Nancy Schoenberger
ELIZABETH STRIDE
Duffield’s Yard/September 30, 1888
I came from Sweden. I sewed, I cleaned houses. I was called
Elisabeth Gustafsdotter. I sold myself in Gothenburg back home
and paid the price for it. I had a stillborn girl. I had two husbands:
Johnny Stride and Michael Kidney. Johnny was a carpenter,
we ran a coffee room in Poplar, here in th’ East End, till that went bad
and Johnny left me, so into the Poplar Workhouse goes I.
I say Johnny drowned in ’78 when the Princess Alice
went down into the Thames. They told me he survived -- I never saw him.
So I lived with Michael Kidney off and on, in a common lodging house
in Whitechapel, where I spoke Yiddish with the foreigners.
He called me “Long Liz.” They all call me that now,
all who remember. My hair was curly and dark for a Swede. I was 45.
It was better back home. We had a farm but lost it. Always was I
losing things – a home, a father, a husband. I swear I lost him
to the great, gray-slated river when that ship went down.
The sun don’t shine here like it used to shine back then,
on fields of larkspur! At least, it never shined on me, till I met the man
what gave me the red posy. Met ‘im in Berner Street, when I left
Mr. Kidney and the lodging house where we occupied a room.
Not tonight, I told him. Yet some other night. So I placed
the pretty rose on my lapel and headed for Ten Bells,
for I was bloomin’ thirsty. But I felt clean and strong.
I say there were two of ‘em:
A short gentleman in a deerstalker cap and black trousers,
A taller gent in black coat and felt hat. He smoked a clay pipe.
I screamed when one of them dragged me to the street.
I screamed like a lady of quality.
I drowned in his arms. I sank down and down, and heard
the whistling music of his knives. Or did the freezing waters
of the Thames come over me, carrying all its poisons to the sea?
Call me Lizzy Stride, if it’s me that you re-member.
THE CITY OF LONDON
THE THAMES
I am called Tamasa: dark river. Along my banks the dead houses
Rise, to shelter the bodies of the drowned. John Druitt leaped into
my arms. They fling themselves at me, week after week,
to find their peace in my great silence. I am older than time,
I am the Thames. Blue-black in winter, I carry
London’s ailments to the sea. I carry her sorrows, her discards, her diseases
and dark crimes, which I fold in my salving arms. I am movement,
I am salvation, I am a force to be reckoned with. Take your place
on my wide inviting back: I will take you where you long to go.
THE MUD LARK
Found drowned.
Pulled from the puling waves
And stacked on shelves
In the Dead House, in Deptford.
On Jacob’s Island. This one’s
a lady: her furbelows and corsets.
Her cloying curls, caked with river silt,
Her tears would salt the very sea.
The jacket on that fine gent
Will fetch a farthing.
I don’t particular care for the work.
God put me here to cleanse the river
And if I am very nimble, I might
Please Him and survive
to find another drowned.
WORKHOUSE HOWL
They put me in a yellow dress in Lambeth, as I worked the streets &
found my living in Whitechapel’s labyrinth. The girls
with child were made to dress in red, and all were set to work
picking oakum – spike – from rope, until our fingers bled –
two pounds a day to earn our doss. The old ones, the hags
with broken teeth or none, set about their work with low hum-
ming that grew into a howl by end of day. They worked too long,
combing out the graying fibrous threads that looked no less like
tangled lady’s wigs, washed up by th’ restless Thames.
We were washed up, washed out, awash with bitter knowing
that the ships what used our matted hair to caulk their joints
would never know our pains, except the sound the riggings make
in heavy weather: that long, low workhouse howl
of women picking oakum all their hours.
Poet and biographer Nancy Schoenberger directed the Creative Writing Program at the College of William and Mary and is the author of three prize-winning books of poetry, including Long Like a River from NYU Press. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, and elsewhere.
Schoenberger co-authored two New York Times-bestselling biographies (most recently, The Fabulous Bouvier Sisters), and is the sole author of Dangerous Muse: The Life of Lady Caroline Blackwood and a book about masculinity issues in John Ford-John Wayne Westerns. Her poem cycle about London’s 1888 Whitechapel murders, “The Whitechapel Arias,” was adapted into a one-act play and performed in 2019 at The College of William & Mary.