Until now it has been impossible to know the truth of these matters, but certain letters sent to Mrs. Lucy Stone Blackwell of the American Woman Suffrage Association and lately published in the Woman’s Journal appear to be genuine, and, if authentic, constitute a shocking indictment of “the world of futurity.” According to Mrs. Blackwell, she began receiving these anonymous letters on a monthly basis beginning in September of 1876 and continuing until March of this year. The author of the letters claims to be an unnamed visitor from the future, and his communications contained predictions of both near and distant events. Mrs. Blackwell naturally dismissed these missives as fabrications, but as the nearer prophecies seemed to come true, including detailed statements about the controversy between Mr. Tilden and Mr. Hayes, and the compromise that eventually resolved it, she gradually became convinced of the letters’ authenticity.
It is no doubt flattering to Mrs. Blackwell that the author of the letters, who signs himself only as “an American citizen who wants to speak honestly,” thinks of her and other radicals as harbingers of the future condition of humanity. This is no doubt what has moved Mrs. Blackwell to expose these communications to the public. We cannot view their contents with equanimity, however, for the letters are incendiary. Our nation has survived a great conflict, and we have no wish to see old wounds reopened, yet the anonymous “American citizen” would do exactly that. By denouncing home rule for Southern states as a “Jim Crow” regime that exchanges slavery for serfdom, the letters threaten to reignite racial tensions and stoke the embers of sectional discord. By holding up female suffrage as a moral ideal that ought to be enacted into law, they threaten to pit husbands against wives and daughters against fathers. By their endorsement of the broadest possible conception of the territorial rights of Indians, they repudiate our army and would push the former president’s ill-advised “peace policy” beyond the point of absurdity. And even these horrifying assertions pale next to the claim that our nation will one day become one in which men may enter into marriage with men, and women with women. It is, we are inclined to say, so grotesque a proposition that it simply cannot be true, though observation of the behavior of visitors from the future does little to dispel our fears.
Similar letters are rumored to have been mailed to other prominent or notorious persons, including Mr. Frederick Douglass and Mrs. Woodhull, but only Mrs. Blackwell has admitted to receiving them, and perhaps we should thank her for doing so. If the claims are not true, we hope Mr. Kemp or his representatives will say so. In the event the claims are verified, we may take solace in Mr. Kemp’s oft-repeated declaration that the future he represents need not be our own. Indeed, that knowledge would serve a tutelary purpose, in that we would then labor mightily to avoid such an outcome.
Jesse took a sip of orange juice, spilling a drop on the folded page of the newspaper. The word “outcome” became an illegible blot.
He was still not entirely accustomed to taking breakfast in the restaurant of the Electric Grand, where the morning meal was presented twenty-first-century style: a buffet table offering eggs, miniature sausages, thinly sliced bacon, and various breads, along with juice and coffee dispensed by luminous machines. He had chosen juice because the dispenser was simple to operate, but he kept an eye on the coffee machine as the tourists used it, planning to make an approach as soon as the crowd thinned. He dabbed the spot of juice from the newspaper with a napkin, which caused an entire paragraph to disappear. When he looked up, Elizabeth DePaul was standing at his table.
“We meet again,” she said.
Jesse stood, banging a knee on the table edge. “Elizabeth!”
“Don’t freak out. Do you mind if I sit?”
“No! Please. I mean, of course.” He added, “I looked for you last night.”
She was dressed twentieth-century-civilian style, denim trousers and a white shirt, no Velcro bustle, no City jacket. Apart from that, she hadn’t changed much since she had pulled her gun on Jesse’s would-be assailant in the back room of Onslow’s curiosity shop. Her hair had grown out a little. Six months, he thought. Three months back in her own time, three more here, doing City work far from Jesse’s runner hunts. He had almost despaired of seeing her again.
She was carrying a plate, which she set down in front of herself. Pineapple wedges and a crescent roll. “Yeah,” she said, settling into the chair opposite him, “the desk guy mentioned it, but I was in a meeting with Kemp’s people until late. All this trouble, which I guess you’re reading about.”
Getting down to business pretty quickly, but Elizabeth had never been one for small talk. She seemed to want to pretend she had never been away. He tried to accommodate her. “The papers love a scandal. Are the Blackwell letters really so ominous?”
“Potentially very bad for us, sure. Whoever mailed those letters—some fucking runner, according to Kemp—is making it hard to conduct business. Did you see the crowd in front of the Grand last night? The only good news is, they weren’t carrying torches.”
“So the letters are truthful?”
“I haven’t seen them, but it sounds like it. And that’s the problem. Do you think we’d be welcome here if the average person knew even the stuff you know about us? There’s a reason we’re careful about what we say. The past is another country, and there’s no guarantee of cordial diplomatic relations.”
“So Kemp chose to hide the unsettling details. I understand, but maybe it was a mistake. People will think you’re ashamed of what you are, now that the truth’s out.”
“We don’t have anything to apologize for. We don’t have to apologize for our superior hygiene or our flashy technology, and we sure as hell don’t have to apologize because we come from a place where women can vote and black people can hold political office and LGBT people can walk down the street with their heads held high.”
Jesse nodded. He had learned about these things when he first came to the City, in a training course aimed at preventing local hires from inadvertently insulting visitors—and, not incidentally, weeding out any employees who were too well-bred or bigoted to endorse a principle of tolerance. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, but it won’t win you friends.”
“Tell me about it. Maybe we have Walt Whitman or Robert Ingersoll on our side. Otherwise, we’re being denounced from every pulpit in the country and in most of these ink-smeared tabloids you guys call newspapers. Which is why Kemp’s been so careful about holding this stuff back until the last year, preferably until the end of the last year—this is exactly what we hoped to avoid.”
A lot of ‘we’ and ‘you’ in these statements, Jesse thought. “The letters are premature.”
“The letters are deliberate sabotage. Obviously the work of a runner trying to stir up trouble.”
“A political radical.”
Elizabeth’s look became guarded. “Probably.”
“Someone who imagines he has a moral obligation to intervene in our history,” Jesse said, thinking of Weismann.
“Someone who hates what Kemp is doing. Someone who wants to warn African-Americans and Indians and so forth about what’s coming.”
“And what exactly is coming?”
“Well, like the compromise Congress enacted to let Hayes take office. The end of Reconstruction. Southern blacks turned into sharecroppers, handed over to chain gangs, worked to death in iron mines or turpentine camps. Legal apartheid that won’t be dismantled until the 1950s. Native Americans pushed onto dwindling reservations or killed outright, because ‘the only good Indian is a dead Indian’—you know who said that? Philip Sheridan, buddy of U. S. Grant and major general in the old Army of the Potomac, soon to be general of the army.” A tourist at a nearby table turned his head, and Elizabeth lowered her voice. “I could go on.”