The Secrets of Mary Bowser (16 page)

“Maybe you ought to start worrying about your own self stead of telling me what I should do. What you think is going to happen to you and Hattie and the rest once you grow up, Miss School Girl? Marry if you’re lucky, and still you’ll likely end up sewing or cooking or cleaning for white people. Only things a colored woman can do, since our men can’t get decent jobs. All that schooling, and you’re still too ignorant even to know that much.”

Sour though Ducky could be, I could see the truth of what she said. Even Bet, white and well off, didn’t try to make her way alone in Philadelphia. I had no fine family mansion to return to, and I couldn’t imagine where I might end up instead.

I wasn’t about to let on how Ducky’s words nipped and gnawed at me, no more than I let on that I marked the way those primers had disappeared by morning, the ash-heap in the fireplace grown that much larger overnight.

I tried to distract myself from my failure with the Upshaws by concentrating on all I had to do at the fair. The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society rented a large hall on Walnut Street just past Washington Square, which we hung with evergreens and lined with booths to sell what we’d made. Not just our sewing circle, either. Ladies far outside Philadelphia sent along all manner of goods. I volunteered to make up a table out of some of those things, since I hadn’t sewn enough myself to fill a booth.

I chose a spot at the rear of the hall, happy to tuck myself out of sight from Zinnie Moore and the rest. I had my back to the room, arranging my table, when a voice called, “Miss Mary Van Lew of Gaskill Street, I’ve found you at last. What are you doing way back here?”

I turned and shrugged at Hattie, not wanting to admit that she’d been right about the Quakers. “School’s been mighty lonely without you. You coming back after Christmas?”

“Yes. Emily’s little girl is pulling through all right, so she’s ready to send me packing.” She glanced around, taking in the bustle all over the hall. “Daddy always says, the harder it is to admit you were wrong, the more you need to do it. So I guess I must really need to say I missed you lots. Not just when I was keeping house at Emily’s, but when my family went to Mother Bethel without you, too. That’s why I thought I’d better hunt you up, bring you these.” She held out a large basket in which a dozen of her homemade landscapes were nestled side by side.

“Oh, Hattie, I’ll treasure them forever. I’ll find someplace special to tuck them away, so Ducky can’t get at em.”

“I hope you won’t. They’re not for you at all. They’re for the fair. Don’t you see, they’ll go so nicely with the things on your table.” She raised her eyebrow. “Of course, with so much more to sell you might need twice as many clerks at this booth. So I’d like to apply to be your aide for the duration of the fair.”

“I suppose I do have a bare spot or two your treasures can fill. And I will be very happy for your assistance, if you can drive a hard bargain for our cause.” We laughed and hugged, glad to lay aside whatever hard feelings had passed between us.

For the next two weeks, Hattie and I had plenty to keep us busy. Shoppers by the hundreds swarmed the hall, nearly all of them white. Maybe before my trip to the Arch Street Meeting I would have told myself all sorts of tales about how nice it was to see so many of them caring about abolition. But now I wondered what brought them to us, what it meant that we worked so hard to fashion the needlework collars and painted china pieces that would be their presents come Christmas morning.

I couldn’t help but notice that none of my Gaskill Street neighbors, white or negro, could afford to shop at the fancy stores on Chestnut Street, nor at the fair. Most of colored Philadelphia had no more money than the Upshaws, and while plenty of white people didn’t either, lots of whites had more. It was their money we were taking, their money we would use to try to set the slaves, set my own papa, free. I didn’t know what to make of all that, even as the pile of goods at our booth dwindled and our receipt-box filled.

Hattie’s landscapes were bought up right away, and my wall mottoes and tea cozies didn’t last much longer. By the twenty-fourth, even the hanging plants and such were finally sold off to the stragglers who picked their way through the hall.

I was packing up the table decorations when Zinnie Moore came by. “May I speak with thee a moment?” she asked.

I nodded.

“The Friends do not celebrate Christmas, for we do not believe any single day is holier than another. There is even criticism of those of us who participate in the fair, which some say encourages worldly indulgences. The Friends in our group feel our work is Christly, so we continue in it, though we do not engage in gift-giving ourselves.” She glanced about, making sure no one was observing us. “But when I think of thy parents, so far from thee, I hope that these might be a comfort to them.”

She withdrew two small packages from her apron pocket. One contained a pair of men’s slippers, the other a needle case. Both were worked with the message
BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM.
I stared at the carefully turned stitches, unsure what to say.

My silence forged a furrow along Zinnie’s broad, high brow. “Thou does not care for these things?”

“I only wonder why you made them, why the Quakers work so hard to free slaves, when you believe us all inferior.”

Surprise flashed in those gray eyes. “I believe no such thing, and thou must surely know it. Did I not say our work is Christly? Have I not spent many hours toiling beside thee, and Margaretta Forten and Sarah Douglass and the rest?” She reached out to touch my face. Her hand was rough from work, not soft like Mistress Van Lew’s. “What has made thee so hard with me these last weeks?”

“I went to the Arch Street Meeting. I know your church keeps a separate bench, a nigger bench. Just like the slave-owners do.”

My words might have been red hot coals, she drew back her hand so quick. “I told thee I do not worship there. Most in our Anti-Slavery Society are Hicksite Quakers, different from those among whom thou went. Had thou come to our Meeting, thou would have been welcome to sit beside me.”

“Would I have been welcome to sit beside any of the white people there?”

Those gray eyes kept steady on me, firm but not hard. “The Hicksite Friends are many, and I cannot speak for all of them. No more than thou may speak for all negroes.”

I thought of Phillipa, Ducky, too, when she said that. I dropped my eyes from hers, but she held the gifts out to me. “Thy parents have much reason to be proud of thee, and I hope thou will accept these, for their sake.”

I thanked her and took the presents, though I wasn’t sure whose sake I had in mind when I sent them along to Richmond.

My Dearest Mama & Papa

Merry Christmas Eve to you & I hope you like the Christmas package I sent last week. Here are two more gifts for you made by one of the ladies from my sewing circle. I suppose you can tell the needle case is for you Mama & the slippers for Papa & the inscription means people here can see you did a fine job raising me.

Please do not think it odd to receive presents from a stranger as she & I have grown close in the past weeks. I think you should like her very much if you could meet her.

I felt a pang as I wrote that sentence, knowing Zinnie Moore would want me to write
you will like her very much when you meet her
. But I was less sanguine than Zinnie about that happening.

Glad as I was to help the Anti-Slavery Society raise funds, if I thought on it too long, it all seemed hopeless. I knew too well the tenacity that led Mahon to refuse an offer of any size in exchange for a single slave. I doubted that a hundred such fairs, or even a thousand, could raise money enough to persuade all slaveholders to part with their valuable possessions. And what other inducement could there be for them to free their human chattel?

“Slavery doesn’t take holidays, so neither can abolition.” That’s what Margaretta Forten said when she called our sewing circle to order a fortnight after the fair. Meaning, proud as we were for making so much money—over eight hundred dollars after the expense of the hall was paid—there would be no resting on our laurels. That very January evening we were stitching again, laying in wares for the next year’s fair before the Anti-Slavery Society would spend even two of our hard-earned dollars on its annual subscription to
Frederick Douglass’ Paper
.

Whenever someone said something like “slavery doesn’t take holidays,” or any kind of slavery is and slavery does sort of thing, I could feel all the women’s attention shift my way. No heads turned or eyes slid to where I sat, everyone was too polite for that. But still, the fact hung in the air around us—I had been in slavery, they had not. Not even the colored ladies.

That struck me as strange at first, when Philadelphia was full enough with former slaves. Of course anyone who ran off from bondage had to keep quiet about it, but there were still quite a few in the city who had bought themselves out or been manumitted. I wondered that none of them turned up at the Anti-Slavery Society, until I thought of Mrs. Upshaw. If just getting by was so hard for her, it must be harder still for women who came out of slavery, needing to put together a home and a life out of the nothing they were able to call their own in the South.

Curious as the other ladies were, I held my tongue whenever any slavery is–slavery does comments were made. It seemed like there were about a million kinds of slavery. I’d never so much as laid eyes on a plantation, couldn’t imagine the horror of slave-breeding farms, the humiliation of the fancy trade, or any of that. Such things were as distant from the life I lived in Virginia as—well, as my life in Richmond had been from Miss Douglass’s life, or Zinnie Moore’s. Or what mine was now.

Colored and white, the abolitionists who gave speeches against the peculiar institution cited its most extreme manifestations. But the slavery I was born into, though every bit as unjust, felt very different indeed. Theirs, the sharp sting of the whip, the family wrenched apart by sale, the years spent without proper food or clothing, in excruciating labor. Mine, the dull ache of exhaustion from long hours of work, the longing for grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins I never met and never would. The never time enough with Mama and Papa and me all together. I didn’t know how I could make the ladies in the sewing circle understand all that, without making it sound as though I were saying some slavery wasn’t so bad just because it wasn’t as terrible as slavery got.

I hadn’t wanted to admit it at first, proud and excited as I was when Miss Douglass invited me to join them, but deep down it hurt to realize what all the anti-slavery people thought of slaves. Just about everywhere I’d turned my head at the fair, I saw things—note paper, embroidered pot holders, even broadsides to hang on the wall—decorated with pictures of slaves, always drawn up the same. Male or female, wearing nothing but a loin-cloth, shackled hand and foot, the slave knelt, hands clasped not like prayer but like begging. The abolitionists loved all the degradation and desperation in that image.

Something sour prickled my skin whenever I saw those figures. Was that how people in the North pictured Papa and Mama? Did they think I’d been half-naked and chained up like that, till Bet rode in on a white horse to liberate me? I don’t know why the other colored ladies in our group didn’t feel the same way I did, even if they’d never been slaves. We were making money for the anti-slavery cause, I guess, and it was easy enough to see what sold.

Come that spring, another white image of slavery appeared, and pro-slavery or anti-slavery, plenty of people found it just as troubling. Bet sent a missive railing about how they didn’t dare sell
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
in Richmond. She instructed me to purchase the novel and send it to her at once. She even insisted I buy a second copy for myself.

Although all the attention Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe was getting piqued my curiosity, it was two months before my name made it to the top of the list at the bookseller’s. The clerk apologized profusely for the delay, explaining that the publishers’ presses were running around the clock, people were buying the novel in such droves.

After I posted Bet’s copy, I settled down to read my own, running my hand along the scene of the slave cabin embossed in gold on the brown leather cover. I admit, I dropped a tear here or there among the pages, the stories of enslaved families forced apart too dolorous not to move me. But there was much that didn’t sit well with me, especially the way the slaves doted on that Eva. Even if a slave was inclined to treat a white child so—and that was a stretch of my imagination right there—it wasn’t as though slaves had time to carry on singing and chatting and reading with their owners. How did Mrs. Stowe think anything got cooked, cleaned, made, or done in the South if slaves weren’t working day and night to do it? Perhaps she meant well, but she didn’t know the first thing about what bondage was really like.

With all the fanfare abolitionists gave the novel, I wondered whether anyone else reacted to it as I had. So I was glad when Hattie invited me to go with her and her father to the Gilbert Lyceum to hear a program on the book. The Lyceum was colored Philadelphia’s very own lecture hall, where all manner of speakers came to address matters of interest.

Large as the auditorium was, it was near full by the time we arrived. As we found places in the back of the room, I nodded toward a figure with neatly trimmed mutton-chops sitting in the front row. “Who’s that white man?”

Hattie laughed. “Robert Purvis? White as he seems, his grandmother was a Moor and a slave, so by good old American alchemy, he’s as negro as you or I. He wouldn’t think of passing for white, and he even married a woman several shades darker than himself—though just as rich, of course.”

Before she had a chance to pass along any other gossip, James Bustill, the Lyceum president, banged on the podium and called the room to order.

“As you know, Mrs. Stowe’s novel has proven quite popular, stirring up as much response from Southerners who haven’t read it as from Northerners who have.” Scattered chuckles greeted this remark. “Given its momentous import to our people, the Lyceum board has decided on an open meeting this evening. We hope that as many of you will join the debate as time allows. Our recording secretary, Mr. Augustus Baggott, has the honor of beginning discussion. I now grant him the floor.”