The Secrets of Mary Bowser by Lois Leveen Page B

state, nor would Mama register as a free negro. She would be free, but no one in Richmond besides her, Papa, and the Van Lews would know it. She wouldn’t have to worry about leaving the state or facing re-enslavement so long as Miss Bet remained alive and well. Every month Miss Bet would make the free papers over again with the new date, destroying the old ones, so if something happened to her, Mama would still have a year, more or less, before she’d have to leave Virginia.
    “I don’t like my wife posing as a slave, that’s for sure,” Papa said. “But I never been wild about my wife being a slave, neither.” It was the first joke I’d heard him make in weeks. He turned serious again before he continued. “Minerva, I been searching for the strength to let you go, but I ain’t found it yet. If you sure you want to stay this way, I ain’t about to stop you.”
    “I’m sure,” Mama said. “If I go North now, I’m gonna work hard for some white family or other, who knows how they treat me or pay me, where I’m gonna live, or any of it. I stay in Richmond, I stay with you. I’ll make Miss Bet give me leave to spend nights here, instead of the Van Lew house.” Mama’s mouth tugged down with the weight of all she was considering. “I’m hard-pressed to trust any white person, but she’s trying to do right by my daughter, I think she’ll pay me fair, and I’ll have my freedom papers the whole time. I been a slave wishing for freedom my whole life. Being a free woman play-acting at slavery can’t be harder than that.”
    I was so used to pretending I wasn’t listening to such conversations that I forgot Mama’d given me leave to participate. When I remembered, I spoke up. “If I go to Philadelphia for school, I can’t come back to Virginia.” The excitement I’d stoked all week long was instantly tempered as I thought on everything I stood to lose. “I’ll never see you and Papa again.”
    Mama squeezed my hand so I felt all the love and fear and hope passing between us. “No one besides Miss Bet needs to know where you’ve gone to, and if they don’t know, they can’t keep you from coming back.” Her voice caught. “Listen enough to white people talk, seems like none of them agree about slavery at all. I hear Miss Bet read to Mistress V from those abolitionist papers how whites and negroes up North even work together to end it. Smart girl like you, living free in Philadelphia, maybe you be the one who figures out how to get rid of slavery once and for all.”
    That day Mama taught me that what other people see you as doesn’t determine who you really are. She could let people think she was a slave, if that meant she could be free and live with Papa. We could let them think I’d been sent to work the Van Lews’ market farm or rented out to a family friend in Petersburg, if that meant I could go to Philadelphia without imperiling any chance of coming back to Richmond. And who knows what I might do—not just for myself but maybe, like Mama said, for all the slaves—if I could have my education and still pass between North and South. Miss Bet always howled and raved against show and ought. But for colored folks in Virginia, survival meant biting our tongues and biding our time, while scheming like Mama did all the while.
    As soon as Mama gave her the nod, Miss Bet began sending letters off to Philadelphia to secure a place for me. Miss Bet wouldn’t think of sending me to the city’s lone colored public school, in which two hundred students met with a single teacher in a broken-down building over a mere dozen books. But it was no easy matter for her to find a private school that would enroll me. A few Quaker-sponsored institutions existed to educate negro boys, but they were just as closed to me as the white academies. Yet Miss Bet kept at it, the way she always did when something fueled her ire. As weeks passed, then months, she tried to distract us from the delay by tutoring me herself,