Mill Towns

by Brett Rutherford

Old factories:

how painfully forgotten!

Once, the hopeful immigrants flocked to them.

Workers and foremen built cities around them,

if not exactly blessing the ground they stood on,

grateful at least to have escaped the whip

     or starvation back where they came from.

The railroads webbed out to meet them,

branch lines and sidings eager to take

the crates and bundles outside their gates.

Without them

     the towns have forgotten the reason

          of their founding.

What did they make?

cotton and calico prints,

steam engines and locomotives

parts of machines uncountable

and the tools to make other machines

and their parts uncountable,

rope walks, brass foundries,

lace- and jewelry-making,

light bulb assembly lines,

refrigerators and fountain pens,

and glory! a piano factory —

all now only names in peeling paint

checkered on bricks and falling signs. 

The nearby houses are humbled now

with torn clapboards,

rot beneath the stage paint of shingles,

the cheap bluster of aluminum siding,

walls bloated, foundations shifted,

split into rat-cell studios for commuters.

Many are boarded-up, foreclosed.

No one remembers when mansard slate

and gable and cupola gleamed new,

when a smokestack with a man’s name on it

was a place arrived at as a good sign

of a continued paycheck.

Things that got made here,

kept getting made.

Now these sad brick temples accuse us:

their plywood-covered windows,

their undecipherable placards,

the weed-trees on their loading docks,

the mystery of abandonment.

Like unburied dead they haunt the roadside,

somber in daylight, shunned and abhorred

when their shadows grow long at dusk.

They will not burn, their wearing away

protracted by fences and guardians.

(Heirs living on compounded interest

preserve them like Chinese puzzle boxes

they cannot open or understand.)

At night, another commerce lights up

the sidewalks along the chain-link fence

as women sell the only thing they have

from the pavement, and men in cars

circle, circle, hands offering dollars,

other hands offering, and taking, small

envelopes of powders and crystals.

Some midnights, the ghost machines awaken,

their ungreased axles screaming,

drive shafts spinning of their own accord.

A dynamo turns, and furnace mouths flicker

in the cool blue flame of St. Elmo’s Fire.

The power looms weave an invisible shroud:

it is long enough to enclose a city.

Tombs without occupants,

they wait for the rites that no one will pronounce.

—Pawtucket, Rhode Island, late 1980s.

From Poems from Providence, 1991.

An Exeter Vampire

by Brett Rutherford

Here is another little lesson in how line length can be used to create a special effect. This poem is about the famous Rhode Island vampire, Sarah Tillinghast, who comes back to kill off her family members one by one. (The family members most likely died of tuberculosis.) I wanted to create the effect of weakness, being out of breath, and suffocation. So instead of writing in the customary blank verse (10 syllables per line), I experimented by having the poem's lines being nine syllables long. They are cut short. The opening line, "She comes back ----- in the rain --- at midnight" is halting, 3 x 3, supporting the idea of being short of breath.

She comes back, in the rain, at midnight.

Her pale hand, not a branch, taps the glass.

Her thin voice, poor Sarah Tillinghast

whines and whimpers, chimes and summons you

to walk in lightning and will’o wisp

to the hallowed sward of the burial ground,

to press your cheek against her limestone,

to run your fingers on family name,

to let the rain inundate your hair,

wet your nightclothes to a clammy chill,

set your teeth chattering, your breath a

tiny fog within the larger mist.

You did not see her go before you,

and yet you knew she was coming here.

Soon her dead hand will tap your shoulder.

Averting your eyes, you bare your throat

for her needful feeding, your heat, your

heart’s blood erupting in her gullet.

You will smell her decay, feel the worms

as her moldy shroud rubs against you.

Still you will nurse the undead sister,

until her sharp incisors release you

into a sobbing heap of tangled hair,

your heart near stopped, your lungs exploding,

wracked with a chill that crackles the bones.

The rain will wash away the bloodstains.

You will hide your no more virginal

throat like a smiling lover’s secret.

Two brothers have already perished—

the night chill, anemia, swift fall

to red and galloping consumption.

Death took them a week apart, a month

beyond Sarah’s first night-time calling.

Honor Tillinghast, the stoic mother,

sits in the log house by the ebbing fire,

heating weak broth and johnny cakes.

One by one she has sewn up your shrouds—

now she assembles yet another.

She knows there is no peace on this earth,

nor any rest in the turning grave.

Storm ends, and bird songs predict the sun.

Upstairs, in garret and gable dark,

the children stir, weak and tubercular,

coughing and fainting, praying for breath.

The ones that suck by night are stronger

than those they feed on, here where dead things

refuse the Lord's sleep in Exeter,

sing their own epitaphs in moon-dance,

and come back, in the rain, at midnight.

_____

Exeter, Rhode Island’s “vampire” case of 1799 ended with the exhumation and destruction of the corpse of Sarah Tillinghast after four siblings followed her in death by consumption. They burned Sarah’s heart and reburied all the bodies.

Moving to Providence, 1985

by Brett Rutherford

This is Providence when it was still rather a hell-hole, but a very cheap place for writers to live. I moved there with my Siamese cat in 1985 and had eleven rooms in a Victorian house, for $450 a month. The unofficial state motto was "Mobsters and Lobsters" and the natives were exceedingly unfriendly. I lived there three years before I ever set foot in another person's house. I just found these poetic journal entries describing how awful it was, or seemed to be. For inexplicable reasons, I would spend almost half of my adult years in New England.

I have moved to Providence,

a writer’s paradise of low rents and large spaces.

The natives speak a dialect of broken English

conjugated with expletives. I have never heard

so many Fs and mother-F’s on a city bus.

They drive outdated cars, wide as bombers,

paint-scraped and dented,

leprous with rust-spot camouflage

turn corners with daring and macho screeches,

black trails of tires at every corner.

Boys at the corner loiter for cars, hand men
those little bags of powder they crave
as they furtively leave the off-ramp
for our disreputable neighborhood.
That the bags are full of baking powder
they will only learn later as even boys
know well the rules of cheat and sharp trading.

Eight of ten voters are Catholic,
virgins in little inverted bath-tubs adorn
the house fronts of the treeless side streets.
An old man tells me, “No trees. No birds.
No squirrels. No nuts. No leaves to rake.”

The heads of state and their families

control unmeasured tracts of property.

The governor’s name and picture adorn

each monolith and highway ramp.
Each sign must include “His Excellency”
before the current felon’s proper name.

The marble capitol is large enough

     to detain, if necessary,

     the entire electorate.

Well-known gangsters reside discreetly,

unperturbed by warrants or searches.
One tip-toes past the vending machine
storefront, the funeral home, the house
of the respected grandmother “of that name.”

Free enterprise is encouraged, narcotically.

Homes of the Anglo-rich are frequently burgled.

On a hill, the prestigious University

trains the sons of the rich

to assume their places of power.

The city is full of history, devoid of culture.

It drove out Poe, and tolerated Lovecraft
while watching him slant and starve.

It imports insults and toxic waste,

exports the simulacrum of itself:

cobblestones and shuttlecocks,

andirons and lightning rods and tassled shawls,

a horse, a red hen, a barrel of molasses

fresh from the Triangle trade.

The natives are known for aloofness,

their way of sidestepping foreigners.

Only family are invited to dinner.

Young men leave the state

to find a girl who isn't a cousin.

One must be introduced to a prostitute.

Despite all this, the artists come here.

Cheap is cheap. Besides, where else

can you find a Third World Country

without leaving New England?

Water Sprite (Providence)

Who are you, Water Sprite of the Seekonk? Who made you, this full moon night of lilacs, like spring itself a-burst, made you leap from the bulrushes of the park lagoon, your bare shoulders wet from the limpid waters, your long hair sun-gold (bleached white in lunary light, but sun-gold nonetheless!)?

Who made you so irresistibly beautiful. your visage the sculpted dream of surrender, your eyes the blue of hyacinth, of lapus lazuli?

As I rode by on my bicycle at midnight, who made you run naked to greet me, then leap into a clutch of chameleon trees?

Who made your fleeing soundless, as your bare feet sought stealth of moss?

Who, as I followed, bicycle laid flat on the clover grass and forgotten, made shards of you dissolve, in dapple of moonlight, in fall of blossom, uncurling fern and peeping mushroom?

Who made your soft voice beckon me, leading me deeper in woods. Circling, to come at you above and behind the lagoon edge, I came confounded to a rock at the other edge of the pool?

Was it your voice that whispered, as ripples subsided from a sinking point:

Follow me if you dare. I can be yours: mad angel of your destiny. Chase me forever – but I will always elude you — always escape to the other surface of water, of mirrors. Yours and not yours at the same moment, I will run through your hands like mercury.

I wait. Nothing rises to the surface to breathe. No bubble breaks the glass sheen of mirrored water. The night sky no longer wavers. The moon above, and the moon reflected, are equally still.

I ride home slowly, inhale the languor of cherry, the braggart bloom of magnolia, the luxury of lilacs. Who could resist this moon, this Dionysian spring? It draws us, real and unreal, mortal and mythical, quickens the water to form you, draws your spirit to my substance, my solitude to your incompleteness.

Were you some runaway, an escapee from the nearby asylum? A teen boy in moon-madness, seized by a sudden urge to plunge naked into the willow-fringed water? Or were you truly spectral, Ariel’s cousin?

Shall I return to find you some other spring first-night? Or shall you seek me out, coalescing from rainstorm? Will you press through my window-screen, cooling my night-heat with your smooth pale skin? Will you caress me with the patient ardor of ocean, the murmur of brooks in my ear? Will I taste dew on your lips?  And will you one day, as we stand at lake’s edge, pull me downward, arms strong as river currents?

Weeks pass. I keep seeing you in others, but others are not you. No one possesses the lilac scent of your impossible hair. No sight matches the clear blue window of your eyes above me.

A Toast to Wendy

The group known as “The Poets of the Palisades” gathers every New Years Eve to read poetry until midnight and beyond, and to enjoy and renew literary friendships that span decades. Two times the group met at a colonial bed-and-breakfast in Bristol, Rhode Island. This is a true account of the strangest bed-and-breakfast visit of all time.

A TOAST TO WENDY
by Brett Rutherford

1

Who fired the cannonball that this colonial manse
(now B-and-B a-host to poets!) caught up and lodged
in fireplace brickwork? The British, of course, from bay,
a frigate bearing down on Lafayette’s abode.
This red frame barn of a house leans back in salt air,
sheds heat from six-paned windows against the blizzard
of modernity. Its literary pilgrims
arrive on the noon of New Year’s Eve, their papers
bulging from backpacks, laptops, Dickensian journals.
They sign the open guest book: who sleeping with whom,
or chaste with Byronic doom-gloom, whose name is real
and whose pseudonymous, details of little note
as the house is all theirs. The rooms are all for them,
theirs the sole use the welcoming fire, the never-
exploding mortar of King George the Third inert
to even the most outrageous manifesto.

Off to their rooms they ascend on Escher staircase,
up front and down back amid the heaped-up bookshelves,
hostess-hoard of Brit-American volumes,
vestiges of her New York publishing career.
Like as not the bookshelves hold this place together
(Rhode Island shore a vast, connected termite nest
to hear the well-off exterminators tell it).
The walls bulge. Windows no longer square won’t open,
pipes rattle and hiss, the wide-planked floorboards gap-toothed
beneath the cat-scratched and faded Persian carpets.

The stooping elder Anderson greets them; son James,
a new face to them, lugs bags and reminds them,
“Wendy will not be with us. She is gravely ill,
told us from hospital bed she wanted you here.
No matter what, she wanted the poets again.”
Old Mr. Anderson seems dazed and disoriented.
He shuffles away as his son gives out advice
on local eateries. “Redleffsen’s the best,” James says.
He counts up heads for the morrow’s breakfast, assures
them he knows his way around the dim-dark kitchen
that looms cool-cave behind the formal dining room.
“We’ll get you breakfast, don’t fear. My father’s no help,
but Wendy made me promise to help you out.”
To the one he thinks is their leader, James adds:
“Of course a large tip would be appreciated,
since I’m off to the ski slopes once this is over.”

As midnight nighs, the fireplace sputters, poetry
sparks up and out, logs spurt out flame-salamanders,
to the lines of Thomas Hardy, to their Gothic
utterances, Poe-reimaginings, wild verse
salt-sown from Carthage in elephantine revenge,
Baudelairean bleedings, achings of heart-sweet
first love, oh what an overflow of unbashful
egos and peculiar tastes. James has joined in,
“I just want to listen,” he says. So on they go.
But when one translates from Russian (Akhmatova)
and reads “I drink to our ruined house, Ya pyu
Nad razorenni dom, James interrupts them, “No!
That is just too close for comfort. Let’s not say that.”
So they veer away from Russian. The Hardy book
makes another round with its bittersweet savor.
The dining room clock then rattles out its midnight
clamor; before twelve-stroke fireworks erupt somewhere;
drunks who failed to kill deer fire off at the heavens.
They break out the champagne. Glasses are passed around,
and one spontaneously says, “Let’s make a toast
to our absent hostess, a toast to Wendy!” “I'll join
in that,” James answers, half-choking the words.
“A toast to our absent hostess! A Wendy toast!”

They drink, and being poets, they read some more, and more.
It goes on till nearly two, till one by one and
two by two they rise to go on up to their rooms.
“Listen!” James calls out to them. “I could not say it,
while you were reading and sharing your work with us.
But I can tell you now that Wendy — my mother —
she died at ten o’clock this morning. Her last wish
was that you all have your New Year’s celebration.”

2
Who slept, if at all?
Who lay awake
and listened
as the bereft husband
in and out of knowing
roamed in his bedclothes
mouthing, Wendy? Wendy?
Then shaking his head,
You fool, she’s dead.

Whose door squeaked open
to Mr. Anderson’s plaintive
Wendy? Wendy?

Who listens as through
the floorboards
James phones his girlfriend
in Minnesota,
hears snatches of sentences:

“She was doing well,
brain-tumor surgery and all.
They planned to send her home,
but then the diabetes kicked in
and they had to amputate
both legs.”

What walked just then,
first up, then down
the crazy-angled staircase;
who thought he saw
a foot, a knee,
a calf, a thigh,
then rubbed his eyes
of sleep-sand
and saw nothing?

“And so I came home. First time
in a decade, to take my mom
to New York in her wheelchair.
Just one last time she wanted to see
the big tree at Rockefeller Center,
the lions at the Public Library,
the Bethesda Fountain.”

And who was it,
in search of toilet,
who saw and heard
the pages turn
in an open book,
the Oxford dictionary
on its oaken lectern,
turn, turn, turn of page
fast-furious,
yet not a hint of draft?
Who would not wish to know
what word was sought
and by whom or what?

“And then it got worse.
Back to the hospital.
They must have liked
her insurance policy.
This time they took her arms.
Both of them.
What was the point?
She died this morning.”

And who, in their bed

where the Gothic dame
and her platonic admirer
shared one chaste mattress,
reached out the hand
that made her yell

I told you not to touch me like that!

And just as he protested
That wasn’t me!

what kicked him hard,

rolled him clear off

the bed to the floor?
That wasn’t me! She cried.

“My father. His mind is gone.
We were in the hearse.
Taking her, you know.
And he had agreed
to God knows what,
signed up for ‘the best’.
I lost it.
We have no money for that.
We had a screaming fight,
right in the hearse,
and so, it being a holiday and all,
we never —”

What roamed the rooms
so that every third book
was pulled from its place
and left at shelf-edge?
The books, perhaps,
she never got around
to reading?

What rattled pots
in the kitchen
in the pre-dawn hour?
No, that was not a poltergeist:

just the quarrelsome son

and the still-angry father.

“There’s nothing fresh!

No eggs! No milk!

How are we going to feed

these people?”

A car roars off. As poets stir,

it screeches back in.

Doors slam. A coffee smell

wafts up. Sun peeks

through clotted clouds,
frowning on Bristol
and its half-frozen bay.

3.

Sensing the rancor and chaos backstairs
two poets brave the kitchen.
They help, they set the table.
James does a yeoman’s job of cooking
while Mr Anderson attends
to a bin of dubious potatoes.
He wields a dull peeler
and just as well it is
they take it from him
and hide away the green potatoes
unfit for human eating.

Uncommon quiet rules the table.
Some make attempts to thank the Andersons
for hosting them despite calamity.
Each thing James says just makes it worse.
“You’ll be the last guests we’ll ever have,”
he tells them. My father is incompetent,”
he says while his father stands right beside him.

Breakfast has passed, and all have breakfasted.
Bags at the door, hugs all around, glances
at the parlor and its extinguished fireplace.
James looks at his watch, reminds them
of his urgent need for ski-lift fees. Wallets
and credit cards go and return.

At the door, he tells the last of them:
“Sorry I didn’t tell you that my mother was dead.
And what I really didn’t want to say at all,
while all of you sat eating there, and everything,
was that Wendy is in the freezer in the basement.”

The Place of Attics

What they say about New England and all the people confined to attics is really true. It is really true.

THE PLACE OF ATTICS

by Brett Rutherford

Hard-rock New England
is a world of attic-dwellers:
spinsters and hermits,
bloodlines of schizophrenia,
tight-shut clapboards,
paint-peeled shutters,
a baleful eye behind
a soiled lace curtain.

Who passed the picket-fence
and glanced into the parlor
as Lizzie Borden
wiped clean the ax-edge,
returned to her bed
with a migraine?

Who idled in Salem
at the old spice shop
as Hester Prynne,
a half-moon frowning
upon her scarlet letter
took basket to market,
and who, averting her gaze,
passed by what locked door
to eavesdrop on Arthur Dimmesdale
self-flogging, his blood beads
spelling the eternal A?
In Adams Fall, We Sinnèd All.

What batly belfry, bell-less
shadowed the wily minister
and his impish daughters,
as they bent pins for the witch-trial —
the spitting pins
they plan to blame on the innocent hag
whose farm and lands they covet?

From what high steeples
does what avenger look down
as the merchant’s gold plate,
the fine furnishings,
the pastoral landscapes,
swell three floors high,
on gold from selling
rum to the Negroes,
molasses to the distillers,
slaves to the sugar planters? 

What starry owl repines
beneath a rotting gable
to survey with unblinking eye
as the miser millionaire
shuffles by, slow-paced
in phlegmy wheeze,
walking a mile in old shoes
to find the cheapest chowder?

Does any widow’s watch
stand guard at night
as trucks roll by,
as slit-eyed criminals
dump toxic waste
behind the schoolyard,
or a barge tips oily sludge
into the harbor?

Up on that mansard height
of City Hall, does even one
of those peregrine falcons
take count of a dollar’s passage
from crack-smoke car-seat 
to bicycle boy,
to the convenience store,
to basement warehouse,
to the unseen drug lord? 

No Athens, Providence:
madhouse-state capital. 
The roads are blocked. 
Hotel rooms lock from the outside in. 
Thieves smirk on the doorsteps; 
they boast of useless crimes, 
confess to hasty interments. 
A tree-squirrel once heard one say
to his baseball-capped brother:  
“I’m just going to rob and rob
      until someone stops me.”

Nothing on high does anything.
The steeples jab Heaven’s eye.
Monotonous, the bells ring on.
Men climb church walls on moonless nights
to steal the lightning rods,
the copper strips from roof to ground.
They’d scrape the gold-leaf halos
from off the painted saints if they could.
The sombre, brown, cathedral ceiling
looks like a never-cleaned toilet bowl.
Hordes hunch in rain each spring,
kneel in a shrine for guidance,
while priests’ hands inch unseen
toward the choirboys’ backsides.
Our Lady among the crawling rats,
tear-streaked in verdigris,
blesses all in diapason tone.

My neighbor, from rooftop eyrie
shouts out from his blackened windows:
“You’re all going to die! All of you!
You’re all going to die.” Another night:
“I want a brain! I want a brain!”
he howls till squad cars’ arrival,
then hurls his television to shards
on the sidewalk below.

On just my block, one attic dweller,
a landlady’s schizophrenic son, hacks
endlessly in smoker’s cough, tubercular;
another houses twin infants mongoloid;
another, a white-haired granny who thrusts
her head out, Medusa locks and all,
to scream at any long-haired man who passes.

I did not live in an attic there, the gods
be thanked, but I wrote in one.

[Revised and expanded May 2019]

SUBJECTS: attics, New England, Rhode Island, Hester Prynne, Lizzie Borden, Providence, insanity, Salem

Sarah Helen Whitman, Poet and Literary Critic, Part 1

Sarah Helen Whitman, Poet and Literary Critic, Part 1

by Brett Rutherford

This essay will appear in my forthcoming book collecting Sarah Helen Whitman's literary essays and selected poems. The footnote references and citations are not included here. Today's posting will be the part of my essay about Whitman's family history and early life. More installments will follow.

SARAH HELEN WHITMAN (1803-1878), poet and critic, is best known for her brief engagement to Edgar Allan Poe in 1848, and for her role as Poe’s posthumous defender in her 1860 book, Edgar Poe and His Critics. She is seldom treated as more than an incidental person in Poe biography, and no books of her own poetry were reprinted after 1916, the same year the only full-length biography of her, by Caroline Ticknor, appeared. The full text of Whitman’s critical writings, most published under pseudonyms, has only recently been correctly identified and attributed to her. A reassessment of Sarah Helen Whitman as poet places her squarely in the Romantic tradition; and, as critic, as a ground-breaking American defender of Shelley, Byron, Poe, Goethe, and Emerson. Whitman’s literary accomplishments were small but significant, given the limits placed upon her success by the social, gender and religious norms of the time and place in which she lived — Providence, Rhode Island in the antebellum decades, as well as in the 1870s, when she published little, but carried on an extensive literary correspondence and served as her city’s literary den mother.

Providence at Mid-Century
Providence had little significance in America’s literary and publishing history in the 19th century. Boston and New York had the lion’s share of literary fame and virtually all of the nation’s publishing firms. It is easy — but hazardous — to assume that female writers had virtually little chance of being published or recognized in this milieu, and even less if they hailed from places other than New York or Boston. 
A glance at published statistics help give us a better feel for the Providence in which Sarah Helen Whitman and her contemporaries lived and wrote. The demographics suggest a society with very distinct class and race boundaries, but still one in which women were often the heads of households. The Census of 1855 documented 8,260 households in the bustling seaport and mill town, of which 1,315 were headed by women (about one in six.) About one in five houses in the city consisted of family groupings or boarding houses in which there were no children. Of the population of 46,400, only 1,390 were listed as “colored,” and the town fathers were in a state of perpetual alarm about foreigners: 22 percent of the residents were recent immigrants from Ireland. 
Providence was a rich city. As the birthplace of America’s industrial revolution, it contained six cotton mills and four textile printing works. More than 5,000 vessels arrived that year in the port, and the city was connected to Boston, New York, and to other parts of New England with railroads, steamboats, stagecoaches and an “express steamer.” If anything, Providence was more interconnected with the other cities of the Northeast than it is today.
A writer living in Providence, however, could look forward to little local success. Although, at the time of the 1855 Census, there were four daily newspapers and six weeklies, and one semi-weekly, literary magazines did not thrive in the city. Albert Greene edited the short-lived title, The Literary Journal, and Weekly Register of Science and the Arts (1833-34), and efforts to establish another around 1840 were greeted with ridicule by locals.  Many local men attended Brown University, but that institution exerted little influence on the literary life of the city, and the leading families were notoriously conservative in taste. In the late 1870s, Whitman wrote this to John H. Ingram, her British correspondent: “Though called the wealthiest city of its size in the Union, it [i.e., Providence]  has no magazine or other literary periodical. ” 
According to the 1855 Census, the Brown University library had 26,000 books that year, and The Providence Athenaeum, a membership library, had 19,000 titles. The major vehicle of cultural transmission other than reading books and journals, was the extensive Lyceum movement, which brought authors and speakers on many topics to all the cities and large towns, where large audiences came to hear them lecture or read from their works.

Sarah Helen Whitman’s Family History
Just as it would be impossible to understand fully female writers like the Brontës (captives of class, geography, and familial stricture) without knowing their family history, we must look to Whitman’s genealogy and family history to grasp some of the social and gender pressures against which she had to strive as a writer. 
The following is mostly derived from the work of John Austin, published in 1889, the only known genealogy of her family. (A 1974 genealogy by Franklin Powers mostly repeats the facts gathered by Austin.) I include genealogy here, despite its slight tediousness, because the information is, first of all, rather difficult to obtain, and, second, because it puts the Power family and its fortunes squarely in the “Triangle Trade” era.
 The Powers were in Rhode Island almost from the beginning. There would be six Nicholas Powers in the family, the last of them Sarah Helen Whitman’s father.
The first Nicholas Power received a home lot in Providence in 1640. He was in trouble briefly with the British authorities for trying to purchase Indian lands in Warwick (RI) — expressly forbidden in the treaties with the local tribes —  and was “dismissed with an admonition.”
Nicholas died in 1657, leaving his widow, Jane Power, a daughter, Hope, and the next Nicholas Power. This Nicholas died in the catastrophic King Phillip’s War in 1675. He is not found in lists of combatants, but Austin explains: “He was killed in The Great Swamp Fight in Narragansett, by a shot from the command in which he was serving.”
His son, Captain Nicholas Power, was born in 1673. This Nicholas’s  second wife was Mercy Tillinghast, daughter of the ominously-named Rev. Pardon Tillinghast. Captain Power died in 1734. He had four slaves: Cuffy, Tony, Caesar, and Peg. 
The next Nicholas Power was a merchant and distiller. He married Anne Tillinghast, and died in Surinam in 1744. He sold his estate and distillery in Dutch Guiana to Captain John Brown in 1743. A family that owned slaves and­ a distillery would almost certainly have been involved in the notorious Triangle Trade of rum, slaves, and molasses.
In the next generation, we have another Captain Nicholas Power, a merchant and rope-maker. He was married to Rebecca Corey, and died January 26, 1808. The records indicate he freed a slave named “Prince” in 1781. 
The Nicholas who figures in our story is the sixth, known as Nicholas Power, Jr., born September 15, 1771. He married Anna Marsh, daughter of Daniel and Susanna (Wilkinson) Marsh on August 28, 1798 in Newport. He was a merchant, going by the title of Major for some part of his life. 
His mercantile life seemed to be land-locked: he formed a partnership as “Blodgett and Power” and opened a store near Providence’s Baptist Meeting House. The goods sold there began with fabrics, linens, threads (English, Indian and Scottish), then dry goods, hardware and groceries. From 1808 to 1810 the store ran auctions of goods. Then, in 1812, the partnership terminated. The war with the British almost certainly interrupted their trade.
The genealogy notes, cryptically: “He was absent from Providence much in later years.” It was a case or adventure and spousal desertion. Nicholas Power had gone to sea to build back his fortune, and was captured by the British during the War of 1812. He was not released until 1815, at which time he did not return to Providence. He was not seen or heard from in Rhode Island until around 1832 or 1833, when he made a sudden return to make amends and presumably resume his family life. 
Indications are that his nineteen-year “widow” was aghast at his return and threw him out of the house. He took up residence in a Providence hotel, and, to the dismay of all, spent the years until his death on April 28, 1844, in conspicuous dissolution. In 1842, he got around to placing a marker on his mother’s grave with an inscription lamenting the effect of his long absence on his parent’s well-being. (Rebecca Corey Power had died in 1825, and it is likely that she never knew what became of her son).
The Power children who, for a time, regarded their father as dead, were three sisters. Nicholas and Anna’s first child, Rebecca, was born in 1800. Sarah Helen Power, our and Poe’s “Helen,” was the second daughter, born in Providence on January 19, 1803. The house where she was born was that of her grandfather, Captain Nicholas Power, at the corner of South Main and Transit Streets. They lived in this house until her grandfather’s death in 1808. 
As Nicholas Power’s fortunes ebbed and flowed, the young family moved to a succession of houses and lodgings: a house at the corner of Snow and Westminster (now a parking lot in a depressed corner of downtown Providence); “the Grinnell House,” and “the Angell Tavern,” which had a garden leading to the water.
Sarah Helen’s younger sister, Susan Anna, was born in 1813. Hers was a dark-shadowed life: daughter of a merchant euphemistically “lost at sea,” she would mature into a willful manic-depressive, the classic mad relative without whom no New England house seemed complete. Since her mother was descended from the Wilkinson line that had produced the religious cult founder Jemima Wilkinson, there is the possibility of a genetic predisposition for bipolar disease if not schizophrenia. Jemima Wilkinson, declaring herself dead and resurrected, took the name “Public Universal Friend” and persuaded a number of people to forsake community and property and go off to live with her in upstate New York, where she preached to Indians, led a sexless commune, and promised (but) failed to walk on water.
After 1816, Mrs. Power, regarding herself as a widow, purchased the house at 76 Benefit Street (now No. 88) as a residence for herself and her daughters. It would be their home for more than four decades. The family was well able to live on the stocks and mortgages Mrs. Power had inherited from her mother, funds happily untouched by the impecunious Major Power.
Although Benefit Street was then fashionable, it had been built over grave plots.  The original settlers of Providence owned long, parallel strips of land starting at the river and running up over College Hill. Until 1710 or so, most families buried their dead on this hillside, and a lane that threaded among the family burial plots was ultimately straightened and paved to become Benefit Street. For some years, the street terminated with a gate, to ward off the denizens of the sinister North End.
With the creation of Benefit Street, the city fathers persuaded families to exhume and relocate their moldering ancestors to the North Burial Ground. A number of gloomy and derelict churchyards were also relocated there gradually, but St. John’s churchyard remained, its wall abutting the Powers’ rose garden. Like the Brontë sisters, the Power sisters’ vista always included a graveyard.
Although a proper Providence upbringing in those days was probably rather stifling to the intellect, Sarah Helen had a few escapes during her younger years: she visited relatives on Long Island, New York and briefly attended a Quaker school.10 Despite the Puritanical suspicions and prohibitions of her relatives, she developed an early passion for poetry. She mastered Latin and would later be sufficiently adept in languages to read and translate both German and French.
In 1821, Sarah Helen’s older sister Rebecca married William E. Staples. Two children were born to them in rapid succession. There is a Judge William Staples home just up the block from the Power house on Benefit Street, and this may be where the couple lived.
Despite her mother’s deep-set mistrust of the male gender, Sarah Helen, too, was wooed and won away from the Benefit Street home. In 1824, during her twenty-first year, she was engaged to attorney John Winslow Whitman. Urged to assume the proper responsibilities of womanhood, Helen was pressured to put aside her literary ambitions. As Ticknor tells it, “Mrs. Whitman’s taste for poetry was frowned upon by certain relatives...[She received] reproving letters, expressing the hope that she ‘did not read much poetry, as it was almost as pernicious as novel-reading’.”
Mr. Whitman seemed a good match. He was not one of those lawyers whom Shakespeare would have us kill. The third son of Massachusetts Judge Kilborne Whitman, he graduated from Brown University in 1818. He started a law practice in Boston, and practiced later in Barnstable.
During their long engagement, in 1825, Sarah Helen’s grandmother, Rebecca Corey Power, died.
Sorrow struck again that year when Sarah Helen’s older sister Rebecca died on September 14th. She had been married only four years, and then her two children, according to the Power family records, “died young.” Was her death childbirth-related, or did a contagion such as tuberculosis (”the galloping consumption”) sweep through the Staples home, taking the young mother and then the children? This tragedy must have made a deep impression on the poetical Sarah Helen, who would have followed four coffins to the North Burial Ground in swift succession.
Sarah Helen’s respectably-delayed marriage took place in 1828, with a Long Island wedding held on July 10th at the home of Sarah Helen’s uncle, Cornelius Bogert. A four-year engagement may seem excessive by today’s standards, but Mr. Whitman may also have needed time to establish his law practice and set up a suitable home.
John Whitman turned out to have a creative side, too. It is interesting to note that Mrs. Whitman’s biographers, and most of Poe’s, seem to know her husband only by his profession. I was startled to discover, during an Internet search, that John Winslow Whitman had another persona altogether: he seems to have had some involvement with the Boston-based magazine, The Ladies’ Album. He was also, briefly, partner in a weekly Boston newspaper titled The Times. 
The Ladies’ Album published some of Whitman’s poems, under the name “Helen.” Ticknor, incorrectly, writes that Whitman’s first published poem was in that journal in 1829, a poem titled, “Retrospection.” Actually, Whitman published two poems there in 1828, the year of her marriage. It is telling that her second published poem, “To the Spirit of Poetry,” is a direct refutation of the religious admonitions against poetry that her family and friends had pressed upon her, as these lines reveal:

Thou art religion, virtue, faith;
Through thee the martyr conquers death;
Thy voice, like solemn music leads
To godlike thoughts, and glorious deeds.
Borne upwards on thy radiant wings,
Man’s soaring spirit heavenward springs,
And burst the ignoble chains that bind
To earth’s dull dross the immortal mind.

To thee alone, the power is given,
To render earth a present heaven:
Oh! may thine influence elevate
My soul above the ills of date:
May thy pure present ne’er depart,
But, treasured deep within my heart,
There may the spirit ever be,
A beauty, and a mystery.14

Through her husband’s Boston affiliations, she met and came to know the circle of Transcendentalists, and started writing and publishing essays on Goethe, Shelley and Emerson. Articles and poems in other magazines soon followed. Mrs. Whitman was clearly not going to vanish into the draperies, and she was fortunate to have a literary ally in her husband.
A few years later, a new kind of turmoil roiled the family. Sometime between 1831 and 1832, Sarah Helen’s mother lost the right to wear her widow’s bonnet, with the sudden reappearance of the wandering Nicholas Power. Did the Major return in a remorseful state, wanting to make amends and restore his family’s fortune? Or was he ruined again, returning to old haunts to nibble away at his wife’s property? Another legend has it that he had a second wife and family in the Carolinas, and had now abandoned them, too.
Sarah Helen, who had cherished a somewhat heroic image of her father, was crushed — and one can only imagine the effect of all this on the younger sister. 
Like her errant father, Sarah Helen’s husband was not destined for commercial success. Money vanished into failed inventions, and several business ventures went belly-up. Mr. Whitman even appears to have gone to jail for a few months in a legal upset involving a bad loan — not a happy career turn for a young attorney. His name also appears as co-author of a series of booklets that appear to be transcripts of controversial Boston lawsuits, including one libel suit that involved a clergyman.
Worse yet, John Whitman also turned out to have a frail constitution. He caught colds frequently, and one of them, contracted in 1833, lingered and worsened into a total collapse and sudden death.  There is a mystery here, and much more needs to be learned about Mr. Whitman. Ticknor disposes of Mrs. Whitman’s youth and marriage in a mere 13 pages, and Mrs. Whitman pulls a veil of silence over the subject for the rest of her life. Husband and wife were clearly partners in the literary life they found in Boston, and one can only assume that inordinate family pressures back in Providence created the virtual cover-up that ensued.
In 1833, then, Sarah Helen Whitman found herself a widow after only five years of marriage. She donned the official “widow’s bonnet” and moved back in with her mother and younger sister on Benefit Street. Her defense of Shelley, published in Providence’s first and only literary journal early in 1834, bore the Roman-Etruscan pseudonym of “Egeria.”
Although she would resume the role of dutiful daughter, Sarah Helen was now a published literary figure in her own right, confident in her worth and powers, and acquainted with many of the best minds of New England.

SUBJECTS: Edgar Allan Poe, Providence, Rhode Island, Sarah Helen Whitman.