1856
Harriet stood by a window in William’s Boston shop. She looked over the notes of her earlier conversations with Benjamin Phipps and with William. The story was a puzzle and she worked to put the pieces together.
She wondered if the meeting between Thomas Gray and Nat Turner might have been the one that Nathaniel Francis had witnessed from his hiding place in the woods. Harriet read from her notes about Nathaniel Francis—notes of Nathaniel’s conversation with Thomas Gray at Waller’s still—a conversation about seeing Thomas Gray with Nat Turner.
“This past spring, near Cabin Pond. I saw the two of you. Had him in the site of my rifle. You handed him a package. You were speaking to each other earnestly. Not like slave and master, but like friends.”
Harriet tried to imagine what it must have been like for Nat Turner and Thomas Gray to have been friends in 1831. She imagined how difficult things must have been for Thomas Gray after Nat Turner’s rebellion.
A quarter of a century later, there were still people who criticized her brother and her for associating with Negroes, for inviting them to their homes. There were people who were furious with Henry and had vandalized his Brooklyn home because of his work as an abolitionist and because he welcomed Negro visitors to his church and his pulpit.
It was extraordinary to think of the two men, separated by law, custom, and culture, still struggling to be friends, to understand each other.
“Excuse me. I thought you might like this.” William returned with two cups of tea and biscuits.
Harriet returned to the small table where they had been working. She sat and then sipped at the tea, but her thirst overcame her. Her cup was soon drained dry. Her face warming, she looked across the table at William. “Please forgive me. I am mortified.”
“Please forgive me for being such a poor host.” He called to his sister to bring more tea and offered Harriet one of the biscuits. “It was thoughtless of me. I should have noticed that you were famished.”
She touched his hand. “You owe me no apology, Mr. Love.” Harriet quickly removed her hand. They were strangers, almost, but they were sharing the intimacies of so many lives. She looked down at her notes again. “So Thomas Gray and Nat Turner were indeed friends?”
William nodded. “Though they were born to different circumstances, they were born the same year in the same area.”
But for slavery, the two of them might have been even greater friends, almost brothers.
“The story is still told in Southampton County that not only Thomas Gray but also Sallie Moore Travis were Nat Turner’s friends.”
Harriet looked across the table at William. It was unacceptable and unheard of, even in Massachusetts, for a white woman to touch a Negro man’s hand. What did it mean for Sallie and Nat to be considered friends? Was cooking for him, in a time when no mistress cooked for her slaves, enough to have made them friends?
The story of Nat Turner being revealed to her was one she could never have imagined.
William’s sister returned with a pot of tea. “Thank you.” Harriet smiled to her. When his sister was gone, Harriet nodded to him. “Thank you, Mr. Love.”
She adjusted the napkin on her lap, then lifted her pen and pressed it to the paper in front of her. “Let us resume.”