They talk about their futures. John says that he wants to do something important, something with weight and consequence, something that will leave a mark. Asia can have no such hopes, but she is excited to think that someone might read the book about Father. In her own small way, she wishes to add esteem to the Booth name. John is not so interested in that. “No,” he says, “I want to be known for something more than simply being Father’s son.”
The creek is clear right through to the bottom, a wavering lens that makes the submerged stones oscillate in size. The sun and the sound of the nearby waterfall are lulling Asia to sleep. “?‘Men at some time are masters of their fates,’?” John says, thinking perhaps again of the gypsy’s curse. And then, “Did you ever think that growing up so steeped in Shakespeare’s plays has left its mark on us? That maybe our dreams are bigger than other people’s? I know I can’t be just a farmer. I can’t be buried my whole life out here where nothing ever happens.”
It’s so normal for Asia to dream for John instead of herself that she doesn’t even notice doing it. A book about Father doesn’t strike her as a big dream. But John, of course, John will be extraordinary.
They return home, contented, logy with sun, water, horse, and dreams. To her surprise, Asia sees smoke coming from the chimney. She points this out to John. The day is so hot. It makes no sense.
They send the horses to the stable and go inside. There they find Mother, red and sweating in the sweltering room. She’s pulled her chair next to the fireplace. Father’s trunks are open, the bundles of letters piled about Mother’s black skirts. She is reading every letter. And then, when she finishes, Mother is feeding every letter into the fire.
vi
Nothing Asia or John can say stops the slaughter. Asia pleads, she shouts. She sobs in her fury and her disappointment. There, literally up in smoke, goes her chance to be someone more than what she is. “Leave us something,” she begs and so Mother begins to tear off the signatures—Tom Flynn, Robert Elliston, the famous blackface performer Daddy Rice—and hand these to Asia prior to burning the letters to which they were attached. The only thing these signatures offer is the certainty that a fascinating wealth of information is now ash. “I will never forgive you,” Asia tells Mother and she means it as only Asia can. She has an unforgiving heart, Shylock’s heart, John once told her, and she wishes it weren’t true, but knows that it is. She may let go, she may move past, but she never will forgive.
For several days, the only person she talks to is John. If Mother enters a room, Asia immediately quits it. John is less devastated—he has other dreams to sustain him—but equally angry. “It was a kind of murder,” John says, which is exactly what Asia also thinks. “A homicidal mania.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Mother says eventually. “I can tell you anything you need to know for your little book,” but Asia has already made a different plan. She writes to those friends of Father’s she knows well, asking them to send her what they remember, along with any playbills and reviews they might have kept. It occurs to her that Father’s sister may have had her own letters and memorabilia. Aunt Jane has recently died, but Uncle Mitchell is still in Baltimore, cast off by his children and living a grasping existence in a squalid garret. Asia decides she would rather talk to her drunken, miserly, contemptible uncle than to her mother.
It is now 1854. June is prospering in San Francisco. He and Hattie have had a baby girl. Her name is Marion Rosalie Edwina Booth.
Edwin is booked for a fall tour to Australia and Hawaii arranged by the British actress and manager Laura Keene. His letters are full of excitement and plans. “I will make a fortune,” he promises, “and then I will lose it all before I return.”
Lincoln and the Kansas-Nebraska Act
We were thunderstruck and stunned; and we reeled and fell into utter confusion.
—Abraham Lincoln’s first response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, 1854
Prior to the admission of Kansas and Nebraska into the Union, the federal policy was to keep the slave and free states in some sort of rough balance. For over thirty years, slavery had been forbidden north of the 36°30′ latitude. The Kansas-Nebraska Act voided this prohibition, upending the Missouri Compromise and threatening those arrangements that had been holding the Union together, if barely.
Stephen Douglas now proposed that decisions about slavery should be made locally, state by state, vote by vote. Congress debated the matter for months, often with spectacular threats, epithets, accusations. The Act was eventually passed by the Senate in March, the House in May. President Pierce signed it into law on May 30th.
The entire political landscape transformed. A feeling in the North that the South had long wielded too much power over the national politics, that they were expanding slavery into the new territories and perhaps had their eyes on the North itself, resulted in the end of the Whig Party and the creation of the Republican.
The abolitionists doubled their efforts. Kansas became a place of blood and terror. Preston Brooks, a congressman from South Carolina, beat Charles Sumner from Massachusetts nearly to death on the floor of the Senate with his cane. Sumner’s recovery from this beating took three years while Brooks became a hero throughout the South, receiving canes as gifts wherever he went. Rather than saving the Union, the Kansas-Nebraska Act hastened the war.
Douglas returned to Illinois to defend himself. He told his friends he could have traveled all night by the light of his own burning effigies. As he began to cross the state, speaking in support of his Act, Lincoln began to follow and answer him.
. . . we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a “sacred right of self-government.” These principles cannot stand together.
They are as opposite as God and Mammon; and whoever holds to the one must despise the other.
—Abraham Lincoln’s Peoria Speech, October 16, 1854
* * *
vii
John becomes a farmer. Asia can see that he feels the same despair over this that Edwin once felt facing a future as a carpenter. He leaves the house before Asia rises in the morning and often returns after supper is long over, too weary to eat what Ann Hall has set aside for him. He has that gift, to choose a course of action, however distasteful, and give himself over entirely to it. When Asia asks, he’s always too busy and too tired to work on Father’s biography. Asia struggles on alone and lonely.