Assassination Vacation Read online

  As for the cutter happening upon the Tlingit victors about to enslave the vanquished, supposedly the ship’s captain broke up the fight. He announced to the newly enslaved that they were now living in the United States of America. And in the United States of America, a president named Abraham Lincoln had come along and freed the slaves. There is no more slavery in the United States, he said, and Alaska was a U.S. territory, so live free my Tlingit brothers. Thus the freed Tlingits went home and erected a totem pole in honor of this Lincoln, their emancipator.

  That’s a cute story. Sunset magazine published it in 1924. Turns out to be hooey. Alaska scholars believe there are two possible explanations for the Lincoln totem pole. The first is that it simply commemorates the tribe’s first sighting of a white man and that the carver borrowed the only picture of a white man available — a photograph of Abraham Lincoln at Antietam. Another more interesting option is that the pole was erected after the American ship freed those slaves, but it was erected as a shame pole, a pole in honor of the thief who let the booty get away — the “Lincoln took my stuff” theory.

  I’m not sure which story I believe, but I find all the explanations interesting — sad, ironic, bitter too. But there is nothing bitter, nothing ironic about standing in the Saxman park and looking at those magnificent totems. There on that Alaskan island dark green with trees, totems are still carved. I have the privilege of watching Nathan Jackson — a Tlingit carver so revered and skilled he is one of the few non-dead people to have appeared on a U.S. postage stamp — use a tool called an adze on a long new log.

  There was a lovely moment when Bill the tour guide, supervising us poking around the grounds, noticed a raw tree trunk waiting to be carved, and spray-painted in turquoise on the rings was the name “Nathan.” It was like watching a Renaissance Florentine come across a chunk of marble marked “Michelangelo.”

  The Seward pole is insult comedy — a little dwarf of a man perched on an upside-down bentwood box, symbolizing the way he stiffed the chief by failing to return the kindness of a potlatch. But the Lincoln pole — that I love, a long, tall shaft painted and carved at the base with the faces of a bear and ravens. In between the animals on the bottom and the Lincoln on top, the length of the pole is unpainted and bare so that you get a sense of the tree it used to be. Lincoln, charmingly short and squat, arms akimbo, is a happy, welcoming man. Even if that’s not what he’s supposed to look like, even if he’s the harbinger of the white men showing up to outlaw the potlatch and take the land, that’s how he looks — friendly. It’s one of the rare Lincoln sculptures that capture the winking, joshing, fun-to-be-with side of his personality.

  Staring up at the Lincoln pole I can’t help but think of Edwin Markham’s poem “Lincoln, Man of the People,” which Markham read aloud at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial. It ends with the poet’s thoughts on what the death of such a man as Lincoln felt like:

  As when a lordly cedar, green with boughs,

  Goes down with a great shout upon the hills,

  And leaves a lonesome place against the sky.

  Interestingly, there’s another replica of the Lincoln totem pole at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield. Cast in fiberglass, the “wood” of the pole is represented by very brown paint. Which is therefore the color of Lincoln’s skin. In other words, in the copy of a totem pole that may be a shame pole attacking Lincoln for foiling the acquisition of new slaves, Lincoln looks like a black man.

  There is one more peculiar American Indian–William H. Seward connection. It has to do with Seward’s attacker, Lewis Thornton Powell, and the thousands of American Indian skeletal remains that used to be kept in storage at the Smithsonian and other museums.

  The Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 enabled Indian tribes to come east to identify the remains of their kinsmen whom anthropologists had pirated off to Washington, and take the remains back to tribal lands to be reburied. The repatriation of remains program was a long time coming, a bureaucratic solution to the sort of racist idiocy that allowed human remains to be essentially shoved into filing cabinets like dinosaur eggs or dried ferns. That Anglo scientists would cart off the dead to study them probably didn’t surprise the tribes, considering that a lot of Indians were appalled and confused by the white men’s ability to move away from the tombs of their ancestors. “Your dead cease to love you,” Chief Seattle of the Duwamish said to the whites, pleading for the right to stay and live among his tribe’s more affectionate ghosts.

  In 1992, a researcher at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History was cataloging bones so that tribes could claim them. He came across a skull identified with Powell’s name. Coincidentally, the researcher had previously worked at Ford’s Theatre.

  Powell, the researcher knew, had been a Confederate soldier. Also known under the alias of Paine, Powell had served at Gettysburg and then with John Mosby’s Rangers (known for raiding Union supply wagons and trains) before joining up with Booth, only to be hanged. The researcher then tracked down a woman whom he believed to be Powell’s closest living relative, a great-niece in Florida. The niece requested the skull, hoping to bury it in the Seminole County cemetery where Powell’s mother was laid to rest. Then, another woman came forward claiming to be an even closer relative than the niece. That woman, a Canadian, claimed to be Powell’s great-granddaughter. She requested that her identity remain a secret, and as far as I can tell, the Smithsonian honored her request. She claimed that her great-grandmother was pregnant with Powell’s illegitimate child when he was executed. The pregnant woman took off for Canada, where she bore his daughter.

  I find the possibility of an impregnated girlfriend entirely plausible. Booth’s good looks get a lot of play, but in a Lincoln conspirators’ beauty pageant, my money’s on Powell taking home the tiara. I remember the first time I saw him. It was in an art gallery at an exhibition of crime photos. Amidst the images of a strangler’s hands and the source photo of the electric chair that Andy Warhol used in his paintings, there was a picture of Powell, a very tall, very handsome man. Who’s that? I wondered. He smoldered, decked out in a jaunty, crumpled, double-breasted trench coat, staring at the camera dead-on. I was unaware of the man’s identity, and thus what he had done to Seward, so the way he was reaching into his pocket struck me as gallant, as if he were Cary Grant pulling out a monogrammed cigarette case to offer a dame a smoke. Of course, right after that picture was taken, the government strung up Powell’s pretty neck.

  Powell’s alleged great-granddaughter wanted the Smithsonian to keep the disputed skull. But eventually, the mystery woman backed off, and, after interinstitutional haggling about whether or not to keep the skull or “deaccession” it to the niece for burial, the niece ended up with the skull in 1994, burying it next to Powell’s mother as she had promised.

  I’ve seen Powell’s grave. When my sister Amy and I were in Florida taking my nephew Owen to Disney World, we made a side trip to the Geneva Cemetery. The whole reason I wanted to take Owen to Disney World is that I fear that someday he’s going to look through his childhood photo album and wonder why all his vacations with his aunt took place at places like the McKinley Memorial and Wounded Knee. And yet here we are. Powell’s cemetery was just too close to Cinderella’s Castle for me to pass up.

  Amy drives past a feed store and a church whose sign out front reads, “Heaven is near. So’s hell. Choose your destination daily.” She continues past palm trees and Spanish moss, turning onto Cemetery Road. Earlier, I had written “Cemetery Road” in black ink on my hand to remind me that’s the road the cemetery is on. When Owen grabbed my hand and asked what it said, I told him, but he didn’t believe me, saying, “No, it doesn’t say that.” What does it say then? “It says that Halloween is coming soon!”

  We extract Owen from his car seat and the three of us stand under some pine trees, looking at Powell’s mother’s grave, and Powell’s. His is decorated with a cross marked “CSA” (Confederate States of Americ
a) and a Confederate flag. This is what it says:

  PVT. LEWIS THORNTON POWELL, CSA

  APRIL 22, 1844–JULY 7, 1865

  2ND FLORIDA INFANTRY CO. 1

  “HAMILTON BLUES”

  43RD BATTALION VIRGINIA CALVARY [SIC]

  “MOSBY’S RANGERS”

  “They don’t make any mention that he was a bad guy,” Amy says.

  “They usually don’t — not on a tombstone anyway,” I say.

  Owen asks if there’s a guy underground in a coffin.

  “Just his skull,” I answer. “Remember that word I taught you at Christmas? ‘Decapitated’?” We were playing knights, fighting each other with plastic swords. Owen was winning. I was doubled over onto my parents’ living room floor and he was pretending to slice my head off with his sword. Trying to be an educational aunt, or as educational as a person can be when a three-year-old is trying to chop her head off, I told him that the act of chopping off a person’s head is called “decapitation” and that a head that’s been chopped off is called “decapitated.”

  Owen, slicing at my neck like salami, insisted, “No it’s not. It’s called meat.”

  Standing there at Powell’s grave, telling my nephew about a buried skull, I realize how much of our relationship revolves around body parts and severed heads. Once Owen learned to walk, we started playing a game I call Frankenstein, in which I am Frankenstein’s monster and I chase him around trying to harvest his organs and appendages because my master is building another boy. “Frankenstein needs your spleen,” I yell, aping the voice of an announcer at a monster truck rally. “Give me your spleen!” Which is why the seemingly gross book I gave him for his birthday, a collection of poetry for children called The Blood-Hungry Spleen was actually a sentimental choice, even though my sister tells me it didn’t go over so well when he brought it to preschool.

  Looking around Powell’s cemetery, Owen sounds a little disappointed when he says, “It’s not so scary here.”

  “Snake!” I yell. This isn’t some shameless ploy to entertain him. As we stare at the grave of an attempted murderer, a black snake wraps itself around my left leg. “Is he a man-eater?” Owen wants to know. I’m sure as hell not going to find out, leaping special-effects-high into the air. Owen cannot stop laughing at my flailing. Just my luck, he prefers physical comedy. In fact, he adds the incident to his storytelling repertoire, repeatedly windmilling his arms, giggling, and jumping up and down, telling everyone he meets, “Aunt Sarah, she see snake and she say, ‘Ah! Ah! Ah!’ ”

  In Washington, D.C., directly across Lafayette Park from the house where Powell stabbed Seward, is a block of lovely brick row houses sheltering pet projects of the executive branch. The former home of Henry and Clara Rathbone is at 712 Madison Place. Today, it’s the Office of the President’s Council on White House Fellowships. (Secretary of State Colin Powell was a White House Fellow once. I remember I looked into applying for the program when I was younger, dropping the idea once I saw then-General Powell’s name on the alumni list, realizing they were probably not looking for someone whose most impressive résumé line was “college radio DJ.”)

  Shuddering as I pass the building next door (Office for Obliterating the Separation of Church and State So That Our Tax Dollars Fund Churches Which Are Already Annoyingly Tax Exempt), I go inside, asking the receptionist to confirm if this was once the house of Major Henry Rathbone.

  “I don’t know,” she answers. “Who’s he?”

  I tell her that Henry Rathbone and his fiancée/stepsister Clara Harris were in the box with the Lincolns the night of the assassination; that Rathbone was the first person to realize what Booth had done; that when he tried to stop Booth from escaping, Booth knifed Rathbone’s arm.

  “Around here,” she says, “for someone like that, there’s usually a plaque.”

  I tell her that Rathbone never fully recovered; that he was actually blamed for not stopping Booth; that he went slowly insane; that Clara married him anyway and had his children; that when Henry insisted on moving to Germany, she agreed, hoping the change would do him good; that crazy Henry shot and killed Clara in Germany just as Booth had shot Lincoln; that he would have killed their children too if a nanny hadn’t stopped him; that by the way one of those kids lived to become the congressman from Illinois who, in 1926, introduced the bill to purchase the collection of artifacts in the Ford’s Theatre Lincoln Museum; that Henry was committed to a German insane asylum, which is where he died; and that they don’t really put up plaques about things like that, though Thomas Mallon did write a good novel on the subject called Henry and Clara.

  “Oh, that guy,” says the receptionist. “Yes, he lived here.”

  She says she’s interested in reading the novel I mentioned, asks me to repeat its title. On the notepad she uses to take while-you-were-out messages, she jots down Henry and Clara, as if her boss is supposed to call them back.

  Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris were not Mrs. Lincoln’s first choices for theater companions. Booth read in the newspaper that Mr. and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant would be accompanying the Lincolns to Ford’s, but the general and his wife backed out. Still, April 14 was a nice day for the Lincolns. Early that morning, their eldest son, Robert, showed up. After graduating from Harvard, Robert had passed the final few months of the war as a captain on General Grant’s personal staff. (That Robert sat out most of the war at Harvard was a political liability for his father, considering how willing he was to send other people’s sons to the front. But Mrs. Lincoln had lost one of Robert’s little brothers in Springfield and another in the White House, so when she begged the president to spare their firstborn, Lincoln gave in. She tolerated Robert’s position with Grant because it was a cushy gig mostly involving escorting bigwigs who came to visit.) Robert was with General Grant at Appomattox. And at breakfast that morning he told his father about meeting Robert E. Lee. In the afternoon, Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln took a carriage ride, both of them vowing to lighten up a little now that the war was over.

  Lincoln was late for his own assassination. The play, Tom Taylor’s Our American Cousin, had already started by the time the president and the first lady, along with Rathbone and Harris, arrived at the theater. Seeing the party enter the presidential box, the audience, along with the actors on stage, applauded the president.

  Surely the plot appealed to Lincoln. The story of a comical American rube bumbling amidst his aristocratic English relatives must have reminded the occupant of the Executive Mansion of his rail-splitting, log cabin past. In fact, Booth, who knew the play well, timed his shot to coincide with a surefire laugh line. (It is a comfort of sorts to know that the bullet hit Lincoln mid-guffaw. Considering how the war had weighed on him, at least his last conscious moment was a hoot.)

  At Ford’s Theatre, I notice that the National Park ranger who delivers the tour does not quote the laugh line. After the tour, I go up and ask him why not.

  “Tell you what,” he says. “I’ll tell you the line. You decide if it’s funny.” Then, pretending to be the character Lord Dundreary, calling after a Mrs. Mountchessington (who had just accused him of “not being used to the manners of good society”), “‘Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Wal, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal — you sockdologizing old man-trap.’ ”

  I don’t laugh, it’s true. I ask what “sockdologizing” means and he and his fellow ranger discuss having looked it up in various old dictionaries. “It means ‘manipulative,’ ” he says.

  I ask if the spirit of it is more “you lying son of a bitch” manipulative or “gosh darn you” manipulative. One ranger says the latter, the other says the former.

  Whatever the nuance of “sockdologizing” was, after the line, then the laugh, the subsequent events happened fast. The ranger, when he was telling the story of Booth’s jump to the stage, held an imaginary dagger, yelling “Sic semper tyrannis!”

  Various people rushed to Lincoln, including the star of the play, actress Laura Ke
ene, whose bloodstained collar is on display, along with the top hat Lincoln wore to the theater, in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

  When a doctor was called for, Charles Sabin Taft, an army surgeon attending the play, was lifted up to Lincoln’s box. Taft asked that Lincoln be removed to the nearest home, which turned out to be the Petersen boardinghouse, across the street, now better known as The House Where Lincoln Died.

  Lincoln was laid diagonally across a bed — the original is on display in the Chicago Historical Society. Surgeon General Barnes arrived, probing for the bullet. Robert Todd Lincoln was summoned from the White House, along with Lincoln’s young secretary, John Hay. Secretary of War Edwin Stanton showed up too, famously pronouncing the next morning, after Lincoln’s last breath, that “now he belongs to the ages.”

  Luckily, Dr. Taft went straight home and described his night in his diary, which is now in the special collections of McGill University in Montreal, thanks to an alumnus who bequeathed his collection of Lincolniana to his alma mater. I happened to be in Montreal to do a reading at the annual Just for Laughs Comedy Festival, so I swung by the library to look at Taft’s book. He wrote, “I remained with the President until he died, engaged during a greater part of the night in supporting his head so that the wound should not press upon the pillow and the flow of blood be obstructed.” Oh, the agony of hours and hours of holding up the weight of Lincoln’s head. The next day, surely Taft’s arms were sore, so sore I’d imagine that every time he had to lift something, reach for the salt shaker, say, he would throb with the muscle memory of Lincoln’s heavy head.