T. Boyle - Riven Rock

It was quarter to four when Carrie and Mrs. Littlejohn came for her, and neither of them made reference to the newspaper articte — that was in the past, already forgotten, the smallest pebble in the road to equality. “Everyone’s ready,” Carrie said, striding briskly across the room to snatch her hat from the bureau in a flurry of animated elbows and flashing hatpins, “though the day is rotten in the extreme, could even rain, and I wonder just how many bathers will be out there on the strand and if the whole thing isn’t just going to be another grand waste of time.”

Katherine was already on her feet, grabbing up her purse and parasol and smoothing down her dress as if girding for battle — and it was a kind of battle, the antisuffragists as nasty as any mob, and they were sure to be there, jeering and catcalling, their faces twisted and ugly and shot through with hate. They were drunk too, half of them, tobacco stains on their shirts and their fingers smeared with grease and nicotine and every sort of filth, yammering like animals, big testosterone-addled beasts out of some Darwinian nightmare. They were afraid of the vote. Afraid of Temperance. Afraid, incredibly, of women. “And the local authorities?” she asked, slipping in beside Carrie to arrange her hat in the mirror. “The sheriff or whoever? Are they still threatening to deny us our right to speak?”

Carrie turned away from the mirror to give her a look. “What do you think?”

“So what will we do?”

“What else? Defy them.”

They were met on the boardwalk by the Norfolk County sheriff and two of his deputies. The sheriff was ancient, just barely alive from the look of him, and the deputies were huge with an excess of feeding, twin butterballs squeezed into the iron maidens of their distended duff-colored uniforms. “You’ll need a permit to hold a rally here,” the sheriff wheezed, wearily lifting his watery old turtle’s gaze from the stony impediment of Carrie’s face and easing it down on the minefield of Katherine’s. Behind Katherine were fourteen women waving the purple, white and gold banners of the Movement and brandishing placards that read HOW LONG MUST WOMEN WAIT FOR LIBERTY? NO TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION and, the stiffest goad of all, DON’T TREAD ON US!

“We have no such permit,” Carrie responded, her voice ringing out as if she were shouting through a megaphone, heads turning, a crowd already gathering, children on the run, “as you well know, since your cronies at the courthouse have denied us one, but we have certain inalienable rights guaranteed us under the First Amendment of the United States Constitution — the rights of free speech and peaceable assembly — and we intend to exercise them.”

“Not in Norfolk County, you won‘t,” the old sheriff rasped, clamping his jaws shut like a trap.

“Go back to your kitchen, grandmaw!” a voice jeered, and there they were, the unshaven potbellied Fourth of July patriots gathered round their beery smirks, but there were women in the swelling crowd too, women with uplifted eyes and proud faces, women who needed to hear the news. All of a sudden Katherine felt as if she were going to explode, and she couldn’t keep it in, not here, not now, not in the face of this mindless barbarism, this naysaying and mockery. She whirled round to face the hecklers, and they were thirty or forty strong already, as if they’d been waiting all morning for this, for a little blood sport to ease the tedium of sucking on the bottle between shoving matches and filling each other’s ears with their filthy stories and crude jokes, and how could they dare presume to address Carrie Chapman Catt like that, grandma indeed. Suddenly she was shouting at the biggest and stupidest-looking behemoth in the crowd, and no matter if he’d opened his mouth or not. “And you go back to the saloon where you belong, you common drunkard,” she cried, feeling the blood rise in her like a geyser. “It’s tosspots like you who ought to be banned from voting, not good decent sober women! ”

That brought the storm down, all right — not the literal one, the one festering in the clouds and rumbling offshore in a tightly woven reticle of lightning — but the hurricane of testicular howls that was only awaiting an excuse to explode in all its wrath. Curses — the very vilest — rained down on them, faces nagged, an overripe tomato appeared out of nowhere to spread its reeking pulp all over the front of Katherine’s dress. Through it all, Carrie’s voice rang out: “To the water, ladies! If they won’t let us speak on the soil of Norfolk County, then we’ll bring our message home from the sea!”

Someone started the chant—“Forward, out of error,/Leave behind the night,/Forward through the darkness,/Forward into light!”—and then they were marching, down the length of the boardwalk and out onto the sand, their heels sinking away from them, shouts, jeers and laughter in their ears, and they didn’t stop marching until they were in the surf, sixteen strong and now seventeen and eighteen, the waves beating at them like some hostile force, their dresses ruined, shoes destroyed, and still they chanted while the sheriff blustered and wheezed and tried to head them off and the bullies pelted them with rotten vegetables, scraps of flotsam and seawrack, anything that came to hand.

The wind picked up and the waves pounded at them. Carrie spoke, and she was as full of fire as Katherine had ever seen her, and no, the women of America were not waiting, they were not asking, they were demanding their rights and they were demanding them now. And then Katherine spoke, the clean salt smell of the spume driving down the sour reek of the tomato pinned to her breast like a scarlet letter, and she wouldn’t wipe it away, wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. She spoke extempore and afterward she couldn’t remember what she’d said, but she remembered the feeling of it, the intensity and exhilaration of doing battle, of thrusting her words like bayonets into the very heart of the crowd that gathered on the shore to hear them.

“Go back to your husband!” some idiot shouted just before the storm broke — the literal one, with all its fierce lashing of wind and rain and even hail, the one that emptied the beach till she was preaching to the dumb sand and the oblivious gulls and the sisters who’d linked hands with her. My husband, she thought, and they were singing the “Marseillaise” there in the wind and the rain and the surf, singing “For All the Saints,” my husband might as well not even exist.

Afterward, when they’d staggered out of the surf and darted barefoot up the beach like so many schoolgirls at a picnic interrupted by a shower, they were giddy and heedless, the laughter running through them like a spark firing the engine of their exhilaration over and over again, and the pulse of it kept them giggling and grinning and thrusting their ecstatic faces at one another as the chauffeurs squeezed them dripping and shivering into Mrs. Littlejohn’s twin Pierce Arrow sedans, a Cadillac touring car and a Chalmers Six loaned for the day by an invalid neighbor of Mrs. Littlejohn who was highly sympathetic to the cause. And of the two women who’d spontaneously joined them in the surf, one — Delia Bumpus, proprietress of a rooming house in Quincy — came along for the celebratory ride back to Mrs. Littlejohn‘s, a bona fide convert. She was a robust woman, huge above her stockings, and her laugh was contagious as they piled out of the cars and gathered round the fire in the drawing room in a flurry of tea things, blankets, towels and warm terry robes provided by a whole army of servants. “I thought you were all crazy,” she roared, lifting her skirts to the fire, “and I was right!”

Everyone laughed at that and ten voices flew into the breach, shrill with excitement. “Did you see the look on that sheriff’s face when Carrie read him the riot act?”