The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  The younger Mrs. Chester—the only Mrs. Chester anymore—wasted no time ordering yards of black crepe and wool for her mourning garments. By the time she cast them off a year and a day later, her regular wardrobe was hopelessly out of style. Weeks of poring over fashion magazines and contemplating different designs followed, and Joanna spent nearly every waking moment with needle in hand, fitting bodices, adjusting hems, offering her opinions on everything from the quality of a cotton lawn to the most flattering color for the mistress’s complexion. Often Joanna’s duties included listening and nodding agreeably while the mistress chattered on about household matters or whatever county gossip had managed to find its way to the plantation. While the two Mrs. Chesters had not always gotten along, as the only two white ladies for miles, they had been forced into companionship. With her mother-in-law gone, the younger Mrs. Chester had no one to talk to save her husband, who was rarely available, or her children, who had little interest in her favorite topics of conversation, or her slaves, who alone could be relied upon to listen and flatter, if not understand as an equal might.

  As the years passed, in a turnabout Joanna never could have imagined, she replaced Marse Chester’s mother as the mistress’s favorite confidante. She learned more than she cared to know about Marse Chester’s tragic weakness for cards and horse racing, about Mason’s struggles in school contrasted with his younger brother’s impressive aptitude, and about her daughter’s growing beauty. To Joanna’s amazement, though she did little but echo the mistress’s own words back at her when obliged to reply, the mistress seemed to think of her as sympathetic to her concerns. If she had known what bitter retorts Joanna concealed behind an impassive face, she would have had her supposedly dutiful slave beaten day and night. If she had only known how often her husband dragged Joanna from her bed, how often Joanna choked down Honor’s preventative remedies, Mrs. Chester would have sold her loyal confidante so far south Joanna would have been unable to even dream of freedom. But instead she gave Joanna all the leftover fabrics from her dressmaking to sew quilts for herself and for Ruth, and when she hired Joanna out to neighboring plantations, she allowed her to keep ten percent of her earnings. Then came an evening—Joanna’s eyes straining in the fading light, her neck and shoulders aching from hours of tedious fine stitching—when Mrs. Chester told Joanna that she was writing her last will and testament.

  “You ill, ma’am?” Joanna asked, as relieved for an excuse to look up from her work as she was surprised by the news.

  “No, I’m perfectly sound, but none of us knows when the Lord will call us home.” Mrs. Chester gazed out the window and sighed. “You have been a good and loyal servant, and you shall be rewarded. Upon my death, you will be manumitted.”

  Joanna reminded herself that a reply was in order. “Thank you, ma’am.”

  As if expecting a different reaction, Mrs. Chester turned away from the window to study her. “That means you will be granted your freedom.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.” Joanna busied herself with her sewing, fighting back a scowl of rage. If Mrs. Chester wanted to reward her so much, why not free her now? Promises in a last will and testament were next to useless unless her son and heir chose to honor them. What if by then Mason Chester had a wife who wanted pretty dresses? What if he weighed fulfilling his mother’s last wishes against the money Mrs. Richardson and others would gladly offer for Joanna’s services? And what if Mrs. Chester passed on before her husband? Marse Chester would never let Joanna go.

  Mrs. Chester should ask the family’s loyal groom what deathbed promises were worth. She should ask her mother-in-law’s favorite maid, who was married to a freeman but still a slave herself. They knew how it killed the soul to wait years and years for freedom that was ultimately denied. And now, even though she knew better, just like them, Joanna would wait and hope and end up disappointed.

  Sick at heart, Joanna bent over her sewing and blinked back tears. No matter how firmly she tried to talk herself out of hoping for the impossible, she knew she would await the reading of Mrs. Chester’s will as if her life depended upon it—for it did. Even though she had seen how blithely the family had ignored the wishes of the elder Mrs. Chester, even though she expected nothing, she could not shut off her hope. She knew she would be devastated when Marse Chester or Mason inevitably found a reasonable way to avoid freeing her. It would have been better if the mistress had never told Joanna her intentions.

  Joanna was nineteen or perhaps already twenty when Marse Chester chose a new favorite, a girl around fifteen, a field hand. For nearly two months he strode off to the slave quarter at night instead of dragging Joanna from beneath the quilts she had pieced with the scraps of his wife’s dresses. She sometimes heard him slip out the kitchen door, but he never once paused in the doorway of the small room off the kitchen Joanna and Ruth shared. Ruth had promised her his interest would fade; she herself had been his favorite once, but he had not sought her out that way in more than twenty years. Although Joanna felt sorry for the other girl, she was even more guiltily relieved that the master had found someone else and left her alone.

  By that time she had become the plantation’s laundress as well as its seamstress, and she rarely helped in the kitchen anymore. A new little girl assisted Ruth, a spindly little thing whose sharp elbows and knees poked Joanna in the back when they curled up under the quilts at night. Joanna tried not to think about how unlucky the little girl would be to grow into womanhood within Marse Chester’s sight, and how one day he would tire of the field hand and seek out a new favorite. Sometimes, though, as the girl bolted down leavings from the family’s dinner, Joanna’s eyes met Ruth’s, and she knew the cook shared her worries about the child’s likely fate.

  Joanna hoped and prayed to be far from the plantation when that day came. She had already saved up nearly five dollars of her own, which she carried day and night in a small pouch pinned within her clothing. She was going to buy her freedom and later that of her mother, whom she had not seen since she was last hired out to the Ashworth plantation nearly four years before. Though she had only been granted a few minutes in the slave quarter, Joanna had memorized every detail of her mother’s features as she hungrily caught up on the news of her brothers and sisters. She would never forget her mother’s face, no matter how much time or distance separated them in the years to come.

  It was two days after Christmas, and the big house was quiet in the wake of the departure of the Chesters’ holiday guests. Mrs. Chester had taken to her bed, exhausted from the effort of entertaining, and had sent down word that Joanna was to begin her new gown without delay. Joanna was in the sitting room, cutting the silk Marse Chester had given his wife for Christmas, when she heard a familiar footfall in the doorway. “Do you need to do that here?” Marse Chester asked, more curious than angry.

  Joanna quickly set her work aside and rose, head bowed. “The mistress told me to, suh,” she said. “This here silk is fine, and she don’t want it to catch on nothing rough.”

  “Where is your mistress?”

  “She’s upstairs, suh. She indisposed.”

  “Is that right?” He studied her, and when he stepped into the room, she knew her time of respite was over. Her heart caught in her throat. Was the marse crazy? It was broad daylight, Ruth was not far away in the kitchen, and though the mistress was upstairs in bed, she was not sleeping.

  “Please, suh,” she said. It was unbearable that he should do this now, after two months of peace. As he lunged for her, she ducked out of reach and seized the shears. “You leave me be,” she said, leveling the sharp points at him, “or I’ll tell the mistress what you do at night. I’ll tell her how you go to the slave cabins when you say you going riding.”

  With a snarl Marse Chester brought his fist down upon her hand, knocking the shears to the floor. As she reached for them, he grabbed her, put his hand over her mouth, and shoved her against the wall. Struggling, Joanna groped for the scissors, for a lamp, for anything—and her
hand closed around something hard and metallic. She struck at him with all her strength, scratching his face, drawing blood. He swore and drew back, wiping blood from his face, but as Joanna tried to scramble away, he snatched the flatiron from the fire and pressed it against her cheek. Searing pain, a terrible odor, a piercing shriek, and then all went dark.

  When Joanna came to, she was lying alone on the sitting room floor, her skirt hiked up above her knees, her face throbbing with heat and pain, her loins echoing another pain. She called out weakly for Ruth, but Marse Chester must have sent the cook away or she would have already been at Joanna’s side. Ruth would have heard everything, would have known how badly Joanna needed her.

  Gingerly Joanna sat up, her limbs aching. Grasping the arm of a chair, she pulled herself to her feet, straightened her clothes, and took the mistress’s warmest shawl from the back of a chair. Wrapping it around her own shoulders, she made her way to the empty kitchen, where a basket of apples sat on a table. She tucked two into her apron pocket and went outside, walking steadily but as if in a dream. She set out on the road she had often taken when hired out to neighboring plantations. She passed the young mistress riding her pony and returned the girl’s wave; she passed slaves working around the stables and outbuildings, and heard distant singing, a mournful, familiar lament about crossing over Jordan. She walked on, and no one paid her more than a passing glance or asked her about her business. They were too far away to see the fresh angry burn on her cheek, too far away to see the emptiness in her eyes. From where they stood, there was nothing to distinguish that day from any other Joanna had been sent on an errand for Mrs. Chester.

  She walked for hours and hours, until evening fell and she could not make her way along the road without stumbling. They would have discovered her missing by now. With a tremor of apprehension—the first stirring of emotion she had felt since setting forth—she hastened across some farmer’s field and hid inside a haystack. The day had been unseasonably warm, but with the setting of the sun, all warmth had fled. Catching her breath, shivering in the thin December air, listening for pursuit, she suddenly realized that she still held the object she had used to strike Marse Chester.

  It was the mistress’s elegant silver needle case, hinged and lined with wine-colored velvet, with five sharp needles and an embossed silver thimble tucked inside. One corner was red with Marse Chester’s blood, or perhaps her own.

  She slept fitfully and woke the next morning, ravenous. She devoured the two apples and hid within the haystack until nightfall, dozing off and starting awake at the slightest noise. When darkness descended, she crept from the haystack and continued north, straining her ears for the distant baying of slave catchers’ dogs.

  On and on she had traveled, day after day.

  With the help of her hard-earned five dollars and a stroke of good fortune that guided her into the Underground Railroad, she had made her way to Pennsylvania, a free state. By that time it was winter, and since she had not thought to bring Honor’s pouch of herbs with her, the evidence of her master’s crime had been growing in her belly.

  The Bergstroms had sheltered her, had seen her safely delivered of her child, and had devised a scheme by which she and her son would travel in disguise to freedom in Canada. With forged documents, new clothes, and a borrowed horse and carriage, at that very moment Joanna and her son should have been embarking upon new lives in freedom. Instead her son was lost to her, and she was back where she started, back at Greenfields, further from freedom than she had ever been.

  Marse Chester’s slaves paused in the tobacco rows and watched in silence as the two slave catchers and their quarry passed. The overseer let them take in the lesson of Joanna’s failure before urging them back to work.

  Isaac and Peter brought their horses to a halt in the stableyard. Marse Chester had heard them approach and waited on the front veranda of the big house. Joanna’s heart gave a lurch. Even from that distance she recognized his proud, angry, self-satisfied stance. Mason stood at his side, tall and sturdy, glaring at her as if he still remembered the poor care she had given him as a child. He was wearing a shirt she had sewn months earlier; she knew the fit of the collar as her own work. She had no time to wonder why the mistress had not come outside to witness the spectacle, for Isaac yanked her down from the horse, propelled her across the dusty yard, and shoved her to the ground at the foot of the stairs to the veranda.

  “We got your girl, Mr. Chester,” said Peter. There were other words exchanged and fees paid, but Joanna’s ears rang and she took no notice of them. Her mind was far away as the slave catchers rode off with their purses fattened and the overseer seized her by the shoulders and dragged her off to be beaten. As her back was torn open by the overseer’s whip, her last thoughts before darkness claimed her was that at least her son was safe, at least he would never be beaten or sold down south or have his dreams of freedom crushed like a flower underfoot.

  When she woke, she was lying on her stomach on a bed of worn quilts in a slave cabin, her back aching and throbbing with such searing pain that she gasped aloud. She heard bare feet scuff the dirt floor, and then a familiar voice spoke close to her ear: “Just lie still. You not fit to sit up yet.”

  It was all she could do to stay conscious; sitting up was out of the question. Joanna swallowed back her nausea and said, “How long I been here?”

  “Ten days almost,” replied Honor. Joanna felt an unexpected coolness as Honor placed wet tobacco leaves on the raw flesh of her back; the pain eased almost imperceptibly before welling up again. “I gave you something to dry up your milk so the swelling won’t grieve you so much. Did you have a boy or a girl?”

  Joanna licked her dry, cracked lips and tried to think. Honor cackled at her hesitation. “Oh, don’t be afraid, girl. I saw the signs, but I’ve kept bigger secrets than yours from Marse Chester. It was a boy, wasn’t it?”

  Joanna managed a nod.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Frederick.” Joanna closed her eyes, longing to slip back into oblivion. “Frederick Douglass North.” Her name in Canada was going to be Joanna North. She’d die before she let anyone call her or her son Chester. “I name him after a great man.”

  “I told you to drink my tea. Didn’t I say you wouldn’t get far with a baby in your belly? Maybe you’ll listen to the old conjure woman from now on.”

  “But I did get far,” Joanna murmured, too exhausted to defend herself for not remembering the pouch of herbs when she fled the plantation.

  “Not far enough. Where’s your boy now?”

  Free in Canada, she prayed. “I don’t know. The slave catchers left him behind.”

  “Well, that’s a mercy.” Honor bustled around the fireside. Joanna drifted, half-awake, until Honor roused her by pressing a warm cup to her lips. She lifted her head slightly to drink, and when she dropped back upon the quilts, exhausted from even that small effort, she glimpsed Honor overturning the empty cup upon the hearth. “I don’t see your boy here,” she said, studying the patterns in the damp leaves. “I don’t see him a slave at all. Long as you keep quiet so no one knows where to look for him, he should grow up free.”

  “Will I ever see him again?”

  Honor hesitated and brushed the leaves into the fire. “Leaves don’t tell everything.”

  An evasive reply that meant no. Joanna’s throat constricted around a moan of anguish. She must not put too much into the old conjure woman’s words. Honor didn’t know everything.

  “Mr. Linney want you in the fields as soon as you’re able,” said Honor, selecting herbs, working with mortar and pestle to make a concoction for some needy slave. “He left it up to me to say when that is, but two more weeks about as much as you get out of an overseer like him. Look like no more big house for you.”

  Joanna nodded to show she understood. She would have to find someone with room in their cabin for one disgraced runaway. It would be a relief to stay out of Marse Chester’s easy reach. Ruth and the new little g
irl would continue to have the room off the kitchen to themselves. “Ruth come to see me since I been back?”

  Honor hesitated, the mortar making a sharp clink against the pestle. “Ruth gone.”

  “She run away?” Joanna’s heart clenched. “Marse Chester sold her?” It couldn’t be. Not even a man as vile as Marse Chester could have blamed Ruth for Joanna’s escape.

  “Yellow fever sweep through here last February,” said Honor. “I did all I could. Ten slaves got taken. Young Marse Billy, too. The mistress hasn’t been right since.”

  “Ruth’s dead?”

  “You ask me, she was ready to go.” The clinking of stone against stone told that Honor had resumed her work. “She blame herself for everything bad happen to you. Folks talk when they got the fever, and I hear everything. Ruth say that if she had just let you be in the fields, if she hadn’t tried so hard to get you back in the big house, Marse Chester maybe never lay a hand on you. Course, we both know he don’t mind walking to the slave cabins for what he want, but Ruth too heartsick to listen to sense.”

  Joanna’s head swam. Ruth, dead and gone, wrongly blaming herself for Joanna’s misfortune. “Her blood on Marse Chester’s hands.”

  “So much blood on his hands already. He don’t care about another drop more.”

  “I care.”

  “But you can’t do nothing about it.”

  Joanna clenched her teeth and squeezed her eyes shut against tears of grief and rage. Maybe Honor was right, but someday, somehow that man would pay for all the evil he had done in life, if not in this world, then in the next. He had lost one son to the same sickness that had taken Ruth, but the scales were far from balanced.

  Ten days later, Mr. Linney ordered Joanna to the tobacco fields. The effort of stooping and bending to pluck the leaves opened the newly forming scars on her back until her dress soaked through with blood and dried stiff beneath the hot sun. Back in the slave cabins that evening, she cried out as Honor peeled the fabric from her skin and applied a salve to her wounds. She sank into sleep immediately upon lying down, and in the morning she woke to find that Honor had washed her dress. It was still slightly damp when she put it on and reported to the fields, where the wounds once again tore open and bled. But each day they bled a little less as her skin knit together and hard ropes of scars formed. The tree of life, slaves called the pattern of branching scars. When only pinpricks of blood dotted her dress at the end of the day, Honor declared that she was healed. Joanna understood that to mean that she had to find another place to sleep at night and leave her pile of quilts to whoever next needed Honor’s tending.