Charleston (26 page)

Ouida married Xeno Hayward at St. Michael's in late June. Alex declined the invitation for herself and her mother. She didn't want to face Gibbes again, and Cassandra showed no interest. Ham refused to attend alone. Alex presumed cousin Ouida would stumble to the altar without her glasses.

On the afternoon of the ceremony Alex sat under the great live oak, vainly trying to resolve the melody for an antislavery anthem, thus far wordless. St. Michael's bells rang to celebrate the marriage. She listened with a sad expression. Imagination conjured a ballroom lit with scores of candles where she danced with Henry, handsome in a tailcoat and white tie. Was there a place on earth where it would be possible?

Following the wedding Dr. and Mrs. Hayward sailed for Portugal and an extended European honeymoon.

 

Weeks passed between meetings in Petigru's garden. Henry grew noticeably thin. He seldom smiled. Alex asked him only once about the shop. He flared. “I hate it. Pa knows I hate it. Marcelle's upset him, too, there's another bastard on the way and she won't say whose it is. I can't take it forever.”

“We'll go to New York.”

He wouldn't answer.

 

Despite the drumfire of abolitionist rhetoric out of the North, cotton boomed again and, with it, commerce on the
Cooper River piers. Ham found a young German, Otto Abendschein, to manage Bell's Bridge. Otto was an enthusiast. “By this time next year upland cotton will reach twenty cents a pound. Everybody will be rich as Rothschild. Isn't this a great time to be living?” Ham was noncommittal.

Alex worried about her brother. He had no close friends and no visible interest in women. He seemed content to bury himself in the law office, though he did accept Simms's invitation to hear Senator Calhoun at Prosperity Hall. Petigru refused the invitation.

It was October, nearing the end of the congressional recess. Calhoun was en route from Fort Hill to Charleston to catch a northbound steamer. About fifty people, three-quarters men, gathered in the plantation's great room. Ham wasn't surprised to find feckless Gibbes absent.

Calhoun was still magisterial, though Ham thought he detected a weariness and a bitter attitude. The senator addressed the sedate and respectful audience for an hour. It was his kind of audience; he was known for avoiding noisy political rallies, barbecues, and the like.

“As the years pass, I become ever more convinced that our system of labor represents a positive good. It provides a secure, untroubled life for a race physically and temperamentally suited to agriculture in a warm climate. It separates the races in a manner that reduces friction. It frees us from harmful conflict between capital and labor. Yet we remain under attack. The number of abolitionist petitions reaching the Congress increases annually. All are utterly devoid of legal foundation. The Fifth Amendment clearly stands as an insuperable barrier: no person may be deprived of property without due process. We deal with the petitions by tabling them, but that only seems to encourage more. The agitators are teaching a whole generation to hate one section of our country. We must resist them at all hazards.”

Simms raised his hand. “Even if it should mean eventual disunion, Senator? Or armed conflict?”

“At all hazards,” Calhoun repeated, his eyes hot with conviction. Ham struggled to compose himself.

Calhoun answered more questions. Autumn shadows grew long. After Calhoun thanked his listeners, house girls came in with silver trays of wine and punch. Simms stepped forward to offer a toast.

“I give you John C. Calhoun, champion of liberty. May any man who opposes him have a scolding wife, disobedient children, small crops, and a mule to ride on that constantly throws him.”

Laughter broke the evening's mood of sobriety. Calhoun's phrase rang in Ham's mind.
At all hazards
. The damned fool.

“May I have another?” he said to one of the servants. He drank two more after that. He took the road to Charleston full of Madeira and gloom.

 

The winter dragged. Cassandra's listlessness upset Alex and the entire household, but there seemed to be no remedy. Edgar's death had stolen away more than a husband and father.

Twice each week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, Alex hitched up the carriage and made the rounds of homes of acquaintances, there collecting discarded clothing. Sometimes she knocked on the doors of strangers. She avoided Sword Gate and the Lark residence.

She drove her acquisitions to the three-story brick poorhouse built on public lands at the corner of Queen and Mazyck Streets. The building housed more than a hundred paupers. They were put out to work daily if they were able, kept in the medical wards if not. Alex's routine helped alleviate her sense of idleness, though she had to steel herself for every visit. Underground cells housed the deranged poor, men and women who wailed and cursed and cried out incoherently from tiny barred windows at ground level. It burdened Alex with a sense of the wide disparity between those who lived handsomely in Charleston, and those trapped in its lowest reaches.

 

Alex visited Naomi Marburg once a week for tea. She loved the spacious Greek Revival house with white Doric columns in the old suburb of Ansonborough. A mezuzah on the doorjamb testified to the faith of the householders.

The interior was a fascinating mix of cultures: in the kitchen, savory German cooking—beef brisket, potato pancakes, red cabbage; in the parlor, an exotic Orientalism—a Turkish carpet, an elaborately bound set of the Talmud, a brass menorah, a silver cup for Sabbath wine on display. Naomi favored heavy lace curtains that diffused sunlight and kept the parlor cool.

The banker's wife was still proudly allied with the brown elite from which she came. Over tea and tiny sandwiches she and Alex discussed copies of
The Emancipator
and
The Liberator
that reached the Marburgs in unlabeled parcels from the North. Morris and Naomi shared Alex's loathing of slavery—the nation's “slow poison” as George Mason of Virginia had called it—but Marburg would not display the papers in the King Street bookstore or allow them to be kept under the counter. He and his manager, William Watkiss, argued about it regularly.

While Naomi dashed off to quell spats between the older girls, or punish Marion for some mischief, Alex read reports of the American Anti-Slavery Society recently organized in Philadelphia to unite societies from that city, Boston, and New York. She learned of a schism within the national group. Some members wanted gradualism, careful preparation for emancipation at some unspecified time in the future. On the other side were men like Garrison, firebrands of immediatism, a term coined by a British Quaker. Both sides had given up resettlement in Africa as a practical solution.

The papers made Alex feel more alienated, out of place in the city she'd once loved without reservation. She saw Charleston as a self-protective enclave ruled by the fearful, the ignorant, and the greedy.

 

Marburg's bookshop manager invited a young writer of short stories and sketches, William Gilmore Simms, to give a reading from his historical romance,
The Yemassee,
as yet unpublished. Alex and Ham attended, along with the Marburgs, two of their older girls, a pair of journalists, gouty Judge Porcher and his wife, and a dozen strangers.

A
Closed
notice hung on the shop door. The author sat in a rocker and read for ninety minutes. At the end Amaryllis Porcher rose to lead the applause. She declared that Simms would rival Fenimore Cooper when the world saw his work.

Watkiss served apple dumplings he'd baked himself. He was a strange, oddly likable young man with prematurely white hair, hands tiny as a child's and constantly aflutter. He was no more than five feet tall, a bachelor. Mr. Simms, not yet thirty, rocked in his rocker, munched a dumpling, and held forth:

“I love the South. I stand by her. Yet the way of life of the planter is intellectually sterile. All they want to do is hunt, ride, lounge, and sleep. Bring up a literary topic, they run off as though you carried plague. Charleston doesn't give a damn—beg pardon, ladies—for literature or art. What's the answer? Stay and suffer, I suppose. I'll not flee to New York or any of those other smoky, dismal places where publishers congregate.”

There we differ,
Alex thought.
If I can ever persuade Henry, we'll go
.

 

Even the beauty of that spring, 1835, couldn't restore her spirits. Cassandra sat in the garden for hours, gazing into space, responding lethargically when addressed. Dr. Hayward, back from his wedding trip, could find nothing wrong with her except extreme fatigue, brought on, he felt sure, by her withdrawal from life.

Alex received a brown paper packet from Philadelphia. It contained several foolscap sheets written in a fine hand. Angelina Grimké's explanatory note said the pages were a draft of a composition that “God showed me I must
write, during one long, sleepless night this winter.” She called it
An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States.

Alex read the pages and immediately saw the rightness of Angelina's arguments. She also saw the inherent perils. Angelina urged women owning slaves to set them free or, barring that, educate them. Should the law forbid it, Angelina was unequivocal.
If a law commands me to sin, I will break it.

Excitement gave her a sleepless night like Angelina's. In the morning she rushed the pages to Naomi Marburg. They carried them to William Watkiss, whose voice slid up to familiar shrillness as it did whenever a crisis arose or some written work stirred him:

“This we must stock. This we must disseminate. How can we not? She is a voice native to Charleston.”

Naomi said, “Certainly there would be repercussions. Such a pamphlet like hers will enrage a majority of the community.”

Watkiss waved his tiny hands. “Let it, let it. The righteous must confront the ungodly.”

“We need my husband's consent,” Naomi reminded him.

Alex sat with Naomi in the Marburg parlor while Morris read the pages with the aid of a magnifier. It was a hot evening, windows open on the garden. No air stirred; another sweltering, temper-fraying Charleston summer in the making.

“Incendiary stuff,” Marburg concluded. “I would never put it in the store if it didn't bear the Grimké name.”

Alex clapped her hands. “You mean you will?”

“Against all good sense, yes. I will write to the Society, request that they ship us a quantity by steamer mail at such time as the pamphlet's published. We will then brace for the inevitable.”

On July 29, Wednesday, the steam packet
Columbia
docked with cargo and mail from New York. Custom House men discovered a pouch sent by the American Anti-Slavery Society to Marburg's Books, King Street. The inspector attached a note to the pouch, calling it to the attention of Postmaster Alfred Huger, a conscientious official and a Unionist.

At the Post Office in the Exchange Building, Huger unsealed the pouch and dumped the contents on a sorting table. Bundles of tracts; two hundred copies or more.
An Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States.
Huger saw the name Angelina Grimké and scowled.

Huger quickly composed a letter to Andrew Jackson's postmaster general in Washington, another to his friend the postmaster in New York. How should he deal with such literature arriving through the mails? A majority in Charleston would not tolerate circulation of material dealing with “the question on which this community is too sensitive to admit of any compromise—emancipation of the Southern slave.”

A messenger rushed the letters to a packet leaving that night. Huger then sent a note to the Crescent Bank informing Morris Marburg that he would keep the “incendiary publications” locked up until receiving advice
from Washington on how to resolve the conflict between civic order and the postmaster's sworn duty. Marburg arrived within the hour, demanding release of his shipment.

“Sir, I can't honor that request,” Huger said. “I cannot circulate material clearly meant to establish anarchy and misrule.”

They argued. Huger held firm. Marburg stormed out, confronting a crowd on the Exchange steps. He saw respectable men such as Simms Bell and Congressman Lark mixed with dramshop riffraff. Damn the customs men for talking freely. Marburg shouldered past, ignoring threats and foul language.

Inside, Huger was gray with worry. “Fetch me the shotgun in my office.” A clerk ran. With the weapon in the crook of his arm Huger stepped outside, greeted by more jeers and cursing. A respected Protestant cleric spoke from the step just below.

“We demand surrender of the incendiary publications, Postmaster.”

“No, Reverend, not until and unless Washington sends instructions to that effect.”

“That could take days.”

A ruffian shouted, “Damn if we'll wait. You don't give 'em up, we'll take 'em.”

Huger showed the crowd both shotgun barrels. “Then I will defend them, and you will suffer. Don't force that.”

Simms and others counseled restraint. The crowd dispersed, though not happily. As darkness fell, the exhausted Huger locked the Post Office and went home.

Sometime before dawn windows were broken, the building entered, the offending pouch pulled from its shelf. Nothing else was touched. That same night a dozen men slipped through the moonlit street leading to Marburg's residence.

 

At two the next day Ham came home from St. Michael's Alley for dinner. He flung down a copy of the
Southern Pa
triot
. “Your friend Miss Grimké's pamphlets were removed from the Post Office last night. The consensus of our good citizens is that it was wrong for the pamphlets to be taken clandestinely, because Huger should have surrendered them on demand, in broad daylight. Furthermore, around midnight the Marburg house was mobbed. Windows were broken, burning rags tossed in. Morris fired shots until the men ran.”

“Oh, it's my fault,” Alex exclaimed. “I took Angelina's first draft to Naomi. I must go to them.”

“That isn't wise. The Marburgs are unhurt. Morris hired men to stand guard on his property. There's to be some kind of rally tonight, to destroy the pamphlets. The situation's very nearly out of hand. You should stay off the streets.”

Ham was more forceful than she'd ever heard him. She thought of defying him, then reluctantly did as he said.

 

Fueled with refuse and broken furniture, the bonfire on the civic parade ground reddened low-hanging clouds. A riotous crowd of several hundred had gathered. Men raised poles carrying cloth and straw effigies bearing crude signs.
WM L GARRISON. ABOLISHINIST FANATIK. GRIMKÉ WHORE
. The female effigy had yarn hair, a stuffed bosom, a skirt. Men set the effigies afire. Bitter smoke ascended. The clouds turned scarlet.

In the shadow of a building Henry looked on. Hamnet had argued against his venturing into the streets alone. Henry's curiosity won out. He was careful to stick to dark thoroughfares, alleys, now this heavily shadowed area well back from the center of the demonstration. He felt he could outrun anyone who spotted him.

Men capered around the fire, war-whooping like Indians. They threw rocks at the burning effigies. A squad of city guardsmen watched passively. Volunteer firemen stood by in case sparks carried. A few Negroes huddled at the far edge of the parade ground. Curfew had rung; no one seemed to care.

Men pitched bundles into the fire, inciting the crowd to
clap and cheer. A small white-haired man ran up, dived between two rioters, tried to retrieve some of the tracts. Men surrounded him, knocked him down. They stamped on his spine, pounded his head with fists and rocks. They left him prone, white hair bloodied all across the back of his head.

Henry's face was stony. No black man who hoped to pursue a decent life belonged in Charleston. Alex was right, they should steal away, together or separately, meet in New York, then spend a few sweet days or weeks together before he abandoned her. He knew he had to do that, for her sake. He'd go to her tomorrow, tell her he was ready to leave.

Something touched him between the shoulders.

“Hello, nigger.”

Henry twisted to the left, glimpsed a beaky nose. Another man slapped the back of his head. “Don't turn around 'less you're told.” There were at least four of them.

The beaky man said, “You come along quiet now, Mr. Henry Strong. You refuse, this little old Kentucky pistol”—he dug it into Henry's back—“liable to blow a hole clean through you. Crowd like this wouldn't give a damn. Most likely they'd celebrate.”

“What do you want with me?”

“Why, just a little talk is all, Mr. Henry Strong. A little conversation about you and white women, someplace where we won't be disturbed.”

A third man said, “Turn real slow. No, the other way. Cross your hands on your shoulders so we see 'em.”

Henry's heart pounded. His mouth felt like dust. He marched into the dark with the four white men following. The female effigy disintegrated in sparks and flying bits of cloth.
Alex,
he thought,
never forget I loved you
.

 

Alex's bedroom smelled of smoke when she woke next day. The servants fairly tiptoed, saying nothing. Maudie averted her eyes when Alex came downstairs. Ham had already left the house. She ignored his warning, slipped out the back way.

Merchants on East Bay had shuttered their shops. Some had nailed boards over the windows. Men reeled from side alleys, drunk despite the early hour. One caught her arm, whispered lewd words in her ear. She kicked his shin, wrenched free, ran on.

At Bell's Bridge only one dilapidated packet boat,
Savannah Miss,
was tied up. Four black seamen played cards under an awning. A mate smoked his pipe and whittled. All of them stared as she knocked at the office door.

Otto Abendschein blinked his way into the sun carrying a Hawken rifle. “Not a good day to be out, Miss Alex. Bad men on the street again.”

“Any trouble here?”

“Fortunately, no. At breakfast at Jones's Hotel I heard that a special committee is meeting to assess the situation. Feeling is high. The authorities fear riots and lynchings. Best you go back home.”

“Soon, Otto, I promise. Take care.”

Moving toward King Street, she encountered more drunken men. One carried a rope tied into a noose. The few Negroes she saw were moving quickly, furtively, as though afraid to be noticed.

Marburg's shop window had been smashed. Black scorch marks showed around the edge. Books had been slashed or ripped apart. A funeral wreath hung on the door.

She ran across to a jewelry shop. The owner's pistol lay on a shelf behind the display counter.

“Mr. Rosen, what happened at Marburg's?”

“Poor Mr. Watkiss, they say he tried to rescue some of the abolition literature from the mob. They killed him.”

Alex held the counter to steady herself. She heard distant shots, barely managed to offer thanks to the nervous jeweler. She ran out and turned south.

At Broad Street a pack of white boys chased two smaller colored boys westward, throwing rocks and shouting epithets. Alex hurried east to the Crescent Bank. Glass crackled under her shoes; a green canvas was spiked to the window of Morris Marburg's office. Obviously it had been broken. Two iron pipes jammed across the door
frame prevented entrance. A sign said
CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE
.

 

At four o'clock the streets drowsed in afternoon heat. Birds sought shade, their songs muted. Alex worked in the garden, constantly swatting at gnats and mosquitoes. Since her experience that morning she'd eaten nothing and worked frantically, trimming and chopping the pink and watermelon-red crape myrtle as she did every July. Finished with that, she'd tried to shape a row of yaupon. After butchering two of the small green hollies she gave up. She sat on a bench, listlessly studying her hands.

Old Drayton, her friend and mentor, was removing the finish from the joggling board on the piazza. His sanding paper rasped. Usually garrulous, he worked silently. Maudie was in the house, scrubbing floors that didn't need it.

Two horsemen appeared outside the gate. One stayed in the saddle. The other handed over his reins, dismounted, jingled the bell. Alex raised her head, pushed back straggling hair. My God, what did he want?

Gibbes was smartly dressed as always. She was filthy, her cheeks dirt streaked, her hands blistered. She walked to the gate.

“How do, Alex. May I come in? I won't be long. The gentleman yonder's my good friend Archie Lescock Third.” The beaky horseman tipped his beaver hat. Alex recognized him from the street fight. Did he recognize her?

She opened the gate. Gibbes walked to a patch of shade.

“I regret that I bring you some sad tidings.”

“If it's about William Watkiss, I've heard.”

“Why, yes, that's tragic. But it concerns a colored man I believe you know. Mr. Hamnet Strong's boy.”

Her legs started to shake. “What of him?”

“Some wild fellows must have got hold of him last night. What he was doing out past curfew I surely don't know. This morning his body floated to the foot of Gadsden's old wharf.”

“Oh, God, no.”

“Whoever did it was mighty cruel. They mutilated him so he was, ah, no longer manly. Decency forbids me from saying any more.”

“Where did you hear this?”

“Saloon bar of the Planter's, not an hour ago.”

Pain blinded her. She feared she'd throw up.
Don't, that's weakness, it's what he'd like to see.

A sudden rush of suspicion then. Somehow he'd found out. Who told him? Who put him on the scent? Ouida?

“Gibbes, please leave before I call you a damned murderer.”

“Why, cousin, whatever do you—?”

“You did it, didn't you? You and your friends. That man out there—was he with you?”

“I'm sure I don't know what—”

“You killed Henry Strong because of me. You came here to boast.”

Calmly, Gibbes said, “I'm really afraid I must plead innocent to the charge, which is purely the most fantastical thing I've ever heard. Don't forget, cousin, Henry Strong was a free person of color. Many consider those people a disruptive and dangerous element. Furthermore, I heard that Henry Strong took liberties with white girls.” Gibbes's face was sorrowful, almost maudlin.

“Plain to see you're distraught,” he went on. “Very understandable. I'll take my leave. I only wanted to break the news gently. Seems I failed. My sincere regrets.”

He grasped her right hand, kissed the grimy knuckles. Alex jerked away.

“God forgive you, Gibbes. I never will.”

“That so?” His eye slid down her front. “It's my earnest hope that you'll change your mind someday. Good afternoon.”

He set his hat on his head, tapped it, walked briskly to the street. He took his reins from his friend and mounted. Alex clutched the gate. She shook so hard, she feared she'd fall. After the horsemen passed from sight she heard laughter in the afternoon stillness.