The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Clinging to the shadows, Joanna made her way to the creek by moonlight, by the sound of the rushing water, and by the feel of the well-worn dirt path beneath her bare feet. Every sense alert, she carried the dripping basket behind the rows of slave cabins, through the moss-draped oaks, and across the clearing—suddenly immensely broad and exposed—until she reached the cluster of chestnut trees. Leah crouched beneath them exactly as she had when Joanna had passed hours before.

  Half-conscious, Leah let the water dribble from her lips to the dirt when Joanna held the basket to her mouth. Then, spluttering, she drank, nearly tumbling over in her instinctive lunge for the water. Joanna steadied her, gripping her around the waist where the whip had not cut her, supporting Leah’s weight until she had drained the basket. Joanna broke off a piece of cornmeal dumpling and placed it in her mouth, but though Leah tried to swallow, she coughed and retched and spat the yellow crumbs onto the ground.

  “You…best go,” Leah mumbled. “Aaron—”

  “Aaron’s asleep,” Joanna said, although she could not be sure.

  “My children?”

  “They’re fine.”

  “I can’t feel my feet.” Leah choked out a sob. “So tired.”

  “I know.” Joanna drew closer. “Listen. It’ll hurt, but you can lean up against me and rest.”

  “The ropes—”

  “I’ll hold you up. You won’t strangle.”

  “If they see you—”

  “Once you’ve slept a bit I’ll go.”

  Joanna sat down on ground damp from blood and sweat, her knees bent, her back to Leah’s. Leah eased her back against Joanna’s, gasping as her gashes pressed against the rough fabric of Joanna’s dress. In the darkness Joanna could not see the blood, but she smelled the metallic slickness as it seeped into her own clothes. She dug in her heels and braced herself as Leah slipped into unconsciousness and let her full weight fall against Joanna.

  Joanna watched the moon set and the sky brighten in the east beyond the oak forest, her ears ringing from the song of cicadas and the strain of listening for Aaron. Hours passed. Once she thought she heard horse’s hooves on the road to the slave quarter, but no one passed by the big house or the chestnut trees. One by one the stars went out and the sky grew pink, the clouds lit up from below as the sun rose. When Joanna could not bear the threat of discovery any longer, she nudged Leah awake. She was so slow in coming to that for one panicked moment Joanna feared she had died. But at last Leah groaned, shifted her weight back to her own feet. “Keep my children away from here,” she asked faintly. “Don’t let them see me.”

  Joanna agreed and fled to the slave quarter.

  Titus lay on the grass outside the cabin waiting for her; there was no room for him in any of the beds inside. “I’m fine,” she said as he leaped up, before he could scold her.

  His eyes were red and bleary from lack of sleep. “Did Aaron see you?”

  If he had, Joanna would be staked down in the buck beside Leah. “I don’t think he left his cabin all night.”

  “Around midnight he circled the quarter twice on horseback.”

  Even in darkness, Titus could identify every horse on the plantation by sound. Joanna shivered. “It’s a good thing I went to her when I did, before he came to stop anyone from leaving.”

  “Joanna.” Titus caught her by the arm before she could duck into the cabin. “Why? You don’t even like Leah.”

  Joanna couldn’t explain how she felt, how she could not have done anything differently. “Because I am Leah.”

  Titus studied her, uncomprehending, and let her go.

  Inside, Tavia was rising from bed, where she had no doubt drifted in and out of sleep all night, waiting for Joanna’s return or for shouts of alarm warning that she had been discovered out of the slave quarter. “How’s Leah?” she whispered. The work bell would wake the others soon enough.

  “She’s strong, but she won’t last a second night in the buck.”

  “Marse Chester never keeps anyone in the buck more than one—Joanna, your back,” Tavia gasped, grabbing Joanna’s shoulder and spinning her around.

  Glancing over her shoulder, Joanna spied the crosshatch of bloodstains on her dress. “It’s not mine. It’s Leah’s.”

  “You can’t go up to the big house like that. As soon as they see this—” Tavia shook her head, thinking. “What about your old dress?”

  Joanna gestured to the pile of Birds in Air blocks and scraps in the corner farthest from the fire. “Cut up for quilts.”

  “She can wear mine,” said Pearl, tossing off her coarse blanket and sitting up.

  “No,” said Tavia and Joanna at the same time. Joanna added, “I won’t have you take a beating in my place.”

  “I’ll have the seed bag on my back to cover the stains.”

  “Joanna’s dress is too long for you,” said Tavia. “It’ll drag on the ground.”

  “I’ll hike it up around my waist and hold it in place with a pin. You got a pin, don’t you, Joanna?”

  Reluctantly, Joanna nodded. It was no use pretending she didn’t. Whenever she pieced her Birds in the Air quilt, she brought out the four pins she had taken from the big house, slim pieces of bent brass the mistress would never know were missing. That didn’t mean Joanna wouldn’t be beaten for stealing if any Chester ever caught her with them.

  Quickly Joanna and Pearl switched dresses. Tavia’s brows knit together in worry; Auntie Bess shook her head but said nothing. The work bell rang. Pearl and Tavia snatched up cold cornmeal dumplings cooked over the fire the night before, grabbed the sweetgrass baskets with their lunch ration, and ran off for the fields.

  Titus was nowhere to be seen when Joanna hurried off to the big house after feeding the younger children their cornmeal mush. She did not know whether to be worried or relieved when she saw only bent grass and scuffed earth beneath the chestnut trees. Worry won out. She ran for the kitchen building and burst in on Sophie, fixing breakfast.

  “Aaron left Leah there until all the hands passed on their way to the fields,” Sophie told her, reading the question in her eyes as she caught her breath. “After they all took a good look, he untied her, gave her back her clothes, and let her drink before sending her to work.”

  “She’s out in the cotton fields? Now?”

  Sophie shrugged. “Cotton got to be planted.”

  “How’s she even keeping her feet? After the beating, and the buck, and no food—”

  “That’s what Marse Chester asked Aaron.” Sophie returned to the work Joanna had interrupted, kneading dough on a floured breadboard. “Marse Chester say she must have rested last night, but how she did that without pulling up the stakes or strangling herself, he don’t know. He thinks someone helped her somehow. Aaron say he’ll be watching the hands today to see if anyone’s more tired than they should be.”

  With a stab of alarm, Joanna remembered Tavia’s restless night and Titus’s bloodshot eyes. She wished she could warn them, but she couldn’t, not without drawing Aaron’s scrutiny their way. A laundress never had good reason to be in the cotton fields or the stable. “We’re always tired,” Joanna said shakily. “We wake up tired and go to bed tired. If that’s all he has to go on, he must think there was a big crowd underneath those chestnut trees last night.”

  “Talk like that and they’ll think you helped her,” warned Sophie. “Except that you and Leah hate each other.”

  “I don’t hate her.”

  “That’s not what I heard. Maybe for a little while you should let people think you do.” Sophie sighed and pounded dough. “Aaron said Leah’s his best picker and ought not to be treated so hard. Marse Chester said she’ll be healed fine by picking time and she can keep those scars to remind her to treat her mistress with respect. If you ask me, the buck wasn’t Aaron’s idea.”

  Joanna was not so willing to absolve him. Aaron had a large cabin to himself and drew extra rations every Sunday, privileges won because he kept the other slaves in line by f
orce. Joanna had not been on Oak Grove long and tried to stay out of his sight, but it seemed to her that each day cruelty came easier to him. Even his warning that Leah should not be treated so brutally was spoken not from mercy but from concern that an injured worker could not carry as many pounds of cotton to the scale.

  Aaron was in a fury from daybreak to twilight, Tavia and Pearl reported wearily after they dragged themselves home from the cotton fields at sundown. His whip was never out of his hand, and all day long he snapped it in the air near the face of any slaves who slowed their pace. They gobbled their noon meal standing up in the fields, feeding themselves with one hand and placing seed with the other. Leah he mostly ignored, though she lagged behind the others, stumbling and spilling seed on the sides of the furrows instead of in the trenches. Twice she fainted, and both times he left her there to lie in the dirt until the mule caught up to her, then he gestured impatiently for the nearest slave to pull her to her feet. She finished the last furrows for the day as nothing more than dead weight, arms slung over the shoulders of friends, feet dragging. They would have finished more of the field had he left her where she lay, but Aaron insisted she work with the others, even after she no longer had the strength to reach into her bag of seed.

  “She’s broken,” Titus told Joanna when they slipped away from the others after supper, the only time when they could be alone. “Her body will heal but not her spirit.”

  “She’s only weak from the beating and the buck,” said Joanna, interlacing her fingers with his. “She’ll get her strength back. By summer she’ll be as prideful as ever.”

  But Titus shook his head. “You didn’t see her eyes.”

  It was true. In the darkness beneath the chestnut trees, she had not looked into Leah’s face, and she did not know what Titus had seen there. On Sunday, she understood. Leah sat listlessly in the doorway of her cabin, her face turned toward her children playing with sticks in the dirt, but she did not seem to see them. The stir of excitement that flowed through the quarter as the ration drawing approached did not touch her, and when it was time for the heads of household to pick up their families’ weekly supply of cornmeal, molasses, salt pork, and potatoes, Leah’s sister went in her place.

  Summer passed, and still Leah seemed remote, as if she looked upon Oak Grove from the opposite side of a great crevasse. When the cotton bolls burst forth, she no longer picked her quota with time to spare and then spent the rest of the day goading the others as she filled her friends’ bags. Instead, Tavia said, she shuffled through the rows as if her limbs were half-frozen, sometimes meeting her quota, sometimes not. She did not cry out when Aaron whipped her, nor did the beatings propel her any faster through the fields.

  Once Joanna tried to talk to her, but Leah’s gaze drifted past her and she walked away as if unaware that Joanna was still speaking. Then one morning, Leah was gone. She did not come to the fields when the work bell rang, and when Aaron seized Lizzie’s shoulders and shook her, the girl burst into tears and admitted that she had not seen her mother since she had left for the cotton fields the previous morning.

  The alarm went out; the patrollers and their dogs were summoned. Every slave in the quarter over the age of seven received three lashes, except for Leah’s sisters and her husband, who received ten. On Sunday Marse Chester canceled the drawing, and when Titus asked permission to go hunting, he was denied. Some men, Titus among them, stole off at night to fish or check rabbit snares; the women shared the harvest of their gardens. Joanna felt her baby stirring faintly and feared that it would starve, despite Sophie’s stolen gifts from the kitchen. “How long will Marse Chester cancel the drawing?” she asked Titus. “He can’t let us all die. Who pick his cotton?”

  “No rations until they catch Leah,” Titus said, a muscle in his jaw working. Day after day he swallowed back his bitterness and anger until it festered in his belly, and Joanna knew he could not hold it forever. He was a man. He would not let his family starve. Joanna feared what he might risk to keep them alive, to keep her and her baby alive.

  But on Friday, when every sack of cornmeal in the quarter was empty and slaves swayed on their feet beneath the hot sun and the too young and the too old collapsed and had to be carried into the shade, word spread that Leah had been found. The slave who drove the wagon that brought her body back to Oak Grove said that she had been discovered floating facedown, tangled in reeds where the Edisto River emptied into the ocean.

  No one knew whether she had drowned while trying to escape or if she had walked into the deepest part of the creek and let the waters close over her.

  Two days later, the heads of households collected their weekly rations as if the drawing had never been interrupted.

  Miss Evangeline spent spring and summer in Charleston with her aunt Lucretia, so instead of sewing for her, Joanna was set to work sewing rough “Negro cloth” into clothing for the slaves, though they would not receive their new garments until Christmas. As the first harvest came in, Marse Chester, figuring Joanna had little else to do with the young mistress away, ordered her to set the slave clothing aside and sort cotton instead.

  All summer long, except on washdays and mornings when Mrs. Chester had mending for her, Joanna joined several older women in the outbuilding where the clattering cotton gin separated the seeds from the silky fibers. They sat on the floor, mounds of ginned cotton piled up around them and across their laps, dividing the pure white fibers from those discolored a faint yellow. The pure white cotton fetched a better price at market, but one yellow speck discovered within the bale could mean the difference between a grade of “Fancy” and “Good Middling.” On her first day, Aaron cuffed Joanna upside the head for allowing a few fibers with a minuscule amount of yellow into the white pile, then cuffed her again when she overcorrected and included a few fine white strands in with the yellow. Eventually she caught on, and by July she could sort cotton as swiftly as the older women, whose thin, leathery hands fairly flew through the piles.

  If she lived long enough, she would become one of those old women, she realized, once her hands grew too stiff to work a needle and her arms too weak to haul wash water. This would be her fate if she reached old age before freedom. The Chesters of Oak Grove needed every slave and hired no one out, so she couldn’t earn any money to buy her freedom. Some days she woke from dreams of Elm Creek Farm so despondent she could hardly rise from bed, knowing Marse Chester would name her child and put him or her in the stable or the big house or the fields as he saw fit. Then an image would appear in her mind’s eye—Leah tangled face down in the reeds, bobbing in the current that might have carried her across the ocean to the land of her ancestors. She thought of Leah and forced herself to rise, to eat, to report to work, to duck her head and avoid the eyes of the white buckra. She lived for the moments when she could be alone with Titus. His arms and his dreams of freedom, so tightly interwoven with her own, were her only solace. Titus and the Birds in the Air quilt reminded her of a world beyond Oak Grove, a world where she imagined her firstborn thrived and where one day his little brother or sister would play by his side.

  But freedom seemed an increasingly elusive dream the larger her belly grew.

  One evening about two months before she expected her second child to enter the world, Joanna sewed the last row of Birds in the Air blocks to the bottom of her quilt. She had made twelve blocks more than necessary, thinking to piece them into a smaller quilt for the baby, but a quilt for her child would have to wait until she finished the quilt that would record the clues that might one day lead her family to freedom.

  The next washday, Joanna approached Mrs. Chester in her study and asked if she might have some of the lowest-grade cotton to fill a patchwork quilt.

  “I’ll ask my husband if he can spare it,” the mistress replied, sizing up Joanna’s belly. “How much longer?”

  “About two months, missus, I think.”

  “That’s fortunate. You’ll have that all out of the way before Miss Evangeline return
s. She would be quite distressed if you were unable to prepare her trousseau.”

  That was how Joanna learned that Miss Evangeline was to be married. She thanked the mistress and hurried back to the washhouse, heart sinking as she realized that the slaves’ new clothing would be pushed aside once again. Joanna would be needed to sew a wedding gown and fine dresses suitable for an officer’s wife in Charleston—if she had guessed correctly and Colonel Harper was Miss Evangeline’s intended husband. Most of the field hands had worn through the clothing distributed the previous Christmas, and Joanna sometimes mended torn seams and patched holes in exchange for food. But she could not repair what had been completely worn away.

  A few days later, the mistress granted Joanna’s request for cotton. “But only enough for one quilt,” she cautioned, “and only the lowest grade.” It made no difference to Joanna; a middling grade, yellow batt flecked with hulls would keep her as warm as the purest white. She filled her apron with sweepings from the floor around the cotton gin and stashed the bundle in the cabin until she could collect enough large pieces of fabric to piece together into a backing. Until then, her quilt would have to wait while she worked on the slaves’ clothing. If she did not finish, many of the 170 men, women, and children the Chesters owned would go naked in winter while Miss Evangeline wore fine wools and furs.

  Later that week, Mrs. Chester announced that Miss Evangeline was returning home from her aunt Lucretia’s house in Charleston earlier than planned so that they could begin preparing for the wedding in earnest. Joanna helped Dove air out the young mistress’s room and change the linens, but she rushed through the chores so she could resume sewing clothing for the slaves. Even the simplest shirts and dresses took at least a day to complete, and although Joanna despaired of finishing before the distribution at Christmas, she pressed on. Basting shirtsleeves and hemming trousers, Joanna longed for Anneke Bergstrom’s sewing machine, which she had learned to use during her single winter in Pennsylvania. If only Mrs. Chester would buy one for Oak Grove, but she was too frugal to spend money on something that did not benefit her. Mrs. Chester already had a sewing machine—Joanna. Why waste good money on another?