Michael finally closed the diary and looked up at me. “Do you think this could be true?”
“What else could it be?”
“It’s amazing. Even without the metaphysical stuff—which I can’t even begin to think about.”
“Me either.”
Michael reverently opened the diary. “Listen to this: ‘Silas believes his blood has, once again, been lost to my father, that as it has always been and will continue to always be, the white man has won.’”
“After I go apologize to Trina, will you help me get him out?”
“What if he isn’t there?”
“He’s there.”
Dinner had just ended when I arrived at SafeHaven. Trina was in the kitchen washing dishes with a woman named Lorelei, and she appeared neither surprised nor pleased to see me. Kiah had recommended I wait another couple of days before approaching Trina, but after reading Sarah’s diary, I couldn’t wait any longer.
“Trina, could we go talk somewhere privately? Kiah’s office maybe?”
She shrugged and kept washing.
“Please?”
Trina shrugged again.
Lorelei turned and gave me a cool up-and-down.
“Trina,” I said, “I know you have every right to be furious, every right not to talk to me, but I’ve come to apologize, and I’m just asking for you to hear me out.”
She didn’t respond, but I detected a slight relaxing of the stiffness in her spine.
“I know I didn’t hear you out, and that I’m asking a lot for you to do for me what I didn’t do for you, but that’s one of the things I came to apologize for—although not nearly the most important.”
Trina peeled the stained yellow gloves from her hands and handed them to Lorelei—who scowled at me—then, without looking up, she marched across the hallway and into Kiah’s office. I followed slowly.
When I closed the door and turned into the room, I saw Trina had seated herself at Kiah’s desk. The principal and the recalcitrant student. How apt. I sat in the chair across from her, but found I was tongue tied, just like the bad girl I was.
“What’d you do about the inspection?”
I hadn’t expected her to speak, and she caught me off guard. For a moment, I had no idea what she was talking about. “Oh, the inspection,” I finally stammered. “It was supposed to be on Wednesday.”
She eyed me as if I were a not-too-bright child, which was exactly the way I was acting.
“We cancelled it—or Michael did. Gram’s just going to have to wait for Phase II.”
Trina nodded. “So the way it came down with Clara was pretty different from how you had it all pictured.”
“I guess you had a better take on Beth than I did.”
“Seems that way.”
I tried to smile. “Are you going to let me apologize or just sit there and rub it in?”
“It’s a free country,” Trina said, but her eyes said she didn’t believe that for a second.
“Look Trina, I’m sorry. Really sorry. I was a shit. I wouldn’t listen, I didn’t believe you, I fell for the old stereotype, just like you said I would—like you said we all would.”
Trina was playing nonchalantly with a paperweight on Kiah’s desk, but I could tell from the tilt of her head that she was listening.
“You were right about how we’re all racist—even when we don’t think we are. I see it now, and, well, I’m just sorry. Sorry for doubting you. Sorry I was wrong. Sorry about everything. I was a lousy friend.”
Trina twirled the paperweight around. “We’re not friends.”
“I know.” I swallowed my disappointment, the self-inflicted pain, and added, “It’s no good when the white man always wins.”
“No good!” she said. “Ha!”
I reached into my purse and pulled out Gram’s emerald-and-diamond bracelet. I placed it in front of her. “I want you to have this.”
Trina eyed the bracelet.
“I know Gram would want you to have it, too.”
She raised her eyes. “Your grandmother was a hot-shit lady, and I liked her a lot, but I don’t have any attachments to this bracelet. I’m not the kind of folk who can afford to have feelings about jewelry.”
“I want you to have it anyway. It’s yours. You can do whatever you want with it.”
“I’m just gonna sell it.”
“Take it to a legitimate jeweler,” I said before I realized how condescending my advice sounded. “You’ll get a lot more money that way,” I finished lamely.
Her eyes narrowed. “You trying to buy me off? Is that why you’re doing this? To get yourself off the hook?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think anything’s going to get me off the hook.”
“Then I’ll take it.” A ghost of a smile crossed her face as she scooped up the bracelet and left the room. A moment later, she poked her head back in the doorway and said, “Thanks.”
Michael was still working in the safe room when I returned. Neither of us said anything as we headed down the narrow stairs into the cellar. Silently, we picked up the shovels and began removing dirt from the tunnel we had worked so hard to fill, the tunnel which had at first held hope, then sorrow and hatred, and now might become the repository of dignity restored.
There was no sign of Silas, but I spoke to him anyway. “Mr. Person, I’m your great-great-great granddaughter,” I explained as I worked. “I can’t do anything about the Colonel’s betrayal or any of the awful things that happened to you, but I can get you out from under this damn house.”
I could feel Michael watching me, but I didn’t stop shoveling or talking. “Don’t think your blood’s been lost to the Colonel—it hasn’t. It’s been mingled with his, and the fact that I’m here right now is proof that you’ve survived. But you deserve more than just to survive in me, you need to be with the woman you love, to be at peace—to be free. So, if it’s okay with you, I’m going to take you to Sarah. You can spend the rest of your days with her, as her husband, as Ulysses’ father, as the patriarch of this family.”
I took Silas’ silence as consent.
That night, Michael and I dug until we couldn’t lift our arms any more, then in the morning, we worked on hands and knees with tiny gardening tools. By late afternoon, we found what we were searching for, and a few months later, I stood in the Old Burying Ground as a headstone was placed over the newest grave in the Harden family plot. The chiseled letters read:
SILAS PERSON
1839–1859
LOVING HUSBAND OF SARAH,
LOVING FATHER OF ULYSSES
MAY HE FINALLY FIND
THE FREEDOM HE SOUGHT
LEXINGTON MINUTEMAN
On Wednesday, October 13, Harden House, owned by Lee Seymour, granddaughter of the late Clara Barrett, and located at 15 Hancock Street, was inducted into the Harriet Tubman Network to Freedom National Park and designated an official station of the Underground Railroad. Harden House boasts both a concealed “safe room” in which slaves were hidden and a tunnel beneath the house for the use of the runaways. To date, Tubman Park, which stretches from Louisiana to upstate New York, consists of 87 sites which represent points of interest along the route taken by slaves before and during the Civil War.
But our own Harden House is famous for more than participation in the Underground Railroad: it is the site of the so-called “Grandma Killing” (Lexington Minuteman, May 6, May 21) and is said to be haunted by the ghost of a runaway slave, Silas Person, who was killed in the cellar by Colonel Stanton Harden, the very abolitionist who was sheltering him. Human bones were indeed recently found under the house (Lexington Minuteman, May 28), and these bones were exhumed and reinterred in the Harden family plot in the Old Burying Ground by Ms. Seymour, the great-great-great granddaughter of Mr. Person and the great-great-great-great granddaughter of Colonel Harden.
The original diary of Sarah Harden, daughter of the Colonel and wife of Mr. Person, has been graciously donated to Cary Library by Ms. Seymou
r. A contract has been signed with a major publishing house to publish the diary sometime next year, and there has been considerable interest in the story from film companies.
The Hancock Street house is currently unoccupied. When asked, Ms. Seymour, who resides in Brookline with her fiancé, Michael Ennen, said that the memories were too painful. Tours of Harden House are held daily, on the hour, between 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. More information on both Harden House and Tubman Park can be found at the Lexington Visitors Center opposite the Minuteman statue.
Descendants of Silas Person
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
And the names remain surprisingly the same. Thanks to my first readers: Jan Brogan, Thomas Engles and Floyd Kemske. Thanks to my second readers: Diane Bonavist, Deborah Crombie, Scott Fleishman, Gary Goshgarian, Tamar Hosansky, Pat Sparling, Vicki Steifel and Donna Stein. Thanks to my agent, Nancy Yost, my publisher, Ed Gorman and my editor, Mary Smith. And, as always, thanks to Dan, Robin and Scott.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Quote from The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau (copyright 1964 by Shirley Ann Grau) used by permission from JCA Literary Agency.
Copyright © 2002 by B.A. Shapiro
978-1-5040-1155-6
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The Safe Room Page 26