Still Here

Still here. Just having some computer issues. First, sketchy internet connection as the lower end hotels where I stayed after the Little Berks ended. -- Oh, yeah, I went to the Little Berks and met Historiann (who has a post about it) and Susan and some lurkers, and they are just as fabulous in person as online -- perhaps more! -- Now, my mouse has broken its tail, and Blogger doesn't seem to want to upload any pictures. Also, what with all of my travels this past week, I've sort of lost my groove. Like Stella, I must get my groove back -- except my groove doesn't involve a 20 year old young man from the islands (the Gentleman Caller makes me quite happy, thank you.)

Anyway.

Why did I move into lower end hotels after the Little Berks ended? Well, the Little Berks was held at Mount Holyoke; and, as luck would have it, the second Mrs. Douglass -- the white one -- Helen Pitts, went there from 1857-1859, with her sister Jane. Turns out, Emily Dickinson went there for a single year a decade earlier, and Frances Perkins and Wendy Wasserstein went there, as well; but I'm not writing a book about them.

Sadly, the main building from Helen's time had burned in 1898, leaving nothing behind but fragments of brick walls. What the Mt. Holyoke archives and library have are mostly published material and an alumnae file on the two Pitts sisters. Still, I transcribed everything that I could, and my have some little bits to pull together about this period of her life.

Since Mt. Holyoke was founded to provide middle class young women with an education equal to that of their brothers, who would be getting all of the education dollars in middle class families, I can get an idea of Helen's class status, or at least the amount of money that Gideon Pitts, there father, was willing to contribute to educate his daughters. Also, since the young women were being trained to enter teaching or missionary service -- and the school's principals at that time were very proud of the women who went to Hawaii, China, and (gasp!) Persia to be missionaries and (although they did not put it this way) agents of American empire. This gives more dimension to Helen, especially since she went down to Norfolk, Virginia, to teach freedmen during the Civil War. With abolitionist parents and this sort of education, I can sort of get an idea of her own value system.

I need now to find out more about her time in Norfolk, first by discovering exactly which agency she worked for, since I've seen two or three mentioned, none of which are the Freedman's Bureau and the most likely of which is the American Missionary Association. She only spent about two years there because she became deathly ill and was confined to her bed for about two years after.

She did several interesting things after Douglass died. The first was to go on the lecture circuit speaking about the Convict Labor System and discussing the abuse of the unequal application of the law in regard to black men and women. She noted that corporate crimes were hardly noticed as such, whereas black men and women were rounded up and incarcerated for petty crimes like vagrancy. That was in the 1890s.

The second was to apply for admission to the Mayflower Society. She was, in fact, descended from John and Priscilla Alden, but the Society rejected her because she had married (gasp!) a black man. So what if he had been recognized as the most preeminent black man of the 19th century, he was still black. I think that one of the things that she was symbolically trying to do in her application was to connect black American history to this most revered story of white American history through herself as widow of Douglass.

Another thing that I found interesting was Douglass's response to both black and white critics of his marriage to Helen. Everyone -- white and black -- was horrified that he didn't find a woman "of his own race." His responded that, had he married a black woman, he still wouldn't be with "his own race." He said that, with a white father and a black mother, he was neither one nor the other. As the product of miscegenation and in the black/white dichotomy as race had been constructed in America, any marriage for him was miscegenation. (Of course, then, what would have he argued had his new wife also been the child of a white and a black parent? What might the lighter skinned black women thought of that?) What I think he was doing here, just as he did when he openly confronted the reality of his bi-racial parentage, was to point out the lie of the construction of race.

I have to think about this more methodically -- since this really is a stream of consciousness here. Still, one of the constant stories of his life, one that makes his sex life relevant to his public life, is one of miscegenation. This isn't the story that dudes like to focus on: "Yeah! Fred! Tap that!" Nor is this the story of racial betrayal. Running under his story is the exploitation of black women's bodies, the restrictions on the contact between black men and white women, the biological and political ramifications of interracial sex, and his defiance of the white definition of "black" not only in abolition and civil rights, but also in his choice of personal companions.

Which puts the first Mrs. Douglass, Anna Murray, in a very cruel position because, in this story, she, as the dark-skinned black woman (and, I suspect the child or grandchild of an African -- her father's name was supposed to have been Bambarra), probably experienced her husband's defiance of racial definitions as a rejection of her. In fact, all of her husband's aspirations -- racial, class, political, sexual -- probably felt very much like a rejection of what she felt that she stood for, of her very being.

Anyway, I hope to gradually post images from my journeys north and east this past week, including the story of the Emily Dickinson haunted house (not really haunted, it just felt like that).