Free The Secrets of Mary Bowser by Lois Leveen

Mama, the station had already slipped past.

Four
    A ll my childhood, Richmond always seemed the most important place in the world. Factories and mills and mines. Grand houses on the Hill and hidden homes in the Bottom. The massive Tredegar Iron Works, one of the largest metal manufactories in the nation. Yet staring out the carriage window as we were jostled along Philadelphia’s streets that first afternoon, the difference astounded me. The noisy bustle of the crowds, cityscapes hued only in russets and grays with no greens, the rush and push that charged the air, all stood in contrast to home. Even the streets themselves, not dirt like Richmond’s—dirt that turned to mud and muck so much of the year, dirt we were endlessly cleaning off the Van Lews’ stoop and shoes and clothes and floors—but paved with cobblestones, row after row for miles. And everything so tight and narrow. These Philadelphia thoroughfares squeezed themselves between the packed brick row houses, just as the row houses squeezed themselves between one another, all jammed in quick as could be.
    Each year during Christmastide, Papa and I played a game in which he led me about the city with my eyes closed, and I had to guess where we were by what I smelled. That was Richmond. Your nose could tell you as much as your eyes, if you knew the difference between the sweet aroma of tobacco factories and the stink of Butchertown, the enticing scent of a bakery or the heavy odor of the docks. I feared that in Philadelphia I’d be lost even with my eyes open, no sight, sound, or smell familiar to me. The brick facades of the buildings seemed indistinguishable, and who could remember so many new streets? I leaned back against the carriage seat, wondering if this city set everyone’s head spinning the way it did mine.
    Miss Bet had arranged for me to board with a negro family, a widow and her twenty-year-old daughter. Now she began to talk of my good fortune at having such a fine home.
    Papa hadn’t even wanted me to think of the Van Lew house as home. It hardly seemed right to imagine any place I might live in this alien city becoming home to me. But I reminded myself that Papa and Mama wanted me to come here. They would wish me to act warm and not standoffish toward my hosts. I fiddled the edges of my cuffs over it, until at last the hack pulled to a halt.
    “Here we are, ma’am, 168 Gaskill Street,” the driver announced as he swung open the carriage door. Emerging from the cab after Miss Bet, I looked up at the narrowest building on the block. No more than twelve feet wide and crammed so tight between its neighbors, it put me in mind of how Mama struggled each morning to fasten Mistress Van Lew and Miss Bet into their corsets. The first floor had only one window, while each of the three stories above it had just two, covered by a series of mismatched shutters. The shutters and the front door badly needed fresh paint.
    Miss Bet surveyed the dilapidated exterior. “What do you think, Mary?”
    I looked the building up and down, trying to summon some enthusiasm. Or at least to hide my surprise over how run-down the home of a free family of color was. “Four whole floors, Miss Bet. How very luxurious.”
    “No, Mary, it’s not . . . that is to say . . . this is an apartment building. The family with whom you will be living occupies only one of the floors.”
    Plenty of the slaves in Richmond were housed over some work space or other, the way Zinnie and Josiah and the girls were quartered above the summer kitchen. But I’d never heard of a building four stories high, divided up floor by floor like that. Free Northerners living as crowded together as the hens in the Van Lew chickenhouse.
    Miss Bet fished a calling card out of her reticule and handed it to the driver. “Please bring this up to Mrs. Octavia Upshaw.”
    A smirk danced across the cabman’s wind-chapped face, but he took the card and disappeared inside the door. Within minutes a window