The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Slowly, painfully, Joanna struggled to her feet, and Isaac chirruped to his horse. “We should hobble her,” he said to Peter, his words slurring. “That’s the only way to cure a runaway.”

  “That’s for Mr. Chester to say, not us.”

  “She ain’t worth it.” Isaac shook his head, swaying slightly in the saddle. “No slave’s worth all this trouble.”

  “Chester must think she is. His wife favors her sewing.”

  The men fell silent as they made their way south. It was nearly twilight before they made camp near the bank of a rushing river. If only she had not given in to her thirst and allowed the Dunbars’ pump to draw her out of hiding. She could be free, right now, and miles closer to the Elm Creek Valley and her son. What did it matter now if she lived or died, if she died of thirst on the way to Greenfields or was beaten to death after her arrival? She would never have another chance like the one she had just let slip through her grasp.

  It might be better to close her eyes forever right there on that riverbank, never take another step south, never take another beating. Her son was beyond her reach; she could do nothing to protect him. She was as good as dead to him already. Why live another day as a slave?

  Too exhausted for tears, she pulled off the secondhand shoes, which would surely never find their way back to Ida Mary’s neighbor now. She washed her feet in the river, slowly and deliberately. In all the years she had lived at Greenfields, Josiah Chester had never hobbled a slave by cutting the tendon joining heel to ankle, not out of kindness but out of concern that the maiming would lower the slaves’ value should he have to sell them. But no slave had ever fended him off with the sewing scissors or threatened to tell his wife about his nighttime visits to the slave quarter. No slave had ever fought back, or drawn his blood and then run off. He might hobble Joanna as a lesson to the other slaves. If the wound didn’t putrefy and kill her, it would at least make certain that she never ran again.

  Behind her came the sound of boots scuffling in the dirt. “Get out of those man’s clothes,” Isaac ordered. “It ain’t proper.”

  He threw her clothes at her back; they struck her across the shoulders and fell to the ground. Joanna reached behind to pick them up, drawing her feet out of the rushing water.

  “Go on, then.” Isaac nudged her with the toe of his boot.

  Slowly Joanna unbuttoned the borrowed shirt, slipped her arms from the sleeves, and folded it, and set on the ground beside her. The dress was still slightly damp from washing. Despite all it had been through, it was still beautiful. Anneke had cut and fit the pieces, and she had added the lace trim with her own hand. How could the same woman who created such a lovely gift have betrayed her?

  “Turn around.” When Joanna did not move, Isaac raised his voice. “I said, turn around. Stand up while you’re at it.”

  She knew it would do no good to argue. Concealing the pins in her palm, she unfastened the trousers, let them fall to her ankles, and stepped out of them. Though the summer night was balmy, she shivered as she turned to face the men, knowing that pregnancy had left its telltale signs upon her body. The pins pricked her palm, a small reassurance that she was not defenseless.

  Peter stared. “Were you a wet nurse on the Chester plantation?”

  “No, sir,” said Joanna, trembling. It was no use to pretend she had been. The youngest of Mistress Chester’s children was four years old, and the wet nurse had been sold away long ago.

  “Don’t she have to have a baby before…” Isaac gestured. “Before all that?”

  Peter nodded, grim. “Do you have a child waiting for you back at Greenfields, wench?”

  Joanna shook her head.

  He frowned, and Joanna knew he was counting the months between her escape and her recapture. Not that it mattered when she had given birth, or who the father of her child was. A child born to a slave was a slave.

  Unbidden, Joanna dressed herself, pulling the soft cotton shift over her head, slipping the dress over it. Her heart lifted. They had not known about her boy. The other men had not sold him off into slavery someplace far away, and she refused to believe Anneke would. Her son surely was safe and sound on Elm Creek Farm.

  “Her child is Josiah Chester’s property,” Peter said. “If he finds out that we left it behind—”

  “He don’t ever have to know,” said Isaac.

  The men fixed Joanna with twin glares. “You can’t tell him, either,” ordered Peter. “You know that’s the only way to keep your baby safe.”

  “My baby already safe,” she retorted. “He on his way to Canada. He set out with an abolitionist lady two days before you caught me. You’ll never find him.”

  As Peter raised his hand to strike her, Joanna darted out of reach. “I might be inclined to forget what I know if I was treated more kindly.”

  Peter slowly lowered his hand. “Is that so.”

  Joanna knew she was unlikely to get anything more from the men in payment for her silence. “As far as Marse Chester ever know, I never had no baby.”

  They crossed the Virginia border a few days later. Joanna would not have known except that Peter announced the news as the horses splashed across a stream. Only a few months before, sheltered by a kind Quaker family in a barn on the Pennsylvania border, she had vowed never to return to Virginia. Then she had dared dream that someday she would live as a free woman in Canada. Now the most she could hope for was that Josiah Chester would not hobble her, she would not be sold off so far south that escape to the free North would be impossible, and that her son would remain safe.

  She would wait, and stay alive, and bide her time, and when the time was right, she would run.

  Chapter Two

  1859

  Greenfields Plantation, Virginia

  When they passed the Richardson plantation, Joanna knew they were no more than a half day’s ride from their destination—Greenfields Plantation and Marse Chester. She felt a sting of phantom pain as if his knife already dug into the cord at the back of her ankle. If it were severed, she could not run.

  Later they crossed Ashworth land, where Joanna had been born. Joanna’s mother and four of her brothers and sisters lived there still, if they hadn’t died or been sold off. Joanna scarcely remembered them. When she was around five years old, Josiah Chester’s mother had come in her carriage to ask Marse Ashworth if he had a young girl to sell, for she needed someone to care for her grandson now that he had started walking. The master’s wife promptly offered Joanna, overcoming her husband’s objections with a wordless look of reproachful defiance that Joanna did not understand, except that she had always known the mistress hated her.

  Swooping her up in her arms, Joanna’s mother fled back to their cabin and hid her beneath a mound of quilts, but the overseer came in swift pursuit. He seized Joanna by the wrist, dragged her outside, and hefted her into the carriage across from her new mistress. When she shrieked for her mother, the gray-haired white lady in the fine dress slapped her and told her to hush, and as the coachman chirruped to the horses, she instructed Joanna in her new duties. She must tend the baby and keep him safe from harm, rock his cradle at night, and change his diapers. She must keep him clean, keep him from crying, and let the younger Mrs. Chester rest.

  Joanna did her best, but she was too young for the task. Mason was a good baby as babies went, but all babies cried, and all soiled their clothes. Joanna could barely lift the chubby ten-month-old and she struggled to hold him still when changing his diapers. Her forearms soon became bruised from his strong kicks, and she ran herself ragged keeping him from breaking her mistress’s precious trinkets or tumbling from the veranda. She was expected to stay up all night rocking his cradle, but sometimes weariness overcame her and she nodded off, awaking with a jolt when Mason wailed. Instead of picking up her son and soothing him, the mistress would snatch a willow whip from her beside table and beat Joanna on the neck and shoulders to teach her to stay awake.

  “She’s useless,” the mistress complained t
o her mother-in-law one afternoon when an exhausted, starving Joanna could not run fast enough to prevent Mason from toddling happily into a mud puddle. “I’ll thank you to allow me to choose my own servants next time.”

  Mother Chester’s thin lips formed a hard line in her wrinkled face. “Mr. Ashworth assured me she’s from excellent stock. Her mother is a strong field hand and she’s already borne five children, and at no more than one-and-twenty. The girl only wants training, and she has six months to acquire it.”

  With a doubtful frown, the mistress lay her slender white hand upon her abdomen, and with that gesture Joanna understood the hints and half-finished conversations of the past few weeks. In six months another young master would join the family, and Joanna would find her duties multiplied. Her heart plummeted. Until that moment she had assumed that once Mason was out of diapers and sleeping through the night, she would be allowed to return home to her mother.

  She dreaded the new baby’s arrival and longed for her mother and siblings. She endured the sleepless nights and beatings, and she felt herself becoming thinner and weaker as Mason thrived and grew. His chubby arms were thicker around than hers, and once, as moonlight streamed in through the window and her little charge slumbered, her mind took hold of the notion that her skin and flesh and bone were disappearing into his, and as he continued to grow, one day there would be nothing left of her but an empty, worn, homespun dress, crumpled in a heap on the floor.

  One afternoon she was straining to lift Mason into his chair when he suddenly lunged for a toy and slipped from her grasp. His head hit the chair with a sickening thud as he fell. For a heart-stopping moment he lay on the floor blinking up at her in surprise. Then he began to scream.

  The mistress came running. With a gasp she snatched up her son, and once assured that his skull had not been split open, she handed the boy to her maid and seized Joanna by the shoulders. She shook her until Joanna’s teeth rattled, screaming horrible, terrifying threats of what would become of her should Mason die. Joanna felt herself slipping into a faint, but she stayed conscious long enough to hear Mother Chester enter the room and declare, shocked and scandalized, “Caroline, you must control yourself.”

  The grip on her shoulders eased and Joanna fell to the floor, dazed and reeling.

  The mistress prevailed upon Marse Chester to buy a suitable wet nurse to tend both newborn and elder brother. Until such a slave could be found, Mason, who was not injured, was entrusted to Honor, a half-blind elderly slave whose knowledge of herb lore had earned her a measure of grudging respect from whites and coloreds alike. Joanna understood that she was in deep disgrace for dropping the young master, but any hope that she might be sent home for her failure vanished when Mother Chester announced that Joanna would help Ruth, the cook, until she was old enough to be put to work in the tobacco fields.

  Ruth’s seven children had been sold off to Georgia traders years before, and Joanna quickly became the unwitting beneficiary of their absence. Upon her thin shoulders Ruth poured the love and attention she had been unable to offer her own sons and daughters. Perhaps somewhere far to the south, other bereft mothers did the same for Ruth’s children.

  No longer forced to stay awake all night, Joanna slept soundly curled up beside Ruth in a small room off the kitchen; it was no more than a walled-in lean-to, but it was more comfortable by far than the slave cabins. She filled out and grew stronger, thanks to Ruth’s willingness to look the other way while Joanna stuffed her cheeks with the best of the table leavings before reluctantly scraping the rest into the slop bucket for the hogs.

  “Watch me,” Ruth admonished dozens of times a day as she cut up chickens and shelled peas, determined to teach Joanna everything she knew. As the months passed, Joanna gradually understood Ruth’s urgency: Only if Joanna became essential to the household would she attain any measure of security from being sold south, to Georgia or Florida, where life was hell on earth for a slave. Ruth’s status on the plantation had not protected her children, nor would it protect Joanna, her favorite, who had thus far proven to be a poor investment.

  If anyone’s position at Greenfields was secure, it was Ruth’s. Joanna once overheard another slave say that Ruth hadn’t been beaten since childhood, since coming into her own as mistress of the kitchen. A popular legend around the slave cabins contradicted that claim. The story said that shortly after Ruth’s youngest son was sold to pay off Marse Chester’s gambling debts, a pound of salt pork and a rope of sausages went missing between the smokehouse and the kitchen. Marse Chester didn’t believe the theft could have occurred without Ruth’s tacit approval, but when she insisted she knew nothing, he ordered the overseer to give her five lashes. After that, Ruth’s cookery took a sudden turn for the worse: the soup was slightly too salty, the chicken a trifle underdone, the biscuits flat and stale. Marse Chester reprimanded her, but when he threatened another beating, she seemed to lose even more of her vaunted skill. On the eve of a grand party, it was said, the mistress begged her husband to make amends with their offended cook or the Chesters would be shamed before the finest families in Virginia. No one knew how Marse Chester had mollified Ruth, but her cooking suddenly returned to normal and from that day forward no one dared beat her or accuse her of dishonesty.

  When Joanna asked her if the stories were true, Ruth was silent a moment before she said, “I fight my battles the only way I know how. You need to learn your own way.”

  When Joanna turned seven, Marse Chester decided she was old enough to join the other children in the fields, picking hornworms off the tobacco leaves. Ruth pleaded with him to reconsider and even begged the mistress to intercede, but the mistress had never forgiven Joanna for dropping Mason—and blamed the girl for provoking her own hysterical reaction, so unbecoming a lady. The mistress would just as soon have her mother-in-law’s regrettable purchase out of her sight, so a place was found for Joanna in the slave cabins.

  Ruth was ordered to take her to her new home. “Don’t you fear,” Ruth said, her eyes red-rimmed. “I’ll get you back in the big house soon. Just wait till they see how I can’t get by without your help.”

  Joanna missed Ruth, but in a way it was a relief to be out in the fields, away from the white family. The work was hard and hot with the sun beating down, but she didn’t have to be so careful, so fearful of spilling a pan of beans or breaking a dish and drawing Marse Chester’s ire. They sang as they worked, and sometimes a slave, granted leave to visit a spouse at Mr. Ashworth’s plantation, would return with news of Joanna’s mother and siblings. She didn’t eat as well, of course, though sometimes Ruth was able to slip her the end of a loaf of bread and repeat in whispers her promise to find a way to convince the Chesters that Joanna’s place was in the big house. Joanna believed her less with each repeating.

  They were picking the tobacco plants for the third time that season when Ruth came running out to the fields. She seized Joanna by the shoulder, called to the overseer that she was wanted up at the big house, and urged Joanna into a trot. “Just do as she say and mind your tongue,” Ruth instructed. “Watch old Mrs. Chester’s hands and do what she do. I already know you got sharp eyes and nimble fingers. Can you tie a knot?” When Joanna nodded, she breathed, “Good girl. Good girl.” Joanna had never seen her so agitated.

  They stopped at the pump, where Ruth hurriedly washed Joanna’s hands and face. Before Joanna knew it, she was standing in the fancy parlor before the two Mrs. Chesters, eyes downcast, wishing she were back in the hot, dusty tobacco rows, far from the white ladies’ scrutiny.

  “This here girl can sew,” Ruth said, placing a hand on Joanna’s shoulder, then quickly removing it as if she didn’t want to seem too fond.

  “I thought she was your kitchen maid,” said the younger Mrs. Chester.

  “She was, but when we all done cleaning up after supper, she help me with my mending.”

  Joanna held herself perfectly still, betraying nothing. She had never done anything of the sort.

  The el
der Mrs. Chester peered at her myopically. “Come here, girl.” Obediently Joanna stepped forward. “Let me see your hands.” Joanna held them out for inspection. “Remarkably clean, for a field hand.”

  “She wash up before she come in,” said Ruth. “She know better than to soil your pretty fabrics.”

  The mistress gave an elegant, skeptical sniff and reached for a pair of silver scissors sitting on a table at her side. She snipped off a length from a spool of white thread, withdrew a slender silver needle from an intricately embossed case, and beckoned to Joanna. “Thread this needle and knot the end.”

  Joanna bobbed a nod and took needle and thread, careful not to touch the mistress’s smooth white hands with her own. She sensed Ruth watching over her shoulder, longing to instruct her but unable to speak and reveal her lie.

  Joanna had seen women piece quilts and mend clothes in the slave cabins, so she knew more or less what to do, although she had never tried it herself. On her second attempt, she poked one end of the thread through the needle’s eye, then stuck the needle between her teeth while she tied a small knot at the other end. She held the threaded needle out to the younger mistress, who recoiled in distaste. “She had that in her mouth,” she said, incredulous. “I’m not going to touch her spittle.”

  Quickly Ruth stepped forward and took the threaded needle. “I’ll wash it for you. She do it right next time.”

  As Ruth hastened away, the mistress turned to her mother-in-law to complain, but before she could speak, the elder woman said, “If you had given her a pincushion, she needn’t have used her mouth. She’ll do, Caroline.”

  “She smells.”

  “A bath will cure that. Let her stay with Ruth instead of returning to the slave quarter. You know very well that’s what Ruth desires, and if you don’t want our friends to starve at your quilting party, you’ll grant her this one favor.”