The Secrets of Mary Bowser (32 page)

“You ready?” he asked.

“I feel like this is something I’ve been ready for, been waiting for, my whole life.”

“Was like that for me, the day I married Minerva.” The memory made him happy and sad, both at once.

“You think she would approve?” I asked, slipping my arm through his as we walked out to Twenty-fourth Street, then across Grace Street to St. John’s Church. It was the day every bereaved daughter most misses her mama.

“Of the lady you become, yes. Of the man lucky enough to wed you, no doubt. Of the place you gonna do it, I’m not so sure.”

His joke took me back to the only other time I ever set foot inside St. John’s, fifteen years earlier. Bet had somehow gotten it into her head that I should be baptized at the Episcopal church, a rare occasion indeed for a Richmond negro. The suggestion terrified me. I saw the white wooden building whenever I looked out from the Van Lew property, and the two windows and the transept door between them always seemed like the gaping eyes and mouth of some ghostly apparition hovering over the church graveyard.

Mama was furious with Bet, sure I didn’t need some baptism in a white church when my soul and I were doing just fine in the surreptitious prayer meeting our family attended every week. “Baptize my child in a church that won’t welcome her to regular worship? No thank you.”

This she said not to Bet but to Papa, who surprised Mama and me both by answering, “That woman respectful enough to ask your leave ’bout the baptism when she might order it. Why not oblige her?”

Making mud pies in front of Papa’s cabin that warm Sunday afternoon, I shuddered to hear him suggest Mama let the goblin building swallow me up. “You usually too wise to let a chance for Mary El’s advantage pass,” he added.

“What advantage is there in our child being paraded around a white lady’s church, when Henry Banks already gave her all the baptism she needs?”

“Yes, she’s already baptized, among our folks and in our faith. Whatever happens ain’t gonna undo that. So if Miss Bet want this, why not use it to get something from her?”

Mama’s mouth curled down, the way it always did when she started scheming. “I do what I can to teach the child to read, but educated folks need to tally numbers, too. If she’ll give Mary El lessons in figures, we’ll go to St. John’s.”

So the next time Bet raised the subject, Mama went into action, saying how kind she was to offer but how shameful it would be to bring an ignorant slave child into St. John’s, when the white children there were all so smart, even knowing their figures. Bet took the hint, musing that though it was illegal for her to teach me to read, there wasn’t any particular law against her teaching me arithmetic in the afternoons while Mistress Van Lew was napping. Bet was as glad to defy her mother’s prohibition as she was to have me baptized in her church. Though Mama wasn’t delighted about that last part, she was satisfied enough with the arrangement to bring me to St. John’s the following Sunday.

Now I was heading to St. John’s again, but with Mama gone and Bet the one bristling at the idea. When I stayed that one night with Wilson, Bet lectured me all the next day about how I’d worried her. As though she were more vexed over my keeping company with him than over the attack on Sumter.

Which was no small part of why Wilson and I were marrying so soon, not wanting to be separated by Shockoe Creek and Bet’s brazen meddling. We chose St. John’s purposefully, knowing that if our names appeared in its official marriage register, Wilson and I would be regarded as family in the eyes of white Richmond, and thus exempt from the law against slaves lodging with free negroes.

As Papa and I entered the churchyard, I caught sight of my betrothed standing proud beneath the white clapboard of the spire, formal and dignified in his deep brown suit.

“Morning,” Papa said.

Wilson’s response was a distracted, “mmm hmmm,” as he gazed at me.

I unhooked my arm from Papa’s and reached out to my intended. Wilson leaned forward to kiss me, but I turned my head, shy in front of Papa. I felt Wilson’s lips in my hair, sensed him breathing in the scent of the lavender I’d bathed in that morning.

“You’re like spring itself, after a winter of my loneliness,” he whispered. “I just hope you won’t be feeling too contrary when Reverend Cummins asks if you take me for your husband.”

I remembered how I’d taken a dislike to Wilson the very first hour we met, his cocksure manner turning me awkward and inept. Nothing like how special Theodore Handsome Hinton made me feel when he contrived and connived to meet me. Theodore doted on me right from the start. But he hadn’t been so much interested in who I was as who he wanted me to be. Seeing how attentively Wilson’s eyes met mine, knowing he always listened with care to what I said, even when he didn’t agree, I shook my head at his teasing. We were both sure of how I’d answer the reverend’s question.

But as we stepped inside the church door, I felt my joy flicker. The interior of St. John’s was dim and dismal, the dark wood absorbing what little light stole through the windows. Besides the minister, the only figure in the cavernous room was Bet. Seeing how rigid she sat within the high walls of her family’s pew-box, her back to us, I missed Hattie so. I longed to share such a day with her and her sisters, and with Zinnie Moore and the ladies from our sewing circle. But it was more than geography that separated me from all of them. Even in the solemn quiet of the sanctuary, occasional shouts and shots could be heard from outside, marking the city’s restless wait for the next day’s vote of secession.

As Papa walked me and Wilson up the aisle, I moved through a commixture of happiness and fear that few brides ever know. I couldn’t imagine what a marriage set against the background of war might be like. But I couldn’t imagine not marrying Wilson, either. And, with all respect to Mama, there was another reason this church seemed the right place for us to wed.

Richmonders learn young that St. John’s was the scene of Patrick Henry’s famous speech urging his fellow colonists to war. I knew Mr. Henry was like the rest of the FFVs, not much caring for colored people’s freedom. But when we took our places before the altar, his famous words seemed to echo through the church, as though they were meant for me that very April morning.
Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace. But there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms. Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

As the minister asked us to troth our love until death did us part, I thought of what Wilson said about risking his own neck to do the Railroad work, but not risking a wife’s as well. It was risk to me and Wilson both I’d be courting, if I were caught doing anything seditious to Southern interests.

But the liberty at stake wasn’t simply mine and Wilson’s. It was the liberty of Papa, who hovered behind us, finding his long-lost hope in the shadow of our joy. It was the liberty of all enslaved negroes, whose chains and slavery were all too real, not just a rhetorical turn of phrase like Patrick Henry’s. Neither love nor liberty could be so sweet without the other. Wilson and I meant to enjoy both. And we meant to see Papa and all the other slaves freedom bound at last.

As my husband and I crossed the city after the ceremony, we passed many a building already flying the Palmetto flag. It turned both of us somber, and we walked in silence along Broad Street.

Virginia and her massive ironworks were an irresistible jewel for the Confederate crown. Rumor had it that just as soon as the convention delegates cast their votes to secede, the Confederates would move their capital to Richmond. And so as Wilson held my hand in his, I made my second vow of the day, silently swearing to be ready for whatever happened.

Fifteen

T
hat spring, Richmond bloomed in a riot of color. Military companies from all over the South poured into the new capital, each donning its own gaudy hues. Reds and purples and yellows were festooned with every sort of cockade and ribbon, as though the Confederates’ strategy were to blind the Federals. The State Fairground on the far end of Broad was given over to the troops, renamed “Camp Lee” in honor of the Virginian who’d turned down Mr. Lincoln’s offer to head the Union army. Drumbeats sounded through the city, a driving rhythm for the buzz of marketplace gossip as people pushed themselves along the jammed streets, eager for what they said would be a glorious sixty-day war.

Up on Church Hill, Bet paced and wrung her hands while Mistress Van Lew stared dull-eyed out the window at the neighborhood matrons passing by on their way to endless rounds of sewing parties. The Union Guard was now the Virginia Guard, and nothing would do but to outfit them all over again in flamboyant new uniforms. Though the maiden daughters of Church Hill made a show of sewing, too, mostly they flirted and waved their handkerchiefs at passing soldiers, welcoming the war as an opportunity to court more beaux than their elder sisters ever had.

In Shockoe Bottom, factories and foundries prepared for the grim reality of battle. The clang of metal from Mahon’s smithy rang stronger and longer each day, and I watched exhaustion eat away at what happiness Papa had found during my courtship with Wilson.

As the days stretched hot into summer, Papa grew so sullen, I tried to guard him from all I was thinking. “What you done to Mary El?” he asked, eyeing us across a platter of cold chicken at Sunday dinner on the twenty-first July. “She never this quiet.”

Wilson frowned as he reached for the lemonade, pretending Papa’s question made no sense. “Day as warm as this, flies can’t even be bothered to buzz.”

“Don’t much care about the flies. Mary El ain’t bothered to talk to her papa, is my concern. Just set there with her face all pinched up in worry, staring at the parlor window.”

“Whole city’s quiet today,” I said, lifting my fork toward my plate.

Papa wasn’t about to be put off. “Don’t start pushing them taters round again. You been at that for near a quarter hour, ain’t so much as took a bite. What’s the matter?”

I laid out the truth in such a way as I hoped would keep him from catching my worry. “Reason it’s so quiet is the soldiers are all gone from the city. They’re fighting a full-on battle, Secesh against the Federals, way up near the Maryland border. If the Federals win, they may be able to take Richmond. But if they lose, the Secesh say they’ll march right from Manassas on to Washington.”

“Manassas, molasses, what it matter?” Papa replied. “Don’t see how that’s gonna change the fact that it’s Sabbath day, a daughter ought to have two civil words to say to her own papa.”

“Lewis does have a point,” Wilson said. Meaning, Sunday was Papa’s only time away from the smithy, from the labor that bent him and bent him until I thought for sure he would break. The day for Wilson and me to dote on him, give him a decent meal and love enough to last through the week. “You bought that big basket of strawberries for dessert,” my husband reminded me. “And I have a mind to get my share, so hurry up and eat that dinner.”

Worried as I was that the Confederates might get their sixty-day victory after all, I did what I might to oblige my menfolk, nibbling and conversing, even wresting out a smile at Papa’s amazement when Wilson set down our biggest wooden bowl brimming with fruit, alongside a tin cup full of cream. The price of strawberries was the lowest anyone in Richmond could remember, farmers from the nearby countryside crowding the markets with rich, ripe fruit that couldn’t pass any farther on account of the Federal blockade.

I chattered with Papa as best I could while we savored the sweet tang of the berries. My fingernails were still stained red with their juice the next morning. But all my delicate fruit and cream hopes soured when word reached Richmond from Manassas that the Confederates had won.

“What do you want with going out there?” Wilson asked as I wrapped a scarf around my head late the next night. “It’s raining to beat the Flood, hours past curfew, and the streets crowded with Secesh.”

I searched through our clothes-chest for my merino shawl. Though the thick night air was plenty warm, I needed something to guard against the downpour. Just as surely as I needed to make sense of the Confederate victory. “Whatever they’re unloading from those rail cars, it’s more true war than all the marching and carrying on we’ve seen in Richmond these months past. I want to see it for myself.”

“Then I’ll come with you.”

I settled the shawl onto my shoulders and looked my husband in the eye. “A negro couple would catch more trouble out there at this hour of the night than a slavewoman will alone. If anyone stops me, I can say I’m with my mistress, got separated from her while looking for my master.” Not waiting to hear more of his disapproval, I kissed him with all the passion of a three-month bride, then hurried down the stairs and out into the night.

The rain hit me as soon as I pushed open the door, stinging hard as pellets and soaking through my sleeve. The deluge had turned the dirt of Broad Street into an oozing brown mass. It pulled at my ankle boots as I crossed to where the dead and dying Confederate soldiers were being unloaded from the train. Knots of white Richmonders and their slave attendants struggled against the mire like flies in molasses. They surged forward and circled back, echoing the eddying mudriver in the street, as here and there a wounded man called out from a stretcher, or a lantern was held up to identify a motionless form.

Somewhere along the dark depot, a familiar voice kept repeating, “My cousin is at the Spotswood. She heard it from Mrs. Davis herself, by telegram from the president. Dreadful news, but he died a hero for Our Cause.”

I heard the refrain two or three times before I placed the speaker. Mrs. Whitlock, one of the ladies who sewed with Bet’s mother for the Union Guard. And who shunned her once the group became the Virginia Guard.

Mrs. Whitlock pushed through the mass of people, presenting herself to the soldier attending one of the cars. “I am here on behalf of my cousin, Mrs. Gardner. The colonel is to be laid in state at my home on Marshall Street. Please see to it.”