Beautiful Exiles by Meg Waite Clayton

Author:Meg Waite Clayton [Clayton, Meg Waite]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781503900837
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Published: 2018-07-31T23:00:00+00:00

The Finca Vigía, San Francisco de Paula, Cuba

JULY 1939

Matie arrived at ten thirty the next morning, Ernest’s birthday, for a two-week visit. When he finished writing for the day, he drove my mother all around the island, showing it off to her and showing her off to his friends. We had a birthday dinner in Havana, with most of the talking done by Ernest and Matie. He loved my mother even then, loved her more than me, I sometimes thought—and with good reason, as she was far more lovable. But much of what they talked about was me: what I’d been like as a girl, and how I took that with me everywhere.

“That’s Matie’s fault,” I said. “She’s the one who dragged me to suffragette marches in my formative years.”

“Seven thousand women,” Matie said proudly, wading into the long-form version of the suffrage protest at the Democratic Convention in St. Louis, in June of 1916. Woodrow Wilson was standing for reelection, and he was progressive except, as so often is the case, when it came to women’s rights. Matie, the president of the St. Louis Equal Suffrage League, organized a protest, placing and paying for ads calling for participation. “Well, we knew how to organize by then,” she said. “We’d managed two years earlier to get fourteen thousand names on a petition to put suffrage on the Missouri ballot. But the South Side brewery wards were afraid women would vote for prohibition, so they voted against suffrage and for the drink. We lost three to one. But three to one, that’s halfway there.”

“Matie,” I said, “I’m sure Ernest—”

“Hush, Daughter,” Ernest said. “You mother is telling a story.”

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” I said.

“A year later,” Matie continued, “St. Louis got the 1916 Democratic Convention, with the president in attendance—the gift we needed. We lined all of Locust Street from the Democratic Party headquarters in the Hotel Jefferson to the convention in the old Coliseum, the route every delegate had to walk to get from his bed to cast his vote. Seven thousand women from all over the country stood silently in proper white dresses, wearing yellow ‘votes for women’ sashes and holding yellow parasols in a ‘Golden Lane for Suffrage’—a walkless, talkless protest to make the point that we had no voice.”

“And you were holding a parasol, Daughter?” Ernest asked me.

Matie answered, “At the Art Museum at Nineteenth and Locust, we made a tableau, one woman representing each of the forty-eight states and the territories, with each woman dressed in white, gray, or black to represent whether the state had granted women the vote, or partial suffrage, or, like Missouri, obstinately refused to budge.”

I said, “The ones in black had nifty chains on their hands, to make the point so subtly.”

Matie said, “We had a Miss Liberty wearing a crown and holding a torch high for the whole time the delegates to the convention walked past us. And down in the front, two little eight-year-old girls . . .” Matie smiled at me then, as she always did when she told this story.

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