by Lois Leveen
His studio is something to see! It is over on Chestnut Street between Seventh & Eighth on the very top floor so his customers all colored folks of course have the longest climb but he says it is for the best as he gets the most light which makes the best pictures of anyone in the building. The studio has three sets of windows running floor to ceiling that swing full open. It was hardly like being inside a building with all that outside coming right in. I do wonder how a building stands with so much window & so little wall.
I sure miss you both. Papa who will walk all over Richmond with you Christmas week? Mama if I were there I would sweep up all the pine needles in the Van Lews’ drawing room I know how they drive you mad when they fall. Most of all if I were there I would kiss you both.
Merry Christmas from
your devoted daughter
Mary El
Once I posted the packet, I turned my thoughts to the Upshaws. Thanks to Bet’s largesse, I could buy my landlady something she couldn’t get herself. I worried over what that thing should be, until I realized I’d had the answer months before.
Way back in August, Mrs. Upshaw had brought home an issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book rescued from one of her customers’ dustbins, which she showed off as proudly as though she were Mr. Louis A. Godey himself. “Just see how pretty these pictures is. To think someone was gonna put it out with the rubbish. Why, I got a mind to hang such pictures on the wall.” She passed the magazine to me, open to one of the color plates. “Look at that bird, drawn all lovely and lifelike. I wonder what kind it is.”
“It’s a black-throated warbler,” I said. “They tell all about it on the facing page. There’s even a little poem about its song.”
Mrs. Upshaw took back the magazine. “ ’Course there is, yes, of course,” she said, as she rushed to flip the page.
That’s how I realized the Upshaws couldn’t read.
When Mrs. Upshaw first cooed, “Why, Dulcey and I so admire all your learning,” I thought, Ducky don’t admire me, she hates me. It maddened me when she went through my things, upsetting books or scattering sheaves of lessons. But that day with the Godey’s, I understood that she didn’t hate me, she resented me. Mr. Upshaw worked his whole life as a stevedore, loading and unloading ships along the Delaware wharves, his salary so meager his wife had to take in sewing to help pay the family’s bills. He passed on when Dulcey was quite young, though like many a poor child she was old enough to be put to work. At twenty, she was probably at service longer than I’d been a slave, without any chance for schooling. Here I was, fresh out of Virginia bondage, with opportunities she, born free in Pennsylvania, would never have.
I recalled all of this when I saw that one of the white ladies in the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society had made up a batch of reading primers to sell at the Fair. She’d decorated them by hand, leaving the usual places to practice writing out the letters. On the cover was just such a bird as Mrs. Upshaw had showed me from Godey’s. So it seemed like I was meant to purchase two of those primers and instruct her and Ducky myself. We wouldn’t even have to sneak around to do it, like Mama did when she taught me.
The evening I brought the gift home, I made sure to fill Mrs. Upshaw with lots of praise for her supper. “After a meal that fine, you should just set and rest a piece in the parlor. I’ll get to the dishes,” I said.
Mrs. Upshaw let me push her toward the sofa. “Come along, Dulcey dear, let Mary be, she so good to lend a hand.”
But Ducky crossed her arms and stayed at the table. “I sit where I please in my own home. Quite a show in here, watching Miss School Girl play the little char-maid.”
I turned to scrubbing the supper things in the big pot of water Mrs. Upshaw had heated on the stove, feeling Ducky’s eyes on my back the whole while. When I finished, she followed me to the bedroom, pushing wordlessly past as I unlocked my trunk to extract the present.
Mrs. Upshaw was hard at her sewing when I entered the parlor. “I thought you’d be relaxing a bit, not working already.”
“Lots to do, ’fore the holiday. My ladies must get their things all fixed up on time.”
“Well, I hope you can spare a moment, because I have something to give you. You and Dulcey both.”
Ducky harrumphed, but Mrs. Upshaw chatted on like she hadn’t heard. “For us? Ain’t you sweet to think of it. Only I’m afraid we don’t got anything for you.”
“I don’t need a thing, unless maybe you’d care to show me how to do some of that fancy crochet you’re so good at.” I held out the magazine. “I thought you’d like your very own subscription to Godey’s Lady’s Book. Now it will come for you every month, you just stop at the post office to pick it up.” Her eyes lit up. “And I got you each a primer, too, so I can help you learn to read.”
Doubt tugged her smile into a defeated frown. “You sweet to offer, but I’m too old for all that. Looking at them lovely pictures is enough for me. Dulcey can learn for both of us.”
“No thank you,” Ducky cut in. “All the hours a day I work, I got better things to do with my little spare time than stare cross-eyed at some stupid book the way a certain pickaninny do.”
That word snipped the very last strand of my forbearance. “Don’t you want to make something of yourself?”
Ducky waddled at me. “What am I going to make of myself? You think I learn to read and write, I can make myself mayor? Maybe make a passel of white men cook and clean for me, ’stead of the other way round? You believe that, you even dumber than I thought.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I kept my mouth pressed shut. Which didn’t stop Ducky.
“Maybe you ought to start worrying about your own self stead of telling me what I should do. What you think is going to happen to you and Hattie and the rest once you grow up, Miss School Girl? Marry if you’re lucky, and still you’ll likely end up sewing or cooking or cleaning for white people. Only things a colored woman can do, since our men can’t get decent jobs. All that schooling, and you’re still too ignorant even to know that much.”
Sour though Ducky could be, I could see the truth of what she said. Even Bet, white and well off, didn’t try to make her way alone in Philadelphia. I had no fine family mansion to return to, and I couldn’t imagine where I might end up instead.
I wasn’t about to let on how Ducky’s words nipped and gnawed at me, no more than I let on that I marked the way those primers had disappeared by morning, the ash-heap in the fireplace grown that much larger overnight.
I tried to distract myself from my failure with the Upshaws by concentrating on all I had to do at the fair. The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society rented a large hall on Walnut Street just past Washington Square, which we hung with evergreens and lined with booths to sell what we’d made. Not just our sewing circle, either. Ladies far outside Philadelphia sent along all manner of goods. I volunteered to make up a table out of some of those things, since I hadn’t sewn enough myself to fill a booth.
I chose a spot at the rear of the hall, happy to tuck myself out of sight from Zinnie Moore and the rest. I had my back to the room, arranging my table, when a voice called, “Miss Mary Van Lew of Gaskill Street, I’ve found you at last. What are you doing way back here?”
I turned and shrugged at Hattie, not wanting to admit that she’d been right about the Quakers. “School’s been mighty lonely without you. You coming back after Christmas?”
“Yes. Emily’s little girl is pulling through all right, so she’s ready to send me packing.” She glanced around, taking in the bustle all over the hall. “Daddy always says, the harder it is to admit you were wrong, the more you need to do it. So I guess I must really need to say I missed you lots. Not just when I was keeping house at Emily’s, but when my family went to Mother Bethel without you, too. That’s why I thought I’d better hunt you up, bring you these.” She held out a large basket in which a dozen of her homemade landscapes were nestled side by side.
“Oh, Hattie, I’ll treasure them forever. I’ll find s
omeplace special to tuck them away, so Ducky can’t get at em.”
“I hope you won’t. They’re not for you at all. They’re for the fair. Don’t you see, they’ll go so nicely with the things on your table.” She raised her eyebrow. “Of course, with so much more to sell you might need twice as many clerks at this booth. So I’d like to apply to be your aide for the duration of the fair.”
“I suppose I do have a bare spot or two your treasures can fill. And I will be very happy for your assistance, if you can drive a hard bargain for our cause.” We laughed and hugged, glad to lay aside whatever hard feelings had passed between us.
For the next two weeks, Hattie and I had plenty to keep us busy. Shoppers by the hundreds swarmed the hall, nearly all of them white. Maybe before my trip to the Arch Street Meeting I would have told myself all sorts of tales about how nice it was to see so many of them caring about abolition. But now I wondered what brought them to us, what it meant that we worked so hard to fashion the needlework collars and painted china pieces that would be their presents come Christmas morning.
I couldn’t help but notice that none of my Gaskill Street neighbors, white or negro, could afford to shop at the fancy stores on Chestnut Street, nor at the fair. Most of colored Philadelphia had no more money than the Upshaws, and while plenty of white people didn’t either, lots of whites had more. It was their money we were taking, their money we would use to try to set the slaves, set my own papa, free. I didn’t know what to make of all that, even as the pile of goods at our booth dwindled and our receipt-box filled.
Hattie’s landscapes were bought up right away, and my wall mottoes and tea cozies didn’t last much longer. By the twenty-fourth, even the hanging plants and such were finally sold off to the stragglers who picked their way through the hall.
I was packing up the table decorations when Zinnie Moore came by. “May I speak with thee a moment?” she asked.
I nodded.
“The Friends do not celebrate Christmas, for we do not believe any single day is holier than another. There is even criticism of those of us who participate in the fair, which some say encourages worldly indulgences. The Friends in our group feel our work is Christly, so we continue in it, though we do not engage in gift-giving ourselves.” She glanced about, making sure no one was observing us. “But when I think of thy parents, so far from thee, I hope that these might be a comfort to them.”
She withdrew two small packages from her apron pocket. One contained a pair of men’s slippers, the other a needle case. Both were worked with the message BY THEIR FRUITS YE SHALL KNOW THEM. I stared at the carefully turned stitches, unsure what to say.
My silence forged a furrow along Zinnie’s broad, high brow. “Thou does not care for these things?”
“I only wonder why you made them, why the Quakers work so hard to free slaves, when you believe us all inferior.”
Surprise flashed in those gray eyes. “I believe no such thing, and thou must surely know it. Did I not say our work is Christly? Have I not spent many hours toiling beside thee, and Margaretta Forten and Sarah Douglass and the rest?” She reached out to touch my face. Her hand was rough from work, not soft like Mistress Van Lew’s. “What has made thee so hard with me these last weeks?”
“I went to the Arch Street Meeting. I know your church keeps a separate bench, a nigger bench. Just like the slaveowners do.”
My words might have been red hot coals, she drew back her hand so quick. “I told thee I do not worship there. Most in our Anti-Slavery Society are Hicksite Quakers, different from those among whom thou went. Had thou come to our Meeting, thou would have been welcome to sit beside me.”
“Would I have been welcome to sit beside any of the white people there?”
Those gray eyes kept steady on me, firm but not hard. “The Hicksite Friends are many, and I cannot speak for all of them. No more than thou may speak for all negroes.”
I thought of Phillipa, Ducky, too, when she said that. I dropped my eyes from hers, but she held the gifts out to me. “Thy parents have much reason to be proud of thee, and I hope thou will accept these, for their sake.”
I thanked her and took the presents, though I wasn’t sure whose sake I had in mind when I sent them along to Richmond.
My Dearest Mama & Papa
Merry Christmas Eve to you & I hope you like the Christmas package I sent last week. Here are two more gifts for you made by one of the ladies from my sewing circle. I suppose you can tell the needle case is for you Mama & the slippers for Papa & the inscription means people here can see you did a fine job raising me.
Please do not think it odd to receive presents from a stranger as she & I have grown close in the past weeks. I think you should like her very much if you could meet her.
I felt a pang as I wrote that sentence, knowing Zinnie Moore would want me to write you will like her very much when you meet her. But I was less sanguine than Zinnie about that happening.
Glad as I was to help the Anti-Slavery Society raise funds, if I thought on it too long, it all seemed hopeless. I knew too well the tenacity that led Mahon to refuse an offer of any size in exchange for a single slave. I doubted that a hundred such fairs, or even a thousand, could raise money enough to persuade all slaveholders to part with their valuable possessions. And what other inducement could there be for them to free their human chattel?
“Slavery doesn’t take holidays, so neither can abolition.” That’s what Margaretta Forten said when she called our sewing circle to order a fortnight after the fair. Meaning, proud as we were for making so much money—over eight hundred dollars after the expense of the hall was paid—there would be no resting on our laurels. That very January evening we were stitching again, laying in wares for the next year’s fair before the Anti-Slavery Society would spend even two of our hard-earned dollars on its annual subscription to Frederick Douglass’ Paper.
Whenever someone said something like “slavery doesn’t take holidays,” or any kind of slavery is and slavery does sort of thing, I could feel all the women’s attention shift my way. No heads turned or eyes slid to where I sat, everyone was too polite for that. But still, the fact hung in the air around us—I had been in slavery, they had not. Not even the colored ladies.
That struck me as strange at first, when Philadelphia was full enough with former slaves. Of course anyone who ran off from bondage had to keep quiet about it, but there were still quite a few in the city who had bought themselves out or been manumitted. I wondered that none of them turned up at the Anti-Slavery Society, until I thought of Mrs. Upshaw. If just getting by was so hard for her, it must be harder still for women who came out of slavery, needing to put together a home and a life out of the nothing they were able to call their own in the South.
Curious as the other ladies were, I held my tongue whenever any slavery is–slavery does comments were made. It seemed like there were about a million kinds of slavery. I’d never so much as laid eyes on a plantation, couldn’t imagine the horror of slave-breeding farms, the humiliation of the fancy trade, or any of that. Such things were as distant from the life I lived in Virginia as—well, as my life in Richmond had been from Miss Douglass’s life, or Zinnie Moore’s. Or what mine was now.
Colored and white, the abolitionists who gave speeches against the peculiar institution cited its most extreme manifestations. But the slavery I was born into, though every bit as unjust, felt very different indeed. Theirs, the sharp sting of the whip, the family wrenched apart by sale, the years spent without proper food or clothing, in excruciating labor. Mine, the dull ache of exhaustion from long hours of work, the longing for grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins I never met and never would. The never time enough with Mama and Papa and me all together. I didn’t know how I could make the ladies in the sewing circle understand all that, without making it sound as though I were saying some slavery wasn’t so bad just because it wasn’t as terrible as slavery got.
I hadn’t wanted to admit it at first, proud and excit
ed as I was when Miss Douglass invited me to join them, but deep down it hurt to realize what all the anti-slavery people thought of slaves. Just about everywhere I’d turned my head at the fair, I saw things—note paper, embroidered pot holders, even broadsides to hang on the wall—decorated with pictures of slaves, always drawn up the same. Male or female, wearing nothing but a loin-cloth, shackled hand and foot, the slave knelt, hands clasped not like prayer but like begging. The abolitionists loved all the degradation and desperation in that image.
Something sour prickled my skin whenever I saw those figures. Was that how people in the North pictured Papa and Mama? Did they think I’d been half-naked and chained up like that, till Bet rode in on a white horse to liberate me? I don’t know why the other colored ladies in our group didn’t feel the same way I did, even if they’d never been slaves. We were making money for the anti-slavery cause, I guess, and it was easy enough to see what sold.
Come that spring, another white image of slavery appeared, and pro-slavery or anti-slavery, plenty of people found it just as troubling. Bet sent a missive railing about how they didn’t dare sell Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Richmond. She instructed me to purchase the novel and send it to her at once. She even insisted I buy a second copy for myself.
Although all the attention Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe was getting piqued my curiosity, it was two months before my name made it to the top of the list at the bookseller’s. The clerk apologized profusely for the delay, explaining that the publishers’ presses were running around the clock, people were buying the novel in such droves.