The Lost Quilter (11 page)

Ruth.

Joanna inhaled sharply and ducked her head beneath the water, cooling her scar, which always seemed too warm to the touch. Eyes closed, she saw Ruth quartering a chicken, wiping her hands on her apron, squinting suspiciously as she examined sweet potatoes for mold. She heard Ruth snoring in the darkness of the little room off the kitchen, felt Ruth’s strong arm around her waist. Ruth had tried to protect her, but now she was gone, and Joanna was in South Carolina, incomprehensibly far from freedom.

Joanna held her breath until she thought her lungs would burst. Finally she rose, gasping, and reached for her old clothing, lying in a heap on the creek bank. She scrubbed the dress and wrung the water from it; it seemed stained but not worn through, but she would know its condition better after it dried. She had never owned two dresses and could not bear to burn this one, despite the mistress’s orders. Mrs. Chester might never see Joanna in it if she wore it only on Sundays, when the colored folk were left to themselves in the slave cabins—unless here slaves worked the Sabbath, too. Until she knew the way of things, she must be careful.

She shook water from her limbs and hair and pulled the new dress over her head, feeling the familiar scratch of the rough
cloth against the tree of life scars on her back. After tying on her apron, she rolled the damp, old dress around her tin cornboiler and tucked the bundle under her arm. She followed the sound of children’s voices back to the slave quarter, where she found Leah’s cabin still empty, the door closed. She pushed it open and stepped inside the single room with floor of swept earth. Two pallets lay beside the wall opposite the fireplace, spread neatly with string-pieced quilts—linens, linsey-woolseys, but mostly cottons. The small, worn, mismatched fragments of one quilt had been stitched together into long vertical columns that reminded Joanna of the barracoon. She preferred the quilt on the other makeshift bed, where the scraps had been shaped into squares of varying sizes and sewn together in a riot of faded color, as if those same bars had exploded outward. She thought of the fancy quilts she had pieced at Greenfields and of the intricate Feathered Star she had sewn at Elm Creek Farm while awaiting Frederick’s birth, quilts that required ample amounts of the same fabric. She wondered if she would ever have the means to create such a quilt for herself again, or if she would from that day forward sleep beneath quilts fashioned from the narrowest strips salvaged from clothes worn to rags.

She had no quilt to call her own anymore, neither fancy nor plain, and nothing to sew one with. Until she could gather needle and thread and build a store of scraps, she would have to hope that this Leah and her children would share. She glanced around for a place to hide her dress and cup and found herself suddenly immobile, unable to decide. This cabin was her home now, but not one inch of it was hers. She was rooted to the spot by the impossibility of finding a safe hiding place within it.

“Whatch doin’ in here?” piped up a voice behind her.

With a start, Joanna spun around to find a young, bare-legged
girl standing in the doorway. “I’m Joanna,” she said. “Mistress told me I should stay with Leah.”

“Leah’s my mama.” The girl peered up at her curiously. “I’m Lizzie. You talk funny. What happen to your face?”

“My old marse burn me with the flatiron. That’s why I run away.”

The girl’s eyes widened. “They chop off your foot when they catch you?”

Joanna lifted her skirt enough to show her feet, scarred but whole. “No. They just beat me and send me here.”

“No one ever run away from Oak Grove,” Lizzie said. “Anyone try, and all the slaves get beat and don’t have no ration drawing until the runaway come back.”

“So for the loss of one slave Marse Chester beat the rest and let them starve to death?”

“He don’t beat the babies,” Lizzie amended. “Just everyone old enough to work. That’s why when anyone even think about running off, the others talk him out of it or tell Aaron. He the driver. He almost as yellow as you.” She eyed Joanna’s bundle with interest. “What you got there?”

“Just an old dress I need to spread out to dry.”

“Hang it on a bush by the creek,” the girl advised, pivoting around one bare foot in the doorway. “Put it out of sight so no one take it. I got to go watch the babies. Dinner coming soon.” And with that she darted off.

Alone, Joanna hesitated before concealing her tin cornboiler under a corner of the nearest quilt and hurrying back to the creek, where she draped her dress over a low branch of a shady tree. The creek was wide there and rocky, the current too swift to cross on foot. Joanna wondered how deep it ran, and if a woman on horseback could cross to the other side safely. She shook her head and
headed back to the slave quarter. Better she should learn to swim than dream of a swift horse to carry her off. Hans Bergstrom had promised her a fine mare and a carriage; Gerda would have provided the false papers that would ensure her and Frederick safe passage to Canada. But she had no allies here.

From a distance, she heard the shrieks of children, and she instinctively quickened her pace. Following the shouts, she found the children gathering in the widest row between the cabins, pushing and shoving to reach two colored women in aprons and headscarves carrying a large black kettle. Through the push of thin limbs and dark bodies Joanna glimpsed a long wooden trough into which the two women emptied the kettle. The children immediately swarmed the trough to scoop up cornmeal mush with wooden plates or chipped tea cups or hollowed gourds or bare hands, and Joanna, after a moment of shock, hurried back to Leah’s cabin for her own tin cornboiler.

But when she lifted the corner of the quilt, the cornboiler was gone.

Joanna flung back the quilt and patted it down in case the cup had rolled beneath its soft folds, but she found nothing. She was certain she had concealed it beneath the quilt of squares, but just to be sure, she checked beneath the stripy quilt, too. Nothing.

Her tin cornboiler was gone.

Taking quick, deep breaths to hold her anger in check, Joanna strode from the cabin and searched the throng of hungry children for Lizzie. “You give me back my cup,” she ordered, seizing the girl’s arm.

“What cup?” Lizzie tore herself free, balancing her wooden plate carefully so as not to spill a morsel of her supper. “I don’t have no cup.”

“I left it in your mama’s cabin. Now it’s gone.”

“Well, I don’t got it.” Scowling, Lizzie backed away just as three girls who looked to be her age came to stand with her, unsmiling, their eyes fixed on Joanna. “Didn’t I tell you to hide your things?”

The dress. Her hunger momentarily forgotten, Joanna raced back to the creek to find the low branch in the shade bare but for leaves and branches.

She stared at it for a long while, disbelieving, until gnawing pangs of hunger drove her back to the slave cabins. The two women had left, taking the kettle with them, and the wooden trough had been wiped clean of even the smallest grain of mush. Instinctively she ran a finger along the bottom of the trough and brought it to her lips, but only the fragrance of cornmeal and stewed greens lingered.

Joanna heard whispers and muffled laughter as she found a seat alone on the ground beneath a moss-veiled live oak. Exhausted, stomach growling, she sat in the shade with her back against the tree, watching as the children devoured their scanty meals and ran off to play under the watchful eyes of Lizzie and the other big girls. From a cabin doorway, an elderly man called out, “That food ain’t for you, yellow girl. We eat when the field hands come in.”

Faint from hunger and exhaustion, Joanna sat and waited for the day to end. The sun was setting when men and women finally trooped in wearily from the cotton fields. As their children ran to them, Joanna caught snatches of greetings and jokes, all in a bewildering, unfamiliar dialect she could scarcely understand. She nodded politely to other women casting her sidelong glances as they passed on their way to gather water and firewood. Heart sinking, she realized that they were preparing their own evening meals, using rations that must have been distributed perhaps
days before her arrival. Her wait for the women to return with another full kettle had been in vain.

A woman was approaching her from across the dirt path, her jaw set so resolutely that Joanna knew she must be Lizzie’s mother. Joanna absently smoothed her apron and feigned indifference as Leah halted only inches away, planted her hands on her hips, and glared down at her. “My girl Lizzie say you call her a thief.”

Joanna blinked up at her, needing a moment to untangle her dialect. “I left my cup in the cabin and my dress by the creek like she told me to, and now they gone.”

“My Lizzie didn’t know nothing about no cup, and anybody could’ve seen your dress hanging out to dry. My girl don’t want your old rags.”

“
Someone
took my things.”

“Not my Lizzie. You probably never find out who and never get ’em back.” Turning away, Leah added in an undertone Joanna wasn’t sure she was meant to overhear, “Stupid yellow girl. Might’ve helped you find your things, but not after you show up on your first day and call my daughter a thief. Like you know anything about her.”

“If Lizzie didn’t take my cup,” Joanna called after Leah angrily, “then someone else went into your cabin while you in the fields and found it. How that make you feel, someone going through your quilts when you out working?”

Leah halted and turned back around, and for a moment it seemed that the focus of her anger had shifted. Then she frowned and shook her head. “Nothing of mine is missing, so it don’t matter to me. Anyhow, no one but you ever saw this cup—if you ever had one. Bet you didn’t.” She strode off, calling back over her shoulder, “You can find somewhere else to sleep.”

Joanna watched her go, ignoring the stares and smirks of the
few remaining onlookers. Twilight had fallen, and most of the hands had withdrawn to their own cabins—to rest, to eat, and to tend to their own chores, forced aside until the master’s work was done. It was the same everywhere, on every plantation Joanna had ever known.

She quickly counted more than fifty men and women walking between the cabins, but she reckoned their real numbers to be at least three times that, including the children and house slaves and those who had already gone home. She saw now that clusters of men and women shared foodstuffs—flatbread, carrots, sweet potatoes—and somewhere someone was cooking meat. How had someone come by meat? Her mouth watered at the smell of it; she wished she had something to offer in trade. All her worldly possessions had been lost, and evicted from Leah’s cabin, she had no ration to share. Her only hope was that tomorrow the cook would take pity on her and give her something to eat when she reported to the big house in the morning. It would be a long, hard, miserable night until then.

“You can stay with us.”

Joanna looked up to find a woman aged maybe not quite thirty years helping a bent-shouldered old woman down the path. Joanna didn’t think twice, didn’t wait for the invitation to be snatched away. “Thank you,” she said, scrambling to her feet. “I’m Joanna.”

“I know. You the runaway.” The woman smiled and beckoned Joanna to follow. “I’m Tavia. There’s five of us in our place, six counting you—me, Auntie Bess here, and the children. It wasn’t smart to pick a fight with Leah. She one of Aaron’s favorites, one of the best pickers. She fast and can work all day without tiring. After she pick her quota, she fill her friends’ bags, too—one boll for her, one for each of them.”

“She usually help new folks, so they don’t get a whipping.” Auntie Bess offered Joanna a toothless grin as they made their slow progress down the row of cabins. “I don’t expect she’ll help you, not after what you said about Lizzie. That child from her real husband, not the man Marse Chester pick for her. She won’t hear nothing bad about that girl.”

“Lizzie’s a good child,” said Tavia, stopping near the end of the row and pushing open the door to a cabin. “I don’t think she stole from you.”

Joanna too was beginning to think she had accused Lizzie too quickly, anger and fatigue having overcome her better judgment. But what Leah had done was worse—humiliating Joanna in front of everyone, casting her out of the cabin as if the mistress’s orders didn’t matter. Maybe they didn’t. The Georgia traders and Augustus had obeyed Mrs. Chester readily enough, but maybe, out of sight of the big house, the slaves made their own rules.

“I won’t need Leah’s help, at least not tomorrow,” said Joanna defiantly as she followed Tavia and Auntie Bess into the cabin, where three children—a toddler, a girl almost grown, and a boy halfway between the two—played a game with cornhusk dolls on a bed in the corner. Joanna marveled upon discovering that it was a real bed, with four oak posts strung with taut rope supporting a double layer of rough, worn blankets. Two other, smaller beds lined the other walls, leaving a small space in the center of the earthen floor to stand.

“You won’t need help?” Tavia regarded her with surprise. “You pick cotton before? I hear Marse Chester’s brother grow tobacco.”

“You’re not the first of his slaves to come to us,” said Auntie Bess, lowering herself onto the bed closest to the fireplace. “We get all his runaways and troublemakers. Aaron break them all.”

She spoke matter-of-factly, but Joanna still felt a chill. She resolved to avoid Aaron’s notice as much as possible. “The mistress told me to come to her tomorrow for my work. I sew and do laundry, mostly, though I work the tobacco fields some back in Virginia.”

“Aren’t you a lucky thing, having easy work in the big house,” said the oldest girl, strong and broad-shouldered. Joanna guessed she had been working the fields for almost half her life.

“I don’t know about that.” Joanna thought of all the nights Marse Chester had dragged her from her bed. “Sometimes it’s best to stay out of the white folks’ sight.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Auntie Bess. “I cook for them since I was younger than Pearl here, till I get too old to lift the stockpot to the stove. Listen good, Joanna. The new mistress think herself a kindly, Christian woman, but she just as bad as the rest of them. Don’t cross her.”