Finding a Place in New Orleans

Already the biggest hurdle was passed. Without changing her mother's views, the long talks between them had only confirmed Charlotte's determination to be a singer. If Unitarianism had prepared her for anything, if Emerson had expressed any truth, she saw herself now, standing calm and unruffled, in a universe of uncertainties. The intuitive voice within her seemed to be indicating her proper place.

Still, logic and intuition could not scatter all the clouds in her heart the afternoon in late November when she took her long farewell of Mary Eliza and Susan, her tall brother Charles, and the large-eyed, unsmiling little Augustus. She begged them to write, then cried that there was really no cause for tears; in a few months she could send home money enough to take them out of the boardinghouse forever. Then bundles in hand, she made her way up the gangplank, turned, and smiled a little too cheerfully down to the huddled figures struggling to return her smile. The hope of later reunion would have to sustain them all.

But in Mary Eliza, deeper fear trembled. Catholic New Orleans was hardly civilized; in morals and outlook it stood a universe away. Even worse, it was diseased. In October 1832, yellow fever had carried off five thousand people; one-sixth of the city had died. In the summer of 1833 fever had killed more thousands. Every city could expect to pay some annual toll to pestilence, but New Orleans seemed uniquely sick. How could Charlotte expose herself to such risks, the family to so much worry, so far away?

Charlotte had faced the big question. She regretted the family's worry about her, she understood fully their sense of loss as she told them good-bye, but the family must bear in mind its responsibility to her. She must do what she must. Her judgment and the temper of the times said go. Wealth at the end of the rainbow, free land at the end of the trail had long been popular refrains along the eastern seaboard; their echoes extended at least as far back as the Puritan "Adventurers" pushing into the wind off Southhampton, and as far ahead as the white lines of wagons plodding westward beyond the Appalachians and the Mississippi. It took stuff to brave the journey: the destiny in it could not be denied.

With her own determination fully intact, Charlotte pioneered by taking her stance on the swaying deck of a tall ship named, interestingly enough, the Star--even if doing so was a little strange. The few young women who left home in the 1830s usually went as wives, armed like their men with high hopes and long rifles. Single girls at nineteen rarely imagined themselves in such a parade. It would be years before Charlotte would see anything peculiar in her forthright shouldering of her family's load. Like the old Puritans, she mingled her hopes for new freedom with a stern conviction. If this trip had much to do with freedom to live as she wanted, it had much to do with duty. The will of God and the duty to those at home looking to her for help sat squarely upon her.

The Star docked in New York for only a day. Charlotte considered making a quick farewell to the Judds, but knowing their views toward theatre, she thought better of it. Later she wrote to Sam Judd, "I feared for my reception and would rather not have seen you at all than braved your unkindness to me,"¹ though the Judds had never been unkind, only concerned lest she make a fatal mistake. This business of becoming a stage person, of facing up to one's destiny, exacted its toll.

Leaving New York, Charlotte first felt the rhythm peculiar to all actors, the continual round of departures that sets their measure, the perpetual journey that becomes for them their only settled place. For Charlotte, this break with all the world she knew determined her destination, the sparkling new stage of the St. Charles Theatre now nearing completion in far-off New Orleans. Aboard the Star, Charlotte noted her fellow passengers, some like herself recruits for the new St. Charles: James and Clara Fisher Maeder and their infant; the young Louisa Lane just beginning her own career; and several Italian musicians.²

For nine days, the Star trailed its easy wake over the swells around Cape Hatteras, then through the Florida Straits into the Gulf toward the mouth of the brown Mississippi. Entering the Balize, the Star met another ship with other recruits direct from England, the soprano Mrs. Gibbs and the comedian Latham. At the docking, a flurry of happy congratulations tore through all the St. Charles people; their chatter about the promising times ahead only heightened Charlotte's own tense elation.

Descending the plank, she saw a harbor at once like Boston's and once like no other place in the world. For a Long Wharf, New Orleans had a vast three-mile levee holding in check the Mississippi's lazy flood. It could service a whole flotilla of merchant ships; dozens of strangely flagged and painted vessels plied their business directly along it; storehouses and cotton presses stretched in a long busy line. Steamboats squatted at anchor, more elaborate than any Charlotte had seen plying the Hudson to Albany or the waters of Long Island Sound. Pushing and heaving among them, crude rafts and low-slung arks from the upper river and its tributaries hugged the water line. Boatmen in fur caps and buckskin poled their makeshift crafts among the larger vessels. Sweating black slaves sang in time to the rhythm of the heavy loads they swung in an endless line from ship deck to drays waiting on the docks.

In the flat green city that stretched beyond the levee, Charlotte sensed immediately the distance she had covered. Her voyage out of Massachusetts Bay had left behind, along with the familiar chill of New England's winters, its tight-lipped restraints and material push. A casual air here swayed the palms; dwellings and shops nestled in tangled vines and climbing roses. In this heavy air, where the forty thousand people of New Orleans moved easily along the low-curbed streets, New England's sharp-edged convictions had little place.

Charlotte soon discovered that though Americans had been making their inroads in New Orleans apparent ever since 1803, housing themselves under spreading oaks and magnolias in the Garden District, pushing their commercialism into the character of the town, they had scarcely loosened the ties New Orleans still maintained with its older culture. Corn pudding and roast beef found little favor; tastes still ran to light sauces and fine wines. Back home, Boston thrust its Georgian towers skyward from the top of its rocky hills, but New Orleans basked in the heavy sun of its gardens, the rain dripping from the green iron of its verandahs.

The new St. Charles Theatre was meant to accommodate the city's American interests and the vast wave of English-speaking transients that flowed into town each winter. When Charlotte arrived, the influx from the plantations and the hinterland upstream had already begun. In the course of a winter as many as forty thousand temporary faces might swell the crowds on New Orleans streets. Sharp-eyed Yankees, large-boned Kentuckians, loud Texans, and tall Virginians compounded a drama that erupted almost nightly in some sidewalk fracas, some altercation in a saloon. Among them swaggered the effete Louisiana planter, redolent of the air of old France, with his mannered confidence, his finely balanced temper. Indians skulked around the coffeehouses and markets. To the Irish comedian Tyrone Power, the special flavor of life in New Orleans was its blend of characters newly arriving each autumn.³

This was the crowd that Charlotte came to know best in New Orleans. The public she observed was largely masculine. The women of the parlors, the ballrooms, and promenades were beyond her reach and her notice. She would see the female population in fleeting glimpses, moving under male escort and peering seductively from behind their lace veils in the dark boxes at the St. Charles.

In this hedonistic city, she came only slowly to know anything beyond the neighborhood of the St. Charles. The theatre set her boundaries; her quick daily walks to and from work and the tall garret she rented in a house nearby spelled her major contacts with the life so clearly opposite from that of Boston. But Mary Eliza had been right about one feature of New Orleans. Even the shortest walk exposed one to the most incredible smells. Stagnant gutters and ditches ran through all its streets, the breeding ground no doubt of every kind of pestilence. And indirectly word would reach her about the passions that quickly flowered, then as quickly withered in pistol smoke under the giant oaks of City Park or in the garden behind the Cathedral.

Faced with the subtle charm and temptations of New Orleans, Charlotte did not forget her reason for coming. At nineteen, she might sense the wide gulf between her own healthy square looks and the enticing grace behind the lace veils, but her Yankee practicality looked beyond this life of pleasure toward the profit it could bring. From whatever idle amusement she might give New Orleans as an opera singer, she hoped to reap a more practical joy. The path to fortune and happiness for her was the narrow line of hard work at the St. Charles.

In a sense, her contract at the St. Charles was the fruit of another man's labor. James H. Caldwell, once a leading English comedian at Manchester and Bath, had emigrated to America in 1817, but his work at the Charleston theatre had created difficulties. His quarrels with the manager had led to a duel, the duel had set off a riot that wrecked the theatre, and Caldwell had fled to New Orleans. Here he had amassed a fortune, become a social leader, and was just now realizing his greatest dream, the building of the finest theatre in America. He still acted occasionally, but by now his major interest centered in the business aspects of theatre and his franchise to light the city with gas.⁴ The love of his life was divided between his lavish new playhouse and the actress, Jane Placide, for whom he had erected it.⁵

The house had few equals. Abroad, only the opera houses in Naples, Milan, and St. Petersburg could match it.⁶ Built at a cost of $325,000, an incredible sum for the day, soaring dramatically above the adjacent buildings, its tall Corinthian and Doric columns set it abruptly apart. Its parquet floor, the four tiers of boxes, and a high gallery for Negroes extending almost to the domed ceiling could seat four thousand people. Its private boxes, the only area for women, were richly curtained and finished in mahogany. A massive gas chandelier weighing over two tons shed brilliant light through thousands of cut-glass drops. Charlotte could only gaze up at the light and the vast reaches of the theatre and feel amazed.

On December 1, 1835, the date set for her New Orleans debut, the theatre was not wholly finished. Rains had delayed the work repeatedly; one incredible deluge had lasted ninety days. A temporary chill and lack of cheer filled it. It was not an easy place for a debut. Nor were the high standards New Orleans demanded an easy challenge to face.

In spite of its casual air, New Orleans brooked no compromise in its art. Its sophisticated Creoles had long ago set one of the most exacting standards in the theatre world, and that standard had carried over into its English-speaking audiences. Once seated, once the curtain had lifted, they held themselves silently attentive. No "society buzz" vied with the voices on stage; except between acts, there was no visiting from box to box. Before such people an actor had little chance to conceal a bungled sentence, a slurred phrase, a fault in timing. Not until the end of a scene did the crowd express any reaction. If it approved, its bravos rang splendidly; its delight was inspiration to the actor. But its disapproval could paralyze; its cold silence could terrify even a veteran.⁷

Another factor in New Orleans life was no less disturbing. For all its interest in current affairs, its concern for cotton and slave prices and the business picture in general, its fascination with the Washington and New York scenes, and the bitter campaign currently raging beyond the Sabine in Texas where American settlers were struggling for freedom from Mexico, New Orleans paid careful heed to its theatre critics. It followed religiously the highly articulate voices of the Bee and the Picayune, opinions that could make or break a beginning career.

Charlotte's earlier fears in Boston did not begin to match the icy dread that surged through her now, alone on this gigantic stage. No papers had given her any comforting advance publicity; no Charley Wiggin was on hand to commend her to the theatre; no friendly support smiled up at her from a full row of friends and relatives. In her mind a single thought stood uppermost. This one first night could make or break her hopes for a whole season--and the bright dreams of a whole family. Young as she was in the theatre, her run at the Tremont had taught her that every appearance on stage brought new unknowns, a fresh chance to triumph, a new chance to fail. Audiences guaranteed nothing. By the rules of the game, she would stand this night on her professional merits alone.

Almost in panic, she had one slight comfort. She was opening in a familiar role, the Countess Almaviva. And she had the warm wishes of Clara Fisher Maeder as the Cherubino and of Mrs. Gibbs as Susanna.

The men in the audience--the planters and merchants, the transients not yet settled down for a break in their high-life in town--and the stiff formal groups in the boxes sat through a performance that left few of them happy. If they did not shout down her embarrassingly bad efforts, neither did they applaud. Charlotte's taut nerves, her short breath, her heavy movements in her costume brought her almost to the verge of collapse. Her top tones came out incredibly shrill. The final curtain mercifully ended a fiasco.

The silence in Charlotte's own records of the night matched the silence of her first New Orleans audience, but the papers of December 4, after her second attempt in Mozart's opera, give more than a clue to the reason. The Bee praised Clara Maeder for her acting and gave mixed praise to Mrs. Gibbs for a voice that was soft and sweet though deficient in volume, but for the newcomer, Charlotte Cushman, it expressed only derision. For all the weakness of Mrs. Gibbs' voice, it was "greatly superior to that of Miss Cushman, who made the worst countess we have had the honor of seeing for some time." Mrs. Gibbs was "a second rate singer," but Miss Cushman was only "bearable."

Facing such bitter words, Charlotte's silence veiled her calamity. She was contracted for an entire season, but who could say if her later efforts would elicit happier reactions in this appalling city? She might yet find her bearings on this formidable stage--using whatever talent she had thought she had--but logic could not ease her disappointment. The future that had glowed so brightly in Boston now lay at her feet.

Later reports would declare that in New Orleans Charlotte lost her singing voice gradually, but from the first the Bee's criticisms tell a different story. The promise she had shown in Boston had disappeared completely by the time she made her bow at the St. Charles. If it was nerves, if it was the change in climate, if it was the newness of the barn-like theatre, or the soprano role that Maeder had cast her in--when strictly speaking she had always been a contralto--the odds were stacked against a brilliant beginning. While the chance to sing with the best theatre orchestra in America might have offered encouragement, it had only increased her fears. The twelve hundred seats of the Tremont had seemed a reasonable limit to carry, but the four thousand seats and the towering height of this palace-like theatre had proved something else. After a third lamentable performance on December 10, Caldwell withdrew The Marriage of Figaro; the ability of Charlotte Cushman and the other singers had proved no match for the theatre's lofty expectations.

Though Charlotte's lamentable efforts that first night foretold her early end as a singer, she tried valiantly during the remaining five months of her contract to please in other singing roles. On December 5, she sang the Princess of Navarre in Isaac Pocock's John of Paris. On the sixteenth, she was the Patrick of O'Keeffe's The Poor Soldier. Sympathetically, James Murdoch recalled seeing Charlotte's first appearance as a singer forced to tax her uncertain powers in too large a hall. But dressed in her soldier costume, Charlotte impressed Murdoch with her "fixed and determined purpose," a subtle clue that she still had other resources.⁸

The papers remained unsparingly caustic; were this Miss Cushman not a pupil of Maeder, on whose recommendation Caldwell had employed her, "she would not be thrust forward in and out of season." The Bee granted Charlotte some acting ability, particularly in her hoarsely rendered recitations, but "we would as soon hear a peacock attempt the carols of a nightingale as to listen to her squalling caricature of singing." Seldom in tune, she possessed neither "taste nor skill."⁹

As for the Maeders, for all their earlier confidence, they could not conscientiously argue that the papers were wholly wrong. But James Caldwell, more sympathetic than the papers, was not so easily swayed. He kept her busy, halfheartedly learning other singing parts. Throughout the weeks that led up to New Year's, she seldom left her garret room except to appear on stage. The Christmas revelry down in the streets only heightened her own despair, studying alone at the top of the stairs.

On January 4, 1836, she sang Lucy Bertram in Guy Mannering. In New Orleans no critic took it seriously enough to comment. On January 8, she recited the dramatic reading, The Standard of Liberty, recalling Andrew Jackson's New Orleans victory against the British in 1815. In this she achieved enough success to merit repeating it on January 16. She played a nonsinging Lady Freelove in Colman's The Jealous Wife on January 20. A week later Caldwell gambled again on her singing voice as Clymante in Dimond's opera, My Native Land. On February 5 she sang "Rise, Gentle Moon" in a musical medley by Gilbert. As Gillian, she sang several brief songs in a play called The Quaker. She played Margaretta in Rule a Wife and Have a Wife with the English star, Thomas Cooper, and the company's tragedian, James Barton, also a transplant from England.¹⁰

Those labor-filled weeks added up to a long wistful struggle against almost impossible odds. Only blind determination and a certain honesty made her keep working. Her living and the small sums she contrived to send home to Mary Eliza depended on her playing the roles assigned, however much she might tell herself that the Bee's stings foretold unavoidable failure. In rare odd moments, she eked out her small income by copying "lengths" of parts for other actors. During the long months of the spring of 1836, stricken with the bitterest homesickness, she tried to prepare herself for the day when she must return in defeat to Boston.

She tried and failed again on April 11. Though her role as one of the wicked sisters in Lacy's Cinderella called for no important singing, the Bee laughed at her. "Miss Cushman can sing nothing . . . in mercy to the audience," in justice to herself, she should limit herself to acting parts, in which she could perform "with success."¹¹

If newspaper venom ever affected the course of an artistic career, the Bee's hostility on April 12 spelled the beginning, not the end, for Charlotte. Unbeknown to Maeder, whose goodwill she had come to doubt in New Orleans' repeated scorn of her voice, she pondered what other recourse she might have. Gathering her courage, she went to James Caldwell. Though a shrewd businessman and a master manipulator of the people in his employ, the owner of the St. Charles gave her a sympathy born of grief. Jane Placide had recently died; his own hopes for the time ahead had vanished in disappointment. In the face of Charlotte's sour reception, Caldwell might have cancelled her contract; he might have sent her home to Mary Eliza's knowing looks and the willing arms of Charley Wiggin.

Instead, Caldwell gave her advice: "You ought to be an actress, and not a singer."¹² She should study some straight dramatic parts. Explaining her problem, he commended her to his tragedian, James Barton. Barton took her in hand.

In later years Clara Maeder and Charlotte would remember differently the incidents leading to the night of April 23, 1836. To Clara, Charlotte's difficulties were due to the girl's own willfulness: the work of practicing her singing roles was too "arduous"; she was "badly stage-struck."¹³ But Charlotte, just as surely, would blame her difficulties in part upon Maeder, for forcing her into roles too high because he needed "the upper register of my voice, which as his wife's voice was a contralto, it was more to Mr. Maeder's interest to use than the lower one."¹⁴ Whether Maeder was to blame or not, Charlotte's loss of her singing powers was a step toward a brighter day. In place of the singing voice that had promised such high rewards, a powerful speaking voice had gradually emerged, a voice that could range from the deepest baritone to a delicate treble.

Barton had already noted Charlotte's penchant for acting. Since there was always room in the theatre for an energetic young woman who could speak lines intelligently, Barton echoed Caldwell's own counsel: "You're a born actress; go on the stage. You cannot fail; you must succeed."¹⁵ Charlotte had already proved her ability as a dramatic reader. Barton was soon to appear in Macbeth; perhaps Charlotte could play opposite him.

If the thought of attempting an exacting role like Lady Macbeth dismayed her, it did not prevent her from setting to work immediately. Except for a brief respite on April 18 and the following two nights to play Helen MacGregor in Rob Roy, a straight role she played in a man's Scotch bonnet and a brace of pistols, she kept herself closeted in her room, poring over her lines.

The challenge was large. Ever since Mrs. Siddons had taken the role to new heights in the late eighteenth century, the part of Lady Macbeth had been considered the acme of the tragedienne's art. Long an admirer of the Siddons-Kemble school of acting, Barton's scholarly notions of stage art, his studious habits, his retiring nature, his gentlemanly manner put Charlotte at ease; under his guidance, she took heart. Perhaps, if she had any future, it lay on the legitimate stage, as Barton and Caldwell and the ill-tempered Bee suggested.

Together in her garret room, Barton and Charlotte worked again and again through the heavy rhythms. Barton remembered seeing the great Mrs. Siddons. Her Lady Macbeth had been infinitely feminine. Deeply in love with her husband, insanely ambitious for him, she had been a subtle wife who ruled her mate with a caress, spurring him to crime and violence with a kiss.¹⁶ But Barton was too perceptive a student of Shakespeare to insist upon this as the only reading. The character inevitably took its coloring from the actress. Barton saw in Charlotte a strongly aggressive, vitally healthy young woman with a husky voice who would appear ludicrous aping the gentle conception of Mrs. Siddons.

More perceptively, Barton sensed in the girl a depth of emotion, a force that had not yet "found" itself. Under his lead, Charlotte must channel her feelings into the very heart of the role. But for the worried girl from Boston, still wearing her reserve like an armor, forgetting herself was hardly so simple. Charlotte hesitated; Barton insisted. Without revealing herself, she could not hope to bring Lady Macbeth alive. Still she held back; Barton demanded: she must open herself wide. In her worry, Charlotte doubted that she had any such hidden reserves.

The moment had arrived for desperate measures. Barton may have recalled Edwin Forrest's narrow escape from a shark, an episode that had occurred some years before while Forrest was en route from New Orleans to Philadelphia. During a sudden calm, Forrest had peeled off his shirt and dived into the sea, circled the ship, then lay back treading water. But a frantic cry of "Shark!" had set him thrashing wildly toward the anchor chain; he had pulled himself up to safety just in time, then had lain breathless on deck staring up into a circle of terrified faces. But Forrest, instead of panicking, had taken the moment as a chance to learn something about basic emotions. Lying quietly on deck, he had calmly considered the span of feelings that had swept over him; recalling these later would increase his skill as an actor.¹⁷

Forrest's experience involved a practical technique, an early suggestion of Stanislavsky's "memory-of-emotion" system, and Barton had already discovered its value. He would put it to use now on Charlotte. Hurling out every imaginable rudeness, belittling her "puny" efforts as an actress, scoffing at her "ridiculous" hopes to make her mark in anything, Barton put her into a towering rage. At the top of her lungs, crying between the words she thundered back at him, she vented all the passion and fire she had in her. While she stormed and wept, Barton stood back observing. With his experienced eye, he saw what he had long suspected. The girl had all the physical and mental attributes of a fully fledged tragic actress. Her expressive face and ringing voice registered every quality necessary in creating a living character on stage.¹⁸

When Charlotte had cried herself out, Barton admitted his miserable trick. And collapsed in her chair, she recognized that she had just gone through an effective lesson in acting. She had seen for herself, at long last, the proof of her own emotional powers. In Barton's confidence and in her own discovery she gradually sensed an awakened belief in herself.

Ever since Elkanah's defeated withdrawal from the family, she had known that any achievement she might make must come through her own efforts. Now in April 1836, she could look back over her bitter failures as a singer at the St. Charles and know she was not really broken. She could tell herself now that Barton's trust was more solidly founded than Maeder's; deep in her own artistic conscience she sensed a keener certainty. Fate often chose puzzling ways to open doors.

From Barton, with an occasional assist from Caldwell, Charlotte received the broad foundation of a permanent technique. During the months at the St. Charles she had watched one of the grand exponents of the Siddons-Kemble school of acting, Thomas Cooper. His style had blended a dignity of manner with an elegance of diction that translated into majesty on the stage. Like Sarah Siddons herself, Cooper acted from a theory that saw in art a purpose to elevate nature, to exclude the ugly, to exalt the ideal. Grandeur was its key; grand declamation and statuesque posture and movements were its structure.

Charlotte had seen a hint of the theory in William Macready, but now, under Barton's repeated drillings, she comprehended its larger aims. The mind-battering sessions with him, their repeated readings of Shakespeare's rolling periods were the only real acting lessons she ever received. She would always observe carefully another actor's individual tricks, the means he used to achieve certain effects, but never again would she undergo such disciplined training in the craft of acting, in vitalizing a character into form and motion and sound.

One detail about playing Lady Macbeth Charlotte failed to mention until the day she was due to perform. Partly because she had immersed herself so deeply in learning the lines, partly because she feared the consequences, she waited until the last afternoon to mention to Caldwell that she had no costume. Later performers would escape the eleventh-hour distractions of supplying their own costumes and makeup and wigs, but in the theatre of Charlotte's youth, actors solved such problems themselves.

And Charlotte had no costume; on her slender means she had no real way to acquire one. Fearing his wrath, but hoping the late hour would prevent his assigning the role to anyone else, she took her problem to Caldwell at the end of the last rehearsal. Caldwell tempered his annoyance with some dismay. The papers had already broadcast the word that tonight Charlotte Cushman would appear as a dramatic actress, as Lady Macbeth, "a character which she has been studying under a competent teacher."¹⁹ The performance could hardly be cancelled. She must dress herself in some sort of makeshift. The other important house in New Orleans, the French Theatre, often gave Macbeth in translation. Perhaps its Lady Macbeth could help. Caldwell dispatched his tall slender actress with a note to Madame Clozel, but at the latter's dressing room door she met a surprise. Clozel was short and enormously stout; her waist measured nearly seventy-two inches.

Sensing immediately Charlotte's tearful alarm, Madame Clozel gave out a great laugh, threw out her arms, and ushered her in. She unwrapped her own costume, shook out its folds, and then set to work lowering hems, basting wide tucks, adding dark draperies to hide the quick stitches. The result would hardly bear close inspection, but from the proper stage distance it would serve. As a final touch she threw several large folds of point lace and some strands of white wax beads over the shoulders.²⁰

April 23, the Bard's anniversary, took on a new meaning this spring of 1836. Whispering a prayer that tonight she could prove, once and for all, her claims for an acting career, Charlotte swept on stage in her heavy dark draperies and bone white beads, her tone suggesting a dawning awareness that the witches' prophecy for Macbeth's destiny held a clue as well for his lady's.

An actor's lines on stage match only rarely his real feelings and thoughts as he moves through his paces, but Lady Macbeth's early lines paralleled the thoughts that had surged for days in the determined young actress reading the letter. For Charlotte, it remained for this performance as Lady Macbeth to show if "the valor of her tongue," the power of her speech could spell her success; but she was hardly into the evening before she sensed that some turn of events was shaping. Playing her big scenes squarely at the point where the dim rays of the footlights converged in a focus, remembering that all the big effects had to be centered there in order to register at all in the vast house, she played the role as she and Barton conceived it, a passionate figure of towering gestures and ringing, declamatory tones.

While her careful diction paid due regard to the standards of Mrs. Siddons, Charlotte rejected completely the divine Sarah's feminine concept of the role. This Lady Macbeth embodied a virile determination to cower her weakling husband into total obedience. In Charlotte Cushman, New Orleans saw Lady Macbeth become the dominant goading force in an essentially masculine play, hands clutching a pair of daggers, eyes blazing an obsessed ambition, chin set firm to the task ahead, overriding completely Macbeth's own moral doubts.

From pit to highest gallery the St. Charles saw the young woman become a monumental compound of fierce intensity and organ-like tones, determinedly pressing her aims, failing at last in a maze of sleep. Alongside this torrent, Barton's noble Macbeth was a pale thing scarcely seen.

An electrified audience saw "a pantheress let loose."²¹ Charlotte's ragtag costume had become queenly robes, blackly regal wings appropriate to the dark outlines of the character. Many in the audience saw the wife of Glamis become real for the first time; the written lines of a poet had become the flesh and fire of a Queen. Long before the final curtain, Charlotte realized that the great waves of applause welling up around her now presaged for her the brightest possible future. Her curtain bows accepted the frenzied cheers. And backing again through the break in the curtains, her hand grasped firmly in Barton's, she took a higher acclaim amid the actors assembled on stage.

Suddenly, James Barton knew the bounding joy that comes to the patron when his protégée is recognized. Almost from the start, he had seen the promise that had enkindled the ovation still roaring beyond the curtains. Now, madly elated, he pumped Charlotte's hands, then dashed off through the people crowding around her, wildly crying, "I knew it, I knew it, the greatest living actress on the stage."²²

It was too soon for Charlotte herself to grasp the full impact of the ringing applause and Barton's glorious words, but already the world had taken a different stance. She could later dismiss this first performance with a terse "And thus I essayed for the first time the part of Lady Macbeth, fortunately to the satisfaction of the audience, the manager, and all the members of the company."²³ But at the time, the frenzied approval all around her foretold an end to homesickness and soul-distress. Just as surely as she had found her speaking tongue in school long ago in Boston, she had now found her artistic instrument, the tool to forge out, in a chaotic world, an ordered place for herself and her family.

The Bee would still remind its readers that Miss Cushman's limitations in opera were "pro-di-gi-ous!" but it cheered her success in Shakespeare. She should confine herself now to straight drama.²⁴

Charged now with a vigor born of new hope, she proved again on May 12 her skill as a quick study in The Tempest. Two nights later she played Lucretia Borgia in a play replete with murder and matricide, another chance to exhibit her special powers.²⁵ On the sixteenth and seventeenth she spoke a prologue to The Martyr Patriots; on the nineteenth she was Fatima in Bluebeard with Clara Maeder--recalling the childish delight she had found on the makeshift stage in Mary Eliza's attic. Next night, "by particular desire," she appeared again as Lady Macbeth and received as her personal benefit a percentage of the box office take in addition to her salary.²⁶

A week later the season ended. Her theatrical apprenticeship, her commitment to Maeder and Caldwell, was over. Though her days and nights had been constant study and acting, at times she had glimpsed the gaudier life Mary Eliza had feared. But while her mother might question Charlotte's ability to judge, New Orleans had not corrupted her; the ramparts of her moral convictions had held. Her sturdy good health had withstood whatever threats lurked in the city's malarial air. Free now to return to the patterned life she knew in Boston, she was equally free to pursue Barton's leads toward legitimate acting in New Orleans or somewhere else. Like the new Texas that had only last month broken its ties to Mexico, she stood now at an important crossroads and faced her freedom.

She decided against New Orleans. Yet her times South, as Whitman himself would phrase it, forever affected her outlook. Boston and New Orleans would stand as factions always at war in man's makeup, his vertical sense of practicality conflicting with his horizontal sense of pleasure. The dilemma did not greatly trouble her, other interests gave her graver concern, but in the later roads she traveled, the later cities she chose, her standards implicitly blended the two. Puritan restraint and Creole geniality, she discovered on this first long break with Boston, were the double facets of her own nature.

She did not really wish to return to the home and hearth of her childhood. Her Boston past had already become a prelude to ampler ranges. During these agonizing months in New Orleans, she had discovered more than an acting talent and a speaking voice. She had sensed, without any chance to savor it, a taste for richer living. If Boston and New Orleans stood as hubs of their own diverse systems, she had learned that somewhere between sober propriety and heedless abandon centered the good life for her.

On June 1 she wrote Sam Judd in New York. She would sail tomorrow on the Edward Bonaffe for Philadelphia; from there she would come directly to New York by the twenty-fifth.²⁷ She wanted to see the Judds again, despite their hostility toward the life she had chosen, to thank them again for their kindness and to take whatever steps were necessary to establish herself in the role of dramatic actress.