The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “If I had sat here with my eyes closed, I still would have known that Joanna did this side of my head and Dora the other,” the young mistress remarked. “Dora, you must tell my aunt that Joanna may need weeks to master your skills.”

  As Dora nodded, Miss Evangeline’s mirthful glance met Joanna’s in the mirror. So the mistress thought Joanna had made clumsy curls on purpose, as she had been commanded. If it put her in good humor to think so, Joanna would not reveal the truth.

  Waking up before dawn to wait outside Miss Evangeline’s bedchamber. Dressing her silently while Asa attended the marse colonel. Helping Sally serve meals. Helping Minnie clean up afterward. Mending and darning when Miss Evangeline or Aunt Lucretia left work in her basket. Laundry once a week, much less of it than at Oak Grove, hanging clothes in the workyard rather than the wide open fields in the shade of the moss-veiled oaks. Hearing the sounds of wagons and horses’ hooves and foghorns and ships coming into harbor rather than the melancholy song of the field hands. Climbing wearily to her bed in the slaves’ dormitory at the close of day. Weeping silently for her husband and lost children until she sank into sleep.

  The days grew shorter, the nights cooler. Back at Oak Grove Joanna would have been sewing coarse cloth into trousers and skirts and dresses for everyone in the quarter, but not in Charleston. A pair of seamstresses on the Harpers’ James Island plantation produced enough clothing for the marse colonel’s slaves as well as their own, replacing the garments with the change of seasons in spring and autumn instead of annually at Christmas. With no slaves to sew for and Miss Evangeline still enjoying the novelty of her trousseau, Joanna found herself sewing less and less and working as lady’s maid, cook’s helper, and housekeeper’s girl instead. Missing the feel of a needle in hand and soft cotton upon her lap, one Sunday morning Joanna asked Miss Evangeline for the gift of an old muslin sheet to line her Birds in the Air quilt. Miss Evangeline agreed, so after church services, while the other slaves enjoyed the last of the November sunshine in the yard, Joanna carried her bundle from the room above the kitchen to the piazza, where she spread out the yellow, hull-flecked cotton over the lining, smoothed the patchwork Birds in the Air top over both, and basted the three layers together with large, zigzag stitches, just enough to keep the fabric and batting from shifting.

  She knew how she would quilt it: crosshatches and feathered plumes, intricate and delicate, fine enough for a mistress’s fancy quilt, dense enough to disguise the images she would stitch into the blocks, the landmarks she remembered from her journey to the Elm Creek Valley.

  Someday she and Titus and Ruthie would make that journey north, to find freedom and her lost son. Joanna had to believe that to get through the days, through the long, lonely nights. She could not do as Leah had and cast herself upon the waters. She was too stubborn, too afraid.

  She quilted the landmarks into the soft, yielding fabric, thinking of the brown hands with cracked and weathered fingertips that had picked each boll, hands of the women she had loved, Tavia and Pearl, and even Leah.

  Ruthie. Would Ruthie wear herself out and die young in the cotton fields? Would she be a bright yellow housemaid, too often before the watchful eyes of buckra men who could take whatever they wanted? Miss Evangeline’s brothers were coming of age, two of them, and they would have friends, houseguests they would want to indulge with a night of pleasure. A pretty housemaid, close at hand, sparing them a walk to the quarter—Titus would not stand for it. Titus could not prevent it. Ruthie would carry a white man’s child, a child she never wanted, a child that could be sold away from her, plunging her into the agony of grief only a mother who had lost a child could understand.

  It would be for Ruthie as it had been for Joanna, as it had been for Joanna’s mother, as it had been for her mother, mother to mother until the first who had been captured in Africa and shackled in the dark, stifling, suffocating stench of a ship’s hold, terrified and sick on the rolling waves, longing for her mother, starving, bleeding from the rusty shackles on ankles and wrists, praying for deliverance, deliverance that never came.

  It would never end. Sunrise to sunset, year after year, mothers and daughters caught up in a current that swept them tumbling over and over, unable to take a breath, thrashing about in the waves for some safe refuge that lay out of reach, beckoning from a distant shore.

  During her first two weeks as mistress of Harper Hall, Miss Evangeline entertained guests every night—her aunt Lucretia, her cousins Bartholomew and Gideon, numerous James Island Harpers, Governor Pickens, General Beauregard, and so many others that Joanna did not catch half their names as she passed in and out of rooms, waiting on one and then another. At Oak Grove parties, the buckra discussed cotton, fashion, neighbors, and the weather; at Harper Hall, the subjects of conversation were cotton, rice, neighbors, states’ rights, the weather, and secession. When talk turned to secession, as it quickly did after crops and weather were hastily introduced and dismissed, the debate sometimes grew so heated that after a while some of the ladies delicately tried to steer the conversation to safer waters. But not Miss Evangeline. She queried general and governor alike on points of constitutional law and the popular belief that the federal government would not contest Southern secession, if it came to that. “Let them confront us if they dare,” declared Miss Evangeline, her eyes snapping blue sparks. “I am a South Carolinian first and an American second. I know that with my husband leading them, our boys will have enough fight to withstand any aggression from the North.”

  Her remarks were invariably greeted with applause, and Joanna overheard other officers congratulating the marse colonel and praising his wife’s fiery spirit.

  The more guests, the more work for the household, the less sleep for the slaves, the more prone Joanna was to making mistakes. One morning she dropped the curling iron, and before she could snatch it up, it had burned a dark line across two floorboards. “Be careful,” Miss Evangeline snapped, her nerves already on edge. Her uncle had come to dinner the previous evening and had asked, smiling kindly, when he might expect his wife back home, to tend to the business of her own household.

  The smell of scorched pine filled the air, and Joanna imagined, strangely, the tall trees lining the road to the old slave quarter in flames. “Sorry, miss,” she murmured.

  Aunt Lucretia left the next day, and although she lived only a few minutes’ ride away in another part of Charleston, Miss Evangeline wept as if her aunt were departing for the western frontier. At supper that same day, the colonel told Miss Evangeline that he intended to spend the next week on the James Island plantation. Joanna could have told him this was a bad idea if he meant to keep his bride in a sweet temper. As Joanna passed dishes and refilled water glasses, she watched from the corner of her eye as it dawned upon Miss Evangeline that she was meant to stay behind. “What a lovely idea,” she said, smiling at her husband as if she assumed she would accompany him. “I would enjoy seeing your mother. It would be pleasant to have female companionship again.”

  The colonel laughed. “My dear, you saw my mother last week, and your aunt left us only this morning! You can’t say you’ve lacked female companionship.”

  “But now I shall, and with you away, I know I’ll be lonesome.”

  “You have your books and knitting to occupy you when the duties of the household don’t demand your attention. You might also consider befriending some of the officers’ wives. I know several who desire to better their acquaintance.”

  Miss Evangeline agreed to follow his advice, but her voice was oddly subdued.

  The next day after her husband kissed her and departed, she watched from the window as he mounted his favorite gray stallion and trotted off through the wrought iron gates, Asa trailing behind on a slower mare with the colonel’s satchel. When they were gone, Miss Evangeline wandered through the house as if seeing it for the first time, running her fingertips over the chair rail in the dining room, peering up at the curved windows as if studying how the glass panes had been
pieced together. Watchful, Joanna finished the day’s mending and began darning the colonel’s socks, waiting for an explosion of temper. But the young mistress surprised her. “Get my wrap,” she ordered after Joanna cleared away the lunch dishes. “I want to see more of the city. If it is to be my home, I must know it.”

  Joanna fetched Miss Evangeline’s wrap as well as her own shawl while the mistress waited in the foyer. When George offered to tell Abner to prepare the carriage, Miss Evangeline waved him to silence, declaring that she intended to go on foot, for she had grown sluggish with so little exercise. “Don’t forget your basket,” she told Joanna as she tied on her bonnet and left the house. Quickly Joanna snatched it up and followed after.

  Miss Evangeline strolled briskly down the cobblestone streets, avoiding puddles, wrinkling her nose at the stench rising from an open sewer. Joanna stayed close, afraid of becoming lost in the throng. They found the market, where Miss Evangeline purchased flowers, which she placed in Joanna’s basket, and a bag of roasted chestnuts, which she munched as they walked. The smell made Joanna’s mouth water.

  They strolled along streets lined by row houses awash in pastel hues, and by the harbor where Miss Evangeline looked out at the ships waiting for high tide so they could approach, her gaze lingering on the horizon beyond the white sails and tall masts. She gazed across the water to Fort Sumter, where the colonel had served before he was posted to the South Carolina Military Academy. The sight seemed to remind Miss Evangeline of her absent husband, for she sighed and turned her back to it, declaring that she had seen enough of Charleston for one day.

  The mistress was silent for the entire long walk home. Joanna suspected she was brooding over her husband’s absence, until just as they reached Harper Hall, she said, “Those iron barricades will do us little good against an invading army.”

  Joanna made no reply, because usually Miss Evangeline did not expect one, but the mistress was too lost in thought to notice her maid’s surprise. For all her bold words about the courage and strength of her husband and his men, Miss Evangeline was not eager for war.

  The front door burst open as they climbed the front steps. “Missus,” the housekeeper exclaimed. “The stovepipe cracked and a big cloud of ash puff out all over.”

  Miss Evangeline stared at her for a moment, uncomprehending. “Well, sweep the floor, then,” she ordered, continuing across the threshold.

  “I did, missus, but now what do Sally do for cooking?”

  Frowning, Miss Evangeline shrugged off her wrap and passed it to Joanna. “Fix the stovepipe, of course, you goose.” She beckoned for Joanna to follow her to the sitting room.

  “It ain’t something I can fix,” said Minnie, bewildered, trailing after them. “Won’t you come see, missus?”

  Barely concealing her impatience, Miss Evangeline went with Minnie to the kitchen, where one half of the stovepipe dangled from the wall and the other lay on the floor beside the stove, split down one long side. Joanna saw that Minnie had indeed swept away every trace of soot.

  Miss Evangeline gnawed the inside of her lower lip. “Who fixes such things?” she asked no one in particular. “Could George manage it? The blacksmith? The scoundrel who sold my husband this wretched contraption?”

  “I don’t know, missus,” said Minnie. “It work fine for twenty years. Never needed to fix it before.”

  From Miss Evangeline’s expression, Joanna knew she was thinking that this never would have happened if her husband had been at home, and if it had, he would have known how to fix it. “Joanna, run next door and ask Mrs. Ames what to do,” she said.

  Joanna threw her shawl back over her shoulders, hurried next door, and quickly returned with Mrs. Ames’s reply. The kindly neighbor had sent word to a trusted handyman who took care of such things for nearly every family on the block. The stove could be repaired, but not until the following morning. Lacking pots and implements for cooking over an open fire, Sally made do with a cold supper, which Miss Evangeline ate alone in the dining room. “At least my husband is enjoying a hot meal at his mother’s table,” she said with forced contentment as Joanna set her plate before her. She retired early, unknowingly giving Joanna the treat of an extra hour alone to work on her Birds in the Air quilt.

  All the slaves went to bed early, tiptoeing out the back door and across the cobblestone walkway so that the mistress would not wake up and decide they were shirking their duties. George, who always tried to catch Joanna’s eye at bedtime, must have been emboldened by the novelty, for as Joanna undressed down to her muslin shift, George brushed by her and spoke for her ears alone: “We both alone,” he said. “You a pretty girl. Why don’t you come with me?”

  “I’m married,” she replied shortly, in an undertone. “Why don’t you ask Sally?”

  “I don’t care for Sally. I like you.”

  “I got a husband.”

  He regarded her, not with the anger of rejection but with sympathy. “How long it gonna be before you see him again? He probably got himself another wife by now.”

  “Not Titus,” Joanna shot back, not caring who overheard. “Not my Titus.”

  George shrugged as if to say that he knew better but considered it unkind to say so. “You change your mind, you let me know. I’m here, and I ain’t going nowhere.”

  Without another word Joanna pushed past him and climbed into bed, drawing the unfinished Birds in the Air quilt over her. How long would it be before Titus abandoned hope of reuniting their family? How long before another girl caught his eye, a girl without a scarred face?

  He’ll be true, she told herself. Titus is a good man. He’ll find a way to bring us back together.

  But new worries nagged her now, doubts where before there had been only certainty.

  When the handyman came the next morning to fix the stove, Miss Evangeline could not resist letting him know how greatly the wait had inconvenienced and upset her. “And look what the explosion did to my girl,” she exclaimed, indicating Joanna’s burned cheek. “If she had been standing any closer when the pipe exploded, it might have killed her!”

  The man eyed Joanna’s scar. “Your girl heals mighty quickly.”

  “Indeed she does. It’s a peculiarity of her tribe. Nevertheless, you shouldn’t be surprised if my husband presents you with a bill for the damage to our slave.”

  The man nodded—only to avoid arguing with a lady, or so Joanna thought—and presented the mistress with a bill of his own. Paying him proved to be no easy matter, since Miss Evangeline and Joanna had to search the marse colonel’s study for the pocketbook he said he had left in a desk drawer but which turned up hidden behind a dictionary in a bookcase on the other side of the room.

  The following morning, the two young stable boys became ill from eating spoiled fish, and after paging frantically through her recipe books in a fruitless search for a remedy, Miss Evangeline hastily wrote out a pass and sent Joanna running to Aunt Lucretia’s house for a purgative. Every day brought another crisis, another household calamity to set before a mistress entirely unprepared to solve it.

  On the morning before the colonel was due to return, Miss Evangeline collapsed into her chair in stunned astonishment upon discovering she would have no milk for her tea, nor butter for her bread, nor even bread for that matter, since she had neglected to give Sally orders to go to the market.

  “Why didn’t you tell me we were running low on supplies?” Miss Evangeline cried.

  “I did,” protested Sally. “You told me to go on back to the kitchen and not to bother you.”

  Miss Evangeline drew in a breath sharply as if preparing to scold her, but then she went suddenly still. If she didn’t remember the exchanges, Joanna could have reminded her, for twice she had witnessed Sally coming to her for instructions and being sent away. But the mistress seemed to need no reminders. Her shoulders slumped and some of the life seemed to go out of her.

  “Joanna, fetch my husband’s pocketbook,” she said. After Joanna returned with the sm
all leather pouch, Miss Evangeline withdrew a handful of coins and counted them out into Sally’s palm. “Go to the market and buy whatever you need to sustain us until my husband returns—and also get everything you need for his favorite meal. I want you to serve it on his first night home. He mustn’t suspect that anything was amiss.”

  “Yes, missus. What meal his favorite, missus?”

  “I couldn’t possibly say. Don’t you know? You’ve been his cook far longer than I’ve known him.”

  “Yes, missus.” Sally hurried away as if worried that if given too much time to think it over, the mistress would amend her instructions and force them to go hungry. Joanna didn’t blame her. Whom would the colonel punish if he came home and found nothing to eat? Certainly not his darling bride. Colored folks took the blame even when everyone knew the buckra were at fault; sometimes, even if the colored folk had nothing to do with it, they were punished just for being unlucky enough to witness the buckra making a mistake.

  Miss Evangeline inhaled deeply, rested her elbows on the table, closed her eyes, and pressed her fingertips to forehead, nose, beneath the eyes, as if smoothing out lines of worry that she dared not allow to form. “I’m beginning to see why my father married her,” she said, mostly to herself but perhaps also to Joanna. “She has neither beauty nor charm nor grace nor wit, but she does know how to manage a household. ‘Practice embroidery!’ she told me. ‘Translate Greek!’ What use are those to me now? I need to know how to manage servants, how to keep a larder stocked. What sort of teacher fails to teach me the things I most need to know?”

  Suddenly she let her hands fall to the table, and she regarded Joanna plainly as if expecting an answer. “I don’t know, missus,” said Joanna. “Maybe Mrs. Chester thought you could figure it out on your own.”

  “Or maybe she wanted me to fail.”