Next to her, a dark-skinned woman threw off her veil, revealing kinky Hawaiian hair, and she sang out, “I am Queen Liliokalani, and I wrote Aloha O’e, ‘Farewell to Thee,’ as your missionaries invaded my island and in the name of your God put me under house arrest. I wrote an anthem, too. Will you not sing it?”
And the elegant black woman who had asked Hannah if she’d been saved now tossed aside her own prayer book and said, “I am Sally Hemings, the real mother of this nation. Your founding father fondled me, and had his children, unclaimed, through me as his slave. His white wife, my half-sister, owned me. In his life Thomas Jefferson fathered children through me while never granting me Emancipation. I am your traditional family values. I am your Constitution. Look at me.”
And a plump white woman at the end of their row sighed and rose on creaking knees, and added: “I am Abigail, and nothing I said mattered, though you read my letters even to this day. I am Abigail Adams. I begged my husband to remember the ladies, to form a government fair to women’s power. Do you think women’s voices must only rise in hymn? To Him? Where is Her America?”
Katharine swept to the front of the room and faced the choir, telling them, “It is time you faced the music, my dear ones. I have loved women since I was but a girl, writing in my diary even as a child that ‘I like women better than men.’ For the span of my adult life I loved another woman, whose name was also Katharine, and in that nineteenth century, mind you, I wrote to her with desire. I wrote to her ‘I want you so much my Dearest, and I want to love you so much better than I have ever loved.’ Will you not teach that, too, in every one of your so-called Christian schools where you sing my song?”
Queen Lil pointed now at Hannah. “Do not ever forget this is not my Independence Day, wahine. Haole. Yes, you teach the history of Katharine’s woman-love. But still you exoticize me. Only yesterday you drank my coffee, feeling free, lying in that hammock, thinking that your hard work merits a vacation in my Hawa’ii. And my hard work? My woman’s home? If, lying in that hammock, you had just looked to the left in your mind’s eye. If you had looked just past your fantasy, you’d see my palace. There. They kept me under house arrest. I had to send Pele to wake you up, to graze you with the fire of her wrath. It was not Christian land, my lovely island. It was raped by Christians, dressed by missionaries, planted, seized . . .” She broke off.
“As I was planted,” said Hemings. “As I was owned.”
In the stunned silence, with the choir agog, no one from the Take Back the United States conference spoke. Then the four leaders for the day’s event knelt together with eyes squeezed shut and began to chant ritually, “Pray away the gay. Pray away the gay.”
All eyes were closed and all lips moving as Bates, Hemings, Adams, and the Queen swept up and out, Hannah trailing in their glorious wake. The church door slammed.
“Don’t worry. They will not remember any of this,” said Sally. “These people are very good at forgetting, at not seeing what they don’t care to believe.” But she smiled briefly.
“Here’s the thing,” said Abigail. “We do not all know one another. We are always starting from that same point, thinking we alone must do all of the work. We fail to work together, do we not?” Her eyes pierced Hannah, who quickly responded, “We don’t all know one another in my time, either.”
“Let’s get away for a moment,” suggested Katharine. “We don’t have much time. We won’t be seen if we keep moving.” A cart rumbled up to the church steps then—an actual horse-drawn cart layered with quilts, the driver’s face hidden behind an enormous sunbonnet.
“Get in,” growled the driver. “Gentle now.”
Hannah watched as her new companions delicately arranged their cumbersome garments while climbing into the wagon. These were the clothes of colonization women had been forced to wear in the nineteenth century, introduced in Hawaii by zealous missionaries, and eventually a normal part of everyday discomfort, particularly in high summer, as now. The “Mother Hubbard” dresses given to the islanders. Corsets in Katharine’s day. School uniforms, gloves and stockings, petticoats, tightly buttoned sleeves. How had women survived, labored in fields and kitchens, endured cramps and wounds, given birth, reigned and resisted, in such garb?
“White clothes,” said Lil, nodding to Sally. “They will weigh you down. In water, they will drown you.”
“You will not know true liberation until a woman undresses you,” Katharine assured. Abigail blushed beet red.
The wagon pulled away from the church steps, and Hannah looked behind her to see if their odd group was visible to the other conference guests still arriving. “Of course not,” said Sally Hemings, reading her mind. “No one sees women’s history. I’m barely acknowledged by Jefferson’s family, my children yet unclaimed by his descendants. Mixed-race women? In plain sight, yet invisible. Watch.” And indeed the wagon drove right through the first traffic intersection, apparently unseen.
Hannah felt a sharp rapping under her feet. The wagon bed planking was rattling with an urgency out of rhythm with the turning of the wheels. A voice spoke below her knees. One faint word, but clear. “Moses.” Then she gasped as four tiny brown fingers reached up through a plank knothole and seized her hand.
There were women and children hidden in the hay, in the false bottom of the wagon. It could only mean that the driver was Harriet Tubman. And when Hannah raised her head, Leroy Street had disappeared. They were on a country road, abundant with pines. And gaining on their party was a smartly appointed coach with a parson at the reins.
Abigail clamped her hand around Hannah’s wrist. “Notwithstanding all your wise Laws and Maxims we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters.”
“That and more,” agreed Hemings. “Didn’t you also tell your husband, ‘If particular care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Law in which we have no voice, or Representation’?”
“I did. But our husbands had peculiar ideas about freedom.”
“Forget husbands altogether,” advised Katharine. “Anyone who enslaved his own kids has failed to love mercy more than life.” She grew quiet as the parson’s coach drew up alongside them. Liliokalani inhaled.
“Blessed day!” said the minister. “I am alert for six runaways, two wenches and their young. Have you had sight of them?”
“I am well known for not supporting your Constitution,” answered the Queen, and Hannah heard a snort of laughter from the well-disguised Tubman in the driving seat of their wagon. Hannah realized that it was important to keep talking, to mask any possible sounds of the children below. “Sir, may we move on?” she heard herself. “We’re, um . . . bound for market day.” She felt rather than heard a child’s cough under her feet.
“Who is your husband?” demanded the preacher.
“She is not married,” Katharine snarled.
“And yet you have a wedding ring!” the man persisted. “Or does that, too, belong to another? Is that, too, missing property?” He leaned closer, the rancid smell of sweaty black broadcloth almost under Hannah’s nose. She flinched. She’d forgotten about Isabel’s ring!
“A pox on your ideas of ownership,” said Hemings, and tapped Tubman on the shoulder with her elegant glove. “Drive, Moses. Drive.” And the horse leapt forward.
“Where are we going?” Hannah begged. And the great Harriet Tubman turned from her perch atop their racing wagon, and answered: “Don’t you know? We’re going Underground.”
“God shed Her grace, crowned thy good with sisterhood,” Bates screamed at the slaveowner, now far behind them in the dust. Queen Lil pulled up the planking with one mighty arm, and the hidden family groups emerged from their hay-strewn recesses, breathing in the fresh air.
“Drive,” shouted Hemings. “Get me out of here. Emancipate us all.”
A circle of women and children looked at Hannah. “Are we bound for freedom now?” asked a girl.
“Nobody is BOUND anymore,” came tossed from the driver’s seat.
“How will we live?” whispered one woman, and Sally Hemings seized Hannah’s hand and said, “You will have to sell that ring. That will feed us all.”
“It’s not mine; it’s Isabel’s,” Hannah tried to explain, and Bates crowed, “Aha. A sister! So, she is your companion?” “No—” Hannah began again, but the dust was swirling thickly, and she found it hard to raise her voice. Then it was actually hard to breathe. She shut her eyes, clearing her throat, coaxing it to relax. She heard the children coughing also. “Water,” they cried.
Hemings had her elegant hand clamped like a vise on Hannah’s. “Listen to these, my children,” she hissed. “Is there no greater suffering on the Cross than their thirst? Which of your pious pastors would bear honest witness to that crucifixion?”
The sun was setting. It was almost dusk. There was a sudden lurch of the wagon and then, abruptly, they turned into a shadowy lane with overhanging trees, heavy with midsummer flowers. Just ahead, beyond the curve of older, dried wagon tracks, Hannah could see a barn.
“All out,” called Tubman. “This is the safe house. Quick now.” The families moved swiftly, unfolding limbs, barely pausing to shake off dust before disappearing into the hayloft, as a tall black woman in a green bonnet hurried toward them. She smiled deeply, gesturing to ritual foods laid out on a rough-hewn table in the barn. “You made it into freedom territory. Come and eat. Welcome!”
Hannah turned to ask her companions What Now, only to find that Queen Lil and Abigail had vanished altogether, and Katharine and Sally were lost in conversation. “They will never tell the truth about our partners,” Katharine murmured.
“It’s the job of the historian,” agreed Sally. They looked at Hannah. Yes, she taught their truths in class. She read their lives late into the night all winter long, marvelling and outraged. Had she done right by them? How much gratitude and respect could she express for their daring, their realities? There could never be enough.
“Come and eat. All are welcome here,” their host was calling, but in a low voice, ever watchful. “Come and eat, and lay your burden down.”
Lay your burden down. Hannah knew there was no earthly comparison to the actual flight from slavery, no appropriating the safe stations of the Underground Railroad in thinking about the flight from homophobia. But leaving that Take Back America meeting and its “homosexual agenda” sermons had reminded her that millions of gay kids were still working their way out of mental enslavement. Finding a way out of shame and punitive religious teachings was a different kind of flight and migration—and Hannah’s classroom was a safe station for gay youth leaving the evangelical authorities who had thundered against their lives. And what had Hannah’s safe station been? The Michigan festival? Hadn’t she laid her burden down there, at nineteen, in those fields of woman celebrating?
Hannah never reached the barn. Tubman turned one last time and looked at her, tipped the male farmer’s hat of her passing disguise, and melted into the night. The planks of the wagon coagulated into leatherette bus seats. The driver of the Greyhound was a gray-haired Amazon in uniform cotton shirt and crisp-creased pants. The neon sign above the steering wheel shimmered Grand Rapids, Michigan. The rows stretched back, four deep, filled with the hearty-shaped ghosts of every woman Hannah had known in festival culture who had passed to the beyond. Maxine Feldman was talking with Kay Gardner. Leslie Feinberg was arguing with Margaret Sloan-Hunter. Therese Edell was strumming a guitar. But next to Hannah in the hot bus seat was a very alive and buff young Asian woman, perhaps eighteen, nervously snacking from a Tupperware container of kimchi. “I’m almost there,” she whispered.
“What? Where? Who are you?” Hannah almost wailed, craning her head to identify anything familiar, and encountering the welcome wink of deceased dykes she had flirted with at festivals. “Where are we going?”
“I’m Grace; I’m going to the festival. I just got away from a Christian intervention camp. You know, they take gay kids, and try to deprogram you? It was so horrible, so scary. But I had a friend who rescued me when I went into town to do the laundry. She got me this bus ticket and even brought me comfort food.” Grace gestured with her chopstick. “I’m never going back! I’m never sitting through another sermon telling me I’m sick. I’m never going to be paddled again by my parents and my pastor. I’m free!” She looked at Hannah, who of course was still in her church clothes. “You made it out, too!” And now Hannah recognized the teenager from the miserable ex-gay group of guests back at church conference she’d attended. Was it just earlier that day?
“Here,” Grace invited. “Have some of my lunch. Come on and eat. We’re free now! We’re going to Michfest, with thousands of other lesbians, and we’re gonna take our shirts off!” And the bus jerked to a halt at the roadside to let aboard Ruth Ellis, who had attended festivals well into her nineties and died at age 100, and the ghosts of lesbian freedom shouted hello. The driver glanced at them in her rear-view mirror, and her eyes were the eyes of Harriet Tubman, of Katharine Lee Bates, and then the eyes of twentieth-century heroines: Barbara Gittings, Gladys Bentley. And then she was Deborah Sampson. Sampson, who had disguised herself as a male to fight in the American Revolution. Wounded in battle, she removed the bullet herself so no surgeon could reveal her secret. She had fought for freedom and healed herself.
As they all had, Amazons all.
Then their mercurial-eyed driver shifted the gear of the mighty bus and it leaped forward, forward. They were bound for freedom in a land they could not yet see. The huge wheels left the ground, and the bus took wing and flew. No turning back. No fear.
“You made it. Come and eat. Welcome!” It was Isabel’s voice, Isabel gently removing the ring from her hand, and Hannah sputtered out dust and inhaled, gasping. “Here.” Isabel held a glass of lemonade to her lips. The shadowy figures around Hannah turned into Yvette, Moira, Dog, Letty, and Trale, and the scent of potato salad rose from a picnic table. They were in the parking lot outside of Sappho’s Bar and Grill, with the first town fireworks breaking loudly overhead and hoots of excitement from the tank top-wearing tomboys gathered for holiday barbecue.
“But what—Tubman, in her wagon—that bus to Michigan. Wait, are we safe here?” Hannah mumbled, stupefied, and her friends gazed quizzically back at her, until Moira relaxed into an expression of understanding. “Yeah, you went to that revival thing! Still in that outfit, too, huh? I’d be shell-shocked myself. Relax; let’s get you changed. But look who followed you here. Here where it’s safe.”
Standing behind the long barbecue table was the young, buff Asian woman Hannah recognized from the mystery bus she’d just been riding, from the “ex-gay” group at the conference. They blinked at one another. “Hello,” said the guest. “I’m gay. I mean, I’m Grace.” Isabel walked over and dropped her ring into Grace’s lemonade glass, and then just once, swiftly, ran a finger around the rim, which released a humming, singing noise. It released the music notes of an old anthem. Much older than the one by Katharine Lee Bates.
Shivering, despite the very warm evening, Hannah peeled off her borrowed church clothes and reassembled herself, adding layer by familiar layer until she was in her favorite and free-wheeling clothes: surfing jams, Lesbian Equality T-shirt. She looked down at the faux-Polynesian pattern on her surf shorts and reflected that the design, the concept, the association of surfing as freedom had all been seized for Americans from Queen Liliokalani’s time. That the woman-loving equality in her shirt slogan had been lived out more than a hundred years earlier by the educated lesbian who penned “America, The Beautiful,” and that Independence Day had done nothing to free the slaves or advance women’s rights in the new Constitution, just as Abigail Adams had predicted. Thomas Jefferson had gladly written of freedom as that which man could not live without, fathering a nation while simultaneously fathering children through a young slave woman he owned. Freedom: It had trickled down incrementally to
the women of America through time—women who had not dared to know each other, who had been told that God forbade their speaking out.
But now the path to freedom was a path for gay rights, too. The binding power of religion was loosening in her own era, despite the angry rally she had infiltrated today. Hannah looked at Grace, beaming over the barbecue, newly released from the folly of trying to be ex-gay. Grace was wearing Isabel’s ring, which had turned into a freedom ring with rainbow gems sparkling from her brown hand. And Grace nodded toward her and said, “You don’t have to go too far to find new family. I’m finding it at Sappho’s, just like you.”
Chapter Eight
Labor Day Weekend
Heading home from the festival each August was always like crossing an unmarked seasonal threshold from summer into fall.
No matter how hot and humid the last night of festival concerts might be, with steam visibly rising from exposed bodies as women danced at the edge of the stage, the next morning the air would change to sharp autumn gloss. That first feeling of the coming fall was a tang and a tentacle that curled delicately around festiegoers as each made her farewells. Teachers packing up tents, bedrolls, and raingear felt their antennae go up: School was coming. Soon.
Inevitably, returning to town via the parkway that hugged the hillside, the first thing Hannah noticed was the discount drugstore’s banner: Back to School Special! The bars along Clinton Street, both seedy and upscale, threw out their sandwich boards with beckoning words: Happy Hour College Specials. Welcome Back Students. We I.D. Awaiting her on campus would be six inches of mail, and little blue notices in her faculty mailbox such as “Your fall textbook order is incomplete. The campus bookstore regrets to report that the textbook you ordered for Women’s History 001 is out of print and unavailable for the fall semester.” And so forth. The distance from festival euphoria to sheer academic panic was a very fast crossing.
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