• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

"I won’t," I said. And I meant that.

I will pass over the details of my return down the Missouri River. The boat was filled with women and children, mostly Missourians, who were fleeing the Kansas-Missouri war. At any other time, we might have been startled by the various groundings, alarms, stoppages, and rumors of boiler troubles that punctuated our five days aboard, but in fact these mundane incidents were reassuring in a way. To be delayed, to have to get off the boat in the middle of the night, even to contemplate one’s death by boiler explosion, gave one the reassurance of normality when compared to war, the war all of us were leaving our friends to fight. Although I didn’t converse with many others, I did overhear what they had to say, about Atchison’s army and Lane’s army and other armies here and there, all of them, according to rumor, plentifully supplied with weapons, rage, and drink. Under the pressure of these reports, I dreamed so often of Lawrence burning to the ground that I came to wonder if it really had burned, if Louisa was sending me some sign. It was true that after Governor Shannon departed the territory, his second in command, the temporary governor, Woodson, a proslave fellow much admired by the Missourians, immediately declared Kansas Territory in a state of insurrection, which gave license to every Missourian to burn, hang, dismember, clear out, scalp, shoot, tar and feather, and do away with, or at least plan to, anyone not thoroughly sound on the goose question. There was much fear on the boat, some weeping, continuous prayers, and many long faces. Groundings and stoppages and alarms gave us something to do.

All was different in Saint Louis. We arrived early in the morning, and I went straight across the levee and asked after the Mary Ida or the Ida Marie. The Ida Marie was going upriver that very day, and so I paid my ticket and walked about for an hour before going on board. I was unescorted and sunburned, my short hair stuck out from under my Kansas-style bonnet, my nankeen dress showed considerable wear and tear. Even so, it took me a while to realize that I was being stared at, and to recognize that I looked a strange being among the citizens of Saint Louis. For their part, they looked strange to me as well, neat, buttoned up, careful. Suspicious. Quiet. Mannerly. Men carried newspapers that talked about the war, but the business of the town showed no knowledge of it. Business, even the always booming business of the levee, went on at a deliberate, unfrenzied pace. And there was a singular absence of gunshots, of anyone even flourishing a weapon. When I asked a question, where I might find a bite to eat, it was my voice that was too loud, my manner that was too insistent, my request that seemed outlandish. Perhaps it was embarrassing, but, in fact, I was beyond embarrassment now. I suspected that I would never feel truly embarrassed again.

After Papa, Lorna, Mr. Graves, Helen, after Louisa and Charles and Frank and Thomas, after Mrs. Bush and the Jenkinses and the Jameses and all the rest of them, it was calming to travel in what seemed to be a cell of anonymity. I sat in my stateroom or in the lounge. I even strolled on the deck, first of the Jack Smith and then of the Ida Marie. I read no books, having none, and did no needlework, having none of that, either, but kept my healing hands in my lap and looked out at the river, first the Missouri, then the Mississippi. I listened to the other women gossiping and talking to their children, shushing their infants and confiding in one another, ordering their slaves about, if they had them, or deploring those who ordered their slaves about, if they did not. I thought I would never really join that world again, that I could not, nor did I want to. I was a different animal now, a horse among cows, a duck among geese.

My sisters had no knowledge of my homecoming, and so there was no one to greet me when the Ida Marie tied up at dawn on September i and I walked down the plank and onto the soil of Illinois. Quincy’s high bluff