“Also, they were the ones who still had bullets. And cannons.”
“Yeah, that’s a good point. But look here.” Faye pointed to the part where Cally said that the ship was “snugged up against the shore” and said, “Even its location is suggestive. Think about it. A ship that could lurk in tidal wetlands would have had an extraordinarily shallow draft.”
“That’s something that a blockade runner would surely need. It’s not like they could waltz into a big port to do their buying and selling.”
Now Faye laughed out loud. “Can you imagine them sailing right past the Union Navy into Mobile Bay? I can just hear the captain saying ‘Never mind us. We’re just here to buy and sell some contraband. We’ll be on our way after we finish trading with your enemy.’”
She opened a browser window on Joe’s desktop computer and said, “Let’s take a look at some ships like the one Cally saw.” Then she typed in a search string.
iron-hulled steamship
She clicked on “Images,” and they sat back and looked at a bunch of cool old ships. When she tweaked the search by adding “blockade runners,” the screen filled with sleek, low craft. Most had masts as well as paddlewheels, because the world was barely a half-century into the steamboat era when the Civil War began. Steam engines weren’t always reliable, but neither was the wind. Shipbuilders in those days liked to hedge their bets.
“Here goes nothing,” she said as she added two words to the search terms:
twin sidewheels
Nothing on the screen changed and Joe said, “Well, crud. I thought that would help.”
“Oh, it helped,” Faye said. “It told us that iron-hulled, blockade-running ships with twin steam engines weren’t all that common. The internet can’t even dredge up a picture of one, at least not on this first page.”
She changed the search from “Images” to “All,” and she was rewarded with a list of links to articles on iron-hulled side-wheeled steamships with twin engines that made her yell “Oh, yeah!”
Joe silently fastened his green eyes on her. He might as well have said what he was thinking right out loud: Are you planning to explain to me why you’re so excited?
“First of all, there are only two ships on this first page. One of them is the SS Syren. She’s famous for running the Union blockade thirty-three times, more than any other ship, so her twin-engine design clearly did what it was designed to do. It made the ship fast. The Syren is so famous that she has crowded almost every other ship remotely like her off the first page of the search.”
Joe pointed at a line about halfway down the screen. “Except for that one.”
Faye gave a satisfied sigh. “Yes. Except for that one. Except for the Philomela.”
The Syren had survived all those blockade runs, only to be captured in Charleston Harbor just a few months before the war was over. The Philomela, too, had continued shuttling goods and money in and out of the Confederacy until very late in 1864, but she was never captured. Nor was she sunk by a Union ship. She presumably sank in a fierce storm, somewhere near Apalachicola, Florida, where she was last seen. Apalachicola wasn’t all that far from Joyeuse Island, not in the grand scheme of things, and the wreck could be even closer to their island. Nobody had ever known exactly where she went down.
Except, perhaps, for Captain Edward Eubank, who believed he’d found her. The captain might have spent his last moments diving on the Philomela. Or on some other nameless ship that the internet didn’t know about. But Cally had seen a ship toward the end of the war—say, 1864 or 1865—and the Philomela sank late in 1864. There was a very real chance that this was the ship that Cally saw. It wasn’t out of the bounds of possibility that the captain had been hot on her trail when he died.
Faye turned back to Cally Stanton’s oral history and began reading it out loud, so she could share it with Joe.
* * *
Excerpt from the oral history of Cally Stanton,
Recorded in 1935 and preserved as part of the WPA Slave Narratives.
The evening was almost full dark, with hardly any moon and the stars hiding behind the clouds. I sat in that boat a-listening to the night wind. The singing of the crickets got louder and louder as we got closer and closer to shore. The frog-gigging lanterns were all the light we had. Soon enough they lit up the iron sides of a big, big ship.
I had ahold of a frog gig, in case I needed to defend myself, but I put it down when I got an eye full of that ship. No one person could defend theirself against something that size, not to mention the people that it carried. I certainly couldn’t do it, sitting in a little boat way down at the waterline. I sat there and looked up…up…up. The hull stretched so far to my left and right that it looked a million miles long.
You can’t know how big it was unless you could be there with me, sitting in a rowboat and just floating. I can still hear the lapping of the water on the sides of our little boat as we sat in the little bay where the ship was anchored.
The lantern light shone down into the water and lit the backs of fish skittering into the shadow of our boat. The frogs I’d been a-hoping to eat were making big plops all along the shore, hopping into the water. I remember how the fish and the frogs took my eyes away from the big iron boat, just for a second, because they reminded me how bad I wanted something to eat.
It’s been a lot of years since then and I’ve forgot a lot of things, but I know this: When I climbed into that rowboat, I hadn’t put a bite of food in my mouth all day long.
If I’d been a-planning to sneak up on the ship, then I would’ve put the lanterns out, but that wasn’t what I wanted to do. I sat in that boat hoping against hope that somebody was on watch that night who would see us and our lanterns a-coming. And they did.
One man after another came up on the deck and looked down at us. I could hear them talking amongst theirselves, but I couldn’t hear a word they said. I couldn’t count ‘em, but there wasn’t a bit of doubt that they outnumbered the five of us in the rowboat.
When we got close enough that I thought they could hear me, I picked up a lantern and held it high, yelling, “Ahoy the ship!”
I held its light close to our faces so they could see who we were, not Union nor Confederate sailors but people who had been born in bondage. “Ahoy the ship!” I hollered. “We need your help.”
They threw down a rope ladder. It wasn’t any small job to get up it in my long skirts and petticoats and button-top shoes. I almost didn’t have the strength. I had to tell myself, “There’s food on this ship and you’re here to find a way to get some.”
The captain had a kind face, and I hoped that meant that he wasn’t planning to kill me or the men who brought me. He found me a place to sit down before I fell over. Then he handed me a cup and said, “You say you need our help. Tell me what it is you need, but first drink up. You look like death on two legs.”
I didn’t have to be told twice to drink my tea. It was well-sugared and I was weak from not eating, so it tasted like melted gold to me.
It’s funny how something simple like a cup of tea can make you trust somebody. What did I know about him? There I sat, the only woman on a ship full of lonely men. What was to keep them from lifting anchor and taking me someplace where I’d never see my home again?
Well, that might happen and I couldn’t stop them, so I put it out of my head. I had an important thing to say and I had to trust that the captain was as kind as he looked. I told him how it was with us. I was living every day with hungry men, hungry women, hungry children, and not nearly enough food stored up to get us all through the winter, which was a-coming sooner than I wanted it to.
He turned to a man standing beside him and said, “Go fix this woman a plate and pile it high. Don’t forget to bring her a piece of that rum cake we ate this evening.” Seeing the look on my face, he said, “Make sure the men who brought her here are fed, too.”
/> When that man talked, people listened, because I had a plate in front of me before I’d taken another good sip of tea. He waited until I’d chewed through a few bites before he asked me to tell him more about myself, but he got around to it. By the time I was working my way through the rum cake, my story had all came out in a rush. I ain’t usually so free with my words, especially not back then. Being under the thumb of a man who calls himself your master will do that to you. I must have been half out of my mind with gratitude to see all that food in front of me.
I told him that my people had been taken out of Africa to work on Joyeuse Island for a terrible man, but he was dead and all of us on Joyeuse Island did our own work now. I had papers to show him if he wanted proof.
“Oh, my dear,” he said. “President Lincoln freed you all a year or more ago.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have let my tongue get salty, but I did. I told him that I talked Mister Courtney into freeing us a long time before that. And I told him that we’d been fending for ourselves since Mister Courtney died, using nothing but our strong backs and good minds and not a cent of cash money. I made sure he knew that we could grow our own food, but we couldn’t make money out of thin air. We didn’t have no other way to get it, so we couldn’t buy supplies. We had to make do with what we grew in the ground. Still and all, we’d done right fine until the cutworms ate the corn, thank you very much.
I did a lot of talking, feeling guilty about my full stomach, since I still didn’t know whether he had any food in the cargo hold for me to take back to everybody else. I knew that blockade runners—and I was pretty sure that’s what he was—mostly ran cash crops out of the Gulf of Mexico and brought food back in. If he was on his way out, he might not have much onboard to eat. And maybe that didn’t make no never mind, because I didn’t have a cent of money to buy it with, anyway.
But I did know one thing about blockade runners that might save us. They didn’t just bring food back through the blockade. They brought fine, expensive things for rich folks who’d managed somehow not to lose all their money in the war—things like wine, silk, jewels, liquor, and spices. That’s where they made their real money, selling fancy things to rich people who thought they was suffering because they was having to live without them.
I didn’t have any of them things to sell him, but I did have a library full of Mister Courtney’s fine books, leatherbound with golden edges on their thin, smooth pages. Rich people liked to have pretty books on their shelves. I knew that. I certainly dusted enough of the first master’s books.
I also knew that they didn’t always read them. Mister Courtney had read all his books, but his mama? And her husband, the first master? Oh, hell no.
Me? I loved those books. They kept me company on the long nights when everybody else on the island had gone to sleep and left me to do their worrying for them. I would miss those books, but I could live without ’em. None of us could live without food.
I offered him the books and he laughed in my face. That’s when I thought we would all be starved to death by springtime.
And then he told me that he could spare twenty barrels of supplies for us. He said, “I’d give you more, but I’m carrying no food for sale, just supplies for my crew. Fortunately, we’ve got more than we need. Even without the twenty barrels I’m giving you, we’ll have enough to make Havana. I can restock there.”
The word “giving” was echoing around in my head. I wasn’t sure I’d heard right. I was afraid to believe that he was going to give us what we needed to stay alive, not asking for a thing in return.
“I have some beautiful first editions. They would for sure bring you a fine price, if you have agents who can get them someplace like Richmond or Montgomery,” I said.
He pulled a bottle out of a cabinet behind him and poured a good splash of brandy in my tea. “Drink up, Miss Cally. I don’t want your books. Well, perhaps just one, if you will inscribe it as a gift to me.”
After we were finished talking, the captain’s men stood on the deck and handed down enough food to fill the boat, leaving just enough room for me and the men to sit. They emptied their kitchen larder, so we carried a big load of whatever-you-got back to the island for a midnight feast, knowing that twenty barrels of supplies would be coming the next day.
I can still see the food being handed down to the folks in the boat that night. They gave us the carcasses of three chickens left from their evening dinner, heavy with meat somebody left on the bones. Loaves of stale bread. Bags of cold boiled potatoes. A tray of biscuits. A vat of cornmeal mush and another one of boiled cabbage. To tell you true, most all of it probably came out of a slop bucket where the cook had dumped that day’s leavings and maybe the leavings from a couple of days before that, but it looked to me like a gift from heaven. I divvied it all up among a hundred people and nobody got full, but nobody went to sleep that night with a stomach that was empty and hurting.
The next day, the captain himself came to Joyeuse Island with the men that he’d tasked with bringing the barrels of food to us, some of ’em full of cornmeal and some of ’em full of flour. Two was full of salt pork and we made that pork last a month, at least. One was full of lard. Twenty barrels won’t keep a hundred people alive all winter, that’s for sure. But put it together with fish and frogs and oysters and crabs, plus the pitiful little bit we grew that year, and we all came through all right. Stronger. Tougher. Maybe a little meaner, but still alive.
The captain took his leave of me by lifting his hat and bowing over it a little. He treated me like the lady that I have always believed myself to be, and that made him uncommon.
“It will be spring before we come back through this part of the Gulf. With your permission, I would like to stop to learn how you and all your people fared during the winter.”
I thought of the barrels of food stored safely in the basement of the big white house where I slept upstairs in the master’s old bedroom, and I said, “I expect we will fare very well, but we would be most proud to be able to thank you again.”
“I expect you will fare very well, too. As a man who has spent many years with people under his command and in his care, I have a great deal of trust that no one in your care need ever fear that you will shirk your duty to them. Nevertheless, I will make a stop here come spring to see after your welfare and to pay my respects.” Then he tucked the book I gave him tight under his arm like it was a treasure, and he lifted his hat again before he walked away, exactly as gentlemen do in books when they take a lady’s leave on a city street.
But he didn’t make that stop in the spring or ever, and that worried me for a time. To tell the God’s honest truth, it worries me still. He was not the kind of man to break his word.
Word was slow getting to us, but we did eventually hear about Appomattox. As that year dragged on, I supposed that the surrender had put an end to the need for blockade runners. Maybe this was why the captain never made the stop he said he’d make.
I hoped so. I hoped he and his crew had slipped back into their old lives after the war, whatever those old lives were. I certainly hoped that they didn’t wind up in jail or at the bottom of the ocean.
That’s the trouble with living on an island, far from the world. People pass in and out of your life and you never find out what happened to them after they leave you.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Faye slept lightly, and at first her dreams were full of cornmeal and bullfrogs with fat, juicy legs. Then they shifted to images of her friend alone, floating, helpless, with nothing to breathe but cold seawater. Until she knew what had happened to the captain, this nightmare would be a soft, black spot of rot at her center. She would never really rest while it was there.
Faye lay awake in the gray light of dawn and saw that Joe wasn’t sleeping either.
He met her eyes and said, “Tide’s low and getting lower.”
Within minutes they were in their
bathing suits. It would have been unkind and borderline immoral to skip out on helping hurricane victims, just so they could take a swim and explore the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. But who would judge them for enjoying the water for a couple of hours early on a Thursday morning before they came ashore and got to work?
“Let’s go for a snorkel,” she said.
Light was seeping from beneath Amande’s door, making Faye wonder whether her daughter ever slept. When Michael reached Amande’s age, she would know what his habits had been for his entire lifetime. She’d notice when his sleeping patterns changed or his appetite ebbed, and thus she’d have a reasonable shot at knowing when her son was depressed or struggling. Amande had arrived in her life at sixteen, nearly grown. Faye felt like she was parenting in the dark.
She tapped on the door, and Amande opened it.
“Do you mind keeping an ear out for Michael? We’ll be back in a bit. If he’s hungry, give him a little bite, but don’t worry about breakfast. We’ll fix something when we get back. Or maybe we’ll just eat at the marina.”
In a boat, they could have gotten out to the The Cold Spot in the time it took them to walk from the house to the water’s edge, but Faye didn’t want to take a boat. She didn’t want to drop an anchor and risk damaging whatever was down there.
A shipwreck? A Paleolithic occupation site? Faye almost didn’t care, because either of them would be pretty cool. With the water this low, even the motor’s wake could disrupt fragile archaeological remnants. Wading, with occasional stretches of swimming, was a far safer way to get out there than boating.
A plummeting anchor could also destroy evidence from Captain Eubank’s last moments. She ached to know what had happened to him.
It was entirely possible that she and Joe were making their way out to the very spot where he had died. Faye was walking outdoors at dawn in a bathing suit, so she was already a little cold, but this image sent a chill creeping up her spine.
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