by Peter Quinn
Nina and Maria were purchased as a pair by Thomas Montgomery, a Scot who had arrived in New York as an indentured servant. He had earned his freedom and became a brewer, one of the city’s most successful, and built a fine house for himself on Cherry Street above Pike. His wife was dead, his two daughters raised and married, by the time Nina and Maria arrived in 1742. He let Nina run his kitchen and made Maria her helper. He kept his servants and slaves under such loose supervision that the city fathers complained. Montgomery ignored them. “I’m rich enough not to have to worry about meddlesome burghers,” he said.
In matters of religion, Montgomery was a freethinker. He belonged to no church and required no worship by those who worked for him. But when Nina came to him and told him Maria wished to be baptized, he had no objections. On the day she returned from her immersion in the waters of the Collect Pond, he presented her with the Bible she would keep all her life and pass on to her children. Maria had been taught to read and write by her father and had salvaged whatever printed matter she could find to create a small library of battered books and tattered broadsheets. Now she threw them away. She would never read another book except her Bible.
As Nina grew older, Maria took over her duties in the kitchen. Montgomery told Maria that so long as she completed her tasks she was free to rent her services as a cook outside his house and to keep the money she earned. He told her he would let her buy her freedom, and set a price. “I will not simply give you your freedom,” he said, “because then you might take it for granted. You will earn yours the way I earned mine, and you’ll never forget how precious it is.” Nina died in 1749. She was buried in the Negro cemetery. Maria worked hard. Her services were sought after. She saved what she earned but made only slow progress toward Montgomery’s price. In 1752, while working as a cook in the home of a family near Cherry Street, she met James Cooper. He was a free black from New Rochelle, a skilled wheelwright who had only recently arrived in the city. He was working in the yard outside the kitchen and came in and asked her for a drink of water. “What’s your name?” he said. She blushed and walked away, saying nothing. A few days later he appeared at the Montgomery house and was hired to refurbish the wheels on a carriage.
When James Cooper finished his work, he kept returning. Maria became comfortable with him, eager for his visits. She told him she was working for her freedom and had saved nearly half of what she needed. He offered her the other half and asked her to marry him. “The one does not depend on the other,” he said. “I will give you the money with the certainty you shall repay it. But I want you to be my wife.” She said yes. They went to Montgomery with his offer and he accepted it. Cooper’s money was as good as any man’s, he said, and Maria had already learned the worth of her freedom.
With the start of the Seven Years’ War, boom times returned to New York. The harbor was choked with warships. Soldiers filled the streets. Wheat and wood and hides poured through the port on their way to the British armies in Europe and India. New York went from being a colonial grain depot to an international port, surpassing Boston in its ability to attract European trade and becoming the American terminus for the British transatlantic mail boat. One of the signs of the city’s new status was the proliferation of imported coaches, luxury vehicles that announced the social arrival of their owners and drew the ire of the American carriage makers. For Cooper, however, the rising number of coaches on the streets meant more work, and he prospered at his trade.
He and Maria rented a small house. They had a son, named James, in 1759, and a daughter, named Miriam, in 1760. Another daughter, Elizabeth, died of fever at age two in 1764 and was buried in the Negro cemetery alongside Nina. The Coopers lived among whites and went about their work quietly, never bothered but never embraced. They ignored as best they could the growing tumult leading up to the Revolution, but James junior was involved in several scuffles with Tory sympathizers.
When the British drove Washington off Long Island and invaded the city, James junior fled with the American army. A few days later, word reached Maria and James senior that their son was a hero. It was brought by Jacob Valentine, a young boy from a Tory family who although too young for military service had trailed along with the retreating army and then slipped back into the city. He told them that as a party of British soldiers had approached the American rear guard, James, who had been lying in a forward position on a stretcher, his leg badly swollen from a musket ball that had passed through his calf, had spotted the British as they stole up, seized a musket, and killed one of the redcoats, alerting the Americans to the danger. That was the last Maria and James ever heard of their son. They could never find anyone who knew what had happened to him after that. They were told a lot of wounded men had fallen by the wayside. Left behind by the retreating Americans, they crawled into the bushes and rocks of northern Manhattan, where they died and were never discovered. Maria prayed that was the case with her son. But she nursed a fear that some Virginians or Marylanders had taken him as a slave, ignoring his status as a freeborn, and that he was living his life in shackles on some southern plantation. Her husband said that Maria’s apprehension was foolishness, but she held it nonetheless, and it troubled her.
The Coopers lived for the next five years under the British occupation. Half the city had gone up in flames soon after the British entered, an act the Tories blamed on a revolutionary arsonist, and the revolutionaries on British vindictiveness. Like many New Yorkers, Cooper did work for the British army. The city had the air of a fortress, redcoats everywhere, frigates and warships riding at anchor in the harbor. British officers took over the house James and Maria rented, and for a while they lived in a tent before they found lodging in a farmhouse on the northern outskirts of the city near Richmond Hill, in an area populated mostly by free black tradesmen.
By the time the British left, Maria and James’s daughter, Miriam, was twenty-one. A strikingly handsome young woman, she married a baker named Charles Harris, who lived with his mother not far from the Coopers. The city came alive again after the occupation, commerce and trade slowly reviving, the flow of goods from the interior resuming. And as the members of the state legislature met to put in place a new government, the free blacks petitioned that the institution of slavery be abolished in New York. The legislature decided against it. The special slave courts were abolished and private manumission was made easier, but there was no emancipation, a decision that made it easier for the city to serve as the seat of the new federal government created by the Constitution.
The city filled up with members of the Congress and the executive branch, and with their slaves, hundreds of them, maids, footmen, cooks, drivers, seamstresses, servants in every possible capacity. Their masters found it inconvenient or impossible to distinguish between the blacks they imported and the ones they found living in New York. When Cooper finished working on the coach of a congressman from Georgia, he knocked on the front door of the man’s house to tell him he was done and to present his bill.
A young black girl opened the door. “What you doing coming to this door, boy?” she said. “Mr. Jarvis see you coming in this way, he’ll have your hide.”
“My hide doesn’t belong to Mr. Jarvis.”
“Don’t matter who it belongs to, he’ll give it a good kick he sees you coming to the front door.”
“I don’t care what he sees. He owes me money. I want it.”
She tried to close the door. He stuck his foot in it. “Tell Mr. Jarvis that Mr. Cooper is here for his money and isn’t going away till he’s paid.” The girl screamed, and a stout, red-faced man suddenly appeared behind her and opened the door wider. He looked Cooper in the face.
“What in God’s name do you think you’re doing?”
“Mr. Jarvis?”
“Yes.”
“My name is James Cooper. I’m the wheelwright who was asked to work on your coach. I’ve completed the work and am here to be paid.”
“Cooper?” Mr. Jarvis seemed to relax. “Nobody t
old me you were a nigger. They said you did good work, but they forgot to mention you were a nigger.”
“I’m freeborn, Mr. Jarvis; so were my parents.”
“Well, Mr. Freeborn Nigger, you scoot down the alley to the rear of the house and I’ll have one of the servants deliver your money.”
Cooper turned on his heels and walked away. He shouted over his shoulder, “Keep your money, you big-mouthed suckfish, I wouldn’t soil my hands with it.”
Jarvis stepped out onto the stoop. He pointed at Cooper and yelled, “You worthless nigger son of a bitch, don’t ever dare set foot near this house, you hear!”
Cooper made a fist with his thumb between his fingers, a gesture he had learned from an Italian wigmaker on Pearl Street. “Don’t worry, I never step near shit,” he yelled back at Jarvis.
In 1798, James Cooper and his son-in-law, Charles Harris, were part of a delegation of free blacks that traveled from New York City to Albany to petition the legislature, once again, to abolish slavery in New York. With the federal capital now moved elsewhere, the time seemed ripe to end an institution already made economically obsolete by the state’s rapid-growing industrialization and the growing pool of cheap immigrant labor. The following year, the legislature acted. All children of slaves in New York born after July 4, 1799, were declared free, but they were required to work for their masters until the costs of their upbringing were paid for. Slave marriages were legitimized retroactively, and the right of blacks to own property approved. The status of slaves born before 1799 was left unchanged. For the time being, they would remain slaves.
During the trip to Albany, the delegation of free blacks was refused lodgings in Kingston. No hotel would have them. They slept in the coach. In Albany, Governor John Jay sent word he was too busy to receive them. They sat an entire morning in the lobby of Assemblyman DeWitt Clinton’s hotel before he sent down word that he didn’t have time either to listen to their requests.
In the summer of 1800, while working in the choking dust of Canal Street to repair a broken wagon, James Cooper had a stroke and died. Maria moved in with Miriam and Charles. They lived in a house near the Minetta Brook in Greenwich Village that had been built by a speculator who had gambled that the postwar prosperity of New York would bring the city right to Greenwich Village and multiply the value of his property. He lost his gamble. The city grew, but not that fast, and the new owner gave Charles and Miriam the chance to live in the house for a year at a low rent. He said that after that time, if they wished to stay, he would raise the amount they paid and apply it toward the purchase of the house. In twenty years they would have full title to the property.
Charles and Miriam had three daughters. The oldest two, Elizabeth and Nina, died as infants, one from the croup, the other from fever. The third daughter, named Rose, was born in 1790, and although thin and sickly, she lived. The family lived quietly in their house. Miriam took in sewing and Maria helped her. When Rose was old enough, she helped, too. Charles worked in a bakery by the rtver that shipped its products to the rest of the city by boat. At night, Maria read aloud from her Bible. She would start at Genesis and night by night read on, a few pages at a time, until they heard the whole book; then she would start again.
In 1809, when Rose was nineteen, a French music teacher moved in a few doors from them. He taught in homes throughout the Village. He walked past the Harris house every day, whistling to himself, and sometimes he stopped to talk. He didn’t seem to notice Rose’s color. His heavily accented English sounded lyrical and charming. He was tall and thin, with a sharp handsome face, and he walked in a loose, graceful way. Gradually it dawned on Rose that he stopped by so frequently because he was attracted to her. Her parents were wary of him, as they were of all whites, but they seemed to relax a bit as they grew accustomed to his visits. He talked with them about everything—politics, religion, music—and listened attentively when they spoke.
The first time the Frenchman and Rose were alone together was on an August night when Rose was too hot to sleep and she stepped out onto the house’s small porch. The moon was so bright it was like day, and she was amazed to see the Frenchman walk toward her. Something in her heart had told her he would appear.
“I couldn’t sleep for the heat,” she said in a low voice.
“Yes, the heat, I could not sleep either.”
He put his hand over hers and kissed her, and she felt as if a seed inside her were budding, coming to life, unfolding. He took her hand and led her away from the house. They lay down behind some bushes, on soft grass, and he was gentle and reassuring, telling her how beautiful she was as he made love to her.
He never stopped at the house after that. He waved as he walked by and shouted a greeting, but he never stood and talked the way he had. In a few weeks Rose knew she was pregnant. She prepared to tell her mother, but just as she was ready, her father was brought home from work; his right hand had been mangled by one of the new kneading machines. Within a week, he was dead from blood poisoning, buried in the Negro cemetery with the other members of the family, and Miriam was so sunk in her grief, Rose didn’t have the heart to tell her.
The landlord stopped by to give his condolences, and Miriam told him that without her husband’s income it would be hard to keep up payments on the house, but that she and her mother and daughter would do their best. She asked how much was left to pay before the house was theirs.
“Left to pay?” the landlord asked.
“Yes, before the sum we agreed upon when we moved in is completed and we have finished paying what we owe.”
“Madam, I have the dimmest of recollections of discussing once, many years ago, some sort of arrangement with your late husband, but it never went beyond the realm of words. I will do what I can to arrange a convenient schedule of rent payments to see you through your period of grief, but, please, dismiss the fantasy from your mind, that you have some claim of ownership on this property.”
Miriam trembled with rage. Her lips became pale. “Get out of this house, you white bastard,” she said. She took the landlord to court, but the case was dismissed before trial; afterward, the landlord served them notice to quit the premises. They moved to the city, to basement rooms on Washington Street, near the Negro church; the pastor, the Reverend Mr. Enders, helped them find their quarters. One day Miriam looked at Rose and said, “My God, you’re with child,” and she wept.
Maria was growing feeble. She spent all day with her Bible, and after they moved to the city she became confused, sometimes speaking to her dead husband and long-vanished son as if they were in the room. She died quietly in her sleep the month before Rose had her baby. At her funeral, the Reverend Mr. Enders said that Maria was a woman whom all New Yorkers of African descent should take pride in, a woman who had never asked for anything, who had earned everything she had in this life, even her own freedom, and who had never let life’s trials shake her faith in Jesus. He said that Maria Montgomery Cooper was a name to be remembered as a source of hope and inspiration.
Rose named her daughter Elizabeth. Rose was sick for over a month after the baby was born, and Miriam had to try to support all three of them with her sewing. They moved to smaller quarters and sold most of the furniture they had brought with them from Greenwich Village. They barely had enough to eat. When the baby was six months old, Rose began to look for work. She found a position in a house on Prince Street as a live-in maid. The woman asked Rose if she was single. Rose said she was. She would be free from Sundays after the afternoon meal until the next morning, the woman said; otherwise, she would be required to be fulfilling her duties. She could eat after the family had been served and was entitled to meat once a week. She would be paid every two months.
Rose lived in an attic on the fourth floor, a cramped room with sloping walls; cold in the winter, stifling in the summer. She lit the cooking fire in the morning and put it out at night, shoveling out the cinders and washing down the floor. She prepared the meals and pumped the water and drew the
baths and swept the rugs and made the beds. In the winter, she rose early to break the ice in the washing bowls. She cleaned out the chamber pots and scrubbed the privy and boiled tubs of water in which to wash an endless traffic of clothing, drapes, and sheets.
The mistress of the house rarely talked to her except to complain about something undone or done incorrectly. The master was a solemn-faced merchant who never acknowledged Rose’s existence except once, when his wife was away and Rose was serving him dinner, and he put his hand on her rear and began to rub. She dropped a ladle filled with hot soup into his lap. After that, he never bothered her. On Sunday nights she returned to the room where Miriam and the baby lived. She brought a small basket filled with sugar and pieces of dried fruit and vegetables and portions of meat, leavings carefully salvaged from the meals she had cooked and served. She played with the baby, then went back to work in the morning. The pay Rose received was pitifully small, but with it Miriam and the baby were able to survive.
Miriam saw a noticeable change in her daughter. Rose became frail and haggard-looking and began to stoop like an old woman. On Sunday evening she would just sit there and ignore the baby. She complained of constant headaches and fevers. One night she giggled and took her mother into a corner of the room and said she had a wonderful secret to tell her.
“What is it?” asked Miriam.
“Mother, the angel Gabriel appeared to me and said he knows where a hoard of gold is buried and will soon reveal its location to me.”
“You were dreaming, child.”
“It was no dream. He was right there in front of me, white wings and a blue robe with gold buttons. I could even see his sandals and the white linen wrapped around his ankles.”
Miriam spoke to the Reverend Mr. Enders. He said the girl was overworked and that Miriam should be sympathetic. In time she would come out of it. She was an intelligent girl who was seeking some solace in her hard situation. Better she saw angels than took to drink. Rose never mentioned the angel again. But she seemed distracted and moody, crying one moment, giggling the next.