Property (Vintage Contemporaries) (26 page)

“Distinguished?” I said.

“It seems Sarah makes a presentable gentleman,” my aunt responded. “Everyone Mr. Leggett interviewed remarked on his aristocratic manner.”

Mr. Maître disembarked at Savannah and stayed at a boardinghouse for a few days, waiting for a packet ship that would take him on to Philadelphia. Again he kept to his room and his servant fatigued everyone in the place with descriptions of her master’s illness. One day it was his eyes, the next his heart. The baby screamed unceasingly; the landlady believed it was colicky. She too wondered how the gentleman put up with his companions. When they left, the whole house breathed a sigh of relief.

Mr. Maître boarded the
Atlantic Clipper
as soon as it docked, but the winds were unfavorable and the ship sat at anchor for three days. The captain took an interest in his passenger, who was, he thought, sick unto death. He had the cook prepare thin gruel, which was the only thing the gentleman said he could hold down. Often he encouraged Mr. Maître to go up on deck to take the fresh air, but he was unsuccessful.

When they reached Philadelphia, though Mr. Maître had booked his passage through to New York, the captain urged him to spend the night onshore while the ship discharged its cargo. He recommended a rooming house nearby. The captain told Mr. Leggett that he feared his passenger would not last the night. When he came on deck and saw the lights of the town, Mr. Maître was so weak he clung to the rail and wept.

He survived the night, and in the morning they set sail for New York. The winds were favorable, the trip without event. Mr. Maître began to eat, his servant ran out of auditors, and the baby stopped crying. When they arrived in New York, Mr. Maître expressed his gratitude to the captain; he told him he had saved his life, and went down the gangway with a steady step. He was met by a gentleman and a lady, who evidently expected him. They entered a cab and drove away.

A good bit of Mr. Leggett’s time and energy went to interviewing the cabdrivers who picked up fares at the dock that day. Eventually he was directed to a house in Brooklyn belonging to a Mr. and Mrs. Palmer. When he learned from the neighbors that the Palmers were Quakers, he knew he had found his quarry.

“What are Quakers?” I asked.

“Some sort of religious society,” my aunt explained, “much opposed to slaveholding of any kind, I gather.”

Mr. Maître had abandoned his disguise at the Palmers’ and become Miss Claudia Palmer, a cousin of the family visiting from the South. Mr. Leggett began a constant surveillance of the house. A few days later Mr. Palmer went out in a cab with the servant Midge and the baby. He came back alone. Mr. Leggett didn’t see either of them again. The next day Mr. Palmer was observed on the docks, inquiring into the availability of passage to England; the next he was at the customs office filling out forms. For several days, nothing happened. Miss Palmer rarely left the house, except to take brief walks with her cousins. Mr. Leggett despaired of capturing her in their company. Any public scene might result in Sarah’s arrest. The free negroes and others like these Quakers were known to protest police actions with such vehemence that the writs could not be served and the prisoner was released. Mr. Leggett watched for his opportunity and hired two strong men to be at the ready when the time came.

Again Mr. Palmer was observed on the docks, and this time he purchased a single berth in the name of Claudia Palmer, on the
Commodore
, bound for London. Mr. Leggett knew his chance had come, and that it would be his last.

He called his men, hired a closed carriage, and arrived at the crowded wharf early on the morning of the ship’s sailing. There these three were met by an actress, paid and coached in advance. When Sarah arrived, accompanied only by Mr. Palmer, Mr. Leggett was sure of success. He had one of his men begin to abuse the actress just as the couple approached the gangway. He relied upon Mr. Palmer’s religious principles to distract him, and he was right. Mr. Palmer turned away from his charge and attempted to interpose himself into the quarrel. Immediately the couple turned upon him, beating him cruelly. There were cries for help, all eyes were riveted on the violent scene. Mr. Leggett and his other man came up on either side of Sarah and grasped her by her arms. “It’s time to go home, Miss Sarah,” Mr. Leggett said. She cried out to Mr. Palmer, who was unable even to hear her through the noise and confusion. Mr. Leggett and his man led her quickly to the carriage, shoved her inside, and drove away.

“You are right,” I said, when my aunt had finished. “It is a remarkable story. What I wonder is what it will all cost. I suppose I will have to pay for the actress and the strong men.”

“Your uncle thinks Mr. Leggett acted properly. It is cheaper to pay an actress than bribe a bailiff.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Mr. Leggett is waiting in Savannah for three other runaways who are being transported from a jail in South Carolina. Then he and a trader who has six more slaves to bring to market here will drive them all on foot overland very cheaply.”

“That will take weeks,” I complained.

“Yes,” she said. “It will be a long walk for Mr. Maître.”

I sniffed. “What a name.”

“Your uncle cautions you that Sarah may be very different when she returns,” my aunt said. “She has passed as a free woman, and that experience is generally deleterious to a negro’s character.”

“She has done more than that,” I observed. “She has tasted a freedom you and I will never know.”

My aunt looked perplexed. “What is that?” she said.

“She has traveled about the country as a free white man.”

WHATEVER MR. LEGGETT saved by sending Sarah overland was swiftly paid out to Dr. Landry, for she arrived more dead than alive. They had cropped her hair close somewhere along the way, and with her sunken eyes and cheeks, her bony limbs, she looked like a skeleton. She had a racking cough that kept the whole house awake all night. In the trek through the swamp she had contracted some manner of foot rot, which smelled as bad as it looked. When Dr. Landry’s treatments proved ineffectual, my aunt suggested sending for Peek, who arrived straightway with her poultices and infusions. She set an iron pot boiling in the courtyard which sent a stench over the whole neighborhood. She put Sarah on a cot in the kitchen with the fire going and kettles boiling day and night until it was like a steam bath and Delphine nearly fainted from the heat. Dr. Landry disapproved, but he advised that sometimes negroes could only be cured by other negroes, which proved correct. I didn’t burden him with the information that all her life my mother had followed every palliative he offered with a dose of something Peek had mixed up. Gradually Sarah began to eat, the cough abated, even her feet dried out and crusted over.

Mr. Leggett’s bill was two hundred and fifty dollars, which I thought outrageous. He had itemized it completely, down to the actress’s cab fare and the charge for shackles at the jail in Savannah. He and my uncle determined to find a way to convict Mr. Roget of abetting Sarah’s escape. Mr. Leggett wanted that reward as well, and my uncle had his own reasons.

They had no luck trying to trace the tickets, but it didn’t take them long to learn that Mr. Roget had commissioned a slave-catcher named Pitt to bring in the talkative Midge, so notorious on the Eastern Seaboard for her intense interest in the health of Mr. Maître. It seemed Midge had found the North so much to her liking that she refused to return to her master. “We will trap him through his own arrogance,” my uncle declared. Mr. Leggett departed to collect sworn testimonies.

As for Sarah’s baby, no one seemed to know what had become of it. When I asked Sarah, she coughed a few times and said, with her usual forthcomingness, “She dead.”

My uncle was wrong; Sarah was not much changed. She was as sullen as ever. As her health improved and she was able to work again, she performed her tasks without comment or interest, but she was more competent than most, certainly better than Rose, who had a more pleasing manner. No one could dress my hair so well as Sarah, nor care for my clothes, nor arrange the rooms. She continued to evidence an aversion to Walter.

One morning, as she was serving my breakfast, Walter came in and commenced pawing her skirt and whining to be picked up and petted, as Rose was always so willing to do. Sarah put down the coffee urn, laid the flat of her hand across his face, and pushed him away roughly. He ran bawling from the room.

“Does he remind you of someone?” I said, earning one of her thinly veiled looks of contempt. She took up the urn and leaned over me to fill my cup.

“He’s as much your responsibility as mine,” I said. “God knows, I didn’t ask for him, but here he is.” She went to the sideboard and stood with her back to me, slicing a baguette, indifferent as the knife in her hand.

“It’s useless to talk about responsibility to you people,” I continued. “You have no sense of it. That’s the gift we give you all. You just run away and we bring you back and you never have the slightest twinge of conscience. No one ever holds you responsible for your actions. It’s just assumed you have no moral sense.”

She spooned a dab of Creole cheese next to the bread and brought it to me. I placed my right hand on the plate to hold the bread, then took up the knife to spread the cheese. “It’s thanks to you I’m a cripple,” I said. “Look at the way I have to eat.” She stood to the side, watching my hands with an interested expression.

“If you hadn’t beat me to the horse,” I said.

It was the first time I’d spoken to her of that night, though I dreamed of it often enough. I was running, running, and the horse was there, if I could only get to it, but someone was holding me back. Sometimes it was my husband, sometimes Sarah, sometimes a man I didn’t know. Once I turned to find Mother clawing at me, her teeth bared like a wild animal. I woke from these dreams soaked in perspiration, my heart racing so fast it hurt.

Sarah stood watching me, her hands folded at her waist. She was listening to me, I thought, which gave me an odd sensation.

“You knew my husband was dead,” I said. “There was no reason for you to run. They weren’t going to kill
you
.” I took a bite of bread and glared at her as I chewed it. She met my gaze, but curiously, as if she wondered what I would say next.

“But you had already hatched your plan with Mr. Roget, hadn’t you?” I said. “I heard you whispering here that night. You had it all arranged; your clever disguise, and your ship passage, and your new friends in the North. I’m sure they all made you feel very important, very much the poor helpless victim, and no one asked how you got away or whom you left behind.”

Her eyes wandered away from me, to the plate on the table, the cup next to my hand. A strange inward-looking smile, as at a recollection, compressed her lips. “When you gets to the North,” she said, “they invites you to the dining room, and they asks you to sit at the table. Then they offers you a cup of tea, and they asks, ‘Does you want cream and sugar?’ ”

I was dumbfounded. It was more than I had ever heard her say. My uncle was right, I thought. She had changed; she’d gone mad. I took a swallow of my coffee. “And this appealed to you?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, raising her eyes very coolly to mine. “It appeal to me.”

I considered this image of Sarah. She was dressed in borrowed clothes, sitting stiffly at a bare wooden table while a colorless Yankee woman, her thin hair pulled into a tight bun, served her tea in a china cup. The righteous husband fetched a cushion to make their guest more comfortable. It struck me as perfectly ridiculous. What on earth did they think they were doing?

Acknowledgments

Those familiar with the Library of America’s compilation
Slave Narratives
will recognize in my character Sarah’s journey north an indebtedness to the intrepid William and Ellen Craft. Disguised as a sick white man and his slave (Ellen taking the master’s role), the Crafts bought two train tickets and escaped from bondage in Georgia, “running a thousand miles for freedom.” The Crafts’ account was widely known in the nineteenth century, and Professor Henry Louis Gates has speculated that “Hannah Crafts,” the escaped slave who penned a recently discovered novel, may have chosen her pseudonym as an homage to Ellen Craft.

Other books that informed my vision of the master/ slave relationship in the antebellum South are Herbert Aptheker’s
American Negro Slave Revolts,
Liliane Crété’s
Daily
Life in Louisiana, 1815–1830,
John Hope Franklin and Loren Schweninger’s
Runaway Slaves,
Mary Gehman’s
The Free People
of Color of New Orleans,
Walter Johnson’s
Soul by Soul: Life
Inside the Antebellum Slave Market,
Harriet Martineau’s
Society
in America, Alton V. Moody’s Slavery on Louisiana Sugar
Plantations,
Joe Gray Taylor’s
Negro Slavery in Louisiana,
and Christina Vella’s
Intimate Enemies
. The journals of two Louisiana plantation owners, Rachel O’Connor and Bennet H. Barrow, were eminently useful.