One Glorious Ambition (30 page)

Despite the cool day, she found a stable and rode. Astride she could think. Her New York work had resulted in nothing, no changes for the suffering. She took in the woods, bent beneath a hanging branch, sat firm when the horse shied at a rabbit. “But I’m gaining perspective and skill,” she told the gelding she rode. “So I suppose all is not lost.”

The coal stove worked against the February wind in Albany, attempting to warm Dorothea’s room. She prepared a small bag and readied her traveling writing desk—an indulgence she felt necessary. She wasn’t certain where she would go next, perhaps to visit Marianna or stay a few days with Anne Heath at Brookline. One of her former students lived in the Oregon Territory, the wife of a missionary there. Shelley Mason had invited her to visit. But she wasn’t ready for the long ship ride around the horn that would be necessary to arrive in the Oregon Territory. What would she do on the Willamette River where her former student labored? There were so few people in the wilderness that mental illness must be absent.

A knock at the door interrupted her packing and planning. She opened the door and lifted an envelope from a woman’s fingers.
The seal bore an official emblem, but not of the state. Rather the merchant marines.

“It is with deep regret that we inform you that Charles Wesley Dix has died off the coast of Africa. He was buried at sea. We extend our deep remorse for your loss.” It was dated some months previous.

Dorothea sank onto the chair. She hadn’t seen Charles in years. His letters had trouble finding her, as did hers finding him. He was her closest relative, the one to whom she had given her heart as an older sister, the one she had mothered as best she could, defending him against an abusive father and an absent mother. Now he was gone. She had been without his physical presence for years, but with his death she felt anew the sharp knife of separation and the heavy cut of abandonment.

She became aware of the room cooling. She had let the fire go out. If she knew such anguish without a loving family to mourn with, what must it be like for the forgotten insane who were separated from those they loved? She must never find out.

“Pennsylvania is interested in having me,” Dorothea told Sarah Gibbs. Her old friend had come to Philadelphia to visit friends and invited Dorothea to join her. Dorothea had not reached out to anyone since the news of Charles’s death. She had grieved alone.

She had written to Joseph, who still lived at Orange Court with the Harrises, but only to inform him. She did not suggest an invitation where they might hold a memorial for their brother. Neither did Joseph suggest one. Joseph did report that he was doing well with his export business and that he hoped she would continue to permit him loans with no interest as “you’ll now have Charles’s share free and clear.” Joseph did not ask for money then, but he alerted her to that possibility soon, as he hoped to marry in the following year and planned to purchase a home. “Everyone needs a home of their own,” he had written. He did not suggest there would be a guest room for her.

The same Philadelphia boardinghouse where Dorothea had stayed before welcomed her back. Dorothea and Sarah strolled the
street not far from the house; the sun shining through the scalloped lace edges of Sarah’s parasol formed busy patterns on her face. They spoke of Oakland and their trips to Newport and the sea, and then Dorothea told her of Pennsylvania’s request.

“Pennsylvania legislators actually want to build an asylum there, and supporters believe I can lend credibility to the need if I commit to a survey for them. They passed a bill in 1840, but the governor vetoed it.”

“Will you go?”

“How can I not? I get restless without a task in front of me.”

“Mr. Channing called you a spinning top, if I remember,” Sarah said. “A spinning top that would fall over if it stopped.”

“I think if I stopped I should go mad.”

Sarah placed a gloved hand on Dorothea’s arm. “You wouldn’t.”

They walked the cobblestones and stopped at a café with wrought-iron tables painted red, and took tea.

“I will do one thing differently in Pennsylvania, though,” Dorothea told her. “This time, the superintendents and physicians will be on my side before I begin. I’ll not have them undermining the work because they think I am out to ruin them.”

“Learning from experience. This is wisdom,” Sarah said.

Pennsylvania in the spring and summer was a balm to Dorothea’s grieving soul. She was welcomed in the state and given free rein to visit most everywhere she liked for as long as she liked. She saw
individual efforts to make the lives of the insane more humane with coal in the stoves and food served on trays with plates, where one could tell what was being served rather than a hodgepodge of meat and who knew what else mashed into one patty and shoved beneath the cell door. She also visited a few prisons and interviewed wardens about proper ventilation, keeping food supplies safe, and having adequate physician assistance. She made copious notes.

At one point she learned that more than thirty-five Pennsylvania counties did not send their mentally ill indigent to almshouses but rather put them up for auction. Impaired men and women and older children would find themselves slopping hogs on a distant farm or following a mule behind a plow, and then end their day with the mule in the barn and barely a bread crust for supper. Those that were not confined were often too frightened to run away with nowhere to go. She could not visit private homes to see how such “auction items” fared, but she knew. She saw the faces of those suffering mongoloid souls as she passed the farms on her way to the next almshouse. Sometimes those sent to the prisons were better off.

“At least,” she urged more than one warden, “separate those who are mad. Don’t let them be the bones that the larger, stronger dogs salivate over, chew on, and bury.”

To publicize her efforts, she gave speeches at women’s events and carefully described her presentations as education lectures and not harangues that some might think beneath a proper lady’s role. She thought of Julia Ward Howe still speaking out for abolition,
although less now that she was married. She did not want to be associated with society’s radical elements. Her words were even, studied, and she made sure she smiled often to the crowd that they would find her efforts worthy of a natural feminine role. She wrote articles about treatment at the request of the physicians of some private mental hospitals. She was often asked to settle discussions about how a hospital might be organized or what strategies were best suited to the moral treatment model.

“Does it not appeal to you that you have become an arbiter in the halls of men?” Anne asked during one of Dorothea’s short visits to Boston.

“No, it does not. It takes me away from seeing with my own eyes the needs of people.”

“But by settling disputes, you make way for many to be helped.”

She could not describe to Anne how a raging soul seemed to calm her in ways that talking with legislators or wardens did not. Still, she did listen in the halls of the assembly. She needed to know what other bills might divert a Whig or a Democrat from attending to her legislation.

Winter came upon her as she traversed Pennsylvania, surveying sites in all fifty-eight counties. Before she finished, a resident of Salem, New Jersey, wrote and asked that she might undertake a survey for that state. Assemblymen were ready to assist her once her memorial was completed.

She moved back and forth between two states, then sometimes ventured into western Ohio and parts of Indiana. For two
weeks she visited in Virginia and then Maryland, always making notes, comparing, spending less time with individuals in need and more time with jailers and superintendents. She slept fitfully, more than once seized by bedbugs in the small inns in which she stayed.

At a crossing with a bridge out, she pondered whether to enter a tiny boat with a smelly bear of a man who would row her across, or hire a wagon. She chose the latter. The wagon had no springs, and every rock in the road of the sixty-nine-mile journey jabbed at her backside, tore aches into her shoulders like arrows. But she listened carefully to the driver, learned of his family and hardships, and admired his care of his horses, despite the weather and distance. Rain pelted them at times, and then they endured spitting snow. She wrapped her cape more tightly around her and held an umbrella over their heads. These were good people who were making do with what they had. When she told the driver of her survey work, he thanked her. “Good of you to care about those you ain’t ever met.”

“I believe we’re required,” she told him.

“It’s a new law, is it?”

“An old law, of loving others as we would love ourselves.”

Once while attempting to visit a village jail, she surprised the warden, who kept the door open but an inch. “I would see your most troublesome prisoners,” she said.

“They’ll eat you alive! Can’t you hear the fighting?” She could hear the screams and shouts, the smack of fist to face.

“Show me.”

The warden threw the door open, stomped to another, and swept his hand as though she were a queen stepping onto a velvet carpet. “Be my guest.”

She scanned the room of burly men, all of whom smelled rank. They had interrupted an assault on a smaller prisoner who walked on his knees to the bars and clung to them. His narrow eyes seeped tears, his tongue lolled, too big for his mouth. He was a mongoloid. “Thank you! Thank you!”

“Who’s in charge here?” she spoke to the prisoners, not the jailer.

“I am.” A wide-faced man with long hair and a longer beard, which could have been a nest for a pack rat, sauntered to the cage door where she stood. No one else claimed leadership. He dug at his ear, pulled out a fingertip of wax, and stared at it.

“What influence you wield. No one disputes your leadership, Mr.…”

“Who’s askin’?”

“My name is Dorothea Dix. I’m here to improve conditions for you.”

He flipped the earwax at her. It dropped and hit her shoe.

“Here now.” The warden reached for the man through the bars, but he stepped back.

“It’s all right. What I wonder, Mr.… What is your name?”

“Jackson,” he sneered.

“Mr. Jackson. What I wonder is how a man of your strength and leadership came to end up here.”

“Theft.”

“That temptation does happen to even the most capable of men. But I would urge you to use your abilities that are obvious, that of leading men, to good purpose while you’re here. Do you read?” He nodded that he did, though he looked stunned at her gentle words. “Perhaps you could teach those who don’t.”

The warden scoffed. “Miss Dix. This is a waste of your precious time.”

“If one man is prepared to return to society with better tools, we will have served a purpose beyond ourselves. Don’t you agree?”

The warden shook his head, but Dorothea handed the ringleader a book. “You’re responsible for what you gain from your time here,” she said. “Let it be that you share the goodness you have and not give in to the momentary temptation to do evil. Especially to those not able to defend themselves.” She nodded toward the mongoloid shivering beside him.

“I’ll bring you other books,” she said, handing him the novel
Paul Clifford
that she carried with her that day. “Read it to your … followers.”

Jackson took the book through the bars, opened it, and read: “ ‘It was a dark and stormy night …’ ”

“You are in such a stormy night. But you will see light one day. I believe it.”

“Yes, miss.” He turned to his cellmates and continued to read, stumbling at first, then gaining confidence with practice.

The mongoloid crawled closer, and she stooped to meet his narrow gaze. “I will pray you will be safer now.” She held his
pudgy hand through the bars. She hated to stand and leave. There was so little she could do.

“You tame the wild beasts,” the warden told Dorothea in the foyer. He held no sarcasm.

“I seek their inner angels,” she said. “Sometimes I find them.”