47

AUGUSTA

December 1858

Twenty years later

A mild December descended on Savannah, the cerulean sky scattered with bloated clouds drifting toward the river. Augusta sat on the piazza wearing a light gray wool cape she’d brought from New York City, where she lived most of the year. Only in winter did she return to Savannah, as summer brought with it not only the deadly heat but also the malignant reminder of the journey that had destroyed her family. Yet despite everything, she still loved the city. Its slow ways and vibrant beauty eased her flesh and soothed her heart.

The breeze had died by midday and the soft clomp of horses’ hooves along the dirt roads was all she heard. A white-winged bird swooped into the yard near the cistern and sat upon the chinaberry tree, eyeing Augusta before lifting off again.

She sat content as the Daily Georgian newspaper bled black print onto her fingers. A cold glass of water rested on the table next to her, and although it had been two decades since the Pulaski disaster Augusta was always grateful for a drink of water. She pressed the glass to her forehead and took a long sip before reading an article on the front page with the headline:

ILLEGAL HUMAN CARGO PUTS ASHORE AT HORSE CREEK

Augusta shivered and read on.

A ship carrying four hundred and eighty-seven enslaved Negroes illegally imported from Africa recently landed near Brunswick. The human cargo was offloaded to rivergoing vessels, brought up the Savannah River, and put ashore on Tuesday evening about three o’clock, at the mouth of Horse Creek, three miles south of Savannah on the Carolina side.

The Wanderer, transformed by its owner Charles Longstreet from a luxury yacht to a vessel for rudimentary slave transport, departed from Charleston with the New York Yacht Club pennant flying, and arrived on September 16, 1858, at the mouth of the Congo River. After negotiating and paying for almost 500 African souls, the schooner sailed to the South and landed on Jekyll Island on November 18th. Of the original four hundred and eighty-seven Africans on board, 79 perished during the journey.

Longstreet, a member of the controversial Fire-Eaters, a pro-slavery group that urges the separation of the Southern states from the Union and the creation of a new nation, has been accused of organizing the importing and holding of African Negroes, in contravention of the 1808 Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves.

The article continued to describe the deplorable conditions on Charles’s schooner and speculate about the high mortality rate. The paper nearly tore as Augusta gripped it tightly in her fists.

She called out. “Henry!”

Her husband stepped onto the piazza and she felt his comforting presence before she twisted to see his beloved face. “Yes, darling?” he asked. She stood from the chair and held out the newspaper, tears falling unnoticed down her cheeks. “What has he done now?” her husband asked.

Henry stood partially dressed for his meeting at the bank in pleated gray pants and a white shirt as yet missing its starched collar. He eased the paper from her hands and wiped a tear from her face before he kissed her. His face had changed in the last years, as had hers. They were both in their forties now. In Henry’s beard gray hairs were woven among the dark. Only six months after the Pulaski explosion, Augusta’s hair had turned completely gray—a phenomenon, her doctor had explained, that sometimes followed great calamity. And yet, when she and Henry gazed upon each other, they saw their younger selves.

Even now a desire to touch Henry overwhelmed Augusta. She loved him with a fierceness that sometimes frightened her. Her need for him was as great as her blinding thirst on the wreckage all those years ago. He was her ballast. She encircled his arm with her hand and squeezed. “I knew those Fire-Eaters were dangerous. They are going to start a war. I can feel it in my very bones. Read it, darling.”

Henry sank into a chair. The double doors to the house had been left open and Augusta shut them against the ever-present mosquitoes. She sank onto the chair next to him as he read, his forehead deeply etched above the reading glasses. The scars on his hands had healed in thick pearly lines that never tanned as the rest of him did.

Henry lifted his chin and faced his wife. “A horror.”

“Why has he chosen this path? We were saved. We were the ones who walked onto dry land and were given another chance at life. Thomas . . .” Even after all these years, she still couldn’t speak his name without a catch in her voice. “And his sisters and brother. His mother.”

“My love, Charles has chosen to buttress his heart with forces that injure rather than heal. You tried to help him.”

“It doesn’t seem like I tried hard enough.”

Henry folded her hand into his and the rough edges of his palm comforted her. “Yes. You did. He elected to become this man. There were other paths open to him just as there were for you and for me. Lamar deeded over to Charles so much money, his homes, and his business, but he could not leave him a kind heart.”

“And off Lamar went and married another woman in just a year. One year.” Augusta shook her head. “And he had six more children. He amassed a new fortune. Maybe his abandonment of Charles broke something inside him, I don’t know, Henry. I had you to save me.”

“And I had you to save me.”

“If not for the tragedy, my love, do you think he would have become such a horror? Was hate already etched into his soul?”

“The tragedy did happen. There is no use in such questions . . .”

She interrupted her husband. “Do you think we would have come together if not for the tragedy? If we could do it over, would we give up those days and nights of terror if it meant not being together?”

“Oh, love, it’s not a question we can answer. Please don’t try.”

“I’d like to think we’d have come together anyway.” She touched his cheek.

“I’d like to believe the same.” He kissed her lips and the passion he always lit took flame and she pulled him closer.

From inside the house a voice called out, “Mama,” and they separated. Augusta adjusted the cape around her shoulders, folded it tighter as a cold breeze rustled the oak leaves.

“It’s Eliza.” She moved to stand and Henry placed his hand upon her leg.

“Stay here. I’ll attend to her.”

“She most likely wants a book she can’t reach in the library.”

He smiled and in that smile, Augusta saw his pure love for his daughters, all four of them. Augusta hadn’t borne a son and yet Henry had not minded in the least. What did he care if his name did not continue into the next generation? His life had been spared that night and living the life after was enough for him.

As Henry carried the newspaper and strode through the doors into the house, Augusta’s thoughts made the long, rambling journey they often took when she was left alone to grieve over her nephew Charles.

How had they come to this? The stepping-stones had been the same, hers and his, yet their destinations had grown far apart. Maybe it was Henry’s love that prevented her from becoming as intransigent and cruel as Charles. Or maybe there was an inner moral compass that she possessed and Charles lacked. Yet how had he once been the child who wept with her upon the wreckage, who sacrificed his sip of wine for a suffering man—how had that boy become this man who brought such suffering to others?

Lamar had left Savannah—the memories there were too painful, he’d told her—and built a new homestead in Virginia. Augusta saw him on holidays and she did love his wife, although she seemed a child to Augusta, twenty years Lamar’s junior and only six years older than Charles himself. Lamar had become a different man, altered by the misery he’d endured. He didn’t take up so much space in the world; he was more humble, quieter. Who could blame him for leaving the remnants of his old life for a new one?

Augusta’s thoughts turned to Lilly. Adam, gone mad and raging at the losses he’d suffered, had brought home a young woman he met in London and married her. Still he demanded the whereabouts of his first wife and child. He claimed someone was hiding her, that she was living nearby. He was often convinced he saw her turn a corner or appear in his bedroom—a ghost, he claimed, come to haunt him. The statue he had built on the river bank became an ever-present reminder of the Pulaski disaster.

In Savannah that year of 1858, unrest filled the air with nervous energy. With the Fire-Eaters fueling the anger, talk of secession was escalating. James Buchanan was president, but Abraham Lincoln was making noise enough to be heard. So much change in the world; so much altered in Augusta’s life.

Over the last century and more, Savannah had survived fire, earthquake, pestilence and war. But would her citizens remember the Pulaski? Would someone in the far future walk along the river’s edge and know about those who had boarded the polished decks of the steamboat? Would they have heard the harrowing stories of survival? Did it matter? The history of Savannah was full of such stories—of the hardships, the persistence and the bravery of so many.

Augusta was convinced her story did matter. The city stood both proud and broken; its people moved on, just as her brother had, just as Charles had, just as Augusta and Henry had. They had all built new lives, found what mattered most for them and lived for it. Charles’s choices broke her heart and she thought often of the rough voice of the man who took the drop of wine upon his leather tongue—“You are a noble boy.”

Charles had been a noble boy.

But he’d changed. They’d all changed. Could they choose by will alone how they were altered?

Augusta stood and went inside. At her mahogany desk facing a window that overlooked Bull Street, she gazed at the daguerreotype they had taken just last year, her four daughters posed around her in gauzy white dresses, with wide smiles. Henry’s hand rested on her shoulder. Only she could see the ghosts that surrounded her family; only she could see those lost souls.

From a drawer she slipped out a letter, let it stay open on the leather blotter. It was the last from Lilly and she wanted to read it once more before she answered.

Two years after the wreck, through a discreet courier from New York, she’d received the first letter from Lilly. She’d prayed every day for news such as this. Lilly trusted Augusta never to speak a word of her survival. The life Lilly had chosen wasn’t easy, but she had come to see the precious value of a life lived on her own terms—a life of freedom for herself, her daughter, and a nursemaid she now called by her given name, Chike. They had been reborn in that sea, made anew in that water. Their lives—for the best and for the horror—would be completely different if they had not boarded that ship, or more accurately, if the second engineer had not poured cold water into an empty, hot boiler. Such a small thing—pouring water—that rendered such a formidable rip in the fabric of their lives. It made no sense on the face of things, yet still it happened.

Lilly’s letters had sustained Augusta through the worst of the heartache, and over the last twenty years. She had shared the knowledge of Lilly’s survival only with Henry. The two women wrote about everything, returning again and again to how through anguish and heartache the explosion had come to shape and define who they were today.

From Wilmington, Lilly, Priscilla and Madeline had made their way north, often sleeping on the side of the road. Eventually they’d arrived in Michigan, in a small lakeside community in Ottawa County. Lilly had sold the jewelry for coin and had raised her daughter in a cabin at the water’s edge where she’d learned to swim and then taught both Madeline and Priscilla.

Priscilla sewed for money, while Lilly taught school, seven-year-old children under her feet, and she’d never been happier. The three of them formed a family more so than some who were blood related. A deep bond born of tragedy and salvation awoke them both to their common zest for a new life. This year Lilly had fallen in love with a man from town who’d lost his wife, a kind man with soft hands and a gentle voice who treated her with love and respect. Priscilla herself had also found love, a minister in town who’d courted her for almost three years. Lilly wrote to Augusta of how she’d attended the first Seneca Falls Convention of the women’s suffrage movement in 1848. Such changes were unfolding in the world.

Lilly used her life to help others. And Augusta thought again of her words—“If not for the accident . . .”

One day Augusta hoped to see her dearest friend, her niece, again, but for now their letters just had to be enough; Adam could not know her whereabouts. Their friendship endured the tragedy and the distance. She slipped Lilly’s last letter back into the thick leather family Bible on her desk—the one place no one would ever look—and decided now was the time to write down what she remembered of that fateful night.

Augusta lifted her quill, dipped it into the dark ink, and took a thin sheet of valuable vellum from the drawer. To save space, she wrote in tight cursive, beginning . . .

“The steam packet Pulaski, with Captain Dubois in charge, sailed from Savannah on Wednesday, June 13th, 1838 . . .”

When she’d written the first sentence, she lifted her head to the sound of her children’s laughter across the hallway. The youngest, ten-year-old Melody, cried out, “Give that back to me.” Their bickering lifted her smile. She thought of the sheer miracle of her daughters’ existence, made possible by her own survival. And then she thought of the generations that would come after her—all because she’d lived.

On her desk lay a rock her husband had brought her from London. A trace fossil, it contained the imprint of a single fish skeleton, thousands of years old. Not the fish itself but the memory of it, forever indelible. She touched it with her finger and ran it over the indents.

Trace fossils had also been etched on her heart—the imprints left by those who suffered in those last days, those she loved, and those she barely knew. Her life was a living testament to survival, and to love.