The Secrets of Mary Bowser

by Lois Leveen

  “You’re welcome for it. Just don’t thank me by cooking me any more suppers.”

  It was well more than two miles from Mahon’s smithy to the colored burying ground on the northern edge of Richmond. Papa’s rheumatism slowed our walk, but he came along without the protestations with which he greeted most anything I said to him these days. He even stopped at one frosty lot on Jackson Street to snap off some sprigs of winterberry holly, “To have something pretty enough to bring to Minerva.”

  Most of the graves in the colored burial yard didn’t have any markers. Others had just sticks or rocks that mourners used to set off their beloved’s resting place. The expense of a wooden tablet, let alone a true gravestone, was well beyond the folks who buried someone here. Many couldn’t read anyway, so a gnarled branch or impromptu cairn was as good a monument as any. But I could pick out Mama’s grave from a dozen yards away, distinguished as it was by one of Papa’s metal crosses.

  Papa bent low when we reached the plot, laying holly along the cold ground. His voice was so quiet, I had to lean close to hear him. “You recognize her yourself, I suppose. Strongheaded just ’cause she grown. She come back without a word of warning, Minerva. What do you think of that?”

  “She knows,” I told him. “It was her idea, me coming back here to be with you.”

  He rose slowly and looked me in the eye. “From the day we decided to send you North to the day she passed, Minerva never talked on anything for you ’cept your freedom, how you was gonna have a different life in Philadelphia. You want to defy that, don’t you be saying it was her idea.”

  “This was after she passed. She used to come to me, going on about what plan Jesus had for me, whether I was at the right task or no. You know Mama always liked to tell a person what to do.”

  He gave a nod of agreement. “Do sound like Minerva. But why she tell you come back here, when she always say North the only place for you?”

  I didn’t want to worry him, but I couldn’t keep all that was happening from my own papa. “Since the election a few months back, people have been saying the country might be going to war, South against North.” I wrapped my hand around his, taking care not to bother his achy joints. “I couldn’t let a war come between us. Mama wouldn’t abide it either.”

  He looked at the hard plot that was all he had left of his beloved Minerva. “Miss that woman so, every minute of every day she been gone. Mary El, why she never come talk to me like that?”

  My heart ached, for him and me both. “Since I came back to Richmond, she hasn’t said anything to me, either. I don’t know why not, but then Mama never did feel the need to explain herself.”

  He hugged me to him with one arm, reaching his other hand to lay hold of the iron cross. “Minerva, we got each other again, but we sure still miss you.”

  We stayed there a good long while, until Papa dropped his arm from my shoulder and gathered my hand in his. We walked back down Second Street and across the city, feeling how Mama had pulled us close together again, without even saying a word herself.

  The easy rhythm we settled into clapped to a halt when we came up Franklin and Papa marked smoke rising from Mahon’s lot. “One of them damn prentices, got the smithy fire up on a Sunday. Man can’t get a moment to his self, got to watch them like they children.” He picked up his labored gait, and I hurried along with him.

  As we drew near, we saw that the smoke that caught his worry wasn’t coming from the smithy but from farther back on the lot. My heart was thick in my throat as we rounded the big building and saw the plume rising out of Papa’s shed.

  “Papa, I’m so sorry. There must have been some accident. I’ll explain to Marse Mahon it was all my fault, I only meant to fix things up for you.” I silently cussed Wilson Bowser for being so tomfool careless as to set the shed on fire.

  Except, I realized, the shed wasn’t on fire. Though a steady wisp of smoke was trailing into the sky, no flames licked at the building. Papa must have perceived it, too, because he slowed his pace. If he noticed the shed had been whitewashed, the holes between the boards plastered over, he didn’t mention it. But once we got inside, neither of us could overlook the changes we saw.

  Mr. Bowser and whoever he’d brought along to help him had cut through the far wall, nearly doubling the length of the narrow structure. They’d dug a fire pit, lined it with loose stones, and even lit a small blaze. The new back wall sloped toward a hole they put in the roof, creating an old-fashioned smoke bay to draw smoke from the shed.

  Papa took it in with wonderment. “You got all this done, Mary El?”

  I nodded. “I know this place will never be home like your cabin was, but you don’t mind me getting it fixed up, do you?”

  “Why should I mind?”

  I didn’t dare mention that he seemed to mind just about anything anyone said or did these days. He was happy now, warming himself over the fire. No need to stifle that.

  “How’d you do all this up so quick?”

  “I asked the help of a free colored man I know.”

  He turned from surveying the room to surveying me. “You only back here a few weeks, already keeping company? Minerva’s daughter for sure.” The old sparkle was back in his eyes.

  Glad as I was to see it, still I couldn’t let him believe what wasn’t true. “We’re not keeping company. Mr. Bowser is just an acquaintance I asked for a favor.”

  Papa chuckled. “I may be old, but that don’t make me simple-minded. Man goes about doing such favors for a young lady, ain’t just the kindness of his heart. I know you like to carry on how you all grown now, but ’fess up. Don’t a father have a right to know when his daughter’s keeping company with some man?”

  Before I could answer, Wilson Bowser’s deep voice rang from the doorway behind me. “Mary’s a contrary gal, sir, likes to deny just about anything you accuse her of. But she’s telling the truth now, I give you my word. We’re not keeping company.”

  I felt like something sharp struck me in the chest, hearing how he sounded. As though it was his dearest wish to refute the charge. The jab was so intense I almost didn’t make out what he said next. “I wouldn’t dream of keeping company with Mary, until I had your permission, sir.”

  By then, Wilson Bowser was standing next to me, reaching to take my hand in his. Papa looked from one of us to the other. I was so flustered I couldn’t meet his gaze, certainly not Wilson’s neither.

  “Why, you got her so she’s speechless.” Papa gave Wilson a happy nod. “Mary El met her match in you, I suppose. I got no opposition to that, and wish you best of luck. I expect you gonna need it.”

  Fourteen

  And so Wilson and I set to courting, with him calling me Contrary Mary all the while.

  I wasn’t about to object to that, knowing he’d only tell me that was just such contrariness as he was referring to in the first place. I didn’t much mind it anyway. Hearing him call to me, that Virginia timbre to his voice, rich as the sound of a grand concert piano and just as moving to my ears. It was something I missed all those years in Philadelphia, the call of a Southern voice.

  Keeping company with Wilson touched something deep inside of me I’d forgotten existed. The thing that makes you giddy when you first wake up, hoping maybe you’ll see him sometime that day. That gets you humming to yourself while you’re mending a hem or walking to market, without you even knowing there’s a melody in your head. The thing that seeps so sweet and warm it makes you feel like every day is the first day of spring.

  Wilson wooed Papa right along with me. He’d bring a cabinet or chair by the shed and convince Papa he’d be doing Wilson a favor to keep it. The two of them would fish Shockoe Creek all Sunday afternoon and laugh about how they didn’t trust me to cook up their catch. And when I fetched round some crushed prickly oak bark for Papa’s rheumatism, it was Wilson who convinced him to drink the decoction. He couldn’t buy my papa, nor build a whole wing of a magnificent mansion to keep him in high style. But he had respect instead
of riches, and when he paid it to Papa as well as to me, I couldn’t help but care for him.

  So I smiled to myself when Wilson called me Contrary Mary while he fixed Sunday dinner in the three-room suite above his shop for me and Papa both. When he closed the shop an hour early on a weekday, just so he could stroll with me up to Church Hill before curfew caught us on the street. When he waltzed me around his little parlor, my spine atingle at his touch and me happier than I ever was at any grand colored ball in Philadelphia. When he read to me from one of the books he kept in the case tucked beneath his parlor window, his meager library positioned so no white Richmonder might catch sight of it. Or when I recited things to him I’d read in Philadelphia years before, abolitionist literature a negro in Virginia couldn’t possibly lay hands on for himself.

  “It’s a gift, that memory of yours,” he’d say, in awe at all I could recall.

  Maybe, I thought.

  Gifts come scot-free. But Mama’s talk of Jesus’s plan always made me feel special and indebted all at once. And now my talent for remembering meant I had more to do than just admire my new beau. By the middle of February, white men from all over Virginia were pouring out of Richmond’s train depot, filling Powhatan House and the Exchange Hotel and such establishments all around Shockoe Hill. They were delegates to the convention that was to decide whether Virginia would secede.

  Bet fumed when the convention was called, saying Virginia had no legal sovereignty to break from the Union. She made a grand show of refusing to attend the convention sessions, even though white ladies from all over Church Hill were crossing Shockoe Creek to fill the gallery at Mechanics Hall. But she was curious enough to convince her mother to go, so I could be sent along to attend her. I was to absorb every word the delegates said, then repeat it all to Bet each night.

  There were plenty of words, too. Such blustery pontification those first weeks, it didn’t seem they’d ever get around to settling the question. It drove Bet to fidgets, though I could tell the delegates were just waiting to see what Mr. Lincoln would do about the self-proclaimed Confederate States, whose Jefferson Davis had taken his own oath of office down in their capital of Montgomery.

  The more I read the news-sheets and listened to the convention delegates, the surer I became that although Lincoln might not be Seward, still he was all the man we needed. Why else had all those other states already seceded, if he wasn’t a threat to slavery, that thing they held most dear? And secession was the very thing that might provoke Lincoln to shake loose the stranglehold of slavery.

  At last, on the fourth April, the Virginia convention called a vote. The Richmonders who crowded into Mechanics Hall that morning had sat through six long weeks of speeches by hot-headed politicos jangling to break from the Union. Though my hatred of slavery was as deep as their attachment to it, I suppose I was as crushed as any of them when the delegates’ ballots got counted out two to one against seceding. Virginia had set her white knights and rooks and bishops on the chessboard, yet still they were looking to Mr. Lincoln, the Black Republican they called him, to make the first move.

  But I had no patience for waiting. So I searched out my own gambit to play.

  That very evening, I repaired early to my garret room, placed a long, slim taper in the brass candlestick, and put a fresh nib on my pen. The hour was late, the candle burned low, and the nib worn dull by the time I’d worked through my many drafts, satisfied at last with what I had.

  The question of peace is not before us. Civil war must now come. Sectional war declared by Mr. Lincoln awaits only the signal gun from the insulted Southern Confederacy to light its horrid fires all along the borders of Virginia. No action of our Convention can maintain the peace. Virginia must fight. She may march to the contest with her sister States of the South or she must march to the conflict against them. There is left no middle course. War must settle the question. We must be invaded by Davis or by Lincoln. Virginia must go to war—and she must decide with whom she wars—whether with those who have suffered her wrongs or with those who have inflicted her injuries. Let every reader demand of his delegate in the Convention that Virginia join with her sister States of the South so that we may decide the question of Our Rights once and for all.

  I copied those lines over in the most mannish hand I could muster and signed them Virginius Veritas. Rousing myself early the next morning, I crossed the city to Twelfth and Main, to slip my factious prose beneath the door of the Enquirer, Richmond’s tinderbox of Secessionist sentiment. Jennings Wise, the paper’s editor, was ever eager for more inflammatory to set before his readers, and I was gratified to give it to him.

  After all that watching and listening and wondering, I was glad to finally be doing, and mighty hopeful that my words could incite Wise’s abolitionist-hating, slavery-loving readers to just such a Secessionist fervor as I wanted the city to show. Eager to tell about what I’d done and figuring there was but one soul in all of Richmond in whom I could confide, I made my way to Wilson’s shop.

  But I caught myself quick as soon as I got there. Though businesses up and down Broad were already open, the shutters on the barber shop were shut tight. A sign in Wilson’s hand was tacked to the door, dated the day before. CLOSED TODAY AND TOMORROW. WILL OPEN SATURDAY FIRST THING.

  I went through the side gate and knocked at the door to his residence, pounding harder and harder still. Just as I gave up, I heard white men’s voices coming from the street in front of the shop.

  “Now what will the Missus say when I arrive home for one of her infernal luncheons with these whiskers untrimmed? These free negroes are too damn free about the hours they keep.”

  “I’d heard the barber got himself a gal in town, thought that would keep him from going off to see his other ladyfriends.” The men chortled. “But I suppose he’s got a hankering for variety same as any man.”

  For all his calling me Contrary, I’d believed Wilson cared for me in a way that would’ve kept him from even looking sidewise at another woman. Yet here I was, listening to a gaggle of white men snickering over the gal who didn’t have sense enough to notice she was being two-timed, or three-or four-timed, by a colored barber with a caustic tongue and copper skin.

  Lovely copper skin, I thought, remembering how it shone in the sun and glowed in candlelight. I didn’t know if I was more mad or sad, keeping my head low and my route to the alleys as I made my way back up Church Hill. But I forced myself to put on as brave a face as I could once I got to the Van Lews’. I wasn’t about to let on to Bet about Wilson, any more than I’d confide to her about what I’d left for Jennings Wise.

  Bet hadn’t much taken to the notion of me courting. I hadn’t felt any need to ask her leave on the matter. It didn’t even occur to me. She wasn’t my owner, wasn’t my people, wasn’t even a friend to gossip and giggle with like Hattie was. But she made her disapproval clear all the same. She pursed her lips each Sunday morning when I left for Wilson’s shop, and poked her nose between the drawing room curtains to watch as he walked me back up Church Hill at the end of the day. She’d steal up on me about the house and say I’d been right to keep up appearances around Terry and Nell, since we couldn’t trust just anyone, even anyone colored, about what we might have to do if all this dreadful secession talk came to anything. Now it seemed she was right enough, at least about the trusting part, if not about how dreadful secession might be.

  The next day, tongues wagged all around town about the Enquirer’s latest call to secede. Knowing my false words were published and passed about like that made me all the more sorry I couldn’t set my true thoughts down in a letter to Hattie. A supposed slave might risk the occasional posting to a free black in the North, but risk it would be—even if the missive said no more than Howdy do? and All are well here. Before I left Philadelphia, Hattie and I agreed that such correspondence would court too much danger. It had seemed sensible enough at the time. But now, between Abraham Lincoln raising one set of hopes and Wilson Bowser dashing another, having no
way to communicate with my friend was awfully difficult to abide. While Bet grew madder that secession seemed closer, I grew sadder that Hattie was so far.

  Though it was warm on the afternoon of the twelfth April, I marked the menacing gray sky as I helped Mistress Van Lew down the front steps and into Mrs. Catlin’s coach, and then took my place on the box beside the driver. As we descended the Hill, heading to the afternoon convention session at Mechanics Hall, fat drops of rain began to fall. I kept my face tipped down, wishing I had a proper bonnet rather than just a slave’s kerchief to cover my head. Feeling the rainwater soak through the back of my collar, I reminded myself how Mama used to say the smell of spring rain was a promise of flowers soon to bloom. I closed my eyes and breathed deep, trying to smell something besides the heavy odor of the carriage horses.

  That’s why I heard the commotion before I saw it. When I opened my eyes, a crowd was already forming into agitated groups right in the street, so thick that Mrs. Catlin’s driver had to stop the carriage nearly a full block from the hall.

  The ladies exchanged worried glances before extending their gloved hands one by one for the driver to hand them down. One of the matrons recognized her nephew in the throng and pushed toward him. I held Mistress Van Lew’s umbrella over her head, as the rest of us followed. “They’ve locked everyone out of the hall without a word of explanation,” the young man told his aunt.

  While the ladies frowned at this news, I listened hard to the snatches of rumor circulating around us. Lincoln had persuaded the Confederates to come back to the Union. Lincoln had recognized the Confederacy as a sovereign nation. Lincoln had been killed. Though everyone was ready to hazard a tale, no one knew which to believe.

  In all the jolt and jostling of the crowd, Mistress Van Lew’s breathing grew strained. I led her across to Capitol Square, hoping to find a place on the green where she might rest while I sought the truth among all the tittle-tattle. As I maneuvered her around the Bell Tower, a small man, his bowler tipped down over his face, rushed right into us.