37

LILLY

Monday, June 18, 1838

The third day of Lilly’s recovery was spent in the home of a kind, well-off family named the Benedicts, of Onslow, North Carolina. Lilly luxuriated on sheets as fine as she’d ever known. The room in which she lay glimmered with a pale yellow paint, muted sunlight. Dark wood furniture glowed with polish. Lilly held the soft blanket close to her face, where a sticky salve covered her sunburn. Mrs. Benedict had brought them soup and tea, washed their bodies, and summoned a doctor who’d checked all three of them—Lilly, Priscilla and Madeline.

“Have other survivors been found?” Lilly had asked first thing when she woke on Saturday morning with a bright light slicing through cream-colored curtains. She spoke in a low voice so as not to wake Priscilla, sleeping deeply in the adjacent bed.

“No,” Mrs. Benedict had told her. “Not yet.”

“Have they sent out ships to search? There were others, many others floating on fragments of the ship. They must send someone. So many were alive when we rowed away. We left them there . . . someone must go find them.”

“Did you have other relatives on board?”

“I did. My aunts, my cousins, my uncle . . .”

“Was your husband on the journey?”

“Yes. I fear he’s gone.” Lilly turned her face away and allowed Mrs. Benedict to believe she was grieved by the thought.

In a bassinet next to Lilly’s bed, Madeline let out a small whimper.

“Shhh . . . darling. Shhh . . .” Mrs. Benedict soothed. “A squall is out to sea and the men can’t launch the ships . . . not yet. It has been assumed that all who were left could not have survived this long. God rest their souls.”

“But they might have. Augusta and—”

“The men know what to do. Don’t you worry. You rest now.”

Mrs. Benedict closed the door quietly behind her as she slipped from the room.

The men know what to do. Did they?

Lilly’s thoughts were a bitter brew.

Adam.

Now, lying in a stranger’s bed with Priscilla’s soft snores close by, Lilly felt a relief she’d anticipated feeling only once she escaped Savannah and had traveled far away. Now the possibility of freedom, and a new life, lay before her like a tantalizing dream. Mrs. Benedict had allowed Priscilla in her house without a word about slaves or Negroes not allowed in her home. Though not an abolitionist, it seemed her role as the wife of a clergyman, her role as the savior of the shipwrecked, had sent all thoughts of what was inappropriate in this manner to the bottom of the sea with the hull and the sails.

Lilly’s thoughts faded in and out like this—clouds that passed and reappeared. She was awake yet saw the sea beneath her. Rising swells seemed to lift the bed the same as they had the lifeboat. She imagined the other passengers on the Pulaski. Were they dead, their last breaths taken, or were they still fighting for their lives, burning beneath the sun, thirsty and wet, hungry and injured?

She was one of the lucky ones. The blessed ones, her pastor would tell her.

Lilly rose from the bed, her legs still unsteady. She held fast to the bedpost and took a few long breaths, but she didn’t yet have the strength to stand for long, and fell back onto the soft sheets. Madeline stirred in the wicker cradle.

“Priscilla, are you awake? I think Madeline is hungry.”

Priscilla sat up on the edge of the bed, the nightdress she wore so large on her that it appeared she had wrapped herself in the sheets. She lifted Madeline and then leaned against the soft pillows as the baby nursed to contentment.

“Tell me about your family, Priscilla. Tell me their story.” With her eyes closed, and Priscilla nourishing her child, Lilly needed to know all there was to know about the woman who had saved her child’s life.

“Mistress?”

“Tell me their story. For if it is yours, I want to know.”

Priscilla took in a long breath. “I don’t know much but what my mama has whispered to me in the night. The ledger in Master’s office can tell you more than I can.”

“I am sorry.” Lilly bowed her head, shame becoming a wash of prickling needles along her ribs. What she wouldn’t tell Priscilla was that the ledger held nothing but sex, age and color—nothing more. Not even the names of the slaves Adam owned. “It is . . .” Lilly’s words, inadequate and lost, fell away.

Priscilla lifted her gaze to look directly at Lilly, an acknowledgment of the power of her request, and she told Lilly what little she did know—of how in the early 1700s her great-grandmother from her mother’s side had been brought over on a ship called the Aurore, one of the very first ships to bring them to southern shores. They’d been brought to Louisiana and eventually sold to the owner of the Ogeechee River plantation near Savannah.

“We weren’t always in-town domestics like we are for your family,” Priscilla said softly. “My grandmama died in the fields.”

“I have never asked you any of this. I’m sorry I’ve never asked. I’m sorry for so very much.” The world they’d lived in, so cruel, appeared in bas-relief to the ways in which they had worked together to survive the past days.

“Your father?”

“I never knew him. Master sold him when he found him dancing with Mama. Said he didn’t like distractions. Mama ain’t been the same since. She’s been whipped a few times for being insolent. She’s still sewing for the family, but she’s tired . . .”

“Oh, Priscilla. This is so heartbreaking. How did I not know all of these things?” Lilly paused. “And what is the name given to you by your mama?”

“It is Chike. Mama says it means ‘the power of God.’ I ain’t seen much of my power, but that’s my name.”

“I see it, Chike. I see it.”

“Mistress, we . . .” She paused here at the joined word, at the “we” that had never been used before. “We have survived.”

Lilly rolled back on the pillow as the sounds of Madeline’s nursing faded and footsteps approached their door. Twilight falling against the window, washing the room in eventide, told them it was time for dinner. It was now the end of day three without word of any other survivors.

“I think we are the only ones who made it to shore, Chike.”

“Don’t be giving up hope.”

“My husband’s plantation will be passed to his brother. We shall begin again with a different kind of life.”

Chike didn’t answer as the door opened and Mrs. Benedict carried in a tray laden with soup, bread and tea.