I’m continuing to share excerpts from my novel draft, A Dangerous Education: The Story of Julia Williams Garnet, with the goal of sharing six sections in total from the beginning of the book.
These upcoming scenes feature Prudence Crandall, the teacher and founder of the first school that Julia Williams attends in the book, Canterbury Female Boarding School. Prudence Crandall is another woman leader in our history who deserves a whole novel about her life, as well as a film drama made about her. At a time when slavery was still in effect, the early 1800’s, Prudence Crandall was breaking all the rules by not only starting a boarding school for girls, but then populating that school with girls of color.
For these bold acts, Prudence Crandall drew epic fire. The townspeople of Canterbury, Connecticut destroyed her school and essentially chased her out of town. She was tried in a court of law for disobeying Connecticut’s Black Law that barred Black people from attending school in the state without explicit permission, and for other alleged offenses related to her work to educate and emancipate the millions still living in slavery. Implications from Prudence Crandall’s trials would go on to influence two significant U.S. Supreme court decisions.
I tried to let Julia become her own character in my mind as I composed the narrative, drawing on remembrances of the playfulness and earnestness of childhood, as well as my clinical experience with hearing so many stories of racism and child trauma. With some historical research into the language of the time, I did my best to portray the ways girls may have talked to each other at the Canterbury Female Boarding School. As always, I welcome your thoughts about the story as you are following along and reading it section by section. This section starts on the same day as the initial scene shared in the previous post.
#
Julia sat beside the wash basin in the lavatory of the school dorm, scrubbing the shirt to her uniform over the washboard. She tried to stay busy with the task, not lost in the memory of the mob’s attack on the school earlier that day. I just don’t know. I just don’t know. The thought kept repeating in her head. It was something her mother used to say out of despair or frustration or just tiredness sometimes, and now it came to her, too. She wondered if thoughts could be inherited, like the shape of your eyes or nose.
“Don’t know what?” came a voice from behind her, and Julia realized she hadn’t just been thinking the words, but must have been saying them out loud. It was Sarah Harris asking the question, one of her classmates. Sarah knew better than any of them what the townspeople of Canterbury were like. The town had begun turning against the school the very week she enrolled. After she was admitted, white families started withdrawing their daughters. But Miss Crandall took no notice, and even got more bold about her decision, reopening the school exclusively for black girls later that month.
“Oh, just thinking out loud, I guess,” said Julia with a wry grin. “I just don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
Sarah nodded sympathetically, taking out her shirt and dousing it in water before pulling up a chair beside Julia with her own washboard. “None of us knows what’s going to happen next,” she said.
“True enough,” Julia responded, but then she had a glimpse of herself from the past in her mind, a smile spreading across her face as she received her acceptance letter from Miss Crandall. “When I remember how happy I was when I was admitted to the Canterbury Female Boarding School,” Julia said. “Now I just want to stay busy and not think about what’s to come.”
Sarah gave a soft harumph of agreement. She must have had the flashes in her mind as well, of the school being burned down by the angry mob, or of being attacked physically, of not knowing what was coming next.
After a long moment, Sarah sighed and said, “It’s like that saying, ‘don’t borrow trouble from tomorrow’–” She stopped and met eyes with Julia. “Don’t add to your burdens with fearsome ideas about the future. It won’t help.”
Julia stopped scrubbing and observed her friend. Sarah was younger than her, but had already been at Canterbury Female Boarding School for over a year, and had probably endured scenes even worse than today’s attack.
“Yes, I suppose that’s true,” she said.
“And here’s another one,” Sarah said. “The only way beyond trouble is to go through it. We want to be teachers, right? So we need to get through our education, whether those angry white folks want us to or not.”
“The only way beyond trouble is to go through it,” Julia repeated. She liked the idea of it, and it was so much more useful than her mother’s lament of I just don’t know.
The only way beyond trouble is to go through it. Julia repeated the phrase to herself over and over as she finished her washing, using it to keep time as she scrubbed. But her mind kept tracking back to the splash of broken glass across the floor from the stone that made its way in. After the mob left, she helped Miss Crandall fasten a piece of clapboard over the open gash in the window, nailing the thin board to the frame on either side. It felt good to do something to block the hole, but it would be a constant reminder of the damage that the mob had done.
By the time she climbed into her bunk bed that night, Julia was feeling unsure again and afraid of what might happen next at the school. Would they burn the school down? Would she and the other girls be further abused somehow? Would they try to steal them, one at a time, or all at once, and hurt them? Would they try to sell them back into slavery?
She lay for hours, listening to her roommates breathing and snoring, some restless and almost fighting in their sleep, some laying quiet and still, before finally succumbing to sleep herself. She kept thinking about whether she should stay in Canterbury and endure the hatred and mobs, or try to go somewhere else, somewhere safer. But where would that “somewhere safer” be?
#
May 3, 1833
The evening study period was long since over, but no one seemed eager for bed. Spring had brought with it windy days, and tonight the wind rattled softly against the windows. Inside the parlor, the girls gathered around the fire with sewing baskets, books, and cups of evening green tea. Candlelight flickered warmly against the wallpaper, throwing long shadows across the room.
Julia sat near the hearth, darning a stocking that was badly in need of patching. Around her, the familiar sounds of the school filled the room: the scratch of a pencil across paper, the click of knitting needles, the occasional burst of laughter.
Miss Crandall sat at her teacher’s desk correcting papers, though every so often she looked up, listening to the conversation with quiet amusement.
“I should like to see Philadelphia one day,” said Sarah Harris, setting down her embroidery. “My uncle says there are bookstores there larger than some churches.”
“A city full of bookstores sounds like my idea of heaven,” another girl sighed.
“It sounds expensive,” said Eliza. A few girls tittered at that.
“What would you do in Philadelphia?” Julia asked.
Sarah considered. “Teach, perhaps. Or write.”
“Write?” asked Mary. “Truly?”
“Why not?” Sarah lifted her chin. “Men write books all the time. I see no reason women shouldn’t do the same.”
Miss Crandall glanced up over her spectacles. “I can think of no good reason either,” she said.
The room erupted with pleasant murmurs.
“My father says women have no business troubling themselves with the outside world, that this is the domain of the men and should stay theirs and theirs alone.” Mary said. “He says our duty is to make good and comfortable homes.”
A thoughtful silence settled over the room.
“There are worse duties,” said another of the girls.
“Surely there are,” Sarah agreed. “But surely there may be more than one duty in life. Men have duty to their family, duty to their work, duty to their country. Why not women?”
Julia listened quietly. At home in Boston, conversations among women usually concerned family matters and church affairs, things like household items that were a good value for the cost, or news of a neighbor who had fallen ill. Women talked of important things, certainly. Yet here, she regularly heard young women discussing much bigger concepts, including their own ideas and ambitions. It was not something she was accustomed to.
Miss Crandall set aside her stack of papers. “Well,” she said. “Since no one appears inclined toward turning in for the night, perhaps we should have a proper discussion. Tell me, girls — what do you hope to do with your education?”
A moment of surprised silence followed.
“You mean after we’re done with school?” Eliza asked.
“Precisely.”
Several girls exchanged thoughtful glances, smiling a little at each other, imagining themselves all grown up and doing something exciting with their lives.
“I hope to teach,” Mary said first. “At least for a few years.”
“Few vocations are more worthy,” Miss Crandall commented.
“I would like to establish a dressmaker shop with my sister,” Sarah said. “A dressmaker and milliner shop where girls might choose their own colors and styles and define their own way of dress.”
“A radical notion,” Miss Crandall observed mildly.
Sarah grinned with pride.
One by one, each of the girls spoke about her plans for the future — to teach, to become missionaries, to write, to travel.
When Miss Crandall’s eyes finally settled upon Julia, the room grew gently quiet.
“And you, Miss Williams?”
Julia looked down at the stocking in her lap. “I also wish to teach,” she said.
Several girls nodded, unsurprised.
“I want to build schools for colored children. There are still very few schools of this kind.” She paused, folding the stocking carefully and placing it in her lap. “I would like there to be schools for everyone.”
The room fell deeply silent. Some girls had stopped what they were doing, eyeing Julia with curiosity.
“I would like to establish schools for colored children wherever they are needed. Good schools. Schools where they might study every subject available to any other child.”
Miss Crandall smiled softly. “Quite a noble ambition.”
Julia looked around the room. In the firelight she saw attentive faces, all holding her dream with her, a dream of education for everyone. For a moment Julia felt something she had rarely allowed herself to feel: proud of her own ideas and the possibility of their fulfillment.
Outside, the spring winds continued to sweep across the dark Connecticut fields. Inside, around the small parlor hearth, a different future seemed not merely imaginable, but potentially within reach.
#
May 9, 1833
Julia stepped carefully across the yard toward the school, a heavy water bucket pulling at her arm. It was a chilly spring morning, and the ground near the well was wet and soft, muddying her shoes. She paused for a moment, wiping her shoes in the grass before approaching the back steps of the schoolhouse. For a moment, she gazed up at the school.
Thin boards covered two of the windows now. The rough planks had been nailed hastily across the shattered glass after the last mob attack, crooked enough that cold drafts still slipped through the cracks. One board had already begun warping from rainwater.
Julia stared at them longer than she meant to. The building looked wounded. It was not ruined exactly — Miss Crandall would never let it become ruined. The floors were still swept every morning. Lessons still began promptly at eight. The brass bell beside the entryway still shone from polishing. But the school no longer looked untouched by the world. A gust of wind rattled the loose board slightly against the frame, and suddenly Julia remembered the first time she had seen the school.
It had been late afternoon when the stagecoach finally rolled into Canterbury after days of travel from Boston. Julia still remembered how stiff her legs felt climbing down onto the dirt road, how tightly she had clutched her small satchel while looking around at the unfamiliar town.
Then she saw the schoolhouse standing on the rise above the road, its white-painted tall-windowed grandness. It looked so solid. It rose like a monument in her mind, the school she was chosen to attend. Her heart had swelled with pride and excitement.
That day, it seemed like the sunlight made the building shine so brightly. The glass of the windowpanes gleamed with flashes of gold. A few of the upper windows had been opened to let in the fresh air from the warm weather, and curtains drifted softly in the breeze.
Julia remembered thinking that it looked exactly like what a school ought to look like — so steadfast, so respectable, so safe. She heard girls’ voices from an open window — laughter and conversation spilling from inside, voices that seemed to be calling out to her, welcoming her to her new home. One girl sat reading beneath a tree while another hurried across the grass carrying books against her chest.
Julia had never seen so many Negro girls gathered for learning before. They were not servants’ children trying to sneak a book to learn some words. They were not at church being taught by the bible. They were full-fledged students, learners in their own right.
She remembered standing there with her heart pounding, hardly able to believe she belonged among them.
A door had opened then, and Miss Crandall herself stepped out onto the front stoop. She had warm eyes and hair that swept across her forehead, almost like a man’s. Her cheekbones had a sharpness to their definition.
“You must be Miss Williams,” she had called out warmly.
Julia remembered immediately straightening her posture. “Yes, ma’am, I am.”
“Welcome to Canterbury,” she said, her bright eyes holding onto Julia’s for a long moment. They were such simple words, yet Julia had never felt so truly welcomed before. No one outside her family had ever spoken to Julia as though her arrival somewhere truly mattered.
Miss Crandall descended the steps and took one of Julia’s bags before she could protest.
“You’ve come a long way,” she said kindly. “You must be tired.”
But Julia had not felt tired then — only hopeful, and grateful, in ways so large they almost scared her.
Back then the windows of the school had stood wide open to the world. Now they were broken, some of them, and boarded shut.
“Julia?”
Sarah’s voice startled her from the memory. Julia turned to see Sarah standing in the doorway, holding it open with one hand.
“Are you planning to stand out there all morning?” Sarah asked with a faint smile. “Or are you bringing that water inside?”
Julia glanced once more toward the boards nailed over the windows. Then she lifted the bucket again and climbed the steps into the school.
