Candle in the Darkness (17 page)

Daddy frowned. “Of course it’s safe. That was the work of fanatical outsiders, not native Virginians. Living in peace with our Negroes is a long-established way of life for us—you know that, Martha. Take your sister’s servant, Ruby, for instance. You’re aware of the bond of loyalty and love that existed between her and my wife. Can you honestly imagine our Ruby taking part in such a rebellion? It’s the troublemakers from the North who threaten to upset that balance.”

“We are not all fanatics like John Brown,” Uncle Philip said, “any more than all slave owners are like Simon Legree.”

Their voices had been gradually growing louder, harsher. Daddy took a moment to stop and carefully cut his meat. When he looked up at Uncle Philip again, I heard cold anger in his tone. “I’ve read some of the headlines that appeared in your Northern newspapers after this incident. The entire South is horrified that you would express sympathy and praise for a fanatic who tried to cause a slave insurrection. How can any thinking man endorse such an outrage?”

“So, that’s why you’ve come for her, then.”

“Yes. I don’t want my only child influenced by that ungodly way of thinking. You’re calling that maniac Brown a hero!”

“I’ve never called him that, George.”

Daddy raised his hand in apology. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to accuse any of you. But if even one person in the North defends that man, then it’s time Caroline came home.”

“Why not wait a bit and see what happens?” Aunt Martha said. “Maybe this will all blow over.”

Daddy leaned back in his chair and gravely shook his head. “To the people in the North, John Brown is a hero. To the South, he’s a murderous villain. Our differences are much too great, Martha. The dividing line between us is too clearly drawn. This won’t blow over.”

“You may be right,” Uncle Philip said quietly. “But there is something we’re all forgetting to consider—what would Caroline herself like to do?”

My uncle knew all about the anti-slavery meetings I’d been attending for the past year. He knew from the fervor of Rev. Greene’s sermons what attitudes I’d been exposed to at those meetings. He turned to me.

“What would you like to do, Caroline?”

If it hadn’t been for Nathaniel’s courageous sermon, I may have drawn back at the thought of facing the darkness of slavery again. But then I recalled the verse he’d read from Isaiah:
“If thou
take away from the midst of thee the yoke . . . thy darkness will be as the noon day.”
I was tired of simply listening to anti-slavery speeches, tired of merely supporting a cause. My own words came back to haunt me—Tessie and Eli were not a cause, they were people.

I looked up at my daddy and said, “I want to go home.”

Chapter Nine

Richmond 1859

As our train neared the city and all the familiar sights of Richmond came into view, I knew that I was home at last. Gilbert stood waiting to meet us at the station, greeting me with a rare smile.

“Welcome home, Missy Caroline.”

“Thank you, Gilbert. It’s so good to be home.”

He loaded all my trunks and hatboxes and carpetbags into the carriage, then Daddy asked him to drive to Hollywood Cemetery to visit my mother’s grave.

The parklike graveyard was quiet and still. The crunch of gravel beneath the horses’ hooves and wagon wheels was the only sound as we drove downhill from the entrance. Gilbert threaded the carriage through the maze of winding roads, beneath ageless trees in their fading fall colors, past the jumble of tombs and monuments, as he must have done countless times.

The James River was visible from Mother’s grave site, with wooded Belle Isle floating serenely in the middle of it. As I stood silently gazing at her tombstone, I felt as though my mother had finally found the peace that had eluded her all her life.

“It’s nice here,” I said with a sigh.

Daddy nodded. Then he put his hat back on, and we drove away.

Hollywood Cemetery was west of downtown, our house on Church Hill east of it, so I was able to savor the sights as we drove up and down Richmond’s hills on the way home. The brick buildings of Tredegar Iron Works sprawled near the canal, smoke rising majestically from its tall chimneys. I saw Crenshaw Woolen Mills, the Franklin Paper Mill, and a half-dozen flour mills whose names I couldn’t recall. On the next hill, in front of the pillared capitol building, George Washington gazed southward from astride his bronze horse. Bells chimed the hour from nearby St. Paul’s. I could see the curving James River in the distance, sparkling in the sunlight, and mules like toy figures laboring to haul packet boats up the Kanawha Canal. We rode through the business district, past shops and banks, past the Spotswood Hotel, past newsboys hawking the latest editions. I begged Daddy to drive past his warehouses so I could see the ships docked at Rocketts Wharf.

Richmond wasn’t enormous and frantic and loud, like Philadelphia, but lovely and dignified, a proud queen perched on her hills. And best of all, everywhere I looked I saw a wonderful mixture of black faces and white faces.

As the horses labored up Church Hill, the spire of St. John’s came into view, and I knew I was nearly home. Then I was standing in our front hallway at last, and Tessie was running out to meet me, looking even more beautiful than I’d remembered. She hugged me so tightly I thought my bones would snap, but I never wanted her to let go.

“I hardly know you, baby,” she wept as we hugged and cried. “You all growed up.”

“Oh, Tessie! I’ve missed you so much! I’m never going away again.”

“Is that our gal?” Esther cried as she hurried in from the kitchen. She took a long, tender look at me before swallowing me in her ample embrace. “Land sakes, honey! You growed some bosoms while you was gone. Looks like it gonna take a mighty strong wind to blow you to Washington, D.C. now!”

We were all laughing and crying, even shy Luella. My mother’s maid, Ruby, cried the hardest. “I just knew you gonna be as pretty as you mama someday. Oh, it so good to have you back.”

But someone was missing. I felt bone-chilling fear when I looked around and realized that Eli’s beloved face wasn’t among the others. “Where’s Eli?” I asked.

“He’s wanting to see you real bad,” Esther said, “but he don’t have clothes that’s good enough to wear inside the big house.”

I flew out the back door and down the walk to the carriage house. Eli stood in the doorway, tall and proud, waiting for me. His hair and beard had turned nearly white while I was gone, but his arms and shoulders were as sturdy and strong as ever. I fell into those arms and smelled the wonderful scent of horses and leather as I rested my face against his broad chest.

“I’m home, Eli.”

“Oh, yes . . . thank you, Massa Jesus! This place sure be dark and dreary without our Little Missy. Maybe now the sun finally gonna shine around here again.”

I was home, and the longer I was, the more certain I became that some of the stories they told in those meetings up north were exaggerated. I felt thoroughly ashamed that I’d ever entertained such an outrageous idea about my father and Tessie. Josiah had been sold to Hilltop around the time Grady had been born—perhaps as a punishment for his behavior with Tessie. As for the color of Grady’s skin, I must have remembered wrong. He hadn’t been any lighter than Tessie, had he? Besides, she’d borne no other children since Josiah had been sold.

But even if some of the abolitionists had exaggerated, I still knew that slavery was very wrong. I had brought a large box of anti-slavery pamphlets back to Richmond with me, convinced that if I simply talked to people, simply explained to them what I’d learned from the Anti-Slavery Society up north, many people would listen to reason.

On a cold November day, I headed down to the mercantile district to do some shopping, carrying a bundle of tracts in my bag with the intention of dropping them off in the stores I visited along Main Street. I was about to step into the milliner’s shop when I heard a loud shout and looked up to see a dark-haired man in his mid-twenties running toward me, chasing a little Negro boy. They were just a few yards away from me when the stranger finally caught the child by the arm. The boy kicked and flailed desperately as he struggled to free himself, but he was ragged and thin, no more than eight years old, and a pitiful match for the welldressed, well-built man who had him in his grip.

Without a second thought, I swung my bag at the man’s head as hard as I could. “Stop that! Let go of him!”

The man was more than a foot taller than me, so I missed his head and struck the back of his shoulder instead. He released the boy, more from surprise than from the force of the blow, and the child raced away. Breathless and angry, the man whirled around to face me, and I found myself looking into the bluest eyes I’d ever seen—wide and clear and as cold as mountain ice. He blinked in surprise when he saw who had struck him, and I noticed the thick, dark lashes that fringed his eyes.

“Listen now,” he said when he’d recovered from his surprise. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“How dare you treat a child that way? You have no right to use force against a defenseless boy just because he’s a Negro!”

“That boy is a thief. I caught him stealing fruit from that vendor over there, but now he’s gotten away, thanks to you.” The man’s dark brown hair had become tousled during the struggle, and he raked it from his high forehead with an angry thrust of his hand. His hair was thick and fashionably long, covering the tops of his ears. A curving mustache and trim beard hid his chin.

His anger unnerved me. I didn’t know what had ever possessed me to interfere in this affair, but I was suddenly very sorry that I had. “Y-your slave wouldn’t be forced to steal . . . if . . . if you treated him fairly,” I stammered.

“He is not my slave.”

A gust of wind suddenly blew, and I realized that some of my tracts had spilled out when I’d swung my bag. They were starting to blow away.

“Oh no!” I scrambled to retrieve them, but running and bending were awkward in my billowing hoop skirt.

“Allow me,” he said. The angry expression smoothed from his face as he remembered his manners. He crouched on the sidewalk and began gathering my papers. But as he stood, straightening the pamphlets into a pile, he read what they were. His anger returned in an instant. “What sort of trash is this?” he demanded.

His startling eyes pinned me, and my heart began to race. I wanted to run, but I also wanted to stand up for what I believed. “Y-you might benefit from reading one of them, sir. They clearly explain that slavery is a sin, and that it is abhorrent to God. It is impossible for a Christian to defend it.”

“Listen now. You’re breaking the law. Don’t you know you could be arrested for distributing this propaganda?” I could see that he was growing angrier by the minute. I was afraid of him, but my own rising anger fueled my courage.

“No, I’m quite certain that I still have the right to freedom of speech here in America. And freedom of the press.”

“Each state has the right to enact its own laws,” he said coldly, “and in the state of Virginia, it is a felony to distribute abolitionist material.”

I had no idea if he was telling the truth. My heart raced faster. “First you try to arrest a poor, starving child, and now you’re threatening to arrest me? Am I to believe that you’re a policeman, sir? Or do you make it your habit to run around Richmond taking the law into your own hands?”

“It’s the duty of all law-abiding citizens to stop people who are breaking the law. I was merely trying to help the grocer recover his goods and to help you avoid arrest—not to mention help retrieve your disgusting pamphlets. It seems I’ve had nothing but abuse from you in return for my efforts.”

“Well, it’s your fault the pamphlets fell out in the first place.”

“Oh, I see. Is it also my fault that my shoulder was in the way when you decided to swing your bag at my head?” He shoved the tracts into my hands, then dusted off his own as if they’d become contaminated. “I wash my hands of you. If you’re arrested for distributing contraband, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”

“I have not distributed a single one of these!”

His brows lifted in surprise. It made his eyes appear wider still. “Excuse me, but most people don’t need a dozen copies of the same tract for their own reading purposes.”

“I don’t see how it’s any of your business what I do with them.”

He folded his arms across his chest. I hated it that his height enabled him to look down on me. “Your accent tells me you’re from Virginia,” he said, “but your actions speak otherwise. Listen now. If you’re visiting our fair city, I only wish to warn you, as a gentleman, that folks in Richmond don’t take kindly to such interference with our Negroes. Nor do we appreciate people spreading abolitionist propaganda. Good day.”

He strode away so quickly that I would have had to either shout or run after him in order to have the last word. I began walking back to where Eli waited with the carriage. The encounter had left me too angry and shaken to continue with my shopping. Had the boy really been a thief? And was it really against the law to distribute anti-slavery pamphlets?