by Tara Conklin
Josephine’s determination never to return again to Bell Creek was steadfast. She had run once before, some years previous, and circumstances had required her to turn back. She wished never to repeat that journey, and her conviction on this point left no room for doubt. I knew she would find her way to freedom, with or without my assistance. I remember her face alive in the weak flicker of our low fire. It was some days still before we would reach Philadelphia when she told me of the morning she had returned to Bell Creek after her first attempt at escape. She described a sudden storm, crows circling overhead as though expecting a death, and her despair. Her face became a flame itself then as she talked, melting half into darkness, half into the brightest light.
Those 10 days and nights with Josephine were a salve to me, the cool night air on my skin and my mind clear, free of drink. I do not know if she sensed my feelings for her, that I had begun to love her. It seems strange to write that word, yet I can think of no other.
The experience of love, for me, was new. There was an element of protection in what I felt—she was only just beyond girlhood, 17 she believed was her age, and her injuries as I have already described were grave. Her cough did not relent as we traveled but grew worse with the hardships of our journey, the constant exposure to open air and sun and dust. I did my best to keep her cool in the days and warm and dry at night, but I feared such efforts were paltry gatekeepers against the illness at the door.
I wished to protect her, yes, but there was more. How to describe it? A purity, a release, a calm. I wanted nothing from her, only to hear the timbre of her voice as my feet rested on the dirt and my eyes leaned heavy in their sockets. Only to watch her face as she spoke. I told her of my parents, my upbringing, the medical college and my work as a country doctor. I did not tell her of Dorothea or that night at my brother’s farm. In truth I was ashamed, I did not want to disturb the peace of those nights, and her image of me. She saw me, I believe, as a good man who had wandered astray and had acted, as I pulled her up onto my horse, to return to myself. I did not wish to dissuade her of this view. If she believed it, perhaps it might be true, and I found great hope in this. There was that, too, in my love for her. Hope, for a different way, for a life where she and I might sit and talk for hours, undisturbed, where my past did not matter, nor the color of my skin nor hers. Hope for myself, that in saving her I might too save myself, and save in a way the lost Dorothea. It may seem strange but I saw in Josephine much of Dorothea. The same spirit and tenderness and a quickness, too, in her eyes, that behind them lay vast imaginings and journeys and struggles, a world unto herself, and I wished only that she might allow me residence there for it seemed a place of many marvels.
During the days, as we rode, my thoughts raced along, past Philadelphia, up farther north, to a new life for us together. I wanted to believe in it and I suppose for a spell I did: I pictured us dressed in clean cottons and walking beside a river under towering maples, or oaks, continuing until the river widens and spills out into a vast harbor and then the sea. I treated a man once who had been to Boston and he told me about the cool spray of salt on your face and the deep calls of the ship’s foghorns as they left the safe harbor, the smart horse carriages traversing the roads and the spiny red lobsters, their meat the sweetest you might ever taste. It seems the city is built up against the sea, and the river Charles leads you along until you are there, directly before it, with nothing to see but white surf and a disappearing dark horizon until the great cities of Europe.
It was a dream of my own imagining. I did not tell Josephine. I never said a word of love, nor did she. The city of Philadelphia was our destination, and there I would ensure her safe passage to Canada, and we would part ways. We did not speak of continuing farther on together and I do not know if the thought ever crossed her mind. I wish now that I had said more. Now, I revisit those nights and I think how events might have changed had I said to her, Come with me, let us both escape.
If there is one lesson I wish to bestow upon you, one shred of wisdom I have gained from my living, dying days, it is this: let your heart lead you, do not be afraid, for there will be much to regret if reason and sense and fear are your only markers.
Finally we neared our destination. I set up camp in a small clearing by a winding creek, just outside the city limits. Alone, I went farther along the city road with the aim of finding Josephine some proper clothes, for her ragged attire marked her as a fugitive. Recently the city had seen rain, and the water falling upon the dry dust of many weeks had turned the road into a veritable river of red mud that slowed my passage and clumped heavily around my horse’s hooves.
At the city’s southern periphery, I found a suitable shop. The woman at the counter was not keen to serve me, rough and unshaven as I was from the days and nights we’d been riding, but she saw that my money was as green as the next man’s and so she obliged me. I walked out into the sunshine with a simple ready-made blue dress and shoes with long leather lashes, a razor, and some soap for myself, and I rode back to where I’d left Josephine at our camp.
It’s nice, she said when she saw the dress, and touched its clean blue length. She washed in the creek while I waited and she returned a different-seeming woman, with the dress fitting close to her shoulders and waist, her hair smoothed back and her high clear forehead, and the bad eye open, the skin nearly healed. I do not know much of beauty but Josephine then in that new dress is the picture I hold in my mind of the word.
We rode first through the smaller southern townships, Kingsessing and Oxford, and then eastwards, towards the Delaware and the city proper, which seemed much changed from my time there three years before. The streets rattled with an unholy clamor of carriages and surging crowds and reeked with the stench of horse and steam and rubbish. After our time of travel through empty grassland, it was an assault to the senses, both exhilarating and nauseating. Josephine said not a word as we rode through the streets, but I felt her body tense behind me in the saddle and twist and turn as she looked at all that we passed.
I directed us first towards the university district, the area with which I was most familiar. As we rode along the wide and busy Market Street, I saw a notice affixed to a post: REWARD written in thick black letters. Such advertisements were common enough, Philadelphia being a center for abolitionist activity and consequently a frequent destination for fugitives. This poster was similar to others I had seen but, as we passed it, I leaned forward to read the full notice and there, I saw her name, Josephine. I felt Josephine stiffen behind me: she too had read the poster, the description of herself there for all to see, the $100 reward offered by Robert Bell for her return.
I spurred the horse onwards. Immediately I navigated us away from the university, as far as I could think to go, away from that poster and any who might have read it. I turned towards the navy yard, close to the river, a district largely unfamiliar to me but one I knew to be more accommodating to people of all walks and stations, a place where someone desiring of privacy might easily find it.
I hired us a pair of rooms over a simple tavern with a washtub between them. The man who handed me the key looked at Josephine from head to toe and after refused to meet my eyes.
Josephine’s room was small and bare: a thin mattress on a metal frame, a small table set beside it and a picture of white frothy flowers tacked above. On the far wall was a single window dressed with a long pale curtain through which filtered weak, streaky sunlight. The air within was hot and used and reminded me that countless others had passed time here, slept here, breathed and coughed and washed here.
Josephine went immediately to the window and pulled the curtain back. I closed the door behind me and stood just inside the room with my hat in my hand like a visitor.
Thank you for bringing me away from there, she said. Her shoulders were a square of dark against the rectangle of light in the window. She turned to me and the gratitude shone on her face and I stepped farther into the room. I stood beside her at the window and watched
the figures on the street below: a man with muddy boots leading his horse, two finely dressed gentlemen deep in discussion, a hatless woman struggling to keep hold of two small children as they turned their heads, distracted by all that the big city had to show.
When I placed one hand on her shoulder, it was not to reassure her or suggest an intimacy we had not shared. I meant only to reassure myself, to feel that her living breathing person stood beside me, that we had come safely from Charlotte County, Virginia, to this place, this sun-streaked room in the city. She did not seem to mind my hand, and we stood like that at the window, looking down at the ordinary people passing on the road, the seconds seeming paused for us, as though the movement below bore no relation to the stillness above. After a spell I let my hand fall back at my side and told her that I must venture out. I had an idea of where to go to find those more knowledgeable than I in the practice of freeing slaves. There was a Vigilance Committee there in Philadelphia, with funds and connections, well known for its abolitionist efforts.
I paused in the doorway as Josephine moved to sit upon the bed. I didn’t know what I’d find beyond the gate at Bell Creek, she said in a wondering, quiet way.
She looked at me, the softest I had seen her face in all our time together. And what have you found? I asked.
It took some time for her to answer. Finally she said, The first time I ran, I was afraid, and I found no help and so I turned back. The second time, I was ready, I felt strong. But the men at the undertaker’s were waiting for me. It made no difference, what I’d done and what I’d tried to do. I thought then that Lottie was right. There was no hope for me, no hope for any of us because it was not the time. There was no use in trying if redemption was not upon us. But you have shown me different. She paused. I found you, she said.
I could only repeat her words. I found you.
At that moment I saw the exhaustion in her. Her cough remained very bad. She had tried in vain to hide from me the blood that spotted her hands after a spell passed through her and I could see the disease gaining strength as it progressed through her weakened form. Rest now, I told her, and she nodded. She raised her hand and waved good-bye to me and smiled as I closed the door.
I had an address for the Vigilance Committee, but it was not a street with which I was familiar. On foot, I walked north, away from the river, in the direction I believed the Committee offices to be located. For over an hour, it seemed, I roamed. I was directed first this way by a passerby and then that way by another. Having no map, I relied on these directions from kindly strangers, but the results were often inconsistent and I soon found myself in knots, going around the same perimeter of blocks located still within that low district where we had found lodging.
It was on one such pass that something in the mud of the road caught my eye. A gem or nugget of gold, I thought at first, some prospector’s treasure dropped here from a pocket or saddle bag, but when I bent to pick it up I saw it was merely a simple stone, no bigger than a plum, but cut through with brilliant colors that seemed to capture the very essence of Josephine’s eyes. I wiped the mud from the stone and slipped it into my pocket with the idea of giving it to her, a small token of our time together.
I lifted my gaze and it was then I saw Bo. He was unmistakable: tall, strong, his head a striking smooth and shiny convex of the darkest brown. He was standing beside a shop window, staring straight at me as I paused in the mud, my hand still within my pocket, gripping the hard round shape of the stone. The hatred and bitterness on his face were very strong. Beside Bo, his back to me, was the figure of the patroller Josiah. I knew that where Bo and Josiah were, certainly Mr. Rust would not be far off. Surely they had brought Bo to assist in the capture of Josephine.
I held Bo’s burning gaze and, for a fleeting moment, I wondered if he might not hold his tongue. Josiah himself had not seen me, so perhaps I might evade detection. But I recalled the sounds Bo had made as he beat upon the locked door of Mr. Rust’s shack. I recalled the smooth steel of the padlock as I slipped it closed. Bo would show me no pity, nor any to Josephine. I had assured that outcome as surely as if I had stood on that street corner and called to Josiah myself.
I turned and fled.
As I hastened back to the tavern, the red mud of the road sucked at my boots such that every step required great effort. I heard shouts from behind and turned to see the figures of Bo and Josiah pushing through the crowds, following me. I increased my speed, seeking to lead them away from our tavern where Josephine waited, but my sense of disorientation was extreme and I found myself passing the tavern door once, and then again as I struggled to find my way. The streets teemed with commerce, navy men and gamblers, the crowd spilling at one point from an open saloon door, and it was only the great commotion of this afternoon brawl that allowed me, at last, to evade my pursuers.
Finally, certain that Josiah and Bo had wandered far afield of our accommodation, I crossed the tavern threshold. My boots now were caked with earth from my flight, their weight nearly double what it had been at the outset of my journey. I left red weeping footprints as I mounted the steps to Josephine’s room and cursed my slow heavy motions. We must leave at once. I felt the greatest urgency.
I knocked upon Josephine’s door but heard no movement from within. I called her name, softly at first but then louder and louder. Again and again I knocked and then tried the knob but it would not give way. Finding myself with no alternative, I threw my shoulder against the door. The weight of my body forced the cheap lock and, with only the barest of groans, the door swung open.
Inside, the room was empty and calm. The curtain blew lazily before the open window and a chair was pulled to the sill, as if recently someone had been gazing out. I wondered what Josephine had seen from this view, if she had witnessed Bo and Josiah’s relentless pursuit, if she had feared I was leading them here to her. Once before she had walked into a slavecatcher’s trap. Had she imagined another one?
A great unease came over me. I considered then that perhaps Josephine believed me akin to Mr. Rust, that she had fled from my company and now wandered the streets alone. I moved to the window and looked down to the street below, my feelings now so far removed from the peace of those moments I had lingered there with Josephine. Frantically I searched the street for Josephine’s form, for Bo, Josiah, and Mr. Rust. But I saw only the passing faces of strangers.
I turned from the window, thinking I must go out to find her, but I saw then her shoes, the ones I had purchased just that day, set neatly beside the bed. For a moment I stood in the center of the room in a state of confusion and despair. Where had she gone? It was only then I remembered the washroom adjacent. A narrow door on the far side of the room allowed admittance and this door was closed. I walked to it and knocked once, then twice with no response. I held my ear to the wood and heard at first silence but then a gentle lapping of water. Josephine? I said and my voice, hoarse from my previous calling, rang rough and hollow in the room’s still air. There was no reply. I did not want to impose upon her modesty, but I longed to explain myself and the need to leave this district, perhaps even the city, at once. And so I opened the door.
She was there, in the tub, the water full against the edge. The red of her blood colored the water a dark crimson close to her arms and across her chest but flowed into a lighter red and then pink as it traveled down her legs and feet and into the open end of the bath. Her bone-handled knife rested on the tiled floor, its blade shining as though afterwards she had rinsed it clean. Her eyes flickered open as I entered and she turned to look at me and smile. It was like the smile of gratitude she had given me earlier that day, but fuller: full of exhaustion and forgiveness and escape. I thought of the open window and the unmistakable figures of Bo and Josiah, the pistols that hung at their belts, their loud angry calls as they chased me through the streets. The reward poster with her name and description. Josephine had believed we were found. And her illness, the blood in her cupped palm: she could run no further. Her resolve ne
ver to return to Bell Creek had been absolute, and this I understood.
I kneeled against the cold tiles and took one hand from the bath; it was cool and wet and slippery from the blood that still coursed from her opened wrist. I held her fingers gently as though they were the greatest of treasures. I held her hand until it went slack.
In that tavern room Josephine left for me a request. A note on the bed. She had written:
Stanmore plantation, Charlotte County, Virginia, a mulatto boy of four years old, my son. Deliver him from that place.
There is a certain kind of man who is forever searching. He wanders from place to place, he looks hard into the eyes of women and men in every town, maybe he scratches the earth or wields a gun, remedies illness or writes books, and there is always a vague emptiness within him. It is the emptiness that drives him and he does not know even how to name the thing that might fill it. No idea of home or love or peace comes to him. He does not know, so he cannot stop. On and on he moves. And the emptiness blinds him and pulls at him and he is like a newborn baby searching for the teat, knowing it is there, but where?
And sometimes such a man is handed a gift. A gift of direction. A path that is marked for him and there, yes, this will ease your suffering, it is sure. This will cure you, it will fill you up, at least for a time. There will be a home, and love, there will no longer be the sorrow when you look at a cold night sky, the sorrow as the sun rises and the mist burns away. This is what Josephine gave to me. The love I felt for her found its purpose in you.