The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis (11 page)

Shaw’s father visited Edmonia’s studio within a week or so. After viewing the bust, he congratulated her. He ordered photos and gave her permission to make and sell one hundred plaster copies for her own benefit.
[96]
He told his friends about it, stimulating interest in Edmonia’s work.

 Months later, Child commented to Shaw’s mother: “After she had done it, it seemed to me to have many obvious defects, and yet, on the whole, it was better than I had expected. It does give the idea of a
gentleman
, I think, likeness or no likeness. I certainly should not be
ashamed
of a son that looked like it.”
[97]

Shaw’s sister ordered a copy carved in marble.

Encouraged by Mr. Shaw’s endorsement, Edmonia began the task of making plaster copies – a tall order for a tiny studio and a beginner. She needed them for the Colored Soldiers’ Fair. The event was a mammoth bazaar of goods from many of the most prominent families of greater Boston. Its purpose was to help colored servicemen whose families were in distress. Charity ever played a role in her strategies.

Bannister’s beautiful wife was among the fair’s chief organizers. She had the honor of presenting the regimental colors to the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth before its departure. Her husband exhibited a full-length portrait of Colonel Shaw called
Our Martyr.

Child exclaimed, “To me there is something very beautiful and pathetic in these efforts of a humble and oppressed people to canonize the memory of the young hero who died for them.”
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She went on to cite Edmonia’s medallions of John Brown, Garrison, and Phillips. “John Brown’s was the best, being made from Brackett’s bust, not from life. She also made a clever little statuette of the colored Sergeant, who, when wounded, exerted himself to hold up the Stars and Stripes, exclaiming, ‘The dear old Flag hasn’t touched the ground, boys!’”
[99]

Edmonia’s depiction of Sgt. Carney – a colored man as a heroic soldier – was historic, unique, and a first for any artist, but more in the shadow of John Rogers than of Brackett, Story, or Hiram Powers.
[100]

Based on a preview, the
Boston Transcript
raved about Edmonia’s bust, vividly recalling the regiment on parade. But the next day, it was nowhere to be seen. Delays in production delayed its appearance.
[101]
A day after the
Transcript
printed its correction, Whittier admired it there “as very excellent.”
[102]

A copy also appeared at a gallery located near the
Liberator
offices. Garrison soon displayed his own copy.

Ever since her arrival in Boston, Edmonia had heard of Harriet Hosmer, the pioneering lady sculptor. Imagine her surprise when the lively superstar bounced into her little studio. She knew the name, but she never expected the larger-than-life celebrity to show up by surprise and demand to see her work.

Hosmer was preparing to launch
Zenobia in Chains
for New York audiences. It would show in Boston next. On a lark, she slipped up to Boston to see old friends. Chapman had suggested she take a few moments to see the work of a young colored woman. A good story would entertain her friends back in Rome’s American colony. Imagine how easily she took the stairs, with Chapman in her wake, and introduced herself.

I came to see your bust of Colonel Shaw.

Edmonia turned and undraped it.

Hosmer likely fell silent as she studied each part. Then, taking a step back, she turned to Edmonia and gave praise!

The verdict delighted Edmonia and Chapman. Meeting her gaze with a sudden directness, Hosmer probably added, Come to Italy.
[103]
It’s a good place for a woman. You will learn in one year what takes a decade here.

Then, with a good luck wish, a grin, and a glance over her shoulder, she left as suddenly as she came. The burble of voices that trailed down the stairs resolved into silence.

Edmonia surely collapsed onto her only chair, stunned and tingling with excitement. The visit lasted only minutes. It must have been like a delicious dream. She turned it over in her mind, playing it back, trying to remember it all, to retain the warmth. She wished it had lasted longer.

Was that really Hosmer? Hosmer was so important. Hosmer approved. She gave her blessing. She ratified the support of friends. She acknowledged Edmonia as a fellow artist! Come to Italy, she said.

Maria Chapman reported the visit to Child who replied in a “private note.” Months after Hatty had departed for Europe, Chapman quoted Child in the
Liberator:
“I am glad to hear that Miss Hosmer, during her recent visit to the country, called upon Miss Lewis in her little studio. She was pleased with the bust of Colonel Shaw and remarked it was ‘modelled finely.’”
[104]

Chapman added a few phrases describing Hosmer as “an older artist of high rank.” (“High rank” was a coy understatement; Hosmer’s exhibit had just moved to Boston with great excitement.) Beyond the endorsement, Child was impressed by what she called Edmonia’s “spirit.” The more she saw, the more she acknowledged it. She went to work on a longer article.

Socially prominent Anna Quincy Waterston also mourned Shaw’s death. The few lines she wrote never made it into her book of poetry, which had gone to the printer just before the bad news.
[105]
They can be found today on Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ monument to Shaw and the 54th:

O fair-haired Northern hero

With thy guard of dusky hue!

Up from the field of battle

Rise to the last review.

A few weeks after the fair, well before Mrs. Child released her report of seeing the bust in Edmonia’s studio, Mrs. Waterston gave Edmonia an unexpected boost. Starting with a quotable phrase and extending her elegy to Shaw, she published the following verse, which she titled “EDMONIA LEWIS, (The young colored woman who has successfully modelled the bust of Colonel Shaw)” and modestly signed “A. Q. W.”

She has wrought well with her unpractised hand,

The mirror of her thought reflected clear,

This youthful hero-martyr of our land,

With touch harmonious she has moulded here

A memory and a prophecy – both dear:

The memory of one who was so pure

That God gave him (what can only belong

To an unsullied soul) the right to be

A leader for all time in Freedom’s chivalry;

The prophecy of that wide, wholesome cure

For foul distrust and bitter, cruel wrong,

Which he did give his life up to secure.

‘Tis fitting that a daughter of the race

Whose chains are breaking should receive a gift

So rare as genius. Neither power nor place,

Fashion or wealth, pride, custom, caste nor hue

Can arrogantly claim what God doth lift

Above these chances, and bestows on few.
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Edmonia, of course, had to be delighted. In status-driven Boston, a poet’s pedigree was more important than the poem itself. Reared in high society, married to a Unitarian minister, Mrs. Waterston was as well connected as she was articulate.

In her own accolade to Edmonia, Mrs. Child aimed to shock conservative New Englanders with bold projections. She prophesied great artistic achievements by colored Americans: “In music, it has as yet only been manifested in Ethiopian Songs, breathing the deep sadness or the reckless merriment of human souls in bondage… Some future composer will give us the prayer of a black Moses in tones as inspired as Rossini. Operas will embody the romantic adventures of beautiful fugitive slaves… The Star of Africa has risen above the horizon...”
[107]
As courageous soldiers, colored men had already achieved a new respect.

Edmonia sold and gave away nearly all her copies of her Shaw portrait. One went to Mrs. Child, who, after seeing the bust for the first time, had written to Shaw’s mother, Sarah, that the bust “really seemed very good without ‘making allowances for circumstances.’”
[108]
Mrs. Child’s copy must have meant more to Edmonia than all the copies sold. Mrs. Child’s moods, so often unpredictable, could sometimes confuse and hurt.

Now, Edmonia could finally feel confident and forgiven. She had a measure of respect and honor. She had proven herself to all who mattered. She no longer needed to fret about shifting moods. The two women may have confessed their doubts to each other as they tearily embraced and exchanged conciliatory sentiments.

Later, in the privacy of her Wayland home, Child lay the bust on its back, took a saw, and brutally cut it through and through.
[109]

Arctic air shivered Boston bones for weeks on end. Exhilarating to some, too frosty for others, it was not so cold that shanty babies froze dead as they had in past winters. It did, however, promote foul air. From pre-dawn to past midnight, every stove labored on carbon fuel. Great clouds of smoke poisoned the very people who depended on fire for warmth. Pneumonia, flu, the common cold, and asthma shared an eager ally.

Edmonia fell ill.
[110]
Weak and feverish, she lay powerless with respiratory distress. Her landlord’s family, the Howards of Poplar Street in the West End (the site is now buried under Mass. General Hospital), called a doctor who warned she should not spend another winter in Boston. Weeks passed before she gained back her strength. Four who knew her were snowbound outside town – Mrs. Child (at Wayland), Anne Whitney (Watertown), Mrs. Chapman (Weymouth), and Miss Peabody (Concord). They were unaware of her condition. Only neighbors in the Studio building, such as Edward Bannister, might have missed her.

Perhaps she had time to read the romance,
The Marble Faun,
written by Peabody’s late brother-in law, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Published a few years earlier, it was a bestseller – but not at Oberlin. Oberlin’s moralists preached that reading novels was likely to lead “to insanity, infanticide, or other crimes.”
[111]

The text was partly travelogue, praising the charm of Italy and the atmosphere of Roman streets, parks, artworks, etc., as the author had found them in 1858 and 1859. Tourists in Rome carried it about, reading it aloud as they stood in front of a statue or monument. More importantly, it was a soap opera of its time, a window on glamorized lifestyles amidst the ruins of faded aristocracy and Romish religion. Readers savored the unfettered adventures of young society artists. Young women could come and go with anyone, at any time, and without caring about meddling neighbors. “Heretic” Protestants, shunned Jews, and exotic Catholics could love each other in the very shadow of the Vatican. An impassioned romance and aching guilt over the violent death of a hooded stalker heated the plot into a delicious brew of sins, secrets, shame, and redemption, topped with a whipped cream of moral purity. The author’s preface bowed to Hosmer, Story, and other American artists he had met there.

The story revolved around Miriam, a young painter with a secret past. A line that could have gripped Edmonia teased, “the one burning drop of African blood in her veins so affected her with a sense of ignominy, that she relinquished all [and fled to Rome.]”
[112]

The thought of mixing races caused shudders even in the most educated and liberal classes. Miriam’s burden – Jewish blood (revealed much later) – made perfect sense to Hawthorne and his readers. Anti-Semitism was widespread. Jews in Rome were kept apart and held back in a sixteenth-century omen of American Jim Crow.

Years before, Mrs. Child had introduced readers to the “tragic mulatto,” a woman with colored blood passing for white, in an effort to dramatize the unfairness of intolerance.
[113]
Mixing the chemistries of race and romance, it was instantly popular with readers and became a romantic archetype. Usually set in the context of slavery in the American South, beautiful, mixed race heroines who gave themselves to white men met unhappy ends. The injustice satisfied readers’ taste for drama and their revulsion to (or fascination with) interracial sex. Hawthorne adapted the idea to his uneasy member of the artist colony in Rome.

Edmonia too had fled her past. She too hid parts of her history and shrank under the haunt of past infamy. With the generous use of the word “wild,” her sentimental story became a smokescreen to her past. It diverted attention from Oberlin to the romance of woodland life, the pathos of orphanhood, and artistic gifts that could excite radical visionaries. As she read Hawthorne’s novel, she could have mused over the discussion of Miriam by two Americans, Kenyon and Hilda:

“She is such a mystery! … We do not even know whether she is a countrywoman of ours, or an Englishwoman, or a German. There is Anglo-Saxon blood in her veins, one would say, and a right English accent on her tongue, but much that is not English breeding, nor American. Nowhere else but in Rome, and as an artist, could she hold a place in society without giving some clue to her past life.”

“I love her dearly,” said Hilda … “and trust her most entirely.”

“My heart trusts her at least, whatever my head may do.”
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Edmonia must have ached for such hearts to embrace her, to accept her without the tests, inquiries, and judgments. Blood, breeding, and an assertive purity were the linchpins of New England society. Sadly describing Yankee stiffness, Hawthorne (in Kenyon’s character) asserted, “Rome is not like one of our New England villages, where we need the permission of each individual neighbor for every act that we do, every word that we utter, and every friend that we make or keep. In these particulars the papal despotism allows us freer breath than our native air.”
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