Your friend,
Susanna
*[N.B. Jefferson Davis ordered Southerners to boycott sales of cotton to Europe, as a demonstration of how much European nations needed the Confederacy—a policy which backfired rather severely.]
Susanna Ashford, Nashville Female
Academy
Nashville, Tennessee
To
Cora Poole, Southeast Harbor
Deer Isle, Maine
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 17, 1861
Dear Cora,
I wasn’t going to write again until I heard from you, but something has happened—or I think something has happened. You are the only person I would speak to of this; you are the only person who saw what happened at the depot, that day you and Emory left for Boston.
Saturday I got Den to ride up to the Holler with me, to hand your letter to Justin Poole. I hadn’t seen him since that day at the depot. The whole house is in ruins now, not just the side he nailed up after his wife died. He and his dogs were waiting in the laurels, and because of what happened at the depot all those months ago, I didn’t know what to say. He asked me, “Are you happy, Susie? Barrin’ your grief.” And I said, Yes, I am, because in a strange way it’s true. Being at the Academy, and getting proper Art lessons, and being able to copy good paintings—knowing that I really am on the road that will take me to Philadelphia and beyond. It’s as if nothing—not even the War—really matters, not deep down where the Real Me lives.
Mr. Poole said that he had a favor to ask of me, and we left Den at the Holler with the horses, and climbed part-way up the mountain to Skull Cave. (You remember, I took you there last March?) On the way he said he was sorry that he could do no more at Payne’s funeral than stand in the church door, but I knew if he’d done that, he must have seen your Emory. And yet he did not mention it.
I asked him about what had happened to his wife. He told me that she’d run out of the cabin after they’d quarrelled, and when the storm came up he shut Emory (who was only three) into the cabin, and went looking for her. He found her broken body at the bottom of Spaniard’s Leap, but the storm was too fierce then to get down the mountain. “I was no fit husband for her or any girl,” he told me, and added with a little grin that’s very like Emory’s, “luckily for you, Miss. I know I was crazy, after. But I did all I was able, just then.” I remember Mrs. Johnson telling me that her husband tried to take little Emory away from his father and that Justin drove him off with a shotgun.
There are all kinds of stories about Justin Poole’s treasure, because he was the worst miser in five counties while Emory was growing up, saving the money to send him to Yale. But you’ll never guess what’s in the cave! It’s even better than gold, Cora! Way down deep past where I took you, is the rest of his books. “I wanted somebody besides me to know where these were,” he told me. I peered into one of the trunks and saw the Inferno and Jane Eyre and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations in Latin, and all Walter Scott’s the Waverly novels, which I desperately wanted to take back with me to Nashville except I knew stupid Nora Vandyke would cut the pages out of them for curl-papers. “You’d think, in forty-five years, I’d have more to show,” Justin said. I promised him that I’d come to check on them, every time I was back in Greene County. “You did ask Pa for my hand,” I said, to make him smile. “Keeping these safe is the least I can do for you. Will you join the Army, when you get to Kentucky?”
“Not Kentucky,” he said. “If I join there, Emory and I would meet, sure as death. I can’t shed my son’s blood.” He said he’d go to his sister in Illinois, and join there. “And when the War is done,” I asked, “will you be back?” He said, “I see it bringin’ me nuthin’ but pain,” which made me feel strange, because everyone in the mountains swears Justin Poole has Second Sight. “When the War is done, you’ll be gone,” he went on, and put his hand to my cheek, the way he did in the depot, the day he went to watch his son get on the train with you as his new bride last April. “To Philadelphia, and Paris, and wherever artists must go.” And just the way we did in the depot that day, I put my arms around him and we kissed, and if he’d asked me to go with him then, to Illinois or the Moon or back to the Holler to live the rest of our lives, I would have gone.
I thought that Art was the only thing I cared about, Cora, the only thing in the world for me: the road out of being the housekeeper at Bayberry all my life, the road out of the South, out of a world where everybody expects girls to marry and have babies when the only thing that makes me happy is drawing and painting. But with everything in me I also want to be with Justin. And I know I can’t have both things. If I’m an artist, I would be a terrible wife, and a mother worse to my babies than Pa is to me. And I would hate them, and Justin, too. I can’t be what I need, and what everybody else needs.
And I can’t imagine living without either one.
I don’t know whether to tear this letter up and throw it in the fire, or put it in an envelope and send it.
Susanna Ashford, Nashville Female Academy
Nashville, Tennessee
To
Cora Poole, Southeast Harbor
Deer Isle, Maine
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 24, 1861
Dear Cora,
The Christmas present I most wanted (since it isn’t likely anyone’s going to give me a painting by Caravaggio); your letter from Deer Isle, about those awful ladies of the Southeast Harbor Reading Circle telling you that you must divorce your Emory. Being buried in snow like that with everything smelling like smoke sounds horrible, and it’s hard to imagine how trapping more snow around the house is going to keep you any warmer. I love cheese-making but I’m afraid the only time I’m glad Pa is a slave-owner, is when it’s time to make soap. But there’s no cheese this fall because the militia has eaten most of the cows.
I’ve enclosed some of the drawings I made of one of the taverns on Spring Street. Use your best judgement about showing them to anyone. Nora and the other girls here all squeal when I paint things like old shoes and broken glass and ask, “Why do you always paint such ugly pictures?” She should talk! Her flowers all look like cauliflowers and her butterflies look like ducks. Dead ducks. I replied, “I don’t know, Nora—why do you paint such ugly pictures?”
Most of the girls have gone home to their families, and the school halls echo strangely tonight. Mr. and Mrs. Elliot gave those few who are left here presents at supper. (New pen nibs! Heaven only knows how Mrs. E got them!) I will go to the Russells’ tomorrow for dinner.
WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 25
Well, everybody who said last spring, “The War will be over by Christmas” is wrong. Last Christmas was the last time I saw Payne. Now my dearest brother is gone, and Bayberry … isn’t really Bayberry anymore. I hope and pray your brother Brock is well, and having a happy Christmas, wherever he is. I pray for Emory, and for you, buried under a hill of snow on Deer Isle.
Last night I pretended I was there with you in your snug bedroom behind the stairs; that we could whisper to each other the way Julia and I used to do. I pretended I still had all my brothers (even one whose wife would rather sew than read!) and a Papa to spend Christmas with, and a Mother who’s strong and kind. Since I can’t have those tonight, I’ll settle for Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d’Artagnan, savored secretly like candy in the stillness here that’s broken only by the sounds of the troop trains.
TUESDAY, DECEMBER 31
MORNING
I will send this off to Mrs. Johnson tomorrow, and hope she still “knows people who know people” (she should—her middle son is riding with the bush-whackers!). Mrs. Polk—widow of the President—gives a ball at her house. There is much dashing about the hallways and lending back and forth of gloves and laces, and you can smell burnt hair even downstairs in the parlor. Henriette’s sisters will be there, but Julia begged Henriette to stay home with her. She would have begged me to stay home with her (she is due in March), except she and Henriette are trying desperately to marry me off. Both tell me I should cha
nge to second mourning for the occasion, to better my chances: Henriette’s sister has a black-and-white that will fit me, they say, and hint that six weeks is “enough” for a brother. But I remember dancing with Payne, and in his honor will go to Mrs. Polk’s ball in my best black. Not that Payne would care, but I feel better so.
To be honest, I’d rather stay here at the Academy tonight reading The Three Musketeers … or better still, be magically transported to Maine, with a bottle of Mrs. Polk’s blockade-run champagne in my hand, to toast in 1862—and all it may bring—with you!
A blessed Christmas, dearest Cora.
S
Cora Poole, Southeast Harbor
Deer Isle, Maine
To
Susanna Ashford, Nashville Female
Academy
Nashville, Tennessee
THURSDAY, JANUARY 2, 1862
Dearest,
The same boat that brought Papa home to celebrate Christmas brought your letter of early November. I am so sorry, to hear about your brother—if there is anything that I can do, to help you or Julia, please let me know.
It feels strange to write that I’m glad you saw my darling Emory. Thank you for not upbraiding him on my behalf. You asked how you could make his departure more bearable for me, and you have done so already, in greeting him as a friend. Did he look well? Thank you, too, for that wondrous sketch in the margin, of him on the gravel of Bayberry’s drive, wearing a borrowed black coat.
And thank you for the drawing of me in my room. I laughed at the portrayal of me reading that mammoth pile of newspapers in bed: would that there were so many available here! Yet more often—my preceptresses at Hartford Female Seminary would grieve to hear—bedtime finds me lost utterly in Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, or the beguiling Emma. How often I have been told, and have told others, that the reading of novels “rotted” a girl’s mind and rendered her unfit for “serious” mental effort. I suppose, if my mind is rotting this winter as a result of the contents of Mr. Poole’s trunk, I would not be aware of it. Yet it is to Miss Austen—and to yourself, Susie—that I owed my ability to laugh and shake my head after my “speech” before the Southeast Harbor Ladies Reading Circle, rather than weeping with vexation and rage!
To give the Reading Circle its new and proper name: it is now the Daughters of the Union Propaganda Society. Do you have Propaganda Societies in the South? They have sprouted up over the East since the War began, to encourage recruitment and promote the purchase of government bonds to finance the War. I spoke of the people I met in Tennessee: said that many Southerners sincerely support the Union but favor slavery as well, that many are kind, good-hearted, Christian people who do not deserve to be judged by their leaders or by their neighbors. Of Emory I only said, “My husband made a hard choice, one with which I cannot agree. But he has not ceased to be my husband, before the eyes of God.” This was when Elinor went to the melodeon and said, “Why don’t we all sing ‘May God Save the Union’?” The only person who spoke to me afterwards was Sukey Greenlaw. She said that her cousin is a lawyer in Portland and if I wished to divorce Emory for treason, her cousin would see to it at a quite nominal charge. When I crept to my bed that night, throbbing as if from a poisoned wound, I seemed to hear kindly Mr. Bennet say to his daughters, “For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbors, and to laugh at them in our turn?” I managed one rich laugh, and slept.
I had been searching (vainly, alas) for another of Miss Austen’s books in the trunk when I came on a slender volume by Mr. Dickens entitled A Christmas Carol, which moved me to tears. Surely you have read it? But Papa remonstrated, “Do you truly think any work of man is fitter to read on Christmas, than the tale embodied in the second chapter of the Books of Matthew and Luke?” And he is right of course. Yet on Christmas Eve, Ollie and Peggie and I huddled together in my room all under the same quilts, long after our parents were in bed, and I read Mr. Dickens’s magical story to them. Knowing you were alone at the school that night, I pretended you were here with us, too. And I could just imagine how your eyes would sparkle when Bob Cratchit saw that Christmas turkey that was bigger than Tiny Tim!
When I say, by the way, that Papa was here to “celebrate Christmas,” I must add that most of Deer Isle holds by the old New England habit. Here, Christmas morning is marked by church-going and prayer, but beyond that, it is a day like any other. We exchange little presents on New Year’s Day, but that is all.
FRIDAY, JANUARY 3
MORNING
A quick word, to conclude. The weather has become threatening, and though we hoped that Papa might remain through Sunday, and return Monday to Yale when the students come back, it has been decided that he should leave today. There have been storms every week since I have been home, heavy snows followed by bitter “nor’-easters” as the fishermen call them. My fingers are always chapped and bleeding from the cold.
I see you in your curtained house, the grief of mourning, as if it were still going on today, this minute. But I look at your sketches and know that somehow, you will find a way.
I see Ollie bringing the sleigh around for Papa. I will write again very soon, Susie.
Yours,
C
Cora Poole, Southeast Harbor
Deer Isle, Maine
To
Susanna Ashford, Nashville Female
Academy
Nashville, Tennessee
TUESDAY, JANUARY 14, 1862
Dearest Susanna,
Would I have gone on with my education, if women were allowed to go to college? I assume you mean a true college, with the same education as young men receive: in law, in medicine, in engineering, rather than the sterile piling-up of “accomplishments.” There are, goodness knows, Female Academies and Colleges where one can progress quite far in the disciplines of history, languages, and such sciences as botany and mathematics: the Hartford Female Seminary, which I attended for four years, was one of them.
Yet at no time was there ever a discussion of what one does with one’s education, if one is a woman. We—women—have come far, in that it is even possible to attend a Female Seminary these days at all. Forty years ago, the great discussion was, Should girls be taught to read? (They would, after all, only consume foolish novels like Pride and Prejudice, poor silly things.) All a young woman may qualify herself to do is teach—if she can find a school. And then, only very young children. I wish there were a way to send you my copy of Mrs. Wollstonecraft’s astonishing book, A Vindication of the Rights of Women—since, rather to my surprise, a second copy of it lies in Mr. Poole’s trunk: well-thumbed, imagine that! Find a copy, Susie, if you can. Read it, I beg you. It will open your eyes, as surely as mine were opened by Uncle Tom’s Cabin]
It has been brought home to me how few places there are to go, if one is a woman, and with child. I am glad and grateful that my family has welcomed me, but I am aware—with the wave of patriotic feeling now sweeping the land—of how few here would welcome a Rebel soldier’s wife. I shiver to think of what my lot, and my child’s, might so easily be! As I grow weary of pointing out to Peggie, when I married Emory he was not a Rebel soldier, nor did he have any intention of so being! On her most recent visit, Elinor did not scruple to repeat to me what Deborah said to her: Every time I look into her (that is, my) face I wonder if she prayed this morning, that my Charles would be killed. I cannot tell you, how ill this makes me feel. I could only be glad that a snowstorm prevented me from attending this month’s meeting of the Daughters of the Union! I am grateful that by next month, snowstorm or not, I shall be too far advanced in my condition to be out in public.
Nor do I find comfort in the single newspaper that comes from the mainland once each week, with its squabbles over whether Southern slaves “deserve” freedom, and its dreadful cartoons of “Rebel ladies” collecting the skulls of slain Federal soldiers, and wearing shawls wrought of those soldiers’ scalps and beards.
Mother counsels Bible reading, for she has never ap
proved of my addiction to newspapers. I do find comfort in the Psalms, and the Book of Job. At least I am not the only person in the Universe, who has been full of tossings to and fro, unto the dawning of the day. Mother firmly agrees with the ancient destroyers of the Library of Alexandria: “Whatever was true in those books is also in the Scripture; whatever in them was not also in the Scripture, is better consigned to the flames.” Yet my heart finds a gentler refuge in Mr. Dickens’s Bleak House. And since I am not yet reduced to sitting on a dung-heap covered with sores, I find in its heroine’s philosophy of helpful cheer a clearer road-map to guide me day to day, and, I blush to admit, in the horrendous Mr. Tulkinghorn an outlet for the pent-up malice in my soul: I can wish him all the ill in the world, and savagely rejoice when it finds him.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 18
Wash-day today. Please excuse the awkward penmanship. I managed to burn my hand, raking out the ashes from the stove. Because of the cold we only black-lead it once a week, early on Monday mornings, when it has been cold over Sunday. Raking of ashes on other days is a trick for which I never acquired the knack. The latest nor’-easter has at last ceased blowing. Yesterday was spent hauling snow and boiling water to soak everything overnight for washing today. Despite the bandage, my hand smarts from the lye, and I face a day of pouring yet more lye, hauling yet more snow, and boiling yet more water. We hope to have a few days’ drying-time before another storm. With good reason do Deer Isle girls bring to their marriages wedding-chests brimming with sheets, chemises, towels, stockings to last through winter if possible. Since Peggie proves indeed to be with child, I can only contemplate what wash-days will be like next winter, with two infants in diapers under this roof.
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