The New John James and Mary Ellen Pleasant Blog

John James Pleasant was Mary Ellen’s second husband, married to her for approximately thirty years.

“The Father of Civil Rights in California!”

When I research MEP, I find she signed court documents  with her husband John James (known as JJ) Pleasant. He cosigned law suits and property deeds showing he was with her in Canada on her John Brown adventure. Their John Brown adventure. They were married after all. And, if you pay any attention to the first 37 pages of HH’s epic yellow rag, you will see that he was in the employ of her first husband, James Smith, with whom he did various UGRR activities before MEP joined them. My guess is that JJ drove while they concealed people in the body of the carriage and other such useful things.

Where HH got the description of him she uses in her book, I have not been able to ascertain, but I found no other source, so I will use HH’s description, though heaven only knows how accurate it is. She describes JJ as having auburn hair and blue eyes. He was quite attractive. He did not look black, but proudly claimed he was the former slave son of slave owner, who was in turn, the son of a Virginia Governor named Pleasant. The father probably freed him and somehow he had found James Smith (Mary’s first husband) and worked the UGRR with him He was passionate about abolition as were Mary and her first husband. This was a lifelong passion for all of them, but Mr. Smith was a couple of decades older than Mary. He died after some years with Mary, and left her cash with instructions to continue the fight for abolition.

She and JJ did just that until word of the gold rush arrived. It seems that JJ may have gone out there right away followed by Mary, but this point in Mary’s life has been obscured by HH’s “scholarship”, which dictated that MEP arrived in Yerba Buena in 1852 or 53-  IF she took the same boat as Thomas Bell and IF she used the name “Madame Christophe”. I would argue that any or all of that idea was unlikely. First MEP herself always claimed she was out there in 1849. Second, there is no reliable testimony she was ever in New Orleans or used the name Madame Christophe. Third, her brother in law John Gardner had a whaling boat. He and his wife Phebe (Mary’s “sister” by upbringing) did participate in UGRR activities, especially taking people up and down the East Coast and bringing people out to the west coast. Fourth, it has been put out there, though no paper exists to prove it, that JJ and Mary were married on his ship, by Gardner. Fifth, Cap’n Gardner was the guardian of Mary’s money from Smith. In order to give some to John Brown, she had to get it from the Captain. All that is in HH’s book, though glossed over. Mary was not the freewheeling independent scoundrel that HH portrays. She had a family that acted like a family and the head of that family was Captain Garner after Granma Mary Hussey died. The Captain was in charge of Mary’s money, and well-being, while Mary had to answer to him for her activities and expenses when it was as big a thing as moving to the West Coast or giving John Brown the remainder of the inheritance.

Let’s take a little detour. I doubt Thomas Bell met MEP on the boat to SF when he got on it in Lima or thereabouts. According to HH, in the book, “M…. Pleasants Partner”, in the early months after that boat arrived in SF, Tom Bell did take up with La Negrissa, a traveling performer. That is why, speculated HH that he and MEP didn’t meet again for a couple of years after that boat arrived. Tom was in love with La Negrissa. La Negrissa, in my opinion, is much more likely to have been the “Madame Christophe” and she and Tom probably met on that boat, then hung out until she had to move on. It is much more likely that Captain Gardner brought JJ and Mary out on his boat as he had already made that Pacific journey a number of times, while whaling. He was Mary’s Guardian and he also traveled full time with his wife, Phebe. Now Mary she was going to a wild woolly place where there was barely any civilization. I am pretty sure he oversaw that move to the West Coast. And since JJ and Mary did everything together, they probably took the same boat. And, it would not have been a  passenger vessel, it would have been with someone from Nantucket, a family member with a whaling ship. MEP and the Gardners stayed in close contact until the Gardners were lost at sea together in the 1870-80s ( remind me to check the exact date).

Since HH was speculating and manipulating evidence to suit her purposes most of the time. There is no reason to assume she was correct about when MEP arrived in SF. She was invested in the New Orleans version and bent all evidence to give Mary the “Voodoo” background, not knowing a thing about Vodoun, the diasporal religion of Haiti.

So, in the preceding paragraph, I put together what I knew to be facts about Mary’s family and came to an Occam’s razor solution of how she and JJ arrived in SF. I can’t think of a single reason that this is not the best explanation.  Since MEP and JJP did everything else together, why not this, the biggest move of their lives? They set up a terminus of the UGRR together and together homed and helped start businesses for former slaves -and former freedmen. Mary had an inheritance that was dedicated to abolitionist activities, but they both worked well-paid jobs for their day to day living expenses.

So, the fact that JJ and MEP did everything together is the reason I am completely revamping the POV of this Blog. From now on, I include them both.

JJ signed every lawsuit paper for the trolley car discrimination cases, though Mary’s inheritance may have paid the fees. They won the right for blacks to ride, together. Whoever later started calling MEP the “Mother” of Civil Rights in CA should have said the John James and Mary Ellen Pleasant are the Parents of Civil Rights in CA, and it is a crying shame that JJ is denied his part in the history.

In my next post, I will revamp the timeline of MEP’s life to exclude all undocumented claims. Doing that gives her  a much simpler, quite straightforward life history with lots of documentation.

 

 

 

A Review of the Helen Holdredge Collection of the SF Public Library

The Helen Holdredge Collection

San Francisco Historical Collection

San Francisco Public Library

Oct 21, 2016

This collection is a compilation of several other major 19^th Century SF figures that used to be in separate collections. Box 4 of this collection contains most of the notes Helen Holdredge (HH) made to write “The word that must not be said, Pleasant”, her book published in about 1952.

My overall word for the quality of HH’s notes is “Pathetic”. She is not a historian and did not use any standard history-hunting tools- like birth and death certificates, properties owned, legal documents, even when they were available in government records in SF. (There are two marriage certificates and one of baptism for the four Bell children. These are side notes of little value or relevance to the book)

She did not discuss her informants, and how they obtained the information they gave HH, who, as it turned out, usually gave them no credit for the particular stories they had told her. However, if you are familiar with the book, you will realize that almost all of the salacious material that did not come from 1880’s yellow journalism, came from one person, William Willmore jr., seconded only by the material she supposedly saw in a memoir transcribed by Charlotte Dennis Downs on behalf of Mary Ellen Pleasant (MEP) around 1875-1890.

There is no discussion of whom William Willmore jr (WWjr) was, although if you have read the book, he takes over Teresa Bell’s mansion on 1661 Octavia street, as the Head Steward- after MEP was kicked out of the residence she had lived in since her husband John James Pleasant had died in 1877 or so (I didn’t check this date before writing it) Mary Ellen had been in charge of the household operations of the Bells for over 15 years. Willmore jr was her sergeant. Now she wasn’t in charge; he was. He thoroughly proved his loyalty to Teresa Bell when he published a shockingly slanderous newspaper article about MEP around the turn of the 20^th Century. Then he must have still been alive in the early 50’s when HH interviewed him. There is no indication of how old he was when he took over Pleasant’s job or when he supposedly talked to HH.

HH not being a scholar, not even having a BA level degree ( her bio states she attended U of O (or W), not that she graduated) did not mention when or where she interviewed him for her book. Or mention his bias, she just has several pages of notes in various places as her note taking was not organized.

There is a section of letters HH wrote and answers that people wrote back. I only see one consistency in any of the letters, and that is that they all called MEP, “Mammy”. No one who liked or loved her would ever do that. So it appears that even before the book came out, HH was collecting material only from people who called Mary Ellen “Mammy”, not (Mrs) Pleasant, which she preferred.

I saw the ‘born a slave” story as told by an informant whose name never appears anywhere else. And offers no proof of any kind. (The same story is told by Mildred Beasley in a book about black CA pioneers, published 1918, though I can’t ascertain the source of that story either) It was a variation on the version in the book, lacking any detail such as how Americus Price happened on MEP in GA before she was six years old, because she was six years old when she moved in with Grandma Hussey. (Americus was from Price’s Landing Missouri and probably was involved in MEP’s post-John Brown debacle) . I analyze that entire story for logic and probability in another post.

I copied her notes on WWjr and a couple of other things, but I totally and profoundly realize that the real Mary Ellen Pleasant will never be found in the Helen Holdredge Collection.

So, this signals something entirely new should happen with this blog. I will elaborate on that in my next post.

Can Mary Ellen Pleasant be compared to Harriet Tubman?

Well, no. What Tubman did was un-matchable and deserves all the credit and attention, possible.

However, MEP -and both her spouses- spent many months and years working on the UGRR. They did transport many ex-slave fugitives to Canada and even bought property up there for  immigrant purposes. They helped  fugitives in California too. Mary Ellen and JJ Pleasant deserve recognition for this work- as I hope other stories of the UGRR are uncovered. I hope they can both be included in future stories of the UGRR along with others yet to surface.

Was Mary Ellen Pleasant a Madame?

The answer is ,”No”. She always had a full time job, but she did help others get started in business. One fully documented example of that was the Dennis and Downs Livery stable, which she was acknowledged as financing.

She (and her husband, JJ) were known to set people up in business, and possible did finance a Madame or two in the early days, but there is no proof, only gossip, about that. All gossip after the 1880’s was tainted by the trashing MEP took in the press over supporting Allie Hill against WilliamSharon.

That was After JJ Pleasant died. Who knows how he would have reacted to the beating she took in the press? While he was alive, they did everything together. All the court cases are in BOTH their names. Good research in SF property records will reveal she (and her husband, JJ) banked a few houses, too.

She may have become an easy target after JJ died. Holdredge and therefore, history, ignores JJ completely, but it is clear and documented that they were partners until he died.

Is Mary Ellen Pleasant, “the Mother of Civil Rights in California”?

Yes, she is, but that is not the whole story and I don’t know how the other half of the story has been neglected for 130 years. The other half of the story is John James Pleasant, Mary Ellen’s Spouse of approximately 25-30 years. Her partner and companion on the UGRR.

It is true that MEP’s friend was kicked off the trolley for being black and MEP dared the conductor to kick her off, too. But, she and her husband JJ filed all the suits and followed up on them. They should share the honor as, “Parents of Civil Rights in California”

Did Mary Ellen Pleasant have any background in African Religion?

There is a story in the Mary Ellen Pleasant lexicon put out there by Helen Holdredge, that Mary Ellen Pleasant had been acquainted with Voodoo(sic) since her childhood. Apparently, according to Holdredge, MEP was born a slave in GA and at a tender age, her mother was taken away for practicing African Religion. Later that day, Holdredge (HH) reports, MEP at about the age of 6-10, held a Voodoo(sic) ceremony in the field, with adult slaves watching . The overseer who had taken her mother died that night clutching his throat, according to HH.

This story is very improbable, to say the least. Children do not perform Voodoo curses and that story is really a fantasy that gives MEP evil,  magical powers at an early age. This is fiction, or myth, maybe, but it is not the truth. It reflects a profound dishonesty in HH’s approach to MEP. But HH was not finished with that recitation; she has Americus Price of Price Landing MO, no less,  show up and buy her, and take her to New Orleans to be educated at the Ursuline academy for one year, then returns and travels with her up the Mississippi river when he dies (Mammy Pleasant, pp 8-13). Somehow she gets to the home of a man with the same name as her father in the Pandex version of her birth in Cincinnati Ohio, where she is a servant to his wife until, disturbed by her evilness, he takes her to Nantucket.

According to HH, MEP isn’t able to finish her Voodoo training until many years later when she is trained by Marie LaVeaux before she goes to SF.

There is not one iota of truth to this story. While it is possible that MEP’s second husband had a distant blood relationship with Marie La Veaux’ boyfriend, there is no indication MEP ever went to New Orleans either as a child or an adult. She certainly never mentioned it in her later life, though she was known to talk about John Brown, Nantucket, and her trips to Canada.

Except for Helen Holdredge’s story, there is not one indication that MEP ever practiced Voodoo. There is no indication there was any organized Haitian religion going on in SF, only a fortune teller or two that claimed to do “Voodoo”. There was never a big drum party in the Octavia street house.

Mary Ellen Pleasant didn’t know Voodoo; she was a member of the SF AME church and that IS thoroughly documented.

Was Mary Ellen Pleasant born a slave in Georgia? The evidence.

Actually, there is no documentation of the sort. The earliest reference to this version of MEP’s birth was in a 1919 book by Delilah Beasley. She did not reference her source directly, but it appears it was from a San Francisco newspaper interview, as many of her other sources were, so maybe it can be found.

If a newspaper article saying MEP was born in Georgia is found, that still does not qualify as documentation. If it is a from an interview she may have participated in, and it directly contradicts the story she gave the Pandex in 1904, in which she said she was born free in Philadelphia; it becomes apparent there was a reason for her to lie about her birth.

Until someone finds the origin of the Born in Georgia story, the words of her own mouth in an easily accessed interview should take precedent. Of course, there is still no documentation, but at least we know she actually gave the born in Philadelphia story out of her own mouth and we do not even have that for the born in Ga. story.

So the logical conclusion is that until MEP is caught lying, she was not born a slave in Georgia, but was born free.

In the Pandex interview, she named a street that did not exist in Philadelphia when she was born, according to Hudson’s research. (Hudson could not find evidence of her father, either) The particular street really doesn’t mean much, as it may have been a faded memory. In this version she claimed to be half black and half Hawaiian. No proof one way or the other on that, but she was mistaken for Queen Emma of Hawaii and some ‘MEP scholars’ still use Queen Emma Pix to portray MEP. Hawaiian scholars are agreed that the younger photos of MEP are actually wearing Queen Emma’s jewelry, so can’t be portraits of MEP at all. I have another article on that. Read it and judge for yourself.

In any case, even in the authentic portrait of her at 86, she doesn’t look particularly black – it is easy to see she could pass for white and apparently did . Or pass for Hawaiian or even Cuban.

The main piece of evidence for Holdredge’s claim she was born in GA came from a recreation of a lost memoir that Charlotte Dennis Downs had possession of for the last 50 years, supposedly dictated to her by MEP in the Octavia St house. Anyway, it was supposedly lost, so Holdredge with the supposed help of Downs “recreated” the memoir, complete with the born in GA version of the story in far more detail than Beasley’s version.  In any case,  Charlotte Dennis Downs was the niece of the guy who wrote the “Queen of the Voodoos” article who, in turn, was in the employ of the woman who kicked MEP out of the Bell house. This is not documentation of the Born in GA story, it is hearsay.

There is no proof that MEP was born in GA and there is good reason to doubt the story, including direct, published quotes from MEP, herself.

 

Odd Footnote:

There were a lot of Hawaiian Kanakas coming and going from Nantucket on whaling ships MEP’s entire childhood. Moby Dick is a story based from Nantucket and its multi-cultural sailors from all over the world. Moby Dick is a good anthropological survey of a Nantucket whaling boat. MEP probably saw Kanakas whenever a whaling ship came in. Maybe her Kanaka father was part of that scene- or had left it for a career elsewhere -then brought MEP back to Nantucket when her mother died. That is actually a better guess than born in Georgia. It is more probable anyway. Her paper trail begins in Nantucket. Why not trace it backwards from there instead of looking in Georgia because some undocumented news article said so?.

 

Undocumented Incidents in the Life of Mary Ellen Pleasant.

These are the issues in MEP’s history that have no documentation:

If you can find documentation for any of the following, I would be VERY surprised.

.There simply is no documentation about her birth. There are three birth stories with no documentation. Nothing is known until she shows up on Nantucket at about age 6. She once said she had no real memories before Nantucket and that could be true.

.There is no documentation that she ever went to New Orleans or met Marie LaVeau. Bibb’s story about Liga is extremely far fetched and has no evidentiary value.

.There no evidence she ever practiced any kind of “Voodoo” or was a practitioner of Vodoun, the ancient diasporal African Religion. There is evidence she was a member of the local AME church and attended regularly and was actively involved.

.There is no evidence she was a Madam or adopted children out. Or handled abortions.

.There is no evidence she owned 49 plots in a graveyard in SF and filled them all.

.There is no evidence she had parties for men out in the country and had female “entertainment”.

.There is no evidence she was ever involved in any murder plot or any other scandal she was later accused of by her enemy, William Sharon.

.There is no evidence that she was promiscuous and had affairs outside of marriage.

.There is no evidence she had any kind of formal business partnership with Thomas Bell, that netted her millions. (though she may have given him good financial tips she learned from the movers and shakers she served lunch to) He may have invested for her, but it is not yet proven and there was no proof she owned anything of Bell’s, when Bell died.

There is no evidence she built the House of Mystery. It was never in her name.

I expect and hope that future research will distinguish between fact and things unproven.

The provable, documented, historically correct facts, about MEP are:

.She shows up in Nantucket at the age of 6 in 1820. historically

.She lived with Grandma Hussey until she married in about 1840.

.She helped her first husband on the UGRR taking slaves to Canada.

.When he died, She and her second husband continued the work.

.She moved to SF in 1852-3 where she and her second husband continued the UGRR work until after the war.

.This work included a highly documented contact with John Brown in Canada where she seems to have given him money and bought property for slaves in Canada.

.After the war, she and her husband initiated a series of civil rights cases in SF- until his death ca. 1875-7.

.After husband’s death she helped Thomas Bell move into his new mansion.

( There is proof in City Hall who was the architect and who owned it. The citation is in one of my comments sections from a reader who is also doing research on MEP. It is in the article on the house of mystery -in the comments.)

.She got involved with The Allie Hill case and Williams Sharon did his best to discredit her as a witness.

.She became the subject of the tabloid journalism of the 1880’s, to great detriment of her reputation.

.She lived in the Bell mansion until Thomas Bell died and Teresa used the courts to kick her out.

.MEP did get the Beltane ranch, but apparently the strangers who cared for her until her death got everything that was left when she died.

 

MEP and Me

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(I began this post in 2012, but never finished it. It is meant as a history of my relationship to MEP. I don’t know why I left it a draft for so long, but I just finished it up and here it is.)

When I was 15, my family visited San Francisco during the Xmas of 1956. My mom was from there, our family had roots there, and her sister still lived in Nearby San Mateo where she was finishing her degrees in Anthropology. I was taking my first anthropology class at the time, from Joseph Epes Brown, an unusual class for high school, but I was delighted I had an aunt in the field already. I spent much of my visit roaming her bookshelves. She had a copy of the Sacred Pipe, Joe’s followup to Neihardt’s Black Elk Speaks. This gave me even a bigger crush on Joe, that she liked it, but I had already read it.

Then my eyes fell on a book by Helen Holdridge. It was called, Mammy Pleasant. I read the first few pages of the book-  until she arrived in San Francisco with growing horror and repeated some of the stuff it said to my mom, who then forbade me to finish it. It was my first true crime novel, so to speak and left an indelible impression on me. My mom and aunt talked a bit about it and my aunt concurred with my mother that the book was sheer yellow journalism of the worst kind. I didn’t even understand what yellow journalism was.

My mom was born about 15 years after MEP died, my aunt 18,but they had family memories of her that were warm. They thought she was impeccable and had moved in the highest circles of early SF society and had arrived about the same time our family had, in the early 1850’s.

My grandmother was 10 when MEP died and her parents had property near MEP’s in Berkeley, though maybe MEP’s was in Oakland. Anyway, my grandmother knew who MEP was because her parents talked about her fall from grace and said they didn’t believe the half of it. That is about all of the family memories, but it was enough to make me remember her in 1971-2, when my husband inherited his grandmother’s books. She had a lot of travel books, at least 7-8 about Tibet alone, which was very exciting….. then I saw a copy of Mammy Pleasant… of course I read it through immediately. I had such mixed feeling about her. She was wonderful in so many ways, a here in the Emancipation Movement, but HH was saying she was a liar, a thief, a madam, a baby eater, a serial murderer, a voodooist, an abortionist and baby stealer.  I had difficultly and kind of thought where there was smoke, there was fire and put it aside.

I had a vague recollection of the paper my roommate sophomore year in college wrote on Vodoun. I knew it was a legitimate African Diasporal Religion, not a bunch of curses, so I found it fascinating that MEP had connections to voodoo- as voudun was called in those days, even by Metraux and Herskovitz, which were the books she used.

In 1985, I enrolled my 4 year old daughter in a friend’s (Barbea Williams) dance classes. Barbea taught ballet and Katherine Dunham technique, which I like, as it is dynamically very similar to Martha Graham’s work, which was my professional dance training. The following year she got pregnant and hired a troupe from back east to come teach for her. This troupe consisted of Aziz Ahmed and his good friend whose name I forget at the moment and Denise Bey. Aziz and friend were African drummers and Denise was an African dancer, trained by Ladji Camera, and she is a world class dancer. Zoe loved these classes and I was proud when Aziz told me she had African nuances because she was learning it before she got culture bound. I kept her with Aziz for a couple of years then when he and Denise parted ways, I kept her with Denise until she was 11 and wanted to study ballet. I was discouraging about her starting so late, but in less than 6 months she was in her age group at the ballet studio, she picked up combinations just by watching them, and she was very musical, as ballet dancers called nuances.

So, for 7 years I was an African Dance Mom and my kid performed with Denise a hundred times. Before a performance Denise would choreograph the pieces they would dance and the children only needed a quick marking and they had it.  I realized this African Dance training was an excellent foundation for any other kind of dance, even one as opposite as ballet and that is why she caught up so fast in everything but a perfect turnout, which she did eventually achieve.

1986, I was bored and read Mammy Pleasant again. This time I looked at it critically and was far more horrified at what they had done to her name and reputation. I thought that if the research was done, she may have helped as many slaves as anyone else through and after the underground railroad. I was furious. I carefully read and reread the first 35 pages of the book, before she arrived in SF, then looked at every so called crime carefully and considered where the defaming had come from. I couldn’t quit thinking about it. I starting asking others if they had ever heard of her. No one in Tucson had.

I went to the University of Arizona library and looked her up. I found another Holdredge book about her partner Thomas Bell. I illegally photocopied the whole book. Then I also found some articles and mentions, but all leaned to the Holdredge POV.  HH was all I had. There was nothing else.

After maybe weeks wondering and pondering, I suddenly had an idea. I would look at every accusation and find a way to defend it. The image was that  HH’s telling of MEP’s life was a string pattern. I wanted to reach my hands in there and turn it inside out.

And so I did.

I was stymied by the Voodoo at first, but on a visit to the corner public library, I was perusing 299.7  when a page shelved some books, than gave the books a big whump to tighten them up,  a book popped out of the shelf and I got it. I looked at it. It was Divine Horsemen by Maya Deren. I read the front cover and got a chill- this was my book! I also looked at the rest of the books on that shelf and chose one by Louisah Teish, as well.

I read Divine Horseman and was carried away by the beauty it revealed. Then I read Teish, who was another Dunham-trained dancer, and had learned African Religion at the same time as dance and was some kind of initiate of a lodge in St Louis. Her book was great, because she gave everyone who read her book permission to learn African style Religion, so to speak and make it relevant to our own lives. Thus I had little fear of trouncing on the hallowed ground of sacred African rites, though I hope I had enough respect for them.

I began to ask questions of the people around me and found they all had close acquaintance with African theology, some more close than others. I tried to listen carefully and only asked questions to clarify something. That I even knew that much was often a surprise to my friends. Some times people would relax around me and say things that added to my gropes.

So in the second year of my daughter’s studies, I woke up one morning and felt I wanted to start writing my version of MEP’s life. I sat down at a primitive computer, no Windows, and no spell check, and started in. I decided to start at the defining moment of MEP’s childhood, the loss of her mother.

What happened next is I went into a dream,  a kind of fever. Without deciding to, I jumped into the first person and started typing so fast to catch the words in my mind, that hardly one word was spelled correctly. I could “see” what was happening. I could “hear” MEP’s voice, feeding me words. Now I made a joke to myself about “channeling” her, but I realized this was a phenomenon many writers experience when they are writing fiction.

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I had it all inside percolating for months- I had done some book knowledge and built some experiential knowledge from people who were initiated into various sects. Now it was cooked and ready to come out in chronological order. It poured out. About 35 pages.

I tried to proof read it, and every time I thought I had it, I’d find more errors, but now I had a goal. I wanted to make 50 copies of this pamphlet and pass them out,starting Juneteenth, a local African-American celebration of when they got word, in Tucson, of the end of slavery. I did and I did. I mailed a copy to Louish Teish’s publisher and got no immediate response. I gave a copy to Taj Majal, when he came through town. I kept about 6 copies and passed most of them out later. Later, I heard that Rita Marley got a copy, maybe Taj’s?I got other feedback of where those booklets went and it was a lot of places.

Well, I felt I had done an earth shattering thing. I had written a short bio Of MEP based on my love and passion for her. I felt I totally refuted HH and made MEP a whole person again. An abolitionist, an entrepreneur and all around good person.

Maybe 5 years later, when I was working on a since abandoned PhD, I went into the U of A Library again to do some research on Esteban, another of my heroes. I had to ask a clerk where the special collections were, and for some reason,  I wrote down my name and phone number and gave it to her.  Her mouth dropped and she said, “Someone called here asking about you this morning. I took down her name and phone number” She was shocked at the coincidence as was I. Susheel Bibbs, San Francisco and a number.

I called her and she said Luisah Teish remembered I had sent a booklet about MEP to her about 5 years ago, but she didn’t have it. Susheel called the U of A on a blind search for me. All she had was my name and the fact I lived in Tucson! Wow. So I sent her a copy cringing over all the typos I had missed.

When she called me back, she told me I was the first person in 85 years to print a good word about MEP! I had broken the line of wretched writings about her and presented her in a strong and positive light. She said she was donating the booklet to the San Francisco library to the MEP collection!  The she had a couple of other questions like, HH never called MEP’s second husband anything but John James, but I had called him JJ and only her recent research had brought that to light. there was one other thing I said that Susheel said no one should know because she had uncovered it after I wrote the pamphlet. It was actually something pretty profound, though I can no longer remember what it was.

I am a scientist by training and not into magical coincidences,but there you have it; this story is rife with them.

So, all full of woo woo, I was proud of my work. I even wrote a highly summarized biography of her and sent it to Susheel for approval as I felt she had the lock on MEP at the time. It was approved, and I sat on my laurels for several years, proud of myself.

My awakening has been slow. I was reluctant to let go of the Voodoo. After all, if MEP did know Voduon as a religion, it sure made her story loud. Another Marie LaVeau. That idea was exciting to me, but it is a sidetrack, though one worth learning the source material about, independently of this story.

But it was the various birth stories than began to crack the edifice I had built. The born a slave in Ga. story came from Charlotte Dennis Downs according to HH. However, even in the HH book, it connects the born a slave story to John James, JJ, Mary’s second husband who was born on the plantation where Mary’s mother was supposedly sent from. It is obviously some kind of confabulation, if HH ever did talk to Charlotte. Hughes proved the born in Philly on Barley Street to be a confabulation because there was no Barley St in 1814 when MEP was born.

All we know is she was on Nantucket by the age of 6. The rest is imaginary or confabulated. I became convinced there was a reason for her secrecy regarding her birth. There was some reason she ended up with the Husseys and the best one I can think was that she was some kind of relative, possibly an illegitimate child related to the Husseys, but that is a speculation that could be proved or disproved by some further research.

So by now, I was a far more sober researcher than when I just hated on HH. I began to realize the entire edifice HH had created was a lie, but I kept looking for morsels of truth.

I have never gone and done any research, but if I ever get up to the SF library, I will have a field day, I am sure. Meanwhile, I just keep trying to strip the fables from MEP’s fabulous life. By putting my incoherent thoughts out there, I am starting to get some good feedback from real researchers.