, she’d dropped the pages onto her lap and broken
into tears. When she read it to me, I cried too, but my tears were a mix of
joy and wretchedness and fear. I wanted this marriage for her, I wanted her
happiness as much as my own, but where would I go? For days I couldn’t
concentrate on the lecture I was trying to write or hide the bereft feeling I
carried inside. I couldn’t bear to think of life without her, life alone, but
neither did I want to be the burdensome relative living in the back room,
getting in the way, and I couldn’t imagine Theodore would want me there.
Then one day Nina came to me, plopping on the footstool beside my
chair in Sarah Mapps’ front room. Without a word she opened her Bible and
read aloud the passage in which Ruth speaks to Naomi:
Entreat me not to leave thee, or to return from following after thee: for
whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy
people will be my people, and thy God my God. Where thou diest, will I die,
and there will I be buried. The Lord do so to me, and more also, if ought but
death part thee and me.
Closing the Bible, she said, “We can’t be separated, it isn’t possible.
You must come and live with me after I’m married. Theodore asked me to
tell you that my wish is also his wish.”
Theodore had bought a small farm in Fort Lee, New Jersey. We would
make an odd trinity there, the three of us, but I would still have Nina. We
could go on writing and working for abolition and for women, and I would
help with the house, and when there were children, I would be auntie. One
life ending, another beginning.
In the dining room, the minister was offering a prayer, and for some
reason I didn’t close my eyes as I always did, but watched Nina reach for
Theodore’s hand. We’d made a plan that I would give the married pair two
weeks of privacy and then join them in Fort Lee, but I thought now of
Mother and the question in her letter, Will I see you again? It seemed more
than the elegiac pondering in an old woman’s heart, and I wondered if I
shouldn’t seize the break in our work and go to her.
“What do you know, we are husband and wife,” Nina said when the
prayer ended, pronouncing it herself.
The dining table sat out in the garden laid with a white linen cloth strewn
with platters of sweets and fresh-picked flowers—foxglove, pink azalea,
and feathery fleabane petals. The confectioner had iced the wedding cake
with frothed egg whites and darkened the layers with molasses in keeping
with Nina’s brown and white theme, and there was a large bowl of sugared
raspberry-currant juice where all of the teetotaler abolitionists were lined
up, pretending it hadn’t fermented. I’d consumed a sloshing cup of it too
quickly and my head was floating about.
I walked among the guests, some forty or fifty of them, searching for
Lucretia, for Sarah Mapps and Grace, thinking, a little tipsily, Here are our
friends, our people, and thank God no one is speaking today about the
cruelties in the world. I came upon Mrs. Whittier’s son John, whom I’d not
seen since our head-to-head last August. He was amusing everyone with a
poem he’d written that skewered Theodore for breaking his vow not to
marry. He compared him to the likes of Benedict Arnold. When he saw me,
he greeted me like a sister.
Lucretia found me before I could find her. It had been years. Beaming,
she pulled me to the edge of the garden beside the blooming rhododendron
where we could be alone. “My dear Sarah, I can scarcely believe what
you’ve managed to accomplish!”
A blush crept to my face.
“It’s true,” she said. “You and Angelina are the most famous women in
America.”
“. . . The most notorious, you mean.”
She smiled. “That, too.”
I pictured Lucretia and me in her little studio, talking and talking all
those evenings. That fretful young woman I’d been, so stalled, so worried
she would never find her purpose. I wished I could go back and tell her it
would turn out all right.
Glancing up, I caught sight of Sarah Mapps and Grace across the
garden, striding toward us. Nina and I had traveled almost constantly for the
past year and a half, and except for our visit last winter, we’d seen little of
them. I wrapped my arms around them, along with Lucretia, who’d known
them back at Arch Street.
When Sarah Mapps pulled a letter from her purse and handed it to me, I
recognized Handful’s writing immediately, though it bore my sister Mary’s
seal. Unable to wait, I ripped it open and read Handful’s brief message with
a sinking feeling. There were reports of runaways beginning to find their
way across the Ohio River from Kentucky, or to Philadelphia and New York
from Maryland, but rarely from that far south. We’re leaving here or die
trying.
“What’s the matter?” Lucretia said. “You look shaken.”
I read them the letter, then folded it back, my hands trembling visibly.
“. . . They’ll be caught. Or killed,” I said.
Sarah Mapps frowned. “They must know what they’re attempting.
They’re not children.”
She’d never been to Charleston. She had no idea of the laws and edicts
that controlled every moment of a slave’s life, of the City Guard, the
curfew, the passes, the searches, the night watch, the vigilante committees,
the slave catchers, the Work House, the impossibility, the sheer brutality.
“They’re coming to us,” Grace said, as if it had just sunk in.
“And we’ll welcome them,” Sarah Mapps added. “They can live in your
old room in the attic. They can help out at the school.”
“They’ll never make it this far,” I said.
It occurred to me that Handful and Sky might already have left, and I
opened up the letter again to look at the date: 23 April.
“It was written only three weeks ago,” I said more to myself than to
them. “. . . I doubt they’ve left by now. There may still be time for me to do
something.”
“But what could you possibly do?” Lucretia asked.
“I don’t know if I can do anything, but I can’t sit here on my hands . . .
I’m going back to Charleston. I can at least try and convince my mother to
sell them to me so I can set them free.”
I’d asked before, but this time I would beg her in person.
She had called me her dear daughter.
