The Lost Quilter (34 page)

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, General 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.”

“No. Army camp no place for Ruthie and Hannah. That no life for two little colored girls, or for you either.”

“At least we be free.”

“It won’t be freedom for me if I have to fear every day I might lose you.” Titus pulled her into an embrace. “I got to go. Kiss me, Joanna, be sweet. Don’t know when I see you again.”

Her anger was not yet spent. She wanted to argue, to persuade him to see sense, but all at once her will to fight evaporated. He had made up his mind, and he thought he had chosen what was right. Nothing she said would persuade him otherwise. She would only delay his departure, risk his capture, and make what could be their final parting ugly and bitter.

So she swallowed hard and flung her arms around him. The butt of his rifle brushed against the back of her calf as he held her tightly. “Remember to keep breathin’,” he murmured in her ear, but then he released her and stepped from the open doorway into the night.

Joanna stood rooted in place for a long moment, her eyes filling with tears. Then she blinked them away and eased the door shut, holding on to the latch and resting her forehead against the door.

“That your man?” George asked quietly from the top of the stairs.

Joanna didn’t turn around. “That Titus, my husband.”

“An army of colored men.” Georges’s skepticism stung, though it was but an echo of her own. “Your man likely run off to get himself killed.”

“He go to fight for his freedom,” Joanna snapped. “Mine and yours too. Slavery got to end and look like this the only way to do it.”

“Someone tell your man a wild fib. No way no buckra general gonna make a colored army.”

“If Titus say it’s true, I believe him.”

George made no reply. Silence filled the stairwell.

“You best come to bed,” said George eventually. “All your work still gonna be there in the morning. Your husband ain’t made us free yet.”

Without a word, Joanna climbed the stairs, brushed past him, and climbed into bed. She put her arm around her girls and drew the thin blanket over them, her back to George and his pallet on the floor.

Two days later, Miss Evangeline summoned Joanna to the parlor. Joanna had heard the messenger at the door, and when she saw the letter in the mistress’s hand, she knew it had been sent from West Grove.

“Joanna,” said Miss Evangeline sternly. “Have you seen Titus?”

“Yes, ma’am. Last time he brought letters from your pappy Marse Chester, before they move to the new place.”

The mistress’s blue eyes narrowed icily. “And not since then?”

Joanna furrowed her brow and shook her head, but not too much, just enough to suggest confusion. “No, ma’am. You know I ain’t never been to West Grove.”

“I’ve heard from my father.” Miss Evangeline tapped the folded paper lightly on her palm. “Your Titus seems to be missing.”

Joanna hesitated. “Sorry, ma’am. What you mean, missing?”

“I mean he’s run away.”

“Run away? No, ma’am, not Titus, he—”

“He’s run away, and my father believes he is on his way here. Unless he’s been here already.” Miss Evangeline studied her. “But I don’t suppose he would have continued on without you. You’re a runaway. You know more about running away than he does. For that reason alone he would have taken you.”

“Mrs. Harper, Titus ain’t the sort to run off.”

“He was sent out hunting with my father’s old rifle. He never returned and a horse is missing.”

“Maybe he don’t find no game close, so he take the horse to look far off.” Joanna pressed a hand to her throat. “He don’t know the land ’round the new place like he know Oak Grove. Maybe he got lost. Maybe he fall off the horse and layin’ hurt somewhere. Maybe them Yankee soldiers kill him for the horse and rifle.” Joanna fell to her knees and clutched the hem of Miss Evangeline’s dress. “Missus, please, you got to ask your father to send folks out to look for him. He could be close to death in those woods somewhere.”

“Oh, not to worry. My father has certainly sent people to search for Titus, and I have no doubt that they will find him, wherever he might run.” But a slight shadow of doubt clouded her pretty features as she gave her skirts a twist to release them from Joanna’s grasp. “In the meantime, if your husband does turn up here, you must inform me immediately or you’ll find yourself without a husband or a daughter.”

Anger churned, but Joanna ducked her head and nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

When Miss Evangeline dismissed her, Joanna quickly left the room, only to find George standing in the hall. “You almost as fine at playactin’ as her.”

“Better,” Joanna retorted. “I got to be.”

She stormed from the house and across the cobblestone path to the laundry, where the steaming kettles and stinging lye boiled and burned as if with her own simmering resolution.

In mid-June, the Harpers rejoiced at the news that the heavily outnumbered Confederate forces had successfully fought off a Union attack on Secessionville on James Island. If the Yankees
had won, and if they had overrun the Confederates’ yet unfinished earthwork fort, they would have flanked the defenses of Charleston Harbor and would have been perfectly placed to invade the city. Instead, after suffering heavy losses, the Union forces had withdrawn from the island. Colonel Harper’s family eagerly sought out news about the battle, debating and pondering every new detail, imagining the scenes of battle that had taken place on the lands they knew so well. Old Marse Harper even declared that he was glad to sacrifice his plantation to such a glorious purpose even if it meant he would be raking grapeshot out of his rice fields for years to come. Mrs. Givens gave voice to what was probably the unspoken hope of the rest of the buckra in the household: Surely this stunning victory meant that the Confederates would soon bring about a decisive end to the war.

But the family’s jubilation was short-lived.

The letter that brought word of Colonel Harper’s terrible injury was written in an unfamiliar, feminine hand—a nurse, perhaps, a young belle who tended the sick and injured instead of dancing at balls, a widowed plantation mistress numbing her grief through useful work. The colonel had been shot, his right leg amputated below the knee. Considering what had befallen him, he was in fair spirits, though not sufficiently recovered to write to his dear wife on his own, and if the wound did not fester, he had a good chance of surviving. His body servant had been killed on the battlefield at his side, faithful to the last.

The colonel’s mother collapsed in a faint after Miss Evangeline read the letter aloud. George was sent running for the doctor, Joanna for smelling salts. Mrs. Harper was conscious but dazed by the time the doctor arrived; he ordered her to bed and dosed her with laudanum. He offered Miss Evangeline a bottle too, but she waved him off and assured him it was not necessary. He did not
press her, perhaps seeing as Joanna did that although the mistress was pale and trembling, there was nothing anxious or hysterical about her mind.

After the doctor left, Miss Evangeline and her father-in-law fell into urgent debate. They agreed that no nurse would tend the colonel better than his own devoted wife, and she resolved to go to him at once. But she would not allow her husband to languish in an army hospital tent, “those cesspools of filth and putridity,” as she called them. As soon as he could travel, he must be removed to a more healthful location.

Mrs. Givens entered into the discussion; Joanna, Millie, and George listened from the fringes. Over supper Miss Evangeline, old Marse Harper, and Mrs. Givens concluded that they must impose upon Marse Chester’s generosity and evacuate the entire household to West Grove. The Harpers would be responsible for transporting household goods and slaves and would go directly to the new plantation; Miss Evangeline would take only the necessities in the carriage, with Abner to drive her, so that she could proceed as quickly as possible to her husband. As soon as he regained enough strength to make the journey safely, they would join the others at West Grove.

Once the decision was made, preparations proceeded swiftly. Miss Evangeline ordered Sally to pack a hamper with food, medicine, and bandages. The colonel’s father decided what possessions must be brought along and what could be safely left behind—what they could, if they must, do without. Joanna and Hannah raced to pack trunks with clothing and valuables; whenever buckra eyes were not upon them, the slaves stole away to say their good-byes to friends and to bundle their own few belongings into kerchiefs or worn blankets.

Once Joanna found George alone in the slaves’ dormitory,
folding his extra footman’s coat and tucking his clothes into a faded feed sack. “Faithful to the last,” he muttered. “That’s what they think about Asa now he dead and gone. He got a wife and child, you know that? Before you come here, Marse Colonel sold them both to buy that fine black horse he rode off to war on.” He shoved a pair of trousers into the sack. “Faithful. Only reason Asa not leave Marse Colonel to face those bullets on his own ’cause he know he get shot in the back if he run.”

Joanna did not know what to say. “Asa gone to a better world.”

“Better world. You sound like that buckra preacher they make us listen to Sunday after Sunday. Asa don’t want no better world, not yet. He want his wife and son.” George slung the feed sack over his shoulder and stormed past her to the staircase. “Now his bones lie in some trench with all the other faithful servants who go with their marses into war, covered over with dirt and not even a stone to mark the place.”

She watched him go, wishing that her attempt to comfort him had not gone so badly awry. George was right. Asa had faced every danger his master had faced, but the buckra would soon forget him. When he was well enough, Colonel Harper would buy a replacement, and perhaps even change the new slave’s name to Asa so he did not have to trouble himself to remember a different name.

Joanna spread the Birds in the Air quilt over her narrow bed and rolled her extra clothing, her tin cornboiler, and her few other treasures into the center. The knotted kerchief that held her carefully hoarded coins she tied around her waist under her skirt. Her quilt, her kerchief, and her girls—she was packed and ready to go to West Grove. If only her beloved awaited her there.