The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “Dearest.” The colonel cupped his wife’s face in his hands. “Don’t worry. This city is well out of range of their cannons. Anderson’s bought himself some time, but that’s all. He’ll run out of provisions eventually on that island, and then he’ll have no choice but to surrender.”

  “I suppose so,” said Miss Evangeline, with a frown that suggested she could not believe resolution would come so easily.

  The colonel smiled. “Darling, remember, this is Major Anderson in command. He’s married to a Georgian, for goodness’ sake. He’s owned slaves. He doesn’t want a war any more than I do. He’s taken Fort Sumter, but he can’t hold it. We’ll starve him out, send him back north, and that will be the end of it.”

  Joanna kept her face studiously impassive as the colonel kissed Miss Evangeline good-bye and strode from the room. She figured Miss Evangeline was right to be doubtful. Josiah Chester had owned many other slaves, but when Joanna had run off, he hadn’t contented himself with the slaves who remained but had hired Isaac and Peter to hunt her down. He had lost money recapturing her, for she had seen his brother’s ledger and knew Stephen Chester had bought her for less than Josiah Chester had paid in slave hunters’ fees and expenses. How much more would a nation do to regain a rebellious state?

  Miss Evangeline occupied herself entertaining her guests while the colonel was out seeing to a soldier’s business, but Joanna knew she was distracted. All day long the Chester and Harper women left behind at home murmured worriedly and started at any loud noise from the street. The colonel’s sister—Mrs. Givens, the same woman who had beaten the voice out of Hannah—wrung her hands and lamented that Major Anderson would surely fire upon the city at any moment, and that they would all be much safer back on James Island. “You must come with us too,” she told Miss Evangeline. “Our father has enough room for your entire household. You can return to Harper Hall after the Union men are driven from the harbor.”

  Joanna’s heart quaked until Miss Evangeline shook her head in refusal. “Nonsense,” she replied briskly. “Robert says we’re perfectly safe in the city, and I trust in his judgment, both as my husband and as a military man. In fact, it might be wiser for you to extend your visit.”

  Apparently the colonel’s sister was not convinced, for she persuaded her parents to return to the James Island plantation the next day. To Joanna’s sorrow, the following morning Marse Chester announced that his family too would be cutting their visit short. When Miss Evangeline protested, the colonel tried to persuade his father-in-law that such precautions were unnecessary. “Anderson will surrender Fort Sumter when his men run out of food,” he said. “We’ll take the fort without firing a single shot. You’ve heard what Colonel Chestnut’s said.”

  Marse Chester gave a rough chuckle. “That he’ll drink all the blood spilled in this ‘war.’”

  “He must have a prodigious thirst,” remarked Mrs. Chester.

  Both Marse Chester and the colonel regarded her in surprise for a moment, but then the colonel smiled. “What the colonel meant, Mrs. Chester, is that he expects there to be so little bloodshed—”

  “Oh, I understood his remark perfectly,” Mrs. Chester interrupted. “What I don’t understand is how he could have reached such an astonishingly optimistic conclusion.”

  At last someone was talking sense, Joanna thought. Mrs. Chester was a Northerner herself and understood Northerners better than those boastful men did. They ought to listen to her. But even though she was white and had once been a teacher, they were likely to ignore her because she was a woman—and because she was saying what they did not want to hear. They would gladly agree with a woman who echoed their own certainties.

  Despite his son-in-law’s reassurances, Marse Chester was determined to return to Oak Grove before the day was out. Joanna was sent scurrying to dress ladies and pack trunks, with not a single moment to slip away to bid her husband good-bye. Titus found her in the laundry, searching for Mrs. Chester’s petticoats that had somehow gotten mixed up with her stepdaughter’s. They embraced, but Joanna held back her tears, unwilling to make Titus’s leave-taking any more difficult for him.

  “I meant what I said before,” he told her, covering her face in kisses. “Now you got Ruthie with you, there ain’t nothing to hold you back. Abner’s gonna show you how to ride and how to drive the wagon. First chance you get, you run.”

  “And leave you behind at Oak Grove?”

  Titus nodded, his gaze locked on hers. “I’ll find my way to you somehow. You got to have faith in me.”

  “Take my quilt,” Joanna blurted. “I don’t need it. I got the pictures right here, in my heart.” But Titus shook his head. “Why not? You know I can’t run off unless I know you follow after.”

  “Joanna, those pictures don’t mean nothing to nobody but you. You the only one who understand what they mean and what order they follow.”

  “I can tell you what they mean,” she persisted. “If you get the chance to run, you got to be ready and take it, just like you said I should do.”

  “When I run, I can’t carry a quilt with me. But I don’t need to. I remember every word you ever tell me about Elm Creek Farm. I know I can find it even without your quilt. You keep it, and you teach Ruthie its secrets.” Titus scowled as from somewhere around the front of the house, Marse Chester shouted his name. “Devil take that man. Someday, Joanna, I swear—”

  Joanna tightened her grip on his hands. “Don’t go just yet.” She flung her arms around him and kissed him as if she might never see him again. Perhaps she wouldn’t. With Union men occupying the harbor and South Carolina militiamen marching and drilling with rifles, it was impossible to say when the Chester family would return to Charleston.

  “Listen,” Titus said, his lips searching hers. “Keep breathin’. No matter what. Keep breathin’, keep livin’. Long as you and I keep breathin’, we got a chance. We always got a chance, long as we stay alive.”

  Marse Chester shouted for Titus a second time. Soon Abner would be sent to find him, and the white master would think twice about letting Titus visit his wife again. They both knew it. With one last, fierce kiss, Titus tore himself from her arms and hurried off without looking back.

  She wished he had agreed to take her Birds in the Air quilt with him. Since she was keeping Ruthie, when he returned to Oak Grove there would be nothing left to remind him of his wife. She wished she could think of him comfortable and warm as he slept in the hayloft, the quilt embracing him as she wished she herself could do.

  More troubling than her loneliness was Titus’s insistence that she must teach Ruthie the secrets of the images hidden in her quilt. Ruthie was just a baby, unable to understand. Titus must believe that they would remain enslaved for years, long enough for Ruthie to grow old enough to make sense of words and pictures, long enough that she might have to make the journey north to freedom on her own.

  Keep breathing, she told herself. Keep breathing.

  What else could she do?

  After her houseguests departed, Miss Evangeline paced through her lovely, empty home, stroking her abdomen absently even though she had not even the tiniest bump yet. Soon, Joanna suspected, the mistress would have her making over old dresses so they would accommodate the growing baby. Joanna wondered if she would need a new dress for herself. She had spent every night of Titus’s brief visit in his arms, and maybe Ruthie was not the only child he had left behind. She did not know whether to hope for another baby or pray that her womb would remain empty. She wanted Titus’s children, but she could not wish them to be born into slavery at such times, with their escape plans so fragile and the buckra at turns jittery and exultant.

  The work of the holidays ended and the New Year began. The Union soldiers still held Fort Sumter, but since they hadn’t turned their guns on the city yet, it seemed increasingly unlikely that they would do so. Joanna knew their provisions wouldn’t last forever, just as the colonel said, and something would have to happen. But even as the colonel assured his
wife that he doubted even a single shot would be fired over South Carolina’s secession, he prepared as diligently as if he expected bullets to rain down like hail upon Meeting Street. He was often away from Harper Hall from before dawn until after dusk, and when he was at home, he was ensconced in his study with other officers clad in the uniforms of the various state militias, or with men in fine suits who could be businessmen or politicians or both. Once the colonel got into a shouting match with a distinguished older gentleman who stormed from the house without bothering to put on his coat and hat until he had reached the street.

  “Mr. Petigru is the only man in South Carolina who hasn’t seceded,” the colonel remarked ruefully when Miss Evangeline hastened to the foyer to see what was the matter.

  “I wish you could have made him see reason,” said Miss Evangeline, watching through the window as the man strode away. “I did so enjoy Jane’s company.”

  “Our political disagreements shouldn’t prevent you and his daughter from remaining friends.”

  Miss Evangeline offered him an arch smile. “You forget we women take sides as firmly as you men do. You men weren’t the only ones who seceded. Besides, I don’t expect the Petigrus to remain in our commonwealth if they love the Union so dearly, do you?”

  “They’ll have to decide which they love more—the Union or South Carolina.”

  Before Miss Evangeline could reply, the colonel smiled indulgently and disappeared into his study, where the other men waited. Joanna knew this annoyed the young mistress and she resigned herself to an hour of grumbling and ill-temper. Miss Evangeline understood that her husband was busy with the affairs of state and had few idle moments to pass in his pretty bride’s company, but that didn’t mean she liked it. Sometimes Miss Evangeline complained about his negligence, knowing that Joanna dared not repeat her complaints to anyone who mattered.

  In her husband’s absence, the mistress found other ways to occupy her time—managing her household, calling on friends, and waiting attentively on her husband at the one time of the day when she could command his attention, over supper. There she drank in every word as the colonel spoke of the militia’s preparations. Joanna dreaded each new revelation. More soldiers in the city meant more eyes to spot a fleeing slave, more guns to wound a fugitive. Once, when the mistress was in a reflective mood, Joanna suggested that they might be safer at Oak Grove. Miss Evangeline responded so promptly that Joanna knew she had considered the idea herself. “I couldn’t leave Charleston,” she said. “My place is with my husband, especially now that we’re going to have a child.”

  Joanna almost replied that she too had a child, and that her place was with her own beloved, but she held her tongue. Miss Evangeline could take back her Christmas present as quickly and unexpectedly as she had given it. If Joanna were not careful, Ruthie could be sent back to Oak Grove, or even sold off.

  Joanna often accompanied Miss Evangeline on her rounds of friends and family, and while sitting in the back rooms and kitchens, sewing and awaiting her mistress’s call, she learned that other families were just as anxious about Major Anderson’s presence in the harbor as the Harpers and Chesters were. On one occasion, Miss Evangeline’s friends mulled over rumors that a ship from the North might bring provisions to the Union men holed up at Fort Sumter; a few days later, all of Charleston buzzed with the reports that a newspaper in far-off New York had announced that a Union steamer had set out from the city, bound for Charleston with supplies for Anderson’s men.

  The colonel warned Miss Evangeline to stay close to home when the ship was expected to arrive, but when a message came from Aunt Lucretia that a crowd was gathering on the Battery, Miss Evangeline ordered Abner to prepare the carriage and set off as soon as it was ready. Joanna rode along beside Abner, almost forgetting her apprehension in her determination to learn all she could about driving horses. Her beloved had told her to learn and she would not disappoint him. Once Abner let her take the reins, joking good-naturedly that he hoped she didn’t learn too well or the colonel might order them to trade work, and his fingers were too callused and clumsy for a needle.

  When they reached the Battery, Miss Evangeline managed to find her aunt in the crowd, and arm in arm they looked out across the harbor. “Anderson’s run his guns out,” Joanna overheard a man say, but even when she shaded her eyes with her hands, she couldn’t make out anything different about the small fort perched on the island in the middle of the harbor.

  Suddenly a thrill of excitement sped through the crowd; a ship had been spotted entering the channel. Joanna held her breath and knotted her apron in her hands, wishing she were back at home, praying Ruthie was safe in Hannah’s care.

  “Colonel Harper ain’t gonna like us being here,” said Abner, shaking his head at their young mistress, who stood well out of earshot. “He told her to stay home.”

  “Next time he’ll remember to tell you too,” said Joanna. The master’s orders always trumped the mistress’s.

  Slowly the ship moved into view—just one lone merchant steamer as far as Joanna could see, and not a decoy with a string of gunboats behind it, as some of the rumors had warned. Suddenly puffs of white smoke appeared at the tip of Morris Island; the sound of gunfire took a few moments longer to reach Joanna’s ears. On the Battery women cried out; a man whooped and threw his hat in the air. More bursts of smoke from the point where Charleston’s defenders were stationed, more pops like distant fireworks. And yet nothing, nothing from Fort Sumter. It was as if Major Anderson and his men had already fled.

  Almost imperceptibly the Union steamer pressed on, closer to Fort Sumter, closer to the hail of gunfire from Morris Island. Sometimes the smoke grew so thick in the distance that Joanna couldn’t discern what was happening—if the ship had fired upon Charleston’s defenders or if it had been sunk. But then a breeze wafted the drifting smoke aside, and again the ship came into view, pressing ever onward. Joanna silently willed it along, praying for the blue expanse between ship and fort to swiftly narrow, her heart pounding as the ship came fully into the range of the guns.

  And then all at once a cheer went up from the men and women watching spellbound from the Battery. Slowly, so slowly that Joanna could almost convince herself it wasn’t happening, the ship was turning—away from Fort Sumter, back toward the open ocean.

  “What are they doing?” Joanna cried, standing. “They’re so close, so close!”

  Abner seized her arm and yanked her back to her seat. “Hush up,” he muttered. “Don’t let the buckra see you upset.”

  “But the ship—”

  “It got hit. Don’t you see? On the mast and the rudder. They got to turn back before they get sunk.”

  Joanna bit her lips shut, mindful of the cheers and celebration surrounding the carriage. The steamer looked sound enough to her. How could those few guns endanger a ship that size? They had turned tail and run, and why, Joanna couldn’t imagine. It sickened her to watch as the steamer grew smaller in the distance and finally disappeared in the lingering smoke.

  She had not realized until that moment that she had expected salvation to arrive on that Union ship.

  “Those were my husband’s men,” Miss Evangeline told her aunt triumphantly as they returned to the carriage. “Those were his cadets. Think of it—students, boys really, driving off a Union invasion.”

  Joanna didn’t think it had been much of an invasion, considering the ship had never even dropped anchor, but she knew better than to say so as she helped Miss Evangeline and Aunt Lucretia into the carriage, tucking skirts and shawls around them, shutting her ears to their exultant retelling of the events they had all witnessed. Abner let off Aunt Lucretia at her home before returning to Harper Hall, where Miss Evangeline ordered Sally to prepare a grand feast to celebrate the victory, which the young mistress seemed to believe was entirely her husband’s doing. In later days, Joanna overheard Miss Evangeline boast that her husband had fired the decisive shot that had struck the Star of the West’s mast and sent her flee
ing to safer waters—although by then, Miss Evangeline knew perfectly well that her husband had not been within four miles of Morris Island at the time.

  Weeks passed. Somehow, even without reinforcements, Major Anderson clung stubbornly to Fort Sumter, unwilling to provoke a war and unwilling to leave. Other states quit the Union—Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas—and in February, Miss Evangeline held a grand party to celebrate the forming of their own nation, the Confederate States of America. She hosted another in early March, on Mr. Lincoln’s inauguration day, to celebrate that he was not their president.

  Joanna knew she could no longer hope for Union soldiers to bring her freedom on a merchant steamer. While Miss Evangeline celebrated and Colonel Harper drilled, Joanna waited—and prepared. She memorized the streets of Charleston as she ran errands for the mistress; she befriended free colored merchants and craftsmen whom she might one day be able to call upon in a time of need. Slowly but certainly, she taught Hannah to read, forming letters from thread, spelling simple words. She praised Hannah when she pointed to the object the thread letters named, but she was not satisfied. “It ain’t enough to know what the word look like. You need to say it too,” she told the girl, but Hannah did not reply.

  Marse Chester did not bring his family to visit Harper Hall again, but on one joyful day, Titus appeared unexpectedly, sent from Oak Grove with letters and gifts for Miss Evangeline and the colonel. He stayed only long enough for the newlyweds to write their replies, which was barely enough time to marvel at the changes in their daughter since he had last seen her. Though it was almost more painful than joyous to see him so briefly, Titus left Joanna with a hopeful secret: He had heard Marse Chester and the mistress talking, and he knew their letters urged Miss Evangeline to return to Edisto Island until it was certain that the Union would let the Confederate States secede peacefully.

  But Joanna’s hopes were short-lived. Miss Evangeline was determined not to leave her husband, although she was reluctant to choose him over her father. “Papa must understand that it makes no sense for me to return to Edisto Island just in time for the malaria season, when in every year past he has sent me to Charleston to avoid it,” she told her husband as she tucked the letters into a desk drawer. The colonel nodded, and as far as Joanna knew, they never again considered evacuating the city.