The first expedition undertaken by this regiment left Beaufort somewhere around the middle of November [1862] . . . Several of the men were wounded. While the Surgeon Dr. H. was dressing the wounds of one of the men—another came up with his arm badly shattered—when the first man stepped back saying, “Fix him, boss, he’s worse than I is.” How few are the men of any color who could have been more unselfish.
Esther Hawks, MD
HARRIET REMOVED A CLEAN APRON FROM the hospital closet, tied it around her waist, and carried her broom and dustpan into the main ward. The repetitive duties of nursing would allow her to collect her thoughts. Walter’s information meant she must find some way to convince General Hunter without further delay.
Doctor Henry Durant stood near a window at the far end of the long room, formerly a salon in the opulent mansion. The Northern volunteer leaned against the wall for support while writing on a chart. A small man with red hair and jug ears, Durant tended to favor one leg over the other due to an old injury. He walked with a limp when he was tired.
Two long rows of iron beds held the hospital’s worst cases. Other patients lay on mattresses in the walkway. Someone had opened windows overlooking a veranda to dispel the odor of urine and gangrene, though black flies flew in on the sprightly breeze. A man in the middle of the room thrashed on his cot. “Fuck!” he shouted in his delirium. Harriet started her work in the near corner and proceeded down the row.
General Hunter must be warier than ever of making a mistake, Harriet reflected as she dipped her broom under a bed and circled round a chamber pot. She knew from camp gossip that the West Pointer had spent decades as a paymaster and pressed for a frontline command after the war broke out. Nearing the end of his career, Hunter must itch to make his mark. Any man who dyed his mustache clearly felt a need to prove he wasn’t a has-been. Hunter had promoted colored units but done little with them. With the War Department breathing down his neck, budging him would be even harder.
The problem consumed Harriet’s attention so thoroughly that she hardly saw the floorboards as she wielded her broom.
“Who dat?” someone asked. “Dat you, Harriet?”
She looked up to see a patient with a bandage over his eyes and the outline of only one leg under the covers. He waved a hand in front of his face to shoo away the flies that crawled under his blindfold. An especially big one hummed noisily before landing on a plate that rested on the windowsill. Harriet had just edged her broom under the man’s bed, coming away with a pile of mouse droppings and human hair.
“It’s me, Uncle Romulus,” she said. “Can I get you something?”
“Yo’ voice medicine enough, sugar, though I wouldn’t turn down a cup a water,” he said. “It taste bettuh coming from you.”
“Yes, Uncle. I’ll get that now,” she said as she leaned her broom against the windowsill. Romulus always wanted the same thing.
Harriet picked her way across the room, stepping over patients until she reached the water urn under a large fresco of a bucolic plantation scene. The artist, likely a slave, had painted handsome men hoeing green fields at the edge of a river, overlooked by a mansion on a hill. Tiny women in colorful headscarves carried sheaves of rice to a brick mill in the distance while a liveried servant drove a gaily dressed white couple in a barouche toward a church at the edge of the picture. Billowy clouds scudded across the blue sky.
Everyone looked so healthy, Harriet reflected as she held a cup under the tin spout. From such a picture, one would never expect the disease that was rampant among the Sea Islanders in the civilian hospital. Since Doctor Durant’s arrival, the confiscated mansion had been constantly full. Most patients had only ever had root doctoring. They presented an array of swamp fevers, typhoid, worms, abscessed teeth, and old injuries. The wall mural made bygone days look good, though; it was as if God was smiling down.
“Moses,” a woman called.
Harriet turned around to see Doctor Durant limp across the room with his hand under the elbow of Esther Hawks, the physician whom the army had assigned to a schoolhouse. Esther had arrived with other missionaries after the Union invaded the islands. Most of them served as teachers, but Harriet thought it a shame that one as qualified as Esther was not assigned more specialized duties. Her husband, also a physician, had started Beaufort’s new hospital for black soldiers. General Saxton had insisted on two facilities for colored folk—one for civilians, and another for the military.
“How you find yourself this morning, Doctor Hawks?” Harriet asked.
“The day finds me well, Harriet, thank you.” The tall young woman reached for Harriet’s hands and leaned down to kiss her cheeks. “My spirits are higher—and hearing better—since I shifted to the hospital. You wouldn’t imagine the din occasioned by three hundred pupils reciting their ABCs. They nearly drove me deaf.”
Harriet smiled. “Didn’t realize you was freed up from teaching, ma’am. How that happen?”
Doctor Durant wiped his brow with an ironed handkerchief that he then tucked back into his breast pocket. He had an unmistakably courtly air in the lady’s presence even though he was married. “I suggested Missus Hawks take charge of Number 10 when General Hunter sent her husband to Florida last month. The brass could hardly object since no other physician was available.”
Esther was taller than the doctor and looked down at him with a benevolent smile. “I’ve been working night and day since,” she said. “No trauma yet—unless you count the soldier whose ear was taken off last week by a Rebel picket across the river. ‘A lucky shot,’ he said, though it sounded more like good aim to me.”
Harriet’s attention sharpened. If Hunter approved the raid up the Combahee, colored troops would have casualties. “How does Number 10 stand for beds and chloroform?”
“We’re finally ready for action,” Esther said. “My husband spent so much time outfitting the Barnwell House that training unavoidably came second. Now every orderly can suture.” The doctor pushed back the dark waves that framed her face. “Though we still beg for supplies. The army apparently isn’t aware that colored patients bleed as copiously as white ones. I believe that’s why I was allowed to take over. It doesn’t bother them if colored soldiers have only a female doctor.”
“The army letting you stay, then?” Harriet said.
“No,” she said with a rueful shrug. “It’s back to the schoolhouse now that Doctor Greenleaf has arrived. What a pity that men insist upon hogging all the glory.”
A cough from the other side of the ward reminded Harriet of the cup in her hand. “Lordy,” she said. “I clean forgot bout Romulus. Excuse me, Doctor Hawks.”
“Don’t let me interrupt. I just wanted to express my regards. My ears still ring with your speeches in Boston. Did you ever write them down?”
“No, ma’am. I wouldn’t know how.”
“Then I hope you’ll come see me when I go back to teaching,” Esther said.
“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll think on it,” Harriet said, though she’d given up the prospect long before. Her head ached whenever she stared too long at letters that spilled across the page, looking like someone had kicked over an anthill. Telling one word from another pressed against some scar deep in her brain.
Harriet continued across the room to the sightless patient. After he emptied the cup of water, she returned to her broom, turning over the problem of General David Hunter. When she was done sweeping, she took a basin from the cupboard, got ice from the icehouse, and filled the pan from a pump in the garden. Patients appreciated the cool bath water.
In her years on the Railroad, she’d helped people strong enough to run. The hospital, built for a family that didn’t mind watching other families suffer, housed bodies too broken to make such journeys. Nursing was her amends for abandoning them all those years. Harriet sighed at the hardest part of her task and began with the old woman in the first bed.
“Morning, Auntie,” she said as she sat down and waved away the flies on the patient’s forehead. “How you doing this sunny day?”
“Well, de Lawd gib me another, so I like it jest fine,” the old lady said with a smile that lifted the tumor on her cheek. “How bout you, nurse?”
“Sassy enough to pester poor Doc Durant.”
The woman laughed. “Bless his soul,” she said. “Dat white fella never miss a day. Laying on his hands like Jesus.”
Harriet held up her rag. “He asked me to clean y’all up. Okay to start with your face?”
The woman closed her brown eyes, which made her easier to look at, even though Harriet focused on only one part of the face at a time. She wiped saliva from the chin and dabbed at the remains of soup on the upper lip. Then she moved her cloth around the tumors that bulged from the forehead and distorted the nose, and finally, she made a second pass at the drool on the chin. Its fine cut hinted at the beauty the woman must have possessed before contracting her master’s French pox.
“How’s the pain in your legs today?” Harriet asked as she dipped her cloth and washed the woman’s right hand.
“If it feels as bad as I do, it sho has my sympathy.”
Harriet laughed and started on the other hand.
“Tell me sumpin’ cheerful,” the woman said. “How yo man?”
“Oh, he all right,” Harriet said.
“Bless you,” the old lady said at the comforting fiction. “Dat nice.”
Harriet returned her rag to the water. She stood and lifted the basin. “I’ll let the doctor know to check on your legs, ma’am.”
“Thank you, chile. P’haps he got a physic,’” she said and closed her eyes.
It took Harriet another two hours to wash every patient. When she finally threw her linen in the basket, she stretched her neck right and left to take out the kinks. Doctor Durant stopped by the cupboard for a clean towel at the same moment.
“Done for the day, Moses?” he said and leaned against the wall to take the weight off his bad leg.
“Done with this part a my day, sir. Now I’m on to the next.”
“Always busy. What don’t you do?”
Harriet thought for a moment. “Well, I don’t insist on glory, sir. Like Miz Hawks, I mostly want to get things done.”
The physician straightened. “Just like a woman,” he said. “I’m afraid men need more motivation.”
Harriet stared as Durant reentered the ward, and she then turned toward the front door. He had made her argument. She didn’t need to convince General Hunter that the plan was foolproof. She just needed to convince the old paymaster that he had one last chance for glory.