The Lost Quilter Page 10

  “Leah’s my mama.” The girl peered up at her curiously. “I’m Lizzie. You talk funny. What happen to your face?”

  “My old marse burn me with the flatiron. That’s why I run away.”

  The girl’s eyes widened. “They chop off your foot when they catch you?”

  Joanna lifted her skirt enough to show her feet, scarred but whole. “No. They just beat me and send me here.”

  “No one ever run away from Oak Grove,” Lizzie said. “Anyone try, and all the slaves get beat and don’t have no ration drawing until the runaway come back.”

  “So for the loss of one slave Marse Chester beat the rest and let them starve to death?”

  “He don’t beat the babies,” Lizzie amended. “Just everyone old enough to work. That’s why when anyone even think about running off, the others talk him out of it or tell Aaron. He the driver. He almost as yellow as you.” She eyed Joanna’s bundle with interest. “What you got there?”

  “Just an old dress I need to spread out to dry.”

  “Hang it on a bush by the creek,” the girl advised, pivoting around one bare foot in the doorway. “Put it out of sight so no one take it. I got to go watch the babies. Dinner coming soon.” And with that she darted off.

  Alone, Joanna hesitated before concealing her tin cornboiler under a corner of the nearest quilt and hurrying back to the creek, where she draped her dress over a low branch of a shady tree. The creek was wide there and rocky, the current too swift to cross on foot. Joanna wondered how deep it ran, and if a woman on horseback could cross to the other side safely. She shook her head and headed back to the slave quarter. Better she should learn to swim than dream of a swift horse to carry her off. Hans Bergstrom had promised her a fine mare and a carriage; Gerda would have provided the false papers that would ensure her and Frederick safe passage to Canada. But she had no allies here.

  From a distance, she heard the shrieks of children, and she instinctively quickened her pace. Following the shouts, she found the children gathering in the widest row between the cabins, pushing and shoving to reach two colored women in aprons and headscarves carrying a large black kettle. Through the push of thin limbs and dark bodies Joanna glimpsed a long wooden trough into which the two women emptied the kettle. The children immediately swarmed the trough to scoop up cornmeal mush with wooden plates or chipped tea cups or hollowed gourds or bare hands, and Joanna, after a moment of shock, hurried back to Leah’s cabin for her own tin cornboiler.

  But when she lifted the corner of the quilt, the cornboiler was gone.

  Joanna flung back the quilt and patted it down in case the cup had rolled beneath its soft folds, but she found nothing. She was certain she had concealed it beneath the quilt of squares, but just to be sure, she checked beneath the stripy quilt, too. Nothing.

  Her tin cornboiler was gone.

  Taking quick, deep breaths to hold her anger in check, Joanna strode from the cabin and searched the throng of hungry children for Lizzie. “You give me back my cup,” she ordered, seizing the girl’s arm.

  “What cup?” Lizzie tore herself free, balancing her wooden plate carefully so as not to spill a morsel of her supper. “I don’t have no cup.”

  “I left it in your mama’s cabin. Now it’s gone.”

  “Well, I don’t got it.” Scowling, Lizzie backed away just as three girls who looked to be her age came to stand with her, unsmiling, their eyes fixed on Joanna. “Didn’t I tell you to hide your things?”

  The dress. Her hunger momentarily forgotten, Joanna raced back to the creek to find the low branch in the shade bare but for leaves and branches.

  She stared at it for a long while, disbelieving, until gnawing pangs of hunger drove her back to the slave cabins. The two women had left, taking the kettle with them, and the wooden trough had been wiped clean of even the smallest grain of mush. Instinctively she ran a finger along the bottom of the trough and brought it to her lips, but only the fragrance of cornmeal and stewed greens lingered.

  Joanna heard whispers and muffled laughter as she found a seat alone on the ground beneath a moss-veiled live oak. Exhausted, stomach growling, she sat in the shade with her back against the tree, watching as the children devoured their scanty meals and ran off to play under the watchful eyes of Lizzie and the other big girls. From a cabin doorway, an elderly man called out, “That food ain’t for you, yellow girl. We eat when the field hands come in.”

  Faint from hunger and exhaustion, Joanna sat and waited for the day to end. The sun was setting when men and women finally trooped in wearily from the cotton fields. As their children ran to them, Joanna caught snatches of greetings and jokes, all in a bewildering, unfamiliar dialect she could scarcely understand. She nodded politely to other women casting her sidelong glances as they passed on their way to gather water and firewood. Heart sinking, she realized that they were preparing their own evening meals, using rations that must have been distributed perhaps days before her arrival. Her wait for the women to return with another full kettle had been in vain.

  A woman was approaching her from across the dirt path, her jaw set so resolutely that Joanna knew she must be Lizzie’s mother. Joanna absently smoothed her apron and feigned indifference as Leah halted only inches away, planted her hands on her hips, and glared down at her. “My girl Lizzie say you call her a thief.”

  Joanna blinked up at her, needing a moment to untangle her dialect. “I left my cup in the cabin and my dress by the creek like she told me to, and now they gone.”

  “My Lizzie didn’t know nothing about no cup, and anybody could’ve seen your dress hanging out to dry. My girl don’t want your old rags.”

  “Someone took my things.”

  “Not my Lizzie. You probably never find out who and never get ’em back.” Turning away, Leah added in an undertone Joanna wasn’t sure she was meant to overhear, “Stupid yellow girl. Might’ve helped you find your things, but not after you show up on your first day and call my daughter a thief. Like you know anything about her.”

  “If Lizzie didn’t take my cup,” Joanna called after Leah angrily, “then someone else went into your cabin while you in the fields and found it. How that make you feel, someone going through your quilts when you out working?”

  Leah halted and turned back around, and for a moment it seemed that the focus of her anger had shifted. Then she frowned and shook her head. “Nothing of mine is missing, so it don’t matter to me. Anyhow, no one but you ever saw this cup—if you ever had one. Bet you didn’t.” She strode off, calling back over her shoulder, “You can find somewhere else to sleep.”

  Joanna watched her go, ignoring the stares and smirks of the few remaining onlookers. Twilight had fallen, and most of the hands had withdrawn to their own cabins—to rest, to eat, and to tend to their own chores, forced aside until the master’s work was done. It was the same everywhere, on every plantation Joanna had ever known.

  She quickly counted more than fifty men and women walking between the cabins, but she reckoned their real numbers to be at least three times that, including the children and house slaves and those who had already gone home. She saw now that clusters of men and women shared foodstuffs—flatbread, carrots, sweet potatoes—and somewhere someone was cooking meat. How had someone come by meat? Her mouth watered at the smell of it; she wished she had something to offer in trade. All her worldly possessions had been lost, and evicted from Leah’s cabin, she had no ration to share. Her only hope was that tomorrow the cook would take pity on her and give her something to eat when she reported to the big house in the morning. It would be a long, hard, miserable night until then.

  “You can stay with us.”

  Joanna looked up to find a woman aged maybe not quite thirty years helping a bent-shouldered old woman down the path. Joanna didn’t think twice, didn’t wait for the invitation to be snatched away. “Thank you,” she said, scrambling to her feet. “I’m Joanna.”

  “I know. You the runaway.” The woman smiled and beckoned Joanna
to follow. “I’m Tavia. There’s five of us in our place, six counting you—me, Auntie Bess here, and the children. It wasn’t smart to pick a fight with Leah. She one of Aaron’s favorites, one of the best pickers. She fast and can work all day without tiring. After she pick her quota, she fill her friends’ bags, too—one boll for her, one for each of them.”

  “She usually help new folks, so they don’t get a whipping.” Auntie Bess offered Joanna a toothless grin as they made their slow progress down the row of cabins. “I don’t expect she’ll help you, not after what you said about Lizzie. That child from her real husband, not the man Marse Chester pick for her. She won’t hear nothing bad about that girl.”

  “Lizzie’s a good child,” said Tavia, stopping near the end of the row and pushing open the door to a cabin. “I don’t think she stole from you.”

  Joanna too was beginning to think she had accused Lizzie too quickly, anger and fatigue having overcome her better judgment. But what Leah had done was worse—humiliating Joanna in front of everyone, casting her out of the cabin as if the mistress’s orders didn’t matter. Maybe they didn’t. The Georgia traders and Augustus had obeyed Mrs. Chester readily enough, but maybe, out of sight of the big house, the slaves made their own rules.

  “I won’t need Leah’s help, at least not tomorrow,” said Joanna defiantly as she followed Tavia and Auntie Bess into the cabin, where three children—a toddler, a girl almost grown, and a boy halfway between the two—played a game with cornhusk dolls on a bed in the corner. Joanna marveled upon discovering that it was a real bed, with four oak posts strung with taut rope supporting a double layer of rough, worn blankets. Two other, smaller beds lined the other walls, leaving a small space in the center of the earthen floor to stand.

  “You won’t need help?” Tavia regarded her with surprise. “You pick cotton before? I hear Marse Chester’s brother grow tobacco.”

  “You’re not the first of his slaves to come to us,” said Auntie Bess, lowering herself onto the bed closest to the fireplace. “We get all his runaways and troublemakers. Aaron break them all.”

  She spoke matter-of-factly, but Joanna still felt a chill. She resolved to avoid Aaron’s notice as much as possible. “The mistress told me to come to her tomorrow for my work. I sew and do laundry, mostly, though I work the tobacco fields some back in Virginia.”

  “Aren’t you a lucky thing, having easy work in the big house,” said the oldest girl, strong and broad-shouldered. Joanna guessed she had been working the fields for almost half her life.

  “I don’t know about that.” Joanna thought of all the nights Marse Chester had dragged her from her bed. “Sometimes it’s best to stay out of the white folks’ sight.”

  “Ain’t that the truth,” said Auntie Bess. “I cook for them since I was younger than Pearl here, till I get too old to lift the stockpot to the stove. Listen good, Joanna. The new mistress think herself a kindly, Christian woman, but she just as bad as the rest of them. Don’t cross her.”

  “The new mistress?” echoed Joanna. Marse Chester’s mother had lived in Virginia forever and had never been the mistress of Oak Grove. Maybe the plantation had come down through the wife’s family, not Marse Chester’s. “You mean Mrs. Chester’s mother?”

  “No. None of us ever seen her,” said Tavia. “Marse Chester’s first wife died of consumption two winters ago. She was a kindly woman—never beat a slave, always saw that we had enough to eat, tend us when we sick. She gone only six months when Marse Chester marry his children’s teacher. She come here from a city up north.”

  Auntie Bess shook her head. “Lived all her life in a free state, but she took to slave owning as quick as if she born to it.”

  “And here we been thinking we got ourselves a new abolitionist mistress,” said Pearl.

  “Hush, Pearl,” admonished Tavia, glancing at the door. “What if Aaron walk by and hear you?”

  Pearl shrugged as if unafraid, but she sat down on the edge of the largest bed and clasped her hands tightly in her lap.

  “The new mistress only four years older than Marse Chester’s eldest girl, and Miss Evangeline hate her,” said Auntie Bess. “She’d bite her tongue off before she’d call the new mistress Mama. Don’t get caught between them two.”

  “Keep quiet and do as you told and you be all right,” said Tavia, passing Joanna a small, flat sweetgrass basket holding a slab of hoecake and a piece of dried fish.

  Joanna thanked them for the warning and devoured every bite of her meal, hoping that the next drawing day wasn’t far off. When the mistress assigned Joanna to Leah’s cabin, she hadn’t given the household extra rations. It was little wonder that Leah had taken the first opportunity to send her away so that feeding her would be someone else’s problem. Joanna hated to think of Tavia and the others spreading their scarce rations even thinner on her account.

  The women’s warning lingered in her thoughts as she picked the last crumbs from the bottom of the basket. She would never forget how, as a child, she had sought refuge in Ruth’s kitchen when the tension between the two Mrs. Chesters from Virginia escalated, and how the younger mistress had disliked her on sight simply because she was her mother-in-law’s purchase. If she did something to please one mistress, she earned the enmity of the other, but if she did nothing, she angered both and paid a double price.

  Joanna never understood why some white ladies couldn’t get along with one another. If they had their choice of companions, maybe they could afford to bicker and squabble with the women of their households, but plantations were so far apart that most white ladies rarely saw any others except members of their own family. Back in Virginia, the younger Mrs. Chester had spoken well of her mother-in-law only after her death. If white women were torn from their mothers and sisters in childhood, or lived with the daily threat of losing daughters to the Georgia traders, maybe then they’d learn to cherish their women kin while they remained among the living.

  In the darkness, Tavia sorted out the sleeping arrangements, assigning two to a bed—herself and her son Paul in one, Auntie Bess and the youngest daughter in another, Pearl and Joanna in the largest. Joanna had not slept off the ground since Pennsylvania, and as Pearl offered her one of the rough blankets, she asked how they had come to have three beds. “My uncle Titus made them,” Pearl told her, her voice growing faint as fatigue overcame her. “My mama’s younger brother.”

  Joanna drifted off to sleep, heart pricked by envy. She thought she could have borne a thousand seasons picking cotton if she could have lived with her mother, if she could have known her uncles. That, she realized, was how the Chesters of Oak Grove kept their colored folk from running away. The older Marse Chester knew what his brother never learned, perhaps because his own family life was so miserable. It was difficult to run away, but harder still to leave beloved relations behind, especially knowing they would bear the runaway’s punishment. How could a husband abandon a wife to beatings and starvation, a mother her child?

  Unless the whole family ran off at once, they must all stay put. It was a trap, an impossible trap, one she could escape only if she never allowed herself to care about anyone at Oak Grove.

  But she knew it was already too late for her to turn her heart to stone. The kindness of the women who had taken her in, who had made room for her in their crowded cabin, had seen to that.

  It was still dark in the cabin when Pearl shook her awake the next morning to gather firewood and fetch water. Outside, the sun was low in the sky, the forest of live oaks a dark, moss-draped silhouette in the east along the river. Other figures moved in the shadowed mists—shawl-wrapped women, slender girls, half-naked children—hunger urging them on. Joanna collected dry, dead branches while Pearl dipped a tightly woven sweetgrass basket into the swift-moving stream. They worked in silence, slowly waking up to the day—another long day picking cotton in the hot sun for Pearl, a day full of strange newness and unknowns for herself.

  Back at the cabin, Tavia quickly packed two sweetgrass ba
skets with corncakes and salt pork. Covering each with a tight-fitting lid, she distributed the last of the corncakes between Pearl, Joanna, and herself. “You’ll get your noon meal at the big house,” she told Joanna between bites, handing one basket to Pearl and tucking the other beneath her arm. “Can you help Auntie Bess lay a fire so she can make the children their mush? Mistress won’t be up yet, so you got time. Me and Pearl got to get to the fields before Aaron do.”

  She didn’t need to explain why. Joanna agreed, glad for something to do to thank them for their kindness. Pearl touched her arm in passing as she and her mother hurried out the door. “We’ll eat better tonight. Uncle Titus going hunting.”

  “Hunting?” Joanna asked Auntie Bess after the other two women were gone. The younger Marse Chester had forbidden his slaves to hunt. “With what? Sticks and stones?”

  Auntie Bess shrugged, searching through a pile of sacks in the corner for the cornmeal. “Some of the men use sticks and stones, if that all they got. Titus, he borrow the marse’s old hunting rifle. Sometime he take possum or squirrel, sometime he get a deer. But today I think it’ll be rabbit. He say he set some snares yesterday.”

  Joanna stared at her in disbelief. “Marse Chester give his slaves guns?”

  “Not any slave. Just Titus. And Aaron, and one or two others.” Auntie Bess cackled through a toothless grin. “I know what you thinking. Why not just shoot Marse Chester? Well, what Titus gonna do then? Where he go? What happen to Tavia and her children after he run off? Girl, you gonna make that fire so I can feed these children or not?”

  Quickly Joanna laid the dry sticks in the fireplace, but before she could light the tinder, Auntie Bess waved her off and urged her to hurry on up to the big house. “Mind yourself,” she cautioned as Joanna hurried out the door. “Tell Sophie you Tavia’s friend and she look after you.”

  Munching the dry corncake, Joanna hurried up to the big house, her nervousness tempered by the comforting thought that Sophie, whoever she was, might help her find her way in the unfamiliar household as a kindness to Tavia.