Gabriel stared straight ahead as the others looked at his face and then at each other. Finally he parted his lips and made a sound that was like a groan of pain. Annie started. But before anyone made another sound, Gabriel began to hum and he built upon his humming until he was singing—though softly. He sang not to lift the rafters, only to commemorate.
Sewing Annie resolved to be Annie Coats in that moment and she joined her son in singing. Her voice was small and tinny but she sang out unabashedly.
Well used to drinking goat’s milk from a cup, Delia climbed into her mother’s lap and pulled at Ellen’s dry breasts and buried her face between them. Gabriel looked at her pawing at his sister’s bosom and felt some aversion spoil his joy at this picture. This child had no right to Ellen. And Jonathan Ridley had not forgotten about her. Ellen added her voice to the singing and each of several familiar tunes made rounds. Only once did Gabriel raise his voice as loud as was possible and he cared not who heard him sing.
Gabriel put aside stitching on a commission when his mother finally ascended to her bed. Ellen and the babe had gone before her. Gabriel’s restless hands took up his knitting as he mused on the number of buttons sewed on to buy his freedom. For that matter, what number of rows of knitting had passed his fingers and his mother’s to come thus far? It was quiet work—their lap work—but it was furious and productive. How many rows of knitting had his mother completed? It had been a many, oh, Lord. It had been plenty! Gabriel considered that for his mother’s sake, she ought never to take up knitted work again. She could let her arms fall asleep at her sides. But he chuckled to himself. It might be that his mother’s arms would seize up and become useless to her if she were to stop working at her knitting. Needlework was the thing she had done since she had begun working—which had been so early in her years that there could be no way to know when.
Gabriel imagined that when his mother had carried him her arms had rested upon the bulge of him as they had when she carried Ellen. This was in the long-ago time when their father had been alive. He recollected his mother propping her arms on her bulging stomach full of Ellen. He remembered seeing her. And her hands were never stopped from knitting and what she worked upon rested atop the child’s head.
Is that what makes Ellen so lively and sure at the needles? Gabriel thought, cheerfully recalling her early gifts. Ellen’s lap work output was prodigious from her toddling. Her skills were so sure that the needlework seemed less toil than a beautiful undertaking that often couldn’t be stopped or interrupted. She would knit smoothly for so long without breaking off that she seemed not to inhabit the body that worked. Gabriel remembered that he had used to think the same about his mother—that her soul belonged to her needles.
But he did, in fact, know better. He knew that both these women had belonged to Master Ridley and now they did not. Whether or not it made them happy or content to be so, it made them different. He mused on it—Sewing Annie and her boy, Gabriel, and her girl, Ellen, belonged only to themselves. Gabriel’s vitals had a singular feeling when he considered the way they had all come. Yet there was the burr—the constrictions, the limitations. Again he felt the phantom grip of Jonathan Ridley squeezing his meat and potatoes.
At this thought, Gabriel’s hands became still for the first time. They had moved constantly all the day. Even when he’d stood frozen before Jonathan Ridley, his hands had shaken and he imagined the bones in them rattling like dry stalks. He remembered his knitting and began again. Gabriel’s weary fingers wanted to be still, but his thoughts would not allow it for long.
Mary—a tender, painful spot of worry for Gabriel. Where was she on this night? Had she reached Canada? Had she made herself free? Today Gabriel Coats was made free, but he could not fly.
Gabriel sighed and reflected that his work left him too much time to ruminate. He rose from the table to recapture errant pins and buttons and to wind threads. At last it was time to put up and go to bed.
Gabriel climbed to his room with a small candle end. At each landing, he paused long enough to catch a troubling sound if there was one. But the house was silent. There was nothing unexpected. He crushed the candle stub between his fingers and went to his rest.
Twelve
MOURNFUL BOAT WHISTLES blew through the dusk as Aaron Ridley left the shop to pursue his supper and his friends. Daniel Joshua approached the shop’s back door secretively. From behind a tree in the yard he looked for a signal that it was safe to knock. Since Daniel had become warm with them, the Coatses were a regular bead on his circuit of town. They had their signals between them. Daniel recognized Annie’s signal in the small square window of the kitchen workroom. A white curtain tied in a knot in the middle told him they expected and welcomed him. His mouth got set for a bracing cup of coffee and a pan of biscuits as he scraped his fingers on the back door. He did wonder, though, how his friends would take the news he was bringing.
When Daniel Joshua was inside and seated, Annie replaced the knotted curtain with a square of indigo cloth that shut out all light from the window. Not a soul else was expected that night.
Daniel took seat in a chair and paused only a few moments before laying out the information he’d brought. “That gal that you hid in your root cellar got captured and is brought back to be sold at the auction house in Alexandria,” Daniel said. His words landed on their ears like a stone. There was no sound. Annie and Gabriel said nothing. They appeared to wait until all was said—until all had settled. Ellen looked at her mother’s face and then at her brother’s to discern the import of this Mary’s name.
Annie and Gabriel hadn’t had word of Mary in all the long time since she had left. They had been hopeful and prayerful for her safety. Now they knew her fate.
The oldest, most visceral lesson Gabriel had learned from Annie was to hold his water—to resist every inclination to react right away.
“No. No. No crying, boy,” Annie demanded when he ran to her with a small, injured knee. She clutched him firmly, but with no indulgence—never that. “Be still, Gabriel,” was her unequivocal command.
He had learned to guard his nerves. His cautious demeanor was his insulation against uncertainty and brutality—all of the painful consequences of revelation. Now, with great effort, he did not cry out or pepper Daniel with questions.
What consequence might come if he revealed to Daniel Joshua and his mother and sister the depth of his feelings in regard to Mary? He had an appetite for this Mary that he felt ashamed to reveal. He had nurtured this longing and fed it upon the thin hope of seeing her again. The time of separation had not dulled his ardor. He felt a fool to let his mother know his longing. And he felt a further fool to think Ellen or Daniel Joshua might guess his yearnings.
In the moment, Gabriel was a superstitious lover who imagined that his longing had brought Mary back to this jeopardy. Cold reasoning told him that it was greed and cruelty that had thus tossed her like a handkerchief. It was chance that had placed her within his reach again.
Gabriel sucked sharply first at the air and then at his pierced fingertip. Annie sprang forward out of her seat and leaned toward Gabriel’s wounded finger. He raised his hand and stopped her coming to his aid. His eyes flashed a rebuke at his mother’s uncharacteristic fussing. She had bolted from her chair as if she herself had been stuck. What could she mean by coddling him when Mary was suffering untold horrible treatment?
The needle had pierced his fingertip with the same precise efficiency that it pierced cloth. Gabriel stared at the drop of blood and his own calloused finger. The painful puncture would thwart his work.
“She been through some several hands since the first. They’ve settled on to sell her deep south since she is a troublemaker—a runner. They intend to sell her for hard labor, though she don’t look up to doing it according to the eyes that have seen her,” Daniel said. He hadn’t wanted to soften the words. He wanted them to have the truth. And naked truth went down best fast.
Annie spoke up more quickly than usual.
She felt a trembling interest running through Gabriel. She sought to preempt him. “Is it anything we can do for her?”
“Had you the money you could buy her and set her to freedom—had you the money. She ain’t to the taste of those that buy for the fancy houses. She done spoiled for that. They plannin’ to do her like an ox and run her until she drop dead. Somebody puttin’ together a work gang for cotton or rice likely buy her. Pitiful, poor gal!” Daniel said heatedly.
Gabriel winced some at Daniel’s words and was poised dangerously at the top of his emotions.
Unexpectedly, Daniel Joshua was demonstrative of his feelings for Mary. His face was torn up with concern. He shuddered to think of what would befall her. He knew how things were done at the sale house she’d been put at. The man who had come to him with the descriptions and information was Bob Jackson, whose woman carried the meals over to the factors. He said Mary was hit and busted up a bit. This was the least of it, Daniel knew, for Bob Jackson’s face unintentionally betrayed the ugly tale. They were selling her for a beast of burden and so they were not wasting care on her comfort.
Since Mary had gone away, Daniel had inquired for word of her from the usual folk who kept their ears to the ground. Until bowlegged Bob Jackson brought this news, there had been no reliable information. Daniel had heard it said that a Quaker couple had been clobbered into their graves and that the woman they were transporting was grabbed and taken back to slavery. This tale had been an unconfirmed rumor. Now it was stitching up a tragic story.
Annie rapped her coffee cup on the table several times. Gabriel dropped his needle. He clapped his hands together and rubbed them as if applying a secret powder.
“Nanny, I have failed the fire. Your coffee is cold,” Gabriel said, rising suddenly. He went out of the back door to get sticks to stoke the fire in the stove and returned with one. He fiddled with the stove and stood to boil the coffee and pour for all.
Annie placed her flatirons on the stove and moistened a starched white shirt with a sprinkle of captured rainwater. Water from the pipes and spigots in town put blemishes on white shirting so that careful laundresses captured water in a barrel for their fine work. She took her time and let the irons sit on the stove, heating until their readiness was smelled. When she applied iron to cloth, the room became thick with steam. Clouds of it circled Annie’s head and the hissing mist was tonic for her. She said nothing but simply clink-clanked the flatirons.
Reluctant to have the babe’s gibberish spoil her mother’s contemplation, Ellen scooped Delia up and put her to bed.
Gabriel peered at his mother through the steam and asked, “Shall we act on Mary’s behalf, Nanny?”
“Yes, Brother, I think we must,” she answered. Her eyes were still trained on the shirt that she ironed.
“I would move yonder mountain to help her, Nanny.”
“Yes, Brother, I know,” she said.
Annie stood upon the porch of the rectory of Holy Trinity Church and kept her head bowed respectfully. She knuckled down the center of the large, intricately carved oak door to call the priest’s attention. She knew he was watching. She had seen him looking out the window.
Higgins opened the door. “Come inside, Mother, please. Come inside and we can speak,” he said. Higgins stood aside briefly to allow Annie to pass through the door in front of him, realized that she would not accept this honor, and turned back into the house first. He felt her follow him down the oak-paneled hallway into the receiving room.
“Please sit down, Mother,” Higgins said with gentleness and warmth. His manner always surprised Annie, coming from a pale white face with rosy circles on the cheeks.
William Dinmont Higgins, the young priest assigned to Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Georgetown, was an active antislavery worker. He was known in the circles of Blacks in Georgetown as a helper.
“Are you sent to me, Mother? Has someone sent a message?” he asked cautiously, trying to ease the woman’s nerves and get to the purpose of the visit.
Higgins was also the son of a woman held in slavery in Virginia and her white slave owner. Because he looked like his father, he’d succeeded well in passing as a white person. Occasionally he was disquieted by his own deceptions, but he was committed to using his color as cover to assist escapees. And he maintained the fiction of his color with all—white and Black.
Higgins would not stand out physically among men. He was not broad and he generally gave the impression of bookishness. He was, though, an active, aggressive man. He could be counted upon in a fight—having endured many pummelings in his youth. He usually finished the fray atop the one who started it.
Higgins looked long at Annie. This woman was not quite so old as he imagined his own mother to be. But she was apparently a woman whose every day was applied to the task of survival. When Annie entered the room and took a seat, the warmth from the fireplace caused her to unbend, and she loosed the many layers of her wrappings. A taller, younger, more vigorous-looking woman gradually emerged. Reverend William Higgins was mildly surprised.
Higgins preferred to refer to all colored women above a certain age as “Mother.” He stoutly refused to call colored women “Auntie” for reasons that he explained to no one. His appellation was courteous without arousing the suspicions of those who might overhear.
Higgins thought he knew the travails of ones such as Annie from firsthand observation. He thought about his own mother’s grief-stricken life and rebuked himself for his resemblance to the brutal man who visited his mother’s cabin and ordered her children out the door while he raped her. The master cared not a whit for what the children saw, only that their hollow-eyed staring not distract him.
Higgins’s complexion had always been his father’s pale white with rose-red cheeks. His hair was also the master’s, brown with red highlights, and was thin and wispy.
Again and again Higgins recollected the day his father whipped and then sold his mother. He whipped her before the traders took her. Why? To spoil her for the next man who would use her? Millie, as she was known on the master’s record books, simply fell out of his favor. The boy received a kick to his head because he had the temerity to clutch his father’s booted leg and beg for mercy for her. Aye, this was the tormenting nighttime vision William Higgins prayed against.
A short time after his mother was sold, William was sent to a Jesuit seminary to work for his keep and education. Years later he was not able to determine whether he’d been a slave of the Jesuits or a servant. He never knew fully what his father’s arrangements had been. But he became a favored student when he excelled at his studies.
The other boys at seminary were ones like him who had fathers among the planters nearby. William was not the only one whose mother was a white planter’s slave mistress. In fact, it was thought appropriate by some that the issue of these couplings should have the advantages of education. These offspring might bring about an improvement in the Negro race.
Some of the mulatto and octoroon boys the fathers had charge of were dusky-colored and had kinky ringlets. It was not until William Higgins was well toward completing his studies that he realized he’d been culled from the larger group to join the smaller knot of boys who, like him, were pale and could pass into the white world.
When William Higgins left the Jesuit seminary in which he’d grown and been educated, he left as a white man. Higgins’s reflections and recollections of bondage came with him to the vestibule of the Holy Trinity Church rectory though. These pictures offered him no comfort, only contemptible familiarity.
He pondered the woman before him. What travail had brought her?
“Were you sent to me, Mother?”
“They commended me to you. A man that calls himself Daniel Joshua commended me.”
“Yes, Mother, I understand.”
“We’ve a girl that will be sold. She’s come up to auction. She was one who escaped and has been caught and returned. They are going to sell her south! We want you to go forth and buy her. We w
ant her to be free with this money,” Annie said. She patted her breasts so that Reverend Higgins knew her to be honest and wise enough to keep her money where it could be defended with her own life.
“I have money enough if the price doesn’t go too high,” she assured the priest.
“This girl is your girl, Mother?”
“No, sir. She is a good girl known to me,” Annie replied stoutly.
“Why, Mother? Why are you so determined to buy the freedom of this one? What is she to you that you do so?” Higgins asked. He did not doubt Annie’s goodness or her compassion. But the priest wanted to know why Annie had chosen to assist this bondwoman. He reached to grasp Annie’s sleeve and she started.
“She drop in my pocket like a chestnut. I don’t waste nothin’. I want her back,” she answered.
“Whence comes the money, Mother?” Higgins eyed her levelly and inquired. It would behoove him to know.
“It has been earned, sir,” she replied. “My son and I and my daughter have saved this money. This poor one is a chestnut we have known.”
Yes, Mary’s eyes were like those nuts. They were a simple, quiet dark brown that compelled the looker. They were not as dark as her skin, but were warm and round and took up most of the pool of her whites.
“Have no fear, Mother. I will accomplish the task. I will set myself to it. We will get your girl safe,” the priest said with amiable conviction, as if answering her misgivings. His rosy red cheeks got redder still with his fervor.
Annie identified Mary to Higgins and he assured her that he had performed this onerous duty many times in the past and that he knew what methods ensured success.
As their meeting ended, Reverend Higgins suggested strongly that Mary would be safest if she left the area altogether after her freedom. Washington would not necessarily be a safe place for her. Annie said that her family was prepared to take Mary in.
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