Redfield Farm: A Novel of the Underground Railroad

by Judith Redline Coopey

  Redfield Farm

  A Novel of the Underground Railroad

  Judith Redline Coopey

  Chapter 1

  1903 . . .

  Jesse died today. Right here on Redfield Farm, where we grew up. I’m glad it was here and not someplace out west, where they didn’t know him and there was no one to grieve. Worse yet, no one who knew him when he was young and on fire. I’ll probably follow him in about two years. Always did. Born there. Grew up there. Grew old there. Two years behind Jesse.

  We’ll bury him in the Friends Graveyard at Spring Meadow. With Mama and Papa and Abby. He’ll be happy there with the rest of the Friends. And the silence. Jesse always did love the silence of Meeting. Said it moved him. Now he can have it forever.

  He sure kicked up enough dust around here when we were young. Kept us on edge for most of our youth with his hatred of slavery. Don’t get me wrong. I hated it, too. But Jesse’s hate didn’t just smolder under his hat. He acted on it, from the time he was a boy.

  . . . 1837

  The first I knew of it was back in 1837, when I was nine and Jesse eleven. Redfield Farm sat, as it does now, on a hill overlooking Dunning’s Creek in Bedford County. The hill slopes gently, giving a wide view of the creek as it curves to the north. The field was pasture then. Cows crowded under the shade of the few trees, swishing flies in the afternoon heat. Jesse and I trotted barefoot down the hill, he with a fishing pole, I with a pail for picking berries.

  “Ooooh, Jesse! There’s a snake!” I jumped as it slithered across the path.

  “Don’t step on it,” was all he said. That’s how Jesse was. Unconcerned. He was ahead of me, strutting along, pole in his right hand, worms in his pocket, straw hat on his head.

  I ran a few steps to catch up. It seemed I was always following a few steps behind Jesse. I spent my life there. “Why are you always so in a hurry?” I jumped to miss a cow pie.

  “Don’t get much time to fish.”

  That was true. Farming was a round-the-clock responsibility, not limited to adults. My brother was expected to put in a man’s work every day. This summer afternoon, when the hay was in and the corn was growing meant almost a vacation, with only the morning and evening chores to do. Jesse wasn’t one to miss an opportunity.

  It was then I saw her. Well, I can’t say I really saw her—just a glimpse. That’s all I needed to know it was Pru Hartley, sneaking around, watching. Always watching. I didn’t know why I disliked her so. Maybe it was how she looked. Unhealthy. Scrawny. Pale. Maybe it was that sneakiness I couldn’t abide, or the promise of trouble that trailed after her. Whatever it was, her presence never failed to raise the bile in me.

  “Jesse!” A loud whisper. He turned. I jerked my head toward the other bank and mouthed her name. Pru wouldn’t ever show herself if she thought she could get by unseen. Jesse nodded. We swung to the right, following the path along the creek.

  “You gonna fish here?” I wanted to know. The blackberry bushes were farther downstream, near the woodlot, but I didn’t like to get too far separated from Jesse in case there were snakes. I didn’t like snakes. Still don’t. Anyway I didn’t want to run into Pru by myself. She had an annoying way of waiting until you got busy with something and then appearing suddenly, like a ghost.

  “Not here,” Jesse replied. “Too much sun. Down in the woodlot, where it’s shady. Fish aren’t dumb. They find shade when it’s hot.”

  I hopped up, pail in hand. “Come on, then. I can see those juicy blackberries from here.” I skipped along the creek bank, and stopped to pick a few black-eyed Susans to decorate my apron pocket. I liked the way they dressed up my plain brown dress and apron. Papa would have said it was vain, but I thought, since flowers were God’s creation, He must like fancy, just a little bit.

  I was already in the blackberry patch at the edge of the woodlot, my first berries plinking noisily onto the bottom of the pail, when Jesse wandered past on the bank, looking for a place to drop his line. I lost track of him working to fill my pail, alert in case Pru tried to sneak up on me. When I did look up, Jesse was nowhere in sight. My pail was almost full, so I set it down near the path and started out to find him. Then, on second thought, I took the berries with me. No telling where Pru might be, but she’d steal your berries rather than pick her own. That was sure.

  Then I saw Jesse, crouched, hiding behind a fallen tree, his abandoned fishing pole propped on a ‘Y’ shaped branch. His annoyed hand swat gave me notice to be quiet. I stopped and looked around for what made him hide. Stepping off the path, I crept up close.

  “What is it?” I whispered

  He pointed to a bend in the creek, all shaded, where the branches of a maple tree nearly touched the water. At first I didn’t see anything. Then I made out a man’s legs standing in the stream, the rest of him hidden behind the leaves. The legs were clothed in torn, ragged breeches, but the exposed skin was unmistakably black. I inhaled sharply. I’d never seen a black man before. As we watched from behind the log, the legs moved cautiously out from the shelter of the maple branches until a tall, dark-skinned Negro, dressed in rags, stood, clearly visible, not twenty yards away.

  We watched in silence, wild eyed, our alert senses sharp. There were two of them—young, strong and full of caution. They moved along in the calf-deep water, looking around, making their way downstream, away from us, their backs glistening in the sun. We stayed hidden, barely breathing, for long minutes after they disappeared.

  “Do you think they’re runaways?” I whispered.

  “Of course they’re runaways.”

  “Where are they going?”

  “I don’t know. North. Away from slavery.” Jesse had a way about him, even then, like he knew everything.

  “Where north?”

  “Canada, probably. They don’t have slaves up there.”

  “We don’t have slaves here, either. Why don’t they stay here?” My eyes scanned the bushes on the other side of the creek. Pru was hiding out somewhere over there. I wondered if she’d seen the Negroes.

  Jesse was annoyed with my ignorance. “Too close to slave catchers. They might get caught.”

  “Slave catchers?”

  “People who hunt them down for a bounty.”

  “Bounty?” Now I was really beyond my ken.

  “Money. Their owners want them back, so they advertise and offer a reward. Slave catchers make a business of it.”

  Across the creek I caught a glimpse of Pru, her white-blond head giving her away even behind a bush. My attention came back to Jesse. “That’s mean. How are those two going to get to Canada without getting caught?”

  “People help them.”

  “Which people?”

  “People like us. Friends. Friends and others who think slavery is an abomination.”

  I was amazed at his command of big words. Abomination. I’d heard it before—at Meeting—but I had only a vague idea of what it meant. I wouldn’t be confident enough to use it. But Jesse would. He’d stand up in Meeting—all eleven years of him—and talk, lecture, harangue Friends into the right path. Shake his finger at ’em. Get red in the face with righteous indignation.

  We waited until the two Negroes were out of sight and hearing before we went back for Jesse’s fishing pole. He had a fish on his line. He unhooked it and dropped it into a net bag hanging from his back pocket.

  “Get your berries,” he directed. “Let’s go.”

  Eying Pru Hartley’s hiding place, I shouted, “Why don’t you come on out, Pru? We can see you over there!”

  Jesse shushed me. He didn’t want her to come out. Didn’t want to talk to
her. I didn’t either, but it vexed me, the way she thought she could fool us.

  I stepped along behind him, thoughtful on the walk home. It was still hot; the flies buzzed around our faces. Sweat trickled from under Jesse’s straw hat. My eyes darted to the bushes on the other side. I knew Pru was over there someplace. Watching. But this other thing was stronger on my mind.

  “Jesse, who helps them? Which Friends, I mean.”

  “Can’t say. Wouldn’t if I could,” he replied. “As few people as possible know. That way we don’t have to lie if anyone asks.”

  “I’ve never seen a Negro before.”

  “I have. In Bedford. Some free Negroes live there. And once, when I was there with Papa, I saw a slave catcher on his horse, leading a shackled Negro on foot. Made my blood boil, I can tell you.”

  “Oh.” I pictured the man, stumbling along behind the horse. “That’s cruel.”

  We came up to the back of the cabin, and Jesse took the fish around to Mother to cook for supper.

  “Oh, Jesse, thee is a fine provider,” she smiled. “And Ann, thee, too!” she said, taking the pail of berries.

  Jesse ran out, heading for the barn to find Papa. I took the berries to the spring to wash the dust off, all the while pondering the plight of slaves. A few minutes later I looked up to see Jesse on the back of Old Hand, one of the plow horses, behind our older brother, Ben. Looking important, Jesse barely acknowledged my wave as the two barefoot boys, legs spread wide over the horse’s middle, bumped out of the barnyard and up the road.

  I returned to the cabin, where sister Mary set two loaves of bread on the windowsill to cool and little brother Nathaniel played with a cat in the dooryard.

  “Mama?”

  “Yes, Ann.”

  “Why do people have slaves?”

  “To do their work for them, child. Why do you ask?”

  “Jesse and I saw two black men down by the creek. Jesse said they were runaway slaves.”

  Mother’s face showed her concern. “It’s a sad practice,” was all she said. “Go get the churn so you and Rachel can take turns working it to butter.”

  “Mama?”

  “Hmm?”

  Why’s Pru Hartley so nosy?”

  “Who knows, dear? Maybe she’s not nosy. Just curious. Poor child. Doesn’t have anything. Now get that churn.”

  I stepped obediently out the door to the springhouse and lugged the heavy churn for mother to fill with milk. Then we both wrestled the full churn out under the shade of a huge oak in the side yard, and I sat down on a bench to the hated job. It was long, boring, hard work. Even in the late afternoon the heat was oppressive, and the flies wouldn’t give me any peace. I counted the required thousand strokes and looked around for Rachel. Even then, at only seven years old, she was a dreamy, engaging child that I would have been tempted to call lazy were I not a properly brought up Quaker girl.

  “Rachel!” I called. “Your turn!”

  Rachel’s response, coming from over the brow of the hill above the cabin, sounded far away. “I’m here!”

  ‘You’re there and I’m here’, I thought. I continued the numbing work of churning, with only slim hope that Rachel would actually come and relieve me. Blonde and blue eyed, she held a special place in our father’s heart. Not that he didn’t love the rest of us. He did. But Rachel didn’t have to earn her love. It was her birthright for being beautiful.

  I churned on as the shadows lengthened, and Papa, passing me on his way in from the barn, reached down and patted my head. “Thee is our industrious one, Ann,” he said. “Thee was well made for a life of work.”

  I knew it was a compliment, but it didn’t feel like one. I wondered how it might feel to be Rachel—light hearted and happy all the time. Everybody’s favorite—pretty, smiling, full of charm and laughter, and oft excused for idleness. But I could have a worse lot in life. I could be Pru Hartley, wearing flour sack dresses and fighting with nine brothers and sisters for every scrap.

  I felt the butter coming, so I kept up a steady rhythm, though my arms and back ached. I stopped counting when it was clear Rachel wouldn’t relieve me. Slowly, slowly the butter came.

  “Mama! It’s butter!”

  Mary crossed the yard with a large wooden bowl and two paddles, and we poured off the whey into a pail for the pigs and cleaned out the churn, piling the butter in the bowl.

  “This will taste so good on my fresh bread,” Mary smiled. I dragged the churn back to the springhouse for washing while Mary carried the bowl of butter inside.

  By the time I was back, the table was set for supper, with two benches on either side. Papa was already seated at the head, and Mother was dishing out stew from the kettle over the fireplace.

  Jesse and Ben appeared in the doorway in time to scoop up three-year-old Nathaniel and five-year-old Elizabeth and set them on the end of each bench closest to Mama. The Amos Redfield family sat to eat, three boys on one bench and four girls on the other.

  We observed a silent grace, which was way too long, by my way of thinking. I kept looking up to see if Papa had raised his head yet. He finally did, cut off a chunk of bread and slathered it with butter. He took the first bite, the signal that it was all right to eat. We dove in, to the clinking of spoons on pewter plates.

  Jesse was bursting to tell his news. He squirmed in his seat, watching Papa for a sign that it was all right to speak. Amos nodded to him.

  “There’s trouble, Pa,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well you know those two Negroes me and Ann saw this afternoon? The ones I told you about?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, me and Ben rode over to Uncle Sammy Grainger’s to see if we could hook them up, like you said.”

  “What’s hook them up?” I asked.

  “Hush now, girl. Let them talk,” Mother admonished.

  “And . . .?” Amos hurried Jesse along.

  “And when Uncle Sammy and us got to the creek, we looked high and low and couldn’t find them. So we started back, and then we saw Zeke Barnes sittin’ on the fence by the Alum Bank School. He said he was guardin’ two Negroes locked in the school for Charlie Marsh and Rad Hartley.”

  “Locked in the school?”

  “Yes, sir. Seems Charlie and Rad come upon those two Negroes right after me and Ann saw them and told them they’d hide them in the school until it was safe. Then they lit out to Bedford to look for a slave catcher they saw there yesterday. He was offerin’ a reward for two slaves escaped from North Carolina.” Jesse was breathless with telling the story. Then Ben took it up.

  “While we were standin’ there talkin’ to Zeke, along come Rad and Charlie with the slave catcher. He got chains out of his saddle bags and had the two of them chained up in no time. They tried to fight him off, but Zeke and Rad and Charlie helped him. He gave Rad and Charlie a twenty dollar gold piece each! They gave Zeke a dollar for guardin’ them!”

  “Uncle Sammy was furious,” Jesse added. “He didn’t say anything, but you know how he looks when he’s mad. Like a cock rooster, red faced and raised hackles!”

  I listened in silence, my mind racing. So that’s what Pru Hartley was doing down by the creek! She’d seen those Negroes, same as us. She’d gone and told her no account daddy about them, and now look what had happened!

  Papa listened to the boys’ account, expressionless. Once or twice his eyes met Mama’s and looked away. He, too, was full of anger—anger that would come out. This week, next week, a month from now, he would stand up in Meeting and hold forth about the evil curse that was slavery.

  But Rad Hartley and Charlie Marsh wouldn’t be there to hear it. They weren’t Friends—at least not anymore. Rad had been read out of meeting for his drinking, and Mama said the rest of the family had fallen away. I pictured the Hartleys, all twelve of them—all tow headed—standing on an overhang above the creek, with the water eating away underneath them, falling away. Still, Friends would be exhorted to have nothing to do with Rad or
Charlie. Not to hire them or buy anything from them or loan them anything. There would be a price to pay for their treachery.

  Jesse’s face was red with anger as he and Ben related the picture of the slave trader riding off toward the south with the two black men in tow, heads bowed, stumbling along, hands shackled behind their backs, metal collars linked by chains about their necks.

  I could see it as sure as if I’d been there. My heart quickened. I knew even then that all human beings should be treated with respect, even the likes of Zeke and Rad and Charlie. Even them—and Pru. Hard though it might be.

  That was the start of it. The first time I ever heard tell of black slaves running away from their masters and white people helping them do it. Little did I know where the knowledge, and my brother Jesse, would take me.

  Chapter 2

  1847

  Pru Hartley wasn’t through with me. Not by a long shot. The Hartley clan lived down over the hill on the other side of the creek. You couldn’t see their tumbledown cabin from Redfield Farm, but it was there. The evidence was all around us—a chicken missing from the coop, a sickle left lying around disappeared—Papa said they’d steal anything they could carry. There was plain meanness in that bunch, and, for me especially, Pru. She knew how uncomfortable she made me and relished it.

  Mama died in childbirth with her eighth baby when I was twelve, leaving Papa with seven children to finish raising. The baby, a boy, died, too. Mary was sixteen, so she had most of the work, but I did almost as much. Ben and Jesse helped with the farm, and Mary and I cooked, cleaned and looked after the younger ones, Betsy and Nathaniel, without a lot of help from Rachel, who at ten, had a long way to go toward growing up.