On that occasion, I showed them the places where I had once wandered, the harborside and levee, the labyrinthine center of the French Quarter, even the old coffee stands where I used to dally as a young man. And I took them up the main commercial strip, where I had once worked for the better part of a year as a clerk in a store. When we came to that location, at number 3 Tchoupitoulas Street, we found that a store still existed there, selling, as far as I could tell, much of the same kinds of goods, though with many a modern addition to its inventory. I could not resist going inside to take in the old ambience.
Then we strolled over to my first boardinghouse, an old clapboard affair on St. Thomas Street. I was very touched to see that with the exception of some physical improvements to the premises and the addition of some rosebushes clustered by and adorning the front yard’s white picket fence, it was much as I remembered it. And because it had been such a happy place for me, a home where I had received much kindness, I felt a great curiosity to see if my former landlady Mrs. Williams still lived there. And so with my wife and mother-in-law in tow, I knocked on the front screen door. Shortly, as we waited in the heat of the day, we heard a voice calling from inside—“Hold on!” Though I had not heard that voice in years, it sounded like Mrs. Williams, and within those moments, I experienced a drawing back in time to my youth, when I knew little about the world. With those years falling away from my travel-worn self, I felt a strangely invigorating grace come through me. To my delight, when the door opened, there stood before us a pretty black woman, her hair all white and tied up in a bun; she was wearing a floral-patterned dress and an apron and smelled sweetly of lilac perfume. She was perhaps seventy or so, though her bearing and manner were youthful.
“What can I do for you folks?”
At first, she displayed no awareness that the well-dressed gentleman with his hat in hand and in the company of two ladies had been one of her boarders many years before. I had, indeed, changed: The lad of eighteen, with his youthful countenance and ruddy cheeks, who until he was twenty-five had never seemed to most people older than fifteen, now stood before her with his hair turned white, a weathered face, and a great walrus mustache.
“Good afternoon, madame. Are you the same Mrs. Jessica Williams who ran this boardinghouse in the years before the war?”
“I surely am and still do. And who might you be?”
“You may not remember me. My name is Henry Morton Stanley, but I once stayed here for the better part of a year in the late 1850s, under another name, Mr. John Rowlands.”
Looking me over, she finally declared: “Why, the little Welsh boy, Mr. Johnny! Come in, come in!” And she beamed so delightfully, shaking all our hands and smiling so gratefully, in a way not often seen in our lofty London circles, that even my most aristocratic mother-in-law was charmed. “Oh, my,” Mrs. Williams said with excitement. “Ain’t you the very one I have been reading ’bout in the papers!”
Indeed, my arrival in New Orleans had been much publicized in advance, thanks to my agent, Major Pond — my every lecture advertised and every luncheon and dinner engagement duly noted. Extensive, too, had been reports of my African exploits and the celebration of my return as an “adopted son of the city.” Yet I felt somewhat humbled to be in Mrs. Williams’s presence, for she had known me before I had become the “great Henry Stanley.”
We sat in her parlor and reminisced, but as I had some pressing engagement awaiting us later that afternoon, we could not stay as long as I would have liked. As we took our leave, Mrs. Williams told my wife—“Your husband, ma’am, was one of the most polite and studious of my boarders, and neat as a pin and grateful for the littlest things. Always thought he would land on his feet one way or the other. But never in all my days did I think to see him go so far in this world; you’ve made an old woman happy, coming here, you certainly have.”
When we parted, though I wished to embrace her, for the thought occurred to me that I would probably never see Mrs. Williams again, my affectionate side, seen by so few in this life, remained within, buried under the shell of my long-practiced formality. So in farewell, I simply took her hand in mine and held it for a few moments. She smiled, and I could see a few tears in her kindly eyes. I came away from that visit in a solemn rather than joyous mood, as in those moments, I had repeated one of the great failings of my life — an inability to express, regardless of my desire to do so, just how deeply moved I could feel by a person.
IN THE COURSE OF THAT LECTURE TOUR, I had been presented with honorary university degrees and keys to one city and another and with medals and plaques and certificates singing my praises, but as my visit with Mrs. Williams had come on the heels of so many formal occasions, that brief meeting, standing out in my mind, seemed to have a subtle effect on my emotions. For I continued to think about our visit together, my mind vexed by how so simple a soul, whose importance to the greater world was negligible, had certainly found contentment, while I seemed to be in the midst of a perpetual mad scramble to preserve my fame and reputation.
WITH MR. TWAIN
From Lady Stanley’s Unpublished Memoir
THE YEARS 1891–92 were occupied with much travel. When we returned from America in April, after a short rest in London, Stanley was pressed to fulfill a commitment to tour the British Isles, our journeys taking us, by private train, out from London to the far reaches of Scotland and Wales. Wherever he appeared — to champion the cause of England’s further involvement in Africa — the public gathered. (There was another category of lecture as welclass="underline" Stanley would receive a heartfelt summons from an earnest vicar speaking on behalf of his parish. Because he was known, in some devout circles, for his pious work of bringing the Word to the savages of Africa, as per the example of his “second father,” David Livingstone, he was often sought out by the common religious folk, those lordly people of the earth who always asked Stanley to come to their churches to speak.) Aside from advocating that England build a great Congo railway, so as to link the isolated interior with the rest of the continent, he wanted the British people to rise to the challenge of fostering English civilization in East Africa — in the regions of Uganda and Kenya. He spoke before antislavery societies about the repression of the Arab slave trade, to medical societies about the training of medical officers, and to medical missionaries about the treatment of tropical diseases, for from his own experience with malaria, he saw that such diseases, unchecked, would eventually evolve into new plagues, impeding European progress in those countries. But many a deaf ear was turned to him.
Such tours were exhausting for my husband. While Mother and I sometimes accompanied him and could enjoy the amenities of luxury travel, we did not have to mount the stage and speak for several hours at a time. (Hard as he tried, he had only been able to get his Emin Pasha speech down to one hour and forty minutes.) Nor did we have to answer the unending questions of journalists or put up with the demands of holding forth with strangers at those meals. We were something of a buffer for Henry, and he had become grateful even for my mother’s company, for people are not so forward if you are not alone. What private moments he had, on such tours, when he was traveling without us, he cherished: His free time was spent reading or writing. Still, when ensconced in a room in a small-town inn, my husband, craving the fresh air, got into the habit of slipping out at every opportune moment.