The Secrets of Mary Bowser (20 page)

“I’ve latched the back entry. Be sure to keep it so, and don’t let anyone through this way, except for Mr. Jones, or one of his girls.”

He passed outside and headed off on foot, the Scotsman and his cart already gone.

I tried hard to calm myself after that. But whenever I started into a passage of Mr. Ovid’s poetry I’d see a metamorphosis right before my eyes, devil’s horns sprouting from the stranger’s orange hair.

I longed for the distraction of my workbox. Zinnie Moore was teaching me how to work a lace collar, which was quite a joke between us, since my Quaker friend would never wear any lace herself. But Zinnie was a keen businesswoman, and she knew lace sold well at the fair. I closed my eyes and was concentrating hard on the steps she’d shown me, when I heard the knock.

Not a knock. More of a thump, really. From the back room.

I told myself it was only my imagination, when—thump—it came again. I crept to the communicating door and leaned an ear against it.

No thump now. Even worse—a low moan. Half-human, it went through my bones like a wet wind on a dark night.

I was so scared I was beyond scared. Whoever or whatever that white man was, he’d brought some restless spirit into the shop.

I tore my way out of the parlor, clapping the lock on the front door. My fist was still clamped tight on the key when, wide-eyed and dry-mouthed, I spied Hattie coming down the street with her sister Diana and a tall white man in a dark suit. Diana led the man up to the house, while Hattie continued over to me.

“Mary, what’s the matter?”

“Some strange white man came here. Appeared out of thin air, I didn’t even hear his cart. McEvil or McDemon or something. Worried me half to death, then he was gone as quick as he came. Only to come back later, with David Bustill Bowser of all people. And they brought a”— my voice dropped to a whisper as I glanced at the shop door—“a body. Only that body isn’t resting peaceful. It’s tossing and turning, thumping and groaning.”

Hattie stifled a little laugh, but then her mouth drew back down into a determined line across her face. She pried opened my fingers, took the key, and unlocked the door. “Come inside.”

“I’m not going back in there.”

“I’m sorry you had such a fright. But you’ve got to listen now. I’ll explain it all once we’re inside.”

Shaking head to toe, I followed her into the parlor. But I kept a yell ready at the back of my throat, just in case that restive spirit came to get us.

“I’ve got to tell you something, only I’m not supposed to,” Hattie said. “Not supposed to tell anyone, ever. So you can’t ever tell anyone either. Not Theodore, not your parents, nobody. Promise?”

I wasn’t about to set that yell aside just yet, so I nodded.

“You know my daddy’s an undertaker. Only, some of his undertakings, they aren’t exactly what you might expect.”

I remembered how I joked years back about her father being a Voudon master. Now I wondered if he might really be a spirit doctor after all.

Hattie shifted nervously. “Daddy always says he’ll skin us alive if we talk about this outside the family. But you’ve been in slavery, your parents are still there.” She drew in a deep breath. “You ever heard of the Underground Railroad?”

I managed to murmur a small “mmm-hmm.”

“Well, this is a stopping place. Sometimes Daddy collects baggage from down in Chambersburg. Sometimes he forwards it up to Bucks County himself. Sometimes another conductor transports the baggage instead.” She gave me a moment to take in what she was saying. “That white man, Mr. McNiven, he’s one of the best. Rides right into Delaware, Maryland, even Virginia and brings his cargo all the way here.”

“That’s a slave back there, closed up in that coffin?”

She nodded. “If I realized the wind was blowing from the South today, I would have sent you on to Diana’s and waited here myself.”

“What’s the wind got to do with it?”

“That’s what we say to mean baggage is headed this way. And baggage is what we say to mean—” She gestured toward the other room. “Daddy always says we owe it to them to mind how we speak, even among ourselves.”

I thought of all the times I heard Mr. Jones or one of his daughters or sons-in-laws talk about the wind. I wondered what else they’d said in front of me that I hadn’t understood.

Hattie practically bent over apologizing, she felt so bad about deceiving me. “Are you sore I never told you before?”

“Of course not.”

“Well, Daddy can do what he wants when he finds out, but I’m glad you know. I hated having any secrets between us, and now we don’t.”

When she said that, I knew I couldn’t hold quiet. “We’ve still got a secret. And if I tell you, you’ve got to promise me you’ll never tell anyone either. Okay?”

“Miss Mary Van Lew of Gaskill Street, to think you’ve been holding out on me all these years,” she teased. But when she realized I wasn’t yet ready for joking, she turned serious again. “I swear, I’ll keep your secret.”

“My mama, she isn’t really a slave.” Hattie’s eyebrow nearly raised right off her head as I told her about Mama’s subterfuge.

She might have been trying to undo the tautest sailor’s knot, the way she mulled over all it meant. “Mr. McNiven’s brought baggage from Richmond a bunch of times. I always think of your folks when I hear he’s headed that way. Maybe he could help your papa escape from Mahon.”

I shook my head, worrying whether I could make Hattie understand. Scared that if I didn’t, it meant we could never be truly best of friends.

“Papa thought about running, when Bet first freed Mama and me. But he won’t.” I glanced toward the back room. “You see the baggage headed North, all hope and daring because they’re freedom bound. In Richmond, we see the fugitives who’ve been caught. Whipped, branded, sometimes even maimed to keep them from running again. Then sold South, into a slavery that’s ten thousand times worse than the slavery we knew in Richmond. Which is plenty bad enough.” I ran a hand along the seam of my skirt, trying not to think too hard on just how bad life as Mahon’s slave might be. “In Richmond, Mama and Papa can be together, and they know I’m safe here, getting an education. If Papa runs, there’s no guarantee we’ll end up someplace where they can earn enough to live on and I can go to school. Papa won’t put me and Mama in jeopardy like that. He’s too good a man.”

Hattie gave me just the answer I needed to hear. “Of course he is.”

A thump from the back room made us both jerk.

“I better get some water and food back there,” Hattie said. “Why don’t you go along to the Institute now?”

I gathered up my books, promising to come by after school and sit with her while she tended her father.

Mr. Jones was well again before the week was out. Curious as I was about the Railroad, I never said a word on it, knowing I’d keep Hattie’s confidence, just as surely as she’d keep mine.

Nine

I
t was a day too cold even for February, when the letter arrived. Ducky was at work, and Mrs. Upshaw had braved the icy winds to collect a new round of piecework from her customers. Alone in the apartment, I pulled the parlor chair close to the fire and tore at Bet’s seal.

My dearest daughter

You see this letter in young Miss Van Lew hand maybe you guess the sad news I got to tell. This very day your dear Mama my beloved Minerva passed. She took ill quick just as quick was gone from us. Shocked as we is to lose her so fast it seems somehow right she was not one to waste away slow. Strong near till the end lovely as ever when her eyes closed finally.

Her last words was Jesus got a plan for you make her proud and she loves you. Then some thoughts for me Im gonna keep private. We bury her at the colored cemetery out by Shockoe Creek tomorrow. I expect a large turnout you know the people love Aunt Minnie.

Jesus comfort us

X

The bile of grief flooded my mouth, choking me. My biggest fear when I left Richmond was that I’d never see my parents again. Now that fear had come part true.

Days of my childhood, it seemed anyone I might ask would know Aunt Minnie, and it made me feel special just to tell people I was her daughter. Whatever Theodore and Hattie and Zinnie Moore meant to me, to them I was Mary Van Lew, not Mama and Papa’s Mary El or Aunt Minnie’s Mary, as I’d always been at home. It tore at me to think there wasn’t a soul I could talk to in Philadelphia who knew my mama. The near five years I’d lived in the North stretched behind me, seeming like too many to bear. Fingering Papa’s shaky cross mark on that letter, thinking of him as alone in his grief as I was in mine, I wondered if maybe it was time to go home.

The idea caught me tender at first. I wanted to believe being with Papa might stop up the agony I felt, knowing Mama was gone. Wanted to believe I might assuage the same agony he must be feeling, too. But as the wind cracked at the thin panes, it blew doubt in along with the cold.

Ceding my life here would be like contemning Mama’s insistence that Jesus had a plan for me. I’d never quite believed in it until that day Bet sat us down in her dining room, and even after that it seemed more a product of Mama’s willful invention than any true calling. Yet to deny it now would mean betraying Mama’s memory, something I wasn’t about to do.

Besides, Mahon still wouldn’t sell. Bet had renewed her offer more than once without getting so much as a maybe from the smith. My being there couldn’t do any more to win Papa’s freedom than a pile of her money had. And to return to a Richmond in which there was no Mama—how could I have stayed away so long, and go back only when I knew she was gone?

All I remember about the next months is that I walked through them in a haze. I barely noticed the murmurs that followed me through the Institute halls, students and instructors alike wondering at my mourning attire. I had trouble concentrating on my studies, though I tried very hard, knowing how Mama wanted me to succeed at school. Theodore kept his kindest words and his finest handkerchiefs at the ready during our Saturday drives, never complaining when I begged off invitations for anything more than our solitary rides. Hattie coaxed me to her house at least once a week for a cup of tea, listening close while I told and retold stories about home. Grief like mine was something she knew from way back. She understood that for a while I needed to keep my thoughts more with the dead than the living.

I worried Papa didn’t have anyone to do for him what Theodore or Hattie did for me. It was hard to send much comfort to him care of Bet. I knew she meant to do right by my family, but she never was one for regarding people’s feelings. Still, I didn’t have any other way to get word to him, so I kept sending letters to Grace Street, then waiting and waiting for a reply. Not from Bet, she scratched out her missives right away, but Papa—even when Bet said she’d read him my letters, she didn’t always have a response from him to send. Reticent as he was around white people, I suppose he didn’t take too well to having her scribe for him.

Sometimes a sentence or two would turn up in a different hand, when Papa enlisted some literate negro or other to take down a few words for him. These epistles seemed too stilted to come from my sure and easy-going Papa, all the blank space on the page saying more than the spare bit of writing. While it might be easier for him to share his private thoughts with a colored person than with Bet, easier wasn’t necessarily easy, not with him grieving his beloved Minerva. It was like losing both my parents at once: Mama gone, and with her the only real connection I had to Papa.

All the time I lived in Philadelphia, I always looked forward to the first signs of spring, when the ice on the rivers broke up and birds twittered out their songs again. That year, the only notice I took of the seasons was when the weather grew so warm I had to go to Besson & Son’s store to replace my winter mourning outfit with something suited for summer. I stood tall in that dress to cheer Hattie on as she graduated, but I slumped back into grief just as quick as she doffed her mortar-board and gown. With school out of session, I channeled my sorrow into churning out tea cozies and seat cushions, coaxing all manner of potted plants to maturity, even sketching a few scenes of Richmond, all for sale at the fair. Miss Douglass and Miss Forten nodded with approval, and Zinnie said how Christly work was always a comfort. Though it didn’t begin to fill the hole that Mama’s death rent in my heart, I kept at it, even in the new school year, which was to be my last.

The previous December, we doubled the entrance fee for the fair and still drew huge crowds. Rumors circulated that this year we might even have to turn visitors away. I hoped the busy hours running my booth would leave me little time to dwell on facing Christmas without so much as a note from Mama.

The doors had just opened, customers streaming into the hall, when I caught sight of Theodore.

It gladdened me to see his face among the crowd of strangers. “How sweet of you to come.” Usually he couldn’t be dragged within a half mile of the fair.

“I had to come,” he said. “It’s the only way I can see you.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been so busy. After the fair, I’ll have more time for you, I promise.”

He smiled. “Good. Then I shall expect you to accompany me to the Purvises’ New Year’s ball.”

I gestured toward my dress. “You know I can’t. I’m in mourning.”

“A daughter’s mourning need only be worn for six months, and you’ve kept yours nearly a year.” He might have been reciting from Lea & Blanchard’s
Etiquette Handbook
.

Before I could answer, a plump white lady standing at the side of the booth picked up one of my embroidered bookmarks. “I should like to take this, please,” she said, handing me several coins.

I accepted the payment and thanked her for supporting our cause, waiting until she departed to turn back to Theodore. “This isn’t the time or place for discussing personal matters. I have to tend my customers now.”

“I’ll buy everything you have.” He pulled two fifty-dollar notes from his wallet and tossed them onto my table. “You can keep the change for your Society. Just promise you’ll come to the ball. Make it your Christmas gift to me.”