Candle in the Darkness

by Lynn Austin

  Richmond wasn’t enormous and frantic and loud, like Philadelphia, but lovely and dignified, a proud queen perched on her hills. And best of all, everywhere I looked I saw a wonderful mixture of black faces and white faces.

  As the horses labored up Church Hill, the spire of St. John’s came into view, and I knew I was nearly home. Then I was standing in our front hallway at last, and Tessie was running out to meet me, looking even more beautiful than I’d remembered. She hugged me so tightly I thought my bones would snap, but I never wanted her to let go.

  “I hardly know you, baby,” she wept as we hugged and cried. “You all growed up.”

  “Oh, Tessie! I’ve missed you so much! I’m never going away again.”

  “Is that our gal?” Esther cried as she hurried in from the kitchen. She took a long, tender look at me before swallowing me in her ample embrace. “Land sakes, honey! You growed some bosoms while you was gone. Looks like it gonna take a mighty strong wind to blow you to Washington, D.C. now!”

  We were all laughing and crying, even shy Luella. My mother’s maid, Ruby, cried the hardest. “I just knew you gonna be as pretty as you mama someday. Oh, it so good to have you back.”

  But someone was missing. I felt bone-chilling fear when I looked around and realized that Eli’s beloved face wasn’t among the others. “Where’s Eli?” I asked.

  “He’s wanting to see you real bad,” Esther said, “but he don’t have clothes that’s good enough to wear inside the big house.”

  I flew out the back door and down the walk to the carriage house. Eli stood in the doorway, tall and proud, waiting for me. His hair and beard had turned nearly white while I was gone, but his arms and shoulders were as sturdy and strong as ever. I fell into those arms and smelled the wonderful scent of horses and leather as I rested my face against his broad chest.

  “I’m home, Eli.”

  “Oh, yes . . . thank you, Massa Jesus! This place sure be dark and dreary without our Little Missy. Maybe now the sun finally gonna shine around here again.”

  I was home, and the longer I was, the more certain I became that some of the stories they told in those meetings up north were exaggerated. I felt thoroughly ashamed that I’d ever entertained such an outrageous idea about my father and Tessie. Josiah had been sold to Hilltop around the time Grady had been born—perhaps as a punishment for his behavior with Tessie. As for the color of Grady’s skin, I must have remembered wrong. He hadn’t been any lighter than Tessie, had he? Besides, she’d borne no other children since Josiah had been sold.

  But even if some of the abolitionists had exaggerated, I still knew that slavery was very wrong. I had brought a large box of anti-slavery pamphlets back to Richmond with me, convinced that if I simply talked to people, simply explained to them what I’d learned from the Anti-Slavery Society up north, many people would listen to reason.

  On a cold November day, I headed down to the mercantile district to do some shopping, carrying a bundle of tracts in my bag with the intention of dropping them off in the stores I visited along Main Street. I was about to step into the milliner’s shop when I heard a loud shout and looked up to see a dark-haired man in his mid-twenties running toward me, chasing a little Negro boy. They were just a few yards away from me when the stranger finally caught the child by the arm. The boy kicked and flailed desperately as he struggled to free himself, but he was ragged and thin, no more than eight years old, and a pitiful match for the welldressed, well-built man who had him in his grip.

  Without a second thought, I swung my bag at the man’s head as hard as I could. “Stop that! Let go of him!”

  The man was more than a foot taller than me, so I missed his head and struck the back of his shoulder instead. He released the boy, more from surprise than from the force of the blow, and the child raced away. Breathless and angry, the man whirled around to face me, and I found myself looking into the bluest eyes I’d ever seen—wide and clear and as cold as mountain ice. He blinked in surprise when he saw who had struck him, and I noticed the thick, dark lashes that fringed his eyes.

  “Listen now,” he said when he’d recovered from his surprise. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “How dare you treat a child that way? You have no right to use force against a defenseless boy just because he’s a Negro!”

  “That boy is a thief. I caught him stealing fruit from that vendor over there, but now he’s gotten away, thanks to you.” The man’s dark brown hair had become tousled during the struggle, and he raked it from his high forehead with an angry thrust of his hand. His hair was thick and fashionably long, covering the tops of his ears. A curving mustache and trim beard hid his chin.

  His anger unnerved me. I didn’t know what had ever possessed me to interfere in this affair, but I was suddenly very sorry that I had. “Y-your slave wouldn’t be forced to steal . . . if . . . if you treated him fairly,” I stammered.

  “He is not my slave.”

  A gust of wind suddenly blew, and I realized that some of my tracts had spilled out when I’d swung my bag. They were starting to blow away.

  “Oh no!” I scrambled to retrieve them, but running and bending were awkward in my billowing hoop skirt.

  “Allow me,” he said. The angry expression smoothed from his face as he remembered his manners. He crouched on the sidewalk and began gathering my papers. But as he stood, straightening the pamphlets into a pile, he read what they were. His anger returned in an instant. “What sort of trash is this?” he demanded.

  His startling eyes pinned me, and my heart began to race. I wanted to run, but I also wanted to stand up for what I believed. “Y-you might benefit from reading one of them, sir. They clearly explain that slavery is a sin, and that it is abhorrent to God. It is impossible for a Christian to defend it.”

  “Listen now. You’re breaking the law. Don’t you know you could be arrested for distributing this propaganda?” I could see that he was growing angrier by the minute. I was afraid of him, but my own rising anger fueled my courage.

  “No, I’m quite certain that I still have the right to freedom of speech here in America. And freedom of the press.”

  “Each state has the right to enact its own laws,” he said coldly, “and in the state of Virginia, it is a felony to distribute abolitionist material.”

  I had no idea if he was telling the truth. My heart raced faster. “First you try to arrest a poor, starving child, and now you’re threatening to arrest me? Am I to believe that you’re a policeman, sir? Or do you make it your habit to run around Richmond taking the law into your own hands?”

  “It’s the duty of all law-abiding citizens to stop people who are breaking the law. I was merely trying to help the grocer recover his goods and to help you avoid arrest—not to mention help retrieve your disgusting pamphlets. It seems I’ve had nothing but abuse from you in return for my efforts.”

  “Well, it’s your fault the pamphlets fell out in the first place.”

  “Oh, I see. Is it also my fault that my shoulder was in the way when you decided to swing your bag at my head?” He shoved the tracts into my hands, then dusted off his own as if they’d become contaminated. “I wash my hands of you. If you’re arrested for distributing contraband, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.”

  “I have not distributed a single one of these!”

  His brows lifted in surprise. It made his eyes appear wider still. “Excuse me, but most people don’t need a dozen copies of the same tract for their own reading purposes.”

  “I don’t see how it’s any of your business what I do with them.”

  He folded his arms across his chest. I hated it that his height enabled him to look down on me. “Your accent tells me you’re from Virginia,” he said, “but your actions speak otherwise. Listen now. If you’re visiting our fair city, I only wish to warn you, as a gentleman, that folks in Richmond don’t take kindly to such interference with our Negroes. Nor do we appreciate people spreading abolitionist propaganda. Good day.
”

  He strode away so quickly that I would have had to either shout or run after him in order to have the last word. I began walking back to where Eli waited with the carriage. The encounter had left me too angry and shaken to continue with my shopping. Had the boy really been a thief? And was it really against the law to distribute anti-slavery pamphlets?

  Eli looked surprised to see me back so soon. He hurried to help me into the carriage. “Back already? Shopping all done? Hey, now . . . what’s wrong, Missy Caroline?” I was nearly nineteen years old, but I had a ridiculous urge to sit on Eli’s lap and cry.

  “Take me home, please.”

  “Sure thing, Missy. Right away.”

  He maneuvered the carriage through the crowded streets and up the hill toward home. By the time the steeple of St. John’s church came into view, I was beginning to calm down, but I still longed to talk to Eli like I used to do when I was a little girl, telling him all my troubles, listening to his gentle wisdom. When he drew the carriage to a halt beside the gate and helped me down, I hesitated, unsure of how to begin. Eli made it easy for me.

  “Now, Missy Caroline . . . anything you want to tell me, you know I listen.”

  “Can . . . can we go inside the carriage house and talk?” A cold wind was blowing up from the river, and the air had turned chilly.

  “Sure thing, Missy. I be going in there to unhitch these horses anyway.” He opened the double doors for me, and I watched from inside as he climbed up into the driver’s seat and drove the carriage in behind me. I was a little afraid of the horses and kept a respectful distance, but Eli treated them as if they were his children, gently patting their flanks, rubbing a favorite spot on their necks, talking quietly to them as he unhitched their harnesses. He would wait patiently for me to speak my mind. And I knew he would listen carefully to everything I said.

  “When I lived up north,” I began, “I met a group of people who are working hard to end slavery. One of the reasons I wanted to come home was so that I could work to abolish slavery down here.” I waved the pile of windblown pamphlets that I still clutched in my hand. “See these? They explain what the Anti-Slavery Society believes. They spell it out so clearly. If I could just get people to read them and see the truth, I know they would change their minds.”

  Eli examined a spot on one of the horses’ necks where the harness had rubbed. “That what you try and do today?” he finally asked. “Change folks’ minds?”

  “Yes . . . but I only talked to one person. And he threatened to throw me in jail.” I exhaled angrily at the memory. “I don’t know what I did wrong . . . or what to do differently next time . . . or how I should go about this. I need your advice, Eli.”

  He had removed one of the harnesses, and he held it in his huge hands, rubbing the smooth leather with his thumb as he studied me. “Seem like it be a mighty hard thing to change someone’s mind,” he said. “Most folks won’t change their mind unless they have a change of heart first.”

  “Well, then . . . how do I change their heart?”

  “You can’t, Missy Caroline,” he said gently. “Only Massa Jesus can change folks’ hearts.”

  “How does He do it?”

  Eli hung up the harness and led the horses into their stalls. When he was finished, he walked back to where I waited and leaned against the carriage wheel. “If a person’s heart is soft and tender toward God—like yours, Missy Caroline—I think his heart get changed pretty easy. But if folks’ hearts is cold and hard, like a stone—well, only fire can melt stone.”

  He looked down at his feet for a long moment, then lifted his head to face me again. “Seems like God gonna have to bring an awful lot of folks through the fire before we see their hearts changing any.”

  I wrote to my cousin Jonathan, who was in his last year of school at the College of William and Mary, and told him that I was home. The trip from Williamsburg wasn’t too far by steamer, so I invited him to visit me whenever he was in Richmond. Jonathan had always had a tender heart, and I hoped for an opportunity to preach abolition to him. He’d once told me that he owned Josiah, and I had the crazy idea that if he recognized the truth about slavery he would set Josiah free. At the very least, he might recognize Josiah’s marriage to Tessie and allow them to spend more time together. But I knew I’d have to take Eli’s advice and proceed slowly after my disastrous experience with the stranger I’d met on Main Street.

  Jonathan came to see me several times that fall, and I was happy to discover that my cousin hadn’t changed one bit. Of course he was older and taller, a grown man now, with a silky brown mustache. But he was still lanky and lively and every bit as mischievous as he’d been as a boy. He came to the house one afternoon when he was home for Christmas vacation, and he was so excited that he grabbed me by my waist, lifted me up in the air, and whirled me around saying, “Congratulate me, Caroline! I’m in love!”

  “Put me down,” I said, laughing, “and tell me who the lucky woman is.”

  “Her name is Sally St. John—Sally, Sally, Sally!” he sang. “The most beautiful name, the most wonderful girl I’ve ever met . . . after you, of course. When I’m with her I feel drunk with joy.”

  “I’m not sure you’re sober right now,” I laughed. “Come on.” I took his hand and led him into the parlor to sit down. “I’ll have Esther bring some coffee and maybe a bite to eat, and then you can tell me when the wedding is going to be.”

  He didn’t sit. His face was suddenly a mask of tragedy. “You don’t understand. I can’t eat. I’m too lovesick. And there is no wedding date. Every man in Richmond is in love with Sally. She lives in a tower in a castle on a distant hill, and I must embark on a quest to woo and win her.” He pulled an imaginary sword from its scabbard and waved it in the air. “But I must be victorious! I simply cannot live without her!”

  I grinned up at him. “You’re quite insane.”

  “I know. Insanely in love.” He suddenly dropped to one knee in front of the sofa and took my hand in both of his. “Dear Caroline, I’ve come to ask for a favor. I need your help on this valiant quest.”

  “Get up, you crazy fool.”

  “Not until you promise to help me. Sally has invited me and a dozen other fellows to her Christmas party next week. Please, please, I beg you to come with me.”

  “Wait a minute. If you’re in love with Sally, why are you inviting me to her party?”

  “Because you’re beautiful, Carrie. If I arrive with you on my arm it’ll make Sally insanely jealous. In fact, every man there will be jealous. One look at you, and the other men will toss Sally aside like yesterday’s newspaper. I’ll have her all to myself, don’t you see? She loves the thrill of conquering men’s hearts. And she always wants what she can’t have. If I bring you to the party, I’ll win her heart and destroy the competition in one simple stroke.”

  “Get up,” I repeated, pulling him onto the sofa beside me. “Your plan will never work.”

  “It will! I know it will! Please say you’ll help me. I’ll do anything you want in return.”

  “Anything?” If I had Jonathan in my debt, maybe I could bargain with him on Tessie and Josiah’s behalf. I dreaded the thought of socializing with strangers at a Christmas party, but I made up my mind to do it for Tessie’s sake. “All right,” I said. “I’ll help you on one condition. I’m going to give you a booklet, and you have to promise me that you’ll read it. And that you’ll really think about what it says and not simply get angry and toss it aside.”

  “Sure, I’ll do anything.” I gave him one of my tracts and he stuffed it into his coat pocket without even glancing at it. Then Jonathan fairly raced to the door, obviously eager to leave before I changed my mind.

  “I’ll pick you up for Sally’s party at eight o’clock on Saturday,” he called. Then he left again as if carried away by a whirlwind.

  On the evening of Sally St. John’s party, I put several pamphlets in my reticule before leaving home, planning to give one to every gentleman who asked to
dance with me. If I didn’t convert anyone, at least the tracts might scare away unwanted suitors.

  Sally’s ornate house in the fashionable Court End district was enormous, glittering with all the trappings of great wealth. As our carriage stopped beneath the porte cochere, a half-dozen liveried servants rushed out to assist us.

  “Are you sure you aren’t in over your head, Jonathan?” I asked.

  “She’s filthy rich, I know. Her family owns a couple of flour mills, and who knows what else. But I don’t care a thing about her money. Her father can keep all of it. I just want Sally.”

  “That’s very noble, but how will you ever afford to keep Sally in the style to which she’s accustomed? I mean, Hilltop is nice, but it’s nothing like this.”

  Jonathan wasn’t listening. He had spotted Sally, greeting her guests in the soaring entrance hall. Behind her, a sweeping staircase decked in candles and greenery seemed to float toward the second floor with nothing supporting it.

  “Isn’t she beautiful?” Jonathan sighed.

  She was. Sally St. John wore a magnificent gown of rosecolored silk that must have taken twenty yards of cloth. It dipped daringly low off her shoulders, revealing skin like white rose petals. Her hair was the color of honey, and her vivacious green eyes sparkled like the jewels around her neck. My face was probably just as pretty as Sally’s, but my shyness made me seem cold and withdrawn. Sally’s vibrant personality, her effortless warmth and bubbling charm, made her irresistibly beautiful.

  “Why, Jonathan Fletcher,” she exclaimed when she spotted him. “I’m so glad you could come!” He might have been the honored guest the entire party had been waiting for.

  “Merry Christmas, Sally.” Jonathan acted very cool as he gallantly kissed her hand. I saw no sign of the lovesick boy who’d come to me begging on one knee.

  “Who is this darling girl you’ve brought with you?” she asked as she sized me up. I didn’t see “darling” in her eyes. Sally had the alert look of a competitor at a sporting event, eyeing her opponent before dashing off for the prize. I was amazed to discover that Jonathan had been right; Sally was jealous of me. His plan just might work.