The Tubman Command

by Elizabeth Cobbs

  The rest of the family was well ahead. The rain had picked up. Harriet sighed, steeled herself, and reached down. Kofi lifted his hands, and she hoisted the boy onto her hip. His spindly legs bumped against her knees. He was a slight child for his height, hardly heavier than her satchel, and he smelled of tadpoles and cornbread.

  “The good Lord will decide, but He gone watch over you til then,” she said. “Jest like He do me and your mama and papa.” Kofi laid his head sleepily on her shoulder, as if she was his most trusted friend. Harriet felt a thrill of tenderness, then a pang of sorrow. She stared straight ahead.

  “And my brudduh, too?”

  “And your brother, too,” she agreed, and she moderated her pace to encourage the boy to nod off. The Gullah practice of burying kin at night meant weepy children in the morning.

  He lifted his head. “And Mama’s new baby?”

  “Uh-huh. And the baby.”

  When they reached the makeshift church, kerosene lanterns cast a ruddy glow over the mourners. Sea Islanders marked death by hugging life close, and a shout in the family’s cabin typically followed a funeral. On this occasion, due to the renown of the old man, the preacher had lent his Praise House in anticipation of a large crowd. Harriet laid the sleeping boy on a bench just inside the front door. She tucked her shawl around his shoulders with a vow not to forget it later.

  She turned to find Septima in the crowd, which had swollen to fifty or sixty friends of the deceased chatting eagerly, ready to shake off the sadness of the funeral and weariness of the day. Most were strangers to Harriet, though they seemed to know her, which made her feel oddly apart. Men doffed their hats. Their wives nodded in shy greeting. A girl dipped into a clumsy curtsy when her mother commanded, “Make yo mannuhs,” as Harriet looked for a corner to stand in. “Berry pleased t’meet you, Moses,” the girl said under her mother’s stern eye. “We glad you come,” her mother added with a smile as she clasped Harriet’s hands.

  “Wouldn’t miss Uncle Henry’s big night for anything,” Harriet said, warmed by the stranger’s touch, and continued across the room where she found an inconspicuous place against the wall. Most people had a partner. She didn’t need one but also didn’t want to stand out as alone.

  Lanterns illuminated familiar faces that Harriet hadn’t previously spotted in the dim burial ground or coming off the boats. Robert Smalls and Walter Plowden talked near a window. Samuel Heyward placed a bench against the wall for two missionary ladies who appeared determined to sit out the festivities. Harriet recognized Philadelphia spinster Laura Towne when she waved an embroidered handkerchief. Harriet recalled Samuel saying that Miz Towne was teaching him to read. The ladies were members of the small band of northern missionaries—white, with the exception of young Lottie Forten—who had come south to help the abruptly liberated Sea Islanders.

  Samuel glanced over, catching Harriet’s eye as she returned Laura Towne’s wave. He gave a pleased smile, as if he thought she had meant to signal him. Harriet felt her face flush when Samuel returned the gesture.

  “Take yo’ brudduh’s hand,” a deep bass boomed over the crowd.

  “Take yo’ sistah’s hand!” another person called out.

  Septima appeared on Harriet’s right and grasped her palm with a happy smile. An elderly man Harriet didn’t know took her other hand in a fist as rough as tree bark when they joined a circle that grew larger as congregants took their places. The gray-haired old soul closed his eyes and swayed in anticipation. People around the room hummed different melodies like members of an orchestra tuning their instruments. When the circle grew too wide for the cramped space, parishioners formed a second circle inside the first.

  Harriet usually avoided shouts. Sea Islanders packed a room tight, and their singing rushed toward a Gullah so fast and exotic that Harriet struggled to decipher the words. Septima aimed at regular English, as did most of the contraband who worked in town, but men and women from the fields could be hard to understand.

  Shouts reminded Harriet that she was an outsider with a strange accent and fractured family. Yet Septima had pleaded while they crimped crusts on a tray of hand pies that afternoon. She’d even strung a necklace for Harriet out of tiny pink-and-white shells. Only Septima’s children had escaped with her from the mainland. “Be my sistah tonight?” she’d asked with a plaintive expression, and then she added, “You bossy ’nuf!”

  Harriet replied with a swat of the dishtowel in her hand and a promise to attend.

  Two younger men and an ancient woman in a tattered dress made their way inside the circle as congregants briefly dropped their hands to admit the singers. The two men began with a deep hum that drew the random melodies into one broad stream. The tiny crone, whose back was so crooked that one shoulder sagged three inches below the other, took up a slow beat, clapping with hands whose nails were scarred and broken. Life had plowed deep furrows down her cheeks, and one filmy eye drooped below the other. Harriet realized with a stab of kinship that the woman must have taken a blow to the head in some distant age that had damaged her left side.

  Conversations fell away, the humming deepened, and the circles slowly rotated around the two men and the decrepit old soloist as she closed her eyes

  She began in a soft, pure alto that sounded like honey poured over butter. “John Brown’s body is a’mold’rin in its grave,” she sang quietly. “John Brown’s body is a’mold’rin in its grave,” she continued more warmly as the circles picked up speed and her accompanists increased their tempo. “John Brown’s body is a’mold’rin in its grave,” she belted in a voice that made the light shimmer and a finer, higher, more glorious place open above their heads, “and his soul is marching on!”

  The crowd joined in on the chorus of the abolitionist anthem beloved from Beaufort to Boston. “Glory, glory, hallelujah,” people sang as they circled, stamping faster and faster. When they came to “soul,” everyone dropped hands, clapped, and shouted out the precious word that expressed the dignity, worth, and eternal life of all God’s children. Then the circles wheeled in the opposite direction, and the old woman and her troubadours added more verses, each embellished with unexpected harmonies and strange Gullah phrases until “soul” became the only word Harriet felt confident shouting during the chorus.

  No sooner had the trio finished their song than they began another, keeping the dancers in constant motion. Harriet’s palms became so sweaty that she felt the old man’s dry calluses soften. When she accidentally stamped on his foot, he gave her a radiant, toothless grin and squeezed her hand tighter. “Hang on, sistah,” he said.

  Harriet felt surrounded by friends. While the gray-haired man kept up his warm pressure, Septima gripped her other hand. Walter waved from across the room. Harriet caught herself looking for Samuel and saw him smiling back like they’d known one another all their lives. She felt part of a living chain that would pull them to safety through all the tragedy. At the end of a breathless hour, the singers stopped for a short recess. Septima went to check on Kofi.

  Harriet made her way through the crowd to a stone well outside where people took turns lowering and raising a bucket in the dark. The rain had stopped. When someone near the front of the line brought up the pail, Harriet recognized Samuel’s silhouette as he offered the dipper to a woman next to him. Moonlight caught the flash of his smile.

  Harriet turned around. She didn’t want the waterman to think she was following him. “Go on ahead,” she said to a man behind her, who held a child’s hand. “That youngin’ looks parched.”

  The father’s eyebrows went up in recognition, reminding her again of her reputation in the crowd. “Yes, Moses,” he said and pressed forward with a grateful nod.

  Harriet drifted across the open grounds to a magnolia whose upper branches were lost in the silvery night. She leaned against the trunk and closed her eyes, grateful just to drink the air refreshed by the storm. A barn owl hooted in a nearby tree, sounding as solitary as she suddenly felt. Why did she feel so conn
ected one moment and apart the next? A visitor wherever she went, not fully belonging North or South, not with men, not with women.

  She’d never forget the first night she’d been alone, which was when she’d walked out on John without saying goodbye. She’d been afraid he would try to prevent her, or that his angry voice might alert someone who would trade their secret for food or mercy. So when her husband left for Baltimore with his loaded wagon one ordinary morning, she merely called from the doorway, “See you tomorrow.”

  She’d been a fool for thinking she could make it up to him later and that he’d wait for a wife who hadn’t mentioned she was leaving him. Deep down, she’d known John would never get over the hurt of her wordless disappearance. No one would. The rupture wasn’t only his fault. It was hers, too.

  She had also betrayed their only child. First by giving Margaret away at birth, and then by taking her back. The girl had lost her family twice. Although Margaret accepted the story that Aunt Harriet could offer her a better life than any colored girl would have in the South, the “niece” Harriet took from Baltimore at ten whimpered in her sleep for a month for the woman she thought was her mama. Over the years, Margaret had become fond of her eccentric aunt, who wanted nothing more than a child of her own to love—and who then abandoned her again to fight the war.

  Harriet had never mustered the courage to tell Margaret who she really was, even though the girl was now old enough to keep a secret. It would mean admitting her shame: that she’d given away that bundle in a quilt not just for the child’s sake, but also for her own. Everyone thought Harriet was so unselfish. It was partly true, which meant it was also partly a lie.

  She wondered if she had sacrificed for her child or just sacrificed the child. No real mother turned her back. Rachel hadn’t. And then she’d died. In the end, her boys had been lost anyway.

  A tear escaped down Harriet’s cheek, and she brushed it away quickly, though no one would see in the dark. People were returning to the building. The thud of feet had picked up again. She wondered if she could slip away, then reminded herself that she’d sworn never again to leave without a farewell. A sad half-smile flickered across her face. The brain was so fickle, always ready to forget promises made in contrition, when regrets briefly cowed selfishness. She would stay for another song, she decided, and then she would make her excuses.

  Harriet stepped from the lee of the trunk in time to collide with someone returning from the well. The dipper in Samuel Heyward’s hand flew upward. Water drenched his shirt.

  “Oh, my!” she cried. Harriet started to reach for the utensil on the ground but remembered the last time they had butted heads, and she hesitated.

  He apparently had the same thought because he glanced at her warily before leaning sideways to snatch the dipper. “You a hard lady to help,” he said.

  “I don’t need help,” she said instinctively.

  “Maybe you jest don’t want it,” he retorted.

  “I do fine on my own.”

  “I see that. But I ain’t the enemy. Folk who dish out help ought to be able to take it.”

  His observation brought her up short, and for a second, she didn’t know what to say. Why was it so hard to let anyone take care of her when she spent so much time taking care of others? He was right. Harriet smiled, and then she burst into a laugh at her own pigheadedness.

  Samuel grinned. “Saw you give up your spot in line. Thought you could use some water. Didn’t realize you needed something stronger.”

  “I hope you don’t take me for a drinking woman,” she said.

  “Nope. Though I myself wouldn’t say no to a drop a ’shine.”

  Harriet laughed again. “I might jest join you. Feel like I’m at sixes and sevens tonight.”

  “With respect, it looks like you being jest Harriet for once.”

  Harriet felt her face grow rigid. Like most folk, Samuel must believe that a real woman wasn’t a serious person. A real Harriet wouldn’t act like a man among men, ordering them around. Let him think what he wanted. “Don’t know why you say that,” she said stiffly.

  “You got a big job,” he replied in an easy tone. “Glad to see you let down. A shout’s s’posed to make folk laugh and cry. This your first?”

  Harriet relaxed at his answer. She touched the necklace Septima had given her—proof that she wasn’t “Moses” all the time. She was glad she’d worn the pretty strand along with her better dress.

  “First shout in a while,” she admitted. “My friend Septima twisted my arm. Made me come.”

  Samuel put his hand under her elbow, leaning closer in the moonlight. “’Pears she falling down in her duty. Mind if I take over? You don’t want to miss the next dance.”

  Harriet looked up into his eyes, which held more than one question. She sensed the warmth of his body. He had unbuttoned the collar of his shirt to cool off, revealing the light pulse in his neck.

  His hand tightened on her elbow when she didn’t answer. Instead of guiding her toward the hall, he drew her closer. “Anyone ever let you know you the brightest star in God’s sky, Harriet Tubman?” Samuel spoke so softly that the breeze seemed to scatter his words, though he clearly meant her to hear each one.

  Harriet’s elbow felt as if it was melting. She ached to reach up and touch the beating of his heart. If she did, would he take her in his arms?

  Maybe she didn’t have to be alone. Maybe life could start over. She’d never understood if John Tubman’s new marriage meant she was divorced. Was she free to remarry? The law ignored the tangled obligations of black people.

  Too much was happening at once. Harriet turned her gaze to the Praise House and willed her feet to move. The arm Samuel held was the only part of her body that seemed to possess nerve endings. “Music’s starting up,” she said. “We best go in.”

  Neither of them spoke as they started toward the harmonies that tumbled through the open door and mounted the steps that shook with the rhythmic pounding of a hundred feet. Samuel hung the dipper on a nail as they came inside. Harriet hooked the hand on her elbow closer for an instant—an intimate gesture that felt daring yet natural—before letting go and taking his hand as they joined the circle. One of the male singers now performed the solo role in a spiritual that spoke to all their hopes and dreams. The room resounded with music.

  The shout ended an hour later when the female soloist led them in a song that reminded Harriet of all the people she had urged into creeks and streams to hide their footprints. “Wade in de watuh, chillun,” the singer began, her warm voice rising. “God’s gone a trouble de watuh!”

  Samuel and Harriet looked at one another. The song was meant for Moses. Meant for her. Harriet glanced around the room and caught Septima grinning back. Across the circle, Harriet saw a man and woman she didn’t know nod in her direction. They reminded her of others she had smuggled across the swamps of Maryland, kin to those now wheeling in the lamplight. God had troubled the waters for them all, covering their tracks and sparing their lives.

  When the song was over, Harriet found her hand still in Samuel’s as the crowd jostled toward the exit and emerged into the balmy night. Now the back of his shirt was damp from the evening’s exertions rather than the front. The missionaries preceded them down the steps, tying their bonnets. Their words drifted back.

  “. . . Heathenish,” Laura Towne said in a low voice to the other woman. “I shall never get used to it.”

  Harriet darted a glance at Samuel, who was looking over the heads of the crowd. He seemed not to hear the women in the hubbub.

  “I’ve only ever seen quiet prayer at the Praise House,” said her companion, dressed in brown Quaker garb. “The better negroes come here on Sundays. Why, a shout hardly looks Christian.”

  Harriet stepped aside at the foot of the stairs to allow others to stream past. If her hand weren’t in Samuel’s, she would cover her ears. It hurt to hear the contrabands’ white supporters react with disdain to their unabashed fervor. Colored people had t
he same problem in reverse. A local preacher had told her, “The Buckra, they know the Bible’s reasons and rules, but they ain’t never caught the feeling. I’m not sure God have much respect for that.” To Sea Islanders, the missionaries’ relationship to the divine felt dry. Perhaps whites had less need for a passionate God, ready to take their side, ready to inspire a faith mighty enough to counter the worst evils. Could black and white ever be one, as they must—as they truly were, if Christ’s injunction to love thy brother meant anything?

  Someone bumped into Harriet as she paused in distress, nearly dislodging her shoe. She pressed down into the heel and turned to see Walter Plowden. The joyful expression she’d glimpsed on his face during the shout had vanished. His eyes were hard, unforgiving slits. Perhaps he’d overheard the unkind comments. Yet he wasn’t looking at the Northern spinsters retreating down the path. Instead, the wiry scout scowled at Harriet and Samuel’s joined hands.

  Walter lifted his chin to stare straight at Samuel. He didn’t look at her, and she had the distinct impression Walter was avoiding her gaze. He spoke each word like it cost a dollar. He didn’t stutter one bit. “Too bad your missus ain’t here, Samuel. Must be awful hard on her, left behind on the plantation with your boys.”

  The warm night went cold. Time stopped and then sped back to that moment when Harriet first learned of John Tubman’s new wife. Her face flamed red.

  Samuel glared at Walter. “We talked bout this.” He turned toward her. “Harriet, it ain’t—” he started to say.

  But she dropped his hand faster than a hot pan. Without a goodbye, without hearing the rest of the conversation other than its brusque tone, she strode furiously down the road toward the river. When she spotted a man lifting a woman into a boat anchored in the shallows, Harriet spun on her heel in the opposite direction. There was more than one way home.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Two particular traits of the black troops grew out of their former state of servitude. When serving on their own soil, or even on a soil or under conditions resembling their own, they had the great advantage of local knowledge. They were not only ready to serve as guides, but they were virtually their own guides . . . They could find their way in the dark, guess at the position of an enemy, follow a trail, extract knowledge from others of their own race; and all this in a way no white man could rival.