Freedom Stone

by Jeffrey Kluger

  “Louder!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Again!”

  “Yes, sir!” Cal shouted this time, wincing with the jolt of pain that seemed to go through his brain.

  “Once more!” Willis screamed, snapping his whip at the ground next to Cal. “Answer me, boy, and answer me loud!”

  “Yes, sir!” Cal now shouted as loudly as he could. “Yes sir, yes sir, yes sir!”

  With that, Cal’s eyes widened and his nostrils flared, and the people in the crowd looked at him and froze. In that instant, they could see, Cal was about to do the most dangerous thing any slave could do: He was about to forget who he was. He was no longer just the property of the Master doing the bidding of the overseer. He was a blameless boy being tormented by a small, cruel man with a whip. A slave who let himself think that way was a slave getting set to scream or curse or even strike out, and to earn himself a whipping so severe it would cut the flesh from his bones. In Willis’s eyes there was a quick, cold spark as he braced for the blow—a blow, it was suddenly clear, he’d been hoping for all morning. In a flash, the two slave men who’d tried to help Cal before leapt forward and grabbed him hard. One of them pinned the boy’s arms by his side, while the other slapped him hard across the face.

  “Don’t do it, boy,” the one holding him hissed into his ear. “Don’t do it.”

  Willis glared furiously at the men, then turned to Cal and fixed him with a poisonous look. “You’re no good, boy!” he shouted, his pasty skin turning an angry crimson and a small, wormlike vein bulging in his forehead. “No good even for a slave. I’d whip you till there weren’t nothing left to whip if the Master didn’t think he could make a coin offa you. You best just hope he sells you before I kill you— because that’s what I aims to do! Now get back in that plow harness! The rest of you, back to work!”

  The slaves edged away slowly, dispersing back into the field. The two men who had hold of Cal carried him bodily back to the plow and waited there until he had himself back in harness. Plato stood staring, and Mama turned him around by his shoulders and ordered him back to the fields. When the boy was gone, Mama approached Cal, touched his cheek and turned his head so she could examine him. The blood was oozing from a lump the size of an egg and Mama winced at the sight of it. Mr. Willis had been right; if that horse had kicked him square, Cal would be dead. She looked him in the eye.

  “Keep hold of yourself, son,” she said. “He means what he says.”

  Chapter Eight

  MAMA WAS NOT happy when Lillie told her she’d be traveling to Bluffton with Bett. News like this was not the kind of thing that would have pleased Mama on any day, but having already seen Cal get kicked by the horse as the morning was just beginning, she had about had her fill of the kinds of trouble children their age could cook up for themselves.

  “Are you tryin’ to get yourselves sold?” Mama asked when Lillie told her about her plans.

  “But, Mama,” Lillie said, “Bett almost always takes a child with her when she goes to Bluffton.”

  “A small child,” Mama said. “Girls as old as you got work to do right here.”

  The matter would have ended there, but Lillie’s eyes looked so bright at the idea of leaving the grounds—brighter than they’d looked at any time since Papa died—that Mama couldn’t bring herself to say no. The world could be tiny for any slave, especially one with the restless spirit of a child. If the plantation’s gates opened even a little, it would be flat cruel not to let Lillie go through them. Mama swallowed her worries and said yes.

  It was, as Bett had promised, just two mornings later that she and Lillie set out on their journey. Mama and Plato accompanied Lillie to the stable, where the wagon would be getting readied for the trip. The girl’s breath quickened with each step that took her farther away from the cabin. Plato noticed her rising excitement and looked at his sister enviously.

  “How come I can’t go too, Mama?” he said.

  “Hush, boy,” Mama answered. “I can’t have the both of you to worry about.”

  When the three of them rounded the path that led to the stables, they could see that the horse and wagon were already waiting and Bett had settled into one of the seats behind Samuel, the old wagon driver. Samuel had spent much of his life on the plantation and had never done any job but tending the horses and driving the Master or the other slaves. A tall, broad man with large, powerful hands, Samuel would once have been considered good protection for a woman and a girl traveling by themselves. But he was now past sixty—very old for a slave and even for many white men—and sometimes he seemed barely able to look after himself anymore. Mama regarded him uneasily.

  Lillie pulled free of Mama’s hand, which she had been holding since they left the cabin, and sprinted ahead. She hopped up lightly into the seat beside Bett and kissed the old woman on the cheek. Bett patted her hand. Mama and Plato trotted up after her.

  “You have your traveling pass?” Mama asked Samuel. The old man smiled and patted his breast pocket, then looked alarmed. He groped in his jacket for the paper that was the only thing that would protect them from slave catchers if they left the plantation without a white adult accompanying them. The paper was not there.

  “Samuel!” Mama cried.

  “Phibbi,” Bett said evenly, “quit your worryin’. I got it here.” She patted her apron pocket and Mama could see the edge of the precious paper poking from the top. “Samuel gave it to me already; he just forgot.” Samuel looked embarrassed, and Lillie and Bett smiled. Mama didn’t.

  “All right, then,” Mama said, waving her hands impatiently. “If you’re gonna go, go. Soonest you leave is the soonest you come back.”

  “Yes, Miss Phibbi,” Samuel said. He turned to Bett. “All right, Miss Bett?”

  Bett nodded and Samuel snapped the reins. The wagon jerked into motion, and as it did, so did Lillie’s heart, pounding in anticipation behind her breastbone. She waved excitedly to Plato—who waved back sulkily—and blew a kiss to Mama; then she watched them dwindle behind her as the horse clopped away. When Lillie could see them no more, she turned ahead, looking all about herself as the wagon bounced past the slave cabins, circled around the side of the Big House and headed for the long, tree-lined drive that led past the plantation gate and into the swirling world beyond.

  For more than a quarter hour, Lillie sat with her back straight and her head swiveling from one side to the other, taking in the strange roads and fields and fences as they passed—roads and fields and fences that were no different from the ones on the grounds of Greenfog, but utterly different all the same. After a while, her neck began to ache and Bett pulled her gently back.

  “Long trip and a lot to do when we get there,” she said. “Don’t work yourself up too much now.”

  Lillie nodded and settled back. Bett was right, she knew. Collecting baking supplies was not the only reason she was on this trip, nor even the one that concerned her much. She was really here to look for Henry, the one-legged slave who fought alongside Papa. Bluffton was a big place to go searching for someone—the biggest place Lillie had ever seen—and how a single person would go about finding a single other person there was beyond her. As Lillie thought of that, a feeling of worry came over her and she dropped her eyes. Her gaze fell on the traveling pass in Bett’s pocket and Bett noticed her staring at it. The old woman looked at her, then carefully removed the paper and—as was the slave’s habit even when no one was looking—glanced cautiously about herself. Then she handed the folded sheet to Lillie, who took it excitedly and unfolded it. She looked down at the curly writing on the page, trying to focus her eyes on the small fancy letters as the wagon bounced and bumped. Slowly, sometimes moving her lips, Lillie did something extraordinary: She read to herself.

  “Know all men by this instrument: The slave man Samuel, the slave woman Bett and the slave girl Lillie have leave to journey from the Greenfog Estate to the town of Bluffton on plantation business on this Twelfth day of September, Eighteen Hund
red and Sixty-Three. Please lend all assistance and offer no delay to their passage as they are under charge and order to return before nightfall of this day.”

  It was signed by the Master in letters even harder to read than those that filled the rest of the paper. Under his name were the words “Planter and Owner.”

  Lillie felt the pride she always experienced when she read, along with the thrill that came from doing something that was strictly forbidden and harshly punishable. No one was certain how many slaves on all the plantations of the South were able to read so much as a word, but the guessing was that it was not five in a hundred. Lillie had learned from her papa, who himself had learned as a boy, when he would carry his Master’s son’s books to school and then wait outside in the sun so that he could carry them home in the late afternoon. With nothing to do during those long hours, he found himself listening through the window as the white children got their lessons and slowly learning the letters himself. Oftentimes he’d even get to practice what he’d learned when the white boys would bring picture books and adventure journals to school—things their parents forbade them to read—and leave them with their slave boys to hold.

  Papa taught Lillie’s mama to read shortly after they wed, and he began teaching Lillie and Plato as soon as they could talk. He decided what he wanted to call Plato even before the boy was born, after he’d been summoned to the Master’s library to fix a leaky ceiling and had secretly flipped through a book written by a man of the same name. Papa never had a chance to read more than a few scraps of sentences in those pages, but the little he did see had stayed with him. He told Plato that he’d given him the name to remind both of his children of the kinds of grand thoughts all people could think—whether they lived forever as slaves or one day tasted freedom.

  Lillie carefully returned the traveling pass to Bett, then sat quietly for the rest of the hour-and-a-half-long journey to Bluffton. When they finally arrived, there was no mistaking where they were. Buildings rose up on either side of the hard dirt street, some of them three stories tall. The building fronts were a splash of colorful awnings and signs describing the businesses conducted inside—DRY GOODS, HABERDASHER, HAY & FEED, TELEGRAPH OFFICE—but Lillie dared not linger on them, lest she reveal herself as being able to make sense of the letters.

  People seemed to be milling everywhere—black people and white people alike, though it was mostly the whites who were on the planked sidewalks or inside the stores. The slaves kept largely to the streets, loading and unloading wagons and dodging the horses and rigs that clattered by. Lillie thought she recognized some of the black faces from visits those slaves had paid to Greenfog when they were running errands or driving their masters. None of the white people looked familiar.

  “Stay close by me, girl,” Bett said. “It won’t do for you to get lost.”

  “Yes’m,” Lillie said, not needing to be reminded of such a thing.

  Samuel brought the wagon as close as he could to a store marked GROCER—PURE MILK, FOODS & NECESSITIES and reined the horse to a halt. Lillie hopped down from the wagon and helped Bett ease herself out of her seat and into the road. They left Samuel to mind the horse, dodged the puddles and wheel ruts underfoot, climbed the sidewalk and entered the store. With the sun not yet high, it was poorly lit inside, but as Lillie’s eyes began to adjust, she gaped at the bounty on the shelves and tables that filled the big room. There were bags of rice and grains, jars of beans and peas, baskets of apples and squash, jugs of milk still foaming at the top, dried fruits wrapped in brown paper and jars of preserves put up on shelves. There were whole salted fish and dried flanks of pork, wheels of cheese covered in wax and barrels of nuts, barley, coffee and cocoa. There were also large sacks of sugar and flour and salt, which were the things they had come here today to buy.

  Lillie and Bett were the only shoppers in the store save for a white man in coveralls, and they stood to the side while the proprietor tended to him. As they waited, a young white mother and her small, toddling boy entered. The proprietor turned to them when he’d finished with his first customer, seeming not to notice Lillie and Bett at all. He smiled agreeably at the mother, inquired if she wasn’t finding it warm for September and offered the boy a licorice stick from a large glass jar he kept on the counter. He filled the woman’s order—a long shopping list of what seemed to be no end of items—and helped her out to her wagon with her bundles. It was only after the mother and child had left and the proprietor had sorted through some receipts on his counter and poured himself a cup of coffee from a pot he kept on a black iron stove, that he turned to Bett and Lillie.

  “Traveling pass,” he said brusquely. Bett stepped forward and handed the man the folded paper; he scanned it quickly and handed it back to Bett. “Greenfog,” he said with a snort, as if this was somehow bad news. “Tell me what you’re needin’ and scat.”

  Bett told the man what they had come for and he gathered up the items quickly and wordlessly. Slaves were not allowed to carry money and the purchase would thus be billed to the Master. The shopkeeper made a note of the amount and carried the heavy sacks out to the sidewalk—less to be courteous, Lillie suspected, than to be done with her and Bett. Samuel spotted them and ran over. The man waved Lillie and Bett off the sidewalk and away from the front of his store.

  “Your man can do your liftin’,” he said. “You two wait in the street meantime. And tell your Master he’s owin’ me for two months of goods; I’ll be expectin’ payment soon.”

  Lillie went a little cold at that. The emptier the Master’s purse grew, the more he’d need the money he could raise selling his slaves. The two hundred dollars the appraiser said he’d get in exchange for Plato would settle a lot of debts. Bett seemed to know what Lillie was thinking and squeezed her hand, and the two of them stepped off the sidewalk as Samuel began to hoist the sacks and load them into the wagon. Lillie tried to help, wrapping her arms around what looked to be the lightest one and feeling its scratchy burlap against her face and arms. She heaved with all her strength and while she got it off the ground, she staggered under the weight of it. Samuel took it from her with one hand and flipped it into the wagon bed. Bett then pulled Lillie aside, looked about herself and leaned toward her. She spoke in a low voice.

  “We done with what I come here to do today, and the smart thing now is just to go home,” she said.

  Lillie nodded.

  “You still mean to look for that man what can speak for your papa?”

  “I do.”

  “You understand the trouble you can fetch yourself messin’ in affairs like that?”

  “I do.”

  Bett looked at her thoughtfully. “I reckon you do know,” she said. “You best go do it, then, ’fore you lose your nerve.” She waved Lillie off the way the shopkeeper had just shooed both of them. Lillie stayed where she was.

  “You ain’t comin’ with me?” she asked.

  “I’m old, child,” Bett said. “I can’t go chasin’ around a town this size. And Samuel can’t leave the wagon.” She pointed Lillie toward the tall tower that crowned the top of the Bluffton town hall. A great clock with fancy hands looked down at them. “You read time as good as you can read words?” she asked.

  Lillie nodded. “It’s quarter past ten,” she said.

  “You got till quarter past four,” Bett said. “That travelin’ pass says we don’t got to be home till sundown, but we don’t dare get back a minute later. Keep that clock in sight and be here on time, lest we got to leave you behind.” Bett pointed to a stand of sycamore trees that was casting a shade big enough for a wagon. “Samuel and I brought water and a bite o’ bread. We’ll be there waitin’.”

  Lillie looked slowly around herself at the busy town with the milling people and swallowed hard. Then she looked back at Bett.

  “Go, little Ibo,” the old woman said. “Do what you got to do.”

  Chapter Nine

  MINERVY WASN’T the kind of girl inclined to use a curse word. That was good, sinc
e even at age thirteen, she hadn’t yet learned one. Her mama was very strict on the matter of curse words and made that clear from the time Minervy was old enough to speak.

  “There’s words what are poison berries and words what are sweet berries,” she’d say. “Put too many bad ones on your tongue and you quit tastin’ the good ones.”

  That made sense to Minervy, and she’d always prided herself on never having uttered so much as a single word too nasty to say in polite company. She dearly wished she had at least one at her command, however, the day Lillie told her she’d be going off to Bluffton and leaving her to tend the nursery cabin on her own.

  Lillie had mentioned nothing about the Bluffton trip until the very afternoon before she went, reckoning that every hour a nervous girl like Minervy knew about what lay ahead was another hour she’d fret about it. Best to give them both fewer of those hours to abide. When Lillie finally did reveal her plans, Minervy indeed became a tangle of worry.

  “But what if somethin’ happens when you’re gone?” she asked.

  “Somethin’ like what?” Lillie responded.

  “S’pose a baby gets sick or a mama gets cross?”

  “That happens every day.”

  “S’pose all the littlest ones takes to squawlin’ at once?”

  “That happens too,” Lillie answered. “And it’s always you what sets things right.”

  Minervy was not convinced and passed the rest of the day clucking her tongue worriedly and looking at Lillie crossly. But when the next morning came, she handled the nursery cabin as well as Lillie had predicted she would, collecting the babies and shooing away the mamas with so little fuss that most of them didn’t even seem to notice that Lillie was gone. Still, when the last of the mamas had left, Minervy closed the door in relief, knowing that it would not be until mid-morning that she’d see any of them again and looking forward to a quiet hour or two with no more noise in the nursery cabin than the sound of the sleeping babies. She was thus both surprised and cross when, not long after all the mamas were supposed to be at work, there was a rap at the door. Minervy snapped her eyes to the slumbering babies, who stirred slightly but did not awaken. The knock sounded again, and the door creaked open. Minervy rose and hurried over, hoping to stop whichever mama it was before she entered and created a disturbance.