Petigru had been raised to have sympathy for oppressed people. He frequently defended indigents and, occasionally, slaves. That encouraged Ham to climb the stair to Petigru’s second-floor office, close the door, and pour out as much of Alex’s story as he dared.
Coatless, Petigru sat on a library ladder with a book open on his knee. When Ham finished, Petigru said, “Your sister and her friend are in a dangerous position.”
“Alex knows that, sir. I’m the only person in whom she’s confided.”
“Inevitably, if they choose to remain close, they must leave Charleston. Until then I’ll allow them to meet across the street occasionally. When people conduct clandestine business in the open, they are hardly ever suspected. However, they must show no signs of intimacy. Henry Strong must act respectfully, as a hired man would.” Petigru smiled. “I’ll have to tell my wife, Amelia, that I’m playing cupid. I won’t say for whom.”
“Bless you, sir,” Ham said.
All Charleston knew that Petigru cherished his garden directly opposite the office. Two marble pillars flanked the entrance to the lot. A single huge magnolia towered over azaleas and camellias. Petigru often walked in the garden, hands behind his back, talking to himself as he planned an argument.
Alex and Henry met in the garden ten days after their reunion. She arranged it with a note sent to John Street. Henry reported to St. Michael’s Alley that morning, and Petigru set him to weeding and pruning. Alex arrived at noon, with a cut glass decanter of ratafia for the office. She didn’t care for the potent liqueur concocted of wine and brandy, fruit and almonds, but Ham liked it. He was providing drinks for the other clerks after hours, to celebrate his birthday.
She sat on a garden bench, shaded by the magnolia. “Tell me more about what you did in Beaufort.”
The tattered brim of Henry’s straw hat hid his face. “Mostly I suffered. Wasn’t for those books, I’d be crazy by now.” He tore weeds from the sandy soil. A redheaded lizard ran from under a bush, inspected Henry’s busy hands, and ran off again.
“I read all of Shakespeare’s plays. Every one. Missed the Charleston Theater something fierce. I decided for good and all that I’m going to be an actor. Play Othello someday.”
“That means you’ll have to go North.”
“I will.”
“I’ll go with you.”
He raised his head. Sweat glistened on his cheeks. “No.”
“Why do you say that? You know how I feel.”
“I feel the same way.”
“Then marry me. I’m nineteen, Henry. Old enough to make up my mind.”
“No,” he said again. “I’d never let you marry a colored man, even one light as I am.”
“What you’re like on the outside doesn’t matter. I read a poem by Samuel Coleridge, the English poet. I memorized it because it’s what I feel.” Henry knelt with his hands resting on his thighs. He waited.
“I have heard of reasons manifold
Why love must needs be blind,
But this the best of all I hold—
His eyes are in his mind.”
Henry pulled off his hat; wiped his shiny forehead as a horseman rode by in the street.
“What outward form and feature are
He guesseth but in part,
But that within is good and fair,
He seeth with the heart.”
“Don’t,” Henry whispered. “For God’s sake, Alex, what does some English poet know about things in America? Marrying me would blight your life. I’d never put that on you.”
“You think conditions won’t change? Get better for your people?”
“I do not. In Beaufort I saw how Mr. Porcher, kind as he was, couldn’t live without his niggers. He wouldn’t last an hour in a flooded rice field with the sun frying his skull. Only way he can keep his fine life is to keep slaves. And fight anybody who says he can’t.”
“Then where’s the end of it? How will the cycle ever be broken?”
“Down there in Beaufort I read something I wasn’t ’sposed to see. A slave who’d been taught reading and writing in secret gave it to me. Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, it’s called. Never saw or heard of it in Charleston. Probably they’d hang a man for having a copy. David Walker’s a Negro. Ran away from North Carolina, settled in Boston. Sells clothing there. A seaman bought a coat from him. Walker took his pamphlet apart and sewed pages into the coat lining, so all the pages would get to South Carolina. Walker says there’s just one way for colored people to free themselves. By rising up and killing their masters.”
“Like Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner? Do you believe that?”
Henry jammed his trowel in the ground. “I get mad enough to believe it.”
“This is a devil of a conversation for a reunion.”
“Can’t help it. I won’t let you throw your life away and live in some shanty in New York, despised and spat on because of your husband. I love you too much. Now get out of here, I have to weed this whole place before it’s dark. I’ll catch hell at home. I didn’t tell Pa where I’d be all day.”
“Does he know about us?”
“Some. He doesn’t like it too much.”
“When shall I come here again?”
“Better not. Not for a while. Too hard for me. Too hard for both of us.” He tipped his straw hat in a respectful way. “Good afternoon, ma’am.”
“I seen him,” beaky Archie Lescock III said. “Right there in Petigru’s weed patch. I followed him in the morning, then kept watch. I rode by and saw him talking to Miss Alex Bell bold as you please. One thing for sure. He’s the nigger I tangled with in the street.”
“You think the woman that night was my cousin?”
“Never saw her real clear, but I suspicion it was.”
Gibbes tilted forward in his chair; the legs banged on the piazza. “That dirty bitch. Free love, niggers—what else?” The thought of Alex lying with anyone but him enraged him. He shook a finger at his friend. “That boy’s done for, Archie.”
Lescock beamed.
“Need to figure out how to do it,” Gibbes went on. “Got to be careful, so he gets what’s coming but we keep our hands clean. Might take a week. Might take a year.”
“Worth waiting for, Gibbes.”
“Yes indeed.”
43
Adrift
Ouida married Xeno Hayward at St. Michael’s in late June. Alex declined the invitation for herself and her mother. She didn’t want to face Gibbes again, and Cassandra showed no interest. Ham refused to attend alone. Alex presumed cousin Ouida would stumble to the altar without her glasses.
On the afternoon of the ceremony Alex sat under the great live oak, vainly trying to resolve the melody for an antislavery anthem, thus far wordless. St. Michael’s bells rang to celebrate the marriage. She listened with a sad expression. Imagination conjured a ballroom lit with scores of candles where she danced with Henry, handsome in a tailcoat and white tie. Was there a place on earth where it would be possible?
Following the wedding Dr. and Mrs. Hayward sailed for Portugal and an extended European honeymoon.
Weeks passed between meetings in Petigru’s garden. Henry grew noticeably thin. He seldom smiled. Alex asked him only once about the shop. He flared. “I hate it. Pa knows I hate it. Marcelle’s upset him, too, there’s another bastard on the way and she won’t say whose it is. I can’t take it forever.”
“We’ll go to New York.”
He wouldn’t answer.
Despite the drumfire of abolitionist rhetoric out of the North, cotton boomed again and, with it, commerce on the Cooper River piers. Ham found a young German, Otto Abendschein, to manage Bell’s Bridge. Otto was an enthusiast. “By this time next year upland cotton will reach twenty cents a pound. Everybody will be rich as Rothschild. Isn’t this a great time to be living?” Ham was noncommittal.
Alex worried about her brother. He had no close friends and no visible interest in women. He seemed content to
bury himself in the law office, though he did accept Simms’s invitation to hear Senator Calhoun at Prosperity Hall. Petigru refused the invitation.
It was October, nearing the end of the congressional recess. Calhoun was en route from Fort Hill to Charleston to catch a northbound steamer. About fifty people, three-quarters men, gathered in the plantation’s great room. Ham wasn’t surprised to find feckless Gibbes absent.
Calhoun was still magisterial, though Ham thought he detected a weariness and a bitter attitude. The senator addressed the sedate and respectful audience for an hour. It was his kind of audience; he was known for avoiding noisy political rallies, barbecues, and the like.
“As the years pass, I become ever more convinced that our system of labor represents a positive good. It provides a secure, untroubled life for a race physically and temperamentally suited to agriculture in a warm climate. It separates the races in a manner that reduces friction. It frees us from harmful conflict between capital and labor. Yet we remain under attack. The number of abolitionist petitions reaching the Congress increases annually. All are utterly devoid of legal foundation. The Fifth Amendment clearly stands as an insuperable barrier: no person may be deprived of property without due process. We deal with the petitions by tabling them, but that only seems to encourage more. The agitators are teaching a whole generation to hate one section of our country. We must resist them at all hazards.”
Simms raised his hand. “Even if it should mean eventual disunion, Senator? Or armed conflict?”
“At all hazards,” Calhoun repeated, his eyes hot with conviction. Ham struggled to compose himself.
Calhoun answered more questions. Autumn shadows grew long. After Calhoun thanked his listeners, house girls came in with silver trays of wine and punch. Simms stepped forward to offer a toast.
“I give you John C. Calhoun, champion of liberty. May any man who opposes him have a scolding wife, disobedient children, small crops, and a mule to ride on that constantly throws him.”
Laughter broke the evening’s mood of sobriety. Calhoun’s phrase rang in Ham’s mind. At all hazards. The damned fool.
“May I have another?” he said to one of the servants. He drank two more after that. He took the road to Charleston full of Madeira and gloom.
The winter dragged. Cassandra’s listlessness upset Alex and the entire household, but there seemed to be no remedy. Edgar’s death had stolen away more than a husband and father.
Twice each week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, Alex hitched up the carriage and made the rounds of homes of acquaintances, there collecting discarded clothing. Sometimes she knocked on the doors of strangers. She avoided Sword Gate and the Lark residence.
She drove her acquisitions to the three-story brick poorhouse built on public lands at the corner of Queen and Mazyck Streets. The building housed more than a hundred paupers. They were put out to work daily if they were able, kept in the medical wards if not. Alex’s routine helped alleviate her sense of idleness, though she had to steel herself for every visit. Underground cells housed the deranged poor, men and women who wailed and cursed and cried out incoherently from tiny barred windows at ground level. It burdened Alex with a sense of the wide disparity between those who lived handsomely in Charleston, and those trapped in its lowest reaches.
Alex visited Naomi Marburg once a week for tea. She loved the spacious Greek Revival house with white Doric columns in the old suburb of Ansonborough. A mezuzah on the doorjamb testified to the faith of the householders.
The interior was a fascinating mix of cultures: in the kitchen, savory German cooking—beef brisket, potato pancakes, red cabbage; in the parlor, an exotic Orientalism—a Turkish carpet, an elaborately bound set of the Talmud, a brass menorah, a silver cup for Sabbath wine on display. Naomi favored heavy lace curtains that diffused sunlight and kept the parlor cool.
The banker’s wife was still proudly allied with the brown elite from which she came. Over tea and tiny sandwiches she and Alex discussed copies of The Emancipator and The Liberator that reached the Marburgs in unlabeled parcels from the North. Morris and Naomi shared Alex’s loathing of slavery—the nation’s “slow poison” as George Mason of Virginia had called it—but Marburg would not display the papers in the King Street bookstore or allow them to be kept under the counter. He and his manager, William Watkiss, argued about it regularly.
While Naomi dashed off to quell spats between the older girls, or punish Marion for some mischief, Alex read reports of the American Anti-Slavery Society recently organized in Philadelphia to unite societies from that city, Boston, and New York. She learned of a schism within the national group. Some members wanted gradualism, careful preparation for emancipation at some unspecified time in the future. On the other side were men like Garrison, firebrands of immediatism, a term coined by a British Quaker. Both sides had given up resettlement in Africa as a practical solution.
The papers made Alex feel more alienated, out of place in the city she’d once loved without reservation. She saw Charleston as a self-protective enclave ruled by the fearful, the ignorant, and the greedy.
Marburg’s bookshop manager invited a young writer of short stories and sketches, William Gilmore Simms, to give a reading from his historical romance, The Yemassee, as yet unpublished. Alex and Ham attended, along with the Marburgs, two of their older girls, a pair of journalists, gouty Judge Porcher and his wife, and a dozen strangers.
A Closed notice hung on the shop door. The author sat in a rocker and read for ninety minutes. At the end Amaryllis Porcher rose to lead the applause. She declared that Simms would rival Fenimore Cooper when the world saw his work.
Watkiss served apple dumplings he’d baked himself. He was a strange, oddly likable young man with prematurely white hair, hands tiny as a child’s and constantly aflutter. He was no more than five feet tall, a bachelor. Mr. Simms, not yet thirty, rocked in his rocker, munched a dumpling, and held forth:
“I love the South. I stand by her. Yet the way of life of the planter is intellectually sterile. All they want to do is hunt, ride, lounge, and sleep. Bring up a literary topic, they run off as though you carried plague. Charleston doesn’t give a damn—beg pardon, ladies—for literature or art. What’s the answer? Stay and suffer, I suppose. I’ll not flee to New York or any of those other smoky, dismal places where publishers congregate.”
There we differ, Alex thought. If I can ever persuade Henry, we’ll go.
Even the beauty of that spring, 1835, couldn’t restore her spirits. Cassandra sat in the garden for hours, gazing into space, responding lethargically when addressed. Dr. Hayward, back from his wedding trip, could find nothing wrong with her except extreme fatigue, brought on, he felt sure, by her withdrawal from life.
Alex received a brown paper packet from Philadelphia. It contained several foolscap sheets written in a fine hand. Angelina Grimké’s explanatory note said the pages were a draft of a composition that “God showed me I must write, during one long, sleepless night this winter.” She called it An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States.
These are only sketches for certain paragraphs of the whole, which I hope to publish as a pamphlet, through the American Anti-Slavery Society. God revealed to me that Southern people who would not read a Northern abolitionist might be more likely to read one of their own. I address women because addressing men will only reach men, while addressing women may reach all.
Alex read the pages and immediately saw the rightness of Angelina’s arguments. She also saw the inherent perils. Angelina urged women owning slaves to set them free or, barring that, educate them. Should the law forbid it, Angelina was unequivocal. If a law commands me to sin, I will break it.
Excitement gave her a sleepless night like Angelina’s. In the morning she rushed the pages to Naomi Marburg. They carried them to William Watkiss, whose voice slid up to familiar shrillness as it did whenever a crisis arose or some written work stirred him:
“This we must stock. This we must disseminate.
How can we not? She is a voice native to Charleston.”
Naomi said, “Certainly there would be repercussions. Such a pamphlet like hers will enrage a majority of the community.”
Watkiss waved his tiny hands. “Let it, let it. The righteous must confront the ungodly.”
“We need my husband’s consent,” Naomi reminded him.
Alex sat with Naomi in the Marburg parlor while Morris read the pages with the aid of a magnifier. It was a hot evening, windows open on the garden. No air stirred; another sweltering, temper-fraying Charleston summer in the making.
“Incendiary stuff,” Marburg concluded. “I would never put it in the store if it didn’t bear the Grimké name.”
Alex clapped her hands. “You mean you will?”
“Against all good sense, yes. I will write to the Society, request that they ship us a quantity by steamer mail at such time as the pamphlet’s published. We will then brace for the inevitable.”
44
Fanning the Flames
On July 29, Wednesday, the steam packet Columbia docked with cargo and mail from New York. Custom House men discovered a pouch sent by the American Anti-Slavery Society to Marburg’s Books, King Street. The inspector attached a note to the pouch, calling it to the attention of Postmaster Alfred Huger, a conscientious official and a Unionist.
At the Post Office in the Exchange Building, Huger unsealed the pouch and dumped the contents on a sorting table. Bundles of tracts; two hundred copies or more. An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States. Huger saw the name Angelina Grimké and scowled.
Huger quickly composed a letter to Andrew Jackson’s postmaster general in Washington, another to his friend the postmaster in New York. How should he deal with such literature arriving through the mails? A majority in Charleston would not tolerate circulation of material dealing with “the question on which this community is too sensitive to admit of any compromise—emancipation of the Southern slave.”