The Secrets of Mary Bowser (23 page)

McNiven clambered to a stand. “Ho, there! Canna a fellow take his hour’s rest?”

“It’s not a fellow’s voice called us from the woods,” the first man shouted. “Where is the gal?”

I rose up from the wagon bed, and the man whistled as he squinted in the dim before-dawn. “Not just any wench. A darky.”

His companion rubbed his hands together. “An escaped slave, I bet. Likely with a bounty on her head.”

The men started closer toward the wagon. McNiven drew a revolver from his coat, the metal glinting. “The lass is free, and with me. If you be kind enough to take your leave, I’d much appreciate it.”

They looked from the firearm to me and back again. “Queer business, a white man raising a gun to protect some nigger gal.”

My worry for the fugitive brought the lie on quick, pouring from my mouth like water from the faucet in the Joneses’ soak-tub. “Please, sirs, I’s just the housemaid. If his wife find out, I lose my place for sure. My pappy’s all laid up, I supports us both. Only come here so us can get some privacy.”

McNiven took up the tale as quickly as I laid it down. “Hush, Sally. Your mistress is not going to find us out, I hae told you that a hundred times these past three months.” He grinned at the men. “Man’s got to take his pleasure sometime. Surely you fellows understand.”

“Mighty cold night you’ve chosen for it,” the shrill-voiced man said.

His companion leered. “Darky wench can keep a man as warm as all the devils in hell. Though I might treat you better, gal, than to make you cry out like he did.” He lumbered toward me.

McNiven fired, sending a deathly warning right between the men’s heads. The shot set the horses whinnying, and the girl beneath the quilt pile moaning. As the cart bucked forward, I dropped down beside her, covering her moan with one of my own.

“Come on, Bart,” the second man said. “Might as well let him to his dark-meat feast.”

As their footsteps fell away, his companion called back, “Better keep an eye out, once you’re back atop her. Wouldn’t want to catch you with your britches down.”

I barely pulled myself up the wall of the wagon before I began retching. In the pale orange light of daybreak, I watched what little I’d eaten in the past day dribble down the outside of the wooden panel. “I’m sorry.”

McNiven waved my words away. “Twas nothing to be sorry about. Quick on your feet and clever like that, who ken what you may do for us.”

The first time I ever saw McNiven, I’d feared what threat he might be, to Mr. Jones and to me. Now because of him, I’d been in the greatest true peril I ever knew—but he’d had as much to do with getting me out of it as with putting me into it. It proved he was no more like the two men who’d threatened us than Zinnie Moore was like a slave mistress, white though they all were. The Scotsman shared something of the Quakers’ values, though without their renouncement of violence—and for that I was indebted. As my stomach twisted up again, I leaned back over the wagon’s edge, wondering what else he might mean to ask me to do.

McNiven didn’t say another word on what had passed, just settled onto the driver’s bench and started the team back toward the road. As the cart wheels turned, I knelt and lifted the shawl from the girl’s face. Her eyes focused on me, and she whimpered her despair. She was back among us, but maybe not for long. Not if she got another fright.

“You’re all right now,” I whispered. “Not in Virginia anymore. You’re free.” I hoped that last part proved true. Fugitive and free weren’t exactly the same thing.

She struggled to form words. “How I get here?”

I stroked her forehead, meaning my touch to reassure her. “We’ve got people all over, South and North, helping slaves get to freedom. Even have some whites working with us, bringing our folks out.” Though I figured that would make things easier when she saw McNiven, still I worried the mention of white people might yet stop her up with fear.

But there wasn’t room for any more fear in her face, and she didn’t struggle out another word.

I asked if she wanted something to eat. She nodded, and when I brought a spoonful of cold broth to her mouth, she drank the liquid greedily. She must have been three-quarters starved by then, and I fed her all the broth I had.

Let that sit for a while, Mary El
, I heard Mama’s voice saying,
give her stomach a chance to get used to food again
.

I tucked the quilts around her. “We still have a ways to ride. Why don’t you rest a bit? I’ll be right by you, watching and listening. If you need anything, just let me know.” Her lips trembled a bit, not exactly into a smile, but at least away from the purse of fear they’d been in. She blinked her agreement and closed her eyes.

The girl woke from time to time, and I gave her a bit of bread or water, said what I could to soothe her. When I ran out of palliative words, I recited one of Miss Frances Watkins’s poems, or one of Miss Phillis Wheatley’s. I realized the girl couldn’t know they were colored ladies, one an abolitionist and the other a slave herself, who wrote such fine verse. Just the rhythm of the lines calmed her, though, and she eased back into sleep.

She never asked where we were going, didn’t seem curious about who was driving the team. I suppose curiosity was far past her in that condition, and in a way I was glad. I wasn’t much over being scared of McNiven myself. I could only imagine how he might seem to someone in her state.

He was careful to stop to tend the horses only when she was asleep, I noticed that. It was at just such a stop, late on our second full day of travel, that he told me we’d soon reach our destination.

“New York?” I wondered where in that vast state we might be.

“Not quite. Yet in New Jersey, a settlement what delivers baggage for our fowk.”

Somehow I’d gotten it into my head that we were taking the girl all the way to New York. I told myself it didn’t make much difference. But now that she’d come out of her stupor right to me, it seemed wrong to leave her.

When she woke next, I explained that we’d soon leave off traveling for a while. “We’ll get you inside to a proper meal, then I have to go back home. Folks where we’re stopping will carry you on to where you need to go.”

She didn’t say anything, but she squeezed my hand hard. We sat like that, wordless but holding tight, for an hour or more, until McNiven eased the wagon onto a narrow lane off the main roadway. When he reined the team to a halt, I drew my hand from the girl’s and stood. Over the high sides of the conveyance, I saw a small farmhouse, surrounded by a cluster of outbuildings and acres of snow-covered fields.

The noise of the horses brought an elderly couple from the house. The dark hue of their coats turned their pale skin ghostly against the white landscape.

“Isn’t there a colored person, can come for her?” I asked McNiven.

He narrowed his eyes at me. “Be sure you tell Joons I was right about the lassie wanting a companion she could trust.”

“Send Chloe round first, will you?” McNiven called out. The woman turned back to fetch their servant from the house while her husband stood to the side, waiting.

“You have no reason to be fretting.” McNiven broke the silence as we started home the next day, me lonely in the wagon bed while he drove. “She’ll be fine afore long. A fighter for sure, that one is.”

“A fighter? She’s barely eating, barely breathing, said no more than four words in two days.”

“ ’Tis not these two days past I judge her by, but the ones what came afore. Our wee lassie has killed a man.”

The idea of that child taking a life stunned me. “At least she might hae killed him,” he continued. “David Bowser’s cousin did not wait to find out afore bringing her away.”

“Miss Douglass brought that girl out of Virginia?”

He laughed like I’d told the funniest tale he ever heard. “Bowser has got himself more than one cousin. This one is a free man doun in Richmond, locates baggage needing to come North.”

McNiven’s revelation about the girl caught me quiet for the better part of the day, until the sliver of moon rose, and we pulled off the road. He tended the horses, and then we exchanged places, so he could rest in the wagon bed while I kept watch.

I settled onto the plank seat, listening to the creaking of the buckboard as he lay down. I looked ahead, my eyes searching the deepening dark. “Why? Why did she kill him?”

“Fear as much as hate, I suppose. ’Twas her owner coming after her, and she were scared. He awready had one baby on her, sold it off the very day, then come after her again that night. He was drunken enough, she had a brick and hit him on the head. A fighter that one be, for certain.”

I imagined the weight of a brick in my hand, the force it would take to bring it down hard enough to kill a man. The hate I’d have to have in my heart to do such a thing, and the sorrow that could make a person hate like that.

I wondered how many more there were like the girl, who didn’t have a brick to take up in their hands, or a free colored man to send them North if they tried.

Eleven

I
felt Mama’s presence most days, soothing and advising me all sorts of ways. As I closed my eyes to doze off for the night, I found myself holding confidences with her, just as I had when we shared the husk pallet in the Van Lews’ garret all those years before. But come autumn of 1859, she was as agitated as could be with me, and making me agitated, too.

Mary El, school teaching’s a job, not a Calling.

But, Mama, aren’t you proud? Miss Mapps picked me. Only one she wanted of all the girls from the Institute. Not just from there, she could have hired anyone from anywhere, and she picked me, because I’m the best.

After Zinnie left Richmond, Mistress V went on about she was the best cook the family ever had. But you know Zinnie meant for freedom, do for her own family, not just cook for the Van Lews.

But teaching colored children isn’t like slaving. It’s for our own folks. Don’t you remember when you taught me?

I just showed you what you half knew already,’cause of your Gift. Gift from Jesus. And He knows what He means for you to do with that Gift, so don’t be telling me or Him either that you’re already doing what He wants.

If this isn’t what I should be doing, how am I supposed to know what is?

When I traced letters and words in the fireplace ash, you mastered them fast enough. You so good at reading, didn’t you learn to read His signs, too?

I thought I was going mad, arguing with a voice in my head. Mama sure could drive a person crazy, she was that persistent, that insistent, that loving. I had seen it in the way she played the Van Lews, the way she managed me and Papa both. But now only I heard her. And I needed to know if it really was her, or just a voice in my head.

“Jesus, if Mama’s with You, and she must be up there, good a soul as she always was, then she’s probably got Your ear, and You’re hearing all about me from her. But Mama’s telling me—at least I think it’s Mama—that I set myself at the wrong task. But what else can a colored lady do? I’m teaching, I sew and sell for the fair, I help Mr. Jones with the Railroad. If there’s something else You mean for me to do, send me a sign. And since Mama says I’m not so good at reading Your signs as reading books, which I suppose is true, make it a sign I can’t miss.”

I guess that prayer got answered, because the very next week came a sign nobody, North or South, could ignore.

Zinnie Moore and I were making an inventory of the worsted yarn supplies, and the other ladies were sewing, when the elderly butler entered the Fortens’ sitting room, addressing Margaretta Forten with an urgency that made us all look up from our work.

“Madam, a messenger just brought this note.”

Any servant with so much as a whiff of literacy would read such a missive before bringing it to the lady of the house. We in the house wouldn’t have missed such an opportunity, and I didn’t expect the Fortens’ butler to, either. But what surprised me was how clear it was to all of us who sat looking at him that he had perused the note, the tenor of its contents written all over his vexed features. No servant I ever knew, either when I was on their side or since crossing over, would let the mistress see that he’d been in her correspondence.

All this flashed in my mind as Margaretta Forten took up the slip of paper. I didn’t have time to puzzle over it, though, because the moment she read the note she fell back in a faint.

Abby Pugh, one of the Quaker ladies, had done a bit of charity nursing, and she was on Miss Forten in a heartbeat, undoing the buttons on her bodice and loosening the stays of her corset. She fanned our hostess vigorously while the butler fetched smelling salts.

As the crystal vial was passed beneath her nose, Miss Forten blinked her eyes open. She glanced about uncertainly until she noticed the page in her lap and asked Mrs. Pugh to read it aloud.

The Quakeress took up the note. “
My dear Sister-in-Law. Reports have come of a slave revolt in Virginia. The telegraphs there are down, all is still rumor. Mob violence expected here as soon as news of the uprising spreads. Please keep the ladies in the house until the Vigilance Committee can escort them home. Robert Purvis.
”

Strands of carmine yarn oozed like blood between Zinnie Moore’s pale fingers. “Virginia.” It was all I could say, and all she could do was nod back.

I was born long after Nat Turner was killed, but his name, Gabriel Prosser’s, too, were bywords from my childhood. I don’t remember ever being told right out who those men were, how they plotted to rise up. Just a slow seeping knowledge of the hate with which white people spat those names, the pride and fear together with which black folks whispered them. Even when Mama and Papa talked of freedom, they never dared speak of such rebellions. To utter a word on it was death, as surely as to try it.

Only two of the ladies took up their sewing again, Quakers both. I knew how they spoke of worthy tasks and idle hands, but I wasn’t up to needlework just then. Neither was Zinnie. She sat beside me, clutching my hand in her lap as though her fear were as great as mine.