Matthew Pearl - The Poe Shadow

"You are safe, Mr. Clark," Edwin said with remarkable tranquillity. "You need to be out of the rain for a while."

"Why did you put yourself at risk for me? You do not even know me."

"You're right, Mr. Clark. But I did not do this for you. I did it for someone I did know," he replied. "I did this for Edgar Poe."

I looked over the hard angles and handsome features of the face before me. He was perhaps a few years past forty and had enough lines in his face to be older, but there was a younger, or at least more restless, gleam hidden in his eye. "You knew Edgar Poe?"

"Before I was freed, yes."

"You were a slave?"

"I was." He studied me and nodded thoughtfully. "Mr. Poe's slave."

More than twenty years earlier, Edwin Hawkins had been a house slave for a relative of Maria Clemm's. Mrs. Clemm, called Muddy, was Edgar Poe's aunt and later, when Poe married her young daughter Sissy, would become his mother-in-law. Upon the death of Edwin's owner, the slave's deed and title had fallen to Muddy, then a resident of Baltimore.

Around the same time, Edgar Poe had recently withdrawn from his position as sergeant major in the army at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, certain now that he would be a poet after having completed an epic lyric, "Al Aaraaf," from his army barracks. The struggle to secure his military discharge had been long and frustrating, as Edgar Poe had needed consent from two equally strict parties: John Allan, his guardian, and his military superiors. Having finally accomplished this, Poe was now residing temporarily with Aunt Muddy and their extended Baltimore family. Eddie, as he was called by most people then, had enlisted in the army as Edgar A. Perry (the young slave had overheard Poe tell Muddy to watch for mail addressed to that name), initially having hoped to end all ties with Mr. Allan, who refused to support Poe's desire to publish his poetry.

Now, though freed from Allan's demands and from his army service, Edgar Poe had no money and no help to earn his place in the world.

Muddy, a tall, nurturing woman of forty, opened her home to Eddie Poe as though he were her son. He seemed to Edwin the style of man who liked exclusively to be around women. Overwhelmed with family illnesses in the household, Muddy asked her nephew to take the newly inherited slave and act as her agent in Edwin's sale. Soon Poe made an arrangement to sell Edwin to the family of Henry Ridgeway-a black family-for forty dollars.

I expressed my interest in the details of this arrangement. For a strong young male slave, Poe might have received five or six hundred, possibly more.

Edwin explained: "Our legislature tries hampering the freeing of slaves by making the process costly, so they don't look like they're disturbing our domestic economy. Mr. Poe and his aunt did not have that sort of money. But there is no law to prevent a free black family from purchasing a slave, and no law requiring a minimum sale price. Selling a slave cheap, maybe for the price of the lawyer's fee, to a free black owner was another way to free a slave-a way to free me, as Mr. Poe did in this arrangement. It also meant I could stay in Baltimore: not a perfect city, but my home. There are men among my people who own their wives and children as slaves, for the same reason."

"Poe did not write much about the slavery question," I said. "He was not a writer for any abolitionist causes." In fact, it had always seemed to me that Poe had never liked causes at all, automatically believing them hypocritical. "Yet he did this in your situation, forgoing hundreds of dollars, at a time when he was entirely poor and without support."

Edwin replied, "It is not a question of what a man writes. Especially a man who writes to earn his dollar, as Poe was beginning to do then. It is a question of what a man does that says who he is. I was only twenty years old. Mr. Poe was twenty, also, only a few months older. Whatever he thought on slavery, he was quiet about it in the little time I was acquainted with him. He was quiet altogether, actually. He was a man with few associates, and if he had associates, they were not friends. He saw something of himself in me, and he decided right there that he would free me if he could.

"I never saw Mr. Poe again, but I'll never forget what he did. I loved him for it and love him still, even though I knew him a short time. I began employment for several of the local newspaper offices when I was freed. Now I assist in wrapping the papers to be delivered to various points around the city. It was in one of those offices that I overheard your complaints to the editors, around the time Poe died, that Poe had been used up by the press, and that even his grave was unmarked. I had not known where he was buried until then. After finishing work that day, I walked there and left a token at the place you described."

"The flower? Was that you who left it?"

He nodded. "I remember Eddie was always neatly dressed, and sometimes wore a white flower like that one in his button-hole."

"But where did you run to once you left the flower?"

"It is not a Negro cemetery, you know, and it would attract suspicions to loaf there in the evening. While I knelt at the grave I heard a carriage coming fast and made haste exiting."

"That was Peter Stuart, my law partner, out looking to see where I was."

"Every day after that as I readied the newspapers for delivery, I saw another ungentlemanly article about Poe's character-having long ago been taught to read by the Ridgeways and their Webster's spelling-book, I could decipher all of this unkindness. The living like to prove they're better than the dead, seems to me. Much time had passed when another fellow, a foreigner, began coming around to the newspaper offices, filled with blusteration about Poe. He claimed he wanted justice for Poe, but to my eye he wanted to spread base excitement."

"That is Baron Dupin," I explained.

"I talked to this man, more than once, asking that he should respect Poe's memory. But there is a saying he reminded me of: all sham-skin and no possum. He merely dismissed me, or tried to persuade me there was cash to be made for helping him." I remembered the day I'd seen the Baron with his arm snaked around Edwin's and thought they were conspiring.

"It was around this time that I saw you again, Mr. Clark. I saw you and this Baron, as you call him, arguing over Poe. I decided to learn more about you, and I followed you. I saw you bring that young slave to the depot, and stand up to that slave-trader, Hope Slatter."

"Do you know Slatter?"

"It was Slatter who arranged my own sale to my second owner. At the time I did not blame Slatter in particular, for I was just a boy and it was the life I knew. He had his job. But I came back to his pen once years later to ask who my parents were-for he had sold them and had split us apart, though he had promised all the owners he would never separate families. Slatter was the one man who knew, yet he refused to answer, and drove me away with his cane. Since then, I can never look up when I see him with his rumbling omnibuses on the streets, bringing slaves to his ships. It is strange, but he sits always with Poe in my head-I knew neither man's heart, I guess, but I know one put me in chains and the other took me out of them.

"I saw you defy Slatter. It seemed as though you might need help-and so when I happened upon you out this evening in the storm, I followed again."

"You probably saved my life, Edwin."

"Tell me about those men."

"Villains of the first order. The Baron owes large amounts of money to powerful interests back in Paris. This is why he pursues the mystery of Poe-for money."

"And your involvement, Mr. Clark?"

"I have no involvement with those men who wished to leave me under the sod! Whatever ideas they have formulated in their minds, they're fables. They don't know me from a bull's foot."