Remembering the treatment that these poor people would suffer for their attempt to escape to the Yankees, it was hard to leave them. But it was impossible to take another one, and sadly we swung away from the landing.
Captain William Lee Apthorp, 2nd South Carolina
MINUTES LATER A DECKHAND REACHED DOWN to pull Harriet aboard the John Adams. Two other men held the tender to prevent the river from carrying away the lighter craft. The wind had picked up. Dark clouds gathered in the direction of the Sound. Just before, Samuel had guided Jacob’s wife into the hands of a sailor, and the pair disappeared into the ship.
Harriet placed a foot on the main deck and allowed the sailor to help her up by the elbow. Her hands trembled with shock, yet she couldn’t allow herself to think about what had just happened. They must still retrieve the advance troops at Tar Bluff and Fields Point.
“Where you sending the sick?” she asked the deckhand.
He reached down for the next passenger coming aboard. “Hurricane deck.”
Drops of water from the hull of a tender overhead fell on Harriet’s scarred neck as she ducked under the craft. Slaves they had picked up along the river sat and stood everywhere, all talking excitedly. Mesmerized young men studied the rifles of the colored soldiers who lined the railings. The racehorse was tethered near the stern. Harriet heard its whinny as a woman asked where her young daughter might relieve herself. “Thataway, ma’am,” Harriet said, pointing toward the head, and she then made her way up the ladder to the hurricane deck. Someone had propped a bag of rice against the door of the saloon.
Pregnant women, old people, and children with eyes red from smoke sat on sacks of dry rice. A man with his leg in a splint was propped against a wall, eyes seamed against pain. The confusion was such that it took a few minutes for Harriet to spot Samuel. He balanced on one knee in the far corner, talking with Jacob’s wife, who sat against the wall. A tall woman with a water jug looked down at the pair.
Harriet stepped over the legs of the wounded man to reach Mayline.
“She doing okay?” Harriet asked the woman with the jug, though as the words left her mouth, she realized it was the refugee who had stood on the chair at the Heyward Plantation. An arresting woman with deeply arched eyebrows, she wore the same indigo headscarf. Samuel’s wife was a pretty woman.
“She look healt’y t’ you?” Lucy said with a pronounced Gullah accent, not taking her eyes from Jacob’s widow. She wiped away a tear as she spoke.
Samuel gazed up, his expression stoic. He must have decided that mourning would have to wait, though grief showed in the heavy lines that bracketed his mouth. He glanced from Harriet to the woman with the jug, then again at Jacob’s wife.
Samuel tugged at a sack of grain to make space between it and the wall. “Luce,” he said to the woman next to Harriet, “wedge that jug here, where Mayline can get at it. It ain’t too too full, is it?” The directness of Samuel’s inquiry suggested familiarity, and Harriet caught the echo of other questions across the years: When would supper be ready? Did they need more firewood? Where would they get shoes for the boys? Had Master Heyward said anything about being short of cash?
Lucy squatted to place the jug on the floor between the wall and the sack of rice. “I gots to get back to de chillun, Mayline,” she said and arranged an army blanket that had slipped from her sister-in-law’s shoulders. “You res’ easy now. We gone take care y’all.”
The pregnant refugee choked up. Tears glistened on her cheeks. “Can’t b’lieve I made it. Can’t b’lieve he didn’t.”
Lucy wiped Mayline’s cheeks with her hand. “Me neither. But you and his baby here now.”
Samuel rose. He looked at Harriet, then at his wife. “This is Moses,” he said to Lucy. “She commands the scouts.”
He had introduced Lucy to Harriet, not the other way around, Harriet noticed as she detected a shimmy under her feet.
Lucy stood. “You in charge? A de men?”
Harriet cleared her throat. “Yes’m. Jest when we scouting.”
Lucy laid a hand on Samuel’s arm. “Bless you for watching obuh dem.”
“Moses planned the raid,” Samuel said. “She found Jacob—” His fists closed, and he didn’t finish the sentence.
Lucy’s hand tightened on his sleeve, and she cocked her head sideways as if observing an odd phenomenon. “Ki. Leel gal like you?” she said to Harriet. “You must got a man’s head.”
Harriet recalled Lucy rallying the other slaves. She thought Lucy’s head probably worked like hers. “Somebody got to give orders,” Harriet said.
“Praise Gawd, you can git back to you own fambly now,” Lucy replied. She looked at her husband and smiled. “Our fambly with my sistahs.” Lucy shook his arm. “Coming, Pa?”
“Not now,” he said.
“But de boys,” Lucy said. “Dey can’t take dey eyes off a you.”
Samuel straightened as if the thought of his sons made him feel bigger. The lines in his face softened. “Hardly recognized Sammy, he growed so much.”
“Tall like his daddy,” Lucy said. She jiggled his arm. “Come see em.”
Samuel shook his head. “Colonel Montgomery needs me.”
Lucy dropped his arm and put her hands on her hips. She stood a little taller. “Dem boys need you.”
Samuel frowned. “Didn’t you say they with your sisters?”
Harriet now heard the echo of old arguments. She backed up a step. “Thank the Lord you made it aboard,” she told Lucy. “I jest wanted to see Mayline got settled.” Harriet turned away and closed her ears to the couple as she left the saloon. Only the mission counted, she told herself, and concentrated on the vibration that came up through her soles. The boilers were stoked, paddle wheels turning. The deckhands must have secured the last tender. The John Adams was sailing downriver. Into a trap, if the Confederates had finally mobilized.
Outside, the sky was darker than before. A rising wind had mostly cleared the ash from the air, but storm clouds gathered to the east. Harriet climbed the ladder to the pilothouse. The ensign waved from the doorway as she took the last steps. The chair he had put out for her earlier was gone.
“Captain Vaught doesn’t need help scouting the torpedoes, ma’am. We charted them on the way upriver,” he called.
“Colonel Montgomery with you?” Harriet asked.
“No, ma’am, he’s on one of the lower decks.”
Harriet backed down. She didn’t see the colonel on the hurricane deck, so she continued below. She found him at the bow of the boiler deck, speaking with Samuel.
“—for now,” the rawboned Jayhawker was saying.
“Yes, Colonel Montgomery,” Samuel said.
Montgomery looked to Harriet as she approached. “Moses. You can help by keeping the contraband calm. We’re stopping at Tar Bluff for Captain Carver and his men. The Weed will pick up Captain Thompson at Fields Point. Be ready for anything.”
“Yes, sir,” Harriet said.
At that moment, an officer from the 3rd Rhode Island Artillery elbowed his way through the refugees who crowded the railing. “Colonel,” the white officer said with a hurried salute, “we’ve got to clear the hurricane deck. My men need room to maneuver.”
Montgomery nodded. “Moses,” he said, “you and Samuel get busy. Spread out.”
Over the next half hour, Harriet waved refugees coming down from the hurricane deck onto the jammed lower levels of the ship. She ran into Walter, whom she told about Jacob and Kizzy. His right eyebrow twitched, and he rubbed it with a knuckle. “Hanging’s t-t-too good for P-P-Pipkin,” Walter said.
At that moment, an old man behind them said to a companion, “Dis remind me when I come from de Congo. So many ooman die, dey only mens left by time we reach Cuba. Buckra jest pitch dem bodies overboard.”
Walter shot Harriet a look. “Let’s get folks to put their backs to the railing,” he said quietly. “If they keep their eyes on each other instead a the riverbank, they won’t be worrying about t-t-trouble ahead.”
Harriet hardly noticed the river as she circulated among the refugees. “Face the smokestack,” she instructed. “Hold tight to your chil’ren til the river goes so wide you can’t see the other side,” she said, realizing that few had ever spied the ocean. “It gone be a couple hours yet.” When two young men balked at turning their backs to the view, Harriet explained that the colored troops needed help. The youths jumped at the opportunity to assist the uniformed men, and within short order, they had gotten those on the boiler deck seated and mostly quiet, except for the babies. Tension crept over the ship as everyone realized they weren’t yet safe. An hour passed.
Harriet positioned herself between two soldiers at the portside railing, facing the north bank, and took tweezers from her satchel to worry the splinter out of her palm. When finished, she plucked at her collar to let air into her shirt. The humidity had thickened.
The Secesh must have finally learned what had happened. Their field artillery would be on the road to Tar Bluff or Fields Point. It was baffling that the gunships had encountered so little opposition thus far. Could the Secesh commander be even more incompetent than they’d thought, or was he grouping his forces to smash them at the end? Harriet guessed that the Adams had only a mile or so before the first Rebel fort. The river still moved toward the sea, yet the black water had turned sluggish. It must be close to two in the afternoon. Earlier in the day, Captain Vaught had said the ebb tide would speed their escape until then. After two o’clock, the incoming tide would fight them—though it would also raise the water level to float them over the bar.
Harriet scanned downriver for the Harriet Weed, hoping Septima’s sister Juno was aboard. She closed her eyes briefly. Dear Lord, please let Juno be on the Weed, she prayed. As if in answer, Harriet heard a faraway ship’s whistle. The Weed. It must be near Field’s Point. A moment later, another distant trill echoed across the marshes in the far distance. Then another. Three altogether. The signal for distress. The Weed had encountered Rebels.
The vibration under Harriet’s feet increased. Two blasts sounded from the ship’s whistle as the Adams gunned her engine. The river took another bend. On their left, the fort at Tar Bluff appeared. A Union officer on the dock urgently waved his hat. Troops clustered behind him.
“Hallelujah!” said a soldier standing to Harriet’s left. He spoke over her head to a man on her right. “See dat? Didn’t lose a single sojer!”
The Adams backed water at the last moment. They came alongside the dock so quickly that Harriet feared they were going to ram it. But the ship slowed in time, and a gangplank went out. As the advance guard ran aboard and vanished below, Harriet heard Montgomery. “Double-quick!” the colonel yelled. “Cast off!”
The Adams pulled away and picked up speed. Black soot from the smokestack filled the air. The ship’s paddle wheels dug trenches in the slack tide. They sailed another couple miles. Clouds overhead grew ominous. They were closing on Fields Point: the end of the Combahee and last obstacle to freedom. When the John Adams rounded the last bend, Harriet spied the Weed treading water at the river’s mouth. Puffs of gray smoke issued from her guns. The ship was firing at the road beyond the fort. On the landing, a white officer and a handful of colored soldiers stood with their backs to the river, guns trained at the promontory above. Just then, an enemy shell careened over their heads. It hit the slope next to the dock. Dirt flew onto the landing. The colored troops ducked, but they kept their muskets trained above.
Rebel field artillery had arrived. The Secesh were making a last stand. Trees obscured the road, and Harriet couldn’t see how big a force they’d assembled, but a single shell in the wooden deck of either ferryboat would sink it. Everyone would go down.
Harriet leaned over the railing. Thunderheads towered above the estuary. A faraway curtain of rain blocked the light in the direction of Port Royal. Someone in the Weed’s pilothouse pushed a wigwag flag out the window to signal the Adams. A deafening boom sounded immediately from the deck above Harriet’s head as a twenty-pounder opened up. All the heavy guns seemed to discharge at once. The Adams quaked with the concussion, and an instant later, an explosion erupted behind the Rebel fort on the hill. They had scored a hit. Other cannons boomed on the Adams, and debris again flew above the trees on Fields Point.
A cheer went up. “Give it to em!” Harriet yelled. A soldier beside her stamped his feet. Others shouted oaths. On their feet now, refugees strained over the railing. A woman covered her baby’s face with a shawl and screamed, “Smite dem! Smite dem!” Harriet wished she had her musket. Just once, she wanted to kill someone. Draw blood. Strike down those who’d taken each and every one of her sisters.
Onshore, anxious Union troops crowded the landing while the Weed steamed forward and shoved out a gangplank. A boom came from the trees, and a fountain of water sprang up twenty feet from the portside. The spray washed the railing as the advance troops raced aboard. Moments later, the Weed sailed toward St. Helena Sound when thunder broke overhead.
Jagged lightning ripped across the sky like a root torn from the earth. The storm had arrived. Harriet felt the lift of the turbulent tide as a howitzer boomed above her head. Then, as the front wall of the Rebel fort erupted in dirt and stone, the John Adams steamed out of the Combahee and into the gale.