The Secrets of Mary Bowser (8 page)

“Make you go? What are you talking like that for? This is a dream coming true for you, not some punishment. If you ain’t smart enough to see that, well, that’s just one more thing they’re gonna have to teach you in that Northern school.” She softened a bit and pulled back from me. “Let me take one last look at you, my beautiful girl.”

But the train whistle blew, so loud my head echoed with the vibration. “All aboard,” called the conductor.

“I love you, Mama,” I said as I turned away. “I love you, too,” I heard from behind me as I rushed to the car Miss Bet had entered.

Just as I got there, a sallow-looking white man stepped in front of the entry. “Where you think you’re going, gal?”

I fumbled for my ticket. “Here you are sir, I’m going to Washington.”

“Not in this car, you ain’t.” He nodded toward the fore part of the train. “Niggers ride in the baggage car, just behind the locomotive. You best run down there quick, train’s about to start moving.”

“But, sir, I’m supposed to—”

Before I could finish, Miss Bet appeared behind him. “Surely my servant can ride here, to attend me.”

He turned and took in the quality of her suit, lifting his cap to her. “Pardon me, ma’am. She never said nothing about attending a lady. Thought she was one of them free niggers, putting on airs.”

He stepped aside, and Miss Bet yanked me up, deriding me loudly enough for half the compartment to hear. “You impudent pup, what did I tell you about minding the time? Need I remind you it is your duty to obey me? Come along.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I muttered, trying to keep steady as the train bucked forward beneath my feet. I knew Miss Bet was playing a necessary part in front of our fellow passengers, that she was reminding me of the need for me to play my part as well. But her words stung me hard. As we took our seats, my head hung heavy with loneliness.

By the time I remembered to look out the train window for Mama, the station had already slipped past.

BOOK

TWO

Philadelphia

1851–1859

Four

A
ll my childhood, Richmond always seemed the most important place in the world. Factories and mills and mines. Grand houses on the Hill and hidden homes in the Bottom. The massive Tredegar Iron Works, one of the largest metal manufactories in the nation. Yet staring out the carriage window as we were jostled along Philadelphia’s streets that first afternoon, the difference astounded me. The noisy bustle of the crowds, cityscapes hued only in russets and grays with no greens, the rush and push that charged the air, all stood in contrast to home. Even the streets themselves, not dirt like Richmond’s—dirt that turned to mud and muck so much of the year, dirt we were endlessly cleaning off the Van Lews’ stoop and shoes and clothes and floors—but paved with cobblestones, row after row for miles. And everything so tight and narrow. These Philadelphia thoroughfares squeezed themselves between the packed brick row houses, just as the row houses squeezed themselves between one another, all jammed in quick as could be.

Each year during Christmastide, Papa and I played a game in which he led me about the city with my eyes closed, and I had to guess where we were by what I smelled. That was Richmond. Your nose could tell you as much as your eyes, if you knew the difference between the sweet aroma of tobacco factories and the stink of Butchertown, the enticing scent of a bakery or the heavy odor of the docks. I feared that in Philadelphia I’d be lost even with my eyes open, no sight, sound, or smell familiar to me. The brick facades of the buildings seemed indistinguishable, and who could remember so many new streets? I leaned back against the carriage seat, wondering if this city set everyone’s head spinning the way it did mine.

Miss Bet had arranged for me to board with a negro family, a widow and her twenty-year-old daughter. Now she began to talk of my good fortune at having such a fine home.

Papa hadn’t even wanted me to think of the Van Lew house as home. It hardly seemed right to imagine any place I might live in this alien city becoming home to me. But I reminded myself that Papa and Mama wanted me to come here. They would wish me to act warm and not standoffish toward my hosts. I fiddled the edges of my cuffs over it, until at last the hack pulled to a halt.

“Here we are, ma’am, 168 Gaskill Street,” the driver announced as he swung open the carriage door. Emerging from the cab after Miss Bet, I looked up at the narrowest building on the block. No more than twelve feet wide and crammed so tight between its neighbors, it put me in mind of how Mama struggled each morning to fasten Mistress Van Lew and Miss Bet into their corsets. The first floor had only one window, while each of the three stories above it had just two, covered by a series of mismatched shutters. The shutters and the front door badly needed fresh paint.

Miss Bet surveyed the dilapidated exterior. “What do you think, Mary?”

I looked the building up and down, trying to summon some enthusiasm. Or at least to hide my surprise over how run-down the home of a free family of color was. “Four whole floors, Miss Bet. How very luxurious.”

“No, Mary, it’s not . . . that is to say . . . this is an apartment building. The family with whom you will be living occupies only one of the floors.”

Plenty of the slaves in Richmond were housed over some work space or other, the way Zinnie and Josiah and the girls were quartered above the summer kitchen. But I’d never heard of a building four stories high, divided up floor by floor like that. Free Northerners living as crowded together as the hens in the Van Lew chickenhouse.

Miss Bet fished a calling card out of her reticule and handed it to the driver. “Please bring this up to Mrs. Octavia Upshaw.”

A smirk danced across the cabman’s wind-chapped face, but he took the card and disappeared inside the door. Within minutes a window on the third floor flew open, and a woman’s voice chirped down to us.

“Why, Miss Van Lew, I’m a-waiting you up here. Don’t be shy none, come on up.” The gray-haired head slipped back inside, and the window slammed shut.

When the driver reappeared, Miss Bet instructed him about which baggage to bring upstairs. Then she led me inside, tilting her broad skirts this way and that to fit through the door and down the short hallway to the stairwell at the middle of the building. I’d spent countless hours up and down the servants’ stairs of the Van Lew house, which were every bit as narrow and dark as these tight steps. But Miss Bet was unused to such confined spaces. She kept reaching her hand to the wall to right herself as we climbed.

“Come on dears, you almost here,” Mrs. Upshaw called as we turned onto the final half-flight of steps. As we reached the landing, she held open the apartment door with one hand and urged us inside with a grand sweep of the other, nodding like a poppet-doll and chittering “Hello” and “Howdy do” all the while.

The tiny parlor was crowded with shabby furnishings playing at respectability. The upholstered chair and sofa were threadbare. Faded rag rugs of assorted sizes and shapes lined the floor. A motley collection of gaudy trinkets, many of which showed chips or cracks, cluttered the end table. On the mantel of the fireplace sat an ornate clock, its hands immobile at five minutes past twelve. In a corner by the window stood a ladies’ worktable stacked high with a pile of folded fabrics and topped with needle case, scissor case, and pincushion—the sewing work Miss Bet had told me my landlady took in. Along the other side of the room, a small bed was made up for day use. And in the midst of it all was Mrs. Upshaw, proudly submitting to our inspection as she gushed her stream of welcome.

A small woman about Mistress Van Lew’s age, she chatted constantly, never pausing for a response, until at last she disappeared to make us some tea. Once Mrs. Upshaw was gone, Miss Bet wagged her fan back and forth so furiously, she seemed to be trying to flap her way right out of the wearisome room.

Miss Bet might be imperious, but at least she was familiar. Sitting in my stiff new clothes and listening to the thuds of the cabman hoisting my trunk up the stairway, the clop of footsteps in the apartment overhead, and the muffled noises Mrs. Upshaw was making at the back of the house, I missed my own world so. Part of me wanted to throw my arms around Miss Bet and beg her not to leave me.

But the idea of clinging to Miss Bet, of all people, was ridiculous. I held myself still until Mrs. Upshaw returned, then kept my eyes low as we drank down the weak tea.

“My cousins must be quite anxious for my arrival,” Miss Bet said, the very moment the driver brought in my things. “Mary, I shall call for you in the morning to take you to Miss Douglass’s school. I’m sure you and Mrs. Upshaw will have a nice time getting acquainted in the meanwhile.” She nodded stiffly and followed the cabman out.

With Miss Bet gone, Mrs. Upshaw chattered more than ever. She wanted to put me at ease, I guess, but her prattling set me on edge. “Anything the matter, dear?” she asked finally.

Everything was the matter. But I forced myself to shake my head. “I’m just tired from the journey. May I see the rest of your lovely home?”

“Our lovely home. You gonna have a fine time living here.” She gestured to the next room. “Here’s where you sleep. The bed’s real feather, you know.”

I’d never slept on anything but a husk pallet. My heart leapt at the thought of having my own featherbed. But it fell again when I entered the narrow, windowless room and saw the scuffed wood frame slung with a thin, lumpy mattress.

“Ain’t that something?” Mrs. Upshaw spoke as though she were showing off the Queen of Sheba’s own boudoir. “Have a try, dear. No being shy round here.”

The mattress sagged badly on the bed ropes, making it difficult to sit upright. Perched on the edge of the bed frame, I could smell how musty the feathers were.

“Quite a luxury,” my landlady said. “You believe I had that bed since I first married up with the late Mr. Upshaw?”

“Yes,” I answered without thinking. “I mean, no.” Not wanting to seem rude, I searched about for a distraction. A wardrobe occupied the narrow space between the bed and the side wall. Its doors had been removed from their hinges, because there was no room for them to swing open. Two worn dresses hung inside. “What are those?”

“Why, those is my Dulcey’s things. Won’t it be cozy for you girls, sharing this nice room? You never gonna get lonely with us.”

Sharing a fusty bed with a stranger wasn’t my idea of company, or comfort. I followed as Mrs. Upshaw led the way out of my new quarters into the third and final room of the apartment, an awkward space in which an ancient cookstove, a wobbly table ringed by an assortment of chairs, and a dented wash-basin made up the makeshift kitchen cum dining room. “My Dulcey be along soon. She works for a nice family up on Prune Street—that’s over to Society Hill, you know. Why don’t you refreshen yourself while I get up supper?”

She handed me the wash-basin and waved me through a low doorway to a rickety wooden stair on the back of the building. At the bottom of the steps I found a hydrant pump, from which I filled the basin. I splashed my face as best I could, nearly gagging at the stink from the rotting garbage piled around the tiny yard.

As I carried the emptied basin back up the stairs, I could hear Mrs. Upshaw’s gibble-gabble overhead. Why, the woman don’t stop talking even when she’s alone, I thought. But then I made out another voice, low and bitter, answering her.

“I’m sorry you couldn’t seen Miss Van Lew. She was some dignified.”

“I see white people all day long. Nothing dignified about any of them when you got to wash their drawers. Or mend them, as you should know.”

“No need to be nasty, Dulcey dear, we all wear drawers. Shouldn’t be jealous of wealthy people, just ’cause they don’t have to wash and mend their own things.”

“Shouldn’t worship them ’cause they don’t, either.”

“Why, I never said to worship anyone but the Good Lord. I’m just saying Miss Van Lew is very proper, and so is Mary. I’m sure we gonna benefit from sociating with her.”

“Only benefit is the dollar a week the white lady paying you, which will go right to the butcher for ground meat that’s all gristle, the grocer for bread that’s already gone moldy, and the landlord for this rat-trap apartment, where I can’t even get a moment’s peace after working all day.”

Mrs. Upshaw sighed. “We got to make a virtue out of necessity. We got the privilege to know a genuine schoolgirl, and her so far from home, only right to make her welcome.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll make our Virginia pickaninny feel right at home.”

Pickaninny
. That was a word not even the Van Lews used. To hear the term called out by a negro and applied to me, that was past bearing. I was ready to turn round and run back down the stairs. But to where?

As I looked down at the walled-in yard, I could hear Papa’s voice calling out,
My free young la-dy
. I was a free lady, no Mama and Papa to protect me. I told myself I had to show this Dulcey I was no pickaninny. I marched myself back inside, trying not to wonder whether my hands were shaking with rage or with fear.