Something Worth Doing Page 17

  Could I become the editor of the Oregonian? No. Converting that newspaper would not be possible. It had a New England snobbishness that Harvey fit right into and advanced. Moneymen, some Democrats who wanted nothing to do with the new Republican party of Lincoln or the progressive ideas toward rights for men of color and for women. Any newspaper that didn’t carry the Pittock party line would face fierce competition. But she was up to it.

  Abigail’s “Marthas” were not.

  “It’s too large of an undertaking, Abigail.” The fledgling Albany association brought reality to her dreams. “We’re neophytes in this.”

  Abigail patted baby Ralph, resting on her shoulder.

  “Starting up will take hundreds of dollars. Printing presses. A place to rent. Subscribing agents, how will we pay them? And the work itself of writing and typesetting and getting the papers on the streets.”

  “I have children.” Abigail put Ralph into his cradle. She poured tea for her friends and colleagues. “I can employ them for some of the work. As for capital to begin, I might approach Jacob Mayer for a loan. Or perhaps sell the millinery.”

  “But that’s it. You have too many activities already. And there’s your health.”

  “Let’s see what the new year brings.” Abigail tapped her hand against her cane in a nervous gesture. “We’ll get through the holidays, which are always lucrative for the millinery. Meanwhile let’s find new recruits. There is strength in numbers. It’s a chicken-and-egg question: does the newspaper get us more recruits, or do more recruits help support the paper and broaden our cause?”

  “There has to be a way,” she told Ben that evening. How she would have loved to be in the position Harvey was in—able to leave behind a career she envied, step into social settings she could only hope to look at through windows of the finest hotels. Why, he’d even been given a ticket on the maiden voyage of the steamship Oriflamme between Portland and San Francisco. She only imagined the grandeur. If she ever booked passage on the ship, she’d be sleeping in steerage. If only she’d been given an education, she too could climb the rungs of that ladder out of the depths of a ship to the captain’s table and the successful men and women who dined there. She would have to build her own ladder, find the lumber for it, and climb up. She imagined she’d be doing it herself, but Ben might have other options. He was a builder at heart.

  TWENTY-TWO

  The California Connection

  1870

  _______

  It would be my humble pleasure to serve as a delegate to the California suffrage association meeting in San Francisco in December on behalf of the Salem Equal Suffrage Association. I will be in the city for my millinery business and will, with humility and shared purpose, represent both your fine organization and the State Equal Suffrage Association of Albany in this cause that calls us all.

  Sincerely yours,

  Mrs. A S Duniway

  Abigail finished her letter and paused, only half hoping the Salem group would allow her to add their weight to her presence at the California convention that serendipitously coincided with her buying trip. If they appointed her, they might even allow a small grant of expenses. They were a bigger chapter in the cause than Albany. She financed most of the Albany group she’d helped start, feeling ever guilty for spending family money. But then she’d advise herself that she had worked hard in the past year since Ralph’s birth to get herself back on healthy feet.

  She sent the letter and prepared her millinery order, always leaving herself open to discovering new items. In a previous visit she’d picked up hosiery and false hair additions, sorted through jewelry pieces, and even added a few toys she thought might sell, especially at Christmastime. And she looked forward to seeing Shirley.

  “I wish you didn’t have to go this time of year.” Ben was having a down day, as they’d come to call the episodes of increased pain, back spasms, and debilitation from the laudanum. “The stage from Albany to Portland is unpredictable in the rainy season and neither does much for your aches.” Clara Belle played the piano while Ben rested on the daybed they still kept in the parlor.

  “The weather is hard on my bones if I’m at home too, and at least this way I have a little time to myself.” She hung the boarders’ dresses. They had three living in the attic.

  “Yes, there’s that. You do enjoy your time to yourself.”

  “And see here.” She held up the mail she’d picked up on her way back from the classroom. “Here’s a reply from my request to be a delegate for the Salem crowd. And look what they granted me. Not only a delegate status but a pass on the rail line from Albany to Portland and a steamship ticket to San Francisco. I won’t have to take the stage. I’ll be rolling in luxury. I’ve never been on a train.”

  “You should take me with you, Momma.” Clara Belle stopped her playing. “Then you wouldn’t be alone at Christmas.”

  “Oh, that would be fun, but this time I can save good money by riding on Salem’s ticket. I’ll bring you back something special. And what would Annie do if you weren’t here for the holiday?” Maggie’s daughter still lived with them.

  Clara Belle returned to the piano in silence.

  “What’s that you’re playing? ‘Toll the Bell Mournfully’?”

  “No. It’s one I’ve composed. ‘Bring Me Home Oh Distant Ship.’ I wrote it for you.”

  “It’s lovely.”

  Her seventeen-year-old daughter twisted so she could smile at her mother, and Abigail’s heart clutched. She was such a help and so kind and unassuming, generous. Abigail often overlooked Clara Belle, who was especially good with her cousin and with Clyde and Ralph as he tottered around the furniture, just learning to walk. The boys brought attention to themselves, but Clara Belle was content to serve in the shadows. Maybe she should take her along to California. But the cost . . . no. She’d pay more attention to her. “You must play that at our next meeting, would you do that?”

  “I would.”

  Abigail vowed that in her effort to help all women rise to their potential, she not neglect the feminine presence beneath her own roof. It would be something to remind the California mothers too. The married women and mothers working in the cause bore an extra burden to make sure their own daughters weren’t set aside for the larger effort. Advocacy had its price, even with occasional privileges.

  The trip couldn’t have gone better. She spent Christmas Day at the home of an abolitionist and her husband and met Sarah Wallis, who had been named president of the 1870 conference. She was famous in her own right, having been a part of the Stephens-Townsend-Murphy company of 1844, the first to bring wagons into California through the Sierra Nevada. Sarah was a woman who landed on her feet, as Abigail thought of her perseverance and rise. She’d been abandoned by her husband a few years after reaching California, following a harrowing winter of near starvation. Then she married a second time, only to discover that that husband was a bigamist from whom she got legal custody of their son, extracted a settlement for her pain that she used to start a boardinghouse and speculate in land. She later married a judge who became a state senator, and together they supported women’s suffrage and were working to allow women to be admitted to the bar. At the reception for the delegates the night before, Abigail garnered up her courage to introduce herself to Mrs. Wallis.

  “I’ve heard so many—I mean much about your—I mean about you, Mrs. Wallis.” Abigail found herself stumbling over her words upon meeting the famous woman.

  “And I you. I’ve admired reading some of your letters to the editor.”

  “In our little agricultural papers? You read them?”

  “They’re often reprinted in Emily Stevens’s Pioneer.”

  “I wasn’t aware.”

  “You’ve such a way with words, Mrs. Duniway.”

  “Please. Call me Abigail.”

  “And I’m Sarah. I didn’t learn to read until my journey west in 1844 and ’45 as an already married woman. Educating girls is a top priority of my efforts, alo
ng with the vote, of course.”

  “There are so many threads to our freedom cloak,” Abigail said. “Education, ratifying amendments granting Negro men the vote, temperance without prohibition—at least that’s my position. I don’t wish a sip of wine, but I decry anyone’s right to tell me I can’t have it. And I so hope we don’t bring prohibition into the suffrage cause, because men will never grant us the vote if they think we’ll take away their liquor.”

  “California is pushing the vote by showing what kind of community goodness we can bring, beautifying cities, operating immigrant shelters for women and families, representing the arts. It’s wonderful to have you able to join us. Perhaps we can meet later. I’d love to hear about what’s happening in Oregon.”

  “That’ll be a quiet conversation,” Abigail said. “We Oregonians favor the still hunt, pressing prominent legislative men to bring the vote to the people, without flamboyance or efforts that might suggest we’d neglect our duties as wives and mothers.”

  “There’s always that pressure, isn’t there? Your husband is encouraging, obviously, or you wouldn’t be here.”

  “He is.” She hesitated, then, “Do you get support from the national organizations?”

  “We do, but we raise most of our own funds for our activities and to publicize our efforts.”

  Abigail nodded. I shouldn’t advance our work at our family’s expense, even though Ben approves. “I hope to learn things from being a delegate.”

  The women exchanged addresses and circulated to other parts of the gathering. Abigail loved meeting these men and women. There were eastern representatives and advocates of legal reforms and women who edited regional newspapers; and there were working women, eastern-trained female physicians, one of whom advised Abigail not to let her ailments hold her back. “Our best hope of avoiding invalidism is to declare ourselves engaged in the wider world. It’s a much better elixir for health than laudanum or even rest. You’re fortunate you’re young, Mrs. Duniway. You have much life ahead of you, now that your child-bearing years are behind you.”

  It surprised Abigail that she was willing to express her personal concerns to women she had only met. It was as though she’d known them her whole life, like they were sisters she didn’t know she had. They were as open to her as her sisters—perhaps more. She made copious notes of other speakers and her own observations of the bustling city and formed them as articles she would submit to the Oregonian, not that she had any assurance they’d be printed unless she paid for it. Harvey held no sway there now with his customhouse work. News was happening here, and those righteous editors needed to cover it. There were no journalists assigned to this event. But she was here, and she’d have stories for a dozen letters to the editor. And a feature article or two—on the famous Mrs. Wallis or the editor of the Chicago Legal News, who’d been refused entry to the Illinois bar despite her stellar reputation as a legal journalist. Oh, yes, she had stories to tell.

  This network of women mattered never more so than when Mrs. Wallis surprised her a day after Christmas with an invitation. “Will you grace us with a rhetorical presentation on New Year’s Eve?”

  “Speak? The way Susan B. Anthony does? Oh, I’m not sure—that wouldn’t be wise.” Public speaking was still considered risqué and unladylike. “Poor Susan B. Anthony had tomatoes thrown at her. I’ve never spoken about women’s issues in public. Or any issue, really.” A lecture at her schoolhouse to parents hardly counted. Abigail had addressed Fourth of July schoolhouse rallies, introducing the children before their presentations, but she had never orated to a crowd, on a subject that mattered to her deeply, from her heart. “I . . . I’m not sure my husband would approve.”

  “You’re here over the holidays. He must trust your judgment greatly. It’s safe here, Mrs. Duniway. You won’t be risking your reputation among this body. We women have voices God gave us. We mustn’t shy away from using them.”

  She’s right.

  Now, on New Year’s Eve of 1870, Abigail’s heart fluttered behind the curtains at the hotel stage. She twisted her mother’s earrings. Am I honoring her? Would Ben approve? There was no time to send a telegram to ask. There is time. I don’t want him to say no. Her fingers shook as she held the velvet drape and peeked out to see several hundred women and some supportive men in the audience, their feet shuffling on the polished floor, the wooden chairs creaking as they settled beneath the hum of chatter. A chandelier cast streams of speckled light over them. She’d spent the two previous evenings writing out what she wished to say but knew she did not want to be tied to reading her words, given the poor lighting.

  “Are you nervous?” Shirley asked.

  “Yes.” She twisted her earrings again.

  “Didn’t you orate to your younger siblings when you were a child?”

  “And to the mules and cows when they’d listen, those big eyes looking up at me while they chewed their cuds.” She smiled. “Speaking is different from writing or even twisting a man’s arm about a subject one-on-one.” By instinct, she knew she had to be fully present at the moment to give a speech and not somehow translate words from paper to tongue. She needed to see what was happening in front of her, whether people were getting restless or whether someone had dozed off. At least she imagined she needed to see those things—and more—to make what she was saying relevant to her immediate audience. To move people, she had to give herself wholeheartedly to where she was on the stage, reaching out to the minds and hearts of those before her and not to the script on the podium with a fern set before it.

  “I’ll say a prayer for you,” Shirley said.

  The offer brought a surprising calm.

  She heard her introduction, then stepped out onstage. In seconds, she would see in front of her whether she had moved people or lost them. She took a sip of water and a deep breath. Then using the voice that got the attention of her sons and their friends when they rattled through the house with swords and saunter, she began.

  She was humble. Thankful to those who had invited her. She told stories. She made her audience laugh, and she brought them to tears with her own vulnerability that she saw as demonstrating strength to those before her. She spoke things she hadn’t written at all, quoted Scripture she wove into the struggle of women’s lives. And she appealed to them as western pioneers, people who had come from somewhere else, had chosen to live with the uncertainty of a journey with promise but without the assurance of success. She invoked Sarah’s story of survival more than her own that endeared her to her California audience, most of whom were pioneers themselves, having come across a challenging landscape or survived a ship’s crossing. They had lived on a frontier, made do, innovated, worked side by side with men, and come together in community to help a neighbor regardless of their race or religious or political beliefs. People applauded mid-speech, feeding her spirit. Abigail reminded them of their own pioneering moments.

  And then she spoke of the American revolution. “That is the basis on which we press for women’s rights. We work toward the nation’s ideals rather than on what the nation might gain from women achieving the vote. It is to advance the cause of democracy, of freedom. This great nation did not intend to leave women out.” Thunderous applause followed that line, as it did with her closing when she charged the audience to go forth and do great things. “Ours is a cause worth doing regardless of how long it takes or how it turns out.”

  She perspired as she sat down, the heavy curls wet against her neck, and at first didn’t see Sarah Wallis urging her to stand back up, for the audience had done just that. The applause was music, almost as beautiful as Clara Belle’s composition. By speaking, Abigail knew she’d tapped into something inside her that she had not known was waiting to escape.

  Gave public lecture. Newspapers praise. Stop. Offered salary and speaking tour of California. Stop. $800. Stop. Must extend time away. Stop. Seek your blessing. Abigail.

  It was happening so fast. She’d been asked to be the Portland editor of the
Pioneer, to go on a lecture tour of California, perhaps beyond, to inspire. Ben has to approve! She’d sent the telegram. Surely the money would make him say yes.

  Ben’s return telegram was swift and short.

  Come Home Immediately. Your presence required.

  “What could it be?” Shirley helped Abigail toss her clothes into her trunk, made sure the invoices for her purchases were in order and ready to ship.

  “I have no idea. I’ve a housekeeper and manager for the store while I’m gone. Surely, he would have said if one of the children was ill, wouldn’t you think?”

  “It would seem so.”

  “I hate to see that eight-hundred-dollar salary disappear down the latrine.” Abigail supposed they would have another speaker they could send, but what a joy it would have been! She couldn’t think about that now. She boarded the weekly steamer to Portland and, on the way, wrote an announcement for the Oregonian she hoped they’d publish.

  Arriving in Albany, she rushed home to find out what the crisis was. Ben wasn’t there. He was at the farm with his pintos.

  “Everything fine, Mrs. D. You worry things no good?” Chen seemed confused by her opening question of what was wrong.

  “The children? They’re all right?”

  “All good. Like all time, good.”

  She picked Ralph up, hugged him, kissed his fingers sticky from a summer jam he’d poked into. Clara Belle put her arms around her. “You’re home, Momma. I missed you. We all missed you.”