by M. J. Rose
Mabel had grown accustomed to the scorn and derision from the noisy, nattering minority of classmates at Barnard College, especially after she’d fought for, and won, the abolition of the Greek system on campus. After a three-year campaign, the final vote had been 244–30. Gone were the sororities that occupied so much time and attention of her peers, especially wide-eyed freshmen who saw college as a place of cotillions and ball gowns, curtsies and corsages, where their education consisted of finding a suitable husband as they auditioned for the future role of broodmare or corset wrangler.
“Now we can focus on intellectual pursuits instead of social polarization,” Mabel had said in her victory speech. The first of those pursuits would be the right to vote.
As the hectoring women stepped toward them atop the library landing, pillorying them with insults, henpecking them with incivility, Mabel reached into a pocket she’d sewn into her dress and pulled out a large handful of pledge pins from Delta Delta Delta, Chi Omega, and Kappa Kappa Gamma. She cast them at the women’s feet as though she were an emissary of the Persian conqueror, Xerxes, casually presenting the heads of fallen kings. Mabel kept singing and smiled as she pointed to the yellow and purple brooch on her chest emblazoned with VOTES FOR WOMEN.
“Damn, Mabel,” her roommate, Sophie Gleeson, whispered as the opposing women retreated, slack-jawed, mouths agape. “You keep this up, and you’re either going to get kicked out or given a scholarship.”
Mabel snapped her fingers and motioned for the others to continue singing, pointing upward to indicate they should sing even louder, with more vigor.
She knew full well that the Barnard board of trustees were deeply divided, especially since its founder, Annie Nathan Meyer, and her older sister, Maud, both banking heiresses, were on opposite sides of this particular battle of the sexes. Mabel had ridden her horse, a bay courser named Quiet, in the vanguard of the city’s last great suffrage parade three years ago, alongside Maud. While Annie had stayed on campus, lecturing how the moral superiority of women was enough and that voting rights were wholly unnecessary.
“Marching in a parade is a shocking and shameful thing for female students to do,” Annie Nathan Meyer had argued to a half-empty hall. “It’s clearly unladylike and too sordid an undertaking for a refined woman of this institution.”
Since then, Dean Gildersleeve had asked Mabel to lead the student suffragettes on campus, following in the footsteps of Juliet Poyntz, who had inspired Mabel as a freshman. That odious blessing, along with a byline in The New York Times, had earned Mabel a place on the dean’s secret honor roll of Barnard activists. As well as the school board’s list of students now facing conditional probation, since for months Mabel had been organizing protests and discreetly circulating maps with directions to where students could sign up for today’s march.
As more Columbia students exited the library, Mabel and her group were quickly outnumbered and the jokes and taunts turned to curses and threats.
“Are you sure you’re up for this?” Sophie asked. “Things got pretty ugly last time. I can take the lead if you need to slip away and saddle up for the parade?”
Mabel looked down at the menagerie of brown stains she’d been unable to clean from her dress. She remembered the finely tailored men who spat upon her and called her a chink and a whore. The men who threw garbage at them. When the march turned into a scrum, dozens of women had been shoved, pushed, and groped, while a handful had been beaten. Meanwhile, police officers in starched blue uniforms, sporting badges of polished silver, looked the other way. They were chivalrous enough, however, to summon stretchers.
Since that day, members of the Barnard Suffrage Association had taken self-defense classes, taught by a colleague of Kitty Marshall, the British activist who believed in direct action.
“I’m fine,” Mabel said, but her heart was pounding.
“You don’t even have a hatpin.”
“‘Deliver me from my enemies, O God; be my fortress against those who would attack me.’” Mabel held up her large leather-bound Bible. “Psalm fifty-nine.”
Sophie raised a worried eyebrow and continued singing.
As a group of male students in soiled rugby uniforms joined the growing crowd, Mabel chewed her lip and looked out at Columbia’s great lawn. She could smell the freshly shorn grass, which had been cut in a checkerboard pattern. Her eyes were drawn to the Pompeiian grotto where an ornate fountain had been built. Adorning the fountain was an enormous sculpture of the Greek god Pan. Stretched out in lusty repose, black of beard, and uninhibited in his nudity.
Mabel thought this was as good a god as any to represent their opposition.
Then she looked up and beheld the giant, weather-worn inscription in the attic of the library. She read aloud the words of King George II: “For the Advancement of the Public Good and the Glory of Almighty God.”
God is mighty. Mabel felt emboldened and popped her knuckles. As for man, well, King George was a man and he died while sitting on the privy.
The louder Mabel and her suffragettes sang, the angrier the crowd became. The more she smiled, the more the crowed turned into a well-heeled mob, a riot of hateful privilege. They encircled Mabel and her group, trapping them. The crowd inched closer as Mabel, Sophie, and the dozen students from Barnard continued singing in earnest as though the rapture might save them. They stood tall, chins out, heads held high.
Ignore the thunder, Mabel thought. But watch out for the lightning.
A barrel-chested young man emerged from the fog of noise in front of Mabel. He rolled up his sleeves. “Don’t make me do this,” he said as he grabbed her shoulder.
Everyone heard it well before they saw what happened—the heavy slap of old leather as Mabel, two-fisted, swung her Bible across the young man’s simian jaw—so hard that pomade flew from his hair and spattered the squealing girls beside him. Followed by a pregnant silence that gave birth to the sound of a body hitting concrete. The dull thud of a one-hundred-and-eighty-pound bag of flour in a rugby jersey crashing to the ground. The assumptions of previous generations, flattened, knocked out cold.
“I will not be a midwife to violence,” Mabel said in a manner so controlled, so resolute, so piercing, her words felt like lances to those on the receiving end. “But I also will not abide any man to lay hands upon my person. Ever.”
In the awkward moment that followed, Mabel noticed that starlings and sparrows were singing. She heard motorcars growling in the distance. The clanging of a streetcar bell. The whispers of students as they gently revived her assailant.
“Emgoi joi gong.”
Mabel looked up to see who was speaking to her in Cantonese. Yet even as she searched the crowd, she realized who it was before she saw him.
“You can say that again,” a handsome young Chinese man said for the benefit of his English-speaking peers as he parted the crowd. He spoke with a British accent and, like the others, wore a fine wool suit. But his blue tie had a pin in the shape of a cross with a golden sun, honoring him as a senior member of Columbia’s Philolexian Society. The debating club for men had been founded by Alexander Hamilton, but the common joke was that they were only debating who would someday rule the world.
“Are you still angry with me, Ping-hua?” he said as he peered over the rims of his tortoiseshell spectacles. “Chinese only get angry about things we truly care about. I didn’t know you had such feelings for me. I didn’t know you were capable.”
Mabel gritted her teeth. No one but her family ever called her by her real name. Not even the parishioners at her father’s Chinese mission home on Pell Street. She tried to calm her emotions, but her blood was still racing. “I have more important things to do than be angry with you, Tse-ven. Like shoveling manure from my horse’s stall.”
He smiled as he released the button on his suitcoat and adjusted the knot of his silk tie. “How about this? I’ll call you Mabel and you can call me President Soong.”
Mabel hadn’t seen Paul Soong in more than
a year. Not since he’d defeated her in the most recent election for president of New York’s Chinese Student Association. Though defeated was a subjective term. They both came to this country as toddlers, spoke fluent English. Both were finishing their degrees in economics with perfect marks and had been handpicked by their respective deans for leadership positions on campus. The difference was that his college admission had been bought with a sizable donation from his family, while Mabel had won a Boxer Indemnity Scholarship. She’d had twice as many supporters. Yet when the ballots had been counted behind the closed doors of the Low Library, she’d lost by a dozen votes. She was the poor daughter of a Baptist minister in Chinatown. Soong lived uptown, the princeling of one of the four wealthiest families in Shanghai. She should have known the rules would change for him. There was no way he could return to China having been defeated by a woman.
“You’re speechless for once.” Soong smiled, laughing. “I like that.”
Before Mabel could respond, Sophie was tugging at her sleeve. She pointed at her wristwatch. “I know you want to fight every battle, but there’s a war to be won today. We need to go, Mabel. It’s time to get ready for the march.”
“You should listen to your rabbit friend,” Soong said.
Mabel tightened her jaw and closed her eyes. Then she opened them, turned, and walked back through the crowd, her face glowing red with anger. Sophie walked next to her as their group of protesters followed.
If Soong and the male student body of Columbia had more words, Mabel didn’t hear them; her ears were ringing with frustration and humiliation.
“Why did he call me a rabbit?” Sophie asked. “Is that a Chinese thing?”
Mabel said nothing. She didn’t want to explain the gift that had shown up on her doorstep on the eve of the student election—a copy of What the Master Would Not Discuss—a collection of short stories that had been banned in China. In it was the story of Hu Tianbao who, after confessing his feelings for another man, had been tortured and executed. Tianbao’s spirit later returned from the underworld in the form of a rabbit.
“It’s an insult, intended for me,” Mabel said.
Sophie seemed to mull this over as she walked. “Well, whatever it means, I’m kind of glad he showed up. I mean, we’re lucky to have gotten out of there in one piece.”
Mabel stopped and held up her Bible.
“When you’re down on your luck, grow a wise heart. Proverbs nineteen.”
“Yeah, but…” Sophie said.
Mabel opened her Bible and withdrew a horseshoe that had been slipped inside the back cover. She felt its weight, then handed the rusted piece of metal to Sophie.
“I’ve learned to bring my own luck.”
* * *
In the livery next to her family’s mission, Mabel left her sidesaddle hanging on the wall and instead dusted off her father’s old Western saddle. She hefted it atop her horse, Quiet. Then she adjusted the breast collar and shortened the leathers.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said as she scratched her horse’s withers and fed Quiet a piece of ginger candy. “I know this saddle isn’t what you’re used to, but just like everyone else, you’re going to have to get used to something new from now on.”
Quiet, who never neighed and rarely even nickered, flapped her ears, bobbed her head, and flashed her tail as though in reply.
Mabel had decided she would never again ride sidesaddle. Especially after reading how Inez Milholland had ridden astride, like Joan of Arc, charging her horse through a crowd of howling drunks in last year’s parade in Washington, D.C.
“If Inez had been riding like a so-called lady,” Mabel told Quiet, “that mob would have pulled her down and beaten her like all those other women who were carried down Pennsylvania Avenue bleeding. Instead it was the hooligans who had to be rescued, by the U.S. Cavalry.”
Lack of mobility, Mabel thought, just another way we’re kept in our place. Lack of education. Arranged marriages. Being treated as property. A man can divorce a woman but a woman cannot divorce a man.
Mabel heard a knock on the door and was startled to look up and see Soong in the doorway. His double-breasted suit stood out against the raw timber of the stable and the horse tack hanging from the beams. She noticed him trying not to wince at the odors of hay and sweat from the horses, which to Mabel smelled better than the finest perfume.
“What are you doing here?” Mabel asked, as Quiet whinnied and twisted her head.
Soong removed his hat and then sneezed into a handkerchief, twice. He wiped his nose, then refolded the pocket square and put it away. “Would you believe me if I said I came all the way down here to make amends for that scene earlier today?”
Mabel slipped a headstall over Quiet’s ears. “No. I wouldn’t, actually.” Soong’s aspirations always came first. She’d never heard him apologize for anything, ever.
“Well, here I am nonetheless. You know me, Mabel. We used to be friends. I am many things, but I’m not one of those brutes. Though appearances must be maintained—surely you can appreciate that?” He let himself in, watching where he stepped so as not to ruin his expensive leather Oxfords. “I came down here, because on a day like today, we shouldn’t be fighting. Or at least we should be fighting on the same side.”
Mabel found a riding crop and flexed it. “You once told me that we’re opposites. That I’m yin. You’re yang. I’m dark. You’re light. I’m closed. You’re open.”
“And I meant it. You and me—look at us—we’re the epitome of dualism. I’m order, and you’re…” He motioned to the stable of horses and bales of hay, sighing. “You’re whatever this is. But we complement each other. One might even say we need each other. Together, we’re stronger, more capable. I lead the Chinese students at Columbia. You lead the Chinese girls—the women—of its sister college.”
“What do you want, Tse-ven?”
“I want you to give up this idea about riding in today’s parade, Ping-hua. You weren’t born here. Even if you win, you won’t be able to vote anyway.”
Mabel stared back at him, shaking her head, smiling. “That’s the difference between us. I don’t do things just for me.”
“Then I’m sure you’ll be astonished to hear that I came down here to offer you a seat next to me as my guest in the viewing stand in front of the city library. Mayor Mitchel will be there, the Board of Aldermen and their wives—”
“I have a better idea,” Mabel cut him off. “Why don’t you support us by marching in the men’s brigade? There are thousands of men who signed up this year.”
Soong smiled but Mabel could see he was trying not to laugh.
“Me, marching in a women’s parade?”
Mabel hung the crop from the saddle horn.
“They won’t even let you ride in this year’s parade,” Soong argued. “Look in the mirror. You’re not Nellie Bly, or Margaret Vale, or even bloody Helen Keller. They all have something in common, in case you haven’t noticed. Ever since Woodrow Wilson took office, there haven’t been any colored women invited to these marches.”
On campus, Mable had watched Soong win debate after debate. He could be convincing when he wanted to be, powerfully charming.
Soong cleared his throat. “Lincoln said, ‘I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.’ He said those words to Stephen Douglas, but those sentiments apply to us as well.”
“Things are different now.” Even as Mabel said those words, they felt more a wish than a statement of fact. She chewed the inside of her cheek, knowing there was an uncomfortable truth in Soong’s words. She felt it strangling her, like a tight button collar, a corset, squeezing her until she felt light-headed, dizzy with discomfort. Since President Wilson had been sworn in, even maverick suffragettes like Alice Paul had been hesitant to affiliate themselves with women of color. Wilson was a southerner, after all, and to southerners, women’s suffrage was a road paved to the unthinkab
le—black suffrage. Lincoln had been practically beatified for helping to emancipate the slaves, but he’d still been against black Americans voting, serving on juries, holding office, and intermarrying with whites. Mabel frowned as she remembered how in Washington, D.C., Ida Wells had refused to march in the back of the parade with the black delegation. Instead, she waited with spectators along the parade route and then walked into the middle of the street and took her place at the head of the Illinois group as they passed. Mabel wasn’t even sure if Ida was going to bother with today’s march. She couldn’t blame her.
“If you sit in the viewing stand with me, the world will see you differently. I could introduce you to some very important people. We could present ourselves as a united front, representing all Chinese in the city. Not just students. All you have to do is—”
“Be your subordinate,” Mabel said. “Show them all that you’ve tamed a suffragette. Be your pet, your pretty lap dog, but not your equal.”
“Women never will be,” Soong snapped, then stared at the ceiling, nostrils flaring as though he’d just revealed his cards in a poker game before the final round of betting had ended. “But … that doesn’t mean we can’t help each other. I’m trying to offer you something. But all you see is your anger. You’ve been bitter for as long as I’ve known you, Ping-hua. Even before the student election. You’re a leader at school. You have Dean Gildersleeve’s ear. Why are you so unhappy?”
You’re Chinese. You would never understand.
“I have my reasons,” Mabel said.
There was an awkward silence.
Then Quiet chuffed and stamped her hooves.
“Fine. I’ve wasted enough time here. If they somehow let you march, do wave when you see me. I’ll be the one sitting next to Senator Wadsworth.”
As he stalked out, Mabel stood wondering for a moment if she’d made the right decision. She was well regarded at Barnard. She’d planned to pursue a doctorate at Columbia, something no woman had ever achieved. But even then, she’d be seen as a mere woman. Would it be better to be seen with Soong? Visible—her photo would appear in hundreds of newspapers—instead of just another face in a crowd of thousands?