by Lois Leveen
It was illegal for a negro, free or slave, to set foot in the square, thanks to one of the laws passed after John Brown’s raid. But before I could think what to do, the man lifted his hat, and I saw it was McNiven.
I kept even the slightest flicker of recognition from my face. Even so, the shock of finding him in Richmond paled compared to the shock of what he had to say.
“Apologies for such clumsiness.” He took care to hold his eyes on Mistress Van Lew as he spoke. “I am rushing to get word to a friend o’ mine. The Confederates hae fired on Fort Sumter. They are giving Mr. Lincoln his war, whether he is wanting it or no.”
The news sent Mistress Van Lew into a faint. I was fast enough to get behind her, and McNiven’s quick tug kept her upright. I held her propped against the base of the Bell Tower while he fetched a cab.
Once she was installed inside the hack, he took off his overcoat and hung it over my wet shoulders. “I’ll take her up to Bet, lass. Go tell Bowser all what’s passed.”
I watched the cab roll off through the rain, knowing I had no mind to pass any news to that philandering Wilson Bowser. So I turned in the opposite direction from the barber shop and headed down to the smithy. It would be hours yet before Papa was done with his day’s labor, but I figured I could wait until then. Only, before I even cleared the block for Mahon’s, I saw I wasn’t going to be waiting alone.
“What are you doing here?” The words were out before I even knew I was uttering them.
“Hoping to see you. Same as I’ve been doing every afternoon this week, ever since you didn’t come by my place on Sunday. Don’t you have so much as a hello for your Wilson?”
“Not my Wilson.” I hated him for assuming I could still be duped. “Leastwise, not mine alone.”
He shifted his cap back on his head. “What’s gotten into you?”
“The truth’s gotten into me, thanks to some of your customers. Bad enough to be treated so by you, but to be laughed at by white men. The soft-headed gal who doesn’t know her Lothario’s got a string of sweethearts.”
He let out a low whistle. “Who told you what about me, exactly?”
I kept my arms crossed tight in front of me. “You expect me to tell you what I heard, then let you prevaricate some lie to explain it away?”
“I never lied to you, and I never will.” His voice was a soft drawl compared to how hard mine was. “I swear it, Mary. Never.”
“Never lied, but didn’t exactly tell me the truth. The truth about how many lady friends you’re courting.”
“If I never told you you’re the only one for me, I’m a fool for keeping quiet, since I’ve known it ever since I first laid eyes on you. You’re the only one I’ve got and the only one I want.”
“Only one in Richmond, maybe. But someone called you away Thursday last, and you went running. Left your customers standing in the street guffawing about your romantic conquests.”
“Don’t you know me better than that? What’s the first thing you knew about me?”
The remembrance of chill January air streaming sunlit through a stand of leafless trees wasn’t going to cool my April anger. “You didn’t want to bring me to Richmond. Thought you had a right to tell me what to do.”
“I did bring you here, remember? But think back before that. What’d you know about me when you were up in Philadelphia?”
I remembered taking that cataleptic girl over toward New York with McNiven, him telling me it was David Bustill Bowser’s cousin who brought her out of Richmond. “Working for the Railroad doesn’t give you the right to two-time me.”
“I never said it did. What took me away yesterday was another woman, sure enough. Her and her husband. He’s already up in Canada, sent word of where he is so she could get to him.” Wilson took a single step toward me, holding his hand out, palm up, in peace offering. “I let out it’s lady friends keep me heading all over the Virginia countryside, because it’s the best cover I can get to do Railroad work.”
I worked the strand of his words over, slowly hooking myself a lace of renascent trust, before slipping my hand into his. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“The need to take this woman came on so fast, I hadn’t the chance. Figured you wouldn’t even miss me. But you did miss me, huh?”
“Why do you stay?” I’d wondered it often enough but never dared to ask, never wanted to set him thinking about leaving Virginia. “You’ve sent so many North, and you’re free to go yourself any time you want.”
“Free to stay as well as go. Come, let me show you.” He kept tight to my hand as we walked all the way back to his house, rain falling in soft drops on the two of us. He led me up to a pair of hand-drawn portraits that hung in his parlor.
“My family’s been free so many generations nobody’s sure we ever were slaves, and they haven’t hounded us out of Virginia yet.” He pointed to the sketch of an elderly black man. “James Bowser, my grandfather, fought for Virginia in the Revolutionary War. He made his appeal for a bounty land-grant with the rest of the veterans in 1833, same year I was born. A year after they made him give up preaching because of a new law passed in response to Nat Turner’s rebellion, meant to intimidate free negroes and slaves alike. Older sons, like David’s father, they’d get restless and leave. But my grandfather insisted the youngest in each generation stay. He taught me, and my father before me, that he’d earned our right to be here, just as much as any white man.”
He turned to the other portrait, of an Indian lady. “Of course, my mother’s mother would have had a fit to hear such things. No person owns the land, that’s how her people saw it. Through her, I’ve got a legacy here longer and stronger than any white Virginian.” He gave off looking at his grandparents’ pictures, took up looking steady and warm at me instead. “And now I found a woman tenacious enough to talk me into bringing her here, and wonderful enough to make me fall in love with her. To my mind that’s the best reason yet to stay.”
I smiled as he took me into the kitchen, where he set to chopping onions and carrots and turnips, claiming I was so soaked through he best cook me a stew. I waited until he turned his back to me to put the vegetables in the pot before asking, “So you never saw fit to court anyone until I came along?”
“I wasn’t about to take up with a slavewoman.”
“Like my papa did? You too good for that?”
He faced me in surprise. “I respect Lewis, you know that. But I can’t imagine how it must have been for him, seeing you and your mama owned by a white family. I couldn’t troth to a woman whose children would be bound in slavery. I’d risk my neck to send any such woman North, but I wouldn’t partner with her here, knowing how things could end up for her and for our babies. Your folks made a life like that, it’s a tribute to them, but it wasn’t something I could take on for myself.”
“What about free colored ladies?” I asked as he unwrapped a hunk of salt pork from his cupboard and set it in to stew. “They have a few of those here, too.”
“I said I’d risk my own neck to send a slave North. But it’s a different thing entirely to risk a wife’s neck, a child’s neck, because husband and father is working the Railroad. It always seemed best to keep to myself.” He smiled and pulled me to him, slipping his arms around my waist and running a line of kisses down from my earlobe to my collarbone. “At least it did, until I found a lady contrary enough to give me reason to think otherwise.”
It was an explosion. Then a chorus of explosions, echoing, repeating, seemingly a hundredfold. Wilson’s body, warm and soft and welcoming as it curved around my own, grew taut and tense in an instant.
“What the hell is happening?” His words brought me fully awake.
It was strange and wonderful to sleep beside Wilson, to have my head and heart so filled with the nearness of him. I’d convinced myself over the week past that he was vain and vile, but the things he told me in those last precious hours reminded me he was valorous—and also vulnerable, a man who’d taught himself to live in th
e service of countless strangers he helped bring to freedom. I wanted nothing more than to be with him, and I savored every word in all the hours we talked, curfew long forgotten. When finally, near dawn, drowsiness overtook me, Wilson carried me from his parlor like I was his dearest treasure, and lay down fully clothed beside me atop the coverlet of his bed. I cherished the way we clung to each other in slumber, closer than I’d ever felt to anyone, all my life.
But strange and wonderful as it was to sleep so, it was strange and awful to hear the thundering report that roused him, drew him awake and away so fast, as he scrambled startled to his feet.
Listening to the bursts and bangs, I thought at first it must be some great fire taking out every window in the city. But then above the shouting in the street, I made out a brass band, playing the same tune over and over.
I sat bolt upright when I recognized the melody. “Dixie”—the coon show song they sang at the rail station when John Brown’s body arrived in Philadelphia.
“Sumter,” I said.
Wilson, already halfway to the window, turned and looked at me in confusion.
I’d forgotten the news from McNiven, that Sumter was under fire. Now the yelling and singing outside told me the Federal fort must have fallen to South Carolina. And from the celebration in Richmond’s streets, the cannonade salute ringing from her armory, I could tell Virginia’s mind was made up. She would secede.
Though the sixteenth April was a Tuesday, Papa was wearing his Sunday suit when he arrived at the Van Lews’ lot. The green vest was long faded, the trousers patched, and the frock coat frayed. But he looked as proud as he had every Sunday of my childhood.
I was waiting for him in the yard, marking how the bright blue sky matched the color of my new tarlatan dress. Though it was a cheaper fabric and a less fashionable cut than any I wore in Philadelphia, I beamed with joy when Papa told me I was the most beautiful sight he’d ever seen.
“You ready?” he asked.
“I feel like this is something I’ve been ready for, been waiting for, my whole life.”
“Was like that for me, the day I married Minerva.” The memory made him happy and sad, both at once.
“You think she would approve?” I asked, slipping my arm through his as we walked out to Twenty-fourth Street, then across Grace Street to St. John’s Church. It was the day every bereaved daughter most misses her mama.
“Of the lady you become, yes. Of the man lucky enough to wed you, no doubt. Of the place you gonna do it, I’m not so sure.”
His joke took me back to the only other time I ever set foot inside St. John’s, fifteen years earlier. Bet had somehow gotten it into her head that I should be baptized at the Episcopal church, a rare occasion indeed for a Richmond negro. The suggestion terrified me. I saw the white wooden building whenever I looked out from the Van Lew property, and the two windows and the transept door between them always seemed like the gaping eyes and mouth of some ghostly apparition hovering over the church graveyard.
Mama was furious with Bet, sure I didn’t need some baptism in a white church when my soul and I were doing just fine in the surreptitious prayer meeting our family attended every week. “Baptize my child in a church that won’t welcome her to regular worship? No thank you.”
This she said not to Bet but to Papa, who surprised Mama and me both by answering, “That woman respectful enough to ask your leave ’bout the baptism when she might order it. Why not oblige her?”
Making mud pies in front of Papa’s cabin that warm Sunday afternoon, I shuddered to hear him suggest Mama let the goblin building swallow me up. “You usually too wise to let a chance for Mary El’s advantage pass,” he added.
“What advantage is there in our child being paraded around a white lady’s church, when Henry Banks already gave her all the baptism she needs?”
“Yes, she’s already baptized, among our folks and in our faith. Whatever happens ain’t gonna undo that. So if Miss Bet want this, why not use it to get something from her?”
Mama’s mouth curled down, the way it always did when she started scheming. “I do what I can to teach the child to read, but educated folks need to tally numbers, too. If she’ll give Mary El lessons in figures, we’ll go to St. John’s.”
So the next time Bet raised the subject, Mama went into action, saying how kind she was to offer but how shameful it would be to bring an ignorant slave child into St. John’s, when the white children there were all so smart, even knowing their figures. Bet took the hint, musing that though it was illegal for her to teach me to read, there wasn’t any particular law against her teaching me arithmetic in the afternoons while Mistress Van Lew was napping. Bet was as glad to defy her mother’s prohibition as she was to have me baptized in her church. Though Mama wasn’t delighted about that last part, she was satisfied enough with the arrangement to bring me to St. John’s the following Sunday.
Now I was heading to St. John’s again, but with Mama gone and Bet the one bristling at the idea. When I stayed that one night with Wilson, Bet lectured me all the next day about how I’d worried her. As though she were more vexed over my keeping company with him than over the attack on Sumter.
Which was no small part of why Wilson and I were marrying so soon, not wanting to be separated by Shockoe Creek and Bet’s brazen meddling. We chose St. John’s purposefully, knowing that if our names appeared in its official marriage register, Wilson and I would be regarded as family in the eyes of white Richmond, and thus exempt from the law against slaves lodging with free negroes.
As Papa and I entered the churchyard, I caught sight of my betrothed standing proud beneath the white clapboard of the spire, formal and dignified in his deep brown suit.
“Morning,” Papa said.
Wilson’s response was a distracted, “mmm hmmm,” as he gazed at me.
I unhooked my arm from Papa’s and reached out to my intended. Wilson leaned forward to kiss me, but I turned my head, shy in front of Papa. I felt Wilson’s lips in my hair, sensed him breathing in the scent of the lavender I’d bathed in that morning.
“You’re like spring itself, after a winter of my loneliness,” he whispered. “I just hope you won’t be feeling too contrary when Reverend Cummins asks if you take me for your husband.”
I remembered how I’d taken a dislike to Wilson the very first hour we met, his cocksure manner turning me awkward and inept. Nothing like how special Theodore Handsome Hinton made me feel when he contrived and connived to meet me. Theodore doted on me right from the start. But he hadn’t been so much interested in who I was as who he wanted me to be. Seeing how attentively Wilson’s eyes met mine, knowing he always listened with care to what I said, even when he didn’t agree, I shook my head at his teasing. We were both sure of how I’d answer the reverend’s question.
But as we stepped inside the church door, I felt my joy flicker. The interior of St. John’s was dim and dismal, the dark wood absorbing what little light stole through the windows. Besides the minister, the only figure in the cavernous room was Bet. Seeing how rigid she sat within the high walls of her family’s pew-box, her back to us, I missed Hattie so. I longed to share such a day with her and her sisters, and with Zinnie Moore and the ladies from our sewing circle. But it was more than geography that separated me from all of them. Even in the solemn quiet of the sanctuary, occasional shouts and shots could be heard from outside, marking the city’s restless wait for the next day’s vote of secession.
As Papa walked me and Wilson up the aisle, I moved through a commixture of happiness and fear that few brides ever know. I couldn’t imagine what a marriage set against the background of war might be like. But I couldn’t imagine not marrying Wilson, either. And, with all respect to Mama, there was another reason this church seemed the right place for us to wed.
Richmonders learn young that St. John’s was the scene of Patrick Henry’s famous speech urging his fellow colonists to war. I knew Mr. Henry was like the rest of the FFVs, not much caring for colored peopl
e’s freedom. But when we took our places before the altar, his famous words seemed to echo through the church, as though they were meant for me that very April morning. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace. But there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms. Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
As the minister asked us to troth our love until death did us part, I thought of what Wilson said about risking his own neck to do the Railroad work, but not risking a wife’s as well. It was risk to me and Wilson both I’d be courting, if I were caught doing anything seditious to Southern interests.
But the liberty at stake wasn’t simply mine and Wilson’s. It was the liberty of Papa, who hovered behind us, finding his long-lost hope in the shadow of our joy. It was the liberty of all enslaved negroes, whose chains and slavery were all too real, not just a rhetorical turn of phrase like Patrick Henry’s. Neither love nor liberty could be so sweet without the other. Wilson and I meant to enjoy both. And we meant to see Papa and all the other slaves freedom bound at last.
As my husband and I crossed the city after the ceremony, we passed many a building already flying the Palmetto flag. It turned both of us somber, and we walked in silence along Broad Street.
Virginia and her massive ironworks were an irresistible jewel for the Confederate crown. Rumor had it that just as soon as the convention delegates cast their votes to secede, the Confederates would move their capital to Richmond. And so as Wilson held my hand in his, I made my second vow of the day, silently swearing to be ready for whatever happened.
Fifteen
That spring, Richmond bloomed in a riot of color. Military companies from all over the South poured into the new capital, each donning its own gaudy hues. Reds and purples and yellows were festooned with every sort of cockade and ribbon, as though the Confederates’ strategy were to blind the Federals. The State Fairground on the far end of Broad was given over to the troops, renamed “Camp Lee” in honor of the Virginian who’d turned down Mr. Lincoln’s offer to head the Union army. Drumbeats sounded through the city, a driving rhythm for the buzz of marketplace gossip as people pushed themselves along the jammed streets, eager for what they said would be a glorious sixty-day war.