The Tubman Command

by Elizabeth Cobbs

  He lifted his reins and turned toward his partner. “Damn Mason Lee has all the luck.”

  The older man just shook his head with disgust at the boorish antics. “That’s enough, Carter,” he said. He turned shrewd gray eyes on Harriet. “Just be back on the Heyward Plantation afore dark, mammy,” he said.

  She met his gaze. The double-barreled shotgun across his saddle looked older than him, yet its burnished action gleamed from polishing. Harriet guessed that he was the deadlier of the two.

  “You don’t want no Yankee Buckra sneaking across the water to steal you,” the man continued. “They’ll sell you to Cuba sure as night follows day. You’ll have spiders crawling down your neck in a cane field fore you know it.”

  “Yes, sah,” Harriet said, and she nodded vigorously.

  The man swung his horse around in the direction from which he had come, and the two patrollers trotted off. Harriet continued down the road. She spit sand until her mouth was clean. Her body trembled as if she’d taken ill, and she clasped the chickens tighter. A forged pass guaranteed nothing against the whim of a patroller who would lasso a woman if he didn’t like the look of a signature. Though her feet stayed in motion, her eyes flicked closed. The image of the roped prisoner burned in her mind. He’d been kind to her at Webster’s store. Harriet took a deep breath and opened her eyes as a whippoorwill announced the arrival of another day.

  In the far distance, the sun had cleared the horizon, dispelling fog that clung like wisps of cotton to the forest hollows. Sparkling rice fields stretched down to the Combahee. Dark heads—too many to count—were bent over their work, ankle-deep in water. The morning rays cast gold splinters in the swaying grass. A white overseer on his horse watched from a causeway with a shotgun across his lap. On the next causeway down, sunrise glowed on the face of a black driver who stood with a coiled whip.

  The road wound another half mile before she finally reached the outbuildings of the plantation, where the aroma of smoked ham told Harriet she was in the right place and reminded her she hadn’t eaten since midnight. She wondered where Pipkin might be as she shambled past the smokehouse and neighboring jail toward a double row of unpainted cabins elevated by bricks on each corner. Deliver us from evil, she prayed silently.

  Few of the shanties had windows. Those that did were bare of glass. Gray moss skulked up the bricks and onto the faded boards. A few had steps but most doorways dropped straight to clay earth dotted with beaten clumps of weed. At the end of the long lane, on a slight incline, stood a large house with blue double-sash windows that overlooked the quarters. Beyond it, higher on the hill and with an expansive view of the snaking river, there rose a two-story mansion with square pillars that supported verandas on the first and second stories. A brass weather vane in the shape of a dove turned atop a green copper cupola.

  Harriet heard the bright tambourine of children’s voices somewhere behind the cabins. She picked up speed, trying to sustain the limp. When the cry of a toddler broke into the lane, she glanced around, and seeing no one in sight yet, she dashed to the second cabin beyond the smokehouse. Harriet pushed the door open with her hip, ducked inside, and nudged the door closed with her foot. With their unbridled curiosity, young children—black or white—were the worst about calling attention to a stranger. She heaved a sigh in the dank room. Safe.

  “Who there?” a voice rasped.

  Ice water flooded Harriet’s veins. She hadn’t seen a rag on the door.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When a girl became a woman, she was required to go to a man and become a mother . . . Master would sometimes go and get a large, hale, hearty Negro man from some other plantation to go to his Negro woman. He would ask the other master to let this man come over to his place to go to his slave girls. A slave girl was expected to have children as soon as she became a woman. Some of them had children at the age of twelve or thirteen.

  Hilliard Yellerday, Slave

  HARRIET SPUN AROUND, TAKING IN THE room at a glance. One window. A reclining figure in a bed struggled to sit. The man started to say something, but a raspy cough strangled him, and he fell back.

  Harriet set the chickens on the floor on either side of her full skirt. She reached down and snapped the neck of one and then the other in quick succession. Harriet placed the poultry in a cold pot on the cabin’s stone hearth. The family would burn rags to disguise the scent, but they would eat well.

  The man groaned as his choking subsided. Harriet sidled up to the window, which looked toward the last cabin and smokehouse beyond. The path between the buildings led down to the rice fields, now whitish in the morning haze. She listened for the children. All was quiet. They must have turned in a different direction. She ducked under the window and crossed to the pallet lined with dried moss.

  “Hey,” Harriet said softly. She knelt and placed a hand on the man’s brow. He burned with fever.

  “Why you here?” he rasped. “You got to—” The words triggered a string of hacking coughs.

  Harriet glanced around for water. A jug stood atop a crate near the door. She scooted under the window again to fetch it. Returning, she lifted the man’s shoulders and placed the spout to his lips. He took a sip and sprayed water over the blanket. After a few tries, his respiration calmed, and he drank. She laid him back on the bed and arranged the cover around his waist. “Jacob, right?”

  The man closed his eyes. “Go away.”

  “I’m looking for Jacob. You him?”

  The man nodded. His lids looked too heavy to open. His nostrils flared, and he panted shallowly. “What you want?” he asked without opening his eyes.

  “I need help.”

  Jacob mumbled something Harriet couldn’t make out. She leaned closer.

  “Can’t help nobody,” he whispered.

  Harriet clenched her jaw. He’d assisted others in the past, so something must have happened. Perhaps it was the fever talking.

  “I gone listen to your chest, all right?” she said in her nurse’s voice. “You hold steady on me. Hold steady on the Lord.”

  Jacob wore a vest cut from old carpet. Harriet parted the garment and lifted his coarse shirt. She placed her ear on his chest to listen for the hiss that Doctor Durant called wheezing. Harriet wished she had the ear trumpet Durant used at the contraband hospital. Jacob’s heart beat more rapidly than normal, but she couldn’t tell if he had pneumonia. The man certainly had the cough and telltale fever. A bad catarrh, if not worse.

  Harriet reached for a pouch she wore around her neck and took out the phials she always carried. Countless runaways had come down ill on midnight treks through rain and snow. She dumped cayenne, ginger, and powdered bloodroot into the water jug, planted her palm on the spout, and swirled the vessel vigorously. “Here,” she said and lifted the patient’s shoulders. “This gone loosen your chest.”

  Jacob drank greedily without coughing but still kept his eyes closed. He must not have had water all morning. His wife would have gone to the field.

  Harriet lowered him to the pallet. She stroked his brow to ease him toward sleep. Rest would calm the fever. Then they could talk. She was prepared to wait—indeed, she had planned to hide in the cabin until he returned from the fields.

  As the man’s breathing evened, Harriet found herself studying him in the quiet of the plain room. Jacob looked younger than Samuel, but he had the same square chin and straight eyebrows. Both had generous foreheads. The bridge of Jacob’s nose was raised rather than flat, however, and his color wasn’t as rich as Samuel’s. White people had little to discuss compared with colored people, she reflected, who debated shades of brown and yellow like farmers discussing the morning sky and whether it suggested rain. Adu, the Gullah said. Very black. Harriet was grateful the Lord had made her as dark as he had.

  Jacob coughed in his sleep. Sweat beaded along his hairline. Harriet felt his brow again for fever, though the perspiration indicated it was breaking. Jacob had probably suffered for his tawny shade, she thought as she wi
ped his forehead with the blanket. Slaveholders watched lighter blacks with extra vigilance, suspicious of attempts to rise above their station; darker blacks sometimes mocked lighter ones, disdainful of the impurity.

  Like Margaret, Harriet thought with the rush of joy and anxiety her daughter’s face always conjured. Harriet hadn’t realized the infant possessed her father’s medium complexion when she gave Margaret to Mary in a patchwork quilt sewn from dresses bought off a Cambridge rag picker. It sometimes took a few weeks for the skin of colored babies to deepen to its natural hue, and Harriet had had but one night before John spirited away the mewling lump of Harriet’s own flesh.

  When she saw the child years later, miraculously grown and holding Mary’s hand in the Baltimore fish market, the four-year-old shone so brightly in Harriet’s eyes—as if the sun touched her alone—that her complexion again escaped Harriet’s notice. All she saw were the curious eyes, snub nose, high cheekbones, and generous smile that looked just like Harriet’s. A real little girl, wearing a red straw hat with an upturned brim and standing in a puddle of light. Free. Harriet had cried herself to sleep that evening, miles away in yet another safe house.

  It was then that she developed the fixation that could wake her from a sound sleep, kill her appetite on an empty stomach, and cause her to break off in the middle of a conversation. After giving Margaret up all those years before, the refrain cycled over and over in Harriet’s head. The time had come. A mother deserves her child. Her only child.

  Sometimes she fretted she was just being selfish. It would be hard on the girl and Mary. Then she reminded herself that Mary had promised to give Harriet’s “niece” back one day. Of course, the child couldn’t be told the real reason, at least not for a long time. If word ever leaked out that Margaret wasn’t Mary’s by birth, she’d be clamped into chains instantly. Even free people of color had to fend off bogus attempts to enslave them. The South was unsafe, which was one reason Harriet had borrowed a cart and driven her own aged parents north a few years earlier at great personal risk, even though Daddy had by then saved enough to buy their freedom. Old and alone, Daddy and Mama just wouldn’t go unless she came and got them, and she certainly wasn’t going to leave them in Dixie by themselves. Nor would she leave Margaret there. John Tubman might object to the child’s removal, but he had a new family, and Harriet had no one. Surely God wouldn’t deprive her of that consolation after all the troubles He’d heaped on her head.

  And so five years later, when Senator Seward sold Harriet some land as a kindness to a fellow abolitionist, she slipped back to Baltimore for Margaret. Even then, she hadn’t noted Margaret’s complexion until she overheard a black woman criticize the girl as “pumpkin-faced” after they returned to New York.

  Footsteps crunched on the gravel path outside the window. Harriet quickly scooted against the wall to hide.

  Two voices approached, though Harriet heard only a single pair of shoes. Boots, perhaps. One voice had the timbre of a bull, the other a bird. A man seemed to be addressing a child. Harriet’s heart beat loudly in her ears. Why had Jacob taken down the rag? How had she forgotten to look? She edged farther along the wall so anyone who glanced in the window wouldn’t spot her.

  “Leave the bedding,” the man ordered. “I don’t need the vermin.”

  “Yes, sah,” a girl replied. “Where . . . Where we going, sah?” Her voice wobbled.

  “My house.”

  “You need he’p with de washing and cooking, Mistah Pipkin?”

  “I got Callie for that.”

  The boots moved past the window. Harriet rose cautiously. She made out the speakers in the narrow slip of daylight. The man wore a dented bowler hat. Streaked gray hair showed on a sun-soaked neck, though he had an irregular bald patch behind his ear, as if a gear had snatched a chunk of scalp long ago. A bullwhip swung from his belt. The gun that extended from every white Southerner’s arm rested on his shoulder. Harriet couldn’t see his face, but his flat tone raised goose bumps on her arms.

  The girl was nearly Harriet’s height and coming into womanhood, a child of thirteen or fourteen. The swinging hem of her dress was wet, and she walked barefoot. Two braids were gathered together at the base of her neck. The pair must have come from the rice field.

  “I never done inside chores, Mistah Pipkin. But I real good wit’ weeding. I . . . I git dem by dey roots, and I ain’t afraid a snakes. I’s good in the field, sah. But I don’t know nothing bout being a house nigger. Mama call me cl-cl-clumsy.”

  The girl spoke breathlessly, words tripping over one another. She turned in profile until Harriet saw her better. She had curly eyelashes and lips as delicately drawn as any the hand of God could manage. Her skin was coffee with a dash of milk, and new breasts sat high on her chest. She was Margaret’s age, Harriet decided. Thirteen. Old enough to be a mother.

  “You’ll learn,” Pipkin said.

  He turned the corner of the last cabin a step ahead of the girl, who glanced back down the lane as if looking for help—and spotted Harriet in the sidelong rectangle. Their gazes met. The girl aged before Harriet’s eyes as an awful knowledge took hold. She seemed carved from cypress, that sorrowful hardwood that grew with its feet in the swamp.

  Harriet poured all her courage into a look and raised a finger to her mouth.

  The girl nodded almost without moving her head, and then she followed the overseer around the corner. Rusty hinges shrieked on the door of the neighboring cabin.

  Harriet slumped against the wall. Knowledge of what was coming—and that she and every other man and woman on the plantation must stand by and watch—sent a bolt of pain across her brow. There weren’t two ways to understand what it meant for an overseer to take a girl on the verge of womanhood into his house. “Getting the first slice a pie,” she’d heard one man brag to another when she passed the auction block in Cambridge.

  Harriet pressed her palms against her temples to stop the awful throbbing. She slowly filled her lungs with air and then breathed out even more slowly. Her mouth tasted as if she had a penny under her tongue. She must remain calm. Away, Devil, she prayed.

  The door of the nearby cabin banged shut a few moments later. She flinched. The child must not have much in the way of possessions. Harriet slid down the wall until her buttocks rested on her callused heels.

  “Mama’s poorly, Mistah Pipkin. She need a hand wit’ my brudduhs,” the girl said. “Maybe I could he’p you during de day, sah. Rest here nights.”

  The man didn’t reply, perhaps thinking an answer would suggest she was due one. Harriet held her breath, waiting for the danger to pass. The one spot on Earth she couldn’t explain her presence was a cabin on a strange plantation.

  “I ain’t being hankty, sah,” the girl said. “Mama jest need de he’p.”

  The slats of Jacob’s bed creaked loudly. The ill man sputtered, then broke into a cough that rebounded in the small room. The boots outside stopped. They pivoted on the gravel. Harriet froze. The yard went quiet.

  A swift blow rattled the old boards under the window. Harriet’s head jerked back, hitting the wall. The butt of Pipkin’s gun pounded mercilessly. His coarse roar was almost in her ear. “Jacob! Still faking it?”

  The man on the bed stirred but didn’t wake.

  “Do I need to haul you out a there, nigger?”

  Harriet’s eyes darted to the stack of firewood next to the hearth—not high enough—and to the bed. Jacob’s narrow pallet rested on the ground. No space underneath. The chimney? No, the chimney was too tight to climb into. The only door emptied onto the exposed yard. No escape. Harriet grabbed Jacob’s foot and shook it. He didn’t move. She shook harder, but he just groaned.

  “Answer me!” Pipkin hollered.

  Panicked, Harriet twisted Jacob’s foot toward the edge of the bed to roll him off. The sick man broke into a cough so ragged that Harriet heard his throat tear. He started up upright. “Yes, boss—” he said, but hacking seized him before he could finish the sentence. He
swung his feet onto the floor and dropped his head between his bent knees.

  Pipkin stuck his face in the window. Harriet shriveled against the planks.

  “He sho sick, Mistah Pipkin,” the girl said.

  The overseer looked over his shoulder. “How would you know, Kizzy?”

  “Mama say he real bad. Got de lung fevuh again.”

  Jacob gasped for air and hacked again, bringing up the lungs in question. Harriet didn’t stir.

  “Mama say it de ketchin’ kind,” Kizzy added more urgently.

  Pipkin withdrew his head. He gave the wall another bang with the butt of his gun, one so hard that dust swirled up from the crevices and made plumes in a shaft of light just beyond the bed. “This is the second time in two months, nigger,” he said. “Be at the rice trunks tomorrow or I’ll use my bullwhip to make you better. I paid good money for your hide.”

  Harriet listened as the boots moved away and faded. She took a shuddering breath. Helplessness caused tears to start in her eyes. Kizzy had saved her, and Harriet couldn’t return the favor.

  Poor girl. Like all the others. Like Harriet’s older sisters Linah, Mariah, and Sophie, all sold south. Like Harriet’s younger sister, Rachel, who wouldn’t leave without her boys, rented out to other Cambridge slave masters. Harriet had gone back three times to convince Rachel that she must rescue herself first—and trust in God to rescue the children later.

  “We going next time, Hattie,” Rachel promised when Harriet slipped onto the plantation one dark January night. Her sister was mending a shirt for the eight-year-old who worked fifteen miles away. But next time never came. When Harriet made her final raid south on the Underground Railroad—the year Lincoln was elected—a logger who worked for John Tubman told her that pneumonia had come for Rachel two months earlier. Knowledge of the boys’ whereabouts perished as well. Her younger sister had waited for nothing at all.

  Harriet was now her parents’ only daughter. Nothing remained of Linah, Sophie, Mariah, and Rachel except their names. Pieces of Harriet had disappeared with each of them. No matter how many trips she made, someone was always left behind, and every year new babies were added to their number. If Harriet had a torch big enough, she would burn every plantation to the ground. Stamp the cinders into ash. Magically corral every man like Pipkin in some vast pen with others who had committed the same crime. They’d turn to one another and ask, “What are you doing here?” Guilt would rise to their shocked faces like scum on a pond. God’s vengeance would be swift.