It was on a Sunday afternoon in April that I first climbed Anacostia Heights to Cedar Hill.
“Here are the terrace stairs,” they told me.
But I knew of the winding path that he had used, and I chose that. It is tangled and overgrown in places now, but up I went until I reached the sloping gardens and yes, there it was, just as I had expected, a lilac bush blooming where the path met the graveled walk!
A typical Virginia homestead, with veranda, carriage house and servants’ quarters, the house and grounds are preserved by the Douglass Memorial Association of Negro Women’s Clubs. I stood beside the sundial and tried to read its shadow, looked down into the well, and sat for a while on a stone seat beneath a flowering trellis.
It was so easy to see them on the porch or in the sunny living rooms with wide window-seats and fireplaces. Pictures looked down at me from every side—Susan B. Anthony, William Lloyd Garrison, the young and handsome Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips and Abraham Lincoln.
I sat dreaming at his desk a long time, fingering his notebooks and the yellowing accounting sheets upon which he had tried to balance that pitiful bank record. On three sides of the study books rose from floor to ceiling—worn and penciled books. Books about people were undoubtedly his favorites.
In the rooms upstairs were pictures and intimate small objects of family life, and in his room in a locked case I saw a rusty musket and a flag.
They opened the case for me, and I laid my face against the folds of John Brown’s flag. There it was in this year of 1946, still furled and standing in the corner of Frederick Douglass’ room.