Lilli de Jong

by Janet Benton

  Hold tight to the reins of thy disposition, but not to the reins of thy spirit. Let it roam to perceive God’s wisdom. Know that to love thy husband truly, thee must remain sensible of thy Inward Light and share the knowledge that it brings. For secrets will corrode thy bonds.

  Know, too, that no matter how dearly thee loves thy husband—and I hope it will be very dearly—it is as a mother that thee shapes the world to come.

  Do not be surprised, when thee has children, to find what I have found: of all the kinds of love that bind, a mother’s love for her offspring is the strongest imperative on earth. It is as common as sunlight, as all-penetrating, as necessary to life. Its strength will fill thee, and in time will grow large enough to extend to many others, friend and stranger.

  Dearest daughter, my firstborn child, thee and thy brother gave me this knowledge. I hope at times thee saw my gratitude and joy.

  Treasure thy days on earth, as I have treasured mine.

  I love thy soul.

  With all blessings on thy coming union,

  Mother

  I won’t write another word till the twelfth. I want her words to echo in me.

  Seventh Month 12

  Dawn brings pink and yellow to our windows. Beyond them, a continual sheet of rain touches the street. Bending forward, I see a city worker extinguishing the lamps. Early-rising laborers pass, mostly hidden by umbrellas, and sodden rats and dogs run along the bricks, sniffing for tidbits dropped by the street cleaners. In my lap Charlotte is taking nourishment, while Johan and Peter sleep, their bodies stretched across the painted planks.

  In several hours, Johan and I will wed at a justice of the peace. Besides Peter, Johan has no one attending; he wants to contact his family only after Charlotte’s untimely birth is covered over by some months of marriage. Father declined my invitation, writing that Patience is too near delivery. But Margaret and Miss Baker have gotten leave on some pretext and will be with us; Margaret will hold Charlotte. After a civil ceremony, we’ll come back to this room for tea and sweets. Then Peter will leave the apartment, as he’s going home to work again in Father’s shop.

  Therefore we face an urgent need of funds. Johan will find work better than selling pencils, I’m sure of it, though his missing fingers and his melancholy do impede him. But I already have a plan for how we’ll survive. It came to me while reading Margaret’s reply to our invitation, which was written in her blockish letters. When Hannah Purdes gave me lessons in geometry ten years back, she’d charged twenty-five cents per lesson. I went to a newspaper office and placed this advertisement to run weekly:

  Experienced teacher available to teach reading and writing to adults and children. 35 cents per lesson. Also, letters read and written. Inquire at 21xx Montpelier Street, 3rd Floor Left, Phila.

  Even as I waited in line, speaking in a friendly way with others, a woman and a man said they would come to me for help with legal letters they need written, and pay a dollar each. It seems my former teaching of persuasion will find new purpose.

  Then, taking two of the four dollars in Johan’s letter, I found a rag-seller’s shop and chose a pale yellow gown and cap, as well as a straw hat. At a jeweler’s, I allowed myself a new clasp for my locket’s chain. So the gold locket with its tintype of Mother rests once more above my heart.

  In my silence since recording Mother’s letter here, I’ve wondered why she knew the corrosive force of secrets—if her marriage, too, had a hidden rock at its center. Did she go to the grave with painful secrets? Must every woman? Will I?

  Which brings me to this moment. My tenth notebook is nearly filled. I don’t know what will become of the many pages I’ve covered with scrawling. Perhaps I’ll burn them, or bury them, or hide them beneath the floorboards. Perhaps I’ll let some dear person read them, in time. I know only this for certain: Words come to me.

  I hope one day to have a voice as strong as a hand on a drum, a hand that pounds its urgent messages across a distance.

  Johan says I’ve changed. He says I’ve grown less youthful in my spirit.

  Of course I have. I’m no longer innocent—nor am I any longer ashamed of not being so.

  For of what use is innocence? It delivers us to danger.

  I think of innocence; I think of Eve, how she chose knowledge; and there I linger.

  It’s said that every woman’s painful labor is God’s punishment. Eve ate an apple, and God pours wrath on every mother. So the Bible tells it.

  Yet in the quiet as my baby sucks, across the boundaries of time, Eve’s story reaches like a hammer. It strikes the bedrock of my heart and cracks it in two. Up leaps a fountain of refreshment—of other meanings.

  That the apple is the world of pleasure that impregnates us.

  That a woman in labor is drenched in two worlds simultaneously—on the border of the eternal garden and the living-dying world.

  That from this suffering she emerges far more knowing, holding the new life in her arms and her own changed self—delivered of her baby and her innocence.

  That by passing through this suffering and furthering our human race, she crosses to a land where pain and joy are ever mingled and where her every move has consequence.

  That every mother follows Eve.

  This knowledge is not a curse. Separation from the garden’s innocence is not a sin.

  It is a beginning.

  Johan stirs; he lifts his head and sends a warming glance across the room.

  My baby nestles in my arms.

  The sun now shoots its rays above the buildings opposite and brings my wedding day.

  Life holds so much and moves so quickly. One can at best convey a pinprick of its darkness, and of its light.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This work of fiction began in the long days and nights of nursing and nurturing my baby. As I held her in my arms and listened to the ticking of a clock, a voice came now and then into my mind. It was the voice of an unwed mother from long ago.

  Sometimes she railed against being cast out, with her life derailed for good, while her lover walked freely among respected persons. Sometimes my own moments merged with hers, as when I marveled at the calm that descended while nursing or felt a fatigue I could never before have imagined. After placing my sleeping infant down, I walked to my desk and jotted those words onto scraps of paper.

  While pregnant, I was inclined to study. I followed the stages of a growing human. I looked into practices of labor and delivery and armed myself with all manner of ideas and stuff. I considered these acts to be preparatory, even protective. Yet for my own specific labor, and for the actuality of caring for the infant who emerged, I was utterly unprepared.

  So perhaps this was when the door to Lilli’s story opened: when I was stunned at being the basis of a newborn’s survival and awed by how my body and heart changed in service of her. Becoming a mother was no small shift in identity. I would never see any aspect of living in the same way again.

  One more ingredient was vital to the brewing story. When we were a few months into parenthood, my husband showed me a review by Joan Acocella of The History of the European Family, a multi-editor, three-volume work that includes much tragic information about families in the past. I read there of the prevalence of so-called illegitimate births in Europe, at times over 50 percent. I’d known that having a baby deemed fatherless meant shame for mother and child, but I hadn’t fully considered the costs of such prejudice. Many mothers gave up their infants to institutions or alleyways or worse, or struggled hard to keep them, and those infants often died.

  Then there was the abject poverty that led couples with too many mouths to feed to give up their new babies. When the price of bread rose, so did the numbers of abandoned infants. Many infants with wealthier parents also perished; out of tradition and preference, newborns were brought to the homes of wet nurses, often in the country, who cared for multiple babies at once and couldn’t protect them from fast-circulating diseases and an insufficient diet.

  I
hadn’t known this vast history of infant death. Bits of understanding began to germinate in my consciousness. As I nursed, the woman’s voice continued to speak. A small pile of scraps formed. I began to research.

  * * *

  The tragedies observed in Europe also took place in the newer nation across the sea. Of foundlings, social-work pioneer Amos Warner noted in his 1894 book American Charities, it “can matter little to the individual infant whether it is murdered outright or is placed in a foundling hospital.” And wet nursing, in its various settings, was also characterized by infant death.

  Because babies had a too-great chance of dying while away “at nurse,” urban families began bringing wet nurses as servants into their homes. Unwed mothers were a ready population to fill these positions, because they had fresh milk and, often, no place to live and no other decent work options. So at a time when character was believed to pass from nipple to mouth, mothers viewed as immoral were nevertheless invited into homes to nurse strangers’ infants.

  These women might have become pregnant by accident or by force. They might have found themselves unaided due to the father’s desertion or death, due to rejection and expulsion by their families, or some combination. Regardless of the cause of their pregnancies and desperation, such women and their infants were—and in many places still are—separated and punished.

  In order to become a live-in wet nurse, too, the unwed mother usually had to give up her infant or board it elsewhere. For if it stayed with her, she might have favored it—or she simply might not have had enough milk for two babies. But her infant, whether boarded with a woman feeding multiple infants or surrendered to an institution, had a small chance of surviving. As physician Charles West observed about this arrangement in his 1874 Lectures on the Diseases of Infancy and Childhood, “by the sacrifice of the infant of the poor woman, the offspring of the wealthy will be preserved.”

  Why was the separation of mother and infant usually deadly? Because no safe substitute for human milk existed. Cow’s milk, the usual substitute, was often problematic. It might have been thinned with unclean water or not kept cool on its trip from udder to household; it might have contained harmful bacteria, including those causing tuberculosis, typhoid, diphtheria, and diarrhea. Doctors of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth made note of the often revolting condition of milk, as here: “[W]hile mother’s milk is free from germs, cow’s milk, as ordinarily obtained, swarms with them, and often contains manure and other filth.”* Bottles, too, were frequently contaminated, from inadequate cleaning.

  In the United States, milk safety improved in the twentieth century with more oversight, more cooling to retard spoilage, and more effective pasteurization. But it is still true in many places on earth that the milk of human mothers is crucial to infants’ survival.

  I thought of my imaginary wet nurse, worrying about her baby from an intolerable distance; I thought of her baby, whose life was threatened by the absence of her mother’s milk and care. Could such a mother accomplish what many wet nurses intended? Could she find a situation that would keep her baby alive while she saved money by working as a servant, then reclaim her baby and create a better life?

  In her definitive work A Social History of Wet Nursing in America: From Breast to Bottle (1996), Janet Golden notes that these women left no accounts of their experiences, stating that “wet nurses remain historically silent.”

  My narrator would tell her story.

  * * *

  But who was she? What sort of a person might have had the moral courage to do as she does and the education to write well and regularly in a diary? I decided that she would be a Quaker.

  This choice allowed her to be well educated, since Quaker girls in late-nineteenth-century Philadelphia could receive strong educations at Friends’ schools. It allowed her to be outspoken, too; some nineteenth-century Friends were principled fighters for social justice. Their numbers included the legendary reformers Lucretia Mott and Susan B. Anthony. Among Quakers, the keeping of intense and lengthy journals was not uncommon. And I was drawn to the Religious Society of Friends because of its founding principles: that everyone can have direct access to God, and that all carry the light of God within. The Friends’ Meeting for Worship can be a time for cultivating a relationship with that Inner Light, an invitation to radical thinking and spiritual exploration. This milieu, and then an alienation from it, could have given rise to the woman who’d sprung up in my head.

  As for that alienation, it was necessary for Lilli to be isolated in order for the plot to unfold as it does. But the interplay between her family and their Meeting is meant to serve the needs of the novel, not to show the history of any actual family or Meeting. Could such events have occurred? Perhaps. The Friends’ Discipline of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting—a set of principles and behavioral guidance that is referred to in the novel as the Discipline—gave stern instructions on how to deal with members who strayed. Yet some Friends would likely have reached out to sustain others who were struggling as Lilli’s family was. As is true in fairy tales, however, the adventure can only begin in earnest when a character steps outside the zone of safety.

  * * *

  The distinctive speech of Quakers (also called Friends) appearing in this novel may be of interest to readers. The Religious Society of Friends is a worldwide network of local meetings, or churches. When the religion began in seventeenth-century England, British people used the informal “thee” and “thou” when talking with peers, and they used the more formal “you” when talking with individuals of a higher social status. But Quakers, in keeping with their revolutionary position that all souls are equal before God, refused to follow this custom. When speaking to any individual, they used only “thou” and “thee.”

  Such choices in language—what Friends call plain speech—spread with the religion across the globe; some Friends today continue to speak in this way. By Lilli’s time, in 1880s Philadelphia, the use of “thou” and “thee” was fading, although “thee” seems to have lasted longer. I chose for Lilli and her family to follow the custom of using “thee,” both to reflect their greater observance and to be true to Lilli’s role as a teacher (since teachers were charged with encouraging their students to use plain speech). When Lilli records what non-Quakers said, however, she records their use of “you.”

  Other features of Friends’ speech that show up in Lilli’s diary include the use of people’s given names without titles (but only if she learns the person’s first name) and the use of numbers to indicate days and months. This is done to avoid honoring the non-Christian gods that our usual days and months were named after.

  * * *

  As for Lilli’s home, because of my interest in a storied and Quaker-influenced area called Germantown, I decided that Lilli and her family would live there. This former township became a part of Philadelphia in 1854. The first American document protesting against slavery was signed in 1688 by some of its Quaker settlers. To visit its sites is to encounter American history in a moving and genuine way. Germantown holds 579 properties within its National Historic Landmark and National Register of Historic Places designations, among them Johnson House, a station on the underground railroad; the birthplace of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women; and the Germantown White House, where George and Martha Washington and their household members lived and worked in 1793 and 1794.

  I took small liberties in my depiction of 1880s Germantown. When Lilli passes along the main street in a carriage, for instance, the order of the streets she passes is not quite the actual order. The Appleton estate and Lilli’s childhood home are invented, though they are in sections where such places could have been located. If one visited Germantown, one would find the meetinghouse, the burial ground, the school where my imaginary Lilli studied and taught, train tracks and stations, and other sites, but much in the environment (including waterways) has changed dramatically. In the case of Angela and Victor’s home in an Italian enclave, Italian families did l
ive in that area from about that time; the industriousness I report was apparently not unusual; the block on which I’ve placed them had no water lines or hydrants to help put out a fire; and a coal yard and train tracks sat close by.

  The same combination of actual and fictional applies to the novel’s scenes in downtown Philadelphia. Albert’s office and apartment buildings are invented. Broad Street Station stood until 1953 by the still-standing and wondrous City Hall. The chapel in which Lilli considers the story of Job was inspired by a small and stunning chapel in the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia, in a building on Chestnut Street completed in 1885. Little remains of the vast public hospital and almshouse complex in West Philadelphia that was long called Old Blockley. The smells of Blockley’s interiors are based partly on a doctor’s recollections of the period. And while Blockley’s practices regarding foundlings varied over time, and the appearance of its nursery is imagined, its dangers were all too real.

  Between 1860 and 1864, nearly 82 percent of Blockley’s foundlings died. In 1880, all foundlings died, per an investigative committee’s 1882 report on rampant atrocities and thefts by those entrusted with running Blockley. One section of that report concluded that “the deaths of these infants was [sic] due to ignorance and neglect” and noted with horror the “barbarous cruelty” that allowed for “the abandonment of helpless infants to die for want of ordinary care.” Fortunately, it appears that, in the month after the fictional Lilli rescued Charlotte, those responsible for foundlings at Blockley started boarding out the infants with nursing women, hoping for better outcomes.

  As is depicted in the novel, corruption at Blockley was extreme, per the vigorous 1882 investigation; in response to its findings, the superintendent fled to Canada and had to be brought back to face charges. And the unclaimed bodies of paupers were indeed ferried across the Schuylkill River and sold to medical students for dissection. (What changed, in time, was that this practice became legal.)