The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton (62 page)

The question of my whereabouts had come up in mid-August, some three weeks after I’d left the Missouri Rose, because it took until then for the captain of that boat to see Mr. Graves and tell him of my disappearance, for Mr. Graves to happen to run into Charles, for Charles to tell Louisa, for Louisa to write Harriet, and for Harriet to receive the letter. And then, even as they were wondering what had become of me, they received Mrs. Hopewell’s letter about my imminent hanging. Beatrice exclaimed, "And to tell you the truth, Lydia, I wasn’t a bit surprised."

As it happened, there wasn’t a war in Kansas after all. The President sent in as governor a fellow named Geary, who’d already seen everything out in San Francisco in terms of big talk, big greed, and the consequences of that, and this Geary, whom Louisa wrote me about with such enthusiasm that she decided to throw out all her former notions and name her daughter Mildred Gearina Bisket, "faced down the bullies and brought them to heel, and now we only depend upon the election for our real apotheosis into a law-abiding state rather than a territory of human beasts." Other news was that Charles had bought another pair of mules and was planning to build a warehouse on Vermont Street. "Let them burn it down and us out; our little Mildred Gearina shows that we multiply and increase!"

But of course, the presidential election did not then go the abolitionist way, and after that there was what some folks called peace for a little space, even in K.T. And after the election, in Illinois—never a slave state, but also never an anti-slave state—those two men Senator Douglas and Mr. Lincoln got very famous, more famous than anyone else in the whole country, which was a source of pride to many and a source of shame to others, since, as my sister Harriet said, "Why don’t folks realize that this trash just isn’t worth talking about? It ruins everything, but the strangest people start bringing it up, and then you’ve got to say something, so of course, you’ve got to make up your mind! I can’t abide that!"

I thought that I might have someone to talk to in Frank, but at first there was never the occasion—he was kept mighty busy at school and at the store. Roland didn’t have to work as hard as he had to oversee Frank’s daredevil proclivities—the guerrilla business, especially the starvation and boredom, had dinned that sort of thing out of the boy for good and all, it seemed. Now he had his sights on a commercial future. There was this, too: Frank was no longer a chatty boy. His voice had deepened, and he walked like a man. He was taller, his hands were bigger, and he had assumed a man’s taciturnity. We seemed thoroughly divided by sex and experience from our old friendship. Perhaps he accepted the family view, subscribed to but rarely stated, that I had lost and abandoned him in K.T., owing to some sort of abolitionist brain fever. My irresponsibility concerning Frank as a helpless child adrift upon the prairie was so thoroughly disapproved of that my sisters were nearly speechless with it. It was only owing to Providential intercession that Frank had been restored to the family circle. As a result, Alice and Harriet became substantially more religious after our return.

I did take the cars to Boston and met Thomas’s father and mother and brothers, as well as friends of theirs who shared their abolitionist views and on balance felt that events in Kansas would issue in a much-needed cleansing of the national soul with regard to that single blot on our pristine character, Negro servitude. Remarks were made to the effect that Geary had actually done every right-thinking citizen a disservice in averting all-out war. Many expressed that same view we used to have in Kansas, that conflict there would serve as a national sinkhole, going so deep and growing so vast that the whole nation would fall into it, from California to Boston, but with this distinction: whereas in Kansas we thought of this as the natural end of what we saw all around us, but all the same something sane men should avert, in Boston there was a great deal of talk about the necessity of it—of getting something done with at last, of expelling the pus of the infection (or cutting off the limb to save the life), or of revealing the wrath of the Lord once and for all to the southern sinner.

Myself, I kept quiet after a few days of this. In my presence, these sorts of things were all they could talk about. Someone would ask me a question, and I would begin my answer, and at my second or third hesitant word, my interlocutor would exclaim, "Yes! Just as I thought!" and then go on and on about how he or she (many of the most ardent abolitionists were shes) deeply felt that his or her own views were fully borne out by my experiences and everything that I was saying, and then I would hear a full discourse on every aspect of the issue, more aspects of the issue than I’d ever thought existed. These men and women went away shaking their heads, of course, but also smiling. They made large, agreeable groups, and their opinions were much bolstered by one another. I got to be something of a celebrity for attempting to aid the escape of a slave, and they loved to have me talk about Lorna. Some even wept openly at her story, and one day, someone "very close to Mr. Thayer himself" asked me to give a series of lectures, or perhaps one lecture only, about her. Something, anything. How good this would be as a way of raising money for the cause of abolition in Kansas could not be expressed.

I was disinclined to do this, and I pondered my disinclination at length. Did I owe it to Lorna to tell her story to the world? Was that my last gesture for her, to use her and what we had done together to raise money to buy guns and cannon to be sent to Kansas? Mr. Thayer’s friend candidly admitted one thing—Lorna herself would never benefit from my telling her story. There was no telling what had happened to her; she’d gotten sold south, just like someone out of Mrs. Stowe’s book, and if she was as obdurate as I made her out to be, well, not all masters were as forgiving as this Mr. Day seemed to be. There could be no hope for Lorna individually, but her cause could be helped through helping the cause of all of those in bondage, and money, money, money, that was the key. Every man who’d been to Washington, D.C., knew that as well as he knew his own mother’s name. Thomas’s mother herself appealed to me to give this lecture. She was a very old woman, bedridden most of the day. Thomas had indeed been her favorite of all the boys, and it was clear that his death was not supportable for her. She was very kind and loving to me, and she made up her mind that I must do this lecture for Thomas and his beliefs and what he died for. I couldn’t explain that I found myself increasingly unable to speak about any of these issues—that the very certainty of everyone around me drove all certainty out of me. She pleaded with me, and I agreed.

The hall was the same size as, or larger than, Danake Hall in Quincy, the only other place of the sort that I’d ever entered. Even the stage was nearly the same size as the stage whereon I’d viewed those scenes from Macbeth and Dombey and Son more than a year before. And it was crowded. The title of my lecture, given it by Mr. Thayer’s friend, was "Latest News from the War in Kansas, with a FIRSTHAND ACCOUNT of a foiled SLAVE ESCAPE in Missouri." Mr. Thayer himself was expected to attend but got delayed out of town, and I never met him.

Standing on the stage, looking out at the audience, was daunting and horrifying, especially after the lights that lit them up were doused and I couldn’t see past the torches at my feet, which dazzled my eyes. I could hear them, though, shuffling and wheezing and coughing and sneezing and moving about, and even though I knew they were New Englanders and didn’t tote guns and shoot them off routinely, as westerners did, guns seemed to be out there, as we all knew what the funds would be going for. I began to speak, and a voice or two shouted, "Louder!" and so I pressed more volume out of my lungs and voice box. It wasn’t easy, and the lecture, advertised for only an hour, seemed like a path up a very steep hill and I had to carry myself up on breath alone, which seemed akin to, and as impossible as, flying. I had no energy for it; perhaps that was what made every word about Lorna seem like a betrayal of her, every word about Papa and Helen a betrayal of myself. I mixed up my story, got a few things backwards, tried to straighten them out. It was confusing to me, and so I suppose it was many times more confusing to the audience. My lecture was not a success.

But that made no difference. The audience acclaimed me. Here I was. There I had been. Giving testimony was more important than the testimony given. They clapped and applauded and shouted and passed the hat, until I was numbed by the whole experience and had to be led off the stage, a smile fixed to my face. Afterward, there was a reception with refreshments and much conversation. They were excited by everything I had to say, fortified for the conflict ahead, bright and eager, men, women, young, old. My lecture was a success.

I asked Thomas’s mother not to require any more lectures of me, and she agreed, remarking that perhaps everything was just too fresh, and of course there was my grief for Thomas.

There was, but that wasn’t it, though I allowed her to believe that it was. What it was was a revisitation, but far more strange and disturbing, to those feelings I had had that morning in Saint Louis, of being too big, too loud, too strange, of bringing tidings that were too unwelcome. No one could describe what was true in Kansas and Missouri. Hardly any Kansan or any Missourian, I thought, could describe what was true there to another Kansan or Missourian, even one supposedly on his or her side. To say what was true, you had to look into the eyes of your interlocutor and see something there that you recognized. I didn’t think you could do that about Kansas or Missouri. And when I looked into the eyes of my new friends in Boston, I didn’t see anything I recognized there, either. The more they embraced me and drew me in, the less I felt like one of them, like a woman, even like a human being. I felt like a new thing, hardly formed, wearing a corset and a dress and a shawl and a bonnet and a pair of ladies’ boots, carrying a parasol in my gloved hand, but inside that costume something else, which didn’t fit, something I felt myself to be but couldn’t name. By Christmas, I couldn’t tolerate Medford any longer, and I went back to Quincy for a while. At least there I was accustomed to feeling out of place.

And that, I suppose, is the end of my Kansas story. Everyone knows the end of the story, about the war and all of that. And most people know about the Lawrence Massacre, in August of ’63. The fellow Quantrill, who led it, was said to be about Frank’s age. No one had heard of him during my time in K.T., but he must have been as mad with rage as any of them, because he oversaw the killing of some two hundred men or so, all of them civilians, many of them in front of their wives and children. And as always, they burned what houses they could burn. I heard later from Louisa that Charles was safe—off in Leavenworth—and Governor Robinson hid in a gulch, while Jim Lane ran off across a field in his drawers. But Mr. Stearns, who had the store, was shot, and old Mr. Smithson was, too, and many, many others. Louisa wrote: "I never thought I would thank the Lord that the Bushes both passed on with that fever last winter, but I do, for no one who saw what those devils did will ever forget or forgive. The Lord Himself isn’t powerful enough to make you do it."

One thing is left to tell. After I returned from subsequent travels, and Frank returned from fighting in the war, with General Grant at Vicksburg for a while, then in Virginia, he was twenty-three years old and looked forty. It was only then that we ever spoke of K.T, and then it was only to agree that whatever anyone else thought, after K.T., nothing, not Bull Run or Gettysburg certainly not the raid at Harpers ferry that some thought started it all, not the Emancipation or the burning of Atlanta, not the killing of the President, nothing ever surprised either of us ever again.

The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton

JANE SMILEY

A Reader’s Guide

A Conversation with Jane Smiley

Q: Explain the genesis of The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton.

A: I was in Washington D.C. during a book tour when I heard that the federal building in Oklahoma had been bombed. I then called a friend of mine and told him that I wanted to write about the intersection of ideology and violence in American life. Without hesitation he said, "Kansas, 1850." So the idea came from outside of me, but the material was so interesting that it quickly drew me in.

Q: How did you select a genre for the novel?

A: Well, when I started writing The Greenlanders in the early eighties, I knew I wanted to write an epic, a tragedy, a comedy, and a romance. Someone I read defined all American novels of the nineteenth century as romances. So it was clear to me that if I was going to write a romance, it was going to be set in the nineteenth century.

I was trained in medieval literature, which has a stock of romances, and the one that I really loved was the thirteenth century Middle English romance The Lay of Havelok the Dane. I would define romance simply as a story in which a character goes on a journey and sees amazing things. Nonetheless, I wanted to play with some of the genre’s conventions. Havelok’s adventure ends in triumph. At the close of her travels Lidie is not saved; she doesn’t find the holy grail. That’s the sign that it’s a modern romance.

Q: Talk a bit about the research that preceded the writing of this novel.

A: The primary source material for this novel was extensive and wonderful. Many women in late-nineteenth century Kansas kept journals; some were quite sad; all of them were politically conscious. One of the most famous belongs to Sarah Robinson, the wife of Governor Robinson. She was smart; she knew what was going on; and she had lyrical moments, too.

She was not only a source of information, but a model of what was possible for a woman in those days.

Q: What’s the story behind your decision to introduce each chapter with an excerpt from Catherine E. Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home?

A: discovered Beecher when reading a book about the history of housework titled Never Done. As a research tool Beecher’s book offered a great deal of substance to me: it was a guide to what Lidie would know and do. Yet I also loved Beecher’s tone of voice and writing style as well as her opinions about what it meant to be a good woman and a good wife. I thought I could piggyback a bit on Catherine Beecher, that she could help me help the reader understand Lidie’s story in the context of nineteenth century domestic life.

First, I thought it was going to take me forever to weave the Beecher text into my novel, that I was going to have to know all the chapters forwards and backwards before using them. Then I decided to use the book like a fundamentalist reads the bible: opened it up, ran my finger down the page, and if it stopped on something remotely appropriate I put it in.

Q: Your 1996 Harper’s essay, "Say It Ain’t So, Huck," for many a dander-raising dismantling of Twain’s famous work, has led a number of critics to regard this novel as polemical corrective rather than dispassionate literature.

A: I prefer to look at it this way: Twain is the dad, Harriet Beecher Stowe is the mom, and Catherine Beecher is the maiden aunt, and I’m not going to throw any of them out of the house. And I don’t think that I have to say that one influenced me more than the other. I love Uncle Tom’s Cabin; I think it’s a much underestimated piece of work, and I learned a lot from reading it—not only about slavery, but about writing as well as the different concerns about men and women. There are scenes of nineteenth century domestic life in Stowe’s work that are as important as any of the feuds in Twain’s novels. And to say that they are not is to denigrate women’s concern

When I was looking back for things to know about the nineteenth century, I didn’t feel that the only thing to know was Huckleberry Finn. Also, I didn’t feel that everything I needed to know was in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. I think it’s unfortunate that some reviewers act as if there is an antagonism between the two. There’s a lot about American literature that’s bifurcated: never the twain will meet, as it were, never the Twain will meet the Stowe. Yet there’s no reason in life for that to be. I came to see the book as a kind of family reconciliation.

Q: Yet you have problems with Huck Finn, no?

A: My beef against Huckleberry Finn is a purely readerly beef: I think it’s boring. It’s hilarious to me that I’ve been so attacked for thinking it’s boring. I’ve always thought that taste is not a moral issue. From the beginning I’ve told my kids, de gustibus non est disputandem, about taste there’s no disputing. So I thought it was very interesting and funny when my taste was attacked or seen as a sign of stupidity or intransigent female-ness.

Q: What challenges arose in attempting a textured treatment of slavery?

A: I began with the assumption that slavery was an abomination, yet realized there was a need for some sort of evenhandedness. I did not attempt to draw the slave-holders as villains. When Lidie goes among them, she realizes that the issue is more complicated than she thought. When she comes away from the whole experience, and has to give that speech in Massachusetts, she doesn’t know what to say; it’s all a tangle. She doesn’t know how to be ideological anymore, because experience—the complexity of experience—has destroyed the simplicity of ideology.

Also, though I adore Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was important to me to have Lorna escape from a plantation that differed from the one depicted by Stowe. I wanted Lorna to escape from a place where she was treated reasonably well in order to separate issues of survival from issues of freedom.

Q: To what extent did content determine form?

A: Loma had to have the last word. She is the owned person, and the last word is I don’t want to be that person. So that’s kind of why I structured the novel the way I did, to have Lorna trump characters such as Helen and Papa. I also wanted to bring Lidie to a point where she knows what the cost of acting will be. At the end of the novel, she says we were never surprised again; she has paid the psychological cost of seeing incredible conflict right in front of her eyes, of believing the unbelievable.

Q: Loss—whether of an illusion, a loved one, or a way of life— appears as a motif throughout your novels.

A: I’m the girl who wrote about a whole loss civilization [The Greenlanders], so clearly that’s something that’s on my mind. Somebody always dies in one of my novels; sometimes everybody does. The idea of coming back from loss fascinates me. How do you go on from a serious loss? I think about that all the time. I don’t have anything theoretical to say about it, however, except what I’ve said with my work.

Q: More often than not your characters endure loss and are enlarged by their trials.

A: The writer John Hersey [A Bell for Adano; Hiroshima] once said to me after reading Ordinary Love & Good Will that he thought my characters felt a degree of joy that at this point in the twentieth century was unusual. So I think that my characters get by because they don’t come. to what happens to them with the expectation of despair or even stoicism; they come with the expectation of pleasure and happiness. When things go wrong, they take it seriously, and suffer, but they’re suffering both from their expectations as well as the actual wound. Often my characters are so excitable that the pain of their situation presents itself as enormous. These characters eventually persevere, but it’s hard for them, because of their expectation of something good.

This raises the issue of the true truth: is it a tragic truth or a comic truth? And in every person’s life the answer to that question is different. For a lot of my characters, not Lidie, but, say, the Moo characters, the true truth is a comic truth: a thing that was taken away from you is returned to you a hundredfold and better.

Take a central story in our society—the life and death of Jesus. You can focus on the crucifixion or the resurrection; both stories are there, and who you are somewhat dictates what you see. There are those comic sensibilities that see the resurrection, and the tragic ones that see only the crucifixion. Those that see the crucifixion are focusing on the body, while those that see the resurrection are focusing on the spirit. And I guess throughout my works I’ve always focused on the resurrection.

Q: The composer Giuseppe Verdi noted that "looking back is a real sign of progress," an observation that seems to characterize your oeuvre.

A: Well, often I’m looking back in an effort to find the meaning of the moment. It could be that I’m looking back in order to stop looking back; there’s a paradox there. I’ve not been able to consistently write in the present tense and say this is happening and that is happening without trying to find meaning in what is happening. In The Greenlanders, I tried to have a narrative that was pure action, and it succeeded pretty well, but the characters still had to ponder the meaning of their experiences in some way. And though Lidie Newton is filled with incident, there’s plenty of reflection.

It takes a great deal of wisdom to give up the past and to live consistently in the present. It takes more wisdom than most people have, and it takes the kind of wisdom that most people have to discipline themselves in some kind of systematic way to achieve. I certainly have done neither, though I’m trying. The things in my world become more and more immediate. I don’t really lead a literary life. I live a life very focused on my animals and my kids and the actual act of writing. Horses make you live in the moment, because if you don’t, you get hurt. Distraction can be deadly. I didn’t know how much I didn’t live in the moment until I started trying to get through the day with my horse.

Q: Do novels provide an entrance to or an exit from the present?

A: An entrance, definitely. I think we’re moving into a world that we’ll be able to live in but that we cannot currently imagine. And maybe learning to live in the present moment is our only refuge; so that’s what I’m working on. Writing or reading a novel allows you to get into that zone—the zone of the present, where the thing that you are doing is fully engaging. And riding or cleaning stalls are present moment activities as well; I’d like to live my whole life that way.

Q: I hear a faint echo of Virginia Woolf’s celebrated and sustaining "moments of being."

A: Yes, once some publication asked me what books made me cry. I named To the Lighthouse and Orlando. Woolf’s writing forces you to say, with her, that nothing exists except the present moment. She thought about things in a literary sense in a totally original way. She was in tune with something in a way that very few people are. The older you get, the more she knows; that’s why people keep going back to her work. The thing that she knows is a thing of the spirit rather than a thing of the world. That’s also true of Shakespeare and Dickens and George Eliot.

Q: How would you explain the enduring relevance of those writers’ works?

A: There wasn’t a single one of them who didn’t engage the social, cultural, economic, and political reality of his or her time. Not one. If you are a novelist and citizen of a certain time, your only option for engaging is with the social, cultural, political, and reality of your own time. If you have a view that those things aren’t timeless enough for you, then I don’t see what you’re engaging with, frankly. I don’t see how you’re engaging with others. I don’t see where your humanity is. So, why bother?

Q: How do you deal with the shadow of past writers and the expectations of today’s readers?

A: I always like to tell a good story, and there are pure story values of narrative, pacing, plot, and climax that I always try to do well. But for almost every serious author, there’s this other level of playing the game that has to do with orienting yourself in the world of literature: saying this is who I am, this is who I love, this is who I refer to, this is how my thoughts are related in a literary way to other people’s thoughts.

You have a number of audiences, and they overlap. If you’re lucky, there are some people for whom everything that you write has three or four modes of meaning. That’s a pretty select group, though, and they have to be trained by you. You may never know them, but it’s through reading your work that they become attuned to who you are and what you have to offer. So, when you come along and offer something new, something you haven’t offered in the past, that trained audience says, oh, this fits in this way, and everyone’s pleasure is enhanced.

Q: What about the Smiley neophyte?

A: When I was a student of writing, my goal was to have whatever I wrote go down easily. It’s like Mary Poppins and the medicine she concocts for each of the children; they find it delicious. I’ve always wanted whatever I concocted to go down easily, and whatever was in it that was informational or thematic or enlightening to slide down practically unnoticed by the reader. That has been one of my lifelong goals. That’s what I was sort of sorry about in terms of Lidie’s lack of commercial success. I thought a lot of stuff about that period of American history would go down easily. People who’ve read it have enjoyed it a great deal, but there’s something about the subject or the book cover or the reviews or the karma of the time that made people resist even taking a taste. That interests me—that this one didn’t go down very easily the first time around. My goal in writing is always for my reader to have a wonderful, satisfying time.

The novel that I’m writing now, which is about horse racing, is one I read aloud chapter by chapter to a friend of mine who knows something about horses but is not that interested. He also is not the literary type. I’m always thrilled when he enjoys it. There’s so much stuff, and if it goes down easy for him, it will go down easy for everybody.

Q: Have you a title for the novel?

A: Horse Heaven

Q: A date?

A: Derby Day, 2000.

Q: I trust you won’t be winding down with a memoir any time soon.

A: No way. If you look at yourself, your material comes to an end. If you look out in the world, however, your material is endless. So for a person like me, for whom just the act of writing is a pleasure, to look outward is simply a necessity. The world continues to offer more and more material. I don’t ever want to stop writing about it.