by Tonya Bolden
As the girls dusted, swept, mopped, scrubbed, washed walls room by room, dumped on the back porch anything that was cloth or broken or just didn’t seem right, Binah peppered Essie with questions about her soon-coming new life.
“What again is the word for what you will be to Miss Dorcas?”
“Companion.”
“Companion,” Binah whispered. Cocking her head to the side, she asked, “That like company?”
“Yes, indeed. I will be keeping her company. I imagine I’ll be doing things like being by her side when she goes for walks … reading books and magazines to her in the evenings. Being someone she can talk to.”
“You will also help her keep house?”
“No.” Essie smiled. “Remember, I told you that I will be learning to be a lady.”
“In a few years’ time won’t you be a lady anyways?”
“Not as in grown woman, Binah. Lady as in someone who knows how to do things proper.”
“Like what?”
“Like how to speak—like just now I should have said someone who knows how to do things properly.”
“Like what else?”
“The correct way to walk, sit, stand.”
“What’s wrong with the way you do all that now?”
“It’s country.”
Essie wished she hadn’t put it that way. Binah looked wounded. “What I mean is, Dorcas Vashon will introduce me to society.” Essie liked saying the woman’s first and last names. “Dorcas Vashon” sounded so strong. Fancy too.
Essie’s imagination rolled on. “There’ll be elegant dress balls … picnics in parks … luncheons … teas … banquets … concerts. Dorcas Vashon will introduce me to better things, a wider world, a more wonderful world.”
Binah shook her head. “Sounds too much for me. I like my world small. No chance I get lost.” After a pause, Binah asked, “You ain’t afraid of getting lost in this wider world?”
Essie smiled. “No, Binah. Dorcas Vashon said I will live and breathe and have my being among colored people of rank and prosperity.”
“What if something happens to Miss Dorcas? She old, could die any day. Then you’ll be away from here all alonely.”
That wiped the smile off Essie’s face. She had never thought of anything happening to Dorcas Vashon.
She scrubbed the kitchen floor harder, pushing back against a sudden wave of worry.
DONE!
Finish up with Lawyer Logan. Done!
Teach the new girl the boardinghouse rules. Done!
Buy a leather traveling bag from Clapp’s. Done!
Pack. Done!
The day before she and Dorcas Vashon were to board the Saragossa, Essie paid a final visit to Shad Island.
“What is this?” asked Ma Clara when Essie handed her the envelope.
They were sitting in the rockers on Ma Clara’s small spring-green back porch.
“Deed to the house on Minis Street,”5 said Essie, bursting with pride. “Lawyer Logan worked it all out.”
“Deed?”
“House is yours now, Ma Clara. It passed to me. I pass it to you. You can sell it. You can make it a boardinghouse. You can …”
Ma Clara’s mouth fell open.
Essie chuckled. It was the first time she’d seen the woman flummoxed.
Then Ma Clara frowned. “Back up a minute.” She raised an eyebrow. “Did you say Lawyer Logan had a hand in this?”
“Yessum. Seeing as how I had to get things tied up fast I figured what with his father being a judge and what with him having a cousin who’s a clerk in the courthouse—”
“What did he charge you?”
“Nothing. I only had to pay a small, what they call a filing fee.”
“Well, I’ll be … Never knew that man had a heart.”
“Ma Clara, of all Mamma’s gentlemen friends Lawyer Logan was one of two who never tried to pat some part of me. But just in case, I took Binah with me both times I went to his office.”
Ma Clara held the document at arm’s length, squinted, then proceeded to read it out loud. “This Indenture made this 18th day of July 1881 by & between Essie Mirth the party of the first part and Clara Wiggins the party of the second part witnesseth: That the said first party, in consideration of the matters herein of the mentioned, hath this day bargained and sold, conveyed & confirmed unto the said second party, her heirs & assigns, foreon, that certain lot or parcel of land situate, lying & being in the City of Savannah …”
“Whatever you decide to do with it, I figure you won’t have to clean houses no more, or at least not as many.” Choked up, Essie paused, took a deep breath. “Should more than make up for you losing work at Mamma’s because of me.”
Ma Clara looked at Essie for a long minute. “Let me tell you something.”
Essie saw that Ma Clara was getting choked up too.
“If it wasn’t for you, I never would have worked for your ma. Not in a million years.”
Essie was stunned. “If it wasn’t for me?”
“Many a day folks asked me how I could work in a house like that.” Ma Clara wiped her eyes. “ ‘For the child’s sake,’ I told them. ‘For the child’s sake … That house on Minis Street is my mission field,’ I explained.”
Essie let the tears flow. “Oh, Ma Clara!” She threw herself at the old woman’s feet, hugged her with all her might. “Bless your heart, bless your heart, Ma Clara, for all you’ve done for me. Wasn’t for you I—the house, it don’t begin to repay you.”
“Up, Essie, up.” Ma Clara rose too, held Essie by the shoulders. “Essie, look at me and hear me good.” When the two were eye to eye Ma Clara continued. “True, I’ve been a help to you over the years, but you saved yourself. You!”
“But—”
“You about to argue with me?”
Essie laughed.
Ma Clara laughed.
Both sat back down in the rockers.
To stem the tide of tears, young woman, old woman gazed at the herb garden, Ma Clara’s pride. Stands of pennyroyal, yellow dock, bright-yellow tansies, bright-green thyme, white yarrow, rosemary, lovage, and lavender. In the center of the small backyard ringed with cabbage palms, Ma Clara also had a patch of tangerine butterfly weed.
“If you want to repay me,” Ma Clara finally said. “You make the most—the very most—of this here chance Dorcas Vashon is giving you.”
“I promise, Ma Clara, I promise. And I promise to write to you every week.”
Ma Clara pshawed. “Girlene, you will be so busy you won’t have time to be writing me.”
Essie saw something odd in Ma Clara’s eyes.
“You promise me now that you will give first focus to your lady lessons. Let all of that be the apple of your eye.”
What was it? Ma Clara was hiding something.
After a few squeaks from her rocker, Ma Clara added, “Essie, I don’t need letters. Wherever you are, I will be with you in spirit.”
Tears were on the rise again as it dawned on Essie that had it not been for Ma Clara she never would have crossed paths with Dorcas Vashon.
She owed Ma Clara everything.
ALWAYS YOU’LL BE HERE
“Your favorite off-work dress!”
Essie relished Binah’s joy gushing up as she stroked the light-pink gingham dress.
“This is really mine now? To keep?”
“Yes, indeed,” said Essie. “Along with my other two,” she added, pointing to her sky-blue and pale yellow calicos. “And here.” Essie reached under her bed and brought out a pair of shoes. “These, too,” she added with a nod at the lace bonnet and the straw bonnet hanging on nails above her bed.
“Who would have thought I’d ever have five dresses and two pair of nice shoes. Four hats too!”
“And some good news, Binah,” Essie said with a lilt in her voice. “Clara Wiggins said she would be pleased as punch for you to call her Ma Clara. She will look in on you from time to time. And you are welcome to visit her on your day off.”
“Oh, thank you, Essie!”
The two girls hugged.
“I will miss you so very much, Binah,” said Essie, trying not to cry.
Not Binah. She was in tears. “I will miss you a mighty amount,” she said. “But you won’t be truly gone, Essie,” Binah added between sniffles. She placed her right hand over her heart. “Always you’ll be here.”
QUEEN OF SEA ROUTES
After tearful goodbyes with Miss Abby, with Binah, on the morning of Tuesday, July 19, 1881, Essie helped Dorcas Vashon into a jet-black carriage. The driver had already loaded their luggage.
As the horses clip-clopped, clip-clopped down one street, then another …
Past shops …
Past stalls …
Past Geechee women strolling strong with baskets atop their heads, some filled with vegetables, others with she-crabs wriggling in nets.
Past warehouses with bales of cotton, tierces of rice …
Past the redbrick buildings that made up Factors Row …
Essie pinched herself.
Once she and Dorcas Vashon were settled on board the Saragossa, Essie took a turn on the deck by herself. The night before she had decided against traveling in her fancy black dress. Instead she wore the silk heliotrope with sleeves and hem finished in an eggshell lace and with a cape of nun’s veiling. Her white straw bonnet was trimmed with satin and feathers.
“Heliotrope,” Dorcas Vashon had explained, “is a symbol of eternal love. Also fortitude.”
Essie felt that fortitude as she watched the waves, took in the smoke billowing from chimneys, church spires piercing the sky. “Farewell, Forest City,” she whispered, remembering that three-masted ship painted on the inside of the lid of her long-gone battered sea chest.
As the Saragossa moved farther out to sea, Essie recalled reading that the firm that owned the Saragossa and many other steamships prided itself as the “Queen of Sea Routes.”
A princess. That’s what she felt like in her heliotrope dress. Her new black lace-up boots still pinched, but she knew it would only be a matter of time before her feet would be fine. Also new was her purse: yellow silk overlaid with lace. Inside was a handkerchief, the pocket watch Dorcas Vashon had gifted her with, and those twenty-five coral beads.
With Factors Row and the rest of the Savannah harbor looking smaller and smaller, with her past growing misty, Essie felt foolish for holding on to those beads. She opened her purse ready to toss them, one by one, into the sea.
Something stopped her.
Another thought took its place.
For a new life she desired a new name, a name befitting a lady.
Later that night she told Dorcas Vashon of her decision to change her name.
Dorcas Vashon looked up from her tea. “What is it, my dear?”
Essie felt sheepish. Something about saying it out loud frightened her. Then she cleared her throat, held her head high.
“Well, my dear, what is your new name?”
“Victoria.”
Said with all the fortitude that she could muster.
FIRST-FLOOR SHUTTERS ASKEW
As she walked down the gangplank of the Saragossa, as the driver loaded their luggage, helped Dorcas Vashon, then her into his coach, Victoria did her best to hold her breath.
Baltimore’s harbor stank worse than Savannah’s. Or was it just a different kind of stink? The place seemed noisier, too, with a greater babble of tongues.
“A broch!” shouted a man in all black, when the rope around his suitcase broke and his belongings tumbled out. Victoria wondered where he was from.
A spindly woman with two small children straggling behind her, a woman with bundles in her hands, bundles under her arms—
“Kommen, Kinder!” she yelled.
Furiously waving his hands to get someone’s attention, a short, olive-skinned young man cried out, “Thar anseo! Thar anseo!”
And stevedores were cussing up a storm.
A stately home, brick or stone. Long driveway. A sumptuous garden. Perhaps even a fountain out front—that’s the kind of home Victoria imagined they were bound for.
When rich people returned from a journey, their servants lined up outside to greet them, Victoria had read. While she and Binah had worn everyday clothes at Miss Abby’s, Victoria was certain that Dorcas Vashon’s maids would be in proper pressed black dresses with lace cuffs and collars. The butler too.
Not in a black dress but in a proper butler’s—
Livery. That’s what it was called. Bright-white shirt. Cutaway coat. Striped trousers. Vest. White gloves.
A housekeeper would also be waiting for them. Footmen. Coach—
Alarm bells went off in Victoria’s head.
Surely, a woman of Dorcas Vashon’s wealth had a fine black carriage and a coachman to drive it. So why were they in this rickety mud-brown coach? The driver was a grizzly old man in seedy gray homespun pants and dingy white collarless shirt. He had a frayed straw hat cocked on his head.
Joy waned, fear rose as the two dirty white horses clip-clopped on.
Down one narrow street after another.
Tiny houses jammed together one after the other after the …
Stretches of plain brick houses, many a sallow red.
Some had no steps leading up to front doors. Others three cold-white steps. Railings were nonexistent or skimpy. Nothing fanciful and festive like the ironwork in Forest City.
“Why Savannah called Forest City?” she had asked Ma Clara when very young.
“Think about it, Essie. How far can you go without seeing a live oak, magnolia, palm, or a multitude of other trees? Especially a live oak.”
She had then asked Ma Clara why a certain oak was called “live” and Ma Clara spoke of legends surrounding Spanish moss.
Of the Spanish soldier lashed to a tree for his love affair with the daughter of a Cherokee chieftain. “That soldier could only be set free,” cooed Ma Clara, “if he vowed to stop loving that Indian girl. Again and again he refused. All the while his beard grew and grew and grew even after he perished, parched and starved.”
Would someone ever love her that much, little Essie had wondered.
“Some say Spanish moss come from the long hair of a princess slain by a Spanish soldier,” Ma Clara continued. “Hair was slung up high in a tree and somehow it spread from one oak to another to another.”
Clip-clop, clip-clop.
A rattled Victoria pined to be Essie again and back in Forest City.
Baltimore was scary. Something was terribly wrong.
Fortitude! she urged herself as here and there she spied droopy flowers—geraniums, poppies, daisies, begonias—in window boxes, but not a single flower garden out front.
On most of the narrow streets not even a tree.
Fortitude!
Victoria felt a stomachache coming on when the coach stopped before a lonesome three-story brick house on a street behind God’s back.
What is this? Is Dorcas Vashon dropping something off to someone? Looking in on someone? But Victoria couldn’t fathom Dorcas Vashon associating with anyone who lived in a house like this, in this cheerless alley.
No railing for the three steps that led to its weather-beaten pale-blue front door. Wooden shutters the only touch of adornment. Weather-beaten. Pale blue, too, with first-floor shutters askew.
Is this my wider world?
BALLERINA LEGS
The luggage was in the house and that grizzly driver long gone.
“Victoria, what has come over you?” Dorcas Vashon stood inside the small front hall, beckoning her inside. “Come along, now.”
What else could Victoria do? She didn’t know a soul in Baltimore. Home was a three-day sea ride, hundreds of miles away.
Victoria entered the house.
It smelled clean.
Hints of cedarwood and lemon.
Floors of herringbone pine polished to a high shine.
That narrow house with first-floor shutters a
skew was eerily quiet.
“Parlor,” Dorcas Vashon said softly of the room to the left of the entranceway, a room that took Victoria’s breath away.
It was finer than Miss Abby’s parlor. A marble-topped table. At the window creamy gold heavy draperies with more material across the top. A few feet in front of the window a five-legged settee in a soft coral color, coral like azaleas, coral like those beads. Victoria guessed the upholstery to be silk, as she marveled that the settee’s honey-brown wood had such elaborate carving. Fruit, flowers, leaves. On its wings there were more intricately carved flowers but in urns. The settee’s five legs—three in the front, two in the back—brought to mind a picture Victoria had seen, perhaps in Oliver Optic’s Magazine, of a ballerina up on her toes. But the settee as a whole made Victoria think not of a dancer but of a winged creature—like a vulture—poised to take flight.
The table before the settee also had ballerina legs.
There was nothing on the walls except a large round mirror over the fireplace. Was the frame real gold? The crystals in the chandelier shined like diamonds. A triangular bookcase in one corner of the room filled Victoria with a measure of comfort.
The small dining room behind the parlor was even more of a wonderland with clusters of grapes and tender leaves adorning the pierced-back chairs with plump royal-blue seats. Matching buffet, sideboard, table—a table that puzzled Victoria. It was too large for the room. There was barely enough room to walk on either side of this table that sat eight.
Who else lives here?
“Take up your bags, now, and follow me,” said Dorcas Vashon.
On the second-floor landing Dorcas Vashon pointed to the front room on the right. “My bedroom.” Down the hall to the left—
“Your bedroom.”
When Dorcas Vashon opened that door Victoria lit up. The narrow bed that ended where the window began was something for a princess. High arched footboard. The headboard was higher still with a more pronounced arch. Atop it was something like a crown of carved flowers. Bedstead to wardrobe to washstand, all the furniture was burl, just like the furniture in Miss Abby’s Room #4.