The Lost Quilter (13 page)

She could not remember her son’s face.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she frantically searched her memory. She could feel his mouth on her nipple, his curly head against her unscarred cheek, his soft baby smell, but her mind’s eye glimpsed nothing, not even the faintest image of his sweet face. He had a perfect, broad nose, she reminded herself. Round, full cheeks like her mother’s. Clear, wide, guileless eyes. Bit by bit, she pieced together her memory of individual features she had once gazed upon so lovingly, so carelessly, but it was all a patchwork of glimpses that she doubted resembled her child at all. How would she recognize him if she ever found her freedom? What horror to think she might pass her own son on a crowded street in Canada and not know him!

“Joanna,” came a distant shout. “You all right?”

Startled, Joanna shaded her eyes and spotted Sophie outside the kitchen. “Yes,” she called back. “Just got sun in my eyes.”

Sophie frowned, bemused, but did not question her. “Marse’s family done eating. Come on inside and have yours before it’s gone.”

Joanna did not need to be asked twice. Gathering the mending and the sweetgrass sewing basket, she hurried to the kitchen, where the house slaves were already eating bowls of rice, beans, and okra, on foot or sitting on the floor, quickly, so they might fill their empty bellies before the Chesters summoned them back to work. Sophie twice filled a bowl for Joanna, who barely tasted the unfamiliar spices and textures in her hunger, and cut her a thick slab of cornbread. Without shame she picked the crumbs
from her apron and ate those too, and if Sophie had not already ordered the kitchen girl to scrub the pot, Joanna might have begged to lick it clean first.

She sewed for the rest of the afternoon, but she was unable to finish all the mending and was thus spared choosing between Mrs. Chester’s dress and Miss Evangeline’s gown. “Mistress want you in the study,” the housekeeper informed her as she separated the mended clothes from those unfinished in the small closet off the kitchen. Through the window Joanna spotted the field hands trooping slowly from the white-flecked cotton fields and she knew Tavia would soon begin supper. Hoping the mistress intended to give her her ration, even a half ration, she hurried to the study.

As before, the mistress sat at the secretary writing on creamy ivory paper. Joanna waited for her to speak, forcing herself not to fidget, her thoughts fixed on Tavia’s hearth and Uncle Titus’s hunting. She could almost smell roasting rabbit.

“I understand that you disobeyed my instructions,” the mistress said suddenly, dipping her pen in a bottle of indigo ink and signing her name to the bottom of the page.

“No, ma’am,” said Joanna, surprised.

“I told you to share Leah’s cabin.” She set down her pen, lifted the sheet, and blew gently on the rows of small, elegant script. “Instead it has come to my attention that you are living with Octavia and her family. Were you somehow confused by such simple instructions?”

“No, ma’am.”

The mistress set down the paper and regarded her sternly. “Did Leah forbid you to enter her cabin?”

“I did go into her cabin, ma’am,” said Joanna, with perfect honesty. “Tavia had more room and she ask me to stay with them.
I help Pearl fetch firewood this morning so she and Tavia could get to the cotton fields sooner.”

The mistress pondered this and did not seem displeased. “Did Leah give you your rations?”

“Not yet, ma’am.” Nor would she ever, but Joanna would endure a whipping before she carried tales to the white folks about a slave, even one as mean as Leah. “There wasn’t no time. I haven’t seen her since yesterday.”

“See that you collect it. The next drawing isn’t until Saturday. You may stay with Octavia’s family, but I must warn you that in the future, you must ask Aaron before you make any changes to your living arrangements. There’s no need to make his job more difficult than it already is.”

Joanna hoped to avoid meeting Aaron as long as possible. “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”

“Did you finish the mending?”

“About halfway done, ma’am.”

The mistress’s eyebrows rose. “Only halfway? It seems my sister-in-law overpraised your sewing skills. Be here all the earlier tomorrow morning. It’s washing day.”

Shaking her head as if she should have known Joanna would disappoint, the mistress turned back to her letter. Joanna made a quick curtsy and returned to the kitchen, where Sophie was nearly finished preparing the Chesters’ supper. “Take that when you go,” she said, jabbing a spoon in the direction of a sweetgrass basket with two woven handles. “Bring the basket back in the morning.”

Murmuring her thanks, Joanna snatched up the basket and hurried outside before Sophie could change her mind. Glancing into the basket as she left the big house, she glimpsed a sack that probably held cornmeal, a tin of molasses, and a slab of salted
pork. It wasn’t much to sustain her for three days, but it was more than she was likely to get from Leah, and it would make her less of a burden to Tavia.

Auntie Bess and the children must have collected more firewood during the day, for when Joanna reached the cabin, a fire already crackled in the fireplace. “We’ll have sweet potatoes with our rabbit,” Auntie Bess announced, poking a stick into the ashes where four large sweet potatoes roasted.

“Uncle Titus caught one?” said Joanna, setting Sophie’s basket on the floor and snatching up the one Pearl had used to fetch water.

“He and Tavia are skinning it now. If you pass them on your way to the creek, tell them to hurry. Pearl’s getting the children and I bet they all about to faint from hunger.”

Joanna promised she would. She had only taken a few steps from the cabin when she saw Tavia coming up the dirt path, smiling as she talked with a tall, broad-shouldered man carrying a skinned rabbit. She stopped short at the sight of him, he looked up, and a smile spread across his face.

He was the coachman who had filled her tin cornboiler with water and passed it to her through the bars of the cage.

“You Uncle Titus?” she said. It seemed impossible he should be Tavia’s brother. Tavia was all goodness, while Titus had mocked her in her thirst.

He shrugged. “I suppose I am to some, but you don’t got to call me uncle.”

Tavia slapped him lightly on the arm, but her eyes shone with pride. “Don’t tease.” To Joanna she added, “Hurry back with the water, won’t you? Sooner we eat, sooner we can turn in.”

As Joanna nodded, Titus said, “You need your rest. Washing day tomorrow.”

Joanna made a tight smile and hurried off to fetch the water. He was mocking her again, pointing out how Joanna’s worst day in the big house was better than his sister’s easiest day in the fields. Of course it was true, but the same could be said for him. The coachman’s job was one of the most prized on the plantation, or at least that was how it had been in Virginia. And wasn’t Titus allowed to hunt with the master’s own rifle? Most field hands suspected that house slaves were spies and shills for the white folks, but Titus was no field hand, and from the sound of things he was more privileged by far than Joanna. He had no call to mock her.

She almost forgave him after that first bite of rabbit, meat so tender it fell off the bone. The younger children were more spirited than she had ever seen them, begging their uncle to tell them stories while they licked meat juices from their fingertips, scrambling for the best seats on the ground beside him. Then, when she had almost taken a liking to him, Titus spoiled it by eyeing her curiously as she tried to drink water from the lid to a jar that Pearl said had once held pickled cucumbers. “What happened to that fine tin cup with the lid and handle you brought from Virginia?” he asked. “You lose it already?”

“I didn’t lose it,” she said shortly, swallowing her last bite of sweet potato and carrying her makeshift cup into the cabin. She heard voices murmuring outside, and she supposed Tavia, Pearl, and Auntie Bess were telling him about her losses and her disagreement with Leah. She didn’t care, except it would give him one more thing to laugh about.

She was in the washhouse putting the master’s trousers through the mangle when she next saw Titus. How long he had stood in the doorway watching her before knocking his boot against the
frame to catch her attention, she did not know. She glanced up, locked eyes with him, and frowned to hide her sudden stir of embarrassment and anger, emotions he seemed to inspire in her without trying. She didn’t pause in her work, but she had never been good at hiding her feelings, and she wasn’t sure she had succeeded this time either.

As he approached, she saw from the corner of her eye that he carried a bundle of calico under his arm. “So at Oak Grave the coachman carries dirty laundry for the mistress?” she said, trying to put enough contempt in her voice to carry over the cranking complaints of the mangle.

“I can’t see the new mistress wearing this,” he said, lifting a faded sleeve and letting it fall. “It’d drag on the ground unless she stood on a chair.”

Joanna released the winch and turned to face him, hesitating at the sight of her old dress. Carefully Titus unfolded the sleeves, unrolled the skirt, and revealed her lost tin cornboiler.

“Where did you find them?” She knew he was not the thief.

“It don’t matter. What matters is you got them back.”

“It matter to me.”

“It wasn’t Leah. Or Lizzie.” Titus draped the dress over her shoulders like a shawl and closed her hands around the cornboiler, all without a trace of mockery. “The thief won’t trouble you no more.”

She knew she would have to be content with that. “Thank you.” The cornboiler was cool and smooth in her hands, but already beads of condensation were forming on the rounded sides. She was suddenly conscious of her flushed face, her hair frizzed and kinked into a wild, dark halo from the humidity. She turned away and draped the dress over the flatiron board and set the cornboiler upon it.

As she took hold of the winch again, Titus gestured to her scar. “Your old marse do that to you?”

Joanna nodded and inhaled sharply, remembering the smell of her own seared flesh. “Flatiron, right out the fire.”

“How far you get?”

“What?”

“When you run away, how far you get?”

“Pennsylvania. A town called Creek’s Crossing.”

“That near Philadelphia?” said Titus. “The new mistress from there. Don’t expect you’d find a lot of buckra kind to runaways in Pennsylvania.”

“Buckra?”

“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 deter
mination 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.