Sister Noon Read Free Page B

Hayes wore one of the more puzzling coins on achain around her neck, so whenever they looked at her, the people of San Francisco would be reminded that she needed their money. The coin was imprinted with a mermaid curled into a circle, her hair so wide and wild it netted the tip of her own tail. If anyone asked, Lizzie said it was the currency of Atlantis.
    Lizzie Hayes had been a volunteer for the Ladies’ Relief Home for almost ten years, its treasurer for three. She had few intimate friends, but attended two churches, Grace Church and St. Luke’s Episcopal, which was good for her soul and also for fund-raising. In 1890 she was a spinster who had just seen her fortieth birthday.
    She was working in the cupola one day in January, sorting through a box of donated books, when one of the older girls came to tell her Mrs. Mary E. Pleasant was at the door. “The front door,” the girl said. “She’d like to speak to you.”
    Culling books was surprisingly dirty work, and Lizzie could feel a layer of grit on her hands and face. She wiped herself with her apron and went downstairs at once. She’d never spoken with Mrs. Pleasant, never been in the same room with her, although two years earlier she’d waited on an overloaded streetcar while the driver made an unscheduled stop so that Mrs. Pleasant could ride. Mrs. Pleasant walked the half-block to the car, and it seemed to Lizzie that she had walked as slowly as possible. She had given the driver an enormous, showy tip.
    Lizzie had also seen Mrs. Pleasant on occasion in her opulent Brewster buggy with its matched horses from the Stanford stables. Mrs. Pleasant dressed like a servant, but she had her own driver in green livery and a top hat, and also her own footman to attend her.
    If she hadn’t ever seen her, Lizzie would still have recognized Mrs. Pleasant’s face. It was one of the most famous in the city, appearing often in editorial cartoons, particularly in the
Wasp
. (Although actually the last drawing had not used her face. Instead, a black crow had peered out from underneath Mrs. Pleasant’s habitual bonnet.)
    “Now, I never cared a feather’s weight for public opinion,” Mrs. Pleasant had been once quoted as saying, “for it’s the ghostliest thing I ever did see.” It was fortunate she thought so. Here are just a few of the things people said about Mary Ellen Pleasant:
    She’d buried three husbands before she turned forty, and in her sixties had still been the secret mistress of prominent and powerful men. At seventy years of age, she’d looked no older than fifty.
    She had a small green snake tattooed in a curl around one breast.
    She could restore the luster to pearls by wearing them.
    Although she worked as Thomas Bell’s housekeeper, she was as rich as a railroad magnate’s widow. Some of the city’s wealthiest men came to her for financial advice. Thomas Bell owed his entire fortune to her.
    She was an angel of charity. She had donated five thousand dollars of her own money to aid the victims of yellow fever during the epidemic in New Orleans. When she got to heaven, she would soon have the blessed organized and sending cups of cool water to the sinners below.
    She practiced voodoo and had once sunk a boat full of silver with a curse.
    She was a voodoo queen and the colored in San Francisco both worshipped and feared her. She could start andstop pregnancies; she would, for a price, make a man die of love.
    She trafficked in prostitution and had a number of special white protégées with whom her relationships were irregular, intimate, and possibly sapphic. She was responsible for all of poor Sarah Althea Hill Sharon Terry’s mischiefs and misfortunes.
    She ran a home for unwed mothers and secretly sold the infant girls to the Chinese tongs.
    She was the best cook in San Francisco.
    Here is what people said about Lizzie Hayes:
    She would have married William Fletcher if she could have got him.

    No one had asked Mrs. Pleasant into the parlor.