CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Thus passed my child.. . . I looked for the approach of another gang in which my wife was also loaded with chains. My eye soon caught her precious face, but, gracious heavens, that glance of agony may God spare me from ever again enduring! . . . I went with her for about four miles hand in hand, but . . . at last we were obliged to part.
Henry Box Brown, Slave
HARRIET CARRIED THE MUG OF HOT broth like a chalice, grateful for the stroke of good luck. The street vendor next to the arsenal had sold her the cloudy dregs of the soup he’d made in his steam digester from bone, marrow, and flank. Harriet knew that the last briny cup was the best, concentrated with the properties needed to rebuild blood. She walked it down the dark hallway of the boarding house. Samuel had fallen into a deep sleep after she and Charles laid him out, but she must rouse him soon. He needed fluids. Needed strength.
A door opened at the far end of the corridor, where the landlady lived. A reedy voice wafted through the opening even before the face appeared. Harriet felt her luck dissipate. Ruby Savan took every opportunity to express disapproval of the black tenants the army had forced her to accept.
“Harriet? That you?” Ruby stepped into the hall with a tatty shawl around her stooped shoulders and a nightcap tied under her chin. She carried a candle. “I heard a man’s voice a while ago. You got a man in yo’ room?”
Hot liquid from the brimming mug escaped through Harriet’s fingers as she halted and splashed onto her shoes. “Evening, Miz Savan. A patient’s resting there. You know I’m a nurse at the contraband hospital, ma’am.”
“Why ain’t he in the hospital?”
“Hospital’s overcrowded. Colonel Montgomery needs this man to get better real soon.”
Miz Savan pulled her wrap closer with a crabbed fist. A ringlet like the spring of a cracked pocket watch escaped her nightcap. “Then send him to the colored soldiers’ hospital.”
“I can’t do that, ma’am,” she said. “This man special.”
“Special.” Ruby’s lips puckered into a prune around the word. “You nigger gals always got somebody special. I won’t have it. I run a decent establishment. General Saxton may push colored officers off on me, but I ain’t got to tolerate harlots, too.”
Harriet ground her teeth. Slavers used black women as whores and then denounced them as loose. She felt like dashing the broth in the landlady’s dried-up face, but Samuel needed every bit of the soup, and Harriet had nowhere else to live. Not in a town overrun with soldiers and refugees. She forced a polite smile. “I got a job to do, and you need to let me do it. I mean no disrespect, Miz Savan, but this is army business,” she said as she brushed past the landlady and opened the bedroom door with her foot. “Thank you,” she called as she bumped the door closed with her bottom.
Harriet leaned against the frame. After a long moment, the footsteps in the hallway shuffled toward the kitchen. Harriet silently nudged the iron rat-tail lock over the doorjamb with one hand and turned around.
Samuel slept on his side with an arm across his face like some mythical hero who’d thrown his last thunderbolt. The new bandage across his crown had only a small bloodstain, dry already, and his breathing was shallow and even. Harriet crossed the room, sat down next to him, and pushed off her shoes. To avoid kicking the mug over, she felt under the bed for the coiled rope she kept for going out the window in an emergency and set the cup against it.
“Samuel,” she whispered. He slept without stirring.
She shook him again. “Samuel. You got to wake up.” He didn’t respond, as if dosed with morphine.
She patted his face. Concussions could turn into comas. “Samuel, come on. Wake up.”
He moaned, and he then rolled onto his back. His arm lolled outward, and his eyelashes fluttered. Harriet retrieved the cup and slid under him, holding him against her bosom. She cautiously held up the mug. “Drink this,” she said.
Samuel hoisted himself groggily. He took the broth, drank until it was finished, and handed back the cup. Harriet ran her tongue around the rim to catch the last drops of liquid and laid the vessel on the far side of the bed. Samuel turned over and nestled into her lap as if he’d forgotten where he was. He fell back to sleep.
Harriet studied the side of his lax face. A tiny white scar she hadn’t noticed glimmered near his hairline. She touched the marred skin, then cupped the back of his head to avoid the bandage over the crown. Samuel had surprised her. He’d rowed upriver for her when she didn’t appear. Not every man thought of himself first; not every man stomped on your heart. In all the years on the road, she’d made others safe, but this was the first time someone had done the same in return. Samuel had braved bullets for her.
Harriet tucked away the strange and precious memory, mentally placing it alongside Linah’s button. She would always have it.
The quietness of the house deepened. Harriet thought about Walter and hoped he’d found a place to hide. Her eyelids felt so heavy that she could hardly keep them open, though, so she nudged Samuel aside and lay down next to him in her clothes. She needed rest.
Harriet didn’t know what woke her a while later. A warm lump pressed against the back of her thigh. She reached around to shove away the cat, but a femur, not a feline, met her hand. Harriet’s eyes opened. She rolled over to look at Samuel.
Moonlight from the window glimmered in his eyes. Samuel’s expression indicated he had been waiting for her to wake up. He traced her mouth with his finger. “Hattie,” he whispered. “You here.”
Harriet’s lips parted. Mama called her Hattie, and she found she liked the sound of it in Samuel’s voice.
He leaned forward and, without asking, kissed her once. “Thank you,” he said. As he shifted back, he grimaced with pain and closed his eyes briefly. Then, not lifting his head this time, he reached out for her.
But Harriet inched away.
Samuel breathed unevenly. He caught her hand without moving his head. “Where you going?”
“You’re injured,” she said. “You need rest.”
He brought her palm to his lips and kissed it softly. “I need you.”
Harriet curled her fist to shut him out.
Samuel sighed and let go. He touched the bandage on his crown. “You some nurse.” He rested his palm on the mattress and extended his fingers toward her, just short of her breast. An inch closer and they would touch again.
They stared at one another. Harriet said nothing. Her heart drummed. His skin smelled of warm, yeasty bread and salty seawater. She dug her nails into her fist to stop herself from digging them into his back and pulling him toward her.
“When this is over,” he said at last.
“We don’t want that cut reopening,” Harriet said to let him know she wished it were otherwise.
“I know.”
“You gone have a heck of a scar at least. Something to brag on.”
“Oh, I don’t brag,” Samuel said. “Never have. Not once. Not even that time I beat the pants off Mas’r Nichols’s fastest nigger in his new batteau.”
Harriet broke into a smile and laid a finger across his mouth. His lower lip had the softness of butter. He opened his mouth to taste her finger, but she pulled back and laid her hand over his on the mattress. “Don’t say that word,” she said.
His brow wrinkled, which caused him to wince. He took a pained breath. “Nigger?”
She nodded. “I never want to hear that word again.”
“Wish I could make that happen, sugar. But I promise you won’t hear it from me.” He touched her chin, then he gently tapped the tooth next to the missing one. “How you get your own badge a honor?”
Harriet’s lips pinched together. The gap wasn’t pretty. “We was on the trail in Delaware,” she said. “I had such a bad toothache, I couldn’t see straight. Patrollers were closing in, so I knocked it out with my pistol.”
Samuel smiled, letting her know the defect didn’t matter. “We’d win in a week if every soldier was a
Harriet Tubman.”
She edged closer, still keeping her torso several inches from his. Harriet tilted her head to see into his eyes. “We gone win. I don’t know when—but I do know it.”
“How?”
“The Lord told me.”
Samuel stroked her back. Harriet couldn’t tell if he believed her or not. That, too, didn’t matter. God’s will be done. Another thing she knew was that winning would not restore broken bodies and minds. And the South would reject the lesson. A man who loses his legs for a cause won’t hear it wasn’t worth fighting for. Northerners had no monopoly on righteousness either—though it would become easy for them to think so.
She settled into the mattress, bathing in Samuel’s protective presence. His hand on her back felt like heaven. “That don’t mean we won’t have to scrape tooth and nail to get there,” she said.
He snorted. “Let’s hope Montgomery’s up to it.”
She recalled the day before, when Samuel had sought out their commander. “Why you head out afore me yesterday?” she asked.
Samuel stroked her again, and Harriet cuddled closer.
“I had something to do.”
“What?” Harriet asked.
“Tell you later,” he said.
Harriet thought about his brother. Samuel’s evasiveness evened them up some. She’d tell him about Jacob in the morning. Best not to share bad news at night, when all one could do was lose sleep over it. Walter’s face suddenly rose in her mind, and her eyes opened. She hadn’t thought about him in hours. Remorse struck her, and her stomach knotted. “You got any idea what happened to Walter?” she asked. “There any good hiding spots on the Heyward Plantation?”
“Not many,” he replied in a low voice that made his chest vibrate. “I’m worried about Luce, too. I hope no snitch saw em together.”
Harriet thought about the woman Samuel trusted to rouse a plantation of five hundred people. The mother of his three boys. She wondered what Lucy looked like, and Harriet pictured a face like Kizzy’s, only older. A good woman.
The room tilted on its axis. Harriet tasted the tin mug on her lips again and rolled onto her back. She hoisted herself up against the wall to stay alert. “Think the overseer might suspect her?” she asked.
Samuel cautiously scooted up alongside her. He was definitely mending.
“Don’t know. He twitchy, what with the Yanks nearby. And me a runaway.”
Harriet smoothed her tousled skirt. She thought of all the times she’d gone back to Maryland. “Why don’t you jest get them? Steal your family in the dugout?”
“Lucy won’t go without her sisters, so my boys is stuck. Her sisters got a passel of chil’ren. That’s why I got to get everybody in one swoop.”
Silence fell between them, peopled by those left behind. Harriet thought of Rachel, whom she had begged and begged. “Not without my boys. Not without Ben and Algerine,” her sister said, arms folded, expression closed, life ended.
“What’s your boys’ names?” Harriet asked.
“Well, there’s Sammy.” He began slowly, as if telling a favorite bedtime tale. “Sam’s our firstborn. Lucy named him for me. Day he showed up, nine years ago, my own name changed. Pa, Lucy called me after that. Sammy’s tall, like me. And he got a level head—unlike Jake, our second boy. Jake’s named for my brother Jacob. I gone make a waterman out a him. The boy ain’t scared a nothing, but that lands him in a fix pretty regular. I’ve taken more’n one licking for something he broke or lost. Abe, he’s the baby. So far, Abe ain’t been a speck a trouble. Some old soul come back to Earth the day he showed up.”
Harriet folded her arms and gripped her elbows. The tender words hurt. She pictured Samuel and Lucy under one roof, watching their children grow and keeping them safe against danger. It was a life she might have had, had she not left John. Samuel’s boys depended on their father, as his words showed, and Lucy ought to have both her husband and her freedom—not one without the other.
Harriet mustn’t get in their way. She wouldn’t forgive herself if she did. Nor would the outside world, which expected and needed Harriet Tubman to be a saint, not someone who had abandoned her own child or busted up another family. No matter how much white folk said they understood the ways that slavery twisted people’s lives, they didn’t. They would look at her and her cause differently. And she mustn’t let the cause be tarnished. No matter the cost.
“We gone get your family. Each one a them,” Harriet said, as loneliness took its normal, rightful place in her heart.
A thump came from somewhere in the sleeping house. Harriet stopped breathing to listen for the landlady. Silence followed.
Samuel turned to her in the dark. He unfolded her arms and took her hands. “I want you to be my family. Maybe I can’t have you tonight, but I won’t spend my life without you. Don’t you ask that.”
Harriet didn’t answer. Mustn’t answer. It was all she wanted and couldn’t have. She jerked her hands away and folded her arms again.
Samuel cupped her chin, then stroked her cheek with his broad thumb. “My boys always gone be my boys,” he whispered. “Jacob and I never knew our daddy. It gone be different for my chil’ren. And I’ll make sure Lucy’s got a roof. I’m working on that. But my life’s mine now. All mine. What’s freedom if I ain’t free to love who I want? Ain’t free to love you?”
Harriet wondered what it would be like to have someone watching out for her, on her side always. Her throat swelled until she felt it would close. She forced out the words. “A child never gets over that kind a loss.”
Samuel paused. She couldn’t see his expression in the shadows. He drew back and cleared his throat. “I never even asked. You got chil’ren, sugar?”
“I was married once,” she admitted. “But tell me more bout your boys. They got their daddy’s coloring or their mama’s?”
“They got their own coloring,” he said dismissively. “But what—?”
She fended away the subject. She didn’t want him any closer to her secret. “How old’s the baby? He walking yet?”
Samuel placed a hand on her knee. He shook it gently. “Hattie. You got chil’ren?”
It was the question she refused to answer. What was her usual lie? It seemed inadequate. Yet the truth terrified her. The shame would swallow her whole. Harriet’s throat tightened like a vise.
Samuel slipped his arm around her shoulders. He drew her close. “Tell me, sugar. You can tell me.”
His voice was so kind, so patient, that a sob broke loose in her chest. A door she hadn’t known was there suddenly opened, and Harriet saw she could walk through it. “I have a girl,” she said. There, she thought. She’d said the words. Right out in the open. Exposed.
“A girl. What’s her name?”
“Her name’s Margaret.” Tears rolled down Harriet’s face. Her heart squeezed hard in her bosom. She struggled for breath. “She’s my very own girl.”
“Course she is. Where she now?”
“She with a white family up north. They watching her for me.”
“She must miss her mama,” he said encouragingly.
The tears rolled faster. The tightness in her chest was fierce. Harriet needed something to dry her eyes. Samuel wiped her cheek with his rough hand.
“She doesn’t know I’m her mama. Poor baby thinks I’m her auntie.”
Samuel nodded and wiped her other cheek. “Uh-huh.”
The words now poured forth. Harriet couldn’t stop them. “I’d die fore letting anyone know Margaret was born a slave and risking some bounty hunter thinking he can jest snatch her up and take her south. But I also can’t tell her that I ran out on her. That I handed her over. Just gave her up.” Harriet covered her face. Her shoulders shook.
Samuel didn’t speak. When she finally calmed, he said, “Seems like you could tell her now, Hattie. You brave. No one braver than you.”
“Won’t I jest break her heart?” she said. “Knowing her own mama put freedom first? That she’s been lied to
every day since?”
“It might break her heart,” he agreed. “But then she gone mend. And she’ll know.”
Harriet looked to the window, where the darkness was mellowing toward dawn. “I did go back for her.”
“Course you did. That’s Harriet Tubman right there.” Samuel tugged her toward him until their foreheads met. She closed her eyes.
“Tell you what,” Samuel whispered. “Let’s get us some sleep, sugar. Day after tomorrow’s the big day, right?”
Harriet nodded. Samuel kissed her cheek, slid back onto the mattress, and pulled her down beside him. He curled against her backside, wrapping his strong body around hers. Despite all the reasons they shouldn’t be together, Harriet smiled as drowsiness claimed her limbs. She didn’t have to carry the weight of the past alone anymore. She had Samuel.
“The raid’s all you got to think about for now,” he said. Samuel held her snugly. “But after that, Harriet Tubman, jest you try and wiggle away.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The New York Tribune says that the Negro troops at Hilton Head, SC, will soon start upon an expedition, under the command of Colonel Montgomery, different in many respects from any heretofore planned.. . . Should any number of negroes cross our lines for such purpose, boldness and confidence will be sure of success against any disparity of force.
Confederate Headquarters, McPhersonville, SC
HARRIET TOOK THE RUMPLED SLEEVE FROM the windowsill where she’d left it to dry and sat on her chair to thread her needle. Cold water had pulled the bloodstains from the gingham. One sleeve would always be shorter than the other, but the dress would still serve. She looked over at Samuel, sprawled on his lean stomach with an arm under his head. His sound sleep indicated that the superficial wound was healing quickly. If he didn’t lift heavy objects that day, he should be fine to sail the next.
Harriet took a deep breath and let it out softly so as not to wake him while she joined the ends of the thread, looped them around her index finger, and rolled them off the tip to make a knot. She felt lighter than she had in years—ready to float to the ceiling—though she could hardly believe she’d told Samuel her darkest secret. Sharing a room with him, even if for only another hour, felt too wonderful to bring to an end.
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