Читать книгу New Harmony, Indiana - Jane Blaffer Owen - Страница 17

I grew up in a small, exclusive neighborhood of impressive homes with magnolia-, jasmine-, and rose-filled gardens. The several families who had built these fine homes and gardens owned stock in the same companies, belonged to the same clubs, sent their children to the same schools, and attended the same church (institutions that were segregated in those days). The presumption that long and enduring friendships would blossom among the beneficiaries of this elite segment of society was in my case never justified.

In the decades between two world wars, children—especially young women—seldom disappointed parental expectations, however often they might have wished to bolt imposed boundaries. My long-suppressed rebellious spirit came close to volcanic eruption in Houston during 1936, my first year after college. Well-intentioned and loyal friends of my parents gave endless lunches, dinners, and dances, for I was considered a proper debutante in my Parisian haute couture wardrobe. Not so. I had done nothing to merit the attention of kind hosts. I saw myself as a wild, alien creature who had been forcefully herded down from her native habitat into a glittering show ring and ordered to go through prescribed paces. I searched in vain for some loose planks in my imaginary enclosure but found none.

Nor was there an acceptable exit from societal expectations after my engagement to Kenneth Dale Owen, the estimable man who would be my husband for sixty-one years. My future role as an active member of Houston society and a promoter of good causes cast its long shadow before me. My family background and education together with Kenneth’s own impeccable credentials would place me in a position of leadership in the energy and oil capital of the world. Would I take a bold leap over my enclosure, embarrass the people I loved, break my legs, and smash my foolish face in the doing? Happily, and I believe by the grace of God, I didn’t have to kick over the traces.

A way out of confining expectations presented itself shortly after my marriage in July 1941 and opened the way for a second marriage. From my perspective today, I firmly believe that every first marriage can be preserved if a cerebral and spiritual marriage follows. The rumblings of discontent in our hearts can lead either to strained relationships and divorces or to life-enhancing breakthroughs. It is unwise to expect happiness solely from another person. Other women have saved their marriages by taking a law degree, answering a call to the ministry, or cultivating an undeveloped talent. Had anyone predicted that a sleepy, dusty little Indiana town would be my threshold to a higher consciousness, I would not have believed it. But something did happen in that unlikely place to redirect my life.

That something began with a stopover in New Harmony one hot August day in 1941, three weeks after our wedding at Ste. Anne, my family’s summer place in Ontario. As we were driving from Canada to Texas, Kenneth wanted me to see the town of his birth before pushing on to Houston. I had, of course, consented but not with enthusiasm. I had heard about my husband’s illustrious ancestors and had read Frank Podmore’s life of Robert Owen with my father before I met Kenneth. Daddy admired Owen for his factory and child labor reforms and initiated similar social benefits and an employee stock ownership plan for the Humble Oil Company that he helped found. For me, the legacy of Robert Owen and his fellow passengers on “The Boatload of Knowledge” existed chiefly in history books and biographies.

Blaffer sisters “Titi” (Cecil), Jane, and Joyce.

Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Dale Owen.

Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

Our car pulled up before an unusual house known as the David Dale Owen Laboratory, which I soon learned had been built in 1859 (4 on town map on back endpaper). David Dale Owen was a geologist.¹ David’s elder brother Robert Dale, who was an early trustee of the Smithsonian, had chosen James Renwick Jr. as the architect for that institution, America’s first castle of science and first national museum.

David Dale had worked and taught in three laboratories before building this one: the Harmonist Community House No. 3 and the Harmonist shoe factory (both long gone from town), followed by seventeen years in the Harmonist stone Granary behind the Laboratory (5, 6, and 7 on town map, respectively). Successive generations of non-geologist Owens had converted David’s Laboratory into a family residence, and my husband called it home. I felt more like bowing my head than looking up because I was, in essence, bringing a wreath to the graves of noble men and women. But an alive and unforgettable presence was standing in the doorway to greet us: Kenneth’s elderly aunt Aline Owen Neal.

Auntie’s freshly laundered white cotton dress, full and floor-length, did not conceal or diminish her somewhat triangular shape. A black, curving ear trumpet emerged like a ram’s horn from the left side of her well-coiffed hair but was quickly lowered so both arms could embrace her nephew. Auntie didn’t grasp what we were saying, but no matter: sweetly smiling, she nodded assent to Kenneth’s every word. She had helped raise him. Ever since his first oil well, Kenneth had maintained her as the châtelaine of the Laboratory, a living monument to the Owen family.

I was no sooner inside than, like a stray cat, I wanted out. The twenty-foot-tall living room, designed to be a lecture hall with a gallery on three sides, was not hospitable. Several tables were stacked high with outdated newspapers and greeting cards. Auntie threw nothing away, perhaps because her nature was too gentle, her mind too comfortable in the past. As we hastened through the clutter to the circular dining room with its arched and diamond-hearted windows, I thought of the fairy tale that had captured my childhood imagination, where everyone, even the flies on the windowsills, had slept for a hundred years. In the story, a beautiful princess lay under an enchantment in a round tower. In the Laboratory, something as beautiful as a princess seemed to lie asleep, hidden from view, yet nonetheless palpably present. Could we summon enough love from our own hearts to awaken her and enough patience to recover her buried treasures?

The David Dale Owen Laboratory as it appeared on May 24, 1940, in the Historic American Buildings Survey.

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS IND, 65-NEHAR, 1—2, Photograph by Lester Jones.

My husband brought me out of my reveries and unanswered questions. “It’s awfully hot in here, Jane. Let’s step outside,” he said, and held open the west door for me to enter an Old World courtyard, a square green space enclosed by a wall overhung with trumpet vines. A pair of gates had long ago opened for Owen carriages.

Beyond the north fence rose the sandstone and brick wall of the Granary, a massive structure that the German Harmonists had begun in 1814 and completed in 1822. Intended as a storehouse for food and grain, it could also serve as a fortress for protection. The Harmonists were avowed pacifists, so never a shot was fired from the tall, narrow slits of the ground floor. These openings were ventilators, not loopholes or meurtriers, the name of which was drawn from the French word for “murder.”

Turning back toward the Laboratory, I looked up in wonder at the conical witch’s-hat roof of the dining room and its weather vane. The directional markers—which would have pointed north, south, east, and west—were missing, but my eye lingered on a long, corkscrew-shaped column that supported a strange wooden fish. Time had battered its stomach and chewed its contours. Sensing my curiosity, Kenneth explained that the Paleozoic fossil fish had been great-uncle David’s tribute to the naturalist Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the passengers on “The Boatload of Knowledge.” Lesueur had not only studied the anatomy of fish but, an accomplished artist, also drawn and painted them. I later learned that the supporting rod itself is an enlargement of both a blastoid, Pentremites, as the base and a bryozoan, Archimedes, a corkscrew-shaped fossil dear to the hearts of geologists and an apt colophon for a laboratory dedicated to science.

Kenneth’s blue eyes saddened as he ended his explanations. “We’ll have to find a good craftsman to replace this tired old fossil. Enough of this gloomy, run-down place,” he said. “I’ll take you across this mess of lawn to the white-pillared house on the far corner of the property that once belonged to us. The Lab is the only house in town still in my family.”

I remembered the same diffident look on Kenneth’s handsome face a few years earlier beside an entrance door of my own parents’ home. He had no idea I was watching through a window, fascinated by his gesture. Having rung the doorbell, he stepped back and with his right hand rubbed the signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. The ring was engraved with the double eagle that Hadrian’s Roman army had brought to New Lanark in the second century AD. Robert Owen had adopted this image for his own crest and, being egalitarian, placed identical eagles on the buttons of the coats of his employees. The intensity of Kenneth’s gesture seemed an unmistakable appeal to his ancestors for help in his pursuit of a difficult, pampered girl.

An appeal to ancestors for courage should come naturally from us, not only from a man in love. Many years later, words from Julie Dash’s film Daughters of the Dust powerfully underscored my belief and spelled out the challenge given and taken by Kenneth. In a graveyard scene, a Gullah African American woman named Nana Peazant addresses her great-grandson Eli: “Those in this grave, like those who’re across the sea, they’re with us. They’re all the same. The ancestors and the womb are one. Call on your ancestors, Eli. Let them guide you. You need their strength. Eli, I need you to make the family strong again, like we used to be.”²

Through the window at my parents’ house, I saw a sensitive man appealing for guidance from earlier Owens and a never-to-be-underestimated mother. At the time, I could not yet appreciate the burden an alcoholic father places on a son’s shoulders. Witnessing his appeal achieved what the daily arrival of a dozen pink roses and at Christmas a pair of antique Italian armchairs had failed to accomplish. At last, after two years of indifference to Kenneth’s courtship, my self-centered ego moved over to make room for love and understanding. My parents announced our engagement shortly after my fortuitous awakening.

On that hot August day in New Harmony, the house that Kenneth and I were approaching stood on the sandstone foundation of Father George Rapp’s 1822 mansion, which was originally a dignified three-story house (8 on town map). (Thomas Say’s watercolor of the house is at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia.) William Maclure, father of American geology and Robert Owen’s financial partner, had owned Rapp’s mansion. Maclure’s brother Alexander inherited it. After a disastrous fire demolished all but the cellar and the apricot-colored foundation stones, Alexander planned the reconstruction.

Kenneth’s briefing resumed. “The 1844 fire destroyed the Rapp house and much of the Maclure library, which was a great loss. Alexander built this really elegant house, thanks to a first-rate carpenter and contractor from England named John Beale.³ My great-grandfather Richard bought it from the Maclure estate in the 1850s and lived there. His son, Horace, sold it in 1901 to a prosperous grain merchant Captain John Corbin. That was lucky for the house and our family, as my grandfather could not afford to maintain it. The Corbins are fine people and good custodians,” he concluded.

The Rapp-Maclure-Owen House circa 1935, showing exterior detail of front portico, in the Historic American Buildings Survey.

Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, HABS IND, 65-NEHAR, 12—2, Photograph by Alexander Piaget, Piaget-van Ravenswaay Photography.

I feel grateful to Alexander Maclure, who chose not to rebuild in the Harmonists’ style, with short German windows and low walls; instead, fourteen-foot-high walls frame ten-foot-high windows. He also added the distinctly southern long white veranda to the east entrance. But even with these positive changes, the house we were observing that sweltering August day in 1941 did not reflect Alexander’s accomplishment. The shuttered windows and the once white-painted brick walls were now layered with soot from the soft coal the town used at that time.

As we returned across the lawn between the two houses, the faded negative of the Laboratory developed into a sharper, more credible image. Its black ironwork—scalloped and thick like Irish lace—embroidered the eaves of the slate roof, the front portico, and the entablature of the windows and doorways. An octagonal lantern crowned the roof of the erstwhile lecture hall. Chimney pots that individually reflected geometric shapes stood guard, alert sentinels.

“All of this for a working, teaching laboratory?” I asked myself. Then a revelation struck me: David Dale Owen, albeit a scholar-scientist, was also an artist and a romantic. Letters in the Owen archives bear witness to his love for his wife, Caroline. But even greater than conjugal love, here in his laboratory stood incontestable testimony of the driving force of his life: geology, his second marriage. He devoted the last years of his life to preparing a bridal bower for his beloved geology that others might share his passion and nurture a still-young and promising profession. David, with no thought of enriching himself or his family, had surveyed fourteen states, pointing the way to wealth for individuals and large companies that benefited from his discoveries.

Lines from a poem by Rumi accurately describe David Dale:

Love is recklessness, not reason.

Reason seeks a profit.

Love comes on strong, consuming herself,

unabashed.⁴

I began to understand his two passions, that for his profession and that for his wife, Caro, as twin vows. David introduced me to the idea of a second marriage while married to the same person—an insurance policy for the safekeeping of a marriage covenant.

I did not share my fantasies with Kenneth, for his scientific mind would have thrown the light of reason upon my emotional response to his heritage. Having had to face practical and critical issues all his life, Kenneth sensibly outlined steps for the restoration of the Laboratory.⁵

“The damn roof leaks, and every room needs replastering and fresh paint. Auntie’s invasive memorabilia need some weeding out. Not that we’ll begin right now.”

“Oh, of course not now,” I replied. “Only don’t forget your plans for a new fossil fish!”

There had not been even a suggestion of a breeze during our tour, but suddenly a wind began to spin the fish westward, toward the route we would take across the Wabash to Texas. Of all my impressions of New Harmony and its imperatives, the parting image of the bruised but indestructible fish remains vivid, a symbol of the continuing challenge ahead.

The restored fossil fish. Photograph by Darryl D. Jones, 2009.

This particular fish, high above a circular tower, is an apt emblem for New Harmony’s two utopian experiments. The pious Harmonists would have valued it for its importance to the early Christian church, for the five initial letters of each word in the Greek phrase “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior” form the acronym ICHTHUS, meaning “fish.” The Owenites would have seen in the fish identified by Charles-Alexandre Lesueur an appropriate symbol of their belief in the redemption of the world through scientific discovery and education. Was the wind that spun the fish telling us that, back to back, science and religion could together accomplish the unrealized hopes of Harmonists and Owenites?

The Laboratory in its present condition was unsuitable for overnight lodging, so we stayed the night at the McCurdy Hotel in Evansville, returning the next day for our farewells to Auntie. We didn’t linger this time because Kenneth had planned our journey to Texas to include a visit to his cousin Natalie Wilson of Wilson, Arkansas. He wished for me to meet a few Owen descendants who were wealthy, urbane, and industrious. But rich or poor, well- or ill-educated, atheist or devout, most of them were kind and generous beyond their means: givers, not takers. Of the hundreds of Owen descendants I have met, some were very creative, none were mentally deficient, and only two, alas, were mean. Not a bad average.

My first visit to New Harmony ended with humor and a new acquaintance I made at the tollgate of the bridge that would launch us across the Wabash on our long drive to Houston (see area map). Horace, the bridge’s defender, and Kenneth had received their early schooling in New Harmony and were delighted to see one another.

“By the way, Horace,” Kenneth asked, “does anyone swim in the river these days, as we used to?”

Horace kept us waiting for a moment of reflection, while my husband looked anxiously in my direction.

“No, not no more, Kenny. Since the gravel diggers caused suction holes, it just ain’t safe for swimming. But come to think of it, there was a lady in there yesterday afternoon. Sure was a lady because she undressed behind that bluff over there, and I couldn’t see a thing.”

Kenneth gave me a sly wink, for the day before I had begged him for a baptismal dunking in that turgid, silt-heavy stream; he had grudgingly consented and followed me into its waters.

The Wabash was no ordinary baptismal font but a river fraught with history. Willows still line both banks, vigorous descendants of those the Indians used for their baskets. La Salle might have grasped the topmost branches of cottonwoods and sycamores when the river’s current swept his canoe too swiftly four centuries ago.⁶ A devout Roman Catholic, La Salle would have rejoiced that French apostles of religious education followed in the wake of his canoe a century and a half later. Mother Theodore Guerin traveled past New Harmony and up the Wabash to Terre Haute in 1840 to found the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods. Two years later, six brothers of the Holy Cross took the same water route on the final stage of their journey to South Bend, where they laid the foundation for the University of Notre Dame. According to Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years, a young Abe ferried passengers from Illinois to New Harmony. And George Rogers Clark waded up to his shoulders along its swollen banks, keeping his musket dry and his ragged army poised to raise the siege of Vincennes. Lesueur swam in its summer waters and felt for Unios (freshwater mussels) and other shells with his feet. Men and women of courage and imagination had traveled that waterway long before the advent of Harmonists and Owenites and long before my own total immersion. Heroic men and women had become my touchstone, as Kenneth’s signet ring had been his at a crossroads of his life.

Fields of tall corn on either side of the highway fueled Kenneth’s plans. “Just look at that healthy corn, Jane. We’re going to grow our corn on the Indiana side of the river. Great-grandfather Richard was also a farmer and as precise about farming as he had been about geology.”

Kenneth’s blue eyes softened. “We once owned thousands of acres south of town. The highest part of it was called Indian Mound because prehistoric Indians had mounded their spent mussel shells. I intend to buy most of that land back and call on Purdue’s agricultural expertise to revitalize the soil. We’ll need to grow our own hay.”

“Do you mean to raise cattle?”

“Yes, of course there’ll be cattle. White-faced Herefords and golden Guernseys.”

I was warming to his dream.

“I’ll be a farmer’s wife and yell out the window when you come home, ‘Leave your muddy boots on the front porch!’ ”

The closer we came to Texas, the more our thoughts turned back to New Harmony. “Richard and his brother had a horse farm, as almost every landowner did in those days.” Kenneth’s voice quickened and his eyes sparkled. “Some of their horses competed in harness races around the county. I’ll show you the old fairground when we return (see area map on front endpaper). I haunted it as a boy with a savvy old horse trader called Truman.”

I sensed that Kenneth was adding Standardbred colts and fillies to his wish list and shuddered at the thought of a racing stable in our family and an absentee husband. Where would he be when the children we hoped to have needed us both? Off to the races! What would happen to the covenant we had formed with the derelict fish above the Laboratory’s tower? Perhaps his oil and gas interests in his Houston office and a young family would divert him from harness horses. Perhaps not.

Whatever the future might hold for us, there was more joy than fear in my heart as we headed southwest to the Gulf Coast. On the outskirts of Houston, however, we became bewildered by its size. The contours of this gung-ho metropolis had expanded during our three-month absence. Houstonians of vision and generosity were proving equal to their city’s physical growth and worthy of their inheritance from “wildcatter” ancestors, bold men before whom I still stand in awe. They birthed a giant industry that in the short course of forty years brought Houston into the pantheon of urban gods. Revenues from that industry would create a world-renowned medical center, universities, museums, theaters, parks, operas, a ballet, and a symphony. Inheritors of oil wealth also built places of worship and eventually the Jung Center to answer the spiritual and psychological needs of Houstonians.⁷

How could anyone of sound mind leave a city teeming with such energy and promise? How could I, a descendant of families who had found their fortunes on the expanding Texas star, a star called “Spindletop,” hanker after another star? My pioneer maternal grandfather, William T. Campbell, and my father, Robert Lee Blaffer, were in the forefront of my mind as Kenneth and I drew closer to Houston’s sleek buildings of competitive heights.

William Thomas Campbell.

Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

Sarah Jane Turnbull.

Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

Grandfather Campbell emigrated from his native England as a young man, worked as a reporter for the Cincinnati Enquirer, and married Sarah Turnbull of Middleport, Ohio. But he remained a true son of empire and envisioned the oil fields around Beaumont, Texas, as a new country to explore, colonize, and conquer. He left his news desk, sold his printing press, brought his young family to Waxahachie and set off for Spindletop in 1901.

My father belonged to a third generation of public-spirited New Orleanians. He cared for his city and its traditions, but the Queen City of the South had lost her crown in the Civil War and, apart from the entertainment of Mardi Gras, had not regained her kingdom or replaced cotton and sugar cane as her source of wealth and revitalization. When news of the bountiful gusher in Beaumont reached Lee Blaffer in the teller’s cage of his uncle’s Hibernia Bank, he lost no time in exchanging a safe monotony for the unpredictable life of a wildcatter in East Texas. He brought more than an adventurous spirit with him to Beaumont; he brought a small library of history books. During the dreary months of waiting for a well to “blow in,” Daddy spent his evenings reading Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Had he been a senator in pre-Augustan Rome, he would have distrusted the imperial ambitions of any Roman citizen and opposed his election. Despite Daddy’s distaste for empires, he and William Campbell became friends. My father fell in love with the Englishman’s beautiful daughter. I became the second child of the bipartisan and felicitous marriage of Lee Blaffer to Sarah Campbell.

Robert Lee Blaffer, his father, John August(e) Blaffer, and my elder brother, John, as a baby, 1913.

Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

Sarah Campbell Blaffer with John, 1914.

Blaffer-Owen family photograph.

Kenneth’s voice interrupted my reverie: “Why are you so quiet? Aren’t you excited about being back in Houston as a bride of almost a month?”

I reached for the fingers of the strong hand on the steering wheel.

“Of course I’m glad we’ll soon be living in our own home. But I can’t help imagining the day in 1909 when my newly married parents arrived here, after their two-month honeymoon in the capitals of Europe. They intuited Houston’s great future. Surely their spines tingled with anticipation before an evolving city where they would invest their energies to improve it economically and culturally. I am also grateful to their contemporaries, men and women who also believed in the future Houston. Nothing was impossible or unbearable for them.”

Kenneth eyed me quizzically. “I’m not hearing your spine tingle.”

“Not above this traffic noise while stopped at the one-hundredth red light that seems to have been added since we left three months ago. But you’d hear it on the Indiana farms you plan to buy. Remember, there’s only one overhead traffic light in New Harmony, and its skyline is formed by the trunks of the tallest and most leafy-headed maples I’ve ever seen. Let’s hope that the gnarled roots of the sturdy trees can keep the poor, malnourished houses from falling until you can take me back!”

Kenneth squeezed my hand. “Thank you for your loyalty to a town most people consider a lost cause, especially your mother. I’d like to spend more time there, too, but I have to make a living in Houston; you don’t. You’ll find plenty to do here and perhaps think more kindly about cities, which are as necessary as farms and country towns.” His words echoed those my father had once spoken to me: “You make money in the city so you can spend it in the country.”

Kenneth drove beyond downtown, toward my parents’ home in Shadyside, where we would stay until our rented house was ready. I couldn’t help but notice the ostentatious automobiles—Cadillacs, Lincolns, even a Rolls-Royce—encircling the Museum of Fine Arts as we passed. With triumph, I pointed. “Look! Houston is teeming with generous benefactors; I won’t be missed here. But in New Harmony . . .” My voice became inaudible as my thoughts turned inward.

Cities are good for commerce, the presentation of fine art, education, advancement, and the intermingling of peoples and races. Yes, they can even be explored, but not as we explore oceans. Persistent daydreams of New Harmony intruded upon my civic efforts. I imagined myself as if on the bank of a great but as yet unexplored river, exhilarated as surely as Magellan had been when he first beheld the unlimited body of water that he named Pacific.

An ocean prompts us to dive below the surface, not to look above unless to navigate by the stars in the night sky. It invites us to sail beyond the horizon of our perceptions. The very uncertainty of what I would find scanning the horizon or discover beneath the surface, treasure or terror, was part of the spell New Harmony had cast over me. Cockeyed or sacrosanct as my daydreams might appear to my family and friends, I felt with all my heart that New Harmony would be my gateway to ocean depth.