according to some, Mr. Bell and Mrs. Pleasant were very much in love. They built the House of Mystery to live in together after her husband (and daughter) had died of diseases caused by excessive drink. They mixed assets freely and, after his marriage to Teresa, deeded properties over to her as well. The Bell and Pleasant finances were a Gordian knot no lawyer was ever able to loosen, though for more than thirty years countless numbers of them tried.
In this version of the household, Thomas Bell’s marriage to Teresa was something he was tricked into while drunk, “bibulous” being the adjective most frequently assigned him. During the various estate cases, servants testified that the Octavia Street house was a divided one, quite literally. Mrs. Bell was not to enter Mr. Bell’s half. He would not enter hers. Nor would he ever speak to her. Any communication was to go through Mrs. Pleasant. Mrs. Pleasant and Mrs. Bell, however, were conceded to be very fond of each other.
Yet there were those eight children (two of them dead). Not a one of them hers, Teresa said. Mr. Bell had paid her fifty thousand dollars a child, so Mrs. Pleasant had produced one whenever the women were short of cash.
Thomas Bell died in 1892. Suffering from a flu, he rose in the night, lost his way, and fell into the well of the spiral staircase. “Where am I?” the servants said they heard him cry out.
Mrs. Bell was in Glen Ellen at the time, on the Beltane ranch owned by Mrs. Pleasant. Teresa recorded the death in her diary: “Oct. 16 telegraph from S.F. 10:30 about Mr. Bell. Took two Gal Red Wine to Officer for [word indecipherable] Mrs. Bell [a nephew’s wife] and Mrs. Gordon go to town. Telegraph to Mammy 25ck [name indecipherable] 1 gal wine J Bergman 1 gal wine 2 o’clock Mr. Bell died.”
On the day after his death, Mrs. Bell shipped two barrels of apples and one package of cheesecloth, paid some bills, and had some horses shod.
The will was contested by Fred, the oldest boy. He claimed that his mother, the executrix, was incompetent, because she was under the sway of her housekeeper. The court eventually agreed. Judge Coffey ruled that Mrs. Bell and Mrs. Pleasant’s relationship was an inappropriate one for a white woman and a colored woman to have. Mrs. Pleasant’s influence in the Bell household was unnatural, and illegal as well.
Ironically, the friendship had worsened by this time. In 1902, after a noisy row during which the police were called, Mrs. Bell had Mrs. Pleasant evicted. “She passed out the door after her two trunks snarling like a mad dog,” Mrs. Bell wrote in her diary. While Mrs. Pleasant said, “I am glad, very glad to go.”
That same year, Mrs. Pleasant published the first chapter of her memoirs. Included was an analysis of her palm—the palmist H. Jerome Fosselli said she showed a “marvelous ability to read motives”—and also the startling assertion that she had never been a slave. She was born in 1814 in Philadelphia. Her father was an importer of silks, a native Kanaka named Louis Alexander Williams. Her mother was a free “full blooded Louisiana negress.”
A dispute with the editor prevented the promised second installment. Mrs. Pleasant died in 1903.
Teresa Bell died in 1923, leaving an estate whose estimated value was $938,000. Before her death, she’d accused Mary Ellen Pleasant of having murdered an employee named Sam Whittington many years before, and also of killing Thomas Bell by pushing him over the stairs, possibly with Fred Bell’s help. She’d accused Fred of murdering two wives. She’d accused Marie Bell’s husband, Arthur Holman, of murdering Marie. She’d accused her mother of murdering her brothers. Her estate, which left nothing to either Clingans or Bells, was immediately contested by both families on grounds of insanity.
None of the large San Francisco estates seems to have passed without objection from one generation to the next, but the Bell estate is the standard by which all others are measured. Every case from 1897 to 1926 was as bad as the Bell business or it wasn’t. John Bell, Thomas Bell’s supposed nephew, made a claim, as did Viola Smith, as did the Clingan sisters. Decisions were made, appealed, reversed. The case went to the state supreme court.
In May of 1926, litigation ended in a compromise. Of the total, $370,000 went to the surviving Bell children, after they had pledged $100,000 to charity and made a settlement to Viola Smith of close to the same.
Maybe:
Fred Bell was the son of May Thompson and a gambler named Bill Thompson.
Marie was the daughter of May Thompson and Dr. Monser, the abortionist who died in San Quentin.
Robina was the child of Sarah Althea Hill and Reuben Lloyd, a prominent city attorney.
Reginald or possibly Muriel was William Sharon’s child by Bertha Barnson (or maybe Bonstell), a maid at the Palace.
Eustace was born to “one of the Harris girls.”
Or:
They were all, as they themselves claimed, the children of Thomas and Teresa Bell.
Reginald Bell gave the following statement to the San Francisco Examiner: “We always called her [Teresa Bell] mother and she was a good mother to us. Mammy Pleasant was a wonderful woman, but there was nothing mysterious about her and there was really no reason why the home should have been called the House of Mystery.”