Her childhood a New England idyll—pranks
and sunshine tempers: at four-years old
she dares her brothers to eat tulip bulbs,
prompting with, ‘What lovely onions!’
She remembered her mother, recalling
the rider through the village
shouting, the Declaration of Independence
was signed—after her mother died,
a new wife: some thought, excepting her love
of Christ, a pretty, blue-eyed bigot.
Harriet’s father, the Reverend Doctor Beecher,
her brothers and her husband
Professor Stowe—all, clergy:
dutifully dull, her journals and letters all
seminary news and cakes, she
waited for her life.
Her first writing—a story
for The Western Monthly, written to exorcise
a taproot ennui.
§
From Cincinnati, visiting her old pupil
Miss Keys south of the river,
they strolled by the courthouse
at Old Washington—people there in leg irons,
bought and sold.
Miss Keys said later, ‘Mrs Stowe said
not a word, only watching the longest time,
her face without expression—abstract,
the way leaves in autumn swirl
in mad hurrahs.’
§
Ohio a hotbed—abolitionist sangfroid
in the face of slave owners
chasing runaways from Kentucky: a mob
ransacks the office of the Free State paper
The Philanthropist, dragging
the letterpress into the river.
A slave girl from Old Washington
finds her way to Mrs. Stowe—looked after
two months, now considered family.
The girl’s master rides north
on a rumour, demanding his property—by night,
by back roads in a wagon, Professor Stowe
takes the girl to safety, deep
into the country.
§
In a letter, Harriet said
she has sent something to The National Era,
‘something from the heart, not the head—a cry
against the darkness;
slavery is someone
shouting of a great calamity—people
killed and wounded and burned alive, and you
quietly continue
with your rolls and coffee;
if you saw
the mangled dead, heard the shrieks
of the wounded, you would faint;
think then, of the cries of tortured people
through every household in the land, until
the heart could not endure it longer:
my story, I call, Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’
§
In 1942, my war-bride mother, waiting
war years at my father’s boyhood home,
his parents’ house
down the back lane from the old Keys place,
writes to him, complaining, The coloreds here
call me by my name direct—not even Miss.
That would never be allowed back home.
They have their own cemetery, for God’s sake; what else
do they expect?
§
Harriet said, ‘I could not control the story;
it seemed to write itself.’
§
Hog pens, a crumbling estate of stones
leaning at alarming angles, the toilet
a shed behind the house
with Sears & Roebuck pages torn ready:
the river road ran to whitewashed histories
of the place—by the Keys house
a plaque to Harriet and the childhood dream
I left—time, its scrupulous fiction,
scything.
Estill Pollock | Versailles
Contents | Mudlark No. 74 (2023)