Abraham Lincoln's Hat

I’ll never forget that first scream. A blood curdling, spine-chilling, never-ending screech which capitalised on the acoustic properties of the theatre and seemed to go forever. The warm glow of the gas lamps was too dim to light up the packed hall. Suddenly I was falling, tumbling over and over until I hit the floor and, still rolling, ended up on the plush red carpet by the wall. I do land light, I always have, but I hadn’t taken a tumble like that for a long long time and it really shook me. It’s hard to remember exactly the next sequence of events. I know I was terrified of being trampled.  There were Jefferson boots, satin evening slippers, fancy leather boots, more screaming, some crying and suddenly a very large man, not Abe, but someone with soft kind hands, picking me up and sort of hugging me to his chest.

Then we were outside in the crisp April evening air and I was with Mary, funny silly Mary, always brushing my beaver fur and adjusting me on Abe’s head. Stove pipe hats have never looked better than me on a night out! That very night she had replaced the black band that Abe always wore around the top of my brim for remembrance of their beautiful boys Eddie and Willie. I loved Mary. Tonight she was holding me by the brim so hard it was hurting, and she was jostling and being jostled by the crowd. She kept calling “Abe! Abe! Abe!” and I just wanted her to stop. If only she’d put me back on Abe’s head where I could see what on earth was happening.

We got carried by the crowd into the building across the road – actually, the same building as the one in which we now speak. The big man with the kind hands was suddenly beside us and he took me out of Mary’s vice like grip, but we kept standing next to her. She was howling. There was quiet weeping going on behind me and repeated cries of “Lincoln’s been shot!! The President is dead!!”  but I think I could hear Abe’s stertorous breathing close by. Soon I was placed on a little table next to Abe’s head. He was lying sort of diagonally on a small bedstead and there were three or four men standing around him mumbling to each other in a language I could not understand. I guess they were doctors, but they were all dressed up for their night out at the theatre and everything looked out of kilter.  It made me sad to think about how happy Abe had been earlier in the night, dressing up for the theatre, the war all but over. He and Mary even danced a little jig on their way out the door. And now – this. Abe – my Abe – was shot at close range in the back of the head by a man he actually knew. He died the next morning at the hands of this lunatic who yelled “Revenge for the South!”  and called Abe a tyrant before jumping from our balcony rail and breaking his leg but still managing to  jump on a waiting horse and make a briefly successful getaway.

It’s been more than 160 years since we lost Abe, the kindest hat owner that ever was.  No more sitting on his desk at cabinet meetings, no more greeting strangers with a polite tip, no more little boys tugging at my brim. No more tobacco smoke, no more war news, no more celebratory theatre nights when at last the war was over. 

The stand I’m on now is not so very different from the one that I used to sit on in the front hall,  back in the halcyon days of the 1860’s White House.  I sit behind glass now, under lights so bright and cold they make my old beaver fur look almost grey. No one brushes my brim anymore. No one adjusts me before a speech. I am safe, preserved, admired — and yet I have never felt so lonely. In the old days I lived on a head that never stopped moving. Now I live in a world that moves too fast for me to follow.

I do hear that the White House is getting a new ballroom – Mary would have been ecstatic! A stove pipe hat’s paradise! And I know that Abe is remembered with pride for his work as the sixteenth president of the United States, the one who defeated the Confederates in a bitter 5 year war that led to the emancipation of slaves  and the end of the slave trade. Amazing grace!   People tell me that every day, in slow moving lines regularly punctuated by flashing camera phones and reverently whispered half remembered fragments of old history lessons. They seem to be in awe. Is this my important role now? To remind the people that good is worth fighting for and that good people have and will always be here doing just that? In contrast to Abe,  life is very long for me and with some irony I think of his words penned not long before that fateful night

"In the end, it's not the years in your life that count. It's the life in your years." –

We soldier on…