The Tubman Command

by Elizabeth Cobbs

  “With women and chil’ren, someone needs to let em know they gone be all right,” Harriet continued. “The Secesh already filled their heads with every kind of nonsense. That you gone sell em to Cuba. That you gone break up their families. They got reason aplenty to figure any plan hatched by a white man is a trick. They need faces they trust.”

  “Aren’t black soldiers enough?” Hunter said.

  “Might be. Might not be,” she said, recalling her sister Rachel, for whom the threat of being parted from her children served better than chains to keep her on the plantation. Convincing trapped and terrified people to make a leap of faith was never easy. A woman’s voice—her voice—was calming in a way different from a man’s.

  Hunter stroked his dyed mustache, which had a rusty look that afternoon. “There’ll be killing. No guarantee who comes back alive. Are you willing?”

  “That depends,” Harriet said.

  “On what?”

  Harriet sat back in her chair. She folded her hands in her lap. “On who you sending as commander.”

  Hunter looked at her quizzically. Then he shook his head in disbelief and burst into a laugh. She waited for him to explain, but he just laughed harder. He stood after a moment, still chuckling, and got another match to light his cigar.

  “Harriet Tubman, you’re some piece of work,” he said as he retook his seat. He blew the smoke straight up. “Most days I ponder how a woman can do what you do, and then I recollect that only a woman would. You have a new job for me every other day and won’t give up until you fix the whole damn world. Exactly who do you have in mind? Not that it’s your decision.”

  “Colonel Montgomery.”

  Hunter raised his bushy eyebrows. “Not Higginson? Haven’t you known him for years?”

  Harriet nodded. “Yes, sir, I have. Colonel Higginson done as much for colored folk as anybody since John Brown.”

  “Then Higginson ought to have command. And he has seniority. So the question is, Moses”—and at this Hunter pointed at her with his cigar—“why are you standing in his way?”

  Harriet hesitated. Hunter was right. The glory did belong to the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the regiment Thomas Wentworth Higginson had drilled until they paraded like an armed ballet. Thomas had been one of John Brown’s most ardent supporters, risking imprisonment for abetting Brown’s insurrection. Leading colored troops into heroic action was Thomas’s dearest wish, and a friend wouldn’t rob him of that honor. But Montgomery prized fighting over drilling, and the Kansas Jayhawker’s men showed more dash than discipline. While his prairie methods raised the hackles of New Englanders, they were exactly what was needed.

  “This a bushwhacking operation, sir. Colonel Montgomery’s the fightingest man we have. If he goes, I will.”

  Hunter looked displeased. “Are you saying you won’t unless I give him the command?”

  Harriet stared out the back window. In the distance, beyond the sandy alleys dividing the refugee camp, she spied men and women hoeing cotton in the hot sun. A child wearing only a slip-like shirt carried drinking pails on a yoke across his shoulders. Harriet thought of Kizzy under Pipkin’s roof, a memory that pained her like a splinter burrowing deeper every day.

  Harriet turned back to the general. “Yes, sir, that’s right.”

  “Why?”

  She nodded at the window. “Cause a them. The minute this operation gets botched, every slave on the Carolina coast gone be marched inland where we’ll never see em again. We get only one try.”

  Hunter flicked fresh ash into the can. “Those Western fighters do have a certain grit. More dirt under their fingernails.”

  “A man told me afore the war that our grandbabies gone be free one day, but not us. I don’t want to prove him right.”

  “Perhaps I will appoint Montgomery.” Hunter pondered the ash can, and then he glanced up. “But I have my doubts about you, too, Moses.”

  Harriet drew back, puzzled. “Doubts?”

  “I’m thinking it might be better if both you and Higginson stay back. What with your condition.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking bout,” she said, though she stiffened. She knew exactly what he was talking about.

  “You’ve got that problem.” Hunter tapped his forehead. “Don’t think I don’t know. I keep track. On a raid as chancy as this, every man must be ready for duty. Consider what might happen if you had a fit at the wrong moment. We can’t take that risk.”

  Harriet’s long fingers dug into the arms of the chair. For once, instead of feeling humiliated by her condition, all she could think about was what she’d done despite it. “You know how I got that, don’t you?” she said. If Hunter insisted on bringing it up, he was going to hear the whole story. “That problem?”

  Hunter shook his head. “No, but it doesn’t—”

  “I got it fighting a white man. When I was jest a sprout. The things that happened on that plantation would make your flesh creep. Would make your hair stand on end. My mama sent me to the store one day for some bicarb a soda for the Big House. An overseer from down the road came in hollering for a child who’d run inside, fearing for his life.”

  Harriet pushed up from her chair. “That man told me—‘Hold onto that nigger! Don’t you let him get away! Help me tie him up.’ Well, I wasn’t much older than the boy. Maybe twelve or thirteen.” She held her hand at shoulder height to indicate someone small. “But I felt older. That child looked so pitiful and scared, dancing and ducking to avoid that overseer’s bullwhip. That man, he was a bad one.”

  David Hunter stared up at her. “Harriet, you don’t—”

  She opened her arms wide, hands back, as if to shield someone behind her. “So I told him, ‘No.’ I wouldn’t do it. I blocked the door, and that child—he flew right around me, onto the porch, and down the steps. That overseer, he mad as a hornet! So he took up an iron weight next to the storekeeper’s scale and chucked it at that boy. Hard as he could. The child got clean away, but that man, he dropped me like a tree. Broke my skull.”

  Harriet fell back into her seat, perfectly composed on the outside, though her hands shook slightly, and her tongue tasted of wire at the memory. “Montgomery needs men who gone fight with everything they got,” she said. “You can count on me, sir. I done this before. I been there, bringing folks home to freedom past bloodhounds and patrollers. Plenty a times. And I’m one a the few in this whole country that can say that. So I ain’t the one you got to worry about.”

  Hunter’s face flushed. The scar on his neck turned liver colored. “Well, I do worry. I know your record on the Underground Railroad, but this is war. Are you ready to end up like Shields Green?”

  Harriet blinked at the reference to John Brown’s colored lieutenant. She had met Green only once, before the attack on Harper’s Ferry. The Charleston native hadn’t said much beyond, “I gone stick with de ole man” when someone questioned John Brown’s military strategy. Newspapers later reported that Shields Green declined to say anything more when he stood under the noose a week after John Brown’s more celebrated hanging.

  “I been facing that possibility more’n a dozen years,” Harriet said.

  Hunter seemed almost angry. “You know they dug Green up?” he said with a scowl. “Dissected his body at a Virginia medical college? Think how they’d treat a woman.”

  Harriet lifted her chin. “Think how they treat women now, sir. If Shields Green could die with Brown, I can die with Montgomery.”

  Hunter studied her silently.

  Harriet stared back.

  “It ain’t a choice, General Hunter,” she said after a moment. “If someone stole your ma and pa, would you go back for em? They took your sister and sent her to some man to use however he want, wouldn’t you do ever last thing you could to save her?”

  Harriet rubbed the back of her scarred neck. As long as she could remember, she’d been both praised and hunted for sticking it out. Of course she was scared. Anyone would be. Thomas Wentworth Higginson
once speculated that her old injury might have addled her brain. “Knocked the fear right out of you, thank the Lord,” he’d said in his small office off the church entrance. “I enjoyed the danger of running guns to Brown,” Higginson said. “But feminine sensibilities are different from masculine ones. Why, you’re just a tiny thing, Harriet.”

  “So you saying I’m brave only cause the Lord hit me upside the head?” Harriet waved at the books on Thomas’s shelves. “Jest last week you preached that girls should learn the alphabet. If they learn that alphabet, maybe they gone write books, too. Like men. That mean they got masculine sensibilities? I’ve had to fight my whole life. Can a woman stand up for herself only if her head is broken?”

  General Hunter now stared at her much as Thomas had done. Maybe bravery was strange in a woman, but she didn’t think so. White gentlemen tended to revere womenfolk who were limp-wristed and lily-livered. Black people didn’t hold with that. They reserved their respect for those who fought back against a world trying to take down their families. A woman like that was a prize.

  The old soldier sighed and reached for a match to relight his cigar. “Saxton returns next week,” he said after a few puffs. “My authority will be at an end after that. So I can give you until then. I’ll send orders for Montgomery and tell him you’re to go along.”

  Relief washed over Harriet as if poured from a bucket. They had a plan. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “But keep Plowden and Heyward quiet,” he said. “If Colonel Montgomery’s troops learn they’re readying for an assault nearby rather than on Florida, spies will get ahold of it, and you’ll have guns instead of gators waiting for you on the Combahee. You can count on that.”

  “Yes, sir.” Dismiss me, she thought. Dismiss me—she repeated silently, afraid he might change his mind. Her hand crept toward the satchel.

  “And make sure you obey every goddamn order he gives you, like it or not.”

  “A course, sir,” she said.

  “No going off on your own,” he lectured.

  “Yes, General Hunter.”

  Hunter looked as though there were other warnings he wanted to lard on but couldn’t think of any. “Dismissed,” he finally said.

  “Thank you, sir,” Harriet said, and she reached swiftly for her bag.

  “Careful, hear?” he called as she hurried from the room before he could think up another objection.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  More slaves were born than died. Old [John] Pinchback would see to that himself . . . because it meant money for him. He chose the wife for every man on the place. No one had no say as to who he was going to get for a wife. All the wedding ceremony we had was Pinchback’s finger pointing out who was whose wife.

  James Green, Slave

  WALTER STOOD WITH ARMS CROSSED TALKING to Samuel at the bottom of the porch outside. The men fell in step once Harriet descended the stairs and turned onto the street. The trio walked a block without speaking until they entered a busier thoroughfare where horse-drawn wagons coming from the port dominated the afternoon traffic.

  Samuel looked straight ahead. “What the devil you up to, Moses?” His voice hummed with anger.

  Walter walked on her other side as they navigated the pedestrian strip. “Robert Smalls never told me n-n-nothing bout going up the Cum’bee,” he hissed.

  Harriet nodded at a white-haired old man who stopped his wheelbarrow for them as he approached with a precarious load of rocks. “Thank you, Uncle,” Harriet said as she sidled past—and took the opportunity to put Walter between herself and Samuel. It made her mad just looking at him, especially now that they were finished with Hunter.

  The contraband tipped his hat and grinned. “I know’d it was you a mile off, Moses. Watch yo step now. Cain’t have you gitting runned over.”

  “I surely will, Uncle.”

  The man clamped his hat back on his head and squinted suspiciously at Samuel and Walter as they passed.

  “Getting runned over is right, Moses,” Samuel said once they were out of earshot. “Except you barreling over us. You making up information we don’t have, without letting us in on the plan.”

  “Smalls never said nothing to me,” Walter said, repeating himself. “When did he tell you bout—”

  “You gone get us killed,” Samuel interrupted.

  Harriet held the strap of her satchel tight across her breast to prevent the bag from knocking against her companions. She carried herself as calmly as if going to the market for a hair ribbon, but doubts troubled her. She felt certain she had done the right thing—yet what if she hadn’t? The fifth torpedo must be where Robert Smalls suggested. It made sense.

  “Hunter needed a push,” she said defensively. “He understands you can’t figure every angle fore a mission.”

  “Don’t you sweetmouth us,” Samuel said. “He was asking bout that fifth hole on the map. Wanted to be sure you knew what the heck you was talking about. And you don’t.”

  “I did speak with Robert,” she said.

  “What he t-t-tell you?” Walter asked.

  “He said they put torpedoes on either side a the Stono ferry. Figures they did the same here.”

  “So Smalls hasn’t been up the Cum’bee. You was lying through your teeth,” Samuel said.

  Walter shook his head. “Thought you was. That’s why I stalled. Figured you was mincing the truth pretty fine.”

  Samuel looked at Walter, ignoring Harriet. “That’s why I said the torpedoes in the river are plain as rice. Dang it to heck. Cum’bee is more like mud soup.”

  “M-m-mud stew,” Walter said. “With a helping a alligator on the side.”

  Amusement crept into their voices.

  Harriet kept her eyes forward. They were almost to the dock. She wondered if they could get upriver again before the raid. General Hunter would now pass the initiative from the scouts to Colonel Montgomery, who might want them to lie low. Scouts usually stepped aside once troops came forward. It had surprised her when Walter and Samuel insisted she was still essential to the mission. And she’d been grateful. It would save her the trouble of stowing aboard.

  “Thanks for sticking by me,” she said. “And for telling Hunter I should come along.”

  Walter looked at Samuel. “Hear that? She saying she needed our help.”

  Samuel smiled and stroked his beard. “Oh, you know how she hates that.”

  “I don’t mind help,” she protested.

  “Like cats don’t mind getting wet,” Samuel said.

  As they approached the wharf, she wondered if her own cat had turned up at the kitchen on Port Royal. She hadn’t seen Trouble in at least a day. At the head of the dock, a contraband in a straw hat ladled molasses-water into a cup for a line of customers. Someone had written “1¢” on a broken slate shingle. A buyer at the head of the line downed his drink and passed the cup to the next man.

  “Want to wet your whistle?” Samuel asked Harriet and then Walter. “My nickel.”

  “Sure thing,” Walter said. “I’ve been working up a thirst ever since Hunter say he gone p-p-put us on point.”

  Samuel’s mouth curled into a smile as they stopped. The hollow of his neck shone with sweat. An urge to accept his offer stole over Harriet. She tasted the molasses—nectar in a bottle to a Southerner. She wondered if he had stashed a jug for his family along with the pork he left them. Anger immediately prickled her skin. She pinched her lips tight. As if all it took was a smile to make things right.

  “No,” Harriet said, and she drew her satchel closer. “I got business with the captain. I’ll see y’all back in Beaufort.”

  “Suit yourself,” Samuel said without missing a beat.

  Harriet made her way down the wooden dock to the boat. She was thirsty from the hot day, but no libation was worth more time in Samuel Heyward’s company. Though he had helped with Hunter, his notion of loyalty and hers could never be the same.

  A raucous squall blew over Port Royal Sound during the cro
ssing from Hilton Head, which caused Harriet to spend most of the voyage holding the hand of a contraband woman convinced they were all going to die. When she arrived at her boarding house well after dark, she opened the door to her room and lit the oil lamp expecting to see Trouble shedding black and tan fur on the clean mattress. Yet the scoundrel was nowhere to be found. Harriet searched under the bed and even carried a wooden crate up from the storage room to look on top the wardrobe in case the cat had decided to nap there while waiting for mice foolish enough to venture indoors.

  Harriet finally gave up and took off her shoes to get ready for bed. She never tired of the luxury of a feather tick after all the floors on which she had slept. On impulse, just as she started to unbutton her collar, she went to the window and pushed up the sash. Propped on her elbows, she leaned into the muggy night. “Here, kitty, kitty,” she called. “Trouble!”

  The wind answered in the oaks, and a cicada soloist sawed a tinny melody somewhere nearby, but the only creature she spied was a mutt trotting down the street that glanced over its shoulder in the moonlight before continuing on its lonely way. Perhaps the cat had wandered under the house, she thought, into the arched breezeway that constituted the first floor of most Beaufort mansions, with their crinolines lifted above seasonal floodwaters.

  “Trouble!” she sang out again.

  Hearing no response, Harriet reached for the sash to close the window against mosquitoes but stopped when a tiny whimper sounded above the cicada. She held her breath. A small meow. Then silence.

  “Trouble,” she called. “Kitty cat!”

  The weak meowing grew more insistent. Harriet scrutinized the street until the sound drew her attention to the oak tree that shaded the house by day. On a bough that looked a considerable jump from the windowsill, a pair of glowing eyes begged for rescue.

  “Dang-blame cat,” she said. “How did you get yourself over there?” She leaned out of the second-floor window as far as she could and held out her hands. “Come on. Come back, kitty.” Settled deep into its haunches, Trouble answered only with a plaintive cry, so Harriet laced up her shoes once more.