To serve as the “In the Library” columnist, John Brisben Walker hired the twenty-seven-year-old journalist Elizabeth Bisland. It was an understandable choice on his part: Bisland was highly literary, with refined tastes and wide-ranging interests (the subjects covered in her first few columns included Tolstoy’s social gospel, the fourteenth-century tales of Don Juan Manuel, the collected poems of Emma Lazarus, and a new two-volume history of the Vikings by the Norwegian author Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen), and she had established herself as a frequent contributor to many of the city’s leading periodicals. An admiring item in The Journalist, published the month before her work began appearing in The Cosmopolitan, noted that “her talents have realized for her that recognition of publishers which gladdens the heart and burdens the purse.” Like every other contemporary journalistic account about her, this item remarked on her “great beauty,” and it also made reference to her “powerful friends” in the city. But it did not mention that Elizabeth Bisland had arrived in New York with no friends at all, and that those she now had scarcely knew how difficult the journey there had been.
ELIZABETH BISLAND’S EARLIEST memories were of water: of waves churning on the Mississippi River in endless permutations of dark and light, rising in gray curls and then sizzling down into white foam, strong enough to rock the steamboat on which she stood watching at the rail. She was four years old and traveling with her family from Mississippi to Louisiana, returning to the sugar cane plantation from which they had fled two years earlier. It was 1865, and the Civil War had just ended. She was with her mother and father, her older sister Mary Louise, whom everyone called Molly, and the baby Thomas Pressley, whom everyone called Pressley; she herself was Elizabeth Ker, and was called Bessie. She watched as the land moved slowly away, until she was surrounded by an immensity of water, a waving blue plain under a blue vault of sky. Then it was night and the sky was sprinkled with stars, and her family was waiting for another boat on the riverbank, her father having built a fire there as a signal. Earlier they had stopped on the porch of an old house, where the owner, wearing a black sunbonnet and black calico dress of mourning, gave them warm saleratus biscuits and buttermilk; it was all she had, she apologized, because of the war. The railroad had been torn up in the fighting; the only way to move now was by water. The moon rose large and orange, as though reflecting the glow of their fire, and after a long time the lights of a steamboat appeared on the horizon. The steamboat sailed through the night and into the next afternoon, dropping them at the mouth of a bayou where four rowboats awaited their arrival, propelled by black men dressed in overalls. When the family decamped for Mississippi the men had been slaves; now they were free, but they still called her father “Master.” The boats moved easily through the still brown water of the swamp, only the splash of the oars breaking the silence. Stands of cypress trees rose from the water, forming columns and arches above them, woolly tresses of Spanish moss hanging down below. The thick, hot air shone green in the gathering dusk. Finally the boats emerged into a clearing. In the distance stood a large white house that she did not recognize. Its pillared portico was spotty and charred, the brick chimney jagged at the top. Bullet holes scarred its face like pockmarks after an illness. A log barricade, crudely lashed together, hid most of the front yard; nearby a broken cannon listed uselessly to one side, the eye of its barrel staring unblinking at the sky.
For several months during the war the Bisland family’s estate, known as Fairfax, had served as the base of operations for troops under the command of the Confederate general Richard Taylor. On the morning of April 12, 1863, advancing Union forces launched a barrage of artillery fire against Taylor’s position; the rebels answered with their cannons. The battle went on until dark and then resumed the next day, now intensified by shelling from U.S. and Confederate gunboats stationed offshore. That night General Taylor, fearing that Union troops were about to cut off an escape route to the rear, ordered an immediate evacuation. The fierce two-day fight had produced hundreds of casualties on both sides, and would come to be known as the Battle of Fort Bisland.
Inside the house, Taylor’s men had hastily thrown up barriers to aid their retreat; for the rest of her life Elizabeth Bisland would remember how the family’s chairs and sofas were climbing over one another, as if in a panic to escape, against the battered front door. A huge mahogany bedstead, hacked and mangled, had been wedged fast on the front staircase. Paintings hung in grotesque tatters from their frames; torn books, their pages burned, were strewn around the fireplace. Overwhelmed by the devastation, her mother sat on the lowest stair and wept.
That night four-year-old Bessie and her five-year-old sister Molly slept rolled up in shawls on the floor; the South, they agreed, seemed much more interesting than the North, where they had always gone to sleep in a bed. During the war, as Union troops began their advance through Louisiana, their mother had fled with the two girls in an army ambulance, first to the home of her husband’s family in Mississippi and eventually to safer territory at her parents’ home in Brooklyn, New York, where they stayed for the remainder of the war. Their father had long been away from home, serving as a quartermaster sergeant in the Twenty-Sixth Louisiana Infantry. When the war ended, the Bisland family reunited in Mississippi and then made their way down the river back to Fairfax.
It was a while before even a semblance of order was restored in the house, and for a long time after that the children had to remember to sit carefully on the chairs with mended legs, and not lean too hard on the parlor table or move the little stool that hid the burned place in the carpet. Their father tried to paste the covers back on the damaged books, and he replaced as best he could the pages that had been torn out; those books would prove to be Elizabeth Bisland’s best teachers. Her actual schooling was conducted at home by her mother—there were no local schools, and not enough money to send the children away—though often the lessons were interrupted by the reveries about prewar life that now occupied so much of her mother’s attention: how her grandfather had owned a stable full of horses in Attakapas, and how they had never spent the hot season on the plantation but had always gone north to Saratoga, and how on her wedding day her father had given her a five-piece silver tea set, each piece engraved with anthemion and morning glories, and all on a silver tray. It was strange, Elizabeth thought as she listened, how a war could change people so completely. Before the war, it seemed, everyone had been good-looking and clever and rich; now there were lots of ugly and stupid people around, and no one seemed to have any money.
Her mother, Margaret Cyrilla Brownson Bisland—she was called Maggie—could trace her family back to the Leicester baronets of England in the early seventeenth century; Elizabeth’s great-grandmother on her mother’s side had been the second wife of the last Spanish governor of the province of Louisiana. Her father, too, could trace his family back to England, and in 1782 his ancestors had received their first territory in Mississippi as a land grant from the Spanish governor. At one time the Bisland family had owned six plantations and nearly four hundred slaves across Mississippi and Louisiana. Now Elizabeth’s father spent a lot of time chewing the ends of his bushy black mustache and looking worriedly up at the sky. One year there was a freak September snowfall, and despite the frantic work by every hand on the plantation to get the cane cut and into the boiling kettles, most of the year’s sugar crop was ruined. After that he rode to New Orleans carrying the silver epergnes and salvers and pitchers that had been hidden beneath the floor of the smokehouse during the war; when he returned home his cart was empty. Trained as a doctor, Thomas Shields Bisland had left medicine because he preferred the more leisurely life of a Southern planter, and in 1858 he had spent $112,000—his share of his father’s estate—to purchase Fairfax; now he milked the cows and fed the mule, chopped wood and tilled the garden. During the week he wore old checked shirts and cottonade trousers, and on Saturdays Elizabeth and her sister scrubbed his black clothes and filled in the seams with ink so he could wear them
in church the next day. The family sewed their own clothes, boiled their own soap, and brewed their own medicines. Most of the time they ate hominy made from whole corn kernels, which they called, in the Louisiana fashion, “big hominy.” After suppers came the long evenings sitting out on the gallery, when Tom would lean back in his chair and smoke his meerschaum pipe, brooding about the Yankee carpetbaggers who had let in all that cheap Cuban sugar (never did he begin to suspect that the plantation system—ever so slightly modified after the Southern defeat to include meager wages for its former slaves—might itself be the culprit, that feudalism could never compete with modern capitalism), while Maggie reflected aloud about how that silver tea set had been engraved with her own initials, M.C.B., and how her father had always been able to get money when he needed it, and how Southern men had seemed ever so much more energetic and capable before the war. The only relief came on the nights when they went to dinner at their cousins’ house, where there was chicken gravy and sweet potato pone and watermelon pickle, and talk around the table turned to who had really written the Letters of Junius and whether, as her father always insisted, English poetry had ended with Byron. “The conversation impressed me,” Elizabeth Bisland would later write, “as having risen to the highest levels.”
Like many of their neighbors, Tom and Maggie Bisland held strongly to the belief that children were by nature sinful and the proper role of the parent was that of a missionary among pagans. Children should be taught to obey their parents and distrust their native instincts; to be irreverent, or careless, or impatient, or untidy—to be, that is, at all childish—was deemed not just wrong but wicked, and the offender was duly punished, in the time-honored adage, “for your own good.” Even the harshest beatings, it was solemnly affirmed, were being delivered in the spirit of loving kindness, and had as their justification infallible scripture, in the injunction from wise King Solomon that to spare the rod was to spoil the child. The Bisland children were ordered to read a chapter from each Testament every morning and evening, and on Sundays secular reading of any type was strictly forbidden; instead, the time was spent memorizing selected hymns, psalms, and Bible chapters, and any straying from letter perfection brought corrective discipline. Yet Elizabeth did, in her own way, find escape. From a very young age she was losing herself in the books that she found on the shelves at home, not the didactic children’s tales prescribed by her parents but the six thick volumes bound in polished tree calf that contained the complete plays of Shakespeare, and novels by Cervantes and Zola, and a long row of black-bound volumes collectively entitled The British Poets, in which she discovered for the first time the work of Pope and Keats and Sir Walter Scott, and committed to memory the whole of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” for the sheer enjoyment of it, and marveled to herself at the unexpected pleasure she took in repeating “The mountains look on Marathon—And Marathon looks on the sea.” She read every book she could get her hands on, and did not let on to any adults what she was doing. “I was quite old enough to realize that my pastors and masters would be convulsed with horror did they at all suspect what I was at,” she would later write. “I had intelligence enough not to chatter about every book I opened.”
Mount Repose (Illustration Credit 3.1)
Each year, it seemed, another child arrived; by 1874 there were nine Bisland children in all, two of whom died of tuberculosis. In 1873, when Elizabeth was twelve years old, her father inherited the house in which he had grown up in Natchez, Mississippi, and the family moved there from Louisiana. Mount Repose was a large, gracious two-story plantation house amid a grove of live oaks. The doorway was hand carved, and inside were numerous historical pieces, including a desk once used by Aaron Burr; on the walls hung portraits of generations of Bislands. The Bisland who oversaw construction of the house in 1824, Tom’s father William, had been a great admirer of the Kentucky politician Henry Clay, the longtime Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. According to Bisland family lore, William had vowed that his house’s front drive would remain unbuilt until Clay was elected president; half a century later, Thomas Bisland and his family, like all other visitors before or since, entered Mount Repose by the side gate.
Perhaps it was the family’s increasingly straitened circumstances, now placed in such stark relief by the luxuriousness of their surroundings—and made worse by having to live with those more prosperous Bislands always gazing down at them—but the move to Mississippi seemed only to exacerbate the tension within the family. Maggie wanted to move back to New York, where her father had established himself as a wealthy attorney, but Tom would not hear of it; once an argument grew so heated that she pushed a grandfather clock down the stairs at him. On at least one occasion the couple separated, with Tom going to live with a nephew back in Louisiana.
In her youth Maggie had considered herself a poet; now she began writing poetry for a newspaper that had recently been founded in New Orleans, the Times-Democrat. The poems weren’t especially good but they helped the family make ends meet. Elizabeth, too, had begun writing poetry, in private. She worked on her poems whenever she could wrest a few minutes from the hours spent helping her mother care for the younger children, writing in the remotest parts of the garden or high in the stable loft, far from the prying eyes of her family, like Jo March in her ink-stained pinafore scribbling away in the garret. When she had to stop, she stored her work in a secret cupboard that she had found in the house; previous occupants had used the cupboard to hide money, and now the poems became for Elizabeth Bisland a valuable cache of her own, concealed from discovery by potential invaders, a bulwark against future uncertainty.
When she was twenty years old, Bisland decided that the time had come to submit her work for publication, and under the nom de plume of B.L.R. Dane she sent a Christmas sonnet to the Times-Democrat; to mail it she walked several miles to a neighboring town so that the postmark would not betray the poem’s origins. In the days that followed, she eagerly scanned the pages of the newspaper, and one morning she was secretly thrilled to see her poem included in its Christmas edition. Her initial success encouraged her to submit several more poems, also pseudonymous, composed in a variety of poetic forms—including sonnets, villanelles, and a rondeau with the arresting title of “Dead! Dead!”:
O fierce wild wind that in thy moaning pain
Beats’t with wet fingers on my door in vain!
Dost thou come from the graves with that sad cry
That pleads for entrance—that, denied, goes by,
And faints to tears amidst the freezing rain?
In here the glowing fire leaps amain
And from its red heart casts a ruddy stain:
Here is no thought of death or men that die—
O fierce wild wind!
Why shouldst thou come, then, to my window-pane
To wring thy hands and weep and sore complain
That they alone, and wet, and cold must lie
In dark, deep graves, and we breathe not a sigh?
We had forgot—the quick and dead are twain,
O fierce wild wind!
The newspaper’s literary editor, Lafcadio Hearn, thought this poem “exquisite,” revealing “a power of weird fancy worthy of any literary celebrity.” Edgar Allan Poe was clearly an influence—she was a great admirer of his poetry—but other poems of hers did not lean so heavily on gothic effect, such as a poem in quatrains called “Mardi Gras” that vividly presented a nighttime street carnival as seen from a balcony overhead. Her most ambitious poem was the one entitled “Caged,” a four-stanza ballade about a songbird who vainly beats against the bars of her golden cage, longing to feel the “grey and patient sand” and the dawn breezes that “come up across the lea / With wild wet feet.” She imagines the thunderous wings of the seabirds over the water and curses the gods for having so confined her, lamenting at the end of each stanza: “Alas!” she saith,—“how sweet the world outside.”
As the poems continued to arrive
in the newspaper office, Hearn would later recall, “considerable curiosity was aroused in regard to the personality of the author,” so much so that eventually Page M. Baker, the editor in chief of the Times-Democrat, wrote to Maggie Bisland to ask if she happened to know of any poets in her area by the name of Dane. When Maggie mentioned the unusual query at supper that night, Elizabeth shyly confessed that she was the mysterious poet. Tom and Maggie were astonished—not just by their Bessie’s unsuspected talent, but also that she had successfully hidden her literary aspirations for so long—though their astonishment was hardly greater than that of Baker himself, who later admitted that he had imagined B.L.R. Dane to be an elderly man who had once lived in England.
THE ACTUAL B.L.R. DANE was about to turn twenty-one, old enough, she felt, finally to move away from home and get a job to help support the family. Though she hadn’t published anything beyond those poems in the Times-Democrat, Elizabeth Bisland already recognized herself to be a natural writer, someone who could produce work quickly and with little need of revision; she would later characterize herself as one of a “mob of gentlewomen who wrote with ease.” She wrote to the Times-Democrat asking about the possibility of obtaining a position on the paper, and she was soon hired. In the winter of 1882 she set off for New Orleans, with the promise that she would send back as much money as she could.
Bisland took a small whitewashed room on the third floor of a cheap boardinghouse on the Rue Royale in the French Quarter, where vacancies were signaled by a sign that read CHAMBRES À LOUER dangling by a string from one of the balconies. The room looked out on a world far removed from any she had known before. The French Quarter was home to the dignified and the disreputable alike, and every block seemed to whisper of secrets: wherever one turned there were shuttered windows, locked gates, narrow alleys, private courtyards. On the famous wrought-iron balconies of the Quarter the metal seemed to come alive with a profusion of vines, flowers, and fruit, the filigree as complex and delicate as lace. Just down the street from her boardinghouse the stately marble-fronted Merchants’ Exchange had lately been turned into an immense gambling palace that offered its patrons games from keno to roulette, with no limit placed on bets. There were barrel houses, dance halls, and concert cafés where the din of raucous, drunken laughter competed with a fiddle’s wail and the tinkle of a cheap piano, and at the front door, always, bouncers stood guard wearing brass knuckles on both hands. At the intersection of Royal and Canal was Monkey Wrench Corner, a gathering place for local sailors, especially ones who were currently out of work (“monkeys,” in the local argot) and looking to borrow money from (“put the wrench on”) those fortunate enough to have a ship. She must have felt a sharp pang of memory when she first saw, by that same corner, the twenty-foot-high monument to Henry Clay.
Eighty Days Page 7