The Secrets of Mary Bowser (25 page)

Dear Mary

Thank you for your note concerning Uncle— I had trouble making it out at first but of course if there is someone who might aid the dear man please send him immediately. It is my fondest wish to see Uncle recovered.

We have plenty of room for such a guest. My Brother has let a house of his own near the stores and Mother can be urged to take a trip to White Sulphur Springs—her nerves are worn so by the situation with Uncle it would do her good. Your friend should not expect much of a social visit in town—the menfolk here mostly marching with their militias in case of any more excitement from Harper’s Ferry.

Please let me know how soon I might expect the visitor. Uncle is not well at all—some say he will not last even to the end of the month.

Yours

Bet Van Lew

Bet had freed me and Mama and the rest of her family’s slaves, spent her own money on that and on subscribing to lots of abolitionist groups, too. But this was different than just spending or subscribing or making do without her favorite cook and butler. This was risking her own life just as much as McNiven was risking his. As much as I’d ever risked mine tending to the baggage. More even, if half of what everyone said about the panic in Virginia was true. Hang them first and convict them after—that’s how it would be, if they caught anyone at what McNiven meant to try. White or not, woman or not. And still Bet wanted to help.

McNiven spent his time in Richmond walking about and pretending to look for work, all the while picking up information about most anything that might prove useful, especially the excursion trains to Charlestown. That’s what the ticket barkers called them, as though people were taking a ride to the seashore or an agricultural fair for an afternoon’s entertainment.

On the eighteenth November, McNiven boarded one of those trains, rode it all the way to Charlestown, and hunted up Mr. George Hoyt, Brown’s attorney. Hoyt wasn’t much of a lawyer, really, at twenty-one hardly older than I was by then—not that it mattered, since Virginia hadn’t given Brown a trial so much as a showpiece for the slaveholders’ hate. Hoyt was more of a spy for the wealthy New England abolitionists who financed Brown, sent to suppress any evidence that implicated them. And to secure Brown’s release through extralegal means, if possible, since surely that was the only way to save him.

All this we heard later, from McNiven, who told it with such relish, we had to believe all of it was true. So when McNiven told us Brown refused to be rescued, it seemed we might as well believe that, too.

“
Let them hang me! I am worth inconceivably more to hang than for any other purpose
.” That’s what Brown told Hoyt. That’s what Hoyt reported to McNiven. And that’s what McNiven repeated to Mr. Jones, Mr. Bowser, and me when he returned to Philadelphia in the last fading days of November.

“I found a remembrance for each o’ you, on how important our work is,” McNiven said, as he finished telling us about John Brown’s final stand. “Bowser, you hae yours awready. Jones, yours will come in good time, brung by a more bonnie hand than mine. And Mary, yours I hae right here.” Reaching into the leather haversack he’d slung over the back of the parlor chair, he drew out an iron cross.

A cross whose maker I knew right off, it was so like the one that hung in Papa’s cabin all the days of my childhood. “How is he?” I asked, taking the rood from McNiven.

“I canna say if he is better or worse, having only seen him the once, as any customer might. But he is a good smith, any can look on that and tell you so.”

I rubbed my palms against the well-sculpted scrolls, nearly feeling the fire with which Papa had worked the metal. It was easy enough to see what McNiven meant for me to make of the memento, given as purposefully as Brown was giving up his own life.

I didn’t need John Brown nor Thomas McNiven to make me hate what kept Papa from me. But McNiven had chosen wisely enough, setting me wondering what yet kept me from Papa.

On the last day of November, Miss Forten called a special meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society to hear a resolution proclaiming the club’s position on John Brown.

“
The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society has long worked to end the dreadful institution of slavery throughout this nation and its territories. Although we deplore any use of violence in plan or practice, we commend Mr. John Brown’s heroism in sacrificing himself and his sons for the cause of abolition
.”

Mrs. Pugh frowned. “I should think we would want to dissociate ourselves entirely from anyone who does violence of any sort.”

“Mr. Frederick Douglass wrote about how he
repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery,
” I reminded her. “If force was good enough for him, why should we condemn it?”

Sarah Mapps Douglass had always been especially proud of the former slave who shared her name, though he was no relation to her. “Mr. Douglass is a noble man in many ways,” she said. “But like many men, he falls to violence too easily. We ladies must be a corrective to the male impulse.”

I recalled the girl I helped transport two years earlier, imagined again the weight of a brick in my hands, the emotions that could make me bring such a weight down hard against a man’s skull. That brick was plenty enough corrective to the male impulse, so far as I could see. But I couldn’t loose that girl’s secret, nor Mr. Jones’s, in the middle of the Forten sitting room. “I thought we meant to be a corrective to slaveholding.”

My former teacher nodded in her prim way. “That is why we sponsor lectures and publications on the wrongs of slavery.”

I’d attended plenty of those lectures without noticing any slave-owners in the audience. Much as I enjoyed the speakers and the pamphlets and whatnot, I knew they only brought our cause before those Northerners who were mostly like-minded to begin with. “I’ve worked as hard as anybody to make our fairs a success. But do any of us really believe such things can raise money enough to buy out every slave?”

“It shouldn’t matter if they did,” Mrs. Pugh said, offering me a gentle smile. The kind of smile the Friends were always putting on, which mostly I delighted in but which could truly irk a person sometimes. “We would not purchase a single slave, not every slave even if we could, to set them free. To do business with slave-owners is a vile thing, and to engage in slave-trading only encourages the buying and selling of human souls.”

“So I should be a slave rather than a free woman?” I asked.

“Bless thee, no,” Zinnie said. “Thou was manumitted by an owner who came to see the evils of slavery. May she be a model to other slaveholders.”

“Bet Van Lew wasn’t my owner, her mother was. Bet bought me so she could manumit me.” I looked around the room, catching each of the ladies’ eyes with my own. “I assure you, it is no small thing to know yourself bought and sold that way. But I don’t regret that Bet made trade with a slaveholder. I wish she could trade with another, so my father might have his freedom, too.”

“Your feelings on this matter are quite understandable,” Miss Forten said. “But our group has certain principles we hold dear, and we shall see, by vote, whether those beliefs lead us to adopt the statement in regard to Mr. John Brown.”

While she called for a show of hands, I gathered my things. As I headed for the front door, Zinnie came trailing along the hall after me. “Will thou not stay and sew with us?”

I shook my head. “The time for sewing is past. It’s time for something else now.”

Zinnie’s gray eyes didn’t show a bit of the merriment that first drew me to her. “We want the same thing,” she said, “though I suppose none of us knows how we shall get it.”

As I hugged my friend good-bye, she must have sensed something in me that I’d only barely begun to make out for myself, because she added, “Do take care that neither a blow to thy body nor a mark on thy soul will be the consequence of whatever work thou chooses.”

Walking out into the dark ocean of night, I turned my back to the North Star and began my journey home.

“Our own church, putting us out.” Hattie was furious the morning of the second December, as we walked with her family to a memorial service for John Brown.

“Wasn’t us they meant to turn away,” her sister Diana said. “Just whatever pro-slavery mob might be coming along to meet us.”

The trustees of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal weren’t about to risk their church building, not for John Brown or anyone. And so we hurried past Mother Bethel and all the way to Passyunk Road, then turned west toward Shiloh Baptist Church. Mr. Jones traced this route often, directing his hearse to the Lebanon burying ground across from Shiloh. It was strange to catch sight of the headstones there, knowing the man we were remembering that day wasn’t yet dead. He was set to hang at eleven that morning, and hundreds of folks were crowding into Shiloh’s sanctuary before then.

“You sorry you’re here and not over to National Hall?” Hattie asked as we slid into a pew.

I shook my head, looking about at negroes of every shade and age gathered together. “Nothing there could be more to me than what I see here.” The speakers at the meeting organized by white abolitionists would be more famous, and the audience in the National Hall would be larger—with Sarah Mapps Douglass, Zinnie Moore, and all my other friends from the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society turned out in full. But it just wasn’t where my heart was anymore.

At Shiloh, it was mostly colored ministers speaking. They could all talk their talk—John Brown was their common text, but the sermons each went their own way, condemning slavery, Philadelphia’s race prejudice, and every level of American government.

Reverend Elijah Gibbs took the pulpit first. “We hear folks telling the slave-owners they have a moral responsibility to free the slaves. But when have any but a handful of slaveholders heard the call of moral responsibility?”

Murmurs of “Amen” broke out among the crowd.

“We hear folks talk about the Underground Railroad, call the name Harriet Tubman and say she’s the Moses of our people. Brought out fifty or more her own self. But how many Harriet Tubmans, what army of Moseses, how many lifetimes of Railroad work, will it take to free four million slaves?”

“Too many, brother,” shouted a man in front of us.

“How many of us here today have loved ones over on the other side?” Reverend Gibbs asked, and I raised my voice with the rest. Seemed more of us did than didn’t, and even those who didn’t, like Hattie and her family, all knew someone like me who did.

“How many of us here today,” he repeated, the spirit of the congregation moving along with him, “live our freedom a little less, knowing our loved ones have none? How many of us think every day of those held as so-called human chattel, to be worked, whipped, beaten, bred, and sold, all at the whim of the slaveholder?” The chorus of responses grew louder.

“We hear folks speaking of compromise, and containing slavery, and preserving the Union. But what is to be comprised, contained, or preserved, for the husband who has a wife in slavery, the mother who has a daughter in slavery, the brother a sister, the child a father?”

His voice rose. “I have more family in slavery than out, and I have no time for compromise, no heart for containment, no desire to preserve anything but my family’s right to freedom. I do not know John Brown. But I know that what he has done to free our people is a great thing. And we must each of us be prepared to do no less. God bless us all in the struggle.”

Shouts of approval rang out all over the room as Reverend Gibbs stepped from the lectern. Other ministers stood one after another to preach their piece. I leaned back against the pew, letting their words pour over me like the rush of the James over the boulders studding its falls.

But I sat bolt upright when a familiar voice boomed out from the pulpit.

“I’m not a minister, and I’m not here to mourn John Brown,” David Bustill Bowser began. “I want to speak today of another man. A negro man. A man whose mother was a slave and whose father was her master. A man whose father freed his own slave children, but only after he had lived a lifetime on the proceeds of their labor. Only after his son was grown to manhood and married to a slavewoman, property of another master.

“This man took the freedom his slaveholding father gave him, and what did he do with it? He set out to buy his wife and child.

“I say wife, though for a slave there is no legal marriage, no bond the slave-owner is lawfully bound to respect. I say child, though this man had more than one. He and his wife had six precious children, all in slavery. But the wife’s owner said he would sell him one, the youngest, and the wife herself, for no less than one thousand dollars, cash.”

Cries of “Tell it, Brother” and “That’s always the way, ain’t it?” erupted around the room.

“What is it for a negro, who can earn so little at the jobs we are suffered to have, to save one thousand dollars? It is years, and it is tears. But this man did it.

“He returned to his wife’s owner, and handed him the money. The owner counted it out, felt it in his hand, and said,
it is not enough
. This owner of human flesh and blood held the wages of a loving husband’s labor and said,
I told you one thousand dollars, but now I believe I can make fifteen hundred at least if I sell them to a trader. So that is what I will do
.

“The colored man went off to see if he could make another five hundred dollars, a half again as much, to satisfy the white man who called himself the owner of this colored man’s wife. And all the while, the wife in slavery kept writing to her husband.”

Mr. Bowser unfolded a few loose pages and began to read. “
Dear Husband, I want you to buy me as soon as possible, for if you do not get me somebody else will. It is said Master is in want of money. If so, I know not what time he may sell me, and then all my bright hopes of the future are blasted, for there has been one bright hope to cheer me in all my troubles, that is to be with you. If I thought I should never see you this earth would have no charms for me. Do all you can for me, which I have no doubt you will.
” He looked up from the pages. “The wife wanted freedom, for herself and her child. But that’s not all she wanted. She wanted the love and comfort of her husband. She wrote that, too.
Oh, Dear Dangerfield, come this fall without fail, money or no money. I want to see you so much. That is the one bright hope I have before me.