The Secrets of Mary Bowser (6 page)

I didn’t know whether to be grateful or hateful to Miss Bet, for vexing Mama and Papa, and even me, so. From where I lay on my pallet, I could make out Mama sitting at the table in the next room, the tallow candle throwing her hunched shadow against the wall. “We married with a promise to stay together no matter what. All these years we managed it. How can freedom, the one best thing that’s ever happened to me, pull us apart? What’s freedom without my family together?”

Papa leaned forward and kissed her. “You and Mary El got something I may never get. You freedom bound. I can’t ask you to give that up.”

And so the week went. Papa attempted to distract me during the day, leading me on adventures throughout the city. But for once his winking humor felt forced. I cursed Virginia’s law expelling newly freed negroes just as surely as I ever cursed slavery. I hated how our news could change so much so fast, even change my smiling Papa and his easy way with me.

Mama’s nightly reports from Church Hill reminded me that after my holiday ended, I wouldn’t be returning to the life I’d always known. The snatches I strained to overhear were as strange to me as the Van Lews’ conversations, and every bit as troubling. “Zinnie and Josiah gonna stay for six months, earn what they can, and then try for Ohio. They’re worried about Lilly, though. The girl has her eye on some sweetheart works at one of the tobacco factories and don’t seem too happy to be leaving him. Lilly don’t know but Josiah means to talk to the boy, tell him she has her freedom coming and soon enough headed off. If the boy is decent, he won’t want to break up the family or make her do anything crazy, and Josiah says maybe if they court serious through the spring, Lilly can work once they get West, help buy him out.”

Strange as it was to think of the house without Zinnie and Josiah and the girls, at least their departure was a long way off. Not so with Old Sam. “He says he ain’t got time to wait around earning a piddle bit here or there. He’s asked Miss Bet’s leave to write his brother’s children in New York, see if they have room to take him in right off. Miss Bet says if they do, she’ll pay his fare to travel North. How he can imagine going back at his age, I don’t know. Can’t even think of it at mine.” Mama got quiet for a long minute, and when she spoke again her voice was low and tight. “Left three children of his own when we were brought away from New York. Girl baby always was a bit sickly, nobody expected her to live. But those two strong boys, running and climbing everywhere. Heard way back his wife’s owners took them all and moved somewhere far off. Far off in time and place from Old Sam’s freedom, that’s for sure.”

Mama’s revelation astounded me. I understood that she and Papa had people they’d been sold or sent away from, their memories of those families so tender they kept them wrapped tight inside, the way I wrapped Mistress Van Lew’s tortoise-shell hand mirror in her silk handkerchiefs when she went for a week’s holiday at White Sulphur Springs. But Old Sam, with a wife and children? I could no more conceive of it than I could fathom which tree our plank table was hewn from, or what chicken our egg supper might have hatched up to be.

I barely had time to dwell on Old Sam’s mysterious past before he was departing for an equally mysterious future. He was the first of us to hold free papers in his hand, and we shared his pride in touching those pages, at once so fragile and so weighty. On a windless and chill Thursday afternoon not long after New Year’s, Mama, Josiah, Zinnie, Lilly, Daisy, and I walked down with him to Rocketts Landing to await his boat. It was the first time we’d all been together off the Van Lews’ lot. And the last.

Old Sam and Mama held to each other in long recollection of all they’d shared, and most especially of how being brought to Virginia robbed them of the freedom promised to slaves in New York State. At last Mama said, “When we stood together on that Long Island dock, you told me you’d make it back. Looks like you knew this day would come.”

Old Sam shook his head. “Good thing I didn’t know. Couldn’t have imagined it taking this long. Maybe wouldn’t have wanted to know what there’d be left to go back to now.”

A stout white man approached, rubbing his hands against the cold that had already reddened the half cheeks above his blond beard. He was the ship’s captain, well aware of Old Sam’s presence. Fear of slaves’ escape meant that any boat taking a negro out of Richmond’s river port required extra scrutiny, so Miss Bet made Old Sam’s arrangements with care. The captain nodded at us, indicating it was time to board. We hugged once more all around, Zinnie presenting Old Sam with a basket of what she declared was “the last decent food you’ll get till who knows when”—she’d been born in Virginia and sincerely doubted anyone, colored or white, could cook an edible meal way up in New York. Then Old Sam followed the captain up the gangway, away from Richmond forever.

Life without Old Sam made each of us feel even more keenly the varied emotions surrounding our own freedom, the way your gum aches more just after a sore tooth is pulled than it did before. This ache was one of pain but also pleasure. Missing Old Sam, anxious about my family’s future, I rolled the word
free
around my mouth, wondering how it would apply to me.

Hard as I listened all Christmas week and every Sunday thereafter, Mama and Papa still must have managed a few private conversations when they sent me out on some errand to a neighbor or the store. Because by the time I heard about Philadelphia, it was clear they’d been talking on it for quite a while. And talking wasn’t celebrating, that’s for sure. It was one thing for Jesus to have a plan for me. Mama put all her prayers and hopes and demands into that. But for Miss Bet to have a plan for me, well, that was something else again.

Miss Bet was eager to secure my education, which she believed would prove the folly of the peculiar institution—and confirm the virtue of her own benevolence. Slave or free, there was no opportunity for a negro to acquire formal schooling in Richmond. Virginia had no public schools, even for whites, and the spare handful of private girls’ academies would no more enroll me than they would a barnyard turkey. Besides, these institutions designed their courses of study to narrow, not broaden, young ladies’ minds. Even Mistress Van Lew acknowledged as much when she sent Miss Bet to school in Pennsylvania twenty years earlier. And so Miss Bet insisted that Philadelphia was the best place in the country for any child to get an education.

But Philadelphia was two hundred miles from Richmond, as the crow flies. And I was no crow. It would be days by train or boat to get from home to this city neither I nor my parents had ever seen. More than that, it might be a one-way journey, for Miss Bet grudgingly admitted that any negro who left Virginia to receive an education was barred by law from ever returning.

The blows against my family were coming so fast and furious, I felt tender and bruised, like I wasn’t my solid self any longer. Mama and I couldn’t stay in Richmond and keep our freedom. Papa couldn’t leave. Mama wouldn’t go without him. Miss Bet wanted to send me far off to be educated. Everything stood at an impasse, until the matrons of Church Hill came to call.

Like any Southern gentlewoman, Mistress Van Lew practiced fine needlework, whiling away many an afternoon at her embroidery, joined by neighbor ladies. “Needlework indeed,” Mama would say. “Needling each other is more like it, with all their gossip and bragging, whose child this and whose house that.”

One afternoon late in January, Mistress Van Lew called Mama to tend the drawing room fire and serve tea to her stitching visitors, tasks that Old Sam previously performed. I was across the hall waxing the furnishings in the library, for now that Miss Bet was my owner, she insisted I tend this room. She meant the assignment as a way to give me leave to read, not understanding how little time I had for such pursuits—especially since Old Sam’s departure, which made the rest of our workloads that much heavier.

Miss Bet hadn’t made a public show of her plan to free all the family’s slaves just yet, because so much with me and Mama was undecided. But it was generally known that Old Sam had been given his liberty, and Mama’s presence in the drawing room reminded the guests of this unusual development.

“Why, it must be right much of a loss to you, Old Sam leaving after so many years.” Mrs. Randolph’s high, haughty voice condescended clear across the hall. “He came to Richmond way back with your husband, didn’t he?”

Before Mistress Van Lew could respond, Mrs. Whitlock said, “Your Bet and her odd ways, sending the man off to some distant relations at his age. But then, I suppose that’s a product of her Yankee education.”

“I myself had a Philadelphia education.” Mistress Van Lew made the name of her native city sound especially mellifluous against the hard syllables of the word
Yankee
. “And an excellent one it was. Young ladies were schooled at fine academies there even in the last century. It is a tradition of which we are proud.”

“Proud, yes, of course,” Mrs. Whitlock said. “But your education did not keep you from marrying and raising a family, rather than taking up such fool-nonsense as abolition. Some of your daughter’s peculiar leanings must try a mother’s pride, and her patience, too.”

Whatever puncheons and barrels of consternation Bet provoked in her mother, Mistress Van Lew wasn’t about to admit a drop of it to the neighborhood gossipry. I was so curious to hear how she might answer without fibbing outright, I stepped into the archway between the library and the hall. I set my dust-cloth to the mahogany and brass-wire birdcage with such feigned diligence that the goldfinch twittered in dismay. When Mistress Van Lew looked over to see what disturbed her beloved Farinelli, she held her eyes on me for a long moment. But instead of reprimanding me, she turned to reprove her guest.

“A child is not a thistle-bird to be kept in a cage, happy only to peck at her seed. My late husband and I educated our daughter that she might know her mind and act on it. Her independence and her interest in causes of freedom are nothing less than the legacy of Pennsylvania’s Revolutionary fervor, in which my own father was very much involved, you know.”

The First Families of Virginia always carried on as though their forebears had invented the American Revolution single-handed. Mistress Van Lew tended more to amity than antagonism with her neighbors, so on the rare occasion when she reminded the Richmond FFVs of Philadelphia’s role in the birth of the Republic, everyone knew she was upset.

The visitors must have been relieved when she shifted her attention to Mama, who was tending the blaze in the large marble hearth. “There is no need to brood about. You have built a strong enough foundation, and you can trust your handiwork not to smolder out, even when you are not present.” Her voice softened a bit. “Mind what I’m telling you, Aunt Minnie, mind what I’m telling you.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll mind you of course,” Mama replied, curtsying her way out of the room.

She barreled down the broad hall without so much as glancing my way, then disappeared through the china closet to the servants’ stair. I heard the rear door to the cellar open and close, and from the back window I watched her scurrying toward the privy, cleaning supplies in hand. This was Mama’s especial task, the thing she set herself to whenever she wanted an excuse for serious contemplation. “Time to set the privy to right,” she’d declare, disappearing for half an hour or so before returning quiet and determined. It was our most distasteful chore, and Mama put herself to it only at moments when she needed to think on some important matter without being disturbed.

As I watched her cross the yard, marching hard against the winter wind, I already knew what she would resolve while she scrubbed and limed and whitewashed. And so I returned to my own labors, humming to myself as I began to imagine what my life would be like in Philadelphia.

Mama didn’t say a word about the matter for the next few days. But I anticipated the coming Sunday would bring much important discussion between her and Papa. Supposing Mama was already concocting excuses to get me out of Papa’s cabin so they could speak freely, I began contriving excuses to stay. I meticulously collected everything we needed before leaving the Van Lews’, so there would be no reason to send me back to fetch a forgotten article. I let out a careful sneeze or two, so that I might claim a cold if they instructed me to go on an errand. Then I thought perhaps a cold would give them an excuse to leave me inside while they went out together, so I ceased sneezing immediately. The conniving weighed on me all week. But it turned out all my scheming was for naught.

As soon as we arrived at Papa’s cabin, Mama set all of us down for a talk. When Papa started to send me off to check on his elderly neighbors, Mama stopped him. “What I have to say concerns Mary El, she needs to hear it for herself.” She turned to me. “You’re old enough now to keep the family confidences, aren’t you?”

When she said
you’re old enough,
I thought of all the times that phrase meant some new, unwished for responsibility, and how it always struck a pang of resentment in my heart. But now I wanted things to be different. I wanted to feel intrepid rather than timorous or obstinate about what my old-enough self would be expected to do. “Yes, Mama,” I said. “I’m old enough.”

And so I sat beside Papa at his little table and listened to her plan. Freedom meant little without opportunity. Wasn’t that precisely what Virginia’s restrictions on free negroes and freed slaves proved? Education would increase my opportunity, and so an education I would have. And since a Philadelphia education was the only one good enough for Miss Bet, it surely was the only one good enough for me. My parents would miss me, but Old Master Van Lew and Mistress Van Lew must have missed Miss Bet, and anything they could bear my parents could certainly bear, too. It was a good thing, not a bad thing, after all, to be living apart from a daughter who was getting such a fine Philadelphia education, better than any white family’s daughters got here in Richmond.

Right about there, Papa cut in. “Minerva, no need for you to be talking yourself through missing Mary El when you gonna be right there with her. Gonna get that Philadelphia opportunity yourself.”