Chapter One #2
I worried at my lower lip, wondering if I had enough coins to gift her the salt fish and cornmeal she had in her basket. I
wondered what my very frugal Mr. Adams would say if I did.
Thankfully, the shopkeeper either took pity on her or wished to avoid a spectacle. “I’ll open a line of credit for you. In the meantime, use your old currency to pay provincial taxes; they’ll have to take it. At least until Parliament devises some other way to bedevil us.”
I left the shop that day rattled by the plight of my poor widowed neighbor. And as we set out on the muddy road for home,
I let Elizabeth carry my basket. Because if motherhood meant always finding a way, then despite my pride, I did not wish to
do it alone.
I was blessed with a blue-eyed baby girl who delighted my heart. Where I was dark, she was fair—more like her papa. And though
I knew my husband was below stairs pacing by the hearth, eager to meet his child, I decided to keep her to myself a few minutes
more.
I had secretly hoped for a daughter and gloried in my triumph. Nestled in childbed, I breathed her in, marveling at her auburn
lashes, kissing the pink spot on her head where she was soft and tender. My first child. My first daughter. Would mothering
her make me soft and tender, too? Or would it make me stronger?
In the end, I hadn’t needed to send for Dr. Tufts. My hips turned out to be wide enough. And now, flooded with maternal bliss,
I felt capable of anything.
When I finally sent my sister Elizabeth downstairs to fetch my good man—who had been gloomy and apprehensive during my ordeal—he
bounded up the stairs without the gravitas proper for a propertied man of twenty-nine with a growing legal practice.
Upon entering the birthing room, John kissed me with breathless relief.
And I smiled, saying, “I present your daughter, Mr. Adams.”
I laughed as my husband’s stern expression melted at the sight of his newborn peeking up from the folds of the blanket. John Adams was an utter misanthrope, or so I liked
to tease, but he had a more tender heart than anyone else knew. And once I discovered that tender heart, I claimed it—and
gave him mine in return.
That was why I’d let him whisk me away from my father’s parsonage to install me as mistress of this slope-roofed saltbox farmhouse
where we set straight to the business of children. A business at which we’d been too efficient!
“Tongues may wag,” I told him. “But do not be vexed with our daughter for arriving two weeks early.”
“Oh, I’d forgive her anything,” John said, reaching as if afraid to break her. “Why, hello, little Miss Adorable . . .”
I gasped in mock offense. “She’s already usurped the pet name you bestowed upon me in courtship?”
“Oh, but you are Mrs. Adorable now,” John said, cradling her. “And I propose to make little Miss Adorable your namesake entirely. Our little Abigail.”
Though I was delighted by this, it was not the convention. “You don’t wish to name her after your mother?”
“No,” he said, firmly. Very firmly. For relations with his nearby mother and brothers were ofttimes strained.
“You don’t fear confusion with two Abigails?”
“She will be Abigail Amelia,” John pronounced.
I liked the sound of this. I pictured the sort of young lady our daughter might become with such a name. Abigail Amelia sounded like a cheerful girl. Elegant, not pretentious. Which pleased me, as I could never abide vanity.
In fact, when, as a coltish fifteen-year-old girl, I first met John as a guest at my father’s table, he’d boasted so much
that I’d made sport of him. And smarting from my taunts, John gave every impression that he thought me a sharp-tongued shrew.
In his enormous pomposity he’d chided me for my unladylike habit of sitting cross-legged with a book. When I shot back that
a gentleman had no business to concern himself with the legs of a lady, he’d flushed beet red and fled.
Thankfully he returned at a later date, somewhat humbled, and gifted me a book. I don’t know if he’d been advised by one of
my sisters that books were the surest way to my heart, but in any case, he was able to apologize and to laugh at himself,
which made me welcome his courtship.
My father opposed the match, and my mother’s Quincy relations thought John Adams beneath me. None understood my attachment
to the short, stout lawyer, whose name was familiar to us primarily because his kin were maltsters in Boston.
But I sensed in him a man of destiny.
And something about Mr. Adams’s natural irascibility had appealed to the rebelliousness in me. Perhaps because he courted me by way of bickering, encouraging me to argue with him as if he gave my opinions weight. And because he was a man of words, not the rod.
In John Adams, I’d seen the possibility of freedom. And I’d insisted upon my heart’s desire until my parents finally gave
their consent.
Never for a moment since had I doubted my choice. And now I hoped our daughter, with her beautiful name, would inherit her
father’s many wonderful traits. Our little Abigail Amelia . . .
Within days of my daughter’s birth, the name Abigail Amelia was shortened to Abigail, which then became Abby, until finally, during the exhaustion of breastfeeding, I murmured Nabby, my own childhood nickname, which stuck.
Motherhood was a tiring business. So much so that I swallowed my pride and thanked my mother for sending Elizabeth. Not that
my little sister was much help—as often as not, she took a blanket up Penn’s Hill to write poetry and lallygag in the sun.
Fortunately my mother also sent my old nurse Phoebe, the enslaved woman who had swaddled me in my infancy. Phoebe was, to
me, both friend and second mother. She was also the subject of much childhood rebellion, for I’d determined at a young age
that slavery was an evil—and argued unsuccessfully with my father to set Phoebe free.
Thus it was always with feelings of guilt that I accepted Phoebe’s help, even when she professed eagerness to assist. “Now
you give me that baby to bathe, Miss Abby, before you get too tired and drop her.”
Phoebe still called me Miss Abby, though everyone else more properly called me Mrs. Adams now. Too tired to argue, I let Phoebe take the baby into her arms, bathe her, and rock her to sleep with songs from her native
Africa.
When my small breasts threatened to run dry of milk, Phoebe insisted I take fennel and barley water instead of tea, so I could better nurse Nabby.
And when I did, she said, “Lord, you were such a wild colt as a child, I could never credit the idea of you as a mother. Never did I think I’d see you contented with a baby at the breast. But here we are. ”
Taking umbrage, I retorted, “Grandmother Quincy said wild colts make the best horses.”
“Well, you’re saddled now, Honey. And in mothering this little one, you’ll need to be steady.”
Steady. I could be steady for Nabby. Especially since I thought her the most special child in creation. Elizabeth claimed she was
not often charmed by babes but mine was an exception. Phoebe could not resist pressing kisses on Nabby’s chubby cheeks. And
John often stared at her in her cradle.
I did, too, for I was fascinated by every movement of her tiny fingers and every hair upon her head. And I didn’t want to
miss attending to a single one of her needs, whether milk or touch or comforting words. As friends and family paid call to
welcome our daughter into the world, I ought to have been embarrassed by my overweening pride! After all, I used to feel so
vexed when parents chitchatted about every queer little thing their child did. I’d resolved never to become tiresome by prattling
on endlessly about my own children. But now I was proud as a peacock of my baby and eager to show her off.
My parents had already come to coo over their granddaughter. But there were more introductions to be made. “Might we visit
Salem?” I asked my husband while we breakfasted. I wanted to see my older sister, Mary Cranch, whose approval I craved. And
I knew John would enjoy the trip because Mr. Cranch was John’s friend as well as brother-in-law.
In courtship we’d been a gay foursome, and now that we all had wee ones, I longed to see our babies together in a cradle.
Alas, my husband said, “We cannot go to Salem just yet. Farming and the courts are coming too thick upon us. In fact, I’m
shortly to argue a case in Martha’s Vineyard.”
“What sort of case is it?”
“A complicated one,” John said.
Giving him a droll stare, I rocked Nabby gently in my arms. “As most are. Do you fear this one might confuse my female brain?” To our daughter, I whispered, “I do hope your papa knows legal talk won’t give me the vapors.”
“Don’t be saucy, woman,” my husband grumbled, hiding a smirk behind his napkin. “It’s a case involving a child. The mother—having fled her
drunken husband—arranged to indenture the boy to his grandmother until the age of twelve so that his father would have no
claim on him.”
“Clever mother,” I murmured, stealing a crust of toast from John’s plate.
John arched a disapproving brow—either at my words or at my crust thievery—and pulled his plate closer. “When the boy finally
did turn twelve, he didn’t want to go with his drunken wastrel of a father.”
“Smart boy, too, then.” Because my own brother was always drowning in rum, I held drunken wastrels in low regard, which my
husband had cause to know. “Can you blame the boy for not wanting to go with such a father?”
John scratched at the back of his head in answer. “It isn’t the boy’s choice. His father has rights to him. But all the womenfolk
of his family formed an army of Amazons to keep the father away. And when the lawmen finally came to seize the boy—”
“Seize him?” I startled, midbite. “Lawmen seizing a twelve-year-old boy?”
“Came to escort him,” John corrected. “Into his father’s custody.”
“You mean, they tore him from the only safe hearth and home he’d ever known.”
John pointed with his fork. “Your partiality makes me think it’s a good thing women do not serve on juries.”
With my daughter in my arms, my whole body shuddered against the idea that anyone should ever be impartial about a mother being separated from her child. “I think it would be better if women served on juries so the partiality of
human nature did not always go one way—against the woman.”
“Must you always champion your sex?” my husband asked, apparently amused by what he took to be this peculiarity of mine.
“Someone has to champion my sex,” I replied. “Since your sex won’t. Pray tell me you’re not arguing before the court that the mother must give up her boy.”
John gulped down a forkful of eggs, now a little irritated. “No, I’m arguing in favor of the officers.”
“Which officers?”
“The ones who came to get the boy. The women attacked them. The boy’s aunt, in particular, being a fearsome shrew, waved two
frying pans at the officers with menace. So, they arrested her. She’s suing for assault and false imprisonment.”
My lips tightened involuntarily.
John noticed. “Do not say she was justified!”
“Very well.” I sipped my tea. “I won’t say it.”
Puffing up as he was prone to do, John began to lecture. “My dear wife, one cannot have civilized society without the law.”
“Can a society still be called civilized if its laws are so unjust?” I asked, because the law always prioritized a father’s rights over a mother’s.
“An interesting question,” John said. “One of frequent debate in taverns these days when it comes to these odious acts of
Parliament. But a man scarcely expects to encounter such a quarrel at his breakfast table with wife and infant.”
“Are we quarreling?” I asked sweetly.
He bit back a smirk. “We’re bickering.”
When we bickered, it was playful banter about such trivial matters as his barbaric habit of leaving the shutters open to the
night air—when any civilized man, or indeed any barbarian, should know shutters must be shut at night. But this was a serious
matter, and he did not want to admit it. So, I merely drank my morning tea—ever a saving grace for a new mother whose babe
does not sleep through the night—knowing that my uncharacteristic silence would force my husband to stew.
“The laws might be unjust,” my husband finally blustered on. “But by rebelling, anarchy follows. This woman and her frying pans unleashed chaos on the whole island. Brawls led to shootings—all because
of women’s violent passions.”
All because of a wastrel father, I wanted to say.
Instead, I gentled my husband’s impatience with a kiss on the cheek and a second helping of eggs, consoling myself that though John might be of acerbic temper, he was as good a father and husband as God ever bestowed upon the earth. And I loved him dearly.
. . . even so, I made a silent promise to my baby girl: I’d defend her with frying pan, broomstick, or musket if need be.
Even if the price was anarchy.