The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  When Miss Evangeline returned, Joanna resolved to convince her that a sewing machine would allow Joanna to sew a finer seam and produce more pretty dresses in a fraction of the time. Never one to turn away from any opportunity to acquire more finery, Miss Evangeline might persuade her father that a sewing machine would be a good investment.

  In the meantime, Mrs. Chester found her own solution to Joanna’s impossible workload.

  She was heating water in the washhouse when Lizzie appeared in the doorway. “Mistress says I’m supposed to help you,” she said sullenly, as if she still resented Joanna’s accusation that she had stolen the tin cornboiler. “You supposed to teach me everything you know.”

  Joanna could not look at Lizzie without imagining Leah tangled in the reeds. “Why you? You don’t act like you asked for this job.”

  “All the bigger girls are picking cotton.” Lizzie put her head to one side and thrust out her chin, eyes narrowed and fixed on Joanna’s face as if she were daring herself not to flinch at Joanna’s scar. “I’d rather be with them in the fields than in here with a stupid yellow girl who thinks I’m a thief.”

  Joanna emptied soap in the wash water and stirred the steaming brew with a long wooden paddle. “You only say that because you never had to work the fields.”

  Lizzie tossed her head. “What would you know about it, house slave like you?”

  “I pick tobacco back in Virginia,” Joanna retorted. “Girls and boys younger than you weren’t playing in the slave quarter, watching the little ones. That was a job for old women. Soon as a child five or six years old, they out in the fields picking hornworms off the tobacco leaves. The driver follow behind looking over your row, and if he find any hornworms you missed, he make you eat them.”

  Lizzie looked ill. “Well, I wouldn’t miss any.”

  “Everybody miss some, specially at first.”

  “Not me.”

  Exasperated, Joanna shook water from the paddle and thrust the handle toward Lizzie. “Here. Try not to burn anything or Aaron might decide you old enough to pick cotton after all.”

  Grumbling, Lizzie snatched the paddle and did as Joanna said.

  That day’s work took twice as long as usual, but as the week passed and Joanna shared what she knew as patiently as she could, she discovered that Lizzie had a quick mind to go with her saucy tongue. She could remember, word for word, Joanna’s recipes for different soaps—one for clothes, another for skin, several different mixtures for different kinds of stains—and although she wasn’t strong enough to empty a full bucket of water into the washtub or haul a basket of damp laundry out to the line, she could still feed wet clothes into the mangle while Joanna cranked the winch, or stir the soaking clothes with the wooden paddle so Joanna could turn a few pieces of coarse homespun into a dress for a girl in the quarter. The more the girl learned, the more Joanna discovered to teach her.

  If Lizzie had any care about her future, Joanna thought, she would learn to do the washhouse work quickly and well. Field work would be the death of her. Her sharp tongue was no match for Aaron’s whip.

  Sewing, mending, washing, sorting cotton. Awaiting Miss Evangeline’s return. Awaiting the arrival of her child. Bartering sewing services for food; rejoicing when Titus came home from hunting with a rabbit or a squirrel. Slipping away from the quarter to be alone with him; whispering of the day they would run off, all of them, leaving only an empty cabin behind. Wondering if they were only sharing wistful dreams rather than plans, real plans, plans they intended to carry out.

  Then one night, Titus drew her off into the woods near the creek, where the rushing water would cover their voices. “What do you say we run off sooner rather than later?”

  For a moment, Joanna could only stare at him. “I haven’t finished my quilt yet” was her first, foolish response.

  “You don’t need the quilt. You got everything fixed in your mind.”

  “How soon?”

  “Next week. Sunday.” He clasped both her hands in his. “Marse Chester is sending me to Charleston to fetch Miss Evangeline home.”

  “He’s not going with you?”

  “He got too much to do here with the harvest and his buyer coming, so he’s sending me alone.”

  “But don’t Miss Evangeline need an escort?” White ladies rarely traveled anywhere without a husband, father, or brother to look after them.

  “Her cousin Bartholomew’s coming back with her—or he would be, except we won’t be going that way.” A rustling in the bushes silenced him, until he saw it was only a squirrel. “Listen. You, Tavia, Auntie Bess, and the children can hide in the coach until we well out of sight of the ferry and anyone who might know me or Marse Chester’s horses by sight. I know a blacksmith in Charleston—a slave, but he can write. He’ll make us passes all the way from Charleston to Philadelphia.”

  Joanna thought it over, took a deep breath, and shook her head. “No one would believe us, not even with a pass. What reason would seven slaves have to be driving themselves all that way alone?”

  “Not seven slaves. One widowed white lady, her trusted driver, and her five slaves.”

  Joanna’s heart hammered. “Titus—”

  “You know you can pass for a white lady if you wear a fine dress and bonnet. Didn’t you tell me that was the plan to get you from Pennsylvania to Canada? We’ll say you a white lady whose husband died from measles. You don’t have any kin here, so you going back to home to your mother to have your child. We’ll paint spots on your face so no one will want to get too close and ask you questions.”

  “But when you don’t show up in Charleston—”

  “By the time Miss Evangeline gets word to her father that I never show up, we got ourselves a good head start. They’ll be looking for runaway slaves, not a poor, sad, sick white lady in a coach.”

  “Aaron won’t miss us, not on a Sunday,” said Joanna, mulling it over. “Not until Tavia don’t show up for the drawing.”

  “We can say she sick, ask someone else to get her ration. That’ll buy us a little more time.”

  “And then Monday morning, when she and Pearl don’t show up at the fields, whoever got her ration for her will get beat.” Joanna shook her head. It couldn’t be done, not without bringing down punishment upon others. “Everyone will get beat, and everyone will go hungry.”

  “I’ll hunt every day between now and then so that everyone has a little meat put away. They can have our garden. We won’t need it.” He squeezed her hands tightly and pulled her close. “I know you hurt whenever anyone else hurts, but sometimes you got to think of your own. Marse Chester won’t starve them to death, and he won’t let Aaron beat everyone to death. If they kill us all, you think they gonna send Miss Evangeline and her brothers and sister out to the fields to pick that cotton? They need us or they lose everything.”

  Joanna pressed her lips together and nodded. She didn’t want anyone to suffer on her account, but if the alternative was to stay forever a slave, to bear her child into slavery—

  “It might work,” she said. “It could.”

  “Once we get to Philadelphia, first thing we do is send word to your friends and find your son,” Titus promised. “I’ll raise him like he’s my own.”

  Joanna burst into laughter, tears in her eyes. “He don’t look nothing like you.”

  “I don’t care.” Titus raised her hands to his lips, eyes shining with hope and pride. “You a brave woman. I knew that when you first glared at me through the bars of that wagon. I know it won’t be easy to travel so close to your time, but it’ll be easier than running with a newborn who always pick the worst time to cry, who make noise just when you most need him to be quiet.”

  She knew he was right, and that a chance like this might never come again.

  They went over their plan every night in the cabin while the children slept. Tavia clasped her hands in her lap, eyes wide and anxious whenever Titus described the dangerous route north, but she agreed that this was their best chanc
e for freedom. Pearl, eager and determined, offered to help pack food for the journey and promised to keep the children quietly occupied on the long drive north. In vain they all tried to persuade Auntie Bess to come along, but she insisted that she was too old to travel so far, that she would slow them down if something went wrong and they had to abandon the coach and travel on foot. “Didn’t you say you need someone to draw the ration on Sunday?” she said. “If I do it, no one else needs to know what you got planned. That’ll buy you an extra day, almost.”

  “If you stay behind, they’ll punish you,” said Tavia.

  Auntie Bess cackled. “What they gonna do, beat an old woman?”

  “They done it before,” said Pearl.

  “Even if they do, it be worth it to get you almost an extra day head start.”

  “Come with us, Auntie Bess,” Titus urged. “Live the rest of your days a free woman.”

  “Tell you what,” she said. “You get free, then you get yourself a good living and buy my freedom.”

  Nothing they said would persuade her. All Titus could do was to promise to buy her freedom someday, leaving unspoken how unlikely it was that he could ever do so, how many years he would have to work to earn enough wages, how impossible it was to imagine him persuading Marse Chester to sell one of his slaves to one of his runaways.

  Joanna stole one of the mistress’s old dresses, one left in the mending basket so long the mistress had forgotten it. One night she let out the hem, ripped out seams, and made it over to fit her belly. If anyone noticed that the fabric didn’t match, she hoped they would pity her as a newly impoverished, frugal widow. She was counting on the painted measles spots to keep people at a distance. As for her burn scar, she had no idea how to explain it away except as a symptom of the same disease.

  Auntie Bess used up the last of the cornmeal baking biscuits for them to take on their journey. When they protested that she ought to keep some back for herself, she retorted, “Next week I’ll have the whole ration to myself.”

  “After that, you’ll be lucky to get a ration at all,” said Titus, still confounded by Auntie Bess’s refusal to run. “You best eat your fill Sunday night, because Monday morning they’ll take everything you got left.”

  “I’ll hide it in the woods in a basket,” she said airily, so Titus let her be.

  They counted down the days and slept restlessly at night, full of eagerness and worry. The children sensed something was coming, but they were accustomed to uncertainty and did not fuss. Some mornings Joanna awoke from nightmares of slave hunters and bellowing dogs, shaking from fear and tasting bile. Other days she fairly flew from the big house to the slave quarter, counting down the number of times she would swing the washhouse door shut, pass the chestnut trees, cross the dusty road between the cabins. Dread and excitement haunted her; anticipation spurred her to plan for an uncertain future: This time next month, they might be crossing the border into Pennsylvania. This time next year, they could be building a home in Canada, with rooms for them all, her older boy and her new baby taking his first steps, her husband and his kin.

  This time next week, they could all be in the buck, bound down in a squat, backs split open and seeping blood. This time next week, they could be dead.

  Friday came—their last Friday on Oak Grove, the women murmured to one another as they prepared to leave Tavia’s cabin for the day. Two more days to prepare; two more days to worry, to think of a million reasons to change their minds. Joanna rolled Mrs. Chester’s altered dress into her Birds in the Air quilt top and tucked her carefully hoarded pins, the needle case she had fashioned from a piece of worn linsey-woolsey, and her tin cornboiler into the bundle. Tomorrow she would leave the big house with the sewing shears and add them to her belongings. She figured she had earned them.

  But as she was leaving the kitchen building after the noon meal, she spotted Titus striding up the road to the big house, his face contorted from the effort to conceal his fury. Instinctively her hand went to her belly to comfort her child, and when she caught Titus’s eye, she nodded and moved off behind a stand of live oaks so they could speak unobserved.

  “What is it?” she asked as he took her hand and led her even farther into the thicket.

  “Marse Chester change his plans,” he said, his jaw clenched so hard he could barely get the words out. “He’s sending me tomorrow to fetch Miss Evangeline. Not Sunday, tomorrow.”

  “What?” Suddenly dizzy, Joanna reached for his strong arm and held fast. “Why? Why tomorrow? Does he know we mean to run?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so, or we’d be feeling the lash right now.” Titus held her by the shoulders and locked his eyes on hers. “We can still run. We still got the coach, we still got this chance. We just got to figure out how to do it.”

  Numbly, Joanna shook her head, trying to clear it. “How?” Titus could hide the children in the coach before sunrise, and maybe, maybe she could slip away from work since no one but Mrs. Chester knew from day to day whether she would be sorting cotton or sewing, but what about Tavia and Pearl? “Maybe Auntie Bess can tell Aaron that Tavia and Pearl sick.”

  Titus shook his head bleakly. “Aaron always checks to make sure no one’s shamming. If they wait in the cabin until Aaron come by, someone might see them going from the quarter to the stable.”

  And if Aaron didn’t believe they were sick and sent them out to work anyway, they couldn’t simply drop their bags and walk off the cotton fields when the time came for Titus to depart in the coach.

  “Maybe—” Joanna took a deep, shaky breath. “Maybe when they take their full bags to get weighed, instead of going back to the fields—”

  “Aaron can see everything from the farthest edge of the fields to the scales,” Titus broke in. “If they out of sight for more than five minutes, he’ll know they run off.”

  Joanna knew he was right—and that she was watched almost as constantly as Tavia and Pearl. The buckra might not notice her absence as quickly, but before the day was out, everyone would realize that Joanna had disappeared. If the fugitives managed any head start at all, it would be a matter of hours or minutes, not days. A man on horseback with a rifle could overtake them before they reached Charleston, before they could collect the forged passes, their only measure of protection from patrollers and slave hunters.

  If Joanna disappeared while Titus was out with the wagon, Marse Chester would know exactly where to search. He would punish them severely, sell them away from each other—or sell their child and keep Joanna and Titus, the better to punish them for the rest of their lives.

  But Titus might never get another chance like this one.

  “You got to go alone,” she told him.

  “Joanna—”

  “You got to. We can’t come with you, but you can still get away.”

  “What would Tavia say if she hear you talking like this?” Titus placed a hand on her belly, and she laid her hands on his. “She wants freedom for her children as much as we want it for ours.”

  “Tavia would say I’m right and you know it.” Titus shook his head, but she hurried on before he could argue, before he could persuade her that it had to be all of them or none. “Your friend can write a pass saying you been sent to fetch someone back to your master, someone in his family—make it his old mother, who can’t travel alone. Patrollers’ll believe that before they believe a coach full of slaves and one white lady with measles and a burned face. Soon as I talk, or if they see my hair, they’d know I’m not white anyway.”

  Anguished, Titus embraced her. “No. I can’t do it. I can’t leave you and Tavia and the children. Not when you about to have my child.”

  Joanna fought back tears, tears she could not explain away when she returned to the big house, tears that would arouse the mistress’s suspicions. “You got to go.” She pressed her hand to his cheek, to the dear face she loved to look upon. “After you get to Philadelphia, you make your way west to the Elm Creek Valley. You find Gerda Bergstrom at Elm Cr
eek Farm, and you find my son. Keep him safe until you can buy my freedom.”

  She buried her face in his shoulder and felt him nod, his tears hot on her skin.

  Saturday morning. Tavia looked so frightened, Pearl so bitterly disappointed, that Joanna implored them to keep their faces turned away from Aaron or he would know something was wrong. They had said their good-byes the night before, after supper, knowing it would be too difficult on the day of their parting. Titus had told his young niece and nephew only that he was going to Charleston to fetch Miss Evangeline, hoping that the children would not be punished too severely if, when questioned later, they knew nothing of his escape. As if they had sensed that their uncle would be gone much longer than he claimed, they had held on to him when he tried to go, begging him to stay until they fell asleep. He agreed, and sat on the edge of their bed stroking their backs until their eyes closed. Then he kissed them, embraced each of the women in turn, and gave Joanna one last, lingering kiss before he gathered up the food set aside for the journey and ducked out of the cabin.

  The next morning the sun shone brightly in a clear blue sky, but Joanna was insensible to anything but grief and fear. If Titus could not get the forged pass or if it wasn’t convincing, he could be shot on sight as a runaway and Joanna would never know what had become of him. Even if he made it to freedom—when he made it to freedom—he might not be able to send word to them. She would wonder for the rest of her life if the father of her child were living or dead.

  She was sewing beneath the oak trees when she heard the coach rumble out of the carriage house, her husband high upon the driver’s seat, reins in his hands. He turned around once to look back, and she knew, although he gave no sign that he had seen her, that as long as he lived he would remember how she had looked as he had driven away, resting her sewing upon her ample belly and watching him go.