He performs his first scene rooted in place, just when his father would be striding the stage. He can think of nothing but that squeaking. Or maybe quacking. His boots sound like a duck. A stagehand meets him when he exits, standing in his stocking feet, holding his own boots out to Edwin. They don’t fit the period, they don’t fit his feet, but at least they are silent.
Onstage, the actors nearest him provide every possible support. Those offstage crowd the wings, watching in friendly, nervous sympathy. He can see their eyes, the way they clasp their hands together as if praying for him. The audience, too, begins to pity the young boy, so obviously out of his depth, drowning in his own sleeves. Edwin can feel the change when it happens. He can feel the moment they start wanting him to succeed. He rides that change; it lifts him.
He has them on the edge of their seats, wondering if he’ll get through his next line, his next scene, his next thrust, his next parry. The play ends with Edwin’s first ovation. He won it merely by surviving.
* * *
—
In May, on Johnny’s thirteenth birthday, Mother and Father marry. Afterwards Edwin, Asia, and Johnny pretend to forget that Adelaide ever existed. They do their best to insist that the rest of the world do the same.
* * *
—
June, like his father before him, has abandoned his wife to run away with a younger woman. In July, he and Harriet run all the way to San Francisco, where they’ve been booked by the indomitable Jenny Lind Theatre. Destroyed repeatedly by fire, the Jenny Lind is being rebuilt yet again, even as they make their way to it.
During this same month, June’s nine-year-old daughter, Blanche, is sent from the chaos of her father’s abandonment to stay with the Booths in Baltimore. Blanche adores her grandmother. Her grandfather frightens her with his temper, his violence, his casual cruelty. One night, when the whole family has gathered for dinner, he suggests that Blanche isn’t really a Booth, that Clementina was already pregnant when she tricked June into marrying her. No real Booth was ever so stupid as this one, her grandfather says, waving a spoon in Blanche’s direction. He doesn’t even say this to Blanche herself. The comment is made across her to her gorgeous teenaged uncle Johnny.
* * *
—
In August, Edwin and John Sleeper put on an evening’s performance at the Bel Air Courthouse. The early program is high-minded, consisting of several Shakespearean soliloquies from Macbeth and Hamlet, but the audience prefers the minstrelsy that ends the evening—Edwin on the banjo, Sleeper on the bones, both of them singing Negro songs with their faces corked.
The response is so positive, they repeat the performance on a second night.
* * *
—
One of Johnny’s friends at school is a boy named Thomas Gorsuch. The Gorsuch plantation, Retreat Farm, is near the school and Johnny’s been a frequent guest there, eaten supper at that table, spent the night. He greatly admires Edward Gorsuch—“the finest of men”—so sober and prosperous, so little like his own father.
Two years earlier, four enslaved men had fled the Gorsuch plantation. Gorsuch fancies himself a kindly master. He tells everyone that they will return of their own accord.
He gets tired of waiting.
In September, Edward Gorsuch travels with a posse of seven white men plus his eldest son to Christiana, Pennsylvania, where he’s heard that the men are being sheltered by another escaped slave, the abolitionist William Parker. Gorsuch confronts Parker on Parker’s doorstep.
Parker orders Gorsuch away.
Gorsuch answers that he’ll breakfast in hell before he leaves without his property. The white men attempt to force their way into Parker’s house. They have warrants and a sheriff with them. The law, they say, is on their side.
Parker blocks their entry. He says if they take another step, he’ll break their necks.
Meanwhile Parker’s wife, Eliza, has opened a window on the second floor. From it, she sounds several loud blasts on a tin horn. The first shots are fired at her.
Neighbors hear the horn. They come at a run, they are armed, and in the subsequent conflict, Gorsuch is killed and his older son, Dickinson, badly wounded.
Johnny happens to be with Thomas when the news of his father’s death arrives. Johnny’s outraged to learn that a man can’t even go and recover his own slaves in safety.
Cruel retribution comes for the black community in Christiana, but it doesn’t dim Johnny’s fury. Five white and thirty-eight black men are arrested, and still no one is found guilty of the killing. William and Eliza Parker have fled to Canada. Why has no one gone after them? If Johnny were only older, he thinks, he’d see to this himself.
The whole episode clarifies his thinking about slavery, which it turns out is not at all the same as his father’s. He doesn’t say so to Mother, opposition to Father always making her so uncomfortable, but he shares his views freely at school, where they are largely agreed. Slavery, Johnny tells his schoolmates, is the luckiest thing to ever happen to the Negro. He describes Retreat Farm as a peaceful, happy kingdom until robbed of its benevolent king. “I have seen the black man whipped,” he will later concede, “but only when he deserved more than he got.” Over the years, he speaks often of what happened at Christiana. So does the South.
So does Frederick Douglass, who’ll say that Parker’s action, more than anything else, led to the destruction of the Fugitive Slave Act. Others, later, will call the battle at Christiana the beginning of the Civil War.
* * *
—
Father wants a larger house for the family on the farm. He hires an architect, James Gifford, to build something in the currently popular Gothic Revival style. In October, work commences with the digging of the cellar, done on Father’s instructions, in such a way so as not to trouble the nearby locust trees.
The new house will be pretty rather than grand, two stories high, with diamond-paned windows, a peaked tin roof, and a wide, pillared front porch. Asia names the house-to-be Tudor Hall. The old log cabin is to be given to Joe and Ann.
* * *
—
In November, Edwin turns eighteen.
* * *
—
In December, June sends Father a letter. He says that Father could make a lot of money by coming to perform in California, where gold is plentiful and elevated entertainment scarce.
xv
In 1852, June has convinced his father to come West.
This story begins in a familiar way. No one imagines for a moment that Father can make the trip alone. June and his Harriet (called Hattie) make the long trip from San Francisco to pick him up, and another actor, George Spear (Old Spudge to his friends), joins them in New York. Old Spudge has the face of a clown—mobile mouth, pouches under his eyes, fringe of hair in a wreath around the dome of his head—and the voice of a tragedian. He can do it all.
Edwin is to be, at long last, left home. He’ll resume his schooling, catch up to Asia and Johnny. He’ll be able to finally accept an offer from the Baltimore Museum to join the company as a utility player, on salary, taking smaller roles and learning his craft. He’ll remember who he is when he’s not with Father—this will take time.