The
Early Years
According to
her various memoirs, Pleasant, was born a slave near Augusta, Georgia
between 1814 and 1817, and according to ships records and confirming
testimony, she arrived in San Francisco in April, 1852 to escape persecution
under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, for slave rescue work in the
East. However, the courage to do that and other great deeds started
in childhood.
At
birth, Mary had no last name. In her first memoir she said that she
was born the illegitimate child of a Virginia governor's son (John
H. Pleasants) and an enslaved Haitian voodoo* priestess, so Mary had
to create names for herself. After witnessing the death of her mother
at the hand of a plantation overseer, Mary had to make her way largely
on her own. But, how did she emerge strong and able to love across
racial lines from such difficult beginnings?
Note:
(*Above, the word voodoo, meaning "spirit," refers to the Haitian
religion descended from Yoruba, Fon, Bambara, Congolese, and other
cultures of Africa and the diaspora, not to the derogatory connotations
given it today.)
An
account by Nevada writer Sam Davis, one of Pleasant's biographers,
infers that, in childhood, Pleasant was bought out of slavery by a
sympathetic planter. No one really knows his name or if it this is
true since Pleasant was a survivor who altered and embellished her
story in several memoirs to offset the criticisms levied against her.
However, her final memoir (Davis, 1901) says that this rescuer sent
her first to New Orleans to work as a linen worker at the Ursaline
Convent and subsequently to work as a free servant for his friend
(Louis Alexander Williams), a merchant in Cincinnati. His promise
was that, after she served the Williams for some time without pay,
she would be freed. However, Williams, in debt and ultimately jealous
of his wife Ellen's affection for the girl, eventually placed Mary,
not in freedom, but into nine years of indenture (Mary called it being
"bounded out.") with an aging Quaker merchant, (merely called Grandma
Hussey) in Nantucket, MA. Indentured servants could be of any race,
and Mary, a mulatto child who in her earlier years was very fair,
was told not to reveal her race -- a heavy burden for a girl of about
eleven.
In
Nantucket, Mary adopted Ellen Williams' name, becoming "Mary Ellen
Williams," and she learned business as a clerk in Grandma's general
(huckster) store. Although she could not read or write then, she said
in her final memoir, "I could recall the accounts of a whole day,
and she [Grandma] would set them down and they would be right as I
remembered 'em." Mary grew smart and witty, and despite being "in
service", she grew to love her Quaker guardians. The Husseys,
and later Capt. Edward W. Gardner and family, reveal in their letters
that they grew to love her too. Mary also adopted abolitionist beliefs
and the principles of equality that they taught her. So, in Nantucket
Mary learned enterprise, equality, and love-- In Nantucket, she took
the shackles of slavery off of her mind!
Later
in the 1840's,
when her service had ended, the Husseys helped the brilliant and talented
twenty-something, young woman, become a tailor's assistant in Boston.
She also became a paid church soloist there. There Mary Ellen Williams
soon met and married James W. Smith, a wealthy mulatto. According
to a letter fragment by Mary (letter dictated to Mrs. S), James (part
Cuban-mulatto, part white) was a contractor/ merchant who "passed"
for white (Cuban) so as to serve as a Southern contributor to William
Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist paper and a rescuer on the Underground
Railroad. Soon both Smiths served on that Railroad -- the trackless
series of homes and volunteers who helped slaves escape to freedom
by various routes (tracks) to Canada, Nova Scotia, and Mexico.
James
Smith's "track " took slaves from Nova Scotia to Virginia. He also
owned a plantation
near Harper's Ferry, left to him by his white father. Smith staffed
it with freed slaves (freedmen), whose freedom he helped secure. However,
daring as he was, James was very restrictive of Mary. She says she
still grew to love him. However, when he died suddenly (sometime between
1844 and 1848) some felt that it was by Mary's hand. Nothing ever
came of this accusation, however, but James Smith left Mary a wealthy
woman. She eventually remarried, but she continued their slave-rescue
work between New Bedford, MA, and Ohio out of her own inner calling.
Mary says that, disguising herself as a jockey so that she could steal
onto plantations, she soon became a much-hunted slave rescuer, and
there is some support for this account.
Finally,
in 1851, with slavers hot on her trail, she fled West. The route taken
between 1848-1851 seems to have carried her to hide out in both Nantucket
and New Orleans. In the latter, she lived with her second husband,
John James Pleasance ("J.J. Pleasants" when Anglicized). Pleasants
was not related to her father, John Pleasants, as some have alleged.
In fact he told friends that the Pleasants name had simply been assigned
to his father and that his real name surname was "Christophe."
Once
in New Orleans, JJ., a ship's cook, took off to scout a safer life
for them in California gold-rush country, but Mary stayed behind to
own up her heritage by studying with the social/activist Voodoo Queen
Mam'zelle. Marie LaVeaux. LaVeaux had invented a way to use Voodoo
to aid the disenfranchised, and Mary, who should have inherited a
voodoo priestancy from her mother, wanted to learn it. Said the only
eye witness of this study, LaVeaux's granddaughter, "She (LaVeaux)
was teachin' Mrs. Pleasants Voodoo so she could use it some way."
So, from Mam'zelle LaVeaux Mary learned to mentor her people and to
use the secrets of the rich to gain aid for the poor -- a "model"
that would serve her well in San Francisco. Soon JJ sent for her (and
her money, which, said Mary, he loved as much as he loved her), and
being again hunted for slave rescuing, she fled to San Francisco,
assisted by Marie LaVeaux.
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