JUST AS THE JUDGE and Mrs. Maynard had planned, we had our grand dinner, Mitchells and all. Around Judge Lord’s table, beautifully elongated with leaves and bedecked with silver and china as for a wedding, the talk turned to the slavery question and the rights of women. I was surprised to see the extent to which David’s sympathies had enlarged. It seemed an issue on which he and Frannie saw eye to eye.
“I understand Lucretia Mott is from Nantucket,” Frannie said.
“We are famous for our independent women as well as for our intrepid whalers,” Maria answered. She had already invited Frannie, almost as soon as she met her, as she had done with me, to visit the rooftop observatory one night. I instantly fantasized a scene in which by accident Frannie, not Maria, discovered a comet telescopically.
“And we are famous for our schools,” William Mitchell put in.
“And for our wealth,” Mary Starbuck said, with dancing eyes.
Somehow she seemed so unworldly, her comment made us all laugh, even the gaoler.
Both Frannie and Mary made efforts to draw Isaac, the gaoler, into the conversation as much as possible. Judge Lord had seated Isaac between the two women, so that on his left was a woman whose face was all light and beauty (though I knew her history had not left her unmarked) and on his right was a young woman whose face was pitted and furrowed by her past illness. (Though lonely, Frannie had had a much more sheltered and fortuitous life than Mary.) I admired how Isaac spoke to each with the same courtesy and interest. In truth, anyone surely would look past Frannie’s skin to her spirit after five minutes of conversation.
I was surprised to hear Frannie ask Isaac a question that had often troubled me, when I first knew him. “Does it not prey upon you,” she asked, “to turn the key upon another soul?”
The judge (I was seated to his right) interposed: “What would we do without gaol? We would all be the victims of criminals. People in gaol are not innocents.”
“Which I believe,” Isaac said. “But nonetheless, it does trouble me at times.”
Mary said, “They will want a lighthouse keeper at Sankaty in a few months. You could go there, if your present work troubles you.”
I chimed in then, urging him to consider a move. In terms of the liberality of his nature, Isaac reminded me of Uncle Torch, who had found the lighthouse work so congenial. Of course, Isaac would be a pleasant addition to our little community at the east end of Nantucket Island.
Frannie told Isaac how I and also she, for a longer period, had lived at lighthouses. “It’s a more authentic experiment in self-reliance,” she said, “than Mr. Thoreau’s at Walden. If you are in charge of the place.”
Maria Mitchell spoke of the interesting fossil beds at Sankaty, and the judge offered to put in a recommendation for Isaac with the government. We sounded like a colloquy of blackbirds, each putting in his note. But I did not know how Isaac Starbuck could manage his four little children alone at the Lighthouse, unless one of his younger sisters came back to help.
After the roast beef, the question of how we should occupy ourselves arose, and the judge said that the next evening the abolitionists were having testimonials from former slaves.
David showed a great interest in this, seconded by Frannie, and I, too, felt drawn to attend.
WHEN WE WENT to that meeting, I was disappointed to see that all the speakers were men, and I said as much to Frannie, who ardently agreed. But David was bouncing with excitement. “It’s him,” he said, pointing to a young black man with chiseled features. “The one I let go. It’s Frederick Douglass.”
“Is it?” said the judge. “He’s in very distinguished company. That’s William Lloyd Garrison, the famous orator.”
I wondered if the black man knew anything of Susan and determined to ask him at the end of the meeting. He started off his speech at the podium rather haltingly, but then, as a backwoods preacher would say, the spirit came to him, and he became one with the audience. Drawing upon his experiences, Douglass made us laugh and cry at the spectacle of man’s inhumanity to man. He thrilled us with how he physically defended himself when he was sent to a “slave breaker.” Even as he spoke in Nantucket, he could have been snatched up by a bounty hunter and returned to his master. David sat up on his knees, the better to hear and see. He was very excited that someone he had singled out as extraordinary was a featured speaker in a lecture hall.
Frederick Douglass was exceptionally fine-looking, with a splendid timbre to his voice and very natural and expressive gestures. All of that combined with his narration to mesmerize us and to fill us with a smoldering indignation that such a speaker could be owned, as property, by any other human. It was on this idea that Garrison focused as soon as Douglass sat down.
“Is this a man or a thing?” Garrison thundered.
And the audience responded, “A man!”
“Is this a man or chattel?” Garrison quizzed. (Even the question, that Garrison would frame it so, pointing at the handsome black man, embarrassed me.)
And the reply roared, “A man!”
And all the other dignified speakers rose in turn to thank and compliment Frederick Douglass. The image of my mother ripping the bounty posters from the side of the steamboat came to me many times that evening, and with the image came a surge of pride in her action. While I felt myself stirred as never before to do something practical—money, if nothing else—about the outrages of my time, when I looked at Frannie, I saw that she was aflame with it.
Frannie turned to me and said, “I have been in Nantucket for two days, and I have found my life’s work.”
When I tried to approach Douglass, such a press milled about him that I despaired. At that moment, I was approached by a somewhat familiar face.
“I am your neighbor,” he said.
“My neighbor?” I felt confused. The judge was my neighbor.
“Your neighbor at ’Sconset. Perhaps you have moved away? I’m just off the ferry today.”
The woodcarver! Yes. Tall, thin, a lined face, graying, tight curls. “I have forgotten your name,” I confessed.
“Avalon. Robben Avalon. I carve figureheads for ships.”
“I remember that well enough,” I answered. “You showered me with warm water.”
“And I remember that. Have you moved back to town, then?”
“Nay. I own the house at ’Sconset. I have had a barn built, and I shall never leave.”
He looked at me curiously. “You were trying to speak to Douglass?”
“I wanted to ask him about a woman, a former slave, Susan Spenser. She went back to the Deep South to get her mother.”
“I will squeeze in for you, and bring you word.”
“I’m very eager to hear.”
“What age is Susan?”
“A little younger than I.”
“But I can’t guess your age,” he smiled.
He disappeared in the crowd. I watched him carefully. His body, thin as a whittled stick, was well suited to slipping between people, scarcely disturbing them. His dress seemed odd to me, though he wore ordinary trousers and a shirt. Then I realized they were exactly the same shade of charcoal gray, almost black. They flowed together, bottom and top, in a way that accentuated his leanness.
When Robben Avalon reached Douglass, I could see Douglass shaking his head in the negative, and I knew the request was fruitless. Douglass glanced around as though to locate me. When his gaze swept over me, I felt an electric sizzling of my nerves. I felt that I had been looked at by a great man.
Soon Mr. Avalon returned to confirm that Frederick Douglass had not crossed paths with Susan, and David Poland came up to us. He and Mr. Avalon shook hands in a rather serious manner, David reaching up and tall Mr. Avalon leaning down. “David and I are old friends,” I explained. “He has guided my cousin here all the way from Wisconsin.”
“I’m back from a trip myself,” Mr. Avalon answered.
“Where you been?” David asked. Was there a trace of sneer in his voice?
r /> “Italy.”
“Amidst the revolution?” I asked. “I’ve received a letter from a friend there.”
“I stayed only briefly. Then I went to Greece.”
“Foreign places,” David said. “On the other side of the Atlantic.”
“Both Italy and Greece are on the Mediterranean, actually.”
“Slave trader?” David seemed ready to bristle.
“Not at all. A slave trader would be an unlikely member of this audience, wouldn’t he? I went to see the marble statues.” He nodded toward Frederick Douglass. “None were so striking as that former slave, a living man. I’m a woodcarver. I wanted to see the art that survived all the politics and philosophy of Greece and Rome.”
“Art!” David exclaimed incredulously.
“Excuse me, please,” Avalon replied and moved off toward Douglass again.
“That’s a strange fellow,” David opined.
I looked down at him and smiled. He seemed to forget that to some he might appear to be a “strange fellow.” I liked the woodcarver.
One of the great, good things about the electrifying effect that such a speaker as Frederick Douglass can have on a group is that it causes the people to speak to one another. Even the judge, jolted from his judicial reserve, had joined the knot of men: I saw him turn to introduce himself to Mr. Avalon. Soon the judge was much more animated than I usually saw him—perhaps Mr. Avalon had chanced, after mentioning marble statuary, to speak of porcelain.
LATER THAT NIGHT, when the lights of the town were low, Frannie and I accompanied Maria to her observatory atop the Union Pacific Bank. When Frannie peered through the powerful telescope at the moon, she mused quietly, “Her face is pockmarked, like mine.”
“And yet she shines,” Maria said.
The moonshine lay on our shoulders like epaulets, on the curve of our skirts arcing from our waists, on three women standing on a railed platform built over a roof.
THE VERY NEXT AFTERNOON, Frannie went off to an abolition meeting, and every day thereafter. I became afraid that she would not want to return to the quiet and isolation of ’Sconset with me when there was so much reformist fervor in town, and I said as much to Austin Lord. “Let her stay here, then,” he said. “She is quick and tidy in her habits. She can be my second housekeeper. A judge needs an assistant housekeeper.”
When I asked Frannie, at the end of the week, how she was disposed, she replied, “I long to be with you, but the meetings are here. Let me visit ’Sconset and see how my ardor for the work fares there. If it lasts.”
By the work, Frannie meant abolition, not housekeeping.
Her answer seemed a sensible one to me.
FRANNIE WAS DELIGHTED with her room above the sea, and she enjoyed all the pleasantness of nature, but she had no passion for it.
Our best times were when we sat on a blanket, watched the waves, and talked. When we were girls together, we had gotten along splendidly, accepting each other simply as the children of the family, and at ’Sconset we both felt happy again to be kinswomen. Frannie took fine responsibility for herself and for the household, so I had very few extra duties because of her. Instead, those household chores that I did were made lighter by her help and conversation. But I knew that these charms of sea and shore, of familial intimacy and cooperation, lacked excitement for her. She had experienced all this before.
For myself, I continued to savor everything, those days when Frannie first came to ’Sconset. My delight was to see only people I loved with all my heart, and animals as well! Our horses, goats, chickens—Pog the dog above all other animals! Sea, sky, sun, stars! The vegetation around me, my house, my stable in the dell, the things that inhabited my rooms with me—why should such simple items be enough? But they were. And every day the flavor of them grew sweeter and more nourishing. I loved the turning of the day to night, the slower turning of summer toward late summer and toward fall. Love of the passage of time and of all of us caught in time’s flow evoked in me a deep movement, like the largest waves that start deep down in the ocean and roll inexorably to satisfaction.
The Woodcarver’s Studio
I VISITED Robben Avalon for a tour of the wooden women almost as soon as we returned to ’Sconset. When I complained that they had no expression, Robben replied that expression could not be seen at a distance—only the larger form of the sculpture.
“Still, they are incomplete,” I said, hoping my honest response was welcome. “I think that their facial features are too typical. Was it that way with the Greek statues?”
“As the civilization became more decadent, they sank to realism—wrinkles and warts. In the most classical period, everyone was idealized.” How pleasant he looked as he spoke. He did not mind my questions.
“And you prefer?” I asked.
“The ideal. And you?”
I did admire his work. It was a most strange experience to walk among these figures. Some seemed like dryads with only a face materializing out of wood. For others the upper torso leaned out at me, and I might touch a woody shoulder or cheek. Many were in various stages of being painted, and I loved the vividness of the colors, which had an extra depth to them so as to longer withstand the salt water. With the completed figureheads, the colors were sealed under shiny varnish. Such ruby reds and emerald greens—as rich and mysterious as jewels! But the faces of the women, even of the completed ones, were disappointingly lacking in expression.
“I prefer the real to the ideal,” I answered, but I also felt real admiration for his work. And I believed I had been granted a privilege in being admitted to his studio.
“I would be interested in sculpting the actual features of Frederick Douglass,” Robben Avalon added, with pleasant quickness. “In him, the ideal and the real are conjoined.”
“As they are in Mary Starbuck.”
He did not reply.
This conversation with Robben Avalon reminded me of ones I had had with Margaret Fuller about the nature of art, but in this case, Robben was himself an artist. As with Frederick Douglass, his statements were of particular interest to me because of his own experience. I thought of Margaret’s saying I preferred the poem to the poet, a preference that gave, finally, but an incomplete picture of the poem, and decided she was right. Or at least I was inconsistent, for it was not the actual words that made me prefer Douglass on slavery to Garrison, or Robben Avalon on art to Margaret Fuller, but my knowledge of the history of the speaker of the words.
Of my own history, to Robben, I had no desire to speak. He knew, of course, that I had been married to Captain Ahab, and he had died. Yet from the beginning and in all my long future with Robben, I felt, oddly, that despite my reticence he, like Captain Ahab, thoroughly knew me. He knew me artistically, intuitively, without a factual history—the contours of my shape. He knew who I was, without the clutter of details. And, so I discovered, I knew him intuitively, too, or at least knew what seemed his essence.
I knew him to be lonely, something of a misfit, passionate, joyful about his carving and his garden; a person of integrity and concern for justice, a man spiritual but not religious, seasoned with a dash of pride, or even arrogance. Save for the defect I have mentioned, I thought Robben’s work quite wonderful. Like the judge, he was a perfect neighbor, I felt, and soon-to-be friend.
A FEW DAYS after our return to ’Sconset, our townfolk began to come to see us. I was surprised, however, to note one day Austin Lord’s buggy not stopping at my house but continuing to my neighbor’s. That the judge and the artist had much in common surprised me. Yet, there was the judge’s buggy passing me by and stopping at Robben Avalon’s wooden hitching post (a beautifully carved horsehead). The judge’s horse reached out his neck to sniff the impostor horse, and I called Frannie to watch. The real horse, finding no familiar scent, tossed his head and rolled his eye. We both laughed.
“Una,” Frannie said, watching the judge and Robben heartily shake hands, “I do feel restless here.”
“Return to town w
ith the judge, if you wish,” I said, smilingly. “This is a decision that conveys no hurt to me, if you wish to make an arrangement with the judge. I am not your gaoler.”
“No,” she replied. “But here comes the gaoler.”
“Sure enough,” I reported aloud. “In a borrowed buggy, full of children. Look, he stops to visit Mary Starbuck.”
I turned from my window. Suddenly it seemed odd for my neighbors on both sides to have visitors while I had none. For the first time, I felt lonely at ’Sconset.
“Let’s cook,” Frannie said energetically. “We will smell so good that they’ll all come running.” She picked up a bowl, filled it with apples from the barrel, and immediately began to cut them up. I put water to boil, got out cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg, lard, flour, sugar, salt, saleratus, vinegar, and all the other things for apple pies. We both laughed happily. How easy it is, we thought, to make a decision, to implement a remedy, to act.
Ah, it was the we of us—Frannie and Una, Una and Frannie—so beautiful was our accord as we turned to the making of apple pie.
“You know,” I said, “I have never found Hamlet convincing.”
Frannie laughed out loud at the unexpected nature of my pronouncement. Then she asked, “Why is that?”
“All that hesitation. A person would either kill the king or go to another country.”
“Hesitation is more natural for some of us than it is for you, Una.”
“What is your favorite play?” I asked.
I was surprised to find that Frannie was nothing like the reader of literature that I was. That difference made no difference at all in the harmony of our spirits. May every woman have such a kinswoman or friend. Frannie had read Hamlet, but no other Shakespeare.
“What I like is for you to tell me stories,” she said. “Someday you must write it all down.”
“Do you think so?” I asked. I was stunned. “I have enjoyed writing down a few thoughts. I do it when I want a moment to live forever.”
“Not philosophy,” she said. “Not about time or stars. The things you’ve seen and done. The people you’ve met. You describe people very accurately, I think.”