by Lamb, Wally
The second event that heightened Lizzy Popper’s resolve to fight against slavery was the arrest in New Haven harbor and subsequent trial of the Amistad defendants, fifty-six kidnapped Africans who had killed captain and crew members of the Spanish-owned schooner Amistadand commandeered the ship in a failed attempt to sail home from Cuba. Following former president John Quincy Adams’s successful defense of the would-be Amistad slaves, they were supported by Farmington, Connecticut’s Congregational First Church of Christ while awaiting the collection of private funds to finance their return voyage to their homeland, now Sierra Leone. Members of New Haven’s North Church were active in this fund-raising initiative as well, and Lizzy Popper solicited and obtained significant contributions from prominent businessmen in New Haven, New London, and Windham. This cooperative effort between the Farmington and New Haven churches most likely initiated Lizzy and Charles Popper’s association with the Underground Railroad, as Farmington was Connecticut’s “Grand Central Station” of the secret system by which escaped slaves made their way north to Canada. Following the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, agents of the “railroad” were subject to arrest for aiding and abetting runaways; therefore, arrangements were covert and documentation is scant. It is believed, however, that both the Poppers’ attic and the barn of Lizzy’s sister, Martha Weeks, were used to harbor fugitives.
Atypical of married women of her era, Lizzy Popper was the nineteenth-century equivalent of the “working mother,” frequently leaving her children in the care of the childless Martha Weeks when she traveled on behalf of one of her social justice causes. At the invitation of Lucretia Mott, Popper attended the 1848 Conference on Women’s Rights at Seneca Falls, the historic New York gathering that launched the struggle for women’s suffrage. More a moderate than a radical thinker, Lizzy Popper was ambivalent about women’s suffrage. Aboard the train returning her home, she wrote to Martha Weeks:
While I support many of the agreed-upon points of the Declaration of Sentiments, I fear that the demand that women be granted their “sacred right” to elective franchise will cost us dearly. We can accomplish far more by appealing to the better instincts of men of mark than by battling for access to the ballot box. Extremism will negate our efforts, and here is a perfect example. Three or four of the delegates advocating suffrage saw fit to promenade up to the podium wearing pantaloons! Thee would have laughed the livelong day, dear sister, to see what I saw: women in trousers asking to be taken seriously! Liberate women from toil and drudgery, yes, but why from skirts and petticoats? I trust that my three babes have minded their manners in my absence. Thee can rest assured I shall spank the bottom of any boy who has not.
An 1851 letter from Charles Popper to his wife, when their sons were nine, eight, and seven, reveals that Lizzy’s frequent travels became a source of conflict between the couple. A somewhat remote parent who was himself frequently on the road selling books, Popper accused Lizzy of saving the world at the expense of his children, and of ignoring “the sound, common-sensical guidance of Miss Beecher, whose book you stubbornly refuse to open.” Of the volumes he sold to his subscription customers, Charles Popper’s perennial best-seller was Catharine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School. (Beecher was the sister of author Harriet Beecher Stowe and feminist Isabella Beecher Hooker.) Written in an autocratic tone, the book instructs women and girls on cooking, laundering, and household sanitation, and advocates the sublimation of the female’s personal ambition for the sake of her family. “I lay any future flaws in our sons’ character firmly at your feet,” Charles Popper warned his wife. But Charles’s criticisms failed to slow Lizzy’s momentum; her ledger of travel expenses reveals that she took seven trips in 1851, eleven in 1852, and sixteen in 1853. As for A Treatise on Domestic Economy, Lizzy Popper apparently read Catharine Beecher’s book after all—or tried to. In a letter to her sister, Anna Liver-more of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, she observed wryly that Beecher had taken seven pages to instruct readers on the proper way to prepare a garment for ironing “before the iron is allowed to touch the cloth.” Dismissing the work as “well-intented poppycock,” Popper concluded, “Let Miss Beecher attack her wrinkles. I shall attack injustice. There is no short supply of either!”
In addition to her antislavery efforts, Lizzy Popper was active in the—
* * *
I STOPPED THERE. PUT IT away. I had to.
Because if Peppy Schissel was right—if Mary Agnes had been pregnant when she left New York—then it was possible, maybe even probable, that I was not the great-great-great-grandson of the amazing Lizzy Popper. That I was not a Quirk at all but the bastard son of Calvin Sparks or Gus Weismann….
But if that was the case, then why didn’t the math add up? Peppy had told me “Jinx” was already pregnant when he drove her back to Three Rivers in March of 1950. I was born in October of 1951…. Or was I? If they’d gone out of their way to lie about who my mother was, maybe they’d fudged my date of birth, too. Paid off some town clerk or something. Was I a year older than I’d been led to believe? Half Jewish? Half black? Was I someone’s half-brother?
Not knowing what to think, I kept my mouth shut. But not knowing, not telling anyone, was making me crazy. I caught myself slamming things, dropping things, muttering to all the dead liars in my life. One afternoon, at the wheel of my car, I couldn’t recognize where I was or remember what I was supposed to be driving toward. One night, battling insomnia, I became lost in the corridors of our old corn maze. A woman’s voice was calling my name. Was it Maureen? Mary Agnes? I ran along the twisting packed dirt paths, getting closer and closer to the voice. Velvet’s voice—I recognized it now. But when I reached the center of the maze, instead of Velvet, I found Harris and Klebold, armed and smirking. It was Eric who spoke. You know what I hate? Cuu-unnntry music! And people who think that wrestling is real! And idiots who are so fucking clueless, they don’t even know who their parents were! As they raised their shotguns and took aim, I bolted upright in bed, gasping, flailing for the light.
* * *
JANIS HAD WOWED THEM AT the Women’s Studies conference—had returned from San Francisco with business cards and e-mail addresses from department chairs and university press editors. Her adviser had assured her that, with a few strategic expansions and some fine-tuning, “Elizabeth Hutchinson Popper: An Epistolary Self-Portrait” would serve beautifully as both a detailed proposal for her doctoral thesis and her gateway to the job market. If she could complete her revisions by April, they would call her committee together so that she could present her proposal and get the green light to proceed.
“Did you read it?” she asked me the evening she got back. She’d come down to the kitchen and found me leaning against the counter, eating canned ravioli out of the saucepan. In the week she’d been away, I’d both missed Janis and been relieved she was gone.
“Started it,” I said. “Great job. Lizzy was quite a gal, huh?”
She asked how far I’d gotten.
“Uh, well … Seneca Falls. The suffragists wearing pantaloons.” Watching her smile turn from anticipation to disappointment, I changed the subject. “So did you hear about the big feline smack-down?”
In the month or so since the Micks’ cat had arrived from New Orleans, there had been no love lost between him and Nancy Tucker. Fat Harry and little Nancy had had several howling, arched-back face-offs. But while Janis was away, the fur had finally flown. Nancy had come out of it with a torn ear and a bald spot on her back. Harry, sporting a rakish gash over his eye, had been banished to the barn.
“Moses says he loves it out there,” Janis said. “He left him a dead bat as a thank-you present yesterday.”
“Is he sure that wasn’t Velvet?” I quipped. “She’s kind of got that Vampira thing going on.”
Janis smiled, said I was awful. “So when do you think you’ll be able to read the rest of my paper? Because I’d really love to hear what you think.”
“Hey, don’t worry about what I think. It’s your doctoral committee you’ve got to impress. Not me.”
“This isn’t about impressing you, Caelum,” she said. “This is about your having given me the gift of access to your ancestor’s archives and my giving you a gift in return.”
“Yeah? What am I getting—an iPod?”
But I couldn’t back her off with sarcasm. “You’re the blood of Lizzy’s blood, Caelum,” she said. “You exist because she married Charlie after everyone had written her off as a spinster, and because they had babies together: Eddie, Levi, and then your great-great grandfather, Willie—Lydia’s father.” Damned if I could hold her gaze when she started that blood-of-her-blood stuff, which I probably wasn’t. I dumped the rest of the ravioli in the garbage. Started washing the pan and whatever else was in the sink. Problem was, Janis grabbed a dishtowel and came up beside me. “Willie was an entertainer—a star on the minstrel circuit. Did you know that?”
“Nope.”
“You know what everyone at the conference was talking about after I presented my paper? The incredible ironies in your family history.”
“The ironies?” I glanced at her for a second, then looked away again.
She nodded. “In 1863—the middle of the war? Willie was performing on the New York stage, entertaining audiences with these hideous parodies of black women. And meanwhile his sixty-year-old mother was down in Washington, nursing the wounded and defying the terms of the Emancipation Proclamation—sending slaves from the border states off to safe havens before their masters could catch them. And then there’s the irony that—”
“Hey, not to interrupt,” I said. “But what does Moze think?”
That stopped her short. “About what?”
“Your paper. He’s read it, right?”
Now it was she who was struggling to keep eye contact. “I haven’t asked him to, Caelum. Moses doesn’t really value my scholarly work.”
“Oh,” I said. “Well …” I promised her I’d read the rest of it as soon as I could—probably that weekend.
But two weeks later, Lizzy Popper was still stuck on that train coming back from Seneca Falls. When Janis asked again if I’d finished, I told her I’d been crazy busy. School stuff, plus a situation over at the prison—something I hadn’t anticipated.
“Is everything okay with your wife?” she asked.
“It is now,” I said. “But it took some doing to get it fixed.”
“Get what fixed?”
I told her I didn’t have the energy to go into it. “I do want to read your thing, though. It’s not that I don’t.”
What had happened was: Mo’s former cellmate, Camille, had filed that complaint about Officer Carol Moorhead, the CO who’d sexually assaulted her during that cavity search for the missing pepper shaker. There’d been an investigation, and Maureen, the only witness, had been questioned by two of Moorhead’s supervisors. The surprise was that they’d taken Mo’s word over their officer’s. Moorhead got a letter of reprimand and a transfer to the juvenile detention center in Hartford. That had been good for Camille but bad for Maureen, because Moorhead’s fellow officer and paramour, Officer Tom Tonelli, had targeted her for some payback.
Tonelli began harassing Mo in quiet ways: shadowing her when she walked to and from the chow hall, making inaudible remarks under his breath, chuckling at nothing. One afternoon, he gestured to Mo when she was on her way to her NA meeting. She approached tentatively and asked if he wanted something. “Nah,” he told her. “My trigger finger’s just a little itchy today.”
Tonelli upped the ante when he did a third-shift rotation. They do hourly head counts over there—daytime, nighttime, twenty-four/seven. At night, when the women are sleeping, most of the COs just enter their cells quietly and shine a light on them. Try not to wake them up. But if a CO wants to be a prick, he’ll throw on the overhead light, make noise. Maureen’s roommate, Irina, was sleeping through all these intrusions, but Tonelli would wake up Mo three, four times a shift. Then one night, she opens her eyes and there’s Tonelli, his face about six inches away from her face. “Boo!” He whispers it, okay? Laughs under his breath and leaves. I mean, come on. After what she lived through at Columbine, and everything after that. And she’s got to put up with some vindictive low-rung state employee who’s trying to screw with her sanity?
The trouble was, I didn’t know this was going on. She and I had had that argument, see? That day in the visiting room, when she told me to just get up and leave. And so I’d left. Walked out of that room, and stayed away for maybe the next six or seven visits. And when I finally did go back there, I was like, Oh shit, because I could see it immediately on her face: the PTSD, the hypervigi-lance. It was like she’d spiraled back to Littleton. And when she told me why—told me about what that asshole was doing to her—well, I went a little ballistic. But this time, instead of picking up a pipe wrench, I picked up the phone. Called and complained to everyone I could think of: the warden, the deputy warden, the Corrections commissioner, my legislators. I kept calling the ones who wouldn’t speak to me directly until they finally got on the line. I wrote letters, e-mails. Contacted Dodd’s and Lieberman’s offices, the governor’s. I was goddamned if I was going to let her get “Columbined” again.
And guess what? It worked. Tonelli got transferred. Maureen got to see the jailhouse shrink without waiting the usual three or four weeks for an appointment. She got new meds—an antidepressant and an antianxiety drug. And once those kicked in, she was better. Much better. She began to come out of herself a little, and then a little more. So it was better for me, too. Because I tell you, it’s a hell of a lot easier to walk across that visiting room floor toward a smile than toward a face that’s suffering. “Thank you,” she said, two or three visits in a row, and I told her she didn’t have to thank me—that I’d done it because I loved her. “I love you, too,” she said, and God, I don’t think we’d told each other that for three or four months.
I was grading papers at the kitchen table when Janis came downstairs to make herself some tea. I asked her how the revisions were going. She had finished them, she said; she had e-mailed them off to her adviser and was waiting for a response. She asked me again if I’d read Lizzy’s story.
I shook my head. Grabbed a bunch of student papers and held them up to her as evidence. “I really want to, though,” I said. “Because from what I’ve read so far? Wow.”
“Do me a favor,” she said. “Don’t patronize me.”
“I’m not. I’m going to read it. But I can’t just drop everything and—”
I stopped mid-sentence because that’s exactly what I was doing: patronizing her, bullshitting her. I’d been doing it for weeks.
The kettle whistled. She poured her tea and started to leave. But at the doorway, cup in hand, she stopped. Turned and faced me. “Caelum, the thing that happened between us while Moses was away? It just happened, that’s all. We were both feeling a little vulnerable that night, a little sorry for ourselves. We’d both had too much wine.”
Nodding in agreement, I began to gather my stuff together so I could work someplace else.
“We made a mistake. It doesn’t have to be a wedge between us.”
“A wedge?”
“Oh, come on, Caelum. You know what I mean. We don’t run together anymore. You don’t share meals with us like you used to. Half the time when I talk to you, you won’t even look at me. And this refusal of yours to read my work: it’s passive-aggressive. And it hurt.”
“Being busy makes me passive-aggressive?”
“You couldn’t read sixty pages in six weeks? About your own ancestor? No one’s that busy, Caelum. Look, we didn’t plan for it to happen. It just—”
“I planned for it to happen, okay? I kept pouring you that wine hoping it would happen.”
That stopped her, momentarily. “And I kept drinking it,” she finally said. “So maybe I was hoping it would happen, too.”
“Does he
know?”
“Moses? Oh, God, no. I would never—”
“Good,” I said. “Great. Because you know something? I’ve been the husband who got cheated on. And you know what? It sucks when you find out. It hurts like hell.”
She blinked back tears. “Caelum, why are you so mad at me?”
“I’m not. I’m mad at …” At who? I wondered. The uptight mother who wasn’t really my mother? The mother who was screwing two guys that summer? My straight-talking aunt who had kept it from me, too?”Never mind,” I said. “I can’t go into it.”
“Can’t?” she said. “Or won’t?”
I had to pull the plug on this going-nowhere conversation, so without answering her, I stuffed my students’ papers inside my grade book and stood. Let her think that my not reading that damn thing was about what we did that night. Let her flatter herself that that’s all that was on my plate…. And besides, it had hurt like hell—getting that phone call out of the blue that night from Hay’s wife’s meddlesome friend. We just wanted you to know, in case you don’t know, that your wife is having an affair. That phone call had lit a fire in my head, and it had spread as fast and wild as the one that killed all those people at the Cocoanut Grove that night, Ethel Dank included…. If things hadn’t gone the way they did—if that pipe wrench had crushed Paul Hay’s skull like I’d meant for it to do—then it might have been me sitting in prison for having killed someone….