Our mother, Esther Thomas Keen, one of John and Kitty Keen’s six children, was born in Philadelphia, December 3, 1811. She was described by one who knew her in her youth as “a little beauty of the dark vivid type, with perfectly regular features, black startled eyes, and quantities of red-brown curls just the colour of a cherry wood sideboard that stood in her house.” She was a tiny creature, under five feet in height, and never in her life weighed more than ninety pounds; but in spite of that she was exceedingly strong, swift in her movements, straight as an arrow to the end of her days, and always went leaping up the stairs, even when she was over eighty. Fear was absolutely unknown to her. She once caught a mad dog and held its mouth shut with her hands, protecting her children till help came. She was resourceful in emergency, whether it was sickness or accident, and never lost her presence of mind. She had a tender sympathy for animals and all weak, suffering, and young creatures, and it could be truthfully said of her, as of Jöran Kyn, her ancestor, that she “never irritated even a child.” Her daughter Fanny said of her: “I never heard my mother speak an angry word, no matter what the provocation, and she was the mother of seven children. No matter what the offense might be she always found an excuse.” In this she was like the old Scotch woman who, when told she would find something to praise even in the devil, said: “Weel, there’s nae denyin’ he’s a verra indoostrious body.”
It was from our little mother that my sister Fanny inherited her vivid dark beauty, her reticence, her fortitude in suffering, her fearlessness in the presence of danger, and her unfailing resourcefulness.
Jacob Leendertsen Van de Grift, the first paternal ancestor of whom we have any record, settled in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, towards the close of the seventeenth century. The graves of several of his descendants are still to be seen in the fine old cemetery at Andalusia, and upon the tombstone of one of them is this epitaph:
“Farewell my friends and wife so dear,
I am not dead but sleeping here.
My debts are paid, my grave you see.”
This name has descended in an unbroken line from Jacob Leendertsen Van de Grift, of New Amsterdam, through eleven generations, to the brother of Fanny Stevenson, Jacob Van de Grift, of Riverside, California.
John Miller, a paternal great-grandfather of ours, was also Dutch. The family account of him is that he fought at Brandywine, crossed the Delaware with Washington, was wounded at the battle of Trenton, and that when he died, at the age of eighty-four years, the city of Philadelphia paid him the tribute of burial with military honours.
Miller married twice, and it was Elizabeth, a daughter by his second wife, who married a Jacob Van de Grift.
Her son, Jacob Van de Grift, was born in Philadelphia in 1816. Upon the early death of her first husband she married again, presenting to her children the cruel stepfather of fiction. Indeed, the story of our father’s childhood and youth and the adventures of his brothers and sisters reads more like melodrama than sober fact. One brother, Harry, wandering disconsolate in the market-place, was carried off by a kind and wealthy Kentuckian, who took a fancy to the handsome boy and brought him up as his own son. Matilda, the beauty of the family, seeing a peaceful Quaker couple sitting by a window, was so struck by the contrast between their gentle lives and her own that she went into the house and asked to be allowed to stay with them. The kind-hearted people were so touched by her distress and beauty that they adopted her as their own. Little Jacob, encouraged by the success of his brother and sister, ran away on his own account, but fell into evil hands, and was beaten and ill-used until rescued by his beautiful sister Matilda. Fortunately for Jacob, he found favour in the sight of Grandfather Miller, who educated him, dressed him well, and gave him a good allowance. At this time there was an outbreak of small riots in Philadelphia, caused by roughs attacking the Quakers. The “shadbellies,” as they were derisively called, did not fight back, which made the sport all the more alluring to the cowardly rioters. Young Van de Grift, who was an excellent amateur boxer, joined in these frays with enthusiasm in defense of the Quakers. It was not only his fine American spirit of fair play that urged him into these fights, but he felt a deep gratitude to the Quakers all his life on account of his sister Matilda. Strangely enough, Grandfather Miller disapproved of young Van de Grift’s conduct. He scolded and fumed, and when, early one morning, his grandson was found on his door-step beaten black and blue, the unreasonable old man, utterly losing sight of the chivalric cause, sent the troublesome lad away — to the farthest place, in fact, that he could reach. This place turned out to be the frontier backwoods town of Indianapolis, Indiana.
Here Jacob’s attention was soon attracted by a pretty young woman, a tiny, dainty creature named Esther Keen (our mother, whom I have already described), who was on a visit to her sister. The records show that they were married in Philadelphia in 1837.
Jacob Van de Grift, about 56 years of age, father of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson.
Like many another irresponsible young man, Jacob Van de Grift married became quite a different person. Returning to Indianapolis, he built a house for himself with the aid of friends, and, launching out into the lumber business, soon became one of the prosperous and solid citizens of the place. His house was on the “Circle,” next door to Henry Ward Beecher’s church. This was Mr. Beecher’s first pastorate, and between him and his neighbour a warm friendship sprang up. In after years, when Beecher had become a national figure and scandal attacked his name, the friend of his youth, Jacob Van de Grift, clung loyally to his faith in his old pastor and firmly refused to believe any of the charges against him.
The little house on the Circle was made into a pleasant home partly by furniture sent by Jacob’s mother from Philadelphia, partly by articles made by himself, for he had served a short apprenticeship at cabinet-making while living in his grandfather’s house. Among other pieces of furniture made by him was the cradle in which Fanny Van de Grift was rocked. As long as she lived she never forgot just how this cradle looked.
Jacob Van de Grift, father of Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, was a fine-looking man, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, slightly above medium height, blue-eyed, black-haired, and with the regular features and rosy complexion of his Dutch ancestors. One particularly noticed the extraordinarily keen expression of his eyes, which seemed to pin you to the wall when he looked at you. This penetrating glance was inherited by his daughter Fanny, and was often remarked upon by those who met her. He made money easily but spent it royally, and, in consequence, died comparatively poor. He had a hasty temper but a generous heart, and while his hand was always open to the poor and unhappy, it was a closed fist ready to strike straight from the shoulder to resent an insult or defend the oppressed. Like his ancestor of the Andalusia cemetery, he could not endure to owe any man a debt. It was from our father that my sister Fanny inherited her broad and tolerant outlook on life, her hatred of injustice and cruelty, her punctiliousness in money matters, and her steadfast loyalty to friends.
CHAPTER II
EARLY DAYS IN INDIANA
When Jacob Van de Grift arrived in Indianapolis in 1836 the first rawness of frontier life had passed away, and many of the comforts of civilization had made their way out from the East or up from New Orleans. When he married Esther Keen he took her to live in the little red house, which, as I have already said, he had built next door to Henry Ward Beecher’s church, opposite the Governor’s Circle. Seven children in all were granted to them, of whom the eldest, a daughter, was born on March 10, 1840, in this same little red house on the Circle. When the infant was two years old she and her mother were taken into the Second Presbyterian Church, and were baptized by Henry Ward Beecher in the White River, in the presence of a concourse of several thousand spectators. The record of this noteworthy occasion is still preserved in the church at Indianapolis.
The little girl was named Frances Matilda, but when she grew older the second name was finally dropped. To her family and friends she was known as “Fa
nny.”
The main source, in fact almost the only one, from which I have been able to draw a description of the childhood of Fanny Stevenson is an article on early reminiscences written by my sister herself, which was found among her papers after her death. As she was always her own worst critic, she has dwelt on mischievous childish escapades and has said little of the sweetness and charm and warm generosity that even then drew all hearts to her. From this article, called A Backwoods Childhood, I quote the following extracts for the sake of the vivid picture they give of those Indiana days:
“Our life in the backwoods was simple and natural; we had few luxuries, but we had few cares. In our kitchen gardens potatoes, cabbages, onions, tomatoes, Indian corn, and numerous other vegetables grew most luxuriantly; and of fruits we had great abundance. We lived a natural life and were content. The loom and the spinning-wheel, though they had by this time largely disappeared from the towns, still had a place in every farmhouse. We raised our own food and made our own clothing, often of the linsey-woolsey woven by the women on their home-made looms. We breakfasted by the light of a tin lamp fed with lard, four o’clock being a not unusual hour, dined at noon, supped at five, and went to bed with the chickens. Our carpets were made of our old cast-off garments torn into strips, the strips then sewn together at the ends and woven into carpet breadths by a neighbor, who took her pay in kind. Wheat broken and steeped in water gave a fine white starch fit for cooking as well as laundry work. We tapped the maple tree for sugar, and drank our sassafras tea with relish. The virgin forest furnished us with a variety of nuts and berries and wild fruits, to say nothing of more beautiful wild flowers than I have seen in any other part of the world, and, laid up in the trunks of hollow trees, were rich stores of wild honey.
“Except for ague we had little sickness, and for ordinary ailments healing herbs waited everywhere for seeing eyes. These were calamus, bloodroot, snakeroot, slippery elm, tansy, and scores that I do not remember the names of. There was sumach for tanning and butternut for dyeing; hickory wood for our fires and hard black walnut for our house-building and fences. Everything that we needed for comfort or health was within reach of our hands. Nor in this wholesome simple life were the arts forgotten. Among us lived a poetess who is quoted wherever English is spoken. Theatricals were cultivated, and my father belonged to a Thespian society. We had good painters, too, and at this moment there hangs before me my father’s portrait at the age of twenty, done by Cox of Indianapolis, which has been praised and admired by both French and English artists of reputation.
“When we made maple sugar there were the great fires built out-of-doors with logs that needed the strength of two men to carry; the bubbling cauldrons, and the gay company of neighbors come to help; the camp where the work went on all night to the sound of laughter and song.
“And the woods, traversed by cool streams, where wild vines clambering from tree to tree made bowers fit for any fairy queen — what a place of enchantment for a child! There were may apples to be gathered and buried to ripen, and as you turned up the earth there was always the chance that you might find a flint arrowhead.
“Then, too, there were shell barks, hickory nuts, walnuts, and butternuts to be gathered, husked and dried, an operation which produced every fall a sudden eruption of the society of the ‘Black Hand’ among the boys and girls. Haw apples, elderberries, wild gooseberries, blackberries, and raspberries provided variety of refreshment. Or you might, as I often did, gather the wild grapes from over your head, press them in your hands, catch the juice in the neck of a dried calabash, and toss off the blood-red wine. With my romantic notions, imbibed from my reading, I always called it the blood-red wine, though it was in reality a rather muddy looking gray-colored liquid with the musky flavor peculiar to wild grapes. This wild dissipation I felt compelled to abandon after I joined a temperance society and wore a tinsel star on my breast.
“Through the little hamlet where I was born ran, like a great artery, the National Road. Starting in the far East, it crossed the continent, looked in on us rustics, and finally lost itself in the wilds of Illinois. Though we lay on the banks of a romantic river, and a canal, a branch of the Erie, languidly crawled beside us, breathing fever and ague as it passed, the Road was our only real means of communication with the outside world. The river, though of a good breadth, had too many shoals and rapids to be navigable; and though now and then boats crept along by the towpath of the canal, I never heard that they landed or received any produce. The streets of Indianapolis had no names then; it was too lost a place for that, and we just said the ‘main street.’ This was afterwards called Washington Street, and was really a part of the National Road. Oh but that was romantic to me, leading as it did straight out into the wide, wide world! At certain intervals, about once in two weeks, the weather and the state of the road allowing, a lumbering vehicle called a ‘mud wagon’ left for regions unknown to me with passengers and freight. I don’t know where it came from, but on its return it brought letters to my father from his mother, who lived in Philadelphia.
“Sometimes bands of Indians, wrapped in blankets, came through the town. They seemed friendly enough and no one showed any fear of them.
“We little girls wore pantalettes, to our ankles, and our dresses were whale-boned down the front, with very long bodices. We had wide flat hats trimmed with wreaths of roses and tied under our chins. We wore low necks and short sleeves summer and winter. I was thin but very tough. My Aunt Knodle made long mittens for me out of nankeen beautifully embroidered; they came up to my shoulders, and were sewn on every day to keep me from spoiling my hands. My hair was braided in front and my everyday gingham sunbonnet sewn to my hair. This was done in the vain hope of keeping off sunburn, for I was dark, like my mother, and my complexion was the despair of her life. Beauty of the fair blonde type was in vogue then, so that I was quite out of fashion. It was thought that if one was dark one had a wicked temper.”
In reality, Fanny, with her clear olive skin, her bright black eyes, her perfectly regular features, and mass of half-curling dark hair, was the prettiest in the family; but the dictates of fashion are imperious, so her mother put lotions on her face and her grandmother washed it with strong soap, saying: “She is that colour by nature — God made her ugly.” The little girl asked rather pathetically if they would not change her name to Lily, to which her mother replied: “You are a little tiger lily!” In after years in her many gardens in different parts of the world there were always tiger lilies growing. She was a high-spirited, daring creature, a little flashing firefly of a child, eagerly seeking for adventure, that might have brought upon her frequent punishment were it not that her parents held exceedingly liberal views in such matters. About this she says:
“Henry Ward Beecher and my father were great friends, and used to discuss very earnestly the proper method of bringing up children. At that time it was the custom to be extremely severe with youth, and such axioms as ‘spare the rod and spoil the child,’ ‘to be seen and not heard,’ were popular; so that the views held by Mr. Beecher and my father were decidedly modern. They argued that if a child was bad by nature it would grow up bad, and that if it was good it would grow up good, and that it was best not to interfere with the development of children’s characters, but to allow them to have their own way.”
As Esther Van de Grift limited her corrections of her children to an occasional mild remonstrance, they worked out their own individualities with little interference. Fanny was what the children called a “tomboy,” and always preferred the boys’ sports, the more daring the better. She roamed the woods with her cousin Tom Van de Grift, and the two kindred wild spirits climbed trees, forded streams up to their necks, did everything, in fact, that the most adventurous boy could think of. School was a secondary affair then, and, except for drawing and painting, in which she was thought to have a remarkable talent, Fanny paid little attention to her studies.
When she was a little girl she was caught in the wave of a gre
at temperance revival which was sweeping over the country, and, in her enthusiasm to aid in the work, she produced two drawings that caused a sensation. One, representing a rickety house with broken windows, a crooked weed-grown path leading up to a gate fallen off the hinges, and a fence with half the pickets off, she labelled “The Drunkard’s Home.” Then she drew a companion picture of a neat farmhouse with a straight path, and fence and gate all in apple-pie order, which she called “The Reformed Drunkard’s Home.” These two drawings she presented at a public meeting to Doctor Thompson, the leader of the movement. Fifty years afterwards she met Mrs. Thompson, who said she still had the pictures and thought them “very beautiful.”
In spite of her indifference to study she was very precocious, and learned to read at what was considered by her parents’ friends as an objectionably early age. Her father was very proud of the accomplishments of his little daughter, and liked to show her off before his friends, who, to speak the truth, looked with extreme disfavour upon the performance. Once Mr. Page Chapman, editor of a newspaper, put her through an examination on some subjects about which she had been reading in Familiar Science, a work arranged in the form of questions and answers. He asked: “What is the shape of the world?” “Round,” she replied. “Then why don’t we fall off?” he asked, and she answered: “Because of the attraction of gravitation.” “This is awful,” he said, in horror at such precocity.
Her father had a taste for verse, and often when walking with his children would recite a favourite poem, more, evidently, for his own amusement than theirs. Of this Fanny writes: “He used to declaim so often, in a loud, solemn voice, ‘My name is Norval — on the Grampian Hills my father feeds his flocks,’ that I naturally received the impression that these flocks and hills were part of my paternal grandfather’s estate. Years afterwards when I was travelling in Scotland and asked the name of some hills I saw in the distance, I felt a mental shock when told they were the Grampian Hills.”
Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) Page 859