by Lois Leveen
Late in the afternoon, Mr. Bowser steered his cart off the road and down a narrow lane to a lone cabin. Without a word of explanation, he jumped to the ground and made for the door. Wondering if I was meant to follow or no, I decided to stay where I was. If he wants me with him, let him ask, I thought, stamping my feet against the cold.
An elderly negro, positively ancient in appearance, answered Mr. Bowser’s knock, accepting some coins before disappearing back inside. When he returned, he handed Mr. Bowser a pair of birds. From their long, curved beaks, I recognized them as woodcocks, a species I hadn’t seen in all my years in Philadelphia. Mr. Bowser returned to the cart, holding what I supposed was our dinner.
When I reached for the purse pinned against my skirts, Mr. Bowser waved me away. “I pay my own way in the world. And you best hold on to your pennies just as well as your dollars. I wager you’ll get yourself in a heap of trouble before too long and need everything you have to get yourself out.” He flicked the reins, and the noise of the horse and cart covered the silence between us.
We stopped that evening at a small brook a half mile off the main road. While Mr. Bowser set about feeding and watering his horse, I gathered what kindling I could find, piling it on a patch of bare ground.
Mr. Bowser took his time tending the bay, so I stepped to the cart and lifted out some split logs he had there, figuring that if they weren’t meant for the cookfire, he could very well stop me. When he didn’t, I brought them into the clearing and laid them with the kindling. It took me three trips to fetch all that wood out, and my arms were aching by the time I took the bucket from the cart to draw water from the stream. Just as I was thinking how lucky I was that the brook hadn’t frozen up, my foot slid along a mossy stone. I slipped into the frigid water, soaking myself up to my skirts before I regained the shore.
“Mr. Bowser,” I called in the sweetest voice I could summon, “would you be so kind as to light the fire?”
“I’d wait to light it,” he said. “But if you insist, I suppose I should oblige.” He drew a match-safe from his frock coat, and in a moment the fire was blazing.
As I warmed myself before the flames, Mr. Bowser brought out the woodcocks. I insisted on cooking them, though I was relieved he didn’t inquire about my culinary experience before handing the birds over.
Plucking the carcasses took rather longer than I expected. So many feathers on those two little bodies, with now and again a plume breaking off in my hand. My fingers stiff with cold, I struggled to pry the remaining portion of those shafts from the puckering flesh.
When I had the birds more or less prepared, I brought them to where Wilson Bowser had laid out the iron rods of his cookspit. Two were the same length and had forked ends, with a third longer crosspiece fitted to lay inside the forks. I poked the crosspiece through the first bird, meaning for the pole go into its rear and come out its mouth, like all the skewered carcasses I’d ever seen. Only, it was harder to tug the body onto the pointed rod than I expected. The speared tip came out the neck instead of the mouth. The near-severed head dangled off at a horrible angle, dripping bits of giblet onto my skirt. I took greater care with the second bird, without much more success.
Putting the cookspit together was even more difficult. The end pieces could only stand with the crosspiece in place between them, but I couldn’t lay the crosspiece inside both forks because one side or the other kept falling down. And the weight of the skewered birds made it even harder to balance the crosspiece. The woodcocks’ eyes seemed to gawk at me from their lolling heads the whole while, making me all the more jittery.
When at last I had the pieces assembled, I turned to the fire. The only way I could maneuver the spit over the flames without setting my skirts ablaze was to ask for Mr. Bowser’s help. He let out some comment about how awfully much easier it is to get a spit over a fire that hadn’t yet been lit, though between the two of us we finally managed to stand the contraption in place.
I rested from all the hauling and plucking and poking while the first side of the birds cooked. When they looked about done, I rotated the spit to roast the other side. Mr. Bowser brought out a lone tin cup and tin plate from the cart and offered them to me. “If I’d known McNiven was going to ask me to escort a lady to Richmond, I would have brought place settings for two.”
“I can cup my hands to drink,” I said, “and I’ll take the plate once you’re done.”
He considered my proposition. “I’ll use the tin cup, if you take the plate first. After all, you should have the earliest opportunity to enjoy the delights of your cooking.”
I started to argue with him, but he nodded toward the fire. The blaze was licking at the underside of the birds. I jumped up to turn the spit, but in my hurry I caught the iron bar too near the flames. Before I could even cry out, Mr. Bowser grabbed my wrist, submerging my scalded hand in the water bucket. While the water cooled my blistering flesh, he deftly removed the crosspiece from the spit, slid the first woodcock onto the plate, and handed it to me.
It was the singular most awful thing I’d ever tasted.
One side was burned to a crisp, positively inedible. The other was already cold, and so dry I thought the woodcock must have been dead a week. I chewed and chewed on the tough meat, now and then catching a tooth on a bit of feather shaft. After only a few minutes, I gave up. Hunger was better than choking down any more of that bird.
I expected some comment from Mr. Bowser about how little I ate, but he was waiting in silence for his own supper. Which wasn’t going to be much satisfaction once he had it.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “The woodcock doesn’t seem to have turned out. Perhaps the other one will be more savory.”
“I doubt it. A bird that small shouldn’t be drawn before it’s cooked. And it needs to be rubbed with fatback or butter or some such thing before roasting. And anything on a spit must be turned constantly, to roast evenly.” His deep brown eyes held my own. “You’ve never cooked a meal in your whole life, have you?”
“No, I never have.” I gestured at my skirt, damp and stained, and then held up my singed hand. “But at least I look a bit more like I’ve cooked or cleaned for somebody, don’t I?” My pride was even harder to swallow than the burnt bird meat. “I’m sorry I spoiled your supper.”
“I suppose I knew you would. But you were about as entertaining to watch as any traveling tent show, and that’s more satisfaction than even the best roasted game bird would be.” From a bag in the back of the cart, he drew out two large sweet potatoes. He was still chuckling as he nestled them into the embers to cook.
I had more on my mind than Mr. Bowser and his woodcocks when we turned down Mechanicsville Turnpike into Richmond the next afternoon, me directing him to head east, up Church Hill, rather than continuing into Shockoe Bottom. It tore at me to go to Bet before Papa. But Papa could no more leave off working the forge at the smithy to celebrate my arrival than he could have walked away ten years ago to come to Philadelphia with me.
I wasn’t exactly sure celebration would be his response, anyway. I hadn’t sent Papa word of my plan to return to Richmond, telling myself I wanted to surprise him. But the truth was, what little I’d been hearing from him sounded so angry and defeated, I feared what he might say.
As we rode along Grace Street, I was startled by the ornate hodgepodge of buildings that had sprung up during my absence. Italianate cupolas, Greek Revival mansions, even a Gothic Revival church—it seemed wealthy Richmonders all wanted to pretend they were in some other time and place. Only the Van Lew mansion appeared unaltered, setting by itself on the family’s block of property. The other houses seemed to shy away from it, pulling together to avoid their imposing neighbor, just as the ladies of Church Hill had always shied away from Bet.
When I directed Mr. Bowser to stop, he jumped from the driver’s bench to help me down. Then he reached into the cart and drew out my lone satchel, the stark reminder I was returning to Richmond with fewer possessions than when I left.
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Mr. Bowser’s reddish brown skin gleamed in the afternoon sun. “My barbering shop is over at Broad Street and Seventh, right across from the rail depot. I live upstairs. Whatever trouble you find yourself in, you come by or send word. If I’m away, pass a note under the side door. No one will find it but me.”
Holding myself from protesting that I knew better than to get myself into trouble, I thanked him for transporting me. He nodded one final time, took his seat on the cart, and drove off.
Looking up at the mansion where I’d passed more than half my life, I felt as out of place as when I first stood before the Upshaws’ apartment building. There were plenty of places I didn’t go in Philadelphia—didn’t because negroes couldn’t. But where we did go, we walked in the front door, same as whites. Even into white families’ homes. Knowing no colored person, free or slave, presumed to mount the front steps of a Church Hill house, I gathered my flimsy skirts in one hand and my satchel in the other and walked around to Twenty-fourth Street.
The Van Lews’ garden and arbor lay bare and frost covered. I marked how much smaller they were than I remembered, how barren against the sharp-sweet odor of rabbit soup and marrow pudding emanating from the kitchen. I knew Zinnie was long gone. I even remembered reading about Terry Farr in Mama’s long ago letters. But I didn’t take time to think much on this stranger before the cookfire as I made my way to the servants’ entry at the rear of the mansion. Before I even had a chance to knock, Bet swung open the door, looking as altered as Church Hill itself.
When she brought me to Philadelphia, Bet was a spinster of thirty-two. Now she was an old maid, already forty-two. Nearly the age her mother was when Old Master Van Lew died. Her features looked pinched, her once light curls fading to a dull gray.
She studied me as though she couldn’t believe I was truly standing there. Then she pulled me toward her, her embrace almost desperate in its ferocity.
A white lady hugging a negro right where anyone walking by the yard might see us. That vexed me. My safety depended on Bet, and I doubted she had sense enough to know how such conduct put me in jeopardy.
But I was grateful, too. Though Bet wasn’t quite family, wasn’t quite friend, that hug was the first welcome I had.
“It’s so good of you to come.” She spoke as though she’d summoned me.
Figuring I might as well let her believe my return was her idea, I answered, “Of course I came, Miss Bet. We need to be ready for whatever happens.”
She nodded. “We shall show those seditious Carolinians. Come upstairs, see what I’ve prepared for you.” She led me through the house and up to my old garret quarter. A feather mattress set upon a new mahogany bedstead, Mama’s chipped wash-set replaced by a rose-patterned porcelain pitcher and bowl.
Bet stood behind me in the doorway like a ruffian guarding the mouth of his treasure cave. “If there’s anything else you need, I can obtain it.”
“I appreciate your offer of a place to stay,” not that it had been an offer, just a presumption on her part, “but I will be living with my papa.”
She held steady. “It would be best if you reside here. Your father’s circumstances are not what you think.”
“His circumstances aren’t what I wish, but I suppose I know them as well as anybody.” How dare she lecture me about Papa? “Perhaps I should go to his cabin now, to wait for him.”
“No.” Bet answered so quickly, it startled me. She tried to make her voice less sharp as she added, “You’re tired, and it will be some hours yet before Lewis is done with work. Rest here, have something to eat, and I’ll send word for him to come as soon as he can.”
I remembered how long it had been since I’d taken a proper meal, and how good Terry Farr’s cooking smelled. Walking down to Shockoe Bottom wouldn’t get Papa away from the smithy any sooner. Besides, it would be perilous for me to move about Richmond without the protection of a white person, so it made sense to appease Bet. Especially since I had no intention of staying on once Papa came. I agreed to wait there, and her smile returned.
Once the afternoon light began fading from the sky, I took up a post at the garret window, straining to make out Papa’s figure. More than once I thought I saw him, only to watch the person I set my sights on pass down Grace Street. At last my eyes lit upon him. Maybe I wasn’t any more sure at first than I was with the others. But I surveyed this figure closely as he turned the corner of the lot, disappearing toward the servants’ entry to the Van Lew property.
His footsteps sounded out slowly as he mounted the servants’ stair, achy limbs finding trouble with each riser. When he reached the landing and we caught sight of each other, his face turned into a mess of confusion and anger. “How long she been keeping you up here? Ain’t you free after all that?”
“Bet didn’t bring me here,” I said, hugging myself to him. “I came to be with you.” I wasn’t about to set him worrying by mentioning McNiven and our plans. “I’m still free, though I have to pretend otherwise. Like Mama did.”
He pulled away, his words as pointed as a leather-punch. “Minerva died no different than if she was a slave. I don’t want that for you. Not that anyone asked my idea on it.”
Time had worked its way along his face in angry gashes, leaving long, deep creases in its wake. His hair was all white, as though a permanent frost had settled on him. Hardest on me was seeing his eyes. I still thought of the eyes I found gazing back at me every day from the looking glass as Papa’s eyes. But the ones I saw now were missing the light, the fight, the play I remembered.
First I left him, then Mama did. Alone, Papa had become a different man. His letters had hinted as much. But it meant something more to stare it in the face than to read it between the scant lines of correspondence written in someone else’s hand.
“Papa, I’ve missed you so. My coming home without telling you, I meant it for a surprise. Like a great big just-because, from me to you.”
“Just because they keep me here year in and year out, like a lame horse wondering when someone gonna have the decency to shoot it, you throwed away fancy Philadelphia?”
“Just because I love you, I came back home.”
He stared past me, out the window. “Curfew’s coming on. I best be getting back to the Bottom.”
I reached for the stiff handle of my satchel. “We best, you mean. I’m going to live with you, in your house. Our house.”
He kept his eyes on the darkening pane. “Got no house now. Greerson Wallace put me out.”
“When? What for?” Resentful as he’d grown toward Mahon, still I couldn’t imagine my sweet, good-natured papa offending his old friend and landlord.
“Since that John Brown, white people worrying us all the time. This damn curfew was the first of it. Then they passed a law, no free negro can rent to a slave, even with the owner’s permission. Free colored caught renting liable to a whipping, one stripe for each day the slave was there.”
All through my childhood, nearly every slave in Richmond except domestics boarded out. And it wasn’t too many white people who rented to them. “Where are all the slaves living?”
“Whites allow for free negroes to lodge relatives who are slaves, and the big factory owners, they can pay someone in the government to look the other way when the slaves they hire board out. But Mahon says he ain’t got money for that. Told me I’m welcome to do what I like, but Wallace and me be taking our chances on the law finding out. Wallace weren’t about to risk it, and I weren’t gonna ask him to.”
I knew how proud Papa always was of his little cabin. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You always tell me everything happen to you up in Philadelphia?”
There was much I omitted from my letters, wanting to shelter him from the daily humiliations that reminded Pennsylvania negroes we might not be slaves but we sure weren’t equals. But now I realized my trying to protect him, his trying to protect me—it had opened a breach between us I didn’t begin to know how to fill.
“Wher
e are you living now?” I asked.
“In a shed, back of Mahon’s lot.”
I told him I’d stay there with him, but he wouldn’t hear of it. “That shed ain’t big enough for but one person, barely even that. And it ain’t mine to offer you.”
I set my satchel back on the floor beside the mahogany bedstead, realizing why Bet had been so insistent. I wouldn’t prefer the finest rooms in Richmond over residing with my own papa. But even if I couldn’t live with him, I’d find a way to do for him. Find a way to cheer him back to his old self. And try to keep him from finding out my other reason for coming back to Virginia.
As he hugged me farewell, he whispered, “I want better for you than this. But it does a body good to see you so grown up.” I bowed my head, and he kissed it just like he always had. Then he turned down the servants’ stair and headed back to Mahon’s.
When I lay down in my old room that night, I felt as far apart from Papa as I had all those years I was away in Philadelphia. The half mile that separated us now widened into the chasm between slave and free, age and youth, despair and determination.
Thirteen
As the slant of morning light streamed through the familiar gap between the shutters, I reached out for Mama, hoping the warmth of her body would brace me for the chill air before I got out of bed.
Out of bed. Not off the pallet. The difference pulled me from my drowsy slumber, made me realize there was no Mama here with me. Yet I sensed I wasn’t alone. As I blinked my eyes open, I saw Bet hovering in the doorway.
“Did I wake you?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “Terry will have breakfast up by now. I shall have Nell set it out for us while you dress.”
“Miss Bet, if you want me with you, I can serve your meal and clear it after you’re done,” I said. “But if you sit down to table with a negro, it won’t set right with your mother, nor your servants. And it will be trouble for both of us before too long.”
“Nonsense, Mary. Surely Terry and Nell have better things to do than go about Richmond telling tales on their employer.” She spoke as though she hadn’t read a single of those leather-bound volumes of Mr. Shakespeare’s plays down in her father’s library, nearly every one with some maid or manservant playing pranks or plotting intently against master and mistress. “We shall do as we please.”