Seven for a Secret (40 page)

I didn’t even know her name.

twenty-four

Another woman, to save her children, who would all have been doomed to slavery, if her claims to freedom had been rejected, precipitated herself from the top of a house, where she was confined, and was so dreadfully mutilated and mangled that she was suffered to escape, because she was no longer fit for sale. There was no doubt that she was a free woman; but she knew a whole family of young slaves was too valuable a property not to turn the scale against her.

—E. S. ABDY,
JOURNAL OF A RESIDENCE AND TOUR IN THE UNITED STATES OF NORTH AMERICA, FROM APRIL 1833 TO OCTOBER 1834

A
t first the
ticking of the clock
was the only sound. I listened. Just breathing, my hands on my legs as I knelt on the carpet. Seeing the gun. Seeing Julius in my periphery. Surrounded by death, though only one that I’d grieve over.

I reached for the sofa, leaning, and I pulled a cloth from its arm. Coles and Varker could be sprawled like so many slaughtered chickens, but not Julius. Carefully draping the lace over his features, I pressed his hand for a moment. It was still warm, still pliant. Just no longer
him.

When I had to speak or go mad, I posed the question.

“Will you tell me who you are?”

All the blood had drained from Delia’s warm complexion, leaving her grey. Drawing her fingers over the gun she held limply in her lap, she gave me the briefest of glances.

“Varker and Coles gave me away to the Committee just now. But however did you find out?”

“It was Mr. Timpson, partly.” My tongue felt clumsy, overlarge. “He told me about a wedding Lucy had worked on—magnolia centerpieces, gardenias in the bride’s hair. It was a Southern wedding he was describing, where such things grow. He even mentioned a memory of Lucy’s, running through fields of coneflowers when she was a little girl. Though he didn’t know it, he was painting a picture of the South. Where?”

“North Carolina,” she whispered.

Closing my eyes, I nodded.

Silkie Marsh hadn’t said it was impossible to answer whether Lucy’s name was Wright or Adams because she didn’t know if the marriage was legal—Lucy Wright never existed. I thought about Long Luke whining to us weeks before that the women were escaped slaves and realized that, if I’d listened to the right party, I could have known the truth all along. I’d been charging into battle with flaming sword held high, assuming all the righteous anger of the law was on my side when, in fact, I was classed with cracksmen and sneakthieves.

“We didn’t realize until I was fourteen and my sister sixteen, you know.” Her voice was as lifeless as the gun in her hand.

“Realize what?”

“That we were slaves, of course.”

I stared back at her, mute. The woman I knew as Delia Wright was fine-boned and lovely, as lovely as Lucy had been. Her pear-shaped brown eyes with the gay freckles surrounding them were clear, her hand quite steady. I thought about Bird Daly suddenly, and what she’d said to me about returning to brothel work.

There’s nothing I’d not do to keep from going back there. . . . I’d die sooner. I’d do terrible things, Mr. Wilde.

“Is Jonas all right?”

I went to sit before her, seeing the room as if from a great distance. As if I were viewing a
Herald
sketch of a crime I’d never set eyes on. As if it weren’t my life at all.

“He’s in an upper bedroom with Mrs. Higgins. She’s trying to settle him.”

“Where’s George?”

“George went for help,” she said. Then, tears spilling onto her cheeks unheeded as she glanced at Julius, she added, “They grew up together. George isn’t well.”

“I’ll listen if it helps. If it’s useful. Not otherwise.”

Delia’s face twisted in surprise. Finally, she pulled her knees into her chest, resting her chin on them.

She looked very young just then. In the way that Bird had once looked very young and endlessly sad. Sadder than health and youth ought to allow.

“Our father was a wealthy white doctor in a small town. The coneflower field was part of his property. I used to run through it too.”

I nodded. Recalling when Greenwich Village was a village and my parents alive and how I’d run through switchgrass by the river. Run for no reason at all.

“He hadn’t many slaves,” she said, frowning, “and we lived in the house with the doctor and my mother. We’d lessons, though not at the school—he hired a private tutor from Philadelphia.”

“I did wonder about your accents.”

“Did you? My father studied medicine in the North. Much of our time was spent at our lessons, and our father appreciated that we spoke so well. Differently from our friends among the slave children. We’d no idea we were just like them. My mother was a quarter African . . . the doctor called her
darling
and us his little sweethearts. Then another doctor arrived in town. One with, as it’s said, airs and graces. He laughed at my father for living with a black mistress, mocked him relentlessly among their colleagues and began stealing his patients, and my father decided to take a white wife instead to save his practice. He was bettering himself, I suppose.”

To say I am as ignorant of the realities of slavery as I am regarding the realities of New York City politics would be a bald lie. Mercy and her late father the Reverend Underhill had kept me well informed. They’d told me repulsive things. Things I’d wanted to pluck gently from Mercy’s whimsical mind as if removing a worm from an apple. So I’d heard tales of unspeakable cruelty.

I wasn’t inured to such stories, however. On the contrary.

“He also decided that he needed improved furnishings,” Delia continued. “
Doctors
ought to maintain
a certain standard.
So he sold my mother to a man traveling home to Missouri and my sister to a neighboring plantation, and I was put to work with his other house slaves. I often saw my sister, when she could manage time away. If I hadn’t, I think we’d both have gone mad.”

“Lucy was also a house slave, I take it.” Regardless of her true name, she would always be
Lucy
to me. “She arranged flowers and helped with banquets and celebrations.”

“All the vases and arrangements fell under her care eventually. She’d always been clever with flowers. She loved them.”

“If I could kill the son of a bitch who carved words into your sister, I wager I’d do it,” I swore under my breath.

Wherever Delia’s mind had been, I’d jarred it badly. She started, lifting her chin from her knees.

“Whatever do you mean?”

“Those words.”
As many as I love I rebuke and chasten, be zealous therefore and repent.
“The man who punished her by carving a Bible verse into her chest ought to be shot like a dog.”

Delia laughed suddenly. It was such an incongruous sound in that room, she might as well have fired the revolver. When she kept laughing, she tried to stop, covering her mouth with her hand. Eyes shining with fright at the unnatural peals of mirth fighting to escape.

“I’m sorry,” she said a moment later. “No man carved that message into my sister’s skin. She did it on her own with a dirty piece of metal. She was so beautiful, you see.”

Delia’s words came clearly. Marched straight as foot soldiers who no longer fear death as they did once. If I live to be a hundred, and God knows that isn’t going to happen, I’ll never erase the image of her giving me the key to a riddle I’d never had any right to try to solve.

“Everyone on that plantation wanted a piece of her, of something beautiful. Everyone wanted her, and a great many of the men in the house took what they wanted. She said that they wouldn’t look her in the eye when it happened, and they wouldn’t speak to her either, her masters, and so she left a message where they couldn’t miss it. I think when they sold the children their violence inevitably produced, she lost her mind a little. I’ve two nieces and another nephew, all auctioned while she lived in that hell. I’ll never see them again.”

My throat worked, but no sound emerged. Nothing visible about me changed that day. I was the same scarred copper star at the end as the beginning, for all I’d seen and heard. But almost without meaning to, I made a decision.

If a war was required to end such stories, then I wanted a war.

“Something happened to alter everything. You were sold, weren’t you? And to the same plantation?” I reasoned when I could speak.

She sighed. “My father decided a new horse and buggy were also required. Yes.”

“How soon afterward did you leave that place with Lucy and Jonas?”

“I was an unbroken nuisance, my sister unbalanced, and Jonas valuable. We were given to a broker after barely a fortnight, to be auctioned in the Capital.”

“And how did you escape?”

“My sister saved us. She was very brave, or . . . I thought she was. She didn’t know that she was, she thought herself a coward, but— I’m sorry. Wasn’t she brave, though? Wasn’t she?”

Delia wept into her sleeve for several moments before I reached out and touched her wrist. It was a tiny, inadequate gesture. But I feared offering more. When she looked up again, shoulders shaking, she took my hand.

“She was braver than I’ll ever be,” I told her.

The rest of the tale was simple. The slave brokers entrusted with the women and child were crude, underhanded men. They were en route to a District of Columbia slave pen to auction the family and return to the plantation with the money, pocketing a percentage as a fee, when Lucy had spied Rutherford Gates riding in the same direction. Though she was near to the breaking point and chained in the back of an uncovered wagon, she had seen something in his eyes. A sympathy, perhaps. Perhaps a weakness. In any case, she had screamed to Gates that the three travelers were kidnapped free blacks from Albany and not slaves at all. She had begged him for help.

And to her shock, he had actually believed her.

“The look in his eyes,” Delia remembered. “As if he’d been given a sacred mission. I’ll never forget it. When he threatened to drag the slave agents to the nearest magistrate, they hatched a scheme. They explained—always in sideways language, dropped hints—that magistrates were very busy people. That witnesses would have to be called, that weeks would pass and everyone the worse for it, since the three of us would be forced to pay for food all the while we awaited adjudication—that’s the law in the Capital, and naturally we hadn’t a cent. The brokers were right, meanwhile, and so Charles—Gates—took out his purse and paid them two hundred dollars for the three of us.”

“As a bribe larger than the commission they’d have earned delivering you,” I clarified. “Not as payment for property.”

“Precisely.”

We fell briefly silent. There wasn’t much remaining I didn’t know. But that didn’t mean I was overeager to reach the conclusion.

“We stayed in his house in West Broadway for three months, living out the story we’d told him, writing letters to imaginary kin in Albany,” Delia recalled. “Shushing Jonas whenever he spoke of the plantation. I honestly don’t think he remembers it any longer. At first we were terrified and grateful in equal measure, but Gates was kind to us, and seemed . . . I still can’t believe he never cared for my sister. It’s monstrous. In any case, he proposed, and she liked him very much by that time. I think no less she reasoned it would be . . . sensible . . . to be married. To have her new name on another official record.”

Gates had arranged for them all to be given new free papers, doubtless through the Party, having been told that the kidnappers destroyed their Albany documents. Lucy agreed to marry him in Massachusetts, and the family had traveled across Connecticut and celebrated with a small ceremony at an abolitionist church in the rolling countryside. Upon returning to Manhattan, Delia and Lucy had joined the Abyssinian Church, where Delia taught and Jonas learned alongside other colored youth, and they had been reasonably safe. Contented, though Lucy still suffered attacks of nameless, overwhelming fear.

Then Lucy found work at Timpson’s Superior Blooms, Gates departed on one of his journeys, and all fell to pieces.

“Varker and Coles were engaged to get rid of your sister,” I said to Delia. She was gripping my hand in a frenzied clench. “One black woman and her child, residing at Eighty-four West Broadway. They mistook you for her.”