The Lost Quilter

by Jennifer Chiaverini

  “Slow down.”

  Joanna had never heard the voice before. She glanced at Adam, but he had turned in his seat and was staring into the back of the cart. She followed his line of sight but glimpsed only her girls, Ruthie in Hannah’s lap, sucking on one fist and clutching the front of Hannah’s dress with the other, Hannah studying the wagon and carriage ahead of them.

  Just then, Hannah’s lips parted and Joanna heard the unfamiliar voice a second time, pure and sweet. “Slow down.”

  All at once Joanna understood.

  “Right, Hannah,” she murmured, as if the Harpers might overhear. “Thank you, baby. You such a smart girl.”

  She gave the reins a gentle tug, and the mare obediently slowed her pace. The carriage pulled farther ahead, the wagon not close behind it. Amidst the cargo and slaves Joanna spotted her Birds in the Air quilt, holding her belongings as safely as it sheltered the secrets of the way to Elm Creek Farm. Once she had believed that those landmarks would be sealed in her memory forever, but so much had happened since she had been snatched back into slavery, so much grief and pain and upheaval, that she sometimes could not remember the route. Sometimes at night she needed to study the patterns worked in thread before the images floated to the surface of her memory, before she could remember the order the landmarks followed. Without the quilt, she could not be sure she would ever get back to Elm Creek Farm, to the Bergstroms, to Frederick.

  But Ruthie and Hannah were with her now, and Titus was out there somewhere, fighting for their freedom. He needed her even if he couldn’t admit it.

  Another few streets, another imperceptible slowing of the cart. Her heart tore painfully as she lost sight of the Birds in the Air quilt. She could urge the mare into a trot, call out to Sally to throw her the bundle—but of course that was unthinkable, impossible. She would only draw attention to their escape.

  The distance between the cart and the wagon increased. Another block. When a peddler’s wagon moved into the gap, Joanna slowed the cart and ducked her head in a show of allowing the white driver precedence.

  George glanced over his shoulder at her and smiled. Then he turned back around and urged his horses into a slightly quicker pace.

  Joanna held the mare to a walk as other carriages and wagons and men on horseback sped ahead of her and obscured her view of the Harpers’ carriage and wagon. “Joanna,” Adam said worriedly, “we fallin’ behind. We gonna get lost.”

  “Hush up, Adam,” said Hannah, low and urgent. “Mama know where we goin’.”

  Adam fell silent, and Joanna bit her lips together so that she would not cry. Hannah was speaking. Hannah had called her mama. It was surely a sign.

  When she could no longer spy the high top of the Harpers’ carriage, Joanna turned the cart down a side street and made her way south. No one cried out, no one pursued them.

  At the edge of the city, they arrived at a camp of Confederate soldiers. A sentry party standing guard at the foot of a bridge challenged them, but when Joanna produced the pass, they questioned her briefly before waving her along, their attention already drawn to another approaching wagon.

  “Where we goin’, Joanna?” asked Adam plaintively as the horse’s hooves clomped over the wooden bridge.

  Hilton Head, Joanna thought. Hilton Head and Titus. She knew only that it was south of Charleston along the coast, but she would put her trust in the Lord that he would guide her, perhaps sending sympathetic colored folk to tell her the way. Hadn’t he already given her a sign? Hadn’t he made the mute speak? But she couldn’t tell Adam her plans in case they were stopped and questioned again. “Don’t worry,” she said instead. “I’ll look after you.”

  They traveled all afternoon, Adam wary and full of questions, Ruthie sweet and curious, Hannah inexplicably calm and speaking only rarely. But at least she spoke.

  They were challenged only once more that day, by a party of four very young soldiers who seemed vexed to have been left behind to guard a little-used road when the excitement of the real battle lay only a dozen miles away. They studied Joanna’s pass, poked around the cargo for a while, and queried her about the location of West Grove, which was too new to have garnered any fame. Eventually they grew bored with her vague replies, and having found nothing threatening about her or a cart full of miscellaneous household items and skinny slave children, they let her go.

  They stopped for the night in a small clearing in the woods, just off the road. In a stroke of good fortune that Joanna recognized as another divine blessing, Sally had packed many of the kitchen supplies in the cart, including sacks of flour, a tin of oil, dried apples, cheese, bread, and a peck of beans. Joanna was afraid to build a fire and take the time to cook, so she unhitched the mare, fed the children apples, cheese, and bread, and made a bed of quilts for them beneath the cart while they devoured every crumb. Exhausted though she was, she stayed up all night watching over them and listening for sounds of pursuit. Occasionally she heard explosions in the distance and knew that somewhere nearby the war raged on. She feared that she might be leading the children straight into it, but she could think of nowhere else to go but to Hilton Head.

  She knew the Harpers would begin the search for her soon if they hadn’t already. She had almost no head start to speak of and very little time. She would never make it to the North, not even with a horse, a cart, and a pass whose value diminished with time and distance from Charleston.

  Her only hope was to reach a place where Northern freedom had come to South Carolina.

  All through the next day they traveled southeast, slowly and cautiously, pulling off the road into the thick underbrush at the sound of other travelers. Joanna alone stepped out from hiding twice to speak with colored folk—once to a slave traveling on an errand for his master, another time to a free colored family evacuating in advance of the approaching army. Both told her that Hilton Head wasn’t a safe destination. “You want Port Royal,” the free colored man told her. “That’s where all the freed slaves from the barrier islands are going. That’s your best bet. Yankee soldiers and abolitionists setting up things right nicely for freed slaves, so I hear.”

  “Have you heard anything about a colored army?” Joanna asked him. “You know where they might be?”

  The man shook his head. “I heard something about that in late spring, but not much since. If there’s a colored army, I don’t know where you might find it.”

  But he had heard of it, which meant that Titus hadn’t been chasing some fool story. She would find the colored regiment, and there she would find her beloved.

  In midafternoon the clouds burst open and rain poured down in sheets. The children huddled in the cart beneath a canopy of her quilts, but the soft covers quickly soaked through and did little to keep the rain off. Before long the cart wheels slowed and churned through ruts in the muddy road. Joanna walked alongside to lighten the load and urge the mare forward, but it was a long, hard slog through ankle-deep mud, and they made little progress.

  Eventually she was forced to admit defeat. Although she was anxious to get as far away from the Harpers and Charleston as quickly as possible, she knew they could go no further until the cloudburst ended and the muddy roads dried.

  She found a rocky place more or less free of mud beneath a cluster of oaks a few yards off the road. After managing to coax the mare over to it, she unhitched the harness, picketed the mare near a patch of grass, and urged the children to take shelter beneath the cart. They obeyed without complaint, shivering and gobbling up the last of the bread and cheese as they sat cross-legged on the hard-packed earth. Exhausted, Joanna joined them, though the shelter would do her little good, soaked through as she was. Ruthie climbed onto her lap and clung to her so tightly that Joanna doubted she had the strength to pry her loose. Eventually the children slept, and Joanna, overcome with fatigue, felt herself drifting, fading.

  She woke to the sound of voices and rustling underbrush. The rain had stopped and night had fallen. The children were awake and alert, wa
tching her, waiting for her to tell them what to do. Adam began to speak, but Hannah slipped her hand over his mouth before he uttered a sound.

  “Wheel ruts,” a man called out. “Fresh. They go into the bushes.”

  Joanna’s heart pounded at the sound of branches being forced aside, heavy boots in mud. Please let them pass, she prayed. Please don’t let them see us. Torchlight flickered on the ground, and she knew all was lost.

  Four pairs of boots halted in front of the cart; rifles cocked.

  “You, under the cart,” another man said. “Come out from there with your hands up.”

  Shaking, biting her lips together to keep from sobbing, Joanna rocked onto her knees, kissed Ruthie, and passed her to Hannah. “You listen good,” she whispered. “You the oldest, so you got to take care of these little ones. You understand?”

  Wide-eyed, Hannah nodded.

  “Soon as I go, you take Adam and Ruthie and run fast as you can the other way through them bushes there. Get far away but go quiet. You hide yourself good until morning, then you get these children to Port Royal. Don’t trust nobody but other colored folk until you get there. Stay out of sight. When you get to Port Royal, find a nice Yankee lady and she’ll get someone to look after you.”

  “What about you?”

  “Time’s running out,” the man called. “Come out now or we’ll drag you out.”

  She could not let the men see the children; it was their only hope. “Do as I say,” she told Hannah, and waited for the girl’s answering nod. She touched each of the children’s faces briefly. Oh, Lord, protect them. The fear and confusion in their eyes—

  Joanna took a deep breath and extended her hands into the open. “Don’t shoot. I’m comin’ out.” With one last warning glance to Hannah, she crawled out from beneath the cart. She stood and instinctively straightened her skirts and headscarf. Then, though her heart was pounding so fiercely she was sure the men would hear her terror, she planted her feet and wordlessly faced the four soldiers, who slowly lowered their rifles.

  “Looks like we found ourselves some contraband,” one of the men said, his grin a flash of white behind a dirty red beard.

  “Evening, miss,” said another. Joanna recognized his voice as that of the man who had ordered them to come out from hiding. “I expect you’re a runaway.”

  Joanna thought of the crumpled pass, soiled and soaking wet in her pocket. If the ink had not smeared beyond legibility, he might accept it. He might believe her if she told him that she had become hopelessly lost in the rainstorm, that she was trying desperately to get back to her mistress. But if they believed her, they would send her off toward West Grove. They might even insist upon escorting her there in order to collect whatever reward they might have coming. Then what would become of the children? Miss Evangeline would order her beaten until she revealed where they had gone, and eventually the overseer might drag the truth out of her.

  Her only hope was to delay the soldiers long enough for the children to make their escape. And if she provoked these soldiers into killing her now, before they questioned her, before she was bound and gagged and pulled along behind a horse all the way to West Grove, before the Harpers could summon the overseer with his whip—so be it. The children would be free, and she would no longer be a slave.

  “Yes, suh,” she said defiantly. “I am a runaway. I’m on my way to the Yankees at Port Royal. I’m done with bein’ anyone’s slave. I am a woman. I don’t belong to no one but myself and the Lord.”

  “Is that so?” drawled the man with the red beard, but he fell silent at a sharp gesture from another soldier.

  Joanna was beyond caring what happened to her. She had to buy time for the children to flee. They would carry her hopes with them. They would keep breathing, long after slavery ended and all colored folk were free.

  “Yes, that’s so,” Joanna shot back. “Maybe today you can keep me from getting to freedom, but you can’t stop freedom from comin’ to me. The Union army be comin’ this way soon, and they got colored men fightin’ too. You can try but you can’t stop so many folks all fightin’ for their freedom. It’s coming because it’s got to come. You can be sure of that. And the only way you can stop me from runnin’ is to kill me right here and right now, because I ain’t goin’ to stop. Take me back and I just run again. I gonna run and run and run until I get my freedom. Long as I keep breathin’, I gonna run for my freedom.”

  She glared at the astonished men, breathless and defiant, listening for her children, hoping they had slipped away into the forest, that they had obeyed her, that somehow through some miracle she would see them again.

  Keep breathing, she told herself, her thoughts an echo of Titus’s voice. She wanted to, but she feared her next breath or the next or the one after that would be her last.

  She had held out as long as she could.

  “I don’t doubt for a moment that you’re determined to be free.” The soldier’s voice had lost its sharpness, and his eyes were kind. “But you can stop running now. I’m James Conner of the Sixth Connecticut Infantry. This is Union territory, and you’re a free woman.”

  Epilogue

  Seated at her father’s oak desk, Sylvia spread out the documents Summer Sullivan had sent from Chicago, printouts of old census records the young historian had found online through a genealogy website. Summer had found Josiah Chester in federal census records from 1850, 1860, and 1870, but had been unable to locate a slave census for Greenfields. Summer had also found many Chester families in South Carolina and Georgia, but it was impossible to determine which, if any, were the relatives to whom Josiah Chester had sold Joanna. Indeed, as Summer had pointed out in her accompanying letter, those relations might have had a different surname, in which case searching for other Chester families would be a wasted effort.

  “I’m not going to give up,” Summer had written. “I’ll ask some of my professors to recommend other resources. If I uncover anything new, I’ll let you know.”

  But Summer was busy with her graduate studies, and Sylvia knew she didn’t have much time to devote to Sylvia’s request. She had already found so much: the census records, the map of Greenfields, a few slim leads that might lead to answers. Sylvia resolved to be patient. Summer never gave up on an intriguing puzzle once it captured her interest, and Sylvia knew she would explore every possibility until she either found the answer or determined that the historical record could not provide it.

  Sylvia had waited years for the fresh leads the bundle of letters in the antique desk had unexpectedly discovered. She could wait a little while longer.

  She was arranging Summer’s documents into a neat pile, preparing to file them, when Sarah entered the office carrying a slender, sturdy cardboard envelope that was so flat it appeared to be empty. “Grace Daniels overnighted this to you,” said Sarah, “but I’m not convinced there’s anything inside.”

  Sylvia took the envelope, which was so light that she was inclined to believe it was indeed empty. “Goodness. I can’t imagine what Grace would need to send me so urgently that she would go to this expense. Camp registrations aren’t due for months.”

  Sylvia peeled back the tab and withdrew a colorful brochure for a quilt exhibit. Grace was a museum curator as well as a quilt artist, and it wasn’t unusual for her to let Sylvia know about new, intriguing shows, especially if she or one of her friends were directing them. But the postal service or email had always served Grace perfectly well before.

  “The Quilts of North Freedom,” Sarah read over Sylvia’s shoulder. “I think I’ve heard about them. In Quilter’s Newsletter Magazine, maybe?”

  They sounded familiar to Sylvia as well. She studied the photographs, admiring a series of scrap quilts that seemed improvisational rather than carefully planned, with bold colors and striking arrangements of squares, bars, and triangles. Then she turned to the front of the brochure and read the story of the quiltmakers, members of an enduring quilting circle from the small rural town of North Freedom, South Car
olina.

  The quilting circle, the Freedom Quilters, had come into being shortly after the end of the Civil War on an isolated barrier island that had once been the site of a prosperous cotton plantation. The founder of the group, Joanna North, was a former slave who had worked for the Union army as a laundress, nurse, and literacy teacher from 1862 through the end of the war. Afterward she accepted a government grant of forty acres of land on Edisto Island, where she raised five children and helped create a thriving community of former slaves. After the boll weevil destroyed the Sea Island cotton industry, Joanna North trained her daughters and other neighbor women as seamstresses and laundresses so that they could become self-supporting. The Freedom Quilters evolved from her early lessons, as the women continued to meet for quilting, literacy classes, prayer, and friendship even after they had finished their training. As the years passed, the women brought their daughters into the circle, and then their granddaughters, and on and on up to contemporary times. Since until recently the community had been relatively isolated, their quilting evolved in a unique style, departing dramatically from popular quilting trends elsewhere in the country. Perhaps most significantly, every quilt completed by a Freedom Quilter since the founding of their circle contained one important, identifying feature whose symbolism had been lost to memory: a pattern of four triangles, one large and three small.