The Tubman Command

by Elizabeth Cobbs

  Her wagon finally rolled up to a large canvas tent in the middle of the camp. A tall man with sergeant’s stripes brushed aside the flaps and stepped out. Dressed in the dark blue of the Volunteers, the colored officer carried a tablet. He paused to make a mark and then handed the pad to an orderly. His dignified carriage was unmistakable. Harriet was surprised to see Colonel Higginson’s chief assistant on Colonel Montgomery’s side of the camp. Sergeant Prince Rivers looked up as Harriet halted her rig and climbed down.

  “Miz Tubman, how may I help you?” Rivers said with the formality and educated phrasing that had earned him a reputation as the proudest coachman in Beaufort prior to the war. Rivers had stolen books when still a slave and applied himself to reading despite the threat of whipping. He had been one of General Hunter’s first recruits, back when Congress still wouldn’t pay colored men. Rivers famously faced down a mob that had ripped the chevrons from his sleeve as he and General David Hunter passed through New York on their way to petition the War Department. Copperheads wouldn’t abide black men carrying arms or courting heroism.

  Harriet ignored the impatient set of Rivers’s shoulders. She smiled across the rope that surrounded the colonel’s quarters. “Afternoon, Sergeant. How you find yourself today?”

  “I’m well, Miz Tubman,” he said, but he declined to return the small talk. “What do you need?”

  “I’m looking for Colonel Montgomery, sir.”

  Rivers read her face as if he knew exactly what she and every man in the camp had in the bank. Harriet wondered if he knew about her wider responsibilities. As provost marshal in charge of troop discipline, Prince Rivers must make it his business to chase down rumors.

  The tall sergeant appeared to make a swift decision. “The Colonel is with someone at the moment, but you may belong in this meeting.” Rivers lifted the rope to admit her, then held up a hand. He paced to the tent and peered through the flaps. “With your permission, sir. Harriet Tubman is here.” He nodded to someone inside. “Yes, Colonel,” Rivers said. He held open the canvas and motioned her forward.

  Montgomery leaned over a map that spilled across a small camp table. As Harriet entered the tent, he put up a finger to signal patience, and then he reached for a pencil behind his ear. He placed the lead on some feature of the scroll.

  “—the dikes, then,” Montgomery said to the man standing next to him. “How easy is it to flood the fields?”

  Samuel Heyward glanced up briefly, catching Harriet’s look of surprise. He refocused his attention on the map. “The trunks are spaced regular along the river bank.” Samuel traced the curves of the Combahee with his broad finger. “They made a cypress. The gates are heavy, but they got long handles. Two men can lift em.”

  “Does it take long?” Montgomery asked.

  “No. But breaking em takes even less time. And they ain’t easy to replace, sir, especially if you get em all. Then the tide comes in.”

  Montgomery nodded at the waterman’s logic, just as if a white man had spoken. The commander’s manner was perfectly natural. His good qualities registered in Harriet’s brain at the same moment that she wondered if this was the first time Samuel had gone around her. She had no rank, but the colonel and every one of her scouts knew Hunter had placed her in charge.

  “Salt water kills the new crop,” Samuel explained.

  Montgomery crossed his arms. His chestnut hair tumbled across his brow. “We’ll need whatever rice they have stored. We have to feed those we can convince to join us.”

  “That’s why we need to get word to a few folk that we coming, Colonel,” Samuel said. “Make sure someone is pushing the hands toward the river. They afraid a the drivers. Got to persuade em quick. Grab the Buckras’ stores, too.”

  Samuel finally looked at Harriet. A charge traveled across the room, and she felt like her drawers had disappeared once more. Colonel Montgomery followed his gaze.

  “Moses, what do you think?” the Kansan said, as if she’d been standing there from the start.

  But she hadn’t. She’d walked in to find her subordinate hatching plans with their commander. Samuel had embraced her so fiercely the night before. Seeing him again, she felt his arms and wished she didn’t. Harriet addressed herself to Montgomery. She couldn’t look at Samuel for wanting to horsewhip him.

  “I got a mission planned for tonight to do jest that—get word to a few a the slaves—with your permission, Colonel,” she said, hoping neither man heard the wobble in her throat. “We need to get folk primed.”

  “Excellent.” Montgomery gave a rare smile. It rusted over immediately, and he frowned. “Can you be sure they’ll keep a secret?” he said. “We cannot afford a single slip. If word gets out, this mission is finished. We need the whole world to think we’re headed to Florida again—not up the Combahee.”

  Samuel awkwardly cleared his throat, something Harriet hadn’t heard him do before.

  “I know a gal on the Heyward Plantation,” he said. “She can rally the women, sir. And no man gone let himself be outrun by a gal.”

  The idea was brilliant, Harriet realized. A brave woman would shame reluctant men and give courage to mothers and girls. Samuel must be thinking of Lucy. That’s why he had gone to Montgomery—to avoid talking with Harriet about putting his wife in charge. The conniver. The coward.

  Yet he was correct. Slaves must decide in an instant whether to trust the Yankees or obey the tyrants who held guns to their backs. A respected woman could make all the difference. “Samuel’s right,” Harriet said without looking at him. “And I know a gal on the Lowndes Plantation. She’s young, but she got grit.”

  “Can she keep quiet?” Montgomery said.

  Harriet recalled Kizzy staring back wordlessly. The girl had shown courage in pulling Pipkin away from the window. The experiences that must have followed would have fired her motivation to escape. Most people refused to think about problems they couldn’t remedy, but once they had hope, they couldn’t think about anything else. Harriet trusted Kizzy to keep a secret, especially if she got a whiff of freedom. Harriet prayed the Lord would strengthen the girl to do more. He had made Harriet His servant at a young age, too.

  “Yes, sir. She gone keep quiet,” Harriet said. “Samuel’s brother can help, too. He been sick, but folk will heed him.”

  “I want you to get word to them tonight, then,” Montgomery said. “We’re taking advantage of the full moon two days from now. These shallow waters are treacherous, and we need all the moonlight we can get.”

  Harriet cocked her head in Samuel’s direction. “I’ll take Heyward here, along with Plowden and Simmons. We can’t send anyone to a plantation where they’re known, so I’ll assign em accordingly.”

  She turned at last to Samuel. He better not count on the night before as anything special. It hadn’t earned him a thing. No way was she sending him to his wife. Would he think she was spiteful? She didn’t care, and she was boss. “You gone handle the boat,” she said. “Plowden can meet up with your gal on the Heyward Plantation.”

  Samuel ran a hand over his beard. “If that’s how you want to play it.”

  “I do. We’ll meet up around four o’clock. You talk to the dockmaster bout a boat and bring that almanac a yours.”

  Montgomery rolled up his map. “All right, then, Mister Heyward,” he told Samuel. “I need a moment with Moses.”

  Harriet felt a warm glow. At least the Colonel appreciated her. Samuel picked up his hat and left. Harriet noticed that he limped only a little. The bandage had done its work.

  Montgomery tapped the edge of the scrolled map on the table to straighten it. He looked concerned. “You aren’t going to get caught, right? This isn’t the time to get yourself killed.”

  “Absent from the body, present with the Lord,” Harriet said.

  He frowned. “That’s not what I want to hear.”

  “No, sir. I won’t get caught. Nobody knows how to fool patrollers like Harriet Tubman. I jest waltz right up to em. Asks em to dance.
”

  “Well, don’t do that this time,” he said. “I don’t want you or anyone else fouling this mission. Not with three hundred colored troops at stake. You get yourself and your scouts back here by tomorrow morning.”

  “Yes, sir. I will, sir,” Harriet said, though she knew all she could promise was not to squeal if caught. She didn’t know why she spoke so glibly—except that that troublesome man had knocked her world spinning.

  She was glad that Samuel was gone when she exited the tent to study the encampment. An air of excitement pervaded the grounds, she noticed. The brisk movement gave an impression of hurriedness. Axes rang aggressively; harnesses jingled loudly; men half ran. Supplies accumulated in the center of the parade ground. A young black nurse Harriet knew rushed past with an armful of bandages. “Hey—” Harriet called, but Susie King Taylor just nodded and kept going. Harriet made a loop, pretending to look for a former hospital patient, though she had spotted him on her drive through the parade ground. An hour later she caught up with the cooper whose hand Doctor Durant had stitched when a faulty iron strap sprang loose from a cask. Swearing her to secrecy, the older man confided that they were preparing for a raid on Florida.

  “We ain’t got no orders yet. But de colonel sho gone make it hot for dem Johnnies.” The Sea Islander tipped the heavy barrel on its side and slid his hands down the seams to check for imperfections. “Ki! Our cullud sojers make me so dern proud. I ready to quit the world all togedduh when I see dem marching with dey muskets.”

  “You headed to Florida, too?” she said.

  The man shook his head. “Nope. I wit’ the 1st South Carolina. Higginson’s sojers. But I tell you, Moses, I’d give up gulu to go.”

  Harriet didn’t believe that. Islanders parted as readily with their hogs as soldiers turned their backs on tobacco. “Even bacon?” she said with a smile.

  “Down to de chitlins,” he swore.

  Like others she’d met on her walk, the cooper could give her no precise information about when the 2nd South Carolina might sail for Florida. His comments confirmed that he little suspected their target was much nearer. Busy with preparations, the man soon excused himself. By early afternoon, Harriet had seen eight supply wagons roll out of camp, headed for the Beaufort wharf.

  She finally aimed her mule in the same direction. She needed ashes from the kitchen, a shawl, the older of her two dresses—the others having been lost during an emergency evacuation of Beaufort—and an hour alone to fortify her nerves against a long ride in a narrow dugout with Samuel Heyward. They had a job to do. She couldn’t waste energy on anything else, especially a man she had welcomed into her bed like a blame fool.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  In the middle of the door [of the jail] was a large staple with a rusty chain, like an ox-chain, for fastening the victim down.. . . We also found three pairs of stocks of various construction, two of which had smaller as well as larger holes, evidently for the feet of women or children.

  Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson

  THE AFTERNOON HEAT HAD DRIVEN EVERY dog into the shade and worn the edge off Harriet’s anger by the time they gathered at the dock. The mission now crowded out all other thoughts, leaving her with a hard focus on what lay ahead. As she thought about each scout’s assignment, she felt the same worry for each man—and the same painful awareness that she might be leading him to capture or death.

  Upon arrival, she discovered that Samuel had cleated two trus-me-Gawds to the dock instead of one. The dugouts floated between two old ferryboats, now gunships, from which a toiling stream of soldiers came and went. Samuel suggested they split into two teams in order to travel up and back on a single tide.

  He opened the farmer’s almanac to the page that showed the phases of the moon and tides. Kneeling, he placed the open book across his broad knee and pointed to words that no one else could decipher. “The tide gone crest around midnight, and the moon set around three,” Samuel said. “Sunrise is a couple hours after that, around low tide. We got twelve hours to get up and back fore daybreak.”

  “Can we make it?” Harriet asked.

  “It gone be hard, but yes. Walter and I done it before. And the full moon helps. Tide moves faster when it’s big.”

  “That means everybody got to do their job in under an hour,” Harriet said.

  She turned to Charles Simmons, who knew the river nearly as well as Samuel, having been a waterman on the same plantation. “Charles, you gone find Sadie at the Nichols place. After Samuel drops you there, he’ll scout the torpedoes near the ferry,” she said. “I don’t want either a you anywhere near the Heyward Plantation.”

  She turned to Walter. “You gone take me to Lowndes, then row upriver to find Samuel’s wife. After that, come on back for me fast as you can. We’ll meet up with Samuel and Charles where the Cum’bee hits the Sound.”

  The men listened solemnly. No one said the obvious. Getting onto any plantation was perilous. Hurry heightened the danger. It was hard to say whose mission was chanciest. Walter had the farthest to row—all the way to the Heyward Plantation—but Lucy’s cabin was close to the river, and Walter should be able to get in and out quickly. Harriet’s target was closer, yet she had to walk farther and must contend with the worst overseer. Charles would infiltrate the Nichols Plantation, nearest to the Combahee’s mouth, but he might have to search around for the midwife if she’d been called to attend a birth. Although Samuel should be relatively safe on the water, he must locate a bomb in the dark, which was no Sunday stroll either.

  “What if I gets delayed?” Charles asked. He fingered the rabbit’s foot around his neck.

  “Don’t,” Samuel said. “We ain’t waiting, and we ain’t going back for you. We got one tide. Just one.”

  “That’s right,” Harriet said. She eyed each of the men in turn. “Y’all know this territory. We got a long way to go, but we been over it before, and we all coming home.” Her tone was rough. “So don’t let me down. Or I gone have your heads.”

  The afternoon sun beat on their faces as they rowed west toward the mainland. When night fell and the waxing moon rose, the dugouts lost sight of one another in the Coosaw River, a salty ribbon between the mainland and the Sea Islands. They met again as they crossed St. Helena Sound to enter the mouth of the Combahee when the tide turned. Just past the first Rebel post at Fields Point, Samuel raced ahead of Harriet and Walter on an oxbow bend where the river curved like the ring in a bull’s nose. With their dark clothes and faces, Samuel and Charles vanished against the black water.

  Walter and Harriet traveled on alone. He breathed heavily by the time they reached a short tributary that was the closest approach to the Lowndes Plantation. The moon was still high. It couldn’t be much later than eleven o’clock.

  “Careful,” Walter whispered when he nosed the boat up to the landing. He leaned forward to touch her sleeve. She sensed the trembling of his hand. “You be careful, M-M-Moses.”

  Harriet nodded and stepped from the boat. She didn’t wait for him to shove off. Eyes accustomed to the dim, she followed a path that ran below the dark mansion on the hill. No light shined from the windows of the overseer’s house either. The sleeping slave quarters were equally quiet as she approached, and Harriet ran her hand along the back walls to stay within their protective lee until she came to the last two shacks.

  Harriet crept around the corner and cautiously put her head into the black hole of Jacob’s window to avoid alarming him or his pregnant wife. Mayline was the woman’s name, Harriet reminded herself, listening for someone shifting on a pallet. Yet the cabin was quiet. Harriet stopped breathing to hear better. The profound silence was unbroken.

  Her heart sank. The cabin was empty. She had counted on Jacob’s help—at the very least to get a message to Kizzy. Just then, Harriet heard the creak of the door to the last shack. She slid back behind Jacob’s vacant cabin. A feathery tread approached on the gravel between the buildings. The person must be barefoot and couldn’t weigh much.
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  Harriet peered around the side. A small form neared. The silhouette of a dress. The outline of braids swinging free. It was Kizzy. Harriet slid behind Jacob’s cabin again.

  She let out a hiss to avoid startling the girl. The footsteps stopped.

  “Who dere?” came a whisper.

  Harriet stepped around the corner. She put a finger to her mouth. Kizzy cocked her head but didn’t speak. Harriet approached, took the girl by the hand, and led her behind Jacob’s cabin. They slid down the wall and crouched close to the earth on their haunches.

  The slave put her hand to Harriet’s face, feeling the shape. Her clothing had a musty smell, as if the fabric had mildewed before it could dry fully. “What yo’ name?” she asked.

  Harriet waited as Kizzy satisfied her curiosity. Then she slipped an arm around the girl’s shoulder. “Moses,” she whispered.

  “You was in Uncle Jacob’s cabin,” Kizzy said. “Fore Pipkin took ’im away.”

  “Took Jacob? Where?”

  Kizzy pointed to the buildings beyond the cabins.

  “The smokehouse?” Harriet said, wondering why Pipkin would send an ill man there.

  “No, ma’am. De jail.”

  Harriet felt the young woman shudder. “Jail? Why?”

  “Cause,” Kizzy said in a whisper so faint and scared that Harriet felt she was dreaming, “Cause Jacob hit Pipkin.”

  “Lord help us.” Harriet drew her closer. “Where’s Jacob’s wife?”

  “She staying wit’ my mama, cause a her baby coming. Didn’t want to be alone.” Kizzy leaned her head on Harriet’s shoulder. “It’s my fault, Moses, that Jacob got put away.”