Gypsy - Lesley Pearse [102]
After washing and dressing properly Beth went back upstairs to offer Pearl some help with the chores for she felt bad about her earlier rudeness. Pearl’s wide smile showed she appreciated the offer, but she promptly brewed another pot of coffee and made it quite clear she was happier just to chat than worry too much about chores.
Beth had seen many negroes in Liverpool, and even more since she arrived in America, but Pearl was the first she’d ever had a real conversation with. She was intelligent, witty and kind. Even her voice was a delight to listen to for it was low and melodious, with just a hint of the Deep South.
But the most astonishing thing about her was her age. Her face was unlined, she moved gracefully and quickly despite her bulk, and Beth had imagined she was no more than forty. But if the stories she told were true, and Beth did believe them, then she was over sixty, and she laughingly told Beth that the reason she covered her head with a turban or a cap was because her hair was snow-white.
She said she had been born into slavery in Mississippi, but she and her mother had run away when she was thirteen and been helped by some Abolitionists in Kansas.
‘Folk were making their way west then in wagon trains,’ she explained. ‘They were mostly good folk too and we tagged along helping them out with their children, the washing and the cooking in return for food. We meant to go all the way to Oregon, but a story got about that men had found gold in San Francisco, and a whole bunch of the folk on the train broke away to go there. Ma thought we should go too cos we could get work as cooks.’
Beth listened spellbound while Pearl described making their way over the Sierra Nevada to California as winter came upon them. ‘It was so cold and the snow so deep we feared we’d die up there, like some of the others did,’ she said. ‘But we got through to San Francisco somehow. There weren’t too many women there then, and it was a wild, rough place, but Ma was right, cooks were badly needed. We set up our tent as soon as we got there, made a big pot of stew and sold it ten cents a bowl as quick as look at you.’
Beth was expecting that Pearl would soon be telling her that she and her mother eventually found it easier to sell their bodies than their stews, but she was wrong. They continued cooking, gradually increasing both their prices and the range of dishes. They charged miners for washing and mending their clothes, and even opened a ‘hotel’.
‘It sure weren’t like no hotel you’d recognize.’ Pearl chuckled. ‘Just a big tent, and our lodgers got a straw-filled palliasse on the ground, and provided their own blankets. We made a bath-house out the back too. I could hardly lift those buckets of hot water off the fire, they were so heavy. But we made money, more than we’d ever dreamed of. We got a real hotel built in ’52, a fancy place with furniture and mirrors brought all the way from France, but by then respectable women were arriving and they didn’t want to stay in a place owned by darkies. They were real mean to us; if they’d had their way they’d have got us run out of town. So Ma turned the place into a brothel to teach them a lesson.’
She laughed uproariously at this, and Beth joined in, for by then she was seeing the scene through Pearl’s eyes. ‘But surely that would get you run out of town even quicker?’ she said, spluttering with laughter.
Pearl put her hands on her wide hips and rolled her eyes. ‘Ma knew a thing or two about men, especially those stuffed shirts who ran the city. She hired the kinda girls that turned those men inside out and made them come back howling for more. The polite ladies brayed for the place to be closed down, and their men nodded and agreed, but those same men slunk in the back way any chance they got.’
Beth could see why men would prefer the company of Pearl and her mother… She could imagine those sharp-featured, cold-hearted wives gossiping over afternoon