The Secrets of Mary Bowser

by Lois Leveen

Genres: Historical Fiction

Synopsis

Based on a remarkable true story, The Secrets of Mary Bowser is an inspiring tale of one daring woman's willingness to sacrifice her own freedom to change the course of history.

All her life, Mary has been a slave to the wealthy Van Lew family of Richmond, Virginia. But when Bet, the willful Van Lew daughter, decides to send Mary to Philadelphia to be educated, she must leave her family to seize her freedom.

Life in the North brings new friendships, a courtship, and a far different education than Mary ever expected, one that leads her into the heart of the abolition movement. With the nation edging toward war, she defies Virginia law by returning to Richmond to care for her ailing father - and to fight for emancipation. Posing as a slave in the Confederate White House in order to spy on President Jefferson Davis, Mary deceives even those who are closest to her to aid the Union command.

Just when it seems that all her courageous gambles to end slavery will pay off, Mary discovers that everything comes at a cost - even freedom.

 

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Release date: May 15, 2012

Publisher: William Morrow

Sample

One

Mama and I woke early, put on our Sunday dresses, and stole down all three sets of stairs from the garret to the cellar, slipping out the servants’ entrance before the Van Lews were even out of bed. We walked west down Grace Street, turning south past the tobacco factories to head toward Shockoe Bottom. The Bottom was nothing like Church Hill, where the Van Lew mansion sat above the city. Buildings in the Bottom were small and weather-worn, the lots crowded with all manner of manufactories and businesses. I held tight to Mama’s hand as we ducked into a narrow passageway between two storefronts along Main Street.

Papa stood tall on the other side of the passage, same as every Sunday, waiting for us in his scraggly patch of yard. As soon as he caught sight of me and Mama, a smile broke across his face like sunshine streaming through the clouds. He hugged and kissed us and then hugged us some more, looking me over like I’d changed so much since the week before that he feared he might not recognize me.

I may have changed, but he never did. My papa was so lean and strong, his muscles showed even through his Sunday shirt. His rich skin shone with the color and sheen of the South American coffee beans that made Richmond importers wealthy. Large brown eyes dominated his narrow face, the same eyes I found staring back at me whenever I passed the looking glass in Mistress Van Lew’s dressing room. What a strange and wonderful thing, to see a bit of Papa in my own reflection. All the more delightful when I pestered Mama with some peevish five-year-old’s demand and she chided, “Don’t look at me with your papa’s eyes.” Mama’s complaint told me that I was his child as much as hers, even during the six days a week we spent apart from him.

Standing beside Papa, Mama seemed small in a way she never did when she bustled about the Van Lew mansion. Although she was not a heavy woman, she was fleshy in a way Papa was not. Her skin was even darker than his, so deep and rich and matte that whenever I saw flour, I wondered that it could be so light in color yet as sheenless as Mama’s skin. Her brow and eyes curved down at the outside edges, making her seem determined and deliberate, whether her mouth was set straight across, lifted in one of her warm smiles, or, as was often the case, open in speech.

But for once, Papa was talking before Mama. “About time you ladies arrived. We got plenty to get done this fine morning.” Papa spoke with the soft cadence of a Tidewater negro, though he hadn’t seen the plantation where he was born since he was just a boy, when his first owner apprenticed him to Master Mahon, a Richmond blacksmith.

Mama’s voice sounded different from Papa’s, as sharp as though she and Old Master Van Lew had come from New York only the day before. “What can we have to do at this hour on a Sunday?”

“High time we return all that hospitality we been enjoying at the Bankses. I stopped over there on my way home last evening, invited them to come back here with us after prayer meeting.”

“That whole brood, over here?” Mama eyed Papa’s cabin. The four-room building had two entrances, Papa’s on the left, and the one for Mr. and Mrs. Wallace, the elderly free couple who were his landlords, on the right. Even put together, Papa’s two rooms were smaller than the attic quarters where Mama and I slept in the Van Lew mansion or the summer kitchen where the cook prepared the Van Lews’ meals. One room had but a fireplace, Papa’s meager supply of foodstuffs, and a small wooden table with three unmatched chairs. The other room held his sleeping pallet, a wash-basin set on an old crate, and a row of nails where he hung his clothes. The walls were unpainted, outside and in, the rough plank floors bare even in winter. The only adornments were the bright tattersall pattern of the osnaburg curtains Mama had sewn for the window and the metal cross Papa had crafted at Mahon’s smithy.

The way Mama frowned, I could tell what she was thinking. Broad and tall, Henry Banks was a large presence all by himself, a free colored man who risked enslavement to minister to the slaves and free negroes who gathered each week in the cellar of his house. A two-story house big enough to accommodate him, his wife, and their six children. On those Sundays when Mama, Papa, and I were invited to stay after prayer meeting for dinner with their family, I savored the chance to amuse myself among all those children. So though Mama frowned at Papa, I was delighted to hear that the whole pack of youngsters was coming over today.

Besides, Papa was already soothing Mama. “It’s warm enough to do our entertaining outside. All we got to do is borrow some chairs and plates and whatnot from the neighborhood, so it’ll all be ready when we get back here.” He smiled. “Honestly, folks’d think you married a fool, the way you carry on, Minerva.”

To everyone else in Richmond, colored or white, Mama was Aunt Minnie. But Papa always called her Minerva. Whenever he said the name, she made a grand show of rolling her eyes or clucking her tongue. So I figured Mama wasn’t nearly so put-upon as she pretended to be, planting her hands on her hips and shaking her head. “Don’t you start with me at this hour, Lewis, don’t you even start.”

Papa winked at me. “Don’t you dare stop, she means. And I ain’t one to disobey her.” With that he hustled me and Mama about, gathering up what we needed to serve our guests before he hurried us off to prayer meeting.

All through the morning’s preaching and praising, my head buzzed in anticipation of hosting company. Each week, when Mama, Papa, and I walked back from meeting, I took care to lag a few paces behind, then come barreling up between them, my arms flailing in the air. Mama and Papa would each grab one of my hands and swing me forward, calling out, “Caught.” Once caught, I walked the rest of the way between them, my hands in theirs, my face beaming. But this Sunday I was so excited to be with the other children I forgot all about getting caught until Papa turned around, his big eyes searching for me. I wrinkled my nose at him and went back to chattering with Elly, the oldest and prettiest of the Banks girls. When I looked ahead again, Papa was no longer watching me.

Once we reached the cabin, Papa hauled a bucket of water from the well, and Mama called me from my playmates to help serve our guests. When I carried the first pair of filled cups to where Reverend and Mrs. Banks sat with Papa, I marked how Mrs. Banks was shifting in the straightbacked chair, trying to catch a hint of shade from the lone box elder tree in the tiny yard.

“I’m sorry there’s no ice for your drinks,” I said as I served. “Papa don’t have an ice room, but if you come visit my house, we can give you lots of ice and cushions for your chairs, too.”

In a flash, Papa yanked me to him. He turned me over his knee and swatted me hard.

“That big house ain’t yours, Mary El, it’s the Van Lews’. And you don’t mean no more to them than the cushions or the chairs or any other thing they got for their comfort. Understand?”

He kept his tight hold on me until I murmured, “Yes, Papa.” As soon as he let go, I ran into the cabin. My Sunday joy curdled to shame at being treated so in front of Elly and the other children, and I sobbed myself to sleep on Papa’s cornhusk pallet.

I woke hours later, to the sound of low, angry voices in the next room.

“The child need to know her place is with me, with us, and not with them Van Lews,” Papa said.

“Well, you’re not gonna teach her that with a spank,” Mama replied. “Slaveholders can’t get enough of beating on negroes, you need to do it, too? To our own child?”

“What should I done? Smile and pat her on the head? Mary El can’t be acting like she better than other folks just cause a rich family own her. This is our home, whether them Van Lews let you here one day a week or one day a year.”

“Lewis, you think I like it any better than you? Wake to them, work for them, doze off at night to them, every moment aching for you. But what are we supposed to do?”

“For one, you can stop carrying on about we in the house this and we in the house that. You in the house like them pretty horses in the barn. There to do the Van Lews’ work till you no use to them anymore, and then—”

Mama caught sight of me, and sucking her teeth hard to cut him off, she nodded toward where I stood in the doorway.

“What’s the matter, Papa?” I asked. “What’d Mama and me do wrong?”

He rose and walked toward me. I shrank back, afraid he might hit me again. My terror drew a look of bitter contrition I’d never seen before across Papa’s face. He knelt and reached out both hands, palms up to me.

“Mary El, you more precious to me than a ice room or fancy cushions or anything in that big house. Am I more precious to you than them things?”

I wanted to please Papa, to set everything right between him and me and Mama. Slipping my small hands into his large, strong ones, I nodded, my own shame at being spanked fading next to all the fear and humiliation in Papa’s question.

 

Old Master Van Lew was always a shadowy figure in my childhood, already suffering from the breathing troubles that everyone whispered would kill him. In the fall of ’44, not long after we’d exchanged the canvas floor coverings for wool carpets and taken the mosquito netting off the beds and paintings, he finally passed.

As Mama and I dressed the drawing room in black crepe, preparing for mourners who would call from as far away as Pennsylvania and New York, all she said was, “We in the house have plenty to do, good days or bad, happy times or sad.”

We in the house meant the seven Van Lew slaves. Me and Mama. The butler, Old Sam, who toiled beside us in the mansion and slept across from us in its garret. Zinnie, the cook, and the coachman Josiah and their daughters, Lilly and Daisy, who were quartered together above the summer kitchen at the side of the lot. We knew things people outside the Van Lew family couldn’t have guessed, things the Van Lews themselves wouldn’t care to admit. We listened close when Young Master John stumbled in after an evening at Hobzinger’s saloon, reeking of whiskey and raving about being made to stay in Richmond to tend the family business, when at the same age his sister, Miss Bet, was fanfared off to a fancy school in Philadelphia. We discovered the embroidered pink bonnet that the widowed brother of Mrs. Catlin, a neighbor woman, sent spinsterish Miss Bet, cut to pieces and stashed inside her chamber pot. Mama taught me how we were to mark such things and, with a few spare words or a gesture, share them among ourselves whenever the Van Lews’ backs were turned.

We in the house were always decently dressed, while some Richmond slaves didn’t even have shoes to wear on the city’s unpaved streets. Though Old Master Van Lew’s family held slaves, including Mama and Old Sam, when he lived in New York, neither Old Master Van Lew nor his Philadelphia-born bride could quite abide the way human chattel were treated in Virginia. We were Van Lew property. To Old Master and Mistress Van Lew, keeping us suitably clothed and fed was a measure of both their financial and their moral accomplishments.

The Van Lews were Northerners enough that when their housekeeper set her eyes on a handsome young blacksmith twenty-five years earlier, they understood she meant to be a proper wife to him. Though they made it clear they would neither sell her nor purchase him, they consented to the match. But no law tied my mama to my papa, or either parent to me.

Much as we slaves studied the Van Lews, still we didn’t know whether they had more capital or creditors. Which meant we didn’t know what might happen to us when the time came for the settling of Old Master Van Lew’s estate. The morning that George Griswold, the Van Lews’ family attorney, called on our widowed mistress, we lurked outside the drawing room, knowing we had as much interest in the terms of the will as the Van Lews themselves.

We heard how the mansion and all its contents—that meant Mama and me and our fellow slaves, along with the inanimate possessions—were held with a handsome annual income for Mistress Van Lew, until her death or remarriage, at which point they would pass to Young Master John. He was sole heir to his father’s businesses, hardware stores in Richmond and Petersburg, which Griswold reported had substantial assets and little debt. Miss Bet would receive a ten-thousand-dollar inheritance, a share of the annual yield from a small market farm the family kept southeast of Richmond, and residence in the mansion until her death or marriage.

That last stipulation had Zinnie snorting to Mama, “Guess we’ll be waiting on Miss Bet till the Good Lord take her home.”

 

In the months and years after Old Master Van Lew’s death, it seemed this prediction would surely come to pass. Miss Bet was headstrong just for the sake of being headstrong, constantly railing against show and ought, her favorite expression for anything expected of her that rubbed her as too constricting. Balls were frivolous, beaux were overbearing, ladies’ parlor conversations only dulled an educated mind—she so seldom accepted a social invitation, she hardly seemed to notice when they no longer arrived. She preferred to pore over the daily news-sheets until her fingertips were stained inky black, lecturing her mother and brother about what she read, and clipping out articles to stick in her scrapbook the way other belles might preserve pressed nosegays.

Miss Bet was so contrary she even declared she couldn’t abide slavery, claiming she came to understand its horrors when she was away at school up North. But such proclamations didn’t make her much of a favorite among her servants. “She needs her chamber pot emptied just as often as the rest of them,” Mama would mutter, to which Zinnie would reply, “She’s got to, ’cause she takes her meals just as often as they do.” Miss Bet’s anti-slavery sentiments seemed to owe more to her family’s and her neighbors’ embrace of the peculiar institution than to any true understanding of the feelings of us slaves. Especially when all her abolitionist speechifying only seemed to tat out trouble for us.

Papa, like many of the slaves who worked as skilled laborers in Richmond, received a small sum from his master each month to cover the costs of his room and board, as well as his clothing. He stretched this allotment as best he could, always saving enough to donate to some worthy cause or other at prayer meeting. And from time to time Papa laid by a few cents to purchase a trinket for me.

I knew come Christmas or my birthday I’d get such gifts, but the ones I enjoyed most came without my expecting them, what Papa called the just-because. “Just because you my treasure.” “Just because you helped Mrs. Wallace tote water from the well without being asked.” “Just because spring come at last.” Any old just-because was special coming from Papa. When we arrived at his cabin one Sunday morning late in 1846, he presented me with a length of bright orange ribbon, “just because the color almost as pretty as our Mary El.” He dangled the satin strand high in the air above me, demanding all manner of hugs and kisses before lowering it into my greedy hands.

The hue was rich and beautiful, and I sat on the cabin floor, winding the ribbon back and forth between my fingers. As I watched the ends flutter against my Sunday skirt, I thought of Elly Banks, with her bright dresses always so nicely trimmed. “Mama, will you sew my ribbon onto my sleeves?”

She frowned at the question, but it was Papa who answered. “It’s the Lord’s day, Mary El. No laboring today.”

“But we go to meeting today. And I want to wear my ribbon to meeting.”

“Meeting is for praying, not for showing off your new things.” Mama flashed a look at Papa. “See how such trifles fill her head, Lewis.”

“Pride ain’t vanity, Minerva. Time enough we teach the child the difference.” He nodded to me. “Mary El, leave your ribbon home today and give thanks for it at meeting. Be good this week, and your Mama gonna teach you how to fix the ribbon to your sleeves yourself before next Sunday.”

Though Mondays were always tiring for me and Mama as we made up the chores from our one day off, that Monday night I begged Mama to stay up and show me how to sew.

“Sewing is work, not play,” she said. “You sure you got the patience for it now?”

I nodded, and she went to our trunk and drew out the sewing kit she used to mend our clothing and Papa’s. She carefully chose a needle and measured out some thread.

“You’re not about to take any fancy stitches, so for now, hardest part will be just getting your needle threaded.” Quick as you please, she drew the thin strand through the eye of the needle. Then she drew it out again and handed me the needle and thread.

I squinted in the dim candlelight, imitating the way she licked the end of the thread. But even after several passes, I couldn’t loop the strand through the impossible hole.

“Mama, can’t you do it for me?”

“If you’re old enough to sew yourself some trim, then you’re old enough to thread a needle.” She laid one of her hands on each of mine. “Just tell yourself you can do it, like it’s a riddle you set yourself to solve.”

With her hands on mine, I held steady and drew the strand through. “I spy, with my little eye, a girl who’s got her thread through her own needle’s eye,” Mama said, her laughter more splendid than a whole spool of orange rickrack. Then she grew serious. “Mary El, that’s a hard task, and you should be proud you did it. You know the difference between pride and vanity?”

Remembering Papa’s words, I wanted to say yes. But fact was I didn’t know the difference, though I sure did know Mama would catch me if I lied. “No, Mama.”

“When you work hard at something, or do right by a person, it’s proper to be proud. The day Mr. Wallace took so sick, and your papa walked through that blizzard to fetch Aunt Binah to doctor to him, I was real proud. Taking all that risk to be out in such weather, just to help his friend.” She smiled, more to herself than to me. “Years ago, just about the time Miss Bet got born, Old Marse V went to Marse Mahon’s smithy and ordered up three fireplace sets. Your papa made those sets, and when he delivered them was the first day I ever seen him. The look of pride on his face as Mistress V admired what he’d made, well, he caught my eye right then.”

“Why didn’t Papa make enough sets for all the fireplaces?”

“Back then, three was all the fireplaces the Van Lews had. We were in a smaller house, farther down the slope of Church Hill. When Old Marse V moved the family here, he went back to Marse Mahon to have Papa make up five more sets, all to match the ones he made ten years earlier. You ever notice a difference in them?”

I shook my head. If you laid the andiron from one set beside the ash shovel from another, I couldn’t have said which rooms they came from, though I tended the fires often enough.

Mama’s smile broadened. “That’s a sign your papa knows smithing well, which is something to be proud of.”

“Is pride like money?”

“Just the opposite, nearly. What put that idea into your head?”

“When customers go to Marse Mahon’s smithy, they give him money for the work he does. And when Mrs. Wallace hires Ben Little”—Mama nodded at my mention of the free colored boy, a few years older than myself, who lived near Papa and his landlords—“to run an errand, she pays him money. So I thought pride is what slaves get instead of money, when they do something for somebody.”

“You can be proud of something you get money for, like Old Marse V was proud when his business grew so big he could buy this house. Sometimes, when your papa does a job that’s extra hard or gets it done extra quick, Marse Mahon even gives him a bit of money more than his usual board and keep. And Papa, he usually turns around and spends that money on a just-because for you or me, ’cause he’s proud he can. But slaves got a right to be proud of all the work we do, even when nobody pays us for it.”

“Like Zinnie’s proud of being the best cook in Richmond?”

“Well, that brings us round to vanity. Zinnie declares she’s the best cook in Richmond to put herself over Ida Tucker, whose marse said she was such a good cook he set her free. One time, when Ida’s marse was to dinner here, he said Zinnie’s harrico mutton was the most delicious thing he ever ate. I told Zinnie, and she’s bragged on it ever since.” Mama gave her teeth the slightest little suck, just enough for me to make out her gum squeal of disapproval. “Zinnie feels bad that Ida got free for being a good cook and she didn’t, so she likes to say she’s a better cook than Ida. Which maybe she is and maybe she ain’t, as I never tasted a thing Ida cooked and neither to my mind has Zinnie. We know Zinnie is a fine cook from eating her food every day, and she got a right to be proud. But if she thinks it and says it just to feel better than someone else, that’s vanity. Same as if someone wants to wear a new just-because to prayer meeting to show it off and make other girls jealous, that’s vanity, too.”

Catching Mama’s hint, I tried to direct her attention away from me and my ribbon, which it seemed we weren’t going to get around to sewing any time soon anyway. “When Miss Bet brags on her fine Philadelphia education, or Mistress Van Lew brags on how many books they got in Old Marse’s library, is all that pride or vanity?”

Mama got real quiet. She wasn’t one to talk up her masters’ saintliness, but she didn’t like to say too much flat out critical about them, either. Once Young Master John bought himself a riding horse that was real wild, and Josiah said the only way to break that stallion was to refuse to let it know how ornery it was. Just bridle and saddle it and hang on as best you could, trying not to let on how scared you were it might rear up and throw you. That’s how Mama was with the Van Lews, struggling to keep control over a beast bigger and more powerful than herself.

“White people live by different rules than us, Mary El. The rules I’m telling you about, pride versus vanity, those are Jesus’s rules. We got to try to live by His rules and by the ones whites make for us, both at once. That’s hard enough without worrying ourselves up all night about whether or not white people are holding themselves to Jesus’s rules, too.” She coaxed the threaded needle from my hand. “Why don’t we lay this by for now and get some sleep. Tomorrow I’ll show you how to make a nice stitch, and you’ll have that ribbon on your Sunday dress in no time.”

By the next night, Mama was done teaching on pride versus vanity and settled right in to teaching me chain-stitch, which she made me practice over and over on scrap until I could sew nice and straight. Once she was satisfied I could make strong, even stitches, she gave her nod. Sewing the ribbon to the fabric while taking care not to sew the sleeve closed took more concentration, and my head ached by the time both elbows of my Sunday dress were festooned. But when I held my handiwork before me, I shone bright as my ribbon with delight.

“Now you can be proud of having trimmed that up yourself,” Mama said, “because you worked hard to do it.”

Though I smiled up at her, I was still all vanity on the inside, impatient as ever to show off the ribbon.

The next afternoon, when the Van Lews were out and Mama was scrubbing the hall floor and I was supposed to be making up the bedchambers, I snuck up to our quarters, threw off my everyday frock, and put on the Sunday dress. With my sleeve ribbons tied into the biggest bows I could manage, I stole back down to Mistress Van Lew’s dressing room and twirled before the looking glass, losing myself in scenes I played out in my head, in which Elly Banks begged to know where I got such a fine gown.

Mama must have been calling me a good long time, because her voice was hot with anger when I finally noticed it. “Run get the floor cloth quick, Mary El. Miss Bet’s waiting outside to come in.” I fetched the cloth to the front hall and stretched it open along the floor, so Miss Bet could walk across without slipping or dampening her shoes. I forgot all about my Sunday dress, until I looked up and saw Mama’s face.

Before she could reprimand me, Miss Bet came inside. “How charming you look, Mary. Is that a new frock?”

Mama answered for me. “It’s her Sunday dress, Miss Bet. She must’ve just slipped into it while my back was turned. Child knows better than to wear a Sunday dress when we’re working hard, don’t you, Mary El?”

I nodded, but Miss Bet shook her head like she was trying to loose herself from her own yellow curls. “It’s an offense the child should have to work at all. Mary, don’t you wish you could wear such outfits every day, like white girls do?”

I didn’t need to see how fiercely Mama was squinting and frowning to know the danger in answering that question. “I only wanted to see how my new ribbons look. Papa bought them for me just-because. And I sewed them on myself.”

The last part was drowned out by the sound of the Van Lew carriage arriving outside. “Mary El, you get upstairs this minute and change, ’fore Mistress V comes through that door.” Mama clipped her words so quick, I didn’t dare dawdle. “Miss Bet, please don’t say anything about this. The child’s young, but she works hard, even when Mistress is out of the house.”

“Nonsense, Aunt Minnie. Mary, come right back here. I want Mother to see how nice you look.”

Much as I wanted to hide myself away from Mistress Van Lew, there was no ignoring Miss Bet’s command. Already partway up the staircase, I turned back just as the front door opened to Mistress Van Lew and Young Master John. Mama, Miss Bet, and I must have made quite a tableau, because they looked at us like we were three foxes in a henhouse.

“Mother, you know I have asked your leave to pay our servants some small remuneration for their labors,” Miss Bet said.

“And you know Mother has denied that request,” Young Master John answered. “There is no need to antagonize her, or to disgruntle the servants.” In the two years since his father’s passing, Young Master John had grown important in his role as man of the house. He reprimanded his older sister the way Zinnie slaughtered a recalcitrant sow, sighing aloud over the duty, though we all knew he took pleasure in performing it.

But Miss Bet wouldn’t be scotched so easily. “The servants are hardly disgruntled. Look how happy Mary is, wearing a ribbon her father bought her.” By then I felt about as happy as a housefly caught in a barn spider’s web. But Miss Bet wasn’t paying me much mind. “Surely, if a man of Timothy Mahon’s standing can give his slaves wages, so can we.”

Mistress Van Lew’s face flushed fever red, and she turned to Mama. “Aunt Minnie, am I a good mistress?”

There’s only one way for a slave to answer when her owner asks that question. “Yes, ma’am,” Mama said.

“Have you or your child ever gone hungry in my house?”

“No, ma’am, never.”

“Do you go about without proper attire, summer or winter?”

“No, ma’am.”

Mistress Van Lew turned back to Miss Bet. “I provide for my servants far more than law or custom require. I will not have anyone make a mockery of my generosity.” She looked up at me. “Mary, come here.”

Dread thudded low with each slow step I took. As soon as I got near, Mistress Van Lew reached out and snatched the bows from one elbow, then the other. My stitches broke easily under her firm tugs. Holding the bits of ribbon out to me, she nodded toward the drawing room. “Put these on the fire.”

Miss Bet hurried up beside me, protesting, “Mother, I cannot agree—”

Young Master John cut her off. “This is a matter between Mother and her servants. It is none of your concern.”

I walked across the drawing room and stood before the fireplace, squeezing my clenched hand so the smooth silk of the ribbon rubbed across my palm. I thought of how Elly would never see my just-because. How nobody could ever treat her and her brothers and sisters the way Mistress Van Lew treated me. How it wasn’t fair that after I worked so hard to sew on the ribbon, now I wouldn’t have it at all.

Only when the heat began to singe my wrist did I open my hand and let the pieces fall. As I watched, the flames licked up, consuming the orange ribbon till the colors of the fire and the colors of my lost just-because blurred inseparably. I still couldn’t tell pride from vanity, but I sure could tell slave from free.

 

When early spring warmed the Virginia morning, Mistress Van Lew and Miss Bet took their breakfast on the back veranda. The garden just past the house, the fruit arbor that sloped to the edge of the property, and the view of Richmond and the James River beyond were all so pretty that looking out at them seemed like a hazy slumber dream, until a dull ache in my overworked arms roused me from my reverie. As I fanned the first flies of the season from the Van Lews, they buzzed around my head instead. I didn’t dare swat them away. I’d been told enough times not to wriggle or shift during these meals, to stand perfectly still except for the movement of my arms. No motion allowed except what served the Van Lews.

To distract myself, I listened as Miss Bet read to her mother from the Richmond Whig. Most days she chose dull stories about the Virginia legislature or President Polk. But this morning she read the report of a dashing swindler who posed as a gentleman to rob travelers on the train between Richmond and Washington. Such a story set my eight-year-old self wide-eyed with wonder, and I hung on every word. More than that, I remembered every word.

This was my solitary amusement, listening as grown-ups spoke and repeating their conversations to myself while I was working. Rehearsing the tale of the train robber in my head made the rest of the Van Lews’ breakfast hour pass quickly, and before I knew it, Mistress Van Lew announced she was ready to take her morning stroll about the arbor. As Miss Bet led her mother down the steps to the garden, Mama gathered the breakfast things onto the silver serving tray. I hung the fan in its place behind one of the white columns that rose two stories to the veranda roof. Clearing the news-sheet from the table, I began to recite the wonderful story out loud.

The crash of china startled me. Mama was not a clumsy woman. Never one to drop a cup and saucer. Perhaps it was a trick of the heat, but as I turned to look her way, it seemed the whole world stood still, except for me and the buzzing flies.

And then all at once, Mistress Van Lew stormed back up the steps. “Aunt Minnie, we are not in New York. You know the laws of Virginia, and we have made our wishes very clear on this matter. You were not to teach the child to read.”

Mama fell to her knees. “Ma’am, I never taught her to read. I swear to Jesus, I didn’t.”

Mistress Van Lew knew Mama wasn’t one to swear to Jesus falsely. Our irate mistress turned to her daughter.

“Bet, this abolitionist nonsense of yours has gone too far. How you have managed it, I do not know, but now at least you see your faith in the servants is poorly placed. The girl may know how to read, but she does not know enough to keep your secrets.” Her eyes went narrow. “Perhaps sending Mary to Lumpkin’s Alley will teach you both a lesson.”

Fear cramped my stomach, catching its echo in Mama’s low moan. White Richmond called the public whipping post Lumpkin’s Alley, after the slave-auction house next door. But to colored folks it was Devil’s Half-Acre, the most dreaded spot in the whole city.

Miss Bet jutted out her chin. “I am not sorry to see a slave learn, it is true, but this is as strange to me as it is to you. If you have the child flogged to punish me for something I haven’t done, you will only prove that slavery is every bit as evil as I believe it to be.”

Mistress Van Lew whirled at me, cracking a hard slap against my cheek. I felt the sudden sting and knew it was a pale promise of the beating I’d get at the whipping post. “Who taught you to read, child? I will stand no lies.”

“No one, ma’am. I don’t know how to read.” Mama was so near, yet I sensed she didn’t dare reach out to comfort me, that I needed to say more to make Mistress Van Lew leave us be. “Miss Bet read the story to you. I only remembered what she said.”

Mistress Van Lew snatched the news-sheet from my hand and passed it to her daughter. “Tell us now, without the paper, what Miss Bet read.”

And so I repeated the story, as Miss Bet followed along in the news-sheet. After only a few sentences, she burst out, “Mother, it is remarkable. The child recites the article word for word.” Miss Bet beamed at my accomplishment. “She wasn’t reading at all. Stranger than that, she can recall exactly what she hears.”

Mistress Van Lew spent a long moment considering what this meant. Finally, she looked from me, to Mama, to Miss Bet. “No one is to know of this, do I make myself clear to all of you? This is a dangerous thing. Do not speak of it again.” Her daily promenade in the garden forgotten, she went into the mansion, leaving each of us to make our own sense of what I’d done.

Mama took the revelation of my talent as a sign from on high. For as long as I could remember, I’d heard her recount every tale in the Bible about a barren woman, remembering how she spent the first twenty years of her marriage childless. “I prayed every day, thinking of Sarah and Rebecca and Rachel. Wasn’t a one of them bore a child right off. That poor wife of Manoah, not even a name for her, who had Samson. Elizabeth, who carried John the Baptist. Those women were blessed with a child to raise up to serve the Lord, and year after year I begged Jesus to do the same for me. Then at last you come along.”

Mama’s vow to dedicate me to Jesus’s service always gave her reason to cajole and connive Him and me both. “You know this child is meant for Your work, Jesus”—thus would begin anything from a reprimand of my ill behavior to as outlandish a demand as nagging Jesus to set me free. If Mama suspected either Jesus or me of slacking in fulfilling the plan she envisioned, she was sure to let us know. And whatever she felt I did right became certain proof to her that this plan was already writ in stone.

So despite the law and Mistress Van Lew’s prohibition, after that morning on the veranda Mama set time aside every Sunday for my lessons. She’d trace out a few words in the ashes of Papa’s fireplace. Keeping her voice low, she always began, “This being Virginia, I sure can’t teach a slave that this writing means . . .” and finished by saying what she’d written. It didn’t take any more instruction than that for me to learn to read and write.

Miss Bet, ever fain to flout her mother, took her own interest in me. As I grew older, she pressed books from her father’s library on Mama, nodding my way. Now and again, she even sat me down for an arithmetic lesson while the rest of her family was out. But my memory for Mistress Van Lew’s anger was just as keen as my memory for what I heard and read. I hated her for it, until I was grown enough to realize the lesson she taught me was as valuable as any of Mama’s: A slave best keep her talents hidden, feigned ignorance being the greatest intelligence in the topsy-turvy house of bondage.