Maritcha Rémond Lyons: the birth of a mentor. Part one

Maritcha Rémond Lyons would be so pleased that you decided to read this article and get curious about her life.? She would be thrilled not because she felt she should be worshipped like a film star.? No, it was because Maritcha loved being a mentor: empowering people to feel accepted and giving them the skills to achieve their dreams.?

One hundred years ago, Maritcha wrote biographies about important but overlooked Black women. She believed that by sharing people’s life stories, you the reader, might be inspired to do amazing things in your own life. By diving into the life of another person, reading about the lessons they learned, discovering how they overcame troubles and challenges, finding out the ways they helped their community and improved their own lives, Maritcha believed your own life could change for the better. Maritcha wanted to be an influencer in the most empowering way possible.?

Towards the end of her life, Maritcha decided that her own experiences had some important lessons worth passing along. She decided to write an autobiography.? When she was finished, Maritcha created a sixty page life story:? A story about what she learned in order to became a successful educator, writer, and influential Black woman in 19th century Brooklyn.

She hoped her book publisher would print her story. Over the years several of Maritcha’s poetry books and short stories were published.? Theater directors produced her comedies and dramas on the stage.? Sadly, by the 1928, no one wanted to publish her autobiography.? Maritcha's writing style was perfect for the 1860’s, but for modern readers, her writing was too complicated and hard to understand. ?And so Maritcha's autobiography, “Memories of Yesterday: All of which I saw and part of which I was,” remains in a file at the Schomburg Center in New York.

Recently, people like you, have grown curious about Maritcha Lyons and what they might learn from her life. Tonya Bolden has written a children’s book, "Maritcha: A Nineteenth Century American Girl", focused on Maritcha’s exciting childhood. She uses sections of Maritcha's autobiography to inspire children. For older readers, Judith Wellman includes important stories about Maritcha’s life as an adult in her book: “Brooklyn’s Promised Land: The Free Black Community of Weeksville NY. So does Carla L. Peterson in her book “Black Gotham.” ?Lara Steensland Mullarky writes about Maritcha’s work inspiring teachers in her dissertation: “In the hands of their own: The story of Weeksville School 1840-1893.”? These books and papers are all helping Maritcha inspire and influence readers long after her death.? And yet Maritcha’s complete life story, with its potential to motivate and inspire, is still largely unknown.

As a high school student, Maritcha wrote an essay about escaping death during the New York City Draft Riots of 1863.? She told the true story of how angry white New Yorkers murdered hundreds of their Black neighbors and how they tried to kill Maritcha's family and destroy their home during the summer of 1863.? Her teacher doubted the events in the story were accurate.? Maritcha replied that it was all true.? ?About what really happened to the Black people of New York, she wrote: “The half has never been told.”?? So for Maritcha, here is a part of her inspiring life.? Let her influence you, let Maritcha be your mentor.

Maritcha’s younger years are a choppy mess of amazing experiences and huge disasters. Her parents were New York City business people, and the Lyons family was wealthy.?She grew up with her mother and father, two sisters and a brother. Her father Albro was educated at New York City’s first public school for Black children.? Her mother Mary grew up in a prosperous Black family from Venezuela. Mary’s father was a housepainter. Mary’s mother ran a bakery and owned her own home, built for her by her husband before his death. Mary's father owned land in Seneca Village, a free Black community, land that would later be taken from them to create Central Park in New York City.? Mary was sent to Rhode Island to live with the Rémond family to learn how to make chocolate delicacies. Later, back in New York City she added hairdressing to her skills and met and married her husband Albro.

Albro, as a young man learned how to make cigars and later ice cream.? Next he experienced life as a sailor and a baggage handler. Eventually he began to own and run boarding houses for sailors, places where black sailors could rest and eat a healthy meal between voyages.? These boarding houses and Mary’s businesses allowed Lyons family to become wealthy.?

Throughout her life, tragic historical events kept invading Maritcha’s life, challenging her to overcome huge obstacles. In her autobiography Maritcha focuses on how she learned to be resilient, telling what it took for her to bounce back each time life turned tragic.

Life at the boarding house at 20 Vandewater Street in New York City, where Maritcha grew up, was not what it seemed.? Her mother, Mary Lyon was a delightful, caring, cheerful mother and her children loved her. Maritcha remembered “she amused us and others with gossipy, good natured chat and was welcomed everywhere.”? She wanted her children to know about the world and took them in 1853 to the Crystal Palace in Bryant Park, which had exhibits of new inventions from around the world. ?

However, her friendly manners, and the pleasant stories she told guests and neighbors hid a dark secret. Her cheerful nature helped disguise the fact that Mary and Albro were running a criminal organization, in the eyes of the law.

In the 1850’s, under the Fugitive Slave Act, any person who helped an enslaved person on their journey to freedom in Canada could be imprisoned.? Slave catchers roamed the streets of New York, kidnapping Black people, sending them into slavery in the Southern United States.? Networks of white and Black men and women helped escaping enslaved people hide in New York City and then travel north to Canada. Everyday this network of helpers was continually at risk of having their methods discovered. They lived each day with the dreadful thought that one mistake by any of them could mean arrest and years in prison. Even worse was the thought that slave catchers would learn about their secrets causing an enslaved family to get captured and returned to slavery. ?

Albro and Mary Lyons were part of several anti-slavery organizations, and their boarding house provided excellent cover for helping over one thousand men, women and children escape to Canada over ten years.? The network was not actually underground, and it was not actually a secret railroad, but it was called the “underground railroad.” Enslaved people where hidden in Albro's boarding houses, clothing store and workshops, then secretly smuggled onto ships and trains on the journey north to freedom in Canada. ?

Helping out with the railroad was a powerful way to destroy slavery.? Since enslaved people were the most valuable “possession” a slave owner had, helping a Black family escape could financially ruin a white farmer in the south and prevent him from purchasing more slaves. For the escaping family, safety, freedom from slavery, and possessing farm of their own in Canada, meant everything.?

Keeping up a deception of a cheerful gossipy mom, keeping her children quiet about the true identity of the people staying in her home, trying to secretly buy food and clothing for her visitors in hiding, all of this must have been very stressful for Mary.?

Albro was uniquely positioned to get enslaved people to and from the many ships that sailed into New York Harbor. He operated a boarding house for Black sailors and a clothing and supply store for seamen. He knew New York’s business community, and he knew sailors and baggage handlers. Many sailors in that day were free Black men.? When they sailed to ports in the American South, they made connections with those who wished to escape bondage by sea. Using crates, forged papers, sailor uniforms, they helped whole families escape to freedom.? The famous freedom writer and civil rights leader Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery with the help of sailors, through secret networks his wife Anna knew about.? Frederick Douglass would later stay with Albro and Mary Lyons.?

Maritcha remembered how important it was for her to keep quiet about everything she was seeing. She recalled that word was spread through “the grapevine” that anyone escaping slavery would find help in New York City. Knowing as little as possible about each stop on the underground railroad, and as little as possible about each person escaping, were crucial to keeping the escape network from being discovered by slave catchers and the authorities. ?She wrote: ?“Under mother’s vigilant eye, refugees were kept long enough [at their boarding house] to be fed, have disguises changed and met by those prepared to speed them on in the journey toward the North Star [freedom in Canada]."? Maritcha remembered that even though her parents faced possible arrest and prison, for over ten years her parents took extraordinary risks to help others.? About those stressful times she wrote: “Every thinking man and woman was a volunteer in the famous “underground railroad.”? Watching exactly how her community banded together out of love for Black families, how Black and white people worked together to create a secret network, gave her crucial knowledge she would use in later years.

During these exciting times, Maritcha suffered from a medical problem that kept her out of school.? It seems likely that her spine was growing improperly.? She needed to wear a brace to correct the problem.? Mary and Albro were childhood friends with Dr. James McCune Smith.? When no American medical schools would give him training, he traveled to Scotland and got his medical degree there.? Dr. Smith returned to New York, highly skilled, and became Maritcha’s doctor.? Stuck in a brace, not in school, at home for hours, made Maritcha an unhappy little girl.? Her parents tried to cheer her up by giving her a piano and paying for lessons.? A piano would be her musical companion for the rest of her life.? Soon she could entertain families escaping to freedom with the music of Mozart, Bach and Chopin. On other days Maritcha would be brought to Dr. Smith’s office where he also had a drug store.? This store was not just a place to buy medicine, but a place where the Black community gathered.? Maritcha remembered Dr. Smith’s pharmacy had a back room with a library. It was a place where the community held rallies, and where they gathered for “discussions and debates on all the topics of the day.”? Listening while stuck in her brace, Maritcha would begin to learn from these men and women, how to made a speech and how to use logic and reason to win an argument.??

For Maritcha, Dr. Smith’s braces and treatment were a success. Her spine began to grow normally again and she was freed from her brace and allowed to return to school in 1861.

At that time the American Civil War had begun.? Soon President Lincoln would abolish the Fugitive Slave Act and the Lyons family no longer had to keep their work helping others a secret. Maritcha was thirteen and attending Colored School Number Three in Manhattan. ?This school was a three mile walk from her home.? At that time Black New Yorkers Thomas Downing, and Elizabeth Jennings were fighting legal battles to be permitted to ride New York City street cars ( the buses of that era).? As that struggle continued, Maritcha had to get to school.? Sometimes the street car conductors would stop for her, others times they would call her names and refuse to let her ride.? Maritcha began to experience the unfair sorrow of being hated for being Black, while learning how to endure the long walk to and from school each day. She later commented that at least the long walk made her healthy.

When Maritcha arrived at Colored School Number Three, she arrived an unhappy schoolgirl, used to hours stuck in a brace, and now enduring racist jeers on her way to school. She was years behind in her schooling and found little enjoyment in anything other than playing the piano.? Maritcha felt her parent’s love and knew they were concerned about how low her spirits were. Fortunately, they were good friends with the principal of Colored School Number Three, Black educator Charles Reason.? He took an immediate liking to Maritcha and was determined to help her excel in school and break out of the sour mood she was stuck in. He managed the school and whenever he could, Charles Reason worked one on one with Maritcha and helped her catch up. Not only did Maritcha learn long division, and how to write a good sentence from Mr. Reason, she became passionate about the art of learning new things. Maritcha’s parents must have been grateful to see their daughter’s transformation, her spirits seemed to mend. ?

Maritcha felt that her parents played a huge part in helping her recover, she believed that they helped her become someone ready “to do the best for myself with the view of making the best of myself.”? Maritcha came to believe that her "best self" would be to become someone like Mr. Reason, ready to help others grow in confidence and develop a personal passion for learning.

All seemed to be going well for Maritcha and her family, when tragic historical events came crashing into their lives once again.?