Large numbers of Baltimoreans have simply stopped trying to vote. “I thought my life of more consequence than voting,” says David C. Piquett, a Democratic candidate for office, who was chased through the streets and shot at. The death count on Election Day is down, but a policeman is murdered. Twenty-four gang members are arrested and charged. They all stand trial. None are found guilty.
Baltimore is one of the last remaining bastions of Know-Nothing power. The national party has collapsed over the issue of slavery. Henry Winter Davis, the man John and Asia had gone to hear in Churchville, now a congressman, argues that slavery is so very divisive, the best way to deal with it is never to mention it.
The city government often appears to take that advice. But the local population of free blacks, estimated now to be more than seventy-five thousand, is concerning to slavers in other parts of the state. Even Davis, who opposes slavery, feels that blacks and whites cannot live together. He himself inherited several human beings and freed them all, but only on condition that they move to Liberia. At this time, Abraham Lincoln also sees Liberia as the answer to the slavery question.
This is not the solution the Maryland slaveholders want. They want the free blacks re-enslaved.
In 1860, a bill proposed by Representative Colonel Curtis Jacob outlines a number of mechanisms through which this might be accomplished. He delivers a lengthy speech on the subject. In it, he castigates the Northern abolitionists as “frenzied vampires,” “literally crazed and mad . . . with the lust for Southern blood.” How long, he asks, must they wait to see someone, anyone, punished for Edward Gorsuch, who went to Christiana to recover his slaves and died there?
He goes on to decry free-Negroism as “an excrescence, a blight,” and then, just to be clear, “a mildew, a fungus.” The free Negroes have no actual rights of citizenship, he says, pointing out that they cannot vote or carry a gun or testify in court or own a dog or attend a church with a black minister or buy alcohol or sell corn or gather publicly or gather privately. Their condition is a freedom in name only. And yet, by their very existence, they destroy the contentment of those in bondage.
Jacob mourns those happy slaves of the past, now infected with the desire for liberty. Universal re-enslavement is the only path back to black contentment. His bill proposes that every Negro emancipated in the last thirty years be returned to their rightful owners without the cost of litigation or any other vexatious delay.
Jacob’s bill is thankfully defeated. But a number of city representatives, including the theatrical manager John T. Ford, spend their own money to publish and disseminate Jacob’s speech. They will not accept this defeat. They will get their message out and try again.
* * *
—
The Booths are neither oblivious to nor personally affected by these events. Edwin is scarcely home before he leaves again on tour. John’s starting his theatrical career in earnest. June is still in San Francisco with his family. Joe remains at school. The time of the Maryland Booths is coming to an end.
Rosalie
i
In 1856, when Edwin returns from California, Rosalie is thirty-three years old. Re-occupying the house on Exeter entails a spate of housekeeping. November is not the month for these things, and yet the bedding is aired, the curtains washed, the rugs dragged out on the first sunny day and beaten within an inch of their lives. Mother, Asia, and Rosalie work together to polish the house back to their standards. Mother is interviewing candidates for cook and laundress. Someday soon, Rosalie will be a woman of leisure, or at least more leisure than she currently enjoys. In the meantime, she works.
Increasingly, Rosalie feels the need to talk with Edwin on a delicate matter. As she sweeps and dusts, as she runs the tablecloths and curtains through the mangle and returns them to the tables and windows, as she chops the vegetables and grinds the spices and flours the fish, she tries to plan this conversation. She will have to be alone with Edwin—this in itself is difficult to accomplish as neither Mother nor Asia is inclined to let him out of her sight. And then she must find just the right way to say what she wants to say. The Edwin who’s come home is bigger, louder, and more colorful than the Edwin who left. Rosalie is not fooled. Was she not, for many years, practically his mother? She could be blunt with this new Edwin if she didn’t see through his new clothes and mannerisms. Underneath, he is still that little boy with the big, sad eyes who never asked a question if he didn’t already know the answer. Rosalie has never done anything to hurt that little boy and she won’t start now.
It’s so wonderful, how he swooped in to save them all. He has every right to congratulate himself, although, Edwin-like, he’s just as prone to self-flagellation for not understanding sooner how dire the situation was. Why, he asks, didn’t anyone tell him? Mother too selfless, of course, but Asia or John or Rosalie herself surely could have written. So he’s already feeling guilty when there is no cause. Rosalie fears that he will seize fresh guilt from what she wants to say.
Which is this: Rosalie is worried about John. Edwin hardly knows him. He doesn’t understand how abnormally sensitive John is where his own shortcomings are concerned. And Edwin’s miraculous rescue wouldn’t have been necessary if John hadn’t failed so miserably on the farm. This doesn’t mean John’s not as relieved and grateful as the rest. He hated the farm. He’s well rid of it. Everyone knows that he did what he could. No one blames him for the year of trial and tribulation. No one except for John himself.
So Rosalie would like to ask Edwin to consult with John as if they are equals. To try not to provide such a vivid contrast to John’s failures. At the very least, Edwin could stop talking about the way poor Mother has been supporting them all, educating, clothing, feeding them on the paltry hundred or so dollars left in Father’s estate, as if John had been nothing but another mouth at the table, another millstone around Mother’s neck. Another albatross, just like his sisters.
* * *
—
Rosalie and Asia are working together in the parlor. Outside, a chilly winter morning. Inside, the bright sunlight is streaming between and through the lace curtains, dappling the floor.
Outside, the mulberry trees are dripping free of their glittering ice casings. Inside, it’s just turning warm enough to let the morning fire die. One charred log rests on a mound of glowing ash. Soon enough, when the sun shifts and the chill returns, Rosalie will coax that log into flame. For now, the sunshine suffices.
Asia is standing on a chair, in her work clothes, gingham skirt, burlap apron. She’s pulling books off the higher shelves and handing them down to Rosalie to be dusted. Asia’s talking to the books as she does this. “Hello, Homer, you old blind fool. Hello, Byron, you mad, bad man. Come! Let us clean your dirty faces.”