The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Resigned, the mistress dismissed Joanna with a distracted wave of the hand. Joanna hurried back to the kitchen to tell Ruth, who cried out for joy and embraced her. But the promise of more food, easier work, and Ruth’s happiness did not settle Joanna’s mixed feelings. The mistress was as determined to find fault with her as Marse Chester’s mother was to prove that she had been right to purchase Joanna. Joanna would rather work bent over in the hot sun than caught between those two women.

  Two days later, carriages arrived bearing masters and mistresses from plantations throughout the county. The Ashworths came with their eldest daughter, who was to be married soon and for whom the party had been arranged. While the men talked and smoked, the women layered pieced and appliquéd tops in a long wooden frame on the veranda and finished the quilts for the bride’s trousseau. Joanna was on her feet all day, threading needles, tying knots, snipping loose threads so the ladies needn’t interrupt the rhythm of their work. Deftly, they soon covered the elegant tops in intricate patterns—bows, flowers, crosshatches, feathered plumes, and fans, all created with the finest, most delicate stitches Joanna had ever seen. The ladies chatted and gossiped and exchanged advice as they worked, forgetting or ignoring Joanna’s presence except to beckon her to snip a thread on the underside of the quilt or to pass them a new, threaded needle. They spoke about the upcoming wedding, praised the advantageous match, speculated about the new household, and despaired of the difficulties the newlyweds would face in obtaining good, loyal, trustworthy servants. Times had changed, they sighed. Nowadays slaves were so lazy and dishonest it was hardly worth the trouble to feed and clothe them, especially since they took ill so often—or stayed abed shamming illness—and had to be supported into their old age when they could no longer work to earn their keep.

  “It is our responsibility and our Christian duty,” said the elder Mrs. Chester, bending over the quilt to inspect her work closely. “We are enslaved every bit as much as they are and we must resign ourselves to it.”

  The other ladies nodded and murmured their agreement.

  Thanks in no small part to Joanna’s hard work, the quilting party was a success. At the end of the day, twelve beautiful, soft, warm quilts were completed for the betrothed couple and packed away until they could adorn the new house being built for them on the northern acres of the Ashworth plantation.

  Since Joanna had proven herself useful, the Chester ladies began summoning her whenever they had sewing of their own to complete. As she grew older, she worked in the kitchen less and in the ladies’ sitting room more often. She learned to piece simple quilt blocks, to mend torn clothing, to hem a gown, and to assemble a shirt from pieces the mistress cut out. She knew as if by instinct how to cut the fabric so that it draped most becomingly, how to take apart and reassemble geometric shapes so that quilt pieces fell together in a new and delightful pattern. By the time she was fourteen, she could piece, appliqué, and quilt as beautifully as any of the ladies who had attended the quilting party, and she could design, cut, sew, and fit a dress beginning with nothing more than the mistress’s description. Eventually almost all the household sewing fell to her, from coarse homespun clothes for the slaves to a fine summer suit for Marse Chester himself. She trembled as she took his measurements; Marse Chester endured the imposition on his time good-naturedly, complimenting Joanna on her work while the mistress looked on sharply. He must have known he frightened her, for he spoke kindly while she fit the suit, adjusting the length of the trousers and the sleeves. “Mother did well to bring her to the household,” he declared to his wife when the suit was finished, admiring himself in the mirror. “We’re the best-dressed family in the county, and rightly so.” The mistress, observing them over her needlepoint from a chair near the window, agreed, if only because she wouldn’t dream of contradicting her husband in front of a slave.

  A few months later, the mistress arranged to hire out Joanna to Mrs. Richardson, who had much admired Mrs. Chester’s newest gown and requested Joanna’s services, since her arthritis made fine sewing impossible. It was the first time Joanna had left the plantation since arriving as a young child, and she packed her sewing basket with mounting excitement. Marse Chester’s trusted groom was instructed to deliver Joanna to the Richardson plantation and fetch her home in a week’s time. But Joanna saw little of her new, temporary surroundings, for from the moment she arrived, she measured and cut and sewed, all too aware that she had only seven days to finish the task. By day she sewed, pausing only for scanty meals of coarse gruel and a bit of pork; at night she slept on a folded quilt on the floor near the cookstove. She set in the last lace panel two hours before Marse Chester’s groom arrived with the wagon. Delighted with her lovely new gown, Mrs. Richardson paid him Joanna’s wages and instructed him to thank Mrs. Chester for the gracious lending of her seamstress. To Joanna she gave a small bundle of leftover fabric, “For quilts, or whatever other use you may have for it.” Joanna, who had never had even the smallest scrap to call her own, stammered out her thanks and offered to come back whenever Mrs. Richardson needed her and Mrs. Chester permitted.

  On the ride home, Marse Chester’s groom told her she was a lucky girl. A slave who brought in outside wages was even more valuable than one who worked only on the home plantation, especially with the master’s gambling habits throwing the family into occasional precipitous debt. “If you can earn more for him than he could get selling you to the Georgia traders,” the groom said, “then you in a very good spot.”

  Joanna nodded to show she understood, but she knew she would only be allowed to earn outside wages at the mistress’s discretion. The mistress was so proud of her finery that she would not be inclined to help other ladies acquire a wardrobe as varied and as pretty as her own.

  “Sometimes, if you work hard and mind yourself, Marse Chester maybe let you keep some of your wages,” the groom added. “You could buy something good to eat, something pretty to wear, maybe save it up and buy your freedom someday.” Even as Joanna’s thoughts seized upon that revelatory idea, the groom slowed the horses a trifle and gestured to a gang of slaves laboring in the tobacco rows in the distance. “This here’s Ashworth land. See that pretty woman with the shawl? That’s my wife. The little one next to her, that’s your mama.”

  Joanna’s heart leaped. She shaded her eyes with her hands and studied the distant figure, but she was too far away to see the woman’s face clearly. “And my daddy?” she asked the groom eagerly. “Is my daddy out there, too?”

  The groom regarded her incredulously. “Girl, your daddy’s Marse Ashworth. Everybody know that.” He chuckled and shook the reins, urging the horses to resume a faster pace.

  She was fifteen when Marse Chester began watching her from the doorway while she sewed. Sometimes he would ask her to fetch him something to eat from the kitchen and bring it to him in his study; other times he would merely eye her silently for a few moments and move on. She knew white people hated to see a slave sitting down, so when his gaze fell upon her, she made an effort to appear as busy and industrious as she could. He made her so nervous that she often had to pick out stitches after he left, and she dreaded the sound of his footsteps on the floorboards, knowing the distraction would make her fall behind schedule. She expected the two Mrs. Chesters to scrutinize her work, but why would a man take an interest in a slave’s sewing? Maybe, she dared hope, he contemplated hiring her out to Mrs. Richardson or another mistress, and maybe if she did well, he would let her keep some of her wages. Maybe one day she would be able to buy her freedom, and her mothers’ and siblings’ too. Maybe they could reunite in the North, in Canada. Her brothers could grow tobacco, her mother and sisters could keep house, and she could earn wages taking in sewing. They need never fear beatings or Georgia traders, and no one would ever separate them again.

  Her hopes died a few days later, when Marse Chester brushed the length of his body against hers as she stood in the kitchen, chopping carrots for soup. Ruth said nothing, not even after he left t
hem alone in the kitchen, so although Joanna felt sickened and unsettled, she pretended it hadn’t happened.

  But that night a shadowed figure appeared in the doorway of the little room Joanna shared with Ruth. She held herself perfectly motionless and silent, feigning sleep, but Marse Chester groped beneath the quilts and seized her arm. Before she could cry out, she felt Ruth’s strong arm encircle her waist, restraining her. “You want something to eat, suh?” Ruth said, her usually sure voice quavering. “I fetch it for you.”

  Marse Chester pulled on Joanna’s arm until she gasped from pain. “Go back to sleep, Ruth.”

  “Suh, she’s just a girl. I…I can take care of you.”

  “Ruth, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll hush up and go back to sleep.”

  Ruth said nothing more. Marse Chester hauled Joanna out of bed and propelled her, stumbling, out the kitchen door, past the smokehouse, to a grassy hollow some distance from the big house. She struggled, but he was much too strong. He held his hand over her mouth to muffle her cries of anguish and pain.

  When he finished, he stood up, brushed the grass from his knees, tucked in the shirt she had sewn for him, and held out a hand to help her to her feet. She wrapped her arms around her waist and rolled over onto her side away from him. “Very well. Lie here alone, then,” he muttered. She heard the grass rustle as he strode back toward the house, but soon the chirping of crickets drowned out the sound of his footfalls.

  She tried to sit up, but her stomach rebelled. She vomited up everything she had eaten that day, until bile burned her throat, until she shook with dry heaves. Suddenly she felt strong hands on her shoulders. A scream strangled in her chest as someone wiped her face with a cool, damp cloth. “Hush, baby,” Ruth murmured. “It’s gonna be all right.”

  But it wouldn’t. Joanna knew that. She would never be all right again.

  When Marse Chester came for her again a few nights later, Joanna kicked him and thrashed and clung with both fists to the quilts so he could not drag her outside again. Before long he either decided she was not worth the effort or feared waking the mistress, for he stormed off, muttering curses.

  The next night he was prepared for a struggle. He pinned her arms against her sides and hauled her out of bed before she had a chance. Outside he pushed her down into the same grassy hollow, and when she scrambled to her feet and tried to run, he seized her skirt and hauled her back. Again when he was through, he offered a hand to help her up; again she ignored him. Alone, she made her way to the pump and washed up before heading back to the small room off the kitchen where she knew Ruth waited anxiously. Brushing grass from her clothes and hair, she smoldered with resentment and rage—against Marse Chester, who deserved it, and unreasonably, unfairly, against Ruth. She knew Ruth couldn’t have protected her from Marse Chester, couldn’t have prevented what had happened—and yet, to her shame, she wished the stout cook had risen from the bed, snatched up her cast iron fry pan, and split his skull with it. But it would have ended the same. Marse Chester would have had his way, and Ruth would have earned herself a beating that probably would have killed her. No slave who valued her own life attacked a white man, especially her own master.

  He came for Joanna at least twice a week. She gave up fighting him, knowing it was useless, knowing she was only dragging things out and delaying her return to her own warm bed. After the fourth time, Ruth told her that she ought to see Honor for the herb that would keep her from getting Marse Chester’s baby. “Don’t waste any time,” Ruth urged. “Honor’s cures won’t do nothing once the baby’s in you.”

  “Maybe I should get a baby,” said Joanna bitterly. “Once the mistress knows what her husband’s doing—”

  Ruth set down her spoon with a sharp whack. “You think she don’t know? She know. You think you the first? As long as she can pretend he’s a good, faithful, Christian husband, she overlook a lot of sins. But you wave a big belly in her face, you find yourself worked hard in the tobacco rows until your baby come, and unless it at least as dark as you, it’ll be sold down south as soon as it’s weaned.”

  What did she care what happened to the master’s baby, a baby she never wanted? But she had seen how other mothers changed their minds once they held their unwanted babies in their arms, and she couldn’t be sure the same wouldn’t happen to her. Nor did she want to risk the mistress’s ire or, worse yet, death in childbirth.

  Later that day, she slipped away from the house and hurried down the hill to the rows of ramshackle cabins that made up the slave quarter. Hot and stifling in summer, frigid in winter, the cabins were bordered by small kitchen gardens Marse Chester allowed them to cultivate on their own time. Young children—mostly unclothed, although a few wore shirts too big for them, the hems past their knees—toddled in the dusty footpaths between the cabins and stared at her in frank curiosity as she passed.

  Honor’s cabin was the last in the row, nearest the stream and farthest from the privy. In front of her door lay offerings of dried apples, bundles of cloth, a chipped cup—gifts made in gratitude for cures bestowed or curses lifted. The woman herself—thin as a cornhusk and bent with age—was around back directing a pair of girls as they weeded her garden. Within a year, Joanna estimated, they would be in the tobacco rows picking hornworms.

  Honor turned a pale, cloudy eye upon her as she rounded the cabin. “You that girl who sews?” she called. “That Joanna from the Ashworth place?”

  Joanna had been at Greenfields so long that the reminder she had come from somewhere else startled her. “I’m Joanna.”

  Honor beckoned her closer and grasped her forearm, looking her up and down as if trying to study her through thick cotton wadding. “Well, you’re all right for now but you should have come seen me sooner.”

  They went inside, Joanna unsure whether she was guiding the old woman or she was being led. “You know why I come?” she asked uncertainly, glancing around the dim room. Bundles of roots and herbs hung above the fireplace, and in the corner was a crude table set with a chipped plate and a mortar and pestle.

  “Course I know. All the pretty girls need old Honor sooner or later.” Honor shuffled to the fireplace and felt among the dangling bundles for two plants Joanna did not recognize. She separated them on the table, placed a few sprigs of each in the pestle, and crushed them together. She tapped out the blended herbs onto a scrap of cloth, twisted it into a small pouch, and tied the ends shut. “Brew this into a tea. That shouldn’t be hard for you, working in the kitchen as you do. Drink one cup every morning, and another cup at night if you don’t feel your courses coming on at the right time. When you run out of leaves, come for more.”

  Joanna accepted the pouch and gave Honor a thin slab of pork and two biscuits Ruth had wrapped in cheesecloth. But instead of taking the gift, Honor closed her hands around Joanna’s. A knowing smile spread across her face. “That’s not all you wanted from me, is it?”

  Joanna freed herself, closed Honor’s grasping hands around the bundle of food, and backed away. Honor’s smiled deepened, and she tapped her lips with a gnarled finger. “Of course I have what you need,” she said in a voice scarcely above a whisper. “And you so close to the kitchen—it would be easy to do. But poisoning the marse—even if you only make him sick, they kill you for it.”

  “I know that,” said Joanna. That’s why she hadn’t asked for the poison; that’s why she had only brooded in vengeful silence. But somehow Honor had known. “How did you—”

  “I hear him with you at night. Course you want him dead.”

  “Maybe they kill me for it, but at least he’d be gone too.”

  Honor cackled. “And after that, you think his widow set us all free? No. We just get a new marse, maybe worse than the marse we got now. You only thinking of yourself, only thinking of today. Ruth the cook. They blame her, too, if Marse Chester die of poisoning. Maybe blame her instead of you. Ever think what they might do to her?”

  “No,” said Joanna. “I didn’t think—”


  “You right you didn’t think.” Honor tapped Joanna on the temple. “Use your head, girl. I know you got one. You ever want to be free, you got to think. And drink that tea.” Honor turned away from her to put away the bundles of herbs. “When you run, and you will run, you won’t get very far with a baby in your belly.”

  Without replying, Joanna stumbled from the cabin into daylight. Blinking from the sudden glare, clutching the pouch of herbs in her fist, she hurried back to the big house before the two Mrs. Chesters realized she was gone.

  Less than a year later, there was only one Mrs. Chester to placate, to please, and to fit for dresses. In February Marse Chester’s mother caught the grippe in her chest, wheezed putrid fluid for a week, and expired. She had left instructions in her will for her personal maid and loyal groom to be freed and paid the sum of twenty dollars apiece, but Marse Chester and his lawyer concluded that she must have been delirious from fever at the time she amended her will, so her heirs could legally ignore her request. When he realized he was not going to be freed, the groom ran off and hid in the woods, but since he came back the next morning, Marse Chester did not order a whipping. “He missed two meals and slept on the cold, hard ground last night,” Joanna overheard him tell the mistress. “That’s punishment enough.”

  The slaves were of two minds regarding the groom’s return. Some congratulated him for avoiding punishment after annoying the master and said that he had done right to return after he had made his point. Others thought he should have stayed in the woods until the master agreed to abide by his mother’s deathbed wishes. Joanna thought he never should have lit out for the woods in the first place. Wasn’t he the Chesters’ most trusted slave? Wasn’t his word law in the stables? He should have hitched up a wagon, set out for the northern road as if sent on an errand, and kept going until he crossed over into freedom. “Think,” she imagined Honor saying. “You ever want to be free, you got to think.”