The ground crunched under his feet—mostly charcoal and shells. And the top sheet from a package of Polaroid film lay there. Somebody had taken a picture, somebody careless.
He tried to stand and banged his head on the floorboards. Charcoal… floorboards.
He pointed the light above him and saw strange marks, like letters, scratched into the wood. Beside them was a drawing that looked like a drinking cup. And words, very faint, almost gone: “God Bless the good Bigelows, God damn the bad and God bless our baby.”
“My sentiments exactly,” said Jimmy.
“ ‘Nance, Iron Axe, and charcoal on the floorboards.’ That’s it, whatever it means.”
Jimmy dropped into the hole beside him. “That cup looks like the Big Dipper—the Drinkin’ Gourd. That’s what runaway slaves called it. Follow the lip of the Drinking Gourd to the North Star and you’ll be free.”
CHAPTER 28
October 1850
Follow the Drinkin’ Gourd
September 18 had been a black day. Of that Nancy Drake Rains had no doubt. President Fillmore had signed the Fugitive Slave Law, thus violating a higher law that no politician could compromise.
Nancy Drake Rains: Cape Cod aristocracy of the first salt. Her husband’s memorial stone stood on a plot in the Dennis cemetery, though his body lay at the bottom of a distant sea. Her father descended from James Drake, who in 1660 had bought up a thousand acres of Monomoyick land in what was to become Chatham, for a small boat and a greatcoat. Her maternal grandfather, as far as she knew, had been the famous Eldredge Dickerson. And her grandmother’s name, Hannah Bigelow Dickerson, echoed back to the Mayflower itself.
There could be no finer pedigree for a young widow of thirty-six with two growing sons, none finer in a young nation searching for a sense of its own past, a nation that had come to define 1620 as the moment of its spiritual conception. The First Comers had always been revered in the Old Colony, but as the nineteenth century unfolded, they had grown in stature across America.
Nancy remembered the bicentenary of the Pilgrim landing and Daniel Webster, then a young man of mighty voice, proclaiming, “Who would wish that his country’s existence had otherwise begun?… Who would wish for other… ornaments of her genealogy, than to be able to say, that her first existence was with intelligence; her first breath the inspirations of liberty; her first principle the truth of divine religion?”
On that day, Webster turned a bedraggled band of religious rebels and fortune seekers into the ancestors of the American ideal, and he made Plymouth Rock the touchstone of American myth. That was good, thought Nancy later, because a nation built upon a lie needed its myths to remember its ideals.
After Webster had praised the Pilgrims, he unleashed his fury upon slavery. “I hear the sound of the hammer, I see the smoke of the furnace where the manacles and fetters are forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those, who by stealth and at midnight, labor in this work of hell, foul and dark.”
Not all of America had heard the hammer or seen the smoke, however, because the wind of commerce blew a hurricane that sometimes carried conscience before it. Despite the ports into which commerce had blown her vessels and the prosperity they had brought back, the Cape where Nancy grew up had remained a close-bred place. On occasion, a pair like the Doone brothers blossomed forth. But in the main, the twining of the old names had produced a forest of families, hard-headed and Protestant to the core, whose roots held the land in place where the trees were gone. And in such earth, conscience sometimes thrived.
Many Cape shipmasters, among them Nancy’s late husband, had risked lives and livelihoods to smuggle living cargo from the slave states to ports on the south side of the Cape. No manifest mentioned this cargo, because it was always hidden in steerage until a vessel was well out to sea. And no customs officer taxed it because, in Massachusetts, no price could be put upon human life.
Of course, not all Cape Codders believed that slavery was their concern, any more than their use of herring for fertilizer should be the concern of the Georgia planter. Many of the churches of the Cape—indeed, of the nation—refused to condemn a practice that brought Negroes to Christ, no matter the fashion. Some even considered the theft of a Negro a greater crime than his enslavement.
But until the Compromise of 1850, slaves were free when they reached ports like Hyannis or Harwich. They could take themselves to Mashpee and mingle with the Indians there. Or they could cross to a bay-shore town like Barnstable and continue their journey aboard a north-coasting schooner.
But, to avert civil war, Daniel Webster had acceded to Henry Clay’s compromise. California would join the Union as a free state, the territories of New Mexico and Utah would decide the issue on their own, and the Fugitive Slave Law would be enacted, so that any runaway in any state could be apprehended and remanded.
In Boston, three thousand Whig merchants signed pledges of support for the compromise. At the same time, abolitionists created a Committee of Vigilance to watch the docks for southern slave catchers. The pivotal moment had come for men and women of conscience, among whose number Nancy counted herself and her grandmother, founder of the Barnstable Anti-Slavery Society.
“Your Dennis Methodists have been a disappointment.” Hannah Bigelow Dickerson sat by the window in her upstairs sitting room. She was now eighty-seven and had outlived her daughter and any affectation but a stiff spine. She wore a simple brown dress, a yellow shawl, and a net on her white hair. People were still struck, however, by the stern brown eyes and the brows which had remained dark, even into old age.
Nancy had her grandmother’s eyes but hair as black as mussel shell and skin translucent white, untouched by the sun that leathered most Cape wives. She did not deny that she had been more pampered than most, but now that she had taken up the task of her late husband, she would not falter.
She fluffed a pillow and leaned back on the new settee. “The congregation denied a slave permission to speak from the pulpit, so one parishioner marched in and tore his pew right out of the floor.”
Hannah laughed. “I hear that you’ve decided to leave as well and become a Come-Outer.”
“A Come-Outer of the new style.”
“No fence-walking and singsong for you, I hope.” Hannah looked into the road, where Nancy’s two sons played at kick-the-can. “It wouldn’t do them any good.”
“A Come-Outer of conscience.”
The first Come-Outers had followed the call of evangelists who urged them to come out of their hidebound churches and express their faith in every aspect of their lives. The result seemed more affliction than religion. When the spirit was upon them, Come-Outers spoke in strange voices, walked fences, swung from trees, and sang their talk, like characters from Gilbert and Sullivan.
When others came out of their churches because they disagreed over slavery, they were called Come-Outers as well. In the eyes of the orthodox, the abolitionist Come-Outer and the religious lunatic merely pulled at different oars in the same boat.
“Whatever we call ourselves,” said Hannah, “we must move runaways to Canada quickly. The new law may prove toothless. But given our notoriety, Massachusetts may be crawling with federal marshals and southern agents already.”
“We’ll treat them the way we treated the British when you were a girl.”
“ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ ” Hannah stared out her window, lost in memory. Then she noticed a man striding up the road. “My word, an answer to our prayers.”
Captain Jonathan Walker was about fifty, an altogether unremarkable specimen in frock coat and stovepipe hat. But like others who looked unremarkable on land, this man and his stovepipe stood out like boldness itself on the stern of a Boston ship.
In 1844, he had attempted to smuggle seven runaways aboard his ship. For his efforts, he spent eleven months in the jungle dampness of a Florida prison and had the letters “SS,” slave stealer, branded into his palm. A pariah in the South, he
needed only raise his right hand to become a hero in the North. John Greenleaf Whittier even wrote “The Branded Hand,” making Walker one of the few Cape Codders ever to appear in a poem longer than five lines, without the word “Nantucket” in the rhyme scheme.
He sat on the straight-backed chair beside Hannah’s knitting frame and balanced his hat on his knees.
“To what do we owe the honor of your visit,” asked Hannah over the hat.
“Ladies, I’ve circled the world three times, and the trip from Harwich to the Barnstable Courthouse is the thirstiest journey I know.”
“Tea is all we can offer.” Hannah poured a cup.
“A fine drink.” He balanced the cup on top of the hat, as though it were a table that traveled with him wherever he went. “But after I do my business, I always take somethin’ stronger at Crocker’s Tavern, which this afternoon put me in the presence of Mr. Heman Bigelow.”
“My great-nephew,” said Hannah, “one of my brother Elkanah’s grandchildren.”
“A lawyer, is he?”
“A banker and businessman.”
“He talked like a lawyer, puffin’ and opinionatin’ that it was ’bout time all this slave runnin’ was put stop to. So one of the locals—didn’t catch his name—said he heard that Heman’s own relatives was runnin’ slaves.”
“Our fame spreads.”
“And may sink you, if Heman keeps talkin’. He said if he thought there was slaves in his aunt Hannah’s house, he’d send the sheriff to arrest ’em and think nothin’ about it.”
At that, there was a thump loud enough to startle Captain Walker’s stovepipe right off his knee. Then something rolled across the attic floor above them.
The captain looked up at the ceiling. “It sounds like somebody’s been pressing his ear to a glass on the floor, listenin’ to everythin’ we say.”
“Not a glass,” said Hannah. “A jelly jar.”
She led them into a closet and, with a broom handle, rapped twice on the ceiling, which then rose. But there was neither sound nor movement in the little space above.
“Jacob,” said Hannah gently, “come down, Jacob… You and Dorothea both.”
After a moment a ladder was lowered, and the pink soles of a black man’s feet appeared in a shaft of light. The black man did not descend tentatively. Once he had decided to come, he dropped like a big cat, fixed Nancy and Captain Walker with a furious glare, and puffed his chest in threat.
Then the reason for his ferocity appeared. A young woman hung down her feet, a young woman with child, nearing her time. In fact, she was too far along to back down the ladder properly, so she descended as if on a narrow staircase, an African princess in a blue gingham dress, her hand placed for support upon the shoulder of her devoted retainer.
She had coffee-colored skin and hazel eyes that showed a mother’s fear, not for herself but for her unborn child. It was a fear that every woman who had carried a child understood, just as Jacob’s protectiveness was known to every father.
They had lived on a Virginia plantation owned by a gambling drunkard. Jacob, the plantation carpenter, and Dorothea, a seamstress, had paid no mind to their master’s ways until he began to sell off what he called prime breeders to pay his gambling debts. One night, as they lay together, feeling the baby kick in her belly and fearing a sale that might tear them apart, they resolved to go to a place where they would be treated like human beings rather than breeders.
Making the trek to Norfolk, hiding in the cellar of a sympathetic Quaker, being smuggled onto the Yankee ship at midnight—their safe passage through these they had seen as evidence of God’s guiding hand. When the Yankee schooner leaned into the wind, they thought their ordeal had ended. But somewhere between Chesapeake Bay and Cape Cod, old white men had made a new law, and the northward journey stretched now even farther, like a trip the wrong way down a captain’s glass.
“We ain’t a-goin’ back, Miz Hannah,” said Jacob. “If this feller comin’ to—”
Walker held up his hand, causing Jacob to fall silent. The Negro could not read, but he had seen the symbol branded into other white men, and he knew its meaning.
“We’d best get them on their way to Canada right now,” said Hannah, “what with the tavern talk.”
“Canada’s a fair distance,” said Walker. “Why not Boston instead? There’s men on the Boston Vigilance Committee who can handle a schooner.”
“We cannot be certain what’s happening in Boston or how intent the federal forces have become.”
“I wouldn’t move them to Thatcher’s house or Howe’s,” offered Nancy. “Those houses are watched, and there’s some Cape Codders who’d gladly turn in a runaway for five dollars.”
Hannah went to the window, looked out on the plot where once the liberty pole had stood. “Indeed.”
“I know fishermen who’ll make the run to Nova Scotia”—Walker rubbed his palm and studied the Negroes—“but it might take a day to track ’em down.”
“I fear we may not have days,” said Hannah calmly, “in that Heman Bigelow is coming up the walk this very moment, with Sheriff Whittaker in tow.”
Jacob grabbed his wife. “We ain’t a-goin’ back.”
“Just go back to the attic,” answered Hannah.
ii.
At the front door, Heman Bigelow doffed his beaver hat. He always said that prosperous men wore prosperous hats, and at the bottom of this dispute was the matter of prosperity. Like most who supported the Compromise, he believed that anything was better for the country, and for trade, than civil war. And no part of the country slept more soundly upon the bed of trade than Cape Cod.
“What a surprise,” said Hannah upon his arrival, with little enough emotion that he could not tell what kind of surprise. Then she led Heman and the sheriff into the downstairs sitting room, where Nancy awaited. Captain Walker, however, had wisely hidden himself in the pantry.
Heman was thirty-two, in height and hard edges most surely a Bigelow. But somewhere along the line, his maternal ancestry—Snows and Linnels of old Cape stock—had bestowed upon him a pair of bespectacled eyes and a bald pate that seemed to shine with irony itself, in that he resembled no one so much as Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison.
While his brothers went to sea or to Boston, Heman had chosen to remain on Cape Cod and plow the fields of local investment. Fisheries, saltworks, cranberry farms, tanneries, the Sandwich glassworks, boatyards, and above all, the merchant marine had brought prosperity to Barnstable County. The first cracks in the prosperous facade had begun to show when saltworks met competition from the western mines. But prosperous men in prosperous hats would find ways to keep prosperity flowing, provided there was no war.
Nancy considered Heman an ass who wore his status as pompously as his hat. But through the whole of his visit, she felt as if she were about to have the baby, rather than the poor colored woman trembling in the attic.
“Sheriff Whittaker and I been talkin’ about the Underground Railroad. He’s heard that some members of our family are engaged in it, and”—Heman smiled as though he were about to grant a loan—“I just want to assure him of the otherwise.”
“Then assure him.” Hannah smiled sweetly.
Nancy looked straight at the sheriff. “I pity you, Emulous Whittaker. This Fugitive Slave Law may make you busier than a one-armed mackerel jigger.”
“A jigger for niggers.” Emulous Whittaker laughed, a disagreeable sound from a scrawny little body.
“You are also a plain-speakin’ man,” said Hannah dryly.
“On the lookout, upholdin’ the Constitution.”
“ ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’ ” said Hannah.
Heman laughed, “Very good… a quote from the Preamble, is it not?”
“A pleasure to meet learned folks,” said the sheriff.
“Remember, ladies, tell your abolitionist friends that running an underground railroad is now a crime, even in the state of Massachusetts.” Heman put on his h
at.
After they left, Hannah went to her desk, took out pen and paper, and scrawled a note. “We’re going to smuggle these people out right under Heman’s prosperous nose.”
“On a Bigelow boat?” Captain Walker now appeared from the pantry.
“No. Young Heman, by virtue of inheritance, owns half of Jack’s Island. There are Hilyards on the other half.”
“Hilyards?” Nancy laughed. “My husband never had a good thing to say about a Hilyard in his life, especially that drunkard Isaac.”
“If you want to run the railroad, you’re about to meet Hilyards in the flesh.” Hannah sealed the envelope and shoved it into her granddaughter’s hand. “Get goin’.”
“When?”
“Now, dear, now.”
Nancy had not expected this moment to arrive so quickly. She had hoped that she would have time to consider her tactics, choose her cohorts, select a wardrobe.
“Hannah, are you sayin’ that crazy old Come-Outer Will Hilyard’s a conductor?” asked Walker, still rooted to his spot in the middle of the rug. “Or any of his durn-fool spawn?”
“No, but Sam Hilyard has a fine sloop.”
“Sam? He’s even crazier than his brother… and older.”
“He is exactly my age.” Hannah raised her chin haughtily, then turned her gaze to Nancy. “Will can take you to Sam. Give Sam the letter, and he’ll run you north.”
iii.
Just after dark, Captain Walker’s carriage left Hannah’s barn and pointed east on the County Road. As it happened, Emulous Whittaker and Heman Bigelow were just then coming out of Crocker’s, and Whittaker gave a wave. Walker’s driver, a retired seaman named Quintal, nodded politely, and the man seated in the carriage gave a wave of his own.
“They recognized your carriage.” Nancy hunkered down in the shadows beside Captain Walker.
“Nonsense,” he whispered. “There are dozens of carriages on Cape Cod. And this is not the only one that’s closed up and battened down against the weather.”
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