The Tubman Command

by Elizabeth Cobbs

  Rebel field artillery had arrived. The Secesh were making a last stand. Trees obscured the road, and Harriet couldn’t see how big a force they’d assembled, but a single shell in the wooden deck of either ferryboat would sink it. Everyone would go down.

  Harriet leaned over the railing. Thunderheads towered above the estuary. A faraway curtain of rain blocked the light in the direction of Port Royal. Someone in the Weed’s pilothouse pushed a wigwag flag out the window to signal the Adams. A deafening boom sounded immediately from the deck above Harriet’s head as a twenty-pounder opened up. All the heavy guns seemed to discharge at once. The Adams quaked with the concussion, and an instant later, an explosion erupted behind the Rebel fort on the hill. They had scored a hit. Other cannons boomed on the Adams, and debris again flew above the trees on Fields Point.

  A cheer went up. “Give it to em!” Harriet yelled. A soldier beside her stamped his feet. Others shouted oaths. On their feet now, refugees strained over the railing. A woman covered her baby’s face with a shawl and screamed, “Smite dem! Smite dem!” Harriet wished she had her musket. Just once, she wanted to kill someone. Draw blood. Strike down those who’d taken each and every one of her sisters.

  Onshore, anxious Union troops crowded the landing while the Weed steamed forward and shoved out a gangplank. A boom came from the trees, and a fountain of water sprang up twenty feet from the portside. The spray washed the railing as the advance troops raced aboard. Moments later, the Weed sailed toward St. Helena Sound when thunder broke overhead.

  Jagged lightning ripped across the sky like a root torn from the earth. The storm had arrived. Harriet felt the lift of the turbulent tide as a howitzer boomed above her head. Then, as the front wall of the Rebel fort erupted in dirt and stone, the John Adams steamed out of the Combahee and into the gale.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  It took a smart nigger to know who his father was in slavery time. I just can remember my mother.

  Elias Thomas, Slave

  DIRTY WAVES CRESTED THE BOWS OF the flat-bottomed ships as they entered the Sound. Heavy clouds blocked the setting sun. On the John Adams, errant waters forced most passengers off the lowest deck and onto the boiler and hurricane decks where they sat hip-to-hip, terrified and soaked to the skin. Once darkness fell, not a glimmer of moonlight penetrated the clouds. Rain slashed the small flotilla, seemingly determined to wreck it on the enemy shore. President Jefferson Davis of the Confederacy might have sent the torrential storm.

  Sometime after midnight, dead with exhaustion, Harriet struggled across the crowded deck with a sack of provisions. She had passed out most of the hardtack in her possession, but Harriet hoped to save some for morning, when it would be hard to calm the children’s crying.

  The storm had dampened her euphoria at victory and reminded her of all those she’d left behind, again and again. It seemed the cycle would never stop. Colored troops had triumphed, yet slavers still clutched their stolen flesh. A dark despair gathered in her mind. No, she thought. She would not let it engulf her. She would not think of Kizzy. Not yet.

  The boat rocked sideways on a steep wave. Frightened passengers sent up a howl as the overburdened ferryboat bucked and wallowed. Harriet’s shoe caught the torn hem of her dress, and she stumbled. She grasped at the slippery railing with her free hand. A lantern fixed to a pole threw a dim light onto the sea-foam twenty feet below.

  The ripped dress was going to get her killed. If she slipped overboard, the waves would swallow her in an instant. Steadying herself, Harriet set down the bag and took up the sagging hem. To shorten the skirt, she tore off the damaged fringe at the bottom and threw it overboard. Her ankles now showed, but compared with the tattered refugees, she looked as proper as a Baltimore nun. For the first time in hours, a half-smile flitted across her face at the absurd thought.

  Harriet felt a hand close on her ankle.

  “Auntie, I hongry,” a small voice said. A youngster whose age and sex were indeterminate in the dark looked up at her. Something told her it was a boy. His mother dozed sitting up, one arm tight around him even in sleep. The child’s head was too big for his body.

  “You got sumpin’?” he asked.

  Harriet squatted, opened the sack, and withdrew two ship’s biscuits. The wet burlap had moistened the rocklike bread. “One for you, one for your mama, hear?” she said as she handed him two pieces. Other hands reached out immediately. Harriet was too weary to resist. She gave out the remaining hardtack. “Pass it along,” she said. “Share with your neighbor.”

  The child examined the biscuit. “Buckrabittle?” he asked.

  “Buckra-what?”

  “Buckra-bittle,” the little boy said as if repeating the obvious. “White folk food.”

  “Jest food,” she said before laying the empty sack on top of him to keep off the rain. Harriet stroked his head. She guessed his age at five. The boat pitched, and the child leaned his face into her hand. Tenderness swept her, and for once, she didn’t resist. He was free—and always would be. This is what a free boy looked like. It made up for a lot.

  “Everything jest fine,” she said in her storyteller’s voice. “We be safe and sound on Port Royal by morning.”

  “Dey plant rice dere?” he asked.

  “No,” she said, “cotton.”

  The boy took a small bite of his bread. “Mama and me work de field?”

  “Your mama might. But you gone go to school.”

  The boy stopped chewing and tucked the biscuit under the burlap. “School?” His voice grew small. “Where dat? Cuba?”

  Harriet placed a hand on his knee and shook her head vigorously. “No, school ain’t Cuba. Your mama gone work during the day while some missionary ladies teach you letters. At a place called school. Nights, you and your mama be together.”

  The boy retrieved his bread and took a cautious bite. “We mos’ dere?” he asked.

  “Yes, we are,” Harriet said. “You take care a mama ’til then.”

  Harriet stood and picked her way through the hunched crowd. She actually had little idea how close they were. They had planned to be in Beaufort before midnight, but that hour had passed long before. She hadn’t seen Samuel since he took food for the contraband to the hurricane deck sometime after dark. She wondered if he was spending his boys’ first night of freedom with them. He must be ecstatic for his children and devastated about his brother. It was hard to imagine how one heart could hold both feelings without tearing in two.

  Harriet noticed families holding one another in the storm. One father had his long arms around a woman and at least four tiny children. At last, she found an open spot and propped herself against the outside of the boiler room. The motion of the waves seemed to cease the moment she folded her legs under herself. She was so everlastingly tired and wet. Harriet breathed rhythmically. The wind sighed, and she fell asleep.

  A loud thunderclap broke overhead sometime later, waking her abruptly. A wave knocked the person next to her almost into her lap. She glanced at him. Samuel reached over and took her hand in his. “You awake,” he whispered.

  “How long I been out?” she said.

  “A spell.” He lifted her hand and gave the back a private kiss. “Jest glad I found you.”

  Harriet shifted closer. She didn’t know how to ask about his family. “The boys all right? Everybody get something to eat?”

  He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. They made short work a them biscuits. Downed em in a bite. Lord, it ain’t been three months since I left, but Sammy’s growed two inches.”

  “Lucy eat, too?” she said.

  “Yep. She had some dried pork. Didn’t want the biscuits, so I gave em to her mama and sisters.” Samuel reached into the pocket of his old coat and drew out something that looked like leather. “Brought you a piece a the pork.”

  “Thank you. Got my own. You keep it for your boys,” Harriet said, unwilling to take the woman’s food. She reminded herself they had been forced to marry. Freedom should include free
dom to love. Still, her conscience troubled her—and the grief she’d been ignoring welled up.

  “Samuel, what about Jacob?” Her voice cracked. “And Kizzy?”

  Samuel put his arm around her shoulder. “They in God’s hands now.”

  Harriet thought of her sister Linah. “Seems I could’ve done more.”

  Samuel’s arm tensed. “You could’ve told me sooner bout Jacob.”

  She didn’t speak. What could she say? All the years of walking in front told her she had made the right decision. Years earlier, her brother Robert had called her cold. He’d been late for their rendezvous to escape to the North, when she’d had the safety of four other runaways to think about in addition to his. “I wait for no one,” she’d told him. Robert kept up with the group after that but acted differently toward her once they got to Canada. “Your heart made a stone,” he said.

  But she wasn’t made of stone. She was so human it ached.

  Samuel’s torso rocked as the boat hit a particularly large swell. “Seems like I been waiting for something bad to happen ever since mas’r sent him to Pipkin,” he said after a moment. “Feels like someone cut off my right arm.”

  Harriet knew there was nothing she could say that would lessen the loss, but words were what she had to give. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “Real sorry.”

  He held her close. “I know, baby.”

  “Pa!” a voice called. Harriet looked up to see Lucy a few yards away, in the light of the ship’s lanterns, following the railing toward them.

  “Samuel Heyward, what you doing down here?” Lucy reached for her hair as the wind tore her scarf loose. “Yo fambly—”

  The man on Harriet’s right rocked against her as the ship slid down a wave. She braced her shoulder to keep him upright.

  “No!” Samuel cried.

  Harriet looked back at the railing. Splayed flat on the deck, Lucy clung to a heap of coiled line next to a barrel. The wind had whipped the indigo scarf from her head and blown it into the dark sea. One of her shoes had slipped through the slats in the railing and disappeared. Lucy looked ready to go overboard.

  Samuel was at her side. He put his hands under her armpits and hauled her to her feet. “Where the boys?”

  The howling wind picked up, and Harriet didn’t hear Lucy’s answer as Samuel helped his wife across the deck to the ladder. He didn’t look back as he pushed her up the hurricane deck.

  The ship bounced on the chop. It was a motion the ferry hadn’t made before. The flat-bottomed boat slid sideways while its paddle wheels fought with the swell. The ship’s bow seemed turned around. Harriet glanced fearfully toward the ocean in time to see a wall of water rise up. A giant wave hit them broadside, and the gunship tilted like a top.

  Passengers skidded into one another. A woman screamed in terror. Harriet slammed against the boiler room. Her teeth clacked as her head hit the paneling. Then the ship crested the immense swell and heaved in the opposite direction. A loose rucksack sped past, bounced when it hit the railing, and sailed into the sea below. Harriet plastered her hands against the wet wood to keep from sliding downward. The overloaded ferry was ready to capsize.

  She lifted her face to the rain. “Heavenly Father,” she cried. “You saved your chil’ren from slavery. Take pity on us now. Send us home to Port Royal!”

  The gunship entered a dark trough, and then it climbed the next wave. The vessel slanted backward, pinning Harriet against the wall of the boiler room yet again. At the top of the wave, the ship’s rudder dug into the swell. The ferryboat shifted direction, and the bow turned. Rather than wallowing, the ship pitched.

  Soon, they were riding the waves instead of hitting broadside. Harriet looked around, surprised to be alive. Passengers were crying, but no one had gone over.

  The rain gradually slowed. The waves became longer, the water smoother, and the sky lighter. Pink showed on the horizon, and Harriet caught sight of a landmark on Lady’s Island. Her legs felt wobbly, but she stood and gripped the railing to make certain. Yes, there was the oak split by lightening the year before. They were in the Coosaw at last, and everyone on board seemed awake. In nooks and passageways where they had found shelter, on open decks where others had clung to one another during the night, men and women got up to greet the first day of freedom. As the sun came over the horizon, refugees talked, laughed, hugged in astonishment, wrung out their shirts and scarves, and exclaimed at the approaching islands.

  “What dat place called?” a stocky young woman asked a colored soldier at the railing.

  The man smiled and pointed. “That one’s Lady’s Island. Maybe you gone be a lady there.”

  Harriet turned. She must find Samuel. A horse whinnied somewhere. Passengers hustled down the ladder from the hurricane deck to get closer to the gangway. At last, Harriet had an opportunity to ascend. She spotted Walter Plowden as she reached the top. The skinny scout and several other passengers stood looking down at a group huddled under the saloon’s shallow eave. The crowd shifted, and Harriet realized that one of those seated was Samuel, who had something in his lap. A form wrapped in a gray army blanket. The still body of a child. Lucy sat beside them, one hand on the covering.

  A cry escaped Harriet. She ran to the saloon, dodging around clumps of passengers. She pushed someone aside. “I’m a nurse,” she said.

  The crowd parted. Harriet fell to her knees. It must be Samuel’s son. How could this happen? Not this child, too. Robbed at freedom’s door.

  “Samuel,” she said.

  He didn’t answer her. Eyes anguished, skin gray, brow furrowed, Samuel looked as if this blow on top of losing his brother hours before had stripped him of reason. He wiped the face of the limp boy again and again. “We almost there, Jake, almost free,” he said. “Stay with me.”

  “Wake up!” Lucy said frantically and shook the leg under the blanket.

  “Come on, boy. Come on,” he said, pleading with the inert child.

  An older child spoke to a tall woman who gripped a toddler on her hip. “Mama said to wait, but Jake went looking for Pa. Jake always in trouble. Now he cain’t wake up.”

  The unconscious boy appeared to be around six. He had a bloody scrape across his cheek and an immense purple lump on his forehead. He lay absolutely still. Then his eyelids fluttered and he inhaled sharply. He looked up at his father.

  Samuel bundled the boy closer. His voice broke. “I got you, son.”

  A deckhand set a tray with mugs of hot broth on the deck for the family of the injured boy. “This’ll perk you up,” he said.

  The morning had dawned bright and calm. Lucy’s sister had taken the other two children to watch the approach of Port Royal on the starboard side and to let their dazed parents rest. Harriet examined the tray. She didn’t see the utensil she’d requested. With a concussion, the boy needed fluids. “Did you bring a spoon?”

  The crewman reached into his top pocket. “Yes, ma’am.”

  Samuel leaned forward quickly. “Give that here,” he said, and he took the utensil. They were the first words he’d spoken to anyone other than the child.

  Walter reached down for the steaming mugs. He passed one to Samuel, then Lucy and Harriet. For himself, he took the last, which he sipped quietly. Hands wrapped around the cup, he glanced at Harriet before training his gaze on the deck, which he examined with pity.

  Samuel dipped the spoon. “Here, Jake,” he said as he lifted the broth to his son’s mouth.

  The boy sat against the wall with the blanket around his shoulders. He opened his lips, not taking his eyes from Samuel. Father and son gazed upon one another’s features as if committing them to memory.

  “The patrollers gone ask if I seen you, and I got to be able to say no,” her own father had said when Harriet stole back to take her brothers north. So Daddy tied a kerchief over his eyes and entered the Maryland safe house blindfolded. He explored their faces with his hands as if molding a likeness before saying goodbye.

  Samuel gave his son a te
aspoonful of broth, then another. When the ship’s roll caused him to spill some, Lucy dried the boy’s chin with the hem of the blanket.

  Harriet backed up. She sipped the hot liquid as quickly as she could without burning the roof of her mouth. It had no flavor to her.

  Walter placed his empty cup on the tray. “Make sure you d-d-drink some a that yourself,” he told Samuel. He looked at Harriet. “Coming? I think we ’most there. Colonel M-M-Montgomery gone want us.”

  Harriet set the broth on the tray without finishing it. “You all right?” she asked Samuel.

  He nodded but didn’t look up. Instead, he set the cup aside and put an arm around his son’s shoulders to keep the slumped boy upright. Lucy rested against the wall, eyes shut and holding Jake’s hand. The formidable woman looked spent. Walter touched Harriet’s sleeve. “I’ll be on the main deck, Moses,” he mumbled and turned in the direction of the ladder.

  “Samuel?” Harriet said. “You coming?”

  Lucy Heyward opened her eyes, apparently alarmed by the question. She shook Samuel’s leg. “Pa. You got to let other men do de sojering now. Me and de boys never been nowhere ’cept Heyward’s place.”

  Samuel didn’t speak, though he nodded once more in understanding.

  Harriet felt as if the deck had tipped sideways again. The world seemed to slip away. She took a step toward him, pride broken. If only they could touch, he wouldn’t leave her. No one saw that she was vulnerable, too. Never had she admitted it even to herself—especially to herself—but she needed someone just as anyone did. Rejection had turned her inside out years before, making her feel as if she was worth nothing, except in what she could do for others. She wanted to be loved for herself.

  “Coming, Samuel?” she repeated, forcing out the words. “It’s time.”

  Samuel finally looked up. His face was smudged with dirt, and indecision showed in his eyes. The light pulse in his neck beat fast. Harriet felt his longing from ten feet away. The engine purred, and the ship rocked gently on the tide. Harriet heard distant cheering from the shore.