The Tubman Command

by Elizabeth Cobbs

  Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  “NANSI!” SEPTIMA YELPED THE NEXT MORNING as they took stock of their supplies. She dropped her end of the heavy sack on the cookhouse floor.

  “Where?” Harriet said. She plucked the entire bag off the ground and swung it rapidly onto the counter. Expensive sugar must be handled with care, but she also didn’t want to get bit.

  “Dere! It run’d under de bag.”

  Harriet lifted one end. A large spider scrambled into the canvas folds of the opposite corner, though not before Harriet spied the red hourglass on its black abdomen. She grimaced, mad at a world overrun by spiders and troublesome men. She had no time to waste on either.

  “How’d a black widow get under there?” she said, angry at her own foolishness. “I shouldn’t have taken that sugar off Webster. We don’t have enough cupboards to keep it up off the gol’dang dirt.”

  Harriet took a wooden spoon from a container of utensils on the counter. She flipped the bag over and gave the spider a whack hard enough to kill a mouse. The crumpled body tumbled into her spoon, and she threw it out the front door onto the ground.

  “Think I’ll see if John Lilly will take it off our hands,” she told Septima. “Maybe he’ll give us a penny more a pound.”

  “I can handle de work here,” Septima said.

  Harriet nodded. “I ’spose four dozen biscuits gone be enough.”

  Septima tilted her head sideways. “Why, I b’lieve you ready to trust me with dat dere gingerbread, Miz Harriet.”

  Harriet cracked a smile but merely lifted the bag to her shoulder by way of answer. She must get going. Today she would see General Hunter. Nothing else mattered. “I’ll stop at the store, then the hospital,” she said. “From there, I’m off to Hilton Head.”

  Septima looked curious. “Seem you jump dat packet near every day. What keep taking you dere?”

  Harriet nudged the cat’s bowl under the table with her shoe to keep Septima from tripping on it. “There’s new contraband,” she said, fudging the truth.

  New runaways often did slip through the lines, but Harriet didn’t know if any had arrived recently. Most people believed Harriet’s job on Port Royal was to nurse contraband and help Hunter recruit new scouts. Few knew she went behind the lines.

  “I hope General Hunter paying you for de trouble,” Septima said. “Dem teachers told my husband make sure he gets paid for extra work. De guv’ment giving some folk close on twelve dollar a month.”

  The comment reminded Harriet that she had taken Septima’s earnings from under her mattress that morning. She set the bag down one more time, drew the money from her satchel, and handed over two greenbacks. “Almost forgot,” she said.

  Septima pocketed the money gratefully. “Dat remind me. Yo’ shawl. You left it with Kofi last night.” She fished the article from a sweetgrass basket on the floor. “Dat chile sho do mind you. Don’t know how you git him to quiet down so quick. You gone have to tell me yo’ secret.”

  Harriet recalled the morning Septima had arrived late because Kofi had wandered to the riverside looking for frogs. “What if a gator got him?” Septima had said, horrified. “’Clare to Gawd, I roping him to his bed tonight!”

  Harriet smiled at the idea that the child favored her. “I ain’t done nothing special.”

  “Well, he think you special.” Septima handed her the shawl. “Here.”

  Harriet put the item in her satchel. “Good thing my head’s attached,” she said as she lifted the bag of sugar to her shoulder once more.

  “Famembuh,” Septima said. “Make sho de guv’ment pay you.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Harriet trudged up the front steps to John Lilly’s store on Bay Street. Men crowded the entrance. A colored soldier stepped aside when he recognized her. He tipped his blue kepi cap but didn’t offer to take her load.

  “A thousand. Maybe more,” Harriet heard one man say to another as she pushed past a group standing around a white soldier who was reading aloud from a newspaper. Someone groaned.

  “Troops under General William Tecumseh Sherman led the assault,” the man read. He glanced up from the page. “That’s the redheaded officer what refused to join the Louisiana secessionists,” he explained.

  “We don’t care if his hair is blue,” said a man with a burl pipe in his hand. “How’d he lose, goddammit?”

  The tall soldier refocused on the cheap newsprint. “Flags unfurled, the troops of the 13th United States Infantry charged bravely along Graveyard Road,” he read. “Despite Federal valor, the Rebels carried the day, firing over the abatis and inflicting considerable losses.”

  Another soldier spoke up. He was an older white man who gripped his long beard with a firm hand, as if he’d pull it off to win the war. “Valor, my ass. That’s a load of crap. What the hell is Grant up to? Ain’t Vicksburg been under siege a month?”

  “Close on two months,” the reader replied. “The army’s been in Mississippi since April. Grant’s circling around, or so the papers report.”

  “Bull,” the bearded man said.

  “Another thousand gone,” came a gloomy observation from somewhere in the back.

  “And don’t forget Chancellorsville,” the reader said. The tall man had the sharp cheekbones and prominent chin of the Scots-Irish. “Copperheads were right. Lincoln can’t win. He should’ve given the South their terms to start with.”

  Someone hissed loudly. An angry murmur broke out near the doorway, where a group of colored troops stood with arms crossed. Everyone knew what terms meant to the Confederacy: a guarantee of slavery until the Second Coming. If Judas had been a northerner, he’d be a copperhead Democrat, Harriet thought.

  She plumped her sack on the counter.

  “What can I do for you, Tubman?” John Lilly asked. The stout, dark-haired shopkeeper ignored the arguing troops. Quarrels broke out whenever a new edition of Harper’s Weekly or The Soldier’s Journal arrived from up north. The news in recent months had been particularly disheartening. After two years of bloodshed, the North seemed less likely to prevail than ever. Talk was that the Rebels would win.

  “I got sugar to sell, Mister Lilly. Bought more’n I can use.”

  The jowly storekeeper drew back his double chin. “You didn’t buy it here.”

  “No, sir. But it’s quality. Jest can’t use it fast enough. I can give it to you at fifteen cents a pound.”

  “That’s hardly giving it to me. I earn barely a penny above that.”

  Harriet tried to recollect what Webster had charged her, but all she recalled was that he said it was a cut rate. She didn’t have much head for bargaining. “What if I lower the price a penny?” she asked.

  John Lilly looked beyond Harriet. “What’s that you got?” he said as another customer dropped a sack on the long wooden counter.

  “Afternoon, Mister Lilly, sir,” Walter Plowden said. “Wondering if you can use some sugar. T-t-turns out I have t-t-too much on my hands.” The skinny scout glanced at Harriet and tipped his hat. “Moses,” he said cautiously and took a small phial from his pocket to apply salve to his lips.

  “Walter,” she replied with a cool nod. After the preceding night, Walter was one of the two men in the world she felt least like seeing.

  The merchant crooked his thumbs under the straps of his apron. “Now that’s something,” he said. “This is wartime, and both of you have more supplies than you can use. I don’t know the last time I saw that.”

  Harriet looked at him sharply. “What you saying?”

  Lilly stared right back. His blue eyes narrowed. “I’m saying it’s curious. Contraband are in here every other day begging for credit, complaining that they’re waiting on rations because a ship from New York’s been delayed, and here you two have more than you know what to do with.”

  “I bought this sugar from the commissary,” Harriet said.

  “That’s where I got it, t-t-too,” Walter said. “It’s jest more’n I need for my business, sir.”
r />   “So you hope to turn a profit,” Lilly said. “Off the Union that’s helping you people.”

  Harriet pressed her hands into the counter until her knuckles wrinkled. “You accusing us?”

  Walter shifted. Harriet felt the toe of his boot against her foot.

  “We all trying to make ends m-m-meet, Mister Lilly,” Walter said. “I know you are, too. But I promise you, Miz Harriet and me got these stores fair and square. I don’t know why Private Webster had extra, but he did. You can ask him.”

  “I’ll do that,” the shopkeeper said. “Because I can’t accept stolen goods. If they’re stolen,” he added without looking at Harriet.

  “And I’ll talk to General Saxton,” she snapped. “He gone be interested to know how you treat people he trusts.”

  She picked up the sack and perched it on her shoulder. “Walter?”

  Walter nodded at the shopkeeper and hoisted his bag. As they made their way toward the screen door, John Lilly’s voice drifted back. “Biggity niggers,” he told the next customer. “Never know when they’re telling the truth.”

  Walter and Harriet exited the crowded store and walked down the steps into the bustling street as a wagon loaded with bricks rumbled by. Two women clothed in old flour sacks and carrying water jugs on their head waved to Harriet from the other side of the street. She nodded back, careful not to lose her grip on the heavy bag of sugar.

  “Don’t that beat all?” she said.

  “Seems that happened every t-t-time I walked into a store in New York, once I got free.”

  “But when we laying down our lives for the Union?”

  Walter shrugged. “People used to stealing from others believe everyone else a thief. White folks took so much from us, they convinced we trying to get it back.”

  “Think Webster’s crooked?”

  “Hard to know. He sure got a lot of supplies coming down from the North for the refugees, that’s for true.”

  “He better not be filching their rations,” Harriet said and pursed her lips tightly. The idea infuriated her. New runaways got little more than a few cups of flour along with meager handfuls of beans, hominy, and sugar.

  “Either way, I sure ain’t gone t-t-truck with Lilly again,” Walter said.

  “That might not be enough. He could turn Saxton against us. Hunter, too.”

  “No one gone doubt you, Moses,” Walter said.

  “Doubts are like skeeters. You got to swat em quick.” Harriet shifted the sack to her other shoulder and glanced at him, irritated. “Wish you would a let me give him a bigger piece a my mind. I would a taken his head clean off if you hadn’t been kicking me.”

  “And have Lilly throw us out? Or get them white soldiers mad? You know how it is.” He shook his head. “Someone got to w-w-watch out for you, Moses.”

  Harriet started up the street. That’s what Walter had been doing last night. It wasn’t something she wanted to talk about.

  “I need to get this sugar back to the cookhouse,” she said. “Least it’s on the way to Saxton’s.”

  “Didn’t you hear? Saxton just sailed for Washington. Folk saying he might replace Hunter.”

  Harriet stopped short, causing the bag to slip slightly. She jiggled it more squarely onto her shoulder. She hadn’t known that Hunter’s head was on the chopping block. She’d spent months cultivating his trust. If Hunter was reassigned, she would have to start over. The delay would cost them the raid. “Replace Hunter? Where you hear this?”

  “Last night at the shout. Robert Smalls told me word’s all over Hilton Head that Hunter’s gone be relieved soon.”

  “Why?”

  “His failure to take Charleston or much a anything, I reckon. The Union’s drowning in blood. Saxton hopes to get the job. Wants to do more than b-b-babysit contraband.” Walter looked around and lowered his voice. “What did Hunter say bout the map?”

  “I missed him. Gone try him again this afternoon,” Harriet said.

  “You missed him?” Walter’s eyebrows shot up. “Those Rebs could put back their artillery any t-t-time.”

  “I know that. But Hunter’s not some hound dog waiting for me on the front porch. He ain’t there all the time. Tell you what. I owe Doc Durant a few hours at the hospital, and then I’m headed straight to Hilton Head. You grab Heyward and meet me at army headquarters ’round four o’clock.”

  Walter’s gaze shifted to the road ahead. “Samuel?”

  “Yes,” Harriet said impatiently. “He knows the river better than either a us.” Determined to put the mission ahead of personal feelings, she ignored the flush creeping up her neck. “I don’t care what a man’s situation is. I need all the backup I can get, and three voices is louder than one. We need Hunter to shake his head north-south ’stead a east-west fore it’s too late.”

  Walter hesitated. He gave her a searching look, as if there was something he wanted to say. “Harriet, you deserve—”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Walter.”

  He tried again. “I should explain—”

  “No explanations,” she said. “Be on Hilton Head by four.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, and he fell back as she continued up the street.

  Walter had used her Christian name. And he’d called her ma’am. That surprised Harriet some, but she found she didn’t mind so long as those words didn’t roll off the lying tongue of Samuel Heyward.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The first expedition undertaken by this regiment left Beaufort somewhere around the middle of November [1862] . . . Several of the men were wounded. While the Surgeon Dr. H. was dressing the wounds of one of the men—another came up with his arm badly shattered—when the first man stepped back saying, “Fix him, boss, he’s worse than I is.” How few are the men of any color who could have been more unselfish.

  Esther Hawks, MD

  HARRIET REMOVED A CLEAN APRON FROM the hospital closet, tied it around her waist, and carried her broom and dustpan into the main ward. The repetitive duties of nursing would allow her to collect her thoughts. Walter’s information meant she must find some way to convince General Hunter without further delay.

  Doctor Henry Durant stood near a window at the far end of the long room, formerly a salon in the opulent mansion. The Northern volunteer leaned against the wall for support while writing on a chart. A small man with red hair and jug ears, Durant tended to favor one leg over the other due to an old injury. He walked with a limp when he was tired.

  Two long rows of iron beds held the hospital’s worst cases. Other patients lay on mattresses in the walkway. Someone had opened windows overlooking a veranda to dispel the odor of urine and gangrene, though black flies flew in on the sprightly breeze. A man in the middle of the room thrashed on his cot. “Fuck!” he shouted in his delirium. Harriet started her work in the near corner and proceeded down the row.

  General Hunter must be warier than ever of making a mistake, Harriet reflected as she dipped her broom under a bed and circled round a chamber pot. She knew from camp gossip that the West Pointer had spent decades as a paymaster and pressed for a frontline command after the war broke out. Nearing the end of his career, Hunter must itch to make his mark. Any man who dyed his mustache clearly felt a need to prove he wasn’t a has-been. Hunter had promoted colored units but done little with them. With the War Department breathing down his neck, budging him would be even harder.

  The problem consumed Harriet’s attention so thoroughly that she hardly saw the floorboards as she wielded her broom.

  “Who dat?” someone asked. “Dat you, Harriet?”

  She looked up to see a patient with a bandage over his eyes and the outline of only one leg under the covers. He waved a hand in front of his face to shoo away the flies that crawled under his blindfold. An especially big one hummed noisily before landing on a plate that rested on the windowsill. Harriet had just edged her broom under the man’s bed, coming away with a pile of mouse droppings and human hair.

  “It’s me,
Uncle Romulus,” she said. “Can I get you something?”

  “Yo’ voice medicine enough, sugar, though I wouldn’t turn down a cup a water,” he said. “It taste bettuh coming from you.”

  “Yes, Uncle. I’ll get that now,” she said as she leaned her broom against the windowsill. Romulus always wanted the same thing.

  Harriet picked her way across the room, stepping over patients until she reached the water urn under a large fresco of a bucolic plantation scene. The artist, likely a slave, had painted handsome men hoeing green fields at the edge of a river, overlooked by a mansion on a hill. Tiny women in colorful headscarves carried sheaves of rice to a brick mill in the distance while a liveried servant drove a gaily dressed white couple in a barouche toward a church at the edge of the picture. Billowy clouds scudded across the blue sky.

  Everyone looked so healthy, Harriet reflected as she held a cup under the tin spout. From such a picture, one would never expect the disease that was rampant among the Sea Islanders in the civilian hospital. Since Doctor Durant’s arrival, the confiscated mansion had been constantly full. Most patients had only ever had root doctoring. They presented an array of swamp fevers, typhoid, worms, abscessed teeth, and old injuries. The wall mural made bygone days look good, though; it was as if God was smiling down.

  “Moses,” a woman called.

  Harriet turned around to see Doctor Durant limp across the room with his hand under the elbow of Esther Hawks, the physician whom the army had assigned to a schoolhouse. Esther had arrived with other missionaries after the Union invaded the islands. Most of them served as teachers, but Harriet thought it a shame that one as qualified as Esther was not assigned more specialized duties. Her husband, also a physician, had started Beaufort’s new hospital for black soldiers. General Saxton had insisted on two facilities for colored folk—one for civilians, and another for the military.