The Secrets of Mary Bowser (10 page)

“Hattie Jones, you are a prig, and always will be. Take her, then, and won’t she be sorry never to have any fun, just like you.”

Hattie watched to make sure Phillipa and the rest of the girls cleared the block before she turned to me. Then she smiled and stuck out her hand. “Mary Van Lew of Gaskill Street, I presume?”

“Hattie Jones, prig, I presume?” I took her hand in mine and grinned back at her.

“Don’t pay Phillipa any mind. She gets positively feline, mousing after any new girl in class.” She told me how she’d been the new girl, too, when her family moved from Baltimore years earlier.

I admitted that I didn’t understand half of what Phillipa said, or at least not why the other girls thought it was funny. Hattie explained that though Gaskill Street was not so impressive as some of Philadelphia’s grander thoroughfares, it was the alleys and the courts off streets like Gaskill where the poorest of the poor lived, a dozen people huddled into a one-room shack tacked up out of boards filched from warehouses along the waterfront. “Phillipa lives on Lombard Street, which her mama tells anyone who will listen is the very best row in all the city. Which does make a person wonder why most of the white families who lived there are moving all the way west to Rittenhouse Square, where they won’t risk meeting up with Mrs. Thayer or her darling daughter any time soon.”

Hattie squinted at a clocktower on the next block. “It’s getting awfully late—are you expected at Gaskill Street for dinner?”

“I don’t know,” I said, thinking of Mrs. Upshaw hovering over me in her cramped apartment, “but I don’t mind if I don’t go.”

“Good. My daddy’s gone to Chambersburg on business, so I won’t be missed at home. Miss Douglass told us to make you welcome in Philadelphia, which means I must introduce you to pepper pot.”

She grabbed my hand and dragged me to a bustling market she called Head House Square. From over half a block away, we heard an old colored woman shouting, “Pepper pot! Smoking hot!” Hattie led me into an arcade filled with stalls, elbowing her way through the crowd surrounding the woman.

“How many?” was all the greeting the woman offered.

“Two, please.” Hattie fished a few pennies from a purse tucked inside her skirt.

The woman dipped a jar into a large wooden tub of stew, from which a wonderfully scented steam was rising. She poured the contents of the jar into a bowl, plunked in a spoon, and passed it to me. After she did the same for Hattie, we retreated to a bench set against a nearby storefront.

I rushed to take my first mouthful of the Philadelphia delicacy—and nearly choked on it. “What’s in here?” I sputtered.

“It varies day by day, but usually it’s pepper, and tripe, and pepper, and ox feet, and pepper, and—”

“I’ve never had so much spice in all my life. Did Phillipa put you up to this?”

Hattie laughed. “Don’t worry, you’ll get used to the spice. My daddy always says pepper pot alone is reason enough to come to Philadelphia, though I suppose Phillipa would about croak if the thought of pepper pot so much as entered her head.”

“How come she’s so stuck up?”

“That’s the way of the colored people here, at least those with the means to send their daughters to Miss Douglass’s school.”

I took a cautious spoonful of stew. “You aren’t like that.”

“You forget, I’m from Baltimore. Thanks to Maryland’s preservation of the peculiar institution, colored folks there know how to look out for each other.” Hattie had more piquancy than the pepper pot as she railed about how standoffish the dozen families who proclaimed themselves Philadelphia’s better sort of colored people could be. “Even the ones who talk anti-slavery and equal rights for all negroes, why, they want you to know just the same they’re not like all negroes themselves.”

She lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Even our dear teacher carries on that way, always saying her name as ‘Sarah Mapps Douglass,’ so you know who her uncle was, as well as her father. Her cousin does the same, ‘David Bustill Bowser,’ holding connection to the Bustill family, even though his mother married a man without a nickel to his name or an ounce of standing in colored Philadelphia society. My daddy always says, nothing’s more trouble than a three-name negro—except any two-name white man.”

Hattie carped on about the elaborate family trees of colored Philadelphia, Bustills and Douglasses, Fortens and Purvises. The revelation that there were negro families who could trace their genealogies to way back before the War of Independence, just like the FFVs, flabbergasted me.

“Are all the girls in Phillipa’s set descended from Revolutionary War heroes?” I asked.

“Heroes, hunh. Profiteers and toadies more like—Cyrus Bustill made his coin selling bread to Washington’s troops, and James Forten was a powder boy for a privateer during the War, earned his money later by shimmying up ship masts to repair the sails. Phillipa’s own grandpappy wasn’t any more than a waiter in a rooming house, till the cook took sick one day and he stepped up to the stove. Now her father proclaims he’s got the oldest catering house in the city, bragging how white people throw money at him to make their parties go just so.”

I could tell from Hattie’s tone she didn’t mean for me to be impressed by those families, but I couldn’t help myself. “To think colored folks can be so rich.”

“Rich isn’t always the case—most of those families don’t have a tenth of the wealth they pretend they’ve got. You think Miss Douglass teaches school out of the goodness of her heart?” She kicked a cigar stub someone had tossed on the sidewalk, sending it tumbling into the street. “How are you enjoying our colored girls’ academy?”

“Seems like Latin and all that will be fun, like knowing a secret cipher. But history was awful dull. I never thought about any of that stuff, and I don’t know why I should start now.”

“History’s not so bad, once you get past who’s who and start learning what they did to each other. Those whites can be as nasty to one another as they are to us, if they’re kings and queens and whatnot.” She paused to spoon up the last of her stew. “Maybe you’ll like the afternoon lessons better—though mathematics and the sciences make my head ache. We best hurry, or Miss Douglass will have our hides.” Leaving our empty bowls in the pepper pot vendor’s pile, we headed back to Arch Street.

Five

My dearest Mama & Papa

I am fairly bursting with news I almost cannot write fast enough to tell it. After we recited our lessons today Miss Douglass assigned us new places. Guess what? I moved up two whole rows! Miss Bet got herself so pleased when I told her she even gave me extra toward my pin money as a model of the rewards for hard work. I did not contradict her of course but studying my lessons is not nearly so much hard work as waiting on her & her family & cleaning their things.

The truly hard part is finding a place to study. Mrs Upshaw does like to chat at a person & Mama you understand that a person cannot read very well if someone is chatting at her the whole time. Also if I leave my books out Dulcey or Ducky as I think of her the way she quacks & quacks at me she scatters them every which way around the apartment & I have to hunt them up. Sometimes she tries to hide that she has gone through my things but she leaves my written pages in all the wrong order so I must lock everything in my trunk the very moment I am done with my studies.

Another thing I am studying in my own way is Philadelphia. Where do they keep the negroes I wonder every time I am out. So few colored faces compared to Richmond. Hattie has been living here so long she must have forgot the South because all she can say is Philadelphia has more colored people than any other city in the North. Maybe so but more is not near enough by my count.

You are ever loved & missed by

Your devoted daughter

Mary El

Writing home was all the comfort I had, yet never comfort enough for all the ways I missed my parents. Even the things that nettled me all through my childhood—how Mama’s muttering in her sleep would wake me some nights or the way Papa’s Sunday shirt itched me when he hugged me tight each week—now were things I longed for. Whether I scribbled my missives out fast or took my time crafting every curve of every letter of every word, still they couldn’t seem to say near what I would share with Mama if I could talk to her first thing when I woke up and last when I went to bed, like I always had. Looking down at those pages before I sealed them and sent them made me all the sadder, realizing how impossible it was to lay out in writing everything I was doing and thinking and feeling, when Mama and Papa never had the chance to do or think or maybe even feel anything quite like it themselves.

When it was originally decided I’d go North to be educated, everyone talked about the fine opportunity I’d have. But I was more fretful than grateful those first weeks of my formal schooling. Reciting was hard for me. I couldn’t forget that long ago morning on the Van Lews’ veranda, how my gut wrenched up over Mistress Van Lew’s threat to send me to the whipping post. Nobody could try that now that I was free, but standing up before the whole class, I stumbled over more than a few things I could say perfectly well when no one was around to hear. Phillipa caught me one afternoon on the way out of class, saying how she hoped I liked the view from the back row, seeing as it seemed I’d be there permanently. That set me seething and simmering. The next time I stood to recite, I said each word perfectly just to show her I could. After I finished, Miss Douglass beamed and Phillipa scowled. The smile and the frown, they urged me on, and I made sure to recite loud, clear, and steady after that.

Once I got over my nervousness, I discovered what a joy it was to be in school, even if I lagged behind in most subjects. Like when you think you’re not all that hungry but you sit down to a real fine meal and suddenly you realize you were ravenous after all. Though Phillipa called me Polly, saying I was no more than a poll-parrot repeating back what I read or heard, I was too eager to pay her much mind. I asked Miss Douglass for extra assignments to take home so I could catch up with the girls my age, and our teacher nodded her prim approval. That was as much fanfare as she ever seemed to offer, and I relished it.

Even more than that, I relished Hattie’s friendship. Right from my first week in Philadelphia, Bet set up an allowance for me on account with her cousin’s husband, who was an attorney. She made it clear he was to give me pin money aplenty, even after she finished visiting with her relations and returned to Richmond. It was generous of her, I suppose, but it was Hattie who gave what to me was real riches: companionship. Hattie walked me home from school each day and was waiting at the curb to accompany me back the next morning. Later, when Miss Douglass taught us about Lewis and Clark and how Sacajawea—a colored woman, she reminded us proudly, though not African—had guided them and interpreted for them, it made me think back to those first few months when Hattie was the Sacajawea of my Philadelphia life.

We’d promenade through the city, and she’d point out this or I’d ask after that, the two of us making up all manner of stories for what we saw and laughing over any nonsense that came into our heads.

“Miss Hattie Jones, prig, whatever is a humidor?” I’d ask, pointing at the sign on a tobacconist’s shop.

“Well, Miss Mary Van Lew of Gaskill Street, the better sort of colored Philadelphia worry that this heat will frizz their hair and make them look quite negro. This good gentleman secures them in his humidor until such time as the weather cools.”

“Why, I believe I see Phillipa’s parasol in his umbrella stand.”

It sure was humid. Summertime in Richmond, Lilly was out at dawn on laundry days, stirring the Van Lews’ clothes and linens in vats of boiling water before the day grew to its hottest. In Philadelphia, the air felt just as steamy as if you were standing over a row of laundry pots at mid-day. Heat radiated off the brick buildings and cobblestone streets, which stayed warm to the touch even after sundown.

“Hattie, I don’t think I can make it so far as Head House Square today,” I said during one sweltering recess. “It’s too hot for pepper pot anyway.”

She smiled slyly. “Then let’s get some ice cream instead.”

The only ice cream I ever had was what Zinnie snuck off from what she made up for the Van Lews. And given how wild her Daisy was for ice cream, there was never much left to slip to me. I fairly skipped as Hattie steered me down Arch Street.

We stopped before a low building midway along the third block. It was built right up against the stores on either side, no way to get around to the back. “Where’s our door?” I asked.

“That’s it, silly. Right in front of your nose.”

“We go in that way?”

“We go in, we sit down, we eat our ice cream. Ain’t they got ice cream in Virginia? What’s all that Dolley Madisoning about down there, and no ice cream parlors?”

I explained that in Richmond, negroes calling at the confectioner went round to the rear of the building, where they’d buy a dish to carry away. Papa had never even tasted ice cream, because he refused to be served so.

“Now you’re in Philadelphia, you can come right on in the front door.” Hattie led me inside, looking as proud as if she’d invented ice cream parlors herself.

She ordered vanilla, though I couldn’t imagine why she overlooked strawberry. Bland as Mrs. Upshaw’s cooking was, I couldn’t order something as plain as vanilla once that man told us they had strawberry, too.

“This ice cream has positively restored my delicate constitution,” I announced as my spoon hit the bottom of the parfait glass.

“Pleased to be of service,” Hattie answered. “My daddy always says I’m practically made of ice cream, I eat so much of it all summer.”

By now, I’d heard
my daddy says
so many times from Hattie, it seemed I practically knew the man myself. Which always made me wonder why I never heard about her mother. “And what does your mama say?” I asked.