The Secrets of Mary Bowser (31 page)

For all his calling me Contrary, I’d believed Wilson cared for me in a way that would’ve kept him from even looking sidewise at another woman. Yet here I was, listening to a gaggle of white men snickering over the gal who didn’t have sense enough to notice she was being two-timed, or three- or four-timed, by a colored barber with a caustic tongue and copper skin.

Lovely copper skin, I thought, remembering how it shone in the sun and glowed in candlelight. I didn’t know if I was more mad or sad, keeping my head low and my route to the alleys as I made my way back up Church Hill. But I forced myself to put on as brave a face as I could once I got to the Van Lews’. I wasn’t about to let on to Bet about Wilson, any more than I’d confide to her about what I’d left for Jennings Wise.

Bet hadn’t much taken to the notion of me courting. I hadn’t felt any need to ask her leave on the matter. It didn’t even occur to me. She wasn’t my owner, wasn’t my people, wasn’t even a friend to gossip and giggle with like Hattie was. But she made her disapproval clear all the same. She pursed her lips each Sunday morning when I left for Wilson’s shop, and poked her nose between the drawing room curtains to watch as he walked me back up Church Hill at the end of the day. She’d steal up on me about the house and say I’d been right to keep up appearances around Terry and Nell, since we couldn’t trust just anyone, even anyone colored, about what we might have to do if all this dreadful secession talk came to anything. Now it seemed she was right enough, at least about the trusting part, if not about how dreadful secession might be.

The next day, tongues wagged all around town about the
Enquirer
’s latest call to secede. Knowing my false words were published and passed about like that made me all the more sorry I couldn’t set my true thoughts down in a letter to Hattie. A supposed slave might risk the occasional posting to a free black in the North, but risk it would be—even if the missive said no more than
Howdy do?
and
All are well here
. Before I left Philadelphia, Hattie and I agreed that such correspondence would court too much danger. It had seemed sensible enough at the time. But now, between Abraham Lincoln raising one set of hopes and Wilson Bowser dashing another, having no way to communicate with my friend was awfully difficult to abide. While Bet grew madder that secession seemed closer, I grew sadder that Hattie was so far.

Though it was warm on the afternoon of the twelfth April, I marked the menacing gray sky as I helped Mistress Van Lew down the front steps and into Mrs. Catlin’s coach, and then took my place on the box beside the driver. As we descended the Hill, heading to the afternoon convention session at Mechanics Hall, fat drops of rain began to fall. I kept my face tipped down, wishing I had a proper bonnet rather than just a slave’s kerchief to cover my head. Feeling the rainwater soak through the back of my collar, I reminded myself how Mama used to say the smell of spring rain was a promise of flowers soon to bloom. I closed my eyes and breathed deep, trying to smell something besides the heavy odor of the carriage horses.

That’s why I heard the commotion before I saw it. When I opened my eyes, a crowd was already forming into agitated groups right in the street, so thick that Mrs. Catlin’s driver had to stop the carriage nearly a full block from the hall.

The ladies exchanged worried glances before extending their gloved hands one by one for the driver to hand them down. One of the matrons recognized her nephew in the throng and pushed toward him. I held Mistress Van Lew’s umbrella over her head, as the rest of us followed. “They’ve locked everyone out of the hall without a word of explanation,” the young man told his aunt.

While the ladies frowned at this news, I listened hard to the snatches of rumor circulating around us. Lincoln had persuaded the Confederates to come back to the Union. Lincoln had recognized the Confederacy as a sovereign nation. Lincoln had been killed. Though everyone was ready to hazard a tale, no one knew which to believe.

In all the jolt and jostling of the crowd, Mistress Van Lew’s breathing grew strained. I led her across to Capitol Square, hoping to find a place on the green where she might rest while I sought the truth among all the tittle-tattle. As I maneuvered her around the Bell Tower, a small man, his bowler tipped down over his face, rushed right into us.

It was illegal for a negro, free or slave, to set foot in the square, thanks to one of the laws passed after John Brown’s raid. But before I could think what to do, the man lifted his hat, and I saw it was McNiven.

I kept even the slightest flicker of recognition from my face. Even so, the shock of finding him in Richmond paled compared to the shock of what he had to say.

“Apologies for such clumsiness.” He took care to hold his eyes on Mistress Van Lew as he spoke. “I am rushing to get word to a friend o’ mine. The Confederates hae fired on Fort Sumter. They are giving Mr. Lincoln his war, whether he is wanting it or no.”

The news sent Mistress Van Lew into a faint. I was fast enough to get behind her, and McNiven’s quick tug kept her upright. I held her propped against the base of the Bell Tower while he fetched a cab.

Once she was installed inside the hack, he took off his overcoat and hung it over my wet shoulders. “I’ll take her up to Bet, lass. Go tell Bowser all what’s passed.”

I watched the cab roll off through the rain, knowing I had no mind to pass any news to that philandering Wilson Bowser. So I turned in the opposite direction from the barber shop and headed down to the smithy. It would be hours yet before Papa was done with his day’s labor, but I figured I could wait until then. Only, before I even cleared the block for Mahon’s, I saw I wasn’t going to be waiting alone.

“What are you doing here?” The words were out before I even knew I was uttering them.

“Hoping to see you. Same as I’ve been doing every afternoon this week, ever since you didn’t come by my place on Sunday. Don’t you have so much as a hello for your Wilson?”

“Not my Wilson.” I hated him for assuming I could still be duped. “Leastwise, not mine alone.”

He shifted his cap back on his head. “What’s gotten into you?”

“The truth’s gotten into me, thanks to some of your customers. Bad enough to be treated so by you, but to be laughed at by white men. The soft-headed gal who doesn’t know her Lothario’s got a string of sweethearts.”

He let out a low whistle. “Who told you what about me, exactly?”

I kept my arms crossed tight in front of me. “You expect me to tell you what I heard, then let you prevaricate some lie to explain it away?”

“I never lied to you, and I never will.” His voice was a soft drawl compared to how hard mine was. “I swear it, Mary. Never.”

“Never lied, but didn’t exactly tell me the truth. The truth about how many lady friends you’re courting.”

“If I never told you you’re the only one for me, I’m a fool for keeping quiet, since I’ve known it ever since I first laid eyes on you. You’re the only one I’ve got and the only one I want.”

“Only one in Richmond, maybe. But someone called you away Thursday last, and you went running. Left your customers standing in the street guffawing about your romantic conquests.”

“Don’t you know me better than that? What’s the first thing you knew about me?”

The remembrance of chill January air streaming sunlit through a stand of leafless trees wasn’t going to cool my April anger. “You didn’t want to bring me to Richmond. Thought you had a right to tell me what to do.”

“I did bring you here, remember? But think back before that. What’d you know about me when you were up in Philadelphia?”

I remembered taking that cataleptic girl over toward New York with McNiven, him telling me it was David Bustill Bowser’s cousin who brought her out of Richmond. “Working for the Railroad doesn’t give you the right to two-time me.”

“I never said it did. What took me away yesterday was another woman, sure enough. Her and her husband. He’s already up in Canada, sent word of where he is so she could get to him.” Wilson took a single step toward me, holding his hand out, palm up, in peace offering. “I let out it’s lady friends keep me heading all over the Virginia countryside, because it’s the best cover I can get to do Railroad work.”

I worked the strand of his words over, slowly hooking myself a lace of renascent trust, before slipping my hand into his. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“The need to take this woman came on so fast, I hadn’t the chance. Figured you wouldn’t even miss me. But you did miss me, huh?”

“Why do you stay?” I’d wondered it often enough but never dared to ask, never wanted to set him thinking about leaving Virginia. “You’ve sent so many North, and you’re free to go yourself any time you want.”

“Free to stay as well as go. Come, let me show you.” He kept tight to my hand as we walked all the way back to his house, rain falling in soft drops on the two of us. He led me up to a pair of hand-drawn portraits that hung in his parlor.

“My family’s been free so many generations nobody’s sure we ever were slaves, and they haven’t hounded us out of Virginia yet.” He pointed to the sketch of an elderly black man. “James Bowser, my grandfather, fought for Virginia in the Revolutionary War. He made his appeal for a bounty land-grant with the rest of the veterans in 1833, same year I was born. A year after they made him give up preaching because of a new law passed in response to Nat Turner’s rebellion, meant to intimidate free negroes and slaves alike. Older sons, like David’s father, they’d get restless and leave. But my grandfather insisted the youngest in each generation stay. He taught me, and my father before me, that he’d earned our right to be here, just as much as any white man.”

He turned to the other portrait, of an Indian lady. “Of course, my mother’s mother would have had a fit to hear such things. No person owns the land, that’s how her people saw it. Through her, I’ve got a legacy here longer and stronger than any white Virginian.” He gave off looking at his grandparents’ pictures, took up looking steady and warm at me instead. “And now I found a woman tenacious enough to talk me into bringing her here, and wonderful enough to make me fall in love with her. To my mind that’s the best reason yet to stay.”

I smiled as he took me into the kitchen, where he set to chopping onions and carrots and turnips, claiming I was so soaked through he best cook me a stew. I waited until he turned his back to me to put the vegetables in the pot before asking, “So you never saw fit to court anyone until I came along?”

“I wasn’t about to take up with a slavewoman.”

“Like my papa did? You too good for that?”

He faced me in surprise. “I respect Lewis, you know that. But I can’t imagine how it must have been for him, seeing you and your mama owned by a white family. I couldn’t troth to a woman whose children would be bound in slavery. I’d risk my neck to send any such woman North, but I wouldn’t partner with her here, knowing how things could end up for her and for our babies. Your folks made a life like that, it’s a tribute to them, but it wasn’t something I could take on for myself.”

“What about free colored ladies?” I asked as he unwrapped a hunk of salt pork from his cupboard and set it in to stew. “They have a few of those here, too.”

“I said I’d risk my own neck to send a slave North. But it’s a different thing entirely to risk a wife’s neck, a child’s neck, because husband and father is working the Railroad. It always seemed best to keep to myself.” He smiled and pulled me to him, slipping his arms around my waist and running a line of kisses down from my earlobe to my collarbone. “At least it did, until I found a lady contrary enough to give me reason to think otherwise.”

It was an explosion. Then a chorus of explosions, echoing, repeating, seemingly a hundredfold. Wilson’s body, warm and soft and welcoming as it curved around my own, grew taut and tense in an instant.

“What the hell is happening?” His words brought me fully awake.

It was strange and wonderful to sleep beside Wilson, to have my head and heart so filled with the nearness of him. I’d convinced myself over the week past that he was vain and vile, but the things he told me in those last precious hours reminded me he was valorous—and also vulnerable, a man who’d taught himself to live in the service of countless strangers he helped bring to freedom. I wanted nothing more than to be with him, and I savored every word in all the hours we talked, curfew long forgotten. When finally, near dawn, drowsiness overtook me, Wilson carried me from his parlor like I was his dearest treasure, and lay down fully clothed beside me atop the coverlet of his bed. I cherished the way we clung to each other in slumber, closer than I’d ever felt to anyone, all my life.

But strange and wonderful as it was to sleep so, it was strange and awful to hear the thundering report that roused him, drew him awake and away so fast, as he scrambled startled to his feet.

Listening to the bursts and bangs, I thought at first it must be some great fire taking out every window in the city. But then above the shouting in the street, I made out a brass band, playing the same tune over and over.

I sat bolt upright when I recognized the melody. “Dixie”—the coon show song they sang at the rail station when John Brown’s body arrived in Philadelphia.

“Sumter,” I said.

Wilson, already halfway to the window, turned and looked at me in confusion.

I’d forgotten the news from McNiven, that Sumter was under fire. Now the yelling and singing outside told me the Federal fort must have fallen to South Carolina. And from the celebration in Richmond’s streets, the cannonade salute ringing from her armory, I could tell Virginia’s mind was made up. She would secede.

Though the sixteenth April was a Tuesday, Papa was wearing his Sunday suit when he arrived at the Van Lews’ lot. The green vest was long faded, the trousers patched, and the frock coat frayed. But he looked as proud as he had every Sunday of my childhood.

I was waiting for him in the yard, marking how the bright blue sky matched the color of my new tarlatan dress. Though it was a cheaper fabric and a less fashionable cut than any I wore in Philadelphia, I beamed with joy when Papa told me I was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen.