Her brother gave details that serve to fill out her tales, but he omitted many references that would match hers: Albany, Greenbush, Canada, Indians, etc. It is likely he found the association with Indians – which drove her career – would not be helpful to his. He wrote only that he traveled from 1847 to the spring of 1852, working as a barber. Perhaps he roamed with the tribe, entertaining, shaving, and cutting hair as they peddled their crafts at local fairs. In his later years, he entertained at public events, singing and playing a banjo, harp, or guitar. Their tales begin to mesh only after 1852.
Sorting through published sources, archived letters, records, etc., led us to question many published claims, including some of our own. The wrong birth year of 1845, traceable to the American Cyclopedia (1883), can be corrected. Inferences drawn from Canadian records pointed to a colored grandfather named Lewis living with the Mississauga Chippewa in Ontario, Canada.[22] A later comparison with the 1851 Canadian census dispatched that notion as baseless.
More interestingly, we came to believe her brother hid his Haitian birth all his life as he did his teen years with the Indians.[23] Their father was too young to have experienced the bloody war – but not too young to have absorbed its militant message of equality without exception, passed it to his son, and cautioned him appropriately.
As an adult, Edmonia had her own secrets. One was her brother’s name. Her interviews and letters by her friends refer to him only as her “brother” or as “Sunrise” (his “Indian name”). Aside from his obituary, discovered in 1990 and quoted here, we found no descriptions or photos of him and no witness accounts of his visits with her in Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc. He lived as a frontier businessman and died an esteemed citizen of Bozeman, Montana. After his death, the mayor eulogized him as “very much of a white man … white in his entire make up – physically, socially, intellectually, morally.” Edmonia denied having white blood, but the mayor’s remarks suggest a “white lie” in her attempts to impress her blood-obsessed fans – or the mayor’s use of the word “white” as a metaphor of praise.
A secret of her young adulthood was her Roman Catholic childhood religion. Earnest Protestants, who controlled the communities where she lived from 1856 to 1865, rejected the Catholic Church. She claimed her mother was Chippewa, but the nearest Chippewa, who lived in Canada near Niagara Falls, were avid Wesleyan Methodists. Only long after she fully settled in Rome did she make clear she was not raised as a Protestant. In 1879, the New York Times reported, “her creed and blood did not harmonize with the precision and method of Oberlin.” The “black robes” from whom she had learned prayers with the tribe in Canada, used the Indian term popularized by Longfellow for French Jesuit missionaries.[24] As an adult in Italy, she took the baptismal name Maria Ignatia[25] – another Jesuit connection. St. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus. That she did not receive the sacrament as a child tells us her parents were not practicing Catholics.
The repeated Jesuit references point to the Mohawks living 250 miles north of Albany, on the Québec frontier with New York State. In the 1800s, they were the only Catholic tribe in the region still served by Jesuits.[26] They also had a remarkable tradition of adopting outsiders to fill their ranks – some captured, some refugees or wanderers – allowing for a displaced Chippewa woman and her family to settle in their midst and join local trade and customs. Notably, around 1864, Edmonia said her Indian name was Suhkuhegarequa,[27] a Chippewa word that literally means “fire-making-woman.” We take this as a poetic bow to her fitting in with local ways in her pre-teen years. The Mohawks still call themselves “People of the Flint,” flint symbolizing the key to making fire. Other tribes speaking Algonquin languages (which include Chippewa) called Mohawks the “fire-making” people.
French Jesuits set up many North American missions in the seventeenth century. Recalled and replaced as the French withdrew from Canada after 1763, a few remained to serve Mohawk fur traders in the St. Lawrence Valley. By the time of Edmonia’s childhood, they had well-established mission churches for the St. Regis Akwesasne Mohawk Nation, including Kahnawake (Caughnawaga), Québec, about 60 miles south of Montréal. After the War of Independence, the U. S. / Canadian frontier bisected the tribal area, giving the Mohawks free passage but creating a fertile field for administrative conflicts. In Canada, tension between the official Church of England and the Roman Catholic Jesuits afflicted the quality of education. South of the frontier, New York State built and furnished a secular school in 1847.[28] Possibly her brother took lessons there. He chose an Albany education for his young sister.
To earn a living, the tribe depended on tourists who bought crafts and river tours. In the summer, some members of the tribe traveled through the Mohawk Valley and Finger Lakes selling herbal remedies door-to-door and entertaining at county fairs.[29] Edmonia described similar activities of her mother and their people, peddling beaded moccasins, baskets, pincushions, etc. – naming Genesee Falls, Watkins’s Glen and Niagara Falls – then going to New York City to replenish supplies. The period of her parents’ deaths also approximates scourges of cholera, small pox, and typhus that decimated the St. Regis Mohawks.[30]
That both Edmonia and her mother were born and lived in the Albany area also weighs against the idea she lived with the Chippewa tribe. The nearest Chippewa lived 300 miles to the west, near Niagara Falls in Canada – never around Albany. (Catholic Chippewa lived eight hundred miles from Albany NY in upper Michigan and Wisconsin where Longfellow set The Song of Hiawatha.) In 1869, Edmonia recounted a visit to her mother’s kin at Niagara Falls.[31]
Niagara Falls is near Mississauga Chippewa settlements, but the reference proves nothing. It was the number one attraction for anyone on America’s grand tour, boasting forty thousand visitors a year by the late 1840s. In August 1869, St. Regis Mohawks were probably there selling souvenirs to tourists, side by side with local Tuscarora, Chippewa, and other Indians. Moreover, the Niagara peninsula also served as home to the Grand River First Nations, including Mohawks who came from Albany in 1784.
At the time, the Mohawk label could be almost as scary to some New Yorkers as Haiti was to slaveholders. Long before the American Revolution, the Mohawks prevailed around Albany. Their rivals called them man-eating cannibals. The Mohawks scared their neighbors with Dutch guns and impressed their allies with proverbs like: We are all of the race of the bear, and a bear never yields while one drop of blood is left. Stories circulated about their uncanny ability to withstand the most horrific tortures.
In colonial times, the Albany Mohawks had joined the Church of England and followed King George III during the Revolution. They took colonial scalps on his behalf. After losing, they fled to Ontario, Canada, where the King provided compensation. In the 1850s, the Mohawks retained infamy as the most bloodthirsty warriors in the world.[32] That the other Mohawks in upstate New York and Québec had not joined the English made little difference to colonial families harboring bitter grievances directed at one tribe or another. They had terrorized American soldiers in the War of 1812, a history that pleases them to this day.
Our narrative, below, shows how Edmonia repeatedly adjusted her story and her course, choosing her battles and avoiding the unwinnable. It would take only one or two unhappy incidents to convince her that the Mohawk brand was a liability.
Sojourning
At Oberlin, Edmonia was unlike most colored folk. She lacked full membership in any race, religion, class, or special society. The College eagerly embraced her, boarding her on the north side of town with one of its most respected families. The choice meant more as a model of its credo than any intent to make her a friend, companion, or bride. No Catholic service was available, and she quietly melted into the austerity of the College’s Calvinist rigor. As a student, she was ignored by the 1860 census. As an orphan, she lacked any other home. When most students retreated over winter recess, she stayed and studied extra courses in algebra, botany, composition, or rhetoric. To the world and in the looking gl
ass, she bore the brand of Africa. That she showed no hint of colored ways and lived with whites (rather than with a colored family on the south side of town) put off Oberlin’s colored community.
She always spoke of her life with wild Indians living in the forest. To those who suspect this was a pose to separate her from southern field hands, we say she had no other past. For years, she would give observers impressions that she spoke and thought more like Chippewa than like colored Americans. Their comments (all post-Oberlin) tell us more about them than about her. An 1867 article called her “the youthful Indian girl.”[33] In 1871, Laura Curtis Bullard, noted, “if she has more of the African in her personal appearance, she has more of the Indian in her character.” The next year, a collector described her as “a Chippeway Indian sculptor” and noted her colorful gratitude, “the Good Spirit always sends me friends.” She cited the “Great Spirit” in an 1876 interview. A Bostonian in 1883, asked, “Why not [call her] the Indian sculptress?”
The Indian sculptress would earn no public honors among the Indians. The press rarely failed to trumpet her Chippewa past. Yet, we found no sign that any Indian ever returned her tribute. Her father was not a member of the tribe, thus she had no totem. Unlike Mohawks, Chippewa recognize no legacy through a mother.[34] By the same token, no Mohawk would notice a colored person calling herself Chippewa. Despite critics’ praise of her Hiawatha subjects as “authentic,” they were still fictional characters from the pen of a white poet. Aside from speaking of her “burden of two despised races,”[35] the record seems to say she took no occasion to remind anyone of important issues: broken treaties, the oppression of spreading European settlement, and the distress of Native sovereignties.
She would never revise her claim to the Chippewa brand. It was a key to her success. Notably, her muse, Longfellow, had applied the name of a Mohawk chief, Hiawatha, to the Chippewa myths he had adapted for his American epic.[36] No consumer or critic seemed to care.
Forced to be on her own at an early age, she could have shown a cynical desperation. Instead, she swallowed the angst that comes from life’s unfairness and did her best to adapt. Like Pip in Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861), she went all out to reach beyond her beginnings. She fit in gracefully, passing in a cocoon of Protestant, biracial, and Chippewa camouflage. Such secrets must have reined her in tighter than a whalebone corset. Combined with Oberlin’s puritanical dread of premarital sex, they gave her no chance of real closeness to anyone.
She sought instead to rouse respect from a distance by choosing an unexpected path. For Oberlin, art was a mere pastime and not held in high regard. Fostering purity through self-denial, its leaders rejected fashion and ornaments in favor of prayer and hard work. Beyond its “ladies” drawing class, Oberlin had little decoration, no sculpture, and a lack of interest in a career in the visual arts.
By 1862, the Civil War had become a death machine. Grief ground away at families torn by bloody battle and awful disease. Old rules lost their energy to chaos and uncertainty. The College bestowed degrees in absentia to students who had joined Company C of the Ohio Seventh Regiment Volunteer Infantry.[37] Many had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner.
A local colored girl, Mary Jane Patterson, would soon earn Oberlin’s AB degree – an honor once reserved for men. She presented a serious challenge to doctrines of race. White women had ruptured the gender barrier twenty years before. The most progressive Oberlinites marveled at Mary Jane’s intelligence, courage, excellence, and self-esteem. To others, she was surely a source of anxiety, even embarrassment. Some warned an educated colored girl could not find a husband. Some thought colored people should just leave the country.
The Spirit of Change, the tacit release of apocalyptic times, was ripe. It drifted through student rooms beset by stress and worry. Edmonia surely prayed for a sign, a promise for the future. Fasting to focus the senses and incite a dream was a custom of her mother’s people, a duty for a young man, a choice for a woman. Dreaming could help, even sanction her coming of age. Absorbing the Spirit, she emerged as a complex adult seeking distinction as an artist – a novel bent she credited to memories of her mother.[38]
She also consulted with her brother by mail. He again agreed to support her, thus fueling her odyssey across social and national frontiers. Turning seventeen in 1861, she signaled her adulthood by asking everyone to call her “Edmonia” instead of “Mary.”
As if stirred by the new name, the one-eyed monster of bigotry rose up eager to feed on her simple trust. A gothic nightmare followed, splitting the town in unmatched storms of treachery, gossip, and physical assault. Following is our theory of the crime.
First Communion
In the wake of Oberlin’s religious settlers, others came seeking a simple education, opportunity, or kinship. By their variety, they sullied the tidy vision of the founders. A few felt the beacon of equality burned too brightly. Those who helped capture and return runaway slaves found themselves run out of town. Some rebelled against other elements of the founders’ Puritan-like preferences. In the 1850s, Episcopalians organized and opposed the “Oberlinism” of the first generation. Other groups introduced more exceptions to strict observance. The town outlawed the sale of alcohol in 1856, but a saloon and two drug stores would not abandon their most loyal trade. Students brought their biases with them as they sought a liberal education from abolitionists. Some said they would tolerate colored students but only if they did not have to kiss them or speak to them.
In the midst of harsh uncertainties, two mean Ohio girls, freshmen on holiday, accused Edmonia of overdosing them with the fabled sexual stimulant, Spanish fly.[39] She had served them mulled wine as they embarked on a sleigh-ride tryst on fresh snow with two sailors. As they reportedly teetered near death for a week or more, news of the vigil reached as far as Cleveland, thirty-five miles northeast. The father of one of the sailors, despite his lack of legal standing, bullied the justice system into action.
Rev. John Keep, the eighty-year-old patriarch of the College and head of the household where Edmonia (and the two girls) boarded, must have vouched for her. She had earned his trust and the town’s respect as his ward. Accused but not in custody, she remained at Keep’s house. All prayed the ailing victims would return to good health and withdraw their allegations.
Closeted bigots, sulking under Oberlin’s progressive regime, could not help expressing themselves periodically.[40] They must have seen her as an alien who lacked proper respect. Her rank as an upperclassman, sharing the table and privy with white boarders, ordering newcomers about, and wearing jewelry as nice as anybody’s could have been more hateful to them than her presence at class. Innocent smiles could have riled rivals for the attention of some boy. She also could be outrageous, claiming to dress only in blankets before she ever attended school. “You see I had good opportunities for studying the nude,” she would quip to a judgmental journalist one day.[41]
They believed she deserved punishment. She was not a citizen. She lacked rights. She was a half-breed wench, the combination of two inferior races little better than barnyard animals. She was an “orphan” – often a euphemism for a child born of prostitution, alcoholism, or adultery. Coming from New York City, according to College catalogues, could only confirm their worst ideas of sin and illegitimacy. The forbidden aura of lust radiating from the sexual nature of the crime was to be expected. Colored people lacked morals. They were responsible for the Civil War and all the trouble it was causing. Signals of malice abounded. Racist sarcasm crept into the news coverage. The father of one of the victims took a shot at her attorney. Seeing her as alien, most of Oberlin’s colored townspeople were ready to pronounce her guilty.
In short, she vexed feelings already raw. Latent hatreds came boiling to the surface as she challenged her betters by not confessing her crime and embracing her fate. That she victimized nice white girls from proper Ohio families gave license to a furtive minority. They surely deployed cruel epithets to justify their disgust. S
he was vulnerable, from out of state with no local kin to defend her.
Edmonia’s freedom drew the eye of the Cyclops. She might escape the law at any moment. Who will defend the honor of the white race? Who will engage, teach a lesson, make an example? Who will send a message to the underclass before it runs amok? Given the values of Oberlin’s leaders, such questions could thrive only as back street whispers on a moonless night.
Keep’s boarders visited the outdoor privy each night in preparation for sleep. On the night of Jan. 31, four days after the girls went sick, someone silently grabbed Edmonia as she headed across the yard. Covering her mouth, pinning her arms, they easily carried her into the flat fields as deep as the fence allowed. Far enough that her cries could not be heard, they dropped her on the snow and chased her about. They made it a sport, taunting her, hooting, cursing and calling names, tormenting, hitting, kicking, punching, slapping. They snatched away her wrap. Piece by piece, they ripped off her jewelry and her clothing, teasing her and tossing each piece out of reach, laughing at her terror.
She was unable to resist. She could not escape. She was a featherweight, no taller than today’s average seven-year-old, and no match for grown men used to physical work. Trying to stand her ground, to fight back, she must have wished for her brother and her aunts who were hundreds of miles away. Silently, she called for her mother long dead and buried. She craved her father, barely remembered and equally departed. Where are my guardians? Why me? Why has everyone abandoned me? Why is this happening? Where is the fairness? Who are these people? What do they want? What can I do? Oh, please, please! Desperately, she prayed, making hasty promises to God, repenting sins, errors, unkind words and regrettable thoughts. She wished for anyone, anyone to come and save her.
The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis Page 3