Rhoda of the Underground

by Florence Finch Kelly

She talked much with Rhoda about the delightfulness of plantation life and she dwelt long and lovingly upon Jeff Delavan’s passionate devotion and upon his ambition and capacities which, she was sure, would result in a career of national renown. Rhoda hearkened with interest, saying but little in opposition, for her heart had begun to ache for her mother almost as much as it did for herself and she shrank from bringing the hurt look into those gentle eyes any oftener than she found necessary. But sometimes, when evasion was no longer possible, she would say, with caresses, and humble manner:

“Dear mother, you don’t know how much all you tell me makes me long for that kind of life and surroundings. I think the wish for them must have been born in me. But, mother, dear mother, I couldn’t endure them if they meant being a part of slavery. Perhaps I should feel different about it if I had been born there, as you were, and had grown up in it.”

Dr. Ware knew of the efforts his wife was making to win Rhoda’s consent and, perceiving that her arguments and presentations made a strong appeal to their daughter’s temperament, set himself to counteract any effect they might have by appeals to her conscience. But he openly urged no argument against the marriage, and in all his talk with her he took it for granted that the question was settled for good.

Once he told her the story of Fanny Kemble, then at the zenith of her fame,—of how, for love’s sake, she had married a slaveholder, although herself convinced of the wrongfulness of slavery, and of how life on the plantation, in close contact with the system, had filled her with such loathing that she had not long been able to endure it.

“I am very glad, Rhoda,” he added, “that you were able to appreciate, before it was too late, just what it would mean to marry into the South’s ‘peculiar institution.’ You have saved yourself a great deal of unhappiness.”

But especially did Dr. Ware have confidence in anti-slavery work as a preventive of possible weakening in his daughter’s determination. To that end he encouraged her in her sewing-circle activities, enlisted her help in the sending out of pamphlets, newspapers and other literature which was a part of the work of the Rocky Mountain Club, and entrusted largely to her care the refugee slaves who sought the shelter of their house.

Husband and wife said not a word to each other of their opposing desires. Silence upon the question of Rhoda and Delavan was a part of their lifelong habit of ignoring the question of slavery in their mutual relations. But each felt so much at stake in their silent struggle that gradually it forced them apart, and as the winter months wore on there grew up between them the first alienation of their married life.

Rhoda was soon sensible of the growing coldness between her father and mother and guessed its cause. Her heart ached over the unhappiness she had so unintentionally brought about and she spent much thought and many secret tears upon the endeavor to find some way out of the intolerable situation. Sometimes, in her misery over having brought such disaster into her home, she felt that, if it would only heal the breach, she could even sacrifice her scruples against becoming a part of the system of slavery.

“But it wouldn’t do any good,” was the conclusion to which she had always to come. “For if I were to marry Jeff it would make father bitterly unhappy and he would blame mother for having influenced me to give way. And as long as I don’t marry him mother will keep on feeling that it is father’s fault and being angry with him because of it.”

The hiding place for runaway slaves was completed during the stay of Mrs. Ware and Charlotte in Cincinnati, in October. It was a little, narrow room, or cell, long enough for a man to stretch himself at length on the floor and high enough for him to sit upright on a bench. On three sides and across the top, cords of wood for the winter fires were stacked in orderly array. But on the third side, containing the entrance, where there was only a little space between the room and the back wall of the shed, the wood was piled irregularly. From any but a very searching eye these apparently haphazard sticks would conceal the tiny, boarded structure, while in a moment they could be thrown aside and passage in or out made easy. Within, a pile of straw and some old quilts and carriage rugs made a bed comfortable enough, save on the worst of winter nights, for those who had seldom known a better.