The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  Joanna knew better than to criticize one white lady in front of another. “What about your friends? They mothers teach them how to do all these things?”

  Miss Evangeline thought for a moment. “No, I suppose not. Their educations were much like my own. Surely if they were learning how to make tallow candles and bake bread, they would have mentioned it.” She let out a small laugh of astonishment. “I don’t know how to cook. Do you know I’ve never cooked a meal in my entire life?”

  The image of Miss Evangeline red-faced and perspiring in the kitchen, up to her elbows in bread dough or testing the heat of an oven, was so absurd Joanna almost laughed. “You don’t need to cook,” said Joanna. “You have a cook.”

  Miss Evangeline smiled, suddenly lighthearted. “Yes, you’re right. And Sally did try to warn me that I was neglecting my responsibilities, but I didn’t listen. My father is not above taking advice from slaves. He listens to Aaron regarding the field hands and the cotton, and he seeks Titus’s opinion regarding horses. I shall follow his example.” She slapped her palms flat on the tabletop and pushed herself to her feet, her confidence restored. “And you, Joanna, you must help me. If you hear servants fretting about this or that not being done the proper way, you must tell me promptly.”

  “Yes, missus,” said Joanna, concealing her dismay. She had never carried tales to the big house at Oak Grove, though some in the quarter believed all house slaves spied for the master. She didn’t want any of the Harper Hall slaves to think ill of her, nor did she think Miss Evangeline was likely to heed her warnings when she ignored Sally’s.

  She would have to be careful, but with any luck, helping Miss Evangeline learn to manage the household would send her off on many other errands around Charleston. In two days she had been sent out twice, the first times she had been truly on her own since her recapture at Elm Creek Farm. It was a heady feeling, almost as if a wind might sweep in off the ocean and carry her far away. She saw the ships in the harbor, dodged wagons rumbling over cobblestones, heard trains chugging in the distance, and knew that some of them carried cotton and rice and oranges to northern shores. If they could carry bales and sacks and crates, they could carry far more precious cargo, if she could just find a way, if she could just get her family together and make a plan and go.

  She would learn the city and the ways out of it, so that when she and Titus and Ruthie were finally all together again, she would be ready. Her Birds in the Air quilt was nearly complete. She had saved the pass Miss Evangeline had written for the errand to Aunt Lucretia’s. All she needed was her family and a plan.

  Miss Evangeline must have realized that she couldn’t rely upon her busy husband for amusement, for she befriended several young wives who lived nearby and eagerly accepted her aunt’s invitations to gatherings at her house on East Bay Street near the Battery. Joanna usually accompanied the mistress when she went visiting, and she came to know the back rooms and kitchens of most of the houses on Meeting Street from hours spent sewing and talking with the hostesses’ slaves while listening for her mistress’s summons. Afterward, Miss Evangeline would query and probe and question Joanna until every scrap of slaves’ gossip about their masters’ families had been wrung from her. Joanna always felt exhausted afterward, as if Miss Evangeline had put her through the mangle. Although the other families’ slaves never demanded that she keep their secrets, they surely assumed she would. Eventually word would get out that Joanna told her mistress everything, and no one would talk to her anymore.

  After an outing, Joanna had to scramble to make up for the work neglected during her absence. She learned to wash clothes at a breakneck pace and to sew everything right the first time so she did not have to waste time picking out stitches. Once, as she was sewing in the kitchen while Sally started the fire for breakfast, she heard Miss Evangeline call for her, so early and so unexpectedly that Joanna bolted to her feet and jabbed herself with the needle. The thread snapped and the button she had been sewing to the marse colonel’s new shirt rolled away and fell between a crack in the floorboards. Sally tsked her tongue in sympathy, knowing Joanna would be punished for the lost button.

  Joanna had only a moment to crawl on hands and knees to see if she could spy the button before she had to hurry away to dress the mistress. All that morning worry gnawed at her. She could not substitute a button snipped off another shirt, not even one he rarely wore. The mistress had purchased these brass palmetto-shaped buttons especially for her husband’s new uniform, a Christmas gift from his wife.

  All day long as she worked and waited on the mistress, her thoughts were on the shirt and how she might rearrange the buttons so that no one would notice one was missing. It was impossible, and she knew it. She would have to tell the mistress and take her punishment.

  Then, as the slaves were gathering in the kitchen after the Harpers’ supper for their own meal, Joanna felt a tug on her sleeve. Hannah, the little girl who never spoke, peered up at her solemnly, the shiny brass button pinched between her thumb and forefinger.

  “How did you find that?” Joanna exclaimed. Hannah made no reply but to drop the button into Joanna’s palm and scurry over to the stove, where Sally filled her gourd bowl with rice and okra.

  “I saw her down cellar this morning,” Sally told Joanna in an undertone when she went forward with her own bowl. “That button must’ve fallen clean through. Lucky for you it wasn’t stuck somewhere in between.”

  “Lucky for me Hannah think to look for it,” said Joanna, watching the little girl scoop rice and okra into her mouth with her fingers. She sat on the floor in the corner, cross-legged, hunched over her gourd bowl as if expecting someone to snatch it away before she finished. Joanna had never taken much notice of the girl before except to wonder why she never spoke. She obviously wasn’t simpleminded, and she followed Miss Evangeline’s directions, so the problem wasn’t that she understood only Gullah talk.

  Later, as Joanna sewed the rescued button onto the marse colonel’s shirt, she noticed Hannah watching her from the doorway. “Come closer,” she said. “You know how to thread a needle?”

  Hannah shook her head, so Joanna snipped a length of thread and demonstrated. “Now you try,” she said, pulling the thread from the eye and holding out needle and thread to Hannah.

  Hannah hesitated before taking them. She threaded the needle properly on her second attempt and held it out to Joanna solemnly. “Good,” Joanna said. “Now watch and I teach you how to make a knot.”

  By the time Hannah was called away to help in the kitchen, she had made five good, strong knots, spaced evenly along the thread.

  From that day forward, whenever Joanna sat down to sew, she found Hannah at her elbow, watching intently, memorizing the motions of her hands as she worked the needle. Joanna trimmed a few patches into squares and set the girl to work on a Nine-Patch block, correcting her mistakes, praising her successes. Perhaps because she could not ask questions, Hannah hung on Joanna’s every word and practiced every gesture, and Joanna was amazed by how quickly she learned. “If you learn to sew good, mistress might train you up as a seamstress,” Joanna said. Hannah’s eyes darted to her face, then back to her sewing, another Nine-Patch block for her growing pile. “It’s not bad work. Better than scrubbing floors—”

  Joanna stopped short. Many years ago, as a much younger girl, as she had ridden back from the Ashworth plantation, she had listened eagerly as Josiah Chester’s loyal groom told her that her sewing could lead to her salvation. The money she earned would keep the Chesters from selling her down south, he had said, and Marse Chester might let her keep a portion so that she could buy her freedom someday. Now she was farther south than she had ever been before, and Miss Evangeline valued her services so much that she refused to hire her out.

  Joanna could not bring herself to give Hannah false hopes.

  And yet sewing was a skill that might serve the child well someday. So Joanna continued their lessons, and though they were brief, infrequent, and often interrupt
ed, Hannah learned like dry earth soaking up rainwater. Joanna was proud of her, and yet it pained her to think of how she might have, should have, passed on her knowledge to her own daughter. Who would teach Ruthie the things she needed to know while Joanna taught another little girl?

  Titus will see to it, she told herself firmly. Tavia will teach her to cook. Auntie Bess will tell her stories. Pearl will teach her pride and strength. Ruthie would learn. Even without Joanna there beside her, Ruthie would learn.

  Over time, Joanna’s curiosity compelled her to ask Sally why Hannah couldn’t speak. “Nothing’s wrong with her mind,” Joanna said, as if daring Sally to contest the point. “She always been like this, or she get a sickness?”

  Sally opened the oven, held her hand inside, and counted silently, testing the temperature. “Nothing wrong with her until about three years ago,” she said, placing another stick on the fire and closing the door. “Before the colonel marry your mistress, his widow sister live here and keep house for him. Her name Missus Givens, and Hannah’s mother her maid.”

  “Hannah could talk back then?”

  “As good as any child. Maybe more than most.” Sally wiped her hands on her apron and took a sack of cornmeal from the pantry. “She still too young to work much but she help me out from time to time, help her mother, too. The Givens boys her playmates. You know how buckra children and colored children play together till they grow up and figure out one’s the master and one’s the slave.”

  Joanna nodded.

  “One day—” Out of habit, Sally glanced through the open doorway for eavesdroppers. “Hannah and the boys playing on the low piazza, stacking up the boys’ wood blocks and knocking them down. They laughing and having a good old time. Then all a sudden, Missus Givens put down her knitting and calls Hannah to her. She say she got a very important job for Hannah, ’cause she gonna send Hannah to fetch something from the store. Hannah so proud. She never been out on her own before like that and she felt like such a big girl. So Missus Givens write out a pass, and she write out a note, and she give both to Hannah along with the money. Then she say, ‘You give that note to the storekeeper, and you tell him to read it and fix up what I ask for, then you pay him and bring my parcel back to me.’

  “So Hannah run off, and soon here she comes back carrying something wrapped in brown paper. She ran smiling all the way, and she want to give the parcel to the missus, but the missus tell her open it herself.”

  “What was it?” asked Joanna.

  “A leather whip. Wood handle, braided fringe. Before Hannah knew it, the missus was whipping her, not saying a word, just whipping her over and over. Hannah cried and screamed and begged to know what she had done wrong, but the missus don’t tell her. Hannah’s mother hear her and come running, and she beg missus to stop. She even tried to grab the whip out of Missus Givens’s hand, but she just got whipped herself.” Sally measured four handfuls of cornmeal into a bowl and took two eggs from the basket on the table. “Hannah never say another word after that.”

  Sickened, Joanna pressed a hand to her mouth. “Why?” she managed to say. “Why she beat a sweet child that way?”

  “Them wood blocks she was playing with, you recall, with the missus’s sons.” Sally gestured awkwardly, forming a shape in the air. “They got letters carved in the sides.”

  A flash of rage shot through Joanna. It was unfair, so terribly unfair. “But Hannah wasn’t trying to read. She stacking blocks and knocking them down! Could’ve been any picture carved on them blocks for all it meant to her.”

  “It meant something to the missus.” Sally cracked eggs and set the shells aside. “After that, Hannah wasn’t good for nothing. She hide when Missus Givens call her, she jump at the tiniest noise. I hear the marse colonel tell Asa his sister ruin a perfectly good slave and their father not too happy about it. When Marse Colonel marry your mistress, his sister and her boys go back to live on the James Island plantation with their folks. Missus Givens take her maid, but she leave Hannah here. Say the marse colonel can sell her or keep her, she don’t care what he do with that useless thing.”

  “And now Hannah so scared of words she don’t even say them.”

  Sally nodded. “Marse Colonel understand why she that way. He won’t sell her for it.” She seemed to be reassuring herself as much as Joanna. “He don’t mind a quiet slave. He say at least she never sass no one.”

  That was what he said now, Joanna thought. But masters changed their minds, or died, or forgot promises when a change in fortune compelled them to sell slaves to pay debts. No slave was safe, and a frightened child who could not speak was more precariously placed than most.

  One day when the mistress was in a particularly cheerful mood, Joanna asked her if she might train Hannah as a seamstress. “You mean the mute girl?” Miss Evangeline asked, surprised. “My sister-in-law says she isn’t suited for anything but the simplest of chores.”

  “Maybe that’s how she was when Marse Colonel’s sister here, but she older now, and she can learn. I seen it.” Joanna tried to sound as if she didn’t care too much one way or the other. Seeming to want something too much was a sure way to convince the mistress not to let you have it. “This way, if you need me to dress your hair or sew you a fancy gown, there’s someone else to do the little things like mending and darning. That work always got to be done even when other, more important things come first.”

  Miss Evangeline considered the proposal and agreed that Hannah could learn to sew as long as her lessons did not interfere with her other chores.

  That same day, while Miss Evangeline was out with her aunt Lucretia, Joanna sat down with the colonel’s shirt and waited for Hannah to come to her with her pile of Nine-Patch blocks. As the girl sat down at her feet and threaded a needle, Joanna strained her ears for the sound of approaching footsteps. All she heard were carriages and wagons passing on the street outside, Sally singing in the kitchen, a loose shutter banging in the wind.

  “Look here.” Joanna snipped a long thread off the spool and arranged it on her lap until it formed the proper shape. “This here the letter A.”

  Hannah’s eyes went wide and she backed away.

  “It’s all right.” Joanna beckoned to her, but Hannah stood rooted to the spot, just beyond arm’s reach. “Marse Colonel and missus gone. And look. Anyone come in, we do like this.” She brushed her fingers across her skirt, and at once the letter was no more than a snarl of thread. “See? Don’t be afraid. Don’t never be afraid of words.”

  Hannah looked terrified, but she took one step forward, and then another until she stood so close she touched Joanna’s knee.

  “This here’s the letter B,” Joanna said, and arranged the thread.

  That night, a rustling of coarse blankets and a sudden stir in the air woke Joanna. Invisible in the darkness, Hannah climbed into bed beside her, pulled the covers back over them, and promptly fell back asleep. Joanna sat awake for a while, her hand resting on the girl’s head, thinking of Ruth back at Greenfields and how safe she had felt curled up beside the larger woman, even when her presence did not protect her from Josiah Chester’s predations.

  Joanna rolled over on her side, put her arm around the sleeping child, and drifted back to sleep.

  Winter came, and when the master and mistress weren’t discussing secession, they were debating Christmas. The colonel wanted to spend the holiday on the James Island plantation as he had always done, as every Harper had done since the first Harper came to South Carolina, but the mistress was equally determined to celebrate Christmas with her father and siblings at Oak Grove. Joanna hoped and prayed that the mistress would have her way, because Miss Evangeline would certainly expect Joanna to accompany her home. Joanna longed for Ruthie and Titus so deeply that she could almost feel her husband’s arms around her and the weight of her baby in the sling. But instead of indulging his bride, the colonel proposed that they invite both families to Harper Hall. Joanna’s heart sank as Miss Evangeline threw her arms around her hus
band, kissed him, and declared him “as wise as Solomon.” Joanna might still see Titus, for he would surely drive the coach that brought the Chesters to Charleston, but Ruthie would just as surely be left behind.

  The decision sent Sally and Minnie into a frenzy of alarm, cleaning, cooking, preparing for a houseful of guests. Joanna was so busy helping them whenever she could spare time from her regular duties that she had to set Hannah’s sewing lessons aside. Joanna wondered, but could not ask the mistress, if the colonel’s sister would be among the guests. Joanna felt a strange, angry eagerness to see the woman who had stolen Hannah’s voice. She imagined Mrs. Givens as a monster, imperious and terrifying, and she fretted over little Hannah, who had become less jumpy and fearful in recent weeks. If Mrs. Givens tried to hurt the girl again, Joanna did not think she could stand by and watch it happen, but what could she do? Best to keep Hannah out of her sight altogether. With so many houseguests bringing slaves of their own, Joanna hoped she could shield Hannah within the crowd.

  Suddenly she remembered that Hannah might not want to hide from the visitors. Joanna had forgotten that Hannah’s mother was Mrs. Givens’s maid. Hannah’s desire to see her mother again would surely overcome her fear. If Joanna had been offered a chance to see her mother again, she would have left Ruth’s side in a heartbeat. It was only natural that Hannah would just as easily forget Joanna when her mother appeared.

  But Joanna couldn’t help feeling a twinge of regret, which she quickly chased from her thoughts. How could she, who had been taken from her own mother and missed her own daughter so desperately, begrudge young Hannah a visit with her mother?

  A few days before the Harpers and Chesters were expected to arrive, Joanna and Minnie were receiving Miss Evangeline’s instructions for their guests’ sleeping arrangements when the pealing of bells interrupted her. First a church bell rang somewhere in the distance, and then another and another until it seemed every steeple in Charleston swelled the chorus. Joanna gasped as a low boom rattled the china in the cabinet. “Cannon fire,” said Miss Evangeline in wonder, and suddenly she clasped her hands together as her face lit up in fierce joy. “The vote. They’ve taken the vote!”