Soon: Stories

Rowing to Darien

March 1839, just after midnight on the Altamaha River. The air smells of silt and fish and wood smoke. The hoot of a horned owl carries across the water, the creak of oarlocks and the splash of oars. The moon is up, one night past full; it throws a bright track on the water, and across this track Frances Butler rows a boat with a lantern set on the thwart. Out under the big moon that lights the whole sky, the lantern flame looks like a fragment of the larger brightness escaping across the river. That’s how she thinks of it as she rows—a mission, not a flight—to dignify the journey and keep the fear at bay.

Fear of the Altamaha to begin with. The river is wide and deep, and from the banks it looks slow, even sluggish, as it glides through the Georgia swamps. Go out onto it in a boat, and the story changes, for here at Butler Island, twenty miles inland, the river is still the ocean’s instrument, the road the tides use to travel in and out of that country. On a tidal river, lacking strength and will, you go where the water goes, which is, it occurs to her now as she rows away from her husband’s rice swamp, what Mr. Butler expected of her once they were married. He the river, and she the boat, carried on his tide. Whither thou goest; wives be subject to your husbands, and all the other trappings of this world in which she has found herself, down here in the dark pockets of his wealth, the flood and drain of his profitable estuary.

Now, as her husband’s boatmen have taught her to do, she sweeps the oars back, dips them deep, pulls with all her strength, all of this done quickly, for in the pause between strokes, when the oars are lifted, the current grabs the boat and pulls it downriver. She is an accomplished horsewoman, a hiker in the Swiss Alps; she is no flower, but this is hard, almost desperate, work. The sleeves of her dress are pushed up over her elbows; her hair straggles out of its twist. She rows steadily away, but someone rowing a boat across a river has to face the shore she’s leaving. One last trial, she thinks, and would have laughed if she’d had the breath for it: to be made to watch the scene of her downfall vanish, though in this endless flat landscape, that might take all night. So be it, she thinks, because once Butler Island is out of sight, she will be free. It is only a matter of time.

Back on Butler Island, the tall cane and the grasses stir and hiss. She sees the landing from which she’d launched her boat, then the rice dike and beyond it their house, then the kitchen house and rice mill and beyond the mill, a cluster of slave cabins. Smoke pours out of many chimneys there and flattens like a ceiling, so that the whole scene lies under a smoky haze lit by the bright moon. Otherwise, all is still. No torches move along the dike that separates the river from the rice fields; no light shines on the water, as it would if someone on shore held up a lantern and looked into the river. No one is searching for her yet. Across the Altamaha lies a wide marsh island, General’s Island, and beyond that island, the town of Darien, a line of two-story warehouses and a dock from which she’ll step onto a ship and sail away north, then home to England and become again the woman she was before she married Pierce Butler and came down to Georgia: mistress to no Negroes, no slaveholder’s wife.

Seven years ago, she’d come to America with her father, the actor Charles Kemble, on a tour to raise money for the Covent Garden theater in London. The two of them performing scenes from Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, at theaters in New York, Philadelphia, Boston. The newspapers in those cities called her glorious, sublime, and everywhere they went people threw yellow roses onto the stage and shouted her name until she stepped out from behind the curtain to curtsy again and speak a few more lines.

Still, she found acting demeaning, a kind of drudgery, a nightmare, really, for a woman of her sensibilities. Waiting for her cue among the dusty drapes and props, the shabby backstage clutter. Then out onto the stages of those packed and stifling theaters where, in winter, tin stoves blazed in the aisles, and candles cast wavering shadows across the rows of upturned faces. She was a writer, a poet, a published diarist, sister in soul to Byron and Keats. Byron above all, that reckless hero poet-man of the tragic limp and swagger, whose poetry moved her, she once wrote, like an evil potion taken into my blood.

They had not been in America for long when an English friend, a fellow connoisseur of women, wrote to Pierce Butler at his home in Philadelphia: You must go and see this Frances Kemble perform, he wrote. Her eyes flash with passion, and when, as Juliet, she flings her head back in love’s tormented ecstasy, you will be deeply stirred.

The day after their first Philadelphia performance she walked into the outer room of their hotel suite to find Pierce Butler sitting down to tea with her father. He wore fawn colored trousers, a green coat and pale yellow satin vest over a creamy shirt. As she entered the room, he stood and bowed, then kissed her hand, held it tightly between both his own. His eyes were deep, soft, and brown; they’d flown to her when she’d walked into the room and stuck to her when she smoothed her hair, and when she spoke they watched her lips. Please do sit down, she said. He wore three gold rings on one hand and carried a cane with a silver handle. He had a boy’s brown curls, a small, moist, pouting mouth, a weak chin. He lounged when he sat, as though expecting to be served. In this luxurious room where yellow brocade swags and fringed drapes framed the tall windows, he seemed completely at home. Miss Kemble, he said in his buttery voice, soft and broad of vowel, I hope that in the future you will number me first on the list of your greatest admirers. He sat with his back to the window, sunlight pouring in over his shoulder.

She sat across from him, next to her father, in the circle they’d made with their chairs. I might consent, Mr. Butler, had I such a list, she said, and then she smiled at him with her eyes as she sipped her tea. She set her cup back in its saucer. Though in America I fear I shall be judged a traitor should I encourage such undemocratic ranking, she said.

Then allow me to keep that traitor’s ledger for you, he said. I shall be honored to take the blame as fair exchange for being listed first in your favor.

She learned that he was rich, and that he would be richer when his father’s last sister died and he claimed his share of the family’s Georgia rice and cotton plantations. He was waiting for that day, passing time in a rich man’s way: cards and music, the racetrack, the theater. Rich enough to follow her from Philadelphia to New York to Boston, to rent rooms in the hotels where she and her father stayed, to buy a front-row seat at every performance. He slid into her life that way and she let him come. First thing every night when she came out onto the stage, she skimmed the faces of the front-row patrons and there he was, smiling up at her, the silver handle of his cane shining. In New York, he filled her dressing room with yellow roses; in Boston, bottles of old Port and Madeira appeared backstage. In Philadelphia his carriage waited at the stage door to drive her to his house on Chestnut Street for a late supper. Once, she returned to her dressing room, exhausted after three curtain calls. Her face ached from smiling; her throat felt raspy raw; her legs ached from striding and curtsying. On the dressing table she found a pair of cream colored leather gloves tied up with a narrow, green ribbon, gloves so soft, so warm, they seemed to melt on her hands.

This went on for two years. The American tour. Flowers and port and gloves and candlelight. Get this for Miss Kemble. Take that away. Quiet, please. Bring the carriage. Mr. Butler the first on his feet when the curtain came down, leading the applause, pressing money into her father’s hand. For the theater, he would say, for Covent Garden, Mr. Kemble. Riding in his carriage with the curtains drawn, falling into his arms. Deep kisses in the deep night, his words breathed into her ear: Marry me, Fanny, marry me, marry me, until, resting in his arms, she began to feel the whole tiresome weight of herself, her vividness and intelligence, this life of roles and exile, and to imagine how it would be to shrug it off like a heavy coat and rest lightly, cherished, in his care.

So what has gone wrong, five years and two children later? Why is she fleeing without coat or bag across this dangerous river? In January, she and Mr. Butler had left their daughters, Sarah and Francis, in Philadelphia in the care of an Irish girl and traveled down to the Georgia coast. He’d come to inspect his properties and to oversee the rice planting at Butler Island and preparations for cotton planting at Hampton, a short distance down the coast on St. Simon’s island. She had come for her own reasons.

On New Year’s Day, they’d sailed from Darien to Butler Island on a sloop running up the Altamaha under full sail on the incoming tide. Sun a white disk in the palest blue sky she’d ever seen. The river had looked dark as strong tea and the winter marsh was a rippling palette of brown, red, gold, where flocks of red-winged blackbirds wheeled and settled in the grasses. After the pleated, rocky folds of New England, the landscape had looked startling: flat all the way to some dim, distant tree line or open to the horizon where the sky sealed itself to the edge of the land. A world of grass and water and sun, towers of clouds in the sky.

As the Butler Island landing came into sight, they’d stood at the rail together. He’d taken her hand, and feeling its warm pressure, she’d smiled up at him and renewed the private vow she’d made to rescue her husband’s slaveholding soul from the darkness in which it now lived and kindle within it the light of moral conscience. From the pulpit of his Boston church, her friend and mentor Dr. William Channing had often preached that it was the duty of every Christian opponent of slavery to accomplish this waking and kindling, for it was by this persuasive pressure of one soul upon another that slavery would be abolished, one slaveholder at a time. Sailing for Butler Island, she remembered how the light had poured in through the tall, clean windows as Dr. Channing preached and how she’d imagined Mr. Butler’s soul bathed in that light, imagined it freed and rising to meet her own. She’d never loved her husband more than she did that morning, imagining his salvation as she sailed toward his rice swamp.

As the sails were furled and the sloop tied up at the Butler Island landing, the people swarmed out to them, weeping, dancing, clapping, crying Massa and Missis, kissing the hem of her dress, stroking her hair, until, frightened, she’d called out for Mr. Butler, who was laughing and shouting as he was plucked at, wept over. Up at the house, she found herself in a long, bare room furnished with a pine table and a sofa with a dull green baize cover where she sat for a long time after the noisy, happy mob had departed, one hand pressed to her chest to quiet her pounding heart. Candles flickered in sconces along the walls and on the table. At one end of the room, there was a fireplace, and as she waited for her heart to slow, he began to build a fire. When she found her voice again, she said, This is idolatry, Pierce, or something very like it.

He knelt on the hearth, pushing sticks into the fireplace. You are their mistress, now, Fannie, he said over his shoulder.

I will not be worshipped, she said.

Already, he was weary of her intensity, her forceful mind. Over time, you will acclimate yourself to their feeling for you, he said.

I never shall, she said. Not even if I live here for a thousand years.

It only felt like a thousand years since she’d come to this place. A thousand more to leave it. From her boat, their house on Butler Island looks peaceful. A whitewashed, square, wooden box of a house squatting on brick pillars behind the river dike. The rice fields begin behind the house and stretch for miles in every direction: from the house to the river and across the river and out of sight. In January the people had moved into the fields. They’d chopped and hoed the boggy ground; in late February, they’d sowed and tamped the rice seed. They opened the trunk gates and flooded the fields, squatted under trees at noon, scooping food out of cedar piggins with their fingers. Their children ran around half-naked, and when any of them got sick, they lay down on the floor of the sick house and recovered or died. Seeing them lying under their wretched scraps of cloth on the sick house floor she’d decided: if she must be their mistress, she would raise them up; she would teach them their worth. She went down to the slave settlements with lessons on cleanliness and order. She bought glass for the sick house windows, new blankets for the sufferers.

All winter, she went out in the long plantation canoe, up and down the Altamaha in any kind of weather. Primus, Quash, Hector, Ned and Frank rowed, and Kate’s John, the foreman of the boat crew, rowed and shouted orders and led the singing that thrilled her to hear: wild songs on the wild water. She went out on horseback with Renty, Jack, and Ben moving ahead of her, hacking trails with their machetes through thick stands of oak and pine, through nets and loops of vines and creepers, and for these services (until he found out and forbade her to do it) she paid small wages to Mr. Butler’s men, to teach them the value of their labor. That winter, from Darien to St. Simon’s, their plantation neighbors talked: Pierce Butler could not control his wife, they said, that English actress, that scribbler, that abolitionist on a mission to their country, to her own husband, as though he were the one who needed saving. Every day, so they heard, every waking hour, she lectured him on the evils of slavery, on the will to power that corrupts master and slave alike.

A breeze comes up and cools her scalp and her face, which is hot with the work of rowing. She thinks of the flocks of swifts that skim the water in the daylight hours. She is one of them, she thinks, flying away. She thinks: you row and each stroke of the