The Secrets of Mary Bowser (29 page)

Without saying a word aloud on it, Bet and I connived a routine that kept me from spending much time around her hired servants. Most days, I accompanied her mother to gatherings of the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the Union Guard. As we walked to the Carringtons’ or the Catlins’ to join the other stitching matrons, I carried my former mistress’s sewing kit, minding she didn’t twist an ankle despite her cane. Her slow physical recuperation seemed a steely testament of her Philadelphia patriotism. Stitching for the Union Guard, even iterating the militia company’s name, had become her talisman against secession. During those gatherings, I sought talisman for something else entirely, keeping my head low but my ears alert for any news of whether Virginia would abandon the Union. But the white ladies of Church Hill hardly knew about such things themselves.

“What bluff and bluster from our men.” Mrs. Carrington tut-tutted her way through mending a tear her son had put into his uniform during a drinking party that passed for the militia’s shooting rally.

“I tell my Henry, sun will still rise in the East and set in the West, for all your grand talk,” Mrs. Whitlock agreed. “Millie will still plead for a new ball gown every other week, and Carter will do more card playing than reading up at the university. And I’ll still have a time trying to keep the house in order with such servants as we have. Mistreating my china and misplacing my silver, hiding out to avoid their chores.” The matrons nodded at the apish male notion that such things could ever change.

But I marked how one of the younger women tipped up her nose at them. “Father says Virginia’s bound to secede and join the new Confederacy.”

“Secession, pshaw,” said Mrs. Randolph. “Let the North secede from us, if they find respecting States’ Rights so disagreeable. But cede the nation founded by our Washington and our Jefferson to them? Never.”

I took care not to show how such declarations set my eye-teeth on edge. So long as the free states made Union with slaveholders, Congress would continue carrying on with its compromises. The Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska agreement. Decades and decades of them, and every one made to protect slaveholding.

Secession was a gamble, to be sure. If the South succeeded at tearing itself away, there’d be less of a check on slavery than there even was now. But for folks with nothing to call their own, not even themselves and their children, a gamble with long odds and high stakes was the only possible way to win.

Secession, then war. War, then defeat. Defeat and then, finally, emancipation. John Brown’s raid convinced me it could be so.

Meanwhile, the ladies of Church Hill kept at their sewing. One small, careful stitch after another, each push and pull of the needle rending a hole in the fabric and then filling it with thread.

All through my childhood, Mama turned just about any errand into an adventure, picking her way through Richmond streets with me at her side whenever she was sent to do the Van Lews’ business. Though these outings took us all through the city, we only went once to Mahon’s smithy. I was very, very young when Mama brought me by, on a day when Papa must have known Mahon would be away. As Mama and I stepped from the bright Virginia morning into the smoky dark of the smithy, the stifling heat caught me in place. More than that, the noise stunned me. Metal hitting on metal, so loud I thought the world was coming to an end, with a host of ungodly monsters bent on breaking it apart. One of those monsters, muscles bulging and hammer in hand, looked up at me, and I let loose a scream. I kept on screaming, so hysterical the only thing for it was for Mama to pick me up and hustle me out, hushing and soothing me all the way back up Church Hill.

My parents never mentioned that visit. It became one of my private remembrances, stored away for months at a time until I’d take it out and toy with it a bit, the way a child runs a tongue along a loose tooth every now and again. The memory frightened me for years, scared me more when I turned old enough to understand Papa had to sit among those monsters every day. Perplexed me when I was older still, wondering why Mahon, who had so much power over Papa, didn’t do something about those monsters himself. I felt mighty foolish once I was grown enough to realize those figures weren’t monsters, just slaves made to work the glowing metal all day long. Ashamed about shrieking at my own papa that way, mistaking him for an ogre just because he was strong and sure at his task.

Now that I was back in Richmond, I went by Mahon’s lot most mornings, carefully choosing the earliest hour of the day for my visits, before Papa’s labors at the forge and mine tending Bet’s mother. But what I saw when I stopped there vexed me almost as much as the monsters I imagined all those years before.

Buildings of all sizes choked the property. The largest by far was the smithy itself, a cavernous brick room anchored by three chimneys so powerful their smoke hung in the air day and night. At a back corner of the lot stood the barn for the horse and delivery cart. In the other rear corner sat the two-story wooden quarter that housed the apprentices. Smaller sheds for storing various supplies dotted what remained of the tight tract. It was in one of those that Papa slept.

The cabin Papa had shared with Mr. and Mrs. Wallace was by no stretch of the facts luxurious. But the bare stall he now occupied shocked by comparison. Four walls so close there wasn’t room enough for him to stretch full out on his narrow sleeping pallet. Frigid air whistled through gaps in the wall planks, which in warmer weather must have been a passageway for vermin. Windowless, the shed lacked not only light but also the colorful tattersall curtains Mama made for Papa’s cabin so many years before. Worst of all, Papa’s sculptured cross was nowhere to be seen.

Sundays of my childhood, I spent hours gazing upon that twisted metal form and marveling at my papa’s ability to bend iron to his will. Now it seemed he had no will at all. Whenever I suggested small improvements we might make to the shed, he replied with the same defeated air, “Ain’t my place to fix up, it’s Marse Mahon’s.”

I cursed Mahon for relegating my dear papa to a workshed that wasn’t even fit to stable an ox. This man, who always held such prepotency over my family, was in truth a stranger to me. I avoided the smithy property while he was around, lest he find reason to object to Papa passing his scant free moments with me. But I worked my nerve up like a skillet warming to a fry, positioning myself on Franklin Street late one afternoon to intercept Mahon as he made his way home for the night.

“Marse Mahon, sir,” I said as I stepped into his path, “I’m your Lewis’s daughter. I been gone out of Richmond for a while, my owner just brought me back lately.”

Mahon didn’t care to be kept waiting. “What is it, gal?”

“My papa, he’s not so young anymore. I fear the chill air might weaken him. Keep him from being able to work so good for you, sir. If I could fill the chinks in his sleeping shed with rags or mud or whatnot. And maybe if I could pretty it up a bit, to cheer him. Only if you think it would help keep Papa strong for you, sir.”

He squinted into the distance. “Don’t know why he insists on sleeping there rather than in the quarter with the rest of ’em.” Could he really mean that Papa chose to dwell in that nasty shed? “Hardly been himself since Aunt Minnie passed. Maybe should have sold him then, before all this talk of secession made prices so unstable.”

That single sentence loosed all that had been building in me for the decade past. I wanted to scream at Mahon, rage at him. Obdurately holding Papa all those years, in the face of unnamed profit from the sale. Keeping both my parents from building a life together, with me, in the North. And now, saying he would let Papa go, once it was too late for him to be with Mama until they met again in Glory. Once it was too late for my family to make a home in freedom.

I bit my tongue hard and kept my eyes low, thinking of what a colored woman’s outburst to a white man on a Richmond street would cost her.

Mahon must have taken my downward glance for submissive gratitude. “You best do something to improve Lewis’s attitude, gal.” He pushed past me to make his way home to his supper.

I felt vain and silly, thinking how I wanted to make myself out to be a great liberator with a heroic part to play in some grand plan for abolition, when I hadn’t so much as managed to help my own papa. Now that I had Mahon’s leave to meddle with his property, I promised myself at least I’d fix the shed up in short order, never mind whose aid I’d have to enlist or how Papa might protest afterward. I wanted to do right by my papa. And I needed to prove to myself that I really could, and would, do even more in Richmond than I had in Philadelphia, to counter slavery.

In the seven blocks beyond the Van Lew mansion, Church Hill slopes down into the Shockoe Creek ravine. Most streets dead-end against the creek, starting up again on the other side. Traveling by foot or cart or carriage, you have to pick your way across by heading some ways upstream or downstream to one of the rickety bridges that traverse the creek bottom. Residents of Church Hill always spoke about Shockoe Hill, which rises up on the far side of the creek, as if it were a foreign land. Since I never had business at Court End or Capitol Square, I had scant sense of the Richmond that stretched west of the creek.

Making my way toward Shockoe Hill, I had to pass through the long blocks of slave pens and auction houses that constituted Richmond’s topographical and moral low point. Omohundro’s slave jail was right on Broad Street. So were smaller slave-traders like Faundron’s and Frazier’s. Clustered on side streets off Broad all the way to the Canal were more than a dozen similar establishments, Lumpkin’s Alley the worst of them. Little wonder colored Richmond called the area Devil’s Half-Acre.

“Servus est.” Sed fortasse liber animo. “Servus est.” Hoc illi nocebit? Ostende quis non sit: alius libidini servit, alius avaritiae, alius ambitioni, omnes spei, omnes timori.
I silently declaimed the passage from the Stoic philosopher Seneca that I translated my first year in Miss Mapps’s class, as the rapacious white men gathered outside Omohundro’s looked me over just as though I were standing half-stripped on the auction block.
You say, “He is a slave.” But he is a person with a free spirit. You say, “He is a slave.” But how shall this harm him? Show me who is not a slave. One man is a slave to his lusts, another is a slave to greed, another a slave of ambition, and all are slaves to hope and fear.

I told myself that the men ogling me were slaves to lust, greed, ambition, hope, and fear all together. They saw me only as an ignorant slave. But surely that was better than being a slave-trader or his lackey, who chose ignorance for themselves.

The noise of the slave pens fell away by the time I got as far west as where Broad Street crosses Seventh. On one corner was the train depot where I said good-bye to Mama. On another was a two-story clapboard structure painted dove gray. Through the six-paned windows that framed the front door, I spied two tall chairs set before a counter laden with all manner of barbering tools. One of the chairs was taken, though all I could see of its occupant were the hirsute hands holding the newspaper that obscured his face.

Mr. Bowser was stoking the fire in the small stove at the back of the shop, and as I opened the door, he called, “Right with you in a moment, sir. Only but one gentleman ahead of you, wait shouldn’t be long.”

When he turned and saw me, he started, then looked to his customer, who remained ensconced behind his news-sheet. “Mr. Saunders, I must step out for a moment, be right back.”

Following me outside, he took my elbow and steered me through a gate by the corner of the building. “What’s the trouble?”

Hearing his worry made me feel funny all of a sudden. “No trouble, only I need a favor of you, if you please.”

Which it didn’t seem he did. “What do you mean coming into a barbering shop, short of a genuine emergency? A lady doesn’t belong any such place.”

“I’m not supposed to be a lady,” I reminded him.

“Contrary Mary, do you ever fail to disagree with something a person says to you? Don’t bother objecting, I have a customer waiting and no time to argue. So tell me what’s brought you here.”

Swallowing my umbrage at being called contrary, I explained about Papa’s living situation. I told him I needed some way to lure Papa off the lot come Sunday, so I could patch and clean the shed. “I don’t know you well, but you’ve been kind to me once already, and I thought maybe we could come up with some excuse for you to invite Papa off someplace for a few hours.”

He shook his head, but I wasn’t about to be refused. “If you’re busy this Sunday, then perhaps next week—”

“Not a thing to do Sunday I can’t put off,” he said. “It’s just that what you’re asking doesn’t make a lick of sense.”

“Doesn’t make sense to want to do for my papa? Man’s got rheumatism, shivering his nights away, and it doesn’t make sense to want to fix up that nasty shed? You call me Contrary Mary, but you’re nothing but a—a Willful Wilson.”

“I don’t know that I’m so much willful myself as I have a tender spot for willful women. Aren’t I lucky one’s fallen into my life, asking me favors one after another without ever meaning to let me decline?” He smiled like he’d been pleased all along, knowing I’d come to plead for his aid. “Fixing up your papa’s place makes plenty of sense. But you can get him away from there easier than a stranger can. So you do that, leave the fixing up to me.”

I didn’t know quite what to make of what he said about willful women, so I just sniffed a bit over the part about him fixing up the shed. “I can do the work myself, you know.”

“No doubt you’re eager to try. But you just worry about distracting him, let me round up a fellow or two who owe me a favor, and we’ll handle the furbishments. What time shall I have them over at the smithy?”

He didn’t leave me much chance to say nay. “We’ll be gone by ten o’clock, and I can keep him out for most of the day. I’ll leave a bucket of mud plaster and another of whitewash for you in the hollowed tree at the edge of the lot.” I gave him my most decorous nod. “I appreciate you showing such kindness to a man you haven’t even met.”