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No one seems to given much of a thought as to the burial place of this family in many years. Then, in 2003, the Mt. Hope Cemetery's archivist, Jean Czerkas, found the record of the grave sites without even trying, according to the newsletter of the the cemetery. This is the burial plot:.JPG)
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The part that I was most interested in was this:.JPG)
The inscription is difficult to read because that side of the monument seems to have taken the most wear. I could just barely make out "Ellen Louise, sister to Nathan Sprague." I had to use my finger tips to make out the dates, 1858 (or perhaps 1853) to 1891. I tried making a sort of rubbing of the 53 in 1853 (or 1858) with pencil and paper. (I know: You aren't supposed to do that.) This is the marker where her body lies, which gives you an idea as to how she was known:
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In the letters from Rosetta to her father -- which are fantastic for so very many reasons not the least of which is that they give me a perfect explanation straight from her pen as to her interpretation of her position in the family (and it corroborates my own theory) -- Aunt Lou or Ellen Louise is call Louisa or Lou. From what little that appears about her, I had somehow assumed that she was somewhat older, perhaps born in the 1820s or 1830s. No evidence suggested this, I just envisioned her as being older since I had also assumed that she was a companion to Anna. The reason that I had assumed Louisa was a companion to Anna was that, after Anna died and after Frederick married Helen Pitts, Louisa sued Frederick for 12 years back-pay as housekeeper. The case was dismissed, but I had immediately jumped to the conclusion that she had assumed that she might become the second Mrs. Douglass. If hers was the same opinion as much of the black community and the Douglass children, especially based on Rosetta's behavior, she certainly thought that she was more fit to be the second Mrs. Douglass.
Twelve years back pay also indicates that she was serving as housekeeper as far back as 1872, about the time that the Douglasses moved to Washington, D.C., and since she was in her early twenties. Maybe she felt that she had passed up opportunities to marry there in D.C. in order to serve the Douglass family. I also find this interesting that she dates her service to this year since I have been reading letters from 1869 in which Rosetta wrote to her father that Louisa was attending school, but that Rosetta would have to take her out of school if she were to attend to the housekeeping, to her two small babies, to her ill mother, and to her father's correspondence, not to mention defending her husband to her entire family.
I'm trying to read Louisa through these letters, too. From what I can tell, Nathan's family were freedpeople and up in Rochester from the south. In 1869, they seem to be contemplating a return south, but Louisa wants to stay in the north. Given the life that she may have been leading on the Douglass estate and the one of persecution and potential poverty that she would face in a more southerly home, I can't say that I blame her.
I also try to figure what her relationship to Anna may have been. I had assumed that she may have been a companion to Anna, but I was envisioning someone closer to Anna's age. This still may be true, but considering this age, I also wonder if Louisa may have filled in as a sort of foster daughter for Anna, one whose loyalty she could have to herself and not have to divide with her husband and his white female companions. Louisa was, after all, an age at which she could conceivably been a natural daughter. Since I'm also considering a differing class identification (despite socioeconomic status) between Anna and Frederick, and that their children identified with the white and black bourgeoisie more than with the black working class, Louisa may have been someone with whom Anna could have more in common -- I'm not sure how to articulate this better just yet, or even exactly what I mean in this respect, but I know that Anna seemed to have a different sense of self in relation to society that went beyond gender than Frederick did, and that perhaps Louisa would share that difference, too. If Louisa could read and write, then she could also be a more willing amanuensis for her than the increasingly harried Rosetta.
Another thing interesting about Rosetta's behavior is that she understood the importance of literacy in her own household, especially for former slaves, yet she was willing to pull Louisa, the former slave, out of school to help around the house. Not that this would have been completely unusual in the grand scheme of girls' lives in America; but, in the Douglass household, this would have been anathema. That could indicated just how exhausted Rosetta was at the time. She needed the help.
What does this say about Douglass, too? His believed that his son-in-law, Nathan, should essentially "pull himself up by his bootstraps," which was part of Douglass's line at the time in regard to freedpeople, but also how he interpreted his own story, even amid all of the racism that he openly acknowledged and criticized. There was the idea that hard work brings rewards, but also that fighting oppression brought rewards, too. He was constantly frustrated, almost to the point of helplessness, when he saw that both did not necessarily happen as he watched his sons and son-in-law meet more and more obstacles no matter what they did.
His vision for freedmen was fairly clear, but what of his vision for freedwomen? Are all of the former slaves, by default, men in his mind? When a young freedgirl occupies his household, how does her place in that household reflect a possibly unconscious position in regard to freedwomen on the part of the Douglasses, and how might that be emblematic of the problems facing freedwomen in general (although that last might be a bit of a stretch...still, it's worth considering).
Finally, where did she go when she left the Douglass household in 1884? Where could she have gone and what could she have done? I'm suspecting, especially given her placement in this plot and that she was the second internment, that she went to the Sprague household.
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2 comments:
Interesting question about freedwomen. I recently did some research on a free black household; while the men in the household would have been able to vote, the house went out of the family's ownership before women became full citizens. For those years between passage of the 15th Amendment and the passage of the 19th Amendment, black women were not slaves, and not citizens. I wonder how that played out differently for white women vs. black women?
I know in the case of the family I studied, that the female head of household contributed to the family income by taking in washing and mending; the artifact pattern even indicates where she sat to sew. But was that done consciously as an expression of black independence and self-sufficiency and distancing of self from more slave-identified (servant) jobs? Or was it "simply" a means of bringing in needed income? Then again, the family had enough income to spend quite a bit of it on displaying their status in ways that read both within the black community and the white community.
There are some references I found very helpful in approaching class distinctions and expressions in the black community that helped a great deal in making sense of things. Drop me a line; I'll be happy to send along a biblio if you're interested
When thinking about Louisa's literacy, I guess age here would play a bit part in how we interpret this. Because if she was born in 53 and left school in 69, then she would have been 16, which many Victorians (at least in Britain) would have thought was more than an acceptable school-leaving age for girls. Girls who stayed on longer than this were usually upper middle class and being honed for elite marriage, rather than housekeeping. Even girls who were going into the professions (like teaching) would expect to move into a classroom assistant role about this age, rather than remain a student.
I also think you could be right about her wanting to be the next Mrs D, but the alternative is that she finds herself displaced by the new wife. If you look at domestic violence suits for remarriages, you sometimes find that new wives and older daughters (especially those who had house-keeping duties) found it difficult to work out a new balance of power- which leads to all sorts of difficulties depending on which side the husband/father takes. In this case, if Douglas took his wife's side, Louisa could find herself unwanted and with no income or savings, which could explain her legal suit. She certainly wouldn't be the first Victorian single woman to find herself in this boat!
If you want some reading on the sorts of issues of 'spare' women and intimacy in the Victorian household, you could search for 'marriage with a deceased wife's sister Act', because the debating of this legislation in the 1860s highlights these same tensions and there are a few articles that look at how this debate is explored in the press and fiction.
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