Sometime after Lizzie finished her tea, Mrs. Pleasant asked if she was happy with her life. She should have said yes. She rarely felt unhappy. Daily association with the downtrodden kept her keenly aware of her advantages. She knew the pleasure of doing good. She knew moments of great joy, often in church during the high notes of particular hymns. She would open her mouth to sing them, and her heart would leap with her voice up to where the sunlight filtered through the colored glass, igniting the motes of dust above her head. So many pleasures. The sight of red tulips. The little buzz of life in the grass. A letter with her name and foreign stamps. The smell of rain. The taste of pomegranate jelly. Reading novels in the afternoon, with no corset and her shoes off and her feet on a chair.
And at the moment of the question, she was feeling nothing at all. It had seemed to Lizzie that as the room returned to normal around her, she herself shrank away like Alice in Wonderland in the “Drink Me” episode. Her concerns, her alarms, became tiny and laughable. She remembered how lovely it was to be small and cared for. She remembered a fever from many years before, not a high fever, just high enough to be exhilarating. She remembered Effie sitting on the edge of the bed and feeding her sips of a salty broth with one of her mother’s special apostle spoons.
And yet she answered that she was not. In direct contradiction, she then went on at length about the gratifications of her work. She couldn’t seem to stop herself. Somehow she mentioned that her mother had once said she played the piano as if she had hooves instead of hands. She felt no distress over this, and yet her eyes filled with tears. She pulled her handkerchief from her bodice and wiped her nose. The handkerchief was hot, and stiff with soap.
“My mother left me naked out in the pouring rain,” Mrs. Bell said. Lizzie had already managed to forget this.
“My mother was sold off.” Mrs. Pleasant sat with her arms crossed and her hands showing. Her fingernails were like white pearls against her dark skin. “The overseer was frightened of her eyes. He couldn’t bear the way she looked at him. He sickened and died soon after.”
Lizzie felt outdone. She was tempted to say something of her father—there were things she could say! But one look at Mrs. Pleasant made her see that she would not win this, either.
And she didn’t really mind being bested. She was finding, to her surprise, that she was quite relaxed in the company of notorious women. Teresa Bell was said to have been a prostitute. Mary Ellen Pleasant was rumored to sell babies to Chinamen. Lizzie felt that she could say anything; how could mere words lower her here? “I’ve never been in love,” someone said, and most likely it was Lizzie herself, although she very much hoped not. She put her handkerchief away, tucked it to the side of her breast and felt her heart beat as she did so. Her pulse was rapid and skimmed over the surface of her skin, delicate as a bird’s. She could hear it, washing through her ears, loud and then soft and then loud again. She was so involved in these observations that she forgot the unseemly topic of love had been raised.
“Anyone who wants love can have it,” Mrs. Pleasant said. “There are ways.”
“Charms,” explained Mrs. Bell.
“You can do anything you want. You don’t have to be the same person your whole life. As to love, you’re better off without. That’s about all I know about that!”
“Mr. Bell and I are very much in love,” said Mrs. Bell. There was an odd pause. “With each other.” She was seated by Lizzie again; she tapped on Lizzie’s arm. “Mrs. Pleasant reads tea leaves,” she said. “If you want to know your future. Not that it’s always such a good idea.”
“Miss Hayes doesn’t believe in that sort of thing,” Mrs. Pleasant observed, and rightly so, but Mrs. Bell’s warning aside, who wouldn’t want her tea leaves read?
“Please,” said Lizzie.
She watched as Mrs. Pleasant peered into her cup, dumped the dregs onto a saucer, let them settle, looked again, and finally smashed them with the back of her spoon in a gesture that could only disturb. The clock struck and still Mrs. Pleasant contemplated the ruins of Lizzie’s tea. She looked for so long that Lizzie suspected she was seeing something bad.
But when Mrs. Pleasant spoke it was all bland bits of other fortunes. “You’ve come to a magical juncture,” she said, which was nice, since Lizzie had been feeling old and used up. Nice to think she was at the beginning of something. “A critical turning. You could lose your way.” This was less nice.
“You must watch out for three signs. This is the order of them: a blue-eyed man, a white dog, and the number twelve. When you’ve seen them all, you’ll have a choice to make.” She looked straight at Lizzie’s face and didn’t look away. Lizzie hated being looked at.
“Your impulses are good,” Mrs. Pleasant said finally, “but you don’t trust them. You fret overly about appearances and say things you don’t really think. Put all that away when you make this choice, or you’ll blunder.”
And that was it. “I see,” Lizzie replied. “That’s helpful, then,” which was not what she really thought. And nothing at all about falling in love, which she’d thought was the whole point. She would have liked to ask, but having already introduced the matter once, she felt it would be nagging.
At just that moment a large Negro in a black top hat entered the room. He whispered something to Mrs. Pleasant, who rose. “The carriage is hitched,” she said. “I’ll get you to it.”
She took Lizzie’s arm, which was quite unnecessary. Lizzie felt a small piece of paper pressed into her hand, a wave of lavender perfume. “Here’s where to buy that tea. You just tell the druggist I sent you, he’ll take special care. Sam, please see Miss Hayes safely back.”
Lizzie’s arm was transferred to Sam. “I’m perfectly well able to walk,” she said crossly, and then looked up to see the crippled girl, Viola, who wasn’t. “So sorry,” she offered, vaguely aware that an apology would only make matters worse.
SIX
In later years the San Francisco Chronicle would refer to the residents of the House of Mystery as the strangest bunch ever to live in the city. The Bell household had a predilection for assumed names and fanciful histories. The 1890 census showed several of them lying about their ages as well.
To have seen the inside, as Lizzie had just done, to have your tea leaves read by Mrs. Pleasant herself, was rare enough to be worth the telling of it. Yet Lizzie found she was reluctant to do so. Her own role was an ambiguous one; she had made herself too much at home.
In fact, Nell Harris told Mrs. Lake that Lizzie had returned to the Brown Ark in a disgraceful state of intoxication. The children all witnessed it, Nell said—Lizzie, with her hair tipped off the side of her head like a melting pudding, setting her feet down with such deliberation and laughing like a crazy woman about it. She had asked Nell if Nell thought she was happy. As if a person could think she was happy, but really not be. As if Nell had time to worry about such things!
And then, when pressed, Lizzie admitted to having learnt absolutely nothing further about Jenny Ijub. Oh, Nell could see poor Lizzie had been as clay in the hands of the cunning Mrs. Pleasant.
While Lizzie had been off tippling, a sparrow had flown into the basement of the Brown Ark. Before Nell could sweep it out the door with the broom, the orange cat had gotten it. This information reduced Lizzie to shockingly voluble sobs—“Poor bright little spirit!” she said in a trembly voice—and then she went upstairs to the tower room and fell asleep at once on the scratchy settee.
If Nell and Lizzie had been a generation older, if they’d read the Pacific Appeal, the paper that came from the Negro community, instead of the Wasp, the things they thought they knew about Mrs. Pleasant might have been quite different. As it was, their familiarity with her was based almost entirely on the coverage of a sensational and long-running court case commonly called the Sharon business.
A lady’s name, Lizzie’s mother had always told her, appears in the paper only twice, once when she’s married and once when she’s buried. Yet there Mrs. Pleasant
was, often as not, on page six, or page twelve, a few paragraphs down, or in the very headline itself. On one side of the Sharon case was a red-haired beauty from Missouri named Sarah Althea (Allie) Hill. On the other was William Sharon, ex–U.S. senator and executive of the Bank of California. Sharon was a San Francisco millionaire, a title reserved for those whose fortunes exceeded thirty million.
Sharon and Hill were either married or they weren’t when she sued him for divorce on grounds of adultery. She had a letter from him attesting to the marriage, a letter Sharon claimed was a forgery.
In 1885, with the trial ongoing, William Sharon had died, leaving Allie widowed or not, disgraced or unimaginably wealthy, or some combination of the above. It took four years for the courts to rule finally against her.
Mrs. Pleasant was rumored to have paid all Allie’s legal costs. She spent many days in court at Allie’s side for no reason anyone could see, except to fix the judge with the evil eye.
The witnesses for William Sharon included an endless succession of star, palm, and tea-leaf readers, spirit mediums and charm workers, all of whom claimed that, under Mrs. Pleasant’s guidance, Allie had fed the ex-senator love potions, placed items of power in fresh graves, pierced the dried heart of a pigeon with nine pins and worn it in a red silk bag about her neck. These were not seen to be the actions of a wife, and Allie had denied them.
The testimony that followed concerned previous lovers, suicide attempts, even the details of carnal intimacies, right there in the press, where any innocent child might read them. It was the sort of case that exposed no end of human frailties and, Lizzie thought sadly, no one’s more than her own. It was so like a good novel, except for the being-real part. Real embarrassments, real heartbreak, real death. She was ashamed of how avidly she’d followed it. Her mother would have canceled the paper first.
So there Lizzie was, only three signs shy of a magical juncture and too ashamed to tell anyone. She spoke only to Nell about the visit and was as brief as could be. In this way she hoped to conceal her intense interest.
It was an interest widely shared. How did a colored woman, an ex-slave, come to have so much money and influence, San Francisco asked itself, and gave itself three possible answers.
ONE
Proposition One: Mary E. Pleasant rose to power and prominence in San Francisco through her cooking.
A better case can be made for this than one might imagine. When Mrs. Pleasant arrived in 1852, San Francisco was little more than a mining camp. Streets were made by sinking emptied whiskey bottles into the mud; shacks were made by dismantling boats and wagons. The food was revolting.
Mrs. Pleasant was already in possession of a sizable inheritance from her first husband when she went to work as housekeeper at an elegant bachelor club on Washington Street.
Among those who sat at her table in the early years were:
The Woodworth brothers—Fred, part owner of the fabulous Ophir mine, and Selim, acting consul for China and a commodore in the U.S. Navy.
Newton Booth, who would go on to be governor and a U.S. senator.
Those kings of the Comstock, William Ralston, who ran the Bank of California and built the Palace Hotel, and William Sharon, senator from Nevada, who inherited the Palace after Ralston drowned.
Senator David S. Broderick and California Supreme Court justice David S. Terry, before the latter killed the former in a dubiously conducted duel and had to flee the state.
And Representative Milton Latham, a lawyer, financier, and railroad engineer.
Here were some of the wealthiest men in San Francisco, most of them quite fond of her. Stock tips, management concerns, and investment strategies were passed about the table as readily as salt and pepper.
Mrs. Pleasant was sharp, well funded, and well informed. By 1880 she owned a stable, a saloon, a dairy farm, a brothel, two boardinghouses, several residences, and considerable amounts of undeveloped land in Oakland and Berkeley. She’d invested in railroads, mining, and ranching, and managed to dodge the crash of 1873 and the crookedness of 1879.
No other explanation of her wealth is necessary. No explanation of power besides wealth is needed.
Many of her recipes survive. Some call for ingredients in proportions large enough to serve more than a hundred diners.
Proposition Two: Mary E. Pleasant rose to power and prominence in San Francisco through a system of carefully managed secrets.
At that same table, Mrs. Pleasant must have heard a great many things besides stock tips. She was widely known as a superior cook, but equally widely as someone who would keep a secret.
She was a woman for women to turn to in a scrape. She found hospitals for girls in trouble, homes for unwanted children; Teresa Bell’s diaries connect her to one Dr. Monser, who ran a foundling hospital (and later died in San Quentin while serving sentence for a botched abortion). Both black women and white women depended on her; she made no distinctions.
Before the war, Mary Ellen Pleasant had taken enormous personal risks on behalf of slaves. She carried money to John Brown and participated in the Franchise League. She went to court to oppose those laws that penalized free blacks.
After the war, people began to refer to her as the Black City Hall. She loaned money to new businesses. She donated to black churches. She found domestic positions for new arrivals in the hotels and in the households of her wealthy white friends.
Any servant sees things, and some of these servants had been trained by slavery to be observant on penalty of death. If an unmarried daughter seemed tired in the mornings, if a married man had unusual appetites or an extra wife back East, if there were gambling debts or domestic violence or alcoholic madness, this information was likely to reach Mrs. Pleasant.
A favor can be freely extended out of gratitude for a secret kept. A favor can be extorted in return for the promise of secrecy. From the outside it may be hard to distinguish the former from the latter. But Teresa Bell was not the only one to call it blackmail.
Proposition Three: Mary E. Pleasant rose to a position of power and prominence in San Francisco through Vodoun.
Mrs. Pleasant sometimes said that her mother had been a Vodoun priestess killed by slave owners frightened of her power. (Sometimes she said other things.) Sometimes she said that she herself had used her Vodoun power to escape slavery.
She was related through her second marriage to the famous Marie LaVeau and had been a guest of that house before sailing to California. In New Orleans, LaVeau created a political base through domestic spies, blackmail, and matchmaking. Mrs. Pleasant appears to have adapted these same methods to San Francisco.
She enjoyed close friendships with several white women for whom she’d found, if not husbands, then near-equivalents to husbands. She introduced Selim Woodworth to his wife, and Governor Booth to a woman whom he felt unable to marry for political reasons, but with whom he had a long relationship as well as a child. She introduced Thomas and Teresa Bell.
A few years before her death, the Chronicle ran an article on Mrs. Pleasant entitled “Queen of the Voodoos.” It was a very unpleasant article, and one of the things it accused her of was genuine belief.
From an item in the Examiner,
October 13, 1895:
Safely locked in her loyal breast are the secret histories of many of the prominent families of the coast. She has supplied the ladder upon which more than one proud woman and ambitious man have climbed to wealth and social position. Her purse—for she has been for years a wealthy woman—has ever been open to aid the needy and unfortunate…. Neither creed, color, sex nor condition in life ever had meaning for her when her interest had been once awakened. Her deeds of charity are as numerous as the gray hairs in her proud old head.
An acquaintance, as quoted
in the Call, May 7, 1899:
“She has not a spark of affection, nor an atom of conscience. She is the smoothest talker and the shrewdest woman in San Francisco. She is childish in her vanities, diabolical in her schemings
, a woman to whom the feeling of power is the breath of life, and one who realizes that it is money that gives power. An intellectual giant, but a moral idiot.”
TWO
On the night following her visit to the House of Mystery, Lizzie awoke sometime after dark. It took her a moment to know where she was, since she was not in her bed, where she ought to be. She couldn’t imagine why she hadn’t told Sam to take her home. A fat moon floated just outside the tower window, one small, dark cloud patting its face like a powder puff. There was a tatted antimacassar under her cheek; when she raised her head, she could feel its web indented into her skin.
She was still dressed, even to her shoes. She still had Mrs. Pleasant’s slip of paper balled in her hand. The gaslights had been long ago put out. She took the paper to the window. She could see the halo of lights over the downtown, too far away to be useful. There was also Mrs. Pleasant’s elaborate script to contend with. Plus the ink had smeared from the heat of Lizzie’s fingers. But she thought the address was in Chinatown.
She’d not eaten since breakfast. She made her way, partly by sight, partly by touch, partly by memory to the basement and the kitchen. The Brown Ark groaned from her weight on the stairs. The parlor clock chimed a quarter-hour. She groped through the dark pantry for an apple. When she bit down, it became a potato instead. After her initial disappointment, she thought it tasty enough. She was very hungry!
What might Mrs. Pleasant and Mrs. Bell have eaten for dinner? Lizzie wondered whether Mr. Bell would have joined them; somehow she thought not. Lizzie pictured the two women at the table together, Teresa and Mary Ellen, both of them elegantly gowned, necklaces flickering in the candlelight, the murmur of their voices. Laughter. She herself might have been spoken of, though she couldn’t imagine what would be said. It was strangely exciting to think of being talked of by two women so often talked of. Ordinarily Lizzie hated the idea of being a topic for conversation.