January 27, 1827

I get a little dewy-eyed about some old manuscripts

[NB: I am writing this from a hotel room erected out in a field behind the emergency room in Arlington, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Aaron and I flew here early yesterday morning to look at a collection. There are about 10,000 books that we will probably transfer to DC later in the summer but this morning we caught a ride to the closest Target and bought a carry-on sized suitcase, a roll of bubble wrap, and all the bubble bags available on the shelf so we could take a few things home with us. When Aaron had his back turned I threw a red and pink bathing suit into the cart, thinking I’d write this out on the concrete by the hotel pool in the afternoon–I still find having this Substack kind of a shameful indulgence and I don’t even really like having Aaron in the room when I write. The first time I sat down to write a post he asked me what I was doing I was so embarrassed he might as well have caught me googling “Jacqueline Bisset wet t-shirt.”

But now it is storming so I’m stuck inside. This is just to say that I apologize: the day got away from me and I am relying heavily on previously catalogued and written descriptions to write this post, which has nothing to do with the collection we are buying.]

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A well-to-do family in Poughkeepsie had trouble keeping on their female help. I know this because a couple weeks ago I read through, catalogued, and sold the ledger they kept to track the women’s wages. Between 1872 and 1883 thirty-five women worked for the family, for somewhere between $9 and $15 a month. Few made it past the one-year mark and all fall into these four categories: work until marriage; work until parents too sick to care for themselves; work until too sick to work; and work until fired. Lizzie Reardon was “discharged on a/c of improper conduct” while Mary Crilley “left in the meanest manner. A liar and a fool.” Two women had to leave because they couldn’t stand to live with someone named Flanagan, most likely a member of the male household workforce. Only Bridget Welsh broke the mould, leaving “without warning or cause about the middle of July.”

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In Maury County, Tennessee, on November 16, 1823, a woman named Sally Wilson, “Not having the fear of God before her eyes and being seduced by the Devil Did of her own Mallace and Aforethought Voluntary [sic] take away her own Life With a razor and hank of yarn by first Cuting [sic] the Veigns [sic] in both arms and then hanging herself.” Almost immediately after she died Wilson was brought back to her house where the Justice of the Peace James Baldridge wrote up a deposition which he signed on a single folio sheet of laid paper. The deposition also had eleven witnesses: Martha J. Harrice, Franky Harrice, Nancy Hill, Margret Fausett Junior, Mary Fausett Senior, Sally Waddle, Sally Turner, Isabella Baldridge, Sarah Andrews, Mary Steele, and Wilson’s friend Franky McKee, “who saith that Miss Wilson told her on the same morning that she would Die on that Day if she could.” Baldridge signed the deposition on behalf of all eleven of his illiterate female witnesses.

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The French philosopher and psychoanalyst Maryse Choisy published a book in 1928 called Un mois chez les filles. It took more than thirty years to appear in English, under the drier and more forbidding title Psychoanalysis of the Prostitute. A year after its appearance in the US, Choisy received an anonymous nine-page letter written on pretty blue stationery. The author of the letter begins by praising Choisy’s book: “It is one of the first..I have ever read on this subject where the author did not attempt to convince the reader that he or she had a complete knowledge of the facts. You candidly admit that you are simply writing about the few people in this profession which you have come into contact with. Also I would like you to know that I am a prostitute and I have a pimp.”

The writer then goes on to give a brief overview of her day to day: “First let me say I am in the business for one reason and that is money. I have never used the term ‘lovers’ for my customers but since you do I will say, I charge lovers only to make money. I niether [sic] have a like or dislike for these men. I hardly think of them as people at all. They are to me as a dinner customer is to a waitress. Someone to be served as quickly and efficiently as possible. My real ‘work’ is before I even get on the bed, that is trying to get the man to spend as much money as possible. Once this is done I simply get rid of him as soon as possible to get on to the next man for no other reason then [sic] to make more money...90% of the time I can see a man I have been with and he looks vaguely familiar. I’m not sure if I have just seen him around or if I have been to bed with him.”

The latter half of the letter covers the author’s relationship with her pimp, to whom she had been married for nearly four years. In her book Choisy argued that the prostitute and pimp unite “not...to love, but to hate.” To this the writer responds “I am so in love with my husband I could write 20 pages on the subject alone. He is handsome, intelligent, a wonderful lover, a perfect companion. We enjoy music together. We go to the ball game together. We have many things in common. Also I know he loves me. How?? The same way a secretary, nurse, or even author knows her husband loves her.” The letter is simply signed “A Fan.”

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Emilie Evans was a nursing student at the Phoenixville Hospital in Pennsylvania in 1900 when she took a course on the Care of Mother and Child. She filled thirty pages in her enormous notebook on the subject, including the draconian measures of postnatal care: “all excitement and exertion of any kind are strictly prohibited, no one may be allowed to see [the mother] but members of immediate family the first week, second week patient may be propped up in bed. Third week she may be up in her room and recline on couch. Fourth week she must still stay in her room.” [Personal aside: I recently learned from Mom that two days after giving birth to me in a Manhattan hospital she brought me home alone to our empty apartment in Brooklyn in a yellow cab. It was a Tuesday so Dad was naturally at the office.]

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The Poughkeepsie ledger of women’s wages came from that big Americana collection we pulled out of a Winchester house a few years ago–it got lost at the bottom of one of my “brain boxes” until just recently. The Sally Wilson suicide deposition and the Maryse Choisy prostitute letter I both scouted up at the same Ann Arbor book fair, the only two things I bought that I day I remember. I had a vague sense of what they both were when I bought them, I knew I just needed to suss them out a bit. They weren’t in our inventory for long but I still get choked up when I reread them from the scans I have. The Emilie Evans nursing notebook I found at a different book fair. I count them as three of the most important primarily documents I have ever read/catalogued/sold, but the most important came to me as a surprise.

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One of the first collections CHB bought when I became a principal was the library of the late academic authority on the Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards. His house had Congregationalist sermons coming out of the floorboards. At the time I spent a lot more time cataloging in the office at the shop. “Office” is a highfalutin term we use for the disused, deactivated, and hollowed out upstairs bathroom where we have set up storage shelves and a desk. The room is windowless, the walls are close, and the HVAC that lives there gives off a low white noise hum. I call the office the “sensory deprivation tank” and I can catalog in there for hours without noticing the passage of time.

I had brought up there with me a box of Congregationalist sermons one evening to catalog when I pulled out a hand-made, brittle and faded manuscript notebook. It had no ownership signature but it was dated Longmeadow, Massachusetts, 1826, at the geographical and chronological heart of the Second Wave Awakening. Someone in a modern hand had laid in a small scrap of paper noting there was a connection to the Stebbins family. I looked at it, made a noise kind of like “Yech” and put it in my “brain box / to be dealt with later” pile. At the end of the night I closed the shop and took it home with me but for some reason it seemed to hang over my head so the next morning I sat down to read it.

Most of the early entries were short and almost entirely related to attending daily Meetings: “Sabbath went to meeting”; “Mr Dickenson preached from Collosions Second chapter”; “Saturday rainy.” Notable, however, was how often the author kept missing Meeting because he felt sick. I remember wondering “What is up with this guy?” TB maybe. I also remember worrying that I was going to read the whole journal and come away with nothing terribly interesting to say. “Sickly man went to Meeting a lot and also missed Meeting a lot.” Then I reached the entry for January 27, 1827, and I realized that all the while I had inadvertently developed preconceived notions of what I was reading and that they were all wrong. I thought I was looking at the drawing of a rabbit when I was really looking at the drawing of a duck. And the duck was pregnant. “Sabbath not well this evening I was confined between 11 and 12 Ock and A son is given us and blessed be God.”