Calvin Stowe Stands Thwarted By The Door Of Harriet’s Writing Room, 1851
By Benjamin Goluboff
Harriet worked in the little sewing room
upstairs in the Brunswick house,
kept her papers there in baskets
and when her door was closed
it only meant one thing:
the Spirit sat with his wife
and there would be no comfort for Cal.
Stowe was a man of deep faith
who sustained visions and visitations
from his earliest youth,
so he believed,
or did most of the time,
that what went on behind
the sewing room door
was exactly what Harriet said:
the Holy Ghost moving her pen
filling the baskets in which her novel
about the Negroes grew and grew.
Calvin was steeped in Scripture,
saw the world in Hebrew
and so for him the sewing room door
was the veil of the Temple, the parochet
before the kedosh kod’shim
(sanctum sanctorum)
in which the High Priest alone
might stand with the Spirit.
Writing by her single thrifty candle
Harriet had Isaiah’s coal of fire
upon her lips.
But the scriptural analogies
combined with the thought of her lips
only inflamed Cal’s desire.
Remembering the little stratagems
of her hands and mouth
Stowe stood in torment
by Harriet’s door.
He couldn’t blame his wife
for being a vessel of the Spirit,
and he couldn’t blame
the Spirit for choosing his wife.
But Stowe was free to resent the Negroes
and some nights he did.
Benjamin Goluboff is the author of Ho Chi Minh: A Speculative Life in Verse and Biking Englewood: An Essay on the White Gaze, both from Urban Farmhouse Press. Goluboff teaches at Lake Forest College. Some of his work can be read here: https://www.lakeforest.edu/academics/faculty/goluboff/
