Richard Zimler - Hunting Midnight

I grew fond of the children at my school right away, and they all flocked around me like I was made of sugar crystals. Maybe because I gave them things to read that they liked. Reading for them is different than it is for us. Adults love surprises and new things all the time. Children love repetition. They embraced the knowing what was coming next.

When I told Randolph about the school, he enrolled Mimi and Lawrence. It made me smile like a loon just seeing them there — like all of us were made of moonlight. Pretty soon I had them and nearly all of the children — even the tiny ones — well on their way to knowing their ABCs. We had some poets among us too. There was a boy named Charles who wrote a whole epic about an ant, a mouse, and a rat who took a boat all the way to Africa. It was real good work.

John came to my classroom after he adopted me, and it was real encouraging to have him there. He’d found good work to do — making a list of slaves and freed Negroes in South Carolina, so that all those folks could find one another when slavery finally ended. And we wrote a message to my father that John had printed once a week in more than a hundred newspapers.

I realized I liked him more and more. I trusted him too, which was more important, the way I saw it. I could see why Papa was so fond of him.

Pretty soon after I started teaching, William Arthur asked me and John to supper with him. That opened the gate between us as friends, and he invited just me to his rooms from time to time. John gave me his permission but said to be careful, since though I acted older I was still just what he called “a wee lassie.” Nothing happened between us though. I thought it might not ever happen.

By the end of December, things got badly twisted between John and Violeta, because she finally told him what he might have guessed long before — that she’d never love him like he wanted. He and I went out to a tiny town on Long Island for a weekend, to escape from her and talk things out, and I saw how disappointment was taking all that man’s strength.

It snowed on Monday morning, just before we headed back to the city. I slipped on the walkway when I ran to greet it. Lying there, watching those unstoppable flakes falling to the earth, opening my mouth to taste their wetness, I knew I’d never live anywhere it didn’t snow ever again.

In January, John’s daughters and mamma came over from London to stay with us. You never saw so much commotion. Mrs. Stewart scared me at first, but I liked her iron affection for her son. And I liked that she wore her spectacles only when nobody was looking. That used to make me laugh when I was in my room alone. She said some real nice things to me right away and taught me how to cook, though a few of her recipes for codfish were just about inedible as far as I was concerned. She reminded me of Lily. I guess because she was a lot older than me and fierce as can be in defense of the folks she loved. I thought that John was real lucky to have her as a mamma.

At first I thought those daughters of his weren’t much alike. Esther was always rushing around and giggling. You never saw a child’s fingers move so fast as when she was playing her violin. It made me all nervous sometimes that she might hit a lot of wrong notes. She talked fast too, so that you couldn’t understand half the words she was saying and had to ask her to start all over. Esther brings me back to when I was just little. We have secrets and giggle all the time. Graça is slower. She studies her maps and most everything else as if there’s something there that’s going to change the whole wide world. I grew fond of her right away, because we both liked silence and observing things. Esther took more getting used to, but like I say, she ended up tugging me all the way to fondness with her excitement. I like it when they knock before coming into my room. It’s like we’re family, but I still have my rights to be alone and not always be so friendly. They’ve got plans for going away with me, all the way to Africa. I told them I’d take them, and maybe I would, but the truth is it’s enough for me to stay in one place that’s safe.

In early June of 1824, after being courted real sweet for months by William Arthur, I found myself in his rooms on Chambers Street one evening, fiddling with a silk cushion on my lap while we talked about the school. When he took the cushion away and kissed me, I just about fainted.

There were some things about him I wasn’t too sure of. And I liked having the power to say no more than just about anything else. I tried to go slow. But he just loved doing things quick. So sometimes after that night in June I’d lie with him for a time in his bed and then rush on home before John and Mrs. Stewart would begin worrying about me. William and I were as fond of each other as two people can be who are a bit unsure of what their lives together are going to mean. The only thing missing from my life were the people who were dead or stuck back at River Bend. I missed Crow and Lily and Weaver and Grandma Blue. And Mamma. I wondered if my papa was with her now, or if he was still somewhere in our world. I wondered if they could see the good things that were happening to their Memoria. I wondered that nearly all the time and knew I always would.

Memoria Tsamma Stewart, June the Twenty-Seventh, 1824

It is now the Seventeenth of October, 1825, and more than eighteen months since I last wrote of my life. For nearly two years we have been placing our requests for Midnight to write to us every week in one hundred and twelve newspapers. All the plates, vases, and ewers I’ve glazed and sold have gone into having them printed.

Mother contracted an agent in Portugal to rent out our home in Porto and sell our lands upriver, and with the proceeds we were able to purchase a comfortable Federal house in Greenwich Village with a view over the Hudson River. We moved there in August of 1824, and as there was room for Mama’s pianoforte, she had it shipped over from London that very month. By the end of September, she already had secured seven students, two of whom are gifted. She’s talking seriously these days about founding the music school she had first envisioned in London. She’s even trying to convince Aunt Fiona to come to New York and help her.

Morri still finds her teaching rewarding, though she had herself something of a shipwreck with the headmaster, who seemed for a time to have really fallen for her. After some weeks of tearful trouble, she reached land healthy and contented, however. She’s got better balance than anyone I’ve ever met — except for maybe her father.

Lawrence and Mimi are in one of Morri’s two classes. When I saw them there recently, Mimi said she hoped that I did not miss my arm too much. I let her and the other children touch my stump, which they found rather scary and marvelous. How they love being frightened when they know they’re perfectly safe!

Esther is studying violin and music theory with a demanding but kindhearted professor from Cologne. Graça has proven herself something of a minor sorceress with languages and is already speaking beautiful French, thanks to the tutoring of a fine young man from Strasbourg.

Over the past several months, Violeta has taken all the Church Street children, as well as Esther and Graça, down to Castle Garden on moonless nights to learn the constellations. She is eager and patient with them, and it is doing her good to be able to teach them, my mother tells me. I am slowly doing my best to develop a new sort of relationship with her. Though we do not see each other, we send greetings and news through my daughters. Mama calls it a “paper-and-ink friendship,” guided from afar by what can never be. She says that that is sometimes all one can hope for. I am trying to rid myself of all expectations.