Sensational by Kim Todd (good short books .txt) 📗

secreting Cisneros a message about his plans, he rented a room next to the prison and sawed through the bars at her window. She drugged her fellow prisoners with laudanum in their coffee, then climbed through the window and over the roof. A few days later, disguised as a sailor, she boarded a ship to New York. Hearst was ecstatic, reveling in the celebration that greeted her arrival. His paper lauded the “shy, dark-eyed Cuban maiden, concerning whose beauty no dissenting voice has yet been heard.” She met with the president, while the World grumbled and suggested the guards might have been bribed to let her go. There seemed no limit to what a paper could do.

In addition to solving murders and rescuing maidens, the New York Journal in 1897 profiled Victoria Earle Matthews in the haphazard way it often jumbled together items considered of interest to women. Her photo with the caption “Mrs. Victoria Earle Matthews who was once a slave, is now the chief organizer of the National Association of Colored Women, and is a clever writer” appeared on a page with pictures from a play and the article “The Real Swell Girl Wears Ten Pairs of Shoes in One Day.”

Matthews’s life had taken a dramatic turn, leaving her searching for her own kind of purpose. Through the early 1890s, her career continued to bloom; she’d written well-received short stories and a play; a biographical sketch said that, among African American female journalists, “none are more popular than Victoria Earle.” She was deeply literary, both in her writing, which showed evidence of wide and careful reading, and her sense of the importance of including stories from Black Americans in the country’s canon. In a profile of Frederick Douglass, she described his life as “America’s great epic.” She defended reading novels (often scorned as a trivial pursuit), and her lecture at the First Congress of Colored Women in Boston impressed listeners with its meticulously detailed case for “The Value of Race Literature.”

“We cannot afford any more than any other people to be indifferent to the fact, that the surest road to real fame is through literature,” she told the gathered crowd. “Who knows or can judge of our intrinsic worth without actual evidence of our breadth of mind, our boundless humanity.”

Many of her nonliterary hopes were tied up in her son. When she’d met Frederick Douglass at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, where he was the representative of Haiti, they rode the railway through the grounds together. In a later letter, reminding him of that encounter, she asked if she could bring her son to visit him for a jolt of inspiration. She imagined the fourteen-year-old as a grown man, saying, “Yes I had seen The Hon. Frederick Douglass—heard him speak—his hand has rested upon my head.”

But her son didn’t get a chance to grow into that man. He died in September 1895, at fifteen. At a loss for something to do with her grief, a state she described as “torn and disordered,” Matthews traveled to the South. She watched brickmaking at the Tuskegee Institute; she chaired the Resolutions Committee of the Congress of Colored Women of America during the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta. Resolutions condemned lynching and railcars that separated passengers by race. Others praised the elevation of “motherhood and womanhood of the race” and requested “the same standards of morality for men as for women.”

And based on disturbing observations, she channeled her grief into an investigation of the conditions of those who remained in rural areas of the South. Matthews had deep-set dark eyes, strong features, thick bangs. With her light skin and straight hair, many thought she was white—a notion she took pains to dispel, often announcing her background at the start of lectures: “When I speak of the colored people, I speak of people of whom I have my maternal origin. I speak of my brother, or my sister.” In letters she implied her father might have been the man who enslaved her mother. But in this instance, she may have taken advantage of the ability to disguise herself as a different race.* In Alabama and Georgia, the state where she’d been born, Black women and children mired in poverty languished on plantations, eager for any education that could help them. Prison reform was essential: the lack of any juvenile justice system meant that children labored on chain gangs alongside adults.

Matthews’s first impulse was to stay in the South, where she seemed so badly needed, to create a model home where she could teach life skills, but a minister urged her to use her energies to help young Black women drawn to New York under false pretenses. So she turned her attention to fraudulent employment agencies, based in Richmond, Norfolk, and other southern cities, those that tempted inexperienced young women with the lure of jobs in the North. The agencies promised to loan recruits money for boat fare, meet them at the dock, and provide housing until they found work. All the girls needed to do was to sign a contract giving an agency their wages until the debts were paid. It was, essentially, indentured servitude.

The southern women found themselves sleeping on the floor in filthy boardinghouses, racking up more debt as time ticked by. The situation of Black women looking for work was complicated by discrimination. They were barred from some factories because white employees refused to work with them. Nursing schools were closed to them. So when they were offered employment, finally, it was often the kind that would bar them from polite society (like Bly, like all the others, Matthews understood the importance of staying on the right side of the line, the safe side)—serving beer in bars and gambling houses, working as prostitutes.

Matthews had a very different sense of New York and its dangers than that reflected in the World and the New York Journal. The major charities at the time focused more on the needs of