Inventing Victoria

by Tonya Bolden

  “How does she know the Bruces?” asked Penelope, popping a lemon bonbon into her mouth.

  “Mr. Bruce and her father are good friends,” replied Fanny.

  “You all sound as if you do not much care for this Mollie Church,” said Victoria.

  “I would not say that,” Penelope began. “It is just that—”

  “She is a little too serious,” said Clementine. “I heard that her great ambition is to earn a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree at Oberlin College. She is now attending its preparatory school.”

  Fanny smirked. “I have heard that she intends to major in, of all things, Greek and Latin.”

  “What is so wrong with that?” asked Victoria.

  “Unnatural. Those are men’s courses!” said Fanny, pursing her lips. “She will never find a husband if she pursues a man’s course.”

  “But she is beautiful and rich,” countered Clementine.

  Victoria was so relieved when the chatter ceased and they got on with their game of whist.

  Greek and Latin … How interesting. On her way home Victoria daydreamed of meeting Mollie Church.

  THEN STOOD THERE IN A DAZE

  “What say you, Aunt Dorcas? The cobalt-blue, floral silk crepe de chine jacket with a tailored front peplum over the ivory skirt or …”

  She rattled off three other outfits.

  “My dear, you look divine in whatever you wear.”

  On that late March day Victoria was ecstatic about tomorrow. She wanted to look her best, her absolute best, when she entered Metropolitan AME Church’s Bethel Hall for its literary society’s weekly lecture.

  In the end she decided on the cobalt blue.

  “Not to fan the flame of sectional animosity now happily in the process of rapid and I hope permanent extinction …”

  Victoria never knew that he was so tall.

  “… not to recount the long list of wrongs, inflicted on my race during more than two hundred years of merciless bondage …”

  His voice was deep, full of power, akin to a command from God.

  His mane of hair, mustache, beard were on their way to snow white. But he did not look old, oh, no. Strong, sturdy. And so immaculately dressed in a stark white shirt, jet-black suit, black cravat at his neck.

  The Honorable Frederick Douglass was truly magnetic, majestic.

  “… nor yet to draw, from the labyrinths of far-off centuries, incidents and achievements wherewith to rouse your passions, and enkindle your enthusiasm, but to pay a just debt long due, to vindicate in some degree a great historical character, of our own time and country, one with whom I was myself well acquainted, and whose friendship and confidence it was my good fortune to share …”13

  His subject was John Brown.

  Victoria looked around discreetly, hoping to catch a glimpse of Daniel Murray and his wife, Anna, for Dorcas Vashon had told her that an uncle of Anna’s, Lewis Sheridan Leary, and her cousin John Copeland had been among the five black men who took part in John Brown’s failed raid on the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, a raid meant to spark a mighty uprising against slavery.

  When Frederick Douglass finished, the applause was thunderous, the crowd on its feet. Victoria clapped hard. But ladylike.

  Later, at the reception, she was a bird afraid to fly.

  There she stood a mere eight, maybe ten feet away from him.

  Dorcas Vashon was mingling. Victoria was on her own.

  What should she—what could she say or ask the great man? Victoria thought quickly. Back in Baltimore she had read her hero’s latest autobiography. Perhaps she could compliment him on that book. While she hesitated, the men and women with whom Douglass had been chatting peeled away. There he was alone, serving himself some punch. It was now or never.

  Victoria walked over. “Mr. Douglass …”

  He looked up, smiled. “Yes?”

  “My name is Victoria Vashon.” She curtsied, extended her hand. “I am the niece of Dorcas Vashon of Charleston, South Carolina.”

  His hand swallowed hers up.

  “I—I—” Touching his hand, standing there beneath his commanding gaze left Victoria momentarily tongue-tied. She cleared her throat. “Your autobiographies have been such an inspiration.”

  “Why, thank you … Beg pardon, your name again?”

  “Vashon. Victoria Vashon.”

  “I am glad to have been of service.”

  “They have been my compass point and guide.”

  She so badly wanted to tell him the role his life played in her decision to say yes to Dorcas Vashon’s offer. Wanted to tell him how nine of his words lifted her up when she hit rock bottom.

  He set his cup on the table. “Where are my manners? Would you care for some punch?”

  The Honorable Frederick Douglass serve her? Even if she were thirsty she would have declined for fear of trembling hands. “No thank you, sir.”

  “And tell me, Miss Vashon, how long have you been in our city?”

  “We have only been here for a few weeks.”

  “You said you are from …?”

  “Charleston.”

  “Oh, Frederick!” an elderly lady with a cane called out from across the room. “Oh, Frederick!” She waved her white handkerchief in the air, then hobbled over and grabbed his arm.

  “Will you excuse me, Miss Vashon?” He bowed.

  “Of course, sir.” Victoria curtsied, then stood there in a daze.

  If that were not enough, weeks later she was at the great man’s house!

  INVENTING VICTORIA

  “Mr. Douglass is out of town lecturing,” said Dorcas Vashon when she told Victoria about the upcoming event. “His sons are hosting the Monday Night Literary Club. The speaker will be Henry E. Baker. His subject will be ‘Originality.’ ”

  Victoria was disappointed that she wouldn’t see the great man again, but the prospect of being in his home had her in high delight.

  “Baker is a recent graduate of Howard’s law school,” Dorcas Vashon informed Victoria as the carriage pulled up to Cedar Hill. “Top of his class he was. He works at the patent office. As I understand it, he is at work on a book about colored inventors.”

  “Colored inventors?” Not in her lessons, not in a newspaper, nor in any book had Victoria learned of colored people inventing anything.

  “Yes, my dear. People like the tailor Thomas Jennings of New York City. Fifty, sixty years ago he invented a method of cleaning clothes without the use of water. ‘Dry scouring,’ he called it. What we today call dry cleaning.”

  Victoria smiled wide. “It never ends, does it?”

  “What?”

  “Learning.”

  “Not if you are awake to the world.”

  They were nearly at Douglass’s front door.

  “If only Mr. Baker knew,” Dorcas Vashon added, “he might have a chapter in his book titled ‘Inventing Victoria.’ ”

  Victoria smiled as they stepped inside Frederick Douglass’s hilltop house with his splendid view of the national capital.

  “Now there ought not to be anything strange or unbelievable in the fact that in any given group of more than 10,000,000 human beings, of whatever race, living in our age, in our country, and developing under our laws, one can find multipled examples of every mental bent.”

  Hear! Hear! thought Victoria as Baker lamented that so many people outside the race had “the fixed conviction that no colored man has any well-defined power of initiative, that the colored man has no originality of thought …”14

  Why not? Victoria thought after the lecture. She drifted away from the East Parlor mingling. “Where is the library?” she asked one of the waitresses. Claire Branch had told Victoria that Douglass’s library was a sight to behold.

  It was indeed. Its walls were hung with portraits of John Brown and a host of other famous people, some colored, some white. Most intriguing was an engraving of someone Victoria did not know.

  A determined black man with so much purpose in his eyes.


  Dressed in something like a toga.

  A staff in his left hand.

  Beneath his portrait was written Cinque

  Below that: The Chief of the Amistad Captives.

  Victoria made a mental note to find out who he was.

  Beholding Douglass’s rolltop desk …

  Letter sorter.

  Paper cutter.

  Blotter.

  Inkstand and pen.

  Victoria imagined the great man deep in thought, writing his speeches.

  And the books! “Must be more than a thousand books in here,” she whispered as she looked around the room.

  Slave Songs of the United States … Socrates, Plato & the Grecian Sophists … Lake Ngam … Narrative of William Brown, a Fugitive Slave … The Negro in the American Rebellion, His Heroism & His Fidelity … Buds and Blossoms from Our Own Garden … Moral Heroism; Or, the Trials and Triumphs of the Great and Good … The Complete Poetical Works of Robert Burns … Complete Works of William Shakespeare … The Odyssey of Homer … Looking Backward. He had two copies of the Columbian Orator.

  “How much I would have missed out on!” Victoria whispered, reflecting on that mad moment in Baltimore when she fled the house with first-floor shutters askew.

  How much I would have missed out on! she thought again during Madame Selika’s concert at Lincoln Hall. As she listened to the “Queen of Staccato,” so resplendent in her soft pink gown, Victoria wondered what the prima donna had worn when she sang at the White House. The first colored person to do so, she had read. Selika’s “Ave Maria” moved Victoria to tears. She also wept during a performance by the Fisk Jubilee Singers at First Congregational.

  Then came the grand masquerade at Tallmadge Hall, where Victoria nibbled on croùtes de foie gras, mushrooms au gratin, and asparagus on toast, sipped champagne, swirled, twirled, glided among harlequins, dukes, knights, princes, Greek gods, an Indian chief, an Ali Baba, a mermaid, an Alice in Wonderland.

  It was more than she could have dreamed of.

  “What an ingenious costume!”

  “Did you come up with this?”

  “You look marvelous!”

  The compliments overflowed and overwhelmed. Victoria had designed her costume herself with help from Madame Keckley: a petticoat of pale gold satin with an overdress made entirely of peacock feather tips and eyes and with a laced-up back. Victoria’s gilded Venetian mask, studded with glass beads of many colors, sported a peacock feather on one side.

  When someone asked, “Why peacock feathers?” Victoria replied simply, “Renewal.”

  She sat not one dance out.

  If only the Sarah Paces of the world could see me now!

  GREATER EXPECTATIONS

  She had just finished a portrait of a lady. The woman had high cheekbones. Hair in a high pompadour with bangs. A haughty gaze. Across the top Victoria wrote, “What Now?”

  As the weather warmed there was badminton, lawn tennis, archery, croquet. She mastered them rather quickly.

  What now?

  More teas. More card parties. More needlework sessions.

  What now?

  Victoria began to chide herself for getting so caught up. Just as on that Baltimore street, she was disappointed in herself. There was a term for what she was on the verge of becoming.

  Social butterfly.

  That’s not who she wanted to be.

  But wait a minute. She hadn’t gotten that caught up. Had she, she would not now be weary of the put-on smiles, weary of the vacuous chatter, gossip, weary of pretending to be oblivious to the whispers.

  “I have heard that Dorcas Vashon will leave the girl her entire fortune.”

  “I hear that she speaks no French.”

  “Are they related to George Boyer Vashon, who taught at Howard some years ago?”

  “She is quite a lovely little thing.”

  Weary of Fanny constantly carping about some colored person who embarrassed her. A charwoman talking too loud in the street to “another old crone.” Folks who left home without combing their hair. Women wearing red bandannas. People who hung their heads out of windows.

  Gauche, Victoria said to herself, then allowed a wry smile.

  Another day Fanny fumed over a doddering old man reeking of himself who tapped her on the shoulder and asked, “Where the poorhouse at?”

  “The audacity of some of these gutter people!” Fanny huffed.

  Victoria cringed at Fanny’s cruelty as she sat in the Miller sitting room doing needlepoint.

  “People like that are the reason why our kind of people may very well stop attending Emancipation Day.”

  Back in March Victoria had feasted on news about plans for the upcoming celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the end of slavery in the District of Columbia. When that April day came …

  All those colored men in such regalia. Sashes and braiding. Hats festooned.

  Spotless black carriages bearing Richard Greener and other honored guests.

  On and on the parade went.

  The Knights of Moses … the Galilean Fishermen … The Eastern Star Twilight Cadets … the Lively Eight … the Good Samaritans.

  “Oh, look!” Victoria had gasped when she spotted the chariots decorated with flags and bunting. There were two young women dressed like queens. In one sat—

  “That’s Albertina Miller,” sniffed Penelope. “She has always been quite stuck on herself. She is no relation to Fanny, by the way.”

  In the other chariot sat—

  “That is Ruth Ward,” said Penelope. “She is ghastly and as dumb as a brick.”

  Yes, Penelope Fitzhugh, tatting a lace collar, liked to tear people down too. She pointed out who wore the same dress twice in one week. “She is big and black—who would want that?” Penelope once said of the Cox girl, only twelve.

  “We only went to this year’s Emancipation Day parade for your sake, what with you being new to the city,” said Fanny. Months later she was still talking about how embarrassed to the bone she was over the way some colored people conducted themselves, onlookers and regular folks who marched behind the mounted marshals, honored guests, fraternal organizations, and chariots. “Remember that old hag kicking up her heels and hollering so.”

  “And what about those raggedy, drunken men!” said Penelope. “There should be a law that only people in their Sunday best can march in the parade.”

  “Well, perhaps those people were slaves,” said Victoria. “Surely the day must have a powerful hold on such people, more so than on people born free.” Victoria seethed at the thought of the cutting remarks Fanny and the others would make about Ma Clara, Miss Abby, Old Man Boney, ferryman Jack. She could hear them calling Binah a dunce, making fun of the way she talked. Victoria thought back to how people like Florence and Drusilla Pace looked down on the likes of her and Primus Grady.

  Clementine Tyler was not with them during that needlepoint session at the Millers’. Victoria was certain that if she were, all Clementine would do is natter incessantly about the latest in buttons and bows.

  The death of Longfellow, Roman remains found in London, the goings-on in government—Victoria could not recall meaningful conversations with Clementine, Penelope, and Fanny. When she tried to change the subject from buttons and bows or “gutter people,” they simply humored her for a few minutes, then steered the conversation back to something vapid. Or cruel.

  Things were a bit better when Claire Branch joined them for tea, cards, or needlework. Claire, chocolate, cheery, and dimple-chinned, the daughter of a professor of literature at Howard, had a keen and hungry mind. During interludes she and Victoria often talked themselves to pieces over current events, The Prince and the Pauper, or some other book they had recently read. Claire was among the few young women Victoria met who did not put on excessive airs. The folks back home would like her. That thought sent Victoria wondering if Betty was being a good friend to Binah.

  Victoria hoped to see as much as possible of Claire in coming
months, before she got married, after which Claire would spend less and less time with single young ladies.

  And so many of the young men, Victoria found them insufferable.

  Timothy Fitzhugh with his high forehead and vulture eyes got a little too close when he was teaching her archery at one of his family’s lawn parties.

  Flemming Cary—egad!—what a dandy, what a hungry wolf grin. He boasted endlessly about his family’s summer home on the Chesapeake Bay. “No one who is anyone stays in the city throughout the entire summer,” he informed Victoria one day.

  The way the young men eyed her, sniffed around her, made Victoria sick, as did the competition for a first dance, who was first to bring her a cup of punch, who could corner her the longest in chitchat.

  Jonah Galloway was one exception. A few years older than the others, a bit sheepish, with kind eyes, Jonah never strutted about or pushed himself forward. With his Deep South accent akin to hers, Victoria warmed to him. Also because he seemed ill at ease in society. And there was his candor too.

  “It has taken me some time to get through Howard,” Jonah told her at a Capitol Guard reception, “because I came up through slavery and did not avail myself of learning to read and write on the sly when I had the chance. But I am bound and determined. If the Good Lord permits I will press on to Howard’s medical school.”

  “Good for you!” responded Victoria.

  “I am especially interested in cures for the cold and chills.”

  On another occasion, when Jonah mentioned that he had been on Sherman’s March, he told her about the white man whose surname he took, the man he followed all the way to the capital. Victoria ached to ask him questions about the march but decided against it, just continued to wonder if he had known Mamma.

  Conversations with Jonah factored into Victoria’s yearning for great expectations. Not of life but of herself.

  Clear about the importance of keeping up appearances, Victoria nevertheless found clever ways to decline more and more invitations.

  She spent more time inside that house with the mansard roof or in a park sketching. A time or two she had an urge to sketch people and places in Forest City, but then felt rebuked by the Ladies’ Book of Etiquette.