Pass the bearer, Harriet Tubman, to Beaufort, and back to this place, and wherever she wishes to go, and give her passage at all times on all Government transports . . . Harriet was sent to me from Boston, by Governor Andrews, of Massachusetts, and is a valuable woman.
Major General David Hunter
A SEA BREEZE SEIZED THE OPEN DOOR behind Harriet as she entered the general’s private office and slammed it shut with a loud bang. It was a terrible way to begin.
General Hunter looked over his newspaper. “You certainly know how to make an entrance,” he said.
The commander’s table was uncluttered. He sat in a chair that had lost one of its arms, reading the paper by the glare of an open window. The bent and fingerprinted glasses at the end of his hooked nose looked like they’d traveled with him all his sixty-plus years. It was hard to imagine he’d ever been young. His freshly combed wig blended more naturally than before with the hair that tickled his veiny ears, but he still looked like a man whose candle had burned low.
“Sorry, sir,” Harriet said, relieved that he wasn’t annoyed. “Must be the Lord making a point. Thank you for seeing me.”
“Colonel Montgomery said you have new information. What is it?”
“I done what you asked, sir,” Harriet said. She stood completely still and straight, hands at her side, saying nothing more. Harriet had often used silence to concentrate listeners’ attention, especially in public forums. Chatter lulled people. Bursts of silence made them listen. From a woman, it was downright unnerving.
The general folded his newspaper and draped it over the remaining arm of the chair. He looked perplexed. “What I asked?”
“What you asked when I last reported, sir. When I brought the news bout Fields Point and Tar Bluff.”
Hunter reached in his breast pocket for a cigar. “Oh. As I said, we can’t launch against those torpedoes.” He bit off the end of the cigar, spat it on the floor, and patted his other pocket for a match.
“I know, sir. You said we need to map em.”
“That’s correct.” Hunter stood and walked to the wooden secretary in the corner to get a tin of locofocos next to a pitcher of water. He struck a match, took an experimental puff, and resumed his seat under the window.
“My men and I’d like to show you,” Harriet said.
“Your men?” he said, as if confused by what she meant. The breeze coming through the window wafted the cigar’s reek across the room.
“My scouts,” she said. Hunter sometimes seemed to forget that he’d asked her to recruit them, as if he couldn’t credit that he’d put a woman in charge, even the famous Harriet Tubman. But he had, and she’d recruited all of them with the exception of Walter, who had found her. “The contraband who help out. May I bring em in, General?”
“How many?”
“Jest Walter Plowden and Samuel Heyward, sir,” Harriet said. “You met Plowden before. Heyward, he’s new.”
“Proceed,” Hunter said, and he drew again on his weed.
Harriet opened the door, taking care to hold the knob tightly. She peered into the anteroom. Samuel read a farmer’s almanac with a finger under the words while eating a hunk of bread. Walter examined the tips of his shoes. A bearded, sour-faced clerk watched the pair with folded arms. The two men looked up. Harriet nodded. Samuel put the bread in his pocket and brushed crumbs from his lap. He and Walter stood and followed her into the smoke-filled room.
Hunter had moved to the head of the conference table. “Men,” he said and motioned to the chairs next to him.
Walter looked uncomfortable at the invitation, but Samuel sat down without any change of expression. Harriet gave the waterman a wide berth and took a chair on the opposite side of the table, next to the general. She placed her satchel on the floor. Walter joined her.
“Plowden and Heyward went with me up the Cum’bee four nights ago, General Hunter.” Harriet nodded at Samuel. “Heyward here found the first torpedo.”
Hunter examined Samuel’s face as if scrutinizing a federal note for counterfeit. “Tell me about that, Mister Heyward,” he said.
Samuel appeared untroubled by the long stare. He rested his large hands on the table and spoke calmly. “I was scouting the Cum’bee by myself a week ago, sir, when I spotted the barrel in the water near the Lowndes Plantation.”
Hunter’s eyes narrowed. “Alone? What were you doing that far upriver?”
“My missus and chil’ren are on the Heyward Plantation, sir.”
“Surely you weren’t visiting them?”
“I stash food in a hollow oak near the river when I can,” Samuel said. “I took em a piece a salt pork.”
Harriet stiffened. The image of Samuel portioning rations in the dugout sprang to mind. The rotten cheater.
“That’s a long haul for one man,” Hunter said. It was a statement of fact that could double for an accusation of lying.
“Master Heyward used to race me on the river, sir. Like his horses at the Jockey Club,” Samuel replied. “I got fast. And good at timing the tide.”
“So what did you see?”
“I was coming back on the ebb, when I spotted a snag jest in time to dodge it. Thought it was a gator. I seen the barrel below the surface as I nicked past.”
Harriet spoke up. “We confirmed it, General.”
Confirm was a word with the power to make doubts go away, she knew. Men in authority liked it.
“How?” Hunter asked.
“My brother Jacob done told us,” Samuel answered for her.
“I got onto the Lowndes place,” Harriet said. “Samuel’s brother gave me the location a the torpedoes. He laid em.”
“Did he say how many there are?” Hunter said.
Harriet reached down into her satchel. She withdrew the small map from the inside pocket and unfolded it on the table. “Jacob said there are five. I used a nail to mark the spots where the Secesh anchored the barrels.” She pushed the pocked chart in Hunter’s direction.
Hunter tapped the ash off his cigar into a tin can that looked as if it had come from the officers’ mess. He took the paper and held it to the light coming in from the window. “I see only four holes.”
Earlier that morning, Harriet had taken out her nail, then put it back in her satchel, unable to commit the lie to paper and certain that God Almighty was looking over her shoulder. She’d known it was Him by the way the sun slanted through the window.
Hunter set the paper on the table.
“Robert Smalls confirmed that the fifth bomb is across from the ferry,” Harriet said. Confirm wasn’t truthful, but it was close enough.
“Smalls? How does he know?” General Hunter asked.
Walter broke into a cough. The wiry scout placed a fist over his mouth and hacked until his narrow chest heaved. When Harriet reached behind to clap him on the back, he shook his head, unable to speak.
“Water?” she said.
Walter nodded vigorously. “Yes,” he croaked.
The general pointed with his cigar to the pitcher atop the secretary. Harriet got up and poured a glass, which Walter downed in noisy gulps.
“Smalls said they done the same on the Stono,” she said as she took her seat, thinking how best to phrase the information without lying outright. “They laid mines on either side a the ferry. He told me to watch for snags.”
“You know what to look for, they plain as rice,” Samuel added.
Hunter balanced his cigar across the tin can, took a pencil from his pocket, and placed a fifth mark near the ferry landing. “In a river that black?” he asked. “A man can’t see to the bottom in five inches around here.”
Samuel replied like he had a hand on the Bible. “Yes, sir. I’m sure. I done it once already.”
General Hunter studied the map again. The room quieted, and someone opened and closed a door in the antechamber. Hunter nodded to himself. He pocketed the piece of paper and leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head. His mouth twisted in an attempt at a smile. “Thank you. I’m sure my replacement will find the information useful.”
Harriet’s toes curled in her shoes, and her heart started thumping. She struggled to stay in her seat. The Rebs could refortify Fields Point any minute. The entrance to the Combahee would swing shut. If the Union didn’t free people when it had the chance, what was its purpose? What did the abolitionists’ fine words add up to? She pictured the last ship for the Promised Land sailing without them. Thousands left behind. When it came to morality, a woman could sometimes say things a man couldn’t. Usually, she hoped Hunter would forget she was one, but now was the time to remind him.
“To everything, there is a season, General, and a time to every purpose under Heaven,” she said. “A time to be born, a time to die.” Harriet leaned forward. “This the time to do what you come for, sir. What we all come for. This ain’t the work of another man, General Hunter. The good Lord waiting on you to lead His chil’ren to freedom.”
Hunter’s jaw squared. “Lincoln appears to be waiting on someone else,” the general muttered. But he took the map out of his pocket and looked at it again.
“No one but you believed in recruiting colored regiments til you went and done it, General Hunter,” Harriet said. “You were the one man in America ready to give em a chance.”
“You’ve got to treat men like men,” Hunter said. “It’s taken a year to get the 1st South Carolina close to a full complement, and the 2nd South Carolina has barely three hundred. We can’t afford to lose a single soldier.”
Harriet at last understood. Hunter had battled Congress, the War Department, and the president for his regiments. He couldn’t bear to see them destroyed. “We can’t afford not to lose em, sir. Your troops want to fight and die for something important—just like you,” she said. “As you say, you got to treat men like men.”
Hunter stared hard at her. Then he held the map to the light again. The old soldier took a deep breath.
“I’ll consider what you’ve brought me.” Hunter looked at Samuel and pointed a heavy finger. “If I decide to go forward, I’ll want you on the lead vessel—where you can scout the torpedoes or be first to get your head blown off.” He looked at Plowden. “You, too.”
Walter had recovered his voice. “’Course, General. What bout M-M-Moses, sir?”
“What about her?” he said. “This is a military expedition, boys.”
“Won’t work without Moses, sir,” Samuel said. His tone was respectful but definite. “The slaves gone be frightened. She knows best how to coax em.”
“Once the t-t-tide turns, the river moves fast,” Walter added. “Them Secesh reinforcements won’t be far away. We ain’t got much t-t-time to get everybody off.”
“Who’s everybody?” Hunter asked.
Walter and Samuel looked at Harriet.
General Hunter stared at her in puzzlement. “The plan is to recruit troops. Fill our regiments for an assault on Charleston.”
“Men don’t want to leave without their wives and chil’ren, sir,” she said. “We gone get more recruits if we don’t make em choose between family and freedom. And if we get all the planters’ hands, rice fields won’t pay. Secesh gone dry up.”
Hunter picked up his cigar, which had gone out. He seemed not to notice and merely flicked cold ash into the tin can. “Thank you for coming by, men.”
The three of them stood. Harriet leaned over for her satchel.
“No, Moses. Not you,” Hunter said. He turned to her as Samuel and Walter left the room, closing the door behind them. “The space on the gunships is limited. What we need are soldiers, not civilians.”
“Yes, sir. But it’s bout impossible for a man to get on board without the woman standing next to him.”
Hunter looked reluctant.
“With women and chil’ren, someone needs to let em know they gone be all right,” Harriet continued. “The Secesh already filled their heads with every kind of nonsense. That you gone sell em to Cuba. That you gone break up their families. They got reason aplenty to figure any plan hatched by a white man is a trick. They need faces they trust.”
“Aren’t black soldiers enough?” Hunter said.
“Might be. Might not be,” she said, recalling her sister Rachel, for whom the threat of being parted from her children served better than chains to keep her on the plantation. Convincing trapped and terrified people to make a leap of faith was never easy. A woman’s voice—her voice—was calming in a way different from a man’s.
Hunter stroked his dyed mustache, which had a rusty look that afternoon. “There’ll be killing. No guarantee who comes back alive. Are you willing?”
“That depends,” Harriet said.
“On what?”
Harriet sat back in her chair. She folded her hands in her lap. “On who you sending as commander.”
Hunter looked at her quizzically. Then he shook his head in disbelief and burst into a laugh. She waited for him to explain, but he just laughed harder. He stood after a moment, still chuckling, and got another match to light his cigar.
“Harriet Tubman, you’re some piece of work,” he said as he retook his seat. He blew the smoke straight up. “Most days I ponder how a woman can do what you do, and then I recollect that only a woman would. You have a new job for me every other day and won’t give up until you fix the whole damn world. Exactly who do you have in mind? Not that it’s your decision.”
“Colonel Montgomery.”
Hunter raised his bushy eyebrows. “Not Higginson? Haven’t you known him for years?”
Harriet nodded. “Yes, sir, I have. Colonel Higginson done as much for colored folk as anybody since John Brown.”
“Then Higginson ought to have command. And he has seniority. So the question is, Moses”—and at this Hunter pointed at her with his cigar—“why are you standing in his way?”
Harriet hesitated. Hunter was right. The glory did belong to the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, the regiment Thomas Wentworth Higginson had drilled until they paraded like an armed ballet. Thomas had been one of John Brown’s most ardent supporters, risking imprisonment for abetting Brown’s insurrection. Leading colored troops into heroic action was Thomas’s dearest wish, and a friend wouldn’t rob him of that honor. But Montgomery prized fighting over drilling, and the Kansas Jayhawker’s men showed more dash than discipline. While his prairie methods raised the hackles of New Englanders, they were exactly what was needed.
“This a bushwhacking operation, sir. Colonel Montgomery’s the fightingest man we have. If he goes, I will.”
Hunter looked displeased. “Are you saying you won’t unless I give him the command?”
Harriet stared out the back window. In the distance, beyond the sandy alleys dividing the refugee camp, she spied men and women hoeing cotton in the hot sun. A child wearing only a slip-like shirt carried drinking pails on a yoke across his shoulders. Harriet thought of Kizzy under Pipkin’s roof, a memory that pained her like a splinter burrowing deeper every day.
Harriet turned back to the general. “Yes, sir, that’s right.”
“Why?”
She nodded at the window. “Cause a them. The minute this operation gets botched, every slave on the Carolina coast gone be marched inland where we’ll never see em again. We get only one try.”
Hunter flicked fresh ash into the can. “Those Western fighters do have a certain grit. More dirt under their fingernails.”
“A man told me afore the war that our grandbabies gone be free one day, but not us. I don’t want to prove him right.”
“Perhaps I will appoint Montgomery.” Hunter pondered the ash can, and then he glanced up. “But I have my doubts about you, too, Moses.”
Harriet drew back, puzzled. “Doubts?”
“I’m thinking it might be better if both you and Higginson stay back. What with your condition.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking bout,” she said, though she stiffened. She knew exactly what he was talking about.
“You’ve got that problem.” Hunter tapped his forehead. “Don’t think I don’t know. I keep track. On a raid as chancy as this, every man must be ready for duty. Consider what might happen if you had a fit at the wrong moment. We can’t take that risk.”
Harriet’s long fingers dug into the arms of the chair. For once, instead of feeling humiliated by her condition, all she could think about was what she’d done despite it. “You know how I got that, don’t you?” she said. If Hunter insisted on bringing it up, he was going to hear the whole story. “That problem?”
Hunter shook his head. “No, but it doesn’t—”
“I got it fighting a white man. When I was jest a sprout. The things that happened on that plantation would make your flesh creep. Would make your hair stand on end. My mama sent me to the store one day for some bicarb a soda for the Big House. An overseer from down the road came in hollering for a child who’d run inside, fearing for his life.”
Harriet pushed up from her chair. “That man told me—‘Hold onto that nigger! Don’t you let him get away! Help me tie him up.’ Well, I wasn’t much older than the boy. Maybe twelve or thirteen.” She held her hand at shoulder height to indicate someone small. “But I felt older. That child looked so pitiful and scared, dancing and ducking to avoid that overseer’s bullwhip. That man, he was a bad one.”
David Hunter stared up at her. “Harriet, you don’t—”
She opened her arms wide, hands back, as if to shield someone behind her. “So I told him, ‘No.’ I wouldn’t do it. I blocked the door, and that child—he flew right around me, onto the porch, and down the steps. That overseer, he mad as a hornet! So he took up an iron weight next to the storekeeper’s scale and chucked it at that boy. Hard as he could. The child got clean away, but that man, he dropped me like a tree. Broke my skull.”
Harriet fell back into her seat, perfectly composed on the outside, though her hands shook slightly, and her tongue tasted of wire at the memory. “Montgomery needs men who gone fight with everything they got,” she said. “You can count on me, sir. I done this before. I been there, bringing folks home to freedom past bloodhounds and patrollers. Plenty a times. And I’m one a the few in this whole country that can say that. So I ain’t the one you got to worry about.”
Hunter’s face flushed. The scar on his neck turned liver colored. “Well, I do worry. I know your record on the Underground Railroad, but this is war. Are you ready to end up like Shields Green?”
Harriet blinked at the reference to John Brown’s colored lieutenant. She had met Green only once, before the attack on Harper’s Ferry. The Charleston native hadn’t said much beyond, “I gone stick with de ole man” when someone questioned John Brown’s military strategy. Newspapers later reported that Shields Green declined to say anything more when he stood under the noose a week after John Brown’s more celebrated hanging.
“I been facing that possibility more’n a dozen years,” Harriet said.
Hunter seemed almost angry. “You know they dug Green up?” he said with a scowl. “Dissected his body at a Virginia medical college? Think how they’d treat a woman.”
Harriet lifted her chin. “Think how they treat women now, sir. If Shields Green could die with Brown, I can die with Montgomery.”
Hunter studied her silently.
Harriet stared back.
“It ain’t a choice, General Hunter,” she said after a moment. “If someone stole your ma and pa, would you go back for em? They took your sister and sent her to some man to use however he want, wouldn’t you do ever last thing you could to save her?”
Harriet rubbed the back of her scarred neck. As long as she could remember, she’d been both praised and hunted for sticking it out. Of course she was scared. Anyone would be. Thomas Wentworth Higginson once speculated that her old injury might have addled her brain. “Knocked the fear right out of you, thank the Lord,” he’d said in his small office off the church entrance. “I enjoyed the danger of running guns to Brown,” Higginson said. “But feminine sensibilities are different from masculine ones. Why, you’re just a tiny thing, Harriet.”
“So you saying I’m brave only cause the Lord hit me upside the head?” Harriet waved at the books on Thomas’s shelves. “Jest last week you preached that girls should learn the alphabet. If they learn that alphabet, maybe they gone write books, too. Like men. That mean they got masculine sensibilities? I’ve had to fight my whole life. Can a woman stand up for herself only if her head is broken?”
General Hunter now stared at her much as Thomas had done. Maybe bravery was strange in a woman, but she didn’t think so. White gentlemen tended to revere womenfolk who were limp-wristed and lily-livered. Black people didn’t hold with that. They reserved their respect for those who fought back against a world trying to take down their families. A woman like that was a prize.
The old soldier sighed and reached for a match to relight his cigar. “Saxton returns next week,” he said after a few puffs. “My authority will be at an end after that. So I can give you until then. I’ll send orders for Montgomery and tell him you’re to go along.”
Relief washed over Harriet as if poured from a bucket. They had a plan. “Thank you, sir,” she said. “Thank you.”
“But keep Plowden and Heyward quiet,” he said. “If Colonel Montgomery’s troops learn they’re readying for an assault nearby rather than on Florida, spies will get ahold of it, and you’ll have guns instead of gators waiting for you on the Combahee. You can count on that.”
“Yes, sir.” Dismiss me, she thought. Dismiss me—she repeated silently, afraid he might change his mind. Her hand crept toward the satchel.
“And make sure you obey every goddamn order he gives you, like it or not.”
“A course, sir,” she said.
“No going off on your own,” he lectured.
“Yes, General Hunter.”
Hunter looked as though there were other warnings he wanted to lard on but couldn’t think of any. “Dismissed,” he finally said.
“Thank you, sir,” Harriet said, and she reached swiftly for her bag.
“Careful, hear?” he called as she hurried from the room before he could think up another objection.