The Secrets of Mary Bowser (11 page)

Her faced turned to stone. “Nothing. She’s dead.”

Dead—that’s just the way she said it, not
passed on
or
gone to Glory
like most folks did. The hardness of the word sank right down past all that ice cream to the pit of my stomach, the way a rock tossed off the wharf would sink deep into the James River. Not the James, I reminded myself, you’re not in Richmond anymore. Ought to say the Delaware instead.

“I’m sorry, Hattie, I didn’t realize.”

“Well, now you know.” She pushed her empty dish to the center of our table and stared at the wall above my shoulder.

Death was something I hadn’t thought much about. Folks we knew from prayer meeting passed away from time to time, but I’d never condoled the mourners much, child that I was. Now I wasn’t supposed to be a child anymore, and I struggled for something to say.

I remembered how after Old Master Van Lew died, Bet wove locks of his hair into a braid and wore it as a mourning bracelet. “Did you keep anything of your mama’s, after she passed?”

Hattie nodded. Reaching into her purse pocket, she pulled out a worn patch of pale green poplin, patterned with forest green flowers. The middle of the swatch was just about worn away from where her fingers had rubbed at it.

“It was my favorite of all her dresses. When Daddy told us each to pick something of hers, this was all I wanted, a piece I could carry with me wherever I go. Charlotte, my oldest sister, had a fit. She wanted the whole dress for wearing herself, but Daddy said no, I was youngest and got to pick first. He cut the piece right then, handed it to me with a kiss.” She blinked her eyes and frowned. “I can remember the cut of the dress, the way it swished around when she moved, like I saw her in it an hour ago. But I can’t remember a thing about my mother besides that. Try to call up her face, I just get the daguerreotype they took after she died, which everyone says doesn’t resemble her at all.”

My mind struggled for images of Mama and Papa, Josiah and Zinnie and the girls, Old Sam, too. I didn’t want to believe you could lose people like that, right out of your memory.

Hattie ran her thumb over the scrap of cloth. “The thing I most wish I remembered was her voice. She had a song she used to sing to me and my sisters, ‘Walk Together Children.’ Daddy sings it sometimes now, but it’s not the same.”

“What does your daddy say she sounded like?” I asked.

“Like me.”

I ventured out my hand to pat hers, even offered a half smile, the kind you can pull back down in case it isn’t met warmly. I saw her chest rise up and fall, one deep breath, and got the same half smile back from her.

As we strolled back toward school, arms linked liked always, I confided, “When Old Master Van Lew died, we were all supposed to go in and pay our respects, but I hid out in the smokehouse I was so scared.”

“My daddy always says we can do more harm to the dead than they can do to us.”

I looked at her sideways. “He some kind of Voudoun master?”

“No, silly, he’s an undertaker. I was thinking of inviting you over for dinner this Sunday, but if you’re so frightened of dead folks . . .”

The idea of visiting the undertaker’s ran chills up and down my spine, even in the mid-day heat. But I said, “Of course I’m not.”

“Good. Come by about one o’clock. My sisters will all be there with their husbands, and a load of nieces and nephews. We’ll outnumber the spirits for sure, just in case you take fright.”

The shoes Bet outfitted me with before I left Virginia weren’t at all the fashion in Philadelphia. I noticed it myself, but when Phillipa made a comment about “certain people who drag their skirts through the streets, one can only presume to hide their most unfortunate footgear,” I counted over the coins I’d carefully accumulated from my allowance, eagerly anticipating the purchase of a fine new pair to wear to meet Hattie’s family.

A small wooden sign proclaiming
MUELLER AND SONS, SHOEMAKERS
hung from the second floor of a building on the Upshaws’ block of Gaskill Street. Though Mama and Old Sam often sent me to the cobbler in Shockoe Bottom on errands for the Van Lews, I was befuddled by what I found when I pushed open the Muellers’ door that Saturday. It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the dim interior, and when they did, I saw about the oddest sight I’d ever seen.

There sat an older man and woman, four younger men, and two girls. They were all sewing shoes, even the females. Stranger still, they were sewing eight identical shoes. And only sewing the leather tops of the shoes together. In the corner of the room rose a high pile of these bottomless wonders, not a sole on any of them.

The older man nodded toward me and spoke to one of the girls in a guttural language. She set down her work and asked, “Have you business here?”

“Yes,” I said. “I need new shoes.”

“We do not take one order.” She seemed to grope for words. “No order from just one person.”

“But I am only one person, and I want to buy one pair of shoes.”

She looked at me as if I’d asked for a pound of butter or a carriage wheel. “We do not sell. The jobber brings pieces, and we sew.” She gestured at the pile in the corner. “Then he brings to the Schmidts to put on soles. Then takes to the stores on Chestnut Street. You go there to buy.”

“How does the store know which kind I want, and what size I need?”

She shrugged. “They have every kind. Pick what you like.”

Her father called to her in their strange language, motioning her to return to work. I thanked the girl and left.

As I walked toward Chestnut Street, I thought about how Bet always insisted the North was more advanced than the South. I couldn’t fathom what was so superior about having someone called a jobber drag pairs of half-finished shoes all over town, with no idea whether anybody even wanted to buy that size or style.

When I reached Chestnut, I walked up and down several blocks, eyeing the elegantly dressed white ladies who disappeared into the various storefronts. A five-story building, bigger than any I’d ever seen in Richmond and proclaiming itself
BARNES AND CHARLES, PURVEYORS OF LADIES’ AND GENTLEMEN’S WARDROBE, BOOTS TO BONNETS
seemed especially popular.

Stepping through the grand doorway, I found myself in a large salon, some forty feet across. Behind long counters on either side, clerks were selling a variety of wares for ladies. Rich carpet covered the floor, and way above my head protruded galleries of counters filled with gentlemen’s goods. In the middle of the salon stood a waist-high mahogany stall, topped with marble. When I told the woman inside the stall that I was in need of new shoes, she directed me to the far end of the room.

Mama always lowered her eyes and waited for all the white people to be served before she stepped up to the counter in a Richmond store. Even little children or people who came in long after her would push right by without a thought on their part or a complaint on hers. But when I stood before the counter that day, marveling at the rows and rows of shoes along the wall, the clerk smiled right at me in turn and asked what I would like.

I had just the shoes I wanted in mind, a half boot in light beige kid, something I could wear right through autumn. But before my mouth could explain all that to the clerk, my hand was pointing to a pair of silk slippers. They were pale yellow, with deep blue rosettes on the toes and a trail of glass beads around the tops.

I knew such shoes were not made for traipsing all over Philadelphia with Hattie. But I also knew they were the most beautiful shoes I’d ever seen, prettier than any Bet or her mother ever wore. Just looking at those slippers, I forgot all about kid and boot and sturdy walking heels.

When the clerk laid a pair in my size on the counter, I understood for the very first time how Papa must have felt when he bought a just-because. The things Bet gave me were nice enough, and it seemed like I had a rich wardrobe compared to Ducky and Mrs. Upshaw. But these shoes were more than rich and pretty. They were the very first things I ever bought myself, picked out just because they pleased me and paid from my own purse, albeit with funds Bet had pressed on me.

I decided to celebrate my purchase by riding the omnibus down Chestnut Street. These large, horse-drawn contraptions filled with rows of seats fascinated me. I supposed them terribly expensive, as Hattie never suggested we take them, even when I hinted about the dreadful heat on our long walks home from school. But emboldened by my successful shopping adventure, I was all too eager to spend a bit more of Bet’s money, for the fun of such a ride.

I walked two full blocks in the opposite direction to ensure I’d have a goodly length omnibus trip back to Fourth Street. A stout white man paced back and forth along the corner, pausing every few minutes to pull out his watch, mutter to himself, and shake his head. When the omnibus arrived, he waved it to a stop, stepped on, and paid his fare. Smiling, I stepped up behind him and offered the collector my money.

“Step down, please,” the collector said.

“But I have the fare.” I jingled the coins in my hand.

“You cannot ride this conveyance. Please step down.”

As I glanced about the half-full car, the man who had just boarded caught sight of me. He turned red as a beet and shouted at the conductor, “Some of us are in a great hurry. If you won’t throw the nigger off, my Jesus, I will.”

The fare collector moved toward me. As I backed away, my heel snagged on the step. The driver whipped the horses forward, sending me stumbling to the ground. Passengers looked out through the windows as the omnibus pulled past, some glaring and some pitying. People walking by stopped to point and whisper.

I ducked into a narrow passageway between two buildings. Shame shook my legs so, I had to lean against one of the walls, the heat from the bricks seeping through my dress.

The stout man’s words echoed in my head,
nigger
and
Jesus
both falling from his mouth.
Nigger
made me think of Virginia. I wondered how a place so different as brotherly love Philadelphia could make me feel the same—worse even—than that Old Dominion of slaveholding. And
Jesus
made me think of Mama. I missed her so. Missed her when Philadelphia was a source of wonder and delight, but especially when it caught me in its strangeness, its loneliness, or its downright meanness. Mama would know how to turn from that man to the Jesus whose name he took in vain.

“Do You really have a plan for me?” I spoke aloud, in a low voice, talking to Jesus just like Mama would. “Walking on cobbled streets while whites ride in an omnibus, buying shoes at a clothier’s store rather than from a shoemaker—what’s all that got to do with my being special, like Mama and Papa and even Bet say I am?”

Back when Mistress Van Lew got it into her head to have the whole household vaccinated against smallpox, Mama asked Jesus whether she and I should take the shots. The very next day, a whole brood of shad making their way down the James River ended up in the Westham canal just above Richmond. No one could guess how the fish got there, and they died by the hundreds, trapped in the basin. Mama took this as a certain answer that we should receive the vaccination. When I asked how she knew that was what those belly-up shad were supposed to mean, she told me it was between her and Jesus, and people too young to read His signs shouldn’t be bothering grown-ups with so many pesky questions.

Now I searched for some sign I could read myself. To my left, people and carriages hurried purposeful as ever along Chestnut Street. To my right, the passageway was darker. I walked in that direction until it widened into an alley ten feet across.

Though bright sunshine lit the boulevard, the alley lay in shadow. A dozen or so shacks hewn of shabby wooden boards crowded together, doors open to the stink from the lone outhouse that served the mass of inhabitants. Two goats and a handful of chickens added to the noise and mess. A mob of children—mostly white, though I made out a few mulatto and black faces among them—played in the muck between their makeshift homes.

One tow-headed child scrambled over and pulled on my skirts. Its face was so dirty and its clothing so tattered I couldn’t tell if it was a girl or a boy, even as it asked, “Spare something?”

I still held the unused omnibus fare. The coins seemed to burn with all my mortification at being cast from the public conveyance, and I gladly dropped them into the grimy hand.

The creature let out a whoop. Instantly, the other children swarmed around me. They tugged and yanked and pleaded so, I fished the rest of the coins from my purse and pitched them as far back in the alley as I could. While the ragamuffins scrambled after the money, I fled back the way I came.

I emerged into the bright light and bustle of Chestnut Street and began the hot walk back to Gaskill, the smells of the alley still clinging to my mangled skirts.

When I found my way to Hattie’s father’s lot on Sixth Street the next morning, I was reassured to see that the undertaking business was in a separate building, set between a small stable and the brick residence. The house hummed with voices. Hattie had five sisters, every sister had a husband, and most had children as well. “Daddy always says, easiest to meet everyone in order,” she said as she led me upstairs to introduce me to her father. “Start at the oldest and work on down.”

Alexander Jones rose from the horsehair armchair in the front parlor, where he was debating with his many sons-in-law, to extend his hand in greeting. Hattie took after her father so strongly, I felt like his face was already familiar. The air of scrutiny suggested by Hattie’s raised eyebrow seemed even more forceful when coupled with his gray hair and deep voice. I would have thought he doubted my very being, save for the warm words with which he welcomed me.

Hattie’s sisters were scattered about, preparing the meal and tending their various broods, so there was much tramping through the house to find them in order, with Hattie returning me to the parlor to introduce each husband just after I met his wife. That did help me keep everyone’s names in order. Charlotte, Diana, Emily, Fanny, and Gertie all looked alike, none of them resembling Hattie or their father a whit. They were all quite beautiful—I felt like I was a traitor to Hattie to notice that—and their husbands were all fine-looking gentlemen. This was a source of especial pride to Gertie, whose husband was the handsomest of the lot.