Before I could think of how to prevent them, the two men had entered the room. Beyond them I saw Anneke turn in surprise. David was in her arms, while Stephen lay in the cradle where she had just placed him. Anneke’s eyes darted to mine, and I saw them widen in shock, but her voice was calm when she said, coldly, “I cannot possibly imagine what more you two would want with us.” She turned her back on the men and picked up Stephen again, cradling a baby in either arm protectively.
The two men studied her and exchanged a bewildered look. The first one said, “I don’t remember there being two babies last time.”
Anneke laughed sharply and regarded the men with scorn. “As I recall, you were occupied with other matters.”
“How fitting that Creek’s Crossing would send its most observant citizens to investigate us,” I added, contemptuous. My heart pounded with fear, and I fought the urge, as I had before, to seize Joanna’s son and flee to safety. “Were you searching for babies, too? Is it now against the law to shelter one’s children?”
The second man’s eyes narrowed, and he drew closer to Anneke. “Whose children are these?”
Her grasp about them tightened. “They are mine, of course.”
“Both of them?”
“Yes.”
“They look to be nearly the same age.”
“They’re twins,” said Anneke, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
The second man looked dubious. “I only saw one baby last time.” He pointed at Joanna’s son. “This here one. You were holding him, and he was crying.”
Anneke’s eyes were fierce. “Crying because you terrified him. You should be ashamed of yourself. It took hours to calm him.”
“His brother was in his cradle,” said I. “I know one of you must have seen him, because you snatched his quilt off him and threw it on the floor. It was torn in two places.”
Anneke’s voice was acid. “Did you think he was hiding a runaway beneath his quilt?”
“Let it be,” the first man advised the second. “Anyone can see this child is white.”
“And anyone can see he wants his mother,” sniffed Anneke, handing her own son to me. “Gerda, would you help, please?”
Dumbfounded, I could only nod as Anneke took to her rocking chair and, full of contempt for the men watching her, began to nurse Joanna’s son.
Embarrassed by the sight, the two men hastened to leave the room. I returned my nephew to his cradle and followed them as they quickly searched the last room, then departed our house with unwelcome assurances that they would be back if they thought it necessary.
Slowly I returned upstairs to the nursery. I watched from the doorway as Anneke finished feeding Joanna’s son, then returned him to the cradle, picked up her own baby, and began to nurse him. “Anneke—” My voice faltered. I wanted to tell her she had certainly saved the little boy, but my heart was too full for words.
Anneke looked up at me. “How many people know I had only one baby?”
“All our friends,” said I. “Anyone else they might have told.”
“A great deal, then.” Her gaze was far away, brooding. “We will have to get Joanna’s son to safety before someone reveals the truth.”
“I will take him to the next station,” said I. “They will have to take him to the next, and so on, until he can be placed with a free Negro family in Canada.”
Anneke gazed at the innocent child, drifting off to sleep in the cradle. “It will be a hazardous journey, and he is all alone in the world.”
I felt tears spring into my eyes. I will take him to Canada myself, I nearly declared, but then thought of Joanna, and decided we should keep him with us as long as possible. Perhaps I could find Joanna and purchase her freedom before the truth about her son came out.
I thought I would have weeks, perhaps longer, but the first inquiry came in a matter of days.
The sight of Mr. Pearson coming up the road to the house so astonished us that at first Anneke and I could only stare at him from the nursery window, and I almost convinced myself I was mistaken as to the identity of the horse and rider. Anneke was the first to turn away. “I will not speak to him,” said she, her voice bitter. I was even more reluctant to greet him, but my amazement at his gall and curiosity as to his purpose compelled me downstairs.
I opened the door to his knock but neither addressed him nor invited him inside.
“Good day, Miss Bergstrom,” said he.
“What do you want?” said I bluntly, all pretense to politeness long past.
He promptly dropped his facade. “I understand Mrs. Bergstrom is suddenly the mother to two children.”
I arched my eyebrows at him. “‘Suddenly’? There was nothing sudden about it. The twins are nearly two months old. The pregnancy was of the usual length, and the labor longer than most.”
“Your sister-in-law did not give birth to twins,” said Mr. Pearson sharply.
“She most certainly did.”
“You forget, my mother and I visited you shortly after the child was born. Anneke had only one son then.”
“Mr. Pearson, I fear your memory has failed you,” said I, feigning puzzlement. “Perhaps you should consult Dr. Granger.”
“Don’t make me out to be a fool, Miss Bergstrom,” snapped he. “If I consult Dr. Granger, it will be to confirm what I already know is true. He was present at the birth, and he knows how many children he delivered that night. Despite his Abolitionist beliefs, Dr. Granger is a man of integrity. He abhors a lie, and he will not depart from his principles merely to protect you. He would not falsify birth records, and he would certainly not sacrifice his own security and that of his family to abet you in your deceit.”
Just as a thrill of fear rose in my heart, I realized Mr. Pearson was utterly, entirely wrong. Indeed, Jonathan was a man of integrity and principle, but that did not preclude a well-placed lie or omission of the whole truth if he believed some greater good would be served—even if he knew he would eventually be discovered. If the fiasco with Charlotte Claverton had taught me nothing else, it had taught me that.
So I looked Mr. Pearson squarely in the eye and said, “Ask him anything you wish. I do not fear his response.”
“He is not the only one who will testify as to the truth.”
“On the contrary, I think you will discover a great many people will remember that Anneke had twins.”
His mouth narrowed, and his eyes were bright with hatred. “I do not know whose child that is, but it is not Anneke’s.”
“If indeed he is not,” said I, defiant, “would he be the only child to call his aunt mother?”
My words brought his threats to an abrupt and decisive conclusion.
A change came over his features as rage transformed into understanding. “Why, Miss Bergstrom,” said he, the familiar smirk returning. “I knew you were no lady, but I had no idea you were a whore.”
I said nothing.
Mr. Pearson laughed, and the sound was full of vengeful merriment. “I wonder if Dr. Granger is aware of this. Well, I suppose he must be. Unless there is another?” He peered at me inquisitively, but I regarded him stoically, my expression revealing nothing. “Of course not. I must say that entirely changes my opinion of the veracity of his record-keeping.”
“I suppose asking you to say nothing of this would be a wasted effort.”
“Indeed it would, Miss Bergstrom.”
I have never seen a man so pleased with himself as Mr. Pearson was as he rode off, believing himself to be the diviner of great, scandalous truths, when in fact all he took away from his interrogation was a lie devised to conceal another lie.
13
June 1859 and after—
in which we perfect the art of lying by omission, or, how it ended
With Dorothea’s help, I sent word to Jonathan before Mr. Pearson could speak with him, so when Mr. Pearson inquired whether Anneke had indeed given birth to twins, Jonathan replied in the affirmative. More than that, he showed Mr.
Pearson the official paperwork confirming that fact, and naming Hans Bergstrom as the boys’ father.
Mr. Pearson knew this to be false but was entirely mistaken as to the truth. My falsehood provided him such gleeful triumph that he had no need to seek another explanation. He wasted no time spreading the tale of my ostensible shame throughout town, which, as his mother was one of the leading gossips of her era, assured that the entire county knew of the scandal within a fortnight. Mrs. Engle was careful to add that she had suspected my whorish nature long before a child was born of it, for I had often attempted to seduce her son. For Charlotte Claverton Granger, the betrayed wife, and Anneke, the virtuous woman who took in my bastard child without complaint, she had only praise, though it was tempered by disappointment that these two women had unfortunate connections to Abolitionists. In their defense, she added, they were linked to the Creek’s Crossing Eight only by ties of marriage; they had not brought shame to our fair town through their own fault.
But the Creek’s Crossing Eight never did come to trial, and circumstances eventually encouraged Mrs. Engle to cease her criticism of the group. The Nelsons’ journalist friend was true to his word, and within weeks, our arrest and Joanna’s recapture had been denounced in every Northern newspaper I had ever heard of, and several others I had not. Creek’s Crossing became the butt of jokes, with the worst foibles of the worst portion of its populace exaggerated and distorted, until the town’s name became synonymous with ignorance and mob rule. So embarrassed were our town leaders that they swiftly dismissed all charges against us, including the dangerous threats to the Wrights’ freedom, and tried as best they could to put the terrible events in the past, but the memory of the public was long, and the reputation of Creek’s Crossing never recovered. In the years to come, businessmen eschewed Creek’s Crossing and brought prosperity to other towns; major roads linked nobler villages and bypassed ours, as did the commerce that traveled along them; surveyors who could make train tracks cling to the ridges of the Appalachians somehow found the route into the Elm Creek valley inaccessible. Eventually the town leaders tired of this and ruled to change the town’s name to Water’s Ford, retaining the original sense of Creek’s Crossing while setting aside the taint it had acquired. It remains to be seen whether their efforts will be rewarded.
My reward, I admit, was seeing Mr. Pearson and Mrs. Engle surprised and eventually undone by the consequences of their actions. I am sure I have my friends to thank for the emergence of new rumors telling how Mr. Pearson had manipulated the innocent Anneke into confessing to the authorities. If not for that, the whispered accusations told, our village never would have experienced its greatest shame. The vitriol mother and son had published in the Creek’s Crossing Informer over the years soon came to mind, and nothing more was needed to make them the county’s least popular citizens. Within a year of the arrests, Mr. Pearson and Mrs. Engle moved away; some say to Virginia, others as far away as Florida. Neither I nor any of my friends ever heard from them again, which, as you can imagine, bothers me not at all.
Before he departed, improving our town with his absence, Mr. Pearson saw to it that my own reputation was ruined entirely. The Certain Faction fought to preserve it, and each and every one of them would have sworn before the highest court in the land that she had seen Anneke cuddling twin boys within hours of their birth. But people inevitably prefer to believe the scandalous over the mundane, and so it was with me. Accordingly, the likelihood of my finding a husband, which my plainness and age had made small enough already, diminished entirely. Fortunately for me, I suppose, I never found anyone else I liked so well as Jonathan, so it did not matter.
But Mr. Pearson, Mrs. Engle, and their associates were not the only ones to receive the condemnation of the town. Although publicly we Bergstroms were exonerated and defended, privately we were lumped in with our enemies and forced to shoulder the blame for tarnishing the town’s reputation. We were never quite as welcome in society as before, and over time, we accepted that the frost in our fellow citizens’ address would never thaw, and we gradually withdrew into the company of our ever growing family and the warmth of the circle of our most intimate friends, which included the Nelsons, the Wrights, and the Certain Faction. We stopped attending town events, such as the Harvest Dance, and I once even overheard one gentleman respond to a visitor’s questions about the “rumored scandal of years ago” with the assertion that Elm Creek Farm lay outside the city proper, so its residents were not truly citizens of Water’s Ford. But although our neighbors politely shunned us, the reputation of Hans’s Bergstrom Thoroughbreds had spread far beyond our little valley, and so our fortunes soared. Our prosperity might have impressed the townsfolk and increased their desire for our company if not for the Creek’s Crossing Eight scandal and my ruined reputation, but instead it merely strengthened their enmity.
Jonathan’s reputation, I should add, suffered little from the scandal, and within the span of a year he once again enjoyed the high esteem of his fellow citizens, while I was whispered about until I was gray-haired and stooped with age. One might say Jonathan was forgiven and I was not because he was the town’s highly respected physician while I was merely a spinster of unremarkable social position, but I know it was because he was a man and I was a woman. The woman is always left to carry the burden of shame, while the man is free to go his own way. But I do not begrudge him his reprieve, for although I did not consult him before allowing Mr. Pearson to believe him my lover, Jonathan never publicly denied it, allowing the true heritage of Joanna’s son to remain secret all his life.
For I am sure by now you understand what I have needed this entire history to confess: Joanna’s son never went to Canada, nor did he rejoin his mother elsewhere. Instead he lived as a Bergstrom from the time Anneke first claimed him as her own.
We never intended this to happen. After Joanna’s capture, finding her became my obsession, and when Josiah Chester failed to reply to the scores of letters I sent him, I decided to travel to Wentworth County, Virginia, to speak to him in person. Then war broke out, as we had all feared and expected it would, and my plans lay in ruins. The conflict forced me to set aside my search and tend to matters closer to home. Hans and Anneke had added to their family, so I had the children to think of, and the obligations and consequences of war to endure. So much I could write of that dark, unforgiving time, but I cannot divert from this history to recount it now, not when I am so near the end. Perhaps I will chronicle those events someday, if I can bring myself to do it, if I live long enough.
After the war, I immediately resumed my search, but my efforts were repeatedly thwarted by one obstacle or another. Despite my frustrations, I clung stubbornly to hope, and often played in my mind’s eye a glorious and triumphant scene of Joanna’s return to Elm Creek Manor and her reunion with her son. So feverishly did I believe this event would take place that I began piecing a quilt, a gift for Joanna, in anticipation of her arrival. I chose a pattern that would be easy to sew, as I had allowed my quilting skills to languish during the war, but one that had special significance: the Log Cabin, named for the interlocking design of its rectangular pieces. The design was invented, or so Dorothea once said, to honor Mr. Abraham Lincoln, and since he had granted Joanna her freedom, I thought it an appropriate choice for her quilt. The square in the center of the block was supposed to be yellow, to signify a light in the cabin window, or red, to signify the hearth, but I cut my central squares from black fabric, to symbolize that an escaped slave had once found sanctuary within our own log cabin.
Time passed, and as my Log Cabin quilt neared completion, the black center squares took on another meaning. Black was also the color of mourning, and as my relentless searches proved fruitless over and over again, I began to mourn my lost friend, who I feared would never see the quilt I had made for her.
My letters finally reached a daughter of Josiah Chester’s, but she claimed to know nothing of what had happened to Joanna after she ran away. She did note that her f
ather usually brought recaptured slaves to the home plantation for a few days of brutal punishment before selling them to family or acquaintances in Georgia or the Carolinas, to show other slaves what fate awaited them should they run off. She did not remember this happening to Joanna, but she did not know Joanna well and might not have recognized her, or so she claimed.
I might have believed her, had Joanna not told me she was a house slave and did all the sewing for the family. At the very least, Josiah Chester’s daughter would have seen Joanna every time she was fitted for a new dress, and likely more often than that.
The years went by. Joanna’s son grew tall and strong never knowing his real mother, and my hopes, which I had clung to fiercely throughout the war, gradually slipped from my grasp. I did not give up because I loved Joanna any less; on the contrary, I loved her more, seeing the fine young man my nephew had become, and knowing how Joanna’s courage and sacrifice had brought him into our lives. No, I finally stopped searching because I believed Joanna dead. Surely if she had lived, she would have returned to Elm Creek Manor for her child. She had found her way here once as a hunted fugitive; as a free woman, she could have done so again, and certainly would have, knowing her son awaited her return. Only death could have prevented her sending word to us. I am certain of it.
But if you are a Bergstrom, Reader, you already know her son was not awaiting her return.
You may wonder why we never told him the truth about his heritage. You may question our judgment; I know I have many times over the years, ever more so as I feel my own death lurking just beyond my sight, and I know it will not be long before I must account for my life before my Creator.
At first we did not tell him because he was too young and would not understand. Then we did not tell him because we feared he might reveal the secret to strangers in an innocent remark, as children sometimes do. Later we said nothing because Joanna’s return seemed increasingly unlikely, and Anneke had forbidden us to tell him. She would not see his heart broken in mourning a mother he had never known, and she did not want him to feel loved any less than his brothers and sisters. Even when he became a man, fully capable of bearing and accepting the truth, still we did not tell him, for we had discovered that granting a people freedom did not bring them equality, and we were reminded daily of the brutality of ignorant folk who would love our precious boy today but despise him tomorrow if they knew the truth. Right or wrong, we could not do this to him.
Elm Creek Quilts [04] The Runaway Quilt Page 27
