The Lost Quilter (8 page)

Honor cackled. “And after that, you think his widow set us all free? No. We just get a new marse, maybe worse than the marse we got now. You only thinking of yourself, only thinking of today. Ruth the cook. They blame her, too, if Marse Chester die of poisoning. Maybe blame her
instead
of you. Ever think what they might do to her?”

“No,” said Joanna. “I didn’t think—”

“You right you didn’t think.” Honor tapped Joanna on the temple. “Use your head, girl. I know you got one. You ever want to be free, you got to think. And drink that tea.” Honor turned away from her to put away the bundles of herbs. “When you run, and you
will
run, you won’t get very far with a baby in your belly.”

Without replying, Joanna stumbled from the cabin into daylight. Blinking from the sudden glare, clutching the pouch of herbs in her fist, she hurried back to the big house before the two Mrs. Chesters realized she was gone.

Less than a year later, there was only one Mrs. Chester to placate, to please, and to fit for dresses. In February Marse Chester’s mother caught the grippe in her chest, wheezed putrid fluid for a week, and expired. She had left instructions in her will for her personal maid and loyal groom to be freed and paid the sum of twenty dollars apiece, but Marse Chester and his lawyer concluded that she must have been delirious from fever at the time she amended her will, so her heirs could legally ignore her request. When he realized he was not going to be freed, the groom ran off and hid in the woods, but since he came back the next morning, Marse Chester did not order a whipping. “He missed two meals and slept on the cold, hard ground last night,” Joanna overheard him tell the mistress. “That’s punishment enough.”

The slaves were of two minds regarding the groom’s return. Some congratulated him for avoiding punishment after annoying the master and said that he had done right to return after he had made his point. Others thought he should have stayed in the woods until the master agreed to abide by his mother’s deathbed wishes. Joanna thought he never should have lit out for the woods in the first place. Wasn’t he the Chesters’ most trusted slave? Wasn’t his word law in the stables? He should have hitched up a wagon, set out for the northern road as if sent on an errand, and kept going until he crossed over into freedom. “Think,” she imagined Honor saying. “You ever want to be free, you got to think.”

The younger Mrs. Chester—the only Mrs. Chester anymore—
wasted no time ordering yards of black crepe and wool for her mourning garments. By the time she cast them off a year and a day later, her regular wardrobe was hopelessly out of style. Weeks of poring over fashion magazines and contemplating different designs followed, and Joanna spent nearly every waking moment with needle in hand, fitting bodices, adjusting hems, offering her opinions on everything from the quality of a cotton lawn to the most flattering color for the mistress’s complexion. Often Joanna’s duties included listening and nodding agreeably while the mistress chattered on about household matters or whatever county gossip had managed to find its way to the plantation. While the two Mrs. Chesters had not always gotten along, as the only two white ladies for miles, they had been forced into companionship. With her mother-in-law gone, the younger Mrs. Chester had no one to talk to save her husband, who was rarely available, or her children, who had little interest in her favorite topics of conversation, or her slaves, who alone could be relied upon to listen and flatter, if not understand as an equal might.

As the years passed, in a turnabout Joanna never could have imagined, she replaced Marse Chester’s mother as the mistress’s favorite confidante. She learned more than she cared to know about Marse Chester’s tragic weakness for cards and horse racing, about Mason’s struggles in school contrasted with his younger brother’s impressive aptitude, and about her daughter’s growing beauty. To Joanna’s amazement, though she did little but echo the mistress’s own words back at her when obliged to reply, the mistress seemed to think of her as sympathetic to her concerns. If she had known what bitter retorts Joanna concealed behind an impassive face, she would have had her supposedly dutiful slave beaten day and night. If she had only known how often her husband dragged Joanna from her bed, how often Joanna choked
down Honor’s preventative remedies, Mrs. Chester would have sold her loyal confidante so far south Joanna would have been unable to even dream of freedom. But instead she gave Joanna all the leftover fabrics from her dressmaking to sew quilts for herself and for Ruth, and when she hired Joanna out to neighboring plantations, she allowed her to keep ten percent of her earnings. Then came an evening—Joanna’s eyes straining in the fading light, her neck and shoulders aching from hours of tedious fine stitching—when Mrs. Chester told Joanna that she was writing her last will and testament.

“You ill, ma’am?” Joanna asked, as relieved for an excuse to look up from her work as she was surprised by the news.

“No, I’m perfectly sound, but none of us knows when the Lord will call us home.” Mrs. Chester gazed out the window and sighed. “You have been a good and loyal servant, and you shall be rewarded. Upon my death, you will be manumitted.”

Joanna reminded herself that a reply was in order. “Thank you, ma’am.”

As if expecting a different reaction, Mrs. Chester turned away from the window to study her. “That means you will be granted your freedom.”

“Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.” Joanna busied herself with her sewing, fighting back a scowl of rage. If Mrs. Chester wanted to reward her so much, why not free her now? Promises in a last will and testament were next to useless unless her son and heir chose to honor them. What if by then Mason Chester had a wife who wanted pretty dresses? What if he weighed fulfilling his mother’s last wishes against the money Mrs. Richardson and others would gladly offer for Joanna’s services? And what if Mrs. Chester passed on before her husband? Marse Chester would never let Joanna go.

Mrs. Chester should ask the family’s loyal groom what deathbed promises were worth. She should ask her mother-in-law’s favorite maid, who was married to a freeman but still a slave herself. They knew how it killed the soul to wait years and years for freedom that was ultimately denied. And now, even though she knew better, just like them, Joanna would wait and hope and end up disappointed.

Sick at heart, Joanna bent over her sewing and blinked back tears. No matter how firmly she tried to talk herself out of hoping for the impossible, she knew she would await the reading of Mrs. Chester’s will as if her life depended upon it—for it did. Even though she had seen how blithely the family had ignored the wishes of the elder Mrs. Chester, even though she expected nothing, she could not shut off her hope. She knew she would be devastated when Marse Chester or Mason inevitably found a reasonable way to avoid freeing her. It would have been better if the mistress had never told Joanna her intentions.

Joanna was nineteen or perhaps already twenty when Marse Chester chose a new favorite, a girl around fifteen, a field hand. For nearly two months he strode off to the slave quarter at night instead of dragging Joanna from beneath the quilts she had pieced with the scraps of his wife’s dresses. She sometimes heard him slip out the kitchen door, but he never once paused in the doorway of the small room off the kitchen Joanna and Ruth shared. Ruth had promised her his interest would fade; she herself had been his favorite once, but he had not sought her out that way in more than twenty years. Although Joanna felt sorry for the other girl, she was even more guiltily relieved that the master had found someone else and left her alone.

By that time she had become the plantation’s laundress as well as its seamstress, and she rarely helped in the kitchen anymore. A new little girl assisted Ruth, a spindly little thing whose sharp elbows and knees poked Joanna in the back when they curled up under the quilts at night. Joanna tried not to think about how unlucky the little girl would be to grow into womanhood within Marse Chester’s sight, and how one day he would tire of the field hand and seek out a new favorite. Sometimes, though, as the girl bolted down leavings from the family’s dinner, Joanna’s eyes met Ruth’s, and she knew the cook shared her worries about the child’s likely fate.

Joanna hoped and prayed to be far from the plantation when that day came. She had already saved up nearly five dollars of her own, which she carried day and night in a small pouch pinned within her clothing. She was going to buy her freedom and later that of her mother, whom she had not seen since she was last hired out to the Ashworth plantation nearly four years before. Though she had only been granted a few minutes in the slave quarter, Joanna had memorized every detail of her mother’s features as she hungrily caught up on the news of her brothers and sisters. She would never forget her mother’s face, no matter how much time or distance separated them in the years to come.

It was two days after Christmas, and the big house was quiet in the wake of the departure of the Chesters’ holiday guests. Mrs. Chester had taken to her bed, exhausted from the effort of entertaining, and had sent down word that Joanna was to begin her new gown without delay. Joanna was in the sitting room, cutting the silk Marse Chester had given his wife for Christmas, when she heard a familiar footfall in the doorway. “Do you need to do that here?” Marse Chester asked, more curious than angry.

Joanna quickly set her work aside and rose, head bowed. “The
mistress told me to, suh,” she said. “This here silk is fine, and she don’t want it to catch on nothing rough.”

“Where is your mistress?”

“She’s upstairs, suh. She indisposed.”

“Is that right?” He studied her, and when he stepped into the room, she knew her time of respite was over. Her heart caught in her throat. Was the marse crazy? It was broad daylight, Ruth was not far away in the kitchen, and though the mistress was upstairs in bed, she was not sleeping.

“Please, suh,” she said. It was unbearable that he should do this now, after two months of peace. As he lunged for her, she ducked out of reach and seized the shears. “You leave me be,” she said, leveling the sharp points at him, “or I’ll tell the mistress what you do at night. I’ll tell her how you go to the slave cabins when you say you going riding.”

With a snarl Marse Chester brought his fist down upon her hand, knocking the shears to the floor. As she reached for them, he grabbed her, put his hand over her mouth, and shoved her against the wall. Struggling, Joanna groped for the scissors, for a lamp, for anything—and her hand closed around something hard and metallic. She struck at him with all her strength, scratching his face, drawing blood. He swore and drew back, wiping blood from his face, but as Joanna tried to scramble away, he snatched the flatiron from the fire and pressed it against her cheek. Searing pain, a terrible odor, a piercing shriek, and then all went dark.

When Joanna came to, she was lying alone on the sitting room floor, her skirt hiked up above her knees, her face throbbing with heat and pain, her loins echoing another pain. She called out weakly for Ruth, but Marse Chester must have sent the cook away or she would have already been at Joanna’s side. Ruth
would have heard everything, would have known how badly Joanna needed her.

Gingerly Joanna sat up, her limbs aching. Grasping the arm of a chair, she pulled herself to her feet, straightened her clothes, and took the mistress’s warmest shawl from the back of a chair. Wrapping it around her own shoulders, she made her way to the empty kitchen, where a basket of apples sat on a table. She tucked two into her apron pocket and went outside, walking steadily but as if in a dream. She set out on the road she had often taken when hired out to neighboring plantations. She passed the young mistress riding her pony and returned the girl’s wave; she passed slaves working around the stables and outbuildings, and heard distant singing, a mournful, familiar lament about crossing over Jordan. She walked on, and no one paid her more than a passing glance or asked her about her business. They were too far away to see the fresh angry burn on her cheek, too far away to see the emptiness in her eyes. From where they stood, there was nothing to distinguish that day from any other Joanna had been sent on an errand for Mrs. Chester.

She walked for hours and hours, until evening fell and she could not make her way along the road without stumbling. They would have discovered her missing by now. With a tremor of apprehension—the first stirring of emotion she had felt since setting forth—she hastened across some farmer’s field and hid inside a haystack. The day had been unseasonably warm, but with the setting of the sun, all warmth had fled. Catching her breath, shivering in the thin December air, listening for pursuit, she suddenly realized that she still held the object she had used to strike Marse Chester.

It was the mistress’s elegant silver needle case, hinged and lined with wine-colored velvet, with five sharp needles and an
embossed silver thimble tucked inside. One corner was red with Marse Chester’s blood, or perhaps her own.

She slept fitfully and woke the next morning, ravenous. She devoured the two apples and hid within the haystack until nightfall, dozing off and starting awake at the slightest noise. When darkness descended, she crept from the haystack and continued north, straining her ears for the distant baying of slave catchers’ dogs.

On and on she had traveled, day after day.

With the help of her hard-earned five dollars and a stroke of good fortune that guided her into the Underground Railroad, she had made her way to Pennsylvania, a free state. By that time it was winter, and since she had not thought to bring Honor’s pouch of herbs with her, the evidence of her master’s crime had been growing in her belly.

The Bergstroms had sheltered her, had seen her safely delivered of her child, and had devised a scheme by which she and her son would travel in disguise to freedom in Canada. With forged documents, new clothes, and a borrowed horse and carriage, at that very moment Joanna and her son should have been embarking upon new lives in freedom. Instead her son was lost to her, and she was back where she started, back at Greenfields, further from freedom than she had ever been.