The Ten Thousand Doors of January

by Alix E. Harrow

  (This, at least, is what a daguerreotype would have recorded, if Ade had ever posed for one. But photographs, like mirrors, are notorious liars. The truth is: Adelaide was the most beautiful being I have seen in this world or any other, if we understand beauty to be a kind of vital, ferocious burning at a soul’s center that ignites everything it touches.)

  But still, something in her eyes made wise boatmen hesitate—something that spoke of abandon and fearlessness, a person dangerously unmoored from her own future. It was pure chance that the Southern Queen was piloted by an inexperienced captain who had hired three drunks and a thief upriver and was so eager to replace them that he hired Ade without asking anything beyond her name and destination. The Queen’s logs record these as Larson and Elsewhere.

  It is at this moment, just as Ade’s feet danced their way onto the whitewashed deck boards of a Mississippi steamer, that we must pause. Miss Larson’s life heretofore has been an unusual story but not a mysterious or unknowable one. It has been possible to act as a historian, sifting through interviews and evidences to create a tolerable narrative of a girl’s growing up. But from this moment forward Ade’s story grows grander, stranger, and wilder. She steps into fable and folktale, sideways and unseen, slipping through the fissures of recorded history the way smoke rises through dense canopy. No scholar, no matter how clever or meticulous, can map smoke and myth onto the page.

  Ade herself has declined to divulge more than a handful of dates or details, and so from here, and for the next many years of her life, our story must become a series of scattered glimpses.

  We are therefore ignorant about her months aboard the Southern Queen. We cannot know how the work suited her, whether her crewmates were charmed or spooked by her, or what she thought of the mud-colored towns scudding by on the banks. We cannot know if she stood on the deck sometimes with her face turned to the southern wind and felt freed from the smallness of her youth, although she was later seen aboard a very different ship in a very different place, looking out at the horizon as if her very soul had unfurled and stretched out to meet it.

  We do not even know if she first heard the story of the boo hag while she worked up and down the river, although it seems very likely. It has been this scholar’s experience that stories slide up and down rivers alongside boats, trailing like silver mermaids in their wake, and the tale of the boo hag was probably swimming among them in those days. Perhaps the story reminded Ade of the haunted cabin in her old hayfield and wakened the dusty promises of her fifteen-year-old self. Or perhaps it merely struck her fancy.

  All we can say with certainty is this: in the warm winter of 1886, Adelaide Larson went into the St. Ours mansion in the Algiers district of New Orleans and did not emerge again for sixteen days.

  We must rely here on the testimony of two locals who spoke to Ade before she walked through. Though many years passed before I was able to track them down and record their memories, Mr. and Mrs. Vicente LeBlanc insisted that their retelling was absolutely accurate because the circumstances themselves were so singular: they were strolling along Homer Street at ten o’clock in the evening, having retired from a dance hall in good spirits (Mrs. LeBlanc insisted they had been at evening mass; Mr. LeBlanc assumed an expression of studied neutrality). The couple was approached by a young woman.

  “She was—well, I have to tell you she was a powerfully odd girl. Kind of grubby, and dressed like a dock worker in canvas trousers.” Mrs. LeBlanc was too polite to provide additional detail, but we may also assume that she was very young, alone, wandering at night in a city she didn’t know, and whiter than flour.

  Mr. LeBlanc gave a conciliatory shrug. “Well, who knows, Mary. She seemed lost.” He clarified: “I don’t mean she was lost like a child. She wasn’t worried. She was lost on purpose, I’d say.”

  The young woman asked them a series of questions. Was this Elmira Avenue? Was Fortuna Manor nearby? How high was the fence around it, and were they aware of any medium-to-large dogs in the vicinity? Finally: “Do either y’all know the story of John and the Boo Hag?”

  Any right-thinking person might be forgiven for simply walking in a wide arc around such a madwoman, and casting nervous glances over their shoulders to make sure she wasn’t trailing after them. But Mary LeBlanc possessed the sort of reckless compassion that led people to give money to strangers and invite beggars in for supper. “Elmira is a block west, miss,” she told the strange woman.

  “Huh. City could do with one or three street signs, if you ask me.”

  “Yes, miss.” Both Mary and Vicente LeBlanc report lots of misses and pardon-mes, presumably because even a powerfully odd white woman was still a white woman. Perhaps they feared a fairy-tale-like test, where the beggar woman transforms into a witch and punishes you for your poor manners.

  “And is that house on it? Fortuna something?”

  The LeBlancs looked at one another. “No, miss, I never heard of it.”

  “Shit,” said the white woman, and spat, with the half-conscious drama of a nineteen-year-old, on the cobbled street.

  Then Mary LeBlanc asked, “Did you mean—there’s the St. Ours place, up Elmira a ways.” Vincente recalls clenching his elbow around her arm, trying his best to telegraph a warning. “It’s a manor house. Been empty my whole life.”

  “Might be.” The girl’s eyes were cat-sharp on Mary’s face.

  Mary found herself half whispering. “Well, it’s just you mentioned that story, and I always heard—they’re just stories, mind, and no educated person ought to think much on them—but I always heard John Prester lived in St. Ours. And that’s where he met the boo hag,4 miss.”

  A Cheshire smile, all teeth and want, crept over the girl’s face. “You don’t say. My name’s Ade Larson. Could I trouble you with another few questions, miss?”

  She asked them to tell the whole story as they knew it, about the handsome young John who found himself tired and gray every morning, with tangled dreams of starlit skies and wild rides. She asked them if anybody ever went into St. Ours (sometimes, young boys, daring each other). She asked them if they came back out again (of course! Except—well, there were rumors. Boys who spent the night in there and didn’t come out again for a year and a day. Boys who hid in closets and found themselves dreaming of faraway countries).

  “Now, just one last crumb, my friends: How did this boo hag character get into the house in the first place? How’d she find poor John?”

  The LeBlancs looked at one another, and even Mary’s softheartedness was beginning to be troubled by the intensity of the young woman. It wasn’t merely the oddness of her situation, dressed for labor and wandering around at night; it was the way her face seemed lit with a gaslamp glow of its own making, the way she seemed simultaneously to be the hunter and the hunted, running away from something and toward something else.

  But few people can leave a story unfinished, with a raveled end left trailing. “Same way a hag gets into anybody’s house, miss. They find a crack, or a hole, or a unlocked door.”

  The girl gave the couple a beatific smile, swept them a bow, and headed west.

  She wasn’t seen again for sixteen days, when a group of young boys rolling hoops down the street saw a white woman emerge from St. Ours. They described her appearance as “witchy”: her practical clothing hung in ragged tatters around her, supplemented by a strange cloak of oiled black feathers; her eyes were wind-whipped and her smile at the night sky was sly, as if she and the stars were on familiar terms.

  When the boys questioned her about her activities, the girl failed to provide any clear explanation beyond a few senseless descriptions of high mountain peaks and black pine boughs and lights in the sky like pink silk pinned to the stars.

  When I asked her myself what she’d seen through the door—for there must have been a door—she only laughed. “Why, the boo hags, of course!” And when I frowned at her she shushed me: “Listen, not every story is made for telling. Sometimes just by telling a story you’re stealin
g it, stealing a little of the mystery away from it. Let those witch women be, I say.”

  I did not know what she meant at the time. I had a scholar’s hunger to reveal and explain, to make the unknown known—but in the case of the St. Ours door I was foiled. I traced her footsteps up Elmira Avenue and found a whitewashed mansion sinking into the sweet rot of magnolia blooms, simultaneously grand and half-forgotten. I made plans to return in the evening to conduct further explorations, but that was the night of the Great Algiers Fire of 1895. By midnight the sky was golden orange and by dawn the entire block, including the St. Ours mansion, was nothing but a sooty skeleton of itself.

  Remember this fire. Remember that it raged from no clear origin and paid no heed to hoses or buckets of water until every grand, sagging inch of St. Ours was burned to ash.

  But still, I record these recollections because St. Ours was the first door I found in this world, and the second door Miss Larson found. With the finding of a door comes change.

  Later, Ade would refer to the period between roughly 1885 and 1892 as her “hungry years.” When asked what she was hungry for, she laughed and said, “Same thing as you, I bet. Ways-between. Nowheres. Somewheres.” She scoured the Earth, wandering and ravenous, looking for doors.

  And she found them.5 She found them in abandoned churches and the salt-rimed walls of caves, in graveyards and behind fluttering curtains in foreign markets. She found so many her imagining of the world grew lacy and tattered with holes, like a mouse-chewed map. I followed her in my own time and rediscovered as many as I could. But doors by their natures are openings, passings-through, missing-places—and it has proved difficult to record the precise geometry of absence. My notes are full of dead ends and uncertainties, whispers and rumors, and even my most careful reports are full of unanswered questions hovering like gray angels in the margins.

  Consider the Platte River door. Ade’s iridescent trail led back up the Mississippi and westward and eventually to a gentleman named Frank C. True. When I spoke to Mr. True in 1900, he was a trick-rider in W. J. Taylor’s Great American Double Circus, Huge World’s Museum, Caravan, Hippodrome, Menagerie and Congress of Wild and Living Animals.

  Frank was a dark-haired, flint-eyed man whose charm and talent expanded his presence far past the bounds of his own small frame. When I mentioned Ade, his performer’s smile turned wistful.

  “Yes. Course I remember her. Why? You her husband or something?” After assuring him I was no jealous lover come to claim a decade-old slight, he sighed back into his camp chair and told me about their meeting in the hot summer of 1888.

  He saw her first in the audience of Dr. Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition, where Frank was wild-westing as a Genuine Plains Indian for a dollar a day. She was conspicuously alone on the wooden benches, tangle-haired and grimy, dressed with a scavenger’s abandon in oversized boots and a man’s shirt. She stayed through the bloody reenactment of Custer’s Last Stand, cheered during the demonstration of mustang lassoing even though the “mustang” was a round-bellied pony no wilder than a house cat, and whistled when Frank won the Indian Race. He winked at her. She winked back.

  When Dr. Carver’s Rocky Mountain and Prairie Exhibition rolled out of Chicago the following evening, Ade and Frank were both crammed in his cubby in the performers’ railcar. In this way Ade suffered precisely the sort of fall from grace her aunts and grandmother most feared, and in so doing made a discovery: fallen women are afforded a species of freedom.6 There were certainly social costs—several of the women performers refused to speak to Ade at the lunch tents, and men made unfortunate assumptions about her availability—but in general Ade’s horizons expanded rather than shrank. She found herself surrounded by a bustling underworld of men and women who had each fallen in their own ways through drink or vice or passion or the mere colors of their skin. It was almost like finding a door within her very own world.

  Frank reports a few weeks of contentment, rattling up and down the eastern United States in the blue-and-white painted cars of the Rocky Mountain show, but then Ade began to grow restless. Frank told her stories to distract her.

  “Red Cloud, I said, now, have I ever told you about him? I swear I never met a woman more in love with a good story.” Frank told her about the valiant young Lakota chief who brought a new and terrible hell to the U.S. Army and the Powder River garrisons. He told her about the chief’s uncanny ability to foresee the outcomes of battles using a handful of carved bones. “Now, he never would say where he got those bones, but there were rumors that he’d disappeared for a year as a boy, and returned carrying a bag of bones from some other place.”

  “Where did he disappear to?” Ade asked, and Frank recalled that her eyes had grown round and black as new moons.

  “Somewhere up the North Platte River, I guess. Wherever it was, maybe he went back there, because he disappeared after they found gold in the Black Hills and broke the treaty. Heartbroke, I guess.”

  Ade was gone before dawn. She left a note, which Mr. True declined to share but which he still possesses, and the oversized boots that fit Frank better anyway. Mr. True never saw or heard from her again.

  If there was a door someplace on the North Platte, Nebraska, I never found it. The town when I found it was brutally poor, wind-scourged, bitter. An old man in a dingy barroom told me flatly that I ought to leave and not return, because if there was any such place it certainly didn’t belong to me, and he couldn’t see that the Oglala Lakota had ever come to any good showing off their secrets to strangers. I left town the following morning.

  This was merely one of dozens of doors Ade discovered during her hungry years. Included below is a partial list of those that have been confirmed by this author:

  In 1889 Ade was on Prince Edward Island working for an aged potato farmer in pursuit of something she called “silky stories,” which were probably selkies. The farmer told her about a long-dead neighbor who found a young woman down by the sea caves. The woman’s eyes were set oddly far apart, oily black, and she didn’t speak a word of any human language. Ade spent the following days exploring the coastal caves herself, until one afternoon she failed to return. The poor potato farmer was convinced she’d drowned, until she reappeared eight days later smelling of cool, secret oceans.

  In 1890 Ade was working on a steamer weaving its way through the Bahamas like a drunken seagull, when she apparently heard stories about Toussaint Louverture’s rebellion and the way his troops simply melted into the highlands and disappeared, almost like magic. The shipping routes at that time curved around Haiti as if it had the plague, so Ade abandoned her post on the steamer and bribed a fisherman to take her from Matthew Town to the wrinkled green coast of Haiti.

  She found Toussaint’s door after weeks of stumbling along the mud-slicked logging trails of the highlands. It was a long tunnel, tangled in the roots of a gnarled acacia tree. She never described what she found on the other side, and we may never know now: the acreage was purchased, logged, and converted to sugar production several years later.

  In the same year she followed stories of ice-eyed monsters whose gaze could turn unwary persons to stone and ended up in a tiny, forgotten church in Greece. There she found a door (black, frost-limned) and went through it. She discovered a wind-torn, brutally cold world on the other side, which she would have happily abandoned except that she was immediately set upon by a band of wild, pale folk dressed in animal skins. As she later reported, they stole everything she owned “down to her underthings,” shouted at her for a while, then dragged her before their chieftainess, who did not shout but merely fixed her gaze on Ade and whispered to her.

  “And I could almost understand her, my hand to God. She was telling me how I ought to join their tribe, fight their enemies, add wealth to their coffers, et cetera. I swear I almost did. Something about those eyes—light-colored, powerful cold. But in the end I declined.” Ade did not elaborate on the consequences of her refusal, but Greek locals report seeing a wild-eyed Amer
ican woman wandering the streets with nothing but a fur cloak, mild frostbite, and a rather vicious-looking spear. (My own experience with this particular door will be recounted at a later date.)

  In 1891 Ade discovered a tiled archway in the shadows of the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul, and returned with great golden disks she claimed were dragon scales. She visited Santiago and the Falklands, contracted malaria in Léopoldville, and disappeared for several months in the northeast corner of Maine. She accumulated the dust of other worlds on her skin like ten thousand perfumes, and left constellations of wistful men and impossible tales in her wake.

  But she never lingered anywhere for long. Most observers told me she was simply a wanderer, driven to move from place to place by the same unknowable pressures that make swallows fly south, but I believe she was something closer to a knight on a quest. I believe she was looking for one particular door and one particular world.

  In 1893, in the high, snowcapped spring of her twenty-seventh birthday, she found it.

  The story traveled in the usual way of stories, slithering from mouth to mouth along the railways and roads like a contagion moving along arteries. By February 1893, it had sifted into Taft, Texas, and permeated the walls of the cottonseed mill where Ade Larson was employed. Her fellow workers recall a particular lunch hour: They were gathered with their tin pails behind the mill, breathing the oil-sticky steam and the green rot scent of cottonseed hulls, listening to Dalton Gray’s daily report of barroom gossip. He told them about a pair of trappers up north who came down from the Rockies raving mad, swearing on everything they held dear that they’d found an ocean at the top of Mount Silverheels.

  The workers laughed, but Ade’s voice thudded into their laughter like a hatchet into a stump. “How do you mean, they found an ocean?”