sister.
Lucretia found me before I could find her. It had been years. Beaming, she pulled me to the edge of the garden beside the blooming rhododendron where we could be alone. “My dear Sarah, I can scarcely believe what you’ve managed to accomplish!”
A blush crept to my face.
“It’s true,” she said. “You and Angelina are the most famous women in America.”
“. . . The most notorious, you mean.”
She smiled. “That, too.”
I pictured Lucretia and me in her little studio, talking and talking all those evenings. That fretful young woman I’d been, so stalled, so worried she would never find her purpose. I wished I could go back and tell her it would turn out all right.
Glancing up, I caught sight of Sarah Mapps and Grace across the garden, striding toward us. Nina and I had traveled almost constantly for the past year and a half, and except for our visit last winter, we’d seen little of them. I wrapped my arms around them, along with Lucretia, who’d known them back at Arch Street.
When Sarah Mapps pulled a letter from her purse and handed it to me, I recognized Handful’s writing immediately, though it bore my sister Mary’s seal. Unable to wait, I ripped it open and read Handful’s brief message with a sinking feeling. There were reports of runaways beginning to find their way across the Ohio River from Kentucky, or to Philadelphia and New York from Maryland, but rarely from that far south. We’re leaving here or die trying.
“What’s the matter?” Lucretia said. “You look shaken.”
I read them the letter, then folded it back, my hands trembling visibly. “. . . They’ll be caught. Or killed,” I said.
Sarah Mapps frowned. “They must know what they’re attempting. They’re not children.”
She’d never been to Charleston. She had no idea of the laws and edicts that controlled every moment of a slave’s life, of the City Guard, the curfew, the passes, the searches, the night watch, the vigilante committees, the slave catchers, the Work House, the impossibility, the sheer brutality.
“They’re coming to us,” Grace said, as if it had just sunk in.
“And we’ll welcome them,” Sarah Mapps added. “They can live in your old room in the attic. They can help out at the school.”
“They’ll never make it this far,” I said.
It occurred to me that Handful and Sky might already have left, and I opened up the letter again to look at the date: 23 April.
“It was written only three weeks ago,” I said more to myself than to them. “. . . I doubt they’ve left by now. There may still be time for me to do something.”
“But what could you possibly do?” Lucretia asked.
“I don’t know if I can do anything, but I can’t sit here on my hands . . . I’m going back to Charleston. I can at least try and convince my mother to sell them to me so I can set them free.”
I’d asked before, but this time I would beg her in person.
She had called me her dear daughter.
Handful
Upstairs in the alcove, I peered out the window at the harbor, remembering when I was ten years old seeing the water for the first time, how tireless and far it traveled, making up that little song, prancing round, and now I was coming on forty-five and my feet didn’t dance anymore. They just wanted to be gone from here. Little missus hadn’t let me out since the whipping, but every free chance I slipped up here. Sometimes like today, I brought my hand sewing and spent the morning on the window seat with the needle. Little missus didn’t care as long as I did my work, kept my tongue, bobbed my head, said yessum, yessum, yessum.
Today, it was hot, the sun eyeing straight in. I opened the window and the wind blew stiff, dredging up the smell of mudflats. From my perch, I could see the steamboat landing down on East Bay. I’d learned plenty watching the world come and go from that dock. A steamer came most every week day. I’d watch the snag boat ply ahead of it, clearing the way, then I’d hear the paddle on the steamer roar and the tug boats huff and the dock slaves holler back and forth, making haste to grab the ropes and put down the plank.
When it was time for it to leave again, I’d watch the carriages pull up at the whitewash building with the Steamship Company sign, and people would go inside