The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

“White folks.”

  “But I did,” said Joanna. “Quakers, mostly. They hate slavery. But it wasn’t just white folks who help me on my way. Free coloreds gave me shelter too. There was one family—” She took a deep breath, tears pricking her eyes at the memory. “A farmer in the Elm Creek Valley—Abel Wright and his wife, Constance. He grow wheat, raise goats, make cheese. He born free, and he bought his wife’s freedom. They have two sons who never knew the sting of the lash. They give me food, clothing, shoes, hope, but I don’t know what’s happened to them. When I got caught, the man who sheltered me got taken by the police. His sister, too, maybe. Maybe everyone who helped me in jail right now. I don’t know.”

  “You sold down south, your friends in trouble…You sorry you ran?”

  “No,” she said, without needing to pause and consider. Wasn’t her son better off? “But if I ran again, some folks I wouldn’t trust a second time.”

  “Some day I gonna run.” Titus spoke with such fierce determination that she didn’t doubt him for a moment. “Sometimes Marse Chester hire me out to his friends need to deliver foals, break horses. He give me a portion of my wages to keep, and I save every cent. If I can’t buy my freedom by the time I’m thirty, I’m gonna take a horse and ride north.”

  “Where you gonna go?” asked Joanna. “What about Tavia and Auntie Bess and the children? I hear Marse Chester set Aaron on a runaway’s kin.”

  “I’ll take them with me,” said Titus, undaunted. “They hide in the carriage, and I drive. You can come, too.”

  “Me?”

  “Why not? You in Tavia’s household. You think I leave you here to get beat and starve? Besides, you the one who know the way. You know folks who can help us.”

  “I don’t know the way from here,” Joanna said, glancing at the open doorway and lowering her voice. “I know the way from Greenfields, the other Marse Chester’s place in Virginia.”

  “I’ll get us that far. I travel a long ways driving Marse Chester, I hear buckra talk, I learn things. I talk to other coachmen.” Suddenly Titus seized her arm. “Say you’ll help us. I can’t die a slave. I’m a man, Joanna. I got a mind, a soul. I won’t die a slave.”

  Joanna took a deep, shaky breath. “You know they gonna have their eye on me. I’m a runaway, remember? They just waiting for me to run off again so they can beat the running out of me.”

  “Then you just gonna have to make them think you happy here.”

  Joanna shook her head. “Unless they stupid, they never believe it.”

  “Buckra want to believe we all happy, loyal servants. Don’t the mistress call us her black family? They see what they want to see.” Just then, Titus glanced down and seemed startled to find himself still clasping her arm. Abruptly he let go. “Meantime, you got to fix the way north in your mind. Draw a map if you can, but hide it good.”

  “Draw a map,” said Joanna, skeptical. “Where’m I gonna get paper and ink?”

  “Mistress’s study.”

  “And if I get caught stealing?”

  He shrugged and grinned with his familiar insolence. “Don’t get caught.”

  Before she could protest, he left the washhouse, pausing in the doorway to throw her one last mocking grin over his shoulder. “You nothing like your sister,” Joanna called after him, and heard his answering laugh. She wondered if Tavia knew of his plans, or if Joanna was his first and only confidante.

  As she hung the wash out to dry—colors in the cooling shade, whites in the harsh sunshine, in a reversal of the usual order of things—she mulled over Titus’s words. He was right to say she must fix the details of her journey north in her mind, but she did not see how she could draw a map. She had never held a pen except for those brief months in the Elm Creek Valley when Gerda Bergstrom had taught her to read. She remembered landmarks, not the number of miles or acres she had followed from one hiding place to the next.

  While the laundry waved in the breeze, Joanna finished the mending and began ripping out ill-made seams of the mistress’s half-finished dress. After trimming a narrow strip of blue-and-brown plaid from the bodice so that it would lie smooth, she was tempted to slip the scraps into her apron pocket, but then she thought of Aaron, whom she had thus far seen only from a distance, and decided it was not worth the risk. Instead she carefully saved all the scraps in the sewing basket, and at the end of the day, when she put away the washing and gave the mended clothes to the housekeeper, she went to the study, where she found the mistress reading.

  “I didn’t summon you,” said Mrs. Chester, marking her place with a finger and closing the book.

  “No, ma’am, but I have to tell you that before I can finish your dress, I need to fit the bodice and check the length of the sleeves.”

  “Very well. Tomorrow morning after breakfast.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Joanna hesitated. “Mistress Chester, I also wanted to know what you like to do with the scraps from the sewing, if you or Miss Evangeline save them for quilting.”

  “My reading and writing keep me too busy to quilt, and Miss Evangeline cares little for needlework save embroidery.” The mistress pursed her lips, thinking. “You may keep the scraps if you can find a use for them.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”

  Joanna slipped away to the washhouse to collect her tin cornboiler and the dress she had worn on the journey south, the dress she would never again wear, for she had discovered a more important purpose for the faded calico. With the fabric from the dress and the scraps she collected from the household sewing, she would create a quilt, the most important and necessary quilt she had ever made.

  With needle and thread she would fashion Birds in the Air blocks like those she had made with Gerda Bergstrom during her brief winter in Pennsylvania, Birds in the Air for freedom and a swift flight north. When the top was complete, she would quilt the three layers with stitched portraits of landmarks she had encountered along the way from Greenfields to Elm Creek Farm. She would disguise the quilted symbols with fine stipple work and crosshatches and feather plumes so the clues would be invisible to a casual observer. No master or mistress would examine a slave’s quilt, ridden with filth and vermin and the stink of the slave quarter. Its secrets would be invisible to the Chesters, whose own cast-off clothing furthered their deception.

  Joanna would create the map Titus wanted beneath the Chesters’ oblivious scrutiny, and one day it might lead them all to freedom, and to her lost son.

  Chapter Four

  1860

  Oak Grove Plantation, South Carolina

  Joanna was forbidden to wash the other slaves’ clothing or to mix her own laundry in with the Chesters’, but a few days before Titus meant to speak with the marse on their behalf, she soaked his best coachman’s jacket and trousers in the same tub as the buckra family’s, scrubbed out every stain, and hung them to dry out of sight of the big house and Aaron. She fixed a loose button, mended a torn hem, and pressed everything carefully with the flatiron. Titus polished his shoes himself, with grease meant for the horses’ tack and saddles.

  “How do I look?” he said, tugging on the lapels of his jacket, turning in the small space between beds in Tavia’s cabin, showing off for his sister and the children.

  “Remember the fancy coachman who drove that cotton buyer from Atlanta last month?” Joanna asked.

  Titus grinned, pleased. “The fine-looking fellow who was too good to sleep in the stable? The one who pretended not to understand Gullah talk?”

  “That’s the one. You don’t look nothing like him.” Over the children’s laughter, Joanna added, “He was silly, all puffed up like a rooster with a new flock of hens. You look like a man to reckon with.”

  “Marse Chester already knows what you look like,” warned Auntie Bess, stirring the children’s cornmeal mush over the fire. “Clean clothes don’t change nothing. You still smell like horses.”

  “If Joanna don’t care, you shouldn’t.”

  “It don’t bother me,” Joanna s
aid, taking his hand. She was so nervous, her heart fluttered against her breastbone. She knew, even if Auntie Bess refused to see it, that clean clothes might make all the difference. Titus had to look like a man of business to do business with a man like Marse Chester.

  Titus had chores in the stable, so after a quick kiss, Joanna hurried off to the big house to finish darning the children’s socks before meeting Miss Evangeline in her bedroom for a dress fitting. Joanna would be relieved to put the last stitch in a gown that had been nothing but trouble even before she made the first muslin pattern. Miss Evangeline had slapped Joanna after she saw her stepmother wearing the blue-and-brown plaid dress she had ordered Joanna to defer in favor of her own. Joanna’s stammered explanation that she had feared that if she angered the mistress, she would face an untimely death like the mistress’s first two husbands incensed Miss Evangeline all the more. “Even an ignorant nigger like you should have realized my stepmother was fortunate to beguile one man into marriage, but three?”

  Joanna soon discovered that she was not only the target of Miss Evangeline’s deceptions, but also an unwitting subject. When visitors came to the plantation and glimpsed Joanna’s scar, Miss Evangeline spun stories of how Joanna had flung herself in the fire in a spiteful attempt to lessen her value before going to the auction block. Sometimes the burn was a brand, marking her as a slave who had tried to poison her master, and another time it was the imprint of a horseshoe glowing from the forge, where she had hidden during a thwarted escape attempt. The story Miss Evangeline repeated most often claimed the burn was a tribal marking inflicted upon Joanna in childhood in a primative rite that involved the worship of idols and the drinking of blood.

  “What would they think if I told them Miss Evangeline’s own uncle done this to me?” Joanna said bitterly one night in Tavia’s cabin, after the young mistress had humiliated her before a crowd of friends and admirers. “My scar might not be so funny if they knew the truth.”

  “Our mother bore the marks of her tribe,” said Titus. “A row of scars across her forehead—cuts, not burns. Her grandmother did it to her when she came of age, but after her mother and grandmother died, there was no one left to remember the name of the tribe or where it come from. No one was left to mark Tavia when her time came.”

  “I thought our mother’s scars were beautiful,” said Tavia softly, and Titus nodded.

  Joanna smiled to thank them, but she could not take comfort in their words. Her scar stood for violence and rage, marking her as nothing more than the property of a man she hated.

  “At last we shall see what this new seamstress can do with finer cloth,” Miss Evangeline remarked when Joanna first cut into the blue silk Marse Chester had bought Miss Evangeline for her new gown. It was true he had bought a finer and more luxurious fabric for his daughter than for his wife, but Mrs. Chester had probably chosen the plaid herself; Joanna had never seen her in silk.

  With the mistress’s blue-and-brown plaid dress out of the way, Joanna was able to devote all her attention to Miss Evangeline’s gown, except on washday or days when Mistress Chester filled her basket with mending or darning. Soon, when Miss Evangeline saw how beautifully Joanna fashioned the blue silk, she seemed to conclude that it would be well worth the wait. She apologized for striking Joanna and insisted she keep the silk trimmings for her patchwork. The gift would have meant more had the mistress not already promised Joanna all the scraps from the household sewing, and Miss Evangeline’s words, meant to please, troubled Joanna. In all her life she had never received an apology from a Chester. She feared Miss Evangeline might mention the apology to her parents, who could send Joanna to Aaron on some pretense to make sure she didn’t get above herself.

  Joanna’s eagerness to be done with that troublesome gown was not why she raced through the darning, glancing down the hill to the stables from the shade of a live oak, determined to finish before Titus came to the big house to speak to Marse Chester. Miss Evangeline’s bedroom was above the study, and Joanna hoped to listen in on their conversation through the open window. The housekeeper, Dove, had promised to arrange it so Miss Evangeline was ready for her fitting before Marse Chester left to ride the cotton rows. Dove’s careful plotting would be for nothing if Joanna weren’t there on time.

  It was only a few weeks after her arrival at Oak Grove that Joanna had discovered what a friend and ally she had in Dove, who had been assigned the laundry chores after the previous laundress had died in childbirth. Dove hated the steam burns and the smell of lye even more than she resented the extra work, and she had found in Joanna her deliverance from the hot, steamy washhouse, barely tolerable in winter, unendurable in summer. Dove was quick to agree to almost anything that would keep Joanna content and industrious, anything to spare herself a return to waterlogged hands and backaches.

  Joanna finished the last sock, packed her basket, and returned to the big house just in time to see Titus leaving the stable, brushing straw from the sleeve of his dark coat. She waved to him, swinging her arm in great arcs above her head until he saw her, but she dared not shout to him, to bridge the distance between them with words. There were too many ears listening, too many people who would thwart their plans out of spite rather than allow anyone to be contented where they were not. One in particular made Joanna wary.

  “Miss Evangeline upstairs in her room, reading,” said Dove quietly when Joanna slipped in through the back door, “but she say she going riding before midday. If you want to catch her, you best hurry.”

  Whispering her thanks, Joanna hurried to the closet, traded the pile of darned socks for the pieces of blue silk that shimmered like water in sunlight, and hurried upstairs to Miss Evangeline’s bedroom. She rapped twice on the door. “Miss Evangeline?” she called. “You like me to fit your new gown now?”

  “Come in,” Evangeline cried, tossing her book on the bed as Joanna entered and closed the door behind her. “Hurry, get me undressed. Wait until Charlotte sees me in this. I don’t care if her gowns are from Paris; they won’t hold a candle to mine.” As she spoke, she spread the gown upon her bed to better admire the graceful lines, and then repeatedly bent forward to move a sleeve or a cascade of lace. “When Robert sees me, he’ll want to go speak to my father that very moment, if Jonathan doesn’t beat him to it.”

  “Miss Evangeline,” Joanna said, struggling to unfasten the buttons down the back of her wool riding dress, “if you could hold still a moment—”

  Miss Evangeline laughed and complied as Joanna undressed her and slipped the new gown over her head. As Joanna fastened up the back and pinned the gown where it needed to be taken in, Miss Evangeline offered up a steady stream of praise for the exquisite mother-of-pearl buttons her aunt Lucretia had sent from Charleston, the blue silk that perfectly matched her eyes, and the various shades of green her friends would turn when she made her entrance at the next dance. Whenever it seemed required, Joanna murmured perfunctory agreement, straining her ears for sounds from the drawing room below. At last she heard voices, and she was certain she recognized Titus’s, but she could not distinguish the words or even the temper of the discussion.

  She gave up in frustration, frowning around pins held between her teeth as she adjusted the length of the skirt and the fit of the waist. “You’ve outdone yourself, Joanna,” Miss Evangeline praised, admiring herself in the mirror. “I’ve never worn a finer garment.”

  “Thank you, miss,” said Joanna, just as a knock sounded on the door.

  “Who is it?” called Miss Evangeline sharply, in the voice she used only for her stepmother.

  “It’s Dove, miss. Marse Chester wants to see Joanna downstairs.”

  Miss Evangeline’s eyebrows rose. “Whatever would he want you for?”

  “I don’t know, miss,” said Joanna, fighting the urge to dash downstairs. “Should we finish here first?”

  “No, if he wants you, you best go to him.” Miss Evangeline’s gaze returned to her own slender figure in the mirror. “Send Dove in to hel
p me undress, and you can come back for the blue silk when Papa’s finished with you. I hope you aren’t in any trouble. I need my gown finished by next week.”

  Joanna excused herself and a few moments later stood outside the drawing room, hands clasped in front of her apron, eyes downcast the way the master preferred them, until Marse Chester beckoned her inside. Titus stood before the master’s mahogany desk, coachman’s cap in hand, but he flashed Joanna a quick smile as she lingered in the doorway.

  “You ask to see me, Marse Chester?” she said.

  “Indeed. Come in.” He regarded her speculatively, dark blue eyes curious in his heavy face, hair the color of faded corn silk growing thin on top, thicker in the beard and sideburns and flecked with gray. “Titus tells me he would like to marry you.”

  Joanna nodded, eyes on the pattern of nicks on the edge of his desk. She recognized the book that lay open on the polished surface—his ledger, where he recorded every penny earned or spent on Oak Grove. Her own name was inked on one of its pages, her name and age and the price she would likely fetch if he decided to send her to auction. “Yes, sir.”

  “Do you want to marry him?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “Titus is a fine man. You’d be a fool not to.” Marse Chester sat back in his chair, frowning thoughtfully and stroking his whiskers. “It’s not a match I would have considered, but I see no reason to object. Very well. You have my permission to marry.”

  Titus took Joanna’s hand. “Thank you, Marse Chester, sir.” Marse Chester nodded, benevolent but bemused, and dismissed them. They left before he could change his mind.

  In the hall, Titus glanced around to be sure they were alone before sweeping Joanna into his arms and pressing his lips to hers. Joanna melted into his kiss, but then she pushed him away. The younger Chester children might be listening around the corner. “He didn’t say anything about where we should live,” Joanna said.

  “I didn’t want to ask and give him a reason to refuse. I’ll stay in the barn for now and you can stay with Tavia. Sometime after harvest I’ll ask him if I can build us a cabin. If we need to.” He always said things like that when they were alone, hints that running off was never far from his mind. Suddenly, like a lamp extinguished, his good humor vanished. “I hate asking him to let me marry you. You already my wife.”