8.1.26 — Keeping Shop: China Mary, Marie Laveau, Henrietta Duterte, and the Business of Building Community Power
Published 15 days ago • 13 min read
August is National Black Business Month, a designation created in 2004 to spotlight Black-owned enterprise in an economy that has never made room for it easily. For this issue of #SistoryLessons, I got to thinking about the legacy of Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous small businesswomen and what we owe them in tribute today. I include myself in this category, as we celebrate the relaunch of Brave Sis Project 3.0! Check out the website and the many offerings—and consider a purchase of a course, merch, or perhaps a deeper partnership to keep sustaining and expanding our work.
July marked the one-year anniversary of #SistoryLessons, and it has given me time to reflect on the purpose of this newsletter, especially as we continue to navigate such grim times for those who believe in and uphold justice, solidarity, and unity across difference. Again, I ask you to go to the new website and learn more about how we are integrating three angles of work: Celebrate/Learn/Act. Please drop a line to let us know what you think!
In this edition of #SistoryLessons, let's celebrate three women who literally built the backbone of their communities, especially within the context of being minimized, under-resourced, and even threatened in their 19th and early. 20th century contexts. They are three of many many such women, and the injustice they faced has hardly faded away. Some would say it's worse. As you read about them, consider ways you can continue to support small business, and give some special love to Black, Brown, Asian, and Indigenous-women-owned ventures.
Here are short introductions to China Mary, who ran the real seat of power in an Arizona boomtown that put the "wild" in wild west; Marie Laveau, who built a spiritual and social network so enduring it still draws pilgrims to a New Orleans cemetery gate nearly a century and a half after her death; and Henrietta Duterte, a little-known Philadelphia undertaker who turned coffins into a getaway vehicle for people escaping slavery.
China Mary (Sing Choy / Ah Chum / Ah Lum) (c. 1839–1906)—Tombstone, AZ's Real Power Broker
A Name Erased on Arrival
Ask five sources what China Mary's real name was and you'll get five answers: Sing Choy, said to be closest to her Chinese name; Ah Chum and Ah Lum, the names on her death certificate and various records; Mary Ah Gue on her marriage license; Agio Lum in the 1900 census. You see, like enslaved Black people, Asian immigrants and US-born in the late 19th and 20th century United States were interchangeable to many, not "worthy" of a last name in the case of the enslaved (making family record-keeping and tree-drafting very difficult!) and for the Asian women of Chinese descent, all named "Mary" or "John." Looking for images of "China Mary," I didn't find any real ones; in my book, the illustrator just created a composite.
And so, the image you see here is derivation of a "China Mary" photo from Wikimedia.
But the China Mary we're reading about in this edition of SistoryLessons really did exist, and so let's learn a bit about her. She was born around 1839 in Guangdong province and arrived in the United States as part of the wave of Chinese immigration that built the railroads and worked the mines of the American West. Like the others from her homeland, Mary was legally locked out of citizenship, land ownership, and basic protection by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But that didn't keep her from running a shop, and basically running the town.
She Ran Hoptown
By the 1880s, China Mary had settled in Tombstone, Arizona, the silver-boom town and as mentioned, famous (infamous) for a thirty-second gunfight at the O.K. Corral. However, if you lived there during the time, the bigger local story wasn't the exploits of Wyatt Earp or Doc Holliday, but rather, a general store in the center of the Chinese quarter, known as Hoptown. It was stocked with both American and Chinese goods, and the proprietress brokered the employment of nearly every Chinese laborer in town. In deep relationship mode, she personally vouched for their honesty to white employers who wouldn't have hired them otherwise. This was all happening at a time and in an economy where Chinese immigrants' very presence was criminalized, you'll remember. In this context, China Mary's word was the only credit line, background check, and union hall many of these workers were ever going to get.
And Mary was a real power broker. She ran gambling operations and was, by several accounts, the town's central broker for opium and other vices that Tombstone's respectable citizens pretended not to know about or indulge in (but did, on the down-low; it wasn't called the Wild West for nothing!) Yup, frontier boomtowns built their economies on vice as much as silver.
In those days as is still the case today, how and which vices were policed was always a selective and racialized construct. For women like Mary, non-citizens were excluded from most legitimate paths to capital; their options were commerce in gambling, drugs, the whorehouse, or a combination thereof. Given her role as a main shopkeeper (and probable purveyor of opium), China Mary was a big deal in Hoptwon. Nothing happened in that quarter without her say-so—so by extension, not much happened in Tombstone without her knowing about it.
A Funeral Fit for a Queen
When Mary died of heart failure in December 1906—her death certificate misfiled under her husband's name, “Ah Lum,” though the date matches her cemetery marker—Tombstone gave her a send-off like no one had ever seen. By multiple accounts, over a thousand mourners turned out, and her carriage procession to Boot Hill Cemetery followed Chinese funeral custom, with attendants scattering a trail of paper behind the hearse the whole way to confuse and throw off any evil spirits trying to follow her.
Chinese tradition called for a body to be exhumed after a year, its bones cleaned and shipped home to China in silk and brandy wine. Mary's people broke with that custom and kept her in Tombstone soil, telling mourners she'd asked to “remain near her friends.” It's just as likely though, that they'd heard the stories about a unscrupulous carrier who was caught discarding the remains he was paid to ship home. In any rate, it was decided American ground was the safer bet for Mary's eternal rest. She still rests on Boot Hill beside her old friend and business partner Quong Gu Kee. The grave of “the godmother of Tombstone” remains one of the most visited markers in the cemetery to this day.
The Afterlife of a Legend
In 1960, China Mary got a moment of pop-culture immortality when she was played by Anna May Wong—herself the first Chinese American movie star, and someone who spent her career fighting Hollywood's refusal stereotyping and limiting of Asian actors—in an episode of The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. See it here, but be warned, the stereotypes are likely to make you dizzy. Sixty years later, in 2020, novelist Vali Benson gave Mary an even fuller afterlife, fictionalizing her rise to power in the novel Blood and Silver.
Reflection: Where in your life do you build quietly but powerfully? What does it mean to create belonging when you're considered an outsider?
Marie Laveau (1801–1881)—Part "Voodoo Queen" Part Public Health System, And a Lot More Too
Free, Creole, and Catholic
Marie Catherine Laveau was born free on September 10, 1801, in New Orleans's French Quarter, the daughter of Marguerite D'Arcantel, a free woman of African, European, and Indigenous ancestry. Her father wasn't named on her baptismal record, since her mother wasn't married at the time, but historians generally identify him as Charles Laveaux, a free man of color who'd built his fortune in real estate—and, uncomfortably (and not surprisingly), in the slave trade. Charles acknowledged Marie as his daughter in later documents, even though he hadn't at her baptism.
On August 4, 1819, Marie married Jacques Paris, a cabinetmaker and free man of color among the thousands of refugees who'd fled Saint-Domingue during the Haitian Revolution. He turns up in the 1822 New Orleans city directory, and then vanishes from the record completely. From that point on, city documents start calling Marie “the Widow Paris,” but that was a social label, not proof of anything—nobody actually knew what had happened to him.
Two theories have circulated for two centuries: the first being that he had an affair and left her, or the second, that he died in a shipwreck, trying to sail back to Saint Domingue. In 2019, an LSU doctoral student turned up a plausible answer: a Baton Rouge succession record from 1823—an inventory of a dead man's belongings—for a “St. Yago Paris,” the Spanish phonetic spelling of “Santiago Paris.” Maybe it's a match, but we can't certify. Either way, by the 1820s Marie had entered a decades-long domestic partnership with a Christophe Duminy de Glapion, with whom she raised a large family, including her daughter and spiritual heir, Marie Laveau II.
There is so much drama and fantasy surrounding Laveau's identity as the "voodoo queen," but few may be aware that she was in fact a lifelong, and devoted, Roman Catholic. She was baptized, married, and had her children baptized at St. Louis Cathedral, and a Reconstruction-era reporter called her “a devout and acceptable member of the Catholic communion.” Showing us that two things can be true at the same time, Mary held both traditions (the Congo Square rites and the Catholic Mass) without treating them as a contradiction, because for the free and enslaved Black communities of nineteenth-century Louisiana, they really weren't.
Just an idea of what she might have looked like. (derived from Wikimedia Commons)
What Her Actual Job Was...
Laveau practiced Voodoo—she was the third in a line of women recognized as its leaders in New Orleans—from three main sites: her home on St. Ann Street, gatherings at Congo Square, and rituals at Lake Pontchartrain. Far from being just a pretty fortune-teller in a headwrap, she provided services to her community that were more along the lines of social worker, herbalist, and unlicensed public-health department, combined. Like many women skilled in herbology, she was also a working midwife. She was a nurse: during the yellow fever epidemic of 1878, she nursed the sick with herbal remedies and prayer, regardless of who they were.
Laveau ministered to prisoners condemned to death, sitting with people the state had already decided to discard. And (of course!) she ran a beauty parlor that served New Orleans's wealthiest white families—which, not incidentally, gave her a direct line into their households' secrets, finances, and feuds. Information was its own form of power, and Laveau collected it the way other people collected currency.
From Voodoo to Vodou, Respect
Laveau's grave at St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 has become a tourist pilgrimage site, marked with X's from visitors seeking favors and, at times, sadly, vandalized by improper tourists who never bothered to learn who she actually was. I personally think a lot of the laziness and disrespect is due to the fact that for decades (honestly, a century-plus), "voodoo" was the word most Americans knew—a racially inaccurate and harmful depiction delivered through Hollywood horror movies, pin-stuck dolls, and zombie tropes that had almost nothing to do with the actual, living Haitian religion.
In 2012, Haitian anthropologist and mambo (Vodou priestess) Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique—daughter of Max Beauvoir, the Ati, or supreme servitor, of Haitian Vodou—joined a group of scholars and practitioners who successfully petitioned the U.S. Library of Congress to retire the subject heading "Voodooism" and replace it with "Vodou," the spelling that actually reflects the religion's Haitian Creole roots.
This may sound like a small bureaucratic fix, but subject headings are the unseen framework of how libraries—and by extension scholars, students, search engines, tourists, and the general public—organize and legitimize knowledge. As long as "Voodooism" was adjacent to witchcraft and the occult, the religion was sen as a frightening superstition instead of a structured, living faith practiced by millions. In getting the lexicon right, and the spelling accurate, Rachel restored honor to her culture, her traditions and their people's religion.
I'm particularly and forever moved by this story because Rachel, who died entirely too young in 2018 at age 52, was my college housemate, beloved friend, and an inspiration in how I learn about and adore culture and story. Her father Max always called my "ma petite Rozie." I miss them and honor all they did for pèp yo ak kilti yo, their nation and people.
Reflection: What power lives in the unseen parts of your life?
Henrietta Duterte, née Bowers (1817–1903) — The Undertaker Who Smuggled the Living
A Trade, Then a Business
Henrietta Bowers was born in July 1817 in Philadelphia's Society Hill, one of thirteen children born to John Bowers and Henrietta Smith Bowers, part of an affluent free Black family in a city that was, at the time, both a center of Black civic life and a dangerous border zone for anyone whose freedom could be legally contested. This wasn't some abstract notion: professional kidnappers worked the city's streets for decades, snatching free Black Philadelphians—children included—and selling them south under the cover of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which gave the accused almost no way to prove their own freedom in court. (Think 12 Years a Slave vibes.)
One of the worst offenders, George Alberti, was indicted twice and eventually admitted to kidnapping around a hundred free Black people over his career. He was active in the very years Henrietta was growing up, so you get a sense of the environment she knew as a child.
Henrietta trained as a tailor, sewing capes, coats, and cloaks for the city's middle and upper classes, before marrying Francis A. Duterte, a Haitian-American undertaker in 1852. None of their children survived infancy, and when Francis died in 1858, Henrietta didn't sell the business or hand it to a male relative, as custom would have dictated. Instead, she took it over herself, becoming the first woman in America to own and operate a funeral home.
Black folks were not sitting for portraits very much in that day; this is a derivation of the only known photo of Duterte (Wikimedia Commons)
Turning a Trade Into an Underground Railroad Stop
Under Henrietta's management, the funeral parlor grew into a serious business, grossing an estimated $8,000 a year—worth well over $200,000 in today's dollars. But the real commerce was underground (literally). Duterte was an active agent of the Underground Railroad, and she used the one kind of cargo nobody tends to inspect too closely—a casket, a hearse, a funeral procession—to move people fleeing slavery north toward freedom. Grief was the perfect cover for the operation: who would stop and interrogate a mourner's carriage? (Though today, one wonders to what depths some people might stoop...)
Using Her Success For the Community
Duterte didn't hoard the funds she made through her business; instead she poured it back into her community: supporting the AME Church of St. Thomas, the Philadelphia Home for Aged and Infirm Colored Persons, and, after the Civil War, the Freedmen's Aid Society, which helped formerly enslaved people in Tennessee rebuild their lives. She kept working almost until the end—she served her last client just two days before she died, in December 1903, at eighty-six. Henrietta is buried at Eden Cemetery outside Philadelphia, in the same ground as Octavius Catto (a Black educator, civil rights activist, and early baseball pioneer in Philadelphia who was assassinated in 1871 while fighting for voting rights), the great opera singer Marian Anderson, and William Still, the man often called the father of the Underground Railroad.
Even in her eternal rest, she lies among the greats.
Reflection: How do I turn everyday work into liberation work?
Reflection and Action: Journal Prompts for Everyone
As you think about China Mary: Recall a time you or someone you know built community in an unfamiliar place.
Celebrating the magic of Marie Laveau: How do you honor your ancestors' traditions? Describe a family ritual or tradition.
As you learn about Henrietta Duterte: Think of a skill or trade you already have—how could it become a tool for someone else's freedom?
HerStory / OurStory: Journal Prompts for Women of Color
China Mary's life might make you wonder: How do you carry your lineage in unfamiliar places? Research a local unsung hero from your heritage and share their story.
In commemoration of Marie Laveau: How has your spiritual practice connected you to your people's survival? Learn about a healing practice from your culture.
Memorializing Henrietta Duterte: What legacy of resourcefulness runs in your family?
Activated Allies: Prompts and Actions for White Friends
In honor of China Mary: Learn about erased AAPI figures in your town — whose story will you lift? Visit a local business or cultural center run by a person of color and listen to their story. Here are two: Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center(erased AAPI figures) and USPAACC, US Pan Asian American Chamber of Commerce.
To uplift the life of Marie Laveau: Respect spiritual traditions outside the mainstream. Learn their histories and contributions, and honor cultural practices without appropriating them. One worth exploring is the Congo Square Preservation Society
For the memory of Henrietta Duterte: Invest in Black women-owned businesses, and learn their histories. Official Black Wall Street has information to get you started.
What These Women Knew, and What We Must Remember
China Mary ran a store; Marie Laveau ran a spiritual practice; Henrietta Duterte ran a funeral home. But honestly, none of those job titles begins to really describe their trade and contribution: these women built community and infrastructure. We know that such enterprises are made up of trust networks, safety nets, information systems, care for the sick (and condemned, and in Duterte's case, literal passage to freedom), oftentimes for people who the official conduits of power ignore or write off. Remembering and honoring women (and men) like these, who made themselves indispensable in economies that possessed little power, is part of the American story we can all get behind.
P.S.: More Keepers of the Shop
China Mary, Marie Laveau, and Henrietta Duterte are far from the only women who turned enterprise into a form of protection and power. A few more names long-time readers of Brave Sis Project and SistoryLessons will recall include: Madam C.J. Walker, who built the first haircare empire for Black women and became one of the first American women of any race to become a self-made millionaire; Maggie Lena Walker, the first woman of any race to charter and lead a bank in the United States; and Biddy Mason, who sued for her own freedom in California, then became one of the wealthiest landowners in early Los Angeles and used her fortune to fund a church, a school, and relief for the poor. Their stories are in the SistoryLessons archives.