The Radical Element Read online

The rest of the room fell silent as Haim Laniado stroked his long graying beard. Rebekah had never heard Caleb challenge an elder. It warmed her from head to toe to have him stand up for her and for their partnership — to hear anyone stand up for her at all. For the first time since her father had marched them into the parlor, Rebekah relaxed her grip on the wooden armrests.

  “You cannot be alone as an unwed man and woman,” Mr. Laniado said.

  “With your permission, we can study on the porch,” Rebekah said quickly. “In full view of everyone who walks by.”

  Mr. Laniado shook his head. “That would certainly not look proper. As Yossi Ben Yochanan teaches us in Pirkei Avot, ‘Al tarbe sicha im ha’isha’ — one is not to engage in excessive conversation with a woman, for he will neglect his own study. This is said even for a married couple, but for an unwed pair . . . I cannot allow it.”

  “Nor can I.” Her father tugged at the cuffs of his linen shirt, the way he always did before making a proclamation. There was no space for either her or Caleb to argue that this wasn’t the sort of idle chatter in question, that it was study. There was barely any space to breathe at all. “I see how arrogant these studies have made you already, not to mention how little regard you have given to your sisters’ futures and the reputation you will give our family. I cannot tell another man what to allow in his home, with his wife, but I will not have a daughter living under my roof behaving in this manner.”

  With his wife . . . She had known, deep down in her heart, that this suggestion would arise, but hearing the words spoken aloud made her wish she could shed her skin like the serpent of Eden. “Papa, I . . . I do not feel . . . I am not . . .”

  “You want to someday wed, do you not? To fulfill the mitzvah of Pru U’Rvu and bring more children into the Jewish community?”

  Rebekah nodded numbly. She did. But not yet.

  It was not that she did not care for Caleb; she did. He was kind to her, and he was intelligent, and she did not mind that he would not earn a merchant’s salary. He was nice-looking, too, with his strong, dark features and lean build. In truth, she had long suspected he would be her future; while many of the Jews in the South were marrying gentiles and working their hardest to blend into Savannah, the Laniados were like the Wolfs in their commitment to marrying within and observing the faith.

  But she was not ready for a home of her own yet, and what time would there be for her Torah study once she had one? Once she had children of her own who needed to be fed and clothed and watched every spare moment?

  Marriage was simply a different way to keep her from her education.

  “What about school?” she pleaded, taking one last chance. “You mentioned Miss Gratz’s school in Philadelphia. . . .”

  Her father laughed, and his mirth had never sounded so cruel. “You reckon your mama and I would send you away from your home and family to study under the tutelage of that woman? I think not. I am kind enough to give you a choice here, Rebekah. You will speak to the matchmaker tomorrow, or Mama will ask Mrs. Baron to take you as an apprentice at her boardinghouse; I am certain she could use plenty of assistance with her sweeping and washing, and you would learn some much-needed skills in return. It seems I made a poor choice in your education once, and I will not make that mistake again.”

  Perspiration snaked down Rebekah’s spine as she waited for Caleb to speak up again.

  He did not.

  It was his father who broke the silence. “It has been a long night, Benjamin. Let us discuss this further tomorrow. It is best we all get some sleep.”

  Rebekah’s body moved as if pulled by the strings of a marionette. If she did not make a choice soon, she would cease to be given one. But what choice could she live with?

  “Are you certain this is what you want to do?” Caleb’s voice was so scratchy, it hurt Rebekah’s throat.

  “I am as certain as I have ever been about anything.” She smoothed down the full skirt of her coffee-brown cotton dress with trembling hands.

  Again, that shadow smile. It made her heart ache to think how long it might be before she saw it again. “I believe in you and what you have to offer the Jewish people, Rebekah. I think you will help change our community’s future.”

  “You don’t know what that means to me.” She wished she could embrace him, feel the sturdy support of the only person who believed in her. But propriety and modesty reigned, now as ever. Running away might be her biggest act of rebellion, but she was determined it would be her last. Well, aside from asking Caleb to assist her in hiring a stagecoach that would take her to Charleston for the first leg of her journey north to Philadelphia. “I’ll be back, Caleb. God willing, I will. It’s not just me I’m going for; I’m hoping that it’s for the future of Mickve Israel, too.”

  “What do I say to your family?” he asked, glancing over his shoulder as if they were lying in wait. Or maybe he was avoiding her gaze, the same way she’d found herself doing many times that day. She’d known leaving her family would be difficult, and she’d cried when she’d left the good-bye letter to her best friend, Deborah, but she had not expected that leaving him would be as hard.

  I will return, she reminded herself as his gaze returned to hers. I will return, and I will return to you, if you’ll have me. He hadn’t said a word about marrying her, but he had come today, and that felt like as much of a sign from Hashem as anything. “I told you, I left a note. They’ll know where I am.”

  “But still, they will ask if I knew. What do I say when they want to know how you could leave them behind?”

  She had thought about this many times since she’d made the decision to leave, as she’d sold all the jewelry she’d inherited from her grandmother in order to afford the trip. And every time, it came back to the one thing she knew her family might understand. “Tell them I’m Jewish first.”

  I was privileged to have excellent Jewish education my entire childhood at schools that valued girls learning all the same things our male peers were, including Talmud. However, this isn’t the case across the board at Orthodox schools even now, and it certainly wasn’t in Rebekah’s time, when education for girls was barely a consideration at all.

  Accessibility of Jewish education to boys and girls, rich and poor alike, can be accredited to the work of Rebecca Gratz (1781 – 1869), who founded the first Hebrew Sunday school in Philadelphia in February 1838. She was a fierce advocate for Jewish women and economic equality, and her life and work are skillfully documented in Rebecca Gratz: Women and Judaism in Antebellum America by Dianne Ashton, which was of great use to me in my research.

  I chose to set the story in Savannah partly to highlight one of America’s great early Jewish communities with tremendous devotion to preservation of their early history (as I warmly recall from a visit to Mickve Israel nearly a decade ago), and partly to send Rebekah on a physical journey to obtain the education she sought. Of course, she had no way of knowing how soon Savannah (and a number of other cities, including New York and Charleston) would follow suit in picking up Gratz’s school model, and that by the time her baby sister was old enough for religious studies, she would have no need to travel at all.

  They shot the prophet!”

  I hear Minnie Gadd shouting before I see her. When I look up from the row of type I’m laying out, she’s flying past the print-shop windows and down the high street, her hair coming undone from its plaits and flapping behind her like a pennant from the rigging of the ships back home in Liverpool. Her face shines when the sun strikes it, like it’s brushed in gold leaf, and it takes until she’s nearly to the Taylors’ house before I realize it’s ’cause she’s crying. Big, broad, unmovable Minnie — who had the boy who slapped my rump on the way out of the social hall swallowing his teeth for a week — has got tears running all the way down her neck and into the gingham collar of her school dress.

  “They shot them!” Min screams, her feet slapping the dry road, sending tulips of dust blooming around her ankles. “They shot Joseph and Hyrum
!”

  At the press, Brother Coulter drops his mallet, and it strikes the floor so hard, it tips onto its side, leaving a half-moon of black ink stamped on the planks. My heartbeat starts to climb.

  “They’re dead!” Minnie stops running in front of the gunsmith’s, but she goes on shouting, the horror hanging in the air like a heat haze and thickening with every word. “They’re dead in Carthage!”

  I’m at the door of the print shop now, almost before I know I’ve moved, the typeset pages of the Book of Commandments abandoned behind me on the desk.

  Eliza, our schoolteacher for as long as I’ve been in Illinois, comes barreling out from the Lyon Drug Store across the road and seizes Minnie, one hand on her cheek, while the other strokes the wild frizz of Min’s collapsing plait from her eyes. Minnie’s shoulders shake as she tries to breathe — I can see it even across the road. “Say it slow, now, Minnie,” Eliza says, and then Minnie’s full-on sobbing, her chest heaving like her ribs are trying to claw their way out of her.

  “Joseph’s dead,” she chokes out. “Hyrum too. They shot them in Carthage. Men with their faces painted black, they broke in and shot them dead on the jailhouse floor.”

  Behind me, Brother Coulter lets out a short soft cry.

  Someone else is screaming from up the street. A man’s voice. A woman’s heaving sobs from the Scovils’ bakery. People are starting to shout to one another over their garden fences. Doors slam. Nauvoo is rippling, the whole city torn up like roots, tumbling the soil as they scratch their way to the surface, with the news that Illinois has been watered with our prophet’s blood.

  Minnie still can’t get her breath, and the words come out in great gulps. “I thought . . . we were . . . safe . . . here. Ain’t . . . this . . . Zion?”

  Eliza presses Minnie into her, like that’ll smother the crying, but the sobs are multiplying up and down the street as the news spreads like fire through dry kindling. “Come with me,” Eliza says, her voice a little frayed but strong. She looks up and sees me standing at the print-shop door, both hands pressed to my mouth. “Vilatte,” she calls across the street. “Get your ma, then run up and get the ladies together in the Markham parlor.” She starts to herd Minnie up the street toward the Markham house, where she rents an attic room, but turns back to me, like she knows I ent yet budged — cold fear is dripping through me like the icy dribble that would spill over the lips of the clams my sisters and I used to shuck back in Liverpool.

  “Go, Vilatte,” Eliza barks.

  I go.

  Down from the print shop, around the block, and down Wells Street. I can hear the hammers from the temple grounds, and when I look up to the spire, still wrapped in scaffolding, it sparkles where the sun strikes it. I careen into the guesthouse where my mam and I have been renting a room from the Risers and pull her from the kitchen — she ent heard yet, and I got to be the one to say it.

  “I don’t know” is how I start. “I don’t know if it’s true.”

  When I say it aloud, it near collapses me. Mam’s face goes out, as if a refiner’s fire has purged her features of anything that ent grief, and what’s left is hard and cold and spare. But then I say, “Eliza wants the women.” And some of the life comes back to her. She takes my hand, and we stumble onto the street — at the corner, we split, Mam one way down Main and I toward Partridge Street. I fetch Sister Ruby, who comes to Eliza’s with a baby hanging from each of her feet. Sister Kimball and Ethel Tremont and the twins from Manchester who I ent yet learned to tell apart. Mary Ives climbs down from the ladder leaned against her house — she’s been the deputy husband of her family since Brother Ives lost his leg at Crooked River in Missouri. They all follow me. That’s what Eliza Snow’s name does — it makes the women come.

  By the time I get myself into the front room of the Markham house, they’re all crowded inside. The women I sit with at church and in the social hall. The women who smashed their china to mix into the plaster for the temple walls so they would sparkle. Who stand at the dock to wave in the Maid of Iowa whenever she chugs up the Mississippi, bringing new saints to our City on a Hill. The women who beckoned me and my mam off that steamship when we arrived, our whole world at our backs, two of my sisters wrapped in sails and buried in the sea between Liverpool and America and my aunt behind us in New Orleans with only a lecture to remember her by.

  “You want Vilatte married off when she’s ne’er ten?” she had demanded — she’d been baptized alongside us in Liverpool by the American missionaries, but the crossing had sobered her. “The fifth bride to some leery Mormon cove?”

  I had only been eight then. I were small, with no mind of my own about God, so when me mam said come, I came. When she said America, I held her skirts and went. And if Mam had married me off to some leery Mormon with a harem of wives, I would have had ne’er a say in that, neither.

  “You’re a foolish lass to follow the Mormons, Rose,” my aunt had told Mam, then looked right at me at her side when she said, “They ent a church made to last.”

  I weren’t old enough to know properly what we were doing then — was still clutching me mam’s hems and suckling off her faith — but my auntie’s words burrowed in my mind and chewed away like aphids on a rosebush as we made the last limb of our journey up the Mississippi River. I were too small to think we might be a wee bit foolish, to come so far from home for a church. To believe a man had seen God and God had told him to make a church in America. It had seemed like a fairy story the first time I heard it, though my mam always believed it with the sort of conviction saved for things you’d seen with your own two eyes. Even then, at eight years old, it ne’er felt like more than a tale.

  But then, from the Maid of Iowa steaming up the Mississippi, we saw them waving at us from the pier, the Nauvoo Mormons, total strangers greeting us like friends with their handkerchiefs fluttering as they thrust them high, and I remember thinking if all these people were here because of Joseph, it must be a true church. So many people couldn’t uproot their lives for something false.

  If only faith were always so easy as white pocket squares in the wind.

  I’m fourteen now and a Mormon. Still a maid — no leery husband for me.

  Illinois wears its summer differently from Liverpool — all swamp and mosquitoes and air so thick that breathing feels like chewing. It’s even hotter in the Markhams’ front room than out on the street, and I feel fit to expire as I squeeze my way through the forest of petticoats and hoopskirts to where Mam is sitting on the stairs with Minnie’s head in her lap like a child and not a girl of fourteen. I want to put my head there, too, don’t want to be fourteen, neither. I want to sit with my mam and cry about our prophet. When we were driven out of Missouri and Ohio and New York, Brother Joseph said, “Courage,” and he was the only one who could make us believe it. “God is good, and God will take care of us. God will protect us in our truth,” he said, the adage that had carried Mam and me halfway ’round the world, and it had seemed true until this moment, because God did nay protect him.

  Everyone is talking. “Gossiping,” Mam says under her breath. Sister Shepherd is telling the red-haired Swedish girl who only arrived last week that they whipped Brother Joseph raw before they shot him. Sister Townsend shrieks that they killed Emma, too, and I start to shudder, thinking of Sister Emma at the head of Benevolent Society meetings, her dark hair pulled back so handsome, the way I want mine to look when I’m older and Mam don’t insist on schoolgirl braids and a checked bonnet each day. Minnie starts to wail again. Sister Kimball is wailing, too, sprawled on the floor with her face in her elbows. We’ve all become islands to ourselves, marooned in our grief.

  Molly Kingston is flapping her tongue the loudest, like she always does, as if being nineteen and engaged to Emma’s cousin gives her an ear the rest of us don’t have. She’s got tears down her cheeks, but her face is set and she’s going on about when the world is gonna let us be. Where we’ll go that we won’t be treated like less than humans ’cause we’re Morm
ons and follow the prophet Joseph Smith. We all might be thinking it, but she’s the only one saying it.

  It was Molly who once said to me at church that I could nay claim myself to know the hardships of being a follower of Joseph Smith because I hadn’t been there in Kirtland, when he and Sidney Rigdon got beat bloody in the street, their skin smeared with tar before they were pelted with feathers. Mam and I weren’t there in Missouri, when Governor Boggs signed the extermination order, granting the militia leave to drive out the Mormons or shoot them on sight. We weren’t there for the massacres, to see our men come home bleeding or not come home at all, our families gunned down by state troops, our shop windows broken and our houses looted and burned, all because we followed Brother Joseph.

  I wanted to tell Molly that maybe I hadn’t been there — maybe my mam and I hadn’t joined up with the Mormons in Fort Des Moines because we’d been too busy surviving the crossing from Liverpool, too busy spending the year before that trying to convince my da to let us learn from the Latter-Day Saint missionaries, then getting turned out of the house by him when he found out Mam and my auntie had taken my two sisters and me to the river Ribble and let Heber Kimball baptize us. Maybe we hadn’t been shot at by militiamen in the streets, but I’d seen my sisters breathe their last, red-faced and burning with scarlet fever, before they were wrapped like caterpillars in silk cocoons and thrown over the side of a ship. I’d watched them sink and we’d sailed on.

  We had all suffered for following Joseph Smith, and now him and Hyrum both shot in Carthage. Eliza confirms it — she went to see Brother Brigham and raised a fuss until he gave her an answer.

  It’s like it ent real until we hear it from Eliza, ent happened when it were just Minnie shouting it on the street. But Eliza’s no gossip nor a tale-teller, neither, and hearing it from her mouth feels like putting Joseph in the ground in earnest. I sit down hard on the ground. Mam starts to cry, very quietly.