Flint and Feather Read online

  Flint & Feather

  Charlotte Gray

  THE LIFE AND TIMES OF E. PAULINE JOHNSON, TEKAHIONWAKE

  FOR GEORGE

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  1 THE ROMANCE OF CHIEFSWOOD

  2 THE EDUCATION OF EMILY HOWELLS JOHNSON 1824–1845

  3 THE LEGACY OF SIR WILLIAM JOHNSON 1738–1845

  4 FOR RICHER, FOR POORER, FOR BETTER, FOR WORSE 1845–1861

  5 THE MODEL FAMILY 1861–1876

  6 SPREADING HER WINGS 1876–1885

  7 WAVE-ROCKED AND PASSION-TOSSED 1884–1888

  8 THE CANOEING CRAZE 1888–1892

  9 THE HEIGHTS OF LITERATURE 1891–1892

  10 BEADS, QUILLS, SASHES, SHOES AND BROOCHES 1892–1894

  11 SMOG AND SNOBBERY IN THE IMPERIAL CAPITAL 1894

  12 ACROSS CANADA BY TRAIN 1894

  13 WHERE DO YOU GO FROM HERE? The White Wampum 1895–1896

  14 “A HALF-BREED BUT SUCH A NICE ONE”: Charles Drayton 1897–1899

  15 A NETWORK OF TRAGEDY 1899–1901

  16 ON TOUR WITH WALTER 1901–1905

  17 A PAGAN IN ST. PAUL’S 1906

  18 THE CHAUTAUQUA GRIND 1907–1908

  19 A GREAT CHIEF DIES: Vancouver 1908–1910

  20 SAILING INTO THE CLOUD LAND 1910–1913

  AFTERWORD

  SOURCES

  PICTURE CREDITS

  INDEX

  P.S.

  About the author

  Author Biography

  About the book

  A Conversation with Charlotte Gray

  Read on

  Further Reading, Recommended by Charlotte Gray

  Excerpt from Reluctant Genius: The Passionate Life and Inventive Mind of Alexander Graham Bell

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Praise for Flint & Feather

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  THE ROMANCE OF CHIEFSWOOD

  WHEN the young Pauline Johnson stood in the hallway of Chiefswood, the family home on the Grand River, on a summer’s afternoon, she had the happy certainty that she was in the centre of her own small universe. All around her flowed the sounds of the busy Johnson household. From the study on her left seeped the growl of discussion as her father, George Johnson, held court with various neighbours. From the drawing room on her right came the plink of awkward chords as her older brother Beverly picked out the latest dance tune on the Heintzman piano. Breathy chatter flowed from the parlour, where her sister Eva helped the maid set out the silver tea service. Allen, the brother closest in age to Pauline, was probably in the kitchen garden, gorging himself on the last raspberries of the season. If Pauline glanced up the elegant staircase, she could see her mother, Emily Johnson, carefully adjusting her tea gown before she descended to the ground floor.

  Even on the hottest July day, the hallway’s dark walnut panelling and high ceilings kept the house cool. Pauline loved to lean against the hand-turned railing, close her eyes, run her finger along a slippery brass stair rod and breathe in the aromas of fresh-cut flowers, newly baked bread and furniture polish. She adored Chiefswood, the creamy stucco villa her father had built in 1855, six years before she was born. She spent her days wandering its grounds amidst the majestic old walnut, oak and elm trees, watching squirrels scampering among the branches and crows wheeling overhead. In early spring, violets

  The graceful symmetry of Chiefswood, built by Pauline’s father in the 1850s, reflected the ideal of harmony for which the family strove.

  bloomed in the shadows. In late summer, pungent walnuts crunched underfoot. In the evening Pauline often ran down to the riverbank, her little dog, Chips, scampering alongside, to watch the mauves and golds of the sunset reflected in the water. And at night she would lie on the grass, gazing up at the brilliant stars twinkling in the inky vastness above her. Wisps of the romantic poetry that her mother read to her each afternoon drifted through her mind. She silently repeated to herself some of her favourite lines, almost intoxicated by the emotions of longing and loss that drenched the languorous verses about blossoms, clouds and seasons.

  Maybe Pauline’s idyllic world occupied only a trackless patch of pink on the margins of the far-flung British Empire. Maybe Queen Victoria, whose stern likeness hung in Chiefswood’s dining room, would never visit this isolated outpost of her mighty realm, let alone encounter her North American subjects on their own land. Even the name of the region in which Pauline lived, a vast and largely unexplored forest stretching from the Great Lakes northward, was uncertain and fluid. Its residents usually called it “Upper Canada,” the name it had been given by the British in 1791, but in 1861, when Pauline was born, it was officially “Canada West” (part of “the Province of Canada”), and six years later at Confederation it would be retitled “Ontario.” But Pauline’s surroundings were all that she knew and, she assumed with childish confidence, all that she needed to know. Most important, she understood even as a child that Chiefswood itself reflected her parents’ larger universe, which blended two distinct traditions: the Mohawk heritage of Pauline’s father and her mother’s British roots.

  Like many houses of the period, when travel along waterways was more comfortable than along rough roads, Chiefswood had two front doors. As Pauline sat on the bottom stair, she could hear, beyond the large oak door ahead of her, the sound of horse-drawn carriages travelling along the dusty rutted track that led to Brantford, twelve miles (nineteen kilometres) away. Pauline occasionally accompanied her mother along that track when Emily Johnson visited the bustling manufacturing town to buy fabric and trimming for her own and her daughters’ gowns. If Pauline peered around the newel post to the other heavy front door, which was usually left ajar, she could look through the wooded parkland towards the sinuous, slow-moving Grand River. Her father loved to walk out of this door, stroll down to the riverbank and chat with friends waiting for ferryman Jessie Green to winch the old wooden boat along its chains from the opposite bank. George Johnson’s youngest child often joined him there, slipping her small hand into his and admiring the dugout canoes of her Iroquois relatives as they skimmed across the water. The creak of the ferry’s rusty old cogwheel and the splash of the heavy chains in the water haunted Pauline’s dreams all her life.

  Whether visitors arrived by road or by water, Chiefswood’s two front doors welcomed them. The house’s symmetry, with its matching French windows and elegant hipped roof, reflected the ideal of harmony that Pauline’s parents were determined to embody. Throughout her life, Pauline extolled her parents’ rapport: “They loved nature—the trees, and the river, and the birds. They loved the Anglican Church, they loved the British flag, they loved Queen Victoria. They loved music, pictures and dainty china…They loved books and animals, but most of all, these two loved the Indian people, loved their legends, their habits, their customs.” They also loved to demonstrate, to an impressive procession of visitors, that European settlers and “the red race,” in the parlance of that era, could live side by side in peace. Chiefswood was as graceful a mansion as could be found in any newly settled British community in Upper Canada, but it was firmly situated within the reserve of the Six Nations Indians. Pauline’s parents were determined that their sons and daughters would reflect credit on their mixed heritage. The children, Pauline later wrote, “were reared on the strictest lines of both Indian and English principles. They were taught the legends, the traditions, the culture and the etiquette of both races to which they belonged.”

  Pauline Johnson, aged 3: all her life, Chiefswood haunted her dreams.

  Yet it was a curious education. George Johnson passed on to his children the legends and history o
f his Mohawk people, but he never taught them to speak the language fluently, so that they never felt they belonged on the Six Nations Reserve. His sons never went through the Mohawk initiation rites that their father had undergone, and his daughters never wore Indian costume. For her part, Emily Johnson had a horror that her children might be considered “plebeian.” Through sharp reprimands and disapproving frowns, she instilled in them a need to please her and an acute English sensitivity to what others might think of them. So her sons and daughters grew up prim and inhibited, unable to relax completely with anybody outside the cocoon of their own family. Only Pauline would learn to move with ease in European-born society.

  Though the Johnsons were a close-knit family, love and a shared sense of purpose could not obliterate the tension under the tranquil surface. Emily and George Johnson wanted to protect their children from the kinds of stress that each of them had suffered—the loneliness felt by a rejected child, the confusion of a young man caught between two value systems, prejudice against an interracial marriage. Perhaps the best illustration of the pressures that made Chiefswood an emotional fortress comes from an unpublished memoir by Evelyn (Eva) Johnson, Pauline’s older sister. One day, wrote Evelyn, her brother Beverly brought home a puppy and insisted he was a purebred fox terrier. Pauline, the scrappy younger sister, insisted he was not purebred and took the puppy to Mr. Glasgow, the dog fancier, to prove her point. She returned at dinnertime and triumphantly reported that Mr. Glasgow agreed with her. Beverly snapped that Mr. Glasgow knew nothing, that the dog was a purebred fox terrier.

  “None of the rest of us said anything,” Evelyn later wrote, “and the argument waxed hot. Finally Allen, who had not spoken before, said, ‘Well, he belongs to a mongrel family, anyhow,’ and calmly went on eating his dinner.”

  Dead silence enveloped the table after Allen’s blunt words; the children stared nervously at each other. Evelyn began to laugh hysterically. Her mother went white and said, “Eva, stop that screaming.” She turned to her son, and said, “Oh, Allen, how can you talk like that?”

  Evelyn did not record how Pauline reacted to this exchange. But for the rest of her life Pauline Johnson struggled with the legacy of Chiefswood. She yearned for the security her childhood home had provided—a security that none of the Johnson children would know in their adult lives. She embraced the ideal of harmony Chiefswood embodied—an ideal that would prove both oppressive and elusive. And in poetry, prose and performance, Pauline tried to straddle the gulf between two worlds, as her parents had done. But as her country evolved from a pioneer society to a self-assured nation, those two worlds drifted further and further apart.

  2

  THE EDUCATION OF EMILY HOWELLS JOHNSON 1824–1845

  IT was largely thanks to Pauline Johnson’s mother, Emily Susanna Howells, that Chiefswood was an emotional fortress as well as a happy family home. Emily was a devoted mother, but she was also an intense and brittle woman. The roots of her neuroses are not difficult to find: she had the kind of childhood that appalls a modern reader but that was not uncommon two centuries ago.

  Emily was born into a devout, law-abiding and ostensibly well-established British family in 1824. Her father, Henry Charles Howells, was a Welshman who started life as a tinsmith. By the time Emily was born, however, he had risen in the world: he ran a small school for the children of the wealthy in Bristol, one of the largest ports in England. Situated on the west coast at the head of the deep cleft between England and Wales known as the Bristol Channel, Bristol was prosperous and smart. It was only nine miles from Bath, the spa fashionable amongst those exhausted by the dissipation of Regency London or by the boredom of county life. There was plenty of traffic between the two cities, although their populations were very different. Bath was a city of fops and flirts living off family fortunes. Bristol was a city of merchant-adventurers earning their money from trade.

  From the Roman conquest of Britain onwards, Bristol had been a major entry point into England. By the start of the nineteenth century, the port was groaning with nautical activity. Schooners, brigantines and sloops from all over the world sailed up the Bristol Channel into the mouth of the River Severn, then nosed their way between the limestone cliffs of the Avon Gorge towards Bristol’s crowded wharves. Once the vessels were moored, sailors unloaded the wealth of the British Empire—Canadian lumber and furs, Newfoundland salt cod, animal pelts from the Arctic, precious stones and silk from India, South African gold. Hoarse-voiced merchants completed their complicated transactions by the four bronze pillars of Bristol’s imposing Exchange Building. At the wharves, the ship’s captains oversaw the loading of the human cargo that filled their holds on the outward journeys: the massive outflow of impoverished labourers from all over the British Isles, hoping to make a new life in the colonies.

  Teaching the classics to the young sons of the merchant class had propelled Henry Howells, Emily’s father, into the comfortable ranks of the Bristol bourgeoisie. Bristol was a good city for a man of education. The city hummed with literary activity: in the 1790s the Bristol bookseller Joseph Cottle had started publishing the works of a young, brilliant and wild group of local poets, including Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Lovell. Henry Howells must have been well acquainted with the works of these men, and of their friend William Wordsworth; he probably had opportunities to meet them. He would also have been familiar with the novels of the period, particularly Jane Austen’s exquisite depictions of Bath society. The popularity of literature in Regency England fired Bristol’s progressive-minded merchants to give their children more education than they themselves had received. Schools for both boys and girls were established. One of Bristol’s better-known educators was Hannah More, a pioneer of female education who ran her own ladies’ academy. Henry Howells flourished, first as the principal of the Kingsdown Preparatory Boarding School (which advertised itself as a “classical and commercial academy” for boys) and then as head of the West Bank Academy in the wealthy suburb of Cotham.

  For all his learning, however, Henry Howells appears to have been narrow-minded and insensitive. He had been raised a Quaker but had been forced out of the Society of Friends when he married Mary Best, an Anglican, in 1805. Nevertheless, the austerity and self-discipline of his Quaker upbringing remained with him—combined with a most un-Quaker-like temper and an autocratic disposition. It made him a tyrant of a father. During her lifetime, Mary Best may have managed to soften her husband’s harshness. She was undoubtedly a loving mother to the thirteen children she bore him (of whom at least seven survived). But Mary died when her youngest surviving child, Emily, was only four. Emily’s earliest recollection, she later told her own children, was of her own terror at the cacophony of shrieks and wails made by hired mourners at her mother’s funeral. Memories of that clamorous grief, and of her father’s ear-splitting rages, instilled in Emily a horror of emotional outbursts.

  In 1830, when Emily was only five, Henry married again. His second wife, Harriet Joyner, was soon too busy having children herself to pay much attention to her husband’s first family. Emily was barely six when her father and stepmother packed her off, along with her sisters Maria and Eliza, to boarding school in Southampton, a day’s journey away.

  Worse was to come. One day in 1832, little Emily and her sisters were summoned to their school principal’s office and told to pack their bags. The girls were to be taken directly from their school to the Bristol docks, to board a ship in which they would sail to New York. Their father had decided to uproot his family and cross the Atlantic. The ostensible rationale for this abrupt move was Henry Howells’s determination, as a God-fearing Christian, to join the fight to abolish slavery. But there were, undoubtedly, other reasons for the Howellses’ emigration. Perhaps Henry Howells’s penchant for ill-treating children caused a drop in enrolment in his academy for young gentlemen. Perhaps Pauline Johnson’s grandfather was influenced by the rest of his large family. In the late eighteenth century, Henry’s father had made
two visits to America to sell woollen cloth, and had been introduced to President George Washington; as a result, he became a big booster of the New World. Two of Henry’s brothers had already emigrated, along with Henry’s eldest daughter, Mary, and her husband, the Reverend Robert Vashon Rogers, an Anglican clergyman. Or perhaps Henry was simply caught up in the tremendous enthusiasm that swept Britain in the 1830s, to escape a crippling agricultural depression and a rising tide of social unrest. Between 1831 and 1841, 655,747 people sailed away from British shores, nearly three times the number that had emigrated in the previous decade. The year that the Howellses crossed the Atlantic was also the year that Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill, two sisters who would achieve fame as writers in Canada, made the same journey. Whatever the reason for Henry Howells’s departure, his leave-taking was hurried. The only memory that Emily retained of the city of her birth was the poignant peal of bells summoning parishioners to evensong in Bristol’s parish churches as the ship weighed anchor and set off towards the setting sun.

  The voyage was dreadfully long; their vessel was becalmed for days, and drinking water ran low. The Howellses were protected from the worst deprivations of the crossing because they were cabin passengers, which meant they dined with the captain and shared his supply of beer and Madeira wine. But they could hear from below decks the groans of the dehydrated, seasick and crowded steerage passengers. Relief swept through the ship when, after thirteen long weeks at sea, the forests, potato fields and water mills of Long Island came into view. Mr. and Mrs. Henry Howells, their large brood and their maidservant Hannah Kell were the first passengers to step ashore onto the passenger ship docks at the southern tip of Manhattan. So many boxes, trunks, packing cases and valises, all labelled “Howells,” were unloaded from the ship’s hold that the porters assumed these new arrivals from the Old Country were planning to open a furniture store. The contents of the crates included a library of books and two pianos. Henry was going to make a fresh start in life, but he was sufficiently rich that he didn’t have to start from scratch. After a few nights in New York City, he planned to travel west to Ohio, a centre of the anti-slavery movement. There he intended to rent a large mansion, with a dining room in which he would put the best piano for his own use and a nursery in which his flock of children could practise their scales on the second piano.