Toward the end of September, when Elizabeth had perhaps two-thirds of the book down, she received word that she had a visitor. She went to meet them, head likely still full of her own writing, little knowing who awaited her.
It was not one visitor but two.
Not one son but a second also.
Toffy and Isaac had come to see her.
How to embrace two boys at once? She clasped them to her, her movements like music: an old refrain that came from eighteen years of mothering. The feel of Isaac’s young man’s body, the sight of his dear sweet face, were all the more precious after her worries for him in the war. Their stories came spilling out: Theophilus had said no to the army, but Isaac and Toffy had both been working as sutlers—merchants who followed the soldiers to sell provisions—and had been attached to the Nebraska Regiment, which had spent much of the past year on garrison duty. They’d both been saving their hard-earned wages for the expensive fare to Jacksonville, and now, at last, both were here.
They were delighted to find her in such good spirits.
“I don’t see, mother,” Isaac said cheerfully, “as you have changed at all… I was afraid I should find you gray-headed, and withered in looks, after passing through such hard times. But I am so glad to see you just as bright and happy as ever.”25
Elizabeth confided in them the reason for her current happiness—her authorship of her book—but swore them to secrecy, fearing Theophilus might somehow put a stop to it should he discover her mission. Elizabeth knew it was critical for her to publish her book as soon as possible. Only then would the government realize the truth and change the laws to protect her.
Only then would she be safe.
Her boys had some very interesting news to share of their father: he was no longer a minister in Manteno. He’d resigned in July 1862. Elizabeth was intrigued to know more, but her sons, having been away traveling, could not enlighten her. Isaac told her Theophilus now lived on charity.
They’d last heard from their father following the trustees’ meeting. When Elizabeth heard what her husband had said, she felt jubilant. He’d written, Toffy said, “that he feared he should not be able to keep his mother much longer in the Asylum.”26
Everyone was expecting her to be released in December.
In the meantime, she had to keep writing to ensure that freedom came forth. She bid her boys a fond farewell, assuring them all would soon be well.
Just a few weeks later, around October 16, 1862, Elizabeth dashed off a final punctuation point. She laid down her pen. Beside her, her completed book lay in a box on the floor. Twenty-five hundred pages were covered with her beautiful script. Twenty-five hundred pages she’d written in just six weeks, with only a Bible and a dictionary for stimulus—and her own memory and imagination.
The Great Drama was finished.
The great drama had only just begun.
CHAPTER 29
It spread throughout the hospital like a virus, a contagion, or a scattering of wind-blown seeds that sprouted where they fell.
The power of Elizabeth Packard and her words.
She did not keep her book to herself. Books were for reading. For reading aloud to her fellow patients on Eighth Ward. For entrusting to rebel attendants, who snuck copied pages to Seventh, where Maria Chapman hid them between the tick mattresses of her bed, reading them in snatched moments when the doctors’ backs were turned. Books were for sharing with the spirit mediums, who claimed to know the contents of Elizabeth’s epic before she’d even finished writing.
It wasn’t long before The Great Drama became “a very common topic of remark in almost every ward in the house.”1 And it caused a “universal sensation.”2
“I will die fighting, before I will not think as I please… No one has any…right to call me insane, because I do not think as they do,” Elizabeth wrote passionately, and each line was a vow that every reading patient echoed. “My thoughts are as much my own right as my eyes; and I would as soon part with one as the other.”3
Reading her words, the patients dared to imagine a world in which they might be free “to sit under their own vine and fig tree, with none to molest or make them any more afraid of being called insane, simply because they dare to be true to themselves.”4 Her words made them sit up a little straighter, walk a little taller through the long corridors. They held their heads just that little bit higher.
Elizabeth, by all accounts, had an “extraordinary power of conviction.”5 Her words simply leapt off the page, whether she herself was present to read them aloud or not. And so her book became a cipher for herself: an early hologram that could transport itself into every cell, every hall, every ward of the hospital. She talked her way into the mind of every reader. She spoke to them in the early morning and in the dead of night. She whispered along with them as the patients huddled in small groups to discuss it. She roused the patients to believe in a better world—a world in which they were all worth something.