Free Charles and Emma by Deborah Heiligman Page B

“It isperhaps foolish of me to say this much but my own dear Charley we now do belong to each other & I cannot help being open with you.” She worried that their difference of faith would be a terrible void between them. She was not willing to give up her belief in an afterlife; to do so would relinquish hope that she would see her sister Fanny again. Perhaps she could convince him to find another route to faith, one that did not require belief in Genesis.
    â€œWill you do me a favour?” she asked. “Yes I’m sure you will,” she answered herself. She knew that Charles cared as much about their happiness as she did; she knew, also, that Charles was not someone who wanted to upset her or anyone else. She asked him to read Jesus’ farewell discourse to his disciples, which begins at the end of the thirteenth chapter of John. “It is so full of love to them & devotion & every beautiful feeling. It is the part of the New Testament I love best.”
    According to the book of John, before he was betrayed by Judas, Jesus washed his disciples’ feet. He tells them, “If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet; ye also ought to wash one another’s feet.” Jesus wanted his disciples, and all of his followers, to love their neighbors enough to even wash their dirty feet. Emma found this love beautiful.
    â€œThis is a whim of mine it would give me great pleasure, though I can hardly tell why,” Emma wrote to Charles. But they both knew why she wanted him to read that chapter: She desperately wanted Charles to believe in Jesus so he would go to heaven with her.
    Jesus tells his disciples that if they follow his teachings, “Whither I go, thou canst not follow me now; but thou shall follow me afterward.” But “if a man abide not in me, he is cast forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather them, and cast them into the fire, and they are burned.” Emma could notbear the thought of spending eternity without Charles, of Charles burning in hell. She did not want him to give her his opinion; she asked him just to read it, and then she changed the subject to her new wardrobe. “The plaid gown arrived safely yesterday & is unanimously pronounced to be very handsome & not at all too dashing.”
    Emma knew Charles was a good man, an honest and moral one. He was affectionate and kind to his family and to animals. He was vehemently antislavery, as was their Wedgwood grandfather, Josiah, who had campaigned against slavery from 1787 until his death in 1795. Josiah Wedgwood’s pottery factory had made a medallion that was the emblem of the antislavery movement. It had a black basalt relief figure of an African slave in chains, bent down on one knee. In a semicircle around it were the words “Am I not a man and a brother?” Josiah’s factory reproduced many copies of the figure on brooches and seals, too. He sent some of the medallions across the Atlantic to Benjamin Franklin, for use in his American antislavery campaign. Slavery had been outlawed in Britain in 1807, but it still caused contention among some of the British upper class.
    During Charles’s voyage, at a stop at Bahia in Brazil, he had gotten into a heated argument with Captain FitzRoy over slavery. FitzRoy defended slavery, stating that some slaves were happy because their masters were good to them. The proof was that when those slaves were asked if they wanted to be freed, they said no. In front of their masters. Charles hated confrontation and controversy, but he could not hold his tongue about this. He told his captain that it was impossible for slaves to answer truthfully in front of their masters, and that it was impossible to be happy without having any control over your own life, without hope of change. FitzRoy hadalmost thrown Charles off the ship for disagreeing with him. Charles wrote about this incident in his account of the voyage, which would be published soon