Stand the Storm (2 page)

Gabriel had listened to the negotiations regarding his hire fee. Abraham Pearl had bargained and cajoled to lower it—to keep hold of more of his margin of profit. He hadn’t meant the disparaging things he’d said to Master Ridley—that the boy was of little use until he’d given him instruction. Gabriel knew he did not believe this. “Boy, you are well up to the mark!” Pearl had often praised him highly.

But from these discussions of his value—his worth—came the thought to acquire this sum for himself, for himself to be free. Could he know the sum and fasten his hope upon it and earn from his own commissions as Mr. Pearl had suggested that he might?

Out of the core of the arrangement with Ridley, another arrangement was created. Pearl agreed to allow Gabriel to earn money from work outside of his obligations to the tailoring shop. This knot, this plug of money, was his beginning.

The efficient division of labor in the shop and the rising fortunes of the region sparked a rapid growth in the tailoring business. Successful local men craved distinctive clothes. And those in government service competed to trumpet their tastes and importance. Pearl’s shop catered to the increasing number of gentlemen aspiring to fashion.

As Pearl preferred not to shout commands or even to waste breath on repetition, he indicated much with silent signals, as had Gabriel’s own mam. The boy’s upright carriage with no touch of impudence was graceful and attentive. A beckoning gesture with the right hand was employed to call Gabriel from his post of observation and set him to measuring a client for a commission or briskly brushing his coat.

Late in the month of June on one of Gabriel’s infrequent visits to the Ridley Plantation, Sewing Annie and her son sat together around the flagging nighttime fire in the cabin. The two engaged in lap work as they were accustomed to doing. Annie glanced over to her son’s hands, gainfully employed with knitting, and mused on Bell. The boy favored his father about the eyes and around the nose and down the face. But Gabriel didn’t have Bell’s mallet hands. His hands were slender and dexterous.

“Keep your head about your shoulders,” was what Sewing Annie said to Gabriel. She settled back and considered that she had formed him up well and she took pride from it. It was she who instructed Gabriel to figure on his fingers and to listen and be still and take care of what he said around the Master and Mistress. She credited herself for his fineness and appreciated her handiwork.

Gabriel held his chin down upon his chest and she touched it there. He faced her to say “Nanny,” in much the voice of always.

Sparing as usual with their conversation, the mother and son worked rows on their knitting. It did tickle Gabriel to hear his mother’s voice occasionally through the night. In Georgetown he sorely missed sitting up listening to his mother clack her teeth and her knitting needles about one thing and another. Talking in the deep dark was a stingy pleasure but a pleasure nonetheless.

Gabriel did some clacking and talking, too. He told his mother about the shop and about Georgetown. There were many things to tell, so his careful whisper was once or twice forgotten. “Nanny,” he said excitedly. He spoke of carriages, cloaks, boots, elegant clothes. “Oh, Mr. Pearl’s scissors will cut an eyelash, Nanny!”

She listened rapt, savoring the sound of Gabriel. “Master Ridley is but one among many. There are other rich masters in Georgetown. And he is not one of the topmost either. And there are”—Gabriel lowered his voice, remembering to be cautious—“white men who do not believe that slavery is right. They fight for the good of slaves. There are even . . .”

Annie coughed a knot of phlegm and made a loud noise of expectoration. She shot a searing look of caution at the boy. Gabriel checked his words.

“Something went down the wrong pipe. Ain’t nothing,” she said to cover the silence.

On subsequent visits, Gabriel returned to the subject of freedom. “There’s folks who help a slave to get to the free states,” he said to his mother. He said no more. He’d let her think about the words and what he possibly meant when he said them. Then she’d consider what her own feelings were. Gabriel would wait for his mother—let her take her time to consider what should come next.

One

A
CRUELLY COLD
but bright sunshiny New Year’s Day was when her mam was sold south to satisfy a debt incurred by the master. She and her mam had shared some honeyed cakes during the slack days at Christmastime. Both had enjoyed laughter and some resting. And then on New Year’s Day young Annie’s pallet was placed alongside that of Knitting Annie.

“Slaves ain’t ’lowed to have shares of nothin’—no chick nor child,” the woman said to the blubbering girl by way of consolation. “Master own it all.”

Female slaves on Ridley Plantation in this time were generally called by a variation of the name Ann. The young girl apprenticed to the older woman who knitted was known as Annie-that-sews or Sewing Annie. She was thus called to distinguish her from the slave women they called Cookananny and from her mentor, Knitting Annie. There was as well the one known as Field Annie, lovingly called Fela, who led the gang of women that cleared brush for planting and harvesting crops.

As Sewing Annie grew, her reputation was gained mostly upon her legendary skills at knitting rather than pure out-and-out sewing. But she kept the name Sewing Annie to thwart confusion.

Knitting Annie was the all-time leader on Ridley Plantation in production of knitted work. She far outstripped lengths accomplished by the eight other slaves who did knitting work and also Mrs. Clementine Stern Ridley, sister-in-law of the master and a needlewoman of repute. She also exceeded the production of Mrs. Mary Elizabeth Brackley Ridley, the master’s wife, whose embroidery and tatting were considered of the finest quality in southern Maryland and whose hands seemed always to be occupied with threads or yarn. The closets in the main house were full of quilts, coverlets, counterpanes, and antimacassars, for the two Mrs. Ridleys assuaged their isolation with work on these favorite pastimes. Knitting Annie’s expert needlework put her around the table at quilting bee time, working elbow to elbow with the mistresses. They greatly esteemed her skills. And it was surely the consideration of this that lightened her travails.

Knitting Annie and Sewing Annie were installed in the ground-floor room of a plank cabin they shared with a changing group of two or three other female hands. There the needlewoman and her charge slept upon a plain bedstead fitted with a straw mattress and a feather mattress. Knitting Annie guarded their mattresses and commanded complete charge of them. The morning after Sewing Annie lost control of herself and made water on the bedclothes, Knitting Annie only grunted and soaked the clothes in a bath of her own concoction. The sheets and covers were pummeled to sweet cleanness and the girl was cajoled not to soil them.

Knitting Annie covered their bed with a sweet old quilt. This quilt was as plain as any other used by the slaves at Ridley, but its fineness was nevertheless indisputable. The back was made from feed sacks, as were all the others, but the top had a myriad of patterned pieces and bright solids of every kind. This was where scraps from whatever came to them as cloth ended up. Worn places were constantly, relentlessly patched, and it could perhaps be said the bedcloth—from patching—had metamorphosed from one thing to another. It was nearly a completely different coverlet than when it had begun, though it remained of one piece. It was old, old—had been done long before Knitting Annie was born.

The fineness of the old bed quilt was the underside, which was so flawlessly stitched and so intricate that to follow the spiraling stitches would hypnotize the eyes staring at it. Knitting Annie traced the intricacies, the whorls, with her finger. Sewing Annie fell asleep upon ruminations about where exactly the thread had begun its journey in this cloth, for each tiny nip and tuck of it appeared identical. However, this quilt cover did shun the straight. Its stitches were intermittently, deliberately broken to spoil the perfect. A needleworker of Knitting Annie’s skill could come close to making it just so, but the devil would like that too much, the old people said. Thus the quilt had proper irregularity so that the devil would not grab up the two needleworkers in their sleep.

Knitting Annie often repeated, “The favored top for sleeping under, girl, is the Drunkard’s Path. The devil will be sure to spurn it.”

One such perfect quilt—not the Drunkard, but a complex beauty—was made at Ridley and caused no end of trouble in the night. It was said to entwine the legs of any who slept with it. Despite its beauty, Mistress disposed of the perfect quilt as a wedding gift to a young girl of middling favor in the county who was to go westward with her husband.

“Them threads was worked too sweet and even,” Knitting Annie maintained as cautionary.

Knitting Annie was kind to her charge and looked after the girl as well as one who is a slave can look after another one who is a slave. It was her duty to pass to this young Annie all of what she knew about knitting and piecing together the knitted garments and the quilting, the spinning and dyeing, and what all else. She passed on all, as well as a few choice secrets having to do with which plants were best for dyes.

As part of the mushrooming prosperity of Ridley Plantation in those years, the needlewoman and her young assistant worked inside the loom house that Master built some few feet from the big house. Mistress Ridley prized hands that knew the needlework skills and the needlewomen were under her direct supervision. She checked output and recorded in her logbook detailed information regarding the projects the needleworkers undertook and completed.

The joint-aching chill of working in low-lying marshy areas on Ridley Plantation in January and February and oftentimes in cold, cold March was assuaged by stockings, blankets, socks, gloves, tunics, shawls, shirts, and pantaloons produced by Knitting Annie and her shadow, Sewing Annie. Knitting Annie had been born to the tasks in production of garments for the Ridley slaves. Her mam, a vague figure at the back of her thoughts, had labored upon a spinning loom. None in their line had ever known work other than the needlework.

“Hunt and peck and Ginny crack corn, and hunt and peck and two and three and four and . . . ,” Knitting Annie singsonged to pass the time and set the tone. There was always the threat of fieldwork to keep them hard at their duties.

Knitting Annie carried needles and yarn in the deep pocket slit of her skirt and worked upon these consistently when her hands were not otherwise engaged. Sewing Annie adjusted the tempo of her needlework to that of her mentor. When Knitting Annie worked calmly and contemplatively she set a similar pace for the girl. The girl learned to speed her click-clacking when Mistress hovered, as Knitting Annie was wont to do. Sewing Annie learned her figuring—a series of tallies with her fingers—from Knitting Annie. Skilled tallying was the hallmark of Knitting Annie’s work—nay, of any needleworker. So it could be said that she who had no aptitude for tallying could never rise as a needleworker.

At noon, Mistress Ridley retired to her boudoir for rest. The two Annies worked throughout the afternoon, though they allowed their fingers to move slowly during this time. This was the time of day for which the Annies earned their legend as the lucky ones who sat upon their duffs. Wary of being caught at a nap, though, the older woman stayed alert as the child was allowed to drowse. Knitting Annie dipped into the youngster’s lap from time to time and worked some rows on the child’s assignments. And if the youngster’s work became knotted or plagued by runners, the older woman picked up her slack for fear they would both suffer. She had soft feelings for the little pup and nerves that craved after calm.

Mistress did not rest for long of an afternoon. She would emerge after precisely two hours’ doze and begin a supervisory circuit of the loom room. She measured and counted the slave women’s output to certify that time had not been wasted.

“She’ll be watering the stock!” Mistress threatened when aging Knitting Annie’s count fell. She said she’d put old Knitting Annie out in the barn to tote water for the animals were she to get so old she couldn’t keep up. As the years passed, the maturing Sewing Annie picked up her mentor’s slack when it came to it. She carried along the old woman’s work that fell into her lap when the old precious slumped forward and snored. Some nights the bone-tired girl advanced Knitting Annie’s work while she slept just as the old woman had done for her. She who had grown moderately tall and solid in the upper body and graceful and dexterous in the hands let the older one rest in a chair and blow gas. Sewing Annie worked ten more rows with her own eyes completely closed. The trick was easily done. It became her habit to go some little bit more after she had said, “Now is the time to stop.” It strengthened her to push on—to leave the work well advanced for the next day before lying down to rest.

“My lap is bloody. I’m not expecting it. But my lap is got bloody. When I stan’ up I see the stain a big, pear-shape, red-brown mess on the front ma’ dress. A funny kind o’ thing.” Knitting Annie had never been a chatterer, but she was a dreamer and a dream interpreter. She had the habit of telling her dreams to Sewing Annie. She woke up one morning talking and unable to stay still. “Name ain’t no Annie. Ma’ name’s Abiba—
Ah-bee-baa,
” she said. Knitting Annie showed her gums, and her loose teeth clacked. She continued telling. “I was scared. Good right to be. I look down in ma’ lap and I seen a white man’s head. That what make the bloody stain and I thought it was the moon blood. I woked up then.”

Sewing Annie thought that she ought not let the old woman sit upright and sleep. She ought to be sure to lay her flat at night. They were tempting spirits to invade an old woman’s dreams by leaving her upright through the dark night like she was a sentry. The old one was becoming chatty, slow, and unproductive, and she needed the night’s whole rest.

Some months after the dream visited Knitting Annie, a blacksmith helper was brought to Ridley Plantation. Purchased to help the regular blacksmith, who had taken ill, he was a man of medium build with large shoulders and arms, at the end of which were hands shaped like mallets. These mallet hands were the main reason Ridley purchased him: “A nigger with hands like that will be useful to a blacksmith,” he had said upon first seeing the slave in the Charleston market.