The Secrets of Mary Bowser (15 page)

Before I could continue with the usual half-truth, she cut me off. “And my mother isn’t. Isn’t alive. And my father is always shooing me away every time the wind blows, so he can go off to Chambersburg on business. My sisters are all huddled upstairs with Emily, carrying on as if it’s some secret society and I can’t be a member because it’s only for married ladies.” She turned away, speaking more to herself than to me. “And now you go leaving me, too.”

I caught her arm. “Don’t be jealous. You’re still my best friend. Just not my only friend. After Emily is recovered, you can come to the sewing circle, meet the Quaker ladies, and be friends with them like I am.”

“If you’re such good friends, why don’t you go over to the Quaker Meeting sometime, instead of tagging along with my family to Mother Bethel? See how you feel about Quakers then.” A toddler’s cry sounded from upstairs. “I’ve got to go. Please be so good as to see yourself out.”

She was up the staircase before I could say another thing.

Her words stuck with me as I walked back toward Gaskill Street. I spent plenty of Sundays at Mother Bethel, for the pleasure of being with Hattie and her family. But services there always made me miss our Richmond prayer meeting. Like trading warm woolen mittens for a pair of leather gloves all decorated with fancywork, only to realize the gloves were too thin and too tight to be any comfort against the cold. So maybe I wouldn’t bother tagging along, as Hattie put it. At least not till she was done fuming at me.

I wasn’t about to join up with the Friends, of course, but I was curious about them. Before I met Zinnie, I thought the stiff and somber Friends as ill-named as Spruce and Pine and Chestnut, Philadelphia’s nearly treeless streets. But Zinnie proved me wrong, she was so friendly. Still, I wasn’t sure I dared to walk into her prayer meeting.

Then I remembered that Zinnie said most of the women from the sewing circle attended the Green Street Meeting House. If I went to the Meeting House on Arch Street, I wouldn’t be likely to see anyone I knew. If I liked it there, then I could go to Green Street, too, sometime. Hadn’t Zinnie told me Miss Douglass’s mother went to meeting for years, without becoming a regular member?

The idea was still catching in my head as I crossed beneath the sign for
GRIFFITH BROS. SHIRTS, COLLARS, GLOVES, & HOSIERY.
Looking up at the store, I thought of the Quaker women in the sewing circle, with their nearly identical clothing. Even when I passed a stranger on the street, it was easy enough to tell if she was a Quaker by her clothes. I couldn’t go to one of their Meetings wearing something that might seem extravagant. I had one dress, a navy blue bombazine, that might do.

I stepped into Griffith Bros. and bought a plain white collar and shawl, along with a five-pleated gray bonnet, the kind Quaker ladies wore over their sheer caps when they went out in public. The collar would cover the bright buttons on my bodice, and the shawl would hide the full sleeves. I spent the afternoon back at the Upshaws’, taking out the stitches on my lace cuffs and skirt trim.

The two-story Arch Street Meeting House stretched the better part of a block, and Sunday morning it loomed no more welcoming than Mother Bethel. I paced the walk outside for a quarter hour, nerving myself to follow the steady trickle of people going through the plain, heavy doors. Inside, rows of wooden benches rippled forward from all four of the unadorned white walls, befuddling me. There wasn’t so much as a pulpit, and not a single cross to be seen. The wide planks of the wood floor weren’t even varnished. Broad square columns along three sides of the room supported a balcony where children milled about.

All around me, people were taking their seats. Slipping into an empty pew, I kept my head down, occupying myself with straightening my gloves.

I hardly even knew when the worshipping started. No preacher spoke. People just stood one at a time, here and there, saying whatever seemed to come to their mind. They didn’t shout to glory or recite a hymn or any such thing. Ladies stood and spoke just as often as men. Sometimes it was quiet for a minute or two before someone rose. I couldn’t even be sure they were prayerful, until one young man thanked God for blessing him and his wife with a healthy new son.

As I looked over to where he was standing, a pinched-looking white woman in the pew in front of me caught my eye. She breathed in sharply, her mouth tight and her nostrils flared, and pointed to a bench in the back row, behind one of the squat pillars.

Ashamed to be found out of place, I gathered myself up and moved. As I came around the side of the pillar, I saw that the only other occupant of the bench was an elderly negro, stooped with age.

“You new here, too?” I whispered as I slid in beside him.

He shook his head. “I was coming here long before thou was born. Nearly sixty years, since I first worked for a Quaker family.”

“So why are you on the newcomers’ bench?”

“Newcomers’ bench? The Friends have no such thing.”

I nodded toward where I’d been sitting. “But a lady over there directed me to move back here.”

“We must sit here, on the bench for negroes.”

The man’s words stung me like a slap.

It was insult enough to be kept out of the academy Bet attended, and degradation aplenty to be thrown off an omnibus. But the way Zinnie Moore sat beside me at the sewing circle, even sharing supper, I never thought Quakers could be so cruel. Despite all the seeming sweet and humble, this prayer meeting was no different from St. John’s, the Van Lews’ church, where slaves were sent to the balcony while their masters worshipped below. Mama was fit to be tied the one time Bet brought us there. Without a word, I rose and left the Meeting House.

I walked bent and bowed against the hard rush of chill December air, as I hurried away from Arch Street. I was angry at that weasel-faced woman for sending me back to that bench, angry at the Quakers for having such a bench at all, angry at the elderly colored man for sitting on that bench for five decades or more. Angry at Zinnie for pretending Quakers were different from other whites. But I was most angry at myself, for forgetting what Mama and Papa taught me, the thing that guided every moment of my life in Richmond. I could hear Papa saying that the best way with white folks is out of their way, could picture Mama maneuvering about the Van Lew house or the city’s shops, ever vigilant for any harm that might be directed her way, or mine. Missing my parents so, I berated myself for not remembering their most important lesson. And I vowed to hold myself more cautious when it came to Zinnie Moore, the same way Mama did with Bet.

It was the very first Christmastide I even had so much as a purse to jingle coins in, and you can bet I set myself to thinking what to buy Mama and Papa.

I considered every practical thing you could imagine, clothing and kitchenware and whatnot, and rejected them all. Papa’s just-becauses had always thrilled me, and now that it was my turn to purchase, I couldn’t choose a necessity over an indulgence. As December wore on, I sewed and thought, thought and sewed. What I really wanted was for us all to be together. Though I couldn’t manage that, at last I puzzled out a way to send something that was as close as I could get to going home myself.

My dearest Mama & Papa

Merry Christmas! My gift to you as you can see is a daguerreotype of me. I know it may seem extravagant as colored folks in Richmond never have such things. Negroes can get daguerreotypes made here easy enough though not the poorest ones which I guess is most negroes but those who can afford it do not have to worry because there is a colored man to make them for us.

It is Miss Douglass’s own cousin David Bustill Bowser. He is a painter but also a daguerreotypist & a sign-maker & sometime barber. It is too bad that he cannot earn enough just as an artist as his paintings are very fine & Hattie’s father & all the best colored families have one for their house but lucky for me he makes daguerreotypes too. I saw him last summer marching in the parade leading the Loyal Order of Odd Fellows. I did not know he was my teacher’s cousin till Hattie told me so. Only close up did I see he has the same serious eyes & purposeful manner as Miss Douglass though with stocky build & neatly trimmed goatee.

His studio is something to see! It is over on Chestnut Street between Seventh & Eighth on the very top floor so his customers all colored folks of course have the longest climb but he says it is for the best as he gets the most light which makes the best pictures of anyone in the building. The studio has three sets of windows running floor to ceiling that swing full open. It was hardly like being inside a building with all that outside coming right in. I do wonder how a building stands with so much window & so little wall.

I sure miss you both. Papa who will walk all over Richmond with you Christmas week? Mama if I were there I would sweep up all the pine needles in the Van Lews’ drawing room I know how they drive you mad when they fall. Most of all if I were there I would kiss you both.

Merry Christmas from

your devoted daughter

Mary El

Once I posted the packet, I turned my thoughts to the Upshaws. Thanks to Bet’s largesse, I could buy my landlady something she couldn’t get herself. I worried over what that thing should be, until I realized I’d had the answer months before.

Way back in August, Mrs. Upshaw had brought home an issue of
Godey’s Lady’s Book
rescued from one of her customers’ dustbins, which she showed off as proudly as though she were Mr. Louis A. Godey himself. “Just see how pretty these pictures is. To think someone was gonna put it out with the rubbish. Why, I got a mind to hang such pictures on the wall.” She passed the magazine to me, open to one of the color plates. “Look at that bird, drawn all lovely and lifelike. I wonder what kind it is.”

“It’s a black-throated warbler,” I said. “They tell all about it on the facing page. There’s even a little poem about its song.”

Mrs. Upshaw took back the magazine. “ ’Course there is, yes, of course,” she said, as she rushed to flip the page.

That’s how I realized the Upshaws couldn’t read.

When Mrs. Upshaw first cooed, “Why, Dulcey and I so admire all your learning,” I thought, Ducky don’t admire me, she hates me. It maddened me when she went through my things, upsetting books or scattering sheaves of lessons. But that day with the
Godey’s
, I understood that she didn’t hate me, she resented me. Mr. Upshaw worked his whole life as a stevedore, loading and unloading ships along the Delaware wharves, his salary so meager his wife had to take in sewing to help pay the family’s bills. He passed on when Dulcey was quite young, though like many a poor child she was old enough to be put to work. At twenty, she was probably at service longer than I’d been a slave, without any chance for schooling. Here I was, fresh out of Virginia bondage, with opportunities she, born free in Pennsylvania, would never have.

I recalled all of this when I saw that one of the white ladies in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society had made up a batch of reading primers to sell at the Fair. She’d decorated them by hand, leaving the usual places to practice writing out the letters. On the cover was just such a bird as Mrs. Upshaw had showed me from
Godey’s
. So it seemed like I was meant to purchase two of those primers and instruct her and Ducky myself. We wouldn’t even have to sneak around to do it, like Mama did when she taught me.

The evening I brought the gift home, I made sure to fill Mrs. Upshaw with lots of praise for her supper. “After a meal that fine, you should just set and rest a piece in the parlor. I’ll get to the dishes,” I said.

Mrs. Upshaw let me push her toward the sofa. “Come along, Dulcey dear, let Mary be, she so good to lend a hand.”

But Ducky crossed her arms and stayed at the table. “I sit where I please in my own home. Quite a show in here, watching Miss School Girl play the little char-maid.”

I turned to scrubbing the supper things in the big pot of water Mrs. Upshaw had heated on the stove, feeling Ducky’s eyes on my back the whole while. When I finished, she followed me to the bedroom, pushing wordlessly past as I unlocked my trunk to extract the present.

Mrs. Upshaw was hard at her sewing when I entered the parlor. “I thought you’d be relaxing a bit, not working already.”

“Lots to do, ’fore the holiday. My ladies must get their things all fixed up on time.”

“Well, I hope you can spare a moment, because I have something to give you. You and Dulcey both.”

Ducky harrumphed, but Mrs. Upshaw chatted on like she hadn’t heard. “For us? Ain’t you sweet to think of it. Only I’m afraid we don’t got anything for you.”

“I don’t need a thing, unless maybe you’d care to show me how to do some of that fancy crochet you’re so good at.” I held out the magazine. “I thought you’d like your very own subscription to
Godey’s Lady’s Book
. Now it will come for you every month, you just stop at the post office to pick it up.” Her eyes lit up. “And I got you each a primer, too, so I can help you learn to read.”

Doubt tugged her smile into a defeated frown. “You sweet to offer, but I’m too old for all that. Looking at them lovely pictures is enough for me. Dulcey can learn for both of us.”

“No thank you,” Ducky cut in. “All the hours a day I work, I got better things to do with my little spare time than stare cross-eyed at some stupid book the way a certain pickaninny do.”

That word snipped the very last strand of my forbearance. “Don’t you want to make something of yourself?”

Ducky waddled at me. “What am I going to make of myself? You think I learn to read and write, I can make myself mayor? Maybe make a passel of white men cook and clean for me, ’stead of the other way round? You believe that, you even dumber than I thought.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth pressed shut. Which didn’t stop Ducky.