Douglass’ Women

by Jewell Parker Rhodes

  “No place for a woman.” “Go back to your stateroom.” “Have you no sense?”

  “You’ve no right,” I shouted back. “No right.” But the men paid no further attention to me. All eyes watched Hessie.

  Hessie tilted her head. Her eyes blinked, tears overflowed, and like someone dousing a candle, her eyes lost their light and were as dull as Mama’s had been. She looked straight through me as though I, no, everyone on the deck were invisible.

  I placed my fist into my mouth to keep from screaming.

  “Come on, Hessie. It’s a misunderstanding. You don’t need to do anything you fear.”

  I blushed and even one of the sailors looked away. Were she not black, not a slave, not naked in the frigid air, one might have suspected this was a lovers’ quarrel. Perhaps a virgin bride introduced to abhorrent wifely duties? But Hessie was a slave and she’d been chained. How long? We’d been at sea for a month and I’d never until this cursed night seen her. How could it be that I didn’t see her or at least not hear her? Did I mistake her voice for wind howling, sea churning, spray lashing against wooden bows? How many sounds were hers that my ears, no, my mind, mistook for a ship’s course across the rough Atlantic?

  “The sea has upset you. We’ll soon be home in Virginia.”

  Hessie looked down into the thunderous sea.

  “We must be done with this,” shouted the Captain. “A storm will have us all overboard.”

  “Hessie,” I breathed. She looked up. I think she heard my soul crying out to her. “Hessie,” I said louder, my arm outstretched as though I could reach over and through the men’s shoulders and backs.

  “Oluwand.”

  I spoke back her name. “Oluwand.”

  “Mine, Hessie. You are mine,” barked Mr. Newcombe, thumping his chest like some wild beast. “Mine to do with as I will.”

  “Grab her, men,” ordered the Captain, and they rushed forward, reaching, grabbing for her dark skin. Hessie—no, Oluwand—without a sound, twisted beyond their grasp (a graceful, arcing movement), and let herself fall, no, dive, into the choppy, velvet-ink sea.

  Gone, without a whisper. Without a trace. Like a seal submerged, refusing to surface. Gone as if she had been nothing more or less than a ghost.

  Everyone was silent. Still. Quiet, I thought, out of respect. Waves still lapped against the stern. Sails whistled in the wind. And stars, overhead, blinked, as if they were crying tears.

  “Fifteen hundred dollars lost,” Mr. Newcombe whispered, peering over the rail, into the sea. “A dozen children she might have birthed. A fortune. A small fortune overboard.”

  Banker Leider solemnly nodded, Herr Schmidt puffed his fat cheeks, and the Captain patted Mr. Newcombe’s back in sympathy. The sailors, some grinning at the excitement, some somber as priests, went back to their posts.

  I was shocked. There was no rush to rescue. No “Man Overboard” for a slave. For a woman.

  I screamed, “God shall punish you. God shall punish you.”

  Mr. Newcombe, the Captain, Herr Schmidt stared at me. They thought me crazy. A witless woman.

  Not witless enough. I will carry Oluwand’s pain to my grave.

  New Bedford

  I thanked God to be off that foul ship.

  We landed in New Bedford. I planned to rest for two, maybe three days, then travel south to New York.

  I remember thinking: “I can make this journey. I can find my dream in America. I must have the strength.” I kept repeating these words, in my head, like a singsong, a child’s nursery rhyme.

  Mr. Newcombe refused to tip his hat to me. As though it were I who pushed Oluwand into the sea.

  Herr Captain denied my request for funeral rites. “Slaves haven’t souls.”

  No words could convince him otherwise.

  Frau Mueller taunted me daily until, weary of her harping, I kept to my cabin. Invisible like Oluwand. Feeling, almost beyond hope, that the voyage would never end. Feeling in danger of losing my mind. I kept painting canvases of hands reaching out of the sea.

  I hadn’t thought of slaveholders as handsome young men. Hadn’t thought of slavery forcing a woman to choose death.

  Papa would’ve said: “Through the desire for freedom, all men shall rise.” But how could Oluwand have risen, chained to a bed?

  If Mama was alive, she’d cry with me. Perverted lust. A greater sin than all other sins.

  Mama and Papa both drilled in me there was a God. As a woman grown, I’d taken God’s name in vain; but the child in me had always believed deeply. Papa’s God, so fierce, insisting on sacrifice; Mama’s God, so forgiving, insisting all was redeemed. After Oluwand’s sacrifice, I began to doubt either existed. Did Oluwand have a God? At the moment of her death, she didn’t call His name but proclaimed her own.

  Oluwand.

  Ottilie. I had much to think about. Much to reconcile.

  I saw things differently in New Bedford. Instead of landscape—arching trees, solid rock, plains caressing the horizon—I saw people. All manner, but the colored in particular: some, barefoot, dressed in rags, some in elegantly cut coats with polished boots. Most were dressed simply like the workers in Germany. Plain, good, cotton fare.

  A charcoal man, his callused hands holding the reins of a job horse, waited at the far end of the wharf. I hurried up to him, bypassing fine, private carriages, job horses and carriages driven by white men. Colored men were last in line.

  “Are you a slave?” I demanded. I could no longer keep my emotions in check.

  “No, ma’am. Free. In the North, most coloreds be free.”

  I started crying, balling my fists against my eyes to stop my tears. I hadn’t cried before and now I cried for Oluwand and for everyone I ever loved. I cried for all the injustices I’d seen. The attacks on Jews, the poverty of a butcher’s child, Mama’s agonizing death, the despair that leeched into Papa’s soul.

  The driver took pity on me, for he checked his startled horse. I leaned against his cart.

  In my mind’s eye, I saw Oluwand diving into the sea.

  My knees buckled, and the driver, leaning forward, his hand cloaked in rough leather, clutched my elbow and steadied me.

  “Do you want Mr. Garrison, ma’am?”

  “Who?”

  “Mr. Garrison. The Abolitionist Society. They fight against slavery.”

  “Yes. You will take me to this Mr. Garrison?”

  He looked at me quizzical. He must’ve thought me a crazed, wild-eyed woman.

  “You should rest first. You look tired, ma’am.”

  “As do you.” I was feeling more myself. Ottilie Assing. I smiled at him.

  “Me and my horse work all the days and all the nights.”

  I exhaled and smiled again. “What is your name?”

  “Moses.”

  I laughed. “You are my sign, Herr Moses.”

  “Just Moses.”

  “No, Herr Moses, as they would say in my country. I insist. A mark of respect. Will you help me? Lift my bags? Carry me to a hotel?”

  “My pleasure. My work, too. To carry things.”

  “Good. You’ll carry me. I’ll change clothes. Then, you’ll take me to Herr Garrison.”

  “And eat, ma’am? You look like you could use warm food.”

  “Yes, eat.” I smiled at the kindness of the man. The first real kindness anyone had shown me in a long while.

  He jumped down and lifted my bags into the wagon bed. Not a big man, but strong. A workingman. He laid a blanket in the wagon crib and motioned for me to sit.

  “No, Herr Moses. If you please, I’ll ride beside you.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Germany. A cold place. Far away. Weeks by carriage. Months at sea.”

  “They all like you? In this Germany?” He scuttled onto the seat, then held out his hand to help lift me up. He smelled of soap and sweet hay.

  “I think there is no one else quite like me. That is why I left.”

  He chuckled. “None like me
either, I expect.”

  “Yes, that’s true. Not in Germany.”

  We laughed.

  Sitting on the wagon perch, this was the closest I’d been to a colored man. I thought this was the closest Herr Moses has been to a German woman. I felt excited about new possibilities. America was still my land of dreams. Moses, like God’s gift, had started me on a new stage of my journey. For a moment, I felt lighthearted again. I was found in the promised land.

  Moses clicked his tongue, snapped his whip, and the horse jerked forward.

  Oluwand was sitting in the wagon beside me. I nearly screamed. The wagon moved steadily. I knew Moses couldn’t see her. My hand moves through her, touches air.

  One day in America and I was seeing ghosts. Bones rose from the sea, walked on land.

  Oluwand and I had become fast friends.

  I went to see Mr. Garrison. He was a fierce man—bushy hair, mustache, his nails stained black with ink. He was of fair height with a lean nose and a gaze that sweeps judgmentally over everything. I imagined him taking seconds to decide if the day was too cold, the clouds were too low, and if his sole visitor was a waste of his hard-earned time.

  “Work. I need workers. I don’t need another society matron who weeps but will not work.”

  I thought of nothing to say except “Guten Morgen.”

  His brows rose. “Fräulein?”

  “Assing.”

  “Excuse me. I thought you were one of our local matrons here to interrupt my work with needless weeping. Or worse yet, one of Griffiths’ disciples.”

  “Griffiths?”

  “Humanity, Rights, and Reason.”

  “I don’t know this name.”

  “You will.” He displaced reams of papers, books, quills, and asked me to sit in a chair long used for storage. “What can I do for you?”

  “It is I who wish to do for you. Help your cause.”

  “You’ve read my paper, the Liberator.” It was more statement than question.

  “No.”

  Garrison sighed heavily and leaned back in his chair. It creaked with his weight. “I don’t have time for this. Lives are at stake. There are things I must do, Miss,” he raised his brows, “Assing.”

  I sat up straighter. “Yes, Miss. Fräulein.” I saw him weighing my absence of an abigail, a companion. There was no man to lend me countenance. No wedding ring to bespeak respectability.

  “Well, good day to you, Fräulein.” His hand swept through his hair, and once again he was busily searching through his papers, upsetting a flurry of quills. “I have much to do.”

  “I’ve just left the Indian Queen. A slave—a woman—committed suicide rather than remain in her Master’s care.”

  Mr. Garrison said nothing. He studied me. I didn’t flinch.

  His eyes shifted to newsprint, his hands shuffled broadsides. “Of course, perhaps you could help distribute papers. Or hold a tea to raise monies? We are always short of money.”

  “I am independent.”

  “Are you now?” he inquired softly. And I saw him deciding that I was wealthy. Saw him change his opinion, his use for me.

  “Neither father nor husband rules me. I wish to give my heart to a cause.”

  “Abolition is an uphill struggle. Tumultuous. Dangerous. Not for the fainthearted.”

  “Nor is traveling the ocean. Nor being a woman. Nor being a German Jew.” I regretted my words as soon as I spoke them. I didn’t trust Herr Garrison. Still, I went on: “None of these things are for the fainthearted.”

  “I’m surprised, Fräulein. With your blond locks and blue eyes, I would’ve guessed you for a German but never a Jew.”

  “Half Jew. My mother was Christian.”

  “How interesting.”

  Garrison moved from around his desk and studied me like I was some rare creature, a butterfly, perhaps, caught, then dissected under a microscope.

  “Your family has been persecuted?”

  I nodded. But my answer was only partly true. Mama and I had never suffered. Yet, perhaps this was the link to the new promised land.

  “Herr Garrison, being Jewish, even half, as much as being a woman makes me eager to help end slavery. Any curtailment of freedom is wrong.”

  “I know little of Jewish fate. Nothing of the trials women claim. Though I do find you quite interesting. Have you heard of miscegenation, Fräulein?”

  I shook my head.

  “You should,” he said, returning to sit behind his desk. “A most interesting concept. Nonetheless, there is but one battle I care to wage. Were you colored, I would be more interested in your thoughts, your speech.” Fists propping his head, he bent over his desk, his pen scratching out lines in an article. “In a few months, if you haven’t gone home, come see me. I’ll put you to work.”

  “Are you always this arrogant?” I stood, trembling.

  “Fräulein Assing, I don’t have time for anyone—male or female—who seeks to fill their empty lives with the colored cause. I don’t know what dream you’re pursuing, but either give me your money and leave or come back when you know something more of what I do, what I’m trying to do, and what it means to be an abolitionist in America.”

  “What about what it means to be black in America? Do you claim to know that too?”

  “Touché, Fräulein. You have a mind. Come back when you fill it with America’s history. Not Germany’s. Not Jews’. Not women’s. But fill your mind with white cotton and black hands. Good day, Fräulein. Come back, if you dare. I have work to do.”

  I turned, hastening away from his patronizing face.

  “Aren’t you forgetting something, Fräulein Assing?”

  I looked back. In his outstretched hand, Mr. Garrison held his paper. The Liberator.

  I wanted to rip the paper and throw it at him. But the word “liberator” held me. Liberation. Mr. Garrison was perhaps right. I couldn’t free others without freeing my own mind. I didn’t like this Mr. Garrison. But he was right, there was little in my head about American slavery. Much in my heart, but little in my head.

  I took his paper. “Good day.”

  “Guten Nacht,” he called out, chuckling.

  As I stepped out of the building, I realized how cramped and ill-smelling both his office and Mr. Garrison were. Printer’s ink made a poor perfume.

  A light snow braced me, uplifted my spirits. A man in a cape was lighting streetlamps with a rod of flame. Candles glowed behind curtains. Smoke streamed out of brick chimneys and mingled with the moist air. Part of me recognized how beautiful the world was … how, in some places, the heart was warmed by a fire’s glow. But my heart was coldly furious with Garrison. Furious with myself for accomplishing so little. Furious I’d given Garrison information that might hurt me.

  Evening approached. The sun set orange over the horizon and I could see the watery expanse where Oluwand rests. A few months before, I’d left Germany. A few hours before, I’d left ship. A few minutes before, I’d spoken to a man who thought me frivolous. Now evening. My first night in America begins. Old life versus new. And I’d already faltered.

  “Ma’am, ma’am.” Across the street, Moses waved his scarf at me. Even his dusty mare neighed, flicked her tail. Courage. I knew someone kind in America.

  Tomorrow, I’d begin anew.

  I surprised Garrison and returned.

  “I’ve read your Liberator. Every issue. Fräulein Griffiths’ essays. The Narrative of Gusta Vasa, America’s Declaration of Independence, John Adams’s musings on the rights of man, and much, much more. Unless your cause has been won, you still need my money, my help, and my offer to work.”

  Garrison laughed and as though he’d never offended me, said, “Fräulein Assing, how delightful to see you. Just the woman I need. We have a new slave who’s just escaped. Splendid man. Exceptional, I’d almost say. The Anti-Slavery Society is sponsoring him. Him and his new wife. Would you care to help?”

  I spent my days and nights hand-lettering posters announcing the Socie
ty’s meeting and its speaker, Frederick Douglass. Garrison wanted hundreds of posters, thousands of flyers. Herr Moses and I traveled throughout the town and countryside. I nailed with my own hands dozens of leaflets on trees, on solicitors’ and government doors. It was thrilling. So many goodly Americans. Upholding the cause of freedom. I was part of it. Even proofing Garrison’s paper, staining nearly every one of my gowns with ink, made me happy. I worked harder than I ever had in my life and Garrison came to depend upon me. I read his correspondence and gave him summaries. Brought him food when he forgot to eat. Sometimes deliveries were made and Garrison would disappear. There a minute ago, then gone. I’d be forced to pay the supplier. I let Garrison play his cat and mouse. I had a trust—a small one. Papa’s grief had prevented him from working. So, I was careful. I saved on oils; I was so busy working for abolition, I rarely had time to paint. All day and late into the night, I wrote letters, posters, headlines proclaiming, “Frederick Douglass, A Slave, Is Here.” Then, finally,

  TONIGHT HE SPEAKS.

  I dressed with care, wanting to look my best. I wore no jewels, swept my hair into a chignon after the French, and wore my best black silk. When I looked into the mirror (a long cheval glass) I thought perhaps I was too pale. My days of reading had worn creases and dark shadows beneath my eyes. With my tongue, I wetted my dry lips. Excitement high, I felt my heart thundering, my breath inhaling shallowly. Now I’d live. I’d step inside my dreams.

  Almost six o’clock. I’d told Mr. Garrison I’d meet him in the hotel lobby.

  I gathered up my fur, for New Bedford had its chills like Germany, and turned to go. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flicker of motion, some shadow dart across my room. Oluwand. I don’t know why I spoke her name. It expelled from me like an unbidden prayer.

  I shuddered. The clock chimed six. I rushed from the room.

  The meeting hall was impressive. It overflowed with passionate people, and the din was almost deafening. Shouts about “Freedom,” “Fighting for the Negro soul,” “Southern greed and corruption” exploded from conversations. No one questioned my place here as a woman. Nor was I segregated. Mr. Garrison had found me a chair in the first row, slightly right of center stage. I was in the thick of pandemonium and from time to time, I could see Mr. Garrison brushing his hair back, talking to one person then the next, issuing orders about proper placement of chairs upon the stage. There were to be several speakers, but Mr. Garrison’s new protégé was to be last. Garrison was clearly nervous. I could tell by how often his fingers combed his hair. I saw him shake hands with each speaker—white and black. But it was the last, a man sitting in the farthest row, in the last chair, that he stayed with the longest. I could barely see this man. Mr. Garrison blocked my view. And the man himself kept his head bowed, as if in prayer or contemplation. His dark locks fanned forward and his features were indiscernible.