The Secrets of Mary Bowser Read online

  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 respon
sibility, 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.”

  “No, Lewis, I’m not.” Mama didn’t seem sad exactly, though her voice held a dim sort of sorry over not even quite knowing what she was giving up. “I remember how lonely it was when I first came to Richmond. I’m not ready to be that lonely in Philadelphia now. Or to leave you to it here. Child grows up, leaves her parents, that’s natural. Wife leaves her husband, though, that’s something else.”

  “You know the law,” Papa said. “Only got one year, and then you be sold off to the highest bidder, who know where you end up. I won’t allow it.”

  “We have one year, but not one year from now. One year from the day the state of Virginia knows I’m free. What if nobody knows, nobody that doesn’t have to?”

  And so Mama outlined the rest of the plan. She’d remain in Richmond, working for the Van Lews, earning wages just as Josiah and Zinnie and their girls were doing. But she’d stay as long as need be, until Mahon agreed to sell Papa to Miss Bet or free Papa himself. Miss Bet would write out free papers for Mama, but she wouldn’t file them with the state, nor would Mama register as a free negro. She would be free, but no one in Richmond besides her, Papa, and the Van Lews would know it. She wouldn’t have to worry about leaving the state or facing re-enslavement so long as Miss Bet remained alive and well. Every month Miss Bet would make the free papers over again with the new date, destroying the old ones, so if something happened to her, Mama would still have a year, more or less, before she’d have to leave Virginia.

  “I don’t like my wife posing as a slave, that’s for sure,” Papa said. “But I never been wild about my wife being a slave, neither.” It was the first joke I’d heard him make in weeks. He turned serious again before he continued. “Minerva, I been searching for the strength to let you go, but I ain’t found it yet. If you sure you want to stay this way, I ain’t about to stop you.”

  “I’m sure,” Mama said. “If I go North now, I’m gonna work hard for some white family or other, who knows how they treat me or pay me, where I’m gonna live, or any of it. I stay in Richmond, I stay with you. I’ll make Miss Bet give me leave to spend nights here, instead of the Van Lew house.” Mama’s mouth tugged down with the weight of all she was considering. “I’m hard-pressed to trust any white person, but she’s trying to do right by my daughter, I think she’ll pay me fair, and I’ll have my freedom papers the whole time. I been a slave wishing for freedom my whole life. Being a free woman play-acting at slavery can’t be harder than that.”

  I was so used to pretending I wasn’t listening to such conversations that I forgot Mama’d given me leave to participate. When I remembered, I spoke up. “If I go to Philadelphia for school, I can’t come back to Virginia.” The excitement I’d stoked all week long was instantly tempered as I thought on everything I stood to lose. “I’ll never see you and Papa again.”

  Mama squeezed my hand so I felt all the love and fear and hope passing between us. “No one besides Miss Bet needs to know where you’ve gone to, and if they don’t know, they can’t keep you from coming back.” Her voice caught. “Listen enough to white people talk, seems like none of them agree about slavery at all. I hear Miss Bet read to Mistress V from those abolitionist papers how whites and negroes up North even work together to end it. Smart girl like you, living free in Philadelphia, maybe you be the one who figures out how to get rid of slavery once and for all.”

  That day Mama taught me that what other people see you as doesn’t determine who you really are. She could let people think she was a slave, if that meant she could be free and live with Papa. We could let them think I’d been sent to work the Van Lews’ market farm or rented out to a family friend in Petersburg, if that meant I could go to Philadelphia without imperiling any chance of coming back to Richmond. And who knows what I might do—not just for myself but maybe, like Mama said, for all the slaves—if I could have my education and still pass between North and South. Miss Bet always howled and raved against show and ought. But for colored folks in Virginia, survival meant biting our tongues and biding our time, while scheming like Mama did all the while.

  As soon as Mama gave her the nod, Miss Bet began sending letters off to Philadelphia to secure a place for me. Miss Bet wouldn’t think of sending me to the city’s lone colored public school, in which two hundred students met with a single teacher in a broken-down building over a mere dozen books. But it was no easy matter for her to find a private school that would enroll me. A few Quaker-sponsored institutions existed to educate negro boys, but they were just as closed to me as the white academies. Yet Miss Bet kept at it, the way she always did when something fueled her ire. As weeks passed, then months, she tried to distract us from the delay by tutoring me herself, insisting it was preparation for my formal schooling.

  It was nearly Easter when word arrived of Sarah Mapps Douglass, a colored woman who kept a small academy in her home. When Miss Bet annouced that Miss Douglass had agreed to accept me, Mama negotiated for me to stay in Richmond a bit longer, to spend my birthday with her and Papa. It was always a sore point with Mama that neither she nor my father knew their own dates of birth—Papa wasn’t even sure what year he was born, separated as he was from his family so early on—so Mama was mighty careful to remember the day I came into the world, May 17, 1839. With my twelfth birthday approaching, Papa determined to outfit me for my new life any way he could.

  Miss Bet, eager to ensure the success of her personal experiment in negro improvement, provided me with the basics of a new wardrobe—two summer day dresses, both fine enough even for Sundays, and one evening dress, plus a night-shirt with matching sleeping cap, new shoes, hose, and my first real set of lady’s undergarments. To Papa were left the purchase of items “necessary to a free young la-dy,” as he called out in sing-song. Unlike the whimsical just-becauses of my childhood, these gifts came deliberately chosen, talismans of all Papa wanted me to be and do, once I was far from him. A toilet set and matching combs, my own Bible, even a bonnet as fashionable as any white girl my age wore—each gift appeared to his merry rhyme. My favorite of all was a sewing kit. Not any old rusty needle and scrap of thread but a proper tortoise-shell box containing a whole case full of new needles of every size, along with a plump satin pincushion, a worked-metal thimble and matching scissors, and a rainbow’s array of spooled threads. All of it meant not just for mending but for the kind of fancy needlework I didn’t yet know how to do.

  Richmond’s slave markets supplied human goods to much of the upper South, and I was old enough to understand the horror of families ripped asunder, with no idea where a child or parent auctioned in the city would eventually be taken. As foreign as Philadelphia was to us, we knew it wasn’t slavery and it wasn’t the South. Knowing I was freedom bound, we savored that time when the future was a promise that had not yet come to pass.

  As I blinked my eyes open my last morning in Richmond
, I made out the iron cross hanging on the wall of Papa’s cabin. Most Sundays of my childhood, I spent half an hour or more tracing over its whorls and flourishes, fascinated that my papa had created such a beautiful thing. But this morning I was ticking too full of emotion to lay gazing at his cross.

  In just a few hours, Miss Bet and I were to take the train North to Washington, where we would transfer to the rail line to Philadelphia. Miss Bet had fussed about how cramped boat passage was, but Mama harrumphed at her protestations, informing me in private that Miss Bet just had a tendency for seasickness. Though I had never been on either a boat or a train, the latter seemed more modern and formal to me, with all the noise and smoke, so I felt glad for Miss Bet’s infirmity.

  I thought my excitement would have me up earliest of my family, but Papa and Mama were already dressed in their workday clothes and seated at the table, a small pot of coffee between them. I quickly rose and readied myself, splashing water on my face and rinsing my mouth. Undoing the plaits I normally wore, I swept my hair back from my face, securing it with my new combs. Stepping back from the doorway to preserve my privacy, I reached for my pile of new clothing.

  I slipped into the knee-length chemise that would protect my undergarments, then struggled into my new corset. As I labored to lace myself in, the stiff fabric pulled my shoulders down and back, causing my rib cage to poke out and constraining me so, I could barely bend and wriggle my way into my new petticoat and corset cover, and then my crinolines, followed by another petticoat. At last I pulled on my dress, a green-and-yellow-striped silk. Unlike the loose frocks I’d always worn, this dress had a lady’s fitted bodice. The double-row of covered buttons down the front followed the lines of the corset, and the elegantly formed sleeves began inches below my shoulders, tapering down to my narrow wrists. The collar, trimmed with green lace, was fashioned broad and low in anticipation of the summer heat, leaving a scoop of skin below my collarbones exposed for all the world to see.