A souvenir from my 1865 childhood
What did they say about those who forget history did they say it was good
I feel like a lot of people know these days that John Wilkes Booth’s brother was a famous stage actor whose career was sort of sent promptly down the shitter by the whole assassination thing. But the whole story — one that involves the whole family — gets so much more interesting than that.
First of all, there are four actors in this family: their dad, the most famous Shakespearian actor in the country and next-level alcoholic, and three of the six children who lived to adulthood: June, John, and Edwin.
Booth paints an incredibly detailed picture of mid-19th century America, from harsh winters on the Booths’ farm in rural Maryland (alongside an enslaved couple, Joe and Ann Hall, who spend their lives trying to buy freedom for themselves and their children) to childhoods spent in Baltimore witnessing the riots that preceded the Civil War and being accosted by their father’s first wife (who it turns out he had not technically remembered to divorce before popping out 11 kids with another woman). Fowler gives us a look inside the lives of three of the Booth children, none of whom is Wilkes, giving us rich portraits of their inner lives, insecurities, turmoil and worries. And in the background of these stories — Edwin, still a child, being taken on tour with his father and made responsible for dragging him home from various bars; Rosalie, the eldest daughter, aging into a spinster and unsure of where she’ll go when her mother dies; and a heartbreaking account of Joe Hall helping one of his children escape to the north, even though it means they’ll never see each other again — a disaffected John Wilkes Booth, becoming radicalized and convinced that things have never been worse for anyone as they are for white men right now. (In 1861). John Wilkes, who often told people about a palm reader who predicted a grim end for him when he was a child, who loved to play Brutus in Julius Caesar, with such an overwhelmingly romantic sense of his own significance which turned out to be quite a bad thing for basically everyone else.
The grievances that drip from John, largely ignored by his family members (who couldn’t understand why someone born and raised in Maryland had such a fetish for The South) until they had reached their terminus, felt shockingly modern. I feel like this book is equally strong for the immersive, enchanting account of this unusual family in a pivotal moment in history as it is for providing a world of context for a single violent act that is often retold without much of it. It also really drove home for me that there always have been and always will be people who decry movement toward equality and justice as an attempt to take something from them and that these people have already been given far too much quarter and we can probably just start ignoring them at this point.
It was interesting to re-encounter so many of the same places from Booth, this time through the winding travels of Edgar Allan Poe a few decades earlier. There’s Richmond, where Edwin once had to spend days searching for his father after he vanished before a performance. There’s Baltimore, where Edwin and John used to roam the streets as part of various boy-gangs. Both cities claim Poe for themselves: Richmond, because he lived there, and Baltimore, because he died there. Boston, New York and Philadelphia also try to get hands on the Poe ball.
The book jumps between the days preceding Poe’s death (when he was discovered, delirious, on the streets of Baltimore after vanishing for days, wearing someone else’s clothes) and the rest of his life, showing how he became the progenitor of, among other things, the detective novel genre.
A bunch of Poe’s story, it turns out, is that of a struggling freelancer, grasping at various editing jobs while trying to publish his own work on the side (and at one point getting fired for being drunk at work). At the time of his death he was traveling up and down the East Coast, trying to raise money to start his own literary journal. Before that it seemed like his greatest hobby other than writing and marrying his child cousin was threatening to kill himself at all inconveniences, both major and minor. Relatable!
Would it be the 1800s without a little Rustlin’? It’s time to traipse into fiction land, although less fictional than you’d think — The Bullet Swallower is based on the author’s actual great-grandfather, a real-life outlaw who became El titular Tragabalas after he was shot in the face by Texas Rangers and survived. This book is about a man who is being hunted by an actual literal curse due to his family being canonically evil; every action he takes, good (bringing an old woman medicine) and bad (robbing a train; setting said train on fire) being weighed on a scale by a faceless being that is still holding out hope for redemption. Its setting in the region where Mexico had recently become Texas is enveloping; you can feel the heat and the dry and the dust radiating off the page. It’s a story about wide open spaces and sharp shooting and debts owed and debts paid and I enjoyed every step I took alongside the main character as he tries to figure out if he can ever not be evil.