by Lois Leveen
The flush I felt on my face deepened. Whenever I went to Bet’s attorney for money, he gave me all I asked for and ten dollars more. But still, I only purchased one evening gown each season. I couldn’t countenance spending sixty dollars or more on a new dress every time I was invited to a dance. Not when I thought of how Papa and Mama were living. Not when I hung my fine things next to Dulcey’s same few dresses, which grew more patched and faded every year. Besides, most of the ladies at the Purvises’ had only one or two fancy dresses anyway.
“Thank you for the compliment, Phillipa. I’m relieved to hear you value having color in one’s face. Especially since some unkind people say just the opposite of you.” Before she could respond, I turned to Theodore. “Would you be so good as to escort me to the garden?”
As soon as we reached the courtyard, its air heavy with the scent of wisteria, he chuckled. “That should keep the hounds at bay.”
I didn’t much care for being taken for hound bait. “Theodore, sometimes I think you only court me because I’m not Phillipa.”
“Don’t be absurd.” He plucked a cluster of the delicate purple buds, offering them up as an addition to the bouquet pinned at my waist. “I care for you very much.”
“In direct proportion to the amount that your cousin doesn’t care for me?”
“I see Aunt Gwen is incorrect. The Institute’s algebra lessons do have practical applications for young ladies.” Realizing I was in no mood for such teasing, he grew serious. “I care for you because you are as fresh and unspoiled as the first breeze of spring coming through the window of a house that’s been shut up all winter. You’re the antidote to the insufferable society Mother keeps.”
Though such compliments captivated me more than a whole hothouse full of flowers, a part of me still wondered why he always seemed to take such pleasure at how Phillipa and I hissed at each other like alley cats—and why I relished the way Phillipa glared whenever Theodore chatted warmly with me in some secluded corner.
Eight
All through Hattie’s courtship with George, and mine with Theodore, she still met me outside the Upshaws’ every morning so we could stroll to the Institute together. We needed a chance to gossip and giggle about those boys, after all. So I was mighty surprised to arrive downstairs one bright autumn day in ’55 and find no Hattie.
She was never even two minutes tardy, and that day of all days, I figured she would be punctual. Miss Mapps had arranged for Miss Elizabeth Greenfield, who sang at Buckingham Palace before Queen Victoria only a year earlier, to visit our class. Hattie was already lording it over her sister Charlotte that she was to meet the famed Black Swan. Yet here she was, or rather here she wasn’t, about to make us both late.
Hattie was always up long before school, taking breakfast with her father before he crossed the property to tend North Star, the chestnut mare with a bright blaze that he kept to pull his glass-paneled hearse. But as I hurried up Sixth Street to their lot, I saw the stable doors were locked, the shutters still closed on the undertaker’s shop. I made my way to the house, worry catching my breath. When Hattie answered my knock, I saw her hair wasn’t pulled back, and her bonnet sat crooked on her head.
“What’s the matter?” I asked as she jammed her hands into a pair of mismatched gloves.
“Daddy’s been burning up with fever all night. I’ve got to fetch the doctor.” A floorboard creaked above us, and she frowned. “Susan took the week off to visit her mother out to Bridgeport, and I’m afraid to leave him. He keeps muttering about going next door, saying how the shop can’t be left untended.”
Her distress must have rubbed off on me, because before I realized it, I was offering to stay at the undertaker’s shop while she was gone.
I hadn’t ever warmed to the idea of setting foot inside a building where corpses came and went. Usually Hattie teased me about my fear, but now she forgot it entirely as she hugged me her thanks and pressed the key her father kept at his watch chain into my hand.
“Don’t worry about North Star, I’ll tend to her later,” she said. “Just mind the shop, and I’ll be back as soon as I’ve found Doc Weatherston.”
I felt all the cold of that metal key as it turned in the lock of the undertaker’s shop, revealing a small, square parlor where Mr. Jones received his customers. The walls, painted a condolent yellow, were decorated with embroidered mottoes. A mahogany étagère in the corner held a display of Hattie’s landscapes. Though the pall of death was too close for my comfort, I took my place on one of the figured damask settees set around a low rosewood table. I drew out my Metamorphoses, meaning to distract myself by reading ahead in my lessons. Captivated by Mr. Ovid’s tales, I started when the front door swung open some half an hour later.
“Hattie, you gave me such a fright.” I laughed as I looked up from my book.
But what I saw stopped up my laughter. The person standing across from me wasn’t Hattie. It was a short white man, his face doughy beneath a shock of orange hair.
“What do you want, sir?”
I hadn’t called a white man sir since leaving Richmond, but the appellation slipped out without me even realizing it. A white man has no business at a colored undertaker’s. And a colored female has no business being alone with a strange white man.
“I’m wanting Joons.” His accent was rough and heavy. The sound of trouble.
“He’s not here.”
“What I hae for him will not wait. Fetch him, or we will all be sorry.”
“Mr. Jones is too sick to come to the shop.”
“Is he abed next door?” His cold eyes shifted in the direction of the house.
I thought of Mr. Jones alone in his sickbed. “The doctor is there with him, tending his fever.” I ventured the lie as boldly as I could. “He was raving earlier, so the physician won’t have him left alone.”
“Raving?” The man pulled out a handkerchief and mopped at his brow. “What has he said?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been to the sickroom myself.”
Without so much as a good-day, he turned and went out the door. I watched through the window as he climbed onto the driver’s bench of a high-sided buckboard and charged away.
I was still worrying the lace on my sleeve when the buckboard reappeared a half hour later, with a colored man sitting beside the orange-haired one. The white man remained on the driver’s bench while his companion jumped down. When he swung open the door of the shop, I saw it was Miss Douglass’s cousin, David Bustill Bowser.
“Miss Van Lew, what are you doing here?”
“Looking after things while Hattie runs an errand.” I dropped my voice, though I knew the stranger outside couldn’t hear. “You know that man?”
Mr. Bowser tugged at his goatee. “He’s a friend of ours. He came by earlier to make a delivery. On behalf of the Odd Fellows.”
I’d seen Mr. Bowser and the other members of the Odd Fellows burial society marching behind Mr. Jones’s hearse as it wound through Philadelphia’s streets to the Lebanon burial ground. But the idea of a white man doing odd jobs for a negro fraternal order didn’t make any sense to me. “He didn’t leave anything when he was here. Just said he had to speak to Mr. Jones and then stormed out.”
“I hope McNiven didn’t frighten you. He’s a Scot, he forgets about custom in this country. I don’t imagine he can understand how a young colored lady feels to find herself alone with a white man.” He motioned to the back room. “If you unlatch the rear entry, we’ll bring our cart around and unload the delivery.”
Mr. Bowser went out to lead the cart horses along the narrow passageway to the rear of the shop, leaving me to open the communicating door between the parlor and Mr. Jones’s work room.
Stacks of planked wood lined the walls, carpenter’s tools neatly arranged on an adjoining bench. Smelling cut pine standing ready to be assembled into coffins made the hair on the back of my neck rise up. I couldn’t bring myself to more than glance over to the embalming table, with its assorte
d tubes and funnels.
Not caring to see that white man, nor the corpse he meant to deliver, I unlatched the service entry as quickly as I could, then hurried back to the parlor. I closed the communicating door tight, trying to ignore the sound of the broad back doors being swung open and Mr. Bowser and his peculiar companion carrying their delivery inside.
A few minutes later, Mr. Bowser came through the communicating door.
“I’ve latched the back entry. Be sure to keep it so, and don’t let anyone through this way, except for Mr. Jones, or one of his girls.”
He passed outside and headed off on foot, the Scotsman and his cart already gone.
I tried hard to calm myself after that. But whenever I started into a passage of Mr. Ovid’s poetry I’d see a metamorphosis right before my eyes, devil’s horns sprouting from the stranger’s orange hair.
I longed for the distraction of my workbox. Zinnie Moore was teaching me how to work a lace collar, which was quite a joke between us, since my Quaker friend would never wear any lace herself. But Zinnie was a keen businesswoman, and she knew lace sold well at the fair. I closed my eyes and was concentrating hard on the steps she’d shown me, when I heard the knock.
Not a knock. More of a thump, really. From the back room.
I told myself it was only my imagination, when—thump—it came again. I crept to the communicating door and leaned an ear against it.
No thump now. Even worse—a low moan. Half-human, it went through my bones like a wet wind on a dark night.
I was so scared I was beyond scared. Whoever or whatever that white man was, he’d brought some restless spirit into the shop.
I tore my way out of the parlor, clapping the lock on the front door. My fist was still clamped tight on the key when, wide-eyed and dry-mouthed, I spied Hattie coming down the street with her sister Diana and a tall white man in a dark suit. Diana led the man up to the house, while Hattie continued over to me.
“Mary, what’s the matter?”
“Some strange white man came here. Appeared out of thin air, I didn’t even hear his cart. McEvil or McDemon or something. Worried me half to death, then he was gone as quick as he came. Only to come back later, with David Bustill Bowser of all people. And they brought a”— my voice dropped to a whisper as I glanced at the shop door—“a body. Only that body isn’t resting peaceful. It’s tossing and turning, thumping and groaning.”
Hattie stifled a little laugh, but then her mouth drew back down into a determined line across her face. She pried opened my fingers, took the key, and unlocked the door. “Come inside.”
“I’m not going back in there.”
“I’m sorry you had such a fright. But you’ve got to listen now. I’ll explain it all once we’re inside.”
Shaking head to toe, I followed her into the parlor. But I kept a yell ready at the back of my throat, just in case that restive spirit came to get us.
“I’ve got to tell you something, only I’m not supposed to,” Hattie said. “Not supposed to tell anyone, ever. So you can’t ever tell anyone either. Not Theodore, not your parents, nobody. Promise?”
I wasn’t about to set that yell aside just yet, so I nodded.
“You know my daddy’s an undertaker. Only, some of his undertakings, they aren’t exactly what you might expect.”
I remembered how I joked years back about her father being a Voudon master. Now I wondered if he might really be a spirit doctor after all.
Hattie shifted nervously. “Daddy always says he’ll skin us alive if we talk about this outside the family. But you’ve been in slavery, your parents are still there.” She drew in a deep breath. “You ever heard of the Underground Railroad?”
I managed to murmur a small “mmm-hmm.”
“Well, this is a stopping place. Sometimes Daddy collects baggage from down in Chambersburg. Sometimes he forwards it up to Bucks County himself. Sometimes another conductor transports the baggage instead.” She gave me a moment to take in what she was saying. “That white man, Mr. McNiven, he’s one of the best. Rides right into Delaware, Maryland, even Virginia and brings his cargo all the way here.”
“That’s a slave back there, closed up in that coffin?”
She nodded. “If I realized the wind was blowing from the South today, I would have sent you on to Diana’s and waited here myself.”
“What’s the wind got to do with it?”
“That’s what we say to mean baggage is headed this way. And baggage is what we say to mean—” She gestured toward the other room. “Daddy always says we owe it to them to mind how we speak, even among ourselves.”
I thought of all the times I heard Mr. Jones or one of his daughters or sons-in-laws talk about the wind. I wondered what else they’d said in front of me that I hadn’t understood.
Hattie practically bent over apologizing, she felt so bad about deceiving me. “Are you sore I never told you before?”
“Of course not.”
“Well, Daddy can do what he wants when he finds out, but I’m glad you know. I hated having any secrets between us, and now we don’t.”
When she said that, I knew I couldn’t hold quiet. “We’ve still got a secret. And if I tell you, you’ve got to promise me you’ll never tell anyone either. Okay?”
“Miss Mary Van Lew of Gaskill Street, to think you’ve been holding out on me all these years,” she teased. But when she realized I wasn’t yet ready for joking, she turned serious again. “I swear, I’ll keep your secret.”
“My mama, she isn’t really a slave.” Hattie’s eyebrow nearly raised right off her head as I told her about Mama’s subterfuge.
She might have been trying to undo the tautest sailor’s knot, the way she mulled over all it meant. “Mr. McNiven’s brought baggage from Richmond a bunch of times. I always think of your folks when I hear he’s headed that way. Maybe he could help your papa escape from Mahon.”
I shook my head, worrying whether I could make Hattie understand. Scared that if I didn’t, it meant we could never be truly best of friends.
“Papa thought about running, when Bet first freed Mama and me. But he won’t.” I glanced toward the back room. “You see the baggage headed North, all hope and daring because they’re freedom bound. In Richmond, we see the fugitives who’ve been caught. Whipped, branded, sometimes even maimed to keep them from running again. Then sold South, into a slavery that’s ten thousand times worse than the slavery we knew in Richmond. Which is plenty bad enough.” I ran a hand along the seam of my skirt, trying not to think too hard on just how bad life as Mahon’s slave might be. “In Richmond, Mama and Papa can be together, and they know I’m safe here, getting an education. If Papa runs, there’s no guarantee we’ll end up someplace where they can earn enough to live on and I can go to school. Papa won’t put me and Mama in jeopardy like that. He’s too good a man.”
Hattie gave me just the answer I needed to hear. “Of course he is.”
A thump from the back room made us both jerk.
“I better get some water and food back there,” Hattie said. “Why don’t you go along to the Institute now?”
I gathered up my books, promising to come by after school and sit with her while she tended her father.
Mr. Jones was well again before the week was out. Curious as I was about the Railroad, I never said a word on it, knowing I’d keep Hattie’s confidence, just as surely as she’d keep mine.
Nine
It was a day too cold even for February, when the letter arrived. Ducky was at work, and Mrs. Upshaw had braved the icy winds to collect a new round of piecework from her customers. Alone in the apartment, I pulled the parlor chair close to the fire and tore at Bet’s seal.
My dearest daughter
You see this letter in young Miss Van Lew hand maybe you guess the sad news I got to tell. This very day your dear Mama my beloved Minerva passed. She took ill quick just as quick was gone from us. Shocked as we is to lose her so fast it seems somehow right she was not one to waste
away slow. Strong near till the end lovely as ever when her eyes closed finally.
Her last words was Jesus got a plan for you make her proud and she loves you. Then some thoughts for me Im gonna keep private. We bury her at the colored cemetery out by Shockoe Creek tomorrow. I expect a large turnout you know the people love Aunt Minnie.
Jesus comfort us
X
The bile of grief flooded my mouth, choking me. My biggest fear when I left Richmond was that I’d never see my parents again. Now that fear had come part true.
Days of my childhood, it seemed anyone I might ask would know Aunt Minnie, and it made me feel special just to tell people I was her daughter. Whatever Theodore and Hattie and Zinnie Moore meant to me, to them I was Mary Van Lew, not Mama and Papa’s Mary El or Aunt Minnie’s Mary, as I’d always been at home. It tore at me to think there wasn’t a soul I could talk to in Philadelphia who knew my mama. The near five years I’d lived in the North stretched behind me, seeming like too many to bear. Fingering Papa’s shaky cross mark on that letter, thinking of him as alone in his grief as I was in mine, I wondered if maybe it was time to go home.
The idea caught me tender at first. I wanted to believe being with Papa might stop up the agony I felt, knowing Mama was gone. Wanted to believe I might assuage the same agony he must be feeling, too. But as the wind cracked at the thin panes, it blew doubt in along with the cold.
Ceding my life here would be like contemning Mama’s insistence that Jesus had a plan for me. I’d never quite believed in it until that day Bet sat us down in her dining room, and even after that it seemed more a product of Mama’s willful invention than any true calling. Yet to deny it now would mean betraying Mama’s memory, something I wasn’t about to do.
Besides, Mahon still wouldn’t sell. Bet had renewed her offer more than once without getting so much as a maybe from the smith. My being there couldn’t do any more to win Papa’s freedom than a pile of her money had. And to return to a Richmond in which there was no Mama—how could I have stayed away so long, and go back only when I knew she was gone?