by Natasha Boyd
I pursed my lips in sympathy. “I’m so sorry.”
“Well.” He forced a smile. “She’ll be happy to have you visit with her—”
“Oh, I knew it was you!” Miss Bartlett’s cheerful voice just barely preceded her through the door. “I saw Essie, and my heart gave a little jig to think you were here!”
“Dear Miss Bartlett.” With effort, I pulled my mouth into a smile. “Yes, though I wish it was under better circumstances. I’m in town to rescue two men from jail.”
Her eyes widened. “Oh! Do tell me all!”
The stench of unwashed bodies and excrement at the jail under the courthouse wafted out to the street. I pulled a muslin to my nose and carefully stepped over the cobblestones and drains as Charles and I made our way to visit the bailiff.
A small beady-eyed gentleman, whose name I forgot two seconds after hearing it, confirmed he held a man by the name of Quash. We stood in a stone room with wooden shelving and numbered boxes along one wall.
“He mulatto?” the man asked, scratching his head and then picking a lice bug between his thumb and forefinger and flicking it toward the wall behind him.
“He is,” I responded and shuddered, feeling my own skin itch in response.
“Well, sir,” said Charles, “I do believe he may have been mistakenly apprehended. He and his companion, Ben, a darker skinned Negro, were traveling on plantation business up the Combahee to Mistress Lucas’ other plantation, Garden Hill.”
“There ain’t no Negro by the name of Ben. And all due respect, Mr. Pinckney, he was in the company of some men we’ve been searching for for quite some time. You may have sent him on plantation business, but that is not how he was spending his time.”
I opened my mouth to jump to Quash’s defense. Charles quickly shot me a look, and I stopped.
“If he’s lucky, and it turns out he ain’t the one what been rounding these fellas all up, he may get off with a whipping. But the leader? He’s gonna be hanged.”
I clenched my fists, my teeth tight, trying to stifle my gasp of horror. “I’ll be speaking in his defense,” I managed before Charles could stop me. “He is an honorable slave.”
The bailiff snorted.
I thought about what other name Ben might go by and got nothing. “And you’re sure there was no slave named Ben?”
“We ain’t got none by that name,” the man snapped, irritated.
Perhaps Quash hadn’t caught up with Ben yet. Equal parts relief he wasn’t imprisoned and dread that he was still out there somewhere washed through me. If Quash and Ben weren’t together, then Ben was very likely gone. Perhaps forever. I couldn’t think of that right now. I tried to keep my spinning mind blank.
“Can we see the prisoners?” Mr. Pinckney asked. “To be sure.”
“Can’t do that. But here’s the belongings what were found with them,” he said turning and hauling a wooden box from the lowest shelf and setting it on the wood counter with a thump. Inside was an assortment of flint stones, dried meat, rope, a small knife, and—I froze.
A small leather pouch sat innocuously to one side. It looked almost identical, but darker, to the one Ben wore around his neck. That was alarming in itself, but more so was the small cutting of yellow lutestring ribbon curled next to it. I slowly put my hand inside and touched it gingerly.
“That was inside the leather pouch, along with some stones and such. You recognize it?”
I swallowed. “Yes,” I said, remembering the coil of yellow ribbon Papa had sent us from Antigua before the King’s Birthday Ball. “I believe it belongs to me.” How did Ben have a piece of my hair ribbon?
“Stole it, did he? Well, we can add that to the charges.”
“No.” I startled. “No, it’s all right. I gave it to him.”
The bailiff frowned, and I felt Charles Pinckney shift uncomfortably next to me.
“Regardless, the pouch looks like it belongs to the man you say you do not have,” I said thickly. “Ben. Not Quash.”
“Well, the militia said they took it from your man Quash. He was half drowned and lying on the riverbank when they came across him. Tried to get away into the river when we raided the rebel encampment, but we hauled him out quick enough.”
“That makes no sense,” I said, confused about him being in a rebel encampment. “What did he tell the militia?”
“Concocted some story of a boat full of rice going down in the ‘Santilina’ and bein’ carried by the water.” The man shook his head. “They’ll tell you anything.”
My pulse pounded in my ears, the voices of the bailiff and Charles Pinckney growing tinny as my vision narrowed. “A … a boat went down?” Santilina? Our boat from Garden Hill always traveled through the St. Helena Sound. I swayed and felt Mr. Pinckney’s warm hand grasp my upper arm.
If it was our boat Quash spoke of, then it would have been carrying our last rice harvest.
“What is it, Eliza?” Mr. Pinckney urged. The crease between his eyebrows was as deep as I’d ever seen it. “What is the matter? Please. Can you tell me?”
I stared up into his concerned eyes, noted the small brown flecks within the gray blue I’d never noticed before, his smooth skin beneath the coarse afternoon stubble. The pipe smoke scent of him that calmed me even now when my heart felt like it had bled out and left a limp gelatinous skin flopping around inside me.
For a thankfully brief but inexplicable moment, I was seized with a jealous rage that men like Charles Pinckney weren’t asking for my hand. Saving me from having to be in situations like this alone, fighting for my existence like one of those hungry wild dogs on the Charles Town wharf. Perhaps even Mr. Pinckney himself as a husband I could have borne. Enjoyed even. Perhaps loved. He was so very, very dear to me.
And I wasn’t alone right now, was I? Charles Pinckney was here. Except he was already married. And men like him didn’t marry scrappy, ambitious little hoydens.
I turned away, shocked at the turn of my thoughts and clutched my head. Guilt flooded me that I could even think of Mr. Pinckney as my husband when his wife, my dear friend, lay ill at their home.
I was a fickle girl. A selfish, fickle girl.
“Do you not want to tell me?” Mr. Pinckney pressed.
“My mother was right; my father should have never left me in charge.” My words came out in a whisper. “I’ve lost it all.”
“Come,” said Mr. Pinckney gently. “Let’s get you home. We can come back here in the morning.”
“No! I mean, no. Please. Can you please ask again if we can see Quash? I must ask him what happened. He mentioned a boat. The future of our plantations depends on it.”
Mr. Pinckney stared at me with his warm eyes for a beat, and I wished for a clue to his thoughts. “Very well.”
Quash was brought into a small stonewalled cell we were waiting in, a man supporting each of his arms. He could barely stand under his own weight. His face was swollen. The whites of his eyes contained crimson pockets of blood. Like his veins had exploded into his eyeballs. His hands were behind him, presumably tied.
My breath left me in a rush.
Unconsciously, I stepped toward him, only for Charles to hold me back.
The two burly escorts dropped him in the vicinity of a bench.
“Careful!” I cried, but they walked out, stationing themselves outside the open door of the cell we’d been allowed to use to see their prisoner.
I tugged my arm free of Charles without much resistance and came slowly toward Quash, crouching in front of his lowered head. He was filthy. I doubted he’d been escorted to the privy since he could barely walk, so the smell of him was overwhelming.
“Quashy?” I said tenderly. “I came as soon as I heard. I’m so sorry.” My voice broke. “We’ll get you out of here, okay? Can you tell me what happened? Did you find Ben?”
I went on when there w
as no response. “Please, Quash. What about the boat, they said you told them of a boat going down?”
His head moved.
“Is that yes, Quash?”
“Yes.” He scratched out the word. His neck bore rope marks.
I swallowed my panic at that news, stuffing it down as best I could.
“Our boat? The boat from Garden Hill?” I managed.
He nodded.
Oh, Lord. I swayed, my crouched legs spasming. It couldn’t be. Oh my God.
Our rice was on that boat.
Everything was on that boat.
Quash wouldn’t have gotten on any other boat except ours, and only if he’d found Ben.
“So—so you found Ben?” I choked in a whisper. “And were headed back? Is he here? Is Ben here?”
Quash shook his head.
“Where is he?” My voice had taken on a high-pitched panicky breathlessness.
Quash shook his head again, his eyes closing.
“What does that mean, Quash? Did he get away? Was he captured too?”
Quash was still for a long moment. The distant clanking sounds of the jail and the wheezing of one of the guards a few feet away made the silence in our stone cell all the more deafening.
Then Quash looked up at me with those bloody, awful eyes and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Ben. He done gone. The storm. The water too strong. I tried. It took him from my hand.” Quash paused, his body beginning to tremble. “His soul … his soul done swim back to Africa.”
The concerned voice of Charles Pinckney, then the bailiff, vaguely registered, though I had no idea what words were uttered.
Quash’s dark, broken eyes swam before me.
My heart felt like it had melted in my chest, my body filled with a raging torrent of blood in the aftermath, drowning me from the inside. I closed my eyes and let the current pull me under.
Ben was dead?
Ben was dead.
“Well,” Miss Bartlett was saying. “Uncle will, of course, do what he can.”
I sat by the fireplace in one of their guest bedrooms, staring despondently into the dancing flames, a shawl over my knees.
“But you will have to go and speak on his behalf. It does all look rather suspicious. Being found with an acquaintance of the notorious Jemmy. He was the Stono ringleader you know? He was a slave at Fenwick Hall. That’s just across Wappoo Creek from you, isn’t it?”
I could almost imagine demon faces forming and melting one after the other in the flickering flames.
“Oh, and a letter came from your mother inquiring after your well-being.” Miss Bartlett didn’t seem at all put off that I wasn’t answering her.
Finally, I looked up at her earnest face and then around the handsomely appointed room with its perfectly needlepointed and embroidered damasks, silks, and tapestries. Essie pushed the door open with her hip, entering the room holding a tray of tea and benne wafers. The wafers, she’d informed me, were Mr. and Mrs. Pinckney’s favorite teatime accoutrement, made in the traditional West African way and baked crisp.
“My aunt will be down shortly to check on you,” Miss Bartlett said as she poured some warm oolong tea into delicate china cups with gold leafing on the rims.
Mrs. Pinckney was coming to check on me? I should be the one checking on her. She was the one who had been so ill recently. But I? I must have had a sickness of the mind, for I could not muster the energy required to move a muscle. Neither for speaking nor moving. At night, I lay in the middle of a too-large and too-soft bed and cried. Water simply flowed from my eyes in an endless torrent. When I awoke, I could barely see for my swollen lids. The salt of endless tears must have ravaged my eyeballs, such that even air stung them mercilessly. And so I kept them mostly closed.
Charles visited me twice. The second time, we were alone, and he took my hand. “Was he—” he started, then stopped himself with a frown. “Was he—” he tried again. “Did you—” He blew out a breath and released my hand.
I grabbed his hand back, knowing he needed a response. Needing his comfort. Now more than ever. But I couldn’t answer him. Eventually I let him go with no answer.
Essie came to me during the night, when sleep finally claimed me only to bring dreams. Dreams not just of Ben drowning but my whole family on a primitive raft made of willow sticks lashed together. Polly, Mama, Father, George, and little Tommy even. My father’s face was thunderous. Mama screeched at me.
Essie brushed my damp hair from my temples. “There, chil’,” she cooed. “You jus’ dreamin’.”
“But it’s real, Essie,” I managed once in the deep dark well of night. “Ben is gone. He’s gone, Essie. Forever. It’s all my fault. You don’t understand. I—I—”
“Shush now.” She stopped my words before they could be uttered. And I’d wake in the morning and Essie would be gone.
I was alone with the wreckage of all my ambitious choices. The utter wasting of a man’s life and talent. I should have bought him immediately so I could set him free. Why hadn’t I? Why had I let Cromwell hang freedom over his head, putting him in that awful position? Betray me or never be free?
I tortured myself with what-ifs.
If he hadn’t needed to run for the chance of freedom. If I hadn’t been so ambitious. If I hadn’t left for the ball. If I’d had the means to buy his freedom early on. Would he have stayed and helped me, or would he have taken his freedom and left me to figure out indigo on my own? If I’d had the chance to buy him his freedom, would I have done it? Or would my selfish need for success have made me keep control of him by any means possible, by keeping him enslaved?
I knew the answer deep in the most horrible parts of myself.
He’d contained more knowledge and skill, and more purpose, than almost any white man I’d known. And it was lost. All lost. The loss of all that incredible knowledge drifting to the bottom of the ocean was a tragedy all on its own.
He’d saved my life once. And given the chance, I hadn’t saved his. I had stalled, questioned, and worried. And every moment I’d wasted had sealed his fate.
Maybe Quash was right. Perhaps Ben’s soul would make it back to Africa. Maybe he’d be reunited with his grandmother once again. If Africa was his heaven, then that’s where he belonged. He was finally free. How could I even think of wishing him back?
Yet each morning I wished his death was but a dream.
My selfishness knew no bounds.
How I made it to the courthouse the following week, I cannot say. The days seemed to be carried out in a fog of sorts.
I sat in front of the judges and told them about Quash’s service to our family, his trustworthiness, and then I told them the frightening story of the morning of September 9, 1739, when I had been just sixteen years old.
“On plantations all around me …” My voice trembled, echoing in the too-large room. Charles smiled encouragingly at me. “While many attended church in St. Andrew’s Parish,” I went on, “many of those who stayed behind that Sunday were murdered, as you know, their plantations burned to the ground.” I stopped and made the sign of the cross as I relived the fear of that morning and out of respect for those whose lives were ended. “Those slaves came by boat along our narrow creek. Headed for the Stono River. I saw them with my own eyes. They made calls like the sounds of animals. Unless I had seen them I would have thought strange and unusual beasts to be about. They beat drums and carried with them a spirit of threat and malevolence.”
I looked around the wood-paneled courtroom. To Quash and two black men I did not recognize who glowered at me with open hostility.
The small gathering of folk in the rows behind me were hanging on my words with rapt attention when I glanced at them. “Something turned them away,” I went on. “Or should I say, someone. Only after the boat and its occupants finally moved on without even attempting to dock at our land
did Quash emerge from the brush where I had not seen him, and he went to wipe away some kind of sign or warning he had posted upon the dock.” I paused and heard a few quick inhales of breath behind me. “He had quite obviously made it clear that Wappoo slaves were not joining the rebellion, and that their landowners were to be left unharmed.”
One of the judges, a red-cheeked man with white bushy eyebrows that matched the shoulder-length white wig he wore, glared at me over a thick, round monocle. “As dramatic a story as that is, Miss Lucas, it doesn’t tell us he didn’t later elect to be involved in a further uprising. Do you have anything else to add?”
“May I interject, Your Honor?” Charles spoke up. “As a character witness?”
“For Miss Lucas? That won’t be necessary. I know her father, and I am quite sure she isn’t lying to the courts. However, her story doesn’t have much to do with today’s proceedings.”
“I understand. I was offering to be a character witness for the slave Quash.” There was an audible intake of breath around us. Charles, undeterred, went on, “He often drives the Lucas family to town, and therefore I have had occasion to see him and converse with him in various settings. I believe him to be honorable and he was indeed carrying out an order to retrieve a runaway slave when he was apprehended.”
“Was he successful?”
Something sharp and stinging filled my ears, nose, and throat. But I forced words out before Mr. Pinckney could go on. “Yes, Your Honor.” I blinked rapidly. “He was successful and was returning on one of our boats from Garden Hill up on the Combahee River. We have suffered a terrible loss as the boat went down in the St. Helena Sound. And unfortunately the Negro slave who was running away …” A hot tear escaped down my cheek, and I cursed my inability to keep myself together. “Drowned.” I finished on a whisper.
Deciding to avoid further mention of Ben, I went on. “Quash almost drowned and in the process must have lost the papers I’d given him permitting his travel. It was likely an act of God that saved him by washing him to shore. And I must thank the militia men for finding him so he could be returned to us.”