Stand the Storm (14 page)

The auction house that offered Mary and others for sale was located across the Potomac from Georgetown in Alexandria—in the state of Virginia. Higgins completed his costume of a gentleman plantation owner by hiring a carriage to take him across the river to Whittier & Sons.

That which he had eaten to sustain the enterprise welled up in his throat on approaching the auction house. Odors off the fetid riverbank, whiskey smells, animal effluvium, and the fear and neglect of the wretched humans being offered for sale swirled around Higgins’s nostrils as he dismounted the carriage in front of the auction barn. The test of his prayers would be the success with which he managed to complete his task and return to Holy Trinity with body and soul intact. He put the handkerchief that was part of his disguise at his nostrils.

The gathering crowd eagerly awaited a pitiful brace of sisters—advertised on handbills hawked about the auction house entrance by scruffy boys. When brought forth the two girls hiccuped as tears streamed down their cheeks. They were comely and well dressed, though their dresses were torn. Bidding for the sobbing girls opened high and was far out of the reach of the priest’s compassionate funds.

In order to further excite the leering traders, the girls’ bodices were torn to show them naked. Bidding soared. The trader who purchased the sisters handled them roughly and cared not a whit for their distress. William Higgins wondered if the two might not be free women stolen off the streets of a northern town as had happened to many colored. Their doelike faces indicated a complete lack of experience with the state to which they had been sent. Higgins could not hear the names they called each other, but burned an image of their features into his brain—one taller than the other by a hair, both nutmeg-colored, gone to a trader for sale to a fancy house—so that word of them could be passed along.

The woman known to Higgins as Mary, who was called Carrie, was presented some time after the hammer came down on the sisters. In contrast to the cowering girls, Mary had a wounded but rebellious look about her. She had been this way before today and her body was braced for the ill treatment that would follow the hammer fall. The auctioneer touted her as able to plow and carry loads. Mary’s face was swollen and lacerated on the left and her shoulder was held hunched up to deflect blows to her head. The right side of her face was unmarked and she held it tight and still. The man who brought her to the stage turned her profile toward the bidding audience and raised his lantern for illumination. Mary’s thin body was covered, though the dress she wore was crude and very soiled. Wisps of straw clung to her hair and she had no shoes upon her feet.

The bidding was light. Only a man making up a work gang to plant rice placed a bid for the thin woman. The planter dropped out at $
125
, shaking his head and muttering that the gal looked ill suited for specialized farmwork. The hammer fell to William Higgins at $
150.

Upon completing the business and leaving the auction barn, William Higgins shoved Mary into the back of the carriage he had hired. The driver balked at allowing a slave woman to ride inside his rig. He insisted that she be tied outside of the carriage and made to run alongside. But Higgins objected to this and tossed a coin to grease the man’s palm and shut his mouth.

Once seated inside Higgins removed the leather thongs that bound Mary’s wrists. He turned his profile toward her rather than look at her head-on, hoping his propriety would put her at ease somewhat. He would need to explain the plan, what her new status was, what her friends had done for her.

Crouched in a corner of the hansom, Mary waited for a blow rather than an explanation from the man who’d purchased her. She kept her eyes low and could make no judgment on his character. She only waited upon her fate as one who knows that what comes next will be painful.

“Your friends Gabriel and Annie have given the money to buy you out. They learned that you would be sold here through the grapevine that the freed people have. Annie is the one who brought the money to me and who bade me buy your freedom as I have done for others. I will take you to a place of shelter and you can see your friends and thank them. Then you can do as you wish in freedom—once again, Mary,” the man said kindly, smoothly. She started at hearing herself called Mary, as also her heart had leaped up at the sound of Gabriel’s name. “Mary” was the name her benefactors had conferred on her when last they were her saviors. The tale this man told must be true. Higgins’s words had a great deal of ceremony about them. It was a benediction—this freedom, this name.

Mary caught her breath and didn’t know what to reply. Far back along the path of this travail, she had given up saying prayers. But if one glimmer of prayer had floated up to God, it had been that Gabriel might come to her aid. And he and his mother had done so. Perhaps she might once again be hopeful.

Annie and Gabriel allowed themselves exuberance as they rushed to Holy Trinity’s cellar to be reunited with Mary. Annie entered the room and moved swiftly to clutch the young woman. She grasped Mary’s shoulders and pressed her to her own chest. The older woman cluck-clucked with her tongue in a satisfied, maternal sound. Mary was startled some by the greeting. She was touched and somewhat incredulous at the fervor of her friends. After a few moments, Mary also smiled. In a sudden display of affection she brought Annie’s hand to her lips and kissed it in gratitude.

Gabriel and Daniel Joshua stood behind Annie. They were timid in their greeting of Mary and only thrust their hands toward her. She shook the hands of both men and kept her eyes modestly lidded.

Mary elected to stay in the church rather than to go that evening with her friends. She was uncertain of herself since she was free. Fearful of offending her benefactors by spurning their offer of a lodging place, she was, however, shy of “putting in” with them. Reverend William Higgins said she need not go anywhere with anyone since now she was free. And he stressed that she was not even beholden to her dear friends because they had given the money to facilitate her freedom. They had not bought her life. “No child of God can be owned by another,” he said earnestly, with passion rising from collarbone to hairline. “You are ransomed.”

Thirteen

M
ARY STIRRED HER
stumps the next morning at the time a few birds outside began caviling about the merits of the dawn. She had not slept this first night of true freedom, but lay on her pallet in the cellar awaiting a cue to get up and go about.

“God bless you and God bless the new day of freedom!” Reverend Higgins said, and placed a chaste hand on Mary’s shoulder when she came into the rectory kitchen.

The tawny-complexioned cook with hair and eyes of matching orange-brown color observed Mary dispassionately. She was accustomed to keeping her opinions behind a noncommittal mask. Reverend Higgins was made a bit uncomfortable by her, but had never found her a quisling to the cause of abolition. For her part, Winnie Wareham had figured out Higgins’s passing secret and had sealed her lips on the subject. Wareham had helped herself to freedom some years prior and would not thwart another. Her lips dipped briefly to a welcoming smile. She prepared a plate of food like Mary had never known and seated the girl to the table at which she took her own meals.

The bright morning after her first night as a free woman—when she’d filled her belly to bursting—Mary set out for the back of Gabriel’s tailoring shop. Reverend Higgins pressed a basket upon her and bade her look as if hurrying about business as she walked through the streets. Also anxious that Mary reach her destination, Winnie Wareham wrapped a shawl about, picked up a basket, and led the young woman down the cobbled thoroughfares to the shop. Winnie salted her directions with warnings about the dangers of coming and going and the two nimbly dodged expectorating men who gave no care to soiling the skirts of colored women.

“You on your own to earn your bread. You got a job of work, Mary?” Annie quizzed the young woman.

Mary set in to helping Annie as soon as she put her feet inside the workroom door. She hoisted a bucket and went out to fill it with water for Annie’s laundering. She returned and put the water to heat.

Mary swiped her wet hands on her clothes and grasped Annie’s hands as she’d done the evening before. She brought them to her lips. “Give me a job of work so I can pay you for my freedom, ma’am.” She turned Annie’s palms upward and kissed her hands as if they were her own mam’s.

Mary’s appearance had changed some. She’d left them as a bald-headed figure shrouded in layers of men’s clothes. Now her face bore knots and welts around the eyes and on her cheeks. It was saddening for Gabriel to consider what had been done to Mary. Evidence was clear on her face, though she tucked her chin next to her shoulder to shield it from view. He recognized that much more could not be seen. But the woman they had known was still recognizable. For that—and the luck of being reunited—he was grateful.

Despite her weakness, Mary pitched in to work with vigor. Gabriel and Annie expressed concern for her strength, but she refused to be coddled. No matter what was said about who owed what and why, Mary was determined to repay her purchase.

It came down to the ease of coming and going and of attachments. Mary felt, despite Reverend Higgins’s words, that she was beholden to the Coatses for their caring. Reasons like these were not bad ones to have for joining with them. She was no ways certain that things would continue thus, but a good beginning had been made and there was often good fortune in a new beginning.

“There is plenty of work here doing laundry and more if you can get it,” Annie said as she slapped her washboard.

Between them it was decided that Mary would work a portion of each day for Annie Coats in repayment of the funds advanced for her freedom. The swift, tidy agreement was satisfactory to all.

Mary negotiated a room in the basement of the rectory of Holy Trinity. In return for the accommodation, she contracted to work for Reverend Higgins to swab floors and haul water. She so impressed the young priest with cautious, self-effacing industry that he left her to the tasks without worry.

New Mary quickly fell to the habit of rising well before light of day, fetching water for her own ablutions and tending to these. Then she put water to heat for Winnie Wareham, who rose after first light and was glad of the help. When this was done and the rectory floors were given their daily swab and polish, Mary set out for the shop of Annie and Gabriel Coats.

Trepidation, as well as chill, caused Mary to walk swiftly through the Georgetown streets to reach her destination. Congress abroad in daytime was new, exciting, and full of the potential for danger. There were agents about who would pull her from the thoroughfare and question her right to proceed. Some might challenge her outright. She must be sharply aware.

The temptation to lollygag was strong. For the streets through which Mary passed on the circuit between the rectory and the tailoring shop were chockablock with storefronts and were congested with all variety of people. On her previous circuit through Georgetown, she had not had the luxury of looking long at things in broad daylight.

In the back room of Ridley & Ridley Fine Tailoring, Annie was the driving hen on top and Gabriel was the rooster by way of his skills and the importance of his work. Annie took charge to organize those tasks auxiliary to Gabriel’s tailoring duties. The others, Ellen and Delia and Mary, were the hens around the yard. Ellen, though she had status as a skilled hand, was nevertheless under the supervision of her mother. Eager to please her benefactors, Mary slipped onto the lowest rung for work as a general helpmeet in the Coatses’ workroom.

Until being sold away from the place of her birth, Mary, called Carrie then, had been one of a field gang of women. She worked mostly with a hoe and had not the experience of much needlework except to mend a tear or sew a button. She’d not paid much attention to her hands heretofore. Now when she compared them to the swift, dexterous hands of Annie and Ellen, she considered them to be lacking.

In these winter months, there was the job of keeping the workroom warm and adequately lit as the light of day faded early. Throughout the first days Mary occupied herself with these tasks and with looking after the girl, Delia. She also accepted cooking duties to free more skilled hands for the myriad spinning, weaving, knitting, sewing, dyeing, washing, and ironing.

Mary shrunk into the lesser light near the stove, turned her back to the center of the room, and disappeared into the happy click-clacking from Annie and Ellen at Gabriel’s entrance into the room when he left his duties in the front. Mary was unused to the company of men and his arrival caused a shift and change in her. This room became where Gabriel dominated, for Annie quickly relinquished it to him, swiftly going to his side to take his coat and brush it. She applied her stiff clothes brush to the collar and shoulders of her son whenever he made to leave the back room and return to face his clients in the front of the store, and she bade him remove his coat upon entering and sitting to his dinner. This worshipful ritual became a familiar preamble to meals in the back room.

Gabriel accepted Annie’s attention—and Ellen’s—with grace, yet high expectations. Brother Gabriel was never given the lesser biscuit or the lesser portion in this precinct.

Standing to the attention of the generally well-dressed clientele of Ridley & Ridley Fine Tailoring, Gabriel himself wore clothes that showed much wear yet were spotlessly clean. In this he again followed the advice of his mentor, Mr. Abraham Pearl. Pearl always insisted that the tailor must be clean but appear to be more concerned with his client’s cut than his own. The tailor must not seem dapper, but neat and circumspect. Gabriel learned that this admonition served a colored tailor even more so. An important part of dressing well up to a standard for the well-to-do gentleman was knowing that not all could afford to do so. The customer must see the coarseness or plainness of one to appreciate the fineness of another.