He paused a moment, then stepped from the side of the lectern as if to show the full extent of himself. His polished shoes, his dark trousers, his jacket trimmed at the waist. His skin was lighter than she recalled. He spread his arms wide, allowed a silence. When the true history of the anti-slavery cause shall be written, women will occupy a large space in its pages. He spoke as if he were saying it for the first time, that he had just found these words in the last few steps across the stage, low now, almost a whisper, a secret to be imparted. The cause of the slave has been peculiarly Woman’s cause. Immediately there was a stir around the room. A stout lady stood and applauded. Several other women followed. There was a shout from a man in the front seat, thrusting a book in the air. Send the nigger home! A scuffle broke out. A flail of arms and legs. The protester was escorted out. Four women left alongside the man. Douglass held his hands in the air and extended the white of his palms. A hush descended. When a great truth gets abroad in the world, no power on earth can imprison it, or prescribe its limits, or suppress it. She could see an orchestra in him, a whole range of instruments and sound. His voice was loud and booming. It is bound to go on until it becomes the thought of the world. He paced the stage. In and out of a pool of light. His shoes clicking on the wooden floorboards. Such a truth is a woman’s right to equal liberty with man. She was born with it. It was hers before she comprehended it. The rational basis for proper government lies in the female soul. Lily could feel the grip of her daughter’s hand, growing tighter now with each moment. There were motes of dust around Douglass in the air, animate and twirling: it seemed as if the dust itself might constitute something.
He put his hand to his forehead as if trying to summon a new idea. He shut his eyes: close to prayer.
Lily thought that he might remain that way, that she, too, would become fixed forever in whatever occurrence his mind had found. She was back on the staircase. He brushed past her to go downstairs. She felt her heart lift. All around her now there were women standing, and the applause rang out around the hall, a series of shouts, but Lily stayed seated, and what she felt was incomparable, singular, yet ordinary, too, all the living moments gathered together in this one, the door of his room closed, a tiny rim of light underneath it, growing brighter in the dark. She understood that she had come such a distance, traveled all this way, she had opened a door, and her own daughter was in the room, her own history and flesh and darkness, leaning down by the light of an ancient lantern, to read.
AFTERWARDS, DOUGLASS WAS ushered quickly from the hotel. A carriage waited outside, the horse clopping its hooves against the cobbles. The night had grown sultry. A hangnail of moon perched above St. Louis. The gas lamps made the darkness unequal.
A group of protesters had gathered on the far side of the street, men in shirtsleeves and wide suspenders. A row of policemen stood in front of them, arms linked, nonchalant.
Lily watched as Douglass lifted his head and glanced across as if in amusement. He held the hand of a white lady, guiding her into the carriage. His second wife. The shouts from the street grew louder as Douglass made a show of his manners.
He bowed to his wife and then came around to the other side of the carriage, dipped and turned sideways, then hunched his shoulders, got in. The horse was tall and elegant. It lifted its hooves and snorted.
Lily had the momentary thought that she should stride across, lean in the window, greet him, say her name, ask him to remember, but she stood instead in the shadows. What could she say? What further meaning might she get from saying her name? He might only feign recognition, or perhaps he would not remember at all. She had her daughter. Her sons. The lifting of ice.
Lily heard the jangle of the harness and a wheelcreak across the night. She ruffled the edge of her dress, and put her hand on Emily’s arm.
— Time to go home, she said. Come on.
1929, evensong
STORIES BEGAN, FOR HER, AS A LUMP IN THE THROAT. SHE sometimes found it hard to speak. A true understanding lay just beneath the surface. She felt a sort of homesickness whenever she sat down at a sheet of paper. Her imagination pushed back against the pressures of what lay around her. Emily Ehrlich survived not by theory, or formula, but by certain moments of ease when she felt herself at full tilt, a sprinting, hurdling joy. Lost in a small excelsis.
The best moments were when her mind seemed to implode. It made a shambles of time. All the light disappeared. The infinity of her inkwell. A quiver of dark at the end of the pen.
Hours of loss and escape. Insanity and failure. Scratching one word out, blotting the middle of a page so it was unreadable anymore, tearing the sheet into long thin strips.
The elaborate search for a word, like the turning of a chain handle on a well. Dropping the bucket down the mineshaft of the mind. Taking up empty bucket after empty bucket until, finally, at an unexpected moment, it caught hard and had a sudden weight and she raised the word, then delved down into the emptiness once more.
THE FIRST-CLASS CABIN was small and white. Two beds. A portside view. Fresh flowers in a crystal vase. A welcome note from the captain. A chandelier that had been designed not to sway.
Announcements shot through the static of the loudspeaker, a steward’s nasal whine: dinnertimes, sunburn warnings, club alerts.
THEY HAD NEVER cared much for appearances, but on the first evening mother and daughter helped each other get dressed.
The water was calm, but even in the small pitch and roll it was difficult to comb each other’s hair. Emily propped a small round mirror in the porthole window. Her hair had gone gray. Lottie’s had been cut fashionably short. Beyond their own reflection, they could see the lines of moving shiplight on the sea.
The weight Emily carried dragged her down to the ground. She was fifty-six years old, though there were times the mirrors suggested a whole other decade on her face. Her ankles were permanently swollen, her wrists and neck, too. She wore her shoes two sizes too big. She walked with a cane. A dark blackthorn wood. A small knob of silver at the handle. A sleeve of rubber at the bottom. It had been fashioned for her by a craftsman in Quidi Vidi. She had a shy walk, conscious of the space she took, as if her body were waiting to acknowledge her discomfort, the space she took up.
Lottie — tall, redheaded, confident — wore a long taffeta dress, a baubled necklace against the curve of her throat. She was twenty-seven, with an air of earliness about her: she seemed to arrive ahead of herself. Mother and daughter were seldom apart. Caught by an orbit. Stitched together in opposites.
They sidled towards the dining room, Emily resting on her daughter’s arm. They stopped a moment in the entrance, surprised by the sight of a curving balustrade. Flowers were wrapped around the banister. A spectacle of wealth all around. Young men in dark suits and fly-collar shirts. Thin women with feathers in their hair, their necks strained, their arms outstretched. Businessmen gathered in groups, cigarette smoke swirling above them.
A bell rang and a cheer went up. The boat was far enough out to water. An opera of anti-Prohibition toasts unfolded. The air itself seemed to have already drunk several glasses of gin.
They were led to a table to sit with the ship doctor. A handsome Canadian with a curlicue of dark hair down the center of his forehead, his face lean and laugh-lined. In a well-cut shirt and arm garters. He leaned across the table towards them. The talk was of Lomer Gouin and Henry George Carroll, of a slight wobbling in the Stock Exchange, of corn prices, of anarchists in Chicago, of Calvin Coolidge and his fondness for robber barons, of Pauline Sabin and her call for repeal.