Candle in the Darkness (49 page)

Charles marched north again with General Longstreet to rejoin Lee’s army, and the news he sent was all good. General Rodes took the city of Martinsburg. General Ewell took Winchester on the same day. At the end of June they crossed the Potomac into Union territory. One year ago a huge Federal army had threatened Richmond; now Washington and Philadelphia felt threatened by the invading Confederate army. Daddy’s hopes for another Rebel victory soared. Surely the North would sue for peace. It would all be over soon.

The first three days of July were the longest ones in my life as the opposing armies finally clashed in an unknown Pennsylvania town named Gettysburg. The early reports of Confederate victories raised hopes higher still. While I waited in an agony of suspense for news about Charles, a devastating blow threw the city into despair. The long siege of Vicksburg had ended in defeat. General Pemberton had surrendered the city to Federal forces on the Fourth of July. That meant the Mississippi River was in Union hands; the Confederacy was cut in half.

Then the awful truth about the battles being fought at Gettysburg slowly began to filter home. The news stunned all of us. Half of General Pickett’s men had been mowed down by artillery and rifle fire in a daring but ill-fated charge up Cemetery Hill. Out of a force of two hundred fifty men in the 9th Virginia Regiment, only thirty-eight had survived. Altogether, Lee’s army suffered more than twenty-eight thousand casualties—more than one-third of his men—and had gained nothing. Lee was in retreat, marching from the battlefield by night in a drenching rain.

After the way Charles had spoken about dying two months earlier, I couldn’t summon the courage to go downtown and read the casualty lists from Gettysburg.
“You must prepare yourself for the fact that I might die,”
he had said. So many thousands of men had died at Gettysburg, so many more had been grievously wounded, that I lost all hope that Charles might have been spared.
“I’ve had to prepare myself . . . and you must, too.”

“I’ll go find out for you, Caroline,” Daddy said. “In the meantime, you’ve got to keep your hopes up.” But I saw him swallow a good stiff drink to fortify himself before leaving on horseback. I waited, sick at heart, unable to hug Tessie with her enormous belly in the way. I told myself that if Daddy galloped up the hill, the news would be good; if he took his time coming home, the news was bad.

“ ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,’ ” Tessie read aloud, “ ‘I will fear no evil: for thou art with me. . . .’ ”

I waited. One hour slowly turned into two.

When I heard a horse trotting up the street I forced myself to walk downstairs to the foyer. Daddy burst through the door, his face flushed and dripping with sweat. “He’s all right, Caroline. Charles and Jonathan both came through it safely.”

I sank to the floor, weeping and thanking God.

On a hot, muggy day in August, the police arrested a Richmond woman named Mary Caroline Allan on charges of espionage. I had been making regular trips to Mr. Ferguson’s booth in the farmers’ market with the information I’d gleaned from social gatherings and from my father’s many visitors, and the news of Mrs. Allan’s arrest alarmed me, reminding me of the dangerous path I was treading.

On the very same day, Tessie went into labor. Ruby and Esther settled her into their quarters above the kitchen and forbade me to come anywhere near her. But I could hear Tessie’s cries of pain through the open windows, her suffering intensified by the afternoon’s sticky heat.

When Esther finally emerged with the good news that evening, she was wringing with sweat herself. “Tessie had herself a boy,” she said with a weary smile. “Another beautiful little boy. And I got myself a grandchild.” I was finally allowed upstairs to see them. “But just for a minute,” Esther warned.

Tessie looked exhausted but radiant. Her son, whom she’d named Isaac, had Josiah’s dark, scowling face. Tears filled my eyes as I thought of Grady.

“You go on out, now,” Esther said, shooing me. “I gonna give Tessie a bite to eat, then she gonna have herself a rest.”

Daddy had gone downtown on business, but I sat in the stair hall that sultry evening, watching out the window for his return. I barely gave him time to come through the front door before confronting him with the news. “Tessie had her baby . . . a little boy.”

Daddy looked flustered. “Well. I see.” Neither of us had ever said a word about her pregnancy but he certainly must have noticed it.

“I have a question,” I said, following him into the library. “Does her baby belong to us or to Jonathan, since he owns the baby’s father, Josiah?”

Daddy stared into space for a moment. “Josiah’s the father? Are you sure?” Then he came out of his trance and glanced around the room as if he weren’t sure where he was or how he got there. “Well. It doesn’t really matter who sired it. The child is the property of whoever owns the mother. Negro women never tell the truth about who the sire is.”

I drew a deep breath. “In that case, I would like to own the baby—as my servant. I know all the servants will be mine someday, but in the meantime I would like one of my own.”

Daddy sank into his chair, his eyes never leaving mine. “Why? What are you going to do with him?”

“I don’t know, but—”

“He’s not a toy, Caroline, not something that you can play with like a rag doll. That’s what you did with Tessie’s other boy and I should have put a stop to it from the very beginning. Slaves are valuable pieces of property.”

“I’d like him to be my property,” I said, forcing the words from my mouth. “When he’s old enough, Gilbert can teach him to drive a carriage. I’ll need my own driver once Charles and I are married. Look, I’ll buy the child from you if you’d like. But I really want to own him, Daddy.” I gazed up at him the way I had as a little girl, begging for favors—the look he’d never been able to resist.

“If that would please you, Sugar . . . all right. But make sure you put him to work. Don’t spoil him. If he grows up to be as big and strong as Josiah, he’ll be worth a pretty penny.”

I made Daddy draw up the ownership papers that same night, making the slave, Isaac Fletcher, my legal property. As soon as the ink dried, I went straight up to my room and transferred my deed of ownership to Isaac, writing it on the back of the same paper, using the legal terms my father had used. I hadn’t even owned my slave for five minutes before granting him his freedom.

When I climbed the steep ladder that night to the stifling slaves’ quarters above the kitchen, Isaac was nursing at Tessie’s breast. I knelt beside them, listening to his soft, baby coos and to the gentle lullaby Tessie hummed as his tiny fingers curled around hers. I could remember her humming the same tune to me years ago.

When the baby finally slept, I gave Tessie the paper. I watched as she read it in wonder and disbelief, trying to absorb what it meant.

“Isaac is free, Tessie,” I said. “That paper proves it.”

“My boy . . . my son is a free man?”

“Yes. No one can ever take him from you.”

Then we both wept.

Chapter Twenty-two

Fall 1863

The weather stayed warm for a long time during the fall of 1863, giving us a near-perfect Indian summer. But even the finest weather couldn’t dispel the twin shadows of poverty and defeat that closed in on Richmond. It became a common sight to see some of the city’s wealthiest families, their clothes threadbare, trying to sell their jewelry and other valuables in order to eat.We still had some of Daddy’s gold, but it did little good since so many of the stores had empty shelves. The goods that were available sold for such exorbitant prices that I watched Daddy’s “fortune” rapidly dwindle.

The Confederate dollar had depreciated until it was worth only four cents. The shoes I had bought Gilbert six months ago now sold for four times as much. The four-dollar butter Esther had complained about seemed cheap with butter now selling for fifteen dollars a pound. We ate a lot of potatoes, but even they were expensive at twenty-five dollars a bushel. And flour, if you could find it, had gone from six dollars a barrel three years ago to as much as three hundred dollars a barrel. With heating fuel scarce and very costly, everyone dreaded winter.

News of the battles raging out west added to the gloom. Federal troops occupied Chattanooga, eastern Tennessee, and the Cumberland Gap. Our Rebel forces under General Bragg won an impressive victory at Chickamauga, but it cost him two-fifths of his men. The North, with its larger population, could replace their losses with fresh troops; the Confederates had no way to replace their soldiers when they fell in combat.

By November, General Ulysses Grant had taken command of the Federals. From Tennessee, they began pushing our Confederate forces back, driving them from Lookout Mountain, inching their way toward Atlanta.

Even with all this suffering, neither Daddy nor anyone else in Richmond talked of losing the war or abandoning the fight for Southern independence. Like the Old Testament pharaoh, their hearts grew harder, leaving me to wonder how many more plagues we would have to endure before the slaves finally won their freedom.

My father still entertained important guests—although on a more modest scale than before—and I continued to collect information and pass it along to Mr. Ferguson. I made it a point to learn more about military tactics so I would know which questions to ask and which facts were important. I became very skilled at acquiring information and remembering details. I not only told the Yankees what the Rebels’ plans and movements were, but I told them what the Rebels already knew of the North’s movements and strengths.

I no longer felt remorse at deceiving my father or using him this way. Not after eavesdropping on his conversation with Mr. St. John one afternoon. “I might be forced to sell some of my slaves this winter so we’ll have fewer mouths to feed,” Daddy said.

I nearly cried out. I had come into his library on the pretense of looking for a book to read, hoping to pick up some new information from the two men, but Daddy’s words stunned me. I wanted to plead with him not to do this, but I was afraid that if I let him know I was listening he would stop discussing his plans. I randomly pulled
A Tale of Two Cities
from the shelf and pretended to leaf through it, biting my lip as I listened.

“I didn’t think you could get a decent price for slaves these days,” Mr. St. John said. “I’d sell a few of mine, too, if I thought that I could get a fair price for them.”

“No, no, they’re not selling for anywhere near what they’re worth,” Daddy said. “I could use the money, but that’s not why I’m thinking of selling them. Frankly, food is just too hard to come by, and I don’t want the expense of feeding so many slaves this winter.”

“I know what you mean,” Mr. St. John said. “The way things are, it hardly seems worth feeding one just so she can polish the silver.”

“Caroline and I can probably get by with two maidservants,” Daddy said. “After all, there’s only two of us. And I really don’t need two menservants either, since we only have the one mare to care for. But it will be hard to decide whether to sell Eli or Gilbert. They’re both good slaves.”

I couldn’t listen to any more. I closed Dickens’ book and hurried from the room with it. By the time I reached the backyard where Eli was hoeing his vegetable patch, my tears were falling fast. Eli took one look at my face and dropped the hoe to run to me.

“It ain’t Massa Charles, is it?” he asked, gripping my shoulders to steady me. “I seen Mr. St. John come, but I didn’t think—”

“No, Charles is all right. It’s . . . it’s you and the others, Eli . . .” I wanted to lean against his broad chest and sob, but Eli took my arm and led me into the carriage house before trying to comfort me.

“Go ahead, Missy . . . it’s all right,” he soothed as he finally wrapped his arms around me. “You can tell me all about it . . . it’s okay. . . .”

But it wasn’t okay. I remembered the expression of joy on Gilbert’s face the day Daddy returned home from blockade running, how Ruby and the others had spread a banquet in celebration, how Esther had cooked all his favorite foods. They loved Daddy, trusted him, served him faithfully—yet he planned to sell them as if they were simply useless possessions he no longer needed. I didn’t want to tell Eli the terrible truth, but I knew that I had to. When I could control my tears, I raised my head to look up at him.

“My father is planning to sell three of you before winter,” I said.

For a moment, Eli appeared not to believe my words. Then an expression of such intense pain filled his eyes that I had to look away. “It’s okay. . . .” hemurmured, “God gonna have His way . . . it’s okay. . . .”

“No, it’s not,” I shouted. “I can’t part with any of you. This is wrong, Eli. Help me think of a way to stop him.”

“Can’t nobody stop him, Missy. We can only pray and trust God to—”

“No! You can’t let him do this. You have to escape to freedom, Eli. All of you.”

“Escape?” He said it as if he’d never heard the word.

“Yes. I’ll never let my father sell you. Never. I’ll help all of you run away first.”