Stone Mirrors Page 9

Edmonia bolts the studio door.

  For a while, breathing is her triumph.

  Then she kneels in what she meant to save,

  but couldn’t, leaving prints in the dust and shattered stone.

  Really, she only ruined part of an arm and a shoulder,

  the chance for Cleopatra to sit straight on her throne.

  Even stones give second chances.

  She’ll show the queen with her head tilted,

  as she might have been when she was dead or dying.

  She’ll sculpt the asp, the small beast

  that changed everything,

  though Cleopatra still commands.

  Edmonia won’t hide what went wrong

  but make it part of the whole.

  Art is made from what disappears.

  THE WORLD’S FAIR

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

  1876

  Earth and Sky

  The streets smell of sausages, cabbage, and coffee sold

  from stands. Horses with small flags tucked in harnesses

  pull carriages past Lady Liberty’s long sculpted arm

  holding a torch from the roof of a souvenir shop.

  Tourists at the Centennial Exposition can ride a train speeding

  eight miles an hour around two hundred and fifty buildings

  filled with displays of ancient Egyptian mummies,

  George Washington’s coat and trousers,

  Queen Victoria’s embroidery,

  a cape made from the fluff of a milkweed pod,

  butter sculpted into a princess,

  and the Declaration of Independence recast from candy.

  Rain falls as Edmonia walks in her bright blouse and wide skirt.

  Her unpinned hair ripples like a river catching wind.

  She strides past bronze winged horses on the steps

  of the Art Building, which holds sculptures and paintings

  from all thirty-seven states, several western territories,

  and twenty nations. Inside, gentlemen shake rain

  from their top hats. Ladies shut umbrellas.

  Their gowns rustle like dried leaves, snapping branches.

  In the galleries, heads turn toward Edmonia,

  whose bright bohemian clothes make it clear

  she’s the sculptor. Gentlemen congratulate her.

  Ladies wearing hats heavy with silk roses gush.

  Edmonia smiles at praise from people around the world,

  but she’s most joyful to be someone with nothing to hide.

  A small girl with braids tied in tricolored ribbons

  touches the feet of Hagar. Across the room,

  people bend back to see Cleopatra’s stone face.

  They raise their chins the way Edmonia once looked up

  at the judge at the trial. She’s been told

  that her masterpiece has been seen by millions,

  including President Grant. And, she supposes, by liars,

  truth-tellers, perhaps girls who once folded paper swans.

  A woman points at Edmonia,

  who straightens her back, bracing.

  The woman bends to a child, maybe five,

  who scrambles out from the tent of her arm.

  Her skirt billows over her woolen stockings

  as she darts around people.

  Her mother calls, Don’t run! Come back.

  The girl halts in front of Edmonia,

  looks up past her waist at her face, then at her statue.

  She asks, Is that lady hurt?

  Cleopatra? That happened a long time ago.

  Hadn’t it? Present and past collapse together,

  one never far from another. She’s safe

  in this moment, though that can’t last.

  I like her. The girl peers up at the asp.

  She shouldn’t have listened to that snake.

  She needed a friend, Edmonia says. Just one.

  The little girl tucks her head, opens her arms.

  She throws them around Edmonia,

  whose hands fall onto the girl’s shoulders.

  For a moment nothing comes between them.

  Then the girl turns and runs

  back to her mother, back into the world.

  Soon Edmonia leaves the building. Rain falls

  into her hair as she walks on, looks back.

  Her self fits perfectly within her skin,

  the way moccasins mold to feet,

  a river wends through land,

  or a crow slices her shape through the sky.

  Memory

  1876–The Present

  The Death of Cleopatra was shipped to a gallery

  in Chicago, then put in storage. The colossal sculpture

  was later brought to a deserted field, a cemetery

  for racehorses, then a warehouse. For almost a century,

  much of the sculptor’s story was hidden, too,

  dazzling, disappearing, and then showing up again,

  like waves that froth, rise, then curl under the sea’s surface.

  After Edmonia Lewis left Philadelphia, she traveled,

  then returned to Europe. Little else is known.

  Did she ever go back to the forest, looking for her aunts?

  Did she find love with a woman or man that lasted beyond

  moments or days? We don’t know if anyone ever brushed

  marble dust from her hair or if she ever nestled her chin

  in the neck of a friend’s baby. No one knows what

  she regretted, longed for, or truly made her proud.

  Some of her sculptures are now in museums,

  but much remains missing. Conversations fade

  even as they’re spoken. Still, how does something many

  have seen vanish from sight? How does history

  lose track of a woman famous in her day?

  People forget, move, quarrel, break things, and die.

  Pianos were sold, fireplaces blocked, mantelpieces taken down,

  and houses destroyed to make way for new buildings.

  Historians still search for a gravestone. Will someone ever look

  through an attic and find a stone face they don’t recognize

  crammed among chipped teacups, boxes of skates,

  mice-gnawed candles, emptied perfume bottles,

  a pair of crutches covered with cobwebs, bent spectacles,

  broken clocks, albums of pressed flowers, and spools

  without thread someone couldn’t bear to toss out?

  Memory doesn’t follow a straight line.

  The past changes every time we look back.

  What can be guessed from the shape of stone,

  and peering through the open spaces in questions,

  has to be enough. History is not only caught

  in vaults or glass cases, but is what’s shoved aside

  or deliberately left out: The letter left within the pages

  of a book, what was whispered over cake or soup.

  What’s discarded turns to treasure.

  What we have is enough, or almost.

  Questions. Beauty. Love.

  Who Was Edmonia Lewis?

  (Mary) Edmonia Lewis (c. 1844–1907) never spoke or wrote much about her past, and some of the stories that have come down through time are vague or contradictory. Other peoples’ letters, diaries, and memoirs suggest places she stayed, but we can’t know much about who she saw or what was said. I read biographies and speculation, studied sculptures, researched the towns, cities, woods, artistic communities, and politics of her time, and looked for what seemed hidden beneath recorded words, plaster, or stone.

  The open questions about her life frustrate biographers, but seem suited to verse, a form that delights in solid furniture and bric-a-brac, but is also comfortable with mysteries and leaps through time. Relying on both facts and gaps in history, I imagined my way into a sense of what might have been, the way a sculptor of historical figures starts with giv
ens but creates her own vision.

  Very little is known about Edmonia Lewis’s parents, whom she honored in her work. Later in life, she may have visited her brother, who seems to have settled near the Rocky Mountains, but it’s considered unlikely that she ever again saw her aunts. What seems certain is that the pride and strength she gained during her childhood among the Ojibwe sustained her through enormous hardships. And through the years, she increasingly credited her father and her mixed heritage for gifts of courage and tenacity.

  Oberlin included a preparatory school when Edmonia Lewis attended. We know almost nothing about the other students. My portraits of Helen, Christine, Seth, and Ruth are fictional, inspired by passed-along stories of events leading to the sparsely documented accusation and trial. Real artists mentioned in the book include Edward A. Brackett, Anne Whitney, and Harriet Hosmer. As I did with Edmonia Lewis, I created their thoughts and dialogue by developing my impressions from letters, nonfiction accounts, and artwork. Other characters based on real people include John Mercer Langston, a member of one of the earliest classes to enter Oberlin, one of the first colleges to be both interracial and coeducational. His distinguished career included tenure as president of Howard University and work in Congress. Lydia Maria Child was well known as an author and for her work for human rights. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw died while leading the 54th Regiment in an attack on Fort Wagner in South Carolina. Edmonia Lewis’s sculpture of him is now in the Museum of African American History in Boston, Massachusetts.

  I cite only some sculptures, and, in the interest of space, naturally omit events. I ended with the Centennial Exhibition, which marked the height of Edmonia Lewis’s fame as a sculptor, partly because around that time the neoclassical style of sculpture she worked in began to wane in popularity. Her reputation was revived in the 1970s, when interest in art made by women and people of color deepened. The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., currently owns nine sculptures, including Hagar, The Death of Cleopatra, and The Old Arrow Maker and His Daughter. More than thirty other sculptures are in private collections, as well as at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Fogg Art Museum, Newark Museum, Detroit Institute of Arts, and Saint Louis Art Museum. Edmonia Lewis is memorialized at Oberlin College with a center named for her that is dedicated to freedom and justice for all.

  Main Sources

  Most of the books here contain information about Edmonia Lewis and her artwork. Please visit the author’s website (jeannineatkins.com) to learn about other books used to research sculpture, Oberlin, Boston, Rome, and the lives of Ojibwe and African Americans in the nineteenth century.

  Bearden, Romare and Harry Henderson. A History of African-American Artists, From 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.

  Buick, Kirsten Pai. Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2010.

  Henderson, Harry and Albert Henderson. The Indomitable Spirit of Edmonia Lewis. Milford, CT: Esquiline Hill Press, 2013.

  Johnston, Basil. Ojibway Heritage. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1976.

  Langston, John Mercer. From the Virginia Plantation to the National Capitol. New York: Bergman Publishers, 1969.

  ojibwe.net

  Richardson, Marilyn. “Vita: Edmonia Lewis.” Harvard Magazine, 1986.

  Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Sculptors. Boston: G.K. Hall and Co., 1990.

  Shuttlesworth, Carolyn (editor). Three Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox. Philadelphia: Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, 1996.

  Sterling, Dorothy (editor). We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1985.

  Vizenor, Gerald. The People Named the Chippewa. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1984.

  Wolfe, Rinna Evelyn. Edmonia Lewis: Wildfire in Marble. Parsippany, NJ: Dillon Press, 1998.

  Jeannine Atkins is the author of several books for young readers about courageous women, including Finding Wonders: Three Girls Who Changed Science and the highly praised Borrowed Names: Poems About Laura Ingalls Wilder, Madam C. J. Walker, Marie Curie, and Their Daughters. Jeannine teaches children’s literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and writing at Simmons College. She lives in western Massachusetts. Visit her at jeannineatkins.com.

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Jeannine Atkins

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Atkins, Jeannine, 1953- author.

  Title: Stone mirrors : the sculpture and silence of Edmonia Lewis / Jeannine Atkins.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Atheneum Books for Young Readers, [2017]Summary: “A biographical novel in verse of a half Native American, half African American female sculptor, Edmonia Lewis, working in the years right after the Civil War”—Provided by publisher. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016003598

  ISBN 978-1-4814-5905-1

  ISBN 978-1-4814-5907-5 (eBook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Lewis, Edmonia—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Novels in verse. | Lewis, Edmonia—Fiction. | Women sculptors—Fiction. | Sculptors—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Biographical / United States. | JUVENILE FICTION / Girls & Women. | JUVENILE FICTION / Stories in Verse.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.5.A85 St 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016003598