Stand the Storm (18 page)
Indeed a colored woman was fair vulnerable as she went about the streets of Georgetown and Washington in her work. The white matrons who employed colored women in laundry and general char favored women they deemed upstanding, not loose, unattached adventurers. And so they judged appearance and behavior very sharply. A laundress seen in the wrong circumstance might lose her customers.
To cart laundry about the town was to rub shoulders with a flock of other colored women. The great many bordellos generated a copious amount of washing and ironing work. Some of the more elite of these establishments advertised themselves upon the feature of clean sheets and lace and accoutrements. There were syndicates of laundry women helping one another in handling customers and covering when a member could not keep up her customers because of a babe or other hardship. Syndicate members also helped others to a turn at the public water hydrants and elbowed out strangers. These arrangements kept newcomers from pinching off good customers.
Mary hoped to move into one of the syndicates and looked to Mount Zion Church. A good many of the free laundresses were members of this house of worship. Mary’s religious instructions had been stingy. She had a few precepts and some few stories from the Bible. The formality of the Mount Zion worship had its draw for her. Gabriel little shared her blossoming interest in the church, but he did not impede her, for he recognized the practical wisdom of it.
The Ladies of Olives of Mount Zion Church, a syndicate of colored laundresses, became the linchpin of Mary Coats’s aspirations.
Annie was skeptical of the fees and the joinings. Mary, who had become a true daughter and claimed a daughter’s affection from Annie, had some trouble to convince her. Though Gabriel had agreed to the expenditure, Annie claimed the right of supervision over funds earned at the laundry trade. She stood upon the idea that the barrels had been her insistence and she had shaped the concern.
“Nanny,” Gabriel conceded with his hand raised behind his ear, “you are the captain.”
Mary cajoled that the few coins in membership fee for the Ladies of Olives were put to good use and in no danger—for there was burial and bodily protection attached. Paid-up members of all of the laundry syndicates could expect to go abroad unhindered by other laundresses and with confidence that upstarts would not encroach. Encroachment, stealing, overturning baskets, dumping baskets, spitting on baskets of clean laundry—an unfortunate fashion among the coarser element that lived in the alleys—or attacking the person of a syndicate member would result in a severe pummeling by the committee of sinewy, hardened, and salty women who exacted and kept the syndicate’s bond. Mary had suffered such on a day when she boldly approached a bordello on Congress Street. She had naively inquired at the back door, received dirty sheets, and left exuberantly. Set upon at the mouth of the alley behind High Street, she was warned and pounded by the fists of the committee.
These vigilantes took no turn in the broader pond of attackers of colored women. They were circumspect as a rule, though they once came to the aid of a member set upon by rapists in an alley. On that occasion, the committee of the Ladies of Olives administered a thrashing soundly and thoroughly, massing themselves with wooden mallets and pails. As the miscreants in this case were Blacks, there was no response from the authorities. In a similar incident with a white man, the woman caught standing over him with a bloody mallet was summarily taken to Maryland and hanged by the neck in a barn.
That Mary had been married at Mount Zion Church and was the wife of the very excellent colored tailor was a great boon to her membership in the Ladies of Olives. Unmarried Ellen was quite shy of joining. She was loath to test the women’s Christian tolerance of her, but became a member upon the wings of Gabriel and Mary’s luster.
As accounts must be kept, permits maintained, and price guidelines strictly adhered to, the Ladies of Olives required literacy and promoted it. Mary’s education—her learning to read and to figure—occupied her and kept her in the kitchen until late at night. Annie had urged her to attend lessons at Mount Zion Church with Ellen and Delia. Gabriel sniffed at Mary’s industry, though, for he was jealous to lose her company for an evening. But he did consider her improvement and was pleased.
Considerable numbers of alley-dwelling Irishwomen sought work as laundresses and there were syndicates amongst them, too. A good deal of fighting and competition existed between the Irish groups, such that they had little energy to fight with the colored women. The occasional incident was generally resolved tit for tat.
T
HOUGH HAPPY IN
her marriage—being tucked within the family—Mary was skittish with Gabriel. And though roundly pleased, Gabriel was tentative with Mary. He worried to be clumsy or cruel unintended. She could not prevent herself from starting at his touch, however gently he approached her.
Mary felt herself marked and unfit. And because nothing in Gabriel’s manner had convinced her otherwise, the new husband and wife shrank from each other.
Respectful, dutiful attention was what a wife owed to her husband, Mary thought. A decent and pleasant man like Gabriel, who was watchful against offense and slow to express anger or vexation, was a good partner.
Gabriel was not used to taking and wrenching congress from women nor did he know the art of pretty persuasion. His experience of the pleasures of women was from several brief, instructional visits to a Georgetown bawdy house with Abraham Pearl. Pearl had felt he was obliged to guide Gabriel in discharging the pent-up energies of youth lest a virtuous girl would suffer for it.
“Boy, do not let your manly humors build up to a pitch. Release them in one way or another,” he’d instructed. Slave or no, Gabriel was a youth come to manhood under Pearl’s influence.
On several occasions, the two shared the time of a bawd who would have them both. She was not averse to well-formed-up Gabriel nor to moneyed Pearl. She enthusiastically and quickly worked them and had her pay. She was not reticent or skittish.
Gabriel was uncertain of how to press his cause with Mary. He did long for her. He was not so much a child that he did not recognize himself. Ought he to grab her and assert a husband’s privilege? The thought of this made him shamefaced and spoiled the feelings of excitement that arose when he came close to her. She was a small, lovely woman. It pained him to sense her heart flutter with trepidation when he approached her, even as his blood cavorted in her presence.
Daniel Joshua, who himself appreciated the womanly attributes of Mary, counseled Gabriel to be forceful. “She will thank you after all is done,” he said.
“I would not frighten or vex her,” Gabriel answered.
“Aye, but this one is no new penny.” Daniel bluntly delivered the observation. “You cannot spoil her.”
“Do you insult my wife, Brother Daniel?” Gabriel bristled at Daniel’s free tongue and prepared to make a physical challenge.
“Make her your wife, boy. Then defend her honor,” the rough man countered, and turned his back.
Gabriel’s own ways of gentle persistence and watchfulness were best after all. Upon an evening when the moon was not quite bright, Gabriel watched as Mary spun at her wheel. This wheel was fast becoming her especial skill after washing and ironing. It was a mundane task, he thought, but suited to her even, plodding temper.
The light from the candles got low and still she worked—bent forward a bit. Gabriel rose and stood close to her, wordlessly reached toward the spinning wheel, and began to turn fibers between his own fingers. Mary drew in her breath and focused her eyes upon her work. She kept her face at right angle to her husband and inhaled the air between them.
Gabriel left her side briefly. As he moved from the circle lit by the two candles he disappeared in the room. Mary sighed regretfully. She wanted him near, though she was confused about what to do with his nearness.
Annie and Ellen were vanished from the room. These women were happy to come and go upon Gabriel’s whim.
’Tis always Gabriel’s wants that are first here,
Mary mused. How lucky he was such a pleasure to his women!
Gabriel returned to her side with a stool and placed it near her. He sat on the stool and touched the spun yarn—gazing upon it. He said nothing and touched only the wool. After a few moments of stroking the yarn that was spun, Gabriel took up knitting upon some socks and sat silently next to Mary for the rest of the length of the candles. The tongue of his finished work fell between his legs, and when the last candle faltered, the two rose together and put up. Gabriel drew aside the small window curtain and let in the moonlight to illumine their final chores. They ascended to their bed in the upper room.
The next evening, Annie and Ellen again rose early from their evening work and went to their beds.
Surprised at the uncommon quiet of the house, Mary continued at her spinning. Gabriel again placed a small stool near Mary’s stool and sat beside her at the wheel. Now and again he would touch the spun yarn between his sensitive fingers.
“It is silken, Mary,” he said, and rubbed a hank of yarn near his nose and eyes. He laughed and sneezed, and she was taken aback by his boyishness. He pulled closer and whispered praise for the fineness of her work.
When sufficient yarn was spun, the two rolled it into balls. Gabriel faced Mary on his stool and gave his hands to the task. She rolled balls and scooted closer toward him. Her heart lightened as the work progressed and she regretted the end would come.
Gabriel dandled the made balls like babes upon the knee. They were without chaff or small sticks or anything to make them scratch or chafe. He smiled at Mary, though she did not raise her eyes to his. Playfully he touched one of the fluffy yarn balls to the shy side of her face. It was puzzling that since their marriage Mary never turned her face full toward him. She had become reticent where she had once been somewhat bold. The feel of the yarn and the childlike abandon with which he touched her cheek caused Mary to smile broadly and face him. For a few minutes they relished the softness of the yarn. Finally, they grasped each other’s hands.
The two gained the floor to their loft hand in hand held tightly. Mary tended the candles that they’d brought and busied herself about the room with her back turned from Gabriel. She heard the collar of his shirt as he unbuttoned it. Her trepidation was then replaced by some other feeling—some delicious anticipation. She heard his collar scrape at his neck as it was brought off. She turned and saw Gabriel’s soft skin slowly revealed for the first and was affected with a possessive passion. The delicious one was hers if only she would accept him! His tobacco-brown color continued evenly to his shoulders with the hard knots upon them. The whole front of his body was covered over with unbroken, smooth skin and dotted with kinky hair that disappeared below his waistband. His arms were sinuously lovely. He pulled her to his naked front and held her face against the bristling hair of his chest.
Mary did not remove her shift. Gabriel gained her beneath the cloth and the pleasure of the congress was doubled by friction and the swathe. Dim candlelight colluded to reduce their shyness and build their comfort.
Watching her sleeping husband, Mary studied his body in the moonlight entering the room. Gabriel’s soft face was a liquid brown tonic in sparse light. His sleepy lips were slack. His shoulders, arms, fingers—these muscles always so busy, always so tensely, authoritatively, expertly moving, were now still, flaccid. His soft penis lay resting in a warm nest against his thigh. All over his body was resting and replenishing itself. Wind puffs burst from him—from mouth and anus—and the air was full of the smelly, benign things that had been inside of him.
Gabriel’s body odor was sharp, incisive, manly, though not hot and frothy like the sweat of a man who labors out-of-doors. His was not the reek of manure or of the thoroughfare. Gabriel’s skin smell was coupled with soap and the starch of his clean shirts. This was Gabriel. The aromas of the chests and drawers and the stacks of Annie’s laundry and her quilted stores and yarns were the aroma of Gabriel and the Coatses. These scents were palliative. They were now the familiar, the comfortable—that which Mary associated with happiness.
The newly discovered joy that Gabriel and Mary felt with each other was evident in the new smiles between them and their affectionate touching. Annie disapproved slightly of so much for others to look at. It was plain in her eyes when she caught them at it. But when she retired, she did not always sleep. She sat on the side of her bed, muffled the noises of her needles by moving them slowly in her lap, and listened to the sounds overhead. She had brought this all together and felt satisfied and was shameless in her vicarious enjoyment of it. Perhaps they would bring her a babe before long.
I
T OCCURRED TO
Daniel Joshua that his feet had gotten stuck in Annie Coats’s kitchen. Since his experience of the croup, a keen sense of companionship had developed between Annie and himself. Most every evening he was found in her orbit and other companions had missed him.
“With happiness and respect, Miss Annie, I will take up with you by the book,” Daniel Joshua intoned solemnly, standing close to her on the lip of the back porch. Annie brushed past him and put her rain barrel between them so as to discourage him from touching her.
Since it was the spring, the herring in nearby Rock Creek were swimming practically right into the frying pans. Folks said that a herring loses his mind in springtime with swimming every which way, and it was said that a man will do the same.
Earlier in the day, Daniel had taken Annie’s elbow and gone to the shallows in Rock Creek. The two used a net to catch a herring dinner. Fish thus caught in this season were considered sublime and were eaten greedily and taken as a treat. The popularity of the herring run among the colored had given the colored settlement near the creek its name, Herring Hill. Some women caught up the jumping and wriggling fish in their skirts, and there was a good deal of ankle and calf visible to the eye at netting time.
