The Secrets of Mary Bowser (35 page)

For once, though, he wasn’t ready to be angry at Bet Van Lew. “Maybe it’s for the best, her getting involved with the messages.”

“I thought you’d be fuming over it, saying how you knew all along she wanted to put herself in the middle of everything.”

“ ’Course she does. So let her.” I wasn’t quite ready to do that, until I heard what he said next. “Long day in the shop, gave me lots of time to think. That article wasn’t railing about any negro servants, just about the Van Lews. If the Confederates ever notice messages in those books, Bet will step right up to tell them proudly it’s her doing. They’ll be so infuriated that a proper white lady’s been up to such things, they won’t ever suspect you’re the one who’s really behind it. If she puts herself in danger, she pushes you out of it. I can only be happy about that.”

I kissed my husband, supposing he was right. And relieved that we were loving and not quarreling, the way we’d been doing all too often because of secession, and of Bet.

Many was the game of I-spy that Mama and I played during my childhood. Each Sunday, I made a grand report to Papa of how many of Mama’s riddles I solved in the week previous. But what I was doing now was no game, and much as I hoped Mama was watching over my work, I didn’t breathe a word of it to Papa. I didn’t want him to know anything that might endanger him, or even give him more to worry over than what he already had to bear.

Wilson and I appeared at the smithy early each Sunday to escort Papa back to our house, fearful of letting him walk by himself, now that he moved so unsteady through the city’s teeming streets. It was more than rheumatism that constrained him. The constant press of strangers, all come to fight for the Confederacy, for slavery—Richmond was whipped week by week to the same rushed pace that so disconcerted me when I first arrived in Philadelphia. And every swell of population seemed to squeeze a little more of the breath from Papa.

“Inch-worm get there just as surely as a March hare, even if it ain’t as quick,” he said as we traced our route one Sunday in September. That was Papa’s way of letting me know that even my deliberately slowed pace was too swift for him. As he walked between me and Wilson, there was no denying he was caught by something weightier and more worrisome than what had held me, giggling with pleasure, between him and Mama as they caught me on all those long ago Sundays when I was a child.

“Maybe I should close my eyes,” I said. “You can lead me about, like you used to do at Christmastime. See if I’m still able to tell just where in the city we might be.”

But Papa didn’t have my heart for reminiscing. “Don’t see how a body could tell. Things here don’t ever sound or smell right no more.”

It was true—the sound of drilling troops filled our ears, and what filled our noses was more distressing still. Even with the worst of the summer’s battles over, wounded soldiers crowded Richmond. By the time they were borne to the hotels and homes that served as Confederate hospitals, or to the factories where the wounded Federal prisoners were kept, those men gave off the same sickly stink, no matter which uniform they wore when they took the field. Much as I wanted to give Papa back the hope he’d lost, and the freedom he’d never yet had, I had a harder time spying out how to do that than I did secreting intelligence out of the military prisons.

Much grumbling by guards the Secesh may rout Union troops in Virginia for good. One Stevenson has brother at Leesburg under commander Evans says they can push the Union off the Potomac. Accuracy of claim unknown. Man a regular braggart but—

A knock on the front door sent my pen jerking across the page. I tucked the message I was scribing in Bet’s cipher into my chemise as Wilson headed down to answer the door.

“I must speak with Mary at once,” Bet said by way of greeting. Wilson didn’t bother to respond, just turned and came back upstairs with Bet following.

“I’m not half done with the transcribing yet, Miss Bet.” For three months, we’d had the same routine. After each of our prison visits, I copied my intelligence into Bet’s code. She waited up on Church Hill for me to bring the day’s message to her, so she could ride it out to her farm, where William Brisby, the free colored man who’d long been Wilson’s Railroad contact in New Kent County, collected the report and brought it farther east. But now here she was, upsetting the very regimen she demanded I follow.

“Mother has had another stroke.” Worry edged tight around her eyes. “Dr. Picot is with her. I must fetch John. You will have to carry the message to the farm yourself.”

“Let McNiven do it.”

Wilson’s words surprised Bet. She’d probably forgotten he was even there. “The pass is for Mother or myself or our servants. A white man cannot use it. Mary will go.”

“She will not. It’s too dangerous.”

I looked from one to the other, wondering that each was so certain of commanding me. I didn’t much care to transport the message out through the Virginia countryside. But I couldn’t tell how urgent it was, what the cost of a delay might be. A gust of autumn wind rattled the window, sending chill air through the panes.

“It’s only a few miles,” I said, as though stating the distance might keep me safe for the length of it.

“Through territory patrolled by Secesh,” Wilson said. “No place for you to travel by yourself.”

“I’ve done it every day.” Bet was proud and indignant all at once.

“Those soldiers don’t have to show a negress the same courtesy they do a white lady.” Wilson let the unspoken threat of what could happen to me settle on all of us. “If she goes, I go with her.”

“I don’t see the need—” Bet began, but I cut her off.

“Wilson’s right. If he and I travel together, it will be the surest way to get the message there. Leave me the pass. You must want to get back to your mother.” I claimed the precious slip of paper and led her back down the stairs.

The steaming breath of the Van Lews’ grand white carriage horse curled into the late afternoon air as we rode through Henrico County, the mare swishing her tail back and forth as though expressing dissatisfaction at drawing Wilson’s humble cart. Osborne Turnpike was nearly deserted, and when we reached the checkpoint at the fork with New Market Road, we found ourselves alone with two Confederate sentries. One plucked on a Jew’s harp while the other sneered and spat a sodden wad of tobacco, demanding to see our pass.

“What trouble you darkies up to?” The soldier stood so close he covered me in a spray of spittle, his eyes shifting from the pass to rove over me.

“Like de paper say, suh,” Wilson answered. “Got to get Mistress dem things from de farm.”

The sentry kept his lusty gaze on me. “They need two of you to rustle up a day’s worth of taters and turnips? This Eliza Van Lew must breed her slaves special to keep them that stupid.”

I swallowed hard, kept my gaze low, and prayed Wilson was doing the same.

“Maybe you so stupid, you gonna try something like to get you killed.” The sentry drew his pistol, nudging my belly with its barrel. “You ain’t planning on running off now, are you?”

Fear closed my throat, as surely as if the sentry had put those tobacco-stained fingers around my neck and started to squeeze.

“Us ain’t gonna run, suh,” Wilson said.

The muzzle dug farther into my gut. “I’m talking to the wench, she can damn well answer me.”

I willed my words past the obstipation of worry. “I’s a good girl, sir. Come along like Mistress tell me, pick out the food Cook need.” I nodded toward Wilson. “He don’t know, bring back all the wrong things. Mistress have a fit.”

“Mistress have more of a fit if such a fine gal as yourself were to run off. But you wouldn’t do nothing like that, would you?” The metal jabbed in again, hard. “Unless some young buck been talking sweet to you, telling about the fine things he’s gonna do once he gets you out to Fort Monroe.”

Before I could conjure out a word of reply, he raised his sidearm, aimed it right between Wilson’s eyes, and cocked the trigger. “That what you been up to, nigger? Talk sweet to this gal, how you gonna run off?”

“No, suh. Promised Marse I look aftuh Mistress, help her make de other slaves mind. Not about to run to no Marse Monroe. Don’t even know who he be.”

“Promised Marse? Don’t say anything about no master on this pass.”

Wilson shrugged. “Don’t know what de pass say. But Marse sure say plenty he hear we ain’t back by curfew.”

Desperate to shake that pistol loose from my sweet husband’s brow, I did the only thing I could think to do. I straightened up with feigned pride. “Marse a great man these days. One of them corn tenants they made up for the war.”

“Corn tenants?”

The other sentry gave off twanging his Jew’s harp with a guffaw. “I suppose she means Lieutenant.”

I nodded. “That’s it, yessuh. Only not just one them regular loo tenants. He that corn kind. Cob tenant, maybe Mistress say.”

My interrogator spat another lump of tobacco and turned to his partner. “Can you translate that bit of darky as well?”

The soldier plucked a few notes before responding. “I don’t suppose this corn tenant of yours is a colonel?”

I clapped and grinned like I was about to jump Jim Crow. “That the one! Loo tenant kernel. Only he sure do get mad, he hear anyone make supper late for his wife and daughter.”

“You can bet the lieutenant colonel ain’t stuck out in the middle of nowhere, nothing to do but keep idiot darkies from running off.” The chaw chewer leaned nearer, his breath hot and stinking. “Get a move on. If you ain’t back here within the hour, I’m going to get on my horse, ride out until I find you, and shoot you both. That clear?”

“Yessuh,” Wilson and I said together. The soldier crumpled the pass and tossed it in my lap. My husband flicked the reins, and we pulled away.

We rode a quarter mile or so, until the turnpike curved around a stand of trees, before I dared speak. “You were right, Wilson. We shouldn’t have come out here, risked ourselves to a brute like that. I’m sorry I let Bet talk me into it.”

He reined the mare to a halt. “You that frightened?”

“Of course I am. I thought he’d shoot you and— And make me wish he’d shoot me, too.”

“Not him. I’ve seen the type plenty of times before. Takes his pleasure being blustery cruel when he can, but not one to risk his own neck just to shoot someone else’s negro. Especially not when there’s another white man around to witness it.” Wilson wrapped me precious in his arms. “I don’t care to see my wife subjected to a man like that, it’s true. But he didn’t stand a chance against a woman as clever as you. Corn tenant indeed.”

Though I held myself proud at the compliment, that dread stayed with me until the sentry waved us past as we crossed the checkpoint on our way back to Richmond. Bet could have her fun, riding through the countryside with those messages sewn in her hem or tucked in a false heel on her shoe. I had Papa to care for, and my husband and my own free self to worry on. I wasn’t about to submit myself to such a man again.

If I were caught smuggling messages from the prisons, I’d likely face hanging—but at least it wouldn’t be on some lonely country road and at the whim of a leering Confederate picket. It was Richmond I’d come back to. Much as I was willing to risk to serve the Union, still it seemed safest to pass the war within the city limits.

Seventeen

N
orth and South, men had volunteered for a sixty-day war. By the time anyone realized it would be not days or weeks but death-filled years, those volunteers were hardened into something even more indurate than any professional soldier trained to battle might be. Some of the Federal prisoners wouldn’t so much as lift their eyes when I passed them what provisions Bet and I brought. At first I took it for the same negro-hating with which many a white man cussed his rebuke as he passed me on a Philadelphia street. Until one day when I came upon a sandy-haired prisoner, a boy of no more than fifteen, whose pale eyes were as weak a watery blue as an early winter sky. Though he brought those troubled eyes to mine, in an instant I wished he hadn’t, for all I read in them of the things that sandy-haired boy had seen on the battlefield. Those eyes would never look upon another mortal soul the same way, although whether what haunted him were the things he’d done himself or just what he’d watched others do, I couldn’t tell. There were tent hospitals and army surgeons for the ones whose injuries were physical. But for the others, it didn’t seem there was a balm in this world that might salve the wound.

More troubling still came the slow, seeping truth that the battlefield wasn’t the only place where folks were being schooled in suffering. Soldiers go to battle, but it is whole nations that go to war. There was no missing what that meant for the South, including my own sweet papa, who was working harder and waning more wasted by hunger than ever. It was like watching fruit wither on the vine, to see a man so strong go weak, not all at once but bit by daily bit. By February of 1862, the Federal blockade had taken such a heavy toll on market prices in Richmond, Wilson’s earnings could barely keep the two of us, let alone provide for Papa. I was glad enough for whatever orts and leavings I might take from Bet’s table, to see my papa fed.

“Brought you a bit of sweet potato pone, some mock turtle soup as well,” I said when I stopped by Papa’s shack one noon hour to supply the meal for his mid-day break from the smithy.

“Keep it for you and Wilson. You young people need your nutriments.”

“And you need to keep strong for all the work you’re doing.”

Papa rubbed a palm along the half-plank table Wilson had put up the spring before. “Not much to do, these days.”

That wasn’t any comfort. Slow business is bad for the slave-owner but worse for the slave. The master makes his profit one way or the other, and the slave is always the source. “I can barely push my way down Main Street, Richmond’s so swollen up with new people. Surely Mahon must have customers enough among them.”

“Customers or no, smith ain’t gonna do much unless he got metal to do it with. And these days, we don’t.”

“Better for you though, huh?” I set a piece of pone on the rickety half-plank. “You keep to supervising the others while they work, less ache in your bones.”