I stood on the river of Jordan,
to see that ship come sailing over.
Stood on the river of Jordan,
to see that ship sail by.
Spiritual
LUSH RICE FIELDS APPEARED ON EITHER side of the river well before Nichols’s landing on the north bank. Low levees curved with the river. Slave cabins above and beyond on the hills sat like wooden blocks some careless child had scattered on a green carpet. Dark heads dotted the fields, bent over and already hard at work in the ankle-deep water, weeding the spring crop.
Suddenly, a small figure in a white turban around half a mile away straightened in the middle of a verdant expanse. It must be a woman, Harriet thought, since she wore a gray flour sack over a long skirt. The slave shielded her brow against the bright sunrise. She froze a long moment, and then she turned to someone stooped several rows over. Harriet wondered what the woman was saying and if she saw the Stars and Stripes flying from the mast. Would a slave so remote from any town know the flag, or that it meant freedom? Had Charles’s informant on the Nichols Plantation alerted the right people?
A broad causeway dividing the wet fields ran toward a mansion of modest size. The wooden house possessed a long, shaded porch along the front, with a view commanding the river. A white man and a black servant stood on it, looking toward the ships. The white man raised what appeared to be a short telescope. He stood perfectly still with his spyglass trained on the John Adams. The black man was gesturing.
Harriet gripped the arms of her chair, and then she lifted her hand to wave in salute. She hoped the white man saw her in his telescope. She wasn’t hiding anymore. Now you know, she thought. I’m coming for you. I’m right here.
The planter lowered his instrument. He said something to his servant, who disappeared into the house. The white man looked again through his spyglass before he ran inside, too. Was he going for his horse to alert the rebel army up Stocks Road?
The John Adams slowed as they neared the point on the river that Harriet had marked with a nail the week before. The second torpedo had to be nearby. She got to her feet on the narrow deck to get a better view of the muddy current below. An odd patch of berry bushes grew from the side of the levee. It would be a tricky place to pick fruit—but useful as a landmark.
“There!” she and Samuel called at the same time. He dashed to the pilothouse and was inside even before she. Harriet heard shouts from the hurricane deck as spotters below marked the torpedo, too.
“Captain. That bush yonder,” he said, pointing. “Snag’s thirty feet out from them bushes.”
The pilot leaned hard on the spokes of the immense wheel. The ship lumbered slowly toward the south bank. They barely missed the triangular ripple. The ensign again waved his flag from the doorway, and the Harriet Weed mimicked their course. Colonel Montgomery disappeared down the ship’s ladder, and Harriet stepped out of the pilothouse. On the hurricane deck below, she spotted Walter Plowden, who waved up at her. She waved back, and they both grinned. Harriet ducked back inside the cabin. Captain Vaught spoke to the ensign. “Signal the Harriet Weed to land,” and the young officer took up a different flag.
The John Adams continued its pace, still moving upriver but slowly enough to watch the other ship as she rounded the torpedo and steamed toward Nichols’s landing. Captain Vaught reached for the cord of the ship’s whistle. A deafening blast resounded across the river and rice fields. The Weed replied with a shrill toot of her own. A shout went up from the deck as soldiers waved and hollered at surprised slaves who looked up like startled deer from their work. Harriet broke into a grin at the signal to commence the operation. She hoped John Brown heard their whistle from his throne in heaven.
Harriet exited the pilothouse again and stood by her chair—too excited to sit—as they passed the Nichols mansion. The activity in the surrounding rice fields had changed. Voices filled the air as people called to one another. Dark faces headed in different directions. Some migrated toward the levee. Others streamed purposefully toward the mansion and cabins beyond. In the middle of one immense field, a man and woman argued as he tugged her toward the river and she pulled toward the cabins in the far distance. Harriet thought of Septima’s sister Juno.
An overseer holding the reins of a spooked horse on the elevated causeway struggled to get his foot in the stirrup without letting go of his gun. He danced around the skittish animal but kept missing the swinging loop. The horse shied. The white man stumbled. His mouth worked as if he was cursing.
Samuel came to stand by her. He pointed at the faraway overseer. “Look at that Buckra,” he said with a laugh. “Shitting his pants!”
Rifles cracked from the deck below. Two sharpshooters had fired at the white man. Just then, he swung up into the saddle, shot his own gun in the air, turned his horse toward the road that divided the rice fields from the forest, and galloped toward the Confederate encampment.
“Let’s hope he don’t reach the army,” she said.
The Harriet Weed pulled neatly into the landing. Within moments, a regiment of colored soldiers sprinted from the ship with their muskets, led by a white captain. Four colored soldiers held torches they must have touched to the boilers at the last moment. Two others carried smoking metal buckets filled with hot pitch.
Harriet stepped around her chair to watch from the rear. The federal soldiers fanned out, running toward different buildings on the plantation. A sizeable group moved in the direction of the main road, perhaps to intercept Rebel pickets before they could reach the main army. A handful made for the barns and a rice mill with a grain chute. Two men with torches ran onto the wooden porch of the plantation house, followed by one with a bucket, who spilled the burning contents onto the floorboards. Harriet couldn’t see what happened next as the John Adams rounded a bend in the river at that very moment.
Alone now, their ship glided alongside the low dike another mile or so, following the curve of the fields. Workers stared disbelievingly as the ship moved past, but some were already headed back toward their cabins. A few ran. One raggedy man climbed the dike and tried to hail the boat, but the vessel sailed on.
Harriet called across the water. “Get your people,” she said and pointed in the direction of the Nichols Plantation. “There’s another ship!”
The man kept waving. Sweat from the morning’s labor coursed down his face. A boy and girl with bare feet stood at the bottom of the levee looking up at him. Samuel cupped his hands to his mouth and leaned over the railing. “The landing. Get to the landing,” he yelled.
The man nodded, climbed back down into the field, and grabbed his children by the hand.
An acrid scent arrived on the water breeze. Harriet looked downriver. Three massive columns of black smoke rose over the Nichols Plantation. The air smelled of burning timbers and scorched rice. Their troops must have found the storerooms.
The incoming tide continued to push strongly. The John Adams steamed upriver faster now. As they rounded an oxbow, Harriet wondered when they would reach the Lowndes property. They soon passed an inlet at the edge of a flat marsh, and she recognized the tributary up which Walter had rowed her a few nights earlier. Jack’s Creek, he’d called it. Incredulous faces met them again as the levee reappeared on the other side of the reed-choked marsh. The workers must not have heard the commotion downriver, though they had likely caught the odor of smoke. Seeing colored soldiers, several people bolted toward the ship. A group of women weeding near the edge of the dike turned their faces in unison, like sunflowers.
Troops arrayed on the hurricane deck waited with remarkable stoicism at the railing for their turn to disembark and take up the attack, but one man suddenly lifted his rifle overhead. He shook the gun to attract the attention of someone on shore. “Ma,” he shouted. His voice broke. “Ma—!”
Several women in the field started forward instinctively, and then they stopped. One took a few more halting steps before throwing down her hoe. She began to run. Her arms pumped wildly. She pelted forward without speaking. The man at the rail kept calling, “Ma!”
A trunk minder must have opened the gates the night before, when sweet water flowed past on the ebb, because the woman’s skirt trailed and floated in the mire of the newly flooded field. She tripped more than once in the drifting grass. Just a few paces from the dike, her foot tangled with some weeds, and she sprawled headlong. Her face and dress were covered with mud when she scrambled up the levee on all fours.
By then, the John Adams had passed the spot where she jumped to her feet and waved her arms, but the troops on deck parted to allow the young soldier to run the length of the railing with his musket jiggling on his back. He looked ready to jump in the river and swim for her, but at the stern, he stopped. Mother and son appeared rooted, afraid to break eye contact.
Tears streaked the woman’s face. “William!” she cried.
Other soldiers shouted and pointed, some downriver to Nichols, others upriver to Lowndes. The young man yelled back. “Downriver, Ma! Downriver.”
Harriet turned her chair to face the bow, and she gripped the arms to steady her trembling nerves. It was hard to know if the woman would make it in time. Godspeed, she prayed, Godspeed. Only one thing was certain. If a Confederate force awaited them at the ferry, other mothers would soon be left on the bank.