Ohio
1832-1870
I was born in 1832 to Scotch-Irish parents and raised in Perry County, Ohio. We were tenant farmers; my father grew oats, potatoes, and, until the market collapsed, tobacco. The land was enough to make only the simplest of livings, and we would barter for necessities from other poor neighbors.
I had nine siblings, but only four of us survived, and I was so unlike them in both temperament and likeness that we may as well have been strangers. The only other living girl was my sister Nancy, a distant and serious figure in my childhood.
All those children took a toll on my mother, both physically and emotionally, especially when she lost an infant daughter. My mother was a dreamer who often retreated to a hidden world only she could see, though she ached to share it with us. She told me stories of witches and fairies from my grandfather’s birthplace near the shores of Lough Neagh, and she taught me her secret language—the one I have shared with you.
Growing up I was impatient with her, as she was frail and neglected the endless grind of chores our farm required. At first this burden fell to Nancy, but once my sister married, it fell to me. I often wished Mama to be more like our father, a generous and vigorous man whose determination to work nothing could disturb but death itself.
All of us children attended the common school available to us, taught by a strict Irish schoolmaster who would beat every child as punishment for just one’s mischief. I learned reading, writing, and, my favorite, geography, but not arithmetic and science, which were reserved for the boys. When I turned eight, my father withdrew me from school. He said I was needed at home, and that girls ought not be too educated. In this matter my mother and sister agreed. To this day, I am ashamed of the gaps in my knowledge, and of my sloppy and shaky penmanship.
When I had no chores or schoolwork I would escape home and explore. It may be hard for you to believe now, but in my youth we called this part of Ohio the frontier. Whatever land was not farmed would soon become roads, railways, and canals, but much remained wild. In those days there were still the earthen mounds abandoned long ago by the Indians we displaced, and on clear nights I would sneak out and lie down on them to look at the mysterious stars. I was so ignorant, I thought the stars were lamps in the sky, lit by God to look back upon us.
My happiest memories of my mother were when the two of us would wade through her garden of wildflowers, whose seeds she taught me to collect in the fall. Neither of us knew the true names of most plants, so she would ask me to invent them for her. In the way of children, I took this task very seriously, and kept an album-book of pressed flowers with my invented names carefully recorded. When I would announce that the dainty blue and white figwort was in fact a Tsoina valseta, she would nod with recognition, as if the name had just slipped her mind, and would use it again the next day without fail. To these she would add more inventions, secret names for colors and numbers and cities in the skies, more than I could remember, always telling me they were for us alone because I was her Gentolēna̤, her little darling, her dearest one.
Church was the center of our parents’ lives, and our little village of a thousand people had an abundance of them. I attended but only out of duty; I did not care for our strict brand of Methodist preaching and I could not see how my mother especially could bear it when the sermons were devoid of any imagination or wonder.
When I was eleven, I was the age where a little sister was the companion I desired more than anything. When my mother got with child, I hoped for a playmate who would accompany me on my rambles, and a confidante who would always agree with me the way my sister Nancy would not.
One day that summer, I came home with the bloom of a white water-lily I had scooped out of a creek. I had never seen a wild thing so clean and bright, and with its central sunburst of cheery yellow, I was sure it would gladden Mama’s melancholy heart.
But when I brought it to her that evening, it folded into itself before my eyes, sealing itself from the world. I know now it is the habit of this plant to close at night and reopen in the morning, but my mother recoiled from my gift in horror. She told me this was the Rodel, that it sleeps the sleep of death, for it blooms but a day before its sweet life ends. She said it was a terrible omen and bade me to take it far from our house, and clutched her belly in fear.
A month later, little Emma was stillborn. Though she said nothing of the water-lily, I was sure I was at fault. My mother insisted on full mourning and refused to emerge from it. I thought I deserved the endless black clothing and darkened rooms where Nancy performed chores with grim efficiency, while my mother sat in silence or mumbled our nonsense words. As the years went on, I found her slipping into this invented language more and more, confused by our family’s inability to understand her. Her little garden went to seed and then stood as a graveyard of dried stalks, susurrating in the hot summer winds.
We had so little already, and then when I was sixteen, waves of cholera came through our town and carried away both my parents. I was the only sibling still living at home. There was little to inherit and what we had went to Samuel, the eldest, a poor farmer himself who had no time for a sister whose only talent was naming flowers.
Before us is an altar, on which lies the draped form of a young girl, her eyes closed as though in sleep. The loose robe drawn aside from her bosom reveals the contours of a maiden in the first blush of womanhood. At her side, holding in his upraised hand a long, keen bladed knife, which he is about to thrust into the heart of the unconscious victim, stands an aged, majestic looking Priest, his crimson robe in strong contrast to the white robed, golden-haired girl, who is to be sacrificed by knife and flames to an imaginary god or gods.
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A prominent family of German heritage dealt with legal matters in the village, and Samuel asked for help from the patriarch, being a Lutheran minister of supposed good character. This man arranged for his son, a recent widower and real estate speculator with a daughter nearly my age, to marry me.
The rest of 1850 is a blank, a terrifying darkness that howls like a storm through a valley when I turn my imagination toward it. When I try to write about it, I can produce only fragments, and the harder I try, the more the words break apart:
I was married to William Möeller at St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church, by Reverend Adam J. Weddell, who was a special friend of my husband-to-be and had journeyed from Springfield at my father-in-law's expense. The clerygman had piercing, deep-set eyes and a full chin curtain beard. He wore his dark robes and Geneva band collar all times, even when not preaching. "Let this union be the cause of happy results in the Lutheran Zion in our City," the Reverand said, as I sat motionless at the front of the church, on a bench empty but for the dark shadowy presence of my fiance. "Let us fervently pray that as pastor and people we may labor faithfully in the cause of our Divine Master, and that these two joined forever in matrimony with us today shall do the same."
After that day, came that night, and I went to the marriage bed with little understanding of the duties expected of me, how long I was to endure them, or how frequently. In the first weeks and months of this marriage I rarely left my room, though my husband had removed first the locks and then eventually the doorknob, so as to prevent me from having my own space. No doubt he would have removed the door entirely but for the presence of his daughter.
Throughout I was only able to exist in a state of numbness. I retreated into my imagination, and as I was still a mere child this was no great difficulty. I could pass a whole day just lying abed, imagining I was atop one of the mounds of the Indians, watching the swaying heads of the prairie grass filtered through autumn light, or the falling stars in August's night sky, feeling the imaginary earth beneath my back and not the thin mattress of his deceased wife.
By 1851, I sixteen years old, and with child. We moved out of my village, and I was allowed to take nothing with me. I lost my album-book of pressed flowers. He left me at home with his daughter Louisa, who was fourteen. She was already accustomed to running his house and I let her continue at it, more servant than stepmother. This suited us both.
My husband served as the County Recorder, and had dealings with all the businessmen of Zanesville. We did not entertain at home, but he would often bring me to the homes of other families when he was needed to witness documents. Their wives would make a show of introducing me to their children rather than their own company, and always sighed and mentioned how much they missed his former wife Eliza, and how she had lost her son. That she also lost her own life birthing him did not seem to warrant as much comment.
I recall visiting a legal office; there were attorneys and a judge there. I was asked to sign documents. The judge took me aside in a separate room and asked if I understood what was happening. I lied and said I did. I don’t think he believed me, so he explained again, more slowly: my husband was buying land in my name, and the judge was required by law to attest that I consented under my own free will. I said I understood. He stared at me and my pregnant form, and asked how old I was. I lied again, because Möeller had told me to: “I’m twenty,” I said.
Our first child was a boy, Carl, who went by his middle name Bernard; he was followed by Adelaide, who I have always called Ada. During these years I saw little of my siblings and resented them for abandoning me to my fate.
After Ada was born, Möeller stopped visiting my room, for which I was grateful. Louisa married and moved out, and I was content for a time, when my children were young and I had to do nothing but raise them in solitude.
Eventually Möeller announced that we were to divorce, because he wished to remarry. I did not care that I was being rejected, but I asked about the property in my name and how I would live. He said my land had turned out to be worthless and implied that I was at fault somehow. He moved us to Iowa where divorce was a relatively simple matter, and when that was concluded, he arranged for the children and me to live with my cousin Liam in Missouri. I would never see William Möeller again.
Liam was a carpenter by trade and found ample work in St. Louis, which was growing in all directions as its railroads and bridges extended the city’s reach. My husband settled a small sum on Liam to pay for board for the children, and the four of us took rooms in a red brick house on Chouteau and 8th Street, near the train yard. St. Louis was the first city I ever saw, and I thought nothing could be more full of people and noise and stink. Soon after we arrived, Liam was called up for the war, and although he came home to us, he brought with him a fever that never broke, and he died in my care.
Across the street from the boarding house was the Chouteau Avenue Methodist Church, of which Liam had been a member. He was well-liked there and he had been generous with his carpentry skills. When he died, the community was kind enough to take up a collection for me and the children even though I had never attended services. Our need was very great, and not just in the immediate aftermath, so the church connected me with one of the Ladies’ Mutual Aid societies. Without it I do not know how we would have survived; most likely I would have needed to beg my brother Samuel to take us in. Instead, the society was able to refer to me to small jobs sewing piecework or doing laundry while the children were in school. I was able to stay in our rooms and not have to live out as someone else’s housekeeper.
It came to be that a society matron visited the Mutual Aid society, to hire young women as servers and attendants for a charity event. She happened to mention in my hearing that she needed an abundance of garlands and bouquets for the place settings, and had been dissatisfied with those supplied by the venue’s usual vendor. I surprised myself by offering my services. While I needed the money, I also keenly missed the feel of flowers in my hands.
Working all through the night, I arranged thirty garlands and centerpieces myself. The children helped me drag a wagon twenty blocks to the event; few sidewalks were paved in those days, and it was a great effort to keep the haul from being splattered with mud or tipping off into the gutter. The matron was pleased with my designs, and generous with crediting me. Her fellow society ladies were soon eager to hire a reliable and vetted designer who was grateful for work.
Window-mounted jardinieres filled with live plants and elaborate Wardian cases for the parlor were coming into fashion then, and I discovered that these were less effort and more profitable than catering events. In the time it took me to assemble two dozen centerpieces, I could design a single window conservatory for twice the price. I assumed a steady roster of clients whose fickle tastes could be wearying, but whose purses were ample.
My Ada has always been naturally graceful and refined, and was popular at the public school. Once she was out in society, I found that no one objected if I were to style a parlor in the afternoon and chaperone my daughter to the same house that evening. This was America and I was afforded the opportunity to reinvent myself, and because our family blended seamlessly with the tragically large population of war widows, I was never called upon to explain that I had been divorced.