Our masters they have lived under the flag, they got their wealth under it, and [provided] everything beautiful for their children. Under it, they have ground us up and put us in their pocket for money. But the first minute they think that ol’ flag means freedom for we colored people, they pull it right down, and run up that rag of their own. But we’ll never desert the ol’ flag, boys . . . and we’ll die for it now.
Corporal Price Lambkin, 1st South Carolina Volunteers
HARRIET PULLED A SECOND HANDFUL OF bandages from the linen shelf in the hospital, concerned that she hadn’t gotten enough the day before. As she did, she wondered if she’d left her sewing scissors at the boardinghouse. She might need them later to cut away clothing. Harriet set her canteen on the floor along with the bandages. She groped inside the satchel. A moment later, she felt the pointed tips. Relieved, she stuffed the bandages on top.
Doctor Durant poked his head in the doorway. “Harriet. Just in time. We’re out of whiskey for pain. Can you hold a patient for me?”
“Sorry, doc,” Harriet said as she struggled with the bag. “Ain’t got time for surgery this morning.”
“Won’t take more than twenty minutes. It’s a simple procedure. My Monday volunteer hasn’t shown up.”
Harriet pushed harder on the bulky bandages, shoving the edges down into the crevices until she managed to buckle the bag. “Jest can’t, sir. Maybe Doctor Hawks can lend you someone.”
Durant frowned, but Harriet kept her head down and made her way out the door with the satchel on one shoulder and a full canteen on the other.
The street was deserted. Horses and soldiers that had been outside when she arrived were gone. Alarmed, Harriet hurried down the avenue. Not until she turned onto Bay Street and heard the roll of a snare drum did her nerves calm.
Lined up in strict formation, troops of the 2nd South Carolina Volunteers waited in closely packed queues from the head of the wharf all the way up Bay Street. Sunlight flashed on their muskets and bayonets, arrayed like knives in a box across their blue-coated shoulders. The colored troops faced stoically forward while onlookers milled at the margins. Montgomery must be taking all of his men. Three hundred.
Townsfolk and field hands from across Port Royal Island had turned out to witness the launch of the 2nd South Carolina. Harriet spotted a woman selling lemonade from a folding table. A dog was curled underneath. A boy with a basket on his head hawked fruit on the crowded walkway. “Best peaches on de islan’!” the youngster called. Shopkeepers stood with their arms crossed in doorways, and two clerks in a second-floor window whistled down at a young woman walking by who ignored them, though a corner of her mouth turned up. A silent mother gripped the hand of a small boy on the corner. “Where papa going?” Harriet overheard the child ask his mother.
Harriet hurried by with the eerie sensation that every day of her life had been preparation for this one. It was the only day she couldn’t miss. Without thinking, she moved faster. Two horse-drawn wagons blocked Bay Street for an instant, and she dashed around them with an irrational fear of losing sight of the ships and being left behind.
By the time she reached the dock, soldiers had begun to embark. Officers directed the queues to their appointed transports while sutlers toting baskets hugged the edges of the wharf, working to deliver the last supplies. Harriet waded through the crowd until she reached the John Adams at the end of the dock, leading the flotilla, where a black officer checked his manifest and waved her aboard the main deck. She passed under one medium-size and two large tenders lashed overhead. Opposite them on the starboard side of the ship, four small rowboats swung on hooks.
At the foot of the ladder to the boiler deck, another officer checked his list carefully for Harriet’s name, as did a third before admitting her to the hurricane deck and up another ladder to the square glass pillbox perched over the forecastle of the steamboat. There in the pilothouse, Colonel James Montgomery consulted the captain and a local waterman. The chamber had windows on all four sides. Beneath them, the wealthy town, marshes, and estuary looked like a drawing room mural. Seagulls fought over a fish on a piling far below.
Harriet stood in the doorway, waiting to be recognized. She noticed that Montgomery had finally shaved. His collar was open, but his missing button had been replaced, and the uniform had been ironed.
An enormous steering wheel dominated the pilothouse, which smelled of cheap pipe tobacco. A table and a captain’s chair sat in one corner, next to freshly painted millwork and a sparkling new pane of glass. The sharpshooter’s bullet that had shattered Captain Clifton’s brainpan during the last expedition to Florida must have busted the window, too. Although the pilothouse had been repaired, the man’s wife was still broken, Harriet knew. Whenever she passed Clifton’s home, his widow stood at the window, staring onto the port as if waiting for her husband to sail in.
“What time will we approach the bar?” Montgomery asked the new captain, David Vaught. An older white man with a long, gray beard that brushed his chest, Vaught removed a corncob pipe from between his teeth and looked to the local pilot. Harriet had met Vaught once before when leaving Hunter’s office. He ignored her now.
“What time, would you say?” Vaught asked the pilot in a flat New York accent.
The Gullah waterman withdrew a watch on a chain. “Dat depend on when we leave, Cap’n.” He glanced at the timepiece, then at the tidal straits of the Beaufort River swirling past. “Round one in de morning, I ’spect. We gone have to hang back some til de tide rises, sah. Nuf to take over us de bar.”
Captain Vaught put his pipe in a dish, shuffled aside the map on the small desk, and withdrew a chart underneath. It appeared to be a tide table. “The flood should be sufficiently high around three,” he told the colonel after consulting the paper. “But it’s best to arrive early and not cast anchor until we can cross. The tide waits for no one.”
Montgomery nodded, satisfied. “We should have a couple hours’ leeway, then.”
Captain Vaught cocked his head in Harriet’s direction without looking at her. “What’s a woman doing on board?” His voice was gruff.
Montgomery gave her his attention. “Moses, find yourself a corner. I won’t need you for a while.” To Vaught, he simply said, “Tell you later.”
“Yes, Colonel,” Harriet replied. “You want me back when we near the bar?”
“That instant. And bring Heyward, since he saw the torpedoes last. I want both of you up here once we’re on the river.”
“Yes, sir,” she said.
Harriet made her way back to the hurricane deck, filling with soldiers and their gear. Bayonets were sheathed. Men stowed their canvas knapsacks on their laps and fixed their cartridge boxes on their belts. White officers circulated on deck.
Next to one of the twenty-pounders, two Rhode Island gunners hurriedly stacked scattered cannonballs. The ammunition piles next to the other cannons were arranged in neat pyramids, but something had upset theirs. Other crews waited in knots around the guns. “Cussed idiots! I told you keep your eyes open,” an officer berated two white artillerymen as they restacked the cannonballs. “I turn my back one goddamn second—”
After the officer stomped away, a colored soldier with the insignia of the 2nd South Carolina approached and held out an iron ball. He cocked his head toward a water cask. “Dis one roll behind dat barrel.”
A white artilleryman took the shell. “Thank you,” he said, and then he placed it in the growing pile.
Harriet eyed the open space in the middle of the deck. Officers must be saving it for the contraband. She calculated that the space would hold at least three hundred people, and she wished it were bigger. The other decks might take another two hundred.
The old ferryboat had been stripped of all nonessential equipment. Ghostly screw-holes for missing passenger benches pocked the deck at regular intervals. Harriet found an empty spot on the deck with her back to the saloon where ladies took the shade in normal times. A cork life preserver still dangled from a hook above her head. The prospect of a long wait reminded Harriet how little she had rested in recent days and that she’d gotten less sleep than planned the night before. Now she’d be forced to sit still. It might be a few hours before they shoved off and several more before they crossed the bar into the Combahee.
Harriet took a packet of dried pork strips from her satchel. Her head felt woozy. From where she’d posted herself, she should spy Samuel and Walter the moment they came up the ship’s ladder. Though hungry, she set the food in her lap while she retrieved Linah’s button from the inside pocket of the satchel. Dyed brown to match her sister’s dress, the polished-bone button had two thread holes. Harriet pressed it to her lips. “Tomorrow,” she whispered, then she tucked it back into the deepest recess.
At last, she unwrapped her food, took the hunk of dried pork she’d brought for supper, and chewed slowly. She was determined not to use the boat’s rations and hoped Montgomery had brought enough to provision the refugees on the long sail back to Port Royal. No one would starve, but they’d need something in the course of a day. Once finished with her meager meal, Harriet put her satchel behind her back for support and leaned against the wooden wall to wait. She took a tiny sip from her army canteen and grimaced at its metallic taste. The glare off the water was intense. She blinked—and closed her eyes without meaning to. The sounds of the dock ceased and the light went out.
A girl with pigtails clung to the white rail with two hands. “Auntie,” she called excitedly over her shoulder as the wharf slipped away, “we gone see the ocean?”
“Aunt Harriet,” she corrected the child. Harriet wanted the girl to remember she wasn’t an auntie of the type black children had wherever they went, but that she was a real aunt, an aunt with a name.
“Aunt Harriet, is the sea big? Mama say it real big.”
Harriet didn’t want to answer but knew she must. “Your mama’s right,” she said. “The ocean bigger than anything else in the whole wide world.”
“Is the ocean far?”
“Not too far, honey. At the other end a the Chesapeake.”
“We gone see it soon?” Margaret asked. She wore a wide straw hat with a chinstrap on which she tugged. The nine-year-old seemed younger than Harriet recollected being at the same age, but she supposed that’s what freedom looked like. White children struck her the same.
“Bal’more’s at the top a the Chesapeake,” Harriet said. “We gotta sail all the way south fore we come to the sea.”
“Mama says we shouldn’t go south. Not ever,” the child said.
“Your mama wants you to have a good education, sugar. Up north,” Harriet said, twisting the truth like a washrag. The child’s real mama did want that, though Harriet’s sister-in-law had wept when Harriet came through the back door and reminded Mary of her promise, at which she gestured to the home she had provided: glass in every window and a piano in the parlor. Harriet’s former brother-in-law, Isaac, had driven off in what appeared to be a new carriage. The timber business must be good.
“You got your boy,” Harriet said, her face set and her mind made up. “Margaret’s my girl, and I ain’t leaving her behind in the land a slavery, where she can walk down the street and see other children bought and sold in the middle a town.”
“But when I gone talk to Mama?” the child now said. She hung from the rail with her shoes nosed against the decorative slats. Margaret had such observant brown eyes. Why didn’t they know their own mother? When tears spilled down the child’s cheeks, Harriet felt she would gladly walk from Maryland to Pennsylvania again to ease the pain. But this wasn’t a hurt she could take away. She’d imposed it.
Rachel materialized at Harriet’s elbow. Her sister’s hair stood on end, uncombed. It had turned shock-white, though she was barely thirty. “Got my boys?” her sister asked and grabbed onto Harriet’s arm. “You got Ben and Algerine?”
“You didn’t tell me where they are,” Harriet said.
But Rachel didn’t relent. “Find em,” she said. “We counting on you. Don’t you let us down.”
Harriet tried to throw off her sister’s grasp. Not everyone could be rescued; Margaret didn’t even want to be rescued. Harriet was doing her best yet must always do more. God had told her that again and again, though she wondered why He worked her so hard. Why her safety mattered so little to Him. A man like any other, she sometimes felt when He seemed not to listen.
The hold on her arm tightened.
“Moses,” a voice said far away. Someone gently shook her.
Harriet woke from her nightmare. She passed a hand over her eyes. The ship’s railing came into focus.
Samuel sat alongside her with his wide knees drawn up in the small space. Next to him, Charles Simmons and Walter Plowden stood with their backs to the wall, looking toward land. The ship under them vibrated. Night had fallen. A full moon hung over the river.
“You was out a while,” Samuel said in a low voice. “You okay?”
“Thought I’d get some shut-eye fore things get lively,” she said to ease his mind. She didn’t want him thinking about her problem.
Harriet rose. Samuel stood as well. Only a few lights glowed from scattered cabins on shore. Men in uniform remained seated, but every neck craned to see the island slip away. Voices hummed with excitement as the boat’s speed quickened. The spirit was infectious, the sentiment palpable: They were going for their kin. From the Beaufort River into the Coosaw, they were threading the maze of slavery, and this time they were armed.
A black sergeant strode into their midst. His heavy boots thundered on the wooden deck. “Quiet!” he said. “I don’t want to hear a whisper ’til we reach our target. Your dang fool voices carry right across open water, and the colonel’s counting on the Secesh to take us for a supply ship, not a troop ship. So don’t let me see a single cheroot or pipe.”
Montgomery appeared. He must have descended the ladder from the pilothouse. The crowd fell silent. The colonel cleared his throat, and men leaned forward not to miss a word.
“I’m saying this only once, soldiers, and then I need you to be absolutely silent. Not a hoot. Not a holler. We’re on the most important mission of this war. This isn’t just about attacking enemy positions. This is about fighting a way of life. We’re going to show the world that evil men can no longer make money from treating people like beasts. You’ve been told we’re headed to Florida. That plan’s changed.”
The colonel paused. Light from a lantern gleamed on his shaved cheeks. He had fastened the top button of his uniform. Standing tall, he looked fully in command. “Our brave scouts have found a way to strike closer to home,” he continued. Montgomery nodded in Harriet’s direction, and a few soldiers glanced her way. “We’re headed up the Combahee, men.”
“Yes!” a voice broke out.
“Praise God!” someone next to the ladder said. A buzz swept the ship.
“Shhh,” the sergeant hissed angrily. The deck fell silent except for the splash of the side-wheels and chug of the engine.
“We’ll be at the mouth of the river before morning,” Montgomery said. “Some of you will storm the Rebel positions at Fields Point and Tar Bluff. Captain Apthorp and the men of the Harriet Weed will attack the Nichols place. Most of you, along with troops from the Sentinel, will continue with me to the plantations on the upper reaches of the river. You’ve trained for this, men. The fate of every man and woman on these shores depends upon your devotion to duty.” Montgomery paused. Emotion colored his face in the glow of the lantern that an ensign held aloft. “Glory, hallelujah!” the former preacher added with feeling.
“Glory, hallelujah,” went up the soft echo from men unable to restrain their voices. “Damn straight,” came a call from the artillery. Several laughed.
A shrill boat whistle cleaved the moment in two. Montgomery froze, startled, then whipped around. He vanished up the ship’s ladder. The whistle sounded again, and Harriet realized it came from one of the ships behind them, out of view around a bend. Three long whistles followed. The universal signal for distress.
“Quiet!” the sergeant barked before anyone spoke.
Every soul tensed. Harriet held her breath. What had gone wrong?
A moment later, the John Adams’s heartbeat chugged to a stop. The splash of the paddle wheels ceased, and the anchor chain clanged off its spindle. Montgomery and the colored pilot descended the ladder and continued on down to the lower decks. The earlier command of silence took on greater import. A profound hush fell over the deck. Everyone strained to hear what was happening. When a man coughed, three shushed him. Minutes passed, broken only by the sound of rowboats being lowered into the water. Time passed with unbearable slowness. An hour or more later, Harriet heard the crew clamber back aboard. The Adams’s engine roared to life. But instead of continuing on its voyage, the gunboat drew up anchor and began a three-point turn in the water, back toward Beaufort.
A soldier across from Harriet groaned. “Oh, Gawd, no. Turning ’round? My mama on de Cum’bee,” he said to the man next to him, who put a finger to his lips.
Harriet felt like jumping to her feet. She must find Montgomery. They couldn’t abort the mission. They couldn’t turn back. Not now. The sergeant who had spoken earlier came up the ladder from the boiler deck to deliver the news.
“Everyone stay put, exactly where you is,” he commanded. “The Sentinel’s hit a sandbar. They can’t get her off, so the Adams and Weed are gone take on her men. We’ll be underway again after that.”
An artilleryman across from Harriet let out a whoop. Others moaned with relief.
“Damn Sentinel,” a Rhode Islander said. Standing beside his howitzer, the white man spoke distinctly, though he kept his voice low. “Everyone knew she was a tub.”
“Good thing Montgomery balked at putting guns aboard,” another gunner said. “I’d hate to move those twenty-pounders in the dark.”
Harriet calculated quickly on her fingers. Taking on the Sentinel’s troops meant at least an extra hundred soldiers divided between the Adams and Weed—fifty apiece—plus the loss of all the Sentinel’s passenger space. Possibly three hundred people, all told. Could she be right? “How many we gone lose?” she whispered to Samuel.
He knew exactly what she meant. “We down at least three hundred,” he murmured in her ear. Three hundred contraband. Three hundred more souls left behind.