When a girl became a woman, she was required to go to a man and become a mother . . . Master would sometimes go and get a large, hale, hearty Negro man from some other plantation to go to his Negro woman. He would ask the other master to let this man come over to his place to go to his slave girls. A slave girl was expected to have children as soon as she became a woman. Some of them had children at the age of twelve or thirteen.
Hilliard Yellerday, Slave
HARRIET SPUN AROUND, TAKING IN THE room at a glance. One window. A reclining figure in a bed struggled to sit. The man started to say something, but a raspy cough strangled him, and he fell back.
Harriet set the chickens on the floor on either side of her full skirt. She reached down and snapped the neck of one and then the other in quick succession. Harriet placed the poultry in a cold pot on the cabin’s stone hearth. The family would burn rags to disguise the scent, but they would eat well.
The man groaned as his choking subsided. Harriet sidled up to the window, which looked toward the last cabin and smokehouse beyond. The path between the buildings led down to the rice fields, now whitish in the morning haze. She listened for the children. All was quiet. They must have turned in a different direction. She ducked under the window and crossed to the pallet lined with dried moss.
“Hey,” Harriet said softly. She knelt and placed a hand on the man’s brow. He burned with fever.
“Why you here?” he rasped. “You got to—” The words triggered a string of hacking coughs.
Harriet glanced around for water. A jug stood atop a crate near the door. She scooted under the window again to fetch it. Returning, she lifted the man’s shoulders and placed the spout to his lips. He took a sip and sprayed water over the blanket. After a few tries, his respiration calmed, and he drank. She laid him back on the bed and arranged the cover around his waist. “Jacob, right?”
The man closed his eyes. “Go away.”
“I’m looking for Jacob. You him?”
The man nodded. His lids looked too heavy to open. His nostrils flared, and he panted shallowly. “What you want?” he asked without opening his eyes.
“I need help.”
Jacob mumbled something Harriet couldn’t make out. She leaned closer.
“Can’t help nobody,” he whispered.
Harriet clenched her jaw. He’d assisted others in the past, so something must have happened. Perhaps it was the fever talking.
“I gone listen to your chest, all right?” she said in her nurse’s voice. “You hold steady on me. Hold steady on the Lord.”
Jacob wore a vest cut from old carpet. Harriet parted the garment and lifted his coarse shirt. She placed her ear on his chest to listen for the hiss that Doctor Durant called wheezing. Harriet wished she had the ear trumpet Durant used at the contraband hospital. Jacob’s heart beat more rapidly than normal, but she couldn’t tell if he had pneumonia. The man certainly had the cough and telltale fever. A bad catarrh, if not worse.
Harriet reached for a pouch she wore around her neck and took out the phials she always carried. Countless runaways had come down ill on midnight treks through rain and snow. She dumped cayenne, ginger, and powdered bloodroot into the water jug, planted her palm on the spout, and swirled the vessel vigorously. “Here,” she said and lifted the patient’s shoulders. “This gone loosen your chest.”
Jacob drank greedily without coughing but still kept his eyes closed. He must not have had water all morning. His wife would have gone to the field.
Harriet lowered him to the pallet. She stroked his brow to ease him toward sleep. Rest would calm the fever. Then they could talk. She was prepared to wait—indeed, she had planned to hide in the cabin until he returned from the fields.
As the man’s breathing evened, Harriet found herself studying him in the quiet of the plain room. Jacob looked younger than Samuel, but he had the same square chin and straight eyebrows. Both had generous foreheads. The bridge of Jacob’s nose was raised rather than flat, however, and his color wasn’t as rich as Samuel’s. White people had little to discuss compared with colored people, she reflected, who debated shades of brown and yellow like farmers discussing the morning sky and whether it suggested rain. Adu, the Gullah said. Very black. Harriet was grateful the Lord had made her as dark as he had.
Jacob coughed in his sleep. Sweat beaded along his hairline. Harriet felt his brow again for fever, though the perspiration indicated it was breaking. Jacob had probably suffered for his tawny shade, she thought as she wiped his forehead with the blanket. Slaveholders watched lighter blacks with extra vigilance, suspicious of attempts to rise above their station; darker blacks sometimes mocked lighter ones, disdainful of the impurity.
Like Margaret, Harriet thought with the rush of joy and anxiety her daughter’s face always conjured. Harriet hadn’t realized the infant possessed her father’s medium complexion when she gave Margaret to Mary in a patchwork quilt sewn from dresses bought off a Cambridge rag picker. It sometimes took a few weeks for the skin of colored babies to deepen to its natural hue, and Harriet had had but one night before John spirited away the mewling lump of Harriet’s own flesh.
When she saw the child years later, miraculously grown and holding Mary’s hand in the Baltimore fish market, the four-year-old shone so brightly in Harriet’s eyes—as if the sun touched her alone—that her complexion again escaped Harriet’s notice. All she saw were the curious eyes, snub nose, high cheekbones, and generous smile that looked just like Harriet’s. A real little girl, wearing a red straw hat with an upturned brim and standing in a puddle of light. Free. Harriet had cried herself to sleep that evening, miles away in yet another safe house.
It was then that she developed the fixation that could wake her from a sound sleep, kill her appetite on an empty stomach, and cause her to break off in the middle of a conversation. After giving Margaret up all those years before, the refrain cycled over and over in Harriet’s head. The time had come. A mother deserves her child. Her only child.
Sometimes she fretted she was just being selfish. It would be hard on the girl and Mary. Then she reminded herself that Mary had promised to give Harriet’s “niece” back one day. Of course, the child couldn’t be told the real reason, at least not for a long time. If word ever leaked out that Margaret wasn’t Mary’s by birth, she’d be clamped into chains instantly. Even free people of color had to fend off bogus attempts to enslave them. The South was unsafe, which was one reason Harriet had borrowed a cart and driven her own aged parents north a few years earlier at great personal risk, even though Daddy had by then saved enough to buy their freedom. Old and alone, Daddy and Mama just wouldn’t go unless she came and got them, and she certainly wasn’t going to leave them in Dixie by themselves. Nor would she leave Margaret there. John Tubman might object to the child’s removal, but he had a new family, and Harriet had no one. Surely God wouldn’t deprive her of that consolation after all the troubles He’d heaped on her head.
And so five years later, when Senator Seward sold Harriet some land as a kindness to a fellow abolitionist, she slipped back to Baltimore for Margaret. Even then, she hadn’t noted Margaret’s complexion until she overheard a black woman criticize the girl as “pumpkin-faced” after they returned to New York.
Footsteps crunched on the gravel path outside the window. Harriet quickly scooted against the wall to hide.
Two voices approached, though Harriet heard only a single pair of shoes. Boots, perhaps. One voice had the timbre of a bull, the other a bird. A man seemed to be addressing a child. Harriet’s heart beat loudly in her ears. Why had Jacob taken down the rag? How had she forgotten to look? She edged farther along the wall so anyone who glanced in the window wouldn’t spot her.
“Leave the bedding,” the man ordered. “I don’t need the vermin.”
“Yes, sah,” a girl replied. “Where . . . Where we going, sah?” Her voice wobbled.
“My house.”
“You need he’p with de washing and cooking, Mistah Pipkin?”
“I got Callie for that.”
The boots moved past the window. Harriet rose cautiously. She made out the speakers in the narrow slip of daylight. The man wore a dented bowler hat. Streaked gray hair showed on a sun-soaked neck, though he had an irregular bald patch behind his ear, as if a gear had snatched a chunk of scalp long ago. A bullwhip swung from his belt. The gun that extended from every white Southerner’s arm rested on his shoulder. Harriet couldn’t see his face, but his flat tone raised goose bumps on her arms.
The girl was nearly Harriet’s height and coming into womanhood, a child of thirteen or fourteen. The swinging hem of her dress was wet, and she walked barefoot. Two braids were gathered together at the base of her neck. The pair must have come from the rice field.
“I never done inside chores, Mistah Pipkin. But I real good wit’ weeding. I . . . I git dem by dey roots, and I ain’t afraid a snakes. I’s good in the field, sah. But I don’t know nothing bout being a house nigger. Mama call me cl-cl-clumsy.”
The girl spoke breathlessly, words tripping over one another. She turned in profile until Harriet saw her better. She had curly eyelashes and lips as delicately drawn as any the hand of God could manage. Her skin was coffee with a dash of milk, and new breasts sat high on her chest. She was Margaret’s age, Harriet decided. Thirteen. Old enough to be a mother.
“You’ll learn,” Pipkin said.
He turned the corner of the last cabin a step ahead of the girl, who glanced back down the lane as if looking for help—and spotted Harriet in the sidelong rectangle. Their gazes met. The girl aged before Harriet’s eyes as an awful knowledge took hold. She seemed carved from cypress, that sorrowful hardwood that grew with its feet in the swamp.
Harriet poured all her courage into a look and raised a finger to her mouth.
The girl nodded almost without moving her head, and then she followed the overseer around the corner. Rusty hinges shrieked on the door of the neighboring cabin.
Harriet slumped against the wall. Knowledge of what was coming—and that she and every other man and woman on the plantation must stand by and watch—sent a bolt of pain across her brow. There weren’t two ways to understand what it meant for an overseer to take a girl on the verge of womanhood into his house. “Getting the first slice a pie,” she’d heard one man brag to another when she passed the auction block in Cambridge.
Harriet pressed her palms against her temples to stop the awful throbbing. She slowly filled her lungs with air and then breathed out even more slowly. Her mouth tasted as if she had a penny under her tongue. She must remain calm. Away, Devil, she prayed.
The door of the nearby cabin banged shut a few moments later. She flinched. The child must not have much in the way of possessions. Harriet slid down the wall until her buttocks rested on her callused heels.
“Mama’s poorly, Mistah Pipkin. She need a hand wit’ my brudduhs,” the girl said. “Maybe I could he’p you during de day, sah. Rest here nights.”
The man didn’t reply, perhaps thinking an answer would suggest she was due one. Harriet held her breath, waiting for the danger to pass. The one spot on Earth she couldn’t explain her presence was a cabin on a strange plantation.
“I ain’t being hankty, sah,” the girl said. “Mama jest need de he’p.”
The slats of Jacob’s bed creaked loudly. The ill man sputtered, then broke into a cough that rebounded in the small room. The boots outside stopped. They pivoted on the gravel. Harriet froze. The yard went quiet.
A swift blow rattled the old boards under the window. Harriet’s head jerked back, hitting the wall. The butt of Pipkin’s gun pounded mercilessly. His coarse roar was almost in her ear. “Jacob! Still faking it?”
The man on the bed stirred but didn’t wake.
“Do I need to haul you out a there, nigger?”
Harriet’s eyes darted to the stack of firewood next to the hearth—not high enough—and to the bed. Jacob’s narrow pallet rested on the ground. No space underneath. The chimney? No, the chimney was too tight to climb into. The only door emptied onto the exposed yard. No escape. Harriet grabbed Jacob’s foot and shook it. He didn’t move. She shook harder, but he just groaned.
“Answer me!” Pipkin hollered.
Panicked, Harriet twisted Jacob’s foot toward the edge of the bed to roll him off. The sick man broke into a cough so ragged that Harriet heard his throat tear. He started up upright. “Yes, boss—” he said, but hacking seized him before he could finish the sentence. He swung his feet onto the floor and dropped his head between his bent knees.
Pipkin stuck his face in the window. Harriet shriveled against the planks.
“He sho sick, Mistah Pipkin,” the girl said.
The overseer looked over his shoulder. “How would you know, Kizzy?”
“Mama say he real bad. Got de lung fevuh again.”
Jacob gasped for air and hacked again, bringing up the lungs in question. Harriet didn’t stir.
“Mama say it de ketchin’ kind,” Kizzy added more urgently.
Pipkin withdrew his head. He gave the wall another bang with the butt of his gun, one so hard that dust swirled up from the crevices and made plumes in a shaft of light just beyond the bed. “This is the second time in two months, nigger,” he said. “Be at the rice trunks tomorrow or I’ll use my bullwhip to make you better. I paid good money for your hide.”
Harriet listened as the boots moved away and faded. She took a shuddering breath. Helplessness caused tears to start in her eyes. Kizzy had saved her, and Harriet couldn’t return the favor.
Poor girl. Like all the others. Like Harriet’s older sisters Linah, Mariah, and Sophie, all sold south. Like Harriet’s younger sister, Rachel, who wouldn’t leave without her boys, rented out to other Cambridge slave masters. Harriet had gone back three times to convince Rachel that she must rescue herself first—and trust in God to rescue the children later.
“We going next time, Hattie,” Rachel promised when Harriet slipped onto the plantation one dark January night. Her sister was mending a shirt for the eight-year-old who worked fifteen miles away. But next time never came. When Harriet made her final raid south on the Underground Railroad—the year Lincoln was elected—a logger who worked for John Tubman told her that pneumonia had come for Rachel two months earlier. Knowledge of the boys’ whereabouts perished as well. Her younger sister had waited for nothing at all.
Harriet was now her parents’ only daughter. Nothing remained of Linah, Sophie, Mariah, and Rachel except their names. Pieces of Harriet had disappeared with each of them. No matter how many trips she made, someone was always left behind, and every year new babies were added to their number. If Harriet had a torch big enough, she would burn every plantation to the ground. Stamp the cinders into ash. Magically corral every man like Pipkin in some vast pen with others who had committed the same crime. They’d turn to one another and ask, “What are you doing here?” Guilt would rise to their shocked faces like scum on a pond. God’s vengeance would be swift.
Squeaking planks interrupted Harriet’s reverie as Jacob fell back on the slats and pulled up the blanket. His eyes were shut.
Harriet wiped her tears on her sleeve and crawled to the man’s side. He needed to drink. Needed to cough up the mucus. If his fever didn’t break, he would die without giving Harriet the information she needed. The baby his wife carried would live the same half-life as every other slave. Harriet fetched the jug, lifted his shoulders, and placed it to his lips. “Drink,” she ordered. “Come on. Let the good Lord heal you.”
Jacob pursed his mouth.
Her voice grew steely. “Don’t you quit on me. You gone drink this water, or I’ll make you a swamp to lie in.”
He opened his lips and took a few sips, but he writhed when she adjusted her grip to hold him more securely. There was a fetid smell Harriet hadn’t noticed before. It came from the moss on the pallet. No, it came from his clothing. “Let’s get these off,” Harriet said and slipped the rough vest from one shoulder, then the other. Jacob cried out when she inched the shirt over his head and rolled him onto his side.
Scars crisscrossed his muscled back. Most were old. The salt water poured into wounds to make suffering livelier had also done its job of cauterizing the broken flesh. The long lumpy welts looked like ship’s rigging splayed on a Maryland wharf. Some of the damage was fresher. A gash from shoulder to tailbone had reopened, ruptured by coughing. Pus seeped along his spine.
Harriet glanced around the bare room for a clean cloth. He needed bandages to protect the wound. A sheet, perhaps. Spying nothing that would work, she stood with a cautious glance at the window, reached under her skirt, untied her cotton petticoat, and tugged it down her hips. She hesitated a second at the lace edging, then tore the undergarment into strips. As Harriet dribbled water on Jacob’s back, she recalled the gray-haired benefactress who had pressed the petticoat into her hands when she sailed from Boston a year earlier. Harriet had never had so feminine an article. She washed it every day. Dingy from its earlier bath in the Combahee, the fine fabric nonetheless took up the sticky pus cleanly. She laid long strips across Jacob’s back and tied them around his stomach. He fell asleep as she wrestled on his shirt to hide the unusual dressing.
Harriet resumed her post against the wall and dropped her head onto her knees. She needed rest. A short nap at least. Before she had a fit when she couldn’t afford one.
A faraway bark woke her sometime later. She lifted her head to see Jacob studying her. He’d propped himself on one elbow. “What your name?” he asked hoarsely.
Harriet hesitated. If Pipkin questioned him in his weakened state, he might give her away. Yet she needed to earn his trust. “Moses,” she said simply. “Folk call me Moses.”
He nodded without expression, seemingly prepared to accept any name she gave him. “What you doing here?”
“Samuel sent me,” she said.
Pained recognition showed in his eyes. “Must be alive, then. I heard he ran. You running from Heyward, too?”
“No. I’m with the Yankees. On Port Royal. We looking for someone to tell us bout the torpedoes in the river.”
Jacob started to answer but coughed instead. He collapsed back on the bed.
Harriet moved to his side, put a careful arm under him, and lifted his shoulders. This was her chance. He seemed stronger, ready to rally. “Bring it on up,” she urged him.
He struggled to sit again, coughed roughly, and finally spat into the hand she held out. Harriet wiped the mucus on her skirt.
Jacob pulled away and lay back down with his eyes shut. “The barrels, right?”
“Yep. The barrels with gunpowder. Secesh call em torpedoes.”
He tugged the blanket fretfully. “We anchored em with chains a few months back. They was four. No, five.”
Gunships could navigate around five mines, she thought. And they would have to. No way could her crew dismantle chained torpedoes without being spied. “Men from other plantations lay em, too?” she asked.
Jacob answered with his eyes closed. “No. Secesh took us from Fields Point clear up to the ferry landing. We would a seen em doing it, if they was.” His voice drifted to a lower register. “I got an eye on the river most a the time. A trunk minder—” He trailed off.
Harriet unbuttoned the collar of her dress and reached for the paper she’d tucked into the band supporting her breasts. “Can you look at this?” she said.
The man didn’t answer. His breathing had slowed. Harriet shook his shoulder. “Wake up.”
Jacob blinked and rocked his head.
Harriet unfolded the sketch of the river and held it to his face. “Show me where you put them barrels.”
Jacob squinted and reached a hand above the blanket. “There,” he said, and his finger pointed to a small island across from Fields Point that divided the broad river into two channels. “We put the first one there. You sail up their blind side, pickets ain’t gone see you—but you’ll hit the torpedo.”
Harriet nodded. The Secesh would count on the Yankees trying to avoid the lookout.
Jacob scrunched his eyebrows. He seemed uncertain. His finger swayed, and he pointed to a spot near Tar Bluff. “We put a second one here. And another there,” he said, tapping a stretch on the approach to the Nichols Plantation. “I . . . I think another there,” he said as he rested a finger on the bend just before the Heyward estate, near the ferry landing that served the plantations on the upper Combahee. The Confederates had a reinforced contingent there.
“Jest a second,” said Harriet. She took a nail from her pocket and poked tiny holes in the spots he had indicated. The torpedo near the Heyward Plantation must be the one Samuel had spotted from his boat. They had marked it on their map in Beaufort. She held the paper up again. “Where you put the fifth one?”
Jacob had become more ashen, and his eyes were sunken. He didn’t answer. Harriet shook the sick man’s shoulder. “Jacob, wake up.” She placed a hand on his forehead, now dry and hot. The fever had spiked again. She set aside the map, reached for the jug, and lifted the man’s dead weight. “Come on, Jacob.”
Harriet placed the spout to his lips, but he was unresponsive. Water trickling down his chin failed to rouse him. His lips were shut tight. A hound barked close by. Harriet shifted back against the wall, still holding the vessel.
Boots approached. It was the same tread as before, now accompanied by an animal, its nails clicking against gravel. They bypassed the window.
Harriet heard a dog whine. The boots turned back toward Jacob’s cabin. Harriet stopped breathing.
“What is it?” Pipkin said.
The hound bayed under the window.
“That’s Jacob,” the overseer told the dog, which bayed and then whined again. A distant gong clanged.
“Hear that, boy? Chow time,” Pipkin said. He walked away.
The dog whimpered. It pawed the wall under the window. Harriet braced herself. Bloodhounds would track a runaway across three counties. They wouldn’t stop to eat or drink. They’d run themselves to death to get their man. The gong sounded again. Pipkin whistled from afar, but the dog scratched harder.
“Come on, now,” the overseer called. He whistled again, and then he turned back, walking quickly.
The hound barked more ferociously. Harriet shut her eyes. She felt him close in. A thud, then a sharp yelp, filled her ears. A second kick produced whimpering. “Damn dog. I said now!”
Harriet heard the boots pivot. The crunch of gravel faded. She opened her eyes. Blood thrummed in her temples. Pipkin must have some task near the cabins or smokehouse. He’d return after supper—and Kizzy wouldn’t be there to distract him. Harriet must leave and hope the noontime bustle covered her movements. If only Jacob could tell her the location of the last mine. She looked at him again. His face was slack.
Harriet set aside the jug, tucked the map into her bosom, and stood to find a new prop. A small crock on the hearth caught her eye. She quickly swept up a handful of ashes, dropped the powder into the vessel, and poured some water over it to mimic a midwife’s poultice. A square of white fabric, tied around the neck of the crock with the last strip of her petticoat, served for a lid.
Harriet tightened her headscarf and fumbled for her gray braids. She bent over to tuck Jacob’s blanket more securely, then placed her hand on his brow. On impulse, she knelt. The hard floor dug into her knees, but she closed her eyes and put her hands together. Keep Jacob safe, she prayed. Safeguard him from sickness, dear Lord. And don’t let Pipkin hurt the girl too bad. Keep her heart strong. Tell her your servant is coming for her.
Harriet drew a deep breath. The air of the cabin seemed less foul than before. She knew He was present. “Amen,” she whispered, and then she patted Jacob’s hand. “Hold tight,” she said to the sleeping man as she stood. “I’m coming back. I always come back.”