I went to see Lily. I do remember that. She sat me down and fanned me, because I was burning up. “Baby, you’s scarin’ me somet’in’ fierce.”
“I’m scaring myself,” I told her.
We were planning on getting the muskets, pistols, powder, and swords out from under the piazza on Sunday at nightfall. We’d go out the front gate and make our way to Petrie’s Landing, where the boats were waiting for us. We’d row them downriver to Charleston Harbor and Captain Ott.
We were going to bind Master Edward and Mr. Johnson with rope and lock them in the First Barn. We’d tie up the two Negro foremen too, since we’d never been able to trust them. By the time someone came along to let them out of the barn, we’d be safe on the
That night, way past midnight, I crawled under the piazza to get one of the muskets. It was dark, and I was afraid of a rattlesnake clamping its jaws down on my hand. I was shaking like a little girl. But I got it. Its barrel fit into the palm of my hand like death itself.
I gave it to Weaver at his cabin door. He woke Saul, Sweet-Pea, and Drummond, the field hands who slept in the same room as him. Sweet-Pea and Drummond were twins, just twenty years old, and Saul was their uncle. Weaver told them what we were planning. Sweet-Pea would come. Drummond said no thank you, it was a fool plan, but he wouldn’t say nothing to the overseer or Master Edward. Saul said he wasn’t sure if he’d risk it. Weaver stayed up that night by the light of two candles and showed Sweet-Pea and Saul how to put in the powder and take a shot. By dawn, Saul was damned certain he could fire the gun, so he agreed to come as well.
At the same time, I told Lily what we were planning. She grabbed a hold of the brass cross she kept around her neck like it might fly away and said that she was powerful afraid for me. She didn’t seem to understand that I was telling her that she could come too. She just shook her head and said, “Not me, baby, I’s gonna die at River Bend, don’ ya know.”
Nothing I could do could make her come along.
“I’s gonna miss ya, baby,” she said, starting to cry, “but I’s gonna pray ya makes it up Nawth.” She took my shoulders. “Ya bettuh jes’ send me a lettuh when you gets there, ’cause I don’ wanna be worryin’ none ’bout ya. I’ll ask Massa Edwood to read it to me. He’s gonna be right relieved knowin’ you’s safe up Nawth.”
She winked at that, and we burst out laughing. Then she held me to her breast like she was my mamma.
So now there were four of us from River Bend agreed to escape — me, Weaver, Sweet-Pea, and Saul. Four more from Comingtee made eight.
Backbend and Hopper-Anne, Lily’s grandchildren, said on Wednesday that they’d come, along with Backbend’s wife, Lucy. They’d be taking their baby boy, Scooper, as well. Grandma Blue said she was too old to go traipsing about the countryside with dogs hankering after her old African hide. But her son, Parker, and his wife, Christmas-Eve — who was born on December the Twenty-Fourth, of course — were coming, along with her grandson Randolph, and his children Lawrence and Mimi. Rosa and her husband, Langston, said it was too risky. We didn’t tell Wiggie yet, since we couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t pass on that information to Master Edward or the foremen.
Crow … We pleaded with the lean old buzzard, but he wouldn’t change his no to yes. When we said we were going to lock all the white folks and the black foremen in the First Barn, he grinned like he did when he was young and said, “Someone got to stay behin’ and make sure they don’t get away. That’ll be me.”
“Please, Crow, I’m begging you. Come with us. We can’t leave you.”
“You ’member when they whip me so bad my ribs showed like teeth? When they did that, girl” — he squeezed my hand real tight — “I says to myself, ‘Crow, you got to get back at ’em and make them bleed.’ This is a chance for me, baby girl. You leave me here and I’m gonna make sure they ain’t goin’ nowhere. Their eyes gonna bleed when they sees River Bend empty and you long gone. And I want to see that for myself!”
“But you can come! There’s freedom out there. Crow, you’ve got to come. I can’t leave you.”
“No, baby girl, my vengeance is here.”
So it was decided by Wednesday at suppertime that thirteen of us from River Bend — including one newborn baby — were going to close the gate to our plantation forever behind us. And then there was Weaver’s family from Comingtee: Martha, Taylor, Frederick, and Sarah.
Lord, I hoped that we could get seventeen persons on the three rowboats that Captain Ott was planning on leaving at Petrie’s Landing.
Late Wednesday night, Weaver snuck across the bridge to Comingtee, where he told his family to make their way to River Bend by six o’clock on Sunday afternoon. Martha was sure now she had no courage for the escape, but Weaver told her there’d be a feather bed waiting for her in New York. That was a little joke between the two of them, since Martha was always saying that just once in her life she wanted to sleep on a downy mattress with a pillow that wasn’t made out of old clothes. Weaver had always said the first thing he’d do with any money he ever made was buy her a proper bed.
Thursday morning, all of us except Weaver were as jittery as fish out of water about what was going to happen. We were all thinking the same thing: that if even one person said something stupid to Mr. Johnson or one the foremen, we’d all be neck-high in night soil. I was so close to fainting half the time that I had to keep dousing my head with water.
Then, around about noon, John walked in the front gate carrying a leather bag and his sketchbook. Weaver saw him before I did, because he was helping flood the rice fields about two hundred yards from the entrance. I only heard him when he reached the piazza, because he called for Crow. I’d been sweeping out a ragged troop of ants from the kitchen and ran to see who it was. He looked at me like he had some polished secret inside him that was going to change everything.
LI
One seemingly harmless remark from Mistress Anne at our supper on Saturday evening, along with one of my own observations, combined to give me suspicions about the origin of the spells suffered by both Big and Little Master Henry. If I had not discovered their cause, then I believe that Morri might never have grown to trust me.
I was close to despair when the meal began, as Morri had again refused to even consider coming away with me. I’d seen her caring for a sick baby that afternoon and spoken to her gently, but she shouted back that I was making her life even more difficult than it already was. I simply couldn’t seem to say anything right to her.
Mistress Anne spoke viciously at first about her dead father and brother, calling the former a brute and the latter a weakling. In the end she softened, however, and she improved my mood when she asked Lily to prepare fresh lemonade for us all, as in the days of her youth when Samuel had given a glass every night to her father and brother for health reasons.
“You know, Mr. Stewart,” Mistress Anne said, “my father and brother were subject to the most terrible spells of fever and dizziness. To be totally honest with you, I occasionally fear my children have inherited this propensity, but so far we have been most fortunate.”
To my subsequent questions, she replied that she had never asked Lily for her lemonade recipe but that it must have contained some of the herbs Samuel grew in his garden. “We all benefited considerably from his presence. Though he vanished into nothing three years ago. I tremble for the fate of the poor little man. I truly do. By now, dogs have probably eaten him down to the last bone.”
As Lily entered the room with drinking glasses and a jug of lemonade, Anne requested that she tell us her recipe. It consisted of lemon juice, water, honey, ground mint leaves, and a powder made from several other herbs. Which ones precisely, she could not say. She told us that only Samuel had known, though Morri had come up with a
