Three generations

I was born near midday on the ninth of November, 1854, in a large room in the apartment familiarly known as “Doctor’s Part”, at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, South Boston. My first friend, Mrs. Margaret MacDonald, familiarly called D.D., presided at this, my earliest introduction to society.

“Your mother was out walking. Much as ever she got up the long Institution steps before you came, sooner than we expected you. Your little clothes had not come home, so I wrapped you up, first along, in an old flannel petticoat of your mother’s.”

If I am somewhat of a vagrant in habit and overfond of wandering, haven’t I a good warrant for it? From my first hour I was wrapped in a fragment of my mother’s garment. If her mantle cannot truthfully be said to have fallen upon me, I have at least contrived to creep under a corner of it, and it has kept me warm all my days!

“You were lying in a green cardboard box in papa’s arms the first time I saw you. ‘Come and see little sister Polly,’ he called to us in the nursery.” This, from sister Laura, is corroborative evidence that I hurried into this world sooner than I was looked for, without even giving them time to get the old cradle down from the attic.

On hearing of my birth, Theodore Parker rode post-haste to the Institution to see my father. Their conversation was, in substance, as follows:

“Another little girl?”

“So it seems.”

“A fourth daughter, a fifth child! You and Julia have your hands full already. Give the baby to my wife and me; we’ll bring her up as our own, call her Theodora, and make her our heir!”

“My dear fellow, you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

When the proposal was repeated to my mother, she exclaimed:

“Parker certainly can have no idea what it means to have a child!”

What an escape! If they could have given me to any one, it would have been to this beloved friend, who longed, above all else, for a child of his own. He put this catechism daily to his wife:

Question. What are you?

Answer. A bear.

Question. What must this bear do to be saved?

Answer. Have pups.

The pups, alas, never came to the poor “bear”, remembered as far more like a dove.

My first home was a public institution, but I had more right to it than most of those who lived there, for the Perkins Institution was founded and built by my father, Samuel Gridley Howe.

The Institution was a large brick building, with a classic façade and big white Doric columns. It stood on an elevated plateau above Broadway. Its windows looked out over Boston Harbor; you could see the Cunard steamers as they started on their trips to Europe, or returned, their red smokestacks covered with snow and icicles, after a winter passage. Strangers, noticing the blind boys and girls pacing up and down the wide piazzas that faced seaward, often spoke of the irony of fate that gave the school for the blind such a view. The rooms were large and well proportioned, with extra high ceilings. The corridors were paved with squares of gray and white marble. An imposing staircase rose, circling round and round a deep central well, to the giddy height of five tall stories; it still remains to me a triumph of architectural splendor. There was a polished mahogany handrail; to the daring, no sport was comparable to “sliding down the banisters.” This was of course strictly forbidden. It was held among us that a slip must prove fatal; one would fall down, down, and crash horribly upon that cold marble pavement at the bottom.

Till little Sam was born, I was the youngest of five children; during his short life of less than four years there were six of us: Julia, called Romana, in memory of her birthplace, Rome; Florence, named for our parents’ friend, Florence Nightingale; Henry Marion, in memory of our many times great-uncle, General Francis Marion of the Revolution; Laura, for Laura Bridgman; and little Sam, for his father. My name was given me for no better reason than that my mother fancied it. There had been a deal of discussion about the matter; when Tennyson’s Maud was published, my mother clinched it by naming me for the heroine of the poem, a fashion her friends, the William Hunts, followed by naming their first and second daughters Elaine and Enid.

The first distinct memory I have of my father is of waking one Christmas morning and finding myself lying in the big mahogany bed in his room. I knew I had gone to sleep in my black walnut crib, drawn close beside my mother’s bed in the next room. He came dancing in, with a small bundle of clothes in his arms.

“Here is a little monkey for your Christmas present,” he cried.

The little monkey was my brother Sammy, born soon after midnight, Christmas morning. Until his advent, I had always slept close to my mother. I remember now the chill of disappointment, if I ever, on waking in the dimly-lighted room, put out my hand to feel for her and found her bed empty and cold, as on some night when she had stayed out late. The desolate sense of her absence at first overwhelmed me; than came a shiver of fear of the dark corners of the room, inhabited by a strange breed of nocturnal foxes.

I did not speak till I was two years old, never so much as saying “mama”; then suddenly I pronounced a complete sentence, “See that little dog.” To help me learn to tell the time, my father contrived a large white cardboard dial with movable hands, like the face of a clock. This soon solved the mystery of hours. It must have been at about this period that some malicious governess taught me a bitter adage, which to this day I repeat, as a penitent plies the scourge on his lacerated back:

Lost, a golden hour, set with sixty diamond minutes. No reward is offered, for it can never be recovered!

Neither of my parents believed in the saying, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” They had both been rather strictly brought up and, as so often happens, in avoiding the extreme of severity they themselves had known, they perhaps went to the other extreme of indulgence with their children. On second thought, and to be quite honest, I was the only spoilt child in the family; the charge cannot fairly be brought against the others. When the youngest child dies, and the next youngest becomes the baby, as in my case, everybody knows what happens! Not only the parents but the older children are as wax in those baby hands.

Of the little anecdotes every mother treasures about every child, the following was the one that Mama liked best to tell of her “stormy petrel.” One day, in that blessed period of silence before I had begun to talk, she found me eating the wild cherries that grew at Lawton’s Valley. Taking the forbidden fruit from me, she showed me a little stick and said:

“If you eat those cherries again, I shall slap your hands with this stick.”

The next day I came up to her, at about the same hour, one hand grasping a fistful of wild cherries, the other holding the switch. Looking her squarely in the eyes, I put the cherries in my mouth, handed her the stick, and held out my hand. The whipping? She only caught, kissed, and hugged me to her bosom.

My earliest friends were all more or less connected with the Institution, where my first years were passed. My father was a good judge of character, and the teachers and attendants he chose to help him in his great task were all rather exceptional people.

Daniel Bradford, the Institution steward, was my father’s right-hand man, and my most intimate friend. When young, he had been a ship’s carpenter; the flavor of the sea was in his talk, the roll of it in his legs. He was a short, stout man, full of a merry friendship for all mankind. On Sundays he wore a gorgeous, flowered velvet waistcoat, a full set of false teeth, and the most brazen scratch wig I ever saw. On week days he was frankly bald and toothless as a new-born baby.

“Bradford, come and make the rounds!” my father called out one morning, looking into the office, where the steward sat, laboriously making up his accounts.

They started on their tour of inspection, my father striding ahead, Braddie trotting after him, two steps to his one, and I tagging on behind. I kept very close to them that day, for Braddie needed my sympathy. Had he not that very morning confided in me?

“Old Turk, I’m going to get married. The Doctor’ll take on like the Old Scratch. You get your Ma to put in a word for me.”

I told my mother; she looked grave.

“Yes, your father will feel the loss of his faithful Sancho Panza.”

“Braddie’s not going away,” I protested; “they’ll live right on here--”

“It won’t be the same; he can’t be ready at five minutes’ notice to start for the ends of the earth at any hour of the day or night!”

There was a good deal of “taking on” about the lady who had “caught” the old steward, and in order to get it over and done with, the marriage was promptly arranged. It took place in our rooms and I was one of the wedding party. There was another guest, Laura Bridgman, my father’s famous pupil. I can see her white intense face, the sightless eyes hidden by a green silk shade, the delicate fingers--that saw more than some eyes--touching the bridal gifts, hear her plaintive cry of pleasure, like the note of some forest bird, as she felt the large blue cut-glass vase that she and I admired far more than such useful presents as butter knives and pickle forks.

“Laura Bridgman--and who was she?” some one is sure to ask.