On the way to town, I carefully ripped the edges of the letter open to see what she had written there, but it was only pleasantries, a single sentence with “profound apologies,” and an invitation to Ben Daisy, and Ben Daisy alone, for tea in a few days’ time.
He came. I was surprised he came, but he did. It was the end of the workday, and he had clearly had a good one downtown—he smelled of clean sweat, and he was smiling when he walked in. “What’s this?” he said, laughing. “You sure you happy to see me?”
Mama smiled and nodded. She had asked Lenore to make a cake. She placed the cake in the middle of her examination room table and led him there. She took her place on the small wooden seat.
“Now,” Mama said as she spread her skirts out about her, “how are you, Mr. Ben?”
He looked taken aback, but he answered. “Fine, Miss Doctor, just fine,” he replied. “Figure I may as well pass the time with you ladies, and now that I’ve got such a warm welcome, you’ll be hard pressed to get me to leave.” He laughed again.
Mama laughed, too. They talked for a bit more. Mama reached over to cut Ben Daisy a slice of cake, and when he caught that, he smiled, a little meaner. She placed the slice in a square of cloth, put it in the palm of his hand. He hunched over to eat it, looking at her sideways.
I sat on a stool in the corner. Mama had told me beforehand to only begin when she gave me the signal. At last, Mama lifted one finger, and I picked up my pen.
“I wish to talk to you a bit about Daisy.”
I watched his shoulders slump forward, ever so slightly, and then back upright, as if he had remembered something. “So that’s what you want,” he said.
“You miss her,” Mama said.
It was quiet for a bit. But then Ben Daisy trusted himself enough to say “She was a fine gal. I miss her something terrible.”
“What if I could give you something,” Mama said. “Something to help with the pain.”
“I’ve already got that down at Culver’s.” Ben Daisy laughed sadly.
“But Culver’s whiskey doesn’t help you,” Mama said.
“It’ll do what it’ll do.”
“But it makes you listless and miss your work. It makes you quarrel with your sister.”
Ben Daisy was quiet. Then he said, “What does Hannah want from me?”
“Nothing,” Mama said.
“That’s right. It’s all nothing.” Ben Daisy lifted his head off the back of the chair and put his hands on the arms, ready to push himself off the big leather seat and out our door.
That’s when Mama said, “You wouldn’t want Daisy, if she were here, to know you like this, though, would you? If she were able to see you. Are you the man she’d wish you to be in freedom?”
Ben Daisy lowered himself back into the chair. “So, what are you proposing?”
Mama stood up and told me to fetch the solution. She measured some out, very carefully, into a smaller vial and handed it to him.
“You take this,” she said. “One swallow, and one swallow only each night. It’s night, isn’t it, that the pain’s the worst?”
Ben Daisy sighed. “Night is when it all catches up with me,” he said.
Mama instructed him to return the following afternoon, and for every afternoon after that for five days. “You see how you feel,” she told him. “And if it seems to help, tell your friends down at Culver’s. It may help them, too.”
When he’d left, she sat and began to dictate to me again.
“We have in our midst,” she said, “a group of men, and a few women, who, upon discovering our community and life here in freedom, find their souls still oppressed. Their bodies are here with us in emancipation, but their minds are not free. Their spirits have not recovered from the degradation of enslavement, despite the many hardships and privations they have suffered to come here.
“Indeed, I argue that it is precisely because of these hardships and privations that when they arrive here, with us, some part of them does not return. When they arrive, I can treat the physical effects of their enslavement—the yaws in their limbs, and the scars on their backs and heads, and the bones that broke and were never set. But I have, up until now, not been able to treat what would be called the mental effects, the spiritual effects, which do not respond to prayer or clean living or even the embrace of friends.
“I believe the root cause for this is an intense solitude and loneliness, even in their freedom. At least, that is how some of them have described it to me. We have seen this illness before,” she said. “In the cases of those we love, like Mr. Ruggles and Miss Sojourner Truth. They were afflicted by this deep and abiding loneliness even in freedom and took to drink, and then the water cure, lying in bathtubs and wrapped in cold, wet sheets to try and soak it out. And it has not done much for them. If all these good and kind warriors are felled by this disease of feeling, what hope is there for any of us?
“And what is at the root cause of loneliness? It is a lack of love. I believe if we can treat this deficit of affection, we can begin to see an improvement in those new to freedom. We can make them whole in both body and in spirit and see a real change in their condition. They will ingest this substance, which is made of the solitude and longing for
