Freeman (67 page)
Ginny’s gaze was direct. Tilda no longer saw it.
Was it just a little more than a week ago that she had stood in the cookhouse with Honey in the predawn darkness, trying to get used to this mad new idea that she, beaten and tired old thing that she was, was a woman someone might come looking for? It had unsettled her, had seemed a thing too large and foolish to believe. She felt it again now, that same sense of disquiet, as if her entire understanding of herself, of who she was and what she meant, had somehow shifted right before her eyes.
Tilda had never thought of herself as a woman someone would
choose
. But apparently, she was.
And then, she was standing. And then, she was walking toward the railing where Prudence tended her husband.
They looked around at her approach. Prudence smiled. “There you are,” she said. “Perhaps you can break the stalemate. Sam is not happy with the name I have chosen for the town we are founding in Ohio. Tell me what you think.”
Tilda said, “Beg pardon?” Words seemed leeched of meaning somehow.
“I want to call it Freeman,” said Prudence. “Freeman, Ohio.”
Tilda said, “I think”—she saw Sam grimace—“that is a wonderful idea.”
Prudence nodded triumphantly. “Well, then,” she told Sam, “that settles it. Freeman, Ohio it is.”
“Fine, then,” said Sam, and Tilda could barely hear his voice. “Apparently, I am unable to talk you out of it.”
There was a moment. No one spoke. Then Tilda saw an understanding settle in Prudence’s eyes. Prudence clapped her hands together as she stood. “Well,” she told Tilda brightly, “I think I shall take a walk. Would you mind keeping our friend company?”
“No,” said Tilda, “I would not mind that at all.”
A squeeze of her arm. Then Prudence walked away. She went to the opposite side of the deck, stood at the railing. After a moment, she pulled a letter from her pocket. She had read it a dozen times in the week since it arrived, read it enough that she could recite it by heart, had no need to see the words on paper. But she opened it anyway and read:
My dearest sister:
I can only imagine what you have been going through since that woman told you about Father’s indiscretion. I am sure you feel great disappointment with him, but also, I would wager, you have endured a period of wondering about your own identity
.Do not judge him too harshly, Sister. You saw him ever through the eyes of love as a favored youngest child and so perhaps you failed to realize it, but he was only a man and as such, heir to all the weakness of men. Yes, he owned slaves. But remember, he set them free. Once he really had a taste of what it meant to own human beings, he wanted no part of it. He saw that while the institution debases the slave, it also debases the owner. I am persuaded that while many men see that, very few have the courage to act upon it. Our father did. On balance, he was a good
man, Sister. He did much good in the world. I implore you to keep this mind
.I am glad you have chosen to share this burden with me. I believe I may be able to ease your mind
.Fourteen years ago, when you were just a girl, a letter arrived for Father. I used to watch him often without his knowing; he was away so often, I think I felt that if we were not careful, one day he might go and never return. For that reason, I developed the habit of spying on him. As he read it in his study that day I was watching secretly from the door, and I saw a great change come over him. His shoulders slumped, his mouth drooped open, his eyes became glassy. So alarmed was I that I contrived to pretend I had just wandered into the room and I asked him what was wrong. He told me it was nothing. I knew better. I bided my time until he was distracted elsewhere in the house. Then I crept into his study and read the letter
.It was from a convent in Springfield. A Sister Mary Catherine was writing to let him know that some little girl he had placed in her care had died suddenly of a fever. On reading this, I was filled with questions: who was this girl and why had Father placed her in the convent’s care and why had he never spoken of her? But there was no one I could ask—least of all, him. So there the mystery remained
.As I grew older, I suppose I figured it out, but I kept the truth from myself, kept it in the back of my thoughts where I need never confront our father’s deepest secret. Your letter forces me to do just that and at the same time, removes any last smidgen of doubt I might have had. As is your way, sister, you have stumbled headlong and heedless into the truth and I suppose I should thank you for it. The Bible says the truth shall make us free
.Here, then, is the truth: our father had a fourth daughter, a little mulatto girl he never claimed. She died in a convent orphanage when she was 12. Our sister’s name was Hope
.Now, as for you—I was six years old when you were born, and I do not remember much. But I do remember when they let me hold you for the first time; I thought you were awful—such a
horrid, wrinkled little thing. And I remember the ghastly pallor of our mother’s face and how she died not two hours later
.So if the revelations of this woman in Mississippi have left you questioning your own identity, wondering if you might secretly be a little mulatto girl whose mother was a slave, you may be at ease, Sister. Nothing of the sort of is true. You are who you have always been—my impulsive and imprudent and very much beloved Sister, Prudence
.I hope these words set your mind at ease. I very much look forward to seeing you again
.With all my love, I remain, your sister, Constance
.
Prudence was gazing at her sister’s signature when Miss Ginny approached. The wind was tossing her thin white hair all about her head. “What’s that?” she asked, nodding toward the letter.
Prudence didn’t reply at once. She could see her oldest sister, her brow furrowed, sitting at the writing desk in her bedroom scratching out these words she hoped would bring Prudence comfort and save her from any more time spent wondering about her own identity, wondering if she was who she’d always thought she was. But, thought Prudence, she need not have bothered. Somehow, an odd thing had happened. Somewhere in the month of preparing this mass exodus of every Negro in and around Buford, Prudence had stopped wondering. Prudence had stopped caring.
It was skin, she decided. Only skin. And it had no power to add or subtract or otherwise alter her fundamental understanding of her own self. She was who she had always been.
“It is just a letter,” she told Ginny. “From my sister, Constance.”
As she spoke, she opened her hand and allowed a breeze to take the paper. The letter sailed high, then began to fall, tracing looping curlicues in the air until it deposited itself in the waters of the Mississippi and, soon after, was gone.
“Why you do that?” asked Ginny. “You didn’t want to save it?”
Prudence felt herself smiling. “There was no need to save it,” she said. “There was nothing in it I need.”
Tilda sat in the chair facing her husband, facing the man who had come looking for her. She dipped the compress in the pan of cool water, wrung it out, and placed it on Sam’s forehead. His brow was on fire.
“We were just talking about you,” he told her.
“About me? Why?”
“If I…” A pause, a cough. “If I don’t make it, I want you to stay with Prudence and Ginny in Boston. At least until you get your bearings, decide what you want to do.”
“Sam, shush. There is no reason to talk like that. You will be fine.”
He shook his head. “It is important to me,” he said. “I need to know that you are going to be all right. Please do this for me.
Promise
me.”
His eyes held hers. She blinked away tears. “Very well, Sam,” she said. “I promise.”
“Good,” he said. “That takes a weight off my mind.”
“Are you thirsty, Sam? I could get you something.”
His hand waved weakly. “No,” he said, “I’m fine. Just want to talk. Haven’t had much chance…just…talk.” She could hear him breathing. “So,” he said, “have you given any thought…what name you’re going to use…now?”
It took her only a second. “Tilda,” she said. A pause. “Freeman. Tilda Freeman.”
Sam smiled. He felt a fullness. It was all gone then, all far away from him, all regret, doubt, blood, sweat, fear. Those were earthbound things and he was sailing far above them all.
“Thank you, Sam”—the tears in her voice slurred her words—“for not giving up on me. For not giving up on us.”
He closed his eyes. His thoughts were cottony. From somewhere far below him, he could hear the sound of a steamboat making its way up the Mississippi, paddlewheels churning the water, engines banging, plates clinking as stewards prepared for the evening meal, a man complaining in angry Spanish. All of it so far away.
Sam opened his eyes. His vision was filled with her. “Do not cry,” he said.
She took his hand. “‘Love is long suffering,’” she said. “Do you remember when I read that to you for the first time? Love is long suffering. And you sure proved it, didn’t you? You sure did.”
“Love never fails,” he added, and his own voice was ragged and breathy in his ears.
“Love never fails,” she agreed. A sad smile tugged at her lips. “And I love you, Sam.”
It made him smile. He closed his eyes, and this time, did not open them again.
His final thought was of her.
THE END
Another writer—I believe, but cannot swear, it was Stephen King—once said that as a novelist, one researches only to enable one to lie more effectively, i.e., to create a believable fictional world in which readers will be emotionally invested. This is particularly true of historical fiction, where you undertake not simply to create another world, but to recreate another time, a task that rests on nailing down answers to a hundred insanely arcane and specific questions.
To wit: What color and character is the soil in northeast Mississippi? How long did it take to repair a chimney in the mid-nineteenth century? Was the phrase “turn in” (as in going to sleep for the night) in use in 1865?
To whatever degree I have been not able to lie effectively on the preceding pages, I take all the blame. To whatever degree my lies do work, I must share credit with a number of individuals and institutions without whom this book would not be.
I am indebted to the staff of the Library of Congress, particularly those in the periodicals room and the map room. In the former, I spent hours reading old newspapers, trying to capture the feeling of the day the Civil War ended. In the latter, I spent hours devising feasible routes for my characters to reach their destinies.
Phil Lapsansky of the Philadelphia Free Library generously unearthed for me images of how Sam’s workplace would have appeared in 1865. Kelly Rodgers, program director of Maryland Therapeutic Riding Institute in Crownsville, Maryland, invited me up there to show me how a disabled
rider might handle a horse. Steve Depew and Tom Head of the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service helped me understand growing seasons and the nature of the soil in northern Mississippi. Historians Kathleen Thompson and Craig Pfannkuche gave me great assistance in understanding the appearance and mores of Chicago in the mid-nineteenth century. William C. Davis, author of
Portraits of the Riverboats,
greatly aided me in my attempt to recreate the ambiance of a steamboat trip down the Mississippi.
I should say here that Leon F. Litwack’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the aftermath of slavery,
Been in the Storm So Long,
was a key inspiration for this novel when I first read it many years ago. A number of the incidents in my novel—including the mother searching for her lost infant daughter—are fictionalized versions of real episodes written about by Litwack and other historians of the period.