The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  They rounded a corner, and suddenly the Ames’s house stood before them, whole and sound but for a blackened north wall. Just beyond it was Harper Hall, entirely undamaged but for a section of the wrought iron barricade that had been knocked into the street by a fallen palmetto tree, which even now smoldered on the front lawn.

  It was not until they passed through the open gate that they saw any sign of life within the house. Minnie and Mattie burst through the front door as they approached, and a moment later, Abner came running from the stable. Mattie didn’t wait for Joanna to dismount before taking an unhappy young Master Thomas from her and putting him to the breast. Without waiting for Miss Evangeline’s permission, Joanna slid down from the horse and ran around back to the kitchen building.

  It seemed undamaged, but suddenly George was there, and he put out an arm to stop her. “You all right,” he exclaimed. “God bless you, girl, I thought you got burned up.”

  Joanna clung to him. “Ruthie? Hannah?”

  “They in the kitchen with Sally. Don’t you worry none. Not a hair on their heads is harmed. Didn’t I tell you I look after them? Have a little faith, girl.”

  In all the confusion, Joanna had not heard his answering shout from the rooftop, nor had she known for certain if George had heard her plea. “Thank you,” she choked out, and embraced him quickly before breaking into a run for the kitchen.

  She found the two girls sitting on the floor, Hannah soaking bread in milk for Ruthie to eat. Joanna fell to her knees and embraced them. “Thank the Lord. Thank the Lord you safe and sound.”

  “Mama,” Ruthie said as she patted Joanna’s cheeks. “Mama.”

  “Mama’s back,” Joanna confirmed, and as she held the girls close, she made a silent promise that she would never leave them again.

  In the days that followed, Joanna learned that two blocks of Meeting Street had burned in the fire that had miraculously spared Harper Hall. In a broad swath from northeast to southwest across the peninsula, almost six hundred homes had been consumed and many businesses lost. Rumors abounded, but most reports concurred that the blaze had begun in a shed near the Russell machine shop and had rapidly spread to Cameron’s foundry, where an enormous quantity of Confederate arms had been destroyed. Some folks said Yankee spies had set the fire, while others blamed rebellious slaves, and still others came up with even more outlandish explanations. As Gideon had predicted, Yankee newspapers proclaimed that the hand of God was visible in the destruction, and the fire was the manifestation of His divine judgment upon the Cradle of Secession. Joanna was unable to read the stories herself, for Miss Evangeline tore up and burned the pages of the Charleston paper that reported on their Northern counterparts’ glee, but Miss Evangeline indignantly repeated the stories so often to her friends that Joanna soon knew every phrase by heart.

  A week later Joanna contrived an excuse to venture down Market Street and through the remains of the alley where she had often passed information to Mr. Lewis, but although she had hoped he would appear, she did not expect him to, nor did he. She considered leaving the basket in the kitchen window to signal to him, but she doubted he would approve of her summoning him merely to discover whether he had survived the fire. She had no new secrets to offer, and therefore no good reason to trouble him. So instead she waited and wondered and eventually concluded that he must have left the city either on foot or up in smoke and she could not count on him to rescue her or her girls from the auction block.

  They were on their own—and, Joanna admitted to herself, they probably had been all the while.

  Chapter Seven

  1862

  Charleston, South Carolina

  After the disastrous fire, other Confederate states sent food and clothing to Charleston, and those residents who had not lost their homes took in friends and families whose homes had burned. Colonel Harper’s relations showed up unexpectedly the day before Christmas, the letter they had sent having gone astray in the confusion. The family led the way in the carriage, a wagon loaded with most of their worldly possessions following close behind. Joanna realized before Miss Evangeline did that they intended to stay indefinitely. Most planters had evacuated James Island after Port Royal fell, and now that the island had been almost entirely given over to military defenses, old Marse Harper couldn’t hold out any longer.

  Joanna’s heart hardened when Mrs. Givens, the colonel’s widowed sister, stepped from the carriage. She resisted the urge to run into the house and warn Hannah to hide, knowing Hannah had surely seen her former mistress arrive, knowing hiding would do little good if a mistress took it into her head to vent her frustration and rage on a slave child. Fixing her practiced, impassive expression in place, she carried the Harpers’ belongings inside, followed Miss Evangeline’s instructions for sleeping arrangements, and helped Minnie with fresh linens and unpacking. Hannah kept out of sight for most of the day, and only occasionally did Joanna glimpse her minding Ruthie in the workyard or in the laundry. As the days passed, Hannah grew bolder and returned to her usual routine, and Mrs. Givens never gave her more than a passing glance. As far as Joanna could tell, the colonel’s sister had either completely forgotten what she had done to the child, or she remembered but suffered not the slightest pangs of conscience. Joanna could not decide which was the greater outrage.

  Christmas came and went; the New Year began. The novelty of entertaining houseguests faded, and Miss Evangeline grew snappish at every implied or imagined criticism from her sister-in-law. “I’m spending a fortune to keep her in cordials and cakes,” she complained as Joanna dressed her hair one morning, referring to Mrs. Givens’s favorite delicacies. “And what are my husband’s people contributing to the household save their delightful companionship and insightful critiques of my housekeeping? If they had brought some cotton bales with them instead of burning everything in the gin house, they might have been able to sell them and live off the profits.”

  “If Marse Harper could sell it,” said Joanna, twining a golden lock around the curling iron. “If he get it past the blockade.”

  “Where there’s a will, there’s a way. England wants our cotton. Not badly enough to go to war with the Yankees for it, apparently, and that’s a lesson learned too late, but they still want it and they’ll pay for it. But my father-in-law let that opportunity go up in smoke, and now my husband’s kin are spending my son’s inheritance as if there’s no tomorrow.”

  Old Marse Harper wasn’t the only one to burn his cotton rather than allow it to fall into Yankee hands, nor was Mrs. Givens the only South Carolinian who lived in defiance of the hardships of war. She accepted every appropriate social invitation and begged Miss Evangeline to throw parties, and the young mistress, eager for diversions, usually assented. But what Miss Evangeline wanted most was news from her husband and from her relocated family, and when too much time passed between letters, she grew peevish and fretful. What troubled her most, she confided to Joanna, was her pervasive feeling of utter uselessness. Her husband could take up arms and lead his men on the field of battle, but what could women do? Some became nurses, others took jobs preparing armaments, a privileged few with the right connections acquired desirable positions in the government, but a young woman with a baby in arms could do little for the Confederacy besides supporting her own husband, encouraging other able-bodied men to enlist, and raising funds.

  As the winter passed, Miss Evangeline became ever more preoccupied with contributing to the Confederate cause. She visited wounded soldiers recovering in hospitals, read to them or wrote in her crisp, elegant, practiced script while they dictated letters to mothers and sweethearts far away. She joined the Charleston Soldiers Relief Association and helped organize charity concerts and association fairs, with the proceeds going to buy provisions for the soldiers at the front—everything from bandages to shaving kits to underwear. If raising as much money as possible was the goal, Joanna thought, the association fairs were impractical. As far as Joanna could tell, it was mostly the association
members themselves who browsed the tables trimmed with bunting and flowers, and association members who bought handicrafts and cooked delicacies from one another. Joanna figured they could have saved themselves a lot of work and made a far greater profit if the ladies had merely donated the money they spent to make their cooked briskets and embroidered table runners. But the organization and management of the fairs kept the buckra ladies busy, and maybe that was just as important to them.

  As impractical as the association fairs seemed to her, they weren’t as odd as another favorite benefit event, the tableau vivant. The buckra ladies would dress up in costume and pose on a stage, not dancing or singing or playacting but holding perfectly still, recreating a famous scene from history, literature, or art while music played. Sometimes they would stage an elaborate scene; more often they would enact several different tableaus, lowering the curtain while the ladies rapidly changed costumes and assumed other poses. Naturally Joanna sewed most of the costumes, not only Miss Evangeline’s but often her friends’ as well. Sometimes the ladies she fitted offered her a few coins as a token of their gratitude, which they probably assumed she would turn over to her mistress. Instead she tied them up in her oldest, most threadbare headscarf with the rest of her carefully saved money and hid them beneath her bed with her tin cornboiler and other treasures.

  Fancy ladies’ costumes were not the only sewing Joanna contributed—grudgingly, reluctantly, delaying as much as she dared—to the Confederate cause. On several occasions Miss Evangeline’s friends gathered at Harper Hall to turn bolts of cloth into uniforms and flannel shirts and drawers for Confederate soldiers. While they sat in the parlor chatting and cutting out shirtsleeves and measuring palmetto buttons for buttonholes, their slaves worked outside on the coarse sewing, fashioning yards and yards of canvas into tents. Some of the slaves had never sewn before, and Joanna found herself giving impromptu lessons, just as she had done with Hannah, who had progressed so well that Miss Evangeline had assigned her to help the more experienced slaves with simple tasks. Hannah seemed proud to have been trusted with the sewing instead of merely minding Ruthie, and she took her place in the sewing circle, stitching diligently while Ruthie toddled about from one new face or comfortable lap to another. Joanna couldn’t help feeling an occasional stab of guilt whenever Ruthie didn’t favor her own mother over someone else with a quicker smile or a more soothing voice or a treat such as a carrot or slice of dried apple in her dress pocket. Joanna had not wanted to give Ruthie to the wet nurse so she could work in the big house at Oak Grove; she had not wanted to leave Ruthie behind when she was sent to Charleston as Miss Evangeline’s wedding gift; she would much rather tend her own child than pass her off to Hannah and tend to Miss Evangeline, who was more of a spoiled baby than Ruthie could ever be. And yet it seemed as if Ruthie, though surely too young for such judgments, wanted to punish her mother for every moment of absence, every measure of protection denied, although none of her neglect had been Joanna’s choice.

  “You should be in the house doing fine sewing,” said Rebecca, another slave seamstress who had long admired Joanna’s deft hand with the needle. “You sew a better seam and fit a better coat than any of them buckra ladies.”

  “I’d rather be outside with you,” replied Joanna. “I don’t want to sew no Confederate uniform unless I get to sew a target on the front, right here.” She made a circular motion in front of her chest, and the other slaves muffled laughter. She’d rather not make tents either, but since she had no choice, she used the biggest, loosest stitches she dared, hoping the wind would drive the rain through the seams, soaking the inhabitants so that they took a chill and became too weak to fight.

  From sewing and benefit performances and fairs of dubious value, Miss Evangeline turned her attention to a more ambitious project—raising enough money to purchase a gunboat to protect Charleston Harbor. With her friend Mrs. Hoskins, a Meeting Street neighbor and wife of a colonel with the Seventh South Carolina Infantry regiment, she founded the Charleston Gunboat Society, and together the two military wives went door-to-door recruiting members and soliciting donations. There were more tableaux vivants, more musical performances on the piazza, more benefit dramas where ladies who only a few years before would never have dreamed of doing anything so unladylike as performing in public took to the stage and recited heartfelt historical speeches or Shakespearean soliloquies. Joanna knew from the colonel’s rare letters that he did not entirely approve of his wife’s new public role, and she guessed from subsequent letters that Miss Evangeline had told him, not altogether truthfully, that she remained behind the scenes organizing the bolder ladies and rarely took to the stage herself. If he could see her glowing and basking in the audience’s admiration as she pretended to be Ophelia or Cordelia or Juliet, he would marvel at the transformation war and necessity had worked upon his wife. But that was because he had never truly known the real Miss Evangeline the way the slaves of Oak Grove knew her. The way Joanna saw it, Miss Evangeline had been an actress all her life.

  Spring came, and one morning in April Joanna realized that Frederick’s birthday was only a month away. He would be, if he yet lived, three years old, still much too young to be sent to the fields to pick hornworms off the tobacco. She caught herself, rebuked herself for such thinking. Her boy was in Canada, safe and free, hundreds of miles from Greenfields, his cruel white father, and the tobacco fields. He was safe and sound, and someday Gerda Bergstrom would tell her where.

  Keep breathing, she told him silently, squeezing her eyes shut against tears. Keep breathing, stay alive, stay safe, and someday I will find you.

  For weeks the older Marse Chester didn’t come to Charleston, never mentioned Titus in his letters, never said anything that might prompt Joanna to put the basket in the window in the slim hope that Mr. Lewis might still be around. Then one day a letter came from Mrs. Chester, a frantic lament that Miss Evangeline’s brother Elliot had run off to join the army.

  Joanna learned what had happened as Miss Evangeline did, from the hasty flurry of letters that followed, from explanations wrung out of reluctant, unfortunate messengers. “He was supposed to be safely out of the way at school,” Joanna overheard the mistress tell Mrs. Givens and her mother-in-law as she paced the front foyer, awaiting an overdue messenger from her father. “He’s only fifteen. Have we come to such desperate ends that we must send children to fight the Yankees?”

  The school that was supposed to have kept young Elliot Chester out of the military in fact helped him find his way to it. Marse Chester, who had strongly advocated secession but did not want to sacrifice his own offspring to the subsequent war, had enrolled Elliot at a private boarding school in Walterboro about fifty miles west of Charleston, twenty-five from the marse’s new plantation, West Grove. Marse Chester thought that if his son’s mind were turned to Greek and Latin and mathematics, he would have no room for thoughts of uniforms or parades or rifles. He had chosen the Vogler Academy because of its school-master, a learned doctor from Germany and reputed pacifist who had opened his school in order to avoid the draft. The physician would not tolerate romantic notions of soldiering in his pupils, and he would surely curb Elliot’s enthusiasm with a dose of stark reality and a course of vigorous study.

  All was well until Port Royal fell, but after that, either newly discovered patriotism, concern for the soldiers wounded in battle, or a combination of the two compelled Dr. Vogler to close his school and enlist as an army surgeon. His pupils were understandably delighted; few boys their age preferred a dry and dusty classroom to the battlefields upon which the brave won honor and glory. If Dr. Vogler had notified his former students’ parents that his school had closed, the letters must have gone astray, for only a handful of the boys returned home. Most followed their headmaster’s example and enlisted in whatever regiment would have them.

  When Marse Chester discovered that his son was training with the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery, he raced to Elliot’s commanding officer, explained that his
son was only fifteen, and demanded his immediate discharge. Apparently Major Powell was unimpressed by the planter’s bluster, for he summoned Elliot and asked if he wanted to be relieved of his duties. Elliot flatly refused, and although Marse Chester threatened to bring charges against Major Powell for allowing Elliot’s illegal enlistment, the major remained unmoved, pointing out that if he let Elliot go, the boy would in all likelihood seize the first opportunity to run away from home and join up with another militia. Major Powell needed men, and if Elliot was going to serve anyway, he might as well serve with the Beaufort Volunteer Artillery.

  Marse Chester, accustomed to having his orders obeyed, did not give up so easily. The letters that flew back and forth between West Grove and Harper Hall were matched by others attempting to reach Colonel Harper in the field. It was days before the colonel learned of his brother-in-law’s enlistment, and days more before he could get leave to call on Powell’s commanding general, Robert E. Lee. General Lee ordered Elliot’s discharge on the grounds that he was underage, giving Powell no choice but to release him. Elliot was furious, and only Colonel Harper’s promise that he could enroll at the South Carolina Military Academy appeased him.

  To escape Marse Chester’s fury, Elliot convinced Colonel Harper to bring him to Harper Hall instead of escorting him to West Grove until a place could be found for him at the military college. He had grown several inches since Joanna had last seen him at Oak Grove, filled out, acquired a deeper voice, but he was still a boy, chagrined that he had been found out but incapable of concealing his delight that his punishment—if it could be called a punishment—was to train as a military cadet.