The Secrets of Mary Bowser

by Lois Leveen

  That was all Mr. Jones ever said to me about the Railroad work. He’d pass the message while we sat at breakfast. It meant I was to stop by during dinner recess and again once afternoon classes were over, to bring food and drink next door.

  When he said that single line, he always looked me straight in the eye, calm as could be. I’d expected he’d drop his gaze to his plate while he uttered so great and dangerous a secret. But Mr. Jones spoke like he acted, with neither self-importance nor worry. Just matter-of-fact purpose.

  He only spoke so on days when he had to be away, dressing a corpse at someone’s house or leading a funeral to Lebanon burying ground. It wasn’t ever more than twice a week, sometimes no more than once a month, that he required my assistance. The first few times my stomach lurched, but I returned his look as steadily as I could and said, “I can see to it.” After a while, I heard the phrase with no more of a reaction than if he had asked me to stop at Head House Square and purchase a bucket of oysters for the housekeeper to serve for supper.

  Hattie taught me what to do when baggage needed tending. I’d gather a jug of milk, a loaf of bread, and some cold meats from the kitchen, and carry them across the property. I was long past my days of fetch-and-tote for the Van Lews, and whenever I hoisted that load, I smiled to think the only fetching and toting I’d ever have to do was against slavery, not in it.

  Letting myself into the back room of the shop, I’d set the food and the jug out on the woodworking bench. Then I knocked on the cover of each of the long pine boxes—some days there was only one, sometimes as many as three—and slipped back to the front room. “Daddy always says it’s best for the baggage the fewest number of people who see them,” Hattie explained. “This way you can pass someone in the street tomorrow and not even know he’s the person you helped out of slavery today.”

  I knew she was right, but standing in the front room of the shop, I wondered about who was on the other side of the communicating door. I listened close to hear the heavy thud of the box tops laid off, the movement of bodies trying to make no sound at all. Sometimes the murmur of low speech on days when there were two or three boxes, or quiet sobs on the days when there was only one. I’d lean against my side of the door, my throat aching with sadness. Nobody left slavery without leaving somebody behind, I knew that well enough myself.

  And nobody came out of slavery all at once, neither bought nor manumitted nor escaped. Being freedom bound wasn’t like putting on a new overcoat. More like shaking off a long illness. Only over time did freedom truly take hold.

  Not slave but not yet free, cargo and still not human, that’s what they were when they came to us. I knew Mr. Jones meant me to be dignified and purposeful about it, like he was. But I never came back from the shop without feeling as though my heart had taken on the weight that had been lifted from the food pail. I’d sit down to my dinner or to planning the next day’s lessons, and an hour later I’d find my meal or my books untouched. Find myself pondering on who I’d fed, where they had been, and where they might go. What made them board the freedom train just then.

  What little I heard from Papa only made him seem farther away. One time it was Mahon dont no more know how to work a slave than to work a piece of metal. Either one gonna snap if you let it go too cold beat it too hard. My heart stopped at the word beat. I’d never known Mahon to beat Papa. Would Papa and Mama have kept that from me? Or was it something that came on lately, some new horror of Papa’s life he wouldn’t say much about?

  Then a month or so later came Man can only take so much. Mahon act like he dont know whatall he gonna make me do the way he keep at me. Some days seem like I dont know neither but know it aint gonna be good. That scared me, Papa saying something so vague and threatening about a white man, letting another negro set such words down on the page. Papa had never been one to sing the glory of his owner, especially not after Mahon refused Bet’s offer, but the way he was giving himself over to bitterness frightened me. And then I felt all the worse for judging him. As though from freedom’s side I could possibly understand what his life in Richmond, in slavery, had become.

  Bet kept up her correspondence, too, though it hardly felt like news of home to read about the Richmond she described.

  Dear Mary

  I have only a moment to dash out a few words before sending this to the post—Mother must have me with her to Mrs. Catlins for tea and needlework. A fine round of show and ought that will be—sewing banners for the Union Guard. The militia is mere sport I think—husbands and sons playing at soldiering. Which to them is all drinking and parading. And the ladies imagining themselves heroines from Sir Walter Scott are just as ready to play along.

  Mother is disappointed John does not join the militia. He is too busy with the stores—at least that is all he says when she speaks of the Union Guard. I believe my brother has got sense enough at last to see the folly of such things. But the sewing means much to Mother—so I shall go along at least for a few hours.

  I would prefer to be sewing for your Abolitionist Fair instead. I suppose it is just as well for me to send funds as goods to the fair—I do not fancy myself much with a needle. Do promise to tell me if you need anything for yourself. I do not imagine the Institute can pay you much and to live in comfort in Philadelphia is I realize quite dear. If you want for anything I am glad to supply it from Richmond—or pay for it at least if you must obtain it in Philadelphia.

  Yours

  Bet Van Lew

  Bet didn’t loose a single word about directing her letters to a new address, though I supposed she wondered why I left the Upshaws, always hinting that maybe I needed her support after all. And she did like to carry on about the fair. Sometimes I wished I hadn’t told her about it at all. Maybe it was wrong, wanting to keep such things private from her when she’d done so much for me, and she did always send along a nice little sum to add to the Society’s proceeds. But all her offers to do for me only made it worse that Papa couldn’t offer as much himself.

  Neither Papa nor Bet knew about my work with the baggage. I wouldn’t have dared hint it, it would put so many at risk. I didn’t need to brag on it, I was doing such a small part, but it felt strange to keep such a secret from Papa. Strange, too, to hear Bet going on about abolition without her imagining how deeply involved in it I was.

  From time to time, I passed that orange-haired McNiven as I walked up Sixth Street. He always looked straight past me as he rode by. Something about him gave me the shivers, and I was relieved he didn’t mark my crossing paths with him. Only, I was wrong about that. He remembered me, and he was making plans for me already.

  “Thomas McNiven wants your assistance,” Mr. Jones said one evening. We were sitting down to supper, Hattie and George joining us to celebrate the end of my first term as an instructor.

  “How could I be of assistance to Mr. McNiven?” I glanced over Hattie’s way. She kept right on eating, as though her father hadn’t said anything unusual. I began to suspect she knew the answer already, that she was there to persuade me to agree to whatever he was about to propose.

  “We have a shipment that must go through to New York immediately,” Mr. Jones said. “McNiven is willing to take the baggage, but he thinks it best to bring someone along.”

  I’d never even been north of Germantown. “What good could I be to him?”

  “It’s not to him, it’s to the baggage.” Mr. Jones gathered himself to the task of breaking his own rule of not revealing anything about the fugitives. “A girl no more than fourteen, she was attacked by a white man and is in some kind of waking stupor, no reaction to anything around her. McNiven worries that if she comes to her senses while traveling alone with him, she might not trust that he is there to help her.”

  “I don’t know why I can’t be the one to go,” Hattie said. George looked as if she proposed walking straight into a herd of stampeding buffalo.

  Mr. Jones didn’t take his eyes off me. “McNiven has asked for Mary.”

  “Why m
e?”

  “The girl is from Richmond. I suppose that’s why McNiven thought of you. Will you go, for her sake? It will be a journey of two days each way.”

  I’d been so curious for so long about the baggage, and now at last I might meet some of it. Someone of it, I reminded myself, a real person. Someone who needed my help. My skin tingled and my heart sped loud as I consented.

  Later I’d have time to puzzle over how McNiven knew I was from Richmond, when and why he learned so much about me. But now there was barely chance enough to finish up supper and gather together quilts, warm clothes, and food for the trip. Usually Mr. Jones never moved a body except in broad daylight. “No need to raise suspicion by sneaking about, when I have legitimate business reasons to travel by day,” he always said. But this baggage was different, and I hurried to be ready.

  After Hattie and George hugged me good-bye and departed down Sixth Street, Mr. Jones and I waited in silence until McNiven appeared, guiding his buckboard wagon into the narrow alleyway behind the shop. He didn’t offer any greeting to me, not so much as a kindly look, before he and Mr. Jones lifted the closed coffin into the wagon bed, spreading quilts along the top. Then McNiven took his place on the driver’s bench, and Mr. Jones returned to where I stood.

  He laid his hand on my shoulder, warming me like a benediction. “You’re doing right, my girl. When the wind blows from the South, we must help it along as best we can.” He lifted me onto the back of the conveyance.

  “Lay her doun.” The Scotsman’s command was thick and throaty.

  Though I chafed at being ordered so, I burrowed between the high wall of the wagon bed and the pile of blankets that covered the coffin. Mr. Jones raised the tailboard, and McNiven urged his team forward, slowly turning the wagon and pulling back into the street.

  As I listened to the creaking rhythm of the carriage wheels, it seemed to me there was something thicker than pine boards separating me from the girl who lay beside me. I looked up, hoping to trace out the constellations Miss Mapps taught us to find in the winter sky. But the clouds hung low and wide, hiding every star.

  I woke with a start. Frigid night stung my face. Damp air penetrated my bones. I made out the walls of the buckboard and realized the wagon wasn’t moving.

  I couldn’t tell how many hours had passed or where we might be, as I heard footsteps on frosty ground. The tailboard slammed down, and McNiven climbed toward me.

  “Awake are you, lass?” He pulled himself into the wagon bed. “That’s good. I’m wanting you.”

  Fear warmed me against the icy night.

  I searched about for something I might use as a weapon. Why hadn’t I worn a hairpin instead of combs?

  I yanked my reticule off my wrist and threw it as hard as I could at him. But it drew little more than a startled glance.

  “I mean to do what I’m about, and you canna stop me,” he said. He pulled the quilts back and reached for the coffin lid.

  Scrambling to a crouch, I hissed, “You leave her be, or I’ll tell Mr. Jones.”

  “Joons be a good man, but he thinks like an undertaker, every body in a box. This lass has been through enough without waking in a coffin, thinking she’s awready dead and gone.”

  I didn’t have time to wonder at his consideration for the girl, before he slid back the pine lid. In the darkness, all I could make out of the interior of the box were the whites of the girl’s eyes, wide with fright though she lay unaware of her surroundings. I shuddered. Seeing her alive yet motionless, witless even, terrified me more than any corpse ever could.

  “Cover her, quick,” McNiven said. “They catch a death o’ cold easy when they hae taken a shock like that.”

  I wrapped each of her stiff, unmoving limbs and lay a quilt across her chest. “Best cover her face along with the rest,” he directed, “in case we hae oorselves an encounter.” Her shallow breath didn’t alter and her wild eyes didn’t blink, as I laid a shawl across her face. I wasn’t sorry to hide those eyes from my own.

  McNiven lowered himself from the wagon bed and closed us back in. I heard his footsteps alongside the cart, then the creak of the buckboard as he pulled himself up onto the seat. One of the horses snorted as the reins fell on its back, and we were moving again.

  I stared at the pile heaped next to me, contemplating such horrors as could leave a girl dead to the world around her, even though she lived.

  McNiven drove through the night and all the next day. By the time darkness fell again, the horses’ gait had slackened and McNiven’s shoulders sank with exhaustion. At last he pulled the cart amid a cluster of trees, too weary to continue.

  I thought of how urgent it was to get the girl to safety. “Perhaps I can drive a bit, while you rest.”

  “Has the lass driven a wagon team?”

  “I’ve driven a one-horse phaeton.”

  “Through rutted country roads, or only upon cobblestone streets? On a night with neither stars to guide you nor moon to light the way, or only by broad daylight?”

  I’d felt so grand sitting beside Theodore, leading his fancy gig. But now I saw how trifling my achievement was. “At least take my place here,” I said. “I can keep watch while you lie down.”

  McNiven agreed, crossing to the back of the wagon and extending a hand to help me down. The cold of his touch sent shivers along my spine. “Indulge me no more than an hour or two. We maun be under way afore dawn.” He pulled himself up, and I secured the tailboard behind him.

  I paced the hard ground beside the wagon for a good long while, relieved to stretch my limbs and hoping to warm myself. But eventually I grew lonely. Longing to see the girl, or rather the pile under which she lay, I hoisted myself onto the driver’s bench. One of the rough planks snagged my skirt, and I let loose a startled stream of hard words.

  My cussing split the night right open.

  “I heard a wench. Don’t tell me otherwise.” The voice was low and menacing, a human growl.

  “It’s the drink you heard,” answered another voice, shrill and tinny, like a knife being sharpened. “And it’ll be ringing in your head some fierce tomorrow.”

  These were white men’s voices, coming toward me from deep in the woods.

  “Go back to Higley’s cabin like a babe to its mammy’s tit, if you like,” the growler said. “More fun for me if I find the gal alone.”

  Even in the light of day and best of circumstances, a man like that wouldn’t take too courteously to seeing a colored lady sitting on the driver’s seat of a wagon.

  I launched myself into the wagon bed, landing hard beside where the girl lay. McNiven jerked awake, and I cupped my hand over his mouth, pointing in the direction of the men’s footsteps.

  “What have we here?” the shrill voice called out. “Someone’s left us a wagon, seem like.”

  “Wasn’t a wagon I heard, was a wench. You can have the goddamn wagon as long as I get her.”

  McNiven clambered to a stand. “Ho, there! Canna a fellow take his hour’s rest?”

  “It’s not a fellow’s voice called us from the woods,” the first man shouted. “Where is the gal?”

  I rose up from the wagon bed, and the man whistled as he squinted in the dim before-dawn. “Not just any wench. A darky.”

  His companion rubbed his hands together. “An escaped slave, I bet. Likely with a bounty on her head.”

  The men started closer toward the wagon. McNiven drew a revolver from his coat, the metal glinting. “The lass is free, and with me. If you be kind enough to take your leave, I’d much appreciate it.”

  They looked from the firearm to me and back again. “Queer business, a white man raising a gun to protect some nigger gal.”

  My worry for the fugitive brought the lie on quick, pouring from my mouth like water from the faucet in the Joneses’ soak-tub. “Please, sirs, I’s just the housemaid. If his wife find out, I lose my place for sure. My pappy’s all laid up, I supports us both. Only come here so us can get some privacy.”

  McNi
ven took up the tale as quickly as I laid it down. “Hush, Sally. Your mistress is not going to find us out, I hae told you that a hundred times these past three months.” He grinned at the men. “Man’s got to take his pleasure sometime. Surely you fellows understand.”

  “Mighty cold night you’ve chosen for it,” the shrill-voiced man said.

  His companion leered. “Darky wench can keep a man as warm as all the devils in hell. Though I might treat you better, gal, than to make you cry out like he did.” He lumbered toward me.

  McNiven fired, sending a deathly warning right between the men’s heads. The shot set the horses whinnying, and the girl beneath the quilt pile moaning. As the cart bucked forward, I dropped down beside her, covering her moan with one of my own.

  “Come on, Bart,” the second man said. “Might as well let him to his dark-meat feast.”

  As their footsteps fell away, his companion called back, “Better keep an eye out, once you’re back atop her. Wouldn’t want to catch you with your britches down.”

  I barely pulled myself up the wall of the wagon before I began retching. In the pale orange light of daybreak, I watched what little I’d eaten in the past day dribble down the outside of the wooden panel. “I’m sorry.”

  McNiven waved my words away. “Twas nothing to be sorry about. Quick on your feet and clever like that, who ken what you may do for us.”

  The first time I ever saw McNiven, I’d feared what threat he might be, to Mr. Jones and to me. Now because of him, I’d been in the greatest true peril I ever knew—but he’d had as much to do with getting me out of it as with putting me into it. It proved he was no more like the two men who’d threatened us than Zinnie Moore was like a slave mistress, white though they all were. The Scotsman shared something of the Quakers’ values, though without their renouncement of violence—and for that I was indebted. As my stomach twisted up again, I leaned back over the wagon’s edge, wondering what else he might mean to ask me to do.

  McNiven didn’t say another word on what had passed, just settled onto the driver’s bench and started the team back toward the road. As the cart wheels turned, I knelt and lifted the shawl from the girl’s face. Her eyes focused on me, and she whimpered her despair. She was back among us, but maybe not for long. Not if she got another fright.