Sister Noon (7 page)

“Anyone who wants love can have it,” Mrs. Pleasant said. “There are ways.”

“Charms,” explained Mrs. Bell.

“You can do anything you want. You don’t have to be the same person your whole life. As to love, you’re better off without. That’s about all I know about that!”

“Mr. Bell and I are very much in love,” said Mrs. Bell.
There was an odd pause. “With each other.” She was seated by Lizzie again; she tapped on Lizzie’s arm. “Mrs. Pleasant reads tea leaves,” she said. “If you want to know your future. Not that it’s always such a good idea.”

“Miss Hayes doesn’t believe in that sort of thing,” Mrs. Pleasant observed, and rightly so, but Mrs. Bell’s warning aside, who wouldn’t want her tea leaves read?

“Please,” said Lizzie.

She watched as Mrs. Pleasant peered into her cup, dumped the dregs onto a saucer, let them settle, looked again, and finally smashed them with the back of her spoon in a gesture that could only disturb. The clock struck and still Mrs. Pleasant contemplated the ruins of Lizzie’s tea. She looked for so long that Lizzie suspected she was seeing something bad.

But when Mrs. Pleasant spoke it was all bland bits of other fortunes. “You’ve come to a magical juncture,” she said, which was nice, since Lizzie had been feeling old and used up. Nice to think she was at the beginning of something. “A critical turning. You could lose your way.” This was less nice.

“You must watch out for three signs. This is the order of them: a blue-eyed man, a white dog, and the number twelve. When you’ve seen them all, you’ll have a choice to make.” She looked straight at Lizzie’s face and didn’t look away. Lizzie hated being looked at.

“Your impulses are good,” Mrs. Pleasant said finally, “but you don’t trust them. You fret overly about appearances and say things you don’t really think. Put all that away when you make this choice, or you’ll blunder.”

And that was it. “I see,” Lizzie replied. “That’s helpful,
then,” which was not what she really thought. And nothing at all about falling in love, which she’d thought was the whole point. She would have liked to ask, but having already introduced the matter once, she felt it would be nagging.

At just that moment a large Negro in a black top hat entered the room. He whispered something to Mrs. Pleasant, who rose. “The carriage is hitched,” she said. “I’ll get you to it.”

She took Lizzie’s arm, which was quite unnecessary. Lizzie felt a small piece of paper pressed into her hand, a wave of lavender perfume. “Here’s where to buy that tea. You just tell the druggist I sent you, he’ll take special care. Sam, please see Miss Hayes safely back.”

Lizzie’s arm was transferred to Sam. “I’m perfectly well able to walk,” she said crossly, and then looked up to see the crippled girl, Viola, who wasn’t. “So sorry,” she offered, vaguely aware that an apology would only make matters worse.

I
n later years the
San Francisco Chronicle
would refer to the residents of the House of Mystery as the strangest bunch ever to live in the city. The Bell household had a predilection for assumed names and fanciful histories. The 1890 census showed several of them lying about their ages as well.

To have seen the inside, as Lizzie had just done, to have your tea leaves read by Mrs. Pleasant herself, was rare enough to be worth the telling of it. Yet Lizzie found she was reluctant to do so. Her own role was an ambiguous one; she had made herself too much at home.

In fact, Nell Harris told Mrs. Lake that Lizzie had returned to the Brown Ark in a disgraceful state of intoxication. The children all witnessed it, Nell said—Lizzie, with
her hair tipped off the side of her head like a melting pudding, setting her feet down with such deliberation and laughing like a crazy woman about it. She had asked Nell if Nell thought she was happy. As if a person could think she was happy, but really not be. As if Nell had time to worry about such things!

And then, when pressed, Lizzie admitted to having learnt absolutely nothing further about Jenny Ijub. Oh, Nell could see poor Lizzie had been as clay in the hands of the cunning Mrs. Pleasant.

While Lizzie had been off tippling, a sparrow had flown into the basement of the Brown Ark. Before Nell could sweep it out the door with the broom, the orange cat had gotten it. This information reduced Lizzie to shockingly voluble sobs—“Poor bright little spirit!” she said in a trembly voice—and then she went upstairs to the tower room and fell asleep at once on the scratchy settee.

If Nell and Lizzie had been a generation older, if they’d read the
Pacific Appeal,
the paper that came from the Negro community, instead of the
Wasp
, the things they thought they knew about Mrs. Pleasant might have been quite different. As it was, their familiarity with her was based almost entirely on the coverage of a sensational and long-running court case commonly called the Sharon business.

A lady’s name, Lizzie’s mother had always told her, appears in the paper only twice, once when she’s married and once when she’s buried. Yet there Mrs. Pleasant was, often as not, on page six, or page twelve, a few paragraphs down, or in the very headline itself. On one side of the Sharon case was a red-haired beauty from Missouri named
Sarah Althea (Allie) Hill. On the other was William Sharon, ex–U.S. senator and executive of the Bank of California. Sharon was
a San Francisco millionaire,
a title reserved for those whose fortunes exceeded thirty million.

Sharon and Hill were either married or they weren’t when she sued him for divorce on grounds of adultery. She had a letter from him attesting to the marriage, a letter Sharon claimed was a forgery.

In 1885, with the trial ongoing, William Sharon had died, leaving Allie widowed or not, disgraced or unimaginably wealthy, or some combination of the above. It took four years for the courts to rule finally against her.

Mrs. Pleasant was rumored to have paid all Allie’s legal costs. She spent many days in court at Allie’s side for no reason anyone could see, except to fix the judge with the evil eye.

The witnesses for William Sharon included an endless succession of star, palm, and tea-leaf readers, spirit mediums and charm workers, all of whom claimed that, under Mrs. Pleasant’s guidance, Allie had fed the ex-senator love potions, placed items of power in fresh graves, pierced the dried heart of a pigeon with nine pins and worn it in a red silk bag about her neck. These were not seen to be the actions of a wife, and Allie had denied them.

The testimony that followed concerned previous lovers, suicide attempts, even the details of carnal intimacies, right there in the press, where any innocent child might read them. It was the sort of case that exposed no end of human frailties and, Lizzie thought sadly, no one’s more than her own. It was so like a good novel, except for the being-real part. Real embarrassments, real heartbreak, real death.
She was ashamed of how avidly she’d followed it. Her mother would have canceled the paper first.

So there Lizzie was, only three signs shy of a magical juncture and too ashamed to tell anyone. She spoke only to Nell about the visit and was as brief as could be. In this way she hoped to conceal her intense interest.

It was an interest widely shared. How did a colored woman, an ex-slave, come to have so much money and influence, San Francisco asked itself, and gave itself three possible answers.

P
roposition One:
Mary E. Pleasant rose to power and prominence in San Francisco through her cooking.

A better case can be made for this than one might imagine. When Mrs. Pleasant arrived in 1852, San Francisco was little more than a mining camp. Streets were made by sinking emptied whiskey bottles into the mud; shacks were made by dismantling boats and wagons. The food was revolting.

Mrs. Pleasant was already in possession of a sizable inheritance from her first husband when she went to work as housekeeper at an elegant bachelor club on Washington Street.

Among those who sat at her table in the early years were:

The Woodworth brothers—Fred, part owner of the
fabulous Ophir mine, and Selim, acting consul for China and a commodore in the U.S. Navy.

Newton Booth, who would go on to be governor and a U.S. senator.

Those kings of the Comstock, William Ralston, who ran the Bank of California and built the Palace Hotel, and William Sharon, senator from Nevada, who inherited the Palace after Ralston drowned.

Senator David S. Broderick and California Supreme Court justice David S. Terry, before the latter killed the former in a dubiously conducted duel and had to flee the state.

And Representative Milton Latham, a lawyer, financier, and railroad engineer.

Here were some of the wealthiest men in San Francisco, most of them quite fond of her. Stock tips, management concerns, and investment strategies were passed about the table as readily as salt and pepper.

Mrs. Pleasant was sharp, well funded, and well informed. By 1880 she owned a stable, a saloon, a dairy farm, a brothel, two boardinghouses, several residences, and considerable amounts of undeveloped land in Oakland and Berkeley. She’d invested in railroads, mining, and ranching, and managed to dodge the crash of 1873 and the crookedness of 1879.

No other explanation of her wealth is necessary. No explanation of power besides wealth is needed.

Many of her recipes survive. Some call for ingredients in proportions large enough to serve more than a hundred diners.

Proposition Two:
Mary E. Pleasant rose to power and prominence in San Francisco through a system of carefully managed secrets.

At that same table, Mrs. Pleasant must have heard a great many things besides stock tips. She was widely known as a superior cook, but equally widely as someone who would keep a secret.

She was a woman for women to turn to in a scrape. She found hospitals for girls in trouble, homes for unwanted children; Teresa Bell’s diaries connect her to one Dr. Monser, who ran a foundling hospital (and later died in San Quentin while serving sentence for a botched abortion). Both black women and white women depended on her; she made no distinctions.

Before the war, Mary Ellen Pleasant had taken enormous personal risks on behalf of slaves. She carried money to John Brown and participated in the Franchise League. She went to court to oppose those laws that penalized free blacks.

After the war, people began to refer to her as the Black City Hall. She loaned money to new businesses. She donated to black churches. She found domestic positions for new arrivals in the hotels and in the households of her wealthy white friends.

Any servant sees things, and some of these servants had been trained by slavery to be observant on penalty of death. If an unmarried daughter seemed tired in the mornings, if a married man had unusual appetites or an extra wife back East, if there were gambling debts or domestic violence or alcoholic madness, this information was likely to reach Mrs. Pleasant.

A favor can be freely extended out of gratitude for a
secret kept. A favor can be extorted in return for the promise of secrecy. From the outside it may be hard to distinguish the former from the latter. But Teresa Bell was not the only one to call it blackmail.