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.”