The Lost Quilter (6 page)

1859
Greenfields Plantation, Virginia

W
hen they passed the Richardson plantation, Joanna knew they were no more than a half day’s ride from their destination—Greenfields Plantation and Marse Chester. She felt a sting of phantom pain as if his knife already dug into the cord at the back of her ankle. If it were severed, she could not run.

Later they crossed Ashworth land, where Joanna had been born. Joanna’s mother and four of her brothers and sisters lived there still, if they hadn’t died or been sold off. Joanna scarcely remembered them. When she was around five years old, Josiah Chester’s mother had come in her carriage to ask Marse Ashworth if he had a young girl to sell, for she needed someone to care for her grandson now that he had started walking. The master’s wife promptly offered Joanna, overcoming her husband’s objections with a wordless look of reproachful defiance that Joanna did not understand, except that she had always known the mistress hated her.

Swooping her up in her arms, Joanna’s mother fled back to their cabin and hid her beneath a mound of quilts, but the over
seer came in swift pursuit. He seized Joanna by the wrist, dragged her outside, and hefted her into the carriage across from her new mistress. When she shrieked for her mother, the gray-haired white lady in the fine dress slapped her and told her to hush, and as the coachman chirruped to the horses, she instructed Joanna in her new duties. She must tend the baby and keep him safe from harm, rock his cradle at night, and change his diapers. She must keep him clean, keep him from crying, and let the younger Mrs. Chester rest.

Joanna did her best, but she was too young for the task. Mason was a good baby as babies went, but all babies cried, and all soiled their clothes. Joanna could barely lift the chubby ten-month-old and she struggled to hold him still when changing his diapers. Her forearms soon became bruised from his strong kicks, and she ran herself ragged keeping him from breaking her mistress’s precious trinkets or tumbling from the veranda. She was expected to stay up all night rocking his cradle, but sometimes weariness overcame her and she nodded off, awaking with a jolt when Mason wailed. Instead of picking up her son and soothing him, the mistress would snatch a willow whip from her beside table and beat Joanna on the neck and shoulders to teach her to stay awake.

“She’s useless,” the mistress complained to her mother-in-law one afternoon when an exhausted, starving Joanna could not run fast enough to prevent Mason from toddling happily into a mud puddle. “I’ll thank you to allow me to choose my own servants next time.”

Mother Chester’s thin lips formed a hard line in her wrinkled face. “Mr. Ashworth assured me she’s from excellent stock. Her mother is a strong field hand and she’s already borne five children, and at no more than one-and-twenty. The girl only wants training, and she has six months to acquire it.”

With a doubtful frown, the mistress lay her slender white hand upon her abdomen, and with that gesture Joanna understood the hints and half-finished conversations of the past few weeks. In six months another young master would join the family, and Joanna would find her duties multiplied. Her heart plummeted. Until that moment she had assumed that once Mason was out of diapers and sleeping through the night, she would be allowed to return home to her mother.

She dreaded the new baby’s arrival and longed for her mother and siblings. She endured the sleepless nights and beatings, and she felt herself becoming thinner and weaker as Mason thrived and grew. His chubby arms were thicker around than hers, and once, as moonlight streamed in through the window and her little charge slumbered, her mind took hold of the notion that her skin and flesh and bone were disappearing into his, and as he continued to grow, one day there would be nothing left of her but an empty, worn, homespun dress, crumpled in a heap on the floor.

One afternoon she was straining to lift Mason into his chair when he suddenly lunged for a toy and slipped from her grasp. His head hit the chair with a sickening thud as he fell. For a heart-stopping moment he lay on the floor blinking up at her in surprise. Then he began to scream.

The mistress came running. With a gasp she snatched up her son, and once assured that his skull had not been split open, she handed the boy to her maid and seized Joanna by the shoulders. She shook her until Joanna’s teeth rattled, screaming horrible, terrifying threats of what would become of her should Mason die. Joanna felt herself slipping into a faint, but she stayed conscious long enough to hear Mother Chester enter the room and declare, shocked and scandalized, “Caroline, you must control yourself.”

The grip on her shoulders eased and Joanna fell to the floor, dazed and reeling.

The mistress prevailed upon Marse Chester to buy a suitable wet nurse to tend both newborn and elder brother. Until such a slave could be found, Mason, who was not injured, was entrusted to Honor, a half-blind elderly slave whose knowledge of herb lore had earned her a measure of grudging respect from whites and coloreds alike. Joanna understood that she was in deep disgrace for dropping the young master, but any hope that she might be sent home for her failure vanished when Mother Chester announced that Joanna would help Ruth, the cook, until she was old enough to be put to work in the tobacco fields.

Ruth’s seven children had been sold off to Georgia traders years before, and Joanna quickly became the unwitting beneficiary of their absence. Upon her thin shoulders Ruth poured the love and attention she had been unable to offer her own sons and daughters. Perhaps somewhere far to the south, other bereft mothers did the same for Ruth’s children.

No longer forced to stay awake all night, Joanna slept soundly curled up beside Ruth in a small room off the kitchen; it was no more than a walled-in lean-to, but it was more comfortable by far than the slave cabins. She filled out and grew stronger, thanks to Ruth’s willingness to look the other way while Joanna stuffed her cheeks with the best of the table leavings before reluctantly scraping the rest into the slop bucket for the hogs.

“Watch me,” Ruth admonished dozens of times a day as she cut up chickens and shelled peas, determined to teach Joanna everything she knew. As the months passed, Joanna gradually understood Ruth’s urgency: Only if Joanna became essential to the household would she attain any measure of security from being sold south, to Georgia or Florida, where life was hell on earth for
a slave. Ruth’s status on the plantation had not protected her children, nor would it protect Joanna, her favorite, who had thus far proven to be a poor investment.

If anyone’s position at Greenfields was secure, it was Ruth’s. Joanna once overheard another slave say that Ruth hadn’t been beaten since childhood, since coming into her own as mistress of the kitchen. A popular legend around the slave cabins contradicted that claim. The story said that shortly after Ruth’s youngest son was sold to pay off Marse Chester’s gambling debts, a pound of salt pork and a rope of sausages went missing between the smokehouse and the kitchen. Marse Chester didn’t believe the theft could have occurred without Ruth’s tacit approval, but when she insisted she knew nothing, he ordered the overseer to give her five lashes. After that, Ruth’s cookery took a sudden turn for the worse: the soup was slightly too salty, the chicken a trifle underdone, the biscuits flat and stale. Marse Chester reprimanded her, but when he threatened another beating, she seemed to lose even more of her vaunted skill. On the eve of a grand party, it was said, the mistress begged her husband to make amends with their offended cook or the Chesters would be shamed before the finest families in Virginia. No one knew how Marse Chester had mollified Ruth, but her cooking suddenly returned to normal and from that day forward no one dared beat her or accuse her of dishonesty.

When Joanna asked her if the stories were true, Ruth was silent a moment before she said, “I fight my battles the only way I know how. You need to learn your own way.”

When Joanna turned seven, Marse Chester decided she was old enough to join the other children in the fields, picking hornworms off the tobacco leaves. Ruth pleaded with him to reconsider and even begged the mistress to intercede, but the mistress
had never forgiven Joanna for dropping Mason—and blamed the girl for provoking her own hysterical reaction, so unbecoming a lady. The mistress would just as soon have her mother-in-law’s regrettable purchase out of her sight, so a place was found for Joanna in the slave cabins.

Ruth was ordered to take her to her new home. “Don’t you fear,” Ruth said, her eyes red-rimmed. “I’ll get you back in the big house soon. Just wait till they see how I can’t get by without your help.”

Joanna missed Ruth, but in a way it was a relief to be out in the fields, away from the white family. The work was hard and hot with the sun beating down, but she didn’t have to be so careful, so fearful of spilling a pan of beans or breaking a dish and drawing Marse Chester’s ire. They sang as they worked, and sometimes a slave, granted leave to visit a spouse at Mr. Ashworth’s plantation, would return with news of Joanna’s mother and siblings. She didn’t eat as well, of course, though sometimes Ruth was able to slip her the end of a loaf of bread and repeat in whispers her promise to find a way to convince the Chesters that Joanna’s place was in the big house. Joanna believed her less with each repeating.

They were picking the tobacco plants for the third time that season when Ruth came running out to the fields. She seized Joanna by the shoulder, called to the overseer that she was wanted up at the big house, and urged Joanna into a trot. “Just do as she say and mind your tongue,” Ruth instructed. “Watch old Mrs. Chester’s hands and do what she do. I already know you got sharp eyes and nimble fingers. Can you tie a knot?” When Joanna nodded, she breathed, “Good girl. Good girl.” Joanna had never seen her so agitated.

They stopped at the pump, where Ruth hurriedly washed
Joanna’s hands and face. Before Joanna knew it, she was standing in the fancy parlor before the two Mrs. Chesters, eyes downcast, wishing she were back in the hot, dusty tobacco rows, far from the white ladies’ scrutiny.

“This here girl can sew,” Ruth said, placing a hand on Joanna’s shoulder, then quickly removing it as if she didn’t want to seem too fond.

“I thought she was your kitchen maid,” said the younger Mrs. Chester.

“She was, but when we all done cleaning up after supper, she help me with my mending.”

Joanna held herself perfectly still, betraying nothing. She had never done anything of the sort.

The elder Mrs. Chester peered at her myopically. “Come here, girl.” Obediently Joanna stepped forward. “Let me see your hands.” Joanna held them out for inspection. “Remarkably clean, for a field hand.”

“She wash up before she come in,” said Ruth. “She know better than to soil your pretty fabrics.”

The mistress gave an elegant, skeptical sniff and reached for a pair of silver scissors sitting on a table at her side. She snipped off a length from a spool of white thread, withdrew a slender silver needle from an intricately embossed case, and beckoned to Joanna. “Thread this needle and knot the end.”

Joanna bobbed a nod and took needle and thread, careful not to touch the mistress’s smooth white hands with her own. She sensed Ruth watching over her shoulder, longing to instruct her but unable to speak and reveal her lie.

Joanna had seen women piece quilts and mend clothes in the slave cabins, so she knew more or less what to do, although she had never tried it herself. On her second attempt, she poked one
end of the thread through the needle’s eye, then stuck the needle between her teeth while she tied a small knot at the other end. She held the threaded needle out to the younger mistress, who recoiled in distaste. “She had that in her mouth,” she said, incredulous. “I’m not going to touch her spittle.”

Quickly Ruth stepped forward and took the threaded needle. “I’ll wash it for you. She do it right next time.”

As Ruth hastened away, the mistress turned to her mother-in-law to complain, but before she could speak, the elder woman said, “If you had given her a pincushion, she needn’t have used her mouth. She’ll do, Caroline.”

“She smells.”

“A bath will cure that. Let her stay with Ruth instead of returning to the slave quarter. You know very well that’s what Ruth desires, and if you don’t want our friends to starve at your quilting party, you’ll grant her this one favor.”

Resigned, the mistress dismissed Joanna with a distracted wave of the hand. Joanna hurried back to the kitchen to tell Ruth, who cried out for joy and embraced her. But the promise of more food, easier work, and Ruth’s happiness did not settle Joanna’s mixed feelings. The mistress was as determined to find fault with her as Marse Chester’s mother was to prove that she had been right to purchase Joanna. Joanna would rather work bent over in the hot sun than caught between those two women.

Two days later, carriages arrived bearing masters and mistresses from plantations throughout the county. The Ashworths came with their eldest daughter, who was to be married soon and for whom the party had been arranged. While the men talked and smoked, the women layered pieced and appliquéd tops in a long wooden frame on the veranda and finished the quilts for the bride’s trousseau. Joanna was on her feet all day, threading
needles, tying knots, snipping loose threads so the ladies needn’t interrupt the rhythm of their work. Deftly, they soon covered the elegant tops in intricate patterns—bows, flowers, crosshatches, feathered plumes, and fans, all created with the finest, most delicate stitches Joanna had ever seen. The ladies chatted and gossiped and exchanged advice as they worked, forgetting or ignoring Joanna’s presence except to beckon her to snip a thread on the underside of the quilt or to pass them a new, threaded needle. They spoke about the upcoming wedding, praised the advantageous match, speculated about the new household, and despaired of the difficulties the newlyweds would face in obtaining good, loyal, trustworthy servants. Times had changed, they sighed. Nowadays slaves were so lazy and dishonest it was hardly worth the trouble to feed and clothe them, especially since they took ill so often—or stayed abed shamming illness—and had to be supported into their old age when they could no longer work to earn their keep.