Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson
HARRIET PULLED HER SHAWL CLOSE AROUND her shoulders in the chill evening air. The crackling fire made the clearing in the woods on the edge of town feel like a cabin with dark just outside the windows. She and five other scouts huddled around a diagram that Samuel had scratched in the dirt. His younger brother Jacob had been sold to the Lowndes estate six months earlier. Samuel suggested that Jacob might have the information they needed. Resting on his haunches, Samuel pointed out the features of the plantation on which his brother lived.
“The first cabins set here, jest shy a the Big House. Jacob’s is second from the end, past the jail and smokehouse,” he said. “The rest of the quarters is on the far side. Lowndes owns bout five hundred head. Same as Colonel Heyward.”
“Where’s the overseer live?” Harriet asked.
Samuel pointed to a small square with his stick. Light from the fire trembled in the grooves of the diagram. “His place is right here, between the quarters and the Big House.”
“Tell us bout him,” Harriet said, wondering about the man whom everyone appeared to fear.
“Goes by the name a Pipkin,” Samuel said. “Old man Lowndes hired him a long time ago. Thinks he owns the place. Pipkin picks the angriest niggers to drive the hands. Bribes em with tobacco and food. He’s outlasted every other overseer on the Cum’bee.”
“When’s the last time you talked to Jacob?” she said.
“Not since Colonel Heyward traded him. Colonel said he wouldn’t sell a dog to Lowndes, knowing Pipkin, but his London buyer came upon a set a rare books. Said they too good to pass up. Always hankered after a library.” Samuel spat on the ground. “That’s when I decided to make a break, soon as I could. Might be me next.”
The small knot of scouts flinched subtly, as if Samuel had brandished a torch from the campfire. Harriet recognized the reaction. Every refugee had a story that he’d rather not remember about mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters never seen again. Runaways, mostly male, chewed off their families like a fox chewed off a leg in a trap. It was a good thing there were so few mirrors on Port Royal. If men could see themselves, they’d cut their throats from guilt.
Harriet recalled the looking glass in the Philadelphia hotel where she’d gotten her first job. Gentlemen and ladies passed behind her while she polished the mirror in the elegant lobby. It was like a picture book in the stationer’s window on Walnut Street come to life, folks looked so grand with their top hats and lace bonnets. However, when a flyspeck in the middle of the glass resisted her rag one day, and she leaned closer to rub it off, Harriet noticed something wrong with the picture. Her own reflection. There she was, with her familiar chin, mouth, and eyes—scar over her left eyebrow and hair pulled into a bun—yet nobody saw her. Guests walked by as if she was a ghost.
What was a life worth when all the people who met your eye and made you feel real were gone? And how could she ever rest, knowing they were captive? It was then she knew she had to go back. Being a ghost would allow her to do so. Once John was out of her life, she’d wed herself to the mission. After she got her family north, she went back for people she didn’t know.
The sea breeze picked up, and Harriet tucked her hands into the shawl. She returned to the rock on which she’d been sitting, shoved against a loblolly pine. The men took the stumps they had pulled around the campfire. Samuel rubbed out the diagram with his boot heel to hide their plan from prying eyes and sat on a boulder across from Harriet.
“How you know the layout?” she asked.
“I delivered messages for Mas’r Heyward sometimes,” Samuel said. “Him and Lowndes belonged to the Charleston Jockey Club. They bet against each other on the races.”
“What your brother do for Pipkin?” Harriet said.
“He minds the rice trunks—them the water gates on the river. If Lowndes loaned anyone to lay torpedoes, he sent Jacob.”
“What do rice trunks have to do with torpedoes?” Harriet said.
“The gates are one a the most valuable machines on any plantation. Only the smartest men work em. My brother’s trained up to fix most anything.” A note of pride crept into Samuel’s voice. “They ain’t gone use no common field nigger to lay a mine.”
Harriet wondered how Samuel had escaped, and why Jacob hadn’t come with him. Samuel had probably stolen a dugout. Watermen who ran errands on the river had more range than other slaves, and after the Union occupied the Sea Islands, they had somewhere to go. Yet Samuel didn’t possess a Sea Island accent. More similar to Virginia or Delaware, though he’d come off the nearby Heyward Plantation.
Walter Plowden leaned forward. “We heard Jacob’s opened his door t-t-twice to men trying to make it to the islands,” he said.
A short, scrawny runaway held together with wire, Walter was Harriet’s unofficial second-in-command. They had met a year earlier when General Hunter asked Harriet to cultivate men who otherwise wouldn’t confide in the Buckra. Walter had helped her recruit their small band of volunteers. Like her, he had fled Maryland before the war and hadn’t waited for President Lincoln to grant permission before heading south. He, too, drew no wages, and he made ends meet selling coffee, lemonade, and a weak beer near Camp Saxton, the army base for colored men. “They’d have to pay me to stay home,” Walter once said. Harriet understood him better than she did her four brothers sitting out the war in New York and Canada. It had taken her years to steal them out of Maryland, followed by her parents. They refused to go south ever again.
Samuel reached for a sack at his feet, drew out some boiled peanuts, and passed the bag to the next man. Although the night was balmy, he wore an old canvas coat with large pockets for carrying odds and ends. One burning log collapsed into another as he cracked a nut, ate the meat, and pitched the shell into the flames. The campfire flickered in his black eyes, which were concentrated only on Harriet. “I know you want onto that plantation, but Pipkin, he got second sight. He gets ahold a you—” Samuel shook his head.
The group grew quiet as the warning sank in, and the peanuts went around the campfire. They had all heard stories about Pipkin.
Harriet leaned against the tree trunk. She suddenly felt exhausted. Her brief nap had been hours earlier, and she hadn’t eaten since late afternoon when Septima pressed a bowl of pork stew on her. The hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach had grown into a general unease. She needed to be careful. Needed to get some food into herself. Across the circle, Walter accepted the goobers without taking any. He jiggled the sack. In Harriet’s experience, the lean scout ate only when reminded, unlike Samuel, who must have gone hungry while enslaved, as he always seemed to have something in his pocket.
Harriet had a slight metallic taste in her mouth. She felt woolly and wished Walter would pass the peanuts. She put out her hand shakily. “Send those along,” she started to say but never did. The glow of the fire vanished. All was darkness. The only sound she heard was a faint hum.
Someone jiggled her shoulder.
“Moses, you okay?” a man said. His voice was far away.
“She okay j-j-jest awhile ago,” someone said. This man seemed closer.
“’Pears de debbil done took her,” a boyish voice offered. “Bet she seen a haint.”
“Naw. She jest sleeping.”
“Dey say she got de charm,” the younger man said in an awed tone. “Dem Johnny Rebs can’t tetch her. Buckra never even know she dere.”
He was wrong, Harriet thought sleepily. Daddy had been the one with the charm, not her. Able to see the future. “War’s coming,” he had told them in ’46, right before President Polk invaded Mexico to grab more land for slavery.
“Moses jest brave, is all,” someone protested. “Got a man’s courage.”
“N-n-nobody brought more slaves north,” a different voice agreed.
Harriet recognized Walter’s stutter. An uneasy feeling crept over her—as if she’d bumped over the refreshments at a public meeting or slipped in manure on th
e way to church—and she forced her eyes open. The scouts loomed above her, all except Samuel, who squatted with a hand on her arm as if to keep her from falling. Charles Simmons, a younger scout with a round face and buckteeth, stood next to Samuel. His mouth hung open, and he looked like he’d seen a specter. Charles fingered a lucky rabbit’s foot on a string around his neck.
Walter stood in front, still holding the sack of peanuts. Three other scouts—Joseph Sellers, Atticus Blake, and John Chisholm—ranged behind him. Walter leaned forward and licked his chapped lips. “Hey there, M-M-Moses. You had one a them spells.”
It seemed no time had passed, but Harriet knew from their faces that she must have been out awhile. She sensed the rough tree bark against her spine and reached down to touch the rock underneath. She was still upright, fortunately. Had her mouth flopped open like a dimwit’s? Harriet flicked her hand over her chin. No drool, thank the Lord. She felt relieved and then angry. Why had He given her this curse? She threw off Samuel’s steadying hand.
“I’m fine,” she said. “Y’all give me some air.”
Samuel rose. Walter and the others backed up.
Harriet swallowed hard against the metallic aftertaste and checked the kerchief on her head. She waved the men back to their seats. Samuel edged away but didn’t sit. Walter took his stump and tugged on the tail of Charles Simmons’s frayed shirt. The boy dropped down beside him. Harriet knew that if she pretended she had merely fallen asleep, the others wouldn’t challenge her, though they would believe she wasn’t the strongest timber in the tabernacle. That was useful when a bounty hunter took her for a feeble-minded field hand sleeping against a fence, but not when she needed to convince six men that she could lead them to hell and back. They needed to know they could depend on her, which was hard since she couldn’t always depend on herself.
“We all brought something with us out a slavery,” Harriet said. She tapped the scar above her left eyebrow. “This here is mine.” Her mouth twisted in a rueful smile. Better to smile than weep, she knew. Her shawl had slipped down her arms, and she drew it back over her shoulders, feeling exposed. “I can run, and I can fight. And with the Lord’s help, I done freed more than a hundred folk. Never lost a one. But I got my spells. Walter can tell you I don’t miss much when they happen. Sounds come through like a whistle in fog. And I never missed a station on the Underground Railroad. Not many conductors can say that, not even on the old B&O.”
Harriet wouldn’t mention that the sounds she sometimes heard were ones others did not. Strange singing, loud buzzing, God speaking. The men didn’t need to know that.
Charles Simmons glanced around at the woods outside the circle of light. He nervously fastened the open neck of his shirt. “Thought you seen a haint,” he said. “Sure you d’int?”
“No, I did not see a haint. I jest had one a my fits. You want to worry on something, worry on Rebel spies.” Harriet looked up at Samuel, still standing. “None a you need to fret bout me.”
“Okay, then, Moses. Glad you all right,” the waterman said and retook his seat.
Like thunderstorms, seizures scrubbed her mind clean once they broke. Harriet returned to the question of Samuel’s brother. She wondered what kept him on the Lowndes Plantation. “Why hasn’t Jacob tried to escape?” she said.
“He got a woman,” Samuel replied. “Pipkin give him one.”
“It’s the overseer’s way a tying men down—and breeding the workforce,” Walter explained. He shot Samuel a critical look that Harriet didn’t know how to interpret, then passed the bag of peanuts to the next scout without taking any.
No wonder Walter looked like a broomstick, she thought. The man didn’t eat. Slavery must have killed his appetite.
“Now he got a child on the way,” Walter continued. “If Jacob runs, Pipkin gone m-m-murder him if he catches him. He can’t catch him, he’ll finish off the woman instead.”
“Won’t Lowndes complain bout property being destroyed?” Harriet said.
Samuel shook his head. His voice was as flat as the Combahee. “Pipkin too good at his work. Best on the river. Meaner than a sack a rattlesnakes.”
“So how does Jacob help other runaways?” she asked.
“They don’t belong to Lowndes,” Walter said. “P-P-Pipkin only hunts his own. A contraband from the Middleton Plantation told us Jacob hangs a rag on his door to wipe his hands. When Pipkin’s in a ’specially bad mood, Jacob takes it down to warn folk trying to sneak by. Them days, Pipkin will take the hide off runaways from other p-p-plantations if they cross his path.”
“Well, let’s hope he’s having a good day. Cause if Jacob helped lay those mines, we got to get to him,” Harriet said, returning to the matter with which they had started the meeting.
Walter frowned. “Why you?”
“You know why,” she said.
“It’s too dangerous,” he protested. “Pipkin catches you, Moses, the whole mission goes in the ditch. Who gone talk to the white folk then? General Hunter won’t listen to us. And if Pipkin spots you, your old life in Maryland gone seem like a church p-p-picnic.”
“Let us watermen find the torpedoes,” Samuel agreed. “I already spotted one. We get two boats working on it, we gone find em all, sooner or later.”
“Ain’t no better disguise than fishing,” Walter said. “Always someone on the river for the big houses.”
Harriet shook her head. “It ain’t enough. You can poke along only so fast on a twenty-five-mile stretch and still fool anybody you jest fishing.”
Refusing to give up, Walter folded his arms across the buttoned vest he had brought with him from New York. “How bout we send someone who knows the Lowndes Plantation real g-g-good? Someone who can get on and off quick?”
The bag of peanuts finally made its way to Harriet. She drew out a handful, crushed the shells in her palm, picked out the meat, and popped the salty goobers in her mouth all at once. Relief washed over her. They tasted like manna. Harriet threw the empty shells onto the smoldering coals of the fire pit. The papery edges lit like fuses before turning red and bursting into flame. “We can’t use anyone the patrollers might know,” she said. “That means Samuel and Charles is out.”
The younger man leaned forward at his name. His lucky rabbit foot dangled into the light. Charles usually hung back in conversation with the older scouts but was first on his feet once they were underway. Like Samuel, he had escaped only recently.
“I can give it a try, Moses,” Charles said. He rubbed one hand over the other. “Better me getting ketched dan you. Dey jest send me on back to Heyward’s place.”
Harriet studied Charles, who couldn’t be more than sixteen. Boys always wanted to face down giants. The bigger the odds, the more excited they got. Trouble was, giants hit harder than they knew. And the mission was too important to trust to any boy. She shook her head. “I got the best chance, Charles. Them patrollers don’t know my face. They gone be on the watch for you, and they won’t look too close at a harmless old woman, especially one that ain’t missing.” She made eye contact with each scout one by one. “Only I can hide in plain sight, and y’all know it.”
Reluctant nods followed. Samuel changed the subject to the question of who was going to bring the fishing poles. They had the Sabbath to get ready. Harriet thought about her own disguise and alibi. A small amount of foot traffic between plantations wasn’t unusual, but she would need a signed pass and legitimate errand.
She listened absently while the men debated whether to make rods from tupelo or willow branches. Joseph Sellers and John Chisholm had strong opinions, having fished regularly for their masters. Chisholm, a barrel-chested man who looked as if he could lift a mule yet had an anxious habit of biting his fingernails, argued for the flexibility of willow. Sellers insisted that tupelo’s rigidity allowed a man to fight the current, giving him a better chance with the fish. Atticus Blake, a scout who generally listened more than he spoke, suggested they borrow poles from the army’s confiscated loot to make
it seem their masters had sent them. Store-bought poles would give the ruse an air of greater authenticity.
Samuel stroked his pointed beard. “No mas’r gone let a nigger use his good gear,” he said.
“My mas’r did once when the neighbors dropped by for dinner unexpected,” said Blake, who kept his hands busy rotating an old slouch hat by the brim. “Say he never did see a nigger wrestle catfish like me.”
“Loaned his gear jest once?” Samuel said. “Ain’t that the point?”
Harriet wondered what the waterman thought of her as the conversation shifted back to the attributes of willows and tupelos. Explaining her defect never got easier. Samuel hadn’t been part of the team long enough to witness one of her fits. Did he think less of her? Would he balk at her command?
As if he sensed what she was thinking, Samuel glanced across the circle. The embers cast a glow across his cheekbones, though his beard disappeared in the shadows. He gave her a smile as he warmed his hands over the dying coals, but it did not reach his eyes. They were watchful.
CHAPTER SIX
They’d send for a man that had hounds to track you, if you run away. They’d run you and bay you, and a white man would ride up there and say, “If you hit one of them hounds, I’ll blow your brains out.” He’d say “your damn brains.” Them hounds would worry you and bite you and have you bloody as a beef, but you dassen’t to hit one of them. They would tell you to stand still and put your hands over your privates.
Henry Waldon, Slave
TWO NIGHTS LATER, HARRIET PUSHED ASIDE the fishing poles in the bottom of the boat, took a hemp scarf from her pocket, and tucked her good shoes under a plank that served as a seat in Walter’s trus-me-Gawd, a Gullah dugout hollowed from cypress. Her hair had finally dried from the soapy gray ash she’d applied. As Harriet wound the rough scarf into a turban, she felt for the braids above her forehead to make sure the gray was visible and tried not to worry about going back into the land of the Pharaohs. She was doing God’s work.
The Tubman Command Page 5