Through the Storm (22 page)

“Miss Clark, Mrs. Jackson is resting quietly now. She should stay in bed for the next few days.”

Sable chuckled. “Who’s going to tell her that, you or me?”

The kindly old doctor smiled in reply. “Certainly not me.”

They both knew how stubborn she could sometimes be.

“She insists upon going to hear Mr. Douglass speak tomorrow,” Sable said.

“Well, she can’t. You tell her. At least she’ll listen to you.”

“Only sometimes,” Sable reminded him.

“She
never
listens to me. Hasn’t for the fifteen years I’ve known her.”

“Maybe the freezing temperatures will deter her, though I wouldn’t count on it.”

“Is she still set upon going South?”

“Soon as Lee surrenders, she says. I haven’t been able to dissuade her.”

“The journey may kill her.”

“I know, but she is determined. Is her cough a sign of something more serious?”

Sable had grown very fond of Verena in the short time they’d been together.

“Just congestion from her cold. I left a draught on her nightstand.”

“Thank you, Dr. Ellis.”

“You’re welcome. So, have you thought about that proposal I put to you?”

Dr. Ellis had been trying to match Sable with his youngest son since the day she and the doctor had first met.

He added, “I’d be real proud to call you an Ellis, Miss Clark.”

“I’m flattered, Dr. Ellis, but I’m not looking for a
beau. I’d like to settle into my position first. Please don’t be offended. If your son is as fine a gentleman as you are, I’m sure I’ll be pleased to meet him someday soon.”

“Just thought I’d ask, no offense taken.”

Sable escorted him to the door. He tipped his hat and headed down the snowy walk.

Mrs. Jackson was sitting up in bed when Sable came up to check on her. “That ol’ sawbones wants me to stay in bed, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, he does.”

“And what do you think?”

“I think you should follow his advice.”

Verena snorted. “What time is Fred Douglass speaking tomorrow?”

“It doesn’t matter. You aren’t going.”

Verena slumped back against the pillows like a sullen child. “You’re as bad as Ellis.”

“And you are going to get wrinkles, pouting that way.”

Verena grinned. “Wrinkles? I’ve more wrinkles now than a dried apple.”

“But you’re much prettier.”

Verena shook her head. “I do adore you, Elizabeth. Those other two girls I hired before you shook in their boots every time I so much as looked at them. You’ve a backbone, child. I like that.”

“I like you too, Mrs. Jackson. How about I read the paper to you for a while, then fix us some luncheon?”

“You have a deal, miss. First, though, is that ol’ sawbones Ellis still trying to get you yoked to that varmint son of his?”

Sable couldn’t hide her grin. “He did mention his son today, yes.”

“Well, the minute you see him, start running. He’s handsome but he’s a cad. Some young ladies see his smile and forget you’re not supposed to let a man sample the milk until he buys the cow, if you get my meaning.”

“I do.”

Sable thought back on the handsome Raimond LeVeq and his devastating smile. Shaking off the sadness, she asked, “Shall I read the papers now?”

“By all means.”

When Sable first began her job as Mrs. Jackson’s companion, the papers were filled with reports of Sherman’s remarkable march to the sea. After pulling out of Atlanta on the fifteenth of November, he and his sixty-two thousand men headed south to conquer Savannah, 285 miles away. Although Wheeler’s Rebs destroyed bridges, toppled trees in their path and mined the roads, their actions did little to slow Sherman’s daunting twelve-mile-a-day pace. His men spread out like locusts over the land, foraging for food and destroying everything of military value to the South, and anything they could not eat. They stole from farms, homesteads, and slave cabins; they made Sherman neckties out of the railroads, burned cotton, encouraged slaves to run, and generally caused hell for the people of Georgia. But Sherman’s men weren’t the only ones plaguing the citizens of the state. Deserters from Wheeler’s own cavalry were just as lawless. Their actions caused one Southern newspaper to angrily conclude, “I don’t think the Yankees are any worse than our own army.”

On December 10, the ten thousand Confederate soldiers defending the city of Savannah fled rather than be trapped inside the city by the men in Union blue. General Sherman sent President Lincoln a telegram that read: “I beg to present to you, as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with 150 heavy guns and about 2,500 bales of cotton.” Marching into the city with Sherman and his troops on that triumphant day were his corps of Black teamsters, Black laborers, and the ten thousand contrabands who’d trailed him from Atlanta.

Like most members of the race, Sable and Verena were always eager for news of the 180,000 Black soldiers and the 30,000 Black naval men who were fighting the war. The United States Colored Troops comprised
120 infantry regiments, twelve heavy artillery regiments, ten light artillery batteries and seven cavalry regiments. Black troops guarded Confederate soldiers in places like Point Lookout, Maryland, and Rock Island, Illinois. They fought against small bands of guerrillas, protected contrabands growing Union cotton, and did not desert as often as their White counterparts despite impressment, unequal treatment and pay, and the threat of being captured and sold into slavery.

Sable was elated to read that the first soldiers to enter the conquered city of Charleston on February 18 were the Black Twenty-first United States Colored Troop, and two companies of the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts. The article she read to Mrs. Jackson went on to say that following the Fifty-fourth were men of the old Third and Fourth South Carolina regiments, many of whom had been among the city’s eighteen thousand resident slaves when the war began.

Before coming North she’d had no idea so many Black men were in the war. Each day as newspaper reports of their accomplishments filed in, she felt more and more proud. Their bravery and courage during battles at such places as Miliken’s Bend, Fort Pillow, Battery Wagner, and Olustee showed a previously doubting country that, yes, they were men.

And because of their bravery the country began to change. On January 31, 1865, the House of Representatives passed the unprecedented Thirteenth Amendment. Unlike the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which abolished slavery only in those states at war with the Union, the new amendment outlawed slavery everywhere in the United States. The next day, February 1, Senator Charles Sumner sponsored a Black Boston lawyer named John Rock for the right to practice law before the Supreme Court. He was the first man of the race to be afforded such a distinction. Eight years earlier, in the case of
Dred Scott v. Sanders
, the Court had denied that Blacks were even citizens.

Then, on March 4, 1865, Frederick Douglass was invited to President Lincoln’s second inaugural reception. It was the first time a member of the race had been invited to a White House social function. Blacks were now being allowed to sit in the galleries of Congress and to testify as witnesses in federal courts. Segregation had been outlawed on the streetcars in Washington, D.C., and members of the race were no longer barred by statute from carrying the United States mail.

Positive change seemed to be occurring all over the country, but for Robert E. Lee and the Confederacy events had taken a turn for the worse. According to newspaper reports, his army had been reduced to thirty-five thousand men. The South had no money to pay them and no food to feed them as a result of Sherman’s punishing push through Georgia and South Carolina. The end seemed near.

Sable and everyone else in the North celebrated April 3 when Union troops took Richmond, the Confederate capital. The first Union troops to enter the city were the all Black, Fifth Massachusetts Cavalry, commanded by Charles Francis Adams, grandson of former President John Quincy Adams. The Black citizens of the city greeted the liberating Black cavalry with deafening cheers.

On April 6, 1865, three Union corps captured six thousand members of Lee’s army, and by the tenth of April, the first war between the American states was over. The nation’s joy was short-lived; four days later, President Lincoln was assasinated by a man the papers described as the sad, mad, bad John Wilkes Booth.

Late April 16, Sable and Verena arrived in Washington by train. Because of the tremendous crowds it was hard to find a hack to rent at the train station, but after a few unsuccessful attempts Sable was finally able to secure one. The Black driver helped them with their small valises, then got them under way.

Sable saw hundreds of people on the journey to the center of the city. Most were walking the same route as their carriage and all appeared as somber as she herself felt. Church bells clanged mournfully and office buildings and storefronts were draped in black. Because of the vast numbers of folks keeping vigil outside the White House, it was impossible for their driver to get them any closer than a few blocks away. After paying his fare, Sable took Verena’s arm to give her support and the two women blended into the crowd as it moved quietly up the avenue.

Everyone appeared to have taken the death hard, Black people in particular. Lincoln had been the President of the United States, but to the Blacks of the nation, he’d been Moses, Father, the Great Liberator. He’d formed the United States Colored Troops, emancipated three and half million slaves, and now he lay dead.

The cold rain continued to fall. Sable’s clothing had soaked through hours ago, but like everyone else she paid the drizzle no mind. Hymns were sung, prayers were offered. Later that afternoon the White House doors were opened to the public. Sable, Verena, and nearly twenty-five thousand others were allowed to file past the body as it lay in state in the East Room.

The next day, a funeral service was conducted inside the White House and the crowd of sixty thousand lining the streets watched with heavy hearts as the black hearse bearing Lincoln’s body slowly made its way to the Capitol rotunda, a mile away. The large procession trailing the hearse marched solemnly to the beat of muffled drums and the dirge bells of the regimental bands of cavalry, artillery and marine units.

Leading the slow-paced cortege was a Black regiment, marching with their guns reversed. A city procession followed. Thousands of Blacks joined in, including the entire membership of the Baltimore Conference of the American Methodist Episcopal Church, which had convened its annual meeting only a few days before. They
marched under a banner that read: “We mourn our loss.”

On Friday, April 21, the funeral cortege pulled out of Washington at eight in the morning. The journey to Lincoln’s home state of Illinois took his body to such cities as Philadelphia, where reportedly more than three hundred thousand people were waiting, and to New York, where about two thousand Blacks, many of them wearing Union uniforms, were among the crowd that marched in the civic procession from City Hall to the Hudson River Station.

Blacks in the South grieved also. All three thousand Black residents of the city of Michelville wore crepe on their arms until April 30. Charleston’s Zion church stayed draped in black for a year.

When Lincoln was buried on May 4, Sable thought a reporter for the
Harper’s Weekly
summed up the feelings of the race best when he wrote, “His death burdened every black with a personal sense of loss…”

Not since the death of John Brown had the race grieved so deeply.

By the end of May, Verena and Sable were making final preparations for their long-anticipated relocation to New Orleans. As the day of departure approached, Mrs. Jackson took on an inner glow. She seemed lively and energetic. She fussed less and smiled more, making Sable believe that maybe the move was not such a bad idea after all.

After a grueling cross-country trip by both rail and coach, they arrived on the doorstep of their new house in early June. On the journey through New Orleans, refugees and soldiers clogged the streets. The hired driver had to stop their coach more than once to let the foot traffic pass. She saw hundreds of dust-covered women, men, and children making their way down the crowded streets, carrying their meager possessions in their arms and on their backs. She saw old men pushing handcarts piled with bundled goods, and barefoot children sitting
on the walks alone. There were people hawking vegetables, fish, and fruit.

Like the rest of the country, Sable knew that many of the freedmen now had no place to go. Had she not escaped to Boston, she’d be one of those trudging through the streets, displaced by freedom.

Seeing the refugees made her think back to the army camp and the people she’d met there. Where were they all now? she wondered—A very and Salome, Araminta, the soldiers at the hospital. And where was Raimond? He made his home here in this city. Would their paths ever cross? She hoped they would. Guilt had been plaguing her since the day of her escape. She owed him not only money, but also an explanation.

By mid-June, Sable and Mrs. Jackson were comfortably ensconced in their small cottage. The structure resembled many others in the city’s south ward, with beautiful iron grillwork on the balcony. Thanks to the kindness of her neighbors, Sable had learned where to market and how to get Mrs. Jackson to St. Louis Cathedral, where she and most of the other French speaking Black Catholic citizens went for Sunday Mass.

After church one Sunday, Mrs. Jackson happened upon a friend she hadn’t seen since leaving New Orleans. She introduced Sable.

“Elizabeth Clark, I want you to meet a dear friend, Juliana LeVeq.”

Sable’s eyes widened. Could she be a member of Raimond’s family? The short, dark-skinned woman’s eyes sparkled with warmth as she said, “I am pleased to meet you, Elizabeth. Thank you so much for bringing Verena home to us. Let me introduce my son, Beau.”

Beauregard LeVeq was as handsome as his mother was beautiful. Tall, with sandy brown skin, he bowed over her hand like a courtier. The bow instantly reminded her of Raimond, and her heart began to pound. She managed to say, “Pleased to meet you, Mr. LeVeq.”