The Eulogist

by Ms. Terry Gamble

  Minister Shands took off his hat and raised it high. “Twelve hundred,” he called out.

  “For shame,” said a woman behind me.

  “Fifteen hundred!” came the same voice from the back of the crowd. Mississippi, I thought.

  Said the Frenchman, “Think of this beauty by your side. Or by the side of your client.”

  With this, he tugged down her shirt, exposing her breasts. He reached down and lifted her skirts. “Turn around,” he said to Elizabeth.

  She stared back at him coolly and did not move, and though I hadn’t seen her in over a decade, I felt proud.

  “Sixteen hundred,” cried the minister.

  “You shall not have her,” said the southern voice from the back.

  “By God, I will,” said Minister Shands.

  And so the bidding went until it reached almost two thousand, the voice in the back growling in chagrin, the auctioneer exultant as the hammer came down. “Nineteen hundred dollars for this magnificence,” he shouted. Men were staring at the ground. Some of the women were crying.

  Theodora leaned over to me. “Now hand that minister your purse.”

  “What?”

  There was a moment of confusion as Elizabeth straightened her skirt, pulled at her blouse, and spit into the face of the auctioneer. Through my shock, I felt Theodora wrest the purse away from me, and the minister was striding toward the stage, bowing and holding out his hand to Elizabeth. In the distance, someone cheered.

  At the edge of the crowd, I caught sight of Eugene Orpheus—bearded, caped—as he turned on his foot and stalked away.

  Chapter 30

  1848

  That evening, we rode back to the school, and wildly, too—that we might escape questions and any return of my good sense. I was once again Olivia Givens, the woman who had stood in defense of Reason so long ago at debates and lectures. Now as then, I was the woman who had lost her mind.

  “Where will I go?” said Elizabeth, who was wrapped in the minister’s coat and bunched into a tiny ball in the carriage seat beside me.

  “Quickly,” said Theodora, once we arrived at the school.

  She hurried the girl into the building and left me standing in the hall. I would wait until morning to think about my lightened purse and what I would tell James.

  “The attic?” I said when Theodora came downstairs and told me that she’d ushered the girl into the garret behind the bookcase. “Didn’t we just buy her freedom?”

  “You don’t know these people,” said Theodora.

  Sighing, I said, “Oh, yes I do.”

  * * *

  When Bella Mason showed up at our door the following morning, I was poorly rested and ill-humored and even less ready to hear what she had to say.

  “Ain’t it come to a pretty pass when a fine man like that goes up against a nigger, and for what?” Bella said, pushing past me. “’Least he won’t get hanged.”

  “Tell me.”

  “And don’t think I won’t wait for him,” she said, after telling me that Erasmus had been sentenced to six years with no parole nor option for a fine. “I have all the time in the world.”

  Any decent lawyer should have shot down the case. The only credible witness was a slave who claimed Erasmus had approached him with a scheme to steal off another Negro named Grady from an adjacent property. Flaunting precedent, the judge allowed the testimony of this ingrate named Dollar, who felt it should have been he who was stolen away.

  And how was he planning to steal you exactly? asked the prosecutor.

  Dollar hadn’t been exactly sure, saying that Erasmus implied he had magic means to conceal people, but what that meant exactly, he couldn’t tell. Still, he’d hung his hat on the notion of piggybacking on the flight of Grady once he’d help get word to the slave to meet Erasmus down by Dobbs’s creek.

  According to Dollar, he waited in the brush, but saw no meeting transpire.

  Then how do you know this man absconded with this slave? said the defense lawyer, a walrus of a man and prone to belching. Were they rendered invisible?

  Huh?

  Did the accused actually make them disappear?

  They’s gone, ain’t they?

  Erasmus averred he’d never met this Dollar, but Dobbs’s foreman claimed otherwise. And there was the matter of a mother with two children gone around the time that Erasmus was loitering in Maysville. Finally—and more damningly—there was Erasmus’s carriage and its suspiciously large compartments.

  You look about the state of Kentucky these past few years, said the prosecutor to the jury, and you’ll see a trail of old hats and vanished slaves.

  That Dobbs’s foreman was white and attested to Dollar’s account was the final blow to Erasmus.

  “That’s preposterous,” said Theodora after Bella finished telling us of the trial. “They are blaming him for every slave that’s run away.”

  “I’m sure he’s flattered,” said I, agreeing that it was Erasmus’s bad luck to have a judge who was itching to make an example.

  “He’s lucky not to hang,” said Bella. “Say, you hear what happened yesterday down at the slave market?”

  * * *

  Had the circumstances been different, Elizabeth might have stayed on and become one of Theodora’s students. Indeed, by posing her as such, we were able to remove her unobstrusively from Mason County. Theodora was well known as the headmistress of Limestone Academy, and I would plausibly pass as the chaperone for a girl being returned to her family. We dressed Elizabeth in clothes suitable for one of our young charges and hid her face under hat and veil. Together, we rode in the school’s carriage to the landing whence Theodora bid us adieu as we boarded a ferry ostensibly for Covington but actually planning to disembark in Cincinnati. Once there, I would explain to my brother and to William why I hadn’t secured Erasmus’s freedom and had returned instead with this “orphan.”

  The captain of the vessel blared the horn as we pulled away, the big wheel reprimanding the water. Elizabeth said, “I’ve always wanted to take a boat ride.”

  But Bethany had hidden her away in Maysville, jealous that her pretty child might be fingered by others and snatched. Had Bethany known that the girl would be sold off along with the silver?

  The story Theodora and I came up with was this: that the girl had been a student whose parents had died, leaving her a pauper. It had fallen upon me to help her out. As to the loss of James’s money, that would require another lie: that a fee had been charged along with incarceration lest Erasmus be hanged.

  I prayed that James wouldn’t read the Maysville papers.

  “You’ll like Hatsepha,” I told Elizabeth. “She’s always longed for a daughter.”

  “Why can’t I live with you, Auntie?”

  “You must never call me that.”

  I had already decided not to linger in Cincinnati. Instead, I would stay on with Theodora while Erasmus served his time.

  “You are safer in the North,” I told her.

  It had rained and blown that day as we steamed down the river. I had held on to my hat, scanning the Ohio shores for the little cabin that belonged to Erasmus, but the area around Enduring Hope had flooded. Indeed, Utopia, just upriver, had all but washed away.

  We alighted at the landing in Cincinnati just as the sun came out, the throng of people pushing and hollering, hauling feed and logs behind whinnying horses and sullen mules. We ducked under lines and made our way around stacks of crates to cabs tethered to nags who would be unenthusiastic about climbing up a hill.

  I hustled the girl into a carriage.

  The muddy streets clutched the wheels as we wended our way up to Mt. Auburn. I had tried to explain my family to Elizabeth, to remind her of her uncle Silas.

  “I don’t remember him,” she said.

  “I brought his body back the summer that I met you.”

  “I wonder where I’ll be buried,” she said, looking out the window.

  * * *

  I shall never forget
the look on Elizabeth’s face when we pulled up to the Mt. Auburn house that clearly outranked the fine but smaller manse on Orpheus Farms. Nor shall I forget the faces of my family when we were announced into the dining room without first sending word. It being summer, the crystal bowl at the center of the table was piled with figs about which flickered candles from James’s workshops. Overhead, a magnificent gaslit chandelier glowed with Givens gas, and around the table, Givenses of every sort, including, to my amazement, Cousin Samuel from Ireland.

  It was William who rose and offered his chair to Elizabeth, who hadn’t eaten all day and looked as though she’d faint at the appearance of all that food.

  “My apologies,” I said. “We seemed to have interrupted your festivities.”

  “Sit! Sit!” said Hatsepha, fussing at the Norwegian girl to add places.

  “This is my ward, Elizabeth,” I said. “Elizabeth . . .”—I flailed about, recalling one of her middle names—“Satfield.” It was the only name I could conjure, having so recently woven a history for the girl while forgetting to change her name. I expected they would ask a million questions, but they sat there dumbly until William cleared his throat and indicated another young woman sitting at the table.

  “This is Cousin Margaret,” he said. “It seems we are to be married.”

  Now I understood their distraction, for we had walked right into the celebration of William’s betrothal to Cousin Samuel’s niece from Ireland.

  Said Cousin Samuel, “It seemed appropriate given William’s circumstances and his imminent graduation.”

  James cleared his throat.

  Everyone gawked at Elizabeth. With her hair pulled up and her borrowed lace collar, she was quite a picture, her dark eyes an indictment of the pale, insipid Irish girl who’d just crossed the ocean and who still looked faintly seasick.

  So many years since we’d left Ireland because there wasn’t enough to go around. Our father on the deck of the flatboat whistling Beethoven. And now the family we’d left behind was turning to us to regain their fortune.

  “How remarkable,” said I.

  * * *

  Hatsepha closed my bedroom door behind her. “Well?”

  “Well what?”

  “Is he . . . emancipated?”

  We hadn’t been able to discuss any of this at the dinner that consisted of six courses, each including a toast to the young couple.

  “No,” I said, dizzy from so much wine. “Anything but.” I stared at Hatsepha miserably. “And why are you marrying off William to this girl?”

  She sighed. “I suppose it’s not a bad thing that William gets established before going into the business. I can’t say the girl is enthusiastic. Plucked out of obscurity in County Crom to be shipped off to Ohio. I expect the whole thing’s quite a shock.”

  “As I well remember,” I said. “But you have a very nice house.”

  “And no children,” said Hatsepha, flatly.

  “Which brings me to Elizabeth.”

  Because of our mutual scheming, I should have been inclined to tell Hatsepha everything, but my intuition told me to avoid revealing the whole story of Elizabeth’s tortured lineage, the fact that she was Tilly’s daughter. Instead, I told her how the girl’s parents had perished at sea returning from the Continent, how they had left her penniless but accomplished.

  “And since you’ve never had a daughter . . .”

  “I would do well to consider this Margaret my daughter, but her accent’s so thick I can’t quite warm to her. Your charge, Elizabeth, seems much more amiable.”

  “Oh, she is,” I said quickly. “We find her very much so.”

  * * *

  In the end, Hatsepha acquiesced. And not only acquiesced, but bought Elizabeth a wardrobe within weeks of her moving in. If any gossip floated down the river about a white girl sold as a slave from Orpheus Farms, it did not reach the heights of Mt. Auburn. Elizabeth, now more beautifully dressed than any debutante, sat at the piano as I once had—playing haltingly but with enjoyment. A few young men came to call, but she concentrated on my brother James, asking him questions about his books and his business so that he, too, grew fond of the girl.

  And when William came home that Christmas and spent more time with the orphan from Kentucky than with his betrothed, no one complained, least of all his fiancée, Margaret, who had taken a liking to the son of Phinneaus and Ariadne Mumford. James assured Cousin Samuel that the Mumford boy was an equally good match and certain to make his niece happier than William, who was prone to rumination and a fascination with rocks.

  I had returned to Limestone Academy. I liked the company of my young students, and the company of Theodora even more. At last, I had found my sister and partner. All through that spring and summer, after the passage of the dreadful law that hunted down Negroes regardless of their status, we kept a lantern in our window for any soul who needed shelter.

  But over time, something continued to nag me. It was what Bella had said about Eugene not being able to father children, along with my dim recollection of Silas mentioning during a dissection that Eugene had been kicked by a horse as a boy in such a way as to compromise fertility.

  When I mentioned it to Theodora, she blushed and grew flustered in a way that was out of character. In a town the size of Maysville, very little escaped the wags.

  Theodora cleared her throat and fingered her lorgnette. “There were rumors, Olivia. He couldn’t . . . you know . . .”

  “Dear God,” I said, filling in the blanks.

  “Probably idle servant gossip. But it does tend to drift upstairs.”

  Rumors, like the one about Bethany Orpheus’s “doll,” who seemed immaculately conceived and who, just as miraculously, had passed as white.

  But if Eugene hadn’t fathered Elizabeth, who had?

  Chapter 31

  1890

  William and Elizabeth married in 1851 just after William’s graduation from Oberlin. The world was changing, and quickly. In 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act had passed, forcing the return of any black person suspected to have escaped. We called it the “Bloodhound Law.” In 1854, William Lloyd Garrison sponsored a freed slave from Canada to return to New York to claim forty acres and a mule. The man, who called himself Handsome Orpheus, told the story of how he’d ushered himself to freedom with the help of Erasmus Givens.

  Erasmus, who by then had served his time, was prone to fits of coughing, but was still strong enough to find his way back to Enduring Hope, where he once again took up ferrying, telling his story to anyone who would listen about the part he’d played in the moral imperative that was abolition. By the time Abraham Lincoln delivered his speech in our fair city in 1859, Erasmus had achieved a small bit of notoriety. Mr. Lincoln declared that there was not a public man in the United States who had not opined as to whether slavery was right or wrong, and Erasmus, having suffered sorely for abetting, was proud to take up the mantle of hero thrust upon him by Handsome, after which he was harassed not only by patrollers and anti-abolitionists, but by the advocates of emancipation, who perceived him as a saint. Although he relished the credit, so poorly was he cut out for this role that, according to Hatsepha, he showed up at their door accompanied by a woman “not fit for society”—namely Bella Mason, whom I defended to Hatsepha as more loyal than the rest of us, having sat through Erasmus’s entire trial and imprisonment. Erasmus, who had set out to save souls, had saved his own in the end.

  As for Eugene—having sold off his chattel and eventually his farm, he was spotted from time to time at a floating card game or at the watering holes of Saratoga and Salt Sulphur Springs. It was while at Saratoga that cholera swept through again and took him out. No one shed a tear, least of all Elizabeth, who never spoke of him and only occasionally of Bethany as a woman who’d taken her in as one might a cat.

  She’d dress me up, Elizabeth told me. Then lock me in my room. I had no friends my age. It was as if I was a leper. After Eugene died, she said to me, I’m glad I’ve become someone
else.

  In 1855, another year of riots and the same year my old friend Salmon Chase became governor, Elizabeth, having lost her first child to diphtheria, gave birth to Mary. My nephew, William, Mary’s father, succumbed to duty over passion, assuming his responsibilities in James’s company along with Absalom, the son of Ariadne and Phinneaus Mumford, now married to Cousin Margaret, who bore him seven children. When James passed away on the eve of the Civil War, William stepped into the chairmanship, but it was Absalom who had the presence of mind to corner the market for rosin—a key ingredient in the making of candles and soap—just before the Confederacy blew up the southern rails, resulting in the Union army encampments lit nightly and exclusively by Givens little wicks.

  Hatsepha outlived James by almost twenty well-dressed years, and when she passed eight years ago, no one wept more than I. She would have been so pleased at Mary’s consolidating all the Givenses in Spring Grove Cemetery designed by Frederick Law Olmstead—not just the height of fashion, but the nearest approximation of immortality one could enjoy in death.

  Tell me about our family, Auntie, Mary asked me a month ago when describing her plans to dig us up and reinter everyone in the beautiful plot bought by her father, William, on the top of a knoll. William himself picked the stone from which to fashion the obelisk—a gorgeous specimen of Kentucky limestone riddled with fossils. Tell me about the Givenses.

  Hatsepha and James lie in the cemetery at the First Presbyterian Church. Mary’s parents, William and Elizabeth, rest there, too, and Mary’s grandmother Julia as well. Sadly, Mary’s great-grandmother, my mother, lies in a pauper’s grave whereupon a music hall now stands. As for Erasmus, William’s father and Mary’s grandfather—well, he was swept down the river, and though marked by a gravestone and redeemed, is, alas, irretrievable.

  I never expected to outlive them. Certainly, I had hoped to die before William. But fevers are capricious, and the one that took first William in 1888 and then Elizabeth a month later spared me, just as the cholera spared me when it stole away our Julia.