The All-True Travels and Adventures of Lidie Newton_ A Novel - Jane Smiley [196]
Well, I could only put my cowardice down to my femininity. There was the great shame of it. When all was said and done, it was Lydia who had panicked, Lydia who had run off, Lydia who hadn’t the wit to do anything else but seek a hiding place. The west was full of men, and of the stories of men, who confronted bullies. That was practically the normal course of western acquaintance: man meets bully, man endures bully, man pulls a pistol out of his hat and subdues bully, man and bully become boon companions. How, indeed, did Lydia plan to confront Samson and Chancy, whoever they were, having so thoroughly caved in to Master Philip? Such questions eventually drove out all thoughts of my boots, but neither was there much hope of sleep. I saw that all I could do was grip Thomas’s watch as tightly as I could and vow to do better, whatever that was.
Were I honest with myself, I would have to wonder why I had taken up the abolitionist cause. Thomas, of course, had made it attractive, so perhaps I had taken it up as a way of being courted. That afternoon with Frank in the creek at Roland’s farm had changed forever my perception of Thomas, as there was such a mysteriously knowing verve in the way he’d passed that money to Frank and caused Frank to pass it to the man in the cave. I had found so much charm in that that I had never even spoken of it to Thomas but cherished my secret feelings like a talisman. Perhaps I hadn’t wanted to hear a more mundane explanation of the incident. At any rate, we had so quickly set out for Lawrence, and so quickly taken up with our friends there, that I had gotten to be an abolitionist by reflex and, my sisters would have said, out of pure contrariness, as well ("just like Miriam"). Ah, well, my sister Miriam. When she was alive, I’d known of her abolitionism, of course, as it was the source of so much family dissension, but I hadn’t cared all that much about it. Yet, after her death, I had let it come to be her defining feature for me, the thing that helped her, from all of them, love me. Possibly that was it. Such a plain young woman as myself could find love only among abolitionists....
And then, in K.T., we abolitionists had been so hated, so stupidly, venally, cruelly, and ridiculously hated, that there was honor in being an abolitionist. For all their foibles, my friends there had been kindly, hard-working folks. I hated those who hated them, even hated the enemy more for my friends than they hated the enemy for themselves. But I couldn’t, in all honesty, look upon that as a virtue. I had become a hater, the sort who wanted to hang, shoot, dismember, clear out, and otherwise dispose of those who wanted to hang, shoot, dismember, dear out, and otherwise dispose of me. That was what my abolitionism had amounted to in K.T
But abolitionism was about slavery, after all, and the evidence of the Master Philip incident was that I hadn’t many instinctive feelings about slavery. I had been slow to act because I had been slow to feel. Master Philip and the child had played out a little scene for me, and even in my fear, I had watched it as comic rather than as tragic. Only afterward did that child’s voice come back to me as the voice of my conscience, you might say. I knew what I should have done only by surmising what Thomas would have done, and by then, of course, it was too late. It wasn’t just having to hide among my enemies that made it hard to be an abolitionist in Missouri; it was also having no friends.
The sun was well up and my nest hot and dusty before I awoke the next day. There was little relief in the open, either, as it was a hot, thick day, with clouds piling in the west. By Thomas’s watch it was past midmorning. I felt achy and