AFTER THEIR SECOND change of trains the track doubled and they approached and then passed an eastbound freight. For an astounding minute, the passengers cringed and stared. The combined speed of the two trains was seventy-five miles per hour. Duff counted 120 cars. Half of them were piled with huge trees, stripped of limbs and bark, hurtling past only a few feet from their faces.
“That train,” marveled Ben, sounding like a boy, “must be a mile long.”
“And somewhere in the north country,” said Skaggs, looking up from the book he was reading, “a thousand birds and deer and bear are wondering why there is suddenly a hole in their forest.”
“What rancid fiction has put you in such a crotchety mood, sir?” Ben asked.
Skaggs smiled and pushed his eyeglasses up from the tip of his nose. “Fiction, is it? No, an exposé of the greatest fiction.” He held up the binding to show Ben—the book was The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined.
“Ah, Professor Strauss. In English now. Das Leben Jesu was the first German volume I attempted to read.” During Ben’s student year in Bonn, the heretical book and its author caused a sensation from Geneva to Berlin. “It was my German-language catechism.”
Skaggs cackled.
“What?” Duff asked, confused by Skaggs’s laugh, then turned to Ben hopefully. “Are you…are you religious, Ben?”
Skaggs laughed again.
“No, Duff, I am not—I mean that I used the book to learn German.” He saw that Duff remained mystified. “The author purports to show—”
“Definitively proves,” Skaggs said.
“—that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John never witnessed the events they describe…”
Duff ’s eyes were wide.
“…and that the Gospel of John in particular is more…fable than fact. And that the miracles in the Scriptures are in the nature of metaphor, or myth, or—”
“Fiction,” Skaggs said, snapping the book shut with both hands. “Turning the water to wine, healing the leper, healing the blind men, all of his healings, five thousand people dining on five loaves and two fish, walking across the Sea of Galilee, raising Lazarus from the dead—all of his wonders, according to Herr Doktor Strauss, fabricated by the Gospel writers. Mere tales. Hoaxes. Fabulous lies.”
No one said a word for a long time. Duff had tears in his eyes. His faith was not shaken a bit, but he worried about Skaggs at moments like this.
“Excuse me,” Skaggs said, exhaling deeply. “I apologize for the ill humor. You have now witnessed the unhappy result of”—he checked his watch—“forty-four hours without a drink of anything stronger than lemon pop.”
Duff reached over and softly patted his shoulder.
The conductor entered the car. “Utica depot is the next stop, Utica the next stop, the next stop is Utica.”
“Lunatica,” Skaggs muttered.
“What?” Ben asked.
“That may be the problem with my mood, as I come to think of it—this region.” He sniffed at the air. “Some strange poison or animalcule in the atmosphere, pressed into my blood and brain by our unholy speed…”
“What are you saying now, Skaggs?” Duff asked.
“My rant. Can it be chance alone that we are now traveling into the heart of our national bedlam, the land where every second peasant believes that a rainbow bridge from heaven touches earth?”
“The heart of what?” asked Ben.
“Have I not told you, Knowles, about the dementias that prevail in these parts? I laid out the facts last year in a magazine, together with a handsome map—the Lunatic Belt, three hundred miles long and one hundred miles wide, the greatest concentration of every species of righteous fanatic, somnambulist, spiritualist, mind reader, necromancer, soothsayer, miraclemonger, and fortune-hunting fortune-teller the world has ever known.
“‘The Poughkeepsie Seer,’ Andrew Jackson Davis, a shoemaker’s apprentice who gives trance performances in which he sees the future and diagnoses diseases while speaking pidgin Greek and Hebrew and Sanskrit…
“The Shaker insanity took root at a farm near Albany…
“William Miller, the farmer who persuaded thousands of desperate idiots that Jesus would return in 1843, or 1844 at the very latest…
“The well-intentioned fool Gerrit Smith of Utica has agreed to give away two hundred square miles of his land in the Adirondacks to any three thousand Negroes who want them…but has managed to recruit only a dozen who will agree to move north and live according to the hard rules of his goodyship.
“Soon we shall pass the Reverend Noyes’s colony of Christian fornicators at Oneida…which is not far from the very place where attorney Finney saw Jesus’s light and became the Reverend Finney.” A lawyer named Charles Finney reported seeing a divine flash in his law office, and had become the most popular evangelical preacher in America.
“And the bleak precinct toward Rochester gave us the greatest of all, the counterfeiter Joseph Smith…”
“Of the Mormons?” Duff asked.
“The Mormon, the martyred prophet, the boy who spoke with Christ and Moses as well as Saints Peter, James, and John—in person, right here in Wayne County. And a few miles west is where our newest young charlatans, the Fox girls, chat with ghosts by tapping on their bedsteads.”
The couple sitting across the aisle had moved to the back of the car with their daughter, and a man on the bench behind Ben and Skaggs had begun shaking his head more and more violently for the last several minutes.
“But if the miracles of the telegraph and the daguerreotype are now possible,” Duff said finally, “then why is it nuts to imagine communication with spirits?”
“You and your poor, dear, trusting sister…” Skaggs said. “By the way, the meddlesome Mr. Brisbane, who supplied Polly her itinerary? Another native of the Lunatic Belt.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I tell you, we are traveling through an accursed land.”
“Ben,” Duff asked, “do you disbelieve in all miracles as well?”
“No, lad, no, you misunderstand me,” said Skaggs, sincerely vexed. “It is delusion and hypocrisy and fakery I loathe, not the true marvels, not an ice plug that halts the falls at Niagara, not plain wonder at the stars and planets.”
“I believe in daguerreotypes, and in the telegraph and electrical engines,” Ben finally said. “And in the stars and planets. And in your dear, trusting sister.”
The rest of the afternoon passed quietly. They changed trains, napped, and nibbled on meat pies. Skaggs finished his book and stared out the window, wishing he could someday witness a miracle. Duff made entries—immure, necromancer—in his journal. They were heading directly into the setting sun when the conductor passed through the car repeating “Syracuse…Syracuse,” and Ben looked up with a curious smile: in the past day conductors had also announced cities called Athens, Troy, Rome.
Skaggs caught his glance and nodded. “And Attica tonight. A ridiculously modern country fitted out with ridiculously ancient names,” he said. “One means of reassuring ourselves that we are a great civilization. Perhaps we shall have the chance in the days ahead to visit the imperial city of Cairo, in Illinois, which the locals call Kay-row.”
Ben was napping when they stopped after dark to take on wood and water and let off passengers in Auburn. He awoke to the sound of long, eerie howls coming from the deep forest to their right.
“Damned wolves,” grumbled a disembarking passenger. It was the man who had shaken his head at Skaggs’s tirade against the region’s visionaries.
“Damned wolf-slaughtering farmers,” said Skaggs loudly enough to make the man scowl.
“Wolves?” Ben asked. The animals had been extinct in Britain for a century.
“And thanks to this great machine,” said Skaggs, “they are now marooned forever up there, on the north side of the tracks—along with the thousand arsonists and murderers forced to make silverware for the remainders of their miserable lives.”
“I do not understand, sir,” Ben said.
Duff understood. Skaggs was referring to the prison. More than once since the sugarhouse fire he had imagined himself sitting alone in a cell or standing on the gallows at Auburn. Now he was in Auburn, and gooseflesh rose on his arms. His scar stung. He stood.
“I need a coffee and a bun,” he said, and shot out of the car toward the food peddler on the platform.
“It was your own French cousin, Knowles,” Skaggs continued, “whose book on our prisons made the place famous, for its system of work and silence. It is why they can now sell tickets to tourists for a quarter apiece. It is our perfect Puritan factory—no choice but to work, and no complaining about the conditions or hours.”
“But about the animals,” Ben asked, “why do you call them marooned?”
“From the Hudson all the way to Lake Erie the wolves now remain strictly north of the railroad line—the creatures take the tracks for a colossal new trap, which they dare not cross.”
They continued to listen to the wolves’ howls until the locomotive fired up and drowned them out.
AN HOUR LATER in Seneca Falls, a small mob of very respectable-looking women boarded. There were so many that the ladies’ cars filled, and the last several were forced to sit on benches in one of the smoky, spittle-strewn men’s cars—across the aisle from Duff and Ben and Skaggs. Only one looked as old as forty, and all were in high spirits as they talked gaily about “the convention.” One mentioned “a brilliant speech,” and another called the speaker “surely the finest person of color on earth.”
Around Geneva—between Waterloo and Vienna, Ben noticed, wondering why the nomenclature had shifted abruptly from Mediterranean antiquity to Napoleonic Europe—Skaggs could no longer contain his curiosity. He introduced himself to the eldest woman and admitted with a smile that he was “ignorant of the great and historic gathering” they had attended.
“You may trifle with us, sir,” answered a girl of eighteen called Hannah, who earlier had wondered aloud where in Rochester she might purchase Turkish trousers to wear, “but we are indeed coming from a great and historic gathering.”
“I do not trifle, and do not doubt you. But which party are you?”
The older woman, a Mrs. Experience King, explained that the convention had not been for any political party. It had been a gathering of hundreds of women and men, organized only during the last week, to discuss the conditions and rights of the female in America and to pass a Declaration of Sentiments.
The girl Hannah could not contain her excitement. “The preamble said we are oppressed and fraudulently deprived of our most sacred rights,” she said, “and listed eighteen injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman. All the resolutions were passed unanimously.”
Mrs. King and the other women were slightly chagrined by their youngest member. But all three men were charmed—and reminded, naturally, of Polly Lucking.
“May I know,” Skaggs asked, “one of the eighteen crimes of which my sex stands accused?”
Hannah was happy to recite. “That man has endeavored, in every way, to destroy woman’s confidence in her own powers and to lessen her self-respect.”
Ben was agog. “May I ask if your declaration stands in opposition to marriage?”
Two of the women blushed.
“No, sir, certainly not,” said Mrs. King. “The objections are only to the laws that turn a married woman into her husband’s chattel, deprived of rights.”
“Like a slave,” added Hannah.
“I believe we overheard you make mention of the remarkable Frederick Douglass,” Skaggs said.
“You gentlemen are familiar with our Mr. Douglass?” Mrs. King asked. Douglass, the former slave, had recently started publishing an abolitionist paper, The North Star, in Rochester.
“Why, yes, of course,” Ben answered.
“And I,” Skaggs said, stroking his beard, “consider him a great friend. Of many years’ standing.”
The women smiled and murmured with interest.
“In fact,” he continued, “I consider him a blood cousin of mine.”
One of the women tittered, but the rest looked dismayed.
“Mr. Skaggs here,” Ben offered, “is a jester.”
“And white,” Duff added helpfully.
“But, ladies—and gentlemen—I am entirely in earnest.” One beautiful afternoon in September of ’38, he explained, he happened to encounter a Negro friend, a fellow journalist, Mr. Ruggles, near his home in New York City. Ruggles was walking with a nervous young man, another Negro, called Mr. Stanley. Skaggs, momentarily flush and also eager to dine with two black men at a certain grand new hotel, treated them to a lavish luncheon—the finest food, Mr. Stanley said, he had ever eaten in his life. Afterward, on the street, once his guests were satisfied that Skaggs was not in league with any lurking blackbirders, they revealed to him that Mr. Stanley was a slave, on the run and new to the city, and that his name was actually Bailey.
Telling the story now, Skaggs paused, smiling broadly. Certainly the women but even Duff and Ben were wondering if he was right in the head.
“I mentioned to Mr. Bailey that Bailey happened to be the name of my mother’s family in Baltimore. Whereupon he told me that he had been raised in Maryland, and that his father had been white. ‘Cousin,’ I cried, and hugged him right there in Broadway in front of the Astor House. When I learned a moment later that we were both born in towns called Hillsborough, our serendipitous encounter came to seem”—here he turned his gaze for an instant on Duff—“fairly miraculous.”
“But, Skaggs,” said Ben carefully, “what on earth is the connection between your Mr. Bailey and Frederick Douglass?”
“Shortly after our meeting, Freddy Bailey changed his name—to Freddy Johnson.” He paused for several perplexing seconds. “And then one time more, of course. To Frederick Douglass.”
The women had fallen in love with Skaggs, who asked them, “And what did he tell your convention in Seneca Falls?”
“It was Mr. Douglass,” offered Hannah, “who persuaded all the waddlers to approve resolution number nine.”
“Hannah Victor!” Mrs. King said sharply. Some of the other women appeared anxious, as they dreaded this first broaching with outsiders of their most audacious act. “May I inquire of your gentlemen’s business in Rochester?” Mrs. King asked, hoping to change the subject.
“You may, but the answer is none at all,” Skaggs replied, “for we are going on to Buffalo tonight—but may I ask you, madam, the details of your resolution number nine?” He still had the rude curiosity of a journalist, if not the job.
Young Hannah Victor leapt in again. “That it is our duty, the duty of the women of America, to demand for ourselves the sacred right to vote. Mrs. Stanton insisted on it.”
No one said a word for a long moment. Looks were exchanged. Throats were cleared. Duff blinked nervously. Female suffrage was a notion beyond radical, nearly inconceivable.
“I am with you,” Skaggs told the women. “And indeed, I hereby volunteer to sacrifice my own franchise so that it may be transferred to any one of you. But who is this remarkable Mrs. Stanton?”
“Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” said Hannah Victor. “She was the organizer, and wrote the Declaration.”
“A lady of Seneca Falls, from a great family of abolitionists,” said Experience King. “You may know of her cousin—Mr. Gerrit Smith?”
Duff and Ben looked at Skaggs, afraid he was about to lodge some terrible insult against the man he had described earlier in the day as a fool.
“A great family indeed,” said Skaggs.
After the women disembarked and the three men boarded a new train, Skaggs announced that his antipathy to anti-liquor zealots and haughty New York City bluestockings had led him to misjudge “the normal American Amazons, such as those good women.”
“They were sweet on you, Skaggs,” Duff teased.
“I am simply their latest Aunt Nancy man,” he replied as he arranged himself for sleep. “And no
w that I am a temperance man as well, perhaps I shall be allowed citizenship in their utopia, this new petticoatdom.” He shut his eyes and began to sing, in the manner of a lullaby: “‘There’s a good time coming, boys,/A good time coming…’”
Ben smiled. He knew the song, a favorite lately among liberals, Quakers, Unitarians, pacifists, and the irredeemably hopeful of every stripe. It was written, Lloyd Ashby had informed him, by the author of the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.
“‘…Let us aid it all we can,/Every woman and every man—’”
“Hey! Quiet!” said a man sitting nearby.
But Skaggs’s baritone grew louder. “‘There’s a good time coming, boys…/The pen shall supersede the sword!/And right, not might—’”
“Shhhh!”
“‘—And right, not might, shall be the lord…/In the good time coming!’ Snooze well, comrades.”
36
late July 1848
Glee, Indiana
AT THE START, life at Glee was like a dream. The sun shone all day every day the first week after they arrived, even on the one afternoon it had briefly rained. That day, a rainbow arched over the entire farm for an hour as two members of the Amusement Team, a soprano and a flutist, strolled the grounds playing Mozart songs (“To Isolation” and “The Song of Separation”) whose English lyrics all the consociates seemed to know. Polly had not seen both ends of a rainbow or eaten apples straight from the tree since she was a girl.
Glee’s orchard and vegetable and hemp gardens were planted among three big earthen mounds in the rough shapes of birds, and enclosed by a high earthen wall, with an opening at one corner. The mounds and wall were “a cemetery built thousands of years ago by ancient aboriginals,” James Danforth told Polly and Priscilla that first afternoon, which made Glee “a hallowed place centuries before Jesus Christ was on earth. This land was inhabited,” he said with a blissful smile, “at the time of Odysseus and Achilles and Homer.”
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