The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

“Only what I already told you, suh,” Joanna said, wishing she had more to offer.

  She feared for a moment that she had displeased Mr. Lewis so much that he would cancel their agreement, but just then he dropped a few coins in her palm and told her he would see her the following week, if not sooner. Without waiting for a reply, he strode away and melted into the crowd, his brown coat blending into the mud of the streets, the storefronts, the passing wagons and horses.

  The weeks passed. Joanna grew bolder, venturing into the colonel’s study in daylight while he was away, glancing at the papers scattered across his desk while dusting or sweeping. Once she smuggled a map to Mr. Lewis, pressing herself into the darkened doorway and willing herself invisible while he copied it into a sketchbook. Her heart did not stop pounding until hours later when she returned it to its pigeonhole in the colonel’s desk, rolled and tied with brown string as if it had never been disturbed.

  Ruthie was walking confidently now, chattering and laughing as she toddled around the workyard, faithful Hannah chasing after. Joanna saw her beloved Titus in the curve of her smile and the shape of her head, and though she tried to find comfort in these signs of his earthly presence, sometimes they pained her so much that she had to look away. Sometimes it seemed as if her brief moments of happiness in Titus’s arms had never happened, that it had all been a dream, that he himself had been a creation of her own longing and loneliness. Ruthie was the only sign that he had ever been, that he had ever loved her.

  The colonel bought a new slave, a midwife and nurse from one of the barrier islands who understood every word she heard but spoke only Gullah. Mattie had sharp, observant eyes and her Gullah talk disguised a keen mind, and Joanna knew she couldn’t continue her daylight excursions into the colonel’s study until she knew whether this newcomer could be trusted to keep her mouth shut. The other slaves would look the other way and say nothing if Joanna ventured into places where she really had no business, but she could not be sure about Mattie.

  Thus only at night when she was certain she would not be observed did she move through the house like a ghost, haunting the study, moving aside books to see what loose pages they weighted down, unrolling documents, slipping letters from envelopes. Every detail she discovered, no matter how simple or seemingly unimportant, she passed along to Mr. Lewis, who never failed to reward her with a few small coins. But that was not why she did it, why she took the risk. Mr. Lincoln’s army had to win. A Union victory was Joanna’s best chance for freedom, for reuniting her scattered family, for finding little Frederick so far to the north. If any of the secrets she passed along to the mysterious man in the long brown coat hastened the end of the Confederacy, it was worth the risk to herself a hundred times over.

  In August Miss Evangeline labored for fourteen hours before giving birth to a robust, dark-haired little boy. The colonel had been away from home for two weeks, and as Miss Evangeline was seized by contractions, she raged at him for being so far away, for sending no kind word of comfort, for abandoning her to her travail. She gasped out curses as she paced the floorboards of her bedroom, Mattie the new midwife on one side, Joanna on the other. “My papa was always present when my mother gave birth,” Miss Evangeline gasped out between curses. “He never left the plantation during her last month. Never!” She added a few curses for Mr. Lincoln, whose selfish aggression she blamed for her husband’s absence.

  When Miss Evangeline could no longer stand, Mattie helped her into bed and checked between her legs, nodding and murmuring that all was well. Eventually pain and exhaustion rendered the young mistress incoherent, but then came one last push, one last groan of pain, and Mattie caught the baby. Joanna quickly helped her clean the child—the boy, a future master—and stepped back as Mattie swaddled him, declared him the best baby child in all of Charleston, and placed him in his exhausted mother’s arms. Miss Evangeline’s anger vanished as soon as she held her child, and the next day, when the colonel returned home in a storm of horse’s hooves and dust from the road, she offered not a word of rebuke but rather praised him as the best of all possible husbands for racing to her side despite the needs of the young Confederacy and the overwhelming call of duty.

  “If he been here a day ago, he’d know the missus’s shouts can drown out any call of duty,” George remarked to Joanna in an undertone. She smothered her laughter, wishing she were brave enough to tell the colonel all the terrible things his sweet wife had said about him in his absence. She had her own reasons for mirth, beyond George’s joke: Miss Evangeline had borne a son, not a daughter. Ruthie would not be compelled to be this child’s maid. Her future remained unwritten, and perhaps she would be able to write it herself, pen firmly within her own grasp.

  Mr. Lewis remained a mystery. As the summer waned, Joanna learned nothing of him, his past, or his people, but his questions and requests for certain documents eventually revealed his most urgent desire: He desperately wanted to close the Port of Charleston permanently and decisively, so that not even the smallest blockade runner could slip through. He queried her constantly about which ships were the fastest—Thomas Lockwood’s Kate was the answer that promptly came to her lips—and which were the most successful—again the Kate—and what they were smuggling in and out. “You can see for yourself what the market holds,” she retorted when he grew impatient. “You can see for yourself the cotton piled on the wharf. Everybody feeling the strain, most of all my people. Colored folk always got the smallest piece of the loaf. Now we get just the crust. Your blockade hurting those who want to help you.”

  Like me, Joanna thought, watching him pace back and forth across the narrow alley. She had put her trust in him, had come to rely upon his extra coins to buy food for her girls, which she smuggled into the attic and fed them under the covers after the others had fallen asleep. Only George knew—he was alert to any movement she made in bed at night, as if ever hopeful that she might suddenly change her mind and lie down beside him—but he said nothing. He never even asked how she came by the food or asked her to share.

  He wasn’t Titus, but he was a good man.

  Mr. Lewis stopped pacing, folded his arms, and regarded her sternly. “Everyone’s feeling the strain, and yet the forts never seem to run out of arms, and yet the Charleston aristocracy feasts and dances and celebrates without a care in the world instead of practicing thrift and preparing for a long siege.”

  It was true. The wealthy buckra threw lavish parties where officers and ladies mingled until dawn, sometimes coming in boats from the barrier islands held within the blockade. Sometimes they stayed too late and the tide went out, leaving their boats stuck in the mud. Miss Evangeline teased her becalmed friends that they conveniently forgot the tides whenever they especially enjoyed a soldier’s company and wanted an excuse to remain overnight in the city. But there was a frenzied quality to their celebrations, as if they knew their merriment couldn’t last. “Them buckra never had to ration nothing,” Joanna said. “They don’t know how. Or they don’t think they got to. They all say the war be over before Christmas.”

  Mr. Lewis snorted. “Your rebel officers don’t believe such nonsense.”

  That was also true; Joanna had read the correspondence herself, the exhortations that they must prepare themselves for a long fight, that a change of command was coming. “They ain’t my officers,” she retorted. “I’ve thrown my lot in with you. You lose, I lose.”

  Her vehemence startled him. “Of course. I misspoke. Forgive me.”

  Joanna did not know what to say. No white man had ever asked for her forgiveness. Unable to speak, she waved a hand and shook her head to tell him it didn’t matter. She needed this strange, unpredictable, unknowable man. She trusted him to rescue her and her girls from the auction block, and yet she had no idea if he was worthy of that trust. If she did get caught with her fingers on the seal of one of General Beauregard’s directives, Mr. Lewis might shrug, turn his back as she climbed onto the auction block at the slave market, and walk away. If she could no lo
nger spy for him, she was of no use to him. Why rescue her when she could no longer serve his cause?

  “You remember your promise, don’t you?” she heard herself say. “What you got to do for me if my family gonna get split up?”

  He regarded her steadily. “I remember every word, and I will stand by that promise until my dying breath.”

  She held his look with equal steadiness, but she could not read him. He spoke pretty words, but he was a practiced liar. The security he offered her might have no more substance than the air between them.

  But she had no choice but to trust him.

  October came. Young Master Thomas Harper grew round and robust, dressed in gowns of the the softest Sea Island cotton, his tiny pink mouth sucking greedily at Mattie’s dark breast. Ruthie hung back and stared at him, fingers in her mouth, unsure what to make of this strange new creature who had thrown the household into such upheaval, whose arrival had heralded so much celebration. A week after his birth, Miss Evangeline squeezed into her most accommodating dress from before her pregnancy and threw the exact sort of party Mr. Lewis had found so inexplicable. The colonel was obliged to sell some precious family silver to pay for it all, but he insisted upon only the best for his son and heir. Joanna thought of Ruthie’s welcome to the world—a coarse blanket, small gifts of food from Tavia’s and Titus’s friends, sorrowful glances from the other women in the quarter who knew the bleak fate that awaited the girl. But Joanna turned her thoughts from bitterness and grimly went about her work, tending to Miss Evangeline by day, collecting priceless information for Mr. Lewis by night.

  War abruptly returned to Harper Hall in the form of a congratulatory letter bringing new orders from General Beauregard. Colonel Harper had been reassigned to Fort Walker on the tip of Hilton Head Island, about fifty miles from Charleston, to help with the defense of Port Royal Sound. Although he would have preferred to have been placed in command of one of the many South Carolina regiments that had been sent north to battle Union forces in Virginia, he was pleased to accept.

  Within a day he was gone, and he might as well have been on the other side of the world as far as his wife was concerned. Miss Evangeline sat listlessly in her parlor as if all the air and sunlight had been sucked out of the room. Gone was the luxury of seeing her husband every day, or even every other day, a luxury she had taken for granted and criticized as insufficient. Now she was as lonely and bereft as any other soldier’s wife, although one with a fine home, a beautiful new baby, and servants to take care of her every need.

  When the colonel’s lengthy deployment began, Aunt Lucretia spent two weeks at Harper Hall to distract Miss Evangeline and keep her loneliness at bay. Aunt Lucretia’s suspicious gaze darted everywhere, and Joanna never knew when she might turn a corner and find the woman eavesdropping on the slaves to be sure they weren’t shirking their duties. Worse yet, she was an inconsistent and light sleeper; twice when Joanna sneaked into the house to riffle through the colonel’s desk, she discovered Aunt Lucretia, first sighing and staring out the front window, fanning herself with a book, and then in the kitchen opening cupboards in search of a bite to eat. On both occasions Joanna managed to steal back outside to the slaves’ dormitory without drawing the older woman’s attention, but she decided with great misgivings to curtail her work for Mr. Lewis until the interloper left.

  Eventually Aunt Lucretia departed, but although Joanna was once again free to examine every document on the colonel’s desk, she found little new information to offer Mr. Lewis. There were no more officers’ meetings in the study, no more messengers coming and going, and few letters from Fort Walker. Even those carried little of military significance; the colonel wrote as a husband would speak to a beloved wife, lavish in his praise for her beauty and goodness, guarded in his description of his work lest the letters fall into enemy hands. But just in case the smallest, least significant detail might aid Mr. Lincoln’s soldiers and sailors, Joanna memorized the letters and recited them to Mr. Lewis. Sometimes a word or phrase would evoke a glimmer in his eye, and Joanna knew she had offered something useful. “What you do with all this I tell you?” she was compelled to ask him once, when he smiled grimly at a somewhat amusing story the colonel had shared about his men’s search for oysters.

  “I calculate their positions, their troop strength, their will to fight,” he replied. “They’re searching for oysters, therefore they must be hungry, though I never met a soldier who wasn’t half-starved most of the time. They snuck off picket duty to do it, which shows that dissatisfaction is high and discipline lax. Port Royal might be the place to strike.”

  Joanna stared at him in disbelief. Mr. Lewis had never shared so much of his intentions with her, nor had she ever imagined that the colonel’s warm, affectionate letters could become the very weapon that would destroy him. And she had placed that weapon in Mr. Lewis’s hands.

  Mr. Lewis studied her. “You don’t regret divulging your master’s secrets, do you?”

  She shook her head.

  “Perhaps you regret only what I intend to do with them.”

  “No,” she quickly replied. It was war, and Colonel Harper fought for those who wanted to keep her and those she loved forever enslaved. He had made his choice and Joanna had made hers. She would not regret it, nor would she cease until the narrow stream of information trickling into Harper Hall dried up entirely. Her freedom, her children’s safety, her very life depended upon it and demanded that she press on.

  Mr. Lewis’s confirmation that her efforts were not in vain should have been enough to encourage her, but it wasn’t. She needed more. She prayed for hope, for courage, for a sign that someday the war would end and her family would be reunited.

  And at last a sign came.

  On the first day of November, Marse Chester wrote to his daughter to tell of hard times on the plantation, her eldest brother’s increasing fascination with the military, and his own purchase of land further inland in case the family should have to evacuate Edisto Island. “Our bountiful harvest is next to worthless if I cannot sell it,” he wrote. “If the war does not end by springtime, I shall consider turning over more land to corn. Our stores are running low and I have little time for hunting. There are days when our table would be bare indeed if not for Titus’s skill as a hunter and fisherman.”

  Joanna’s heart soared, leaving her so faint and breathless that she had to sit down and compose herself before she could read on. Titus lived. He had survived the fever and was strong enough to hunt and fish. One day, she hoped, he would take the master’s hunting rifle and keep going, across streams and through forests, until he crossed over into Union territory and found freedom. They could use a man like him, strong and wise and a crack shot. He would fight for the Union his way, and she would fight hers.

  But of course that was only an ambitious, impossible dream. Titus would not abandon Tavia’s children, even though Pearl was old enough to look after her younger brother and sister. And even if Titus found a Union camp, they would put him to work digging ditches or pounding tent stakes. They would never let a colored man point a gun at a white man, even if that man were a rebel.

  Less than a week later, a massive fleet of Union warships, transports, and supply vessels sailed into Port Royal Sound and launched a ferocious attack on Fort Walker. Within hours the surviving Confederate defenders abandoned the ruined fort and fled inland, and later that night, the defenders of Fort Beauregard at Bay Point on Eddings Island to the north of the sound followed. When word of the defeat came, Miss Evangeline frantically tried to get some official account of her husband’s fate. Days later, when word finally came that he was safe and uninjured in a camp west of Charleston with his surviving men, the young mistress immediately decided to pack the wagon with supplies and join him. Joanna was content to let her, thinking that she and the girls might slip away in her absence, and she hid her eagerness behind a mask of dutiful obedience as she helped Miss Evangeline prepare for the journey. But Mattie spoiled everything. She wat
ched Abner load the wagon, shaking her head and muttering that the missus was in no fit condition to travel and shouldn’t leave young Master Thomas. Before Joanna could stop her, Mattie strode next door and brought back Mrs. Ames, who managed to stall Miss Evangeline long enough for Aunt Lucretia to come racing over to dissuade her. “You can’t become a camp follower,” said Aunt Lucretia, scandalized. “If Robert were injured and needed you to nurse him, that would be another matter altogether. As it is, you will only distract him. He can’t protect you and lead his men both.” Reluctantly, Miss Evangeline agreed, and Joanna could only fume silently over Mattie’s inopportune caution.

  The colonel’s survival and location were the only bits of information Joanna passed along to Mr. Lewis that week, but if he were disappointed, he did not show it. If anything, he seemed especially pleased to see her, which told Joanna that he—and the information she had given him—had played an important role in the success of the Port Royal mission.

  In the days to come, the talk of the streets swirled around a new commander assigned to defend Charleston now that the Union forces had established a foothold on Port Royal, a general named Robert E. Lee. Mr. Lewis urged Joanna to discover all she could of his intentions, but only one letter came from the colonel in all that time, and it said nothing of the new commander. “I don’t got nothing for you,” Joanna was forced to admit one Friday when they met in the alley. It was the second week in a row she had failed to find even the smallest detail that might help him. “Things ain’t the same as they was before the colonel go to Port Royal. Officers don’t come to Harper Hall no more and we don’t get much news.”

  Mr. Lewis said that he understood, and to Joanna’s disappointment, he said that he would not meet her weekly anymore, but if she acquired any information, she should signal him by placing the basket on the kitchen windowsill. She agreed, as she had little choice, but her heart was heavy. She had needed those clandestine meetings even more than the coins Mr. Lewis paid her. Somehow every secret she passed along had made her feel one week closer to freedom, and now that she was no longer useful to him, Mr. Lewis might not feel obliged to save her and her girls from the auction block.