Through the Storm (42 page)

It was yet another threat Sable didn’t want to test, so she took the pen from Sally Ann’s impatient hand and reluctantly signed her name to a contract she couldn’t even read in the dim light.

“Good. You and the children are here for life, so go join Henry in the fields. He’s waiting.”

“I’m hungry, Sable,” Blythe said sleepily.

Sally Ann snapped, “You work and then you eat, not before—now get moving.”

They trudged out to the field where Morse was standing. He handed them scythes and hoes. “We’re going to clear this land. Let’s get started.”

Six days later, when Raimond returned to New Orleans, the news that Sable and the children had been taken by night riders almost brought him to his knees.

A stricken Archer reached out to keep him upright, but Raimond pulled away angrily. “How could you have let this happen?” he raged at his brothers. “There are four of you, dammit, and between you you couldn’t keep them safe?! Damn you all!”

He wanted to turn over every piece of furniture in his mother’s house, smash every window.

The grief in his brothers’ faces did not soften his rage. “Why did you let her stay there at night? You should
have made her come home, dragged her here if necessary.”

Juliana had had enough. “Raimond, stop this! Can’t you see the pain in their faces? They’ve exhausted themselves searching for her and the children.”

“I don’t care about their pain or their exhaustion. It’s my wife who’s gone, my children!”

“And how is this tirade helping to find them?” his mother snapped. “How many arguments have you won from Sable?”

He didn’t answer.

“Not many, I’m guessing. Your wife is a very determined woman, you know that as well as I do. She was determined to spend her nights there so the orphans—her orphans, Raimond—would not be afraid. We are all worried sick, have been for six days. You love her, yes, but so do we!”

He knew his mother was right. Sable was not a woman to be deterred once she made up her mind. “One of you should have stayed with her,” he echoed tightly. “She shouldn’t’ve been alone.”

Drake admitted quietly, “We know.”

Raimond whispered, “I’ll lose my mind if they aren’t found.”

A somber silence settled over the room.

Beau told Raimond, “We’ve been searching everywhere since she and the children were taken. No one knows who the men were or where they went. We found the orphans’ cook and the housekeeper dead behind the house. They’d been shot.”

“How many of the orphans were taken?” Raimond asked as his world crumbled around him.

“Six,” Drake replied. “Four boys, two girls.”

“They’re being forced to work for some White man someplace, I’m guessing.”

“We think so too,” Phillipe put in. “We found homes for the other nine while you were away, but those six could be anywhere. Anywhere.”

“So could Sable,” Raimond added. “And that’s what most scares me—they could be anywhere by now.”

“So what do we do?” asked Phillipe.

Raimond didn’t know. His brothers appeared to have covered every avenue. “I know Morse has something to do with this. I feel it in my bones. Did you check the deed office?”

“In every parish within one hundred miles. There is no record of a Henry Morse owning property, or for a woman named Sally Ann Fontaine or Sally Ann Morse.”

Raimond had no idea how he’d survive if Sable and the children were never found. He prayed they were still alive. There were so many things the four of them had yet to do, so many places he’d wanted them to see. The idea that he might never hold the child she was sheltering in her womb compounded his anguish.
Where were they
? He hadn’t even told Sable how much he loved her or begged her forgiveness for not believing her claims of innocence regarding the Baker affair. So many things had been left undone and unsaid that he’d give up everything he owned just to hold her in his arms again. But he didn’t even know where to begin looking.

Juliana’s soft voice interrupted his thoughts. “Raimond, what shall we do?”

He replied in a voice as soft as her own. “I don’t know, Mama. I don’t know.”

Raimond spent the next day retracing his brother’s steps, but he turned up no new clues. He contacted friends in the Freedmen’s Bureau, old army acquaintances, missionaries, and anyone else he thought could offer assistance. Archer had put up broadsides in his hotel and restaurant, and Phillipe continued combing the docks. The
Tribune
had been running a notice about Sable’s disappearance, and the disappearance of the orphans, since the day after the orphanage’s torching. The editors used their influence and contacted Black news
papers as far east as Richmond and as far west as Topeka, but they heard nothing in response. By the end of the second week, losing hope, Raimond felt he was going out of his mind.

Chapter 16

S
able and her children had been in Paradise for over two weeks. Morse forced them to clear land from dawn to dusk. They’d all become slightly thinner due to the lack of quality meals, but Sable’s baby was still kicking and growing so she assumed it was fine. She guessed that Raimond had returned from Mobile by now and was half out of his mind with worry. She hoped he wouldn’t fault his brothers for her disappearance. She could only blame herself for not listening when the Brats expressed their well-founded concerns.

Sable’s biggest concern at the moment had to do with the way Morse continued to stare at Hazel. He watched her with the same intensity he’d watched Sable when she’d been Hazel’s age. Hazel ignored him, but Sable did not. Remembering the rumors from back home surrounding the deaths of two of his young female slaves, she made a point of keeping her daughter in sight at all times. Cullen seemed to be of like mind. Sable noticed that whenever Morse approached Hazel about anything, her brother always came to stand at her side.

Sally Ann made no attempt to veil her contempt for Sable and avoided any contact unless it was absolutely necessary. When Sable asked her about Mavis, Sally Ann declared she knew no one by that name.

Clearing the fields was hard, grueling work. Morse
still had the mentality of a slave owner in the sense that he expected as much work from Blythe as he did from Cullen, and of course, the work was not going fast enough for him. On several occasions he angrily accused them of slacking and threatened to lay a whip across their backs, but as Sable so angrily pointed out to him, they were three children and a pregnant woman; they were working as fast and as hard as they could.

One day, when Sable asked if he had been among the night riders who’d terrorized the orphanage, he denied it, admitting only, “I contracted with them, told them what I wanted done, and they did it. It wasn’t hard convincing them; they relish making misery for you people. Emancipation is the worst thing to ever happen to the South, and they’re willing to do whatever’s necessary to make sure you people don’t rise above your natural place.”

Sable wondered how anyone could be so consumed with hatred that they’d take it out on defenseless children, but having been a slave, she knew men like Morse and his friends were certain they were doing what was necessary to preserve their way of life. “So how did you learn about the orphanage?” she asked.

“That wasn’t hard. You’re fairly well known. So’s your husband. After I saw you at the dressmakers, all I had to do was ask around. After my friends were done with the orphanage, they brought you and your brood to a prearranged spot outside town. I paid them and they slipped away. Now, enough questions. Get back to work.”

The days began to run together. She and the children got up each morning, worked until it became too dark to see, then went back to the quarters and their beds of straw and rags. Their nightclothes had been reduced to rags after so many days of wear. Sally Ann threw Sable and the children old burlap sacks to wear over their torn and tattered nightgowns.

Because Morse was from Georgia, he wanted to plant cotton, a crop Sable knew well. Back on the Fontaine plantation, she and everyone else on the place had participated in the planting and harvesting, especially when she was young. Unlike other crops that you planted, weeded and let grow on their own, cotton had to be tended like a child. Sable remembered watching the rows being dug by the men and women, recalled walking behind the mules pulling the plows that drilled the holes for her and the other children to put the seed into. Usually seed was planted in March or April. If the cold spring rains held off, the cotton would start to come up in about a week’s time and then a week later the first hoeing could begin.

Before the first hoeing, the plow went through and moved the dirt away from the plants. Grass, weeds, and the scrawniest cotton seedlings would be hoed out, leaving behind a series of dirt hills positioned about two and a half feet apart. The field workers called the process scraping cotton.

Two weeks later, there’d be a second hoeing, when the mounds of dirt were thrown toward the growing plants, leaving one hardy stalk in a two-foot hill. In another two weeks, a third hoeing would throw dirt away from the plants to kill any grass or weeds between the rows. If the weather and the insects cooperated, the cotton would be about a foot tall by the first of July when the fourth hoeing took place. This last hoeing ended with the six-foot space between the rows being plowed to the depth of a shallow creek, then filled with water. When the stalks blossomed and grew five to seven feet tall, they were ready to be picked.

Sable couldn’t have been more than seven or eight when she was allowed to pick that first time, but even now she remembered how tired she’d been at the end of each day. She also remembered thinking how beautiful the cotton had looked at first, its fat white blossoms glistening in the sun, but she’d soon grown to hate it. She’d
been given a bag to wear around her neck that was so long the end dragged on the ground. Many a child stumbled and tripped. Experienced workers like Vashti and Mahti could pick so fast their hands seemed to blur. Sable and the other new children in the fields, lacking the same agility, had to grab each individual blossom and pull, careful not to break the still growing parts of the stalk because broken stalks would not bloom. Bolls that were not ripe would be left until they too blossomed and were picked later.

The children also lacked the adult’s experienced rhythm. Instead of going pick—drop the blossoms in the bag, pick—drop the blossoms in the bag, they had to stop, pull the bolls free and then drop the blossoms in the bag. Most times they wound up having to pick the blossoms up off the ground because they’d missed the mouth of the bag altogether.

When your bag was full you took it down to the end of the row and emptied it into baskets set at each end. One of the adults would stomp down the fluffy white blossoms, then you’d go on to another row and start the process all over again.

Sable dearly hoped to be out of Morse’s foul clutches before spring. She had no desire to spend the months from April to July hoeing from dawn to dusk, or watching her children pick cotton from the end of August on, just so Morse could turn a profit none of them would share.

One morning as Sable bent over her hoe, hacking at some particularly stubborn weeds, Sally Ann came out and stood nearby. She didn’t say anything, just stood. Her presence became such an irritant, Sable finally stopped, looked her way, and asked, “What is it you want?”

“Nothing really. I just enjoy seeing you laboring like a common field hand.”

Tight-lipped, Sable resumed her work, intent upon ignoring her former mistress.

“The fields are where you should have been all along, not sullying my beautiful home.”

“I didn’t ask to be raised in the house.”

“No, you didn’t, that was Carson’s doing. He refused to listen to me.”

Sable kept up her pace, hoping Sally would take the hint and leave, but she didn’t. Instead she said, “I’ll never forgive him for insisting your mother be taken along on our wedding tour.”

Sable didn’t reply.

“I hated her, you know. That golden skin, those golden brown eyes. She had half the White men in the county sniffing around her.”

Again, Sable did not reply.

“What is it about you women that our men find so fascinating? My mama used to tell me not to let it bother me when the men took slave women into their beds, but it did. Still does.”

Sable finally stopped working and asked bluntly, “What do you want me to say? My mother wasn’t given a choice. She was a slave, Sally Ann, remember?”

Sally Ann’s chin rose. “But she refused to be bred willingly.”

“What would you have done in her place? Would you have willingly given yourself to a man just because he demanded it?”

“Of course not, but you women are different, it’s in your blood.”

“What’s in our blood, Sally Ann, is the desire for self-respect!”

Sally wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“We are no different from you. We live, die, smile at our children, grieve over our dead. We are not animals, we are people.”

Sally Ann turned and walked away.

A thunderstorm rolled in that night, awakening Sable and the children with lightning, wind and driving rain.
It didn’t take long for the wet to penetrate their hovel. With no way to keep themselves dry, they huddled together beneath their blankets, hoping the violent weather would soon end. As Sable shivered and sheltered the children as best she could, despair rose up and gripped her hard. Would this truly be her fate? she asked as the wind shifted and rain began to pour through the broken slats of the walls. Would she and her children really have to spend the rest of their lives here? Would she give birth to Raimond’s child here? She’d endured much these past two and a half weeks and she didn’t know if she had the strength to take much more.

She looked up to see Morse standing in the cabin’s entrance. He yelled over the storm, “Come into the house!”

She and the children ran across the muddy field to the side door.

Inside, Morse told them they could sleep on the kitchen floor.