The Secrets of Mary Bowser (17 page)

Mr. Baggott rose. “We must commend Mrs. Stowe for bringing the plight of our enslaved brethren before white audiences. However many of us may read Mr. Frederick Douglass or hear Miss Frances Watkins lecture, surely we must acknowledge that more whites will pick up this novel.”

“That’s reason to condemn the book, not commend it,” said David Bustill Bowser, the burly daguerreotyper who was my teacher’s cousin. “Stowe’s novel is sprinkled with images plucked from the coon shows.”

Mr. Baggott wouldn’t yield. “Some characters are unfortunately drawn, I grant you, but others show negroes displaying the finer sentiments. Think of the maternal devotion that leads the slave mother Eliza to flee with her child rather than have him traded away from her. And the powerful manhood of her husband, George, willing to take up pistols and fight to protect his family.”

“And to what end?” asked a woman on the far side of the hall, her voice ringing with a coloratura of determination. “So they may go to Canada, and then to Africa. Stowe can no more tolerate free negroes in America than the slaveholders can. We cannot celebrate a story that suggests we have no place in our own nation.”

Well, that did it right there. Escaped slaves stole their way to Canada fairly often, especially since the Fugitive Slave Law left them in jeopardy anywhere in the United States. And plenty of free negroes, weary of the daily discrimination and fearful of the sporadic race riots, made their way there, too. Now those who had friends or family north of the North launched into a heated debate on the merits of emigrating.

At last, a dapper man in the second row pounded his walking stick against the floor. “But to return to Mrs. Stowe’s novel. What disturbs me most is the character of Uncle Tom. He’s the very opposite of George, sacrificing ties to his family in a rush to do as his supposed Master bids him. If I met anyone like him, I’d denounce him to his face.” Murmurs of approval sounded through the hall. “Any creature who would choose to remain enslaved rather than take his freedom does not deserve the title of man.”

“That’s not fair.” My words flew out before I realized it. Hundreds of faces turned toward me in surprise. “Plenty of those who don’t come North are truer men, or finer women, than many of the self-proclaimed better sort of colored Philadelphia.”

I wasn’t about to abide some Pennsylvania dandy condemning my papa for not running off from Master Mahon. To be sure, some slaves managed to steal their freedom and build lives in the North, despite the way negroes were kept out of most jobs, most residences, too. But those fugitives lived with the knowledge that what they worked so hard to build could topple in an instant if the slave-catcher came to call. I refused to think of Papa’s remaining in Richmond, and Mama’s staying with him, as a less worthy choice than theirs.

The debate continued after my outburst, but I paid little attention. Everyone else was trying to decide whether Mrs. Stowe should be sainted or damned. But I was fuming as much at them as at her. What a white lady writes in her book, what she makes her characters say or do, that was one thing, but what about all those fellow negroes all around me, acting as narrow-minded as could be?

Between the white abolitionists and the free negroes of Philadelphia, I wasn’t sure who’d ever understand my mama and papa, all they did for each other and for me. I might have cracked the fine leather binding on that novel right to the stitches, and still I couldn’t figure how to keep my parents, and my past, bound to who I might grow to be, now that I was living free.

Seven

I
n the fall of 1852, after nearly twenty years of fits and starts, a private high school for negro boys opened in Philadelphia. Not just another Mr. So-and-So’s school, set up in the front parlor of someone’s house, but the Institute for Colored Youth, in its own brand-new building constructed just for the purpose. Lots of girls from Miss Douglass’s school walked the extra blocks to Lombard and Seventh before class each day to giggle and gape at the matriculants. Hattie and I were known to pass the lot more than once, hoping to see a young George Patterson, on whom she’d set her eye.

Luckily for us, it didn’t take another twenty years for girls to be admitted to the Institute, too. That winter, Grace Mapps was hired to teach high school classes for young ladies, and Miss Douglass moved her school into the building as the “girls’ preparatory department.”

I hadn’t even been in school two full years then, so I didn’t expect to be promoted to Miss Mapps’s class right off, like Hattie was. At least we were still in the same building, and she was the one suffering Phillipa. Besides, the best thing about the Institute wasn’t in any classroom. It was the library.

Before the school even opened, the trustees purchased five hundred dollars’ worth of new books, as much as Old Master Van Lew had spent on his collection in an entire decade. That library became my greatest respite from the Upshaws’ cramped apartment, especially once Hattie and George started courting.

Big as the room was, still I had it to myself most of the time. I always sat in the same leather and mahogany elbow chair and went right to my lessons for the day. Then I gathered up whatever suited my latest fancy—Mr. Geoffrey Chaucer or Miss Phillis Wheatley, Mr. Pliny the Elder or Mr. Olaudah Equiano. I’d pull down whole piles of books and luxuriate in the hours that spread before me. It didn’t matter if it took me days, even weeks, to make my way through some of those tomes. I had time and quiet and lots to read, and that contented me.

Come spring, Miss Douglass had our class memorize Mr. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Village Blacksmith.”
The smith, a mighty man is he, / With large and sinewy hands; / And the muscles of his brawny arms / Are strong as iron bands
. I fell in love with every syllable of those lines, how they venerated a man so much like Papa. That very afternoon, I searched the library to find what else Mr. Longfellow had written. From the very first stanza of
Evangeline,
I was as good as transported to the forest primeval. But when I reached the last canto of the first section, my breath caught. It wasn’t Longfellow’s verses that stunned me. It was the engraving of the Acadians being forced into exile by the British—row after row of white men, bound in chains.

I’d learned by then that Hattie was right, history was full of whites who were as nasty to each other as they were to us. But this story took place only a hundred years before, in Canada—the very place where so many fugitive slaves were now seeking freedom from their own chains. I stared at the picture for nearly a quarter hour, until the resident custodian came to lock the library for the evening.

I was distracted all through the next day’s lessons, anxious to learn what happened to Evangeline and her betrothed. When I got to the library, I rushed to the shelf where I found the poem the day before. But it wasn’t there. Only when I turned to see if I’d left the book on the table did I realize I wasn’t alone. Seated in an armchair in the corner was one of the high school students, so deep in his own reading he didn’t seem to have noticed me.

I cleared my throat. “Pardon me, do you have Mr. Longfellow’s
Evangeline
?”

He looked up in surprise. “Yes, I do. Do you need it?”

“I began it yesterday, but I hadn’t time to finish.”

“Well then, you take it. I can wait until you’re done.” He held the book out to me.

“No, I couldn’t. You were here first.” Not that I wanted to wait, but I thought I ought to be polite.

“Perhaps we can read it together,” he said.

“But you’ve only just started, and I’m halfway through already.”

He shrugged. “I’ve read the poem before. I just want to look it over again, I’ve forgotten so much of it. Isn’t it maddening when that happens?”

I knew better than to tell him it didn’t happen to me. My skill for recalling anything I read or heard had gotten me teased enough among Miss Douglass’s students. I wasn’t about to mention it to this handsome young man.

For he was handsome, and more a young man than most of the boys I saw around the Institute. I was never overfond of pale skin, but his was so smooth, his coloring warm and not wan, set off by the waves of his light brown hair. His eyes were a pretty greenish-brown, looking out from lashes as long and lovely as a girl’s. He had what Mama always called “an easy smile,” and when he smiled it at me, I quickly agreed to read with him.

He held out his hand. “I’m Theodore Hinton, by the way.”

“And I’m Mary Van Lew.” I settled into an armchair near his, and we began taking turns reading aloud.

If I knew all that happened in the second half of that poem—Evangeline and Gabriel searching for each other all those years, then finding one another just in time to die in each other’s arms—and how it would have me dabbing my handkerchief at my eyes, I suppose I never would have consented to read it in front of Theodore Handsome Hinton. He was all gallantry, even insisting on escorting me home when we were through reading. As we strolled toward Gaskill Street, he went on about Longfellow and the American Romantics until I couldn’t tell whether he was making me out to be a great literary scholar or just mocking my sentimentality.

When Hattie and I turned onto Lombard Street the next morning, we nearly collided into Theodore Hinton, who made a grand gesture of doffing his hat and bowing to us. He was barely out of earshot before Hattie said, “Why Mary Van Lew, I do believe you’re keeping company with that young man.”

Of course Hattie, who turned giddy every time she brushed past George in the Institute’s hallways, would draw such conclusions. I explained that he and I had only been thrown together by the necessity of sharing a library book.

She looked at me as though she was trying to be sure she recognized me. “That’s about the silliest thing I ever heard. There isn’t a book in that library the Hintons don’t own.”

“How can you be so sure what books they’ve got?”

“Don’t you know? Mrs. Hinton is Phillipa’s aunt. When she married, her husband took her rather handsome dowry and used it to purchase lots all over Philadelphia. Edward Hinton owns more real estate than any other colored man in the city. More than all but a half dozen white men, even. Anything the dear scion wants, they can buy.”

I frowned in confusion while Hattie grinned and patted my arm. “You poor lamb, did that ole wolf guile you into thinking he was only hanging round to share a pile of dusty library books?”

“Some way for a prig to talk, Hattie,” I said, before escaping into Miss Douglass’s classroom.

When we walked home for mid-day recess, Hattie kept up all manner of bleating and howling and sheep-and-wolf conversation. I giggled and told her she was giving me a headache, wondering to myself if Handsome Hinton could truly be as taken with me as she claimed.

As soon as we turned onto my block, Mrs. Upshaw called down from her window. “A letter come for you, Mary dear. On very fancy paper, brung direct by a servant.”

Hattie raced to the apartment house and up the stairway, with me trailing behind. Between her and Mrs. Upshaw, I was nearly smothered before I could break the seal on the letter.

“
Mrs. William T. Catto,
” I read, recognizing the name of one of the colored ladies from the Anti-Slavery Society, “
would be pleased to have Miss Mary Van Lew at a ball at her home, on the twenty-third
.” Chap-fallen, I said, “It hasn’t anything to do with Mr. Wolf.”

“Oh, see if it doesn’t,” Hattie said. “I’ll wager the whole flock that Mr. Wolf is in attendance.”

“What are you girls on about? Who is Mr. Wolf?” asked Mrs. Upshaw.

I shot Hattie a look that said, don’t you dare or I’ll never hear the end of it. “He’s a cousin of Hattie’s,” I fibbed, “though I’ve never met him myself. But Hattie’s expected home to dinner right away, perhaps she’ll see him there.” With that, I pushed my friend toward the door.

“Is it here?” I asked, the moment Hattie swung open her front door on the afternoon of the twenty-third.

“Hello to you, too,” she said, leading me inside. “Haven’t I told you that you could have your pick of any of my sisters’ gowns? Mrs. John Overton has the loveliest brocade barege, the color of fresh-churned butter.”

“Indeed I do,” her sister Gertie broke in. “Dairy pure. Perfect for an unmarried young lady. And there’s not a hint of wind today, so we can install ourselves next door, turn Daddy’s shop into a seamstress’ paradise, and have you fitted up in no time. What do you say?”

The sisters winked and whistled, because they already knew my answer. Just the thought of being in the undertaker’s shop sent a gale of shivers up and down my spine, much to the amusement of the Jones family. Besides, I knew with all a schoolgirl’s certainty that I wasn’t about to wear one of Gertie’s, or anybody’s, old dresses for my very first ball. Not after spending so many hours hunting out every dressmaker on Chestnut Street, until I settled on one to make my first proper evening gown. A burgundy silk moiré so stiff it weighed as much as any three of the other dresses I tried, and as intoxicating to me as a half-dozen bottles of the wine whose color it shared.

At my final fitting two evenings before, as I instructed the dressmaker’s clerks to send the bill to Bet’s attorney, I also directed them to send the finished gown to Hattie’s house. I felt lucky to have my pick of such fine things. I didn’t care to lord my good fortune over Ducky. Nor to let her quacking about Bet spoil an iota of the pleasure I took in such a purchase. But now Hattie wouldn’t let me so much as see my dress.

“No point you oohing and cooing over what you’re going to wear,” she said, “until you’ve mastered what you’ve got to do.” And so she led me through the dozens of steps of the dozen dances she insisted I’d need to know at the Cattos’ ball.

Lucky for me, she’d already attended a few such events, and had watched her sisters ready themselves for many more. “George Patterson shall take my hand like this,” she said, “and lay his hand like that.” I giggled as she whirled me and twirled me until we were both dizzy, neither of us bothering to mention to whom I hoped to offer my hand.