Oscar Hijuelos - Twain & Stanley Enter Paradise

Thankfully, on this journey I was accompanied by my new wife, Dorothy, the pearl of my days, whose sunny temperament and joy for life remained a solace to me. My mother-in-law, Gertrude Tennant, and her nephew, Hamilton Aide, and one of my old (and most loyal) Africa hands, Lieutenant Arthur J. M. Jephson, comprised the rest of my party. Our private train cars featured all the amenities of a fine hotel, and as we crossed the country, I had the use of a small office and writing desk on which to make improvements to my lectures as needed. Because I had always experienced some unease before audiences and remained wary about going over certain distasteful details in regard to my recent expedition, I was plagued all along by a great reticence. (I worried, mostly, about being boring.) Here my clever wife’s input was invaluable to me. It was her idea that I somewhat broaden the scope of my talks so as to include the story of my encounters with the Pygmies of the forest and other remarkable, somewhat pleasant discoveries. My lecture, which had at first been advertised in New York as “The Relief of Emin Pasha,” became “The March through the Magical Forest,” a change that, according to Major Pond, much invigorated box-office receipts. (We did many thousands of dollars’ worth of business at each venue.) No amount of what I said could begin to capture my experiences, but I tried to put my listeners into my shoes: It was exhausting, to say the least, but I was applauded everywhere I went.

Since I had given over most of my spare time to the refining of my talks, I mainly left sightseeing to my wife and her mother. Dolly could at least use that opportunity to take in something of my adoptive country and meet some of our many friends. In New York, that chaotic metropolis (a city planner’s nightmare was my impression), I had the pleasure of introducing her to Samuel Clemens for the first time — he liked her immediately, I am happy to say, and one evening they attended a Buffalo Bill rodeo show together. And Clemens — that is, Mark Twain — was also on hand during some of the lectures I gave in Hartford, his hometown, and in Boston. It was joyous to me that they got on so well.

On one of those afternoons in Boston, after a fine snowfall, Dolly and Clemens, along with his youngest daughter, Jean, went out for several hours of sleigh riding. Upon their return, my wife was rosy-cheeked and ecstatically happy. “Oh, Bula Matari, come and have a ride and breathe the most delicious air under heaven!” she said to me in her endearing way. Clemens, smiling, his hat of Russian fur and his long coat still dripping with particles of snow, joined in: “Yes, Bula,” he told me. “Your winter chariot awaits.” But having my duties, I excused myself and returned to work; besides, I liked the idea of Clemens befriending my wife. She was, after all, quickly becoming my “better half” and an asset to me socially, and I knew that Clemens would have a more congenial time with her than he would with me, so preoccupied was I about saving my energies for my nightly performances.

NOW, BY THE TIME WE ARRIVED in New Orleans, in March, I was somewhat ready for a diversion beyond the endless dinners and fetes in my honor, which I, being cautious around strangers, would have been happy to avoid. Nevertheless I gave lectures in the elegant salons and society halls of the city. Playing up my “Southern roots” for the crowds, I spiced my stew of African tales with frequent mentions of having worn the Confederate uniform and participated in the Battle of Shiloh, though I had since become better known for “other things.” I spoke of Southern bravery and resolve during that war and ventured the notion that if I had remained cool in some very dangerous situations in Africa and other locales, I owed it to those earlier formative experiences. But while speaking of these things, my life before the Civil War began to come back to me, having lain dormant under a multitude of other memories; and so, breaking from my normal routine, I decided to spend a morning with my wife and her mother, sightseeing around the city.

On that occasion, I showed them the places where I had once wandered, the harborside and levee, the labyrinthine center of the French Quarter, even the old coffee stands where I used to dally as a young man. And I took them up the main commercial strip, where I had once worked for the better part of a year as a clerk in a store. When we came to that location, at number 3 Tchoupitoulas Street, we found that a store still existed there, selling, as far as I could tell, much of the same kinds of goods, though with many a modern addition to its inventory. I could not resist going inside to take in the old ambience.

Then we strolled over to my first boardinghouse, an old clapboard affair on St. Thomas Street. I was very touched to see that with the exception of some physical improvements to the premises and the addition of some rosebushes clustered by and adorning the front yard’s white picket fence, it was much as I remembered it. And because it had been such a happy place for me, a home where I had received much kindness, I felt a great curiosity to see if my former landlady Mrs. Williams still lived there. And so with my wife and mother-in-law in tow, I knocked on the front screen door. Shortly, as we waited in the heat of the day, we heard a voice calling from inside—“Hold on!” Though I had not heard that voice in years, it sounded like Mrs. Williams, and within those moments, I experienced a drawing back in time to my youth, when I knew little about the world. With those years falling away from my travel-worn self, I felt a strangely invigorating grace come through me. To my delight, when the door opened, there stood before us a pretty black woman, her hair all white and tied up in a bun; she was wearing a floral-patterned dress and an apron and smelled sweetly of lilac perfume. She was perhaps seventy or so, though her bearing and manner were youthful.

“What can I do for you folks?”

At first, she displayed no awareness that the well-dressed gentleman with his hat in hand and in the company of two ladies had been one of her boarders many years before. I had, indeed, changed: The lad of eighteen, with his youthful countenance and ruddy cheeks, who until he was twenty-five had never seemed to most people older than fifteen, now stood before her with his hair turned white, a weathered face, and a great walrus mustache.

“Good afternoon, madame. Are you the same Mrs. Jessica Williams who ran this boardinghouse in the years before the war?”

“I surely am and still do. And who might you be?”

“You may not remember me. My name is Henry Morton Stanley, but I once stayed here for the better part of a year in the late 1850s, under another name, Mr. John Rowlands.”

Looking me over, she finally declared: “Why, the little Welsh boy, Mr. Johnny! Come in, come in!” And she beamed so delightfully, shaking all our hands and smiling so gratefully, in a way not often seen in our lofty London circles, that even my most aristocratic mother-in-law was charmed. “Oh, my,” Mrs. Williams said with excitement. “Ain’t you the very one I have been reading ’bout in the papers!”

Indeed, my arrival in New Orleans had been much publicized in advance, thanks to my agent, Major Pond — my every lecture advertised and every luncheon and dinner engagement duly noted. Extensive, too, had been reports of my African exploits and the celebration of my return as an “adopted son of the city.” Yet I felt somewhat humbled to be in Mrs. Williams’s presence, for she had known me before I had become the “great Henry Stanley.”

We sat in her parlor and reminisced, but as I had some pressing engagement awaiting us later that afternoon, we could not stay as long as I would have liked. As we took our leave, Mrs. Williams told my wife—“Your husband, ma’am, was one of the most polite and studious of my boarders, and neat as a pin and grateful for the littlest things. Always thought he would land on his feet one way or the other. But never in all my days did I think to see him go so far in this world; you’ve made an old woman happy, coming here, you certainly have.”