The Secrets of Mary Bowser (54 page)

Puzzlement sowed troughs along his brow. “Why would I be angry at you?”

“What you said before about bloodlust, and violence outside battle . . .” My voice trailed off.

“This wasn’t the same as all that. That man meant to harm you.”

I laced my fingers, clasping my palms tight together, wanting to feel myself solid, instead of feeling the cold, heavy memory of the jug I used to strike a man down. “Once I knocked him out, he didn’t stand much chance of harming anyone. But I kept at him. I kicked him, and I shot him, because I wanted to. I liked it.”

“You don’t much look as though you like it now.”

“Of course not. I’m sick with it. But when it was happening—”

“When it was happening wasn’t the same as now. If something like that happens again, you’d be right to do as you did, protecting Sophronia and Bet and yourself that way. But I’m not much worried you’re about to do so to just any white man you come across. Are you?”

“Wilson, I killed a man. Don’t you know what that means?”

“I surely do.” He set a hand over where the thin wool blanket covered the hole blazed by the metal ball that had traveled through his body. “I hope I’ve killed a man or two, and I won’t be sorry to try again, once this leg is healed.” I started to object, but he stopped me. “Don’t go telling me it’s not the same for you as for me, Contrary Mary. If the Confederates would rather die than see negroes free and safe, that choice rests on them, not us.”

I ached to believe him. Still, I wasn’t sure. “Mama said so many times that Jesus had a plan for me. I guess I wanted it to be true, wanted to know I was special. But Jesus couldn’t have planned for me to do what I did. Maybe that means there’s no plan after all.” Maybe I wasn’t so special. “I just don’t see how you can love me, knowing what I’ve done.”

My husband answered me like only he in all the world could. “Years back, there was some baggage I took North in a hurry. Wisp of a thing, no more than a girl. Young as she was, she’d killed her master. He’d got her with child then sold the baby off, kept coming at her. I don’t know if she planned it or just did it without thinking, but by the time the Railroad people got to her, she was lying as still as the dead. Even as she lay there, I prayed she’d live and get North. I wanted to believe she could fall in love, make a family, in freedom. Because if that could happen, it meant I wasn’t a fool to hope in the face of slavery, even though bondage took so many that carrying a few here or there to freedom sometimes didn’t seem to make much difference.”

It was the first we ever spoke of that girl. Wilson never was much for talking about his Railroad work, knowing how many fugitives’ freedom, how his own safety, too, depended on him holding such things secret. But my reticence wasn’t quite like his. Speaking of that troubled child, what she’d been through, all her owner did to her—how could I talk of such horror, when I just wanted it to be over and done?

He took my hands into his. “For all I know, that girl never did say another word. But I hope she did. I hope someone loves her like I love you, and she can tell him what passed and have him soothe her, without her needing to carry it like a guilty secret in her heart.”

I didn’t hold from him what glimmer I had that his hope might have come true. “That girl spoke again, I know that much,” I said. “She spoke to me.”

I related how I helped carry her toward New York. “When McNiven told me it was David Bustill Bowser’s cousin who fetched that girl out of harm’s way, I never much thought I’d meet the man.”

“Well, maybe that was part of Jesus’s plan. Much as I care for you, I do like to believe perhaps He had a hand in bringing us together. But even if He didn’t, I know I’ll always love you. Just like I know the work you do in Richmond is important, even if He didn’t plan for you to do it. Don’t you know that yourself?”

I nodded, loving Wilson all the more for showing me it was true.

“Well then, forget about Bet and your mama and all the rest. What do you mean to do? Strongheaded as my wife is, I wager she must have some opinion of her own on the matter.”

I thought of the tantrum Queen Varina would throw once she discovered another of her slaves was gone, how much harder I’d have to slave in the Gray House to make up the loss of Sophronia’s labor. How sharp the hunger of the last few months had cut, how much sharper it would slice come winter.

I regarded my sweet, precious husband and tried to imagine leaving him to be nursed by strangers, when we both knew that many a convalescing soldier took a turn for the worst if camp fever hit. I thought of how I missed Zinnie Moore, how good it would be to work beside her again.

But then I thought about that girl we brought to freedom, me and Wilson working together before we even knew of each other. I thought about Dangerfield Newby and the sermon Wilson’s cousin preached on him. And I thought about Timothy Smith of Augusta, Maine, and the CSS
Virginia,
and the Bread Riot. I thought about Early’s raid, how together McNiven, Bet, and I might well have saved Lincoln from assassination, and the Union from dissolution.

All my life, the hardest choices I made were about leaving. Leaving Mama and Papa to go North. Leaving off with Theodore once I realized I couldn’t be the docile wife he wanted. Leaving Zinnie Moore and the rest when I grew impatient with the Female Anti-Slavery Society. Leaving Philadelphia when I believed war was coming, and with it the only real hope for emancipation.

I looked into my husband’s eyes, knowing the choice I had to make now was as hard as any of those. But it was different, too. This time I was choosing to stay.

“Husband, you better hurry up and get healed, so you and the rest of the USCT can march on into Richmond. Because there’ll be a slave working up in the Gray House who’s going to need some liberating, nasty a mistress as that Varina Davis is. In the meanwhile, that slave will do everything she can to help you and the whole Union army get there. And she’ll have quite a welcome for you when you do.”

Wilson smiled. “I suppose she will.”

Twenty-seven

23 December 1864

My dearest one

How many times I have wrote those words! Now before you go thinking I been carrying on with other women remember the US Army is full up with men cant write for their selfs & USCT got more than its share. Many the hour I take up a pen for to write out the words of this fellow or that to send to wife mother or child who ever they got home can read or be read to. So when a certain Scotsman turned up here I see time come to write for myself. He says he might as well bring my letter risk of being caught no worse than risk of what my dear wife do to him if he comes back with no missive from me.

I love you & miss you so. The loving could make a man impashent with the missing but I figure come spring Federals will be in Richmond & youll be in my arms. The thought of it is enuff to keep me warm though the nights are mighty chilly. Leastwise the cold keeps them from marching us around overmuch. Even then I dont grouse like some of the men glad enuff to feel my leg grow strong again. Yes I am recovered from my trial & hope my wife is recovered from hers.

Our friend is making noises about he needs to leave before nightfall so I guess time to close this with a Merry Christmas & know you are in my thoughts even when no messenger can carry a note between us.

Ever your loving

Husband

McNiven brought me that letter on Christmas Eve, and I fell asleep that night hugging the pages as though they were part and parcel of my husband. When I climbed Church Hill the next morning, I found Bet more agitated, her mother more fragile, and the dinner even more paltry than all had been the Christmas before. But still I had all the yuletide joy I could hope for, savoring the anticipation of the fall of the Confederacy as surely as I ever did a slice of goose or a mouthful of plum pudding.

Jeff Davis was about as popular among the Confederates as Abraham Lincoln, by the time 1865 rolled in. So when a pair of senators came stomping into the Gray House one late February morning, I could see it was more than the chill winter air that had them red in the face. Queen Varina tried to shoo them off, saying her poor husband lay abed stricken with neuralgia.

“I suppose he can converse with us as easily in his dressing gown as in his frock coat,” said Senator Hunter as he strode past her to make his way up the grand staircase. Hunter’s stern visage graced the Confederate ten-dollar note, but nowadays the downward turn of his features pulled even more severe than in the bygone time when he sat for that portrait. Back then, ten Confederate dollars might have bought a barrel of flour. Of late it wasn’t enough to buy a loaf of bread, nor this week even a single slice.

“Queen Varina gonna throw a fit they talk at her so,” Hortense whispered as we watched the exchange from the adjacent corridor. “Only a fool stay down here where she like to find ’em, make trouble just ’cause them white mens come barking.”

She yanked me along as she headed up the servants’ stair. Not even making a pretense of cleaning once we reached Jeff Davis’s office, we cupped our hands against the passage door to the Davises’ bedchamber. Hortense’s open curiosity didn’t much surprise me. Queen Varina and her friends complained loudly to one another over how impudent their servants had grown. Why not Hortense along with the rest?

The first we made out was Senator Wigfall’s Texas drawl. “That infernal Jew Benjamin is behind it, I suppose.”

“Secretary Benjamin supports it,” Davis replied. “But the idea originates with General Lee. He has advocated this course of action for some time, although until this winter I did not deem it necessary to pursue. Now, however—”

Hunter wouldn’t suffer him to finish. “We cannot allow a Confederate president to take away the very thing at the heart of our Cause.”

Davis answered like a hyena whooping at his pack. “Without this measure, the Federals will defeat us in a matter of weeks.”

Confusion tugged at the corners of Hortense’s mouth. I shrugged back my own puzzlement and leaned closer to the door.

“We have insisted they are kept in the condition that best suits their limited capacities. Now you would make them our equals, in the very instance when honor and courage matter most,” Hunter said. “If they are truly what we claim, it will be their slaughter, and that of many of our sons as well. If they are not what we have said, then even if they triumph, Confederate society will be ruined.”

“We need hundreds of thousand more soldiers, when there are barely ten thousand white men left to draft in the Confederacy.” Davis’s declaration wouldn’t have been much news to anyone, North or South. But what he said next was the single most astounding thing I heard uttered in the Gray House. “We hold millions of slaves among us. We would be fools if we did not enlist them at this direst hour for our Cause.”

“Where are my damn servants?”

Queen Varina’s demand resounded up the curving stairwell, causing Hortense to mutter, “Just let ’em ’list up this darky. Give me one a them rifles, see what way I point.”

But even Varina Davis’s heaviest wrath couldn’t overpoise the pleasure I took at Hunter and Wigfall’s distress. I knew those men were right. The Confederate army’s enlistment of negroes would sound the death knell of slavery even more loudly than Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation had.

White ladies from the ci-devant wealthiest FFV families toiling all day as government clerks. Mansions along Church Hill turned to boardinghouses, their finest possessions carted off to auction. And now colored men might be armed to fight beside the very whites who owned them. Though the war might rage some weeks more, it seemed the so-called Southern way of life was already gone.

Even Queen Varina saw what it portended. All through the next month, whenever her husband left off his sickbed to return to his Customs House office, strange men came to call on her. They departed the Gray House hauling off furnishings, adornments, even whatever stores of food she’d hoarded down in the cellar. Anything too big for her to take when she left the capital was sold, never mind whether those things belonged to the Davises or not. So long as there was coin to be chaffered for, she bargained away what she could, keeping her dealings tidy secret from her husband.

For once, I hadn’t much standing to fault her. Biding her time and hoodwinking Jeff Davis, she wasn’t so different from me.

Neither Hortense nor I bothered to put on the fool come the first April, when we packed Queen Varina and her children’s bags for their final departure from Richmond.

Mary El, wake up now, child.

Let me sleep, Mama, let me sleep.

We your parents, so you know you best listen. You got to wake up.

But, Papa, I’ve been working so hard, I need to rest. You were here, you saw me. Tell Mama.

Minerva, the child did work hard—

That work is near done and you know it, Lewis. But it’s not supposed to end like this.

Near done, Mama, yes. Queen Varina’s already gone. Rumors Jeff Davis is going soon, too. I did just like you always told me. But it was hard work, and I’m so tired. Why can’t it end now?

Dammit, Mary El. You got to get out this minute.

I want to stay with you. If I just lie here a moment—

Wind is blowing from the South today.

Mr. Jones, is that you? The wind won’t have to blow from the South anymore. Freedom’s coming, along with the Union troops. Be here today maybe, or tomorrow.

She must wake up. Why won’t she wake up?

Mama? You don’t sound right.

’Tis the damn wind, blowing fierce, carrying the hellfire with it. We hae not much time afore we be as wasted as the lass
.

Who’s there? How’d you get in?

She is delirious. We cannot let her lie here any longer.

Someone’s hand under my neck, a strange arm beneath my legs. They lift me out of bed. Carry me downstairs.