Ida, in Love and in Trouble

by Veronica Chambers

Genres: YA Coming of Age; YA Romance

Synopsis

For fans of Bridgerton and The Gilded Age comes a sweeping historical novel that tells the story of Ida B. Wells from her teen years and early romances up through her becoming a civil rights crusader without peer.

Before she became a warrior, Ida B. Wells was an incomparable flirt with a quick wit and a dream of becoming a renowned writer. The first child of newly freed parents who thrived in a community that pulsated with hope and possibility after the Civil War, Ida had a big heart, big ambitions, and even bigger questions: How to be a good big sister when her beloved parents perish in a yellow fever epidemic? How to launch her career as a teacher? How to make and keep friends in a society that seems to have no place for a woman who speaks her own mind? And – always top of mind for Ida – how to find a love that will let her be the woman she dreams of becoming?

Ahead of her time by decades, Ida B. Wells pioneered the field of investigative journalism with her powerful reporting on violence against African Americans. Her name became synonymous with courage and an unflinching demand for racial and gender equality. But there were so many facets to Ida Bell and critically acclaimed writer Veronica Chamber unspools her full and colorful life as Ida comes of age in the rapidly changing South, filled with lavish society dances and parties, swoon-worthy gentleman callers, and a world ripe for the taking.

Release date: September 10, 2024

Publisher: Little, Brown Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 320

Sample

February 1886

Ida perched languorously on the banister at the opera house, waiting for the curtain to rise. The Mikado, a new comic opera by Gilbert and Sullivan, had come to Memphis.

There were, officially, no segregated sections—only a tacit understanding that Black people and white people might attend the theater together if they kept mindfully to their places. But when the calcium limelights were dim, it was possible to move forward and get a better view—and when Ida could, she did. That night at The Mikado was no exception.

Ida had moved as far forward in the theater as she felt safe doing. The front of the mezzanine provided a much better view than the upper balcony.

Her friend Fanny said, “Ida, I think you might be the most courageous woman in all of Memphis.”

Ida beamed, but her friend’s words revealed the chasm that would always be between them. Fanny was amusing, but she was built to fit into society. Ida was fun, but she was always determined to go her own way.

Despite what her friend thought, Ida was not fearless. She was intimate with fear. It greeted her every morning before the sun rose. It sat heavy on her chest, a fat, lazy cat that refused to move, impervious to her pleas, in the name of all that was good and holy, for it to shoo.

But the opera house was not a place that required bravery of Ida. For her there was no corner of the opulent structure that did not delight the senses. If she could, she would enter the grand building early and wander the place, touching it all, from the cool marble to the thick velvet curtains to the ornate golden sculptures that curved up the walls on the orchestra level.

She wondered who had painted the gods and angels on the ceiling frescoes and if they had considered, even for a moment, giving one of the angels brown skin.

She longed to stand at the top of the elaborate staircase and descend as if she were a great diva with a four-octave range. Ida always dressed as if she were going to be seen, and on this particular occasion, she was wearing her favorite dress—a pale blue number with a candy-red underpinning. She had swept her tousle of curls into an elegant bun, and though no one could see her in the dark, she felt beautiful enough to be on the stage. Fanny, who was in all things more understated, wore a pretty pink dress with leaf-green embroidery. Ida would have loved to have a carte de visite of the two of them dressed for the opera. A memory to keep and hold for always.

Ida loved all kinds of live theater, but comic operas were among her favorites. She knew nothing about Japan before she saw The Mikado, and some would say she knew even less about what the country was really like after it. But the musical by Gilbert and Sullivan had been an international hit, and the cast that night in Memphis seemed to delight in the broad, campy humor and the roller coaster of melody they were given to work with.

Ida could see that, beneath all the comedy, there was a great deal of craft. It wasn’t just that there was an exquisite harmony between the tenors and altos, the sopranos and mezzo-sopranos. She felt lifted, as if on a hot-air balloon, by the way the singers bobbed and weaved between their chest voices and head voices.

Although some of the lyrics were purposefully nonsensical, Ida noted how the performers sang the staccato verses, making each word perfectly clear:

Three little maids who, all unwary,

Come from a ladies’ seminary,

Freed from its genius tutelary.

She could gather the meaning from the context, but she vowed to look the word up—tutelary. Ida took elocution classes, because attending the theater in Memphis had taught her that diction was vital. She wanted her words to be understood, not just in her writing, but every time she spoke.

Ida was the daughter of parents who had been enslaved. When she was still just a girl, her parents died. Now there was no one to stand between her and all the pain the world had to offer an orphaned Black girl without connections or means. If fear was insistent on shackling itself to her side, then it had better be prepared to go all the places Ida intended to go.

Each day, her Lord made a decision; He decided whether she would live or die.

Each day, Ida had her own decision to make: to live—really live—or shrivel and rot in the husk of constraints society intended to assign her based solely on her gender and race. Ida intended to live. Really live. She came to the theater as much as she could. She got as close to the stage as she physically could because for her this was not merely entertainment. The drama onstage was a tonic, a tincture of bravery, a reminder of the boldness she needed to realize her dreams. This was what she was obliged to do with the days she had been given: take her life and put it center stage.

She was young and Black and free. A war had been fought for her liberty. A president had been assassinated for his commitment to justice. More than six hundred thousand men had laid down their lives in the bloodiest battles their nation had ever known.

As she set out in the world, Ida B. Wells did not have parents to warn her to tread lightly, that the Reconstruction South had many perils for Black people still. She had no family name to polish or protect. Day by day, scene by scene, she had to craft a life and cast herself at the center of it. Not as a bit player or a caricature of a hateful past but as a woman of tomorrow—a woman who did not ask or need permission. The blank page was her only dowry, and she intended to take that gift and make herself a writer.

She knew there were some of her race who thought that if they shrank themselves—their dress, their courage, their joy, and their ambition—their playing small would protect them from the whims and furies of the majority race. But Ida thought the notion that there was anything a colored person could do to truly armor themselves against any wrongdoing was a paper-thin folly, an ahistorical illusion.

When the gaslights of the theater dimmed and she was no longer fearful of being caught sitting outside the Black section, there was something else—something that captured her attention more than the singing and dancing and the madcap antics of the players on the stage who bumbled and lurched toward love.

Ida noticed that she and her fellow theatergoers laughed in unison and gasped with a single breath, as if they were musicians in an orchestra being directed by the same maestro. It was almost like a sociology experiment testing the theory that there really was only one race—the human race.

Later, in her diary, Ida would remark of The Mikado, “It is a delightful jumble of ridiculous and laughable; a comic combination of songs, speeches and actions, and dress.” As the performance roared on, Ida continued to lean over the banister. And Fanny continued to feel what she always felt around Ida, a surge of admiration and just a smidgen of terror. What if they got caught?

Mark Twain called the period they lived in the Gilded Age. Ida had read that it was his belief that America, as it neared the end of the century, sparkled on the surface but was corrupt and lawless underneath.

He was not, of course, referring to the society of Black elites. Theirs was a world he did not know and could not imagine. If there was one thing that made Ida seethe, it was the cloak of invisibility that was constantly thrown over the best of their race—the hardworking, the moral, the educated, the prodigiously brilliant. If she ever met Mark Twain, she would bend his ear and let him know that among the darker hue of American society, there was no pass from the call for justice, no opting out of the quest for equality. As their sister Frances Ellen Watkins Harper so passionately declared in 1866, “We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity.”

Ida did not yet know how much Harper’s vision for universal rights would become the blueprint for her own life’s work. She knew only how deeply her head and her heart called out—Amen!—as she read Harper’s words: “Society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving a curse in its own soul.”

She had much to say and many worries, but that night, as Yum-Yum sang in her sweet soprano, “The sun whose rays are all ablaze,” there was nothing to do but let the music wash over her and let the laughter of the audience lift her soul.

Six months before The Mikado, Ida had started a new career as a teacher in Memphis. She met the young men and women who would become her colleagues and friends at the New Central House, where the newly elected teachers of the Memphis school district first gathered. It was a bright September day, and the teachers, as well as members of the school board, had gathered for coffee, then a welcome lunch.

In Memphis, there were two classes of young and unmarried Black women. The vast majority worked as domestics and laundresses. Ida passed them in the street, these women holding bags of other people’s dirty laundry who dressed up for work in fresh-pressed whites and grays to clean and serve.

Ida belonged to an upper class of men and women barely out of their teens. It was a club, an elite cadre of twenty Black schoolteachers. Only twenty. It was lucky, dream work.

She had come to Memphis alone from Holly Springs, Mississippi, her hometown. After her parents’ death when she was sixteen, her brothers had moved in with family in rural parts of Tennessee. Her aunt Fanny had moved to California in search of better job opportunities, taking her own daughter and Ida’s little sisters Annie and Lily with her.

The afternoon had been organized by Tommie Moss, a young man who worked at the New Central House as a manager and who Ida liked immediately. She sat at the table between two women named Fanny: Fanny Thompson and Fannie Bradshaw.

“The sun in Memphis is punishing and exacting. Don’t let it catch you without a dress that’s pressed and clean,” Fannie Bradshaw said, as if Ida needed to be reminded of something as pedestrian as looking sharp.

A stylish young woman who introduced herself as Virginia Broughton reminded her, “White gloves and a parasol are a must on Beale Street.”

Fannie Bradshaw, who was quickly becoming Ida’s least favorite of the Fannies, clucked, “You’re a schoolteacher. Each year, you must be reelected to your post by the school board. I don’t know what it was like in Mississippi, but a Memphis schoolteacher must be above reproach.”

It had always seemed to Ida that, while it was a man’s world, women were the wasps you had to watch. One whispered word at teatime and you could spend the whole year in a futile attempt at darning your reputation, with no guarantee that you’d be able to suture the wound.

Ida was taking it all in, the ladies’ manual of teaching, when she noticed a young man staring at her. He was tall, almost as tall as her father had been, and he wore a dark gray morning coat and a perfectly pressed white shirt with a high, winged collar. He seemed to have noticed her upon first glance, and he smiled and waved as if greeting an old friend. While the members of the school board made their speeches, he never took his eyes off her.

All throughout the talk of rising above the clouds of ignorance, the ignominy of their enslaved past, and the importance of excellence in character as well as deed, his eyes seemed to be sending a steady message like the clicks of a telegraph: Be mine. Be mine. Be mine. When the formal addresses were at last finished and they were free to mingle and meet their fellow teachers, he approached her and said her name, not his: “Miss Ida B. Wells.”

His name was Isaiah J. Graham, and he seemed to know all about her. She flushed to think that he had learned so much in such a little time.

They talked about books, Ida’s favorite subject, and Ida was impressed that he had his own personal library. She knew by the way he talked about his parents and their educational pedigree that he was a member of what they called the Upper Tenth, the wealthiest Black Americans, many of whom were descended from generations of men and women who had been born free.

When he gave her his card and asked to call on her, she carefully put the card in her small shell-shaped purse and wished for the thousandth time that women’s dresses had pockets.

A few weeks later, Ida visited the Memphis Lyceum, a literary salon that was one of the most popular social activities in town. The room hushed as Fanny Thompson stepped onto the stage. She wore a chocolate-brown dress with a structured bodice. A lace bib overlay fell across her chest in a deep V; black lace adorned her sleeves and hung like an apron from her skirt.

She smiled at the room of two dozen who had come for the Friday night gathering. The gaslights around them were dimmed, and the room was awash in a saffron glow.

Fanny said plaintively, quoting a line from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House that Ida knew well, “‘But our home has never been anything but a playroom. I’ve been your doll wife—just as I used to be Papa’s doll child.’”

She turned to the front row of women, all Lyceum members, and whispered, “‘And the children have been my dolls. I used to think it was fun when you came in and played with me, just as I think it’s fun when I go in and play games with them.’”

Then, turning to the men, she said, “‘That’s all our marriage has been, Torvald.’”

The audience erupted into applause, and Ida clapped wildly too. As she brought her gloved hands together in ovation, she thought, This is possible. This is something I can and, most certainly, will do.

In the 1880s, lyceums and literary societies flourished in Black middle-class communities across the country. In Memphis, the Lyceum was run by the city’s most prominent Black women, mostly teachers, and their Friday night gathering soon became Ida’s favorite part of the week.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had gained fame and no small degree of fortune by traveling in the postbellum lyceum circuit, but so had Black women such as Sojourner Truth, Maria W. Stewart, and Harriet Forten Purvis. Before coming to Memphis, Ida had heard these names, but she had not seen her female peers perform in front of an audience of enthralled men and women.

Ida had long heard men speak from pulpits, but at the Memphis Lyceum, women commanded the stage. The first night she attended, she took it all in, from the jeremiads calling for safety and opportunity to the dramatic and musical entertainments that brought the words of Tennyson and the music of Verdi into a community whose every action sought to be part of the lyric and melody in the masterful libretto of post-Reconstruction hope.

The Lyceum became the heartbeat of Ida’s life in Memphis. In a letter to her sister, in California, she wrote:

Dear Annie,

Thank you for your last letter. I promise to visit you and L’il in Visalia before the year is over. Right now, Memphis holds me in its thrall. Teaching suits me as I thrill to the world of ideas. And there are suitors who court and send me love letters. (More about them later.) I have also found a community of women friends at the Memphis Lyceum, and it is there I have found what I did not know I was looking for—a breath of life.

The Lyceum is composed mainly of fellow teachers in the Memphis school district. They meet every Friday night in the Vance Street Church. The literary exercises consist of recitations, essays, and debates interspersed with music. It is pure joy to hear the words leap off the page, much the same way we loved Friday-afternoon oratorical speeches when we attended school. The exercises always close with the reading of the Evening Star—a spicy journal prepared and read by the editor. There are news items, literary notes, criticisms of previous offerings on the program, a They Say column of pleasant personalities—and always some choice poetry.

I cannot wait until I take to the stage to make my oratorical debut. Do not wish me luck, dear Annie. In the theater, the correct term is “break a leg.”

Yours, as ever,

Ida

It was the first week of October, and Ida was still getting settled into her life in Memphis. She was thrilled to be teaching in a big city, not a rural country school, but the classrooms were crowded and the days were long. As she stood in front of the classroom, she wrote the day’s schedule on the board:

9–12: PRAYER AND MORNING LESSONS

12–2: LUNCH

2–5: AFTERNOON LESSONS

“It is a fine day. Let us begin with a hymn,” she said, smiling at the room crammed with nearly fifty students. It was a fourth-grade class, but the students ranged in age from eight to eleven.

“I’ll call out your name, and you sing a verse,” Ida continued. “By now, everyone should know the words.”

She called on one of her favorite students, Patience Cullen. The girl had a voice like an angel. The girl stood up and began to sing:

All things bright and beautiful,

All creatures great and small,

All things wise and wonderful,

The Lord God made them all.

Henry Coleridge stood up next and began to sing in perfect pitch:

The rich man in his castle,

The poor man at his gate,

God made them, high or lowly,

And ordered their estate.

It inspired her. Their beautiful voices, and the fact that she could make a difference in their lives the way the teachers in her small town had done in hers.

That night, Ida went to the Lyceum filled with a sense of purpose. She felt her mood darken, though, when Lavinia Wormley, one of the Memphis teachers, walked up to her and asked, “Who are your people?”

The question was meant to sting, as it was about class. Tell me who your parents are, did they go to college, were they born free, do you belong?

Who are your people?

Ida tried not to wince. It was the ultimate Upper Tenth question. The subtext was: Tell me your lineage, and I will decide just how much you matter. If the power players in the Black community didn’t know you, it was incumbent on you to show them why they should know you. The question brought with it a whole thunderstorm of emotion. Because the answer was neither straightforward nor likely to provoke the warmest response.

Ida was the proud daughter of Jim and Lizzie Wells. She was the oldest of five living children. Her parents and youngest brother had died of yellow fever in ’78. Her sisters Annie and Lily were living with her aunt in California. Her brothers George and James, who was called A. J., were training to be carpenters, as their father had been. Her sister Eugenia had suffered from spinal tumors as a toddler and been paralyzed. After their parents’ death, Eugenia was sent to an institution and died there. Ida tried not to think about her, the pain and agony of her short life, but Eugenia had been her people too.

Ida had been on her own since she was sixteen. As a child, she read voraciously, the Bible and newspapers and as many novels as she could get her hands on, but she had not been able to fulfill her dream of attending college.

She was a young woman alone in Memphis, and there were times when this made her vulnerable at worst, suspect at best. Who were her people? For Ida, her people went beyond her family. She wanted to say, Frederick Douglass is my people.

Her people were Jane Eyre and every scrappy orphan that literature had to offer. Her people were the heroines of novels, like Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy—women on a moral, spiritual, and, yes, romantic quest.

Would Lavinia Wormley blink if she named the indomitable Isabel Archer, who kept her company on long winter nights when she read Henry James by lamplight? Ida’s people were the good Lord and His son, Jesus. She hoped. She was, she knew, far from pious. But she aspired to do right, and she hoped that if their God was as almighty as promised, He could see past her temper and indiscretions and into her heart.

She knew she had stood silent, staring at Lavinia for far too long. The woman had asked a simple question; only a simple answer was required.

“My people are the Wellses of Holly Springs.”

Lavinia raised an eyebrow, pretending to search for a connection when she knew there was none. If the Wellses were Upper Tenth, the name would have shone with all the wattage of a skyful of fireworks on the Fourth of July. Still, politeness demanded that she pretend not to dismiss Ida as what was, in those days, known viciously as a “mulatto nobody.”

Light-skinned enough for acceptance, too poor to penetrate the inner circles of the Black elite.

“I don’t believe I know the name Wells,” Lavinia said.

“That’s okay. You will,” Ida said with confidence. And then, as she walked away, she whispered to herself, “You certainly will.”

She had been loved well and raised well for the first two-thirds of her life—it was her intention to take what she had been given to craft a life that would make her parents proud. The Wells name would be synonymous with doing good for their people. She would see to that.

At the Lyceum, Ida noted that the skin tones of the women ranged from very fair—those who could nearly pass—to very dark. This made her feel the tent was bigger at the Lyceum than it was in other social circles. In the 1880s, the Black elite began to solidify their ranks—fair skin was often a critical requirement for entry into the most privileged circles. Many of the families could attribute their wealth and education to white fathers who granted them opportunities and sought, in some meaningful way, to acknowledge their paternity. So many of those Blacks who had an elevated status dating, in some cases, to decades before the Civil War shared a commonality of physical features—fair skin, straight hair, light-colored eyes, and aquiline noses—and this mark of privilege morphed into a preferred aesthetic. “Blue veins”—so called because they were Blacks who were light enough that you could see the veins beneath their skin—tightened their ranks lest they be lumped in with the formerly enslaved and bear the punishments that caste of Black people was still made to endure.

Ida knew all of this because her own father, Jim, was the son of a white enslaver. He had been both progeny and property. Yet her white grandfather had sought to do right by his son. It was he who saw to it that Jim trained as a master carpenter. It was because of the connections of his biological father that, in 1870, Jim had the money, $130, to purchase land and build a three-room house near the town square for his young family.

Jim had been light enough to gain entry into any room that the Black elite occupied. Ida’s mother had been darker skinned. Ida and her siblings ranged in skin tone from the youngest, Annie, who could pass for white, to the boys, who were somewhere in the middle, and to Ida and her sisters Lily and Eugenia, who were lighter than their mother but darker than the other children. When the census taker visited their home, he carefully noted that all the Wells children were “mulatto.”

Ida was particularly aware that the issue of skin color was one of the ways in which men evaluated potential wives. The men of the Black elite, no matter how dark their own skin, almost always leaned toward whiter-looking wives, with the hopes of producing whiter-looking children. Blanche K. Bruce, the second Black man elected to the US Senate and a social climber of “unconquerable ambition,” was said to have sealed his spot in the Upper Tenth with his marriage to Josephine Beall Willson, a woman often described as “fairer tha. . .