Elm Creek Quilts [04] The Runaway Quilt (30 page)

“That must be frustrating.”

“That’s one of the milder words I’ve used.”

He laughed, but then grew thoughtful. “You know, it’s the nature of secret signals that they aren’t published or even spoken about, or they lose their efficacy. There might not be any published records out there to be found.”

“I realize that, but I thought by now diaries or other family
records might have been published, since revealing the secrets so many years after the Civil War, wouldn’t do any harm.”

He shrugged. “More than fifty years ago, my grandfather and his parents fled from Nazi Germany to Switzerland with the help of the underground movement. He told me that even after they came to America, even when the war had been over for decades, his parents said very little about the secret signals and communications they used during their escape.”

“Why?”

“They said they couldn’t risk it, since one never knew if those signals would be needed again someday.”

April into May 1859—
in which we raise and attempt to dispel suspicions

Anneke and Hans’s good news spread rapidly through town, and Elm Creek Farm was soon besieged with well-meaning well-wishers, bearing covered dishes and baby quilts, all eager for a peek at the beautiful little boy. Anneke delighted in the attention paid to her son, and I was grateful for the food, since I was so busy playing nurse I could scarcely find a moment to catch my breath, much less put together a meal for the new parents, Joanna, and myself. Hans and I had agreed we could not display the Underground Railroad quilt under such circumstances, and I was plagued by thoughts of fugitives spending the night in the woods within sight of our house, unable to receive food or clothing or the comfort of a reassuring word.

Joanna helped me as she could, but with visitors arriving unannounced at all hours of the day, she found herself scrambling for the hiding place so often she finally decided it would be most prudent for her to remain there throughout the day. Thinking of her shut up in that confined place drove me to distraction, and I yearned for the flood of neighbors to slow to a trickle.

Our most frequent visitor was someone who would have been chagrined to learn her presence kept Joanna shut up within the secret alcove: my dear friend Dorothea, who came over nearly every evening after her own chores were finished to assist me with mine. Would that every woman could be blessed with a friend possessing such a willing heart and generous spirit! Frequently during those weary days, when I was tempted to fall asleep on my feet or crawl under the bedclothes and stuff my quilt into my ears rather than help Anneke soothe her howling infant, Dorothea’s unwavering serenity and quiet confidence cheered me, and helped me marshal my strength so that I could be the kind of aunt my family needed.

Two of the last guests were, in my view, the two least welcome. A fortnight after my nephew was born, Mr. Pearson and Mrs. Engle paid their respects to the new mother. They arrived at dinnertime, just as Hans returned hungry from the fields, so I was obliged to entertain them better than I otherwise would have done. While Anneke and Mrs. Engle sat in the front room, with Mrs. Engle holding the baby and cooing to him while Anneke looked on, radiant, I set out some of the dishes the neighbors had brought and hoped Mr. Pearson would not feel the need to assist me. He did not, apparently, for when he entered the dining room, he merely stood there smirking, as if I should be grateful he chose to keep me company.

“Anneke looks well,” he remarked, leaning against the door frame and watching me set the table.

I made a noise of agreement but otherwise ignored him.

He followed me in a leisurely fashion as I went back and forth, carrying dishes from the kitchen to the table. “How fortunate is she to know the bliss of motherhood,” said he. “It is truly the highest state to which women can aspire, don’t you agree?”

All manner of retorts rose to my sharp tongue, but I withheld
them. If he hoped to provoke within me even a spark of jealousy toward my sister-in-law, he was wasting his own time as well as mine. “Anneke has been richly blessed, and I am truly overjoyed for her,” said I, and I meant it with all my heart.

He seemed disappointed by the lack of venom in my response, and his gaze turned away from me—and alighted on the Underground Railroad quilt, folded and forgotten on the sideboard. “What’s this?” asked he, unfolding it.

“A quilt.”

“Yes, of course, I see that,” he snapped, but then he frowned. “I do believe I’ve seen this pattern elsewhere.”

“Perhaps your mother has made a similar quilt.”

“No, that’s not it.”

He studied the quilt with such intensity that I grew agitated. “Oh, indeed, Mr. Pearson, are you such a connoisseur of patchwork that you know every quilt block your mother has made?”

He looked up from the quilt, his eyebrows raised in mild surprise. “She would like it better if I did, but I confess I only pretend to listen when she chatters about her needlework.” He folded the quilt and returned it to the sideboard. “If you’ll excuse me, Miss Bergstrom.” With his usual smirk in place, he returned to the front room.

I chided myself for my shaky nerves and resolved to conceal my emotions so well that I would be thought as serene as Dorothea. Knowing that Mr. Pearson could not possibly understand the quilt’s significance steeled my confidence, and since he dared not bait me too much in front of the others, dinner passed without a mishap.

With so many other distractions to occupy my thoughts, I put the incident out of my mind. When another week passed, and it seemed safe again, I draped the Underground Railroad quilt over the clothesline and made ready for new arrivals.

There was, indeed, much to prepare, so much we did not
know about when Joanna first knocked upon our door. Food and rest were the most pressing needs, but after that, the fugitives often needed new clothing, especially shoes, for the men, and gloves and bonnets for the women, the better to pass themselves off as free if they were seen. They also needed papers declaring them free citizens, although I sometimes wondered what good these would do if they were apprehended by slave catchers. Still, if the documents spared only one runaway from the clutches of slavery, they were worth far more than the paper and ink and the work I put into them. I must say I became quite an accomplished forger. Once Hans said, in jest, that he knew people from his vagabond days who could help me turn a nice profit with my skills, but Anneke was decidedly not amused by the suggestion. She said we broke enough laws on Elm Creek Farm not to joke about violating more for mere lucrative gain. For someone who went about day and night beaming over her beautiful son, motherhood had rendered Anneke rather humorless.

In addition to clothing and forged papers, the fugitives needed food for their journey. I learned to bake hardtack and sent them off with that as well as dried apples and hard cheese that would not spoil quickly. They needed directions to stations farther north; Hans determined the most prudent courses based upon rumored slave-catcher activities. Most of all, our guests needed hope, and so we provided encouragement in abundance.

Sometimes our visitors shared news from the places they had abandoned, and their accounts confirmed what we had begun to read in the papers: that Southern animosity for the North was increasing as Northern condemnation of Southern slaveholding became louder and more insistent. Even Southerners who did not own slaves resented Northerners for their self-righteous attempts to interfere in Southern matters, which, they feared, could destroy the economy of the entire South. “Abolitionist” was a word spoken with venom by Southern whites, and slaves
knew better than to utter it, even to ask in all innocence what it meant.

But most runaways who passed through our station were too exhausted and wary to converse much about the institution of slavery. Their strength they reserved for the difficult flight to Canada; their thoughts they saved for the family and friends they had left behind, and would almost certainly never see again.

Four weeks passed between the birth of Anneke’s son and the restoration of the signal quilt to the clothesline; another five days passed with no knock on the door in the night. Then one morning shortly after dawn, when Hans was already in the fields and I was tending to my household chores, two quick raps sounded.

I opened the door and discovered a colored man dressed in farmer’s clothes, the brim of his hat pulled down low over his eyes—and our Underground Railroad quilt folded over his arm. A flash of panic shot through me—did he not realize how he endangered himself and us, approaching the house so boldly in daylight, the signal quilt in hand?—so that I did not at first recognize him as Mr. Abel Wright, the owner of a farm lying roughly fifteen miles south and west of ours outside the boundaries of Creek’s Crossing, whose wife I had met at Charlotte Claverton’s quilting bee.

I stammered out a greeting and invited him inside, but he refused, saying that he had to return to his fields. Then he held out the quilt to me and said, “I just wanted to tell you not to use this quilt no more.” When I told him I did not understand, he looked away, paused, and added, “Too many people know about it. Someone talked. Someone down the line, or someone captured—I can’t rightly say who. But you ought not to use this anymore.” Then he looked directly into my eyes and said, “Do you get my meaning?”

I did indeed, but I also found myself wondering why it had
not occurred to me before that free Negroes in the North might also be stationmasters. Even now it shames me to admit this, but until that moment, I had assumed the Underground Railroad was operated solely by benevolent whites. Though I had prided myself on being an enlightened sort, I had never suspected that Negroes might be perfectly able and willing to help one another, without the benefit of some white person’s direction. What this said about me, with all my high ideals and rhetoric, it troubled me to ponder.

I thanked Mr. Wright and hurried off to find Anneke. She was in the baby’s room, rocking and nursing contentedly, but when I repeated the warning to her, her eyes grew large with fright, as if she could already hear the pounding hooves of slave catchers’ horses storming up the road toward us. Indeed, I had to struggle to maintain my own composure, for although I could not discern the connection, I knew our neighbor’s warning was somehow linked to Mr. Pearson’s odd musings about the Underground Railroad pattern. That despicable man would bring us trouble. He had not done so yet, and so I had no explanation for the intensity of my feelings, but I was certain he meant us harm.

“We shall have to contrive another signal,” said I.

Anneke declared she knew exactly the thing: a quilt pattern common enough that it would not attract unwanted attention, and yet simple enough that even I could fashion it well. It was called Birds in the Air, and as it was fashioned of many triangles, we could, by the placement of the quilt upon the line, indicate in which direction the fugitives could find a safe haven.

At first I was dubious; I suggested a pattern of logs in the woodpile or an arrangement of buckets by the well, anything as long as it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the signal that had become a danger. But Anneke noted that slave catchers, being men, were likely to ignore clotheslines, and even if a slave
catcher did take note of it, he would ignore other quilts in his search for the one pattern he knew Abolitionists favored. “They would not suspect we would substitute one quilt pattern as a signal for another,” said Anneke. “That is why it is the perfect choice.”

Thus she persuaded me, and thus we began our second signal quilt.

Since nearly every moment of Anneke’s days and nights was given over to the care of her son, the task of completing the quilt fell to me, the least able quilter in the county. Anneke suggested that I make a crib-size quilt, both to hasten its completion and to contribute to our ruse: No one would think it odd to spot the same baby’s blanket so frequently upon the clothesline, for as I had recently learned, infants rarely kept garments or bedding clean for long. Moreover, I finally consented to learn to use Anneke’s sewing machine, something she had been pestering me to do since our arrival at Elm Creek Farm. Pumping the treadle and guiding the fabric through the machine was hardly work at all in comparison to the tedious drudgery of hand sewing. I worked swiftly, feverishly, whenever my other chores would permit, and as the days passed, one Birds in the Air block after another joined the rising pile beside the sewing machine. Now that Joanna did not need to hide continuously in the secret alcove, she, too, learned to use the sewing machine, and she completed as many blocks as I.

Working side by side, Joanna and I joined the blocks into rows, sewed the rows together, then layered the pieced top, cotton batting, and a muslin lining in Anneke’s frame. We devoted one long stretch from dusk until dawn quilting, and in the morning when Anneke came downstairs with the baby in her arms, she found us putting the last stitches into the binding.

The three of us inspected the quilt. “It’ll do,” said Joanna matter-of-factly.