Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women (23 page)
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Authors: Elizabeth Mahon
Tags: #General, #History, #Women, #Social Science, #Biography & Autobiography, #Biography, #Women's Studies
BOOK: Scandalous Women: The Lives and Loves of History's Most Notorious Women
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For the short years of her career, Carry Nation was the public face of the temperance movement. Although her tactics could be melodramatic, she influenced lawmakers. As a result of her actions, Kansas at last tried to adhere to its own state laws, and her work eventually led to the Eighteenth Amendment prohibiting alcohol in 1919. Yet during national prohibition, which she had done so much to bring about, and which was abolished in 1933, her grim, iron-jawed figure became a symbol not of reform but of intolerance.
Although Carry died almost a hundred years ago, one can still hear echoes of her message in the moral crusaders who fight what they see as the moral laxity in today’s society, calling for warning labels on DVDs and CDs, supporting antismoking ads, and promoting chastity. No doubt Carry would feel right at home, protesting and swinging her ax at the drive-through liquor stores.
FIVE
Wild Women of the West
I am a whole theater in myself.
—MARY ELLEN PLEASANT
During the late nineteenth century, she was the most gossipedabout woman in California. They called her “Mammy” Pleasant but she was no one’s mammy, thank you very much, although she wasn’t above playing the role if it benefited her. For more than a century, Mary Ellen Pleasant’s name has gone down in history as a voodoo queen, sorceress, and murderer who had unnatural powers over others. In the process her remarkable achievements as a savvy businesswoman and civil rights activist have been obscured.
Mary Ellen Pleasant’s birth, like many aspects of her life, is shrouded in mystery. She claimed to be born in Philadelphia, and that her father was a native of Hawaii and her mother a freed slave from Louisiana. What is known is that at the age of six, she was sent to live with the Husseys, a Quaker family on Nantucket, and when she was old enough she began working in their shop. It was here that Mary Ellen learned the business skills that she would use effectively in later years.
Mary Ellen only had a rudimentary education, learning to read and write. It was something that bothered her until her death. In her autobiography, published in 1902, she wrote, “I often wonder what I would have been like with an education.” In her early twenties, Mary Ellen left the island for Boston, where she met her first husband, James W. Smith, a successful contractor and foreman. He was also an abolitionist who introduced his new bride to New England’s antislavery society. Mary Ellen may have already been involved in abolitionist activity on Nantucket, which had a small but thriving black population.
Mary Ellen was soon a widow, but a wealthy one. When her husband died, he left her fifteen thousand dollars, which was practically a fortune in nineteenth-century America, particularly for African Americans. She wasn’t lonely for long. Soon she was being courted by another mulatto gentleman, by the name of John James Pleasant, a waiter and cook from New Bedford. They were married in 1847 and lived together on and off until his death, his work as a ship’s cook keeping them apart for months at a time. Their only child, a daughter named Elizabeth, was born in 1851.
In 1852, Mary Ellen and her husband, like thousands of others, decided to try their luck in California, lured by talk of opportunities that seemed limitless. Unlike most free African Americans, they had the money to pay for the passage. San Francisco was still the wild Barbary Coast. The boundaries of race and capitalism hadn’t yet been set in stone. This gave Mary Ellen the opportunity to get in on the ground floor.
Although she had a sizable inheritance, she wasn’t afraid of hard work. Most of the jobs available to blacks were menial but they paid better than they did back East. Taking advantage of the stereotype that blacks were great cooks, Mary Ellen managed to auction off her services to the highest bidder, an investment firm, for five hundred dollars a month and she didn’t have to do dishes! She was so amazingly persuasive, her income was twice what other cooks were making.
Keeping her eyes and ears open, Mary Ellen began looking for investment opportunities. Using the investment tips that came her way through her jobs as a housekeeper and cook for some of San Francisco’s most elite families, she began speculating on commodities like gold and silver. Soon she was able to open up three laundries, taking advantage of the demand, and employed newly arrived African Americans. In only three years, Mary Ellen had become one of the most successful businesswomen on the West Coast.
With her accountant, Mary Ellen opened her first boardinghouse, which was actually a refuge for runaway slaves. She also put up the money for several legal battles, most notably the effort to free an eighteen-year-old fugitive slave named Atchy Lee in 1858. Although California was admitted as a free state, it still allowed slave owners to bring their slaves to the state until the Civil War. Mary Ellen lent her support to the black-owned newspaper
Mirror of the Times
, the first African American newspaper west of the Rockies. Historian Sue Bailey Thurman has said that it was Mary Ellen’s money and leadership that led to the repeal of the law banning black testimony in court.
Mirror of the Times
, the first African American newspaper west of the Rockies. Historian Sue Bailey Thurman has said that it was Mary Ellen’s money and leadership that led to the repeal of the law banning black testimony in court.
Mary Ellen and her husband left California in 1858 and moved clear across the continent to Ontario to work with abolitionists there, smuggling slaves into Canada. She would later claim that not only did she financially aid John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry but that she also traveled through Virginia, dressed like a man, in advance, like an African American female Paul Revere, warning the slaves. There is no proof of her claims, although years later she requested that inscribed on her tombstone would be the words, “She was a friend of John Brown.”
After her return to California, Mary Ellen went to work as a housekeeper for a wealthy merchant named Selim Woodworth. Now she really made her mark in San Francisco. Although she owned her own carriage, Mary Ellen decided to help focus attention on the discriminatory policies of the San Francisco streetcars that refused to stop for blacks. These policies hurt African American women the most, as domestics; they relied on the streetcars to get to work. She had already dropped one suit against one company when it appeared that it had changed its policies.
However, her lawsuit against the North Beach and Mission Railway Company went ahead. Pleasant won her case before a jury and was awarded five hundred dollars in damages. Her trump card was having a white witness confirm her story that the streetcar refused to stop for her. And not just any witness but a wellrespected society matron, Lisette Woodworth, the wife of her employer. It was the first time a white had testified on behalf of a black person, male or female. Mrs. Woodworth’s testimony lent legitimacy to Mary Ellen’s case. Her case brought a great deal of publicity and affirmed the right of African Americans to ride the streetcars.
For the rest of her life, Mary Ellen decided to focus on her business activities. Despite her success as a businesswoman, housekeeping was still one of the few occupations open to a black woman, and it had the added benefit of putting her in a position near those with political and financial clout. She purchased another boardinghouse, at 920 Washington Street, this one catering to white businessmen downtown. It was known for its “fine food and wines, and its lavishly furnished upstairs rooms which were set up as a combined private dining and bedroom.” Her boardinghouses—she eventually came to own three—were among the most expensive and exclusive in the city, catering to some of the city’s most successful white businessmen and politicians.
When one of her former borders, Newton Booth, was elected governor, Mary Ellen threw an elaborate postelection gala at her house, telling guests, “This is Governor Booth who has been elected from my house.” At some point, she began to cultivate a devoted following of young marriageable white women whom she matched up with white males she met through her boardinghouses. This led to the later accusations and rumors that her boardinghouses were in reality houses of ill repute.
At some point Mary Ellen met Thomas Bell, one of the eventual cofounders of the Bank of California. No one knows exactly how they met or the exact nature of their business partnership. One of the rumors surrounding Mary Ellen was that she provided some of the seed money for Bell’s success. Bell was a bachelor when they met, and Pleasant introduced him to Teresa Percy, whom he married. In 1877, she moved to a thirty-room mansion on the corner of Octavia and Bush. The mansion, built and decorated according to her specifications, was worth one hundred thousand dollars and was one of the largest black-owned residences in the nation. Thomas Bell, his wife, Teresa, and their two children soon moved in as well. Many people were under the impression that Mary Ellen was the housekeeper, which she did nothing to correct. But she was clearly more than just a housekeeper, although she did hire and fire servants and order the groceries. She acted as a mediator between Teresa and Thomas Bell. In fact she controlled all aspects of Teresa Bell’s life, including choosing her clothes and friends. She later told a judge, “Mr. Bell knew what I was there for, and I knew what I was there for.”
By the 1880s, Mary Ellen owned property in San Francisco and Oakland, as well as mining stock, and was worth an estimated three hundred thousand dollars. Still she cultivated the air of a servant, always dressed in a modest dark dress and apron—albeit one who drove around in a carriage with a liveried footman. Mary Ellen’s husband and child didn’t live to share in her bounty; her daughter died in 1878 and her husband sometime before that.
In 1884 the city of San Francisco was titillated by the scandal of Sharon vs. Sharon. Twenty-four-year-old Sarah Hill filed for divorce, claiming that she was the wife of former Nevada senator William Sharon, having married him secretly in 1880. At stake was thirty million dollars. During the trial it was revealed that it was Mary Ellen who had supplied the cash to pay for Sarah’s suit. Under oath, she reluctantly admitted to providing five thousand to Sarah’s cause, but in reality she may have actually spent thousands more in legal fees. The trial lasted a year and became one of the most publicized cases in the nation. It had all the ingredients of a Victorian melodrama—voodoo, sex, a secret marriage, and, in the thick of it, a mysterious elderly African American woman. Soon Mary Ellen became the one on trial, not the plaintiff or the defendant.
Sharon’s lawyers claimed that Pleasant was a ruthless madam who used voodoo and blackmail to control Sarah Hill, while Hill’s lawyers portrayed Pleasant as the stereotypical “Mammy” figure who had tried to protect the innocent and naive Sarah from being exploited by wealthy white men. The case exposed Mary Ellen as not just another black servant but someone who had become the holder of secrets, which she’d gleaned from years of watching and listening to her powerful employers to make her a force to be reckoned with and feared. Suddenly Mary Ellen Pleasant became “the most discussed woman in San Francisco.” The Sharon trial earned Mary Ellen a reputation as a sinister black woman preying on vulnerable whites.
On October 15, 1892, at half past ten in the evening, the servants at the Bell mansion heard the cries of Thomas Bell and a dull thud as his body fell over the stair railing twenty feet to the basement. Only Mary Ellen and Fred Bell, the Bells’ eldest son, were at home. Teresa Bell was at a ranch house in Sonoma that Mary Ellen later claimed to own. Fred Bell ran for the nearest doctor while Mary Ellen went for pillows and blankets, but Bell was dead. At the inquest, Mary Ellen stated that Thomas Bell had been ill, and then when he woke up in the night, he must have gotten disoriented. The press dubbed the Bell mansion “Mystery House.”
Things began to unravel after Bell’s death. While his will was tied up in probate, Teresa and Mary Ellen continued living together at the mansion. But Mary Ellen had dangerously overextended herself buying property and made some bad investments and had to declare insolvency. She was in great need of liquid capital as creditors began to swarm like vultures. In her eighties, Mary Ellen was no longer at the top of her game and suffering from ill health. Teresa Bell, who it turned out was one taco short of a combination platter, threw Pleasant out. Mary Ellen moved into a small sixroom apartment and launched a counterattack, insisting that every last dime including the jewelry Teresa wore belonged not to Teresa Bell but to her.
The question of just who owned what occupied the courts for years. Deeds changed hands from Mary Ellen to Teresa and back again. Without Thomas Bell to stand behind, Mary Ellen was vulnerable. There were plenty of people willing to believe that a black woman could only be successful by blackmail, murder, and witchcraft. Her life became a cautionary tale of “uppity” black women not knowing their place.
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