I slither my body into this patent leather receptacle which releases just for enough room to give me safety if not comfort, resting my exhausted left arm, as I like to do on the sturdy arm rest. My feet dangled and then cross themselves and soon I am embraced by the chair and became the chair or I should say breathing into the safety of its perimeters, I begin to dream its dream.
Clouds form, the horizon retreats and what comes before my eyes and my touch is a luminous forest magnificent with immature trees: Brazilian rosewood, cedar, maple, walnut (I love the speckled colors that the sun engineers on their trunks.) I turn and am embraced by a wispy cherry tree dwelling in the half shadow of a thin white oak. They all reassure me that wood is clearly the best choice for making furniture and they give themselves greedily to making this reality happen. Their surfaces are readily worked, they delight in being touched (they are poor conductors of heat so changes in their temperature is less startling), they are strong for their weight and agreeably make less noise upon impact than other organic materials of equivalent strength. But above all they can be cannibalized or I should say, various parts of their bodies can be mixed and matched, highlighting different and wondrous grains and clever polishings, revealing beauteous affects that mark origin and finish. Sometimes these trees show us the way they would like to be cut, highlighting their character and personality. In maple, I am told, the fibers are quite close, producing smooth, lovely surfaces. Then there are different grained cousins: fiddleback, blister, mottled, curly grain and of course, bird’s eye (my mother’s headboard). Then again, stains and fissures from my injury or even decay can create desirable patterns when cut.
The trees become most excited over their various contributions with veneers. Here they compete for color and markings and readily give themselves with eagerness to newly invented saws that permit slicing them into rapturously thin sheets. Then with poetic juxtapositioning, veneers or we can say the skin of our trees are sawn and shaved, peeled and sliced producing repeated patterns not readily known in nature. And timid woods that are fragile can be utilized sacrificing strength to beauty (think of burls and crotches) (I understand that some of these trees are uncomfortable that their veneers are used to hide cheap and ungracious wood but this is not their fault.)
Since I feel married to this chair whose dream is so satisfying I press my palm on its hip and it responds by pressure on my hip with its own palm. I feel glued and connected and sense a kind of gravity all out of proportion to our size. It is now that I contemplate all the chairs that have ever been created; they fly by me like ghosts of hungry past.
Here are Asian chairs that are not really chairs but opportunities for human bodies to find comfort and rest. They all parade by. Greek chairs dance before us with finely tapered legs, a rakish backward tilt to their seat promising us comfort and grace (posture and chair are one). Medical benches and stools march by trumpeting their ceremonial discomfort.
Upholsterers appear as we approach our own epoch and we become submerged by yards of fabric covering entire surfaces so that even our legs are veiled. Deep tufting with button pleats anchors the yardage that becomes me in place and keeps our overall design intact. I am serially produced and I espy hundreds like me: bare wooden frames of cheap wood veneered here and there and then rolls of padding arranged to support spine (denying curvature) and the comfort of thighs and knees. We become anonymous objects where fashion determines function and mechanization determines fashion.
My headache intensifies and the familiar chair that I bought in a government sale from M. W. King and Son (466 Broadway in 1851) patent 24917, 18 ½ inches off the ground with a width of 29 inches, upholstery in brown patent leather (actually a burnt sienna) allows me no rest or even safety within its sturdy body. Its origins from the all-giving forest have been undermined by the insistent onslaught of new technologies.
I am set upon by unknown shadows who slice and sliver my wood, screwing and gluing to give me bulk to sustain all the ornament that awaits me. Unrelated either to function or my own body’s pleasure of design, improved machinery, hugh groaning lathes turn out heavy carvings in walnut, ash and pine, of roses and tantalizing fruit. Even before I can catch my breath, heavy clouds and strident trumpets in cherry, bloated human faces in hemlock and ash overwhelm my simple surfaces attached to me by wires and glue. Meaningless veneers, exaggerated turnings take the shape the machine finds compatible; the role of the designer retreats in face of the power of the machine which has a life of its own, turning out miles of disconnected ornament. Soon any human utility falls to the wayside and the insatiable unrelentless need of the lathe to make turnings to justify its own existence, determines my existence. I choke on festoons of apples and pears that are glued on top of cascading roses which in turn are veneered on Egyptian geometrical designs. How unbearable is the present moment because I know that my existence is cursed; no one can sit on me and take pleasure in my evolved form.
I leap up out of the seat at last refusing this chair to control my thoughts. Why do I put myself in this discomfort when all I expect from a chair is to hold me? (forget comfort for the moment) I walk around the chair that now seems quite innocent, if not neutral. It looks back at me as it has always done. And then I force myself to remember actually day dream, about all my prized catches, illustrious Americans I persuaded cajoled, inveigled and seduced to sit in this chair and be photographed by me.
But who is speaking does not seem clear. I take on the dreams of Mr. Brady and become an essential ingredient in the photographic performance. I am the quiet observer of the studio.
And I choreograph all my sitters around this chair and listen to his admonitions and he drinks and eats my dreams and shares his strength with my worried constitution. The chair and the photographer become one in purpose. Together we perceive photography as theater and invite the spectator to create a reality that tells him what a work of art should look like. Cameras lie and we construct a reality that reinforces the popularly accepted view of what illustrious people look like. Just as we rearrange the dead for composition and expressive purposes to match our perception of what death looks like, we pierce our sitters to express what feelings are appropriate. Our perception is their reality and we give back to the public its collective fantasy of what reality really is. We pour water up the hill.
The chair, no longer innocent, begins to argue with me, saying that it was not always easy to sustain the human bulk of so many sitters. These human bottoms sat on its burnt sienna patent leather seat and left residues of energy that were not always compatible with the feelings left behind by previous sitters. Sometimes there was a kind warfare. President Buchanan’s large flatulent bottom had spent minutes deciding the best posture, not for comfort but displaying presidential light and dignity. His bottom left a severe crease on my hitherto smooth surface.
Then there were the Lincolns, all five of them (Fido was the sixth; why did they bring him?) They scratched my armrests (especially Tad) and jumped up and down on my seat leaving more than creases. President Lincoln appeared oblivious of me and even of Brady, so distracted he seemed to me. He left behind a sweet smell of hot biscuits with honey (had this been his lunch?) Mrs. Lincoln moved me around considerably and kept overruling Brady as to the best light, wanting the blue tinted glass to be even more blue.
Fido jumped on my seat (everyone laughed) and left behind something on my left back leg that I will not describe to you. Thad Stevens I remember because the residue of the sweat of revenge haunted me enormously. All the Union generals (Sherman, Sheridan, etc.) left behind the smell of horses, which I liked, reminding me of horsehair upholstery. It was not easy. Humans take us for granted and while they may clean out fabric with warm water and polish our turnings with lemon-oil, they are totally insensitive to how we are sat upon and by whom. Think about it.
I never felt stable after this session particularly my back left leg where Lincoln’s dog Fido had urinated on me. But then my armrests became too tired to sustain ambitious arms and greedy fingers. My patent leather seat and back once so glorious could never exude the shine I was accustomed to. My casters fell off more than once and I wondered if termites had invaded my being.
Brady stopped talking to me and seemed to have found more accommodating chairs to nap and daydream in. I did have a few glorious moments here and there when the attorney general of Connecticut and fashionable ladies sat on me, but I was used less and less and my ideas once so important fell on deaf ears. The memories of illustrious American bottoms that depended on me to sustain them began to die as the subjects themselves died; eventually worms got the best of me (anobium punctatum, a vivacious furniture beetle, probably derived from wild birds).
back to booksShe loved clothes and seemed to subscribe to the maxim that such matters were not disguises but revelations of true character. One night, bored with sentimental novels that seemed to share this folklore, I dreamt first about Mary Lincoln in my studio, then found myself on Broadway surrounded by ladies of fashion parading up and down the boulevard. It was a sort of public theater of ostentation and self adornment so I suspect that it must have taken place in the late 1850’s or even during the war. I even fantasized that phrenologists had become fashion consultants, advising their clients on appropriate ways of revealing (or veiling) their phrenological extremes. Hats and hairstyles were opportunities to become whoever you wanted by veiling your defects.
What I saw on Broadway that day were yards of inflated material made even more magnificent with an excess of petticoats enlarged and held firm with steel hoops-ruffled and flounced, braided, pleated in gauze, brocade, organdy in dark and lavish colors. In the midst of these fashionable ladies I see Mrs. Lincoln, whose presence precludes anyone else from shining or casting shadow on her elevated existence. Her voice is sonorous as it clarity trumpets even over the boom of Lower Broadway. This voice still rings in my ears with its fathomless magic made denser in autumn. Hear her.
You can say that I do like pretty clothes and adore shopping. I am sensitive to trends and when in New York (I like especially A.T. Stewart's Emporium) I purchase a whole array of outfits that will project the image I want.
You must understand that when I was a little girl there was a profound shift in ladies’ clothes. Our shoulders grew prodigiously, reinforced by bountiful sleeves, and this resulted in wide and generous skirts, ankle length, and embellished. I remember petticoats multiplied to give my step-grandmother, Mary Brown Humphries, that fuller look which used to her advantage, adding ornaments, ribbons, and jewelry. She always taught me through example as well as admonition that your sleeves should always be twice the size of your waist. So she and her dressmakers were happy seeking solutions such as hoops to puff out their voluminous upper arms. I frequently dressed in step-grandmother’s clothes and I fit perfectly because the style encouraged the look of a tiny girl dressing up in her mother’s clothes. I guess it was a sort of disguise.
I was almost twenty when I discovered (we lived in Lexington, Kentucky) that what I was wearing was no longer stylish, that a new image of beauty had invaded our lives. Our wonderful puffy sleeves that I had so enjoyed, along with their piping, flounces, and ribbons, were banished and we were directed to cleaner, simpler lines: clothes that ceased to deny gravity; vertical, floor-length, and sleek. My step-mother (though less fortunate than her mother and burdened with continued pregnancies), had the vision to see that the new clothes, now more delicate in pastel tones, would cause the American woman to beheld in a new and untried way. No longer would she trumpet her individuality; instead she would present a whispered self-effacement.
In the new style I felt free, newly dressed, and while I could not raise my arms beyond a right angle, I felt that I was now able to develop a graceful expression of sincerity and yearning. Like my step-mother, but not my step-grandmother, I was proud that my simple clothes reflected my true character, banishing the affectation of ornament and its hypocrisy.
True, I did use padding in my bodice and over the backs of my hips, but on the whole, I felt my clothes conformed to my natural proportions and were a positive home for my truer emotions. I dispensed with hats (many inherited from family) and chose instead a simple bonnet that framed my face and brought to my attention to my features. I was not beautiful, but what beauty I did have was a reflection of my mind, heart, and soul. Clothes provided me with a stage that would enhance their dimensions.
But those days, lovely in the contemplation of beauty revealed by truth, expired with the assassination of my husband. I swore henceforth to wear only black and began gradually to shrink inside, dying like a walnut shriveling in its shell. But since I was dressed as a reflection of my interior state, I felt comfortable in making nightly visits to Summerland, where I could visit Mr. Lincoln. Then I began to visit graveyards, not as sad stone gardens but as places to reconnect with all the departed in my life: my darling sons Eddie, Willie, Tad, and what is most unbearable, Mr. Lincoln. I leave my son, Robert, out.
At night I slept fitfully, the burden of my losses weighing heavily on me. When I would awaken my right eye would open to look about, but in my left eye the pupil sometimes would have rolled in its socket so that it seemed stuck in its casings, peering into my brain . When this happened, I knew that my sweet boys were connecting with me and I would encounter them, not collectively but individually as I preferred.
How does a mother ever know her child? They grow so fast and are always beyond reach, beyond touch and understanding. My first loss was Eddie, and he moves about with such rapidity that I have to immobilize him into sleep so I can love him. This way, I make him a kind of Endymion and I become Selene, a moon goddess. Like the moon itself I can gaze and caress him forever for he will always be there for me, always a boy asleep and accepting of my love and embrace.
Eddie is my garden that hourly changes so that in an expanse of four seasons I can experience the fullness of his nature in its climatic evolution. From his left side his tiny pink chest, soft and delicate grass, tufted and yet waving, invite picnicking and gentle contemplation. I love these summers of his and I time my approach during his naps when with his legs akimbo the smell of rosemary competes with shiny wrinkled leaves of hawthorn that seem to explode with pungent dark orange seeds and tangy sap.
As a mother I can celebrate my boy’s physical beauty, his proportions and his evolving manhood. I am not incestuous nor pedophilic, but can marvel at what I created from my own body, and in my contemplation as a moon mother, I can bathe my boy in silver light and can understand him only as a mother can, the silences of losing him fitfully, hourly to time and inevitably to faraway places.
So I relish Eddie in autumn, his brown matted hair, thick with the smell of pear trees shedding their crowns, English ivy in retreat, green and yet growing brown. And I am happy. He cannot see in the normal way, but I can tell he is dreaming. He looks at me and does not see me, then sees me but does not look at me, and I am happy. Winter surrounds his tiny bird-like fist and in that grasp is the embrace of all that nature can provide and I am happy and return in my own dream to my sleeping husband’s bed.
I lose Eddie and he cannot be replaced, but as the moon I shine in despair and in time replenish my belly and give form to another beautiful boy sleeping. I am the wooer as always, steadfast and strong, and Willie replenishes my loss and fills in his quiet sleeping all that I can ever ask for. But there is more. This tiny evolving boy beautifully formed in me and sharing in Eddie’s spirit is mine in a different way. Eddie died at three, almost four, and with Willie my caress is longer, deeper in my feast of his beauty never to be forgotten. I conceived him in my great loss, and at the moment of ejaculation, I thought of my husband’s strength, gentleness, and intelligence. And I created a safe place on the moon itself as nursery since I was promised a wonderful transformation for this child. I was blessed and Willie blessed all of us in return.
I know I have deep, driving desire, which is who I am, and this desire is also my will. And my will, strong and focused, is also my deed, which is my destiny. So I gaze on this tiny well-made child and my heart is full; he stirs in his sleep to reach for me, sensing his incompletion and I am happy for two years.
When I strive to will again I imagine a beautiful girl at the moment of conception. But this time I am cruelly punished (what had I done?). Another boy appears but not beautiful with enormous head and cleft palate. Thomas becomes Tadpole, then Tad, but for me he is “ my little troublesome sunshine”. It is then I begin to see him not as Endymion enjoying the gift of immortality in forever youth and beauty by remaining forever asleep, but as Pan, Dionysus, a dancing god, mischievous in inexhaustible play. I never can see him clearly, he is always in movement, his face like breath, transitory and formless, and his hands quick, blurred colors suggesting the objects or toys he is playing with.
My eyes follow him and in time I learn to read both his baby-twisted words, later his slurred sentences. But he is my deed, created from my will, and he is all about who I am and ever wanted to be.
I have Willie for twelve years before like Eddie, he is taken from me. Death is no objective thing, no fact to be recited. I know death is grief and sadness, mourning and dislocation. The true reality is the feelings we have of loss, not the fact of death. So I choose carefully clothes that appropriately reflect my inward state. Nothing that I wear in my bereavement can shine, nothing can reflect the moon. What is fitting is a black bombazine, a gentle silk and wool mixture, lusterless and dignified. Trimmed in black crepe, a silk treated to resemble a dull matte finish. My collars, sleeves, and cuffs, even my bonnet (with long black veil) are all made of crepe. I jettison all the ribbons and jewelry I love and choose an oval broach set off by pearls and containing an eyelash of my beautiful boy.
I move in public so as to advertise my bereavements much like a performance. Is this wrong if it focuses my grief and strengthens my resolve? I visit in my dreams the House of Mourning, a dark edifice whose individual floors reinforce different levels of grief, and I move in and out of the ground floor and first floor not daring to go further upstairs. Would my mourning unravel? My heart is broken, split into apple like sections, and like the crowds who surround me I am learning the levels and dimensions of sorrow. I dare not venture upstairs to the next floors, where mourning takes violent forms (to judge from the sounds). But I would soon enough learn the geography of these upper most floors and the circumstances of my own heart. For the time being I use a white linen handkerchief with darkened borders, highlighted by artificial tears in mock pearl sewn asymmetrically.
My tears, however, are not artificial even though I know I make myself cry in order to convince myself (and others?) that my grief is anything but illusion. I know I am blessed with this gift of tears, deliciously wet and cleansing, bathing me in fluid expansion. I am rightly proud of them because they speak larger than words, not from talking mouth, but from the fullness of my woman’s body. But these tears are also signs and shape a mythology of rupture and loss. They deny gravity, flowing sideways, disappearing when they reach their destination.
I know my husband is upstairs in the House of Mourning and I try to reach his rooms, but my feet cannot mount the stairs and my hands become frozen to the banister. My hope is that I can ascend with breathing intact or move appropriately; I want to feel my grief in increments. The vestibule of the House is large and I take full advantage of its generosity. I begin to move first slowly then in small timed increments. Legs moving then arms following. My head encased with veils can then rotate to the left and right though my public bandages of mourning hold me in check. But as I increase my subtle movements, my grief that is suspended over me descends and begins to fill my body, first registering in my flesh and then invading all of my organs, invading my stomach, intestines, then bladder, and finally taking over and pummeling my heart. I let this happen; no, I invite it. Feeling my feelings fully becomes the price of admission to the upper floors of the House, and that becomes my destination, thence to return to everyday life with some sense of being free.
In sympathy night retreats and the wallpapered leaves and flowers that decorate the vestibule begin their own autumn journey of loss, first in color then with leaves dropping prodigiously. Encouraged, my movements become larger and my legs and arms are more fully engaged. I begin to encounter complex movements, or do they spring from my own body as it gains momentum? I had always been a good dancer and even Mr. Lincoln loved to lead me across the floor. But this is no dancing, no, not as I knew it.
My pace quickens, legs and arms almost detaching themselves from my body and the intoxication of falling mounts, coalesces, and then pulverizes my whole being. My sobs quicken, then quiet, then simply breathe and I escape into a window that suddenly opens to allow passage to the floor where my husband lies.
I am resolved now and my body is quick and focused, but I fathom I am crossing a great divide so I hesitate to enter that room I know he sleeps in. My pause distracts me and I find comfort in his clothes and hat, which are suspended on pegs outside the door. Long, white and black, full of sweat and pain and exhaustion, some blood, but the overriding quality to his clothes is a curious embrace of life: grass stain on elbows, the odor of wet dirt on knees; his hat crushed by continuous use, which includes its role as a source of play for children. His pockets reveal their contents and, in the process, their owner: some money, spectacles, a comb, and jacks to play with, a few envelopes with scribbled notes, a tiny pencil. I inventory them in my mind and approach the door, open it and find the room empty.
I understand that his body is gone, not to return, but that his spirit is here and not here for it has much work to do. If I see this clearly it helps only a little in relieving my sorrow and I descended the staircase, pass through the vestibule where the wallpaper is now wintry, with trees now frozen sticks.
Tad is waiting for me, my Pan, my boy whose speech like his life is blur in time and space. But eventually he too is taken and I am alone, utterly alone.
I visit photographers, no not Mr. Brady who is interested in the surfaces of existence, but those who can access other dimensions. My senses hunger for connection, new circumferences, and Mr. Mumler of Boston provides me with new opportunities. In my visits there, I have to climb stairs to encounter my own self-image of woman-ness, fertile as the moon, giving life to males. And when I reach the top of the stairs, I encounter a familiar smell, dusty and pungent which seems to be waiting for me. It pervades my sittings with Mr. Mumler and when I leave I take with me an image of an old lady in black, strong in her past fecundity, with two gentle hands on her shoulders, loving and peaceful. There are others, but this is my favorite and I leave the studio at 170 West Springfield Street, and I leave Boston and eventually I leave even America.
But before my departure, I push Mr. Brady out of my dream and he awakens full of fear and consternation.
I get out of my mother’s bed quietly but with some dispatch and move to the corner of my bedroom, where the moon’s light is blocked. I have never seen spirits, but I have seen other people’s dreams. In the old-wet collodion days, I recall taking a positive print from a negative and being surprised to encounter a ghostly figure floating above the sitter. This spirit-like image was also evident, but less so, in the negative. I sense that what we have here is double exposure, an incompletely cleaned surface of the plate then transferred to the negative and in turn to the positive print. President Lincoln’s spirit is a chemical action registered between the image and the glass itself.
So I get back in bed happy I have explained the phenomenon, but then I see at the foot of my mother’s bed the President himself, gaunt, regal, and disheveled. But I am awake- this is no dream- so I study this specter and he makes no move to leave my darkened bedroom. Then he is joined by three small boys who look disappointed when they look where their father is looking. Had they expected their mother, whose presence I left long ago when I left her dream? Or are they confusing my energy with hers since I had invaded (not exactly with invitation) her nightmare? The wallpaper in my bedroom begins to wilt, and a strange unearthly smell descends into my bedroom. A window opens in the corner and all four Lincolns exit.
back to booksLately, I have utilized a little room off the hallway on the second floor, as a refuge or sanctuary for myself alone, away from the oppression of business matters. Here I could stretch out on a humble couch that is just long enough, but whose width forces my arms to cross my chest much like Pharoah. All I need is a crook and flail to complete my mental picture.
I continue daydreaming, shooting Taney in my mind’s eye, arranging him in our chair (even a three-quarter angle makes him look frightened) Then I illuminate his stooped head with soft glorious blue light and when I touch him slightly to position him he trembles then softens, giving in to what I sense he had been accustomed to, but long ago has jettisoned if not forgotten. So amidst the blue lights of my imagination and the palette of the portrait painter (I project myself as a versatile Van Dyck) I doze off happy in my contemplation of adding still another famous person to my roost.
At the very same time, I understand that the Chief Justice is himself stretched out on his own bed determined to bury a most unforgettable experience. He had proceeded to walk the distance from his chambers to my studio (he had given himself fourteen minutes), but on the way, he encountered strange dark, moving shapes that seemed to follow him. Were these people-or were these trees? Knowing that trees don’t travel, Taney became confused and all the frailty of his existence overwhelmed him. He pined for his mother and her gladdened touch, the dutiful administrations of his wife Anne; he was hungry for the reassurance of his six daughters (five of whom were excellent nurses to their father). So he beat a retreat when he was half-way there (he had seen the moving trees on the corner of second street and Pennsylvania Avenue and quickly got in bed to rest, revive and daydream about the beauty of the law whose chief guardian he had become.
I hear his daydream and invade its parameters: I don’t know if I ever appeared to others as young or even quietly sensuous (what are the qualities we associate with the inexperienced?) I have my stoop, my enlargened smile with visible gums (later yellowed teeth from cigars) to ward off the curious and the insincere. You can call me ungainly, even consumptive; I am neither charming nor heroic (like my hero Andrew Jackson) but it is my mind that can ravish and overwhelm you. Even with a tiny hollow voice the enormous clarity of my legal thinking, my scholarly dedication to truth and justice becomes my reputation. And I husband this renown jealously and it has returned to me all the glories I can imagine. I am the fifth Chief Justice of the United States (after John Marshal of blessed memory).
It is true that I seek to appear inconspicuous, preferring my desk to any lectern. But there is more. Since birth I have been blessed with a way of perception that frees me from the everyday recognition of objects such as people. This is not just my myopia (which I also have), I do not seem to recognize the human fare unless it speaks or moves in such a way that it becomes what it is, a person. Then I appropriate chosen words to address it. Otherwise if I ignore sound and movements, people seem like so many trees, vertical, pointing, products of time and weather. There have been some embarrassing moments in my long life; I have passed my six daughters in Baltimore and did not know them until they spoke and I could perceive they were human and in some way known to me. I feel silly telling you this, but life is an exchange. What if I don’t recognize the everyday? Nature has given me gifts that surpass the ordinariness of human existence. In fact, later it will be said about me that I am "like a disembodied spirit for that his mind did not in any degree participate in the infirmities of (his) body." I guess that is why I prefer letters to conversation; above all, I prefer the law, which is nicely encased in books. So I can decide the fundamental issues of our day, not even requiring me to leave my chambers (food is brought to me) and only occasionally, a toilet break (I have secretly hidden a chamber pot with perfumed cover under my desk). Here the glories of the law: the Constitution, statutes, legal glosses dance around my chambers, invade my daily thinking and perfume my everyday existence. Less and less do I need people and despite my on-going illnesses, I have my bed at home and a humble couch in my chambers where I can stretch out: just long enough but whose width forces my arms to cover my chest like Pharaoh (am I not a pharaoh of the law? my clerks chortle).
While I cannot roll and turn on this couch as I can at home, I let my mind roll and turn inside my head and I dream of conversations with famous jurists (my favorite being Hammurabi who is kind to me) So I am receptive to certain kinds of people as long as the subject is the law (I am less interested in its application). So you can understand that I am not happy when petitioners invade my head with their practical needs. A slight wave of my judicial hand usually banishes them, but it does not seem to work when a doughty Negro deposits himself at the left-handed corner of my dream, apparently not willing to leave.
He’s agreeable, Dred Scott being his name, though originally called Sam. He has sued for his freedom on grounds of residency in a free state. (he is the slave of John Emerson, an army surgeon). I am impatient with this man and try to ignore the landscape of human life that he wishes to surround me with.
I had freed my own slaves on moral grounds, but I did not have to do this. The Fifth Amendment protects citizens from being deprived of life, liberty and property. Slavery is property and a ban on slavery is clearly an unconstitutional deprivation of property.It is true that I am Southern (Maryland) and I am standing up for more than slavery. I seek to support a gentle way of like that I have known from my mother’s touch and for the rights of individual states against the tyranny of a growing federal government. And most important (and here the left hemisphere of my brain becomes indignant) for a strict interpretation of our Constitution against the quagmire of implied powers.
What I am interested in is not how the law affects Mr. Scott’s life, but how his life can be guided by a correct interpretation of the law. Mr. Scott smiles at me (or what I think is a smile, sometimes I have to remember he is a person) but I ignore this distraction and set out to set him straight.
In the United States, slavery does not require legislation being legal as clearly sanctioned by the Constitution; it is true that individual states can prohibit it within their own boundaries but Congress has no power to limit it or ban its existence.
I stretch my legs and feet away from my head to make the point. Dred Scott keeps smiling (does he know something I don’t?). I continue with my thinking. Negroes are “beings of an inferior order…and altogether unfit to associate with the white race.” They possess “no rights which the white man is bound to respect” and certainly have never been citizens of this republic and have no right to sure. Slaves are property and our Constitution protects property. I have been told despite my disheveled appearance, my words are inevitably clear, even simple, admirably composed with few gestures. I underline words ever so slightly so that even adversaries are convinced. “There was an air of so much sincerity in all he said that it was next to impossible to believe he could be wrong”.
Did Dred Scott hear me? Why is he smiling, not uttering a syllable? I face him with my left hemisphere. Reality, after all, can be conveyed more readily by the majesty of our brain than the undependability of our senses. He smiles back at me and his grinning is starting to get the best of me. It really pisses me off and I try to push his sturdy brown body out of my dream. He will not budge. I take another tact. I chose my words carefully and refrain from using a redundant syllable.
I tell him with enormous simplicity that his race is not fit for freedom, his inferiority being determined by heavenly decree. Had not Noah cursed Shem’s descendants who are Negroes because his son had seen his father’s nakedness? But God has compensated the colored race with enormous copulatory endowment which balances out their reduced circumstances.
I roll over slightly with the smile still glued on his person (or did my mind’s eye play a trick on me and that the smile is not a smile but simply part of his face’s circumference?)
Roger Taney dreams of his horse
or is it his house?
Dred’s house or horse and Dred himself
which is more than a horse
since it is a house.
Dred then leans over me and kisses me on my mouth, which is, I am told, too large for my face. Is this indeed a kiss, are these his own lips, or is he trying to tell me something?
