On Sunday, we went to see the bloody pillow.
Lincoln’s Bloody Pillow.
TPINSS (the person I’m not seeing seeing) kindly got me out of bed – out of the canyon I’d been submerged in for days – and took me on a date to see the bloodstained blue and white striped artifact.
Why, you ask, would two poetic head in the cloud hibernating types rise from crisp white hotel sheets, leave vistas better than a John Ford film, and fight the weekend traffic on the PCH to mingle with after church Reaganites?
Why?!?
Because of The Bloody Red Rocking Chair!
When I was 7 years old, my second grade teacher, Mrs. Sharpless, took us to visit Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. At that age, I was already a history freak and rabid reader – inhaling a children’s series of biographies at about 1.2 per day.
I lived and breathed Colonial, Revolutionary, and Expansionist America: rolling my blue Levi cords to the knee to effect breeches, turning down the collars of my white oxfords to represent an 18th century collar, and putting tacks in the bottom of my Buster Brown’s to make a clicking sound, that to my ears, approximated the sound of my brogans striding down a cobblestone street in Williamsburg, Virginia.
I lived in the space of history: somewhere between The Declaration of Independence and Reconstruction.
Greenfield Village was fantastic! . . . I was beside myself when I saw the filament inside the incandescent lightbulb at Thomas Edison’s Menlo Park Laboratory – the invention of light so close to my fingertips! – and there was the parchment Confederate money in my pocket . . . and The Wright Brother’s Bicycle Shop . . . but then we came to the roped off room with low lighting.
Being shorter than most of my classmates, I couldn’t see what made the tall boys and girls in front gasp. I strained to see beyond their heads, but I couldn’t.
I had to wait my turn.
The class moved on and for some reason, I found myself alone, hands on the velvet rope . . . and there it was >>>
The Red Rocking Chair From Ford’s Theater!
The one Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in: blood stained, with his blood and his brains smeared at the top of the red cushion.
Suddenly >>> I was light-headed.
My hands gripped the velvet and began to shake. I felt like I was going to fly outside my body. My eyes started to blink rapidly. I was flashing back to the night of April 14, 1865 at the theater, as if I were in the Presidential Box with the Lincolns!
Eardrums pounding, about to explode like a Howitzer Cannon, and a deep whirring noise overtaking my head . . . all I wanted to do was crawl under the rope and throw myself against the chair . . . caress the stained cushion . . .
And cry.
A museum docent saw me shaking, hands fastened to the velvet rope, and ushered me out of this hushed sanctuary . . . back to my giggling classmates.
Clearly, I was the only one who took this assassination stuff seriously.
But, something happened to me when I saw that rocking chair. I can still feel the buzzing sensation when I think about it, or when I see that famous photograph of Lincoln right before he was killed.
TPINSS is also from the Detroit area. She’s seen the chair and remembers: the hush of the room, the blood on the cushion, the shock of being so close to the physical end of an era . . .
And so when she heard that Lincoln’s Bloody Pillow, from the night of the assassination, was at the Ronald Reagan Museum, she rallied us from our reverie to go experience another artifact from the night of the crime.
The thought of Simi Valley on a Sunday, 100 degrees and Ronald Reagan was a bit much . . . but to see the pillow . . . to be that near, once again, the physical end of an era . . . >>>
What we didn’t know was that the clever museum heads designed the Lincoln Exhibit, “Railsplitter to Rushmore” (that alone should have warned us!), so that one had to labor through a labyrinth of Reagan before ever getting to the Lincoln paraphernalia.
We did our best to avoid Ronnie’s jovial countenance jumping out at us from every wall: Ronnie beaming while discussing nuclear destruction, Ronnie radiant about the economy, big toothy grin about the Berlin wall, Ronnie smiling wide about his brush with assassination … >>>
At one point TPINSS and I were locked inside a darkened room that replays Hinkley’s assassination attempt: 3 screens going “bang! bang! bang!” – then the lights go on and you see Reagan’s new blue blazer with bullet hole, and the burgundy sweater he wore at the hospital . . .
Finally released from that room, we zipped past more “My Fellow Americans” photo-ops, and pairs of ranch boots . . . and saddles . . . and more boots . . . past an odd stuffed horse thing with saddle and no legs that some geezer was trying to “ride” a la Urban Cowboy for his wife’s iPhone . . .
Next, a traipse through an aged and dank Air Force One interior . . . out the rear end of the plane . . . and down past Reagan’s pub – good ole Irish guy he was – up an elevator, down another corridor >>> until we found ourselves face to face with a frightening and what can only be described as:
Ginormous Lincoln BobbleHead.
At last! Lincoln Artifacts!
As TPINSS and I got Sunday bumped by khaki-clad families trying to read descriptions pinned next to indecipherable books and letters . . . it became apparent that “Abe Lincoln: Railsplitter To Rushmore” was a random melange of second and third-rate traveling antique show pieces.
Sensing there wasn’t much to see, we did our best to dodge small children and grandpas regaling bored family members with tales of the Mary Surratt hanging. (The exhibit did contain a key to a jail cell of some conspirator ) . . .
We had to get to that bloody pillow!
Darting past a collection of too many law books and pieces of paper that itinerant lawyer Lincoln might have used once, touched, or Herndon his law partner had been in possession of . . . we came upon a wide area sectioned off into two separate “rooms” – one Mary Lincoln’s, one the President’s office.
Just as I began to osmose that the antiques and carefully strewn papers looked a bit too staged . . . I noticed Daniel Day Lewis (as Lincoln) orating emphatically above my head on a tv screen, and then heard a pretty Asian lady reveal that the clothing in Mary Lincoln’s room was the very same as worn by Sally Field in Spielberg’s film.
The line between Hollywood and History was fading fast . . .
I wondered if the kids in the room even knew that half of this exhibit came from a Dreamworks set, and that President Lincoln himself was never on a DVD?
But, what did I expect? We were inside The Ronald Reagan museum for chrissake! If a Howdy Doody B list actor can go from screen to Democrat to Republican to President! without missing a beat . . . then a historical exhibit can do the same!
But still! That damned bloody pillow was nowhere in sight!
Off the movie set, we were shuttled down another corridor to more “what might be the third known copy” of this and that . . . to the requisite Mathew Brady photograph of twisted bodies at Antietam, rigor mortis jumping out of the frame . .
And then . . . in the very last room, behind a red velvet rope . . . a bed, with a blue and white striped pillow . . .
THE BLOODY PILLOW?
I couldn’t see any blood and couldn’t figure out why they would leave such a precious piece out in the middle of the room. Anyone . . . even I could jump the rope, grab the pillow, and race out of the Railsplitter exhibit . . . >>>
I looked down and noticed a plexiglass container with another blue and white pillow squished inside. I strained to see some flecks of blood. I did see something in the middle of the thing.
I took a breath and waited to feel something. For my hands to shake or my body to tingle.
Nothing.
I asked TPINSS what she thought. Was this another ” might be the third known artifact . . .” or was this the real deal?
TPINSS exhaled.
Did she feel anything? Not really. Wait, yes, she felt like she could see Lincoln’s head cushioned there, as he was dying.
“It’s the real deal. Can we get out of here? Starving. Need . . . sushi,” she said.
And that was that.
Anticlimactic.
No tingling, no electric spike up my spine, no hand tremors . . .
Starving, we headed out, past the final installation:
“Marilyn Monroe and Lincoln.”
Groan in unison. Oh god . . . is that Spielberg’s next film? Or did Ronnie star in a B movie with that title back in the day?
The line between Hollywood and History . . . . . . . . .
Louisa Lane Drew
AMADAES 