“Yes. Carrie Chapman Catt. Ratification. Your mother is quite the clever one.”
“College educated. Mama has never understood why an illiterate field hand on our farm has more of a right to vote than she.”
“So your mother told you to vote for the amendment.”
Harry nodded.
“And do you always do what your mother says?”
“Every good boy obeys his mother, Reverend. Isn’t that one of the commandments?”
“The Bible tells us to honor our mothers — our mothers and fathers.”
“I honored her by changing my vote.” Harry swallowed against the nervous lump in his throat. “And now they’re going to tar and feather me.”
“Cooler heads will prevail, Harry. Try to relax. You made your mother both happy and proud. And Mrs. Catt with her giddy lady rat.”
Rufus and Harry waited a while before they crept back downstairs. There were no feathers, no cauldron of soupy tar. Only hundreds of celebrants and members of the press who had been searching all over Nashville for the suddenly elusive, history-making boy legislator. Someone procured for Harry a single yellow rose and pinned it prominently to his jacket.
The Tennessee War of the Roses was over. In a little over a week, the Secretary of State would certify the adoption of the latest amendment to the U.S. Constitution: number nineteen.
Later that year Harry T. Burn won re-election to the state assembly from his district in rural southeast Tennessee. But he would not run for the seat again, although twenty-eight years later a far more mature Harry did run for and win a seat in the Tennessee State Senate. Over the decades that followed the passage of the amendment, the dozen states that had either rejected it or had postponed voting for it until after Tennessee’s own decisive vote fell in with the majority. The forty-eighth and final straggler, Mississippi, blushingly ratified the amendment named for Susan B. Anthony in the spring of 1984. Four and a half years after that anticlimactic vote, something quite remarkable took place in Harry Burn’s hometown of Niota, Tennessee: six women — four of them running as write-in candidates — won election to the Niota City Board of Commissioners, one of them elected as mayor. The six women won international recognition as the only all-female City Commission in the country.
This, too, would have made Harry’s mother happy and proud.
1921 COMPOSED (?) IN OREGON
Percy Llewellyn knew Aaron Francis before he became famous. They had met when the two were young musicians playing under the baton of John Philip Sousa. Though Percy’s musical instrument in those days was the cornet and Aaron’s was the trombone, both men, in quitting Sousa’s tutelage, decided to devote the next years of their professional lives to the piano instead — as well as to the fine art of music composition. It should be noted that neither man ever wrote a march. Each was sick to death of marches.
Yet by the age of forty-four, Aaron Francis had written a great deal withaclass="underline" five symphonies, three operas, four theatrical overtures, two symphonic suites, and concerti for four different instruments (none of them, it perhaps goes without saying, in the brass family). In the fall of 1921, all of the music above was still extant. What had been lost, however, were several other large works of no small importance, including a symphony (Symphony Number Three, to be exact), a tone poem, and a ballet. Aaron had burned the original manuscripts while in the depths of destructive depression.
There were no copies.
Aaron’s friend Percy, far less accomplished in his own efforts at composition, understood depression, for he was similarly afflicted, though his episodes were less frequent and far less intense than those of his friend.
It took several years for each man, private in his own way, and not given to opening up so easily, to own to the disease of the mind and spirit that had twice prevented Percy from walking down the matrimonial aisle, and kept Aaron from essaying even a single marriage proposal, though both men, being of strong sensitive natures, fell easily in love. The world to each was a beautiful place that was all too often clouded by dark, obsessive, punishing thoughts — like a resplendent orchestral rhapsody marred by the sudden appearance of a roguish Sousaphone.
For the last several years, the friends had spent one week out of every summer tramping through Crater Lake National Park together. They took long hikes around the caldera, negotiated the “Pinnacles,” and climbed Mount Scott like seasoned alpinists. From the mountain’s summit they could gaze down upon the verdant panorama of peaks and glens that had first called them from their boyhood homes in the Eastern flatlands.
On their sojourn this year they bared an even greater portion of their souls, feeling cleansed and renewed in the process. Still, each continued to feel imprisoned by his nature. Aaron, in particular, though heralded as his generation’s Edward MacDowell, worried that, like his predecessor in the field of celebrated music composition, he might also come eventually to lose his mind.
“That’s a rather strong statement to make, chum,” said Percy, having first stopped for a moment to catch his breath, and then to put the distant snowcapped crown of Diamond Peak into the viewfinder of his Number 2C Brownie.
“You don’t wonder sometimes if your hold on reality might start to slip away?” asked Aaron earnestly.
Percy shook his head from behind the little box camera. “I do, however, get depressed from time to time. When that happens, I want to lie down and never get up again.”
Aaron speared the friable soil with the end of his alpenstock. “Then you and I are different in that way.”
Percy pulled the camera down from his face. “How so?”
“I have created a different persona for myself. First you have ‘Me,’ who answers as well to ‘I.’ It is I who works twelve hours a day on his Oregon Symphony commission so that it should be ready to premiere in the spring. It is I who may climb a mountain in the company of a good friend and colleague and breathe the fresh air and pronounce life to be very much worth living despite its shortcomings. And then there is ‘Myself.’”
“‘Myself,’ I take it, is someone entirely different from ‘I’ and ‘Me.’”
Aaron nodded. “And different in quite a disturbing way. Myself will do things that I would never do. He has, in fact, done things of which ‘I’ and ‘Me’ have been egregiously ashamed.”
“Is he the one responsible for the destruction of your Third Symphony? Is he the one who put to flame your all-but-completed score for the Little Dorrit ballet?”
“The very same one. Sad, really, my inability to tell Mr. Denton with the Oregon Symphony that my Concerto for Ukulele and Orchestra is in no danger of immolation when ‘I’ am around. Only when ‘Myself’ comes calling.”
Percy sat down upon the wind-smoothed top of the prehistorically tumbled boulder behind him. “If I were that nervous maestro, I would have taken the very same precautions. Who has the manuscript at this moment?”
Aaron sat down as well. He began to unlatch his knapsack, the two companion mountaineers coming to a silent understanding that the time had arrived for a midday collation. “Rafferty. He’s in the employ of the Symphony. The man has a pinched face and pinched demeanor to match. I can’t compose with him sitting there watching me all hours of the day and night — not that he should ever wish to spend the best years of his youth observing me work — so he shares his duties with two other exigently hired collegians from the neighborhood. One is distractingly female. Now it is the daily occupation of each of the three, in some manner of prearranged succession, to come in the morning with the box containing the full score and at day’s end to take it all away, so that I am never left alone with it.”