Chapter 40
The first time I read it, I was sickened by brutal scenes of slavery and families ripped apart.
It was obvious that Harriet Beecher Stowe had witnessed what she described, her words carried on the cadence of emotions that can’t be contrived.
I recognized that she had the mind of a journalist and an artist’s eye.
To write what she did was incredibly courageous and risky.
Many people objected to her convictions, blaming her for causing the American Civil War.
Now and then the severed ear of a slave would arrive in the mail to thank her.
She often received hateful letters and death threats.
Other authors weren’t always charitable.
Charles Dickens dismissed her work as sentimental, and that must have been painful to Harriet. I imagined those resentful of her success, reminding me of Mr. Owl’s warning about the green-eyed monster. The ugly truth is that many authors don’t like each other even if they won’t admit it.
Writing books is one of the most noncollaborative, if not antisocial and competitive, activities imaginable.
I learned a long time ago not to give in to jealousy.
It doesn’t land one higher on the bestseller list and poisons the soul.
Rarely have I come across writers who are sincerely supportive of their competition.
During the earliest days of my career, I was friends with historical novelist John Jakes. He was one of those generous authors who celebrated someone else’s success. Another was Tom Clancy. When he and his wife were getting divorced, he called me every week for a while.
He’d go on and on about the latest submarine or aircraft carrier he’d visited. I’d asked him for security advice, and he was sorry he couldn’t be helpful. It wasn’t something he thought about a lot. Tom was over six feet tall and a sharpshooter, he explained. He had an Army tank in his front yard.
I wondered what it was like for Harriet Beecher Stowe in an era when women were second-class citizens, not allowed to vote, enter contracts, or own property.
During her lifetime few women were taken seriously, and she was an anomaly.
An international bestseller, she supported her theologian husband and their seven children.
They lived stylishly in fine homes because of her.
Yet when she received awards, she wasn’t always allowed to accept them herself.
Often, her husband did in her stead as she remained seated at the banquet table.
In early 1994, I would visit her home in Hartford, Connecticut, two-story gray brick with a complex gabled roof, a big side porch, and a splendid garden.
Mark Twain was her next-door neighbor. He and Harriet were good friends, sharing similar views about social reform and human nature.
Her house was filled with beautiful art and furniture, the wall coverings rich, the kitchen well equipped, everything precisely appointed.
She liked to shop, spending a lot of money, and maybe I inherited that from her because I’m guilty of the same.
Her Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer Joan Hedrick was kind enough to give me a tour, telling me stories about what I was seeing.
Afterward we visited the archival area where Harriet’s private papers are kept.
I was shown a manuscript of Uncle Tom’s Cabin handwritten in black ink, the words angular and slanted to the right, some of them scratched through.
Most of the pages were missing, and Joan explained that when someone would write for an autograph, Harriet would send a signed original manuscript page.
I wondered how many of them are forgotten in attics.
Or perhaps they were thrown out when the recipients died, and those left behind didn’t recognize what they were looking at.
Joan’s masterful biography Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life had just been published when we first met.
We talked about how onerous it was to promote our written work, and the perils of publicity if you’re an introvert.
I’d been told all my life that Harriet is an ancestor of mine, and it seemed only fair that I should help her biographer if possible.
For some reason, I thought it a great idea to host a book signing in Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy.
Loyalty to the cause still smoldered 130 years later, the city’s thoroughfares resplendent with statues of Robert E.
Lee on his rampant horse, of Jeb Stuart and other Confederate heroes.
The South Will Rise Again was emblazoned on bumper stickers, T-shirts, beach towels. Confederate flags decorated license plates, and waved from poles in front of homes, government buildings, schools. I couldn’t have picked a much worse venue for an event honoring Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Maybe thirty people showed up, all of them my friends and staff.
Each bought a book or two because I’d made sure of it in advance.
Had I not salted the signing, scarcely anyone would have come.
I was dismayed that the subject of Joan Hedrick’s book still inspired such animosity.
If it was like this now, what did Harriet endure?
Yet she had to write Uncle Tom’s Cabin like Michelangelo freeing David from the marble.
The story was already there. It just needed to be told, and she was chosen to channel it.
I understand the feeling. My books don’t change history.
But I write because I must. A story never told is a loss of signal in the cosmos.
It’s been said that when Harriet Beecher Stowe was at the end of her life, she’d sit at her desk every day writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She didn’t remember that she’d already done it. I feel a deep connection to her and perhaps it’s imagined. But maybe it’s in my DNA.
G.G. told me that her mother, Jennie Martha Herrick, was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s cousin. That means I am too, some five generations removed. As different as my stories are from those my ancestor told, we focus on the same thing, the abuse of power. I believe it’s the root of all evil.
I have a feeling she’d agree, and it must have devastated her when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.
She met him during her visit to the White House in late 1862.
It was reported that he grabbed her hand and uttered those famous words, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war! ”
In 1868 her book Men of Our Times is a sketch about his murder.
She sounds like Scarpetta reconstructing the night of April 15, 1865, when actor John Wilkes Booth shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C.
Harriet describes in detail Booth knocking on the president’s upper balcony box, then blocking the door when it opened, barging in with a pistol and a dagger.
This was during a raucous moment of the comedy Our American Cousin and Lincoln was looking down at the performance.
He may have detected a commotion, turning toward it when the bullet punched through the left side of his head.
Harriet describes him collapsing back in his chair and closing his eyes as Booth leapt down to the stage and escaped.
Long after I wrote my childhood poems about Lincoln, I visited the National Museum of Health and Medicine near Washington.
I was shown the bullet that killed him and a piece of his skull.
I held them in my hand while hearing the details of his autopsy report penned by Army surgeon Joseph J. Woodward.
“The ball entered through the occipital bone about one inch to the left of the medial line… it then penetrated the dura mater…”
The hole in the skull was described as “quite smooth, circular in shape, with beveled edges,” and that’s what I saw when I held the squarish piece of cut-out bone in my hand. The museum curator’s name was Dr. Noe, pronounced the same as the villain in James Bond.
She showed me a glass jar filled with a clear preservative, possibly alcohol, since that’s what was used in the 1800s. Suspended in this medium was John Wilkes Booth’s trachea with a hole in it. After fleeing Ford’s Theatre, he eventually was cornered by a posse and shot in the neck.
The pistol ball smashed through vertebrae, severing his spinal cord, perforating the trachea I was looking at.
Booth would have been almost paralyzed and fighting for breath, inspiring little sympathy from the men standing guard.
He died miserably after several hours, a fitting end after what he’d done.
G.G. often talked about her ancestors the Beechers, recounting anecdotes she’d heard while growing up in Michigan.
She said that Harriet’s brother Henry Ward Beecher was a famous preacher known for his pulpit-pounding dramatic style.
He was a political activist, railing against slavery and other social issues.
His church in Brooklyn, New York, was a major stop on the Underground Railroad, a secret network of people who helped slaves escape to freedom.
He was a passionate abolitionist, and in 1863, President Lincoln sent him around Europe lecturing against slavery and the Confederate cause that must be defeated.
An advocate of temperance and women’s suffrage, my distant cousin Henry also was an alleged serial adulterer, publicly accused of having an affair with a married woman in his Plymouth congregation. She sued him, the trial in 1875 lasting six months and a national sensation.
It ended in a hung jury, Beecher acquitted but scandalized. G.G. told me that when she was growing up her family owned a portrait of the famous preacher. It had hung over the horsehide couch until news of the affair hit the press. Then it came down, never to be displayed again.