The Secrets of Mary Bowser (28 page)

When I directed Mr. Bowser to stop, he jumped from the driver’s bench to help me down. Then he reached into the cart and drew out my lone satchel, the stark reminder I was returning to Richmond with fewer possessions than when I left.

Mr. Bowser’s reddish brown skin gleamed in the afternoon sun. “My barbering shop is over at Broad Street and Seventh, right across from the rail depot. I live upstairs. Whatever trouble you find yourself in, you come by or send word. If I’m away, pass a note under the side door. No one will find it but me.”

Holding myself from protesting that I knew better than to get myself into trouble, I thanked him for transporting me. He nodded one final time, took his seat on the cart, and drove off.

Looking up at the mansion where I’d passed more than half my life, I felt as out of place as when I first stood before the Upshaws’ apartment building. There were plenty of places I didn’t go in Philadelphia—didn’t because negroes couldn’t. But where we did go, we walked in the front door, same as whites. Even into white families’ homes. Knowing no colored person, free or slave, presumed to mount the front steps of a Church Hill house, I gathered my flimsy skirts in one hand and my satchel in the other and walked around to Twenty-fourth Street.

The Van Lews’ garden and arbor lay bare and frost covered. I marked how much smaller they were than I remembered, how barren against the sharp-sweet odor of rabbit soup and marrow pudding emanating from the kitchen. I knew Zinnie was long gone. I even remembered reading about Terry Farr in Mama’s long ago letters. But I didn’t take time to think much on this stranger before the cookfire as I made my way to the servants’ entry at the rear of the mansion. Before I even had a chance to knock, Bet swung open the door, looking as altered as Church Hill itself.

When she brought me to Philadelphia, Bet was a spinster of thirty-two. Now she was an old maid, already forty-two. Nearly the age her mother was when Old Master Van Lew died. Her features looked pinched, her once light curls fading to a dull gray.

She studied me as though she couldn’t believe I was truly standing there. Then she pulled me toward her, her embrace almost desperate in its ferocity.

A white lady hugging a negro right where anyone walking by the yard might see us. That vexed me. My safety depended on Bet, and I doubted she had sense enough to know how such conduct put me in jeopardy.

But I was grateful, too. Though Bet wasn’t quite family, wasn’t quite friend, that hug was the first welcome I had.

“It’s so good of you to come.” She spoke as though she’d summoned me.

Figuring I might as well let her believe my return was her idea, I answered, “Of course I came, Miss Bet. We need to be ready for whatever happens.”

She nodded. “We shall show those seditious Carolinians. Come upstairs, see what I’ve prepared for you.” She led me through the house and up to my old garret quarter. A feather mattress set upon a new mahogany bedstead, Mama’s chipped wash-set replaced by a rose-patterned porcelain pitcher and bowl.

Bet stood behind me in the doorway like a ruffian guarding the mouth of his treasure cave. “If there’s anything else you need, I can obtain it.”

“I appreciate your offer of a place to stay,” not that it had been an offer, just a presumption on her part, “but I will be living with my papa.”

She held steady. “It would be best if you reside here. Your father’s circumstances are not what you think.”

“His circumstances aren’t what I wish, but I suppose I know them as well as anybody.” How dare she lecture me about Papa? “Perhaps I should go to his cabin now, to wait for him.”

“No.” Bet answered so quickly, it startled me. She tried to make her voice less sharp as she added, “You’re tired, and it will be some hours yet before Lewis is done with work. Rest here, have something to eat, and I’ll send word for him to come as soon as he can.”

I remembered how long it had been since I’d taken a proper meal, and how good Terry Farr’s cooking smelled. Walking down to Shockoe Bottom wouldn’t get Papa away from the smithy any sooner. Besides, it would be perilous for me to move about Richmond without the protection of a white person, so it made sense to appease Bet. Especially since I had no intention of staying on once Papa came. I agreed to wait there, and her smile returned.

Once the afternoon light began fading from the sky, I took up a post at the garret window, straining to make out Papa’s figure. More than once I thought I saw him, only to watch the person I set my sights on pass down Grace Street. At last my eyes lit upon him. Maybe I wasn’t any more sure at first than I was with the others. But I surveyed this figure closely as he turned the corner of the lot, disappearing toward the servants’ entry to the Van Lew property.

His footsteps sounded out slowly as he mounted the servants’ stair, achy limbs finding trouble with each riser. When he reached the landing and we caught sight of each other, his face turned into a mess of confusion and anger. “How long she been keeping you up here? Ain’t you free after all that?”

“Bet didn’t bring me here,” I said, hugging myself to him. “I came to be with you.” I wasn’t about to set him worrying by mentioning McNiven and our plans. “I’m still free, though I have to pretend otherwise. Like Mama did.”

He pulled away, his words as pointed as a leather-punch. “Minerva died no different than if she was a slave. I don’t want that for you. Not that anyone asked my idea on it.”

Time had worked its way along his face in angry gashes, leaving long, deep creases in its wake. His hair was all white, as though a permanent frost had settled on him. Hardest on me was seeing his eyes. I still thought of the eyes I found gazing back at me every day from the looking glass as Papa’s eyes. But the ones I saw now were missing the light, the fight, the play I remembered.

First I left him, then Mama did. Alone, Papa had become a different man. His letters had hinted as much. But it meant something more to stare it in the face than to read it between the scant lines of correspondence written in someone else’s hand.

“Papa, I’ve missed you so. My coming home without telling you, I meant it for a surprise. Like a great big just-because, from me to you.”

“Just because they keep me here year in and year out, like a lame horse wondering when someone gonna have the decency to shoot it, you throwed away fancy Philadelphia?”

“Just because I love you, I came back home.”

He stared past me, out the window. “Curfew’s coming on. I best be getting back to the Bottom.”

I reached for the stiff handle of my satchel. “We best, you mean. I’m going to live with you, in your house. Our house.”

He kept his eyes on the darkening pane. “Got no house now. Greerson Wallace put me out.”

“When? What for?” Resentful as he’d grown toward Mahon, still I couldn’t imagine my sweet, good-natured papa offending his old friend and landlord.

“Since that John Brown, white people worrying us all the time. This damn curfew was the first of it. Then they passed a law, no free negro can rent to a slave, even with the owner’s permission. Free colored caught renting liable to a whipping, one stripe for each day the slave was there.”

All through my childhood, nearly every slave in Richmond except domestics boarded out. And it wasn’t too many white people who rented to them. “Where are all the slaves living?”

“Whites allow for free negroes to lodge relatives who are slaves, and the big factory owners, they can pay someone in the government to look the other way when the slaves they hire board out. But Mahon says he ain’t got money for that. Told me I’m welcome to do what I like, but Wallace and me be taking our chances on the law finding out. Wallace weren’t about to risk it, and I weren’t gonna ask him to.”

I knew how proud Papa always was of his little cabin. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You always tell me everything happen to you up in Philadelphia?”

There was much I omitted from my letters, wanting to shelter him from the daily humiliations that reminded Pennsylvania negroes we might not be slaves but we sure weren’t equals. But now I realized my trying to protect him, his trying to protect me—it had opened a breach between us I didn’t begin to know how to fill.

“Where are you living now?” I asked.

“In a shed, back of Mahon’s lot.”

I told him I’d stay there with him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “That shed ain’t big enough for but one person, barely even that. And it ain’t mine to offer you.”

I set my satchel back on the floor beside the mahogany bedstead, realizing why Bet had been so insistent. I wouldn’t prefer the finest rooms in Richmond over residing with my own papa. But even if I couldn’t live with him, I’d find a way to do for him. Find a way to cheer him back to his old self. And try to keep him from finding out my other reason for coming back to Virginia.

As he hugged me farewell, he whispered, “I want better for you than this. But it does a body good to see you so grown up.” I bowed my head, and he kissed it just like he always had. Then he turned down the servants’ stair and headed back to Mahon’s.

When I lay down in my old room that night, I felt as far apart from Papa as I had all those years I was away in Philadelphia. The half mile that separated us now widened into the chasm between slave and free, age and youth, despair and determination.

Thirteen

A
s the slant of morning light streamed through the familiar gap between the shutters, I reached out for Mama, hoping the warmth of her body would brace me for the chill air before I got out of bed.

Out of bed. Not off the pallet. The difference pulled me from my drowsy slumber, made me realize there was no Mama here with me. Yet I sensed I wasn’t alone. As I blinked my eyes open, I saw Bet hovering in the doorway.

“Did I wake you?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Terry will have breakfast up by now. I shall have Nell set it out for us while you dress.”

“Miss Bet, if you want me with you, I can serve your meal and clear it after you’re done,” I said. “But if you sit down to table with a negro, it won’t set right with your mother, nor your servants. And it will be trouble for both of us before too long.”

“Nonsense, Mary. Surely Terry and Nell have better things to do than go about Richmond telling tales on their employer.” She spoke as though she hadn’t read a single of those leather-bound volumes of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays down in her father’s library, nearly every one with some maid or manservant playing pranks or plotting intently against master and mistress. “We shall do as we please.”

“We should do as we must, not as we please, if we mean to keep from attracting any notice. You know it yourself, expecting me to call you Miss Bet, while you call me Mary.”

She colored a bit, her only acknowledgment of the truth of what I said. “But I cannot have you waiting on me, when you’re better educated than most white ladies on Church Hill.”

“So far as anyone here is concerned, I’m not free and I’m not educated,” I reminded her. “And any labor my mama performed in this house I won’t consider beneath me.” I put that part about Mama in there to show her that when she talked about servants and their work, she was talking about me and mine. Time, schooling, even death, couldn’t change that.

“I see you are quite obstinate on this matter,” she said. “Still, so long as we are not in public, I insist you call me Bet, not Miss Bet.”

I fingered my burned hand and shook my head. “I need to practice Southern comportment every moment I can.”

Bet puckered her mouth tight, the closest she ever came to admitting defeat. “I suppose we do want to keep up appearances. I shall tell everyone I’ve brought you here to attend Mother, she won’t mind. She’s a true Philadelphia patriot, as horrified by all this talk of secession as are we.”

My hopes about secession were not at all like Bet’s or her mother’s, but I knew well enough to keep them to myself.

She went down to her solitary breakfast, leaving me to dress. It felt strange to go about without a corset, hose, and the rest of a proper lady’s undergarments, as though I were wearing my nightclothes about for everyone to see. Stranger still to find myself listening for the ringing of my old mistress’s handbell, the long ago summons that set me at whatever the Van Lews desired.

When the delicate porcelain peals finally called me downstairs, I couldn’t have been more shocked by what I found. A fetid smell permeated the close air in the bedroom, punctuated by my former mistress’ heavy wheezing. One side of her face hung limp with apoplectic palsy, dragging her features into a lopsided grimace. Bet hadn’t said a word to warn me about her mother’s condition, and my horror must have been wide-eyed apparent to the old woman.

“So you really have come back to us,” she said. “I didn’t expect there’d be much to draw you here these days.”

“My papa is here, ma’am.” I took a cloth from the washstand and wiped spittle from her chin. Her pale skin was papery thin, delicate even on the side untouched by stroke. I dipped the cloth into the wash-basin and bathed her face and arms. Her flesh wasn’t putrefied, and I wondered at the source of the room’s stench, until I pulled back the covers.

Her eyes swam up in her drooping face, milky with shame. “It’s hard for me to reach the chamber pot most nights. I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry
. In all the years I lived in that house, I never heard a Van Lew apologize to a slave. What they did they had a right to do, what we in the house did we had an obligation to do. I met her unwonted humiliation with my own unwonted sympathy, the two of us sharing silent discomposure as I cleaned at where she’d soiled herself.

She stayed quiet while I guided her to her feet, led her to her dressing room, and helped her don the garments I brought out from her armoire. It reassured me to see her seated and dressed, more the lady I remembered. I tried not to stare at her palsied features, but as I pinned back her hair, she caught my gaze with her own.

“Whatever happens, you’ve a place with us, just as Aunt Minnie always did. Same as if you never left us.”

She meant the words as welcome, I suppose. But as I stood tall in the room, remembering how as a child I hid behind a doorway or beneath a bedstead to spy on the Van Lews, I didn’t think anything about me and my place in Richmond would ever be the same.