Charleston

  “I’ve discovered something myself, William. What you said about the woman issue increasing the anger of audiences, especially of men—it’s true. I won’t abandon the message, but I’ve paid a price. I’ve been spat on, hit by flying brickbats, cursed with every foul word in English and a few in foreign tongues.”

  That brought a smile, for which he quickly apologized. “No need,” she said. “You notice that I don’t walk as well as I should.” She touched the lacquered cane lying on an empty chair; told him about Pittsburgh.

  “Another time, in Baltimore, a man who objected to the idea of women being free accosted me and burned me with his cigar.” She laid her left arm on the tablecloth, palm uppermost, to show a round red scar on her wrist.

  “Please know that I’m not complaining. I pay the price gladly. I only want to say I’ve learned how right you were that night. Sometimes all the madness and hatred seem too great a burden. Then I catch myself and know I must go on.”

  “I drove you away that night in Dayton,” he said. “I regretted it as I’ve regretted few things in my life. I vowed that if we met again, I would do all I could to promote a different ending.”

  He paused a moment. “Our work is necessary, and moral, but as you say, it can burden the soul. Sometimes it’s fearfully lonely.” How well she knew. Years of solitary living, travel on grimy trains, hard beds in cheap hotels, had made her a virtual recluse.

  “Men and women can draw strength from each other, Alexandra. You say you’re compelled to go on. So am I. I would like to propose that at some time in the future, we go on together. That is, if you could entertain the possibility.”

  She was stunned, flattered, not a little thrilled. “Let me think a moment. I’m not accustomed to such frank declarations.”

  “I’m not accustomed to making them. I’ve only done it once before, with my late wife, Filomena.”

  “May we have some fresh air? I’ll try to find the right words to answer you.”

  “Yes, of course. Waiter.”

  Outside, they discovered a soft snow falling. Alex pulled the hood of her plain gray burnoose over her head. Encountering a slippery curbstone, Drew took her arm. “There may be ice underneath.” He didn’t let go.

  The evening was windless. The lights of New York gleamed prettily behind the falling snow. She savored the smell of evergreen boughs decorating lampposts and storefronts. A sleigh full of children went by, bells on the team ringing brightly. The city, which could be so ugly and raucous, had a peaceful, almost magical quality, and for the first time that she could remember, she found falling snow beautiful.

  “You asked that I consider the possibility of the two of us going on together in some fashion.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can say that I’ll happily entertain the possibility.”

  “Oh, marvelous. I hardly dared hope—”

  “Wait. First, everything must be open between us.” Under a streetlamp she drew her arm from his, threw back the hood of her burnoose so that he could see her face. Snowflakes drifted against her forehead, pleasantly icy.

  “I must tell you about a man I knew in Charleston. A man I loved, as Shakespeare says, not wisely but too well. His name was Henry Strong.”

  Ten months later Alex and William Drew exchanged marriage vows before a judge in Cleveland, Ohio, where both were speaking on the same program. Alex kept her own last name.

  THE YEARS

  BETWEEN

  1842–1863

  Early in May 1846 a Mexican army invaded Texas. Gen. Zachary Taylor met the enemy at Palo Alto and Resaca de la Palma and hammered them back across the Rio Grande. Congress declared war, against fierce opposition from Whig members.

  The war was not universally popular. Many condemned it as imperialistic, undertaken solely to add a new slave state. While Gen. Winfield Scott was advancing on the Mexican capital, Drew and Alex took part in a protest in New York. Two hundred marched, arm-in-arm in ranks of ten. Crowds along Broadway waved small American flags and cursed and spat on the marchers. Stones and bottles flew. A paving block thrown from a roof struck Drew’s shoulder and drove him to one knee. He was dazed and bruised but otherwise unhurt.

  From that day Alex detected a worrisome change in her husband. He was no less considerate, no less ardent and satisfying as a lover, but he grew somber. She hardly saw him smile, let alone laugh. He spoke of armed conflict between North and South as a certainty and pondered what would follow such a war.

  He spent more time reading his Bible. The word forgiveness became part of his daily vocabulary. He reminded Alex and others that at Golgotha, Christ had asked forgiveness for those who crucified him. “‘For they know not what they do.’”

  Alex argued the point. She felt the slave masters knew very well what they were doing, and why.

  In one of those small miracles of human behavior, Folsey Lark underwent a sea change. It came about because he liked poker, a game new to the country in the 1830s. He played it poorly, especially when he drank. One morning he woke to discover he’d lost fifty acres of his best land to a man widely suspected of being a sharp.

  Sick and wobbly, Folsey hurried to the office of the family attorney, elderly Theophilus McCrady of Broad Street. McCrady examined the note Folsey had signed. “Ironclad.” He proceeded to tongue-lash his client.

  “Come to your senses, Folsey. Your father, my lifelong friend, left you valuable income properties. If you persist in neglecting them, throw them away while in a drunken stupor, as you apparently did last night, I will call on my friends in the state judicial system. It’s rather a closed club, you know. I can easily have you declared incompetent. I’ll see that a conservator is appointed to manage your affairs.”

  “That’s an empty threat,” Folsey retorted.

  “Then test it, sir. Test it, by all means.”

  Folsey retreated a bit. “I can’t have someone running my life. I won’t.”

  “Then you had better change course.”

  To the amazement of McCrady and those close to Folsey, he did. He controlled his drinking and gambling. Like Lydia Bell before him he called on friends to help him learn to be a better steward of his inheritance. If he wasn’t as driven as his father, he was shrewder; some said more devious. Folsey never forgot the promise made at Crittenden Lark’s bedside. He supposed he would fulfill it someday, but he was in no hurry.

  Folsey preferred the bachelor life. Even so, he had needs. He formed a liaison with a handsome nineteen-year-old mulatto, Adah Samples. He kept her in a small house above Boundary Street. She was a beautiful creature, her waist tiny, her breasts mature and full, her throat long and graceful. Her smooth skin reminded him of amber. No one thought badly of Folsey for taking a free colored woman as a mistress. Indeed, he received compliments on his taste.

  He lavished expensive gifts on Adah. At the end of their first six months together, he gave her a turban of yellow velvet with yellow-dyed aigrettes, imported from Paris. She loved to show it off when they went driving. His gentleman friends referred to Adah as Folsey’s yellow bird.

  Adah’s parents were delighted to have their child cared for by a wealthy white man. Adah was an intelligent young woman and proved to be a steadying influence on Folsey.

  Gibbes Bell was smitten with the ripe good looks of Folsey’s younger half-sister, Snoo. Among the young men of Charleston he was far from alone in this, but Snoo favored him because of his family name. In 1847 they were married, over Ouida’s protests that Gibbes was lowering himself.

  Folsey’s social standing was immediately improved, and a friendship cemented between the two men. Gibbes was one of those who counseled Folsey as he evolved into a successful businessman.

  Though he now had a wife, Gibbes often daydreamed of his cousin Alex, “that damned woman.” The phrase was attributed to his friend and political mentor, bearded and balding Robert Barnwell Rhett of the Charleston Mercury. Rhett’s paper was the South’s loudest voice clamoring for dissolution of the Union.
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  Gibbes hated Alex because of her betrayal of Charleston, her carnal dalliance with the dead freedman, Strong, and her lifelong rejection of Gibbes’s advances. At the same time he could never rid himself of a desire to bed his cousin once before he died.

  The Mexican War ended in 1848. Under the peace terms the United States gained vast new territories, the richest prize being California. In July, Alex traveled to Seneca Falls, New York, for a convention organized to discuss and promote women’s rights.

  She returned filled with zeal for the cause. She showed Drew sketches of some unusual feminine styles in a magazine for women, The Lily, published by Mrs. Amelia Jenks Bloomer.

  Drew looked askance. “Trousers worn with a skirt?”

  “A short skirt, as you can see. Why not, William? Mrs. Bloomer says it’s hygienic. Conventional skirts drag on the ground and pick up mud and heaven knows what else.”

  “This Bloomer woman designed the trousers?”

  “No, but people call them bloomers all the same.”

  The exchange was friendly. She and Drew often disagreed but without rancor. Theirs was a good marriage, though both were saddened by their inability to conceive a child while Alex was young enough. They never raised the issue of which of them was responsible. In quiet moments they held hands and spoke of what it might have been like to be parents.

  Upstairs at H. V. Hill’s boardinghouse near Capitol Hill, John Calhoun died on March 31, 1850. He was sixty-eight.

  For weeks he’d been too feeble to reach his Senate desk. Others read his speeches for him. Calhoun had suffered tuberculosis for years. His son John junior, a physician, wrote down the cause of death as “catarrhal weakness.”

  The South grieved. Ouida Hayward was inconsolable. She carried an engraving of Calhoun with her everywhere; she even took it to bed. Dr. Hayward was thankful they’d long ago moved into separate bedrooms.

  Ouida blamed “race-mixing Yankees” for Calhoun’s sad end. Her rambling fulminations frightened her twelve-year-old son, Calhoun Bell Hayward, named for the great man. Dr. Hayward resorted to careful euphemisms when he spoke to his son about his Ouida’s increasingly fragile mental state.

  A steamer brought John Calhoun’s body to Charleston, accompanied by representatives from the Congress. The city gave him the largest funeral procession in living memory—scores of marchers, military units, an honor guard of prominent citizens accompanying a funeral coach modeled after Napoleon’s. Ham and Jim Petigru joined the honor guard out of respect for Calhoun’s long service to the nation.

  Calhoun lay in state at City Hall, then was buried in St. Philip’s churchyard. Ham considered it an irony when one remembered Calhoun scorning the city as frivolous and debauched. Calhoun’s widow, his second cousin Floride, came from a family with strong Charleston connections; she wanted him to rest there. Boundary Street was renamed to honor him.

  Ham and Petigru agreed that Calhoun had been a brilliant man, an accomplished politician, and a bulwark of the Union in his early years. But he’d squandered his talent, energy, and a good part of his adult life on a narrow, almost morbid defense of slavery.

  “Standing forth in vindication of it,” Petigru observed, “with never a word about its oppressive nature or a wish for its demise.”

  Friends of William Drew in Richmond sent him a chilling document: remarks copied down from an earlier exchange between Calhoun and Senator Mason of Virginia. Calhoun had stated his belief that the Union would be dissolved.

  “I fix its probable occurrence within twelve years, or three presidential terms. The mode by which it will be done is not so clear. The probability is, it will explode in a presidential election.” For once Drew found himself in agreement with the South Carolinian admirers and even some detractors who still called Calhoun the Cast Iron Man.

  In 1850 Alex saw one of her great goals realized. Congress abolished slavery in the District of Columbia. Her happiness was tempered by a new fugitive slave law that strengthened the law of 1793 and thereby increased the danger for Negroes who risked flight to the North.

  Although Drew counseled forgiveness after a war that he, too, believed was inevitable, he remained a militant activist. He joined half a dozen other men who traveled to Saybrook, Connecticut, to surround the jail where a captured slave had been imprisoned.

  Before the abolitionists could batter the door open, an armed mob surrounded them. The would-be rescuers fell back and scattered into the night. The mob overran the jail, dragged the Negro out, and hanged him from a nearby oak. The incident left Drew with more bruises and a painful sense of failure.

  Alex’s eyes had been opened long ago to the hatred of colored people throughout the North. Incidents such as the one in Saybrook, while they didn’t excuse similar ones in Charleston, proved that sins of intolerance weren’t unique to her native state or the South.

  In February 1855 Alex and Drew left New York City on a train bound for Rochester, where they were to appear with Frederick Douglass. Douglass joined them at Poughkeepsie. He’d spoken there the night before.

  Freezing rain fell, glazing whatever it touched. The interior of the passenger car was infernally hot near the wood stove at the front, but frigid where they found seats at the rear. Alex could feel the hostility of passengers watching Douglass.

  From her reticule she took a copy of Mrs. Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In 1852 the book had become an international sensation. For all of its melodrama and stereotyping it was a powerful indictment of slavery. She was reading it for the second time.

  When the train reached Albany, two burly men stomped into the car. They glared when they saw Douglass. They took seats two rows away, whispering together as the train left the depot.

  Suddenly the larger of the two men appeared in the aisle next to Alex. His companion passed him to open the door, blasting the passengers with cold air. The first man hooked a thumb toward the open platform.

  “Niggers to the rear car. This one’s for white people.”

  Douglass frowned. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me, brother. You better go along if you don’t want trouble.”

  Drew stood up. “No one’s moving except you, sir.” He made the mistake of emphasizing it with a poke of the man’s lapel. The man drove his fist into Drew’s belly.

  Alex and Douglass jumped up. The man grabbed Drew’s shoulders, pushed him out the door. On the icy platform Drew flung a punch as the train swayed. He slid sideways, his knuckles only grazing the other man’s jaw. The man countered with a blow that drove Drew against the low rail of the platform. He slammed his palms into Drew’s chest. Drew tumbled over and fell between the cars. Alex felt the bump of the wheels. “Oh, my God. Stop the train.”

  It took precious seconds for the brakes to seize and hold on the cindered rails. Drew’s mangled body lay on the track behind the last car. The two men jumped off and disappeared, never to be caught or identified.

  Drew lay in a hospital ward in Albany that night. Alex held his chilly hand; he wasn’t entirely coherent. Shortly after 2:00 A.M. he roused to whisper, “Alex?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Alex, do you love me?”

  “I love you. Don’t you know that?”

  “Do you love me as much as you loved Henry Strong?”

  “Just as much, yes.”

  A ghost of his old, brilliant smile flitted over his face and was gone. He could barely speak. “I beg you to forgive me.”

  “Oh, my dearest. There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “Yes, there is. Forgive me for…leaving you.” His hand slipped from hers.

  “William?”

  Silence.

  She rushed into the aisle. “Matron.” She had lost her first love when she was twenty. Now, twenty years later, she’d lost her second.

  She buried her husband in Roxbury, Massachusetts, beside his mother and the Reverend Justus Drew. Drew’s murder—she considered it nothing less—put new steel in her. She continued to speak and
sing her freedom songs with a ferocity that reflected the growing anger and strife in the nation.

  The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act had effectively nullified previous compromises on expansion of slavery. The new law allowed territories awaiting statehood to decide whether they would come into the Union slave or free. Kansas became a battleground. An abolitionist named John Brown led savage attacks on the proslavery men. Groups throughout the South raised money to combat the free-soilers.

  Armed volunteers traveled to Kansas to join the fight. Alex read of a Beaufort contingent, the South Carolina Bloodhounds, taking part in the looting and burning of Lawrence, the territory’s free-soil capital. An antislavery broadside carried a sketch of the palmetto flag flying on a Lawrence hotel.

  In May 1856 Charles Sumner of Massachusetts rose in the Senate to condemn the situation in “bleeding Kansas.” His oration included an attack on Senator A. P. Butler of South Carolina, full of sexual references. Sumner accused Butler of taking as his mistress “the harlot, slavery.”

  A relative of Butler’s, Congressman Preston Brooks of the Edgefield district, reacted by stalking into the Senate with cane in hand. He fell on Sumner and beat him senseless at his desk.

  Northern papers called Brooks a monster. The South hailed him. Ouida sent a draft of a hundred dollars for the congressman’s legal defense fund and contributed to a group of women who commissioned a silver loving cup engraved with Brooks’s name and the words Heros et Martyr. She came home one afternoon with a scrap of lacquered wood wrapped in her handkerchief. Breathlessly, she showed it to her husband and her son.

  “It’s a piece of the cane Congressman Brooks used on Sumner. Folsey Lark’s friend Marvin Rayburn sold it to me for ten dollars. His relative in Washington guaranteed its authenticity.”