Rosalie says that someone must have told Mrs. Booth that Mother was at the farm, because straight to the farm she’d come, in a hired carriage with a Negro driving, and then on foot, right through the gate and up to the cabin door, where she’d stood in the yard in her big black bonnet, spewing such dreadful names at Mother that nothing on this earth would compel Rosalie to repeat them. She was glad, she said, that none of them were there to hear it.
But farmhands working in the fields heard it. Neighbors on their porches heard it. Children in their graves heard it. “You can’t imagine the humiliation,” Rosalie says. Joe Hall had to loose the dogs to keep her from coming right into the cabin, which she informed them now belonged to her, both the cabin and the house on Exeter, too, and they had no legal right to keep her out of either one.
* * *
—
Rosalie is seated on her bed, her shoulders against the wall and her head pushed forward by the knot of her hair and the stoop of her spine. Her skirt, crinoline removed, spreads limply over the covers like a brown puddle. Asia sits cross-legged at the foot, facing her, and Johnny is stretched out next to her, his head on his arm. Both are lying on some part of her skirt, holding her by her wings like a pinned butterfly as she talks.
Edwin has taken a seat on the floor, which is cold, and either because of that or because he feels coiled so tight with tension, there is a tremor in his legs. He has wanted to know what’s going on, but now that he will, he wishes he wouldn’t.
He pulls his knees up to his chest, wrapping them in his arms until they are still. The light in the room is golden—The weary sun hath made a golden set—and Rosalie’s eyes shine with unshed tears; the bottom of her nose glistens. Edwin wishes he were older, the days about to come now safely in the past. The weary sun hath made a golden set, And by the bright track of his fiery car Gives token of a goodly day tomorrow. The someone who told that woman that Mother was at the farm? That someone was Edwin.
“I don’t see why we should feel humiliated,” Asia says. “It’s not as if we did anything wrong.”
* * *
—
When the shock has abated slightly, the children try to remember if they were ever actually told that their parents were married. They were certainly never told otherwise.
There seem now to be only three possibilities:
1. It’s all a lie and Father was never married to the woman calling herself Adelaide Booth.
This is the option Asia will choose. For the rest of her life, she will insist that Father and Mother married first and ran off to America after.
2. Father seduced and deceived Mother.
This is Johnny’s pick. He will decide that Father tricked Mother with a false wedding, that Mother was as stunned as the rest of them to learn she was unmarried. It’s a sentiment shared by their neighbors and friends. Mother has always struck everyone as every inch a lady. Father, on the other hand . . .
Johnny’s attachment to his mother will deepen. His feelings about his father will, from this time forward, carry an undercurrent of blame and anger.
3. Mother knowingly ran off with a married man.
Edwin is surprised to learn that Rosalie isn’t certain which of these options is true. He is even more surprised to learn that Rosalie is leaning towards number three.
Among the children, Rosalie feels the scandal most deeply. How often has Mother said she has no secrets from Rosalie? Mother is such a liar. Shame spreads like a fever through Rosalie’s body, making her cheeks hot, her hands cold. She adds this to the many reasons she already has for not leaving the house.
Edwin’s own position will shift about over the years. Sometimes, like Asia, he will insist that his father’s one and only marriage was to his mother. Sometimes, like Rosalie, he will acknowledge Adelaide’s prior claim, though dismissing her as an adventuress, thirty-two years his father’s elder (she was, in fact, four years older). Asia saw her once, he will say. I never did.
This is a good reminder that no one in the world is a reliable source for their own story.
Lincoln and the Merry-Begotten
During the ride he spoke, for the first time in my hearing, of his mother, dwelling on her characteristics, and mentioning or enumerating what qualities he inherited from her. He said, among other things, that she was the illegitimate daughter of Lucy Hanks and a well-bred Virginia farmer or planter; and he argued that from this last source came his power of analysis, his logic, his mental activity, his ambition, and all the qualities that distinguished him from the other members and descendants of the Hanks family. His theory in discussing the matter of hereditary traits had been, that, for certain reasons, illegitimate children are oftentimes sturdier and brighter than those born in lawful wedlock . . .
—J. L. Scripps, interview with Abraham Lincoln
Lincoln’s mother had died of milk sickness back when he was nine years old and his sister, Sarah, eleven. The family had then been living in southern Indiana. Up to this point, the hardships of Lincoln’s life were, for the times, quite ordinary—occasional beatings, hunger, a remote and unappeasable father, endless toil, and all the perils of the wilderness. His mother’s love had made his life tolerable. And then she was gone and he, at nine years old, helping make her coffin.
Fourteen months after her death, Thomas Lincoln left his children to travel to Kentucky to fetch home a new wife. He was absent so long, Abe and Sarah decided he must have died. A neighbor described them as all but nude, their clothing rotting away. They were lice-ridden, starving.
When the new stepmother arrived, she was shocked by what she found. The children were immediately cleaned, clothed, and fed. In a matter of weeks, the cabin had windows, a floor, tables, and chairs. She was good at making things better.
Prior to her arrival, his father had forbidden Abe’s reading as a waste of his time. His stepmother encouraged his studies. “Abe was the best boy I Ever Saw or Ever Expect to see,” she will write someday when the gifts she saw early are widely recognized.
Whatever native talents he has, Lincoln attributes entirely to his first mother’s bloodline. That he was allowed to make something of them is the work of his second mother. He credits his father with none of it.
* * *
vii