The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Then he turned back around, and she could only sit and watch his tall, straight back as he disappeared down the road behind a curtain of moss-draped oaks.

  Suddenly hatred surged through her. What was one day to Marse Chester? One day to spoil their plans, to ruin all their hopes, to separate her from the only man she had ever loved. Titus was her only happiness, and now he was gone.

  Shaking with rage, she flung her sewing aside and pressed her hands to her face. The baby stirred and kicked within her. After a moment, Joanna lowered her hands and pressed them to her abdomen, answering the baby’s silent call, pressing gently upon the little feet that explored his little world. If only he could drift there forever, and never know discomfort, never know loneliness or grief or pain.

  The Bergstroms would help Titus raise the money to buy their freedom. If the Bergstroms were not dead or in prison for helping her, they would help her husband.

  The thought was a fragile thread holding her last hopes together, and if she tugged upon it, all would unravel.

  Sunday passed, dull and heavy. When the time came for heads of households to draw the weekly ration, Joanna lined up behind Tavia and asked for Titus’s share. “Don’t you live with Tavia?” asked Aaron, eyeing her skeptically.

  “Only because Miss Evangeline don’t want me to sleep in the barn.” She had stayed with Titus in his corner of the hayloft for the first few weeks of their marriage—after their second ceremony, the one the Chesters knew about—until Miss Evangeline complained that she smelled like horses. Then it was back to Tavia’s cabin and stolen moments alone beside the riverbank.

  She met Aaron’s gaze boldly, ignoring the whip coiled on his belt. She would be feeling its sting soon enough. They all would. “I’m head of household while Titus gone to Charleston to fetch Miss Evangeline. He could get his ration himself when he gets back, but you always say if we miss the drawing, we got to wait until next week. He can’t go without food until then.”

  “All right. Take it.” Aaron set out Titus’s portion on the ground, and Joanna quickly scooped up everything and carried it back to the cabin before he changed his mind. She knew he would not have bent the rules for anyone but Titus, the most trusted slave on Oak Grove after himself. Titus’s betrayal would enrage the Chesters the way the escape of a mere field hand never could. Her throat constricted whenever she imagined what Marse Chester would do to Titus if he were captured. And if they didn’t catch him, those left behind might starve to death, no matter how much Marse Chester needed them to bring in the cotton. She would have to hoard every scrap of food she could in preparation for the coming famine.

  In the meantime, only Joanna, Tavia, Pearl, and Auntie Bess knew what awaited them. They could not warn the others without exposing Titus’s escape, and if Aaron overheard even whispered rumors, slave hunters would be sent in pursuit as soon as Marse Chester could summon them. Joanna envisioned Isaac and Peter dragging Titus, bound and bleeding, behind their horses; she pictured the Georgia traders hauling him from the barracoon to the auction block. Dizzy and sick, unable to drive the horrible pictures from her mind, she ran off to the riverbank and wept, pressing her hand to her mouth to strangle her sobs. Hunger and exhaustion eventually drove her back to Tavia’s cabin, where the other women put their arms around her and held her. In the center of their intertwined arms was Joanna’s child, all that remained to her of the man she loved.

  A storm struck the next day, driving rain and thunderclaps that shook the big house and turned day into night. Bored, Elliot Chester, the eldest son, terrified his two younger siblings with tales of a giant sea monster roaring and thrashing in the ocean to the east, furious at the humble planters who disturbed its rest by casting ships upon the waves above his watery kingdom. Joanna jumped at each flash of lightning, praying that Titus was far north of the storm and that the impassable roads would delay a messenger sent from Miss Evangeline’s aunt.

  The storm subsided by nightfall and the next day dawned warm and sunny. While listing Joanna’s duties for the day, the mistress wondered aloud what could be keeping Miss Evangeline. “Her father should have gone to fetch her,” she said, piling boys’ trousers into Joanna’s mending basket. “Likely she wanted to linger another day to enjoy the shops and parties, and if her aunt agreed, what could Titus do without an express command from his master?” Suddenly she paused and peered into Joanna’s face. “You needn’t be troubled. We don’t blame Titus. Evangeline ought to know better.”

  Joanna composed herself and nodded. Until Aunt Lucretia sent word that Titus had never arrived, the Chesters would invent one excuse after another for the delay. Each day took her husband farther and farther from their reach. She prayed for the horses to be swift and strong, speeding him northward. She prayed that the Bergstroms would offer him work and a place to stay so that he could earn enough to buy his family’s freedom. They raised horses; they could use a man like Titus.

  She prayed that when Marse Chester punished the slaves who remained because he could not touch the one who had escaped, his vengeance would not cause her to lose Titus’s baby.

  She was sitting in the doorway of the washhouse when the clatter of hooves and rumble of carriage wheels came from down the front road. “They’re here,” she heard the youngest Chester boy shout, and her heart suddenly plummeted. The aunt had not sent a man on a swift horse with the news of Titus’s escape but had hired a driver to bring Miss Evangeline herself. Joanna could not imagine a worse messenger. Miss Evangeline would flee to the safety of her father’s arms, and with blue eyes shining with unshed tears and chin trembling bravely, she would weave a tale of an innocent maiden abandoned in the dangerous city, betrayed by a deceitful, ungrateful slave. Each embellishment would fan the flames of her father’s wrath.

  Clutching her sewing, Joanna closed her eyes, but she could not sit there forever. Packing up her mending basket, she grasped the doorframe and hauled herself to her feet. Supporting her belly with one hand and balancing the basket on her hip, she left the solitude of the washhouse for the kitchen building, where Sophie had stepped outside to watch Miss Evangeline’s homecoming.

  The coach rounded the bend—and even from a distance Joanna recognized it as Marse Chester’s own coach, and the road-weary man on the driver’s seat as her own Titus.

  Her knees gave way. Sophie saw her crumple too late to break her fall. “Joanna,” she exclaimed, hurrying to her side. “You all right? Is it the baby?”

  “No,” Joanna managed to say as Titus pulled the coach around to the front veranda. Quickly Augustus appeared to open the door and help Miss Evangeline descend. Holding her skirts out of the mud, a smiling Miss Evangeline floated up the stairs and into the big house, followed closely by a man who looked to be a few years older, dressed in a perfectly tailored suit and mopping his round, bland face with a white handkerchief. After Augustus and Titus unloaded Miss Evangeline’s belongings, Augustus carried the trunks and parcels inside while Titus drove on to the stable to care for the tired horses.

  Leaving the mending scattered on the ground, Joanna hurried to the stable, where she stopped short in the doorway, fighting to catch her breath. Titus was unhitching the horses when her shadow broke up a patch of light on the floor. He looked up and held her gaze, but she was frozen in place and could not throw herself into his arms.

  “I couldn’t do it,” he said, in a low voice only she could hear. “I couldn’t leave you to be beaten and starved. I couldn’t leave you to have our baby alone.”

  “You could’ve gotten free,” she choked out, forgetting to look around for Aaron. “You could have bought our freedom.”

  “That could take years.”

  “I would’ve waited.”

  “Joanna.” He spoke her name like a caress. “You my world. You my life. Aaron and his whip, that crazy Miss Evangeline—and any day Marse Chester could sell you off where I’d never find you. We’re together now, you, me, and the baby. When we run, we run together.”

  Tears sl
ipped down her cheeks. “We might never get another chance like that one.”

  “We get another chance.” He patted one of the horses on the flank and came to her, and she flew the last few steps to cross the distance that separated them. “I know you glad to see me even if you don’t say it.”

  “I am glad to see you,” she said, her voice muffled by his shirt. She had sewn it for him, wishing with every stitch that she dared make it from the same fine cotton she used to make shirts for the master, so that the coarse slave cloth would not chafe the scars on his back. She had given him up forever, and now here he was, holding her.

  She could not be sorry he had returned.

  Miss Evangeline had brought home yards of ivory taffeta, silk ribbon, and lace for her wedding gown. The day after her return from Charleston, she summoned Joanna to her room, spread several magazines open on her bed, and showed Joanna tinted fashion plates of demure, elegant white ladies in fine dresses. She instructed Joanna to take the bodice from one pattern, the sleeves from another, the neckline from a third, and the skirt from a fourth to create a gown lovelier than any of those pictured, lovelier than any gown ever before seen. “Please me in this manner,” she said, smiling brightly as she handed Joanna the stack of Godey’s Lady’s Books, “and I’ll see that you are well rewarded.”

  Joanna nodded and carried the magazines to the closet off the kitchen, heart fluttering. Some buckra would beat a slave for even glancing at words written on a page, and Miss Evangeline had blithely ordered her to walk away with a pile of magazines. It was better not to have the temptation. Titus and Tavia knew her secret, but no one else could discover she knew how to read. But it was impossible to keep her attention fixed on the pictures of white ladies with long, slender necks and plump hands when the words drew her eye. After skimming the patterns in the Practical Dress Instructor sections, she read a poem about a young woman taking her ease in her garden, a favorable review of a new novel titled The Hand but Not the Heart, a treatise on the proper education for young girls, and a letter from the editor admonishing her readers not to discuss politics “as was becoming the fashion among the younger set,” because men did not like such “mannish ways” in their wives and daughters. It was silly and foolish enough to make Joanna stifle laughter, and yet she hungered to decipher the meaning of every line. Too many months had passed since Gerda Bergstrom’s lessons, reading Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography while recovering from her difficult journey through the pass into the Elm Creek Valley. She had forgotten a great deal, but with practice it might come back to her.

  She held on to the magazines as long as she dared, explaining to the young mistress that since she could not draw, she had to look at the pictures from time to time to make a pattern in her mind. Whenever she was sure she was alone, she set fabric and thread aside and slowly read a page, over and over, figuring out the meaning of an unfamiliar word by the words around it and by the pictures, if there were any. Some of the articles offered practical advice for dressmaking that aided Joanna as she struggled to pull together what Miss Evangeline admired about her favorite fashion plates. She memorized tips about making patterns and fitting dresses but doubted she would be able to put her newfound knowledge to practical use. How could she make several different sizes of patterns with pleats already in place when she was forbidden paper and pen? How could she measure carefully along the many different seams when she was limited to a long piece of string rather than a measuring tape? How could she try anything new without piquing the young mistress’s curiosity and leading her to the conclusion that she could read? Joanna needed the magazine’s advice and patterns to create the dress Miss Evangeline envisioned—a six-tiered skirt of ivory taffeta trimmed with wide bands of rose silk, a wrap bodice with a basque waist, a neckline that bared much of the shoulders, gathered puff sleeves—all while maintaining the pretense that she did not know her letters and numbers, that she could assemble complicated garments simply because she was ordered to do so.

  Joanna marveled that a girl as sharp as Miss Evangeline didn’t suspect the truth.

  The struggle to use what she had learned while pretending to know nothing slowed her progress, but when Miss Evangeline grew impatient, Joanna explained that she had to take her time lest she make a mistake and waste the precious fabrics and trims. “That’s none of your concern,” snapped Miss Evangeline. “Let my father worry about the expense. You should worry about pleasing me.”

  Afraid of arousing suspicions, Joanna returned the magazines, having learned all she could from them. The dress came together swiftly after that, and Joanna began to hope that she might finish the rest of Miss Evangeline’s trousseau soon enough to complete the slaves’ clothing in time for Christmas.

  She felt her first pains while crawling on the floor in Miss Evangeline’s room, measuring the fall of the tiers with a long piece of yarn. “Whatever are you grunting about?” Miss Evangeline asked.

  “The baby,” said Joanna, sitting back on her heels as another wave of pain seized her. “It think it’s coming.”

  “Well, don’t have it in here.” Miss Evangeline snatched the luxurious folds of fabrics out of Joanna’s reach. “Go outside. Go to the slave quarter.” Then the young mistress’s composure returned. “You have my permission to return to your cabin until your child is born.”

  Joanna thanked her and left, not bothering to mention that it could be hours before her child entered the world. If Miss Evangeline knew that, she would keep Joanna sewing until the moment she had to set down her needle to catch her own baby on the way out.

  Joanna went first to the stable, but one of the little boys who mucked out the stalls told her that Titus was out exercising the horses. Her discomfort sharply increased as Joanna made her way to the slave quarter, pains increasing so rapidly that she could only shuffle in the dirt, clutching her belly. Labor had not come upon her so suddenly a year and a half earlier when Frederick was born, but then she had relaxed in a comfortable bed, with plenty of food and rest, and Gerda’s attentive care. The Bergstroms had sent for their friend, a doctor and fellow abolitionist, when her labor had taken a dangerous turn. What would Joanna do if something went wrong this time? She had never known the Chesters to summon a doctor to the slave quarter.

  Auntie Bess was sitting in the doorway of the cabin weaving a sweetgrass basket when Joanna arrived, but one glimpse of Joanna’s painful grimace stilled her hands. “It your time?”

  Joanna gasped and nodded as a clenching fist of pain seized her. “It’s not like before,” she said, panting, after the fist released.

  “Second babies sometimes come faster.” Auntie Bess rose and beckoned to her. “Come on, daughter. I’ll take care of you.”

  They walked by the stream in the cooling shade, Joanna leaning on the older woman, pausing to stand and breathe when she could not walk. A blur of hours passed, a pain both worse than her worst beating and more bearable. She cried out for Titus, for Ruth, for Honor, knowing they could not come to her aid but that Auntie Bess was there, murmuring encouragement, wiping her brow, promising her that her child would be well and strong.

  When her daughter came, she came quickly—a sudden wrenching and then it was over. Murmuring words Joanna did not comprehend in her exhaustion, Auntie Bess bathed the child, swaddled her in a worn flannel blanket, a discard from the big house Joanna had made over with her finest stitches around the edges.

  When Joanna felt rested enough, Auntie Bess guided her back to the cabin and sent a child running for Titus. Soon he was there, embracing Joanna and cradling his daughter in his arms. Tiny nose, tiny dark eyes, dark, dark hair, strong tiny hands to curl around a fingertip.

  “I want to call her Ruth,” Joanna told him. “After a woman who cared for me back in Virginia.”

  He glanced at her, and she saw the question flash through his mind: Why not name their daughter after Joanna’s own mother? Just as quickly, she saw understanding: Joanna did not know her mother’s name.

  “Ruth a g
ood name,” he said. “I promise you, little Ruthie, one day you gonna be a free woman.”

  Tears pricked Joanna’s eyes. Titus saw, and he reached for her hand. He laced his fingers through hers, the palm of his hand callused and strong. “Now do you see?” he asked her softly. “Now you see why I couldn’t leave the two of you behind?”

  Joanna had a day of rest in Tavia’s cabin, nursing Ruthie, dozing, walking stiffly around the cramped space when Auntie Bess chided her out of bed to take a few easy paces around the cabin. The next morning, not long after Tavia and Pearl hurried off to the cotton fields, Lizzie brought word from the big house that Joanna had to come tend to the laundry.

  It was washday; Joanna had lost track. “I’m coming,” she said, hauling herself out of bed, wincing at a twinge of pain in her abdomen. Shaking her head in resigned disapproval, Auntie Bess helped her fashion a sling out of Ruthie’s flannel blanket so she could keep her sleeping daughter close while she worked.

  Hurrying to the washhouse, Lizzie’s brow furrowed when Joanna fell behind. “Come on,” she urged anxiously, racing ahead. “Mistress sent Augustus by twice already asking where you at. I start the fire and fill the washtub all by myself, but that ain’t good enough for him. He keep asking for you.”

  Joanna found herself surprisingly moved that Lizzie had started the laundry on her own, but she could not hurry any faster, not even to ease the girl’s worries. As they passed the kitchen building, Sophie leaned out the doorway and called, “Mistress wants to see you. She’s waiting in her study.”

  Lizzie groaned aloud, and Joanna’s breath caught in her throat. “But the laundry—”

  “Big girl like Lizzie can’t do that on her own?”