The Safe Room

by B. A. Shapiro

  I went back through the dark parlor and dining room; my hands trembled as I opened the cellar door. He was hurt, possibly dying. I had to help him. I had to get him out of there. Sharp needles of sweat sped up and down the back of my neck, and I could hear the pounding of my feet on the stairs through the pounding of blood in my ears. I was pulled across the new cellar and into the old.

  But when I reached the spot where his bloodied body had been, the same spot where Gram had lay, there was no blood and no man. There was only me, once again, alone and barefoot, shivering on the cold earthen floor.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  December 8, 1858

  Papa, Caleb and Wendell returned to Harden House late this morning as the snows have finally abated and the sun is strong and bright. Wendell stayed to dinner at Papa’s insistence, and although he was seated to my left, he only spoke of Mr. Garrison and his uncle and the Vigilance Committee. The men are so full of themselves that they do not see I am changed. As remarkable as it seems, they perceive me to be as I was last week. But the girl Papa left behind is no more: she has been transformed into a woman.

  The news from the city is not good, and Papa is much troubled by what he has learned while in the home of William Lloyd Garrison. He brought with him a placard he and Mr. Garrison had written which is now being posted about the city by the Vigilance Committee. It reads:

  Caution to Colored People of the Commonwealth of

  Massachusetts.

  Avoid conversing with the Police Officers of Boston!

  The Mayor has empowered them to act as

  Kidnappers and Slave Catchers.

  Have a Top Eye Open!

  As I read the placard, I am filled with fear for Silas, whose only crime was to be born of a mother with dark skin. How is the mayor able to ignore the words of the Constitution of these United States? “All men are created equal,” the Bill of Rights clearly states, specifying nothing about the color of that man’s skin. It is the same contradiction Mr. Garrison commented upon when he was jailed for his writings in The Liberator. It seems to me that this country is not as free as we wish to believe.

  Papa, Caleb and Wendell spent the last two days of the storm patrolling the city for slave catchers. Papa has caught himself a very bad cold for his efforts, but he says it is a small price to pay for his convictions, that if he must, he will cough and sneeze every day until slavery has been abolished and all men are truly free.

  Still, I went to the chemist to procure a small quantity of Peruvian bark for him to chew upon. At first he refused to take it from me, but then I insisted, explaining that his irritated throat was going to do nothing to further the abolition of slavery. Finally he acquiesced. Often, men are much like small children.

  December 9, 1858

  Papa went into the cellar to speak with Silas this morning. He did not bring good tidings. It is a harsh winter all down the entire eastern seaboard and well into the south. Snow is said to lay deep on the Maysville Road—which is in Kentucky—and Pittsburgh and Philadelphia have suffered the same blizzards as we. Steamers are unable to move on the Ohio River. Needless to say, there has been no word of Silas’ brothers.

  Papa told Silas the Vigilance Committee shall remain watchful for news of the boys, but that it may be late spring before the brothers are able to reach Boston. Quilts are being hung and messages are being sent for each of them to come to Lexington, so it appears that Silas will have to wait here until they arrive. It would not trouble me if Silas should have to remain even longer than springtime.

  December 11, 1858

  After dinner, Papa and Caleb went to Lexington Common to visit the dram shop for an apple brandy and the news of the day. Mrs. Harrington returned to her farm, and Silas and I were able to be together for the first time since Papa’s return from Boston. Silas is much troubled by the thought of his brothers on the road in bad weather and frets that not only will their travel be made more difficult, but that food will be harder to procure. As we sat before the warm fire, he worried that they were cold. He was concerned especially for the youngest, Levi, who he said has not been well since the cathauling.

  Silas has such a kind and tender soul, wrapped in a powerful intellect and body. If only he were not so bruised and angry. If only he had lived the life he deserves. But I know neither his bruises nor his anger will disappear until all men are free. He and Papa are much alike in that way. But when I told him this, Silas disagreed. “No white man can be like a Negro, and no Negro like a white man,” he said. “Although it may look the same from the outside, the Negro and the white man live in two completely different worlds.”

  “What about me?” I asked him.

  He smiled and gently cupped my cheek in the palm of his large hand. “You, my dear Sarah, are a woman.”

  Papa and Caleb arrived home at early candle-light and found me sewing in the east parlor while Silas dug his tunnel under the ground. Papa commented on how pretty I looked, and I knew that I did. For I cannot restrain my happiness, and indeed, I shall not restrain it. I feel not at all condemned.

  December 12, 1858

  As Christmas draws nigh, I can barely remember my earlier distress over not partaking in our annual trip to Hartford. Although I miss Mama dearly, and will indeed miss my visit with Cousin Lizzie, I feel that it was a child who pined for Lewis Campbell and the Buffrum-Chase Christmas Ball. I am no longer that child. I am, as Silas said, a woman. A woman grown and fulfilled by the love of a remarkable man.

  December 13, 1858

  Wendell has asked Papa if I may spend Christmas Eve in the home of his parents and join them in their pew at the First Parish Meeting House for the midnight service. Although Papa does not believe in celebrating Christmas while men are in bondage, he gave his permission. I wish he had not, that he had insisted that his strictures applied to me as well as to him, but I shall take the path of least resistance for the present.

  December 14, 1858

  Papa had Silas come up and take dinner with us today. Although she made it abundantly clear that she disapproved, Mrs. Harrington cooked roast beef with potatoes and turnips and her famous rice pudding. She would not sit at the table with us, and instead pretended she had too many chores to take the time to eat. She fooled no one.

  Caleb engaged Silas in a lively discussion of the Bible and the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe. It was apparent that Caleb was most impressed with both Silas’ knowledge and his intellectual acuity as he sparred with Papa over whether Mrs. Stowe held that a man must reject Christianity if he accepted slavery, and the other side of that argument, that a man who had lived under the injustice of slavery would never be able to believe in the mercy of the God of those who held him hostage.

  I could not contain my pride and could barely contain myself from shouting our secret to Papa and Caleb. Silas has forbidden me to speak of it, claiming that Papa would not understand, that at best, Papa would order him to leave Harden House, and at worst, that Papa would kill him.

  But I believe Silas underestimates Papa. I shall show him that all white men are not evil, that some of us are of a different sort. Silas will not hear me say it, and silences me every time I try, but it is my promise to you, dear diary, that Silas shall know this someday.

  December 20, 1858

  What is sin? I do not know, but I know it cannot be the consequence of love.

  December 24, 1858

  Wendell Parker has asked me to be his wife. I was not surprised, and had actually anticipated the possibility, but still, I do not know what I shall do. I thanked him for his kind offer and told him I should need to think about it until the new year. Then I allowed him to kiss me. He seemed quite pleased, and I’m sure he is certain I shall say yes.

  December 25, 1858

  It is the birthday of our savior, but Papa has mandated that we shall not celebrate His birth until human freedom and human dignity are given to all men equally. When I told Silas of Papa’s decision in an effort to convince him to allow me to tell Papa we are ke
eping company, he just laughed bitterly. He said if I believed Papa would be willing to have his daughter courted by a Negro just because he was willing to give up Christmas, I was even more naive than he had thought.

  Sometimes I fear that Silas has seen so much evil in his life that he will never be able to see anything else. It makes me very sad, but I love him all the more for his pain.

  January 2, 1859

  A new year has come and with it a new fear. I dare not write of it here, and only hope I am mistaken.

  January 3, 1859

  I have managed to postpone giving Wendell an answer to his question as I have been feeling very fatigued and quite ill these past few days. I miss my dear Mama so much and with a great aching pain. I long for her to wrap me in her arms and bring me tea and toast as she did when I was feeling poorly as a small girl. I smell her toilet water in my dreams.

  But I am a child no longer, and must be the woman I am.

  January 8, 1859

  Silas and I have been unable to be together for almost a week as there has been too much activity about Harden House for any privacy. I ache for his arms, for his whisper, for the beat of his heart against mine. I feel his presence beneath my feet as I do my chores, and it is both a comfort and a torment to know he is so close.

  January 9, 1859

  Although it is Silas with whom I wish to speak, this is not possible at the moment, so this afternoon I went out to the barn to speak with Caleb of my fears, but my courage failed me, and I sat quietly for a long time as he shoveled hay. Finally, I asked him if he really believed that all men were equal, that Negroes were exactly the same as whites.

  He looked at me oddly, but didn’t answer for a long while. “Yes,” he finally said, “I do believe that. But it isn’t as simple as you make it out to be.”

  “Why not?” I asked. “Doesn’t Papa believe that it is?”

  Caleb smiled at me the same way Silas had when I asked if I wasn’t different from the whites he believed to be so alien from him. And, just as Silas had done, Caleb did not answer my question.

  January 10, 1859

  Wendell came to call this afternoon, and I had Mrs. Harrington tell him I was still ill. She admonishes me that if I lie abed too long, another young lady shall set her bonnet for him. I think she says this in the fear that I might miss my opportunity to move from Harden House and out from under her feet. Often I feel her eyes upon me and wonder what she knows.

  It occurs to me that Wendell might offer an answer to my dilemma, but I refuse to imagine that this could be my only means of salvation.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  On the west side of Lexington Common, not far from Harden House, an old burying ground was tucked behind the First Parish Meeting House. Only a few timeworn letters chiseled into a boulder at the corner of the property mark the cemetery’s presence and date of origin: 1690. One has to know to follow the crumbling asphalt drive at the left of the church to find the graves. Hardens have been laid to rest in this place since before the Revolutionary War.

  The cemetery was on a small rise, its only gate a granite threshold, now sunk deep and unevenly into the earth. I stepped carefully between the tilting gravestones in the oldest area of the burying ground, unpolished chips of weathered bluestone, so close together it didn’t seem possible that each could be the resting place of a full-sized human being. And many of them were not; the birth and death dates engraved on the stones were often within a few years of each other, sometimes days.

  As I walked toward the Harden family plot, I could see the mound that rose over Gram, the dirt raw and exposed among the old stones. It was a beautiful May day, and the huge maples and oaks overhanging the graves sprouted clusters of chartreuse leaves shiny with new spring. The azaleas and early rhododendrons were in full bloom. It felt both incongruous and fitting that the cemetery smelled of hope and life. Gram loved azaleas. I knelt and pressed my hand to the damp earth. I missed her, but I knew she would be happy here. It was pretty and peaceful and she was surrounded by her family.

  I rocked back on my heels and surveyed Gram’s closest neighbors. “Loving Mother,” Sarah Harden’s lichen-mottled marker read to Gram’s left, “1842-1900, AEt 58.” Sarah Harden, dead for one hundred years and suddenly everywhere. “Sarah,” the hoarse voice of the dying man had whispered in my dream last night. “Please help my brothers.” Why was a runaway slave calling for help from Sarah Harden? Had he thought I was she?

  No, I reminded myself, “he” hadn’t confused anyone with Sarah Harden. There was no “he.” There was only my subconscious mind, my nightmare, my extravagant imagination. Last week, Gram had been talking about Sarah, and since then, I had been looking at her picture, wondering about her lost husband, the unhappiness in her eyes. The workings of the human brain were truly wondrous—and truly bizarre.

  Sarah’s mother and father were buried under a single marker to their daughter’s left: Colonel Stanton Harden and Charlotte Abbott Harden, the original owner of the ruby brooch. The parents’ memorial was taller and wider and much more regal than Sarah’s, topped by an intricate carving of a wide-eyed skull with wings at the back of its neck. The Colonel was born twenty years earlier than Charlotte, in 1800; she was dead eight years earlier than he, in 1857, AEt 37. Sarah had been fifteen when her mother died, twenty-three when she lost her father, and from Gram’s tale, about the same age when she became a widow.

  To Charlotte’s right were two small stones with no names and but a single date each. “January 21, 1838,” read one. “March 3, 1839,” read the other. Along the top of each tiny marker, the same two words were hewn: our baby. There was no sign of Sarah’s husband or of the younger brother Gram had mentioned—Caleb, I thought she had said was his name—but Sarah’s son, Ulysses Harden, born in 1859, was here, as was Ulysses’ wife, Alice Dillaway Harden, and two of their children, Elijah and Zane, AEt 9.

  So much could be read from these names and dates, and yet so little revealed. Poor Charlotte had most likely married before she was seventeen, lost two babies before she was nineteen, and died before her two surviving children were grown. Sarah must have left her childhood even earlier than her mother had done, for Ulysses had been born when she was only seventeen, and her husband, the distant Harden cousin, must have died soon after that.

  I walked along the crooked rows, searching for a man whose name and dates might match those of Sarah’s husband. I found many Hardens, one born in 1650 and another in 1672. I found a single, tragic marker for the six children of Emily and Thaddeus Harden, who had all died between August 17 and September 6, 1778—probably a smallpox or typhoid epidemic—and I found an odd little verse engraved on Alice Dillaway Harden’s headstone: “Death like an overflowing flood; doth sweep us all away; the young, the old the middle-aged; to death becomes a prey.” But I didn’t find anyone who fit the description of Sarah’s husband. He must have been buried in Ohio.

  I sat down next to Gram. All these dead Hardens added weight to my argument against ghosts: If all the spirits of just this one family were still in existence, where were they all right now? I glanced at the hundreds of graves that surrounded me. There just wasn’t room for all those disembodied souls. They’d be hitting up against us, nudging us, smothering us, suffocating us. We’d be constantly fighting each other for the scarce space. I flashed on the image of Gram’s final battle with no one, then pushed the image quickly away.

  I sat there for a long while, studying the names and the dates, and the startling number of children who had died before the age of five. I thought about Hendrika, about all those tiny dead souls and heart-broken mothers. So much had changed—and so little. We married later now and had fewer children, who lived much longer and healthier lives, but we also yearned for love and made families just as Sarah and Charlotte had done. And we still grieved for our lost babies.

  I swiped at the tears that were running down my face, knowing I wasn’t just crying for Gram. I was crying for Sarah and Charlotte and Trina and all the lost
mothers and babies and husbands, crying for the spirit of the black man with the shotgun wound calling to Sarah for help. I was crying for all who had come before and weren’t anymore. For all I longed to learn, but never would.

  I looked at the floral arrangements withering at the edge of Gram’s grave and remembered Gram telling me that she had given a large batch of Harden family papers to her friend Nancy Winsten at the Lexington library. Letters and ledgers and receipt books, she had said. Maybe I could learn more than I thought.

  I stood, brushed off my jeans, and headed across the Lexington Common to the library. The common was a wide swatch of newly greened grass, bordered by steepled churches and white clapboard houses with plaques commemorating their construction dates—usually late seventeenth century—and their role in the revolution. This was the site of the first conflict of the Revolutionary War, the Battle of Lexington, the shot heard ‘ ’round the world,’ a fact in which Lexington residents take great pride. Guides in Colonial dress mingled with the small crowd, answering questions, pointing to markers and taverns and the spot where the first Redcoat was killed.

  I crossed the grass to the Minuteman statue—rumored to be a likeness of Jonas Parker, whose mother had been a Harden and who was also buried in the cemetery behind the Meeting House—and stood among the gawking, camera-toting tourists. I read the inscription and thought about the historic events that had occurred at this very place over two hundred years ago. I looked at the old houses, and even older trees, ringing the common; they had stood here long before those long-ago events. To my right two boys played a raucous game of Frisbee, and behind them a young couple leaned against a gnarled oak and nuzzled each other’s necks. A car alarm screamed, a baby wailed, and the Minuteman stood his silent vigil, musket resting on his knee, gazing eastward at nothing.

  Once, when I was a little girl, we had visited Gram over Patriot’s Day, the anniversary of the Battle of Lexington. The town throws a huge celebration each year, highlighted by a reenactment of the famous battle. At the crack of dawn, the skirmish is recreated by men in full period dress, wielding antique muskets filled with blanks, and watched by tens of thousands. My father had to perch me on his shoulders so I could see over the crowd, and I remember staring in open-mouthed amazement as the British “Lobsterbacks” tried to intimidate the Minutemen with their superior weaponry and fancy uniforms.