The Lost Quilter (22 page)

“Aunt Lucretia’s maid will teach you,” said Miss Evangeline airily, refusing to let such trivial matters diminish the joy of her first day as mistress of her own home. “You have my permission to learn as slowly as you dare, without raising my husband’s suspicions. Until you can master the curling iron, my aunt’s maid will be forced to continue her lessons, and Aunt Lucretia will be obliged to remain with me.”

Joanna was not surprised to learn that Miss Evangeline’s capricious dishonesty to the marse colonel was to continue past the long, implicit deception of their courtship.

Miss Evangeline and her stepmother had grudgingly shared a maid back at Oak Grove, a young woman who had tended Miss Evangeline since they were children together. Joanna could
imagine Mrs. Chester insisting upon keeping the maid since her stepdaughter was taking away her laundress. Joanna wished the young mistress had preferred the maid. She had no desire to play the role of Miss Evangeline’s accomplice in her deceptions and capers, to be slapped for unavoidable mistakes and chided for laziness even as she worked herself to exhaustion. She preferred to stay out of sight of the buckra as much as possible, but here at Harper Hall, it seemed that colored folk and white were never far apart.

Joanna dressed Miss Evangeline for dinner and waited outside the parlor while the mistress chatted gaily with her aunt, reminiscing about the wedding and anticipating her first forays into Charleston society as the wife of a dashing officer. Joanna helped Sally serve the meal and helped Minnie clean up. After nightfall, she undressed Miss Evangeline, assisted her in her toilette, and dressed her in a fine cotton nightgown to await her husband. Later, as she finished her day’s work, she heard the sounds of their lovemaking through the walls and thought of Titus—his strong arms, the pattern of scars on his back, the scent of horses. Her longing for him brought tears to her eyes as, well after nightfall, she retrieved her small bundle of possessions and followed Sally from the house to the slaves’ quarters above the laundry and kitchen building, separated from the house by six feet of cobblestones for fear of fire. If only Titus had been given to Miss Evangeline too, and they were crossing the stones side by side, taking their first glimpse of their new quarters together. If only Joanna had been left behind at Oak Grove with her beloved husband and cherished daughter, the only child remaining to her.

If only she could believe their separation would be temporary, but hoping and praying and enduring day after day of disappointment might demand more strength than she possessed. But the
alternative, to resign herself to never reuniting with her beloved husband, her beloved son and daughter, would be a waking nightmare, a living death. She had to believe they would finally be together and free one day or she could not keep going—but maybe it was foolish to want to keep going.

But she had to keep going. Titus—what would Titus think if she gave up now? What would Ruthie think when she was old enough to understand?

So, as a distant bell somewhere in the city warned slaves still abroad of the ten o’clock curfew, she forced herself to keep on going for at least the rest of that day, nearly over—out the back door of Harper Hall, across the cobblestone walk to the kitchen with its adjacent laundry, a place she would surely come to know well in the years ahead. Inside, she followed Minnie up a narrow staircase to the house slaves’ quarters, men and women together in one long room that spanned the length and width of the building.

The dormitory ceiling sloped on the two long sides so that Joanna could stand upright only in the center where the slats met. A cupola in the center of the ceiling drew hot air upward to cool the floors below, warming the slaves as they slept in winter, Joanna suspected, but roasting them in summer, and a water stain on the floor suggested that it let in the rain. On each end of the room, a small window offered a limited view of a starlit sky and a few palmetto and magnolia trees, and in the morning with the sunrise, perhaps more. The leaded glass panes did not seem capable of opening. The sealed windows made her wonder about the door at the foot of the staircase, and whether Colonel Harper would come around when he was done bedding his bride and lock it, or whether his slaves were so content or so afraid or so despairing that they did not need a locked door to keep them in. Colonel
Harper had no dogs, no overseer, nothing to keep them in the dormitory except fear, the threat of city patrollers, and the lack of anywhere to run.

The narrow beds were arranged side by side a few feet apart, with a thin, wood-and-plaster half-wall partition nominally separating the men’s quarters from the women’s. When Joanna snorted at the ridiculous nod to propriety, the sound echoed hollowly off the pine boards.

Sally gestured to a rope bed covered with a coarse blanket. “Mary’s gone, so it’s yours,” she said, and Joanna did not have the heart to ask who Mary was or what had become of her. Minnie climbed into Asa’s bed and raised her eyebrows in a mild challenge when Joanna’s gaze lingered too long. Glancing away, climbing into her own bed, her eyes met George’s. She might not have recognized him from their brief meeting upon her arrival except for the blue footman’s coat draped neatly at the foot of his bed. He gave her a small, inquiring smile, but she pretended not to see it, rolled onto her side, and stared at the pattern of knots on the pine board walls, barely visible in the moonlight that trickled in through the cupola and windows. She closed her eyes and willed herself to remember Ruthie’s sweet baby scent, but all she smelled was old pine, coarse wool, and weary bodies.

Before dawn, Minnie shook her awake to stumble sleepily down the narrow staircase, through the door that was not locked, and back into the big house to attend Miss Evangeline. She and Asa waited outside in the hallway until the master and mistress summoned them into the room. Miss Evangeline was lying in bed propped up on pillows, but when Joanna answered, she tossed off the quilt and told her which dress to select from the clothespress. The colonel held out his arms so Asa could slip him into a white shirt; he did his own buttons up the front while Asa adjusted the
collar. As they were dressed and groomed, the newlyweds chatted comfortably, flirtatiously, as if they were alone, as if Joanna and Asa could neither hear nor understand them.

After the colonel departed, Aunt Lucretia’s maid, Dora, came in to show Joanna how to heat the slender curling rods over the fire, how to twine Miss Evangeline’s golden locks around the hot metal, how to hold the hair in place long enough to form the curl but not so long that the hair scorched, how to release the curl from the iron so that a golden spring bounced into place. Miss Evangeline held perfectly still, occasionally admonishing Joanna to take care not to burn her, as if she could read the temptation in Joanna’s thoughts. Joanna followed Dora’s instructions carefully, and although her clumsy curls lacked the smooth perfection of the more experienced maid’s, at least she didn’t burn the delicate pale skin along the mistress’s hairline and earn herself her first beating in Harper Hall. At last Joanna set the curling irons aside and watched as Dora gathered the curls in a satin ribbon and handed Miss Evangeline a mirror so she might inspect their work.

“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.”