Ashes (33 page)

He talked at length about the injustice of the circumstances, the horrible hypocrisy of it all. As he spoke, I made more corn bread and roasted the mutton. I offered him a cup of water, which he drank, and meat and bread, which he did not eat.

At the end of his tale he stood and leaned on the crutch. “I had faith in them, Isabel. Even when they handed me back to Bellingham, I convinced myself that things would change; they just needed to see our dedication, how smart and hardworking and patriotic we were.”

“You've always believed in the Revolution,” I said carefully. “You had a mountain of faith in it.”

“I was wrong.” He spat in the fire again. “I should have listened to you and Aberdeen. We could have fled to Spanish Florida or the mountains to the west.” He took a deep breath. “Or even joined the British.”

I added wood to the fire. “So we could be imprisoned in the garrison right now, headed to a life in the lead mines? No, thank you.”

“Five weeks of camp life and suddenly you're a Patriot?” he asked. “You've been arguing against the war for years. You always said the Patriots talk a good game of freedom, but the proof is in their actions, not their words. What was that Scripture you quoted till I wanted to scream?”

“Ye shall know them by their fruits,” I murmured.

“That's the one,” he said. “Well, the fruits of this revolution will be given only to white hands.”

He limped a few steps, turned, and limped back. His crutch snagged on something in the dirt, and he pitched forward, off balance. I grabbed at him and he held on to my arms. We swayed for a moment.

“You should sit yourself down,” I said.

He nodded and let me help him hop back to the log by the fire. Once he was seated, I sat by his side. It was a comfort to be so close to him again.

“What's that mess you've made on the blanket over there?” he asked.

“Sorting my seeds. They're all ajumble, and I've lost three quarters of them.”

“Why bother? You won't know what you're planting.”

“Not until they sprout, I won't,” I admitted. “But I've got to start with something. Once they grow and bloom, I'll know what to call them, and eventually the garden will be orderly.”

“A fool-headed way to farm,” he grumbled.

“'Tis a fool-headed way to grow a country, too, but that's what we're doing.”

“Now you've gone barmy, Isabel,” he said sourly.

I walked over to the blanket, gathered the small handful of the good seeds, and sat back down next to him.

“Seems to me this is the seed time for America.” I took his hand and poured the seeds into it, as he had poured dirt into mine weeks earlier. “War's nearly over. Now we've got to grow a proper nation. That will require stouthearted folks who understand the true meaning of freedom. People like us.”

“They won't let us.”

“They won't have a choice,” I said firmly. “This is our mother country too. Ponder this–the Revolution won't end on account of Cornwallis being captured. The real revolution is the black and Indian men of the Rhode Island regiment. It's you and Isaac and Tall Will fighting alongside Hamilton and Lafayette in the redoubt. It's Ruth and Sibby and me and all the other black women of the army doing our share and being accorded the same respect and earning wages, just like Annie and Cristena. It's Ebenezer, who was ignorant when he met you, but who became your friend and opened his heart to people who didn't look like him and his.”

“That's not enough.” He turned his head away from me.

“Of course it's not, fool. It's not enough and it's not right and it's not fair. But it's what we have. Think on Serafina and Walter. They couldn't run, but they made sure a whole passel of people could. Think on the fellows in our company. Imagine if we all settled close to one another after the war. Imagine a town of veteran soldiers and their wives and children, all folks who understand the struggle and believe in the same kind of freedom.”

“I try not to think about what happens after the war,” he grumbled. “All I think about is freedom.”

“Freedom never gets handed to anyone. You told me that, over and over.” I reached out and gently turned his chin so that he faced me. “We have to fight for it, my friend, no matter how long it takes. We must claim it for ourselves and our brothers and sisters.”

The fierce anger in his face softened a bit.

“You're dreaming, Country,” he said quietly.

“I'm ready to dream,” I admitted. “It's taken a long time, but I know my aim in life. I know my purpose.”

I hesitated, suddenly nervous. The fire crackled and popped, and sparks shot into the air.

“Does your purpose include me?” he asked.

I leaned forward and cupped my hand along his jaw. In his eyes I found the home and comfort my heart had long been seeking. “Indeed it does, you muzzy-headed blatherskite.”

“Does that mean . . .” His voice tightened, and he paused to clear his throat. “Are you saying . . .”

“I'm saying we should marry, aye.” My heart was pounding louder than wild horses. “I want you for my husband. What say you, Private Smith?”

“I've been in love with you, Country, since the first moment I clapped eyes on you. I want to marry you–”

The rest of his words were lost in the most delightful kiss ever enjoyed by a campfire.

  *  *  *  

Ruth woke with a squeal when I whispered my secret into her ear. I stole a few moments to wash my face and tidy my hair, while she plunged into the brush behind the woodpile. She emerged from the shadows with her hands filled with autumn leaves arranged as if they were the most beautiful roses and larkspurs.

“Got to hold some pretty when you wed,” she explained with a grin.

By the time we returned to the cook fire, Henry and Curzon were standing with the rest of our lads, some of them still yawning and rubbing the sleep from their eyes. The fire had been built up so that it blazed high and threw a warming light over all.

We married under the gaze of heaven and in a company of good people who cared about us. Henry preached a short sermon in which he talked about marriage being when two people come together as one to start their life anew. He said it made him think about thirteen colonies that were trying to become one nation. We laughed about that, but he had a point.

The stars wheeled to the west, and the first birds of morning began to call up the sun. As our friends huzzahed and bowed to me, and clapped my husband on the back, and celebrated our union with dreadful coffee and not-quite-dreadful corn bread, I watched the kind ghosts gathering in the mist at the edge of the woods.

Momma used to say that the best time to talk to ghosts was just before the sun came up. That's when they could hear us true. That's when they could answer us.

“We're free, Momma,” I whispered. “We're free and we're strong.”

Ruth smiled at me from the other side of the fire.

“And we're together,” I said.

I held Momma and Poppa in my heart so they could see us both and know that we were well. Then I squared my shoulders and shook out my skirts. A new day was dawning and there was work to be done.

1. Are Isabel, Ruth, and Curzon based on real people? How did you develop their characters?

Isabel, Ruth, and Curzon are fictional characters, as are all of the people they directly interact with in the book. The details of their lives were built on the lives of real people who freed themselves from slavery and later wrote down their experiences. Advertisements about runaway slaves gave a lot of information about how people escaped slavery and the kinds of things they carried with them when they fled. Some African American veterans of the American Revolution later applied for pensions, and those applications offered wonderful insight into their time in the military. Pension applications of white Revolutionary War soldiers and camp women occasionally mentioned African American soldiers too.

Read more:

Sylvia R. Frey,
Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age
.

David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century Mid-Atlantic,”
The William and Mary Quarterly
, April 1999.

Revolutionary War Pension and Bounty-Land-Warrant Application Files
, National Archives microfilm, 1974.

2. Are there any real people or incidents in the story?

Many! Yorktown was a very exciting place to be in 1781, though mayhaps not if you favored the cause of King George. General Washington was there, of course, and the Marquis de Lafayette, Alexander Hamilton, and a host of officers and aides-de-camp who went on to play significant roles in the early days of America.

These scenes from the book are all based on what really happened:

• The chaos in the South caused by the war

• The walk from South Carolina to Virginia

• The American and French armies in Williamsburg

• Baptist worship service led by enslaved preacher Gowan Pamphlet

• The Siege of Yorktown

• The men of the Rhode Island regiment and the large number of African American soldiers throughout the Continental Army

• The roles played by the women of the army

• The British surrender

• How the British treated the self-liberated people who had joined them

• The Continental Army's role in recapturing those self-liberated people and returning them to slavery

Read more:

Douglas R. Egerton,
Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America
.

Jerome A. Greene,
The Guns of Independence: The Siege of Yorktown
, 1781.

Richard M. Ketchum,
Victory at Yorktown: The Campaign That Won the Revolution
.

Gary B. Nash,
The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America
.

Benjamin Quarles,
The Negro in the American Revolution
, introduction by Gary Nash, foreword by Thad W. Tate.

Ray Raphael,
A People's History of the American Revolution: How Common People Shaped the Fight for Independence.

3. What happened to the people held in slavery by Washington and Jefferson who escaped and ran to the British?

Twenty-three of Thomas Jefferson's slaves from three plantations fled to join the British. From Jefferson's Elk Hill plantation, Joe, Jenny, Nat, Judy, and Black Sal with her three small children all escaped. Hannibal; his wife, Patty, and their six children; an old woman named Lucy; and Sam and his wife, Nancy, left the Willis Creek plantation. Robin, Barnaby, Harry, and Will all ran from Monticello. We know the details of their names from the records that Jefferson kept.

After the fall of Yorktown, Jefferson sent a man to look for his fugitive slaves. The man found six of them: Robin, Barnaby, Will, Nat, Judy, and Isabel, who was the daughter of Hannibal and Patty. Isabel was given to Jefferson's sister in 1786, Barnaby died shortly after being returned to Jefferson, and the other four were sold. Historians believe that the rest of the escapees likely died of smallpox because Jefferson did not inoculate his slaves against the disease. But there is a chance they survived to live in freedom.

In April of 1781, fourteen men and three women who were held as slaves at George Washington's Mount Vernon plantation escaped and fled to the British. Two of them were found and enslaved again after Yorktown, as were those later found in Philadelphia. A few of Washington's slaves made it to New York and found safety with the British there. Washington worked hard to convince the British to return those people to him, but the British authorities refused. Instead, the self-liberated former slaves of George Washington traveled with other Loyalist refugees to Nova Scotia when the British left New York in 1783.