Stand the Storm (4 page)

Sewing Annie circulated the barn and was manager of the quilting. From time to time she sat at her own corner and worked furiously to pull ahead of her partners.

“Nanny, you’re a spinning top. Take a seat and rest yourself,” Gabriel got bold enough to say when Sewing Annie had come again to peer over his shoulder. She was enamored of his stitches and they compelled her eye, though she did not say so. She only goaded Gabriel to work faster to compensate for the three old sheep-shearers. These old men laughed at Gabriel’s impudence and began coughing and expectorating and halted their work. Gabriel’s penance was his mother’s good-natured thump upon the back of his head. As she stood close to him, her bosom pressed to his back, he regretted his words, for he would not have her move away.

Annie lingered behind her son and mused that Gabriel had stayed her right arm for far longer than she’d expected. She’d given him up for his own sake. Now she coveted him again. She wanted him back as her own right arm and not Master Ridley’s. She saw the beauty of his stitches and the intricacies that he’d learned from Abraham Pearl.

Annie planned the last evening for Gabriel at Ridley. She drew an exquisite piecing of the Wagon Wheel pattern and bade Gabriel set it in the frame and take a corner to work. She seated Ellen, excited and full of love for her brother, at another corner of the frame. Then she took her own place. Some would call it dangerous for only three to work a quilt, for fear the devil will take the fourth place. But Sewing Annie scoffed at such belief and set her children to their parts. She had a method that used the three equally and quickly, and her children were well practiced. They happily stepped to the pace their mother set, determined to finish the work by the morning. The quilt would go back to Georgetown with the man who had come home calling himself Gabriel.

“Work fast, Brother Gabriel,” Sewing Annie teased.

“Work faster, Brother. I can catch you,” Ellen put in quietly. And indeed her fingers were so swift and lithe that he risked fascination by looking at them.

Sewing Annie slapped at Gabriel’s hand to break his stitches. Even clear-eyed Annie held to the needleworker’s superstition that disliked the perfectly straight. He smiled at her and accepted her compliment. Ellen had the tic of admitting a broken-stitch flaw in her quilting with such regularity that her work was instantly recognizable and of questionable efficacy in thwarting the devil.

When the sun came up, Sewing Annie slapped Gabriel’s hands again. This time she roused him from sleep.

“Finish up your work, good boy,” she said, and could easily have kneaded his face and his newly muscled body between her hands, exercising a mother’s claim. But she cared not to crimp him or shame him or turn away whatever he would give her. Rather, she stood and looked at him fully and savored him.

Annie tied up a gift for Pearl and the quilt for Gabriel in a tight bundle. She boiled up their coffee and allowed Ellen to hang upon Gabriel’s neck with some fondness before chastising her.

“Leave it, girl. Set to your work,” she ordered finally. “You’ve come a masterful hand, Gabriel. You bring out the lovely,” she continued, and smiled.

“Nanny, the Wagon Wheel quilt is the most highly prized in Georgetown,” Gabriel spoke to flatter his mother.

“Sell it then,” she replied, surprising him. She lowered her voice and repeated, “Sell it . . . and put the money by.”

“Yes,” he promised.

On a clear April morning that followed a rain-soaked day, Jonathan Ridley entered the tailoring shop tracking mud and debris on his boots. Gabriel left his sewing to swab up the street muck.

Abraham Pearl did not move hastily. He inclined his head when Ridley entered, but remained at his work. When Ridley slapped his gloves against his wrist impatiently, Pearl rose from his sewing machine and set Gabriel to a task of measurements while he attended.

Jonathan Ridley followed Pearl to the back workroom and abruptly offered him the opportunity to sell his business concern for a small bit of profit. The negotiations were brief, for the tailor had caught a whiff of this wind coming. Pearl would have liked to hold out against the offer to show his disdain for Ridley, but he was, in fact, delighted.

The population of Washington increased every day and the class of men in need of fine tailoring was growing. Pearl’s reputation brought him many commissions that he struggled to fill even with Gabriel’s help. The city was becoming crowded and Pearl had a lust for open space and more adventure.

Abraham Pearl was uneasy about the coming conflict, too. Everyone was predicting it. It looked as though the District of Columbia—trapped between two slaveholding states—would be in a vise. Pearl wasn’t certain he liked the sort of men the conflict was spawning and the type of deals he’d have to make to survive.

Pearl wasn’t squeamish and was of the opinion that a man was responsible for his own conscience. If a man could stomach the owning of another, then he was welcome to the practice. But the long ugly shadow of human bondage was becoming increasingly distasteful. Though the sale of slaves had been outlawed in the city, considerable trade still took place. And he, too, profited by the institution. He could never pay a free man to do the work that the slave, Gabriel, was being compelled to do. His conscience had never quite liked the bargain he had made. Why not have a buyer for his business and move farther west with his profits?

“I’m for the frontier, dear Gabriel,” Pearl announced. “The shop and most of the tools are with you and your master. Don’t keep with him too long, Gabriel. Perhaps the wind is changing even now,” he said cryptically. “These will cut off an eyelash! Take care,” Pearl said with a face of false jollity as he handed a favorite pair of shears to his assistant. The two had been a boon to each other these years and the parting was sad, but friendly. Gabriel wondered at Pearl’s haste.

After the negotiations with Abraham Pearl were at an end and the deal closed, Ridley summoned Gabriel to implement a plan for setting up a trade in fine tailoring. Gabriel, the bondman, would operate the tailoring business and return all profit to Master Ridley. However, it was agreed that Gabriel could take commissions for additional work. Ridley gained much energy from the revelation of his idea to Gabriel. He became animated, marching back and forth in the workroom, gesturing with his hands for emphasis. The excitement added bulk to the man. He then lowered his voice and paused. The final component of his plan—the part that made the idea firm and filled with delicious possibility—was that Jonathan Ridley would install his late brother’s son, Aaron, as manager of the tailoring enterprise. This young Aaron Ridley would oversee the operation, keep accounts, and supervise Gabriel’s work without actually interfering with it.

“This will relieve you of the care. Aye, Master Aaron will do to keep the accounts, as no nigger can be trusted to look to the books,” he explained.

The chance for Gabriel to buy his freedom! This was the jewel that Sewing Annie had been waiting for! They had been patient. They had waited. They’d teased little droplets of luck and now the bits were coming together. Annie remained still and applied herself to her own work. But in her mind she exulted. She gave herself the credit. She had trained Gabriel up. She had stamped him and made him currency!

Gabriel himself ruminated on this supposed good fortune. The binds of it did thwart any plan to leave for Canada.

“The two go on together, Gabriel. Put away the money to buy your freedom and start up flush,” Sewing Annie counseled against his misgivings. “Go to the work with vigor, Brother Gabriel, and salt away the proceeds. Outwait the watcher. Put him to sleep with your click-clacking. Don’t put your head down until his has gone before you,” Annie said, exhausting her store of advice. She’d taken Aaron Ridley’s measure and chuckled to think what little effort it would be to get around him. Master had put young Aaron there to watch Gabriel. Ha! As there was no real work in the shop that Aaron Ridley was capable of except the watching, he might become good at it.

Aaron Ridley, Master’s nephew, had been brought to Ridley Plantation with his mother upon the death of his father, Nathaniel Ridley. Nathaniel, the younger brother of Jonathan Ridley, had died suddenly in a fall, leaving behind a young wife and a three-year-old child. There was no alternative for the widow but to put in with her brother-in-law and his wife. Her husband had built no fortune independent of his brother. The young boy was raised as scion in his uncle’s otherwise childless home. Aaron Ridley, not known on Ridley Plantation for any particular talent or inclination, was accustomed to taking his cues from his uncle. Upon being informed of his new position, he was not enthusiastic but welcomed the chance to live in town.

Young Aaron did intend to keep some attention upon the running of the shop. But as far as the tailoring work was concerned, he could only watch that Gabriel worked sufficient hours on the shop’s commissions.

Aaron Ridley was responsible for interacting with the white people who came to the shop to place orders or to inquire about one. He spoke with servants of the rank of butler, valet, and ladies’ maid and with any white person who felt it beneath himself to conduct business with a Black. Periodically, he rose from his chair, crossed to the back room, and peered at his uncle’s diligent slave.

The young master was given the rear of the second floor of the shop for his own living. Gabriel’s sleeping quarters were on the level above the second floor in the half-height space just under the roof. The large back room on the first floor was the workroom and its table was used as well for meals. Abraham Pearl and Gabriel had eaten their vittles here. Aaron Ridley balked immediately at the arrangement. Averse to eating his meals upon the same table at which Gabriel worked and ate, Ridley took up the habit of going abroad to Pearson’s Tavern for his meals.

Three

Dear Uncle,

I am in spartan circumstance in this shop. There is little for a gentleman’s comfort here. The nigger is occupied completely with his sewing and is unwilling to undertake more. Forgive me, sir, but I must advise you that I am forced to toss my own night water, as there is no one to see to the duties of this like. I am required to go about to hire a woman for assistance. The available char are, I am told, mostly Irishwomen with diseases. It is a sorry lot to pick from. Advise me, dear sir. I am afraid that I will perish in this city’s pestilential airs if my health is not attended to.

Your devoted nephew,

Aaron

The piglet was squealing so soon! Though he had raised this boy since infancy, Jonathan still kept the feeling that if the babe had been of his own body rather than his dreamy younger brother’s, the boy would have come up with more stuffing and cleverness and grit. It was damnably hard to keep these young boys from indolence and pure silliness.

“It will take four hands out of your fields to replace her with the laundry,” Elizabeth Ridley wailed when told that Sewing Annie would be sent to Georgetown to help in the shop. “There is no one of Sewing Annie’s caliber for the needlework. The weaving will fall off. All of this because of a spoiled, lazy boy! Watch out, Master, your nephew will do you little good,” she said, sneering. Her sister-in-law’s maternal arrogance—the one bit of leverage the widow had always had over her—was, at last, under challenge.

But Clementine Ridley, usually cowed by her status in the household, spoke loudly in defense of her son. “If you are weighing him, Brother, then take your thumb off the scale. Give him the chance to please you. You’ve raised him as a gentleman. Doesn’t a gentleman require a cook and a char in Georgetown?” she questioned.

It pleased Jonathan Ridley to set the two women against each other, for it reduced whatever influence they might combine to exert against him.

Indeed there was a sore need for Sewing Annie in the shop as the work at sewing engaged Gabriel’s full attentions. He had come down to stirring up a pot of cornmeal mush to placate his stomach and leaving off all else but tidying his supplies and boiling coffee. The considerable all else that needed doing immediately became Sewing Annie’s province.

As Aaron Ridley did not consider Sewing Annie’s cooking talents up to his appetite, he continued to take his meals at the tavern and left the kitchen worktable to the slaves.

“Does a chicken give milk here?” Annie said to Gabriel, perusing the empty food casks.

“No, ma’am. I’ll take you where is the milk and bread and other things,” he answered her sweetly, relinquishing the cloth he worked on and rising.

Gabriel had gained a measure of comfort in Georgetown through familiarity. He knew that the settling-in to town was daunting for the newcomer. On Annie’s first morning there, Gabriel took his mam abroad under his wing with a market basket and a shawl.

“Nanny, mind the thoroughfare. Nanny, mind the patrollers. Mind to come and go.” Gabriel pronounced lessons for newly arrived Annie. “Nanny, there are a great many harsh men abroad. You must be careful,” he commanded her.

She answered with sucking her teeth, for she chafed a bit at his tone. The town, though, flummoxed her.

As he stood a head above her head now, Gabriel drew up appropriately straight though circumspect to the taste of the town for a colored man. He led her up and down the city’s streets clasping his arm. He showed her through the alleys like a toddling child. Annie continued walking well past her strength the first day without acknowledging the tiredness, for she was eager to learn the customs and to see all.

A stop on Gabriel’s circuit was Holy Trinity Church. The Reverend William Higgins, a blushing Catholic priest who greeted them at the door, was a particular friend to the colored. Daily delighted with flouting the church’s rules, William Higgins drew Gabriel and his mother into the sanctuary and seated them on the oak pews in the nave.

“Hello, Mother,” the priest cried out with unaccustomed respect. Annie did not look Higgins full in the face, though he smilingly sought to engage her. Undaunted by her silence, he continued with warm pleasantries and insisted that the rectory had laundry work if she agreed to undertake it. As they left the church, Higgins grasped Gabriel’s hand and squeezed it familiarly. Gabriel was, as always, taken aback at Higgins’s exuberance.