I believed I’d be unrecognizable if I wheeled Henry before me and disguised myself; Margaret agreed, helping to make it so by loaning me her violet cloak and straw hat, which I wore over the green satin dress from the Haven. I wheeled Henry’s carriage toward Main Street and the burying ground, certain that I looked like an elegant mother out for a stroll—perhaps a South Carolinian transplanted north for the more bearable summer season.
I avoided bumps and mudholes as best I could, grateful for Henry’s acceptance of the jostling. When the road grew smoother, he fell to sleep. I turned onto Main Street, then Coulter Street, and then the flat ground dotted with rough-hewn grave markers that protruded but slightly above the grass. To my far left, a wheelbarrow stood balanced on its haunches. I held still, observing: no signs of people. So I halted the carriage and walked to Mother’s low stone. Along its rectangular top was etched the barest outline of her life: HELEN BROMER DE JONG, 1834–1881.
My hand went to the warm locket at my neck. I kneeled, staring at the ground that held her. “Mother,” I called plaintively, without meaning to.
Then nothing more. My head began to throb. The muscles in my shoulders ached.
I’d come, oddly enough, to ask Mother’s permission to lie. I wanted to claim to be a widow, since others might be willing to help me then. I hoped that Mother’s nearness might let me see how to place a boundary around such dishonesty. Yet at that moment, I understood two things: She would have had nothing but disapproval to offer on the subject, and I would lie, regardless.
If Mother could have but laid a calming hand upon me, I might have broken down and told her everything. I might have found relief in unburdening myself, perhaps even changed my plans. But if her spirit could have perceived me there, I would have been cruel to awaken it, for my situation would only cause her pain.
She had reached her rest after enduring far more suffering than I. Shortly after I was born, Mother’s father and brother died of typhoid fever. When I was four and Peter, two, she birthed twins prematurely; they didn’t live. Then her mother died of consumption. And at forty-seven she faced her own death.
Yet until bedridden in her final days, she never flagged in providing practical and moral assistance. People of all sorts came to our house, seeking her guidance as often as they sought the articles of clothing and food we gathered for them. It seemed she grew stronger, not weaker, until the very end.
“Mother,” I blurted, “where did thee find the strength?”
A ringing voice shot across the graves. “Is that Lillian de Jong?”
I raised my head, appalled. Old Hannah Purdes, the woman who’d delivered Father’s Notice of Disownment, stepped from behind the wheelbarrow. I hadn’t seen her since that day, when she’d said I would no longer teach at the Meeting school.
“Thee looks as if thee sees a ghost, child. I’m visiting my loved ones, same as thee!” Hannah hobbled over, having apparently declined in recent months. She clutched my arm, staring me up and down and back again. “No longer dressing plain, I see! Whose baby is that? Where has thee been? Thy neighbor said thee was a governess.”
“I was—I am. We’ve moved to the family’s summer house, not far from here.”
Hannah pressed for details—the number of children, the name of the family, the reason I was responsible for the baby that day—and I stayed quiet, struggling over what to tell her.
“Dear Hannah,” I said at last, “I’m near to fainting from the heat, and the baby needs changing. Please let me be on my way.”
“Has thee visited home recently?” Her speckled eyes narrowed.
I answered no. Henry gave a moan and a snort, then sank back into measured breathing.
“Go soon. Thy father needs thee.”
I couldn’t ask if he was deathly ill, or if orders for his cabinets were slowing, or if something ailed his wife, without showing the full extent of my estrangement. But Hannah knew.
“Thee seems a human soul cast out by itself,” she said to me, clasping my arm more tightly. “I see it, child. May I visit thee?”
How moved I was! Yet I couldn’t allow this. Begging her pardon, and knowing my quick departure would do no good to her impression of me, I wheeled Henry’s carriage away, leaving with more questions than I’d brought.
As if in counterpoint to that thought, Hannah yelled an answer to what I’d voiced at Mother’s grave: “Helen de Jong found her strength in silent worship.”
Looking back I saw Hannah’s face poking from its gray bonnet, querulous and imposing.
As I walked toward the Burnhams’, Henry woke and called out in hunger. I took a detour through a break in a fence into an unused pasture, and behind a wide tree I soothed him and was soothed. In that deeper state brought on by nursing, a bit of knowing came to me.
Hannah was incorrect. Mother’s calm had come by waiting silently in Meeting, but not her strength. That came by extending wisdom and assistance to those whose welfare concerned her, whether family, neighbor, or stranger. Our needs made her brave and persistent. Our improvements sustained her. When exhausted, she rested and regained her force by reading the works of weighty Friends. Often she returned to the diary of Caroline Fox, an English Quaker, and spoke aloud the words Caroline had once heard articulated in her spirit: “Live up to the light thou hast; and more will be granted thee.”
Through most everything Mother did—though outwardly it might have seemed to benefit only others—she gathered light and knowledge and stored it up within herself. Amidst that brightness, she could always find a bridge across her troubles, until her very end.
As must I, following in her way. I will be grateful for my work with little Henry, and for my service to unhappy Clementina and puzzled Albert, and for dear Margaret, who needs companionship as much as she needs learning—and most of all for Charlotte. These people are my lamps, who bring more light to me, however much that light may sometimes prick my eyes, and who thereby will help me see a way through trials to come.
Sixth Month 2
I came in from the garden this morning with fresh greens to find Miss Baker angling to hear my circumstances—though it grew clear that she already knew from Margaret.
I answered sparely, trying to confine my attention to an examination of each lettuce leaf I rinsed and dried. No doubt sensing my discomfort, Miss Baker gave me to know that I’d find no ill opinion in her quarter.
“I’ve come down some myself, being a cook in service,” she said, sorting good strawberries from bad. “My daddy ran a factory behind our house. My mama—she and two brothers and their mama came here from Tennessee. She played piano and sang at the Mother Bethel AME. When Daddy died, we lost the factory and all the money that came with it. But even when I was living high, I didn’t think I was better than nobody. The good Lord made us all.”
“I certainly agree,” I replied.