The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Miss Evangeline was visibly relieved to see her younger brother safe and sound. After scolding him for deceiving and distressing their family, she embraced him, kissed him soundly on both cheeks, and praised him for his patriotism and courage. “If I had been fortunate enough to be born a boy, I would have done the same thing,” she declared, and immediately put Joanna to work on sewing Elliot a cadet’s uniform. As she took his measurements, Joanna remembered the boy she had known at Oak Grove—brown-haired like his father, freckled, boastful, a boy who hid in the bushes and watched while the women slaves bathed in the river, who took pleasure in pranks and pratfalls and blamed whatever unfortunate colored child was nearest when he got caught. Now he would be drilling, marching, and learning how to kill Mr. Lincoln’s soldiers. Chances were good he would get shot himself before he did anything to advance the Confederacy, but Joanna could not make herself care about his fate. Let the soldier boy die and teach Marse Chester what it was to be separated from one’s child. Then he would know. Then he might understand.

  A few days after Joanna finished the new cadet’s wardrobe and Elliot had been settled in at the Academy, Colonel Harper returned to the war. Miss Evangeline begged him to linger one day more, but the colonel was determined to return to his men. Already the war had aged him, put gray in his hair and furrows in his brow. He said little about the battles he had fought, but the few details he let slip about Port Royal and its aftermath convinced Joanna that he had witnessed more gruesome brutality than he had expected, and far less valor.

  For the first time, Joanna overheard him encouraging Miss Evangeline to consider evacuating Charleston and joining her father at West Grove. The ongoing naval blockade, the continuous shelling of the city, the restrictions of martial law, the increasing scarcity of food and goods, the gambling and vice that had flourished and spread after General Pemberton had taken over, the potential for another disastrous fire—alone, each was a compelling reason to leave the city, and in the aggregate, they were overwhelmingly persuasive.

  But not persuasive enough. “I will not abandon your family home,” Miss Evangeline replied firmly after he had made, in Joanna’s opinion at least, a convincing argument. “You’ve already lost the James Island plantation, and my father has been forced to abandon Oak Grove. Although my father is generous and I know he would welcome us, as he and my stepmother describe the new house at West Grove, I don’t see how it could accommodate all of the Harpers and Chesters comfortably. Even if our families will be able to return to the old home places after the Yankees are defeated, so many of our cherished heirlooms will have been destroyed in our absence. This house is that last repository of our family history. I won’t leave it.”

  “No house and no possessions are more precious to me than you and our son,” the colonel said, and repeated his reasons more emphatically, as if perhaps his wife had not heard him properly the first time.

  Miss Evangeline seemed moved by his emphatic passion, but she held fast. She assured her husband that she would obey his wishes, of course, but with him away so often, she felt much safer in the city. If her husband’s family preferred to evacuate to West Grove, they were welcome to do so, but she would remain behind at Harper Hall with the servants. West Grove was not her home even though her father and younger siblings lived there, and she would feel lonely and bereft in unfamiliar surroundings without her husband. In Charleston she had her friends, her caring neighbors, and her work with the Charleston Soldiers Relief Association and the Charleston Gunboat Society. She could not abandon the important duties she had assumed. The colonel could not ask her to be less of a patriot than he was.

  Thus Colonel Harper was persuaded to let her remain.

  “All that stage actin’ pay off for her,” George muttered as he and Joanna eavesdropped from the hallway. “She always get her own way.”

  “I think she mean every word of that fine, fancy speech,” said Joanna, her hopes of reuniting with Titus at West Grove receding like the tide, slowly and inevitably, but sure to return. She could not stop hoping, no more than she could make herself stop breathing.

  Though the colonel had agreed to allow his wife to remain at Harper Hall, he was apparently not entirely convinced of her safety, for on the eve of his departure, he wrote lengthy instructions for her to follow for managing the household during his prolonged absence. He wrote another, shorter letter explaining what she should do in the event of his death. Miss Evangeline didn’t know about the second letter; Joanna found it a week after the colonel’s departure while riffling through his desk, searching for news from West Grove. The colonel hoped in death to secure what he had not in life: He ordered Miss Evangeline to sell Harper Hall, or rent it out if she could not find a buyer, and return to her father until the end of the war, at which point she had his blessing to remarry. When Thomas came of age, he was to be enrolled at the South Carolina Military Academy unless he demonstrated another particular aptitude for something suitable, such as medicine or law. Joanna almost felt sorry for the colonel as she returned the letter to its envelope. She knew that Miss Evangeline would follow her own inclinations no matter what. If she would not obey the living, breathing man standing in front of her, why would she obey his words on a page?

  Over his sister’s protests, the colonel also sold an antique cherry bureau and a grandfather clock that had been in the family for generations. He refused Confederate bills and insisted upon being paid in silver federal dollars from before the war, and Joanna soon learned that his preference was not only due to the decreasing value of Southern currency. On the morning he left, he instructed Joanna to sew a quilted petticoat for his wife, and to tuck a silver coin into each of the small, square pillows as she created them with crosshatch quilting stitches. When Miss Evangeline laughed in astonishment at the thought of wearing such a garment, the colonel replied that if the city should be overrun with Union troops, she would need her money safely hidden but close at hand. He had seen the ruins of once-grand plantation homes the Yankees had pillaged, taking everything of value and burning the rest. Yet even Yankee soldiers respected genteel Southern ladies, and they would surely not search Miss Evangeline’s person. Furthermore, if her other funds ran out, with the simple snip of a few threads on the underside of the garment, she could remove the coins from as many of the quilted pillows as necessary without disturbing those that remained.

  The unusual project gave Miss Evangeline a much-needed distraction during her husband’s first morning away, but she alternated between admiring the ingenuity of his idea and berating his concerns that Charleston would be invaded. “The Yankees can’t invade by land, not with General Lee’s forces moving so admirably along the railroad lines,” she said, “and they couldn’t possibly invade by sea while our brave soldiers hold the forts so securely. It’s a pity that a weak woman like myself has more faith in our military than one of our own officers.”

  “If they hold the forts so good, why you need to get them a gunboat?” said Joanna through a mouthful of pins.

  “I wouldn’t expect you to understand,” Miss Evangeline retorted. “You’d like our boys to do without a gunboat, wouldn’t you? Then your precious Yankees can swarm into South Carolina and bring you darkies your freedom. Well, I assure you, you’ll have it far worse under the abolitionist Yankees than you do today. You’ll have no one to look out for you, to feed you, to clothe you, to keep a roof over your head. You’ll have to earn your own keeping for the first time in your lives, and you’ll discover it’s much more difficult that you ever imagined. Oh, yes, your beloved Yankees might set you free, but they wouldn’t care a fig for you after that, you mark my words.”

  Joanna knew it was wisest to let Miss Evangeline have the last word, but she couldn’t help herself. “The free colored folk in Charleston seem to do fine.”

  “That’s only because there are so few of them, and each has a white guardian.” Miss Evangeline gave the soft folds of muslin an impatient shake. “Enough nonsense. Keep your mind to your tas
k. And there had better not be a single silver dollar missing when you’re through. I counted them ahead of time, so you may be sure that I’ll know if you’ve stolen from me.”

  Joanna nodded and made her face a mask of perfect obedience. Miss Evangeline had counted the coins, all right, but not until after Joanna had slipped two into her apron pocket.

  Not long after that, Joanna learned from Mrs. Ames’s Jenny that a few days before, in the very early hours of the morning while the buckra officers were ashore, a slave harbor pilot named Robert Smalls had commandeered a Confederate transport steamer. He brought his family and a dozen other slaves on board, turned the ship toward the open sea, blew the proper whistle signal to each Confederate fort to secure permission to pass, and sailed out to the Union blockade, where he raised the white flag and turned over the ship to a Union captain. Joanna was thrilled by his story of daring and courage, and she wished with all her heart that she had known Robert Smalls and could have joined those families on board the Planter. What a treasure he had given those fortunate few who had escaped with him, and what a fine prize he had turned over to the Yankees—not only the ship itself, but armaments intended for the Confederate forts and Mr. Smalls’s extensive knowledge of Charleston Harbor, its navigation channels and currents, and the position of the Confederate defenses.

  Joanna hoped Mr. Smalls would find a man like Mr. Lewis among his Yankees, someone who would listen, someone who would not dismiss valuable information because it came from a slave, someone who would recognize the pilot’s courage and reward him accordingly. Maybe, even though he had not taken them aboard the Planter, Mr. Smalls would help bring Joanna and her girls to freedom just the same.

  June descended, hot and sultry. The laundry was unbearably warm and steamy, so that as Joanna labored over the washtubs, she thought she must drink the air or drown. On washdays, hanging the clothes on the line in the workyard was her only respite from the labor that seemed never-ending. The Harpers’ prolonged stay resulted in so much more laundry that Joanna could scarcely keep up with it. If not for Hannah, she probably would have fallen so far behind on her work that she would never catch up.

  But while her laundress’s duties had increased, her work as a seamstress had sharply declined as fabric, thread, and needles grew more difficult to come by, for the needs of the military increased demand and the harbor blockade reduced supply. Miss Evangeline requested no new ball gowns or summer dresses, making do with what she had in the spirit of patriotism, so except for the occasional project for one of the mistress’s relief organizations, Joanna sewed very little except for a bit of mending now and then. The quilted petticoat was the only new garment she made all that spring and early summer.

  Perhaps that was why sometimes, tired though she was from the work of the day, Joanna’s fingers itched to hold a needle. Some evenings, when Miss Evangeline was preoccupied elsewhere with the Harper ladies, Joanna would sit outside in the workyard beneath the magnolia trees with Hannah and Ruthie, savoring the relief of cool breezes, shade, and her girls’ company. There she would work on her own quilts, so different from those Miss Evangeline admired. Instead of appliquéd flower baskets or neat rows of precise, identical blocks, the quilts she had made since coming to Harper Hall were bolder, covering the entire surface of the quilt, with squares and bars that often bore little resemblance to traditional quilt blocks. Sometimes she added some of the leftover Birds in the Air blocks, placing them here and there, wherever she pleased, without giving any thought to the order or symmetry that Miss Evangeline believed were essential to true beauty. These were quilts no buckra mistress would claim for herself, so they were quilts Joanna knew she would be able to keep forever—if forever meant anything to a woman whose life was not her own.

  Her thoughts and dreams and fears were too big to be contained within the small neat boundaries of a traditional block, her life too strange and unique to be represented by the repetition of the same pattern. She collected everything that was inside her—all the thwarted love, the rage, the anger, the fear, the uncertainty—and cast it upon her quilts like paint upon a fence. She would let it spill over the edges, collect in pools on the ground, soak into the earth. She could not be contained.

  At night the slaves sweltered in the dormitory above the kitchen, crammed two and sometimes three to a bed, while others slept on quilts spread on the hard wooden floor. Mrs. Givens’s and old Mrs. Harper’s maids slept on pallets in the corner of their mistresses’ bedchambers, the Harpers’ groom had joined Asa and the boys in the stable, but the rest had been squeezed in with Colonel Harper’s slaves in the dormitory. Often Joanna couldn’t sleep despite her exhaustion, stifled by the heat and the smell and the press of so many bodies. George had given up his bed to a newcomer, a woman and her two young children, and he now slept on the floor beside Joanna and her girls. At first his closeness had annoyed Joanna, but she eventually grew accustomed to his presence, even glad for it. She knew that George had kept her girls safe from the fire and he would not hesitate to protect them from whatever dangers the future might bring. And what did Joanna give him in return? She would not let him into her bed. She mended his clothes, but she helped all the slaves in this way. She laughed at his jokes, but only because they were truly funny. She did not talk to him more than to the other men, nor flatter him, nor speak admiringly of him, although there was much to admire about him. And yet he slept beside her bed at night and would protect her and her girls and would never demand anything in return. Joanna knew this, as certainly as she knew that she should not allow herself to grow too fond of him.

  One night as Joanna slept, Ruthie’s hand tangled in her hair, Hannah’s breath warm against her shoulder, a soft tapping sound roused her. Groggy, she sat up and traced the noise to the stairwell, just as it ceased. A moment later she heard the door at the bottom of the stairs easing open.

  She glanced at George lying on the floor beside her bed; he had not awakened. As worry stirred in her chest, she carefully extricated herself from between the girls and made her way to the stairwell, gathering herself to scream if some buckra soldier had come looking for trouble.

  Instead, silhouetted in the doorway was a familiar figure—her beloved, her Titus.

  Stifling a gasp, she tore down the stairs and threw herself into his arms, finding his mouth with hers, kissing him breathlessly. “What you doin’ here?” she gasped softly when she could finally speak. So late at night, so stealthy his arrival, Marse Chester couldn’t have sent him on an errand.

  “Been too long since I got to hold you.” Titus’s embrace tightened. “Oh, Joanna. I been missin’ you so much. How our baby?”

  “She a big girl now, walkin’ and talkin’ a little bit. She smart, Titus, she and Hannah both.” Her heart pounded and the hairs on the back of her neck tingled as if a cold wind swept over them. “Titus, you run off?”

  In the dim light, she saw him nod. “Two days ago Marse Chester gave me his rifle to go hunt dinner for the buckra. I set out on foot but double back and take a horse from the stable, and then I just lit out. I stick to the woods, stay out of sight. I come straight to you.”

  Joanna marveled that he had made it so far without being captured by patrollers or shot by soldiers. She shivered to think of the dangers that must have threatened his every step—but he was here now, here and safe. The time had come. At last, they were going to run. “I got all my things bundled in the quilt. Money too.” She squeezed his hand and turned to dash upstairs. “Let me get the girls and we can go.”

  But Titus held her back. “Joanna, no. I can’t take you with me.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not runnin’ north. I’m going south, to Hilton Head.”

  “But—but that don’t make no sense. That right into the fighting. We got to go north.”

  “Joanna, I ain’t running for freedom. I run to fight.” He picked up the rifle, which until then Joanna had not seen propped up in the corner of the stairwell. “I hear about a Yankee there, G
eneral Hunter, who makin’ up a colored regiment. Negro men, Joanna, fightin’ for our own freedom. Most of them I reckon never held no gun. I’m a crack shot. They need me.”

  “I ain’t heard nothing about no colored regiment.” Joanna shook her head and drew a deep breath. It made no sense, no sense at all. At last they were all together, Titus even had a gun and a horse, and he meant to leave her and the girls behind?

  “It all true. A man I trust seen them with his own eyes—marchin’ in uniform, red trousers, blue coats, blue caps.”

  “Titus, you know the buckra don’t give no guns to colored folk.” In response, he shifted Marse Chester’s rifle in his hands, but she waved that off impatiently. “That ain’t the same. He sent you out to fetch his dinner. That different from training up a lot of colored folk as soldiers.”

  “Joanna, I got to go. If they gonna let colored men fight, I got to be with them. I got to get my freedom.”

  “Get it by running north with me and the girls! What use you gonna be to us if you get yourself killed?”

  “Don’t talk like that. I fight for you and the girls too. You ain’t seen what it like out there, outside Charleston. Armies here and there, you never know when a scout party turn up and start shootin’. Four of us run north right smack into a war, we likely all of us get shot. This way no one in danger but me.”

  Joanna stood, hands clasped, trembling, as all of her dreams and plans crumbled into dust. “Fine. You go to Hilton Head. We go with you.”

  “Joanna—”

  “Armies got their women, too. I seen it in the camps all around the city. They got women to cook and do laundry and every other thing. You fight, and I do the same work I always do but I do it for Yankee soldiers. We go together.”