The Tubman Command

by Elizabeth Cobbs

  When she descended the front steps of the sleeping house, she was relieved to see the lane deserted except for a dark form strolling up the opposite side of the street. An audience would make the indignity only more absurd. Harriet walked under the oak and gazed up. The limbs seemed higher than they had from the window. The topmost branches towered over the house. The cat peered down, watching her. Harriet circled the trunk looking for a place to begin. But although the corrugated bark offered ample handholds, no branch hung low enough to provide a foothold.

  The cat cried even more pitifully. “Ain’t no way up,” she called. “You earned your name yet again. Trouble! That’s what you are.”

  “Why ain’t I surprised?” said a deep voice. “Harriet Tubman’s got a cat named Trouble.” Samuel Heyward stepped around the tree and into the moonlight that filtered through the branches. “I’d help, but I know it riles you.”

  Harriet doubted he could see the severity of her glare in the darkness, so she burned two holes into him without holding back. “This ain’t about me. It’s bout the cat.”

  “Maybe I can help the cat,” he said.

  Harriet didn’t answer.

  Samuel edged a rucksack off his broad shoulder and placed it on the ground. Harriet spotted a hammer and an adze as he rummaged inside. She wondered what he was building. The man had mysterious interests. Always packing something. A moment later, he pulled out a rope.

  The waterman looped the line around the wide oak and tied it about his hips. With his feet against the trunk, he threw the loop high on the far side of the tree and, leaning back into the rope, walked his way up—leveraging the line higher every few paces—until he reached a branch to climb. With one hand and then the other, he pulled himself free and onto the limb. He grabbed awkwardly for the rope at the last moment, but it fell to the ground. Harriet thought she heard him mumble a cuss word as she snatched it up, untied the knot, and stood back to watch.

  The sturdy tree didn’t move with his weight until he reached the branch on which Trouble turned around to evaluate the progress of her rescuer. Samuel edged onto the limb on his belly, distributing his bulk along the branch. It sagged as he inched forward, though he stopped every foot or so to quiet the swaying.

  He was too heavy, Harriet thought. She ought to be up there. The limb would support her, not him. “Samuel, come down,” she called.

  “Here, cat,” he crooned high above her head. With one arm around the limb, Samuel reached out his other hand. “Come on, Trouble. Come on, stupid cat.”

  The animal watched him without moving. Samuel crept closer. “Kitty, kitty,” he said.

  A crack split the night. The end of the tree branch sagged toward the ground far below. The cat hissed angrily. Samuel froze. His head was lower than his feet.

  Harriet stopped breathing. Dear Lord, dear Lord, she prayed. Don’t let that fool break his neck. Her own head whirled at the downward tilt of the branch. “Come down,” she called. “Dang cat ain’t worth it!”

  Samuel edged cautiously back toward the trunk. The limb leveled. He called down. “Find a rock. Throw it at her.”

  Harriet dropped to her knees in the dark and groped around until she found a couple of pebbles. She pitched one. It sailed below the branch. Trouble meowed but didn’t move. Harriet cursed her aim. She studied the limb and threw the second rock harder, grazing the cat’s rump. Trouble yelped and ran down the branch. Samuel snatched it under his arm and scooted backward into a seated position against the trunk. Gripping the animal against his chest, he climbed down the trunk until he finally got to the lowest limb. There he leaned over.

  “You take it now,” he said.

  Harriet stretched as high as she could. Samuel let go. The cat dropped into her arms and then sprang away with a loud complaint at the rough handling. It dashed through the dark, up the stairs, and into the house.

  “Damn cat,” Samuel said.

  “Infernal ingrate,” she said with a grin.

  “How do I get down?” he said.

  “Should I throw up the rope?”

  “No,” he said. “I think I can make it.”

  Samuel slipped over the branch again. Hand by hand, he worked his weight toward the middle of the limb. He paused a safe distance from the trunk, then dropped a sickening fifteen feet to the ground. Harriet rushed to help him up, brushing the dirt from his shirt. He looked down at her, which reminded her of the man underneath the clothing.

  She stepped back. “You okay?”

  “Seem in one piece.” He took an experimental step but quickly laid a hand on her shoulder. He inhaled sharply. “Think I twisted the ankle.”

  Harriet picked up his rucksack and wrapped an arm around his waist. “Lean on me,” she said. “Let’s make you a bandage for that.”

  They hobbled up the stairs of the house and down the dark hallway of the boarding house. “This way,” she said with a whisper. “But quiet. My landlady has a tongue on her.”

  Harriet showed him into her room, where he dropped onto the bed. She took a clean rag from a basket, folded it into a long bandage, and removed his shoe and sock. The sprain had started to swell. She wrapped it tightly. “Lay back,” she said and then got a blanket from her wardrobe. She rolled it into a pillow. “Put that foot up.”

  Samuel looked reluctant, but he reclined backward as instructed. “Don’t want to put you out, Moses. I know you’re mad at me.”

  “It ain’t no bother. We don’t want this to get worse.” She doubled the pillow-roll and propped his ankle on top. “Stay here whilst I fetch up some ice.”

  Harriet took a cup from another shelf in the wardrobe and went outside. When she returned from the icehouse, she packed the chips around his ankle with a second rag. By morning, the swelling should be reduced or gone. She would sleep on the couch in the parlor.

  “You stay here tonight,” she said. She put her hands on his chest when he tried to sit up. “No walking. We need you right as rain. Can’t take no chances with the raid coming.”

  “Where will you sleep?”

  “Don’t you worry none. I got a spot,” she said. Harriet stood to get a shawl and walked to the side table to turn off the oil lamp.

  “Stay a minute,” Samuel said. “I wasn’t just passing. I come here to talk to you.”

  Harriet held the knob of the lamp. She was glad he couldn’t see her face. He’s an injured man like any other, she reminded herself. “We ain’t got nothing to talk about,” she said.

  “I need to say this,” he said. “Please.”

  Something in his voice reached her. She turned around. Samuel had propped himself against the wall. The lamplight caught the tip of a broken oak leaf in his hair. She resisted the urge to remove it and instead sat on the edge of the bed. Harriet folded her hands over the shawl in her lap. “Say your piece,” she said.

  He waited a long moment, as if searching for words that didn’t exist. “What Walter said, that’s true,” he said. “I have a wife. Should’ve told you. Mas’r sent her to my cabin years ago. She didn’t know why—she was that young. Fourteen, maybe.”

  Trouble jumped to the bed. Harriet let the cat climb onto the shawl, glad to have something to hold.

  “Lucy had no interest in me. And I had my eye on another gal. But that didn’t matter. Heyward decided it was time for Lucy to breed, and I was the one. He’d bought me and my brother from a Virginia trader. Liked our size.”

  Harriet stroked the cat, which stood and turned around to find a more comfortable position. Samuel leaned forward. He pinched the wisp of the cat’s tail. When the animal settled, Samuel fell against the wall again.

  “I didn’t do nothing when Lucy first came,” he said. “But when I finally told her what Heyward wanted, she thought I was behind it. Got so mad, she threw a frying pan. Took a chunk out a the door.” Samuel smiled. “Luce is known to speak her mind,” he said, using what must be her nickname. He stared down at the cat on Harriet’s lap as if looking at the past rather than the animal.
He doled out the facts in a low voice.

  “So we decided I’d sleep on the floor. Wouldn’t tell no one,” he said. “That worked for a spell. Then Heyward’s driver told me that mas’r planned to sell Lucy to the next trader. Didn’t want no woman who wasn’t a breeder. Said a barren gal wasn’t worth her grub. Mas’r Heyward, he had a new one in mind for me.”

  Samuel looked up. “I couldn’t do that to Luce. So I told her what he said. We decided we’d best get to it.” His voice roughened. “Think South Carolina is bad? In Cuba, they grind niggers up with the sugar. Never heard tell of anybody coming back.”

  Harriet studied his resolute, purposeful face. Despite the turned ankle, nothing about him was weak. His wide shoulders and long legs filled her bed.

  “We didn’t have no choice,” Samuel said.

  Harriet nodded. “I know.”

  “So we took up with each other,” he said. “Now we have three boys. I told her I’d come back for em. And I will.”

  “You miss her?” Harriet asked.

  “I miss my boys. Lucy and me, we get along alright, but she thick with her mama and sisters. Say she can’t leave without em. I think she needs them more’n me.”

  Harriet gazed down at the sleeping cat and ruffled the fur behind its ears. She wondered what Lucy felt for Samuel, then and now. Perhaps she loved him. Or maybe she resented him. Harriet’s own years in Maryland hadn’t been lucky ones, but at least she and John had chosen one another. Turned out, some parts of hell were hotter than others. That wasn’t something preachers talked much about, perhaps because each person’s suffering was different and incomparable and designed just to torture them.

  “Why is Walter mad at you, then?” she said, her gaze still trained on the cat. She recalled the yearning, conflicted look on Walter’s face earlier that day.

  Samuel gave a mirthless laugh. “Jest when you think you got a raw deal, you learn someone else got it worse,” he said. “Mas’r Heyward gave me a woman to sire big youngins’. Walter, he’s a runt. Never had nobody. His mas’r kept breeders for prime hands. Walter thinks I ought to be grateful.”

  Samuel leaned toward the cat again, but this time, he caught Harriet’s sleeve instead of its tail. “And I did accept my lot,” he said softly. “Until now.”

  Harriet glanced up. Their eyes met. She couldn’t look away. Didn’t want to look away.

  “God made you, Harriet Tubman. So I expect He gone forgive me for being awed,” Samuel said. “I never seen anything finer in all my years than that first meeting when you lit into Walter for splashing his oars near a Rebel picket.”

  Harriet leaned forward and picked the golden leaf from his dark curls. “That’s what you remember? My hollering at Walter?” she scoffed.

  “Made a better waterman a me,” he said with a grin. Then his smile vanished. He reached for her hand. Samuel slipped his rough fingers between hers. “It changed me. I never knew there was this,” he said. He withdrew his fingers and wrapped his hand around her slim wrist. “All this fire and glory in one woman.”

  It was as if the cuff of her blouse had vanished and her skin was bare. She felt the warmth of his palm as his hand slid up her sleeve, cupped her elbow, and came to rest on her bare neck, where the scars of childhood didn’t rebel for once. A finger caressed her earlobe. Although his hand was callused, he touched her tenderly. Samuel looked for reassurance in her eyes, and then he drew her down. She came toward him until their lips met like the halves of a locket closing on itself.

  Samuel’s tongue found hers. Eyes shut, Harriet sensed only the tremor in his lips and the irresistible pull of his hand on her neck. She felt his eager body through his clothing. She wanted him on top of her. Wanted to weave her legs with his. Nothing else mattered. Not even saving the world.

  Harriet crushed her mouth against Samuel’s and pushed away the cat. Trouble fell to the floor along with her shawl.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I traveled all that day and night, up the river in the day and followed the North Star that night. . .. I was hoping and praying all the time that I could meet up with that Harriet Tubman woman. She’s a colored woman, they say, that comes down here next to us and gets a man and his wife and takes them out and they don’t get ketched, either.

  Thomas Cole, Slave

  THE FAMILIAR rat-a-tat OF A WOODPECKER summoned Harriet from a profound sleep. The murmur of the town filled her ears like any other morning. Then she remembered. Wonder flooded her. She’d almost forgotten that being held felt as good as breathing. Harriet rolled over and put out her hand to touch him.

  The sheet gaped. Only a few odd lumps in the feather tick, shaken smooth each morning, indicated that someone had lain beside her through the night. Harriet ran her hand over the depressions sculpted by his head, shoulder, and hip. A short strand of hair clung to the sheet. The room he had filled with his presence suddenly seemed hollow. She pressed her face into the mattress. Only a wisp of his scent remained. She twisted a handful of sheet and pushed herself up.

  Voices argued somewhere in the boarding house. Harriet thought she heard the landlady say something about a broken dish, or perhaps a broken desk. Harriet swiveled toward the window. The sun’s rays burned the empty sill, indicating that dawn had passed an hour earlier and not even the cat had stayed to greet her. Samuel had slunk out like a thief. Disappeared. Like John Tubman.

  Harriet pushed back the covers and then realized that her drawers were somewhere in the bed. She felt around in the tangled linens, suddenly desperate to cover up, and found her pantaloons wedged at the bottom of the tick. She pulled them on, sprang from the bed, and jerked her dress from the nail, snagging the collar in her haste. Harriet buttoned the bodice to her chin, wrapped her hair tightly with a kerchief, pulled on her stockings, and tied her shoes. Still, she felt naked.

  Then she spied the abandoned ankle wrap, swirled on the floor in front of the door, with loops and bends like those of the Combahee. Was the rag arranged in a pattern? Peering down, she thought it might be an “S.” The young poet Louisa May had shown her a grammar school template years earlier when Harriet stayed with the Alcotts in Concord, shepherding a fugitive along the Underground Railroad. The letter “S” looked and sounded like a snake, the chatterbox had said as she pointed to the reptile twined around the curvy letter. Its red forked tongue darted at a bird that wasn’t there.

  “Snake,” Harriet said scornfully, “snake in the grass.”

  But her heart ignored the criticism. Instead, she recalled the poem on the first robin of spring that Louisa May had recited for Harriet’s frightened companion. “Welcome, welcome, little stranger,” Harriet whispered as she picked up the rag. “Fear no harm, fear no danger.”

  Harriet tested the letter between her tongue and teeth. She smiled at the hiss. Samuel’s name began with an S, she realized. He had left the cloth to say he would return. With a flush of lightheadedness, she recalled his chest and hips against her. His hands had found and unlocked every intimate part of her. They’d both been spellbound. But why hadn’t he just woken her up to say he was leaving? He knew she couldn’t read, as she’d admitted when he told them about his lessons with Miz Towne.

  A flush of embarrassment swept Harriet as she recalled the times when even the youngest children opened their hymnals in northern churches while she just sat there holding her Bible as if it was a block of wood. Samuel could read. She was illiterate. He was also married and under her command. Harriet wadded up the rag and threw it onto the floor. She had her own life. Her own mission. That was all she needed. What had she been thinking? A fool, she was.

  A rattle at the doorknob scattered her thoughts, and her frown vanished. Samuel must have stepped out to relieve himself. Or went to find something for breakfast. The man was always hungry. Harriet reached for the knob and flung open the door.

  Two soldiers on the other side stepped back at the suddenness with which she appeared. The white officer in front had a sergeant’s stripes and a Colt revolver a
t his waist. The taller man behind the first wore a musket over his shoulder.

  “What is it?” she snapped.

  The sergeant’s chin jutted forward at her tone. He waved a paper with an official stamp, then shoved it in his breast pocket. “I’m Marshal Clyde Granville. Captain Louis Lambert orders you to army headquarters. That is, if you’re Harriet Tubman, the gal what markets baked goods.”

  Now Harriet saw the guns. And white faces. Really saw them. She resisted the impulse to back up and stood taller instead. These men weren’t her allies. She stuck out her hand. “That’s me, and I want to see them orders,” she said.

  The marshal looked displeased but took out the piece of paper. Harriet accepted the document, unfolded it, and turned the blue masthead upright. She pretended to read, playing for time.

  “What this about?” she said coolly, though she felt the start of sweat in her armpits. The forward cast of the officers’ shoulders gave her a bad feeling. She irrationally wished she had made the bed, as if they might deduce what had gone on.

  “I don’t know what Captain Lambert wants, but I got a pair of handcuffs if you need further explanation,” the man said. “I ain’t got time for your guff.”

  “Course not, Marshal.” She nodded at her satchel slung across the chair. “May I get my bag, sir?”

  The man nodded at her meek request, though he took the precaution of placing her between himself and his partner as they marched down the steps of the boardinghouse and across town to the imposing Verdier House on Bay Street, where sentinels guarded the entrance to the confiscated residence that served as army headquarters on Port Royal.

  Harriet took the empty seat shown to her outside the second-floor office of the adjutant general, flanked by the two soldiers. The handcuffs on the sergeant’s belt were the same as those of a slave trader’s. Had she been summoned to face justice for some arbitrary reason? Justice for blacks was usually short work.

  Although the windows facing Port Royal Sound stood open, the breeze had not yet come up, and the air in the corridor was stale. Minutes passed. She hadn’t had even a sip of water since waking. The experience with Samuel seemed a lifetime earlier. They’d slept little. Harriet’s mouth felt dry and tasted like a tin spoon. Thirst, exhaustion, and dread vied for attention. Her nerves were stretched like catgut. She felt the trap close around her and shut her eyes to brace herself.