The Lost Quilter (17 page)

Miss Evangeline spent spring and summer in Charleston with her aunt Lucretia, so instead of sewing for her, Joanna was set to work sewing rough “Negro cloth” into clothing for the slaves, though they would not receive their new garments until Christmas. As the first harvest came in, Marse Chester, figuring Joanna had little else to do with the young mistress away, ordered her to set the slave clothing aside and sort cotton instead.

All summer long, except on washdays and mornings when Mrs. Chester had mending for her, Joanna joined several older women in the outbuilding where the clattering cotton gin separated the seeds from the silky fibers. They sat on the floor, mounds of ginned cotton piled up around them and across their laps, dividing the pure white fibers from those discolored a faint yellow. The pure white cotton fetched a better price at market, but one yellow speck discovered within the bale could mean the difference between a grade of “Fancy” and “Good Middling.” On her first day, Aaron cuffed Joanna upside the head for allowing a few fibers with a minuscule amount of yellow into the white pile, then cuffed her again when she overcorrected and included a few fine white strands in with the yellow. Eventually
she caught on, and by July she could sort cotton as swiftly as the older women, whose thin, leathery hands fairly flew through the piles.

If she lived long enough, she would become one of those old women, she realized, once her hands grew too stiff to work a needle and her arms too weak to haul wash water. This would be her fate if she reached old age before freedom. The Chesters of Oak Grove needed every slave and hired no one out, so she couldn’t earn any money to buy her freedom. Some days she woke from dreams of Elm Creek Farm so despondent she could hardly rise from bed, knowing Marse Chester would name her child and put him or her in the stable or the big house or the fields as he saw fit. Then an image would appear in her mind’s eye—Leah tangled face down in the reeds, bobbing in the current that might have carried her across the ocean to the land of her ancestors. She thought of Leah and forced herself to rise, to eat, to report to work, to duck her head and avoid the eyes of the white buckra. She lived for the moments when she could be alone with Titus. His arms and his dreams of freedom, so tightly interwoven with her own, were her only solace. Titus and the Birds in the Air quilt reminded her of a world beyond Oak Grove, a world where she imagined her firstborn thrived and where one day his little brother or sister would play by his side.

But freedom seemed an increasingly elusive dream the larger her belly grew.

One evening about two months before she expected her second child to enter the world, Joanna sewed the last row of Birds in the Air blocks to the bottom of her quilt. She had made twelve blocks more than necessary, thinking to piece them into a smaller
quilt for the baby, but a quilt for her child would have to wait until she finished the quilt that would record the clues that might one day lead her family to freedom.

The next washday, Joanna approached Mrs. Chester in her study and asked if she might have some of the lowest-grade cotton to fill a patchwork quilt.

“I’ll ask my husband if he can spare it,” the mistress replied, sizing up Joanna’s belly. “How much longer?”

“About two months, missus, I think.”

“That’s fortunate. You’ll have that all out of the way before Miss Evangeline returns. She would be quite distressed if you were unable to prepare her trousseau.”

That was how Joanna learned that Miss Evangeline was to be married. She thanked the mistress and hurried back to the washhouse, heart sinking as she realized that the slaves’ new clothing would be pushed aside once again. Joanna would be needed to sew a wedding gown and fine dresses suitable for an officer’s wife in Charleston—if she had guessed correctly and Colonel Harper was Miss Evangeline’s intended husband. Most of the field hands had worn through the clothing distributed the previous Christmas, and Joanna sometimes mended torn seams and patched holes in exchange for food. But she could not repair what had been completely worn away.

A few days later, the mistress granted Joanna’s request for cotton. “But only enough for one quilt,” she cautioned, “and only the lowest grade.” It made no difference to Joanna; a middling grade, yellow batt flecked with hulls would keep her as warm as the purest white. She filled her apron with sweepings from the floor around the cotton gin and stashed the bundle in the cabin until she could collect enough large pieces of fabric to piece together into a backing. Until then, her quilt would have to wait while
she worked on the slaves’ clothing. If she did not finish, many of the 170 men, women, and children the Chesters owned would go naked in winter while Miss Evangeline wore fine wools and furs.

Later that week, Mrs. Chester announced that Miss Evangeline was returning home from her aunt Lucretia’s house in Charleston earlier than planned so that they could begin preparing for the wedding in earnest. Joanna helped Dove air out the young mistress’s room and change the linens, but she rushed through the chores so she could resume sewing clothing for the slaves. Even the simplest shirts and dresses took at least a day to complete, and although Joanna despaired of finishing before the distribution at Christmas, she pressed on. Basting shirtsleeves and hemming trousers, Joanna longed for Anneke Bergstrom’s sewing machine, which she had learned to use during her single winter in Pennsylvania. If only Mrs. Chester would buy one for Oak Grove, but she was too frugal to spend money on something that did not benefit her. Mrs. Chester already
had
a sewing machine—Joanna. Why waste good money on another?

When Miss Evangeline returned, Joanna resolved to convince her that a sewing machine would allow Joanna to sew a finer seam and produce more pretty dresses in a fraction of the time. Never one to turn away from any opportunity to acquire more finery, Miss Evangeline might persuade her father that a sewing machine would be a good investment.

In the meantime, Mrs. Chester found her own solution to Joanna’s impossible workload.

She was heating water in the washhouse when Lizzie appeared in the doorway. “Mistress says I’m supposed to help you,” she said sullenly, as if she still resented Joanna’s accusation that
she had stolen the tin cornboiler. “You supposed to teach me everything you know.”

Joanna could not look at Lizzie without imagining Leah tangled in the reeds. “Why you? You don’t act like you asked for this job.”

“All the bigger girls are picking cotton.” Lizzie put her head to one side and thrust out her chin, eyes narrowed and fixed on Joanna’s face as if she were daring herself not to flinch at Joanna’s scar. “I’d rather be with them in the fields than in here with a stupid yellow girl who thinks I’m a thief.”

Joanna emptied soap in the wash water and stirred the steaming brew with a long wooden paddle. “You only say that because you never had to work the fields.”

Lizzie tossed her head. “What would you know about it, house slave like you?”

“I pick tobacco back in Virginia,” Joanna retorted. “Girls and boys younger than you weren’t playing in the slave quarter, watching the little ones. That was a job for old women. Soon as a child five or six years old, they out in the fields picking hornworms off the tobacco leaves. The driver follow behind looking over your row, and if he find any hornworms you missed, he make you eat them.”

Lizzie looked ill. “Well, I wouldn’t miss any.”

“Everybody miss some, specially at first.”

“Not me.”

Exasperated, Joanna shook water from the paddle and thrust the handle toward Lizzie. “Here. Try not to burn anything or Aaron might decide you old enough to pick cotton after all.”

Grumbling, Lizzie snatched the paddle and did as Joanna said.

That day’s work took twice as long as usual, but as the week
passed and Joanna shared what she knew as patiently as she could, she discovered that Lizzie had a quick mind to go with her saucy tongue. She could remember, word for word, Joanna’s recipes for different soaps—one for clothes, another for skin, several different mixtures for different kinds of stains—and although she wasn’t strong enough to empty a full bucket of water into the washtub or haul a basket of damp laundry out to the line, she could still feed wet clothes into the mangle while Joanna cranked the winch, or stir the soaking clothes with the wooden paddle so Joanna could turn a few pieces of coarse homespun into a dress for a girl in the quarter. The more the girl learned, the more Joanna discovered to teach her.

If Lizzie had any care about her future, Joanna thought, she would learn to do the washhouse work quickly and well. Field work would be the death of her. Her sharp tongue was no match for Aaron’s whip.

Sewing, mending, washing, sorting cotton. Awaiting Miss Evangeline’s return. Awaiting the arrival of her child. Bartering sewing services for food; rejoicing when Titus came home from hunting with a rabbit or a squirrel. Slipping away from the quarter to be alone with him; whispering of the day they would run off, all of them, leaving only an empty cabin behind. Wondering if they were only sharing wistful dreams rather than plans, real plans, plans they intended to carry out.

Then one night, Titus drew her off into the woods near the creek, where the rushing water would cover their voices. “What do you say we run off sooner rather than later?”

For a moment, Joanna could only stare at him. “I haven’t finished my quilt yet” was her first, foolish response.

“You don’t need the quilt. You got everything fixed in your mind.”

“How soon?”

“Next week. Sunday.” He clasped both her hands in his. “Marse Chester is sending me to Charleston to fetch Miss Evangeline home.”

“He’s not going with you?”

“He got too much to do here with the harvest and his buyer coming, so he’s sending me alone.”

“But don’t Miss Evangeline need an escort?” White ladies rarely traveled anywhere without a husband, father, or brother to look after them.

“Her cousin Bartholomew’s coming back with her—or he would be, except we won’t be going that way.” A rustling in the bushes silenced him, until he saw it was only a squirrel. “Listen. You, Tavia, Auntie Bess, and the children can hide in the coach until we well out of sight of the ferry and anyone who might know me or Marse Chester’s horses by sight. I know a blacksmith in Charleston—a slave, but he can write. He’ll make us passes all the way from Charleston to Philadelphia.”

Joanna thought it over, took a deep breath, and shook her head. “No one would believe us, not even with a pass. What reason would seven slaves have to be driving themselves all that way alone?”

“Not seven slaves. One widowed white lady, her trusted driver, and her five slaves.”

Joanna’s heart hammered. “Titus—”

“You know you can pass for a white lady if you wear a fine dress and bonnet. Didn’t you tell me that was the plan to get you from Pennsylvania to Canada? We’ll say you a white lady whose husband died from measles. You don’t have any kin here, so you
going back to home to your mother to have your child. We’ll paint spots on your face so no one will want to get too close and ask you questions.”

“But when you don’t show up in Charleston—”

“By the time Miss Evangeline gets word to her father that I never show up, we got ourselves a good head start. They’ll be looking for runaway slaves, not a poor, sad, sick white lady in a coach.”

“Aaron won’t miss us, not on a Sunday,” said Joanna, mulling it over. “Not until Tavia don’t show up for the drawing.”

“We can say she sick, ask someone else to get her ration. That’ll buy us a little more time.”

“And then Monday morning, when she and Pearl don’t show up at the fields, whoever got her ration for her will get beat.” Joanna shook her head. It couldn’t be done, not without bringing down punishment upon others. “Everyone will get beat, and everyone will go hungry.”

“I’ll hunt every day between now and then so that everyone has a little meat put away. They can have our garden. We won’t need it.” He squeezed her hands tightly and pulled her close. “I know you hurt whenever anyone else hurts, but sometimes you got to think of your own. Marse Chester won’t starve them to death, and he won’t let Aaron beat everyone to death. If they kill us all, you think they gonna send Miss Evangeline and her brothers and sister out to the fields to pick that cotton? They need us or they lose everything.”

Joanna pressed her lips together and nodded. She didn’t want anyone to suffer on her account, but if the alternative was to stay forever a slave, to bear her child into slavery—

“It might work,” she said. “It could.”

“Once we get to Philadelphia, first thing we do is send word
to your friends and find your son,” Titus promised. “I’ll raise him like he’s my own.”

Joanna burst into laughter, tears in her eyes. “He don’t look nothing like you.”

“I don’t care.” Titus raised her hands to his lips, eyes shining with hope and pride. “You a brave woman. I knew that when you first glared at me through the bars of that wagon. I know it won’t be easy to travel so close to your time, but it’ll be easier than running with a newborn who always pick the worst time to cry, who make noise just when you most need him to be quiet.”

She knew he was right, and that a chance like this might never come again.

They went over their plan every night in the cabin while the children slept. Tavia clasped her hands in her lap, eyes wide and anxious whenever Titus described the dangerous route north, but she agreed that this was their best chance for freedom. Pearl, eager and determined, offered to help pack food for the journey and promised to keep the children quietly occupied on the long drive north. In vain they all tried to persuade Auntie Bess to come along, but she insisted that she was too old to travel so far, that she would slow them down if something went wrong and they had to abandon the coach and travel on foot. “Didn’t you say you need someone to draw the ration on Sunday?” she said. “If I do it, no one else needs to know what you got planned. That’ll buy you an extra day, almost.”