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1. An Impossible Child
- Indiana University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 An Impossible Child Alva described herself as “an impossible child” when she dictated her memoir to her private secretary, Sara Bard Field, in the summer of 1917.1 Some fifteen years later, she claimed that she “was probably the worst child that ever lived” in yet another attempt to tell the story of her life.2 Those who wish to leave a portrait of themselves for posterity are not usually so self-critical, but there was nothing typical about Alva. Given the evidence she provided to illustrate her point, it seems clear that she was proud of her unwillingness to behave herself and her determination to do as she pleased despite the predictable consequences. Her reputation as a holy terror meant that she got a great deal of attention. But that attention was not necessarily accompanied by the affection she craved. She spent her whole life searching for some way to reconcile her willfulness with her desire for love and friendship. The middle child in a family of five children, Alva was born into an affluent slaveholding family in the seaport town of Mobile, Alabama, on January 17, 1853.3 Her father, Murray Forbes Smith, grew up in Virginia and trained as a lawyer. Born in 1823, her mother, Phoebe Ann, was the daughter of Robert Desha, a cotton planter and politician whose family was originally from Kentucky.4 He served as a member of the Tennessee delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives from 1827 to 1831. During that time, he became involved in the political controversy surrounding the virtue of Margaret Timberlake Eaton, the wife of Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war. The experience must have 1 • 2 | Alva Vanderbilt Belmont soured him on politics. He decided not to run for reelection in 1830, left Washington, and moved his family to Mobile, Alabama, where he established a business buying and selling cotton.5 Mobile was a boomtown by the 1850s. Located thirty miles from the Gulf of Mexico on the shimmering waters of Mobile Bay, it served as a commercial outlet for Alabama planters.6 It was, said Hiram Fuller, “a pleasant city of some thirty-thousand inhabitants—where people live in cotton houses and ride in cotton carriages. They buy cotton, sell cotton, eat cotton, drink cotton, and dream cotton. They marry cotton wives, and unto them are born cotton children. In enumerating the charms of a fair widow, they begin by saying she makes so many bales of cotton.”7 A foreign visitor fascinated by what he saw, Fuller could not resist the temptation to engage in a bit of hyperbole. But he was essentially correct. Most of the inhabitants of Mobile were in one way or another associated with commercial services needed to sell and transport cotton. When her parents married in 1840, Alva’s father gave up his law practice in Virginia and moved to Mobile where he joined his fatherin -law in the cotton business.8 His success in selling and transporting cotton enabled him to live in a two-story, stone house with a crenulated roof and substantial-looking Tudor arches over the front porch. Located on the corner of Government and Conception Streets, it stood in the most fashionable part of the city.9 Its spacious rooms were bright and airy, with big windows and high ceilings. Its lawn, dotted with magnolia trees and well-tended flower gardens, provided the space for his children to play. Attached to the back of the house were screenedin porches, one on each floor, designed to protect the home’s inhabitants from Mobile’s bothersome insect population and the sweltering heat of the summer sun. A luxurious bathhouse tiled in marble sat in the backyard. Alva lived in this home until she was about six.10 Alva explained her rebelliousness and refusal to conform to the expectations of others as a result of having been born into a family populated by individuals who, in her words, “would stand neither for oppression nor even dictation.”11 She claimed that her mother’s forebears had been French Huguenots from La Rochelle who fled religious persecution after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. They eventually found safe haven in Pennsylvania and then in the slaveholding South.12 [44.220.182.198] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:00 GMT) An Impossible Child | 3 Her paternal great-grandmother, Margaret Stirling, was equally determined to thwart efforts to dictate how she lived her life...