The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Thirteen

Her poor sister?

Well, perhaps . . . but Alma wasn’t certain.

Prudence Whittaker Dixon was a difficult woman to pity, and she had remained, over the years, a thoroughly impossible woman to comprehend. Alma pondered these facts the next day, as she examined her moss colonies back at White Acre.

Such a riddle was the Dixon household! Here was another marriage that seemed not at all happy. Prudence and her old tutor had been married now for more than twenty-five years, and had produced six children, yet Alma had never witnessed a single sign of affection, pleasure, or rapport pass between the couple. She had never heard either of them laugh. She had scarcely ever seen them smile. Nor had she ever seen a flash of anger directed by one toward the other. She had never seen emotion of any variety pass between them, in fact. What sort of marriage was this, where people march through the years in diligent dullness?

But there had always been questions surrounding her sister’s married life—beginning with the burning mystery that had consumed all of Philadelphia’s gossips so many years long ago, when Arthur and Prudence had first wed: What happened to the dowry? Henry Whittaker had blessed his adopted daughter with a tremendous sum of money upon the occasion of her marriage, but there was no sign that a penny of it was ever spent. Arthur and Prudence Dixon lived like paupers on his small university salary. They did not even own their home. Why, they barely heated their home! Arthur did not approve of luxuries, so he kept his household as cold and bloodless as his own dry self. He governed his family through a model of abstinence, modesty, scholarship, and prayer, and Prudence had fallen into obedience with it. From the very first day of her career as a wife, Prudence had renounced all finery, and had taken to dressing nearly like a Quaker: flannel and wool and dark colors, and with the most homely imaginable poke bonnets. She did not adorn herself with so much as a trinket or a watch chain, nor would she wear even a speck of lace.

Prudence’s restrictions were not limited to her wardrobe, either. Her diet became as simple and restricted as her mode of dress—all cornbread and molasses, by the looks of things. She was never seen to take a glass of wine, or even tea or lemonade. As her children came along, Prudence had raised them in the same miserly manner. A pear plucked from a nearby tree constituted a treat for her boys and girls, whom she trained to turn their faces away from more alluring delicacies. Prudence dressed her children in the same manner in which she dressed herself: in humble clothing, neatly patched. It was as though she wanted her children to look poor. Or perhaps they genuinely were poor, though they had no cause to be.

“What in the deuce has she gone and done with all her gowns?” Henry would sputter, whenever Prudence came to visit White Acre adorned in rags. “Has she stuffed her mattresses with them?”

But Alma had seen Prudence’s mattresses, and they were stuffed with straw.

The wags of Philadelphia had a great sport speculating about what Prudence and her husband had done with the Whittaker dowry. Was Arthur Dixon a gambler, who had squandered the riches on horse races and dog fights? Did he keep another family in another city, who lived in luxury? Or was the couple sitting on a buried treasure of unspeakable wealth, hiding it behind a facade of poverty?

Over time, the answer emerged: all the money had gone to abolitionist causes. Prudence had quietly turned over most of her dowry to the Philadelphia Abolitionist Society shortly after her marriage. The Dixons had also used the money to purchase slaves out of captivity, which could cost upwards of $1,300 per life. They had paid for the transport of several escaped slaves to safety in Canada. They had paid for the publication of innumerable agitating pamphlets and tracts. They had even funded black debating societies, which helped train Negroes to argue their own cause.

All these details were revealed back in 1838, in a story that the Inquirer had published about Prudence Whittaker Dixon’s peculiar living habits. Spurred by a lynch mob’s burning of a local abolitionist meeting hall, the newspaper had been looking for interesting—even diverting—stories about the antislavery movement. A reporter had been pointed in the direction of Prudence Dixon when a prominent abolitionist made mention of the quiet generosity of the Whittaker heiress. The newspaperman had been immediately intrigued; the Whittaker name, hitherto, had not exactly been associated around Philadelphia with boundless acts of generosity. What’s more, of course, Prudence was vividly beautiful—a fact that always draws attention—and the contrast between her exquisite face and her plain mode of living only made her a more fascinating subject. With her elegant white wrists and delicate neck peeking from within those dreary clothes, she had every appearance of being a goddess in captivity—Aphrodite trapped in a convent. The reporter had been unable to resist her.

The story appeared on the front page of the paper, along with a flattering engraving of Mrs. Dixon. Most of the article was familiar abolitionist material, but what captured the imagination of Philadelphians was that Prudence—brought up in the palatial halls of White Acre—was quoted as having declared that for many years she had denied herself and her family any bit of luxury that was produced by a slave’s hands.

“It may seem innocent to wear South Carolina cotton,” her quote continued, “but it is not innocent, for this is how evil seeps into our home. It may seem a simple pleasure to spoil our children with a treat of sugar, but that pleasure becomes a sin when the sugar was grown by human beings held in unspeakable misery. For that same reason, in our household, we take no coffee or tea. I urge all Philadelphians of good Christian conscience to do the same. If we speak out against slavery, yet continue to enjoy its plunders, we are naught but hypocrites, and how can we believe that the Lord smiles upon our hypocrisy?”

Later in the article, Prudence went further still: “My husband and I live next door to a family of freed Negroes, consisting of a good and decent man named John Harrington, his wife, Sadie, and their three children. They are impoverished, and thus they struggle. We see to it that we live no richer than they. We see to it that our house is no finer than theirs. Often the Harringtons work alongside us in our home, and we work in theirs. I scrub my hearth alongside Sadie Harrington. My husband cuts wood alongside John Harrington. My children learn their letters and numbers alongside the Harringtons’ children. They often dine with us at our own table. We eat the same fare they eat, and we wear the same clothing they wear. In the winters, if the Harringtons have no heat, we ourselves go without heat. We are kept warm by our absence of shame, and by our knowledge that Christ would have done the same. On Sundays, we attend the same services as the Harringtons do, at their humble Negro Methodist church. Their church has no comforts—so why should ours? Their children sometimes have no shoes—why should ours?”

Here, Prudence had gone too far.

Over the following days, the newspaper had been flooded with angry responses to Prudence’s words. Some of these letters came from appalled mothers (“Henry Whittaker’s daughter keeps her children without shoes!”), but most came from enraged men (“If Mrs. Dixon loves Black Africans as much as she claims, let her marry off her prettiest little white daughter to her neighbor’s inkiest-skinned son—I stand eager to see it done!”).

As for Alma, she could not help but find the article irritating. There was something about Prudence’s manner of living that looked, to Alma’s eyes, suspiciously like pride, or even vanity. It was not that Prudence possessed the vanity of normal mortals (Alma had never even caught her peeking in a mirror), but Alma felt Prudence was being vain in some other way here—in a more subtle way, through these excessive demonstrations of austerity and sacrifice.

Look how little I need, Prudence seemed to be saying. Behold my goodness.

What’s more, Alma could not help but wonder if perhaps Prudence’s black neighbors, the Harringtons, might wish to eat something more than cornbread and molasses one night—and why couldn’t the Dixons simply buy it for them, instead of also going hungry themselves in such an empty gesture of solidarity?

The newspaper exposure brought trouble. Philadelphia may have been a free city, but this did not mean its citizens loved the mingling of poor Negroes and fine white ladies. At first, there were threats and attacks on the Harringtons, who were so harassed that they were forced to move. Then Arthur Dixon was pelted with horse dung on his way to work at the University of Pennsylvania. Mothers refused to allow their children to play any longer with the Dixon children. Strips of South Carolina cotton kept appearing on the Dixons’ front gate, and small piles of sugar on their doorstep—strange and inventive warnings, indeed. And then one day in mid-1838, Henry Whittaker had received an unsigned letter in the post, which read, “You’d best stop up your daughter’s mouth, Mr. Whittaker, or you will soon see your warehouses burned to the ground.”

Well, Henry could not stand for this. It was insult enough that his daughter had squandered her generous dowry, but now his commercial property was in danger. He’d summoned Prudence up to White Acre, where he intended to drive some sense into her.

“Be gentle with her, Father,” Alma had warned, in advance of the encounter. “Prudence is likely shaken and anxious. She has been much plagued by the events of recent weeks, and she is probably more concerned for the safety of her children than you are for the safety of your warehouses.”

“I doubt it,” Henry had growled.

But Prudence did not seem cowed or dismayed. Rather, she strode into Henry’s study like Joan of Arc, and stood before her father undaunted. Alma tried for a pleasant greeting, but Prudence showed no interest in pleasantries. Nor did Henry. He launched into the conversation with an immediate charge. “See what you have done! You have brought disgrace to this family, and now you bring a lynch mob to your father’s doorstep? That’s the reward you offer me, for all that I have given you?”

“Pardon me, but I see no lynch mob,” Prudence said evenly.

“Well, there may be one soon!” Henry thrust the threatening letter to Prudence, who read it without reaction. “I tell you, Prudence, I will not be happy, operating my business from the charred shell of a destroyed building. What do you think you are at, playing these games? Why are you putting yourself in the newspapers like this? There is no dignity in it. Beatrix would have disapproved.”

“I am proud that my words were recorded,” Prudence said. “I would proudly speak those same words again, in front of every newspaperman in Philadelphia.”

Prudence was not helping the situation.

“You come here dressed in rags,” Henry said, in a voice of increasing anger. “You come here penniless, despite my generosity. You come here from the confines of your husband’s insolvent hell, expressly to be miserable in our presence and to make us all miserable around you. You meddle where you have no business meddling, and you incite agitation in a cause that will pull this city apart—and destroy my trade with it! And there is no reason for it, besides! There is no slavery within the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Prudence! So why do you continue to argue the point? Let the South solve her own sins.”

“I regret that you do not share in my beliefs, Father,” Prudence said.

“I don’t give a farrier’s fart about your beliefs. But I swear to you, if my warehouses come to any harm—”

“You are a man of influence,” Prudence interrupted. “Your voice could benefit this cause, and your money could do much good for this sinful world. I appeal to the witness within your own bosom—”

“Oh, bugger the witness in my bosom! You only stand to make things more wretched for every hardworking tradesman in this city!”

“Then what would you have me do, Father?”

“I would have you stop your mouth, girl, and attend to your family.”

“All who suffer are my family.”

“Curse the moon and spare me your sermons—they are not. The people in this room are your family.”

“No more than any other,” said Prudence.

That stopped Henry. Indeed, it took the breath out of him. Even Alma felt walloped by it. The comment made her eyes sting unexpectedly, as though she had just been clouted hard across the bridge of her nose.

“You do not regard us as your family?” Henry asked, once he had regained his composure. “Very well, then. I dismiss you from this family.”

“Oh, Father, you mustn’t—” Alma protested, in real horror.

But Prudence cut her sister off, launching into a response that was so lucid and calm, one might have thought it had been rehearsed for years. Perhaps it had been.

“As you wish,” Prudence said. “But know that you are dismissing from your household a daughter who has always been loyal to you, and who has the right to seek tenderness and sympathy from the one man she ever had the memory of calling Father. Not only is this cruel, but I believe it will bring anguish upon your conscience. I shall pray for you, Henry Whittaker. And when I pray, I shall ask the Lord in heaven whatever happened to my father’s ethics—or did he never have any?”

Henry leapt to his feet and pounded both fists on his desk in rage.

“You little idiot!” he roared. “I never had any!”

That had been ten years earlier, and Henry had not seen his daughter Prudence since, nor had Prudence made any attempt to see Henry. Alma herself had seen her sister only a handful of times, stopping by the Dixon home in sporadic demonstrations of artificial nonchalance and forced goodwill. She pretended she was passing through the neighborhood anyway, to drop in with small gifts for her nieces and nephews, or to deliver a basket of treats around the Christmas holidays. Alma knew that her sister would only pass along these gifts and treats to a more needy family, but she made the gestures nonetheless. At the beginning of the family rift, Alma had even attempted to offer money to her sister, but Prudence, not surprisingly, had refused it.

These visits had never been warm or comfortable, and Alma was always relieved when they were over. Alma felt shamed whenever she saw Prudence. As irritating as she found her sister’s rigidity and morality, Alma could not help but feel that her father had behaved poorly in his final encounter with Prudence—or, rather, that Henry and Alma herself had both behaved poorly. The incident had cast them in no lovely light: Prudence had stood firmly (though sanctimoniously) on the side of the Good and the Righteous, while Henry had merely defended his commercial property and disowned his adopted daughter. And as for Alma? Well, Alma had come down on the side of Henry Whittaker—or at least it would appear that she had—by not having spoken up more vehemently in her sister’s defense, and by staying on at White Acre after Prudence walked out.

But her father needed her! Henry Whittaker might not be a generous man, and he might not be a kind man, but he was an important man, and he needed her. He could not live without her. Nobody else could manage his affairs, and his affairs were vast and significant. This is what she told herself.

What’s more, abolitionism was not a cause dear to Alma’s heart. She believed slavery to be abhorrent, naturally enough, but she was occupied with so many other concerns that the question did not consume her conscience on a daily basis. Alma was living in Moss Time, after all, and she simply could not focus upon her work—and take care of her father—while also calibrating herself to the shifting vagaries of everyday human political drama. Slavery was a grotesque injustice, yes, and should be abolished. But there were so many injustices: poverty was another, and tyranny, and theft, and murder. One could not set one’s hand to eliminating every known injustice while at the same time writing definitive books on American mosses and managing the complex affairs of a global family enterprise.

Was that not true?

And why must Prudence go so far out of her way to make everyone around her look so paltry-hearted and piggish, in comparison to her own mighty sacrifices?

“Thank you for your kindness,” Prudence would always say, whenever Alma came calling with a gift or a basket, but she always stopped short of expressing true affection or gratitude. Prudence was nothing if not polite, but she was not warm. Alma would return home to the luxuries of White Acre after these visits to Prudence’s impoverished home feeling undone and overly examined—as though she had stood before a strict jurist and had been found lacking. So perhaps it should not be surprising that over the years Alma visited Prudence less and less frequently, and that the two sisters were pulled further apart than ever.

But now, in the carriage returning home from Trenton, George Hawkes had given Alma information that the Dixons might be in some kind of trouble over Arthur Dixon’s inflammatory pamphlet. As Alma stood near her boulder field in that spring of 1848, taking notes on the progress of her mosses, she wondered if she should perhaps call upon Prudence again. If her brother-in-law’s position at the university was indeed threatened, this was serious. But what could Alma say? What could she do? What help could she offer Prudence, that would not be refused out of pride and a willful show of humility?

Moreover, had the Dixons not put themselves in this pickle? Wasn’t all this just the natural consequence of living in such extremity and radicalism? What business did Arthur and Prudence have as parents, putting the lives of their six children in jeopardy? Their cause was a dangerous one. Abolitionists were often dragged through the streets and beaten—even in free northern cities! The North did not love slavery, but it did love peace and stability, and abolitionists disturbed that peace. The Colored Orphans’ Asylum, where Prudence volunteered her services as a teacher, had been several times already attacked by mobs. And what about the abolitionist Elijah Lovejoy—murdered in Illinois, and his abolitionist-friendly printing presses destroyed and thrown in the river? That could easily happen here in Philadelphia. Prudence and her husband should be more careful.

Alma turned her attention back to her mossy boulders. She had work to do. She had fallen behind in the last week, committing poor Retta to Dr. Griffon’s asylum, and she did not intend to fall even further behind now as a result of her sister’s foolhardiness. She had measurements to record, and she needed to attend to them.

Three separate colonies of Dicranum grew on one of the largest rocks. Alma had been observing these colonies for twenty-six years, and lately it had become incontrovertibly evident that one of these Dicranum varietals was advancing, while the other two had retreated. Alma sat near the boulder, comparing more than two decades of notes and drawings. She could make no sense of it.

Dicranum was Alma’s obsession-within-an-obsession—the innermost heart of her fascination with mosses. The world was blanketed with hundreds upon hundreds of species of Dicranum, and each variety was minutely different. Alma knew more about Dicranum than anybody in the world, yet still this genus bothered her and kept her awake at night. Alma—who had puzzled over mechanisms and origins her entire life—had been consumed for years with fervent questions about this complicated genus. How had Dicranum come to be? Why was it so markedly diverse? Why had nature bestowed such pains in making each variety so minutely different from the others? Why were some varietals of Dicranum so much hardier than their nearby kin? Had there always been such a vast mix of Dicranum, or had they transmuted somehow—metamorphosed from one into another—while sharing a common ancestor?

There had been a good deal of talk within the scientific community lately about species transmutation. Alma had been following the debate most eagerly. It was not an entirely new discussion. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had originated the subject forty years prior, in France, when he’d argued that every species on earth had transformed since its original creation because of an “interior sentiment” within the organism, which longed to perfect itself. More recently, Alma had read Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, by an anonymous British author who also argued that species were capable of progression, of change. The author did not put forth a convincing mechanism as to how a species could change—but he did argue for the existence of transmutation.

Such views were most controversial. To put forth the notion that any entity could alter itself was to question God’s very dominion. The Christian position was that the Lord had created all the world’s species in one day, and that none of His creations had changed since the dawn of time. But it seemed increasingly clear to Alma that things had changed. Alma herself had studied samples of fossilized moss that did not quite match the mosses of the current day. And this was only nature on the tiniest scale! What was one to make of the tremendous fossil bones of the lizardlike creatures that Richard Owen had recently named “dinosaurs”? That these gargantuan animals had once walked the earth, and now—quite obviously—they did not, was beyond dispute. The dinosaurs had been replaced by something else, or they had shifted into something else, or they had simply been erased. How did one account for such mass extinctions and transformations?

As the great Linnaeus himself had written: Natura non facit saltum.

Nature does not make leaps.

But Alma thought that nature did make leaps. Perhaps only tiny leaps—skips, hops, and lurches—but leaps nonetheless. Nature certainly made alterations. One could see it in the breeding of dogs and sheep, and one could see it in the shifting arrangements of power and dominion between various moss colonies on these common limestone boulders at White Acre’s forest edge. Alma had ideas, but she could not quite tack and baste them together. She felt certain that some varieties of Dicranum must have grown forth out of other, older varieties of Dicranum. She felt certain that one entity could have issued from another entity, or rendered another colony extinct. She could not grasp how it occurred, but she was convinced that it occurred.

She felt the familiar old constriction in her chest—that combination of desire and urgency. Only two more hours of daylight remained in which to work outdoors before she had to return to her father’s evening demands. She needed more hours—many more hours—if she was ever to study these questions as they deserved to be studied. She would never have enough hours. She had already lost so much time this week. Every soul in the world seemed to believe that Alma’s hours belonged to him. How was she ever meant to devote herself to proper scientific exploration?

Observing the sun as it lowered, Alma decided that she would not visit Prudence. She simply did not have the time for it. She did not want to read Arthur’s latest seditious pamphlet on abolition, either. What could Alma do to help the Dixons? Her sister did not want to hear Alma’s opinions, nor did she wish to accept Alma’s assistance. Alma felt sorry for Prudence, but a visit would only be awkward, as such encounters were always awkward.

Back to her boulders Alma turned. She took out her tape and measured the colonies again. Hastily, she recorded the data in her notebook.

Only two more hours.

She had so much work to do.

Arthur and Prudence Dixon would have to learn how to take more care with their own lives.