The Secrets of Mary Bowser (55 page)

Let us rest here a bit. The air is not so foul, and ’tis a long way yet to carry her.

I cannot rest until she is safe. She did not give pause when it was my life threatened. I shall hardly do otherwise for her.

Explosions. Shouting. A door slammed open. Hands on me again, pulling. I ought to fight. Wilson said I should, if someone comes after me. But I’m so tired. So tired.

Something was being forced into my throat.

“Swallow it down. Thomas must stay here to tend to the slaves, and I cannot carry you alone.”

I blinked open my eyes. In the fumy dark, I made out the slave pens at Omohundro’s. Devil’s Half-Acre had never been truer to its name, flames and smoke and screams.

“Miss Bet? Why’d you bring me here?” She didn’t seem to hear me. I couldn’t make the words come out right.

“Don’t try to speak. You haven’t any voice just now.” She tipped the canteen she held, sending another metallic rush of water into my mouth. “Can you stand? Lay your arm across my shoulder, there. If I slip a hand around your waist, like so, can you walk? Lean against me, we must get you out of here.”

Bet Van Lew never was much for show and ought. But walking arm in arm with a negro, right up Broad Street? Good thing it was so dark, and everyone rushing about like hell had broken loose. They didn’t seem to notice her, or me.

The odor was so sharp, it stung me full awake.

“Aromatic spirits of ammonia may yet make it worse, if she inhaled as much smoke as you say.”

“I cannot let her just lie there.”

Slowly, as though prying open an oyster, I forced my eyelids apart. I lay in Bet’s bed. The Van Lew women bent over me, their faces pinched with worry.

“Thank God you are all right,” Bet said. “We feared perhaps—”

I tried to ask what had happened, but pain tore at my throat.

Bet laid a hand on my cheek, her touch more soothing than I expected. “You must not attempt to speak.” She slipped away from the bedside to rummage in the secretary across the room, returning with a writing pen and a scrap of news-sheet.

Did my house burn?
I wrote.

“Quite possibly. The Confederates incinerated the Richmond arsenal before fleeing, setting half the city on fire. Mother and I could see the conflagration from here. By the time Thomas and I reached your house, the air was teeming with soot.” She closed her eyes a moment. “Truly, I thought we might lose you.”

I took up the pen.
Thank you, Miss Bet. For saving my life.

She frowned at the message. “So weighty a sentiment as that, at least you should state it properly.” Claiming the pen, she set a stalwart slash across the word
Miss
. “Now that Davis and his traitorous ilk have left the city, you may address me as we wish.” She smiled in triumph. “You ought to rest. If you need anything, ring for me.”

She gestured at the nightstand, to the very bell her mother had used whenever she wanted to summon one of the Van Lew slaves to tend her.

Shouts came through the open window, waking me from a deep slumber. Not the fearful screams I heard earlier. These were shouts of joy. Singing and cheering.

I eased myself out of the bed, pulled Bet’s dressing gown over my chemise, and made my way down the stairs and along the hall. I found Bet and her mother on the back veranda. To the west and south, flames and smoke engulfed the city. But closer than that was a spectacle even more amazing to see.

Lines of soldiers clad in Federal blue marched along Main Street. Even from atop Church Hill, we could make out the gallantry that victory marked on their faces. Faces in every hue of brown—an entire corps of the USCT, conquering Richmond at last.

“You should not be up and about,” Bet said. “You have had a great strain, and without proper rest—”

I cut her off, my voice a scratchy croak. “My husband is down there. I mean to go to him.”

She began scolding me about being so stubborn as to put myself at risk, until her mother interrupted. “I don’t suppose Mary can have much faith in your making such declarations, given the way you have comported yourself.”

I might have thought Bet was taking her usual umbrage at being lectured, when she answered, “Mary and I—and you, too, Mother—we have all three of us exhibited the true patriotism one—”

“Ought to show,”
I said.

Her mother laughed at the way I finished the sentence, and Bet gave a look of bear-in-the-honeypot satisfaction. Shooing us both back inside, Bet set all three of us to searching through her wardrobe, and her mother’s. As we sifted over their war-worn garments for whatever might fit me, the Van Lew women took to the task with the same concentration as Hattie and her sisters dressing me for my first ball. Weary though I was, my heart soared with more excitement than if I were donning the grandest of gowns, as I put on the misfit combination of borrowed blouse and skirts, settling a bonnet of at least fifteen years’ vintage atop my plaits.

“Do take care,” my former mistress said, when at last I was presentable enough to go about in public. “The Federal soldiers will have much to contend with, and not only from the blazes. You are welcome here as long as you care to remain, though I suppose we may not be the only household in Richmond that finds its colored members departed today.”

I held her words dear as I made my way down to Main Street, just as Mama and I did so many Sundays of my childhood. Colored Richmond lined the road, singing every song of jubilation they knew and making up a whole new choir’s worth once those were through. I witnessed all manner of hugging and kissing, laughing and weeping among the crowd. But the USCT kept right on marching, looking more eminent than any troops the city had yet seen.

Until that moment, I had not properly understood that my husband, who wasn’t enslaved a day in his life, could never believe himself truly free until he started marching to another man’s—a white man’s—orders. It is said that war, with its majestic maiming and majestic killing, makes animals of men. But the colored men who donned uniforms and fought had carved their own humanity out of the great hulk of combat, seizing a freedom so just and right and full, no white person could have given it to them.

Now here in Richmond, that humanity shone before us. Born free or slave, raised South or North, these legions of colored soldiers emanated a new selfhood, chiseled on their features and meted by their gait. Praying that these precious men and we for whom they’d fought might preserve all the strength and grace of this newly won personhood once the war was done, I joined the throng following in the troops’ wake.

We crossed Shockoe Creek and turned north, skirting the edge of the blaze to make our way to Capitol Square. Upon reaching the green, the corps fell into companies. Every negro in Richmond seemed to be searching for someone among the USCT. Knowing I hadn’t much time to seek out Wilson before they’d all be set to firefighting detail, I bizz-buzzed my way from one group of soldiers to the next.

At last I spied a flag bearing the legend
Sic Semper Tyrannis
and David Bustill Bowser’s martial scene. As I pushed my way toward the standard bearer, I heard a low whistle. A familiar voice asked, “Bowser, is that your wife dressed up so?”

I turned to find George Patterson laughing to Wilson. I fairly skipped to them, kissing my husband and embracing our friend.

Wilson shook his head at my hastily acquired apparel. “The way you enjoy carrying on with that Bet Van Lew, I suppose I should be glad not to find you in calico and buckskins.”

I didn’t bother to explain why I was dressed so. I didn’t much feel like confirming what he must have suspected, that the raging fire had likely destroyed our home and his shop, along with the rest of Richmond’s commercial district.

“We can’t all be so dapper as yourself, dear husband, dressed up in that fine uniform. I admit, it does make a colored lady proud to look upon men so.”

“Men? I thought my wife didn’t have eyes for any man but me.”

George cupped his hand from the peak of his kepi, warding off cinders that fell like glowing snowflakes. “We aren’t any of us going to have eyes for much, if this wind keeps up.”

But I just grinned at him. “George Patterson, you know what Hattie’s father always said. When the wind blows from the South, nothing you say or do can stop it. Not even Bobby Lee’s whole army.”

Not so long as I did my part to set all the slaves free.

Fires were still smoldering by the time I reached the Gray House the next morning. The Federal pickets stationed around the perimeter of the property didn’t think any more about letting a negro maid pass than the Confederates had. I wondered what these blue-clad soldiers would say if they knew how I aided their army all through the war.

I’d come to the Gray House from a nagging sense my work wasn’t quite done. But as I made my way through the cellar and up to the first floor, I couldn’t yet tell what impelled me here. The mansion felt as still as a sepulcher. Jeff Davis and his staff had fled the city hours before the evacuation fires were ignited. Hortense and the rest of the colored servants scattered just as quickly on the winds of freedom. Denuded of what valuables Queen Varina had sold off or taken with her, the empty chambers seemed to echo Confederate defeat.

Tucking my plaits behind my ear, I marched defiantly up the curving center stair and into Jeff Davis’s abandoned office. But disappointment swallowed my defiance, when I saw that the desk and table were cleared of papers.

A great hullabaloo started up outside. Hurrying to the receiving room window, I saw a massive crowd coming toward the house. Most of the throng were negroes, a procession of civilians following the USCT cavalry. Impeccable in their uniforms and mounted proudly atop fine horses, the colored troops set a high contrast to the ragged Confederates who filled Richmond’s streets only forty-eight hours before.

The white soldiers standing guard outside came to attention as the cavalry halted, but when a tall white man in civilian clothes at the front of the crowd nodded at them and strode up the Gray House walk, they forgot their military posture and burst into applause.

Realizing who the man inspiring such devotion must be, I hastened down the stairs to open the front door. “Welcome, Mr. President.”

Abraham Lincoln smiled, sweeping the tallest hat I’ve ever seen from his head. From afar, I was struck by his likeness to Jeff Davis, the high, prominent cheekbones that defined both men’s faces. But up close I marked the difference, Mr. Lincoln taller and lankier, nowhere near as handsome but with a kindness in his gray eyes that the dyspeptic Jeff Davis never displayed.

“Who might you be?” he asked.

“One of the maids, Mr. President. The only one left in the house.” I stepped aside, and he passed through the doorway, to the crowd’s hurrahs.

“The place is mostly empty now, though some of the furniture is still here,” I said as I led him and the young officer who accompanied him upstairs to Davis’s office. “Perhaps you would care to sit in Jeff Davis’s chair?”

“I believe I would, yes.” Lincoln’s eyes sparkled as he settled in behind the desk. Swiveling back and forth in the tufted seat, he seemed as enchanted as a child on Christmas morning, the fall of Richmond as great a gift to him as it was to all the former slaves who stood outside cheering.

The soldier ordered me to fetch something cool to drink. It took me some time of rummaging through the remants left in the china pantry before I could find even plain mugs to fill and take to them. The two men were deep in conversation when I returned, the president shaking his head and chuckling.

“There is only water to offer you,” I said. “It’s been some months since we’ve had tea or ale or even just lemons and sugar in the Gray House.”

Lincoln took the mug I held out to him. “Water in the Gray House will taste sweeter to me than champagne in the White House ever has.” As he swallowed the first sip, his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down his long neck. “Now, if you can spare a moment for a stranger’s curiosity, tell me, what was it like to work for Jefferson Davis?”

I didn’t imagine he’d ever heard by name of Mary Bowser, nor Bet Van Lew nor Thomas McNiven. And with Richmond fallen and freedom ringing at last, I had no need for self-gratulatory vanity. But I spied with humble pride how my president smiled as I replied.

“I wasn’t working for Jeff Davis. I worked for freedom, and for you, Mr. Lincoln.”

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Reader’s Guide

I first learned of Mary Bowser while researching my doctoral dissertation on African American literature, when I read a few sentences about her espionage in
A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America,
by Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson. This brief account immediately sparked my interest: How did Mary Bowser come to play such an amazing role in the Civil War? What was the emotional cost for an educated African American pretending to be a purportedly ignorant slave? How did the unusual relationship between Mary and Bet affect both women?