The Poe Shadow

  “You are safe, Mr. Clark,” Edwin said with remarkable tranquillity. “You need to be out of the rain for a while.”

  “Why did you put yourself at risk for me? You do not even know me.”

  “You’re right, Mr. Clark. But I did not do this for you. I did it for someone I did know,” he replied. “I did this for Edgar Poe.”

  I looked over the hard angles and handsome features of the face before me. He was perhaps a few years past forty and had enough lines in his face to be older, but there was a younger, or at least more restless, gleam hidden in his eye. “You knew Edgar Poe?”

  “Before I was freed, yes.”

  “You were a slave?”

  “I was.” He studied me and nodded thoughtfully. “Mr. Poe’s slave.”

  More than twenty years earlier, Edwin Hawkins had been a house slave for a relative of Maria Clemm’s. Mrs. Clemm, called Muddy, was Edgar Poe’s aunt and later, when Poe married her young daughter Sissy, would become his mother-in-law. Upon the death of Edwin’s owner, the slave’s deed and title had fallen to Muddy, then a resident of Baltimore.

  Around the same time, Edgar Poe had recently withdrawn from his position as sergeant major in the army at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, certain now that he would be a poet after having completed an epic lyric, “Al Aaraaf,” from his army barracks. The struggle to secure his military discharge had been long and frustrating, as Edgar Poe had needed consent from two equally strict parties: John Allan, his guardian, and his military superiors. Having finally accomplished this, Poe was now residing temporarily with Aunt Muddy and their extended Baltimore family. Eddie, as he was called by most people then, had enlisted in the army as Edgar A. Perry (the young slave had overheard Poe tell Muddy to watch for mail addressed to that name), initially having hoped to end all ties with Mr. Allan, who refused to support Poe’s desire to publish his poetry.

  Now, though freed from Allan’s demands and from his army service, Edgar Poe had no money and no help to earn his place in the world.

  Muddy, a tall, nurturing woman of forty, opened her home to Eddie Poe as though he were her son. He seemed to Edwin the style of man who liked exclusively to be around women. Overwhelmed with family illnesses in the household, Muddy asked her nephew to take the newly inherited slave and act as her agent in Edwin’s sale. Soon Poe made an arrangement to sell Edwin to the family of Henry Ridgeway—a black family—for forty dollars.

  I expressed my interest in the details of this arrangement. For a strong young male slave, Poe might have received five or six hundred, possibly more.

  Edwin explained: “Our legislature tries hampering the freeing of slaves by making the process costly, so they don’t look like they’re disturbing our domestic economy. Mr. Poe and his aunt did not have that sort of money. But there is no law to prevent a free black family from purchasing a slave, and no law requiring a minimum sale price. Selling a slave cheap, maybe for the price of the lawyer’s fee, to a free black owner was another way to free a slave—a way to free me, as Mr. Poe did in this arrangement. It also meant I could stay in Baltimore: not a perfect city, but my home. There are men among my people who own their wives and children as slaves, for the same reason.”

  “Poe did not write much about the slavery question,” I said. “He was not a writer for any abolitionist causes.” In fact, it had always seemed to me that Poe had never liked causes at all, automatically believing them hypocritical. “Yet he did this in your situation, forgoing hundreds of dollars, at a time when he was entirely poor and without support.”

  Edwin replied, “It is not a question of what a man writes. Especially a man who writes to earn his dollar, as Poe was beginning to do then. It is a question of what a man does that says who he is. I was only twenty years old. Mr. Poe was twenty, also, only a few months older. Whatever he thought on slavery, he was quiet about it in the little time I was acquainted with him. He was quiet altogether, actually. He was a man with few associates, and if he had associates, they were not friends. He saw something of himself in me, and he decided right there that he would free me if he could.

  “I never saw Mr. Poe again, but I’ll never forget what he did. I loved him for it and love him still, even though I knew him a short time. I began employment for several of the local newspaper offices when I was freed. Now I assist in wrapping the papers to be delivered to various points around the city. It was in one of those offices that I overheard your complaints to the editors, around the time Poe died, that Poe had been used up by the press, and that even his grave was unmarked. I had not known where he was buried until then. After finishing work that day, I walked there and left a token at the place you described.”

  “The flower? Was that you who left it?”

  He nodded. “I remember Eddie was always neatly dressed, and sometimes wore a white flower like that one in his button-hole.”

  “But where did you run to once you left the flower?”

  “It is not a Negro cemetery, you know, and it would attract suspicions to loaf there in the evening. While I knelt at the grave I heard a carriage coming fast and made haste exiting.”

  “That was Peter Stuart, my law partner, out looking to see where I was.”

  “Every day after that as I readied the newspapers for delivery, I saw another ungentlemanly article about Poe’s character—having long ago been taught to read by the Ridgeways and their Webster’s spelling-book, I could decipher all of this unkindness. The living like to prove they’re better than the dead, seems to me. Much time had passed when another fellow, a foreigner, began coming around to the newspaper offices, filled with blusteration about Poe. He claimed he wanted justice for Poe, but to my eye he wanted to spread base excitement.”

  “That is Baron Dupin,” I explained.

  “I talked to this man, more than once, asking that he should respect Poe’s memory. But there is a saying he reminded me of: all sham-skin and no possum. He merely dismissed me, or tried to persuade me there was cash to be made for helping him.” I remembered the day I’d seen the Baron with his arm snaked around Edwin’s and thought they were conspiring.

  “It was around this time that I saw you again, Mr. Clark. I saw you and this Baron, as you call him, arguing over Poe. I decided to learn more about you, and I followed you. I saw you bring that young slave to the depot, and stand up to that slave-trader, Hope Slatter.”

  “Do you know Slatter?”

  “It was Slatter who arranged my own sale to my second owner. At the time I did not blame Slatter in particular, for I was just a boy and it was the life I knew. He had his job. But I came back to his pen once years later to ask who my parents were—for he had sold them and had split us apart, though he had promised all the owners he would never separate families. Slatter was the one man who knew, yet he refused to answer, and drove me away with his cane. Since then, I can never look up when I see him with his rumbling omnibuses on the streets, bringing slaves to his ships. It is strange, but he sits always with Poe in my head—I knew neither man’s heart, I guess, but I know one put me in chains and the other took me out of them.

  “I saw you defy Slatter. It seemed as though you might need help—and so when I happened upon you out this evening in the storm, I followed again.”

  “You probably saved my life, Edwin.”

  “Tell me about those men.”

  “Villains of the first order. The Baron owes large amounts of money to powerful interests back in Paris. This is why he pursues the mystery of Poe—for money.”

  “And your involvement, Mr. Clark?”

  “I have no involvement with those men who wished to leave me under the sod! Whatever ideas they have formulated in their minds, they’re fables. They don’t know me from a bull’s foot.”

  “I mean your involvement in all of this. You say this Baron pursues the mystery of Poe to feather his own nest. Very well. What do you pursue?”

  I thought of the past reactions, the disappointed gazes of my lost friends, of Peter Stuart and of Hattie
Blum, and hesitated to reply. But Edwin did not seem to want to judge me. His open manner had put me at ease. “I suppose my reasons are not very different from yours for helping me tonight. Poe freed me from the idea that life had to follow a fixed path. He was America—an independence that defied control, even when being controlled would have benefited him. Somehow, Poe-truth is all personal to me, and all-important.”

  “Then brisk up, sir. There may still be more for you to do for the good cause.” Edwin signaled the waiter, who placed a steaming cup of tea in front of me. I don’t believe I’d ever tasted anything so marvelous.

  25

  MY WAY HOME was more leisurely than you would think after a night like this. I was filled with relief. I had left both of my pursuers far behind somewhere in Baltimore. Yet there was more than this, more even than Edwin’s camaraderie, that brought me my new sense of relief.

  The day had been long. I had been brought into the Baron Dupin’s sanctum, had heard the painful secret of Auguste Duponte’s past, had discovered something of Poe through revelations of dress and cane, the full meaning of which my mind was still receiving. Something else had happened, too. As I walked through the streets, through a rain that was now no more than an occasional mist, I saw that particular flyer—a yellow flyer with black print, hanging on boards and lampposts all over the city. Some were floating in puddles from the storm. There was a vagrant looking at one under the trickle of gaslight, with his hands deep in the pockets of his threadbare suit.

  I stepped in front of him and touched the paper to ensure that it was real. I saw that he was shivering and removed my overcoat, which he wrapped around himself with a grateful nod.

  “What does it say?” he asked. He took off his bent hat, which had the crown knocked in. I realized the pauper could not read. “Something remarkable,” I commented, and read aloud with a vibrancy that would have rivaled any one of the Baron’s presentations.

  What a sight I must have been. In my shredded, drenched, untailored, unmatched suit, coatless, my hair uncovered and straggled down the middle, leaning my tired body on the precious but bruised Malacca cane. The glimpse of myself in the looking-glass inside the front hall of Glen Eliza seemed to be from another world. I smiled at this thought as I climbed the stairs.

  “Poe was not robbed,” I said to Duponte even before any salutation. “I see your drift now. The cane he had, this type of Malacca, has a sword concealed inside. He had ‘played’ with the cane at Dr. Carter’s office in Richmond, according to the press. That means he would have known of the sword. If he had been robbed of his clothes, or violently treated, he would have tried to use it.”

  Duponte nodded. I wanted to show him more.

  “And the clothes. His clothes, Duponte, would have been soaked through from the weather the day he was discovered. There are clothiers across the city who would change his suit for another.”

  “Clothing is a unique commodity,” said Duponte, agreeing. “It is one of the few possessions that can be worthless and valuable at the same time. When wet, a suit of clothing is quite worthless to the wearer; but, as experience teaches us it will inevitably dry, it is just as valuable as a comparable dry suit in the eyes of the clothier, for whom the value comes only when he sells it later.”

  On the table, there was a pile of the yellow flyers I had seen outside. I picked one up.

  “You are ready,” I said. “You are ready! When did you have these printed, monsieur?”

  “There is more to do first,” said Duponte. “In the morning.”

  I read the flyer again. Duponte was announcing that he would present to the public a lecture explaining the death of Edgar A. Poe. The source for the celebrated character of Dupin, it read. The analyst of great fame in Paris, who sought out the infamous murderer of Monsieur Lafarge, the famous victim of poisoning, will present an exposition detailing all that happened to Edgar A. Poe on October 3d, 1849, in the city of Baltimore. All facts gathered by personal examination and reflection.

  Presented free to the public.

  The next morning, the day of Duponte’s lecture, I left before Duponte woke in order to distribute more flyers. I placed them on many stores, gates, and poles. I had sent for Edwin and, after hearing about Duponte, he agreed to help spread the notices around various quarters of the city while out and about for his newspaper jobs. I handed the flyers to passersby and watched their faces react with interest as they read.

  As a hand reached for one, I looked up into the stern face before me. He grabbed for the flyer.

  Henry Herring narrowed his eyes at me over the top of the flyer. “Mr. Clark. What is this all about?”

  “Everything will now be understood,” I said, “about your cousin’s death.”

  “I hardly consider myself a relation, to speak the truth.”

  “Then you need not concern yourself,” I answered, taking the flyer back. “Yet you were enough of a relation to be one of the few people to watch his burial.”

  Herring’s lips compressed into a tight line. “You do not understand him.”

  “You mean Poe?”

  “Yes,” he grumbled. “Do you know that when he lived here in Baltimore, before marrying Virginia, Eddie courted my daughter? Did your friend Eddie tell you of that infamous conduct? Wrote her poems, one after another, declaring his love,” he said distastefully. “My Elizabeth!”

  Herring starting clucking in the hollow of his cheek. By this time, though, my attention had drifted. Filled with the excitement of the day that was about to occur, I had been imagining the face of the Baron Dupin upon seeing the flyer—assuming the French assailants had not yet caught him. Henry Herring said a few more words to the effect that it seemed unsavory to pull up the affairs of a dead man from a dishonorable grave.

  I stared out at a tree bough weaving in and out of the wind. Looking around, I saw Duponte’s flyers in glorious abundance at every corner. That is what filled me with alarm.

  If the Baron did know about Duponte’s lecture and the flyers, would he not be sending Bonjour and whatever rascals he might hire to tear them down, or cover them with his own notices? He would at least do that. It would only be fair, from his perspective. But not a single one of the notices had been removed. Would the Baron allow that? Would he back out so easily…?Unless…

  “The Baron!” I cried.

  “Where in the deuce are you going?” Herring called out to me as I broke into a run.

  “Monsieur? Monsieur Duponte!”

  I called while still clutching the latch of my street door. I scurried through the front hall anxiously, climbed up the stairs, and rushed into the library. He was not there. I knew something had come to pass.

  No, not Duponte.

  I heard the light steps of Daphne in the hall with another servant. I ran after her and asked her where Duponte was.

  She shook her head. She seemed frightened, or perhaps just bewildered. “His friends took him, Mr. Clark.”

  No, no, I thought, the words clutching my chest.

  A young man had come to the door and said there was a caller for Mr. Duponte; but, he explained, the caller was lame, so Mr. Duponte would have to come to the gate to see him. The carriage was waiting there. Daphne replied that it would be better for the caller to come to the door, as was the custom. But the driver insisted. She informed Duponte and, after giving the matter some thought, he went.

  “And then,” I urged her to continue.

  Daphne seemed to have softened her harsh stance against Duponte, as her eyes were blurred and she dabbed them before continuing. “There was a man sitting in the carriage like a king—I don’t think he was lame at all, as he stood tall and took Mr. Duponte by the arm. And he—sir—”

  “Yes?”

  “He looked just like Mr. Duponte! As though exact twins, honor bright!” she vowed. “And Mr. Duponte went into the carriage, but with a quiver in his face that was sad. Like he knew he was leaving something behind, forever. How I wished you were here, Mr. Clark!”
br />   I had been a simpleton, an ass! The Baron had not stopped our flyers for the lecture because he would stop the lecturer himself!

  There was no trace of the Baron at the hotels, which I began calling on myself. First, I went to the police to report that Auguste Duponte was missing and gave them Von Dantker’s formal portrait, which I had taken from the Baron. I also gave them a drawing I hastily sketched of the Baron and his colleagues, including the various drivers, porters, and messengers who I had noted had at one time or another been engaged by him. Later, I received a message that I was wanted at the station house.

  The same Officer White whom I had spoken with at the time of Poe’s death was waiting at his desk. His hands were folded tightly together in front of him.

  “Have you found him now? Have you found Duponte?”

  “Or Dupin?” he asked. “These portraits you gave us help, Mr. Clark. But the hotel clerks we interviewed all recognize Duponte not as Duponte, but as Dupin. You do notice their similarities even in the sketch you made with the painting?”

  I could barely suppress my agitation. “The reason they appear similar is because Baron Dupin has been flagrantly attempting to ape Monsieur Duponte, and the artist, Von Dantker—he was part of it!”

  White repositioned his hands and cleared his throat.

  “Duponte was pretending to be Dupin?”

  “What? No, no. Entirely the reverse, Officer White. Dupin wishes to prove he was the real source for Poe’s character—”