Stand the Storm (6 page)

Without a word, Annie approached Gabriel, who was seated at his workbench. She eased a tub to the floor, straightened her back, and tucked the corner of her apron into the waistband.

“Don’t let them read your eyeballs. Keep them low and quiet,” she’d lectured him since he was a babe. He knew. In response, Gabriel bowed his head once very briefly—nearly imperceptibly. Annie knew he would follow her to the yard.

When Gabriel reached the backyard of the shop two or so minutes behind his mother, he pondered the ease with which he’d just slipped out without being noticed by Aaron Ridley. He could perhaps keep going, walking—just stretching his legs into it. And he could be on the road to Baltimore and then keep on going to Philadelphia and be free there. Just get the wind at his back and walk all the way to free territory in Canada!

His mother had suggested it a number of times—a freedom walk. She said she could think of a lot of ways of giving him a head start. She would keep the Ridleys guessing awhile to give Gabriel time to get free.

But he had made a plan for his freedom and it included his mother and sister. They were all three to be free. They would all three pull together and be free that way. And maybe in truth—a thought he’d have rather pushed away—he just didn’t have the stuffing inside that it took to run.

Gabriel allowed himself an expression of surprise and an inquiring twist of the eyebrows when he saw the emaciated young woman sitting propped against the water pump. He regained his composure, read concern and urgency in his mother’s countenance. Gabriel reached between two planks attached to the corner of the house and removed a key. He opened the door to a root cellar that was three feet from the rear of the shop. Visible from the back of the shop, the cellar door was hidden from the alley by a sprawling bush. Gabriel and Annie lifted the girl down the three rungs of the ladder to the floor of the cellar.

“Nanny, who comes here?” Gabriel asked.

Annie’s reply was a series of tooth-suckings. She shut him, but he was not satisfied and not complacent.

“Nanny, who’st you’re bringing here?” Gabriel asserted, and stopped only short of demanding an answer from her.

It had been Annie’s idea to behave as if the root cellar were overrun with rats. Shortly after she came to stay in the shop, Annie discovered the cellar and created a commotion of poisoning, wide-eye rolling, and shrieking. Master Aaron was encouraged to steer clear of the cellar.

In truth rats were plentiful in the low-lying areas near the waterfront in Georgetown. But Annie had hung a stinking pouch containing the musk of beaver in the cellar to fool the rats into thinking they were outnumbered there by others. They deserted this cellar and the floor was now dry and soft with straw and flour sacks.

“A sick girl came upon me in the street. We’ll settle her here.”

They helped the young woman onto a pallet. Annie closed the girl’s hand over a wafer she drew out of her blouse. “Rest without worry till I bring you a cup of broth,” she said. “Ain’t a thing in here to eat you.”

Annie and Gabriel closed the door to the cellar and replaced the padlock. Annie prayed the girl would be calm and quiet until they could return safely.

As soon as Aaron Ridley figured to have given a day’s work, he headed for one of his regular alehouses for dinner and drink. The chief compensation that working in his uncle’s tailoring shop afforded him was the proximity to ale and entertainment that Washington offered. To his delight there were plenty of amiable alehouses in Georgetown. At Pearson’s, Ridley was becoming well known.

Annie let out a sigh as Aaron Ridley closed the front door of the shop and went off to his pleasure. It was a fortune of sorts that he was a young man of normal health and had interests that were appropriate to his age. Annie and Gabriel waited long enough to give Aaron Ridley the chance to go, return for something he might have forgotten, and take his leave again before going out to the root cellar. The two had studied him and knew his habits well. Tonight he stayed gone after the first time he closed the front door with a tinkling.

At the stove, working on her dinner, Annie thought of the lost turnips again and sucked her teeth in dismay. They would have put a solid anchor in her stew pot and she was doubly sorry because the pitiful thin girl would profit from a heavy broth.

When Annie brought the broth the girl fell on it. Her great hunger overcame any caution. Annie grasped the girl’s left hand as she clutched the bowl in her other. She wiped the girl’s hand to take off the dirt and blood. The girl drew her hand back to the side of the bowl, then surrendered the other for a quick wash. Annie softened her face encouragingly. The girl seemed trusting of Annie, though she looked anxiously at Gabriel, who stood in the path of the flickering light. This dancing light made the gentle Gabriel look to be taller, broader, larger than his normal self. His looming form frightened the girl. Annie motioned for him to squat and give the girl a chance to take him in.

“Brother . . . Brother Gabriel, you must sit,” Annie said. He squatted away from the path of light.

Ruminating to the accompaniment of the thumping of a wooden mallet churning clothes washing, Annie considered the girl. The clothes she’d taken away were soaked with blood and crusted with man seed. She punched them into the hot suds. It appeared the girl had recently suffered rough treatment from a man. Was it the man who had breathed in Annie’s ear? Surely, it was not. He wouldn’t have tried so to save her getting picked up by patrols and policemen.

Sewing Annie’s pitch-dark cellar, redolent with beaver musk, didn’t scare Carrie. She recognized the smell and felt good on account of it. Ofttimes the old people had put a pouch of beaver musk to ward off rats in the fetid holes they’d made bed in. Rogers Spit—where she’d come from—was a stingy, meager place. She thought about the folks’ tired faces and the damp smell and the smell of the beaver musk and the smell of folks who had worked all day—all of them crowded into a narrow cabin room.

Five

“S
END HER DOWN
to market then,” the woman pronounced offhandedly and returned to her house to change out of her bloodied clothes. Carolyn Ruane would have kept Carrie strung up and gone on flogging her if the overseer had not cautioned. There was possible monetary loss in continuing this way.

The blood upon Carolyn Ruane’s bodice was flecked with bits of flesh, and her own infuriated spittle cascaded down her chin. Speckles of blood dotted her breasts. She shrieked when she saw herself and demanded hot water and soap.

Phillip Ruane’s wife wanted her husband to see the pulpy, disfigured image of his slave mistress to thwart his desire. She reasoned she could not stop him taking what woman—white or black—that he chose. She aimed to spoil his cream with the ugly image before him.

But Ruane’s overseer was reluctant to be wholly in the camp of the mistress. He became nervous that he could not adequately explain to the master his part in the enterprise of Carolyn Ruane’s revenge. He ordered the girl be cut down and cared for by the old slave woman who was kept around for such as that. He would be questioned about it, he knew. And a man can go only so far against the interests of another man without coming to conflict. So he would have the girl sold off for gross recalcitrance and removed from the wrath of the mistress.

Carrie was, at first, happy that the master would be away from the place. She wasn’t prepared for the fate that found her as soon as he left. She didn’t have the time it would have taken to grab a kerchief. She was plucked from the field where she worked, pushed into the back of a wagon, and driven up to the main house. She was bound and strung up in the barn under the direction of Mistress and a flogging commenced, accompanied by epithets.

Rogers Spit was the farm John Rogers had given his daughter and her husband, Phillip Ruane, on their marriage. With the dower came land, two barns, thirty horses, saddles, miscellaneous farm implements, and forty-seven slaves. John Rogers was satisfied to be rid of his daughter and the Spit. He knew little about the man he’d contracted with except that he was virile enough to make good work of the girl, the land, and the slaves. The land was remote and hard to manage. This daughter, Carolyn, was third in a line of plain girls John Rogers had had to work to be rid of.

Carrie had been born at Rogers Main, the hub of John Rogers’s landholdings. Her mother was sent to the Spit soon after her child’s birth as punishment for her unwillingness to accept further visits from the Main’s head overseer. As he had the authority to do so, this overseer rotated hands upon his own whim.

That fair yields were produced at the Spit was testament to Phillip Ruane’s harsh handling of the people who labored there. The pitiful recalcitrants sent to Ruane’s system were fed little and driven relentlessly. Carrie had begun in the rows as soon as she was able to carry a bucket and she remained a hand in the fields until she was taken as the master’s concubine.

Ruane’s once naive and frightened young wife became—-under his influence—sly, cruel, and vengeful. While Phillip Ruane rode to Petersburg to oblige his need for gambling, Carrie was taken up and flogged and then taken away from Rogers Spit to an auction house in Richmond. She knew nothing of the landscape through which she rode, for she was bound with cloths to staunch the dripping blood and reduce the swollen skin, and the bandages kept her immobile.

In the Richmond slave pen, Carrie learned that all thus captured were slated for sale in the Deep South. Her companions keened and she moaned with the pain. She accepted some succor from the other captive women. All hope had left Carrie by the sunrise.

Before the slave women were to be brought to the auction stage, the guard attending them loosed their shackles so that they could clean up for the auction block. Each was prodded to wash off the mud and blood that was caked upon her body and clothes. The guard brought several pots of water and set the largest upon a stove to heat it.

A very short and thick woman of a mature age with three small children lashed to her waist removed her blouse. Slowly and tearfully she moved. She appeared to crave modesty in front of the young ones and she hunched over the small washbowl she’d been given. When the guard turned away to pee against the wall, the woman bent swiftly and picked up the iron kettle that was upon the stove and sloshed the hot liquid onto the man’s back. He cried out, but she crashed the pot down on his head with so much force that only a strangled cry escaped him before he fell. His member was still outside of his drawers.

“Go. Scatter. Take yourself off, gals, ’fore somebody knows what has come about,” the short woman exhorted the others, some of whom had started to chatter and whimper with fright.

Carrie took to her heels running. She didn’t know what had happened. She had seen the pot come down and the man slumped with his thing covered in sawdust. The woman who’d done the deed ran past Carrie with the infant child tied to her chest in a sling and with the talking and walking babes one under each arm. She ran headlong down a street adjacent to the market square with the short, thick legs of her babes dangling at her back.

Carrie imagined with dread that the woman with the three babes would soon be recaptured. How would she keep running with the children weighing on her? But that woman had been determined. She had been the one who’d taken the chance. All of them were free—for the moment—because of her. She saw the woman’s back slice through clumps of people and plunge headlong toward her freedom. These thoughts kept Carrie pumping her legs and sucking in breath and darting down passages. She eventually came to a dark doorway in a part of town filled with dark doorways and dubious passageways. The pungent smell of fish preceded a thwack on Carrie’s head, and she dropped into unconsciousness.

When she came to, she heard some voices. The place—-wherever it was—was dark and quiet. No light was visible. She smelled human stink and liquor. In the next moment a gaggle of men burst through the door and tied her hands and feet. They carried her onto a ship that set sail as soon as they came aboard it.

The men used her in turn. They stopped and withdrew only when she had fouled herself sufficiently to drive them off.

If a watchful one stands back and takes his time he can discover a lot of what is going on without actually seeing it firsthand. Daniel Joshua was experienced with slipping around ships and was attentive to goings-on. The behavior of the three white men he observed meant to him only one thing: they had a woman in the hold of the ship and were taking turns with her. He wasn’t close enough to hear precisely what they were talking about. But the odd word came clear. And it was a thing frequently done on vessels coming up the Potomac River to Georgetown.

When Daniel Joshua managed to get himself aboard, he was as if blind. The hold of the boat was unlit. He decided to chance a light and drew a tiny bit of candle from his pouch and the match to light it. His eyes scoured the area. One thing fell to view—only one creature—a black dark girl tied and gagged and lying on a pallet of bloody straw. Her eyes were wide, and when she saw Daniel it appeared they would shoot out of their sockets.

There was plenty of evidence of what had gone on in the hold. Clearly, several men had been about this business. Where had they gone? Likely they were sleeping off their ale and lust in a gutter nearby and would return to pick up where they’d left off.

Daniel held out his hands flat open. “It’s stop time. I promise you it’s stop time,” he said to the girl before he dared reach to remove her gag. “Don’t cry out. It’s stop time.”

She continued to moan. It sounded the louder after he removed her gag. But she didn’t cry out. Her lips quivered and her eyes bore into Daniel. He put his hand across her mouth to seal her silence and she understood and made no more noise.

Daniel blew out his candle stump and grabbed up a sack to gouge out two air holes with the smoldering wax end. He tied the sack around the girl’s naked body. He didn’t want to scare her anymore, but he knew they’d have to make tracks to get off the boat. He covered her head and hoisted her on his shoulder. “Keep still and live awhile longer,” he said, and bore her along like a sack of farm goods.