Walter held the covered cage on his lap while Samuel pinned the boat against the bank with a long pole in the shallows. The flood tide that had sped them twenty miles up the Combahee under cover of darkness was slowing. Young Charles Simmons and nervous John Chisholm had stopped their boat farther downriver.
The moon had recently set, which made it around one in the morning according to the almanac. Sweet water would start pushing back shortly in the old struggle for dominance, and salt water would ebb toward St. Helena Sound and the sea. Harriet had approximately three hours before the gong sounded on the Lowndes Plantation. As she waited for the dugout to steady against the north bank of the river, she looked over the side with eyes accustomed to the dark.
Harriet reached into a box of gravel in the bottom of the trus-me-Gawd and threw a handful into the slack shallows and onto the bank to scare away snakes. She sent up a prayer against alligators. Walter Plowden said the immense beasts avoided people, yet they nonetheless terrified her with their giant teeth and unholy stealth. Snakes, spiders, and bloodhounds didn’t alarm her overmuch, but she’d never seen alligators before coming to South Carolina. Contrabands sold the pink meat in the market. Not long before, she’d seen one drag a dog into a creek when the unsuspecting pup lowered its snout to drink.
Even so, Harriet knew that mud was the principal danger as she balanced on the edge of the craft and knotted her skirt above the petticoat that covered her legs. “You sure bout this spot?” she asked.
Samuel’s reply came softly in the dark. “Yes’m. Shore hard right here.”
Holding fast to the side of the boat, prepared to claw her way back in, Harriet lowered her bare feet into the murky water that came up to her knees. She ignored the chilly shock to concentrate on the river bottom. Sticky goo bloomed through her toes, but the bank felt solid. Not the hideous pluff mud that swallowed a woman to the armpits and trapped her worse than quicksand. Relieved, she stood upright and reached back into the boat for her oldest shawl.
Walter leaned toward her. A slouch hat obscured his face, but Harriet knew he was agitated. His slim fingers had drummed the wooden cage the entire voyage along the salty ribbons that separated Port Royal Island from the South Carolina mainland. “I still don’t like this plan,” he hissed.
“Dang it to heck, we’ll find the rest a the torpedoes if you give us a chance,” Samuel echoed.
Harriet wrapped the shabby knit around her shoulders. She appreciated their concern but wasn’t going to let her cold feet, or theirs, stop her. “When you gone stop saying that? You know the Secesh can bring back their big guns any time,” she said. “We got to try this.”
“Well, just remember that Jacob’s cabin is second from the end,” Walter said in a resigned tone. “And if his rag ain’t there, don’t stop, hear? Pass on by and find somewhere to hide. We’ll p-p-pick you up downriver on the tide. Where Samuel sh-sh-showed us.”
Harriet nodded. Walter was her bravest scout, but he repeated himself when anxious, and his stutter grew worse.
“If anyone asks, you headed to the Nichols p-p-place to see Sally,” Walter said. He turned to Samuel. “Sally?”
Samuel’s correction came softly in the dark. “Sadie.”
Harriet hoped Walter’s nerves didn’t get the best of him. A precise man, he didn’t usually mix up names. Samuel had described his cousin, known up and down the Combahee as the area’s best midwife, at length. Her name was an important piece of the alibi Harriet had worked out with his help. “Sadie,” she repeated to calm him down. “And Jacob’s wife is Mayline.”
“Mayline,” Samuel confirmed.
“All right then,” Harriet said and put out her hands. “Give em to me.”
Walter slipped the cloth off the cage. The first chicken ruffled its feathers at being awakened but made no protest when handed over. Wrapping her thumb and pinkie finger securely around its scaly ankle, Harriet tucked the bird under one arm. Walter passed her the second chicken, which remained asleep with its head nestled deep in its feathers.
“Good luck fishing. Catch us a torpedo or two,” Harriet said and turned to climb the earthen levee that kept the tidal river out of the fields except when summoned through the trunks in the bank. She pushed upward with straining thighs, careful not to squeeze the chickens. When she reached the top of the slope, she turned eastward to retrace the river toward the Atlantic. Ahead, causeways ran toward the plantation, dividing flat lowlands into squares of rice. Planters had reclaimed most of the marshes, cultivating every foot of the rich, black earth right up to the river. Wild blackberries sometimes attached themselves to the levee, and an occasional tree made a brave stand, but the bank was mostly unobstructed. In daylight, one could see for miles from the high levee. Harriet mustn’t be caught on it. She quickened her stride.
The rice fields were immense. Harriet walked fast, yet the embankment seemed to go on forever. Without moonlight, the brackish river rustling below on her right could be heard but not seen. Silent as a house robber, she finally came to a causeway that allowed her to head inland.
Sounds carried alarmingly with the ricebirds and bullfrogs asleep. Cold gravel bit her callused feet. An owl hooted faintly in the distance, prompting the chicken under Harriet’s right arm to lift its head. She jiggled the bird reassuringly and picked up speed. If anyone spotted her on the raised divide between the fields, they would know she had approached from the Combahee.
Time was against her. She broke into a jog. Her knotted skirt loosened and spilled over her wet petticoat. Growing winded, she switched to two breaths in, two out, which was a trick of endurance learned years earlier. Anxious to get there quickly—afraid to go at all—Harriet forced herself to see only the beaten path, one foot in front of the other. After another mile or so, the causeway tilted upward, and she reached a narrow avenue that skirted a towering pine forest at the back of the rice fields. At least an hour had passed, but she was safely off the dike.
Nothing made one look more like a runaway than running, so Harriet slowed to a walk as she turned east toward the Lowndes Plantation, two miles or so downriver. Her heartbeat gradually slowed. Lines materialized in her brow, and the dirt of the road caked on her feet. Her petticoat dried as she walked the lane dividing the forest from the rice fields. She elbowed the birds close for company, hunched under her shawl, and focused on the rheumatism in her left hip. She didn’t have rheumatism, but her mother did, and she found it easier to mimic the slow, pained limp if she devoted her attention to what the sensation must feel like. Anyone on the road would see an old woman up early, as old women tended to be, on a birthing errand.
Harriet hummed to herself, and then she put words to the tune. “Swing low, sweet chariot,” she began softly as she shuffled along, savoring the hopeful notes. The hymn called to mind all the refugees she had brought to freedom in Canada. Once again, she was coming to carry more home. Next time, if she found the torpedoes, she’d bring a “band of angels,” she thought, as the verse crossed her lips. Blue-coated angels with guns.
Harriet polished the rich, jubilant notes until the sound grew bigger than the empty road and bounced back from the resinous trees to strengthen her courage. Heavenly Father, she prayed even as she sang, Thy will be done.
A rosy glow peeped above the eastern horizon just as the hollow clop of hooves sounded behind her. Her heart fluttered. She forced herself to maintain the same pace as before, though fear twitched in her calf muscles. I’ve come to do your work, she reminded Him. Two—perhaps three—horses were coming down the river road that ran between estates. Must be patrollers. No planter would ride for pleasure at that hour. With dawn breaking, it had to be close to five in the morning, and gongs would have sounded on local plantations. She had hoped the local guards would have retired for the night.
The horses now trotted. They must have spotted her. She trudged doggedly despite a rash impulse to duck behind the pine trees. Her urge to run gathered strength until it was like whitewater rushing toward Niagara Fal
ls under the last train bridge to Canada. “Swing low, sweet chariot,” she began again, closing her ears to their pursuit. The dirt lane vibrated under her bare feet. The throbbing gathered fury in the gloom. They were galloping.
“Coming for to carry me home,” she sang at full volume, pushing toward a crescendo to stop her throat from strangling the sound. Please Lord, she prayed. Don’t let them take me. Not today.
“Swing low—ahh!” A spray of dust and pebbles attacked Harriet’s scarred neck, shooting starbursts of pain into her skull. The road swam before her eyes.
Two patrollers pounded up on either side in the dim light. Both pointed guns. One wielded a coiled rope. The other had a set of horse pistols across his pommel and handcuffs on his thick belt. In the instant they swung around her, saddlebacks clanking with chains, Harriet squinted hard against the dark mist at the edges of her sight and twisted the leg of a bird. “Lawd above!” she cried, stumbling backward. “Land sakes!”
The chicken cackled and winged its way over the head of the nearer horse, roosting on the hind end. The stallion tossed its mane and bucked. Its rider, a grizzled man of fifty or so, brought his horse under control as the bird fluttered to the ground in a blur of speckled feathers that sounded like a gambler shuffling his deck.
“Sorry, sah!” Harriet proclaimed. “You done spooked me. I hard a hearin’!” She crouched and shuffled clumsily back and forth on bare feet to snatch up the chicken, inches from the horse’s sharp hooves. “My missus gone snatch my head if I lose her bird. She be all cut up.”
“What you doing on the road?” the second patroller demanded. He was a younger man with close-set eyes, somewhere around thirty, with an ugly purple welt that crawled the length of his jaw and drew one side of his mouth into a humorless grin. The scar looked like an old burn injury.
Harriet hitched the bird under her arm and clucked soothingly. She stroked the plumage with her cheek, relieved not to look at the man’s shocking visage for an instant and aware that it gave an impression of calmness. It fooled her brain, too.
She opened her eyes as wide as a child’s, boosted her arms to show off the birds, and loosened her tongue so that a honeyed Maryland slur rounded the edges of her words. “They missy’s favorites, sah. Betsy and Bitsy. I dassen’t lose em, or she gone have a conniption.”
The older man’s horse shied sideways again, and he patted its dusty neck. “Why you have your mistress’s chickens, mammy? You sure you ain’t stealing them?”
“No, sah! No how. I keep em with me so nobody can ’propriate em. Niggers have em in a pot ’fo you can whistle Dixie. Missus Heyward told me never turn my back, and I ain’t yet. Sleeps with em at night. Keeps em on my lap when I use the necessary.”
The older man chuckled. He holstered his pistol.
“Why you on the road?” the dour young patroller asked again, though with less enthusiasm than before. He rested the rope on his pommel and yawned, revealing stained teeth. His knuckles were bruised and scraped. “Where you going?”
“I headed to Nichols’ place, sah. That Sadie gal struggling with a mammy what jest birthed twins. Missy give me leave to he’p, so long as I back ’fo dark. Poor mammy’s titties swelled so bad she can’t nurse mas’rs new baby, much lessen her own. Youngins’ can’t grab hold a the nipple. Milk won’t let down.”
The young man winced at the details. “Where’s your pass?”
“Right here in my pocket, sah.” Harriet glanced about for a spot to perch the chickens. She looked up. “Gives me a second, mas’r.”
At that moment, a whistle sounded. Harriet glanced at the pine forest, grateful for the reprieve, and saw a horseman picking his way down the rise. Behind him walked a short man with a heavy rope around his neck. The prisoner’s hands were tied, and his dark face shined with sweat.
“I’ll be damned. Mason Lee,” the young patroller said.
The newcomer’s perspiring red sorrel paused at a ditch and then cantered onto the path. The prisoner’s leash grew taut, and he broke into a run to keep from being dragged. His damp shirt clung to his chest.
“Mornin’, Carter,” the new patroller said as he drew to a halt. “Sir,” he said to the older man and tipped his hat respectfully, though both had gray in their full beards.
“Seems you had a good night,” said the young patroller, whose name was apparently Carter.
Harriet stared at the ground, as she was expected to do, though she saw the slave’s face from the corner of her eye. Her stomach turned over. The man’s swollen nose bled freely, and one eye was a pulpy mess. The rope across his gullet was tied so as not to close the windpipe, though his heavy breathing had a strangled sound. She’d seen his face before. Something about the ears, which stuck out straight from his head. Then she placed him. The man at the commissary. Private Webster’s assistant. Her stomach knotted harder. She wished she could get to her Colt, though she knew better than to move an inch.
The new patroller shrugged off the compliment. A smile flickered across his face. He was still handsome, with a strong nose that deflected attention from his sagging jowls. “Doing my bit,” he said.
“Not bad for an old man,” Carter said with a touch of envy.
The horseman didn’t respond. “Got any water?” he asked. “Lost mine in the chase.”
Carter slipped a canteen from his saddlebag. He threw it to the patroller, who uncapped the container and drank deeply.
The slave put up his hands. “Watuh, boss?” he croaked. “Please, sah?”
The patroller ignored the request. He capped the canteen, guided his horse forward, and handed back the container. “Thank you,” he said. “I best get this nigger home. It’s slow going on foot back, and the overseer’s itching to get ahold of him.”
“Throw him across the horse,” Carter suggested.
The new man shrugged. “Think I’d rather have a polecat at my back.”
“You know this one?” the older patroller inquired.
“Since he was a pickaninny,” the man said. “Can’t miss those ears. He made off a few months ago and was dumb enough to sneak back for some gal at the Nichols place.”
His wife, Harriet guessed.
Perplexed, the three men gazed down at the prisoner. The older patroller shook his head like he’d seen everything under the sun yet still could be amazed. He shifted his tired bones in the saddle. “You’d think there’d be plenty of gals on Port Royal.”
The unscarred half of Carter’s face turned upward to join the other in a grin. “Honeypots ready for dipping,” he said.
The new man turned his horse upriver. “Well, I b’lieve the overseer is going to give this nigger something else to think about.”
Carter lifted his hat. “You tell your sister I send my regards, Mason Lee,” he said. “Hear?”
“Will do,” the patroller called back.
As Lee moved away, the rope tied to his pommel jerked, and the prisoner ran past Harriet on his bloody, briar-torn feet, trailing a sour smell of defeat. The prisoner didn’t glance Harriet’s way, nor did she look up, but the air hummed with their awareness of one another.
The older patroller consulted a pocket watch. “No sense wasting what’s left of the morning,” he told his companion.
The younger patroller turned again to Harriet. He nudged his mount closer. The mare stopped just shy of Harriet. He’d want the pass now, she thought. The forgery was still in her pocket.
“You ain’t from these parts,” the young man said. “You talk different.”
His horse neighed and stamped a forefoot, perhaps sensing that the other animals were headed for the barn. Inches from Harriet’s bare feet, its iron shoes cut gingerbread biscuits in the sandy road. Harriet’s toes curled. A sweat broke out between her breasts. She kept her eyes down. “No, sah, I ain’t. Mas’rs sistah sent me down from Mar’land.”
“Maryland? I don’t recall him having kin there.”
“Miz Heyward was visitin’ a friend,” she said. The patroller�
�s stare burned on her bent neck. He wouldn’t want to go home empty-handed now that he’d seen Mason Lee’s catch. “Mas’r had more niggers than he could use, sah,” she added. “Sold me cheap.”
The patroller’s leather saddle creaked. Harriet sensed him reaching for the rope on his pommel. It would be the work of an instant to tie her around the neck. If he ran her back to the Heyward Plantation, the overseer would be happy to claim her. Permanently.
She looked up with a wide smile that showed off the gap in her teeth. “Sho was lucky. That plantation had no good men a’tall. My old man, he so weak, a baby chile chop firewood faster. I scoutin’ a better man this time. Down here, they thick as fleas. Handsome bucks. Carolina grows em good.”
The young man leered and shifted back in the saddle. “Ain’t you a mite long in the tooth for such nonsense, granny?”
“Why, I got more sap than a cherry tree in July.” Harriet shifted her weight onto her left hip. “If I din’t have this here rheumatism, I be skipping ’stead a walking.”
The rider looked her up and down. His eyes rested on her bosom, to which she held the chickens. Her stomach knotted. Harriet let her left hip sag farther, worse than Mama’s, and stared back.
An unreadable but somehow petulant expression crossed his face. She dropped her gaze again to the road. As if he’d been waiting, the man jerked his reins. The mare shied. Its powerful flank bumped Harriet, knocking her to the ground. The chickens protested loudly against her convulsive grip as she fell onto her side. Dust filled her mouth.
Harriet rolled to a knee and stumbled awkwardly onto her feet. Humiliation and helplessness rose in her, but she kept them from her face. Fear raised the hair on the back of her neck. She brushed her gritty lips against the feathers of a squirming bird and fixed her gaze on the road, praying he didn’t have more in him.
The man guffawed. “Watch your step, Granny.”
“Yes, mas’r,” Harriet replied, impassive.
The Tubman Command Page 6