Pressure against her head had stirred her from a bottomless slumber. Without opening her eyes, Harriet felt for her crown, only to discover a large, purring lump that was definitely not part of her. She cocked her head and looked up.
The tortoiseshell cat was curled on the mattress. It must have crept through the open window in the night. “Shoo!” she said.
The cat didn’t move so she pushed it away from her head. The animal glared and arched upward into a half-moon with a tail. When the cat reversed direction and turned its rump to Harriet’s face, she gave it a stronger push, and the animal jumped to the floor. It gave her a sulky look before leaping to the windowsill, where it licked a black paw and washed its face in the shade cast by an oak.
“I gone call you Trouble,” she said. Lying on her side, Harriet studied the animal. The cat possessed an independent streak as wide as the Chesapeake—a trait she admired. Ignoring her, the cat was just pretending not to want to cuddle. A week earlier, it had placed a dead mouse on Harriet’s pillow when she wasn’t home, repaid with a bit of chicken broth in a bowl.
A muffled voice on the street below, then another, reminded her that the day was well underway. She rolled from bed and reached for her petticoat on the empty chair. When she recalled she didn’t have one, she slipped a dress from the nail on the door and buttoned it over her cotton drawers.
The long hallway outside her room was empty, though she caught the fading fragrance of hoecakes as she passed the parlor of the confiscated mansion that the army had given a local spinster to run. A thread of brown molasses trickled down the side of a jug next to an empty platter on the sideboard. Breakfast had come and gone. Harriet hoped Septima had gotten an early start on the gingerbread so they could roll it out immediately. A biscuit or two would hold her until suppertime, after which she would take a shift at the contraband hospital, which was always woefully shorthanded.
When Harriet arrived at the cookhouse after a quick walk across town, she noticed a sack of sugar on the stoop. Webster’s delivery had arrived. Entering the kitchen, she found Septima perched against a stool with her back to the doorway. A savory aroma of sausage and onion indicated that she had started the dish she called “bog.” Rice for their afternoon meal bubbled on the stove.
“Don’t know you can fight it, ma’am,” Septima said doubtfully. “Mas’r Lincoln done proclamated it.”
Two white women stood next to the worktable on which, Harriet noticed with chagrin, a tray of gingerbread biscuits already sat cooling. The older of the visitors appeared around sixty. Dressed in black widow’s weeds, her pendulous bosom adorned with a cameo brooch made of white ivory and orange coral, the still handsome dowager supported her weight with a cane parasol that had a handle that was shiny from use. A torso of considerable bulk gave her the dimensions of a well-dressed bureau. Behind her stood a much younger woman, perhaps a granddaughter, whose pale cheeks and lace bonnet indicated a sheltered upbringing, though she could have taken to the stage with her brilliant green eyes. The two women looked over as Harriet entered, which caused Septima to turn around, too.
Septima pushed up from the stool with one hand on her lower back. “Afternoon, Moses. I awful glad to see you. These ladies done brought a tangle I cain’t pick.”
“Miz Tubman,” the older visitor said in a peevish tone, and she then glanced reprovingly around the cookhouse as if to note deficiencies in their housekeeping. “I hear you are an authority of some sort. I cannot believe I am standing here, large as life, asking niggers for advice, but such are the circumstances into which this unprovoked war has cast us.”
Harriet’s lips tightened. “Uh-huh,” she said. “What you need?”
“My family has owned two homes on Bay Street—Bay Street, you hear?—for five generations. On that terrible day last year, that day no one in our fair city shall ever forget, when the finest families were driven from their ancestral homes, beggared by those upstart Yankees, I was forced to hightail to New York where my brother’s connections took us in. I could bring only one nigger with me, my girl here, and now that I’m back, those damn Yankees say they . . . want . . . her . . . too!”
The widow punctuated her last words with raps of the parasol.
Her blue eyes watered with indignation. “It’s intolerable,” she continued. “After all I have done for my niggers. ’Specially Edda.”
The young white woman stared at the floor. She rolled one hand over the other as if wringing the wash, and Harriet noticed that the girl didn’t wear gloves, as a proper debutante normally would. Her lips, the heartbreaking color of a ripe peach, held back emotion. Apparently not a grandchild after all—unless she was. Harriet recalled Charles Nalle, the runaway she had busted out of the courthouse in Troy, New York, before the war. Nalle’s fair countenance had been the same as his owner—Nalle’s own half-brother—who had tracked him north. Folk called such pale-faced slaves “white niggers.”
“What I do not understand,” the dowager said, “is why in the world I am perfectly entitled to keep my servant in Manhattan yet forced to give her up when I return to my very own home.”
“That the law,” Harriet said.
“Fiddlesticks. I’m a Barnwell. I know all about the law,” the woman retorted. Blue veins stood out on her knobby hand, flaunting their prominent bloodline. “The Barnwells of South Carolina wrote the laws. Back when the people had a voice in making them. Now it seems that man, that tyrant in Washington, has simply declared, has proclaimed from on high, the end of our way of life.”
Harriet felt her anger mount. She’d heard it before. When would Southerners stop acting as if slaver Thomas Jefferson had anointed them personally to carry the torch of liberty?
“Yes, Miz Barnwell, he has,” Harriet said, as her voice rose, too. “And what exactly would you like me to do bout that, ma’am? ’Cause we ain’t going back to when half the people weren’t people.” She burned to eject the woman but clenched her fists instead. A deserved kick in the rear would only incite a lecture from Colonel Higginson or General Hunter or some other cautious white man in authority about keeping the peace with landowners who trickled back. Harriet must remember her place or lose it. No momentary satisfaction was worth that risk. Though it was tempting. Devilishly tempting. Harriet couldn’t let her head dwell on it.
“Would you have me hand Edda over to that teeming refugee camp, men and women all jumbled together like hogs?” the dowager asked. “To live in squalor and wake up with some contraband’s hands wandering all over her? Or to find a Yankee soldier who will give her protection in exchange for you know what?”
The older woman shifted her parasol to the other hand and nodded at the gingerbread on the table. “Edda,” she said. “Those look cool now.”
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl replied. She brought forth an ironed handkerchief from her reticule, took up a biscuit with it, and handed the gingerbread to her mistress, who bit into the pastry with the aplomb of one entitled to anything made by black hands—colored people having but second call on the results of their labor.
The dowager examined the biscuit curiously. “Orange peel?” she asked, as she ate the other half.
Harriet nodded silently.
Mrs. Barnwell put out her handkerchief for another piece. Septima and Harriet exchanged glances.
“The contraband ain’t your concern, ma’am,” Harriet said. “Slavery done gone from Port Royal forever.”
“We’ll see about that,” the woman said. She finished the second biscuit, handed the girl her umbrella to hold, and brushed the crumbs from her fingers with the linen. “For the time being, I’ll allow it’s a heavy burden lifted, thank the Lord.”
“So why you here, if your burden is lifted?”
“I’ve gone to great trouble for Edda. Taking her North, keeping her from that uppity riff-raff in New York, making sure she knows her needlework. Edda’s a good nigger. I hate to see all my efforts go to waste. And I simply can’t do without a lady’s maid.”
; “So you need someone to do your work for you,” Harriet said. She might not be able to eject the woman, but she didn’t have to lick anyone’s boots in the middle of Beaufort, under the protection of the Union army. “Well, so far as I can see, ma’am, you gone have to get used to ironing your own unmentionables.”
The Barnwell woman inhaled sharply, but before she could retort, Septima put up a hand to stay the debate. “Hush a minute, ma’am. Please.”
She turned to the young woman. “Tell we, chile. What you want?”
“I . . . I don’t know,” the girl said. Her voice was timid, and she looked from Septima to Harriet. Her tender skin was the color of cream, though its silky texture reminded Harriet of a Congolese beauty she’d once met. The girl appeared unconscious of her looks and, with lips slightly parted, immature for her age. “My white folk take good care a me,” she said. “I never done nothing ’cept house chores, ma’am. Miz Barnwell tell me all measure a evil go on in them refugee camps. I scared to go by m’self.”
“She’s right to be frightened,” the old woman interrupted. “An octoroon like Edda will be soiled before sunup around all those loose men. They say there’s more than six hundred runaways in the barracks on Hilton Head.”
Harriet knew the awful dowager was correct—though she refused to agree. Without family, the girl courted a dire fate. Edda’s fair complexion and naïve air would attract stares from men of all colors. Let loose to fend for herself, washing or cooking for Yankee soldiers and sleeping in any corner she could find, she would be fair game the moment night fell. The thought made Harriet’s empty stomach churn.
Septima took the girl’s hand and gave it a consoling pat. “Maybe yo’ missus right. She got a nice house. Dat bettuh dan camp. Jest common sense.” The pregnant Sea Islander looked at Harriet. “Don’t you tink so, Miz Tubman? Fo’ now?”
The dowager interrupted. “If I am to shelter this poor unfortunate, I want to be sure no military man beats down my door. I refuse to be hounded for doing my Christian duty.”
Harriet hated the Barnwell woman’s insistence on an exemption from the law. Keeping a slave was wrong, pure wrong. But could Septima be right? Life was full of compromises that must be endured.
Harriet sighed. “That what you want, Edda?” she asked. “Your choices are your own now.”
The girl glanced at her mistress. The wrinkled dowager, with her neck gone to strings and wattles, bobbed her head like an aged tortoise. Perhaps Edda was just simple-minded, Harriet thought. Some people didn’t have the sense they were born with. Fed a diet of honey-flavored lies—how lucky they were, how much better off than field hands—house servants often had more difficulty grasping their situation than slaves at a farther remove. The girl might not understand this could be her only chance for freedom, lost forever if the rich woman took her north again, where the law still protected the property rights of slaveholders who hadn’t joined the Rebellion.
Edda turned to her. “Yes, Miz Tubman. That’s what I want. To stay with my missus. For now. Can you fix that up, ma’am?”
Harriet caught the words. For now. Edda had repeated Septima’s phrase. Perhaps she wasn’t witless after all.
“Yes, Edda,” Harriet said slowly, though her mind raced forward. “I’ll talk to General Rufus Saxton. He’s in charge a civilians in Beaufort.”
“That’s settled, then,” the Barnwell woman said. “And it’s a good thing, as I am this child’s only bulwark against a life of shame.” She glanced around the cookhouse a last time, patently displeased to find herself still there. Her eyes fell on the Franklin stove, where a glossy spill bore witness to a batch of root beer that had boiled over. “My word,” she said. “You best clean that up. Left to your own devices, you’ll have this place down around your ears in no time.” Then, without a nod to Harriet or Septima, she stumped over the vestibule with her parasol.
Edda followed her mistress toward the open door. She paused to look back. “Miz Barnwell ain’t so bad. She never whipped me. I know I got it good.”
Harriet stepped forward to lay a hand on the girl’s sleeve. “You go with her now,” Harriet said under her breath. “But this ain’t the end a it. I gone talk to the missionary ladies. Find some folks up North, take you in.”
A smile dawned on the young woman’s face, as if an angel had entered the room, and a pretty flush colored her cheeks. “Really?” she said in a hushed voice.
“I done it before,” Harriet said, and she thought of her own daughter, whom Missus Seward treated like a member of the family. “I can do it again.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Edda said and followed her mistress with her eyes lowered to dim their light.
Septima gazed at the empty doorway. She rested her hands atop her belly and shook her head. “Ki! Poor chile tink she a nigger.”
“Ain’t she?”
Septima turned to Harriet. “Dat gal don’t look a ting like we.”
Harriet sat down on the stool Septima had abandoned. “Color don’t make a nigger. That’s jest a word for someone folk think they can use—and who thinks she deserves it somehow.”
Septima sighed. “Whatever she be, I don’t know if we done de right ting or de wrong ting by dat chile. ’Clare to Gawd, I not sure de Buckra know how to be good. Dey proud as Lucifer. Dat no-manners ma’magole preach like she gone help, but you can’t git straight planks from crooked trees.”
Ma’magole. Gullah for old woman. “Amen,” Harriet said.
Septima shook her head. “I thought Miz Barnwell gone poke a hole in de flo’ with dat parrysol. I keep hoping it snap in two.”
“I kept hoping to bust it across her head,” Harriet said as reached for a piece of gingerbread and bit into her breakfast, which had the softness of a macaroon. “How’d you make these?” she asked. “They so light.”
Septima smiled. “If you wasn’t set on doing every’ting yo’self, Miz Harriet, you would a seen two months ago that I learnt to handle dat dough like a baby’s bottom. Mind you, other folk can do stuff. Take all the ’sponsibility and you gone find yo’self wearing it like a millstone ’round yo’ neck.”
A crumb lodged in Harriet’s throat. She coughed and hiccupped so strenuously that Septima finally clapped her on the back. Not do everything, Harriet thought as she waited for the tickle to settle. Hard to imagine how that would work out.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Tonight I have been to a “shout,” which seems to me certainly the remnants of some old idol worship. The negroes sing a kind of chorus—three standing aside to lead and clap—and then all the others go shuffling around in a circle . . . and stamping so that the whole floor swings. I never saw anything so savage.
Laura Towne, Port Royal Missionary
THE LITTLE BOY HELD HARRIET’S FINGER later that evening as they trailed a crowd toward the Praise House after the twilight burial of an elderly member of the community whom Harriet had not known, but everyone called Uncle Henry in accordance with the custom that all adult males were “uncle,” provided they hadn’t been slave drivers or some other type of scoundrel.
“How Uncle Henry gone git to heaven, Auntie?” Septima’s youngest son asked her.
“Why, he go straight on up, Kofi,” she said.
The boy looked doubtful. “It raining.”
Harriet nodded. “I know, baby, but the Lord brings you home no matter how thick the clouds. Uncle Henry got a through ticket on the gospel train to glory.”
Kofi’s round cheeks were wet, and raindrops glistened in his curls. Despite the sprinkle, they kept to a sedate pace in keeping with the occasion. The Praise House was a short distance from the graveyard along the river road, and their blouses would dry quickly in the warm building.
Voices and laughter drifted up from the purplish water, where dugouts and small rafts discharged friends and neighbors from nearby islands who had finished work too late to make the service yet in time for the shout. The twilight revealed forms but not faces as men threw lines to shore, clambered o
ver low gunwales, and lifted women from the boats. One stripling took the opportunity to kiss a girl’s cheek as he swung her from a dugout, and she cuffed the back of his head. Harriet smiled when the youth pretended to lose his footing in the shallows, and the girl squealed, wrapping her arms around him more tightly. It lifted her heart to see people living lives without fear—falling in love—and made her glad that she had come along for once instead of working into the night at the hospital, as she’d planned.
“What de preacher mean, Auntie?” the somber five-year-old continued after a pause in which he appeared to ponder the idea of a gospel train, though the island possessed no such modern contraptions. Kofi looked up at her as if she’d hung the moon. “Friends might forgit you, but death won’t?”
With an arm crooked through her husband’s and her younger son on her hip, Septima darted a look over her shoulder. “Dat ragamuffin gone talk yo’ ear off, Miz Harriet. He got a question a minute.”
“It mean you got to pray every night, baby,” Harriet said. “Jest in case.”
Kofi squeezed her finger harder. “In case a what?”
“In case it’s your time.”
He stopped short. “Is death gone git me like he done Uncle Henry?” Kofi’s eyes were wide. When Harriet didn’t immediately answer, he put up his hands as if hoping to be carried.
Harriet looked away. She hadn’t carried her own baby. It wouldn’t hurt the boy to walk.
“Everybody die sometime,” she said and tugged on Kofi’s hand to get him going again. “But you ain’t gone go for a long time yet.”
They continued walking, though the boy’s feet dragged, and he studied the path with his chin down. “How long?” he asked after a while. His voice was small.
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