Make Me a City Page 8

  He heard a little intake of breath. She touched, lightly and briefly, the sleeve of his coat, a gesture she had never made before.

  “That was a very good deed,” she said.

  “All children deserve to be educated, whatever their circumstances.”

  “Regardless of race or color?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you see that article in the Chicago Democrat attacking abolitionists as enemies of the state?”

  He had seen it, he said, and considered it wrong and irresponsible. Following their other discussions, he explained to Miss Chappell that he had also given the issue of slavery a great deal of thought. He thanked her for encouraging him to do so. He had studied the passages in the Bible she recommended, and considered the arguments. “I even wrote an essay to myself, listing the pros and cons. I find that putting ideas down on paper helps me to clarify my thoughts.” Although he did not tell her this, he had also corresponded with his mother on the topic and found she was strongly in favor of abolition herself, a fact that bolstered his confidence a great deal. His father, of course, was still a committed doughface.

  While he was explaining his thought processes to Miss Chappell, both of them still on their knees, another idea came to him. There was one further step he could take.

  It was something she had been urging him to do for long enough, but he had always demurred. It was not a question of numbers. There were probably no more than three dozen slaves in the whole of Chicago. It was more the fact that there was considerable support for slavery, both tacit and overt, among those “in society.” Although he himself found Illinois’s Black Laws unnecessary, even offensive, he knew how many of his acquaintances were in favor of them. The laws kept Negroes under control and enabled the provision of cheap labor. Why should Illinois businesses be at a disadvantage, compared to slave states like Virginia?

  Perhaps he was being impetuous, but in that intimate atmosphere, his misgivings vanished. “At the next meeting of the Committee for the First Presbyterian Church,” he said, “I shall propose the founding of a Chicago Anti-Slavery Society.”

  Miss Chappell said, quietly, “Nothing you said could have pleased me more.”

  John felt gratified, almost triumphant, but also apprehensive. Maybe he had spoken too soon. His father would be impossible to convert, and he regretted the rift this would create between them. Trade in The Prairie Store would suffer as some customers went elsewhere. And there might be an effect on his real estate dealings. But on the other hand, should we not take a “moral stand,” as Miss Chappell put it?

  “All men were created equal,” he went on, “and are therefore equal before God.”

  “And women?”

  “And women too? Well, yes.” His father would not agree with that either, though he thought that he probably did.

  “And you also believe that Negroes,” said Miss Chappell, “should be able to buy and sell property?”

  He had not gone this far in his thinking. In theory, though, he had to agree she was right. Equality surely had to extend to the purchase and sale of real estate. “I see no reason,” he said, “why not.”

  “And what of the colonizers’ idea that all Negroes should be shipped to Liberia?”

  “It is impractical,” he replied, too quickly. Miss Chappell frowned. “And,” he hastened to add, “unjust.”

  He turned to her. There were many things he wanted to say, of his hopes and dreams, of the difference they could make to the world if they approached it together, of the feelings he had for her. He said none of them. But her hand was somehow inside his, when he asked her, for the third time, “Will you agree, my dear Miss Eliza Chappell, to become my wife?”

  Those words seemed to echo around the confines of that former hog butcher’s shack. There was no creak of timber. The wind died down. The candle steadied. A stillness took hold.

  Will you agree, my dear Miss Eliza Chappell, to become my wife?

  At first, he detected no response at all. Then her hand, cradled inside his own, seemed to flutter. Yes, he thought, with a surge of hope. That flutter must surely be the prelude to a “yes.”

  But before she could speak, three raps, brisk and imperious, struck the front door.

  Spirits, he thought. Spirits have come to signify God’s blessing on our union.

  The front door was flung open. A tall, shivering fluster of black cloth emerged against the gray light of dusk. But no heavenly spirit inhabited those dark robes. John stiffened, trying to mask his disappointment. After all, was not Reverend Jeremiah Porter the next best thing?

  * * *

  It was a frosty evening with no moon. John held the lantern high as he and his father crossed over the new bridge. He kept glancing toward the Sauganash Hotel but could not see anybody on their way. At least Reverend Porter would not be attending. No doubt he knew that the previous year Mr. Kinzie’s Christmas party had turned into a drunken, raucous affair. Following their encounter in the future schoolhouse, the reverend had acted coldly toward John, no matter how many times he swore on the Book that nothing unseemly had taken place. These last few days, John had thought of little else but his interrupted marriage proposal.

  The Kinzie house loomed up before them, even larger than it had looked from afar. The windows twinkled with lanterns, a chain of lights stretching the length of the house. A cottonwood tree stood at each side of the front gate. From some outbuildings, came the lowing of cattle. And beyond, somewhere in the darkness, he could hear the murmur of the river.

  “It’s much bigger than I imagined,” he remarked.

  “Mind you behave yourself,” said his father. “Everybody will be there.”

  Deacon Wright did not like parties. He was only here because he yearned to be seen as “someone” in society. John found that embarrassing.

  When they stepped inside the house, he had a good look around. The main room, in which twenty or so guests were already gathered, was in a poor state of repair. He could imagine it must have once been magnificent. The puncheon floor was worn and splintered and could have done with some polish; the furniture looked old and scratched. One glass door of an elegant French cabinet was cracked down its length and sections of the stone hearth, in which a fire was blazing, had worked themselves loose.

  There was a fine crowd. John soon lost his father and had an ale in his hand. He knew almost everybody and, before long, had become engaged in a debate with his friend Philo Carpenter about which land they should prospect next. John was planning to draw a new chart of Chicago and he wanted it to be bigger and more accurate than anybody else’s. While they talked, he kept checking the door, and when at last Mark Beaubien’s party arrived, he found it hard to concentrate on what Philo was saying. As promised, Mark had brought Miss Chappell.

  He was careful not to stare or catch her eye. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold and she looked to be engaged in an animated discussion with Mark’s wife. A lock of hair had slipped from beneath her bonnet. Her head sometimes turned this way and that, like a bird taking stock of its territory.

  “John, is all well?” asked Philo.

  “Yes, yes, but please excuse me,” he said. “I have an urgent matter to discuss with Mark, before he starts playing his fiddle.”

  Some time would pass before he managed to engage Miss Chappell on her own. He planned an apology. Reverend Porter would have been harsh toward Miss Chappell too, after what happened. But to his surprise, she did not seem much concerned. “I have known the reverend a long time,” she said. “We first met in Mackinaw. He is a fine man, but perhaps a little severe. I explained we had merely been praying for the success of the school. I think he considers the matter closed.”

  A pity the reverend had not closed the matter with him too, thought John. Maybe she would, even now, respond to his proposal if he were to ask again? But Miss Chappell’s attention had strayed. She was staring at a picture, hanging from a nail on the timbered wall. It seemed to depict the Kinzie house, presumably as seen
from the river. It even showed a porch at the front with a man in a rocking chair. At the bottom was an indecipherable signature and a title: The First Mansion at Echicagou.

  “Mr. Wright,” she said. “You remember me telling you about Mrs. Eulalie, the nurse with Indian ointments who lodges at the Sauganash? Do you think it possible she could have been born here? I mean, has this always been the Kinzie house?”

  “Indeed it has,” said a voice behind them.

  John turned to find Mr. Kinzie standing closer to Miss Chappell than he thought proper. His eyes were red, there was liquor foam in his mustache, and he was evidently, to some degree or other, drunken.

  “But did your father not buy it off a Frenchman, Mr. Kinzie?” he said.

  Mr. Kinzie gave John a black look. He demanded to know what the d___ he meant by that, “excuse my language, miss.”

  “I examined the records, when I was thinking to buy an adjoining property. I forget the Frenchman’s name but…”

  “Do I know you?” interrupted Mr. Kinzie.

  “We met last month, at a meeting about the canal lots. I am John Wright.”

  Mr. Kinzie had demanded that old settlers be given priority and a concessionary price on lots. John had argued that a new canal had nothing to do with the old settlers and that the lots should be sold at auction. He’d won the argument.

  “You haven’t been in Chicago long, Mr. Wright. Or you would know more of its history.”

  Mr. Kinzie shifted around until he was facing John square on. A heavy man, probably in his mid-thirties, with ginger hair and freckled hands, he leaned in a bit closer. “My father built this house.” He tipped his hat to Miss Chappell. “You are welcome in Chicago, ma’am.”

  “What an unpleasant individual,” said Miss Chappell, after Mr. Kinzie had gone.

  John tried to make light of it. “Perhaps I should have held my tongue, but the records do show that Mr. Kinzie’s father bought the property from a Frenchman. And that Frenchman, if I remember correctly, had previously bought it off another Frenchman. So to answer your question, Mrs. Eulalie could have been born here, if she’s of French origin.”

  Miss Chappell said she didn’t know about any French origins, but that Mrs. Eulalie had married a Dutchman, and that she was of mixed blood. “Everything else she told me about this house seems to be accurate,” she said. “She knew about this picture. In fact, she said she’d love to have it back.” Either Mrs. Eulalie had been here recently and was making a fool of her, she said, or … She stopped in the middle of a sentence. Her eyes widened. She touched John’s sleeve. “Would you mind coming with me?”

  They wound their way through the crowd until Miss Chappell stopped in front of a large copper kettle he had noticed earlier. She examined it in detail. But whatever she was looking for, she did not seem to find. She asked John if he could see anything on the other side, where the kettle was wedged into the corner.

  John stood on tiptoe. There was nothing strange, he told her. “There’s just a dent,” he added, “quite a big one, which explains why it’s been turned that way around.”

  This, apparently, was the answer Miss Chappell was hoping for, though he could not see why it was important. Old kettles always had dents in them. She had gone quite still. If anything, she looked puzzled, and a bit astonished, as she pushed the stray lock of hair behind her ear.

  “Mrs. Eulalie told me about that dent,” she explained. “She was only four or five years old at the time. One night, she woke up and ran barefoot along this very corridor, picked up a wooden bowl and hammered the kettle as hard as she could.”

  “What for?” he asked.

  “To wake everyone up. She’d had a nightmare. It was the very first nightmare she’d ever had.” She looked at John. “And do you see what this means? She was telling the truth. The first settler wasn’t a white man at all, he was a mulatto.” She made a ball of her two small hands, shaking them lightly up and down, as if she were about to roll dice. “Mr. Wright, would you write to the Chicago Democrat and report this?”

  John would have done anything for Miss Chappell, but he was not sure what would be achieved by harking back to the past. It was a small community. He had already crossed Mr. Kinzie once—or twice if this evening were included. But her request, he thought, might at least provide an opportunity to propose another meeting. “Perhaps, before I write a letter, it would be wise for me to meet Mrs. Eulalie?”

  Miss Chappell considered this. “Yes,” she said. “I think that could be arranged.”

  At which moment, as if out of nowhere, Deacon Wright appeared, seizing John by the arm and demanding to know what he had done or said that had caused such offense to Mr. Kinzie. “Did I not tell you to mind your behavior? He is furious. He’s telling people not to go to The Prairie Store.”

  Only at this point did Deacon Wright notice Miss Chappell. He apologized, in his stilted way, and introduced himself. He asked whether she would mind if he had a private word with his son?

  “Of course not. But I can assure you he did nothing wrong, Mr. Wright,” said Miss Chappell. “He told the truth. And Mr. Kinzie did not like it.”

  * * *

  When John arrived at the Sauganash the main room was empty, apart from a lone figure asleep on a bench in front of the fireplace. Everything had been tidied up from the night before. The floor was swept, the tables and benches wiped, and the furniture straightened. He could hear people moving around upstairs. Taking a corner seat, with a view of the Lake, he propped up his package—wrapped in cloth—on the chair beside him. After checking that his boots looked clean enough, he removed his hat to try to smooth down his hair. Yesterday, he had bought a pot of macassar oil. Either there was something wrong with the oil or he had applied it incorrectly because his hair had congealed into matted clumps. He replaced his hat, adjusting the angle, and looked out of the window. Beyond the bridge, a steamer was approaching the new pier.

  How well he remembered his own arrival here, and the excitement he had felt when the schooner moored offshore and he and his father were transferred to land by rowboat. They had pulled up in front of the same handsome, two-story log building with a shingled roof in which he was sitting now. The timber was whitewashed and the shutters painted blue. A sign hung above the porch—SAUGANASH HOTEL. As they walked toward it, the door opened and a man strode out, massy as a bear, hugging a small child to his chest. On his head the innkeeper wore a broad blue hat with feathers at the rim, arranged in the Indian style. He greeted them with a cheerful smile and a French accent. In a deep, booming voice he said how happy he was to see new faces arrive on this bright fall day.

  “You are welcome, messieurs.” He threw the giggling child up into the air. “This one is number eight,” he explained, “and number nine is on the way. My wife she make the best griddle cakes from ’ere to Peoria. You know Peoria? It is the end of the world.”

  His father said they were on their way to Galena.

  “Galena, monsieur?” he said, shaking his head as the child tugged on his beard. “Why Galena? Please stay ’ere. If everyone stay, we ’ave a ’appy place.” He looked at John. “You, monsieur, is un homme d’affaires?” The compliment pleased John, for that was exactly what he intended to become. “Then this is a good place for you. Plenty of business ’ere for everyone.”

  He threw the child into the air again and called to his wife that there were visitors and opened wide the door. Coffee and griddle cakes, he said, would be on the table before they could unpack their bags. Indeed they were, and they tasted exquisite.

  That was how he had met Mark Beaubien.

  John smiled at the memory. Mark was the most generous and unusual man he had ever encountered. That same evening, while his father was trying to arrange storage for their merchandise, he had been fast asleep in the upstairs dormitory when he was woken by the sound of a fiddle. He had climbed down the ladder …

  “John, mon ami.” His reminiscences were interrupted by Mark in the flesh, the same blue
hat with feathers on his head, arms loaded with logs. He piled them beside the fire and, brushing the sawdust off his coat, he came to join him. “I know what you are daydreaming.”

  John felt himself blush. He had told Mark about his feelings for Miss Chappell. But he insisted that, actually, he had been remembering the very first night he arrived there and heard him play the fiddle. “I’d always thought of fiddlers as lean little men with small hands and slender fingers, until I saw you. And what a mix of people it was.” There had been Easterners, soldiers, French voyageurs, fur trappers, Creoles, Indians. “It was like seeing the whole human race at once. I stood in that corner and gawped like an idiot.”

  “Only two years past, isn’t it?”

  John agreed it was. “I’d never imagined a white man could dance with Indian squaws.”

  “They won’t no more,” said Mark, standing up with a sigh. He clapped John on the shoulders. He had work to do. “We must look forward, not back. Le temps passe vite.” He saw the package wrapped in cloth. “You give it ’er now?”

  John nodded. “Thank you for doing that.”

  “Rien! I think this make a sad lady very ’appy.”

  John was left to himself. If there could be so much change in two years, just imagine how different things would be, say, five years from now. At this rate, he thought, Chicago would soon be bigger than Detroit. That was where his mind was, fixed on the future, when Miss Chappell arrived and introduced him to Mrs. Eulalie Van Voorhis.

  He was not sure what he had been expecting. Mrs. Eulalie was as elegantly dressed and handsome as Miss Chappell had described her. Her fair hair was pinned at the back; her eyes were serious and searching. There was something about her bearing, about the way she spoke and carried herself, that he found deeply impressive. Sandwiched between these two women, John felt young and unworldly. They were more mature and experienced in life than he was. Mrs. Eulalie was a nurse, Miss Chappell was a teacher, but he was simply a young homme d’affaires with no special talent or expertise in anything, running his father’s store and speculating in real estate. His confidence was knocked by this unfavorable comparison.