American Follies

by Norman Lock

  Martin slept through the entire evening. To this day, I believe he was under a spell.

  The next day, we were ignored by the other passengers, who glanced suspiciously at Susan and Elizabeth, who had rid their faces of greasepaint. The Lackland steamed toward Vicksburg, having stopped in the early-morning hours at Greenville, whose tolling bells had not disturbed our sleep. The Lower Mississippi offered a myriad of picturesque scenes, but we took no notice of them. We were like traveling salesmen for whom novelty had faded and, with it, curiosity. My interest—and the story’s—lay elsewhere. I will mention, however, the gentleman we met on the last day aboard the Lackland.

  He was gaunt, his face drawn and of an unhealthy color. It was plain to see that he was gravely ill. He wore a woolen skullcap. I didn’t recognize him as the man whose photograph I’d seen in history books and, recently, on the wall of the Spottswood jailhouse, desecrated by brown spittle. Southerners despised him because during Reconstruction he had enforced the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and scourged the Ku Klux Klan with federal troops.

  “Ladies,” he said politely, although he did not rise from the deck chair on which he sat. He held a book of poetry in his gnarled hands. Despite the day’s heat, he wore a shawl around his frail shoulders. Had it not been for the beard, I would have mistaken him for a pinched and aged spinster. Squinting because of the glare on the water behind us, he looked at Elizabeth and Susan. “I heard about your performance. It took guts. Had I a proper hat on, it would be off to you both.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Susan. Although shrunken, the man had a gravity that could have made my womb wander. Acknowledging his authority, Susan bent her stiff back in a curtsy—perhaps the first and only one in her long, unyielding life.

  “It’s kind of you to say so,” said Elizabeth. And then astonishment registered on her face. “Why, you’re President Grant!”

  He smiled wanly. “The president—and also the man—that was. I’ve nearly finished both my terms. Forgive me if I don’t stand. I’m not up to snuff today.”

  We called to a steward to bring three additional chairs. Margaret had stayed in our cabin, along with Martin. The steward’s having ignored our request, we dragged chairs across the deck ourselves and arranged them about the former president.

  “I’ve been reading Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War. He gave it to me last year, signed in his own hand. It’s not a book I enjoy, any more than I do Mathew Brady’s pictures. It was a bloody business! Sometimes I wish I had stayed home in Galena.” The general read a stanza from the book:

  And horror the sodden valley fills,

  And the spire falls crashing in the town,

  I muse upon my country’s ills—

  The tempest bursting from the waste of Time …

  “A most bloody, barbarous business—necessary though it was. Not like the Mexican War or the war against the Mormons or the war that’s coming against Spain. America seems helpless not to engage in lunatic adventures.”

  “Most of the horrors are still to come,” said Susan, eyes clouded like an oracle’s. “Thank God we won’t live to see them.”

  “You look tired, Mr. President,” said Elizabeth maternally.

  “I am worn to the bone, Mrs. Stanton. “Ladies, I have been picked clean. If not for Sam Clemens, I would draw my last breath in the poorhouse.”

  “You know our true identities?” asked Susan, surprised.

  “I would know your famous red shawl anywhere, Miss Anthony.”

  He shut his eyes, and his breathing became labored.

  “Can I get you anything?” I asked, for the man looked half-dead.

  “No thank you, my dear. In a minute, I’ll be right as rain—unless the Massa comes and takes my breath away.”

  “What has brought you here?” asked Susan gently.

  “I want to see Vicksburg again,” rasped Grant in a voice ruined by too many cigars. “Once upon a time, I had plenty to do there.”

  In 1863, Major General Grant laid siege to Vicksburg with a bombardment that lasted forty-eight days. His batteries shelled the town from across the Mississippi until hardly a house or building was left standing. Thirty-three thousand Confederate gray backs were encircled by 77,000 blue bellies. The townspeople lived in caves dug out of the hills’ soft yellow clay and ate rat meat after they had run out of cats and dogs.

  “They sat in caves and ate boiled shoes served by slaves on linen tablecloths,” said Grant, eyes glazed in reverie. “We blasted Vicksburg all to Hell. Three thousand rebels died of scurvy, malaria, dysentery, and starvation.” The general shook his head, and we saw disbelief shadow his ravaged face. “People are beyond understanding. I expect not even the Almighty can make head or tails of us. We are His folly—His greatest one.”

  “The Greatest Show on Earth!” I had the uncanny sensation that someone had spoken through me like a ventriloquist throwing his voice through a dummy.

  The two women looked at me askance, but the general concurred: “You are right, young woman. We are performers in a spectacle.” He brooded a moment and then asked sadly, “Is it likely that our enemies will ever love us? In any case, I shall see Vicksburg again before I die.”

  “What do you expect to find?” I asked. I spoke to this old man with a sincerity I had not felt since my child was taken from me. I don’t know why that should have been the case, unless I sensed that we two had been granted the dispensation sometimes given to the sick that allows them to see clearly.

  “Something I lost, maybe,” he replied with a contemplative air. “Or something I might find that would make me less afraid.”

  “What’re you afraid of?” asked Susan, trying to conceal a pity that would have offended him.

  “The future, of course.”

  “Yours?” asked Elizabeth.

  Grant laughed painfully because of his throat. “Mine is all used up, or nearly so. You must excuse me, but I’m tired, and my voice is about to give out.”

  “Forgive us,” I said, like an inquisitor to a man stretched on the rack, which the general’s deck chair did, in fact, resemble.

  “Good-bye, ladies.”

  We didn’t see him get off the boat at Vicksburg. We were below, in our cabin, when night fell across the Delta.

  The Commodore

  WE BELIEVED THAT WE’D BE SAFE in a city more interested in commerce than the lunacy of racist hooligans dressed in sheets. But we hadn’t counted on the fury unleashed at Memphis or the confederacy of dunces up and down the river, nor could we have known that the Spottswood sheriff had choked the truth out of his wife and denounced her to the Grand Cyclops. Brister Warwick had also given us away moments before the ghouls lynched and burned him at French Fort. Brister was no more to blame for our trouble in New Orleans than the rope around his neck was for his death or the match for his immolation.

  No sooner had the Lackland lowered her gangway than Elizabeth and Susan were seized by three cigar-chewing zealots who had sworn before the Grand Turk and the Grand Cyclops to lynch the suffragists who had defiled the sacred regalia of the Klan, upset its secret conventicle, and stolen its child sacrifice. Keeping to the shadows, I followed them while Margaret hid little Martin inside a custom’s shed. The Klansmen soon found a beam on which to hoist the objects of their enmity. Excited by the prospect of seeing two loudmouthed northern women strung up, a crowd of wharf rats gathered and ignited a row of smudge pots, which cast a lurid light upon the scene. Eyes bright with malice, they sang:

  Wheel about, and turn about, and do just so;

  Every time I wheel about, I jump Jim Crow.

  Bound hand and foot and their necks in nooses, my friends were invited to speak their last words. I couldn’t help thinking of Mary Surratt on the scaffold, whose own valediction had been “Don’t let me fall.”

  Elizabeth might have been on a lecture platform, facing an audience of reasonable men and women, so calm did she seem as she addressed the jeering mob:


  We declare our faith in the principles of self-government; our full equality with man in natural rights; that woman was made first for her own happiness, with the absolute right to herself—to all the opportunities and advantages life affords, for her complete development; and we deny that dogma of the centuries, incorporated in the codes of all nations—that woman was made for man.

  She had neither begged for mercy nor protested against the indefensible act to which she herself was about to fall victim. I wept in admiration, forgiving her for the small acts of vainglory that had annoyed me.

  Susan concluded the declaration, her stern voice like a hatchet: “We ask of our rulers, at this hour, no special favors, no special privileges, no special legislation. We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all the civil and political rights that belong to citizens of the United States, be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever.” She’d spoken above the heads of the crowd she scorned to the men in Washington who even now, in 1904, have not unpacked their ears of chaff or their hearts of rubbish.

  A Klansman replied, “Ladies, we mean to hang you the same way we would a man—with a rope. So you can’t complain of being treated unfairly.”

  The crowd sniggered and then shrieked in enmity, “Hang the bitches! Hang the bitches! Hang the bitches!” I was amazed to hear the women shout as loudly against their sisters as did the men.

  Offered filthy handkerchiefs, my two suffragists declined to be blindfolded.

  “To Hell with you both!” snarled a man who, by his clothes, could have been a clerk in a law office or a minor customs official. He was ordinary—someone you could picture tipping his hat to a lady in the street more readily than knotting a noose for her neck.

  “If we should find ourselves in Hell, we’ll wave our handkerchiefs as the devils drag you, kicking and screaming, to its most infernal region,” said Susan, visibly pleased by her remark.

  “If in Heaven, we’ll pity you, since not a damned one of you fiends will make it past the gates,” said Elizabeth unflappably.

  “Speak for yourself, Lizzie!” countered Susan with her usual acerbity. “I would not waste a tear to pity or a gob of spit to quench the thirst of these polecats!”

  From my covert behind a stack of cotton bales, I shivered in fear for my two friends.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, we will commence with the overture,” said a man who resembled the master of ceremonies on board the Lackland. In answer, a fiddler, a trombonist, and a banjo player lurched into the snide tune I’d heard on the river two nights before. The overture having concluded, he sat on a barrel head and resumed the role of Mr. Interlocutor.

  MR. INTERLOCUTOR: Without further ado, Sister Bones, I wish you adieu. May you macerate eternally.

  He put a noose around Susan’s neck and tightened it.

  “We shall go up or down together,” she managed to say before rising into the night air (an intoxicating mix of jasmine, musk, and tar), her feet kicking in her high-buttoned shoes.

  Possum up a Gum-Tree,

  Up she go, up she go!

  The voice that had vexed and stung congressmen, nabobs, and the remonstrants of her own sex may have gone silent, but the red shawl set at defiance the rampant beast that is a mob.

  MR. INTERLOCUTOR: Without further aside, Sister Tambo, I bid you good-bye. May you choke on your words eternally.

  Elizabeth inched upward as a man hauled on the rope. Two others from the mob lent a hand, and she was quickly lofted.

  Pully hawl, pully hawl,

  Scream and bawl, scream and bawl!

  In the glow of the smudge pots, Elizabeth was gloriously illumined. Gilded by the light, her face showed her contempt and her triumph. Had Elijah’s fiery chariot descended from the heavens and carried her off to the Rapture, I would not have been surprised. Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, John Brown—you are one of them, my dear Mrs. Cady Stanton! You and Miss Susan!

  “Non Silba Sed Anthar!” proclaimed the Klansmen in the pig Latin of their childish and murderous cult.

  I was about to fling myself on the mob and cut down the dangling suffragists with Brister’s shears, when a noise like rain on a tin roof scattered the rats. Cautiously raising my head like a turkey at a turkey shoot, I peeked and saw a submarine lying against the pier, its Gatling gun raking the wharf with grapeshot. In an instant, I’d cut the hangmen’s ropes. Like two fish gasping in asphyxia, Elizabeth and Susan drew a rattling breath in unison and opened their eyes on the star-spangled sky of a Mississippi Delta night.

  “How do you feel, Lizzie?” asked Susan.

  “My neck feels longer!” she replied querulously, fingering it as a bassoonist would the keys of her instrument.

  We were joined by Margaret and the child, and together we hurried to the submarine half-hidden in a cloud of steam.

  “Quick, ladies!” urged a sailor leaning over the iron deck to hand us on board. “We must not give them time to drop their nets.” He helped us through an open hatch. Elizabeth caused an anxious moment, but with a final effort, she wriggled though the iron collar, tearing her sateen dress on the rivets. While the sailor screwed down the hatch cover, we descended a ladder into a gaslit interior. Was I surprised by this novelty? I’d lost the capacity for astonishment, not all at once, as a woman loses her virginity, but gradually, as she grows tired of her husband or her life.

  Elizabeth called to a fine-looking sailor, “Young man, I am feeling peckish.”

  “I’ll have a word with the cook, ma’am.” He doffed his white cap and smiled, his mouth full of handsome teeth.

  “A hunger of the mind can only be appeased by a well-nourished brain,” she explained.

  A gentleman wearing a Vandyke and gold epaulets on his blue flannel escorted us to a commodious stateroom decorated in a circus motif.

  “Why, it’s Mr. Barnum!” cried Susan.

  “Welcome to the Fiji Mermaid! Except for my stateroom, it resembles Nemo’s Nautilus to a tee. And please address me as ‘Commodore’ until we’re ashore again. Hello, my dear!” he said, kissing Margaret’s dainty hand. “Your friends send their love.”

  “We’re happy to see you, Commodore!” exclaimed Susan, who once had been scornful of his vulgarity.

  “How on earth did you know we were in New Orleans?” asked Elizabeth.

  He laid his finger aside his nose. “Never underestimate Madame Singleton. She saw your plight.” With the same finger, he tapped his forehead. “You must look beyond the requisite tawdriness of her stock-in-trade. She’s a gifted medium. Until its demise, she was an honorary member of the British National Association of Spiritualists. The eminent ‘Poughkeepsie Seer,’ Andrew Jackson Davis, paid her homage in his book The Fountain with Jets of New Meanings.”

  “What about the Fox sisters?”

  “I was suckered.”

  “Where are the clowns?” I asked.

  “You can shoot a clown from a cannon, but you can’t entrust him with a submarine. The crew is comprised of eminent yachtsmen whose only weakness is a fondness for grog. The bottle will be passed at eight bells.” He glanced sharply at the suffragists. “Remember, you two, this is not a temperance hall.”

  Barnum shot the cuffs of his uniform, cut by the son of the tailor who had sewn Cornelius Vanderbilt’s nautical attire when he had been known as the Commodore. The tycoon had owned a splendid yacht in his day, but he couldn’t take it with him onto the waters above the firmament or the lake of fire far below it. In the opinion of many, the ruthless skinflint deserved an eternity of brimstone and castor oil.

  The underwater boat slipped toward the Gulf. Its steam boiler burbled like a teapot, the crankshaft thumped, the miraculously restored Prince Albert shaving mug trembled as the screw churned the water into froth, scattering the little fishes.

  A fish that must have been prodigious rubbed against the Fiji Mermaid’s hull.

  “What in the world was that?” asked Elizabeth, helping Susan to her feet.

  “Moby Dick, I expect.” He gazed at
the brass-bezeled instruments. His voice was tinged with sadness. “Melville, also, is smitten by phantoms.”

  Barnum escorted us through his cigar-shaped domain. The decks, cabins, and passages appeared to multiply impossibly, and I was reminded of Bellevue Hospital after my encounter with a maniac. I mentioned it to the impresario.

  “The architecture of the madhouse and the circus are quite similar.”

  His answer startled me. “Is this a circus?” My glance took in a table heaped with charts showing the location of the world’s forgotten chimeras, monsters, and beasts.

  “One or the other, or both.”

  “Commodore, was the Voice that routed the Invisible Empire yours?”

  “Yes.” I saw that the admission gave him pleasure. “A nice effect, don’t you think? It was produced by an augmenter. Edison ginned it up for me. It will be a tremendous addition to the Traveling Museum, Menagerie, Caravan and Hippodrome.”

  “It was you I saw getting on the caboose at Grand Central!”

  “Barnum, like God, is ubiquitous.”

  In the wardroom where we assembled for dinner, Elizabeth inquired, “Commodore, how long will it take to reach New York?”

  He smiled indulgently. “Who can say how long a dream lasts? But I must be in the city in time to lead the elephants across the New York and Brooklyn Bridge to assure the public of its integrity. That of the moral sort, I leave to theologians and philosophers. I promised those two great cities a parade, and the newspaper scribblers will turn out in droves to witness this latest coup de théâtre of Phineas T. Barnum and …” He looked me in the eye while he finished his boast: “the Greatest Show on Earth!” I had uttered those five words to President Grant on the deck of the Rufus J. Lackland. Barnum winked, as if we two were conspirators in a plot whose purpose would be forever unknown to me.

  He wiped his lips on a napkin embroidered with the word Excelsior and said, “A terrible waste of life that could have been avoided if the mayors had let me test the bridge before it was opened to the public.”