Chapter Nineteen
Indian summer and a fair harvest
They moved him out to the house in November.
“It must be settled before winter,” Rosetta said, and his sons agreed.
“Pipes will freeze up unless someone is in the house.”
So they packed the furniture—the piano—his books. It was a twelve-room house. They looked at each other in dismay. What were his plans? What to put in all those rooms?
“Buy what is needed.” His voice was tired. He went into his room, closing the door softly behind him.
Meanwhile, Robert Ingersoll had moved to Washington. In spite of the many demands of his meteoric career he sought out Douglass, invited him to his home, sent him books.
“She was so happy, Douglass.” Ingersoll laid his hand on the older man’s arm. “Think of that. I wish—” He stopped and for a moment a shadow crossed his face. He was thinking of his brother. Then he said softly, “Blessed is the man who knows that through his own living he has brought some happiness into life.”
Gradually Douglass’ work reclaimed him. Nothing had been neglected at the office. Helen Pitts was now a Senior Clerk there. Everyone had cooperated in seeing that the work went on. His unfailing courtesy had endeared him to the whole staff.
He stopped in several times during winter for tea with Miss Amelia. The little old lady, grown very frail, kept a special biscuit “put by” for him. Jack Haley came in once and joined them. He kept Douglass talking quite late, for even after all these years Jack recalled the first long nights of his own loneliness.
Then the Supreme Court declared the Civil Rights Act of 1875 unconstitutional, and Frederick Douglass leaped into the fray.
He called a protest mass meeting at Lincoln Hall.
“If it is a bill for social equality,” Douglass said, opening the meeting, “so is the Declaration of Independence, which declares that all men have equal rights; so is the Sermon on the Mount; so is the golden rule that commands us to do to others as we would that others should do to us; so is the teaching of the Apostle that of one blood God has made all nations to dwell on the face of the earth; so is the Constitution of the United States, and so are the laws and the customs of every civilized country in the world; for nowhere, outside of the United States, is any man denied civil rights on account of his color.”
He stood silent until the applause had died away, and introduced “the defender of the rights of men.” The speech Robert Ingersoll made comes down to us as one of the great legal defenses of all time.
The voice was the voice of Robert Ingersoll, but as Douglass listened he heard the clear call of Daniel O’Connell, the fervent passion of Theodore Parker, the dauntless courage of William Lloyd Garrison. Sparks “flashing from each to each!”
So Frederick Douglass spoke the following winter when Wendell Phillips died. All Boston tried to crowd into Faneuil Hall for the memorial to this great “friend of man.” Douglass was chosen to deliver the address.
“He is not dead as long as one man lives who loves his fellow-men, who strives for justice, and whose heart beats to the tread of marching feet.”
In the spring the women, gathered in their Sixteenth National Suffrage Convention, paid tribute to Wendell Phillips, and Douglass heard Miss Helen Pitts speak briefly. When he rose he made his “co-worker and former townswoman” a pretty compliment. The women on the platform smiled their approval at Helen.
In the summer Douglass went out on a speaking tour. The 1884 election was approaching, and throughout the country voices were questioning the party in power. Bloody crimes and outrages in the South, betrayal of all the principles and ideals of Abraham Lincoln, had not won over the Southern white vote. Negroes in the North—in some doubtful states their votes were important—began to leave “Lincoln’s Party.”
Douglass was steadfastly opposed to this trend. No possible good, he said, could come out of the Negro’s lining up with the “Party of the South.” It had been faithful to the slaveholding class duringslavery, all through the war, and was today faithful to the same ideals.
“I hope and believe,” he told friends, “that Abraham Lincoln’s party will prove itself equally faithful to its friends ... friends with black faces who during the war were eyes to your blind, shelter to your shelterless, when flying from the lines of the enemy.... Leave these men no longer compelled to wade to the ballot-box through blood.... A government that can give liberty in its constitution ought to have the power in its administration to protect and defend that liberty.”
By midsummer it was clear that the campaign would be a hard one. James G. Blaine, the Republican candidate, was a popular figure. Grover Cleveland, Democratic candidate, was hardly known outside his own state. But the issues were not fought around two personalities.
When Douglass returned to Washington in August he heard about Miss Amelia.
“She wasn’t sick at all,” Helen told him.
“Why didn’t you let me know? I would have come.” Douglass was deeply distressed.
“There was no time. She wouldn’t have wanted us to call you from your work when there was nothing you could do.” She spoke gently as to an unhappy child, but her eyes were filled with tears.
And Douglass, beholding the understanding and compassion that lay in her blue eyes, could not look away. A minute or an hour—time did not matter, for the meaning of many years was compressed in that instant. No word was said, their hands did not touch, but in that moment the course of their lives changed.
Helen spoke first, a little breathlessly.
“Mr. Haley is breaking up the house. I’d—I’d like to take my vacation, now that you’re back. I’ll—I’ll go home for a little while.”
He had turned away, his hand shifting the papers on his desk. He did not look at her.
“Miss Pitts, may I—May I call to see you this evening?” he asked.
“Yes, Mr. Douglass,” Helen Pitts answered simply. “I’ll be at home.”
The next morning Douglass called on a minister who was also his close friend. He told him that he was going to be married.
“I’d like for you to perform the ceremony.”
The minister was all smiling congratulation. The announcement took him wholly by surprise. He had heard no whisper of romanceinvolving the great Frederick Douglass who, for all his sixty odd years, was a handsome figure of a man. The minister beamed.
“You’re very wise. A man needs a good wife! And who is the fortunate lady?”
He repeated the name, trying to place it. Douglass’ next words brought him to his feet.
“Douglass!” Real alarm sounded in his voice. “You can’t! It’s suicide!”
Douglass smiled quietly. A warm peace filled his heart. He knew that all the years of his living had not been barren. All the time he had been growing into understanding.
“I should be false to all the purposes and principles of my life,” he said, “if I did not marry this noble lady who has done me the honor to consent to be my wife. I am a free man.” He stood up, balancing his cane in his hands. He regarded his distraught friend with something like pity. “I am free even of making appearances just to impress. Would it not be ridiculous if, after having denounced from the housetops all those who discriminate because of the accident of skin color, I myself should practice the same folly?”
They said nothing about their plans to anyone, not even to Douglass’ children, but were married three days later in the minister’s home. Then Douglass drove his bride across the Potomac River and out to Anacostia. Within the next few days every paper in the country carried accounts of this marriage. Most of what they said was untrue. They were almost unanimous in condemnation.
When Grover Cleveland was elected President, white and black alike sat back complacently, jubilantly waiting for the Democratic President to “kick out” the Recorder of Deeds. Douglass himself did not expect anything else. His adherence to the Republican party was well known. He was a “staunch Republican” who had made no secret of his abhorrence of a Democratic administration. With his wife he paid his formal respects at the inauguration reception, but they did not linger in the parlors. He was surprised when, upon returning home a few evenings later, he was handed a large engraved card inviting Mr. and Mrs. Frederick Douglass to the Executive Mansion.
“He was a robust, manly man,” Douglass said of Cleveland, “one who had the courage to act upon his convictions.... He never failed, while I held office under him, to invite myself and wife to his grand receptions, and we never failed to attend them. Surrounded by distinguished men and women from all parts of the country and by diplomatic representatives from all parts of the world, and under thegaze of late slaveholders, there was nothing in the bearing of Mr. and Mrs. Cleveland toward Mrs. Douglass and myself less cordial and courteous than that extended to the other ladies and gentlemen present.”[31]
Within the course of the next two years Washington and the country recovered some equanimity so far as Douglass was concerned. But it is doubtful if anybody forgot.
Now Douglass decided on the fulfillment of a long-cherished desire. They sailed for Europe.
“Don’t come back until you’ve really seen the world,” Ingersoll urged them. “Take plenty of time. You’ll be richly repaid.”
They stayed away nearly two years. Douglass revisited England and Ireland and Scotland. He missed the people with whom he had worked in the old days, but their children received him royally. The two sisters, Anna and Ellen Richardson, who forty-five years before had written to Thomas Auld offering to buy his “runaway slave,” were still living. Helen kissed their withered cheeks and breathed her thanks. They set up housekeeping in Paris, watched the ships sail from Marseilles, and climbed the old amphitheater in Arles. In Genoa Douglass was drawn, more than to anything else, to Paganini’s violin exhibited in the museum. This was Douglass’ favorite instrument. He had even learned to play it a little.
“We’ll buy a violin while we’re here,” Helen promised. “It won’t be Paganini’s, but we’ll get an instrument.”
“Well, it won’t sound like Paganini’s, either!” Under the Italian sunshine that was enough to make them laugh. Pisa and then Rome, Naples and Pompeii, Sicily.
Then eagerly they turned toward the rising sun—Egypt, the Suez Canal, Libyan deserts, the Nile flowing through Africa.
Douglass’ heart beat fast. Sandy’s face came before him—Sandy and the bit of African dust he had held in his hand so long ago. Perhaps strength had flowed into him from that dust.
They made the voyage from Naples to Port Said in four days. The weather was perfect, and at dawn they found themselves face to face with old Stromboli, whose cone-shaped summit rises almost perpendicularly from the sea.
“Nothing in my American experience,” Douglass claimed, “ever gave me such a deep sense of unearthly silence, such a sense of fast, profound, unbroken sameness and solitude, as did this passage through the Suez Canal, moving smoothly and noiselessly between twospade-built banks of yellow sand, watched over by the jealous care of England and France. We find here, too, the motive and mainspring of English Egyptian occupation and of English policy. On either side stretches a sandy desert, to which the eye, even with the aid of the strongest field-glass, can find no limit but the horizon; land where neither tree, shrub nor vegetation of any kind, nor human habitation breaks the view. All is flat, broad, silent and unending solitude. There appears occasionally, away in the distance, a white line of life which only makes the silence and solitude more pronounced. It is a line of flamingoes, the only bird to be seen in the desert, making us wonder what they find upon which to subsist.
“But here, too, is another sign of life, wholly unlooked for, and for which it is hard to account. It is the half-naked, hungry form of a human being, a young Arab, who seems to have started up out of the yellow sand under his feet, for no town, village, house or shelter is seen from which he could have emerged. But here he is, running by the ship’s side up and down the sandy banks for miles and for hours with the speed of a horse and the endurance of a hound, plaintively shouting as he runs: ‘Backsheesh! Backsheesh! Backsheesh!’ and only stopping in the race to pick up the pieces of bread and meat thrown to him from the ship. Far away in the distance, through the quivering air and sunlight, a mirage appears. Now it is a splendid forest and now a refreshing lake. The illusion is perfect.”[32]
The memory of this half-naked, lean young Arab with the mirage behind him made an indelible impression.
After a week in Cairo, Douglass wrote, “Rome has its unwashed monks, Cairo its howling and dancing dervishes. Both seem equally deaf to the dictates of reason.”
When they returned to Washington and to their home on Anacostia Heights they knew that they had savored the full meaning of abundant living. They had walked together in many lands and among many nationalities and races; they had been received together by peoples of all shades, who greeted them in many different languages; their hands had touched many hands. They had so much they could afford to be tolerant.
Arrows of ignorance, jealousy or petty prejudice could not reach them.
In June, 1889, Frederick Douglass was appointed Minister to Haiti.