Everywhere she went, she collected herbs and added them to the bundle she had attached to her pole. At Abilene, after she doctored a sick horse and earned the gratitude of a group of drovers, she got to ride in a wagon to Hays when they headed back to Texas.
They gave her credit for saving the horse’s life, but she knew it would have lived anyway. Weary to the bone, for she was not a young woman, she slept while she rode. When she was not sleeping, she listened. When she spoke, it was just to ask careful questions.
None of the drovers could read, so it did her no good to show them the handbill describing Nicodemus. They dumped her off in Hays, and she walked boldly into the general store. There were no Jim Crow signs prohibiting her from entering or shopping there because there was no need. There were no scary groups of black people on the plains.
Startled by the novelty of seeing a Negro woman in their community, a man stepped forward, read her handbill, then assured her the place she sought was farther west. Everywhere was always farther west.
“Not much to mark your way around here. It’s easy to go in circles. Best to follow the faint trail north to Stockton, then head west down the Solomon. Or I suppose you could start out along the Saline River and go anti-goggling toward the Solomon.” He squinted at the small type on the flyer. “But that way ain’t as clear.”
She listened, her head cocked to one side.
“Not many folks been that way,” he said. “The quickest would be to follow the Saline a ways and then go at an angle toward the Solomon, but it’s awful easy to get lost.”
“I thank you kindly. Reckon I’ll tarry a day or two if any of you gentlemen needs clothes washed.”
She was dead tired and hungry. She would need to take food with her. Back home, her sense of the land had been so acute she hadn’t given provisions a thought. She could fish, hunt game, gather plants and grains. Out here, there was just prairie. You could chase a rabbit to hell and back before you caught it. She couldn’t imagine how people managed to live.
She did enough laundry to buy food for her little bundle, and after she had rested for several days, she started off again. She had a superb sense of direction but carefully heeded the man’s words about getting lost.
She headed due west, then when the stars came out, she switched to north and walked for about two hours in the moonlight. The next day she had oriented herself well enough to walk northwest and was rewarded by the sight of the new river.
She was always more comfortable when there were trees around and a chance to catch some fish. She knew how to manage when she was around water. Scornfully, she looked at the muddy, bleak ribbon of water in front of her. What they called a river in Kansas was a pitiful thing by Southern standards. She began following it due west.
She walked.
Bethany was the first to see a person coming across the prairie. It was toward evening, a time for looking west, as the sunsets were incredibly lovely. They stained the evening sky like spilled paints. The snows had stopped. It was still winter, but the air had quickened, and it would soon be their first spring on the prairie.
Last month, Tripp and Harrington had returned with two wagonloads of food, clothes, and seed. Hope soared as the earth warmed. Music floated around the campfire at night.
Blessings always came from the east. Each evening before she went inside for the night, Bethany instinctively turned her face east toward a certain spot in a little line of cottonwood trees standing across the Solomon. She saw the sunrise there every morning after the Lord saw her safely through the night. Her high energy rekindled with the dawn and ebbed toward late evening.
The light was beginning to fade, but her eyes picked out a shape moving toward her. When the speck grew to the size of a person, she could see the traditional white turban and knew it was a woman.
Then as the woman came closer, her heart nearly stopped in her body, and she caught her breath. Blinded by joy, she blinked hard to see if she was conjuring up a vision.
“Momma,” she called wildly as she ran to meet the woman. “Momma.”
The woman started to run toward her. “Bethany? Bethany? My own angel girl? You here? In this town?”
Bethany rushed to meet her. Tears streamed down her face. They hugged, clung, swayed back and forth in the fading twilight. The tall bluestem grass dipped as a sudden breeze moved across the plains. A frog hurrumphed from the banks of the Solomon. A jack rabbit bounded across the prairie.
Racked by sobs, Bethany let go of her mother, splayed her fingers across her face, and bent over like she had been kicked in the stomach. Her voice came in child-like uncontrollable explosions of misery.
“Child, child. I can’t hear you. Can’t understand you.”
“Oh Momma, Momma. I thought you were dead. I thought I was seeing a ghost. How did you find me? How in God’s own name did you find me here? How did you know to come here?”
Her mother’s eyes were like two sinkholes in her lined face. The whites were bloodshot, and her dress hung limply off her painfully thin body. She lifted her blue-black hands and patted her daughter’s face. Felt it all over. Then soft tears started down her cheeks.
“Didn’t know you was here, child. Didn’t know that. Didn’t know nothing about you being here. Just wanted to come to this town. Read about it in this here writing and wanted to come here where black folks could have a chance. I may be an old woman, but I wanted that chance. You’re never too old for chances.”
Bethany took the paper from her and stared at the handbill she had composed herself, stunned that it had brought Queen Bess to her.
“This has to be the Lord’s doing,” she cried. “I wrote this one myself. Wanted folks to read something, just once, that wasn’t a passel of lies.”
“Just knew this was something special.” Queen Bess stared at her beautiful daughter, then stroked Bethany’s soft, black hair. “Oh child, it’s sure enough the Lord’s doing. Just magic. But something was calling me. It was like I just had to come here.”
“Come inside now, Momma. I have a home. You need a home. We’ll have a place. You need food right away.” Her mother was on the verge of collapse, and she seemed to let her strength slither into the deepening twilight as Bethany braced her and led her toward the door of the dugout. “You’re going to be home, Momma. Just a few more feet. You’re going to be home in Nicodemus.”
Then Bethany blinked as the sun blazed as if in protest at being banished over the horizon. Her joy faltered as the setting sun became a fiery red-orange, a terrifying ball of evil in the West.
She remembered, she remembered.
Flames, flames across the land. Flames and heat and destruction. Destruction and stark terror.
It was Momma standing in front of the plantation shielding the St. James women when the soldiers rode up. And Momma, screaming at the Yankees to leave them alone, leave all the people alone. The whites, the blacks.
“This is a good family,” her momma yelled. “We all has it good. Didn’t no one ask y’all to come.” None of the black folks wanted to be freed from that plantation.
And then there was the blue-coated man saying no black bitch was going to tell him what to do and say and how he should act, and some of the other slaves were trying to shut Momma up.
Bethany knew all about men and women even though she had never been with a man. She knew all the things that went on with black women and white men, and it was better not to provoke white folks anyway. Momma had told her it was better for her that all the young white men were off to the wars when she reached her womanhood.
Bethany knew Momma was taking a terrible chance screaming at these evil men, and it wouldn’t do anyone any good, and it wouldn’t stop a thing, and she would just be putting herself in terrible, terrible danger, and then the man dragged Queen Bess behind the house, and Bethany listened for a scream, but she didn’t hear another word from her mother. She hadn’t heard her momma speak again until now.
They had run, all of them, from the burnin
g house, the burning barns, the screaming animals, and she did not understand why the invaders wanted to burn everything. She hated them, hated them, but most of all she grieved for her mother.
She had never seen her again since that terrible day.
Until this very moment she had always supposed Queen Bess had been left for dead. With the return of her mother, this Lazarus raised from the grave, terror limped through her doorway into her little dugout. The malevolent molten blast in the west flared triumphantly.
The fire, the fire. Feelings she kept beaten down like wayward flames threatened to blaze up and get out of hand.
She steadied herself. The sun, the sun. It was only the sun showing off at the end of the day. She eased her mother through the door and into the corner where she had hung a curtain to hide her bed from the rest of the dugout. When there were sick people who needed special care, she laid them there, and she slept on one of her straw pallets. She eased her mother onto the bed.
“Going to get you something to eat first,” she said softly. “A little soup, and then sleep.” Her mother’s nostrils were pinched with fatigue.
Bethany went to the stove. Thanks to the aid from Eastern Kansas, she now had potatoes to add to her rabbit stews. She ladled a helping into a tin cup and sat it on the floor beside the bed. She gently lifted her mother’s shoulders until Bess was propped against the sod wall, then began to spoon little sips into her mouth. Queen Bess savored the hot liquid with her tongue, then noisily began to gulp the broth.
Bethany brought her a cup of water and then lowered her down onto the bed again and covered her with her old quilt. She eased her mother’s dress over her head and slipped a loose nightgown on in its place. She froze when she felt welts on Queen Bess’s back.
The Yankees! The St. Jameses had never touched her mother. None of the Herbert women had ever been whipped. Mindful of the shame on her mother’s face, Bethany finished dressing her. Queen Bess immediately fell asleep.
Then Bethany’s heart swelled until it choked her throat. She began to cry in great silent heaves again. She rose and went outside, afraid she would not be able to control her sounds, and she did not want to wake her mother.
When she was spent, a rhythm began in her heart, a drumbeat as old as Africa. They had come home.
They were all coming home to Nicodemus. Weren’t going to study war no more. Weren’t ever going to know hunger or terror or sorrow or the white man’s lash or blood lust or separation.
Just freedom, precious freedom.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The next morning, several of the women had already heard the news. They walked over to the school before Bethany started her lessons. They gathered around her desk. Bethany’s voice trembled as she told them that sure enough, her own mother had stumbled into Nicodemus like a miracle sent from God.
“She’s plumb worn out and a bit sickly. She’s nearly walked herself to death. She needs to rest, but you all will meet her in a couple of days. Just want you to know . . .” Then she couldn’t stop her tears. “This is a miracle. Sure enough. She found us on account of something we did. She read our flyer and knew she was reading the truth. It wasn’t puffery, wasn’t a pack of lies. See what we can do? Our people need the truth. See what the truth can do?”
“Lord, have mercy,” said LuAnne Brown. “She a healing woman, too?”
“Is she a healing woman? She is quite simply the best healing woman I know. I had to stop myself from running through this town shouting last night.” Bethany raised her hands toward heaven. “We are so very blessed. Yes, praise God. She’s the best healing woman I know.”
“She lay on hands?” Dolly asked.
Bethany stiffened. Either way she answered it wouldn’t set right with some of the folks. Although Queen Bess was part motherwit and a sometimes faith woman, she also put a lot of stock in healing plants.
Queen Bess’s grandmother had come from Haiti, and she knew some black witching she had only hinted at to Bethany. Something darker. Truth was, besides that, she had a special knowing all her own. Once she had tried to get Bethany to see the light shining around people, but Bethany was blind to this kind of vision.
Queen Bess knew the white doctors’ ways, too, from when they were called to plantations. But she also knew they were mostly wrong. White folks were bled senseless to bring the four humors into balance. The more highly trained the doctor, the more likely he was to kill.
But they knew how to cut.
Queen Bess had watched them cut when she attended their rounds. She put a heap of stock in their cutting.
Folks said she was part witch, and she didn’t mind that a bit. She had told Bethany long ago that the biggest weapon they had against white folks was fear. Fear of what their slaves were doing behind their backs. They did plenty, and the white folks knew it.
“Sometimes she lays on hands,” Bethany said carefully. “Sometimes.”
Three nights later, the whole town gathered outside around the campfire to meet Queen Bess.
Bethany pulled Teddy forward from the back of the group. “Momma, I want you to meet the man who’s made this all possible. This is Teddy Sommers. And Teddy, this is my mother, Queen Bess.”
Teddy arched his eyebrows and gave a little tug of his hat as he looked frankly into the face of the blue-black woman, her skin as shiny as a gun barrel. She wore the classic white turban, a vestige of slave status. She was the only lone woman who had come to Nicodemus who had not abandoned it at once. That alone spoke volumes about her.
Everyone knew by now that Bethany’s mother had found Nicodemus from reading a simple handbill that Bethany had created. Hope and wonder rippled throughout the colony. Nearly every black family had people who had been lost or sold away. This woman had walked across the plains to find her daughter. Perhaps their own loved ones would find them, too.
Queen Bess looked at him hard, and he winced under her scrutiny. There was a nearly palpable aura emanating from this woman. Uneasily, he looked around, wondering if others could see the light, the field of pure energy. They did not shake hands or touch. She merely nodded in his direction, but her eyes did not swerve.
Bethany beamed at them both. Unable to turn away from Queen Bess’s hard gaze, Teddy felt a quiet bubble of protest rising within him. It was the first time since he had come to Nicodemus that he felt uneasy in someone’s presence. He closed his eyes for an instant. Trouble had just walked into their town. “You’re simply the two most important people in my life,” Bethany said softly. “The most important.”
Teddy smiled. Implied was her hope they would just love each other. Be the best of friends. Well, he hated to disappoint her, but he could tell her right now, it wasn’t going to happen. He intended to give the old woman a wide berth.
Before the meeting started, Bethany had gone from place to place asking them all to rejoice with her and bring their plates or bowls. Although food was not scarce like it had been during the winter, it was still a rare treat to eat food prepared by someone else’s hands. They lined up to receive a portion of venison, spiced with wild onions she had cooked that morning. All the men sat in a group apart, and all the women wanted a chance to talk to Queen Bess.
Teddy watched and listened.
“Momma is a granny,” Bethany said. “So was her mother ahead of her and her mother’s mother. But Momma, she’s special.”
Teddy studied the faces of the other women gathered. Respectful faces, hands close and neat, waiting to serve. All eyes on this black leopard who had sprung into their midst.
“Granny” could mean many things. This woman was high quality, a healer. But on some huge plantations, the granny was the slave woman in charge of overseeing all it took to make the place run right. Feeding a couple hundred slaves, spinning wool, cutting and sewing their clothes, keeping them well, called for a right smart-thinking woman. Teddy had known a couple of these black matriarchs. Stark fact was some white women just couldn’t figure out how to run a plantation. So they took t
o their fainting couches. Then an able black woman was the heart and brains that kept the whole place from falling apart.
Sometimes, the term granny meant the old woman who looked after the children until they were old enough to join their parents in the fields. But from what Bethany had said, her mother was one powerful doctoring woman. She probably kept things on an even keel, too. Did it all.
Teddy sighed and stuffed his hands in his pockets, one foot braced against the wall. Gloomily he looked at Queen Bess. No doubt in his mind what that turban meant—an ex-slave who wore her badge of shame like it was a crown of thorns. Flaunting it. It mean she ’bout as changeable as an anvil.
Dolly Redgrave had noticed him listening. Seemed like every time he turned around, that woman was peering at someone. He turned back to the menfolks.
“Come spring I’se going to plant a little corn and a little oats.” John More spoke cautiously, as if hoping someone would approve.
“You say it going to be spring, boy? You sure of that?” Henry Partridge guffawed. “And if it do come, how can we tell?”
“I hear say the wind switches to the south, that how we can tell.”
“Corn’s good. I’se going to stick to stuff my youngsters can eat.” Silas Brown’s limp, mottled face sagged with worry. He looked like an old tan coon dog that had taken the wrong turn. “Not taking no chances of going hungry ever again. Going to figure out how to grow food. Then I going to pick up buffalo bones and sell them to the railroad folks. They ship them back east to grind up for fertilizer. Meissner, he say they’s plenty of money in that. But I going to keep the hides.”
“I’m not,” said Henry Partridge. “Gonna sell it all. Meissner say there’s plenty of money in hides, too.”
“Need them hides for covers for my youngsters and shades for my windows,” said Silas. “Reckon I learned a few things this winter even if it was from a bunch of wild Indians.”
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