Elm Creek Quilts [04] The Runaway Quilt

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  When he was still a child, Anneke pleaded with me to swear never to tell her son—for that is how she thought of him, no less her child than if she had truly borne him—about Joanna, about himself. I complied, but not without misgivings. Indeed, all my life I have wondered if in protecting my nephew from prejudice and malice we did not inadvertently perpetuate those very evils. Perhaps we should have announced the truth from the rooftops and dared anyone to treat him differently than any other Bergstrom—but we loved him, and may God forgive us if it was wrong, but we put his safety before our principles. In our defense, if we had not done so, it would not have brought Joanna back to us.

  But since I did so swear, I never told my nephew the truth, nor will I ever tell him. Since I cannot tell him, I instead tell you, not only because this is part of your legacy, your rightful inheritance, but also because I could not bear to have Joanna forgotten.

  Anneke has been gone these past fifteen years, and yet I think I hear her reproach me for divulging our family secrets so long and so carefully hidden. Perhaps she is correct, and whoever reads these words will despise me for what I have done. That is a risk I shall willingly take, for I do not believe, as Anneke did, that this truth will destroy us. It is the missing chapter of our family history that must be restored if we are to be whole, and if we are to truly know ourselves. Guard this, your legacy, closely, and treasure it in the quiet of your own heart.

  I offer these words in memory of Joanna, whom I loved, and whom I pray found in the Kingdom of Heaven the peace, freedom, and joy she was denied in this world.

  Elm Creek Manor, Pennsylvania

  November 28, 1895

  Sylvia closed the book and brushed the tears from her eyes.

  Andrew had held her left hand in both of his as she read the last pages of the memoir aloud. Now he squeezed it and brought it to his lips. The compassion in his eyes threatened to bring forth more tears.

  Sylvia cleared her throat and straightened in her chair, composing herself. “Well, I don’t know quite what to think.” And then her voice failed her, because her emotions refused to be translated into words. Her heart ached for Joanna, who had lost both her child and her dream of freedom. She was sickened and shamed that Anneke had betrayed her own family, and in so doing had ruined the lives and happiness of those dearest to her. But most of all, she was stunned. She felt as if the foundation of her universe had caved in upon itself.

  “My family,” said Sylvia, slowly, “was not what I believed it to be.”

  This time she did not mean merely that reality had failed to live up to the family legends.

  “You see . . .” She sat lost in thought for a long moment. “I know David was my grandfather. And my mother’s Bible indicates he had a twin brother.”

  Andrew nodded, waiting for her to continue.

  “But Gerda does not say whether Anneke bore David or Stephen.”

  Andrew’s voice was quiet. “I noticed.”

  “In fact, she quite deliberately avoids saying whose child was whose.” Suddenly Sylvia remembered that odd crossed-out line earlier in the memoir, the one she and Sarah had tried in vain to decipher. They had supposed that Gerda had written the name of Joanna’s child there, and now she understood why Gerda might have wished to blot it out. It was not an error, but a purposeful obscuring of the truth.

  Sylvia’s mind reeled. She felt as if she were swirling down a drain, faster and faster, moments away from tumbling from her safe, certain world into an ocean of unfathomable uncertainty. “Why?” she said, her voice shaking. “Why confess so much, yet hold back that last detail?”

  “Maybe she was trying to protect you—you, or whoever found her book.”

  “Protect me?”

  “She didn’t know you. She didn’t know how strong you are. It’s quite a blow, finding out you’ve been lied to all your life.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that.” Sylvia felt the first faint stirrings of anger. “Then why write at all? Merely to unburden herself?”

  Andrew shrugged, silent.

  “She did not trust me,” said Sylvia, bitter. “She did not trust me with the whole truth, so she gave me only enough to make me doubt everything I ever believed about myself, only enough to throw my entire identity into question.” Even as she spoke, she felt rents appearing in the fabric of her history.

  Andrew’s hand was warm and strong around hers. “Your family isn’t your entire identity. You’re still Sylvia Bergstrom—a strong, capable woman. A quilter, a teacher, a friend, and the woman I love. What you learned from that book doesn’t change any of that.”

  “But it changes nearly everything else.” All her life Sylvia had prided herself on being descended from Hans and Anneke Bergstrom—courageous pioneers, valiant Abolitionists, founders of a family and a fortune. She had long since come to terms with Gerda’s revelations that her ancestors were not the heroes she had believed them to be, but now her ancestors might not even be her ancestors.

  Sylvia corrected herself. Her parents were still her parents; their parents were still her grandparents. It was the link to Hans and Anneke that was in question, nothing more. But that was so much.

  “Would it be so bad to be Joanna’s great-granddaughter?” asked Andrew gently.

  “No.” Sylvia had responded automatically, but then she forced herself to consider the question more thoroughly. Gradually, within the dizzying mix of emotions flooding her, she recognized wonder, intrigue, and awe. “I would be proud to be that brave woman’s descendant.” Then, in a painful flash of insight, she realized who else she would be related to, if Joanna were her great-grandmother.

  “I had not wanted to believe we had slave owners in the family.” She paused, her throat constricted with emotion. “And now I discover I might be the great-granddaughter of a monster who not only owned slaves but raped and tortured them as well.”

  “Don’t think about him,” urged Andrew. “Joanna didn’t when she held her son. She only thought of how much she loved him.”

  “I would like very much to forget Josiah Chester, but if I am going to accept part of my heritage, I must accept all of it.”

  “Let’s not forget, you don’t know for certain whether it is your heritage. We’re jumping to conclusions a bit, don’t you think? Anneke could have been David’s mother, just as you’ve always believed.”

  Sylvia was about to retort that Gerda would have had little need to expose the family secret in that case, but then she reconsidered. There were other branches of the family besides her own; perhaps they were the ones Gerda had sought to protect. And there was Gerda’s desire to make known Joanna’s story, since the vow Anneke had exacted had nearly banished her from memory. It was entirely possible—in fact, even likely—that Sylvia’s heritage was exactly what she had always believed it to be.

  She didn’t suppose she would ever know for certain.

  Sylvia spent two days contemplating how much she would reveal about Gerda’s revelations and to whom. Her friends knew only that she had finished the memoir and that something she had read there troubled her, but thankfully, rather than pester her with questions, they allowed her time alone to think.

  She tried to explain to Andrew that her mixed feelings came not from rejecting her new ancestry, if in fact it was hers. It was the uncertainty that tore at her, as well as the enormous shift in her sense of self Gerda was forcing her to make. “If I had discovered the memoir decades ago, I might feel entirely different,” said Sylvia. “I might have been able to embrace this change. But to have to come to an entirely new understanding of myself at my age . . . I don’t think I can do it.”

  “You don’t have to,” said Andrew. “You are the same wonderful woman you have always been, and whether all those things I love about you came from Anneke and Hans or Joanna and Josiah Chester, your soul is still your own. You’re not just your parents, you know. You’re the sum of everything you’ve ever done, every wish you’ve ever made, every person you’ve ever loved, and everyo
ne who has loved you. No one can take that from you, not Gerda, not anyone. I don’t care how many darn memoirs they write.”

  He broke off, embarrassed, and Sylvia stared at him, amazed by his uncharacteristic speech making. His unshakable faith in her warmed her more than he could have imagined possible, but she was too fond of him to embarrass him further by telling him so.

  “Perhaps I just need more time,” she said instead, and Andrew agreed.

  A week had passed when Sylvia realized she had come to accept the mystery Gerda had bequeathed her. She could only guess why the same woman who felt she was obligated to make the Bergstrom descendants “the heir of our truths, for good or ill,” would stop short of revealing the most important secret the family had ever kept, so she decided to stop trying.

  She also decided to stop second-guessing every other sentence in the memoir, trying to discern which of the two women had borne her grandfather. If a certain inflection in one sentence suggested Anneke, two paragraphs later she was sure to find a description that indicated Joanna. In attempting to puzzle it out, Sylvia had read and reread the memoir so many times she thought she might be able to transcribe it from memory, backward. When she found herself speculating that perhaps Gerda and Jonathan were her great-grandparents after all and the entire memoir was Gerda’s attempt to protect her descendants from the shame of illegitimacy, she knew she had gone too far. Instead of untangling the threads of her history, she was tugging them into an ever tightening knot.

  And so she gave up. Or rather, as she told herself, she acquiesced. Gerda had meant for her to know only a small measure of her history, not the whole. Since that was more than Sylvia had possessed before reading the memoir, she would accept the gift and not question the motives of the giver.

  Her heart might have rested easy, if not for the image that had once haunted Gerda and now stole into her own dreams: Joanna’s face as the slave catcher led her away, her silent and desperate plea. It jolted Sylvia awake at night, and before she could fall asleep again, a voice whispered in her thoughts: My great-grandmother might have died far from here, alone, enslaved, despairing.

  She shared all her thoughts, agonizing though some of them were, with Andrew. She cried in his arms more than once, mourning her lost surety, fuming at Gerda for leaving her so many questions. Even as a child Sylvia had been proud of herself, of her family—some might say too proud. Now she did not even feel like a Bergstrom anymore. She no longer knew what it meant to be a Bergstrom.

  She accepted Gerda’s right to leave her an imperfect, incomplete family history, but that did not mean she had to like it. Nor did it mean that she would uphold the family traditions of silence and secrecy.

  First, she told Sarah. As the heir to Elm Creek Manor and someone Sylvia thought of as a daughter, Sarah had the right to know. Even as Sylvia recounted Gerda’s bombshell, she felt the burden of her worries ease as her young friend shouldered some of the anxieties weighing down her spirit.

  As to the question of whether Sylvia was a Bergstrom, Sarah’s firm response both surprised and comforted her. “Don’t be ridiculous,” said Sarah, her expression making it clear that she would not accept any self-pity or brooding from her friend—so clear, in fact, that for a moment Sylvia suspected Sarah was mimicking her.

  “I didn’t think I was being ridiculous.”

  “Well, you are,” retorted Sarah. “Even if Joanna was your great-grandmother, Anneke and Hans raised her son as their own. Are adopted children any less a part of the family than one’s biological offspring?”

  “Of course not.”

  “I’m glad to hear you say that, because otherwise some of our friends wouldn’t be very happy with you. Diane’s adopted, did you know that? And Judy’s stepfather adopted her after marrying her mother. Are you going to tell them they aren’t really their parents’ children?”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it.”

  “Then you shouldn’t do the same to Joanna’s son,” declared Sarah. “Of course you’re a Bergstrom. What a question.”

  Sylvia allowed a smile. “I suppose I am.”

  But what that meant, she still wasn’t sure.

  With a sense of recklessness, as if to spite Gerda for providing only partial truths, Sylvia set about telling her closest confidantes what the memoir had revealed. Guard these secrets in the quiet of her own heart, indeed. It was Sylvia’s history, and she was free to do with it as she saw fit.

  After speaking with Sarah, Sylvia next phoned Grace Daniels. To her astonishment, when she finished recounting Gerda’s last cryptic pages, Grace laughed and said, “Well, let me be the first to welcome you into the family.”

  “I’m glad this amuses you,” said Sylvia dryly.

  “I’ve always wondered why we get along so well, and now I know.”

  “Why, Grace, I’m hurt. You mean to tell me we’ve been friends for more than fifteen years, and all this time—”

  “I’m just teasing you.”

  “Same here,” retorted Sylvia. “Although I admit I’m surprised to find myself joking about this. Gerda’s memoir has my mind so twisted up in knots I hardly know what to think.”

  “You shouldn’t blame Anneke and Gerda for keeping their secrets,” said Grace. “I’m not saying our day and age is perfect—far from it—but it was radically different then. Anneke probably thought she was rescuing Joanna’s son from an incredibly difficult and dangerous life.”

  “Was she?”

  Grace hesitated. “That’s not an easy question to answer.”

  “Please, Grace,” urged Sylvia. “The whole truth. That’s been too scarce around here lately.”

  “Well . . .” Grace sighed. “I’m torn between applauding them for adopting Joanna’s son and raising him as a member of the family, and condemning them for robbing him of his true heritage. On the other hand, I don’t know if it’s fair for me to judge them, all safe and smug in my twenty-first-century life. The most immediate consequence of his heritage would have been slavery, and I can’t wish that on anyone just to satisfy my pride. Besides, if they had sent him away with those slave catchers, he and Joanna would have been separated soon anyway, and she never would have known where to look for him.”

  “They might have killed him, even, rather than be troubled with a baby on the road.”

  “I doubt that,” said Grace, with an edge to her voice. “He was valuable property, remember? Josiah Chester might have made the slave catchers pay for him.”

  “True enough.” Sylvia sighed. “So the Bergstroms kept him safe, thinking to reunite him with his mother, although it never happened. Still, after he grew up, they could have told him the truth.”

  “They could have. Maybe they should have. But since he could pass, they probably thought it better to let him.”

  “I don’t like that word, ‘pass,’” said Sylvia. “It sounds like there was some sort of test, and one either passed or one failed.”

  “There was a test,” said Grace. “And even now, in the twenty-first century, when history has provided us with innumerable lessons why it’s wrong, for some people and in some places, there still is a test. To those ignorant enough to think they can judge me, I fail it every day. The ignorance of Gerda’s day not only lives on, it thrives.”

  Sylvia did not know what to say.

  Grace continued, gently. “You said you no longer know what it means to be a Bergstrom. Do you still think you know what it means to be black or white?”

  Two days later, after the Elm Creek Quilters’ weekly business meeting, Sylvia told them how Gerda had concluded her memoir with a mystery. Her friends took in the news with intrigued amazement—except for Diane, who claimed to have guessed it the minute she heard both Anneke and Joanna were pregnant.

  “You did not,” retorted Gwen, nudging Diane so hard she nearly fell out of her chair.

  Diane shoved back. “I did so. I read a lot of mystery novels. Gerda’s memoir wasn’t nearly as complicated.”

  “In that case,” s
aid Sylvia, “perhaps you could put your deductive powers to work on the question of who my great-grandmother is.”

  Gwen grinned at Diane. “Get to work, Sherlock.”

  “Goodness,” said Sylvia, shaking her head. “They way you two get along, I wonder why you sit beside each other every week. Maybe we should assign you chairs on opposite sides of the room.”

  Gwen and Diane looked at each other, and then at Sylvia, in surprise. “Are you kidding?” said Diane. “I look forward to needling her all week.”

  Gwen smirked. “The way you sew, you might mean that literally.”

  The Elm Creek Quilters laughed, and Sylvia felt their mirth lifting her own subdued spirits. She could almost forget for a moment the loss she felt, thinking that if only Gerda had trusted her a little more, the question of her ancestry could have been answered conclusively. The more time that passed, the more Sylvia realized that the truth, whatever it was, was preferable to this empty space in her history.

  Then Agnes’s quiet voice broke into the laughter. “I for one hope that Joanna was your great-grandmother.”

  All eyes went to her. Sylvia regarded her sister-in-law, her baby brother’s widow, with surprise. “Why is that?”

  “She sounds like a remarkable women. Strong, courageous, proud.” Agnes smiled affectionately across the circle of friends at Sylvia. “Whether she is your great-grandmother or not, I do believe I see her in you.”

  The next day, Summer returned to the Waterford College library and the historical society’s archives, not quite sure what she was looking for. All summer she had scoured the records until she suspected she had handled nearly every scrap of paper in every file and on every shelf, and she knew the information Sylvia most wanted could not be found there. But the urgency to keep looking was too compelling to ignore. At the business meeting, Sylvia had spoken in her usual straightforward way, but Summer sensed the very real pain lingering behind her brave front. She wanted to help—all the Elm Creek Quilters did, and out of Sylvia’s hearing they had all agreed to do what they could—but she did not know where to begin.