The Secrets of Mary Bowser (2 page)

Besides, Papa was already soothing Mama. “It’s warm enough to do our entertaining outside. All we got to do is borrow some chairs and plates and whatnot from the neighborhood, so it’ll all be ready when we get back here.” He smiled. “Honestly, folks’d think you married a fool, the way you carry on, Minerva.”

To everyone else in Richmond, colored or white, Mama was Aunt Minnie. But Papa always called her Minerva. Whenever he said the name, she made a grand show of rolling her eyes or clucking her tongue. So I figured Mama wasn’t nearly so put-upon as she pretended to be, planting her hands on her hips and shaking her head. “Don’t you start with me at this hour, Lewis, don’t you even start.”

Papa winked at me. “Don’t you dare stop, she means. And I ain’t one to disobey her.” With that he hustled me and Mama about, gathering up what we needed to serve our guests before he hurried us off to prayer meeting.

All through the morning’s preaching and praising, my head buzzed in anticipation of hosting company. Each week, when Mama, Papa, and I walked back from meeting, I took care to lag a few paces behind, then come barreling up between them, my arms flailing in the air. Mama and Papa would each grab one of my hands and swing me forward, calling out, “Caught.” Once caught, I walked the rest of the way between them, my hands in theirs, my face beaming. But this Sunday I was so excited to be with the other children I forgot all about getting caught until Papa turned around, his big eyes searching for me. I wrinkled my nose at him and went back to chattering with Elly, the oldest and prettiest of the Banks girls. When I looked ahead again, Papa was no longer watching me.

Once we reached the cabin, Papa hauled a bucket of water from the well, and Mama called me from my playmates to help serve our guests. When I carried the first pair of filled cups to where Reverend and Mrs. Banks sat with Papa, I marked how Mrs. Banks was shifting in the straightbacked chair, trying to catch a hint of shade from the lone box elder tree in the tiny yard.

“I’m sorry there’s no ice for your drinks,” I said as I served. “Papa don’t have an ice room, but if you come visit my house, we can give you lots of ice and cushions for your chairs, too.”

In a flash, Papa yanked me to him. He turned me over his knee and swatted me hard.

“That big house ain’t yours, Mary El, it’s the Van Lews’. And you don’t mean no more to them than the cushions or the chairs or any other thing they got for their comfort. Understand?”

He kept his tight hold on me until I murmured, “Yes, Papa.” As soon as he let go, I ran into the cabin. My Sunday joy curdled to shame at being treated so in front of Elly and the other children, and I sobbed myself to sleep on Papa’s cornhusk pallet.

I woke hours later, to the sound of low, angry voices in the next room.

“The child need to know her place is with me, with us, and not with them Van Lews,” Papa said.

“Well, you’re not gonna teach her that with a spank,” Mama replied. “Slaveholders can’t get enough of beating on negroes, you need to do it, too? To our own child?”

“What should I done? Smile and pat her on the head? Mary El can’t be acting like she better than other folks just cause a rich family own her. This is our home, whether them Van Lews let you here one day a week or one day a year.”

“Lewis, you think I like it any better than you? Wake to them, work for them, doze off at night to them, every moment aching for you. But what are we supposed to do?”

“For one, you can stop carrying on about
we in the house
this and
we in the house
that. You in the house like them pretty horses in the barn. There to do the Van Lews’ work till you no use to them anymore, and then—”

Mama caught sight of me, and sucking her teeth hard to cut him off, she nodded toward where I stood in the doorway.

“What’s the matter, Papa?” I asked. “What’d Mama and me do wrong?”

He rose and walked toward me. I shrank back, afraid he might hit me again. My terror drew a look of bitter contrition I’d never seen before across Papa’s face. He knelt and reached out both hands, palms up to me.

“Mary El, you more precious to me than a ice room or fancy cushions or anything in that big house. Am I more precious to you than them things?”

I wanted to please Papa, to set everything right between him and me and Mama. Slipping my small hands into his large, strong ones, I nodded, my own shame at being spanked fading next to all the fear and humiliation in Papa’s question.

Old Master Van Lew was always a shadowy figure in my childhood, already suffering from the breathing troubles that everyone whispered would kill him. In the fall of ’44, not long after we’d exchanged the canvas floor coverings for wool carpets and taken the mosquito netting off the beds and paintings, he finally passed.

As Mama and I dressed the drawing room in black crepe, preparing for mourners who would call from as far away as Pennsylvania and New York, all she said was, “We in the house have plenty to do, good days or bad, happy times or sad.”

We in the house
meant the seven Van Lew slaves. Me and Mama. The butler, Old Sam, who toiled beside us in the mansion and slept across from us in its garret. Zinnie, the cook, and the coachman Josiah and their daughters, Lilly and Daisy, who were quartered together above the summer kitchen at the side of the lot. We knew things people outside the Van Lew family couldn’t have guessed, things the Van Lews themselves wouldn’t care to admit. We listened close when Young Master John stumbled in after an evening at Hobzinger’s saloon, reeking of whiskey and raving about being made to stay in Richmond to tend the family business, when at the same age his sister, Miss Bet, was fanfared off to a fancy school in Philadelphia. We discovered the embroidered pink bonnet that the widowed brother of Mrs. Catlin, a neighbor woman, sent spinsterish Miss Bet, cut to pieces and stashed inside her chamber pot. Mama taught me how we were to mark such things and, with a few spare words or a gesture, share them among ourselves whenever the Van Lews’ backs were turned.

We in the house were always decently dressed, while some Richmond slaves didn’t even have shoes to wear on the city’s unpaved streets. Though Old Master Van Lew’s family held slaves, including Mama and Old Sam, when he lived in New York, neither Old Master Van Lew nor his Philadelphia-born bride could quite abide the way human chattel were treated in Virginia. We were Van Lew property. To Old Master and Mistress Van Lew, keeping us suitably clothed and fed was a measure of both their financial and their moral accomplishments.

The Van Lews were Northerners enough that when their housekeeper set her eyes on a handsome young blacksmith twenty-five years earlier, they understood she meant to be a proper wife to him. Though they made it clear they would neither sell her nor purchase him, they consented to the match. But no law tied my mama to my papa, or either parent to me.

Much as we slaves studied the Van Lews, still we didn’t know whether they had more capital or creditors. Which meant we didn’t know what might happen to us when the time came for the settling of Old Master Van Lew’s estate. The morning that George Griswold, the Van Lews’ family attorney, called on our widowed mistress, we lurked outside the drawing room, knowing we had as much interest in the terms of the will as the Van Lews themselves.

We heard how the mansion and all its contents—that meant Mama and me and our fellow slaves, along with the inanimate possessions—were held with a handsome annual income for Mistress Van Lew, until her death or remarriage, at which point they would pass to Young Master John. He was sole heir to his father’s businesses, hardware stores in Richmond and Petersburg, which Griswold reported had substantial assets and little debt. Miss Bet would receive a ten-thousand-dollar inheritance, a share of the annual yield from a small market farm the family kept southeast of Richmond, and residence in the mansion until her death or marriage.

That last stipulation had Zinnie snorting to Mama, “Guess we’ll be waiting on Miss Bet till the Good Lord take her home.”

In the months and years after Old Master Van Lew’s death, it seemed this prediction would surely come to pass. Miss Bet was headstrong just for the sake of being headstrong, constantly railing against show and ought, her favorite expression for anything expected of her that rubbed her as too constricting. Balls were frivolous, beaux were overbearing, ladies’ parlor conversations only dulled an educated mind—she so seldom accepted a social invitation, she hardly seemed to notice when they no longer arrived. She preferred to pore over the daily news-sheets until her fingertips were stained inky black, lecturing her mother and brother about what she read, and clipping out articles to stick in her scrapbook the way other belles might preserve pressed nosegays.

Miss Bet was so contrary she even declared she couldn’t abide slavery, claiming she came to understand its horrors when she was away at school up North. But such proclamations didn’t make her much of a favorite among her servants. “She needs her chamber pot emptied just as often as the rest of them,” Mama would mutter, to which Zinnie would reply, “She’s got to, ’cause she takes her meals just as often as they do.” Miss Bet’s anti-slavery sentiments seemed to owe more to her family’s and her neighbors’ embrace of the peculiar institution than to any true understanding of the feelings of us slaves. Especially when all her abolitionist speechifying only seemed to tat out trouble for us.

Papa, like many of the slaves who worked as skilled laborers in Richmond, received a small sum from his master each month to cover the costs of his room and board, as well as his clothing. He stretched this allotment as best he could, always saving enough to donate to some worthy cause or other at prayer meeting. And from time to time Papa laid by a few cents to purchase a trinket for me.

I knew come Christmas or my birthday I’d get such gifts, but the ones I enjoyed most came without my expecting them, what Papa called the
just-because
. “Just because you my treasure.” “Just because you helped Mrs. Wallace tote water from the well without being asked.” “Just because spring come at last.” Any old just-because was special coming from Papa. When we arrived at his cabin one Sunday morning late in 1846, he presented me with a length of bright orange ribbon, “just because the color almost as pretty as our Mary El.” He dangled the satin strand high in the air above me, demanding all manner of hugs and kisses before lowering it into my greedy hands.

The hue was rich and beautiful, and I sat on the cabin floor, winding the ribbon back and forth between my fingers. As I watched the ends flutter against my Sunday skirt, I thought of Elly Banks, with her bright dresses always so nicely trimmed. “Mama, will you sew my ribbon onto my sleeves?”

She frowned at the question, but it was Papa who answered. “It’s the Lord’s day, Mary El. No laboring today.”

“But we go to meeting today. And I want to wear my ribbon to meeting.”

“Meeting is for praying, not for showing off your new things.” Mama flashed a look at Papa. “See how such trifles fill her head, Lewis.”

“Pride ain’t vanity, Minerva. Time enough we teach the child the difference.” He nodded to me. “Mary El, leave your ribbon home today and give thanks for it at meeting. Be good this week, and your Mama gonna teach you how to fix the ribbon to your sleeves yourself before next Sunday.”

Though Mondays were always tiring for me and Mama as we made up the chores from our one day off, that Monday night I begged Mama to stay up and show me how to sew.

“Sewing is work, not play,” she said. “You sure you got the patience for it now?”

I nodded, and she went to our trunk and drew out the sewing kit she used to mend our clothing and Papa’s. She carefully chose a needle and measured out some thread.

“You’re not about to take any fancy stitches, so for now, hardest part will be just getting your needle threaded.” Quick as you please, she drew the thin strand through the eye of the needle. Then she drew it out again and handed me the needle and thread.

I squinted in the dim candlelight, imitating the way she licked the end of the thread. But even after several passes, I couldn’t loop the strand through the impossible hole.

“Mama, can’t you do it for me?”

“If you’re old enough to sew yourself some trim, then you’re old enough to thread a needle.” She laid one of her hands on each of mine. “Just tell yourself you can do it, like it’s a riddle you set yourself to solve.”

With her hands on mine, I held steady and drew the strand through. “I spy, with my little eye, a girl who’s got her thread through her own needle’s eye,” Mama said, her laughter more splendid than a whole spool of orange rickrack. Then she grew serious. “Mary El, that’s a hard task, and you should be proud you did it. You know the difference between pride and vanity?”

Remembering Papa’s words, I wanted to say yes. But fact was I didn’t know the difference, though I sure did know Mama would catch me if I lied. “No, Mama.”

“When you work hard at something, or do right by a person, it’s proper to be proud. The day Mr. Wallace took so sick, and your papa walked through that blizzard to fetch Aunt Binah to doctor to him, I was real proud. Taking all that risk to be out in such weather, just to help his friend.” She smiled, more to herself than to me. “Years ago, just about the time Miss Bet got born, Old Marse V went to Marse Mahon’s smithy and ordered up three fireplace sets. Your papa made those sets, and when he delivered them was the first day I ever seen him. The look of pride on his face as Mistress V admired what he’d made, well, he caught my eye right then.”

“Why didn’t Papa make enough sets for all the fireplaces?”

“Back then, three was all the fireplaces the Van Lews had. We were in a smaller house, farther down the slope of Church Hill. When Old Marse V moved the family here, he went back to Marse Mahon to have Papa make up five more sets, all to match the ones he made ten years earlier. You ever notice a difference in them?”

I shook my head. If you laid the andiron from one set beside the ash shovel from another, I couldn’t have said which rooms they came from, though I tended the fires often enough.