The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “Miss Evangeline—Mrs. Harper,” Joanna said, quietly desperate. “Please let me bring Julia with me. She such a good baby, such a sweet child, so quiet you hardly know she’s there. She won’t be no trouble to you or the colonel. I’ll work so hard for you, Miss Evangeline, you never seen someone work so hard as I will—”

  “You’ll work hard in any case.” Miss Evangeline’s cheeks were flushed, her mouth tight with displeasure. “You forget I know how easily distracted you are by that child.”

  “Please, miss, I won’t be distracted—”

  “Enough.” Miss Evangeline shook her head, astounded by Joanna’s impudence. “I can’t expect an ignorant girl like you to understand what a great privilege it is to be permitted to accompany me to my new household, but I do expect obedience. Pack my trunks, and tonight, gather your own things and say your farewells. We’re leaving in the morning.”

  Instead of obeying, Joanna had fled to the stable. “We’ll run,” Titus said, holding her as she choked out the terrible news. “We’ll run tonight. You, me, Ruthie, anyone else who wants to go. I’ll have the horses ready by nightfall.”

  But Joanna’s flight from Miss Evangeline’s bedchamber had aroused her suspicions, and she convinced her father to take back Titus’s key to the stable. She also ordered Joanna to sleep in the big house, on the floor of the closet where she stored her mending basket. Pleas to be permitted one last night with her husband and child were met with a slap across the face and threats of a more severe beating if Joanna did not stop ruining Miss Evangeline’s last night at home.

  Auntie Bess brought Ruthie to see Joanna off; Titus was there, assisting Colonel Harper’s groom. Joanna clung to him, with Ruthie sheltered between them in the cradle of their arms, until Miss Evangeline impatiently ordered her to climb up onto the seat beside the driver.

  “I’ll see you soon,” Titus said, reluctantly releasing her.

  She hoped he was right; surely Marse Chester would want to visit his daughter before long. But Joanna knew Titus would not be permitted to bring Ruthie with him.

  Then Titus pulled her close and spoke in her ear. “If you get the chance, run. Don’t worry about us. Just run.”

  Run. How could she run from Charleston, not knowing the way? If she fled from Colonel Harper, where could she go but back to her husband and daughter?

  “The marse colonel’s not so bad,” Colonel Harper’s groom said kindly after she had sat beside him in silence for the better part of an hour. They were retracing the same route she had traveled with the Georgia traders more than a year before, but nothing looked familiar. Even if she finished her Birds in the Air quilt, how would it ever lead her to freedom?

  “We always have enough to eat,” Abner went on when she said nothing, “and the colonel don’t whip no one unless you lie or steal. Charleston’s a fine place. Don’t be scared.”

  “I’m not scared,” Joanna said. She felt cold and numb, still disbelieving. There was no room for fear or anticipation or hope. Least of all hope.

  Ruthie will forget me, she thought. Joanna would become nothing more than a vague memory, fading as Joanna’s own mother had to her.

  After a while, Abner gave up trying to engage Joanna in conversation and left her to brood. Eventually they came to the city, which Joanna had last seen through the bars of a cage. The streets bustled with gentlemen, planters, tradesmen, and slaves going about their masters’ business; horses pulled carts; slave women in headscarves carried baskets to and from the markets. The sights and smells and noises drew Joanna from her dark reverie; sensing the slight shift in her mood, Abner began describing the sights they passed. Another slave market, similar in appearance to the one Joanna had seen before. The church the colonel and all his household attended, slave as well as free, where colored folk stood along the walls at the back and listened to the same gospel as their buckra masters. The best places to buy fish and poultry, should the new mistress send her on such errands. Abner promised her she would learn her way around the streets quickly if the new mistress let her go out and about, but it all seemed a tangled muddle to Joanna, accustomed to few strangers and narrow paths within fixed borders.

  The colonel lived on Meeting Street in a three-story red brick building with white stone trim and curved balconies on the second and third floors above the front door. As they passed through the wrought iron gates to the carriage house, Joanna glimpsed shady, white-pillared piazzas overlooking gardens behind the house. Surrounding the entire property was a solid wrought iron fence whose decorative flourishes could not disguise the sharp, menacing spikes at the top of each bar.

  “Marse Colonel sure afraid his slaves gonna run off,” said Joanna. He couldn’t be that amiable a master if he needed to turn his yard into a pretty barracoon.

  “Hmm?” Abner followed her line of sight to the barricades as the carriage rumbled over cobblestones. “You mean the fence? That ain’t meant to keep people in but to keep them out. Must’ve been forty years ago they put that up because of the slave uprising.”

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t even born yet myself so all I know is the stories folks tell. Denmark Vesey, he was the leader. He bought his freedom with money won in a lottery and open a carpentry shop. He swore he wouldn’t rest until all his people were free. In secret he got thousands, thousands of slaves from all over Charleston and on plantations near the city to join him, and they were gonna revolt. They were gonna kill the masters and set everybody free. But rumors got around and the white folks panicked, and Denmark and some others got rounded up before they could strike a single blow.”

  “What happened to them?” Joanna asked.

  Abner shrugged and steered the horse around the broad circular drive in front of the house. “What you think? They all got hanged. Even some buckra who took Vesey’s part.” He pulled the horses to a halt, frowned slightly, and said, “Listen here. You best not ask about those times. The colonel don’t like that kind of talk. The Charleston buckra never been so scared as in those days, and they know there more of us in this city than them. Anyone who even seems like he might be the next Denmark Vesey, he gets shut up real quick.”

  Abner fell silent as a footman in a dark blue coat hurried down the front steps to open the carriage door. Joanna nodded to show she would heed Abner’s warnings; only a fool would not. Buckra lived in constant worry that their slaves might rebel. When Joanna was hired out to Mrs. Robinson back in Virginia, the white-haired mistress often complained that the soup tasted bitter and would warn the others at the table not to eat it for fear of poison. Joanna herself had struck Josiah Chester before she ran off, but only from instinct, and only to save her own life. After she was recaptured, no buckra judge would have punished him if he had killed her outright, rather than only nearly killing her with a beating. Almost always, fighting back against a master meant death. Everybody knew that.

  Denmark Vesey had been a free man, and yet he had fought back, though he’d had everything to lose. As for Joanna, everything she cherished most had been snatched from her. A few worldly possessions—her Birds in the Air quilt top, a wad of poor-quality cotton swept up from the floor of the gin house, her sewing basket, the tin cornboiler, the clothes she wore, the dress stolen from Mrs. Chester—were all that remained to her, and they were a cold comfort.

  In a fog of sorrow and disbelief, Joanna settled Miss Evangeline into her new home, wondering if she would ever feel anything but unsettled, uprooted herself. Upon the newlyweds’ arrival, Colonel Harper’s slaves quickly gathered in the front hall to meet their new mistress. They were better dressed than the slaves at Oak Grove, Joanna thought, and they seemed better fed—Sally, the cook; Asa, the colonel’s man; Minnie, the housekeeper; George, the blue-coated footman who had run outside to meet the newlyweds’ carriage; a young boy named Tommy who, Joanna later learned, raked the yard and kept flies off the food at mealtime; and Hannah, a girl a year or two older than Tommy, who emptied pots from the necessary chairs into the privies ou
tdoors, scrubbed floors, swept fireplaces, and jumped, wide-eyed, to any other task she was ordered to do. Joanna never heard her speak and wasn’t sure she could.

  Miss Evangeline’s aunt had come to stay until her niece became accustomed to her new home. Aunt Lucretia’s maid, Dora, slept on the floor of her mistress’s bedchamber for the duration of her visit. Abner and the stable boys slept in the carriage house. There were no field hands, of course, since the Harper family rice plantation was across the river on James Island. Minnie explained that the colonel often traveled to the home plantation when he wasn’t busy at the South Carolina Military Academy, but even when he was away, his household must remain ever vigilant, for he often returned home unannounced. The colonel boasted that as a master horseman he could travel more swiftly than any messenger sent ahead, but Sally scoffed at this. “He don’t send no messenger,” she told Joanna, scathingly. “He hope to catch us unawares. He think it so funny to watch us scramble to please him.” Sally had reason to grumble, for she was expected to have a hot meal ready for the marse colonel whenever he might unexpectedly appear.

  The other slaves, who did not have to worry about food spoiling and accidentally poisoning the master, needed only concern themselves with tending to the master’s estate and possessions during his frequent absences. The grounds enclosed within the wrought iron barricade seemed small and cramped to Joanna, who had lived all her life on plantations, but the gardens surrounding the house were lush and verdant, and the workyard just beyond them seemed well maintained and sufficient for the needs of a small household. The dependencies included a two-story structure that housed the kitchen and laundry, the carriage house and stable, two privies, and another building whose purpose Joanna couldn’t guess at first glance.

  Though the grounds were less impressive than Marse Chester’s, the residence itself was larger and more opulent than the big house at Oak Grove. Joanna had never seen so many windows, some curved at the top and some boasting colored glass, or ceilings more than twice her own height, or so many fancy plaster moldings and carvings framing the top of each room. The front entrance had a white marble floor laced with gray marble threads, and a curved staircase with ornate whitewashed spindles that rose gracefully to the second floor. Slaves were not permitted to use the stairs except to sweep the steps or dust the banister, Minnie warned as she led Joanna past the staircase to the back of the house, where a door concealed the servants’ stairs, narrow and steep, with a landing and a turn every four steps.

  It was while unpacking Miss Evangeline’s things that Joanna discovered she was not only to be the seamstress and laundress; she was also to be Miss Evangeline’s personal maid. “I don’t know nothing about dressing hair,” said Joanna, almost dropping the trunk lid on her fingers in her surprise.

  “Aunt Lucretia’s maid will teach you,” said Miss Evangeline airily, refusing to let such trivial matters diminish the joy of her first day as mistress of her own home. “You have my permission to learn as slowly as you dare, without raising my husband’s suspicions. Until you can master the curling iron, my aunt’s maid will be forced to continue her lessons, and Aunt Lucretia will be obliged to remain with me.”

  Joanna was not surprised to learn that Miss Evangeline’s capricious dishonesty to the marse colonel was to continue past the long, implicit deception of their courtship.

  Miss Evangeline and her stepmother had grudgingly shared a maid back at Oak Grove, a young woman who had tended Miss Evangeline since they were children together. Joanna could imagine Mrs. Chester insisting upon keeping the maid since her stepdaughter was taking away her laundress. Joanna wished the young mistress had preferred the maid. She had no desire to play the role of Miss Evangeline’s accomplice in her deceptions and capers, to be slapped for unavoidable mistakes and chided for laziness even as she worked herself to exhaustion. She preferred to stay out of sight of the buckra as much as possible, but here at Harper Hall, it seemed that colored folk and white were never far apart.

  Joanna dressed Miss Evangeline for dinner and waited outside the parlor while the mistress chatted gaily with her aunt, reminiscing about the wedding and anticipating her first forays into Charleston society as the wife of a dashing officer. Joanna helped Sally serve the meal and helped Minnie clean up. After nightfall, she undressed Miss Evangeline, assisted her in her toilette, and dressed her in a fine cotton nightgown to await her husband. Later, as she finished her day’s work, she heard the sounds of their lovemaking through the walls and thought of Titus—his strong arms, the pattern of scars on his back, the scent of horses. Her longing for him brought tears to her eyes as, well after nightfall, she retrieved her small bundle of possessions and followed Sally from the house to the slaves’ quarters above the laundry and kitchen building, separated from the house by six feet of cobblestones for fear of fire. If only Titus had been given to Miss Evangeline too, and they were crossing the stones side by side, taking their first glimpse of their new quarters together. If only Joanna had been left behind at Oak Grove with her beloved husband and cherished daughter, the only child remaining to her.

  If only she could believe their separation would be temporary, but hoping and praying and enduring day after day of disappointment might demand more strength than she possessed. But the alternative, to resign herself to never reuniting with her beloved husband, her beloved son and daughter, would be a waking nightmare, a living death. She had to believe they would finally be together and free one day or she could not keep going—but maybe it was foolish to want to keep going.

  But she had to keep going. Titus—what would Titus think if she gave up now? What would Ruthie think when she was old enough to understand?

  So, as a distant bell somewhere in the city warned slaves still abroad of the ten o’clock curfew, she forced herself to keep on going for at least the rest of that day, nearly over—out the back door of Harper Hall, across the cobblestone walk to the kitchen with its adjacent laundry, a place she would surely come to know well in the years ahead. Inside, she followed Minnie up a narrow staircase to the house slaves’ quarters, men and women together in one long room that spanned the length and width of the building.

  The dormitory ceiling sloped on the two long sides so that Joanna could stand upright only in the center where the slats met. A cupola in the center of the ceiling drew hot air upward to cool the floors below, warming the slaves as they slept in winter, Joanna suspected, but roasting them in summer, and a water stain on the floor suggested that it let in the rain. On each end of the room, a small window offered a limited view of a starlit sky and a few palmetto and magnolia trees, and in the morning with the sunrise, perhaps more. The leaded glass panes did not seem capable of opening. The sealed windows made her wonder about the door at the foot of the staircase, and whether Colonel Harper would come around when he was done bedding his bride and lock it, or whether his slaves were so content or so afraid or so despairing that they did not need a locked door to keep them in. Colonel Harper had no dogs, no overseer, nothing to keep them in the dormitory except fear, the threat of city patrollers, and the lack of anywhere to run.

  The narrow beds were arranged side by side a few feet apart, with a thin, wood-and-plaster half-wall partition nominally separating the men’s quarters from the women’s. When Joanna snorted at the ridiculous nod to propriety, the sound echoed hollowly off the pine boards.

  Sally gestured to a rope bed covered with a coarse blanket. “Mary’s gone, so it’s yours,” she said, and Joanna did not have the heart to ask who Mary was or what had become of her. Minnie climbed into Asa’s bed and raised her eyebrows in a mild challenge when Joanna’s gaze lingered too long. Glancing away, climbing into her own bed, her eyes met George’s. She might not have recognized him from their brief meeting upon her arrival except for the blue footman’s coat draped neatly at the foot of his bed. He gave her a small, inquiring smile, but she pretended not to see it, rolled onto her side, and stared at the pattern of knots on the pine board walls, barely visible
in the moonlight that trickled in through the cupola and windows. She closed her eyes and willed herself to remember Ruthie’s sweet baby scent, but all she smelled was old pine, coarse wool, and weary bodies.

  Before dawn, Minnie shook her awake to stumble sleepily down the narrow staircase, through the door that was not locked, and back into the big house to attend Miss Evangeline. She and Asa waited outside in the hallway until the master and mistress summoned them into the room. Miss Evangeline was lying in bed propped up on pillows, but when Joanna answered, she tossed off the quilt and told her which dress to select from the clothespress. The colonel held out his arms so Asa could slip him into a white shirt; he did his own buttons up the front while Asa adjusted the collar. As they were dressed and groomed, the newlyweds chatted comfortably, flirtatiously, as if they were alone, as if Joanna and Asa could neither hear nor understand them.

  After the colonel departed, Aunt Lucretia’s maid, Dora, came in to show Joanna how to heat the slender curling rods over the fire, how to twine Miss Evangeline’s golden locks around the hot metal, how to hold the hair in place long enough to form the curl but not so long that the hair scorched, how to release the curl from the iron so that a golden spring bounced into place. Miss Evangeline held perfectly still, occasionally admonishing Joanna to take care not to burn her, as if she could read the temptation in Joanna’s thoughts. Joanna followed Dora’s instructions carefully, and although her clumsy curls lacked the smooth perfection of the more experienced maid’s, at least she didn’t burn the delicate pale skin along the mistress’s hairline and earn herself her first beating in Harper Hall. At last Joanna set the curling irons aside and watched as Dora gathered the curls in a satin ribbon and handed Miss Evangeline a mirror so she might inspect their work.