Samuel seemed incapable of speech. His jaw bunched, and he tugged his son closer.
“All right, then,” she said. “I’m going.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Colonel Montgomery . . . penetrated the mainland for twenty-five miles, by way of the Combahee, with three companies, destroying large quantities of rice and cotton intended for the Rebel army, and burning a great many houses. He brought away 750 Negroes—men, women, and children, and threw the entire country into a panic. His forces behaved splendidly.
The New York Times, June 1863
COLONEL JAMES MONTGOMERY STOOD AT THE head of Port Royal’s long wharf an hour later. Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Sergeant Prince Rivers of the 1st South Carolina had positioned themselves alongside. Ticking the air with a forefinger, Rivers counted the refugees as they streamed toward Bay Street. Harriet assumed that Higginson’s provost marshal took special note of able-bodied men, though she doubted Montgomery would let him steal a single one.
She lowered her head as she filed up the dock, grateful for deliverance yet numb with loneliness. By herself in the crowd, she felt she would never smile again. “Follow the parade, follow the parade,” a white officer chanted to the contraband as they passed. “Everybody’s headed to the church. Look for the church.”
Harriet hitched her heavy satchel higher. She hadn’t needed the bandages and would return them to the hospital on the way to the Savan house. Septima wouldn’t want to work on a day of celebration anyway. Harriet had confirmed that her sister made it out when a woman with catlike eyes disembarked from the Harriet Weed not long before.
“Juno?” Harriet asked.
“Yes, ma’am. Dat’s right,” the woman answered with a familiar quickness. Harriet told her where to find Septima, should her sister not be waiting on the dock.
One more family reunited, praise God. Even if they had lost Jacob and Kizzy, even if Harriet’s own heart was broken, even if she’d let herself down by trusting Samuel, she was alive and so were her men. They had done the impossible and changed the fate of hundreds.
“Moses,” Montgomery called over the crowd. From his elevated position at the head of the wharf, the silver eagles on his gold-braided shoulder straps glittered in the morning light. Harriet drifted behind a bunch of soldiers to avoid meeting his eyes. She needed time.
“See the look on that Secesh when his hoss throwed him?” a soldier in front of her said in a Tidewater accent. He grinned and clapped his companion on the shoulder.
“Like daddy done take out the paddle,” the second man said. “That was my bullet. Too bad it missed his head.”
“Your bullet? That one was mine,” the first man said. “I jest glad it didn’t hurt his hoss. Poor critter didn’t have it coming.”
Both men laughed, and the sun loomed brighter for a moment. Colored soldiers had earned their right to brag.
A messenger on a bay mare galloped onto the dock from Bay Street. He dismounted with a flourish to hand Montgomery a document. Harriet lowered her gaze to walk past, but steel fingers unexpectedly took her by the elbow. Though she tried to pull away, the man drew her easily out of line. “Colonel Montgomery wishes to see you, Miz Tubman,” Sergeant Rivers said. She glanced up angrily at the difficult, exasperating officer. Rivers looked down from his indomitable authority with an expression she didn’t recognize. He smiled.
“Wait here, Moses,” he said as he guided her to the flagpole.
Harriet turned to watch an egret pluck a blue crab from the salt grass on the river’s edge. She stared at the bank, hoping to avoid seeing Samuel Heyward’s face should he and his family pass along the wharf while she stood there. Downriver, a large troopship sailed into the estuary. Harriet wondered where it had come from. Likely Boston or New York. The boat was still a ways off, but she thought she saw uniformed men on deck. Wouldn’t it be something if Lincoln had finally sent reinforcements?
“Look a’ dat,” said a Gullah man who stopped behind her. The refugee pointed toward the river. He had a hand on the ragged sleeve of another escaped slave.
“Dang,” said his friend. “Dem be sojers. Mo’ cullud sojers.”
“Maybe dey going back up de Cum’bee,” the first man said. “I got twenty cousins upriver if I got one.”
Harriet squinted at the approaching ship. She saw the uniforms more clearly now. The water’s glare bounced off brass buttons. Dark faces looked toward land. A man on the ship waved, and the one next to Harriet waved back. “Brudduh!” the refugee shouted in her ear.
A shooting pain above Harriet’s left eyebrow caused her to wince. Gore-splattered fields flashed through her mind. Soldiers running muskets toward a fort. Red battlefields sowed with dead men. She shook her head to clear the awful vision. Would the next assault on Charleston end better than the last one?
Someone tapped her shoulder. Harriet turned around. James Montgomery lifted his blue slouch hat and shoved a hand through his dirty hair. The colonel’s uniform was a mess again, rumpled and sooty, with the lining poking through a tear in one sleeve. “Our job isn’t done,” Montgomery said before restoring his hat. “I need you at the church, Moses.”
Harriet shook her head. “You don’t need a scout,” she said. “Won’t be a single Rebel picket.”
His blue eyes scrutinized her face for clues to her reluctance. “No. But you can help me recruit. That’s why we went up the Combahee. To find men. Now they’ve got to sign up. They’ll follow you.”
Harriet gazed back at the estuary. At the moment, she loathed the thought of trying to persuade any man to follow her. She turned to him. “A course, Colonel. I’ll head right over.”
Harriet allowed her feet to follow the crowd. The weather continued to improve, and the sun shone strongly on her back. Within a block, Harriet’s clothes felt drier, her spirit less stunned. A farmer stopped in the middle of the street to hand out oranges from the back of his wagon. “We’come, brudduh. We’come home,” he said, grinning. The crowd grew as soldiers and contraband marched down Bay, turned onto Church Street, and trooped past the mansion where the war-hungry gentlemen of South Carolina had whipped up their rebellion half a million deaths earlier. By the time the parade wound through the Greek columns of the towering Baptist Church, Beaufort’s largest building, it appeared that every man, woman, child, and dog in town had tagged along in awe.
A contraband preacher Harriet didn’t know stood on the stage as jubilant refugees, mud-stained troops, and blackened artillerymen crowded onto the pews and balconies along with eager townsfolk, reporters, and missionaries. Shouts, cries, and laughter bounced off the thick walls of the building, amplifying the commotion. It was the largest crowd Harriet had seen since Emancipation Day five months earlier.
“Sit on down!” the preacher exhorted newcomers from a wooden pulpit on one side of a raised stage, though there were too many people for everyone to find a place in the pews. Hundreds lined the walls and stood in the aisles of the magnificent church. More looked down from the balcony. Harriet wondered how the army would care for them all. No jobs, no homes, no land.
She stationed herself to one side of the portal to buttonhole men after the speeches ended. The recruitment office was a block away. An old woman in a dress so threadbare that Harriet was surprised it had not yet disintegrated climbed the stairs of the stage with the aid of two robust men. She recognized the trio from the shout. Once they began humming, Harriet smiled despite her troubled frame of mind. A moment later, she—and everyone else—hummed along. The stirring notes of “John Brown’s Body” filled the church.
The crowd quieted and drew together. The warm alto launched into her solo. The new version of the old song, with lyrics that black units had recently adopted for their drills, reverberated in the nave and galleries. The singer’s lone but powerful voice seemed to speak for all of them. Every soul in the grand old building hung on her words.
“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,
He is tr
ampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”
A man standing on the other side of the door from Harriet joined in. The row of soldiers in front of him sang, too.
“He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword.”
Harriet and others who had known freedom even before yesterday’s events, who had seen the war coming down the road and greeted it valiantly, lifted their voices.
“His truth is marching on!”
The walls rang as every single person clapped on the word. Down to the smallest child, each knew where the beat stood. Truth.
Harriet had wondered for years how planters could lie to the world. How they could pretend the color of their skin entitled none but them to liberty. How even whites who didn’t own slaves could look away and tell themselves they had a free country.
When Colonel Montgomery strode down the center aisle at last, most stood. The singers moved to one side of the wide stage, and someone handed up a piano stool for the old woman. There was little sound beyond the fussing of babies and Montgomery’s resolute tread. It was as if the crowd wanted someone to explain what it all meant. Why this terrible tragedy had befallen them and where they would go next. How a man like him could become a friend.
The colonel walked up the burnished stairs of the stage, turned to the throng, and removed his hat. “Yesterday—”
“Jest yesterday!” a woman cried from somewhere in the middle of the congregation.
“Saved!” someone else said, before a chorus of shushes quieted them.
“Yesterday,” Montgomery began again, “three hundred soldiers put a stop to one of history’s gravest crimes. They spared the lives of 756 black men and women. And they saved the souls of millions of white people, too. Those who won’t commit the sin of slavery once we end this terrible scourge.”
The former evangelist paused. A sash scraped wood as someone lifted a window to admit a breeze. Random coughs echoed. Harriet heard someone still softly humming off to one side.
“This deed was accomplished without the loss of a single soldier. Not a single man,” he continued, “and for that, we praise the Lord.” Montgomery bowed his head.
A murmur rippled through the congregation. “Praise the Lord.”
The weathered commander looked up. Strife and suffering had worn gullies in his face over the years. They deepened. “But not without the deaths—ones we witnessed with our own eyes—of at least four bondsmen whose only sin was to love the freedom that is God’s blessing on every man. For that, we ask His forgiveness.”
“Forgive us, Lord,” the refrain sounded somewhat louder.
Montgomery lifted his chin. “Now we must ask Him for courage. Because for every free man and woman here today, there are thousands more still in bondage. We must save them. Help us, Lord!”
“Help us, Lord!” the crowd shouted back amidst clapping and stamping.
Montgomery raised a hand. When the sound died back like a wave against the shore, he continued. “Not all of us are given to know the right thing early on. It often takes a person a long time to see the path of righteousness. It takes a whole country even longer. But there is that rare person who knows the path from the start. They show others the way.”
The crowd leaned forward. Harriet got an uncomfortable feeling. She backed up a foot, into the person of Sergeant Prince Rivers, who stood with his arms crossed in the open doorway. He looked down and shook his head.
“I was a latecomer,” Colonel Montgomery admitted. “I had to be shown. And the person who showed me was a tiny woman who’s known the path for decades and traveled it herself, mostly alone.” He stared straight at Harriet. The pause was long enough that some turned their heads. A reporter across the aisle glanced at her and jotted something down. Montgomery waited until Harriet inclined her head.
“I’ve said enough,” he concluded. “I want Moses to tell us what comes next. I want Moses to show us how we get to the Promised Land.”
Some women now wept openly, and more than one man had call to use his sleeve. “Moses!” came a cry from somewhere in the balcony. Others took up the chant. “Moses!”
Harriet thought of all the white audiences she’d talked to in the North. All the times she’d stood in churches and lecture halls, sat in prayer meetings and sewing circles, to tell her story. She’d never spoken to an audience of black people, she realized, as the crowd parted again to let one person walk the length of the church. And that was because black people knew her story. It was their story.
Harriet heard the echo of her clumsy shoes in the large hall. She wished her hem wasn’t torn and her ankles weren’t bare. As she climbed the stairs to the stage in her ragged skirt, she wished she had her petticoat. And she wished, as she turned around to face her people—black and white—that she knew what story to tell them now.
Colonel Montgomery stood in front. Beside him was Thomas, her old friend. Farther back, she saw Septima, her best friend, whose sister held Kofi on her hip. The boy’s runny nose needed attention, but he gave Harriet a shy wave. Above them, Walter leaned over the balcony and nodded. Others she knew well or not at all waited for her remarks. She looked for, but did not see, a man with clamshell ears. Near the center aisle, she spotted Samuel with his wife, three children, and widowed sister-in-law. Relief, sorrow, and devotion flickered across his face. Then he nodded, too, and she looked away.
“I’m not a preacher,” she began. “I can’t even read the Bible, for which I’m heartily sorry.” She paused to study her hands. Well-made hands that had boosted people up the ladder. “But I can tell you a story. A story bout a girl.”
Harriet raised her gaze to the audience. She sought the eyes of the men. “This child doesn’t have no daddy. When a white overseer took her to his bed, no man could stand up for her.”
A man near the stage put his face in his hands. A mournful keening filled the church.
Harriet looked to the women before her. “When that man came for this child, her crippled mother had no way to stop him. No way a’tall.”
Septima’s eyes filled with tears. Two women in the aisle leaned against one another for support, their faces constricted in private agony.
“And when that child—that brave girl who should be with us today—tried to run away, that same man took his gun and shot her in the sight a God.”
Harriet found her gaze drawn again to Samuel, on whose lap Jake clasped a small orange like he’d won a prize. For most folk, rescuing kin was enough. For a few, life would make sense only if everyone was free. Samuel had done right by his family, but Harriet would fight until not a single person was left behind. Then—if God was good, and He was—He might find the right man for her.
Earnest faces looked up for guidance. Most had been slaves only a day before. They were her people, eager for her words. She wasn’t alone. They were with her.
“That’s the girl we going back for. That girl and all the other girls. And our sons, and mothers, and fathers. That’s our mission.” She paused and held up two fingers. “Cause the Lord, He give us two choices. Jest two. Liberty or death. And I made my choice. Now you got to choose.”
She looked toward heaven, where Rachel waited. Harriet lifted her hands. “But God don’t mean us to fight by ourselves. No how! He brought us together for a reason. He gave us these hands—He gave us each other—to pull every last one a His chil’ren to freedom. Join me, and our chil’ren, and their chil’ren, and chil’ren all ’round the world gone say, ‘That’s where black men and white men, black women and white women, stood up.’ And they gone sing, as we did on Emancipation Day, ‘My country tis a thee, sweet land a liberty!’”
Whistling, clapping, and shouts of “Amen” shook the old building until it seemed the foundation itself must shift. They were as loud as any horn Gabriel could blow. Judgment Day was coming. Men flocked toward the exit where Sergeant Prince Rivers waved them in the direction of the recruiting office. Harriet trembled with excitement and clenched her f
ists.
The Lord had spoken. Make a joyful noise. They were doing it.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Col. Montgomery and his gallant band of 300 black soldiers, under the guidance of a black woman, dashed into the enemies’ country, struck a bold and effective blow . . . without losing a man or receiving a scratch.. . . The Colonel was followed by a speech from the black woman who led the raid, and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted. For sound sense and real native eloquence, her address would do honor to any man, and it created quite a sensation.. . . She is now called “Moses,” having inherited the name.. . . True, she is but a woman and a “nigger” at that, but in patriotism, sagacity, energy, ability and all that elevates human character, she is head and shoulders above all the copperheads in the land and above many who vaunt their patriotism and boast their philanthropy.
Wisconsin State Journal, June 1863
A WRITER OF NONFICTION CANNOT INVENT A single detail. Not a word, not a sound, not even a cloud in the sky. Readers must trust that professional historians will never present something as known when it isn’t. Yet when I first read the quote above, I wondered what Harriet Tubman told the congregation that morning. So I decided to fictionalize the events noted in the report, which didn’t even give the full name of the “black woman who led the raid.”
The reporter’s oversight isn’t surprising. There are gaps in the records of even the most closely observed people. Historical evidence is always incomplete and often maddeningly fragmentary. In previous novels, I have written about men whose lives were well documented. Even so, I sometimes quailed at my nerve. None of us can really know what went on in the heads (or beds) of men whose backgrounds, personalities, and times were so different from our own. Women are more challenging yet. Typically, their lives are lightly recorded. The letters of Elizabeth Schuyler, about whom I wrote in a novel on Alexander Hamilton, have been lost. Harriet Tubman was unable to pen one. When writing a nonfiction account of America’s first women soldiers, I found that although their war records had been kept, they’d been ignored. In the past, chroniclers didn’t think it was especially important to document women’s deeds. Even now, we tend to assume they didn’t do much and disbelieve evidence that they did.
The Tubman Command Page 30