“Certainly you’ll do. Why, you’ll do wonderfully!” She moved her head toward the parlor and raised her voice. “A surprise, ladies! Albert is here, and he’s willing to dance!” The couple joined arms on the hallway carpet and strode toward the parlor.
My talk with Albert had ended so abruptly as to leave my response to his gift still on my lips. “Thank you,” I whispered. I brought the book to my cheek, as if greeting a friend, and slid it into my apron pocket. Then with greater speed I moved about the room and into the foyer and upstairs, wiping and dusting, all the while listening to the dancers stomp and laugh to the rambunctious music.
In my previous life, loud music and dancing had seemed no more than incitements to impulsive behavior. Yet that celebratory stepping and the piano’s torrent of tones brought cheer even to this erstwhile Friend.
Fifth Month 18, near midnight
I ought not to read so late—but I’ve opened On Liberty and come upon an idea that seems to turn Mill’s other ideas on their heads.
We can pursue our true wants, Mill writes, only when doing so harms no one to whom we are obliged.
Of course this must be so. To behave otherwise would be immoral. Yet how it changes everything!
I am obliged to Charlotte.
The freedom I seek is to remain her mother, in word and deed.
I have harmed her in seeking this. Only because of prejudice, though—only because of prejudice.
Mill wishes to do away with such limiting judgments. Yet with it present, infecting our world, the promise of his idea of liberty belongs only to those whose survival is unaffected by narrow minds. That is, it belongs to those who have little need of earning money, and not only that; it belongs to those of that group who are essential to the survival of none.
How many are there of these persons—uncommonly removed from their fellows—who may press against the walls of common morality? The most of us are saddled with near-constant obligations: raising the young and sheltering the crippled, doing farming and manufacturing, tending the sick, lowering the dead to their graves. Does Mill realize just how few can take this liberty he trumpets?
There may be cruelty in such a philosophy. It posits a world we cannot occupy—and makes us feel doubly trapped for knowing it.
But I won’t blame Mill for this. He must have known the sting of prejudice and had his own life narrowed, or else how has he understood its hazards and its costs?
In the philosophy of Friends, one seeks comfort in the Lord when humans fail to understand one’s revolutionary aims.
If only my aims were considered revolutionary.
If only I could speak with Mill and arrive with him at a more practical form of liberty. For we take our steps through this world linked arm to arm, affecting one another. Mustn’t we all accept a partial freedom, a limited but not obscured horizon?
Another idea begins to tickle my mind. It starts with this: I can be considered free only if I can choose.
And what do my choices matter, if they’re of no consequence to someone else?
Then only because my choices affect others can I be called free!
There is no such thing as liberty, then, if I am not obligated.
Yet if I’m obligated, then I am not free.
I’ve wound my thinking into knots. I need to sleep.
Rain is dashing into the oval window at the foot of my bed. Down the street, in the moonlight, a patchwork of blooming trees and bushes glows. A splendid scene. Yet as I watch, the wind and rain are liberating flower after flower from their stems and hurtling them to piles of rotting petals.
Does all beauty end in rot?
Late night is the playground of despair.
Fifth Month 23
We’ve moved to the Burnhams’ estate in Germantown!
The heat was coming on fast, so Clementina decided we should move sooner than planned. Margaret and I spent days packing essentials at the Pine Street house—amid the scoldings of Frau Varschen, who despises disorder. She never comes here for summers, since her home in Moyamensing is too far, but she had strong ideas of what remedies and staples we should bring for the summer cook. In all the rush I had to forgo my visit to Charlotte—but I took comfort in knowing I’d live much closer soon.
Finally we departed. Margaret and Henry and I bumped along in a rented carriage behind the Burnhams’ gleaming green one. Following us were three wagons burdened by barrels, crates, and trunks, with broad-backed horses pulling their weight.
When we reached the main street of Germantown, I looked through the dust raised by our cavalcade to familiar sights: churches, banks, and other grand buildings of stone and brick, before which elegant citizens gestured in conversation; small homes and stores where rougher-looking people stood or crouched about, gulping from cups and spitting. Small children spun tops and chased each other; older folks hawked items from barrels or crates. Aiming to recognize no one, I moved my eyes quickly over them all.
We passed the road that led to the old grist mill, now torn down, where Peter and I had explored and built forts from scraps of wood. We passed the road to the ice-skating pond where Johan and I had courted. We passed the lane to Sterne’s meadow, and how I longed to leap from the suffocating carriage and gallop to that place where gigantic trees hold court, casting patterns of shade and light on ferns and bluebells. We passed the market square, where it’s said Africans were auctioned long ago, and the home of abolitionist Friends who’d sheltered people escaping from slavery. We passed Coulter Street, down which I glimpsed our peak-roofed, stuccoed meetinghouse, wide and long, with no decoration to distract one from its sober purpose, and I sent a greeting to Mother, who lies in the burying ground beside it. We passed the school where I’d been a student and then a teacher, acknowledged for my intellect and virtue, the qualities upon which I’d built all visions of my future life.
A small herd of goats was crossing at Centre Street, so our cavalcade halted, mere blocks from Gina’s home. I took the chance to send my tenderest intentions toward Charlotte; perhaps she felt a flutter of air at her cheek as she nursed or dozed.
Then we passed a certain street that leads to a certain lane with but a handful of small houses along it, built of wood or stone, one of which contains Father and Patience, and my own little room, and—in the attic—the mattress where an hour’s indulgence set my path askew.
I sighed.
“Are you all right?” asked Margaret.
I kept my face still and nodded.