By 1905, when Higginson wrote this comment, Mary had been considered “white” for many years, but it is unlikely that her employer knew her full history. Mary’s liminal identity as a potentially black or potentially white woman remained as salient as ever in the Jim Crow era. In her youth, in the days before Emancipation and Reconstruction, at least four well-to-do white families had tried to adopt her and effect the very transformation that white society made a crime in her adulthood.27 White benefactors, like Higginson, who were once eager to welcome the child Mary as one of their own, now brought the danger of exposure with their greetings.
As Allyson Hobbs writes in A Chosen Exile, passing is a collaborative act—a collusion between family members, benefactors, and the passer, must substantiate the lie—and it exacts an emotional toll. Seth Botts’s name change to Henry Williams protected Mary with the anonymity of a common name like Williams, as did the press’s habit of calling her “Ida May.” It is a historical truth that if Mary identified with the whiteness she was born to, she lived a legal lie, in the context of hypodescent. Much of identity is other-created, meaning that it plays into perceptions that others hold for us and keeps up appearances in society. “Passing” requires that we think of Mary as pulling one over on her fellow workers, her peers, and her potential partners. To “pass” is to suppress difference in exchange for the privileges afforded the dominant, or mainstream, identity. This book features dozens of Americans who would have identified themselves as white without hesitation, and their society (then, as now) afforded them wide latitude to make that choice and to proceed with nuanced intention. Mary’s mother, uncle, and sister moved back and forth across the color line as their hearts bade them, through marriage. What of women who did not marry?
Home was a rented apartment at 106 Chestnut Street—a few blocks down Beacon Hill from where her family first landed in Boston, blocks from the State House where she had been exhibited, blocks from what had been her aunt Evelina’s house, and around the corner from what today would be the bar in Cheers. The steep steps at 106 Chestnut Street are beautifully adorned with flowers, now a townhouse in a tony district.
At Chestnut Street, Mary Williams lived with Mary Maynard, an Irish-American woman who worked for the government as an assistant probation officer at the Boston Municipal Court. Their immediate neighbors were a bohemian mix of editors, artists, a stockbroker, and a masseuse, many of whom, like Maynard, were the first generation of their families in the United States. Every weekday Mary and Mary walked the few blocks along the Boston Common to their work near the State House. In 1908 Mary Maynard was among the Boston probation officers commended by the Chicago Tribune for their humane treatment of female prisoners.28
The 1900 census listed Mary Mildred Williams, fifty-one, as white and the head of the household.29 The census-taker recorded Mary Maynard, forty-five, as her “female partner,” not as her “boarder.” Today that designation “partner” is used for couples. The 1900 census was the first year “partner” could be used, with the following instructions: “If two or more persons share a common abode as partners, write ‘head’ for one and ‘partner’ for the other or others.” Fin-de-siècle Beacon Hill was home to a gay society, and theirs may have been a “Boston Marriage.”
By the turn of the century, Mary’s unsought fame was dispelled. Her stage name’s novel, Ida May, was out of print. Her once large and cherished family was reduced to only her niece, Addy, and nephew, Charles. In middle age, her income and housing secure, Mary Mildred Williams was free to choose, and she chose independence.
EPILOGUE
Hyde Park, Massachusetts, 2017
I keep a stash of old photographs that my mother and I collected at flea markets for about a quarter apiece. (One lucky person once found a daguerreotype of Frederick Douglass this way, in a shoebox of abolitionist memorabilia for sale for cheap at a gun show in Dayton, Ohio. They sold it to the Chicago Institute of Art for $185,000.) I brought a handful of tintypes and studio portraits to class at the Bard Early College where I teach in New Orleans, to use as props for a set of writing exercises to illustrate how slippery historical narrative can be: Write what you think you know about this photograph. Write what you can plausibly say about this photograph. I would ask students to trade narratives and to pass off the new story as history in a short presentation. All the stories were fictional, of course. I did not know even the most basic information about any of the people in my old photograph collection, so the students’ stories might as well speak in response to the photographic silence.
One day before we started, a student, Victoria Suazo, stopped us, saying she did not like old pictures because of the way the eyes haunt you from beyond. Other students nodded their agreement. It is often said of New Orleans that the dead are kept close. Maybe because we bury our dead aboveground, we easily and often access the spiritual realm in conversation. There is no shame here in conforming to superstition. Suazo asked us to reconsider: How do we know the stories we were making up on the spot weren’t the stories that they wanted us to tell, whispered into our intuitions from beyond? Or what if these photographed dead would haunt us once we spoke the wrong story about their lives?
All narrative summons characters out of thin air. Photography compels narrative. Since these characters were once human and deserving of dignity, if they were summoned, they deserved to have their stories told accurately. What is the danger of writing fiction in the absence of facts? What of these subjects’ privacy? Since the class did not have the time or the leads to research the images, we shelved the exercise.
I made a pilgrimage to Prudence Bell’s grave. It is in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Rockland, tucked away in a working-class neighborhood, about an hour and a half south of Boston. The older parts of the cemetery were haphazard and disordered, not in the customary rows. The graves stretched to woods that bordered on two sides, and across the road to a gated section on what appeared to be private land, bordered by Trump signs. There was no map or caretaker to consult.
Here is what I could decipher from the faded inscription on her headstone:
Prudence Bell
died
November 29, 1864
Aged 73 years
—————
Dear Mother they have laid thee to rest
[At? In?] life’s trials [boldly? sadly?] passed
The preparation of the blest
Shall [purpose . . . ] [sustain] at last
The grass and soil have worn away the inscription from the bottom up, making it difficult to read. Prue’s grave does not record a born day, since she may not have known it. Her children’s graves do.
Jesse Nelson has the first tombstone on the row, as he was the first in death. Both headstones show a carving of an acorn, a symbol of humble beginnings and rebirth. Someone in the past applied concrete to secure the tombstone, to keep it from falling over. Now the last two lines of Jesse’s inscription are partially covered by concrete.
The Mount Pleasant gravesite of Prudence Bell and family.
Jesse Nelson
Born in Dumfries, VA
b. February 18, 1828
Died at East Abington
of typhoid fever after an
illness of nine days.
Mar. 24, 1857;
aged 29 years and 1 mo
________
“I asked Jesus for help”
We sadly lay our brother to rest
In manhood’s early d[___]
Our earthly friend [___
___] pray are you1
Between Prue and her son Jesse Nelson in the family row, there is a small headstone, a miniature in the same style, for Prue’s grandson, William Ludwell Nelson. Ludwell and Isabella had had a son who died at eight weeks on June 27, 1864. The second half of 1864 was a hard year for this family. They buried William, a cherished baby boy for a grandmother who had also lost Oscar. Five months later Prue followed, her rebuilt family undone by disease. Mary witnessed these deaths when she w
as seventeen. Her mother and her aunt Evelina oversaw their burials. Unfathomable was the heartbreak of losing the fellowship of family so hard won.
For Ludwell, these losses—brother, nephew, son, mother—would have compounded his grief. According to the oral history by Evelina’s daughter Adelaide Johnson Trusty, which I mentioned in the previous chapter, Ludwell resettled in white society in New Jersey and became a doctor. But at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, I tripped over a fallen headstone that was partially obscured beneath a mound of turf and an anthill, a few steps removed from Prudence. It read:
Ludwell B. Nelson
Died
May 26, 1866
aged 33 years and 10 mos
No further inscription is visible.
Six days after I finished the manuscript for this book and submitted it to my editor, Mary Mildred Williams’s death certificate arrived in the mail. Mary Williams is a common name, and I had been disappointed many times before, but this document proved to be the correct one.2 The death certificate provided several key pieces of information: She lived the last ten years of her life in New York, and her burial took place in Boston at Forest Hills in June 1921. Like Prue, she was seventy-three when she died. Mary M. Williams was recorded, at her death, to be white.
According to the front desk clerks at Forest Hills cemetery, Mary purchased a plot in 1894, plot 4330, when she was only forty-six. She disinterred and moved her mother’s remains there, two years after Elizabeth had been laid to rest, and also her brother Oscar, dead thirty years. This new cemetery was integrated, so mother and son could be buried together.
A third body was laid to rest there, too, in 1918: Ella L. Bradley. According to the 1880 census, Ella was twenty when she came to live with Elizabeth and Mary as their boarder, forming a bond between the young women that apparently lasted until death.
When her time came, Mary would be laid to rest together with them. At her death, Mary’s body was shipped from New York to Boston, at an expense great enough to signify intent. She wanted her family to rest together, and she chose a cemetery that felt like a city park, near the Hyde Park neighborhood where her mother had spent the end of her life. The plot Mary chose was set back from the path and placed her among upper-middle-class families.
The Forest Hills gravesite of Mary M. Williams, Elizabeth Williams, Oscar Williams, and Ella L. Bradley.
Mary wanted her mother to be remembered there. In this history about a person who left no words, the archive offered this last utterance.
At the end of her life, Mary had a diagnosis of chronic nephritis, a kidney disease. She lived her last years at St. Luke’s Home for Aged Women, a seven-story building facing the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which was built concurrently with its neighbor, Columbia University, at the corner of Broadway and West 114th Street. (The university eventually subsumed the building.) Founded downtown as St. Luke’s Home for Indigent Christian Females in 1852 by the Episcopalian diocese of New York City, St. Luke’s cared for “the elderly gentlewomen in the Church who had no other care.”
In Mary’s time, the home had eighty-seven residents age sixty or above, many of whom did not pay board. There were private rooms, a library and a chapel, a solarium on the roof, craft and music classes, a choir, and full-time care for the bedridden occupants of the sixth floor. To qualify for entrance, Mary would have had to be a communicant in a parish in the Diocese and City of New York for three to five years prior to entry. Her death certificate indicates she resided in New York for approximately ten years, so most likely Mary moved to Manhattan in 1911 at sixty-three, then a couple years later entered into St. Luke’s through her parish, where she lived until her death. Unfortunately, St. Luke’s yearbooks for 1912 to 1920 appear to have been lost.
The headstone is nearly six feet tall, with “ELIZABETH A. WILLIAMS 1822–1892” carved across the top portion in relief, and at the bottom, the family name Williams, in a gorgeous font reminiscent of wood. There is an Anglican cross above Elizabeth’s name. Below her mother’s dates, “MARY M. WILLIAMS 1847–1921” appears in a simple sans-serif font, added in the twentieth century.
The reverse side, partially hidden by a flowering bush, reads:
OSCAR
BELOVED SON OF HENRY & ELIZABETH A. WILLIAMS
1845–1860
There is a space below Oscar’s inscription, followed by a fourth commemoration near the base:
ELLA L. BRADLEY
DIED NOVEMBER 11, 1918
The same cemetery holds the remains of William Cooper Nell and William Lloyd Garrison and now, Mary Mildred Williams, recovered to America’s historical narrative. But as an unknowable research subject, she offers up more questions. Was anyone there, at the gravesite, when Mary was interred? What was the relationship between Mary and Ella Bradley? Did Ella have descendants? What became of Henry Williams, and why was he not moved here too? Justice requires that we recover more unrecorded stories, lives, and experiences like those in this book; each one is potentially precious and meaningful to conversations today.
Monuments such as this one should remind us of the sustaining power of family, of the strength of mothers and grandmothers, and of the bravery of those who choose to be fathers. Mary’s story suggests to us a new kind of monument to the past, inclusive of all children, who like Oscar may leave behind only a single sentence of redemption: I now belong to myself.
Datebooks, notes, and newspaper articles help us take the measure of men like Charles Sumner and John Andrew and Henry David Thoreau. But Mary Williams lived a private life, marked not by words but by gestures of the family loyalty that she learned from her grandmother Prue. May Mary Mildred Williams’s monument be a testament to the abiding value of this experience and what it can teach us about what it means to be human.
Mary’s silence remains, even now, a cipher of nuance and depth. Hers is the silence of the private woman, the silence of old photographs, the silence of the beloved, the silence of the caregiver, the silence of the oppressed, the silence of those who find a way through oppression, and the silence wrapped in the archive, ready to be given the honor of a hearing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
While I was writing my dissertation on the literature of abolition and the new technology of photography, the National Endowment for the Humanities was funding a wide-scale digitization of archival documents of nearly every kind in hundreds of archives. Software known as OCR, or optical character recognition, made it possible for reams of newspapers and other documents to become text-searchable. I gained access to one of these databases, American Historical Newspapers, and typed in “daguerreotype” and “slavery.”
Thus did I first learn of Mary in 2006, in much the same way the reading public of 1855 learned of her, that is, by reading Sumner’s February 19th letter reprinted in the Boston Telegraph, which contained these key words, and conjuring in my imagination the little girl he described. That letter was full of leads: Who was “Ida May”? What speech would Sumner have made in 1855? Who was Dr. Stone? Where was the daguerreotype he mentioned, and why was it so compelling? And the question at the heart of it all: who was Mary?
The day I found the letter, I wrote in my notes, I wonder if the daguerreotype is still extant, and if so, if I could see it. I did not see it until two years later. I was a graduate fellow at the Humanities Initiative at New York University, and every so often the university press would drop off its new titles at our scholars lounge. Late one afternoon I was alone in the office when I flipped through Mary Niall Mitchell’s Raising Freedom’s Child: Black Children and Visions of the Future After Slavery, and on page 73, I saw a face that felt instantly familiar. The caption read: “Unidentified girl (probably Mary Botts), daguerreotype, Julian Vannerson, Ca. 1855. Photo I.256 Massachusetts Historical Society.” Mitchell’s footnote mentioned the same February 19 letter I had already found in the newspaper. It was a dead end, but not a disappointment: the daguerreotype had been found, so it stood to reason that more of her story might also be recovered.
I was awarded three substantial grants: from the National Endowment for the Humanities at the American Antiquarian Society, from the Suzy Newhouse Center at Wellesley College, and from the Humanities Research Start-Up Fund at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (where I taught from 2009 to 2012), allowing me to dedicate significant time to archival research.
If the actor left a written record, I read it. Reading biographies, I learned that Higginson and Sumner’s early editors considered Mary’s family and their manumission to be a small footnote in these men’s life stories. Frederick Douglass, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Charles Sumner were exceptionally prolific, so I spent many of these early days of my research reading their words at Houghton Library, Harvard, the Library of Congress, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the New-York Historical Society, the Gilder Lehrman Collection, the Morgan Library, and in printed material.
The novel Ida May was not in print when I began this project, but it was digitized in 2006 by the Antislavery Literature Project. It made clear the reason Sumner chose this novel, but little was known about its author, beyond her birthplace, Calais, Maine, and her husband, Frederick Pike. I learned about Mary Hayden Green Pike’s life from a thesis written by a master’s student at the University of Maine in 1944, which I requested be copied and sent to me. (It has since been placed online.) I purchased a first edition of Ida May online for a negligible sum.
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