‘housed,’ protected, an entirely different spatial feeling from all other big cities I know.”
McCarthy, early on, protests that she is “a frightful correspondent,” but for a reason that actually makes her a good one: she’s “never learned to communicate in a brief style.” There is an amplitude, a long steady narrative drive, to both women’s letters. Only one instance of wounded feelings occurs in the whole quarter-century-long exchange, in 1974, when McCarthy sees Arendt off after a visit and is left to worry: “It was sad to watch you go through the gate at the airport without turning back. Something is happening or has happened to our friendship … The least I can conjecture is that I have got on your nerves.” Arendt’s reply is an immediate, exasperated reassurance: “For heaven’s sake, Mary, stop it, please.” It says something about the authenticity of their connection that a reader is moved by this little blip of misunderstanding, fearful the friendship might come, disastrously, full circle. As it is, their love and letters carried on, the harmonic convergence of a woman Norman Mailer once dubbed our “lit arbiter, our broadsword,” with somebody McCarthy herself described as the only person she had ever watched thinking.
IN READING THE LETTERS of Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown, two young African-American women living through the middle of the nineteenth century, one imagines occasions when Addie must have watched Rebecca not just thinking but also setting her mind to act on whatever conclusion she had reached.
According to Farah Jasmine Griffin, the letters’ editor, Addie Brown (born 1841) and Rebecca Primus (born 1836) may have met when Addie moved to Hartford from Philadelphia sometime in the 1850s and began boarding with the Primus family, whose middle-class members included a clerk, a seamstress and a future portrait painter—Rebecca’s brother, Nelson Primus. The two women write to each other while Addie spends the early part of the Civil War in New York, but the heart of their correspondence comes with Reconstruction, when Addie has returned to Hartford and Rebecca moved to Royal Oak, Maryland, in order to build and run a school for the local black population.
We have to follow the exchange obliquely. Addie’s letters to Rebecca survive, but those Rebecca wrote directly to her have so far not been discovered. (Since they’re alluded to in Addie’s own letters, Professor Griffin remains hopeful.) It is only through the letters she sends to her own family—letters that almost surely reached Addie’s eyes, too—that we hear her urgent, zealous voice.
Addie gives us sharp-eyed glimpses of her life as a servant, including her short-lived stay with the family of Reverend Huntington, a Trinity College professor whose wife, Addie knows from the start, will be hard to get along with. Addie does not believe she should have to take Mrs. Huntington’s white son to church—and don’t get her started on the stairs. As she explains to Rebecca just after putting the Huntington children to bed: “yesterday I counted how many times I went up and down before breakfast six time you can judge for yourself there is a hundred & seven steps when it time for me to go to bed my limbs ache like the tooth ache.” Miss Porter’s School soon proves a more congenial place to work: the money is good; Addie is allowed to use the library; and on cold days the girls keep her company in the kitchen. She can’t, alas, say much for their dancing (“not many of them graceful”).
Addie reports to Rebecca on her efforts toward self-improvement—reading Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, hearing a speech by Henry Ward Beecher—and she’s not entirely without political opinions: she’d rather see Andrew Johnson shot than impeached. But the letters she sends to Rebecca mostly fizz withgossip and mischief; they’re alive with the natural letter-writer’s lack of proportion. The drama of Aunt
McCarthy, early on, protests that she is “a frightful correspondent,” but for a reason that actually makes her a good one: she’s “never learned to communicate in a brief style.” There is an amplitude, a long steady narrative drive, to both women’s letters. Only one instance of wounded feelings occurs in the whole quarter-century-long exchange, in 1974, when McCarthy sees Arendt off after a visit and is left to worry: “It was sad to watch you go through the gate at the airport without turning back. Something is happening or has happened to our friendship … The least I can conjecture is that I have got on your nerves.” Arendt’s reply is an immediate, exasperated reassurance: “For heaven’s sake, Mary, stop it, please.” It says something about the authenticity of their connection that a reader is moved by this little blip of misunderstanding, fearful the friendship might come, disastrously, full circle. As it is, their love and letters carried on, the harmonic convergence of a woman Norman Mailer once dubbed our “lit arbiter, our broadsword,” with somebody McCarthy herself described as the only person she had ever watched thinking.
IN READING THE LETTERS of Rebecca Primus and Addie Brown, two young African-American women living through the middle of the nineteenth century, one imagines occasions when Addie must have watched Rebecca not just thinking but also setting her mind to act on whatever conclusion she had reached.
According to Farah Jasmine Griffin, the letters’ editor, Addie Brown (born 1841) and Rebecca Primus (born 1836) may have met when Addie moved to Hartford from Philadelphia sometime in the 1850s and began boarding with the Primus family, whose middle-class members included a clerk, a seamstress and a future portrait painter—Rebecca’s brother, Nelson Primus. The two women write to each other while Addie spends the early part of the Civil War in New York, but the heart of their correspondence comes with Reconstruction, when Addie has returned to Hartford and Rebecca moved to Royal Oak, Maryland, in order to build and run a school for the local black population.
We have to follow the exchange obliquely. Addie’s letters to Rebecca survive, but those Rebecca wrote directly to her have so far not been discovered. (Since they’re alluded to in Addie’s own letters, Professor Griffin remains hopeful.) It is only through the letters she sends to her own family—letters that almost surely reached Addie’s eyes, too—that we hear her urgent, zealous voice.
Addie gives us sharp-eyed glimpses of her life as a servant, including her short-lived stay with the family of Reverend Huntington, a Trinity College professor whose wife, Addie knows from the start, will be hard to get along with. Addie does not believe she should have to take Mrs. Huntington’s white son to church—and don’t get her started on the stairs. As she explains to Rebecca just after putting the Huntington children to bed: “yesterday I counted how many times I went up and down before breakfast six time you can judge for yourself there is a hundred & seven steps when it time for me to go to bed my limbs ache like the tooth ache.” Miss Porter’s School soon proves a more congenial place to work: the money is good; Addie is allowed to use the library; and on cold days the girls keep her company in the kitchen. She can’t, alas, say much for their dancing (“not many of them graceful”).
Addie reports to Rebecca on her efforts toward self-improvement—reading Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, hearing a speech by Henry Ward Beecher—and she’s not entirely without political opinions: she’d rather see Andrew Johnson shot than impeached. But the letters she sends to Rebecca mostly fizz withgossip and mischief; they’re alive with the natural letter-writer’s lack of proportion. The drama of Aunt
Similar Books
