Ottilie in Paris

"He was always free with me. Wasn't he?"

(Diary entry, 1884, shortly before her suicide.)

I came into this world with dissonance, my soul out of tune, my blood a mismatched river. Somehow my hair was blonde and my eyes   blue-silver and growing up in Germany only my family knew I was half-Jewish. Why? Why not at least a touch of olive in my skin? I could go anywhere— just like a Christian—and the same people who spat in my sister's brown curls held me in generous glances as if I were proof of Aryan perfection, and wasn't I? When the pogroms came my sister snarled, "Why not live white, pretty eyes? Jesus loves all the porcelain girls." But I knew who I was. I loved my family, but still her stare burned my face. So, after our parents died, I turned to a land without idiotic tribalisms: America, where everything would be changed, where a woman could be the exact thing she intended. No more slow suffocations— living wifely and pregnant. What did I really know of slavery, of race? I was young enough to believe my dreams could be everyone's and when I heard Douglass sharpening the word freedom I knew my destiny. I think I loved him right then—if not as a man   as a principle. He embodied a correction for every mistake men had made   and his voice: I loved the way he spoke as if the words alone were half the journey. I remember the first time he shook my hand   after the rally in New Bedford: the abolitionists' faces lit like fresh paint as he left the stage astonished, as if his other self had struck him from behind   and he'd awakened almost singing to a crowd of whites who would drench themselves in his pain, who would listen as if listening could wash them darker, could blacken their hearts against an idea borne on their European blood. Is it wrong to want out of your skin if your color is the enemy's uniform? I learned that when he was property he was called Frederick Bailey, so I spoke only the name he had chosen. Sometimes Douglass would hold me, but in the same moment seem bent on preserving some undefined distance. Even when we were completely alone, we were crowded   as if my white skin were a third person in the room and sometimes, after a good night together, he would remain locked in his quarters: Busy, he'd say, it's not you, Miss Assing. Just work to do. But, of course, it was me—and him and his self-righteous confusion, which made me sick—especially on those evenings when the ship felt so small, when through his door, I could hear him pacing. Didn't he understand who I was? Why would he never call me Ottilie? More than anybody, he should have known my skin couldn't contain me anymore than slavery defined him. Our love denied everything they had tried   to make true. I could cry rape, he said, have him   hung   anytime I wanted. He said this made the sweet words mean one thing in our mouths and something else in our respective ears. I suppose I wasn't listening. When I felt the ridged scars on his back and saw the shade that marked each place our bodies touched I knew that was the border of a country untried, where we could live completely, where I could step outside of history and name myself anything. Yes, he was married and yes, I knew Anna's money paid for his escape, yes   but didn't I free him? When slave hunters pushed further north I paid for the voyage to England. I translated his books and his loneliness. We talked sometimes from dark until the light fought back. That was something, something almost as good as our bodies at peace occasionally in the damp sheets. I wanted to live a life unsullied by the prevailing idiocies of my time and perhaps at...