The Tubman Command

by Elizabeth Cobbs

  A few more minutes passed, and the eastern horizon turned a softer gray. Harriet’s disquiet grew. She had never liked waiting on someone else’s plan. Not on John Tubman’s, no one’s. On the Underground Railroad, runaways wanted her to call the shots. It made them feel safe. Over the years, she’d gotten used to walking in front. Felt right. Harriet rubbed her chilled hands together and put them under her armpits. She wished she hadn’t listened to Samuel. He’d concocted the plan in anger. And she didn’t like it when he said her life was worth more than theirs. He was patronizing her. She’d put a stop to that.

  The breeze picked up. Harriet looked over the waterway. The mouth of the river had the sloppy, inky quality of slack water getting ready to run in the opposite direction. A log bobbed not twenty feet away and looked as indecisive as Harriet felt, as it was moving neither upriver nor down. In the quiet, a horse snorted from the direction of the fort and fell silent again. Harriet stood and placed a hand to her brow, trying to penetrate the underbrush on the bank, yet the deserted shore was too dark and, still standing, she turned again to examine the open water.

  The log had drifted. The stern of the dugout swiveled in the eddy. Harriet reached for Walter’s pole to dig into the shallows in case the current began tugging upriver. It was difficult to tell how much time had passed. What had happened to the men? They hadn’t much longer before the tide began pushing toward the plantations. Harriet shivered at the thought of Pipkin.

  She peered again at the river. The log had picked up speed. Its yellow eyes opened.

  Harriet gasped. She lifted the pole high, transfixed. The alligator that was studying her appeared to be nearly twelve feet long. The scaled monster glided toward Harriet, closing the distance without effort. Her grip tightened.

  The alligator flipped downward and disappeared in the inky water. Harriet’s cramped grip relaxed. It wasn’t interested in her. The animal must be fishing.

  The dugout took a sudden blow from behind and jerked sideways. Harriet’s knees bent in the swaying craft, and she swallowed a yelp. She stabbed the water, unsure where the beast was, trying to scare it with her pole without hitting the boat’s drumlike hull.

  The dugout finally stabilized in the empty water. Harriet’s knees quaked. Where was Samuel? She looked down, then around the perimeter of the trus-me-Gawd. No alligator. A stand of grass waved at the river’s edge. The reptile must have hit the boat by accident. “Thank you, Jesus,” she whispered.

  The next blow came directly underneath, lifting the dugout clean out of the water. Harriet lost her balance. The pole hit the edge of the craft and almost slipped from her grasp as she fell backward onto the seat with an involuntary cry. Harriet glanced frantically around the bottom of the dugout for a decoy. If only she had the pork.

  The heavy boat rocked, and then it quieted. She looked again at the dark river. Two diamonds of light caught her attention. The alligator bobbed five lengths away. Its eyes glowed malevolently. Water rippled away from its snout as it swam toward her, horrible jaws agape.

  Harriet stood again and raised her arms above her head. The heavy pole weighed nothing. She must aim for the dark gap behind the glistening teeth to stop its attack. Her heart felt ready to burst through her chest.

  A roaring pierced the dark. Horses squealed and thrashed somewhere on shore. Men yelled. The alligator dove under the boat. An instant later, the tree limb above Harriet’s head shook. Walter, then Samuel, swung into the trus-me-Gawd. Samuel took the pole from Harriet as she dropped heavily onto the bench. Walter pulled at the rope’s slipknot, snatched up the oars, and rowed swiftly toward the sea.

  Samuel’s shoulders heaved with quiet laughter. “You should a seen them suckers run out a the fort at our rocks! Two were thrown to kingdom come when they jumped on their mounts. Ain’t nothing like cockleburs under a saddle.”

  “Where the hell were you?” Harriet snapped.

  Samuel’s grin died. “What’s wrong?”

  Harriet glanced back at the rippling, but vacant water near the shore as the boat reentered the ocean-bound current. The beast had vanished in the murk. “A gator come at the boat,” she said. “I’ll face down any man, but I can’t abide gators.”

  Samuel hesitated, and then he placed a callused hand over hers. “He must a wanted to see the famous General Tubman.”

  She snorted. “I think he wanted to eat the famous General Tubman.”

  Samuel withdrew his hand and tucked the pole into the bottom of the dugout. “I would a liked odds on that. No question who’d win.”

  Harriet let out her breath. The wind brushed her cheeks as Walter rowed them toward the Sound and away from the horrors of the Combahee. “You should taste my alligator stew,” she said to the two scouts. “Lots a pepper.”

  “I could eat a bucket bout now,” Walter said.

  Samuel chuckled. He spoke to Walter. “Don’t know. Bet she makes it pretty spicy.”

  You have no idea, Harriet thought. It would light up your mouth.

  CHAPTER NINE

  When we entered where she [Harriet Tubman] was at work ironing some clothes . . . she no sooner saw me than she recognized me at once and instantly threw her arms around me and gave me quite an affectionate embrace.

  Lt. George Garrison, son of William Lloyd Garrison, in South Carolina

  “GENERAL HUNTER ISN’T IN,” THE SANDY-HAIRED clerk said, squinting up from his cluttered desk. Numbers crowded the pages of an open ledger, and the knife edge of his hand was blue with ink. The man blinked twice.

  Louvered shutters cast stripes across the soldier’s freckled face. The afternoon sun appeared to hit him in the eyes. Harriet stepped nearer to give him the benefit of her shadow and the lines around his eyes eased, though his dry manner didn’t become any more welcoming.

  “When he coming back?” she said.

  “Who’s asking?” the man said, as if he wasn’t authorized to utter a whole sentence.

  “I am,” she said crossly. “That’s who.”

  Harriet didn’t feel like arm wrestling another Yankee at the moment. It had taken much of the day to get to Hilton Head, following a long night in the dugout with Walter and Samuel and a meeting with Simmons and Chisholm, who’d come up empty-handed on the lower Combahee. She had been awake most of the past twenty-four hours and was entirely out of patience. What was wrong with white soldiers? When would they realize what the war was about? That people like her had done more than their share to build the infernal country, taking all of its punishments and enjoying none of its rewards? The only thing whites had given blacks was a hard time. She felt like slapping the man’s face.

  He squinted again. Harriet saw the gesture was habitual. Perhaps he had myopia. Needed glasses.

  “And you are?”

  “Moses.”

  The man stood up behind his desk and gave a bow out of character in a soldier. He smiled. “I thought you might be. If I had a hat, I’d tip it, ma’am. I heard you were in these parts. I hail from Boston, Missus Tubman. It’s a real honor.”

  Harriet pressed her lips in a hard line to keep them from trembling—and suddenly realized how frayed her nerves were. It was so easy for people to treat one another as human beings, but at low moments, it caught her off guard when a stranger actually did so. She stuck out her hand. The man shook it.

  “I’m pleased to meet you, Moses,” he said in words that now crowded together. “My Aunt Zilfa—that’s Zilfa Bodfish, she’s married to Thankful Bodfish of Concord—perhaps you know them—told me if I ever saw you down here, I was to remind you of your abolitionist friends in Massachusetts.”

  “Thank you, sir,” she said. “I don’t recall your people, but there’s a host of righteous folk up north. Right now I’m scouting General Hunter. You know when he’s coming back?”

  The man glanced down at his desk and shoved aside the ledger to reveal a diary underneath. He flipped open the pages. “I wasn’t here when he left—my shift started an hour ago—but it says he’s headed to La
dy’s Island for the day—a meeting, I suppose. He probably won’t return ’til tomorrow.” He looked up. “May I give him a message?”

  “No,” Harriet said emphatically. “No, thank you, sir,” she repeated more quietly. “I’ll stop on by tomorrow.”

  “Yes, ma’am. And may I write my Aunt Zilfa that you send your regards? Her congregation in Concord prays for your safe return. She thinks of you as a hero—her hero, truth be told.”

  “A course. Please thank her for her prayers.”

  The man nodded eagerly, and Harriet took her leave. When she stepped back into the dirt lane that bordered headquarters, she glanced in both directions, unsure where to turn. With General Hunter on Lady’s Island and Colonels Montgomery and Higginson on Port Royal, Harriet felt the strange slump that sometimes came upon her when thwarted. Septima must have started the blackberry hand pies, Doctor Durant would have assigned another nurse to wash patients, and Harriet’s scouts were circulating in the refugee camps. She could undertake any of these tasks, but none held a candle to seeing David Hunter.

  Harriet idly wondered if Septima had set out milk for the cat.

  A wagon loaded with wooden casks clattered up the road, its wheels spitting sand. The driver pulled up his reins. It was John Webster. She wondered if he knew his assistant was missing, though she couldn’t report where she’d seen the man. A flash of impatience made her grip the strap of her satchel. She just had to see Hunter.

  “Tubman,” Private Webster said as he rolled to a stop in front of Hunter’s headquarters. The commissary clerk shifted the reins to one hand and pushed his wire spectacles higher on his nose. “How are ye for sugar?”

  “Don’t think I need any right yet,” she said.

  “An extra shipment just came in. I can let it go at a special price since it’s the end o’ the month.”

  Harriet thought it over. Root beer required large quantities of sugar to cut the bitterness of the sassafras, and hand pies were popular. Soldiers liked to hold the turnovers by the rippled crust Harriet had learned at the Philly hotel where she once earned money for raids south. Pies fetched a higher price than gingerbread—and Margaret was growing into a young lady in the Sewards’ Auburn household. Distinguished guests frequently came to the home of Lincoln’s new secretary of state, and the girl might need a dress. Harriet and Septima weren’t out of sugar, but extra supplies wouldn’t hurt.

  “I’ll take it,” she said. “Sixty pounds.”

  Webster glanced down the road. He nodded and lifted the reins. “I’ll mark ye down when I get back. One of my fellows will deliver it on the morrow.”

  “The man I saw at your office a few days ago?”

  “Which one? Contraband come and go. Shiftless, they are.”

  Harriet held a hand a few inches above her head. “Not real tall. Funny ears.”

  Webster shrugged. “Cudjo, likely. I’ll send him if he’s around. Don’t worry. The sugar will get there.” He clucked at his mules, which pulled toward the port.

  So Cudjo was the man’s name. Shading her eyes with her hand, Harriet watched Webster’s cart roll away. Would he even care if he knew what had happened? Harriet drew a breath to calm her nerves. She must get Hunter to agree to go upriver—for Cudjo, Kizzy, Jacob, and countless others.

  Webster’s cart turned right at the next corner, where a gang of young contrabands in patched dungarees filled ruts in the harbor road. Beyond that, a smaller gunship sailed out of the port while another took on supplies at the army wharf. Admiral Du Pont’s flagship, pockmarked from the failed assault on Charleston, underwent repairs alongside the smaller boats.

  The Union’s blockading squadron was such a pitiful force, considering all it had to do. Keep the devil from the door. Patrol a coast a thousand miles long. Carry the assault against Charleston. Harriet recalled the men’s smoke-stained faces when they came down the gangplank after their defeat the month before. Many had been wounded. A white man with a crushed leg writhed on a stretcher. He’d died that evening. Of the nine ironclads that had sailed out of Port Royal to attack the Rebel stronghold, five came back disabled. Broken masts, torn sails, and holes near the waterline. Word around town was that some had taken as many as ninety hits. Admiral Du Pont had been forced to scuttle the new USS Keokuk.

  The memory depressed her. How would she persuade Hunter to risk more ships? Torpedoes at Charleston had thwarted their entire force. Was there some key to Hunter’s thinking she had yet to discover? She must find it before the Secesh restored their artillery. Give us time, dear Lord, she thought.

  At last, the heat drove Harriet from the porch to a bench under a massive oak draped with Spanish moss. She felt tempted to camp there until Hunter returned the next day, but that was nonsense. She would rest a moment, and then she would head for the dock and the next packet to Port Royal.

  Harriet tucked her feet under the seat in the deep shade. She sighed, steeling herself to ignore the troublesome feelings she’d been suppressing since the night before. When people told her she was a hero, they didn’t think of her as a woman. Yet she was one. Not a stone statue or a rag doll stuffed with straw. Despite John Tubman’s failings as a husband, the yearnings he had awakened in her had never died away, even though she tried not to think on them. Alone at night, or during quiet hours when nothing else vied for attention, desire still sometimes tugged. And why not? Her body kept living. She had the same heartbeat, as Samuel’s warm breath on her neck had reminded her the night before on the Combahee.

  The waterman’s determination to rescue his family prompted her respect. His forcefulness intrigued her, and she admired his ingenuity. But the supple muscles that worked in his round forearms when he rowed were a distraction that reminded her of old pleasures that had no place in her new life. She was on a mission. God’s mission.

  Harriet smiled as she recalled how daintily Samuel’s big hands had cut the dried pork. Then she frowned and shook her head. She didn’t need any man. Her husband had been good with his hands, too. Harriet poked at the smoldering ashes in her heart and waited for the anger that reliably protected her against sentimental mistakes. Yet the fire was cold. Instead, she felt a different kind of warmth that began in her thighs and spread seductively upwards.

  No, she thought. Harriet bit her lower lip against the traitorous impulses. Plumb tired, she closed her eyes.

  Time abruptly stopped.

  Someone placed a hand on her shoulder. She shrugged it off. Someone shook her shoulder again.

  “General Tubman. May I get you some water?” said a distant voice.

  Wake up, Harriet thought, yet she was tired, and a weight as tenacious as pluff mud seemed to have hold of her, tugging her down.

  “You all right, Moses?” someone said.

  The weight grew lighter. Harriet opened her eyes to the puzzled face of Robert Smalls. The young naval hero sat next to her on the bench with a hand on her shoulder.

  “Oh. Howdy, Robert,” she said, relieved it was not a white person or one of her scouts. She wondered how long she’d been asleep. Then she recollected what she’d been dreaming about and felt awkward anyway.

  “You was so still,” he said. “I thought something happened.”

  “Bless you,” she replied. “Jest resting my eyes and getting some shade. Today’s a hot one.”

  He shifted back on the bench and took off his felt derby. Harriet noted that he wasn’t in uniform. She yawned and sat up straighter.

  “It’s a beatdown, for true,” he said.

  Harriet saw that he hadn’t shaved in a day or so. He had a red rash on his jaw, as if the razor had irritated his skin. “How you find yourself this afternoon, Robert?”

  Robert fanned his face with the hat. “Enjoying every day a freedom. Plotting tomorrow’s insurrection.”

  Harriet smiled. “Good rules.”

  “What brings you to Hilton Head?” he asked.

  “General Hunter. Pity is, he ain’t around.”

  The sailor leaned closer.
“Got something for us?” He clearly expected an interesting answer from the renowned Harriet Tubman. “Something to bring down the bastards?”

  She examined his face. The fewer who knew any secret, the better. Yet Robert was quick and might be of help. A slave at the start of the war, he had nicked the Confederate gunship CSS Planter from the Charleston dock and run it past Fort Sumter, stealing the gunship and six contraband. Afterward, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had pumped Robert’s hand personally. Since then, the twenty-four-year-old war hero had piloted ships for the Sea Islands squadron. He’d been at the recently failed assault on Charleston.

  “We looking at the Cum’bee,” she said. “I got information on the artillery there.”

  Robert placed his palms on his knees and glanced up and down the road. Seeing only the men filling ruts, he said, “What you find?”

  “Secesh took down their guns at Fields Point. Tar Bluff, too,” she said.

  Robert’s eyebrows shot up. “No artillery? That’s a sight different from what we found last month in Charleston.”

  “Which ship was you on?”

  “The Keokuk. A crack vessel, she was, too, fore we had to scuttle her.”

  Surprised, Harriet clasped her hands around one knee and leaned forward. “Not the Keokuk. How’d she take so many hits?”

  “Commander told me to steer within nine hundred yards a Sumter to avoid the torpedoes. Damn fort erupted like a volcano.”

  Harriet shook her head with wonder. “Praise God you still alive. But the Cum’bee’s a different story. No artillery there.”

  Robert rubbed a hand over his pimply jaw. “What bout the torpedoes?”

  “There’s only five, and we can chart four of em.”

  Robert whistled softly. “Damn. You got someone working on the fifth?”

  Harriet sighed and spread her empty hands. “That’s where we weak.”