Chapter 24: Bohemians Rising: Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, Philip Alexander Bell, Emperor Norton
San Francisco, California
Ina Coolbrith
She can’t breathe, can’t move. He is on top of her, a malevolent weight crushing her into the bed. The bleeding stump at the end of his arm presses into her throat, reeking of coppery blood… the fingers of his other hand crawl up under her nightdress, like a hundred times before. This time he will kill her—
Ina wrenched herself awake, a strangled cry dying in her throat.
She forced herself to breathe through her sobs, forced her frantic mind to focus. To remember where she was, who she was.
Moonlight softly lit her bedroom. Wind brushed at the window.
Josephine Smith was no more, Ina Pickett was no more, Josephine Carsley was no more. She was Ina Donna Coolbrith. It had taken nearly two years and a long, ugly trial—but the court had granted her divorce from Robert. She was here, in San Francisco, in the family’s new home on Russian Hill, four hundred miles from Los Angeles and from him.
She was safe.
She gathered up a blanket and went to curl on the window seat, pressed her cheek against the cold glass, looking down at the harbor, the shadows of ships outlined in the fog.
As always, her mind searched for the words to capture what she was seeing.
Sail-reefed ships loom, ghost-like thro’ the haze.
Midnight winds go by
With slow sad wail, as of unuttered woe.
She felt herself calm as the lines came to her. She reached to the window sill for a pen and her journal.
Whatever her new life was to be here, she would write her way to it.
— — —
Summer, 1860—San Francisco, California
Bret Harte
“Bohemia has never been located geographically, but any clear day when the sun is going down, if you mount Telegraph Hill, you shall see its pleasant valleys and cloud-capped hills glittering in the West like the Spanish castles of Titbottom—”
Frank Harte stared down at the page he was writing, and suddenly balled it up, knowing it was nonsense.
Jessie Frémont had charged him with spearheading a new California literature. Not only was he failing, he seemed barely able to write a coherent sentence.
Who are you to think you can write? he silently chided himself.
Mrs. Frémont had kept her half of the bargain and opened the necessary doors. Joe Lawrence had responded to her praise of Harte’s work and hired him for a weekly column at the Golden Era, entitled Town and Table Talk. For the column, Harte created an alter ego, a character he called “The Bohemian,” who wandered about town and commented on the social scene and the city, discussed from a Bohemian viewpoint. The public had responded, and Lawrence was pleased.
But Harte thought often, and guiltily, of Jessie Frémont’s charge. “We can create the city and the state in our own image.”
An image free of the sin of slavery and the restrictive conventions of the East. A city free of war because it was free. Free from blind religion, from subjugation, from calcified thinking….
Frank knew his column fell far short. He felt altogether beneath the task.
Compounding his feelings of inadequacy was the fact that while Harte struggled, the Reverend Starr King had launched himself into the mission Jessie Frémont had set for them.
Starr King had visited the spectacular wilderness of Yosemite in July, and came back to the city with even greater purpose. Inspired by the wilderness’s sheer granite cliffs, waterfalls, glaciers and giant sequoia groves, he incorporated the spiritual beauty of the land into his sermons, urging Californians to find majestic landscapes for the heart and “Yosemites for the soul.” His ever-growing audiences responded with fervor. And his frequent pro-Union speeches in Portsmouth Square had pushed the City to rename the city center “Union” Square.
Now Starr King was pressing Harte for verse that the Reverend could read at rallies. So in between weekly columns, Harte attempted patriotic poems. All the while secretly, utterly despairing of achieving the inspiration that came so naturally to the preacher.
“Fraud,” Harte whispered to himself. The word was bitter in his mouth.
— — —
Philip Alexander Bell (52)
Emperor Norton
In a much smaller office across town, the Black owned and operated Pacific Appeal, another journalist and newly arrived San Franciscan was also struggling for inspiration.
The Executive Committee had found their replacement editor. Philip Bell was born a freeman in New York City and educated at the African Free School there. He’d served as an agent for William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper, The Liberator, and had gone on to found and co-edit the Weekly Advocate, later the Colored American, the second Black newspaper established in the United States.
He’d just arrived in San Francisco from New York and had not been in town a week before he understood why members of the community had wanted him to take the helm of the paper. In the turbulent wake of John Brown’s failed raid at Harper’s Ferry, the current editor, Peter Anderson, had backed away from the fight for abolition. But Bell had seen firsthand how Brown’s martyrdom had galvanized the North. He knew it was time to press the issue of emancipation and full equality, not abandon it.
He had so many plans. San Francisco must become a part of the larger Black literature of the nation, by exchanging articles, educating and inspiriting Black communities throughout the land, amplifying the best ideas and proposing coordinated action for legislation.
But he had to admit this strange new city baffled him. How was one to get a grip on the minds of these gamblers and dreamers? And how especially to seize the imagination—and support—of the white population as well as the Black?
He’d heard himself described, to his amusement, as “unforgiving to his enemies, loving to his friends, but impulsive and somewhat imprudent as an editor.” But he prided himself on his journalistic instincts, and for his first editorial column he was impulsively moved to write of an encounter he’d had on his first day in the City. He used his chosen pen name: Cosmopolite.
A Word for the Emperor
There is in this city an unfortunate man who fancies himself a king, or emperor, or something of the kind. He glides harmlessly, inoffensively along, apparently proud of his faded uniform, which he fondly imagines are the trappings of royalty. He is not hopelessly insane, or the authorities would take care of him; he is not a pauper, for he begs not, neither does he receive alms; he has, I suppose, friends who support him, and suffer him to indulge in his innocent vagaries.
Among savages imbecility is viewed as a Divine inspiration, and the unfortunate subjects of a demented mind are considered as being the peculiar care of the Great Spirit, and are respected and pitied. How differently are they treated in this enlightened community.
Some heartless wretches, who, in their outward form, bear the semblance — “all are not men who bear the human form” — but inwardly have reptile hearts, often perpetrate what they call practical jokes on this poor man, by presenting him with spurious letters from royal personages, swords, epaulettes, &c. He receives them with becoming dignity, and they serve but to confirm him in his hallucinations. If his mind is too imbecile, and his brain too weak, to understand the cruelty of the deception, it must be fearful to his friends to witness such things…
I am a stranger here, and know nothing of the history of Mr. N. Can you give me any information?
- COSMOPOLITE. San Francisco, Aug. 18, 1860.
On the day the editorial ran, Philip Bell looked up from his desk to confront the man himself, standing in the doorway of the office, dressed as he had seen him on the street, in faded uniform and epaulets, a feathered cap perched on his head.
Every muscle in Bell’s body tensed. What is this, now?
Emperor Norton spoke softly. “We have noticed your letter signed ‘Cosmopolite,’ entitled ‘A Word for the Emperor,’ That is, ourselves.”
“That’s right,” Bell said warily, eyeing the sword suspended at Norton’s side. He casually dropped a hand to his leg and eased it toward the lower drawer of his desk, where he had secreted a loaded pistol. He was no stranger to being threatened for what he wrote.
Norton removed his cap and bowed deeply, then cocked his head and looked across the office.
“’Cosmopolite’ is laboring under an hallucination—rather a double entendre. Can the gentleman solve the mystery of our birth and parentage? He pretends to know everything, but still seeks information.”
Bell’s hand rested on the drawer, as he frowned, trying to follow. Norton walked the floor of the office, a slow, pondering stride.
“One may not choose to acknowledge that one is aware of frequent conspiracies against our person, rights and dignity, and that which appears strange to outsiders is part and parcel of those conspiracies.” Norton abruptly turned and looked straight at Bell. “Yet among men, who is more familiar with such outrages?”
Bell blinked. Is this white man saying what I think he’s saying?
Norton continued, with the same bright-eyed intensity, “And who knows better also that politically we have had to contend with a powerful faction, whose policy hitherto has been to encourage dishonesty and drive out virtue?”
Bell was fascinated. He’s talking about the slave powers here, the Cavaliers and Secesh. The thought came to him: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”
A smile hovered at Emperor Norton’s lips. “To all such we say, ‘To be happy, you must be virtuous.’” There was a fragile grace, an almost luminous quality to the man’s face. “Tis not the plumed troop, nor gold, but virtue, that should be King.”
Despite himself, Bell felt a lump in his throat. “Wise words,” he admitted.
“But are we agreed?”
Bell felt mesmerized. “Yes.”
“The American nation is now composed of all nations and almost all religions: it may be difficult to please all.”
Bell sat back in his chair. My brother, you can say that again.
As if hearing his thought, Norton repeated. “Difficult. But not impossible.”
He held Bell’s eyes, then executed a smart turn on his heel to exit. He paused again in the doorway.
“Think on it.”
He dipped his head again, and was out.
Bell sat still, and presently said aloud. “I’ll be damned.” He reached for a sheet of paper and began to write.
It was only after he published the Emperor’s response, verbatim, that he understood.
San Francisco was wild for any print news of their monarch, and the Mirror’s sales spiked due to the Emperor’s inclusion. Completely inadvertently, Bell had caught the attention of the white community and launched the new version of the paper.
And he had a sneaking suspicion that had been Emperor Norton’s intention, all along.
Read After the Gold Rush from the beginning: