by Lois Leveen
“You’re all right now,” I whispered. “Not in Virginia anymore. You’re free.” I hoped that last part proved true. Fugitive and free weren’t exactly the same thing.
She struggled to form words. “How I get here?”
I stroked her forehead, meaning my touch to reassure her. “We’ve got people all over, South and North, helping slaves get to freedom. Even have some whites working with us, bringing our folks out.” Though I figured that would make things easier when she saw McNiven, still I worried the mention of white people might yet stop her up with fear.
But there wasn’t room for any more fear in her face, and she didn’t struggle out another word.
I asked if she wanted something to eat. She nodded, and when I brought a spoonful of cold broth to her mouth, she drank the liquid greedily. She must have been three-quarters starved by then, and I fed her all the broth I had.
Let that sit for a while, Mary El, I heard Mama’s voice saying, give her stomach a chance to get used to food again.
I tucked the quilts around her. “We still have a ways to ride. Why don’t you rest a bit? I’ll be right by you, watching and listening. If you need anything, just let me know.” Her lips trembled a bit, not exactly into a smile, but at least away from the purse of fear they’d been in. She blinked her agreement and closed her eyes.
The girl woke from time to time, and I gave her a bit of bread or water, said what I could to soothe her. When I ran out of palliative words, I recited one of Miss Frances Watkins’s poems, or one of Miss Phillis Wheatley’s. I realized the girl couldn’t know they were colored ladies, one an abolitionist and the other a slave herself, who wrote such fine verse. Just the rhythm of the lines calmed her, though, and she eased back into sleep.
She never asked where we were going, didn’t seem curious about who was driving the team. I suppose curiosity was far past her in that condition, and in a way I was glad. I wasn’t much over being scared of McNiven myself. I could only imagine how he might seem to someone in her state.
He was careful to stop to tend the horses only when she was asleep, I noticed that. It was at just such a stop, late on our second full day of travel, that he told me we’d soon reach our destination.
“New York?” I wondered where in that vast state we might be.
“Not quite. Yet in New Jersey, a settlement what delivers baggage for our fowk.”
Somehow I’d gotten it into my head that we were taking the girl all the way to New York. I told myself it didn’t make much difference. But now that she’d come out of her stupor right to me, it seemed wrong to leave her.
When she woke next, I explained that we’d soon leave off traveling for a while. “We’ll get you inside to a proper meal, then I have to go back home. Folks where we’re stopping will carry you on to where you need to go.”
She didn’t say anything, but she squeezed my hand hard. We sat like that, wordless but holding tight, for an hour or more, until McNiven eased the wagon onto a narrow lane off the main roadway. When he reined the team to a halt, I drew my hand from the girl’s and stood. Over the high sides of the conveyance, I saw a small farmhouse, surrounded by a cluster of outbuildings and acres of snow-covered fields.
The noise of the horses brought an elderly couple from the house. The dark hue of their coats turned their pale skin ghostly against the white landscape.
“Isn’t there a colored person, can come for her?” I asked McNiven.
He narrowed his eyes at me. “Be sure you tell Joons I was right about the lassie wanting a companion she could trust.”
“Send Chloe round first, will you?” McNiven called out. The woman turned back to fetch their servant from the house while her husband stood to the side, waiting.
“You have no reason to be fretting.” McNiven broke the silence as we started home the next day, me lonely in the wagon bed while he drove. “She’ll be fine afore long. A fighter for sure, that one is.”
“A fighter? She’s barely eating, barely breathing, said no more than four words in two days.”
“ ’Tis not these two days past I judge her by, but the ones what came afore. Our wee lassie has killed a man.”
The idea of that child taking a life stunned me. “At least she might hae killed him,” he continued. “David Bowser’s cousin did not wait to find out afore bringing her away.”
“Miss Douglass brought that girl out of Virginia?”
He laughed like I’d told the funniest tale he ever heard. “Bowser has got himself more than one cousin. This one is a free man doun in Richmond, locates baggage needing to come North.”
McNiven’s revelation about the girl caught me quiet for the better part of the day, until the sliver of moon rose, and we pulled off the road. He tended the horses, and then we exchanged places, so he could rest in the wagon bed while I kept watch.
I settled onto the plank seat, listening to the creaking of the buckboard as he lay down. I looked ahead, my eyes searching the deepening dark. “Why? Why did she kill him?”
“Fear as much as hate, I suppose. ’Twas her owner coming after her, and she were scared. He awready had one baby on her, sold it off the very day, then come after her again that night. He was drunken enough, she had a brick and hit him on the head. A fighter that one be, for certain.”
I imagined the weight of a brick in my hand, the force it would take to bring it down hard enough to kill a man. The hate I’d have to have in my heart to do such a thing, and the sorrow that could make a person hate like that.
I wondered how many more there were like the girl, who didn’t have a brick to take up in their hands, or a free colored man to send them North if they tried.
Eleven
I felt Mama’s presence most days, soothing and advising me all sorts of ways. As I closed my eyes to doze off for the night, I found myself holding confidences with her, just as I had when we shared the husk pallet in the Van Lews’ garret all those years before. But come autumn of 1859, she was as agitated as could be with me, and making me agitated, too.
Mary El, school teaching’s a job, not a Calling.
But, Mama, aren’t you proud? Miss Mapps picked me. Only one she wanted of all the girls from the Institute. Not just from there, she could have hired anyone from anywhere, and she picked me, because I’m the best.
After Zinnie left Richmond, Mistress V went on about she was the best cook the family ever had. But you know Zinnie meant for freedom, do for her own family, not just cook for the Van Lews.
But teaching colored children isn’t like slaving. It’s for our own folks. Don’t you remember when you taught me?
I just showed you what you half knew already,’cause of your Gift. Gift from Jesus. And He knows what He means for you to do with that Gift, so don’t be telling me or Him either that you’re already doing what He wants.
If this isn’t what I should be doing, how am I supposed to know what is?
When I traced letters and words in the fireplace ash, you mastered them fast enough. You so good at reading, didn’t you learn to read His signs, too?
I thought I was going mad, arguing with a voice in my head. Mama sure could drive a person crazy, she was that persistent, that insistent, that loving. I had seen it in the way she played the Van Lews, the way she managed me and Papa both. But now only I heard her. And I needed to know if it really was her, or just a voice in my head.
“Jesus, if Mama’s with You, and she must be up there, good a soul as she always was, then she’s probably got Your ear, and You’re hearing all about me from her. But Mama’s telling me—at least I think it’s Mama—that I set myself at the wrong task. But what else can a colored lady do? I’m teaching, I sew and sell for the fair, I help Mr. Jones with the Railroad. If there’s something else You mean for me to do, send me a sign. And since Mama says I’m not so good at reading Your signs as reading books, which I suppose is true, make it a sign I can’t miss.”
I guess that prayer got answered, because the very next week came a sign nobo
dy, North or South, could ignore.
Zinnie Moore and I were making an inventory of the worsted yarn supplies, and the other ladies were sewing, when the elderly butler entered the Fortens’ sitting room, addressing Margaretta Forten with an urgency that made us all look up from our work.
“Madam, a messenger just brought this note.”
Any servant with so much as a whiff of literacy would read such a missive before bringing it to the lady of the house. We in the house wouldn’t have missed such an opportunity, and I didn’t expect the Fortens’ butler to, either. But what surprised me was how clear it was to all of us who sat looking at him that he had perused the note, the tenor of its contents written all over his vexed features. No servant I ever knew, either when I was on their side or since crossing over, would let the mistress see that he’d been in her correspondence.
All this flashed in my mind as Margaretta Forten took up the slip of paper. I didn’t have time to puzzle over it, though, because the moment she read the note she fell back in a faint.
Abby Pugh, one of the Quaker ladies, had done a bit of charity nursing, and she was on Miss Forten in a heartbeat, undoing the buttons on her bodice and loosening the stays of her corset. She fanned our hostess vigorously while the butler fetched smelling salts.
As the crystal vial was passed beneath her nose, Miss Forten blinked her eyes open. She glanced about uncertainly until she noticed the page in her lap and asked Mrs. Pugh to read it aloud.
The Quakeress took up the note. “My dear Sister-in-Law. Reports have come of a slave revolt in Virginia. The telegraphs there are down, all is still rumor. Mob violence expected here as soon as news of the uprising spreads. Please keep the ladies in the house until the Vigilance Committee can escort them home. Robert Purvis.”
Strands of carmine yarn oozed like blood between Zinnie Moore’s pale fingers. “Virginia.” It was all I could say, and all she could do was nod back.
I was born long after Nat Turner was killed, but his name, Gabriel Prosser’s, too, were bywords from my childhood. I don’t remember ever being told right out who those men were, how they plotted to rise up. Just a slow seeping knowledge of the hate with which white people spat those names, the pride and fear together with which black folks whispered them. Even when Mama and Papa talked of freedom, they never dared speak of such rebellions. To utter a word on it was death, as surely as to try it.
Only two of the ladies took up their sewing again, Quakers both. I knew how they spoke of worthy tasks and idle hands, but I wasn’t up to needlework just then. Neither was Zinnie. She sat beside me, clutching my hand in her lap as though her fear were as great as mine.
Not a woman in the room wasn’t frightened, of course. We were thinking of those slaves, but of our own safety, too. It had been some while since Philadelphia’s last big race riot, longer than I’d been in the city, though not much longer. Time and again, mobs had burned down businesses owned by negroes, beaten colored temperance marchers, killed and destroyed in mad frenzies while the police stood by and watched. If slaves were rising up, maybe even killing whites, down in Virginia, there was no telling how mobs in Philadelphia might retaliate.
“The rain will keep the mobbers at home,” Mrs. Catto said, with as much hope as a person could muster just then. But wet streets were no safer for us than dry ones, really. I stared up at David Bustill Bowser’s eagle painting, marking each detail of the predatory beak and pointed talons, as we sat wondering what dangers lurked in the October night. At last the brass knocker fell on the broad front door, and the butler announced Mr. Passmore Williamson.
A gaunt white man entered the sitting room. Miss Forten extended her hand to him. “Mr. Williamson, thank you for coming. Have you any more news?”
Only four years earlier, Passmore Williamson had stormed onto a boat moored at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street wharf, seized a slavewoman named Jane Johnson and her children from their owner, and sent them off to freedom. He went to jail for that, though eventually the judge released him, ruling Johnson’s owner had as good as freed her himself when he brought her through Pennsylvania on his way to a plantation in Nicaragua. Mr. Williamson had safeguarded Miss Johnson and her family when he might have rotted in Moyamensing Prison for the privilege, and he was as respected and trusted, even loved, as a white man could be among colored Philadelphia.
Now he stroked the muttonchops that formed a dark frame around his narrow face. “It is the hero of Osawatomie, John Brown. Leading a band of some two dozen followers, negro and white. They’ve seized the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, to arm the slaves he hopes will join them. There is word of killing on both sides, although Brown’s men yet hold their ground. They mean to extend the rebellion into the neighboring counties, though it is too soon to tell whether they shall succeed.”
Mr. Williamson spoke with a surety of detail that told me he had foreknowledge of Brown’s plan, or at least had heard about the plot from someone on the Vigilance Committee who did. Such propinquity shocked me nearly as much as the news itself.
Was there some great conspiracy afoot, so large it stretched from Virginia to Philadelphia, maybe even to Kansas and Canada? Who around me had known what was to come to pass, and had looked at me without the slightest hint in their eyes?
Was this what we had waited for, worked for, prayed for all these years? Were all the slaves freedom bound at last?
Dear Mary
I presume you have less news of this than we have—though to tell fact from rumor is nearly impossible. Brown of Kansas fame—or infamy as the slaveholders would have it—was captured at dawn Tuesday.
Richmond is thirsty for blood—but all the bluster is just cover for her fright. SLAVE INSURRECTION—the two most fearsome words to a Southerner! All talk of master and servant alike benefiting from the paternal institution is forgotten now—nerves on edge awaiting the tocsin tolling another uprising. Virginians are as terrified of whites in the North as they are of the negroes among us—if there is anything to be glad for these days I should say it is their dread.
Will send more as soon as it is known.
Yours
Bet Van Lew
Dear Bet
There is much excitement here. The telegraph brings the news & the news-sheets turn it all to rumor. No mobs yet though they are feared.
If you can send a word or two from Papa it would do much to ease my mind. Please give him all my love.
Yours
Mary Van Lew
Dear Mary
I am sorry for the delay in responding. The curfew here is quite strict—Lewis could not come to me during the week. This morning I set out to find him—had only a vague notion of the location of his cabin.
When he opened the door he took quite a fright about the reason for my visit. I assured him that I only came because you asked me to bring him your regards. I did not stay long enough to take down any message. But I give you my word he is well and knows he may come to me for any aid a lady can offer should he need it.
Mahon will not let any harm come to him—for selfish reasons perhaps but those may prove as strong a motivation as the very milk of human kindness could be.
Yours
Bet Van Lew
Learning that Bet had gone all the way down to Shockoe Bottom to hunt up Papa’s cabin turned me topsy-turvy. White people passed up and down that block of Main Street all day long, but only laborers, tradesmen, and shopkeepers. Never a Church Hill lady. I was sorry to have caused Papa such alarm. But relieved, too, that Bet knew where to find him, that she pledged her protection of him, even.
When I returned from the Institute one afternoon the following week, I heard men’s voices debating hotly in Mr. Jones’s back parlor. “We warned Brown the raid would be a death warrant. This madness is only more of the same.”
“Faugh! Brown has fowk ready to fight at lang and last. We maun strike now.”
I hurried up the staircase and found Mr. Jones, McNiven, and David Bustill Bowser in the front parlor. Mr.
Jones frowned at my arrival. “Gentlemen, we will need to speak of this matter at some later time. I’m sure you understand.”
McNiven wouldn’t be put off. “We need not be protecting Mary from our talk. The lass is as brave as any man when danger is at hand.”
I looked to Mr. Bowser to see if he would agree. “McNiven’s plan is folly. What harm can there be in speaking of it in front of her?”
“No folly in it,” McNiven said. “So long as I can find a route to Charlestown without coming from the North.”
Charlestown was where they were holding John Brown while Virginia’s highest civil authorities and the jeering mobs gathered outside the prison plotted his demise. “They’re going to Charlestown by the trainload from Richmond,” I said.
“How ken you so?” McNiven asked.
“A letter, from my— from a correspondent in Richmond.”
“If I go first to Richmond, there might be a way to Charlestown that will not raise suspicion.”
Mr. Bowser shook his head. “My cousin says Richmond is too hot these days. We cannot ask him to take on such a party as you suggest.”
“Your cousin need not hazard himself to join me in liberating Osawatomie Brown.”
I let out a little cry, the idea was so audacious. Mr. Jones slammed his fist down on the mahogany table, glaring at McNiven for saying so much in front of me.
“The lass can be trusted, I tell you. Awready she has given me the notion o’ Richmond. I need but find a place to bide there, till I can slip up to Charlestown.”
“Bet Van Lew would have you,” I said.
Mr. Jones raised his arched eyebrow. “You suggest we send McNiven to a white lady?”
“McNiven is a white man, going to save another white man. I don’t suppose the aid of yet one more white person would be so strange,” I said.
“But a Virginian,” Mr. Bowser said. “And female to boot.”