A few hours later, Lottie was wide-awake. The sun was not yet up, and the only light that shone in through the leaded window of her room was from the moon. Lottie slipped out of bed and into her coat and slippers. She then rolled her blankets into a bundle, and very carefully, without making a sound, she crept across the wooden floor and opened the door into the hallway. She looked back to see whether Cary Ann would stir. She didn’t. Lottie tiptoed upstairs and removed the brass key from where it hung on a peg beside the attic door. As quietly as possible she fit the key in the lock, turned it, and swung the huge oak door open.
Lottie closed the door carefully behind her and stood for a moment while her eyes adjusted to the dim light. After a minute or two, she could make out a pile of old desks and bed frames in the far corner and several trunks lined up against the wall. Then she saw what she was looking for—the ladder up to the rafters and then, higher still, another ladder that led to the belfry. Lottie took a deep breath and wrapped her coat belt around the blanket roll and then tied it around her waist. Step by step she began to climb the ladder to the rafters. As she climbed, Lottie thought about how most of the girls in her class would be afraid to do what she was doing—but not Lottie. She had climbed a thousand trees at Viewmont, and when she was younger, she and Ike had played hide-and-seek, scrambling over the huge bales of cotton in the packing shed.
When Lottie reached the top of the ladder, she climbed out onto the rafters and, balancing carefully, made her way over to the next ladder. This one took her higher still, right into the belfry tower itself. Lottie could see the ropes hanging down through the rafters to the floor below. She could just imagine the school caretaker pulling those ropes in an hour, at 6 A.M., as he did each morning.
“But they won’t work this morning, April Fool!” Lottie laughed to herself as she carefully untied the blanket roll and draped blankets over the clapper of the large brass bell. She then tied the corners of the blankets to one of the ropes to hold them in place.
When she was satisfied she had completely muffled any sound the bell might make, Lottie climbed down the ladder and scrambled across the rafters and down the second ladder to the attic floor. Wiping cobwebs off her, she opened the attic door, locked it behind her, and replaced the key on the peg before slipping back downstairs to her room. Thankfully Cary Ann was still sleeping peacefully as Lottie took off her coat and slippers and lay down on her bed.
Lottie lay still straining to hear what might happen next. She watched as the sun peeked through the window and cast its light on the far wall. Lottie knew it was long after get-up time, but still the bell had not rung. She imagined the old caretaker pulling harder and harder on the rope, trying to get a sound to come out of the bell.
Finally, at 7 A.M., a whole hour later than normal, the bell clanged, and the other girls woke up. Lottie was delighted to see how confused they all were when told they were an hour late for breakfast! I bet no one will do a better April Fools’ trick than that all day, Lottie congratulated herself.
Of course, the principal of the school was not about to let such a serious offense go unpunished. Eventually Lottie owned up to her prank. After all, she was the only girl without any blankets on her bed. Because she was so close to graduating she was not expelled, though her deportment grade was marked D for deficient. Lottie grimaced when she read it. She knew that her mother would not be pleased, but on the other hand, her Latin, English, and French grades were among the best in the class. Surely her mother would overlook one “little” mistake. Apparently Mrs. Moon had other concerns on her mind when she read Lottie’s report card, because nothing was ever said about the failing grade in deportment.
The end of the school year finally arrived, and with it Lottie’s graduation from Hollins Institute. The graduation ceremony was held in the Enon Baptist Church, which Lottie had visited as little as possible during her last year at the institute. The girls all sat in the front pews, looking nearly identical in their starched white dresses and powder blue sashes. Each graduating student had some role to play in the ceremony as a way of demonstrating that the school had turned her into a proper young lady. Some girls sang songs or played the piano or violin. Those who had written essays or poems had them read aloud by the male staff members. This was because everyone knew it was not proper for a young woman to get up and address an audience with men in it. Women never did public speaking in a mixed group. Lottie sat and fiddled as the principal read the commencement speech. The speech was all about the proper role of women in their changing world, and its main point was that no matter how smart a woman was, her role was to look after her family and be silent in church.
As she fidgeted, Lottie wondered what her sister Orie would think of such a speech. It was just the opposite of what Orie said and did. Orie believed the church held women back from having a full and interesting life, and she often wrote to Lottie telling her that she should learn to think for herself and not follow the other girls in the class.
Lottie took her advice as much as possible. A number of the girls in her class were already engaged to be married. Lottie, though, was not yet ready to be a wife, and with no father to make her marry and no money worries, she had no reason to rush into anything she did not want to do.
That was the trouble, though. Although Lottie had a long list of things she did not want to do, there was nothing on her list of things she wanted to do. As she sat in the carriage on her way back to Viewmont, she wondered what would happen next in her life. She was fifteen years old with a much better education than most other southern girls, and she had absolutely no idea what good it would do her.
Chapter 3
The Most Educated Woman in the South
At first Lottie was glad to be back at Viewmont. She had servants to lay out her clothes in the morning and bring her warm water to wash with. No bells tolled to rule her day, and she was free to sit on the lawn and read Latin or French books or take a carriage ride to visit some of her cousins on nearby plantations. But after a while, all this began to get a little boring. It was then that her mother suggested that she might like to take over the task of teaching five-year-old Edmonia. Lottie agreed and soon found that she enjoyed teaching her little sister very much. Eddie was a fast learner and especially loved acting out simple plays with Lottie.
Orie returned home for Christmas 1856. She was now a fully licensed doctor. She had achieved her goal. Orie and one other graduate were the first two female doctors in the entire South. However, even after all her hard work, Orie could not find a single hospital that would consider employing a female doctor. She came home for Christmas bitter and more committed than ever to Elizabeth Blackwell and her women’s rights movement.
Surprisingly it was the Baptist church that gave Lottie an idea about what to do next with her life. The Baptists had been paying attention to the women’s rights movement, and although they were not willing to say that women should be educated alongside men, they did agree that women should have access to all of the same educational opportunities as men. This was a new idea, and it created much controversy within the church. Eventually the Reverend John Broadus of the nearby Charlottesville Baptist Church organized the Albemarle Female Institute of Charlottesville. The institute was to be run on radical new lines never tried in the South. The young women enrolled in the school would take exactly the same courses, such as ancient and modern languages, natural sciences, mathematics, moral philosophy, history, and literature, as the men took at the University of Virginia.
Many people viewed this approach as scandalous and doomed to fail. They argued that the only women who could afford such an education did not need it because they had enough money to marry well and be taken care of financially for the rest of their lives. In the minds of these people, an overeducated woman with no outlet in society could be very dangerous!
Lottie was more than ready for the challenge. She enrolled at the Albemarle Female Institute in September 1857, eager to learn. The institute offered her a little more freedom than Hollins Institute had. The young women were allowed to entertain male visitors under the watchful eye of a chaperone, and the professors arranged musicals, lectures, and dances for the women to attend. The students also were encouraged to attend the Reverend Broadus’s church, though Lottie made it clear from the start that she would not be going. On the first Sunday, while the other girls were gathering their Bibles for church, Lottie picked up a copy of Twelfth Night, a play by William Shakespeare, and announced that she was going to lie on a haystack and read the play instead of going to church.
Even though Lottie would not join the other young women in Christian activities, she soon became very popular. She was a quick learner and always had time to help the other students with their Greek or Latin translation work. She still loved to play practical jokes, and when she told the class that her middle initial D stood for “Devil,” they all believed her.
By the end of her first year, Lottie had earned a diploma in Latin. She loved studying foreign languages and was top in her class in Greek, Italian, French, and Spanish.
Meanwhile Lottie’s sister Orie had met with nothing but frustration in trying to get a job in an American hospital. In disgust she decided to leave the country that summer and travel to France and then go on through Europe to Jerusalem to visit her uncle, aunt, and cousins. Lottie was tempted to go with her, but the lure of learning kept her focused on her college career. She went back for a second year at the Albemarle Female Institute.
In December 1858, right after Lottie’s eighteenth birthday, the Reverend Broadus arranged for a series of evangelistic meetings at the Baptist church. Lottie, of course, had no intention of wasting her time attending these services, and no one made her. In fact, Lottie quickly learned that most of her friends didn’t want her to attend, as they were weary of the way she ridiculed their religious beliefs.
On the second day, however, Lottie wanted to have some fun. Since she hadn’t been to church in a long time, she decided to show up for one of the Reverend Broadus’s services and gather ammunition to torment her religious friends with. A buzz of conversation ran through the gathered crowd when Lottie entered the sanctuary. Lottie smiled brightly and took a seat near the front, ready to pick holes in the sermon the Reverend Broadus was about to deliver. Much to her surprise, by the end of the homily she had not found a single thing that didn’t make sense to her. Since she had found nothing to mock, she began to wonder whether she had just wasted an hour.
Yet while Lottie tried not to give any more thought to the service, the Reverend Broadus’s words kept popping into her mind. That night she could not sleep, thanks to a barking dog that kept her awake. As she lay in bed, Lottie began to think of the reasons why she was not a Christian. She decided it was mainly because of her childhood. As a young girl she had overheard so many arguments and debates about which denomination was right that she had become sick of hearing them. The arguments ended up turning her away from religion altogether. But as the night wore on, Lottie began to wonder whether turning her back on religion had been such a smart decision. Should she have given up on Christianity simply because some people argued about it? That didn’t seem a very logical way to approach a decision. The more Lottie thought about it, the more she recalled the Reverend Broadus’s words and the more appealing becoming a Christian seemed to her.
