The Lincoln Conspiracy (14 page)

At the start of the war the hospital had been a cavalry barracks, and it still looked the part, long and low-slung with a simple peaked roof. Augustus had moved here only recently because the Freedmen’s Bureau was converting the Campbell once again; this time it would become a freedmen’s hospital where former slaves and free Negroes could get medical care. Fiona shook her head slightly as they neared it.

“Walt Whitman nursed soldiers here. He spoke with me once when we were tending patients at the Patent Office, and he thought the Campbell and some of the other hospitals killed just as many soldiers as they saved,” she said. “He said he saw two boys needlessly
die here—one because of a know-nothing master of the ward who mistakenly gave him an overdose of opium pills and laudanum, the second because they accidentally let him drink muriate of ammonia intended to clean his muddy feet.”

They stepped down from the carriage and walked up a small incline to Augustus’s home. Temple knocked and then looked back at the hospital.

“Augustus plans for happier days here now that the war is over,” he said. “He’s teaching at the hospital, and there is talk of opening a university for Negroes around the corner within the next year or two. There’s already a trade school in the hospital where women can learn to sew.”

The door swung open, and Augustus stood in the entrance, beaming at Temple and Fiona. Fiona stepped up and kissed Augustus on the cheek. As the two men embraced, Temple flinched.

“Are you hurt again?” Augustus asked.

“My shoulder’s reopened, that’s all,” Temple said, his mouth curled up in amusement. “You live in a
white house
, Augustus.”

“Unlike the President’s House, mine wasn’t built with the help of slaves,” Augustus responded. “Look at all we have here. We have a hospital and a school, we’ll soon have a university, and we have a growing population of free Negroes. We won’t stop there—we’ll have a bank, a building company, and our own businesses, too. The Freedmen’s Bureau will make the District the nation’s home for free Negroes, and the center of it, the very start of it, will be here, in the Shaw.”

“Why here? Why not downtown?”

“Already whites don’t want us there. Renters are being turned away; some Negroes looking for housing have been beaten. So they’re coming here. I’ve gotten a loan from the Freedmen’s Bureau to build my house, and others will build after me.”

“It is called the Shaw now?” Fiona asked.

“The District has given our neighborhood a name, yes.”

“What is Shaw?”

“Shaw is a who—the army colonel killed leading the black regiment that launched the first attack on Fort Wagner.”

“Ah,” Temple said. “You can live here, but they’ll still name it after a white man.”

“It won’t be the only instance, either,” Augustus replied. “Oliver Howard is one of the commissioners at the bureau. He’s a good man, a general in the army, and he’s raised money for the university. But there’s talk that they will name the university after him. I’ve told the bureau that it would be a high and mighty honor to name it after Frederick Douglass, but I won’t prevail in that discussion.”

Augustus led them inside, to a small parlor with a table and a few chairs. As they sat down, he looked out the window at the hospital.

“Names for neighborhoods and universities are a small concession. We are still building something of our own here. It is a magnificent start. Negroes will earn a wage and get an education. Those things are where freedom lies; I’ve come to think that maybe they are more important than even the vote.”

“Step by step,” said Temple.

“Amen. But I don’t suppose you came here to discuss the rights of the Negro.”

“I came because it’s time to share what we have with Fiona. So we will need the diaries.”

“I’ll have to send for them.”

Augustus left the parlor and stepped outside. When he returned, he found Temple, shirtless, with Fiona fussing over his shoulder. Temple’s shirt, stained with the blood from his wound, was balled up and tossed in a corner.

“You’ll need a new shirt as well as the diaries,” Augustus said.

“He’ll also need one of your bedrooms,” Fiona said as she dug into her bag. “I’ll need to stitch him again. Might he sleep until we have the diaries?”

“He might,” said Augustus, leading them toward the back of the house.

T
EMPLE WAS ASLEEP
in Augustus’s bedroom, two fresh stitches in his shoulder, when there was a knock at the front door. Augustus opened it to find an elderly woman on his doorstep holding the satchel with the diaries and a fresh shirt draped over her arm. She was slightly stooped, and a white knit cap clung tightly to her head, matched by a white shawl draped over her shoulders. The cap and shawl almost shimmered against her gleaming ebony skin, and a pair of rectangular spectacles sat across the bridge of her nose. She looked up at Augustus from behind her glasses and smirked.

“Well, say something, Augustus,” she said.

“Isabella Baumfree!”

“Don’t you try to get my goat, boy. I stay Sojourner Truth.”

Augustus turned to Fiona as he ushered Sojourner through the door.

“Mrs. Baumfree is a nurse here at the Freedmen’s Hospital. It is an honorary position because the good Lord knows she hasn’t a wit about her when it comes to medicine.”

Sojourner reached up and slapped him on the back. Augustus, coughing and laughing, put his arm around her shoulders.

“Sojourner Truth is Mrs. Baumfree’s stage name. She has used it for many years to great and wonderful effect, for she indeed blesses all of us with the truth.”

“I am acquainted with your fine words, Mrs. Truth, and I honor them,” Fiona said. “Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others have made market of them in pamphlets examining the plight of the woman and the plight of the Negro.”

“There’s a darling child,” Sojourner said, reaching up to put her hand on Fiona’s cheek. She shuffled into the parlor and put the satchel on the table, explaining that although Augustus had sent a boy down to the alleys to fetch the satchel, when the boy returned, she encountered him and decided to deliver it herself.

“I told him it would provide me reason for a visit and I would take it to you. So here I am.”

“Will you eat with us?” Augustus asked.

“Naw, just a visit, no more.”

“I heard you were speechifying downtown yesterday.”

“Truly. I gave them my regular on the meanin’ of this war: where there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter. I think that ’twixt the Negroes of the South and the women of the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.”

Fiona stepped into the parlor, her face lit with excitement.

“I know this speech, Mrs. Truth! It is your ‘Aren’t I a Woman?’ is it not?” Fiona asked.

“It is indeed, child.”

“Give us some, Sojourner,” Augustus said. “Inspire and motivate.”

Sojourner stood at the table, took her glasses off, and raised her right hand in the air, poking toward the ceiling with her index finger. Her voice was charged and high, and she launched into her speech with the cadence of a preacher and a passion exceeding her frame.

“Look at me! Look at my arm! I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And aren’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And aren’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen them most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And aren’t I a woman?”

Augustus clapped and nodded in time with each of Sojourner’s sentences, his entire body beginning to rock. Fiona joined in, her own clapping growing faster as Sojourner’s speech rose to a crescendo.

“If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again!”

Sojourner’s voice rose more powerfully as she concluded: “And now they are asking to do it, the men better let them.”

When she finished speaking, the room was silent and still. She ran her hands down the front of her dress and sat down. She looked up at Augustus and Fiona with a broad, proud smile spread across her face.

“Mrs. Baumfree, you make us all proud,” Augustus said, leaning down toward her.

She tried to kick Augustus in the shin but missed. He performed an extravagant dodge, laughing loudly again.

“There you go again, boy,” she said. “As I spoke it before, I remain Sojourner Truth, and I’m set against even lettin’ you have this satchel that I toiled to bring y’all. But I will gladly give it up if you introduce me proper to this delight.”

“She’s Temple’s wife,” Augustus said. “Her name is Fiona.”

“She’s a mercy and a gift,” Sojourner said, turning toward Fiona. “Your husband is a righteous man. He aided me gettin’ Negroes on the streetcars.”

“He has told me and has spoken equally highly of you, Mrs. Truth.”

“Where he be?”

“Sleeping in the back.”

“Not even five bells yet and he’s sleepin’? Not hardly. What ails your man?”

“He’s just fine, Sojourner,” said Augustus.

“No need for me to look in on him?”

“No need. But join us for supper? I have a root cellar and a garden here.”

“No. On my way.”

She got up from her chair, leaving the satchel on the table, and walked to the door. Augustus hugged her on her way out.

“It is always a pleasure, Sojourner,” he said.

“Rightly, always mine,” she replied. “I’m back to the hospital to ministrate. We got to keep buildin’ up our new neighborhood here.”

Augustus walked back into the parlor, pulled the satchel across the table, and began to open it. As Fiona sat down beside him, he told her about the diaries. While he was speaking, she reached for two thick candles in the middle of the table and lit them.

T
EMPLE’S BED SWAYED
, tossed about on waves, and his fingers spidered toward its edges in search of rails that weren’t there, rails like those that had run across the side of his tiny bunk in the cramped first-class cabin Dr. McFadden had booked for them when they crossed the Atlantic.

Even in his dreams, the roar of the ocean enveloped everything else: the smell of the pigs and cattle packed into steerage in the bottom of the
Washington
, which they’d boarded in Liverpool; the moaning creak of wood as her timbers, three masts, and 420 tons strained against the sea; the shouts and cries of poorer passengers down below, enduring this to escape An Gorta Mór, notices to quit their land, and their families dying in droves in Ireland; and a seven-year-old’s gasps of breath as he fought off nausea and fear, clutching tightly to the rails of his bunk.

Closing his eyes while he and the ship surrounding him spun atop gray-green cliffs of water that made his stomach surge; hoping the storms threatening to swallow him wouldn’t expand the crossing’s duration from six weeks to ten, but knowing that they would; trusting that the passage’s torture was a bridge from the suffocation of the orphanage to what lay beyond Castle Garden.

Dr. McFadden’s hand was on his forehead.

“There now, Temple, you were brave on the steamer from Dublin to Liverpool, and I know you can be brave again now.”

“The steamer only took twelve hours,” he said, a tear rolling down his cheek.

“And I will read you poetry to pass the time and we will memorize
our favorites together. If you have the Lord, your family, and poems, you can overcome anything.”

Dr. McFadden pulled a bucket to the side of the bed to catch the vomit that erupted from Temple’s mouth.

“There’s a young man from Germany in the cabin next to ours. He comes from good stock, and his parents say he fences with proficiency. They said they’d be happy for him to tutor you. And there’s a teenager in steerage who is a tough; he fights for pay in Dublin. He needs money, and I’ve hired him to school you as well.”

“I don’t have a sword, and both of those boys are older.”

“You have your cane. You’ll learn to use it for something more than a crutch. The two of them will give you a start, so bullies can’t get after you anymore, like they did at the orphanage. We have weeks on this ship—we’ll find ways for you to progress.”

Again Temple vomited.

The Germans were the only other family on the
Washington
with the means to secure a cabin. It cost £50 per person to book first-class passage, and with the famine spreading across Ireland, only those with estates, inheritances, or a profession could manage that sum. Most paid the £19 for steerage and shared space with animals—and disease. Four children who had died of typhus were dropped over the
Washington
’s sides during the fourth week out.

Dr. McFadden had gone down to steerage in the second week to try to treat some of the passengers there, but he was grim when he returned to the cabin. He said the planks that the folk slept on were crawling with abominations and that he was hard pressed to remain below very long because the belly of the ship breathed up a rank, wet stench. Families broke up the biscuits they were rationed because weevils were laced throughout. They tried making a porridge out of water and the biscuit powder, but some slowly starved.

“Temple, remember the wharves in Liverpool?” Dr. McFadden asked him. “How you loved the huge stone piers and the granite that laced the docks? And the view across the Mersey to Birkenhead?”

“Yes.”

“I am told that the wharves in New York are horrid by comparison. They are flimsy wood things, and poorly kept.”

“So we should have stayed in Liverpool?”

“No, because beyond the docks in Liverpool are muck and misery and beyond the wharves in New York are opportunity and promise. We travel for the latter.”

Bridget McFadden never pushed Temple as hard as her husband did, but from the day that they plucked him from the orphanage and took him to their home she insisted he read as much as he possibly could. She corrected his grammar, worked with him on his writing, and sang to him when he was sick. She had long, lovely fingers and wide green eyes, and on the slowest days aboard the
Washington
she taught Temple how to braid her red hair and help her clip it into a bun, promising Temple that they would find their way through the water and the foam and the wind to the other side.