by Janet Benton
I read the titles on their spines as I drew the fluffy duster across them. Some works of geography and natural sciences I recognized, and an encyclopedia. Yet I felt slight in the face of the many titles and authors I didn’t know. A Friend’s guarded education aims at depth in useful subjects and in those that develop one’s inner compass; the more fanciful works are roped off as unwise influences. At a duster’s length from a feast of uncensored ideas, I longed to grab hold.
I remembered the name Albert had said while teasing me—Marx. I found the Ms among the alphabetized rows. Then to my eyes leapt not Marx’s work but a small book bearing a grand gold-lettered title on its thin spine: On Liberty.
I slid the volume from its place and abandoned the duster. The book was published not long ago in London; on its dedication page, a John Stuart Mill credited his wife as part author and offered their work as humbly and earnestly as a spiritual seeker. And though I opened to pages at random, messages of penetrating importance beamed out from every page.
I came to perceive his chief message: that we are oppressed and caged by notions of what’s proper, imprisoned by what it’s thought suitable to want and do. Certainly we need rules to protect us from human beastliness, but society’s conventions do more than that; they strangle thought and innovation in too wide an arena. Why can’t we choose more for ourselves? When public opinion controls us “in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression…penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself.”
What astonishing words. I stood with book in hand, amid the ladies’ laughter from the parlor. Through the guidance of my own modest measure of Inner Light, I’ve chosen to remain Charlotte’s mother and to carry the burden of disgrace that this requires. But why should it require disgrace? In the world that Mill envisions, perhaps it wouldn’t.
“Who can compute what the world loses,” he asks, “in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?”
Which is precisely where I’ve landed.
If I could only meet this writer and speak with him about my case. Could he help me find a place where prejudice wouldn’t block me from teaching, even marrying?
I felt such a longing for this imagined place that my legs grew weak. Despite my duties of the moment, I dropped to the floor with book in hand, settled my skirts about me, and turned the pages to see what else this Mill believes. Already he had given me a precious awareness—for while reading his words, the crushing weight of my entrapment fell away ever so briefly—and in that glimmer of relief from it, I perceived its heaviness.
The front door slammed, and quick footsteps came through the hall. Into his study walked Albert Burnham.
“Miss de Jong?” He stood drenched in his mackintosh and hat, face dripping with rain. I stood hastily and grabbed the duster from the shelf, book still in hand. He gave a small cough. “Have you found good reading, then?” he inquired, bending to see it. “J. S. Mill! An excellent choice.” He wiped the wetness from his face and began to remove his coat. “The man rather inspires one to live a braver life, doesn’t he? The end justifies the means! Damn the consequences!”
I hadn’t seen those words, nor sensed that Mill meant them. But if Albert believed in unpopular behavior, perhaps this was why he wasn’t affronted by my existence.
“Come,” he said, gesturing to the upholstered chairs. “I’m here to get some papers, but there’s no hurry to it. I may as well dry off before starting back.” He draped his mackintosh and hat over pegs on the door.
I took a step toward a chair, then stopped.
“Sit,” he said, though he remained standing. “Let’s compare our thoughts on liberty.”
“I’m dusting for Frau Varschen,” I said. “I shouldn’t have opened this.” I lifted the slender book.
“Are you a follower of Utilitarianism?” he asked, undeterred. “Or perhaps its sister, Consequentialism? Or its progenitor, Machiavelli, in all his unbound glory?”
“No,” I said. “Or, yes. I don’t know.” In haste I searched my mind for anything I might have learned on these subjects; I found only anxiousness.
“Perhaps you haven’t read widely in philosophy,” he said—certainly true, but not the reason I wasn’t yet seated across from him, expounding on the published minds of the Continent. I had work to do, and our conversation would raise suspicion. It occurred to me that his freedom to expound on whatever he likes relies partly on his ample means, which enable him to eat regardless of others’ opinions of him.
He drew his fingers across his forehead and through his damp hair, looking at me with keen hazel eyes. Then he reached to a box on his desk, withdrew a cigar, and began to whittle its end.
“I don’t know what philosophers they have women reading these days,” he muttered.
“It’s not that,” I said. Yet no neat summary came to mind. “Please sit and get dry,” I said. “I’ll return to finish the dusting later.” I stepped to a shelf to file away his book.
“Don’t.” He gestured with his head. “I have no use for it. Not much philosophy in imports!” He emitted a bark-like chortle. “Take it to your garret. Old Mill should make stimulating company.” He smiled as he sat down and reached for a match to light his cigar.
“But,” I said, moving the book toward the shelf, “I shouldn’t have—”
“Ridiculous.” He struck the match and inhaled, then emitted a line of smoke. “I haven’t opened that since university. Keep it! It’s yours. We can talk more once you’ve read it.”
I was going to take my leave, clutching the book and the duster, when the raucous sound of a piano burst through the wall separating us from the parlor. I shrank instinctively against the shelves, not wanting to be found with Albert. Shouts of laughter joined the music, and Clementina’s voice erupted in the hall.
“We need a fourth!” she yelled back to her friends in the parlor. “I won’t have either of you playing wallflower!” Her staccato footsteps came toward us, aimed at the kitchen beyond. “Margaret! We’ve got the player piano going! Come dance!” Hearing no reply, she called, “Where is that girl?”
Albert stepped quickly into the hall. “Will I do?”
She gave a start. “What are you doing here?” Then she muted her tone. “Supper isn’t for hours, darling.”
“Came back to get some documents,” he said. “But I’m always ready for a dance with my beautiful wife.”
She did look beautiful, from what I could see around the doorway’s edge—her face flushed with happiness brought on by music and company, her eyes gleaming, tendrils of hair straying charmingly from the curls pinned beneath her cap. A lace collar accentuated her slender neck, and lace-trimmed cuffs lent gracefulness to her supple wrists and fingers. She didn’t see me, pressed as I was against the shelves, and I was glad. Her demeanor would have soured forthwith and set my stomach cramping.
“Will I do?” her husband asked again. He looked lovely, too, his eyes opened wide and his large features softening as he gazed at her. The smell of his cigar wafted backward, a not-unpleasant, barnlike scent.
“Certainly you’ll do. Why, you’ll do wonderfully!” She moved her head toward the parlor and raised her voice. “A surprise, ladies! Albert is here, and he’s willing to dance!” The couple joined arms on the hallway carpet and strode toward the parlor.
My talk with Albert had ended so abruptly as to leave my response to his gift still on my lips. “Thank you,” I whispered. I brought the book to my cheek, as if greeting a friend, and slid it into my apron pocket. Then with greater speed I moved about the room and into the foyer and upstairs, wiping and dusting, all the while listening to the dancers stomp and laugh to the rambunctious music.
In my previous life, loud music and dancin
g had seemed no more than incitements to impulsive behavior. Yet that celebratory stepping and the piano’s torrent of tones brought cheer even to this erstwhile Friend.
Fifth Month 18, near midnight
I ought not to read so late—but I’ve opened On Liberty and come upon an idea that seems to turn Mill’s other ideas on their heads.
We can pursue our true wants, Mill writes, only when doing so harms no one to whom we are obliged.
Of course this must be so. To behave otherwise would be immoral. Yet how it changes everything!
I am obliged to Charlotte.
The freedom I seek is to remain her mother, in word and deed.
I have harmed her in seeking this. Only because of prejudice, though—only because of prejudice.
Mill wishes to do away with such limiting judgments. Yet with it present, infecting our world, the promise of his idea of liberty belongs only to those whose survival is unaffected by narrow minds. That is, it belongs to those who have little need of earning money, and not only that; it belongs to those of that group who are essential to the survival of none.
How many are there of these persons—uncommonly removed from their fellows—who may press against the walls of common morality? The most of us are saddled with near-constant obligations: raising the young and sheltering the crippled, doing farming and manufacturing, tending the sick, lowering the dead to their graves. Does Mill realize just how few can take this liberty he trumpets?
There may be cruelty in such a philosophy. It posits a world we cannot occupy—and makes us feel doubly trapped for knowing it.
But I won’t blame Mill for this. He must have known the sting of prejudice and had his own life narrowed, or else how has he understood its hazards and its costs?
In the philosophy of Friends, one seeks comfort in the Lord when humans fail to understand one’s revolutionary aims.
If only my aims were considered revolutionary.
If only I could speak with Mill and arrive with him at a more practical form of liberty. For we take our steps through this world linked arm to arm, affecting one another. Mustn’t we all accept a partial freedom, a limited but not obscured horizon?
Another idea begins to tickle my mind. It starts with this: I can be considered free only if I can choose.
And what do my choices matter, if they’re of no consequence to someone else?
Then only because my choices affect others can I be called free!
There is no such thing as liberty, then, if I am not obligated.
Yet if I’m obligated, then I am not free.
I’ve wound my thinking into knots. I need to sleep.
Rain is dashing into the oval window at the foot of my bed. Down the street, in the moonlight, a patchwork of blooming trees and bushes glows. A splendid scene. Yet as I watch, the wind and rain are liberating flower after flower from their stems and hurtling them to piles of rotting petals.
Does all beauty end in rot?
Late night is the playground of despair.
Fifth Month 23
We’ve moved to the Burnhams’ estate in Germantown!
The heat was coming on fast, so Clementina decided we should move sooner than planned. Margaret and I spent days packing essentials at the Pine Street house—amid the scoldings of Frau Varschen, who despises disorder. She never comes here for summers, since her home in Moyamensing is too far, but she had strong ideas of what remedies and staples we should bring for the summer cook. In all the rush I had to forgo my visit to Charlotte—but I took comfort in knowing I’d live much closer soon.
Finally we departed. Margaret and Henry and I bumped along in a rented carriage behind the Burnhams’ gleaming green one. Following us were three wagons burdened by barrels, crates, and trunks, with broad-backed horses pulling their weight.
When we reached the main street of Germantown, I looked through the dust raised by our cavalcade to familiar sights: churches, banks, and other grand buildings of stone and brick, before which elegant citizens gestured in conversation; small homes and stores where rougher-looking people stood or crouched about, gulping from cups and spitting. Small children spun tops and chased each other; older folks hawked items from barrels or crates. Aiming to recognize no one, I moved my eyes quickly over them all.
We passed the road that led to the old grist mill, now torn down, where Peter and I had explored and built forts from scraps of wood. We passed the road to the ice-skating pond where Johan and I had courted. We passed the lane to Sterne’s meadow, and how I longed to leap from the suffocating carriage and gallop to that place where gigantic trees hold court, casting patterns of shade and light on ferns and bluebells. We passed the market square, where it’s said Africans were auctioned long ago, and the home of abolitionist Friends who’d sheltered people escaping from slavery. We passed Coulter Street, down which I glimpsed our peak-roofed, stuccoed meetinghouse, wide and long, with no decoration to distract one from its sober purpose, and I sent a greeting to Mother, who lies in the burying ground beside it. We passed the school where I’d been a student and then a teacher, acknowledged for my intellect and virtue, the qualities upon which I’d built all visions of my future life.
A small herd of goats was crossing at Centre Street, so our cavalcade halted, mere blocks from Gina’s home. I took the chance to send my tenderest intentions toward Charlotte; perhaps she felt a flutter of air at her cheek as she nursed or dozed.
Then we passed a certain street that leads to a certain lane with but a handful of small houses along it, built of wood or stone, one of which contains Father and Patience, and my own little room, and—in the attic—the mattress where an hour’s indulgence set my path askew.
I sighed.
“Are you all right?” asked Margaret.
I kept my face still and nodded.
A group of schoolchildren stopped to stare at the Burnhams’ bright carriage. I drew back from the window so as not to be seen—and barely in time. A cluster of Friends clad in grays and browns poured from a building and turned our way. At their lead was the beloved headmaster of the Meeting school, a man so long and lean that his head seemed to pierce the clouds and his feet barely to trod the earth. Once he told me that a letter I’d written to my colleagues—which recommended that our students write and deliver more speeches on subjects of vital interest to them—was worthy of being carved in stone. How worthy would he find my occupations now?
Then I spied my cleverest student, Louella Lynes. How confident she looked, her head raised in its chaste bonnet, her carriage upright; how untrammeled by the world, with her arms swinging wide, her clear-skinned cheeks raised in a smile, her mouth opened to emit a pronouncement. She’d taken me as her model. I flattened my body against the seat and covered my head and face with a shawl.
I released myself from the shawl’s steamy tunnel only after the carriage turned left onto Walnut Lane. My family and I rarely visited this stately district. Its inhabitants seemed to occupy a separate world of cricket clubs, churches with hired priests, fashionable clothing, and parties meant to bring on gaiety and inebriation. Grocers and other vendors delivered goods directly to their doors, so that even their servants had little cause to take part in village life. The farther we traveled into this realm of estates, fields, and woods, the safer I felt from discovery.
Margaret began to chatter about the house, which belongs to Clementina’s parents, and about the summer cook, Miss Baker—extolling her delectable food, especially her cakes and pies, and her thorough preparation of the place. Margaret said we could expect everything to be spotless and lemon-scented. She caught her breath and fairly shivered as our carriages and wagons careened onto a curving driveway and toward a stone mansion that was as frivolous as a stone house can be, festooned with painted woodwork and garnished with turrets and gables.
The horses halted, lathered with sweat. A coachman ran up to tend them. We disembarked, and then began a time of puzzlement.
The mansion’s windows were shuttered, a
nd its ornate double doors were locked. A sputtering Clementina located a key in her bag and used it. First the Burnhams, then Margaret and I stepped onto the foyer’s thick carpet, encountering musty air and darkness.
“What’s happened here?” Clementina fanned her sweating face. Her pin curls lay wet against her forehead.
Albert stepped to her side and placed his hand on her forearm. “I’m sure there’s an explanation.”
She shook his hand off. “I don’t want an explanation. I want a meal and a clean house. But whatever the explanation, it needn’t concern you, need it? The tedious work to remedy it won’t be yours.”
Her husband flushed. The comment was true enough—and I took her statement to mean that she would put herself to work upon the remedy, alongside her servants. But Margaret gave me a baleful look that dissuaded me from this notion. Then a deep voice called through the opened doorway.
“Hallo there!” A gray-haired, brown-skinned man bobbed across the grass, poking his cane into the ground ahead and pulling himself forward by it.
Margaret whispered, “It’s Mr. Pemberton. He’s the caretaker of this house and the neighbor’s.”
The tall man climbed the stoop and crossed into the foyer, pausing to recover his breath. Removing his hat, he nodded in greeting.
“How are you, sir?” asked Albert, bowing his head.
Mr. Pemberton replied in a rumbling baritone. “I’m right as rain, but Miss Baker took ill last week. Her fever’s high. Doctor says it’s ague. Ordered five days’ more of rest at least.”
“Five days?” Clementina said.
Even Albert looked put out. Margaret sagged visibly. Clementina huffed. “She could have arranged for others to come.”
Mr. Pemberton nodded, acknowledging the point. “She’s been too sick to see to that,” he said. “She sends sincere regrets, madam.”
Clementina winced at his use of the title that she said makes her feel like her mother. Then the elderly man spied Henry in my arms and gave a broad smile, showing teeth yellowed by tobacco. “The newest family member! Let Mr. Pemberton have a look.”