Blessing (43 page)

Later that evening at the desk in his room at Mrs. Mather’s boardinghouse, Gerard penned a letter.

Dear Father,

I am writing to tell you that I am going to marry Blessing Brightman. I’m sure you recall her from Stoddard’s wedding. I will be working with her in her many causes and helping manage her considerable business holdings.

I will invite you to the wedding, to take place in July, but will not be insulted if you don’t come.

I have some advice for you. I suggest you sell the family business—I’m never going to take it over; I will never return to Boston. Then you should go to Manhattan. Live your life with your other family. I liked Bella and Lucille. Tell them you’ve retired from your enterprise, and spend time with them and enjoy their company. Why waste more time away from them? You might even find them understanding if you confessed the truth. I do not know. That’s up to you.

I remind you that, when I visited, I told them my name and that I was a distant relative visiting from Cincinnati. That is the truth. We’ve always been distant relatives. I have resented you for most of my life, but I am free of that now. And I want you to be too.

Confess your sin to God and he will forgive you. Don’t let the past ruin your life. I’m not.

Yours sincerely,

Gerard

He read it over, sanded and sealed it.

Kennan came to mind. Would he keep the secret? Gerard could only hope. However, it was his father’s worry, his father’s guilty sin. He had done what he could to dissuade Kennan from speaking out.

Gerard was free. No longer a slave to his hatred of his father or to the past. He imagined his mother, and she was smiling and clapping.
Mother, you would have loved Blessing. I do.

JULY 19, 1849

Blessing stood before the freestanding full-length mirror in Tippy’s bedroom. Blessing had ordered a new dress for her wedding—she’d chosen a deep royal blue and allowed herself to have it made in the latest style.

Tippy, who’d insisted on hosting the wedding, came into the room and stood beside her. Tippy also wore a new dress in a shade of lavender lovely with her blonde hair and light complexion. “We’re pretty, aren’t we?”

Chuckling, Blessing pressed her cheek to Tippy’s. Tippy was still very thin from her ordeal, but her color had come back and she was getting stronger in spite of the heat of July.

“On this same day last summer in Seneca Falls, we would never have believed this could happen, would we? That you’d be marrying Gerard Ramsay today?”

That was exactly why Blessing had chosen this day for her
wedding. “And who would have thought we would become cousins by marriage?” Blessing slipped her arm around Tippy’s tiny waist. “Our children will play together.”

A shadow crossed over Tippy’s face.

“I’m sor—”

“No,” Tippy cut her off, “I’m fine. Yes, our children will play together. Now let’s not keep the men waiting. The heat of the day is already building.” Tippy led her down the stairs and handed her a bouquet of daisies and pink roses.

Blessing’s father, in his best summer suit, was waiting at the bottom of the stairs. He offered her his arm and kissed her cheek. “You look beautiful,” he signed.

She blinked away tears as she signed, “I’m so glad thee, Mother, and the family are here for this wedding.”

“We are too,” he replied, and escorted her into the parlor. Only Tippy, Stoddard, Aunt Fran, and Blessing’s and Joanna’s families were in attendance at the private ceremony. Gerard had been attending the meeting for the past two months, and he had already begun speaking to the elders about joining. Since Gerard had stated his sincere intention and proven faithful thus far, the elders had agreed that this private ceremony could take place.

By the cold fireplace, next to the Presbyterian pastor from Tippy’s church, Gerard gazed at her as she took her place before him. She read the love in his eyes and drew in a deep breath so she wouldn’t cry. Her heart rejoiced, and she wished for once that she had a voice to sing.

Then Aunt Royale broke the solemn silence and, as if reading Blessing’s thoughts, began to sing, “‘In that great gettin’ up mornin’, fare thee well. Fare thee well.’”

And suddenly everyone was smiling. Blessing knew finally, fully, that she was forgiven and could look forward to a future filled with love and Gerard Ramsay. She sang in her heart, sang away the regret of the past: “‘Fare thee well. Fare thee well.’”

HISTORICAL NOTE

A
S
I
RESEARCHED THIS BOOK,
I found myself appalled by many nineteenth-century facts of life and events, primarily race riots and lack of women’s rights. First of all, would a mayor really incite a riot?

Yes. In very real events, after an abolitionist press had been destroyed in downtown Cincinnati, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a resident of the city at the time, wrote, “The mayor was a silent spectator of these proceedings, and was heard to say, ‘Well, lads, you have done well, so far; go home now before you disgrace yourselves’; but the ‘lads’ spent the rest of the night and a greater part of the next day (Sunday) in pulling down the houses of inoffensive and respectable blacks.”

And in a quote from an 1888 biography of Stowe, she recalls: “During the riots in 1836, when . . . free negroes were hunted like wild beasts through the streets of Cincinnati . . .”

This was just one riot. Race riots took place in Cincinnati in 1829, 1836, and 1841. As a novelist, it’s my job to dramatically portray events, not merely report them. So I transported what happened in 1836 to the year 1848.

If the attitude in the city toward black residents had changed in the twelve years between 1836 and 1848, I would not have felt free to move the event. However, the prejudice against free blacks had remained unchanged and, in fact, might be said to have increased. Cincinnati wanted trade with the South. The South resented the city’s being a pipeline in the Underground Railroad, and these kinds of tensions were among the factors that eventually led to the Civil War.

Also, I again point out (as I did in
Honor
, the first book in this series) the injustice of widows not automatically inheriting property. Blessing only inherited her husband’s property because he unexpectedly made out a will in her favor.

Otherwise his wealth would have gone to his nearest male relative, which could be a woman’s eldest son. If the son was still a child, a trustee would have been appointed to oversee the estate until the child came of age. These laws, which now seem medieval, only began to change in the US in the mid-1840s. Michigan and New York State were two of the early adopters, giving widows the right to inherit and control property.

When I quoted Frederick Douglass saying that a discussion of the rights of animals would be met with more complacence than a discussion of the rights of women, I did not make that up. I know that, as a twenty-first-century woman, this is hard to believe. But sadly it’s true. The words attributed to James Bradley and Sojourner Truth are also historically authentic. You can readily find the full text of their respective speeches by searching for them online.

Wives in the nineteenth century were legally invisible. A
wife could not own property, keep her own wages, or complain if her husband beat her. Seen as less competent than men, women could even get away with certain crimes if their husbands were present—similar to our modern laws about juvenile crime.

If you’ve never read the articles of the Declaration of Sentiments, which discusses all these inequities and was passed at the Seneca Falls Convention, where the story of Blessing and Gerard begins, you should. Here’s one address where you can find it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_Sentiments
. It’s also available, I’m sure, at your local library.

I was especially struck by the sentiment that discusses a double standard:

[Man] has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.

To put it less formally, while a young man was expected to sow his wild oats, any similar indiscretion could banish a young woman for life from respectable society, “ruin” her. This is one of the injustices that Blessing chooses to work against.

She knows that the majority of women who work in the brothels and walk the streets at the riverfront did not go there from choice but often after being abused or abandoned by
men—or because of a lack of opportunity for education or meaningful work that paid enough to live on, another point included in the Declaration of Sentiments.

And in light of her unhappy marriage, Blessing resents the fact that an abused woman has no legal recourse. At that time, if a woman sued for divorce, she could literally be put out on the street with no way to support herself and could lose all rights to her children. Chilling, isn’t it?

I’m old enough to remember my own mother telling me that her mother was already a married woman with children when she gained the right to vote. Her point was that I should never miss voting in any election or I would be showing disrespect to those who had spent their lives working to raise the status of women.

Blessing, as many other women did, decided not to accept the status quo but to work to change the laws that not only bound slaves but also women of any color. I’m sure Christ, who loves us all, approved of work like hers.

In our modern world, it’s hard at times for me to believe that women on many continents are still abused and live subordinate lives without education or rights. I hope that when you consider organizations to support financially, you will choose some missions that are committed to bettering the status of women. God doesn’t love and respect one skin color over another any more than he loves men more than women.

To quote Galatians 3:28—“There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”