One Glorious Ambition (24 page)

She began teaching the Sunday school classes weekly, along with an additional class at the debtors’ jail, where she saw for herself a low fire heating the cavernous room and the smaller cells as well. The greatly impaired prisoners had been removed, and when she asked to see where they were, she was shown to another room, where a flame rose. It brought scant warmth, but at least the freeze of the stone walls had lessened.

Still, the moans of despair and minds in peril overpowered the lingering scent of pain and degradation. It seemed to Dorothea that the people housed here needed to be in a hospital or they would soon affect the healthier cellmates. This mixing of prisoners simply was not wise. Prisoners with less reason could easily become victims of their stronger cellmates, or they might harm the other prisoners as their thoughts grew beyond spats to confused attacks.

“Required to pay my brother-in-law to sit in here and watch ’em when the fire’s going,” the jailer growled. Jailers were paid by
the local sheriffs, and the cost of any care came from their profits, if there were any. “Hope you’re happy now,” he said.

“My happiness is much improved, thank you. It’s especially good to see the floors have been washed. Thank you for that as well.”

“Brother-in-law has to keep busy.”

“And he’s chosen wisely. You may find it easier to manage the prisoner demands by separating the feeble-minded from the others.”

“I wouldn’t push, miss, if I was you. Take what you got and leave us be.”

On a Sunday some weeks later, Dorothea was approached by a prisoner awaiting sentencing and asked if she couldn’t intervene on her behalf. “The woman, my cellmate, hardly sleeps,” the woman told her. Her clothes hung on her. She must have lost weight during her incarceration or she wore someone else’s clothes. “She hovers over me so, when I wake, she’s there, staring at me. Other times she wails and rocks, her eyes jerk like a squirrel’s from here to there.” The woman leaned in close. “She talks to people who aren’t present and sometimes barks like a dog. She can look fierce too. I worry for myself but for her too.”

Dorothea had seen the woman who usually mumbled and rocked in the back corner when she came for the classes.

“Is she ever able to speak of what is happening?”

“Not that I’ve been aware.”

“Why is she here?”

“I don’t know.”

Dorothea inquired of the jailer, who told her the woman had been sent from the Worcester asylum due to overcrowding.

“She appears to have picked at her arms so badly she bleeds.”

“Noticed that,” the jailer said. He rolled a toothpick in his mouth.

“Could we please bring in a physician?”

“That’ll be another expense.”

“I’ll pay for it myself.”

Dorothea contacted Dr. Samuel Howe, the head of the Perkins School for the Blind and a board member of the Boston Normal School. Their paths had crossed during her school-teaching years.

Howe made the journey with her the next Sunday and examined the woman. “Her behavior certainly puts her cellmate at risk. There’s no telling what she might do in her mad state.”

Dorothea advocated with the jailer, her compassion easing onto him, and a separate cell was found, though the jailer complained, “I don’t know how long I can keep her there. I have new prisoners coming in daily and not many going out.”

“We appreciate your assistance,” Dorothea said. She had to be gentle with jailers or they would prevent her from visiting.

“Those conditions for the insane … it really needs a public exposure.” Dr. Howe expressed his concerns while riding in the carriage back to Dorothea’s townhouse.

“It’s not something I can do, being a woman.”

“You were successful in getting heat into the cells. And they allowed me to come in and separate the poor woman from her cellmate’s insanity. I doubt that would have happened without your intervention. You can do more than you think, though you are quite right in knowing a woman’s place.” He gazed out the carriage window. “It is best for women not to be out publicly crusading for some cause.”

Dorothea knew Dr. Howe was courting the beautiful Julia Ward, who was outspoken against slavery. She did not want to mention Julia’s public presence. He apparently approved of crusading quietly. He was but a year older than Dorothea and had wavy hair, which he wore longish at his neck, and a beard that twisted like grass around a fencepost. He had served as a surgeon during the Greek revolution, and some called him the “Lafayette of Greece” for his later fund-raising for refugees. It was a nickname that pleased him.

“Truly, that poor woman needs to be hospitalized. Moral treatment is what she needs.”

“You’ve read the Jarvis pamphlet?” Her excitement bubbled. “Or know of Doctors Tuke and Thomas Kirkbride who promote such treatment?”

“I do. Our friend Horace Mann invited Dr. Jarvis to write of his successes in treating the mentally ill in his home and to describe the way to bring health into schools.”

Dorothea had liked the philosophy of moral treatment ever
since being introduced to it while at the Rathbones’. It required treating all people, rich or poor, with dignity and compassion in a homelike setting.

“Worcester, for all its good intent, merely houses them,” Howe continued. He combed his beard with his fingers. “They need more than that. They need to be in a world as normal as possible, with structure, of course, but more with love, like a family.”

“From chaos into order. God’s very action with the creation of the world. A garden perhaps. Work with animals, gathering eggs or grooming horses.” She remembered the calm a ride on Mercy gave her. Even the Rathbones’ little dog curling up against her back brought her peace during her illness. “Intellectual stimulation, listening to music boxes, employment such as the shoemakers have at East Cambridge. The prisoners have little hope of attempting to acquire a skill without proper instruction or safety.” Ideas popped into her head. “A family atmosphere of compassion and caring.”

“So how might we proceed in our campaign?” Howe asked. “Keeping your feminine guiles secure but using your passion of words to move forward?”

“How indeed.” It was a massive challenge to affect the lives of others while maintaining the private life required of a proper Boston woman. She felt her heart quicken. Howe echoed what Channing had once told her, about every person being our brother’s—or sister’s—keeper. She gleaned a certainty she hadn’t known before. Here at last might be her glorious ambition.

Dorothea was good at classifying. Botany had given her that interest and taught her the importance of ordering and structure. And she observed well, “activities” at least, although she wasn’t always good at attributing causes to behavior or emotions. But she could organize and then write of what she saw. She would be focused and direct.

Dr. Howe and she agreed on how to proceed, and then he left for Kentucky, where he worked to establish another school for the blind. His part of the goal—to get the Massachusetts legislature to provide funds for a hospital committed to moral treatment—was to write a review of the Jarvis pamphlet and have it published in the highly regarded
North American Review
. Thus there would be renewed interest in moral treatment and justice and mercy for the mentally ill.

“I will visit the jails and almshouses in eastern and central Massachusetts, becoming a witness to the condition of those who
are in need of such treatment,” Dorothea said. The two set about doing their separate work.

Dorothea decided early on that she would not just count people but try to see each as an individual, not accepting the words or descriptions given by the jailers or matrons, but seeing for herself how each responded to the presence of a stranger: how they communicated, even without words; what they allowed their eyes to focus on; the unmet need suggested by their behavior. She would classify those distinctions to make a final report, but she wanted always to be mindful of the particular misery of each person. “Where I can,” she told William Channing, “I will relieve the suffering, one person at a time.”

“You’ve chosen a major task, Dorothea. Pace yourself in this. Let God work through you, not where you’re pulling Him along behind you.”

Dorothea’s shoulders dropped. She loved this man as a father. She did not wish to displease him. “Did you not say from the pulpit last Sunday that the way the insane are soothed by mere kindness is proof that love is the divine plan for all? I am merely loving them as I can.”

Channing smiled. “You listen well, Dorothea. Just remember to let God’s love bring kindness to you as well.”

“I hope to suggest ways a hospital designed just for the feeble-minded could meet a patient’s basic needs and still provide parts of moral treatment, not just housing them in cold cells. But first I want to see what is.”

“Find out how often ministers visit them,” Channing suggested.

“Yes. And whether they stay to offer kindness or merely drop off tracts. If I do this, I’ll no longer be able to read to you in an evening. At least for a time.”

“We leave for Vermont for a respite, so you need not worry over our readings.”

“Oh. I’ll miss you all.” She hadn’t been invited to join them. She would not let exclusion stumble her.

“We won’t be here to make sure you eat well,” he said. “So don’t overdo. Remember that spinning top.” He smiled then, and she didn’t feel in the least chastised.

Her first visits to jails close to the city were similar to her East Cambridge experience, but as she took the stage during the summer of 1842 to hither and yon, staying at inns, rising in the early mist to write down what she had experienced the day before, she began to see true suffering in ways she had not encountered before.

“Mournfully,” Dorothea wrote in her diary, “a woman extended her arms to me and asked why she was consigned to hell. Then she used our Lord’s very words and shouted ‘My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?’ ”

Some of the patients were estranged from God, and here was a blackness like hell on this earth for them. The cause of such
estrangement, whether sin or accident of birth or misfortune not of their making, made no difference, Dorothea decided; each was entitled to respect and human kindness and a way back to that relationship that meets all needs.

She was a witness for a woman chained to a heavy metal ring cemented into the stone wall, clothes covered with feces, fingernails on one hand chewed to the quick and on the other longer than a laundry peg. The woman scratched and gouged her own face, arms, and legs. Open sores oozed. A boy, eyes dull as old pewter, leaned against a woman who rocked constantly and was likely the child’s mother. He looked up at Dorothea.

“Why is he here?” Dorothea asked the jailer.

“Nowhere for him to go.”

“No relatives? No orphanage to take him?”

“Sometimes he acts as crazy as his mother. Safer for everyone with him in here.”

“No, it’s not,” Dorothea said.

The jailer bristled. “Let’s move on.”

She turned back and watched the child’s eyes follow them out.