Free Mrs. Grant and Madame Jule by Jennifer Chiaverini Page A

the skin of her apple-red cheeks had begun to slough off in thin, white flakes, sending the missus into lamentations of worry about permanent damage to her complexion. If Jule could win the missus’s gratitude while soothing Miss Emma’s discomfort, that would make for a good day’s work.
    Annie planted a fist on her hip and fixed Julia with a hard, worried stare. “A slave with nothing to do’s always the first to get sold when money’s tight.”
    Unsettled, Jule went about her work more quickly, and the next day, when she overheard Nell and her mother discussing a friend’s betrothal, she suggested that they offer the bride-to-be Jule’s hairdressing services for the day of her engagement party. Nell’s friend was so delighted with her elegant tresses—which attracted the admiration of every other young lady at the party and won a special compliment from her fiancé—that she begged Nell to extend the favor again on her wedding day.
    “This a gift to her from you like last time,” Jule asked as she was packing up her little satchel of combs and ribbons and pomades, “or are you hiring me out to her?”
    A thoughtful glimmer came into Nell’s eye. “A gift, as before,” Nell said, but a musing tone in her voice satisfied Jule that she had planted the seed of an idea.
    Soon thereafter, the missus summoned Jule to the parlor and informed her that in Julia’s absence, the Dent family intended to hire Jule out to ladies who required her special skills. “I realize you don’t often go out amid strangers, but you needn’t fear,” the mistress assured her. “You’ll work only for families we know well and trust, and none beyond the Gravois Settlement.”
    “Yes, missus. I ain’t afraid of strangers.” That wasn’t entirely true. Jule wasn’t afraid of ladies, even the short-tempered ones. Their menfolk, though—they made her wary.
    “Your wages you will bring to me,” the mistress continued. “Anything you earn above that, whether gifts or gratuities, you may keep.”
    As the months passed and Jule’s fame as a skilled hairdresser spread, the old master crowed over her earnings, paid off debts, and bought his wife an exquisite pearl necklace to thank her for her ingenuity. He persuaded her to send Jule farther afield, hiring her out to acquaintances in St. Louis and then to strangers recommended by friends. Jule walked to work when the family resided in the city, but when they moved out to White Haven, Gabriel drove her to her appointments. Afterward, if they were not expected back too soon, Gabriel would direct the horses through neighborhoods where free colored folk lived.
    The freeborn and manumitted colored residents of St. Louis thrived in humble alleys and grand neighborhoods, and although they could not vote or hold office, some, the self-described Colored Aristocracy, acquired great wealth and the power that accompanied it. Jule’s heart quickened whenever she glimpsed the famed Madame Pelagie Rutgers, a former slave of Haitian descent who had married the mulatto son of a wealthy Dutch merchant. She had amassed a fortune in real estate, from selling tracts of land at huge profits as the city expanded and by renting her own commercial properties and tenements to white businessmen. Rumor had it that Madame Rutgers was worth almost a half million dollars, a vast, almost incomprehensible amount. To Jule, who had no surname and knew few women of color accorded so much as the respectful title of “missus,” Madame Rutgers’s honorific was as much a sign of her status and success as her furs and jewels and fine residence. Jule hoped someday Madame Rutgers would find herself in need of a hairdresser, and that a satisfied customer would recommend her.
    “I’m saving every cent I earn,” Jule told Gabriel one humid afternoon as they lingered on the bluff above the Mississippi, gazing across the churning expanse of muddy water to the Illinois shore, postponing as long as they could their return