Stand the Storm (23 page)

Her husband’s studied self-possession was the one most durable tenet of his personality. He would stand. He was not easily shaken. In fact, Mary had never seen him shaken, only rising to meet adversity. He had come back and said they were free if they paid Ridley out. What then was causing him to quake so? Mary rubbed her mound absently and wished it to be a boy—for Gabriel—just to please him in this troubled moment. Gabriel brushed away quickly and entered the kitchen.

Mary had given him a good rehearsal. When he entered and faced Annie and Ellen, he was prepared.

“It’s a sour bargain,” he said. “We are paying him again. As you said, Nanny, it was only money he wanted! If we give him the money we will not stand the examination.”

Daniel Joshua had turned up to sit with the women and await the outcome. He detected a further whiff in Gabriel’s words but could not identify it. He was patient for the more that was coming and continued eating his beans.

“Well done, Brother,” Annie said.

Ellen listened, then questioned timidly, “We are paying, Brother?”

“Yes, Ellen, we are paying again and we escape the examination.” Gabriel swept aside more questioning with sitting next to Daniel Joshua. “Mother, do you have a plate of beans or has friend Daniel eaten them all?” he joked.

Mary would have danced to the table with her husband’s plate if she’d known a formal step or could stop her stomach from twitching. She put down hoppin’ John and chuckled to herself.

It was a cold precedent—keeping troubling news to himself—thinking now that he was the strong one above all and that any big concern was his to tangle alone.

“Husband, husband, husband,” Mary said softly, sliding close to Gabriel. She petted the side of his body and tried to put her head against his shoulder. His body resisted her ministrations. His face would not relax. His arms were tense despite her kneading. After gentle moments of urging and wifely appeal to affection, Gabriel brushed her hands aside.

“No. Let me be, Mary,” he said.

Mary ducked beneath the covers in embarrassment and Gabriel left the bed to agitate on the floorboards. Nervous that he might set off a tizzy of fretful babies, he went out into the yard.

He sat beside one of Nanny’s wooden casks and drummed his fingers upon the wood of it and was lulled. The bile did not rise—he was not ill with the worry. He was resolved, but sickened with dread of the others knowing about it. The turn was damnable!

Gabriel wished to grab Nanny now in this torment and crush her skirts and wring out or tease out a way from this thing. He had always taken his troubles to her. He had never considered standing against her. But if she upbraided him—if she commanded him to go back to Jonathan Ridley and pay for, beg for, bargain for Delia—then he would be in a quandary.

An order to the girl came within a day. Gabriel let the paper spell it out for the women. Delia had been claimed by Jonathan Ridley and sold, and would be taken by the traders.

The force of the words was as a lash to Ellen’s face. She threw up her hands and hugged her head. Mary looked at Gabriel in horror and clutched her sobbing sister-in-law. Rather than cry out, Annie slammed her flatirons upon the stove. Ellen and Mary continued to wail in accompaniment with Annie’s pounding. The only quiet ones were Gabriel and Delia. She silently accepted that her fate had found her.

It sobered Ellen to realize Nanny and Gabriel had not shared her embrace of the illusion that she was Delia’s mother. When the child was given to her, she’d taken her and taken the story. Aye, she had fashioned her own story, with Delia at its center. But Nanny and Gabriel did not see it this way! And Ellen realized that she was at the place that would crush her heart no matter which turn she took.

When the sheriffs came to the tailor shop to seize Delia, a boy called Tillie’s Bill cried out, collapsed to the floor, and allowed himself to be dragged away in petticoats and shawls and sobbing loudly. The Coatses maintained the fiction by crying out and attempting to hold on to Tillie’s Bill.

The boy had performed this ruse before and commanded a good price for it. He employed an expert disguise as a girl and was practiced at slipping bonds over his thin wrists. Upon Annie’s suggestion, Daniel Joshua had contracted him and Annie had looked him over. She had perused his limbs and noted him slim below the waist with long, delicate-looking arms and little hair upon his flesh. He was as well yellow-skinned and had the eyes of a fawn.

Bill, tied loosely in deference to his womanly delicacy and a solemn promise to remain still, worked on his bonds as soon as he was closed into the holding room of the slave agents. He waited for sounds of drunken snoring outside the cell. This was his signal to fly. And since his escape would be on the agents’ watch, he would be their loss. A runner was the liability of the one from whom she last had run.

A stinking jailer, set and determined to have a taste of the girl beneath the shawl, also awaited the others falling into drunken sleep. This one entered the shed and pulled away the shawls from Bill. He scuffled with the girl and when he thrust his hand between her legs, he found particulars he did not expect. “ ’Tis a ruse!” he growled low, for fear of discovery amid mounting excitement. “Still I can take you as easily, lad—and enjoy it, too!”

A clever coquette, Tillie’s Bill did appear to surrender and the jailer loosened his pants.

“But not today,” Bill answered with a knife. He worked the blade into the jailer’s gut—a deep thrust that preempted a scream. After this he sprang up and ran off toward the Long Bridge, pulling off the skirts and petticoats as he flew.

Delia boarded the train for Philadelphia with a layer of face powder and holding to the arm of William Higgins. They made a lovely, plausible traveling couple and were not thwarted. Nervous, they sat on the train reading prayer books and appeared to be a pious pair who never spoke.

Upon arrival in Philadelphia, William Higgins escorted Delia to the home of abolitionist friends and commended her to them. He was reluctant to leave her to these friends though. He had become fond of the feeling of protection and thrilled a bit to be a part of her adventure. He also explored the rise and fall of his unpracticed member that responded to this fond, soft girl. Young Delia had needed him and had had to sit so close to him that he’d risked being enamored.

Twenty-three

C
AME THE MORNING,
Winnie Wareham made her way through the streets with much trepidation. She rushed to exchange information with her dear friend Annie. Her eyes spun wildly as she gained the threshold at the back of the shop.

“Lord help us! The secesh is coming. Hunger is coming!” Winnie insisted, for she’d worked herself into a lather on the crossing from threshold to threshold. She struggled to catch her breath, so that her voice was weak and shrill. The poor woman’s hands shook and Annie was pained to see her friend in such a state. The two had become boon companions over the secret about Reverend Higgins.

“If the secesh comes runnin’ over the capital, then colored will be on a string going deep south. ’Tis what they’ve promised to do. I ain’t young enough!” Winnie exclaimed. “Can we go off from here, Annie? Can we leave?”

Annie tried to soothe her friend. “Where would we go, girl?”

“We could go down by where you all come from—down in Maryland,” Winnie said in a soft, pleading voice.

“None of that, girl. We’re not rabbits. We can stick here.” The two women bumbled and whispered their fears. Their worries kept them rocking and wringing their hands.

The women’s ill ease was part of the growing plague of worry in the town. That very night a circle of free Blacks collected at Mount Zion Church to discuss the situation of safety for the capital and themselves. Another frenzied group gathered in the basement in Holy Trinity Church. Daniel Joshua appealed to Gabriel to make the rounds of the secretive meetings. He countered Gabriel’s reluctance by pointing out that the Coatses had interests. They should be alert to danger in this atmosphere. Though there was reason to fear being out and abroad, there was also the need of information and resolve.

Some urged calm and hiding for fear of riling the whites. These cautious ones thought it best for colored men in Washington and Georgetown to be careful and to wait and see which way the wind did blow. Caught as they were between the slaveholders in Maryland and the slaveholders in Virginia, they were in a shaky position. Who would defend the city itself? Who would defend free colored?

The firing on Fort Sumter and President Lincoln’s declaration of a state of insurrection and calling out militia to defend the city had been the signal for some. Risking recapture in Washington, a good many bondpeople in the surrounding towns and hamlets found courage to take to the road. Clutches of folk from nearby Maryland and Virginia had taken flight while the white folk were tied up with figuring which way they would land.

The newcomers had met with very little sympathy in the city precincts. Pushed into camps set by open sewers, they were hard-pressed to eat or get shelter, and illnesses swept through the encampments. Few reached Washington without carrying fevers.

The fortunate ones were those who could still do a day of work. Arriving contraband were forced to labor on fortifications throughout the town. Daniel Joshua worked alongside the new men with his wagon for shoveling and collecting horse manure. They transported it to dumping spots near the waterfront. Almost daily Daniel Joshua found himself hauling a footsore old grandpa or a woman with several babes in the back of his wagon after he’d dumped a load at the waterfront. He generally deposited the newcomers at an encampment on
12
th Street.

“Keep here,” Daniel Joshua suggested to the wide-eyed comers with spirits flagging. “The thoroughfares are not for you. There’s ruffians and southern agents and a chance for floggings and beatings. Lay low!” was his grim advice.

After Fort Sumter and the rumbling, stumbling fury that followed, there was little chance to rest and no contentment in the edgy capital. Residents and the numerous transients were occupied with gaining news of the conflict.

Would the secesh overrun the town and sell all colored back into slavery? Would they squeeze off the town and starve out the residents?

“We are in a vise, my friends, a trap. We are caught between our enemies. And it appears that our defenders are weakened and far, far off,” a brassy speaker at Mount Zion said, calling for colored men to arm themselves. But he spoke softly, furtively, for fear of the neighbors.

“Must we not look to our own safety? Will we not endeavor to protect our hearths, our wives, and our children?” Each speaker at the church meeting exhorted the group of colored to look to defense—to arm himself or herself for fear that none other would take their bond.

Some in Georgetown rightly feared what the city’s considerable number of southern sympathizers was liable to do. This alone was reason to stock secret arms—to provision secret cellars.

Winnie Wareham’s nervousness was exacerbated by the regiment of federal troops sent from New York City to defend the president and the government that were billeted on Georgetown College’s grounds. Greeted with enormous relief at first, their nightly drunken revels had worn their welcome thin on the campus. Their uniforms, emblazoned with green shamrocks to promote an image of Irish fierceness and determination, initially endeared the regiment to the priests, but their whoring and campfires on the college’s grounds ruined their luster. On a recent night scalawag soldiers in their number had come to the Trinity Church rectory kitchen to beg flour, a stick of cinnamon, and a snatch of sugar—and left behind a splat of tobacco juice and beery piss in the hedges beside the door. After sundown, Winnie was afraid to budge and had taken to locking herself in with a boning knife.

Political contention did, as usual, roil the town. Followers of each party and faction asserted themselves in speeches and parades and alley fisticuffs. Competition increased and invitations to balls and receptions circulated furiously. The bawdy houses were full and flourishing. In this atmosphere there was increased call for suits of clothing and decorative embellishments to old garments. There was a consistent call for the embroidery of partisan slogans and symbols on colorful cloths for fluttering and hooraw. Embroidery being Ellen’s bailiwick, she saw an increase in requests for her work especially. And she came to delight in these commissions. One faction and another bought her work and she cared nothing to take a side.

A woman pushed open the store’s door. “I want a banner done to this design. Is it possible you have a girl who does fine embroidery?” she asked, issuing an impatient order to Aaron Ridley’s stunned face. He did not answer quickly and she asked again with little blush and no blister, “Do you execute fine embroidery?”

“Madam . . . our girls are the most skilled in town. Of that there is no dispute.” Aaron Ridley stammered despite himself. “We can execute any design. Gabriel, bring samples of the girls’ work. Madam, you have my assurance that the girls in this establishment are of exemplary character and are circumspect in the preparation of all garments and accoutrements, especially those items unmentionable.” Aaron Ridley had begun to adopt a demeanor of service that he had heretofore disdained. He had fallen into the habit from necessity and no longer bothered to resist it. Placed in the business, he was becoming used to it. Though it had not the status to which Aaron Ridley truly aspired, he saw that it did have cachet in the heady, exuberant atmosphere of the city. He snapped his fingers in Gabriel’s direction and the tailor brought forth bundles of cloth with intricate designs upon each.

The young woman gasped uninhibitedly and click-clacked her teeth. The design samples were extremely lovely. “Ah. Ah, ah!” she said beneath her breath. The considerable skill was apparent. She looked directly in Aaron Ridley’s face and asked, “You have a girl on your premises who does such work?”

“Indeed, mademoiselle,” he replied with a growing sub-servience.

Gabriel was amused and showed it only by the mischievous inclination of his head to his left shoulder. He turned away from the young woman and Aaron Ridley and busied himself with threads and spools.