The Lost Quilter (9 page)

Marse Chester’s slaves paused in the tobacco rows and watched in silence as the two slave catchers and their quarry passed. The overseer let them take in the lesson of Joanna’s failure before urging them back to work.

Isaac and Peter brought their horses to a halt in the stableyard. Marse Chester had heard them approach and waited on the front
veranda of the big house. Joanna’s heart gave a lurch. Even from that distance she recognized his proud, angry, self-satisfied stance. Mason stood at his side, tall and sturdy, glaring at her as if he still remembered the poor care she had given him as a child. He was wearing a shirt she had sewn months earlier; she knew the fit of the collar as her own work. She had no time to wonder why the mistress had not come outside to witness the spectacle, for Isaac yanked her down from the horse, propelled her across the dusty yard, and shoved her to the ground at the foot of the stairs to the veranda.

“We got your girl, Mr. Chester,” said Peter. There were other words exchanged and fees paid, but Joanna’s ears rang and she took no notice of them. Her mind was far away as the slave catchers rode off with their purses fattened and the overseer seized her by the shoulders and dragged her off to be beaten. As her back was torn open by the overseer’s whip, her last thoughts before darkness claimed her was that at least her son was safe, at least he would never be beaten or sold down south or have his dreams of freedom crushed like a flower underfoot.

When she woke, she was lying on her stomach on a bed of worn quilts in a slave cabin, her back aching and throbbing with such searing pain that she gasped aloud. She heard bare feet scuff the dirt floor, and then a familiar voice spoke close to her ear: “Just lie still. You not fit to sit up yet.”

It was all she could do to stay conscious; sitting up was out of the question. Joanna swallowed back her nausea and said, “How long I been here?”

“Ten days almost,” replied Honor. Joanna felt an unexpected coolness as Honor placed wet tobacco leaves on the raw flesh of
her back; the pain eased almost imperceptibly before welling up again. “I gave you something to dry up your milk so the swelling won’t grieve you so much. Did you have a boy or a girl?”

Joanna licked her dry, cracked lips and tried to think. Honor cackled at her hesitation. “Oh, don’t be afraid, girl. I saw the signs, but I’ve kept bigger secrets than yours from Marse Chester. It was a boy, wasn’t it?”

Joanna managed a nod.

“What’s his name?”

“Frederick.” Joanna closed her eyes, longing to slip back into oblivion. “Frederick Douglass North.” Her name in Canada was going to be Joanna North. She’d die before she let anyone call her or her son Chester. “I name him after a great man.”

“I told you to drink my tea. Didn’t I say you wouldn’t get far with a baby in your belly? Maybe you’ll listen to the old conjure woman from now on.”

“But I did get far,” Joanna murmured, too exhausted to defend herself for not remembering the pouch of herbs when she fled the plantation.

“Not far enough. Where’s your boy now?”

Free in Canada, she prayed. “I don’t know. The slave catchers left him behind.”

“Well, that’s a mercy.” Honor bustled around the fireside. Joanna drifted, half-awake, until Honor roused her by pressing a warm cup to her lips. She lifted her head slightly to drink, and when she dropped back upon the quilts, exhausted from even that small effort, she glimpsed Honor overturning the empty cup upon the hearth. “I don’t see your boy here,” she said, studying the patterns in the damp leaves. “I don’t see him a slave at all. Long as you keep quiet so no one knows where to look for him, he should grow up free.”

“Will I ever see him again?”

Honor hesitated and brushed the leaves into the fire. “Leaves don’t tell everything.”

An evasive reply that meant no. Joanna’s throat constricted around a moan of anguish. She must not put too much into the old conjure woman’s words. Honor didn’t know everything.

“Mr. Linney want you in the fields as soon as you’re able,” said Honor, selecting herbs, working with mortar and pestle to make a concoction for some needy slave. “He left it up to me to say when that is, but two more weeks about as much as you get out of an overseer like him. Look like no more big house for you.”

Joanna nodded to show she understood. She would have to find someone with room in their cabin for one disgraced runaway. It would be a relief to stay out of Marse Chester’s easy reach. Ruth and the new little girl would continue to have the room off the kitchen to themselves. “Ruth come to see me since I been back?”

Honor hesitated, the mortar making a sharp clink against the pestle. “Ruth gone.”

“She run away?” Joanna’s heart clenched. “Marse Chester sold her?” It couldn’t be. Not even a man as vile as Marse Chester could have blamed Ruth for Joanna’s escape.

“Yellow fever sweep through here last February,” said Honor. “I did all I could. Ten slaves got taken. Young Marse Billy, too. The mistress hasn’t been right since.”

“Ruth’s dead?”

“You ask me, she was ready to go.” The clinking of stone against stone told that Honor had resumed her work. “She blame herself for everything bad happen to you. Folks talk when they got the fever, and I hear everything. Ruth say that if she had just let you be in the fields, if she hadn’t tried so hard to get you back in the big house, Marse Chester maybe never lay a hand on you.
Course, we both know he don’t mind walking to the slave cabins for what he want, but Ruth too heartsick to listen to sense.”

Joanna’s head swam. Ruth, dead and gone, wrongly blaming herself for Joanna’s misfortune. “Her blood on Marse Chester’s hands.”

“So much blood on his hands already. He don’t care about another drop more.”

“I care.”

“But you can’t do nothing about it.”

Joanna clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut against tears of grief and rage. Maybe Honor was right, but someday, somehow that man would pay for all the evil he had done in life, if not in this world, then in the next. He had lost one son to the same sickness that had taken Ruth, but the scales were far from balanced.

Ten days later, Mr. Linney ordered Joanna to the tobacco fields. The effort of stooping and bending to pluck the leaves opened the newly forming scars on her back until her dress soaked through with blood and dried stiff beneath the hot sun. Back in the slave cabins that evening, she cried out as Honor peeled the fabric from her skin and applied a salve to her wounds. She sank into sleep immediately upon lying down, and in the morning she woke to find that Honor had washed her dress. It was still slightly damp when she put it on and reported to the fields, where the wounds once again tore open and bled. But each day they bled a little less as her skin knit together and hard ropes of scars formed. The tree of life, slaves called the pattern of branching scars. When only pinpricks of blood dotted her dress at the end of the day, Honor declared that she was healed. Joanna understood that to mean that she had to find another place to sleep at night and leave her pile of quilts to whoever next needed Honor’s tending.

Two other slave women with three children between them agreed to take her in, but Joanna almost refused because the very sight of children wrenched her heart. But she told herself she would get used to constant reminders of her absent son and accepted their welcome. Whenever a baby’s cries interrupted her sleep, she instinctively reached for Frederick and was jolted anew to discover him gone.

She would get used to it, she told herself.

But before that day came, a little girl came running to the tobacco fields with a summons to the big house. “Mistress want to see you,” she prompted breathlessly when Joanna merely stared at her for a moment, her heart turning over. She had not seen the mistress since before she ran off. Perhaps Mrs. Chester wanted Joanna to start a new dress for her, though her year of mourning for her youngest son would not end until midwinter. More likely she needed help with the household sewing and laundry, and her need outweighed her husband’s determination to see Joanna punished with the hardest work on the plantation.

Full of trepidation, Joanna followed the little girl to the parlor. She stopped short in the doorway and dropped her head, not only out of habit but also to conceal her shock. For a moment, as she first glimpsed the black-clad woman by the window, she imagined she looked upon Marse Chester’s mother. The mistress’s hair had gone gray and grief had etched deep grooves around the corners of her mouth and between her brows. Draped in mourning black, she sat gazing out the window with such resignation that Joanna knew she had not been brought there to fashion a new gown.

She stood silently until the mistress addressed her. “So, you’ve returned to us.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Joanna, although the mistress’s words suggested Joanna had come of her own volition.

“You left us in quite a poor state, with the slaves’ winter clothes only half completed. Most of them had to do without, thanks to your disobedience.”

“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” Let the mistress understand that as she pleased. Joanna
was
sorry if anyone had to suffer through the cold because of her, but she would never be sorry she had run away.

“You’re sorry.” Mrs. Chester turned away from the window, and as her gaze lit upon Joanna, she started. “Good heavens, Joanna. Your face!”

Instinctively Joanna raised her hand to cover her scarred cheek.

“My husband said you had injured yourself, but I had no idea…” Quickly Mrs. Chester composed herself. “From the look of your scar, I take it you burned yourself?”

How could she tell the mistress what had really happened? She kept her eyes on the braided rug, and Mrs. Chester took her silence as assent. “Very well. You’ll keep that scar for the rest of your life as a reminder of your foolishness.” The mistress’s expression hardened to iron. “I trusted you, Joanna. You wanted for nothing. You had plenty to eat, money of your own, a bed in our own home—all a slave could aspire to. I never raised a hand to you, even when you were cheeky, even when you dropped Mason. And how did you repay me?”

Joanna did not respond. Could the mistress not remember the many times she had struck Joanna with the willow branch when baby Mason’s wails interrupted his mother’s sleep? Did she truly believe Joanna had forgotten?

The mistress’s thin, spotted hands grasped the arms of her chair, tightening and releasing. Joanna remembered how smooth and pale those hands had once been. “I’ve certainly learned my
lesson, although my husband says I’m still too forgiving for my own good. It was all I could do to persuade your master not to hobble you. He said a seamstress doesn’t need to walk, but I insisted that a laundress does, hauling water and hanging up clothes and so forth. You were fortunate I was able to convince him to settle for a beating.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” said Joanna, barely audible.

“Your gratitude is too little, too late.” The mistress clasped her hands in her lap and regarded Joanna sternly. “I cannot abide an untrustworthy servant, and neither can my husband. Now that the harvest is nearly over, you’re going to be sold.”

Joanna could scarcely breathe. “To the Ashworths, ma’am?”

“Heavens, no. The whole county knows the trouble you’ve given us. No amount of fine stitchery could ever convince our neighbors to overlook your deceitful nature. As soon as we can arrange to transport you, you’re going to the only master who will have you—my husband’s brother in South Carolina.”

1859
Charleston and Oak Grove Plantation, South Carolina

J
oanna begged for one last visit to the Ashworth plantation to say good-bye to her mother and siblings, but although the mistress promised to ask her husband’s permission, Joanna knew she would never see her mother again. Marse Chester would never agree to make extra work for his horses and groom just so a disgraced slave could exchange farewells, and he would never trust her to make the three-mile journey on foot alone.

When a band of Georgia traders came through a few days later, Marse Chester hired them to carry Joanna to his brother’s plantation. Sick at heart, she closed her eyes as a white man barely older than herself locked iron bands around her ankles and forced her into a cage of solid iron bars on the back of a wagon. Another man ran a heavy chain through loops in the iron bands around her ankles and around those of the other six slaves already on board, binding them together. When the traders thrust her into their midst, the other slaves held out their hands to cushion her fall. As the horses started up, they begged her for food and water. She had no water, but the food she had
hidden in her apron was quickly divided up and devoured. Joanna wondered how long it would be until she ate again.

As she watched the big house and the outbuildings disappear around a bend in the road, her head swam with despair. She might never be closer to her son than she was at that moment, and every thud of the horses’ hooves took her farther from him.

The hot, dry days stretched into weeks. The Georgia traders rarely passed food through the bars and twice a day drove their prisoners out of the cage and forced them to jump up and down for exercise. Sometimes they would stop at a plantation to sell a slave, but more often than not, when money changed hands, a new slave was crowded into the cage, sometimes weeping, sometimes stoic, often numb with disbelief and despair.

A few of the slaves had come from far-off Kentucky and had been with the Georgia traders for months. Most, like Joanna, were from Virginia. As they traveled ever southward, Joanna heard stories as heartbreaking as her own: A man who had pleaded with his master not to sell off his wife only to find himself sold instead. A husband, wife, and six-year-old daughter from Maryland sold off to cover a widow’s debts. A mother whose three-year-old child had clung so tightly to her skirts as she was forced into the wagon that the traders had been obliged to buy him, too, only to sell him away from her at the next town. Two young brothers, about ten and twelve, who had no idea where they were from or why they had been parted from the only home they knew. A young field hand who had been afraid to join his brothers when they ran away upon hearing that they were to be sold; he would never know their fate, but it had to be better than his. “Should’ve gone with ’em,” he said glumly, squinting up at the sun. “Even if they dead, they free, more free than me.”

“I ran away once,” said Joanna softly, and a few of her com
panions roused from their numb lethargy to peer curiously at her. “I made it all the way to Pennsylvania.”

“That a free state,” said an older man with gray in his hair. “How you end up here?”

Joanna dared not tell him about her son, the reason she had lingered too long, the reason she had been captured. “Bad luck,” she said instead. “Bad luck and slave catchers.”

After many, many days, when Joanna had lost hope that she would ever know any life but the endless jostling in the crowded, fetid cage, with sun and rain beating down and hunger constantly gnawing at her belly, the wagon rolled into a city larger than any they had yet passed through. She overheard the traders mention Ryan’s Mart, and Chalmers and Queen Streets, but those places meant nothing to her. Throughout the long journey, the traders had never let any potential buyers inspect her, not even the most persistent. She assumed that was because she was not really for sale; Marse Chester’s brother owned her now. Now she wondered if the traders had been saving her to earn a higher profit in the city. But what did it matter where she was sold? One master was as bad as any other. And yet the thought of auction made her tremble. If the older Marse Chester were cut from the same cloth as his brother, Joanna was likely to be as miserable with him in South Carolina as she had been in Virginia, but how much more terrifying it would be to be sold at auction to a complete stranger, about whom nothing would be familiar.

The sun was high overhead when the wagon came to a stop on a busy square—more buildings, more people and horses and carriages and wagons than Joanna had ever seen. Overwhelmed by the assault of heat and noise and unfamiliar odors, Joanna kept her eyes on the cobblestones, dizzy from hunger and thirst. One of the traders disappeared into a building lined with tall
white columns, and after he returned, the slaves were herded indoors, into a brick building the younger trader called a barracoon. There the cuffs and chains that bound them were removed, but they were driven into cells, families and friends clutching one another so they would not be separated. Soon they were locked up again behind iron bars and stone walls, and at the sound of the door slamming shut, the youngest boy broke down in sobs. Wordlessly Joanna held him, rocked him in her lap, and stroked his head until he fell asleep.

The next morning the slaves woke to the sound of the Georgia traders approaching, their voices full of confidence and humor. “Guess they slept well,” muttered the young field hand who constantly berated himself for not running off with his brothers.

“Why wouldn’t they?” said the older, gray-haired man bitterly, pushing himself stiffly to his feet from where he had slept on the cold stone floor. “And us without a bite to eat. Serve them right if we faint dead away on the auction block and they can’t get a dime for us.”

“Who want a gang of sickly slaves?” murmured another.

Joanna stayed out of the talk, knowing it would do her no good to sham illness just to spite the Georgia traders. The little bit of injury she would do them was not worth ripping open her back again. But before the plotting could begin in earnest, the smell of their long-delayed rations cut through the filth of the prison, and the group pressed forward against the bars. Joanna made sure the two young brothers received their share of bread and cold salt pork before settling down with her own portion. It was the best meal they had been offered in weeks, and the barracoon was silent except for the sound of ravenous eating and the distant sounds of the city on the other side of the wall.

It seemed only minutes later that the traders took them from
the cell and back outside. Blinking in the sunlight, Joanna shaded her eyes and regarded the busy street corner with only a small stirring of the nervousness that had struck her the previous day. The colored folk passing by were better dressed here than in the country; some carried the tools of their trades, some wore tin or brass badges engraved with names and numbers pinned to their jackets, and others walked with the confidence of free men. Perhaps they
were
free, Joanna thought, remembering her old plans to earn enough money with her needle to buy her freedom. Perhaps such dreams were possible here.

“Where they taking us?” she asked the older man with gray in his hair as they were led toward a building with a high arched entryway flanked by octagonal pillars.

“Do it matter?” he retorted as they passed through a large iron gate and entered the market proper, a single large room with a high ceiling. “This here’s Charleston, and this here’s the auction block.”

“But…” Joanna glanced from the trader at the head of their group to the one following behind. Neither paid her any attention, and she did not want to call attention to herself, so she looked away despite her misgivings. “I ain’t supposed to be here.”

The older man snorted. “I ain’t supposed to be here neither. I’m supposed to be in my cabin in Virginia, with my wife cooking me up something from her garden. But here I am, and here you are, and that’s that.”

Her heart pounding, Joanna expected to find a crowd of eager buyers waiting for them, but the market was empty except for one slave boy who sat on the ground cradling a drum. At a signal from one of the traders, the boy began to beat out a rhythm, and the slaves were ordered to dance and jump up and down.

Bewildered, Joanna complied, watching the Georgia traders
through downcast eyes and shying away from the strange paddle they used instead of a whip on any slaves who did not exert themselves sufficiently. Less than an hour later, she and the other slaves were herded back into the barracoon, where rations were brought to them, more food than she had been given at one sitting since leaving Elm Creek Farm. While they devoured the meal, a doctor came around and inspected them, one by one. The doctor’s cool gaze lingered on her scarred cheek, but he told the Georgia traders there was nothing he could do for an old burn. After the doctor left, the slaves were left to themselves until evening, when they were again taken to the market and made to exercise, and again brought back indoors for a full if plain meal.

Day after day they were put through the same routine. The wounds the cuffs and chains had left on Joanna’s ankles healed, and her dress no longer hung slack. Looking upon the others as they danced and jumped to the sound of the beating drum, their muscles toned and skin gleaming, Joanna saw few lingering signs of their journey south with the Georgia traders, and she knew that potential buyers were not meant to know how roughly the slaves had been treated.

Then a day came when the Georgia traders inspected them carefully, ordered gray hairs plucked from some of the older slaves, oiled the young girls’ hair, and gave the most raggedly dressed among them new clothes. Joanna’s dress was washed and returned to her, and she submitted to having her hair neatly braided. Two of the Georgia traders studied her scar glumly, shook their heads, and agreed that nothing could be done.

Again they were led from the barracoon and through the high arched entryway of the market. Joanna’s heart pounded, for this time she heard a babble of voices within. As they passed through the octagonal pillars, the older slave, his gray hair now dyed
black, took her elbow and spoke close into her ear. “You a pretty, yellow thing except for that scar. You maybe got a chance. You look out for a nice-looking gentleman, one who got his wife with him. If he’s gentle and kind to his wife, he might be good to his slaves. You be sure to smile nice and tell him you a good worker. If you cry and moan and say you don’t want to go, well then he won’t take you, and you end up with some surly fellow who beat you day and night.”

Before Joanna could reply, the slaves were lined up near the wall and told to face the center of the room, where white men and a few white ladies had gathered. In the midst of the crowd, a man with a loud, booming voice invited the whites folks to inspect the slaves as thoroughly as they wished before the auction began. As the prospective buyers approached, Joanna glanced around frantically for the Georgia traders and spotted them climbing the stairs to a long platform on the far side of the room opposite the entrance. Engrossed in their preparations for the auctions, they had forgotten her.

All around her, white men—some dressed in fine suits, others in sturdier clothes, but all in their best whatever their station in life—examined likely purchases. Their ladies looked on from a discreet distance, apart from the fray, murmuring to one another, offering a deferential opinion to their husbands when asked. Joanna’s companions were ordered to show their teeth, to walk back and forth, touch their toes, stoop and bend, while the whites studied them sharply for hidden defects. Some of the white men looked coolly indifferent as they inspected the merchandise; others looked stern or suspicious as if wary of being cheated. One portly middle-aged gentleman wearing a gold watch on a chain strolled past the line of slaves with his wife on his arm. Laugh lines creased the corners of the woman’s eyes, and when she stum
bled on a loose stone, her husband quickly steadied her and said something to make her smile warmly up at him.

Beside her, the man from Maryland drew himself up and stepped forward. “Look at me, sir,” he called to the portly white planter. “Name’s Elijah. I got a strong arms and a stronger back. You won’t find any man here better than me, and that’s the truth, sir. I pick tobacco nearly twenty years, since I was a boy, and I done a little smithy work too.”

The portly planter had only glanced his way at this declaration, but at a word from his wife, he stopped and looked Elijah over. “You’ve worked as a smith, you say?”

“Yes, sir. Little bit of carpentry too. This here’s my wife, Sarah.” Urgently he beckoned her forward; she bobbed a quick curtsy and gave the couple a trembling, apprehensive smile. “She’s a fine cook and a laundress.”

The planter shook his head regretfully. “We’re only in need of a strong field hand or two.”

“Sarah’ll give you a full day’s work in the fields good as most men,” Elijah burst out before the planter could move on. He reached behind his wife and pulled their young daughter to the front. She seized her mother’s hand and peered up at the planter fearfully. “This our girl, Molly,” he said, placing his hands on her shoulders. “She’s just a little thing now but she’s strong. She already know how to hoe a garden and mind babies. She’s a good girl, sir, and she don’t eat much. Please, marse, sir.”

Suddenly Joanna felt a sharp pinch on her arm as a thin white man with sunken cheeks tested the thickness of her muscles. “Thin, but strong,” he remarked, opening her jaw with two calloused hands to inspect her teeth. “You have the manner of a house slave, but you seem strong enough for field work.”

“I done both, sir,” she said faintly when he let go of her face.
Was he a kindly man, like the one Elijah so boldly addressed? How could she possibly know for sure so quickly? “I pick tobacco in Virginia.”

“Ever work a rice field?”

“No, sir.”

“I expect you could learn. What happened to your face?”