Booth

by Karen Joy Fowler

His theory in discussing the matter of hereditary traits had been, that, for certain reasons, illegitimate children are oftentimes sturdier and brighter than those born in lawful wedlock . . . —J. L. Scripps, interview with Abraham Lincoln

Whatever native talents he has, Lincoln attributes entirely to his first mother’s bloodline. That he was allowed to make something of them is the work of his second mother. He credits his father with none of it.

Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure. —Abraham Lincoln, 1848

Edwin is left with a question that will continue to puzzle him for years. Was his father looking for him in the crowd that day, or was it simply chance that he and Edwin found each other? Mother was quite clear that Edwin’s job was to take care of his father. Was taking care of Edwin also his father’s job? Or had the weather vane stopped pointing that direction?

Maybe, with nothing but love in her heart, his darling mother has eaten Rosalie alive. This seems to be something parents sometimes do.

Ah, you’ve a bad hand; the lines all cris-cras. It’s full enough of sorrow. Full of trouble. Trouble in plenty, everywhere I look. You’ll break hearts, they’ll be nothing to you. You’ll die young and leave plenty to mourn you, many to love you, too, but you’ll be rich, generous, and free with your money. You’re born under an unlucky star. You’ve got in your hand a thundering crowd of enemies—not one friend—you’ll make a bad end, and have plenty to love you afterwards. You’ll have a fast life—short, but a grand one. Now, young sir, I’ve never seen a worse hand, and I wish I hadn’t seen it, but every word I’ve told is true by the signs.

Johnny's prophecy

The whole episode clarifies his thinking about slavery, which it turns out is not at all the same as his father’s. He doesn’t say so to Mother, opposition to Father always making her so uncomfortable, but he shares his views freely at school, where they are largely agreed.

Johnny's feelings towards slavery begin to show

So does Frederick Douglass, who’ll say that Parker’s action, more than anything else, led to the destruction of the Fugitive Slave Act. Others, later, will call the battle at Christiana the beginning of the Civil War.

Edwin has a lot to learn, June thinks. June is very full of himself, thinks Edwin. How happy they are, think Asia, Johnny, and Joe. Those deserters. What lives they are leading!

They talk about their futures. John says that he wants to do something important, something with weight and consequence, something that will leave a mark.

One may smile and smile and be a villain.

All those pleasures were still there when they returned, but denied her by the endless chores that fell to adult women and the limits of her own body. She’d wasted the last of her girlhood, shut up in the dim room of the cabin, afraid of voices she should have welcomed.

Rosalie

But keeping his spirits up is hard work. Keeping him sober is harder work. Had she only known it, her life bears some slight similarity to that of the boy Edwin, the Edwin who followed his father through the moonlight, trying to keep him out of bars.

Mary

One of the peculiarities of the Booth family is how often they communicate via article and review.

John’s made this into quite an exciting story, all politics and devilry and spy-craft. But there’s something hectic in his manner when he tells it, a high-pitched emotion she can’t identify. He seems feverish. She wonders if he’s been this way since he was shot or maybe since he learned some of his beloved Southerners want him dead. She thinks that something has happened and she thinks he hasn’t told her what. She counts on being his confidante. This is her first inkling of a whole world of things he doesn’t tell her.

The song was written in 1861 by a friend of one of the dead rioters. Attempts to rewrite or replace it as the official state song were made in 1974, 1980, 1984, 2001, 2002, 2009, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2020. These efforts finally succeeded in 2021.

Maryland state song

These opinions put him at odds with the rest of the family. But, given his promise to Mother not to fight, no one is much perturbed. Let him say whatever he likes. What’s the harm? Mother, who once angrily told Aunty Rogers that in her house the natural dignity of every person God made was to be respected, makes no such objection when the sentiments come from her favorite son.

it doesn’t seem possible to Edwin that the very first act of every single person he sees on the street, the milkman, the beggar, the lord, and the lady, is to produce a searing pain in the one who’ll love them most.

“I know,” she tells Edwin, “that in the big world, this is such a little matter. I’m going to cry for three more minutes, and then I’m going to stop.”

The Battle of Antietam is a horror. More men are killed on this single day than the fatalities in all of America’s other nineteenth-century wars combined.

The weather is changing, the air dry, but crackling with electricity. Asia feels her hair lifting, on her arms and neck. In the distance, lightning stretches in large white sheets. She can smell a storm coming. There’s a yowling right under the window, that strange unearthly call of a cat in heat. It feels all portentous to Asia, but of what she couldn’t say.

June volunteers to go and talk to him, play the big brother. Obviously this task can’t fall to Edwin. John is currently in the capital so June meets him there at the Surratt boardinghouse. They sit together in the overstuffed parlor, full of geegaws, vases and candlesticks and figurines. June feels oddly spied on by Mrs. Surratt and her daughter, oddly unsettled by the ticking of multiple clocks.

They are so eager to be reassured, they ignore the revelation that John has been lying to them for months.

This war is eating my life out; I have a strong impression that I shall not live to see the end. —Abraham Lincoln to his friend Owen Lovejoy, 1864

In their hearts, each Booth must be asking: What did I do to cause this? What did I not do to stop it?

Are there ghosts? How could there not be?

I did not want to write a book about John Wilkes. This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it; I didn’t think he deserved mine.