ALLEGHENY ROAD
Stan McCown
If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it. If I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it. And if I could save it by freeing some and leaving the others alone, I would also do that.
—Abraham Lincoln
If slaves will make good soldiers, then our entire theory of slavery is wrong.
—Confederate Senator Howell Cobb
Allegheny Road
Chapter One
Scott Patton’s Life
Two blocks shy of the courthouse, the way ahead became impassable. Hordes of people filled the street, marching back and forth in angry outcry over something that was not immediately self-evident. The driver stood to see farther ahead and seemed not to like what he saw. He spat into the street, cursed, then turned around to addressed his passenger.
“Sir, I’m afraid you’ll have to hoof it the rest of the way from here. There’s still a police roadblock up ahead, and this mob makes it impossible just to reach anywhere near the courthouse. Sorry, but this is the best I can do for you.”
Scott rose from his seat and leaned forward, over the driver’s shoulder, taking in the view from the higher vantage point.
“When did this start? You must’ve been in and out of town several times today. How long has it been like this?”
“Couple of hours, Sir.”
“Over what? What’s the unrest about?”
“I ‘spect it’s over them abolitionists caught running the Railroad yesterday. All the talk was of transferring them out of town today, and then big trouble of some sort. Some want them lynched, some want them free, and it’s been like this the last two trips I’ve made in and out.
“Hard to say what it’ll come to. But there it is, isn’t it?”
“Transferred, you say? No, they weren’t supposed to take them anywhere until after the trial,” Scott said. “That’s why I’m here, to see them first. I’ve got to get in there! Here, keep it all.”
Scott tossed the driver a gold coin far in excess of the fare and jumped down from the hack, hauling his bag out of the footwell and wading into the crowd, which had pressed itself into a dense mass up against a makeshift barrier at the southwestern corner of the courthouse square, which also housed the jail.
Moving in, Scott could see through gaps in the crowd that police stood at irregular intervals, eyed darkly by the masses. Mutterings rippled through the mob, to the general effect that the “coppers” were implicated and ought to be arresting each other, but the cause of this anger was unclear.
“What’s going on, what’s this all about?” Scott asked of those around him.
“Couple of people got shot, right out from under the cops’ noses. They let the killers get clear away and now they’re trying to make a clean face of it, like they’re doing their duty investigating or something. Corrupt bastards.”
One of the officers patrolling the line caught the man’s words and reached for his pistol but Scott took that opportunity to barge in, diverting the cop’s attention from the agitator. The policeman grabbed Scott by the collar before he could slip under the rope.
“Just what do you think you’re doing, Mister?”
“I have business in the jail, I need to get through. I’m here to see two defendants. I have a right to get in there. Do your duty, Sir, let me in.”
“It’s impossible, man, it’s all locked down, all tied up as the scene of a crime. No one in or out until it’s been dealt with. No worry, whoever you’re here to see ain’t going anywhere meantime.”
“How much longer? Just let me go in and see two prisoners, it has nothing to do with your crime.”
“Maybe it does. The two deceased were prisoners. That’s the thing of it, so unless you’re next of kin—”
“Prisoners, deceased. Wait a minute. What are their names?”
“What is yours, Sir?”
“Scott Patton—”
“Oh lord help us....”
A cold hand throttled Scott around the heart. “No!”
Scott threw himself forward again and the beefy officer bore him to the ground, drawing his gun, holding it butt-first, ready to brain Scott if he didn’t submit.
“You be good, boy. Understand? Be calm. Now get up, I’ll take you inside if you behave.”
“Yes, let’s go.”
The officer helped Scott rise and pulled the rope out of the way, gesturing the crowd aside with his firearm. He walked Scott down along the high rock wall that surrounded the limestone-faced jail, to the front entrance on Sycamore.
Scott could barely breathe now, and as he caught sight of two canvas covered mounds lying in the street, his legs weakened and he started to wobble. The only thing that kept him up was an odd sense of unreality, that this couldn’t be true, that it was a mistake and he would find Susannah and his father safe in a cell on the inside.
“He seems to know them,” his escort told a detective standing by the bodies making notes on a pad.
“Yeah? So what’s your name?” he asked Scott. Hearing the answer, he muttered to himself and jotted something else down.
“Well, Sir, I’m afraid I must inform you—”
“No!” Now Scott’s legs did fail him and he sank to his knees, and the world turned gray around him. The detective bent over him, touching his shoulder.
“Be brave, now, Sir. You’d better come with me.” He offered Scott a hand up and led him through the gate into the jail offices, on the way bellowing for the chaplain, who rushed out and took up a position on Scott’s other side.
“Come this way and sit down, Son,” the chaplain told him. The two men guided Scott to a bench seat and he held hard to both their hands, still not yet believing the enormity of what had befallen him.
“Both of them?” he said.
“Yes, they were apparently targeted specifically,” the detective told him.
“How? With police all around, how?”
“We can’t talk about that now, it’s being investigated.”
“You just let somebody walk up and kill them?”
“Well, you see, it wasn’t quite that way,” the policeman answered. “But you’re in no condition to speak of this now.” As if from the depths of a great well, Scott heard his voice asking who had committed the heinous deed.
“So far, they’ve gotten away, and they were masked, no way to identify them, and it all happened so fast,” the police officer said.
“Then let me give you a name. Nathan Sommervell. The message I received said it was he who set them up for arrest. But he was involved in the same thing, he moves the slaves across the river. I want him brought in!”
“I don’t know anything about this, but we’ll look into it.”
“Sommervell, Sommervell,” the chaplain said. “Wasn’t there a man by that name in earlier, inquiring about whether they would be released on bail? Perhaps he should be brought in—”
“No, Father! You don’t know what you’re talking about.
You stay out of this, hear me?” The detective seized the priest by the shoulder and escorted him away, leaving Scott alone on the bench, where he slowly slumped over, sobbing, shuddering, wishing he were the one who lay in the street under a tarpaulin.
Susannah was dead. His life was over...this was a blow that Scott didn’t know how to survive. He couldn’t live, he couldn’t make it another hour without her in his life. He had always imagined that if he lost her somehow, he would kill himself, but never believed it would come to that.
Well it had come to it, and all he wanted was the blessed relief of oblivion. Had the jail been located by the river, he would have flown out the door and dashed himself to his death on the rocks below the wharf so he wouldn’t have to suffer another second. Truly, the thought of grabbing the gun from the next cop happening by and blowing his brains out began to appeal, and he was trying to formulate the moves it would take to do it when the policeman who had fetched him inside returned and unceremoniously pulled him to his feet.
“Listen, pal, you’re needed back here.”
The officer propelled Scott to a room behind the front offices, where he discovered his mother, newly arrived from their home, still absorbing the same unbearable news.
The chaplain was with her now and he whispered to Scott, “She hasn’t said a word, nothing. She needs you, son.”
Scott clutched his mother to him and together they sobbed to the point of exhaustion.
From that time on, despite his own anguish, Scott devoted himself to his mother’s needs, the doing of which was perhaps the only thing that kept him in one piece. In another hour, Susannah’s brother and sister arrived to help, and to mourn, and then an aunt and uncle, who gently took charge of Scott and his mother, driving them home, sedating them with potions provided by the family doctor, and then putting them to bed.
The last thing Scott remembered as consciousness waned was Susannah’s sister Jennifer, her face streaked with tears, pulling up a chair beside his bed and squeezing his hand.
Chapter Two
The sedation wore off some time in the evening and Scott sat up in bed, not immediately remembering the horror his life had become. For a moment, he thought he must still be in the hotel in Columbus, until he noticed his sister-in-law Jennifer next to him in a chair, bent over, sleeping awkwardly against the bedside table.
And then it hit him. Susie.
Scott let out a wail and Jennifer was instantly awake, holding him, whispering, “I know, I know,” over and over.
For awhile, she rocked him in her arms, but now she was crying softly, moaning, “Why, why? Of all people, why them? I don’t understand it.
“All Susie did, all she stood for, was helping people. Even if it broke the law to help runaways, why did someone have to murder her?”
“I don’t know but I’ll find out.” He realized as he said it that he meant it.
“It was masked men,” she said, “those awful vigilantes who did it, you know. They didn’t murder the Negroes, they caught them so they could be returned for bounty, but why did they have to kill her? And your father?
“Why?”
Jennifer broke down completely now, sobbing pitifully and even in Scott’s own state of sorrow, her anguish ripped at him as much as his mother’s earlier in the day and he held Jennifer as hard as she had held him earlier.
He was caressing her cheek, trying to calm her down, when someone knocked on the edge of the open door.
“Yes? Oh, Billy. Come in, what is it?”
“Somethin’ big, Sir. You need to come, it’s ‘portant.”
“No, ask someone else, I’m in no condition to help you, can’t you see?”
“Yes Sir, but you must. It’s about the...the trouble. Something downstairs, you understand? You must see, no one else can do it.”
“Downstairs?”
“Yes Sir. Please.”
Scott let go of Jennifer and knelt before her, taking her hands in his, holding them gently before him.
“This is something I think I must go attend to. Come with me, Jenny, I don’t want you to have to be alone right now. Come along.”
He led her out to where more distant relatives from both sides were putting together a buffet dinner for all who could stand to eat, while speaking of plans for the funerals. Scott delivered Jenny into the arms of an aunt, then returned to Billy.
“Okay, show me.”
Billy and Gloria were husband and wife, former slaves who had been brought north and freed years ago. The Pattons, Thaddeus and his wife Agnes, had taken them into their home, given them a room and provided for them as if they were part of the family. But more than that, to Scott, despite the fact that they had never lost the habit of calling him “Sir,” they were almost surrogate grandparents.
Gloria was hovering around now, wringing her hands, while Billy tried to hasten Scott to the secret trap panel leading down into the cellar.
“Gloria, if anybody comes, slam the door hard, to signal us,” Billy told his wife, then preceded Scott down the steep flight of steps. Here, below ground level, the house was not equipped with gas lights, so the old man lit the way with a lantern, taking Scott to the hiding places in the bowels of the house.
To fool anyone who must not know the secret purposes of the cellar, should they wander this far, it was outfitted to appear as a storage room for preserved fruit. Billy tugged aside a row of bins filled with empty bottles, part of the false image, and Scott helped him lever open another false panel. Soon as he had room, Scott accepted the lantern and wormed his way in.
“Coming, Bill?”
“Yes Sir.”
Scott reached back and offered the old man assistance through the crack.
The odors of human habitation, the evidence of occupants pent up too long in this place assailed Scott’s senses immediately.
“Billy, what is going on, what are you showing me?”
“Sir, the polices, they come to the door up theah, they bang around, they catch Miss Susannah and find the tunnel, but they didn’t make it to the ‘partments.
“Sir, they wasn’t seven runaways, they was nine, and just now when I heard it was seven caught, I knew that mean two more might still be here, and they is. Miss Susannah must’ve got them hid in time before they cotched her.
“The polices didn’t know how many, they believed seven, so they didn’t think to come look. Now that they’s all gone, I could come and find them. You need to know, something must be done for them before they die in theah.”
“My God, now I understand, Billy. Let’s get at them before they do die. Come on.
“Show me.”
Scott had designed all this and built much of it, working with his father and Jennifer’s brother Tom. They had not dared trust anyone outside the family to know about this layout, so they had to make it themselves.
Three separate chambers, actually tiny apartments, had been outfitted around the common room in which Scott stood now, each hidden by false walls, sufficient to comfortably house twelve adults. In the center, a panel opened into the tunnel leading through the hill behind the house, down which the “passengers” normally loaded into wagons out in a grove of trees behind the house. Now that the secret was out, no more operations could ever be run from here again.
The fugitives might be in any of the other three apartments, and Billy indicated the one on the left. Scott applied the crowbar the old man handed him, until the hidden door creaked open....
The woman shielded her face from the light and the child in her arms whimpered. Clearly they had been enduring in here for days in the dark. And food and water were running out.
“Oh God,” Scott said. “Dear lady, come out, you and your child, we can’t leave you in here this way. It’s safe, I’m one of the conductors. Cover your baby’s eyes or she’ll have pain from the light.
“Is she well, are you well?”
“Yes Suh, Massa, we well.”
Scott shook his head. “No, Ma’am, you don’t call me
Massa, I’m a friend. Come, come, sit down a minute in this bigger room, let’s talk.
“Were you all alone on the escape? Anybody else in your family with you?”
“No Suh. My man, he stay behind fo’ us, he still theah. We miss him terrible, but he wanted us free. We was with seven other friends, now they...gone on ahead.”
“No, Ma’am, I’m sorry, they’re not gone, they were caught. You’re the only ones safe who remain. So we have to find a way to get you on to Canada.
“Will you tell me your name, and your child’s?”
“I bes Thelma, this be Lucy.”
“Where did you come from, where is your man left behind?”
“Virginny, Shenandoah. Near Lexington, plantation named Marthaland. Terrible Massa, we’re so afraid for Daddy.”
“I understand that, Thelma, and believe me, I know about losing someone you love. Let us hold to the hope that he’s still alive. And let’s keep the two of you that way, too. My wife...if she were here, she would do anything to get you away safe, and I promise to do the same. But for right now, you’ll have to wait, it will be awhile before I can take you out.”
“We’re scared.”
“I understand, Dear. There’s no use my telling you not to be, but you must have been through a lot already to get here safe. That means you’re brave and strong. Be that way a little longer, all right? Just a little longer, a little more and we’ll get you into Canada.
“Tell me, what’s your man’s name?”
“Josiah. Josiah Ward.”
“I see.
“Billy, will you stay with them for awhile, keep them company while I go look into things?”
“Yes Sir, ‘course, Sir.”
Scott squeezed the old man’s arm and returned through the secret ways back upstairs. Knowing now that because of this discovery, he would no longer be taking to his bed in sorrow any time soon, or even doing himself some final harm, Scott wandered instead out onto the porch that gazed out toward the grove of stately old oak trees, on the lower slope of the hill under which the tunnel ran.
He cleared his mind as much as he could and mentally composed a letter.
Dear Lettie, he planned to write,
I’m sending you two friends of mine, the last of Susie’s children, as you will
understand. My wonderful Susie has been murdered and I am in tatters, but I must
finish her work, of which these two precious souls are part.
Please help them all you can and think of Susie and me when you do. I cannot say
what will become of my life now, but Susie’s death as nearly undone me.
I have a mission now, however. The father of these two is left behind in Virginia
and I intend to go bring him out as well
I love you still and always shall, and hope you are happy and well.
He closed his eyes, and brought Leticia’s face before him, as it was when he saw her last, more than seven years ago. Susannah had never met Leticia, but he had put them in touch through correspondence, and of course had written Lettie, himself, and had received many letters in return, enough to know she was alive and well. She had taken up the job of receiving and housing fellow escaped slaves over the border in Canada beyond Michigan. All those that Susannah, Scott, and his father had transported away from here before this disaster had eventually gone to Leticia.
Seated there, the idea that had popped into his head—traveling down to Virginia and rescuing Josiah Ward—began to take hold inside of him. Why not? What was there to lose?
Yes! This was the thing he would do, the very cap to Susannah’s work, and if it killed him in the doing of it, well as long as the father made free, Scott did not at that moment care. It was something to live for, a monument to Susannah, and yes, to his first love, Leticia, even if it was also something worthy of dying for.
He jumped to his feet and tracked down pen and paper, writing the letter just as he had composed it. Then he set to work to make it all reality.
The most direct route to the next Underground Railroad Station was a major pike from Cincinnati to Columbus that paralleled the tracks of the “other” railroad, the one of iron. Vigilantes patrolled the pike from Cincinnati to Columbus, but most of the UGRR stations were not located on the main road.
To reach the next station where Scott would deliver Thelma and Lucy, he would follow a series of farm roads that zigged and zagged across the countryside, and although their indirectness would add miles to the journey, bounty hunters and others looking to intercept runaway deliveries made no attempt to cover all these routes.
In the horrific time between learning he had lost Susannah and his father, and now, the question had not entered Scott’s head of why he had not also been arrested as part of the “gang” that had operated the station at his family’s home in the northern part of Cincinnati. It would have been reasonable for the police to surmise that if the father and the wife were engaged in freeing runaway slaves, the husband—that is, Scott—would have likely would likely have been involved, or at least an accomplice.
The only answer he could conceive was that having not been caught directly involved, Scott was presumed to be unaware of what was going on in his father’s home. Or the arrest and murders were related to something else and the issue of runaway slaves only an excuse to bring them in.
Much more remained to be determined and dealt with in this nightmare, there was no doubt of it. Nathan Sommervell, his father’s partner in the shipping business had also participated directly in the operations of the Patton family in receiving and moving slaves from Kentucky to Canada. Living across the river in Covington, Kentucky, he had received incoming runaways and moved them over the Ohio into Cincinnati, where Scott’s father took over, relaying them to the house, where Susannah had hidden them in the house, until Scott drove them to the next station.
The fact that it was Sommervell himself who had led the police to the Cincinnati side of the Underground Railroad operation without implicating himself, and avoiding all charges, led Scott to very dark thoughts about him.
The death of Thaddeus Patton would open up the company to buyout by Sommervell. That was something he had desired for a long time and Thaddeus had refused. A simmering feud had begun to grow between them and Scott was certain he knew how it had ended. The gunmen had almost certainly been hired by Sommervell, insulating himself from the atrocity, if no other link turned up. The suspicious reaction of the police to the name Sommervell and the accusations of the crowd suggested the police had made sure the assassinations were carried out even with the prisoners in their control.
Before he left to find Josiah Ward, Scott would make sure he blocked any possibility of Sommervell taking over the country by exercising his own rights, shared with his father and his mother.
Sommervell would come to regret that he had not waited to act until he could catch Scott in the trap.
As for the process of moving Thelma and Lucy Ward north to the next UGRR station, in the time before the raid, the operation would have been routine. Scott had made more such journeys than readily came to mind.
Now, however, Scott had good cause to fear that police would be watching the house, on their own accord, seeking reward for catching more escaping slaves, or by information supplied by Sommervell if he had not yet realized Scott was in fact still alive and meant to have him finished.
Thus, Scott must make the beginning of the trek after sundown. That was where routine broke down—following the right roads in the dark would be a considerable challenge. Should he miss a turn, he could end up miles from his objective, with no notion which direction to go to correct the mistake.
Scott consulted his maps and selected the shortest of the meandering routes to the next station, and still fretted that it could take until daylight to feel his way along.
Time was wasting, then, and he moved the woman and her baby aboard the wagon the moment it was dark enough to hide what he was doing, and set out.
The night-time passage proved exhausting and as slow as Scott had feared. The sun was threatening to light up the landscape when Scott located the final turn, onto the half-mile long lane to the station. Now shielded by a line of trees, Scott hya’d the horses into a trot, driving past the front yard of the farm, straight through the yawning doors of a barn whose function was just this, to receive incoming escapees. The instant the horses were stopped inside, Scott jumped down and slammed the barn doors closed.
Safe.
Concerned for his passengers, Scott threw off the tarpaulin that hid them from probing eyes, and reached down to take Lucy from Thelma’s arms. He lay the child on the wagon seat and helped her mother out of the cramped position in which she had been forced to lay most of the night.
“We’re here, we’re safe, Dear. How are you feeling?
I know you’re all stiff and uncomfortable, so walk around a minute, stretch your legs. Don’t worry about Lucy, she’s safe with me.”
“Yes Sir, I’m kind of kinked up. But first, I have to, you know....” She made as if to squat and he caught on.
“Oh yes, of course. Over there in that corner, I won’t look.”
He apologized profusely for not thinking to let Thelma out for a toilet break but she assured him she would have been too afraid to show herself outside the wagon even in darkness.
She hurried over to the corner and when she returned, still tugging at her skirts, Thelma was smiling for the first time since he met her the day before.
“Oh, that sure feels better. So where did you say we are?”
“I’m afraid only fifteen miles further on in straight line distance, but we had to do a lot of zig-zagging on back roads. It’s just some farmhouse, but these people will take you the next way and the sailing from here will be a lot easier. They’ll probably keep you here a day or two, to feed you better, to build up your strength and Lucy’s, and make sure nobody somehow followed us and know you’re here. Then they’ll begin the last stages. I assure you, the quarters here will be better than mine were.”
“Sir, it was like a hotel, compared to our hut.”
Scott laid his hands on her shoulders.
“Thelma, I have to tell you, I really admire your grit. There aren’t enough good words to praise your strength and bravery through all this, and I don’t see how there could be a better baby anywhere than Lucy.”
“Oh, thank you, we just do what we have to. Daddy sacrificed so much, we must make it all worthwhile, you know.”
In that moment it was all Scott could do to hold back from telling her his plan to find her husband and restore him to her. Yet to give her what might very well be false hope could be more cruel than leaving her to believe she would never see Josiah again. Almost crying, Scott refrained from offering her his promise, because he did not know he could keep it.
He still held Lucy, kissing her, rocking her in his arms, finding he didn’t want to give her up, but Mama was waiting.
“There you go, little angel. I hope you’re embarked on a better life than you would have ever expected.
“Thelma, may I kiss your cheek, before I go tell the people you’re here?”
“Oh, I’d be so honored.”
“And then I have this. It’s a letter to the woman you’ll meet, another escaped slave like you, named Leticia. Would you keep it and hand it to her when you’re there?”
“Oh, yes Sir, I’d be double-honored.”
Scott fetched the letter from its packet under the wagon seat. Thelma tucked it into the folds of her worker’s dress, and continued rocking her baby, as Scott had done.
“Okay, relax here a minute,” he told her. “I’ll go tell them....”
When the conductors at this station had ensconced Thelma and Lucy in their own secret hideaway, Scott once more hugged the mother.
“I hardly know you, but I’m very sad to say goodbye and I’m going to miss you and Lucy,” he whispered. “I wish you all the luck in the world, Thelma.”
He kissed her cheek and the baby’s one more time.
“Thank you so much, Mister. You’re a good soul.”
“I’d like for you to remember me to Lucy when she’s old enough to know,” he said and Thelma avidly promised.
That was it, reluctantly he turned away, back to the wagon. He was in tears when he climbed aboard and pulled back down the lane.
Scott openly drove into the nearest town now, relieved that he carried nothing that could cause his arrest if he were investigated. Close to the railway station, an inn beckoned to him and he took a room, exhausted from being up all night, and from some of the hangover left by the sleeping potion he had swallowed before he learned of Thelma and Lucy. Though it was well into morning now, he flopped into bed and sank into merciful sleep within seconds.
In the dream, Susannah smiled upon him, blessing his mission of the night before, convincing him as nothing else could have done that he must finish the job he had proposed, going to the Shenandoah Valley and rescuing Josiah Ward.
For Scott Patton, this mission was a saving grace; without it, without a dangerous and daring job to do now, Scott knew he could still very easily slide into a morass of depression over Susannah and his father. Certainly, without his beloved, he would never be happy again, he knew that, and he still had no interest in living any longer than it took to carry out his mission. But at least that mission gave him purpose in the meantime, although it would keep him alive and suffering longer than he really wanted to.
Certainly, this mission would take weeks or months to carry out and he wasn’t sure he had the stamina to suffer over Susannah that long. Clearly, then, he needed more than just the quest for Josiah Ward to keep him alive. It would require anger, anger at the murderers and anyone who abetted them, to provide the added impulse he required to contend with the constant aching. At least that, the anger, he did possess in abundance.
With that understood, he must go to work on the secondary mission first: he would not rest until he solved the murders and exacted his price on all those in any way involved.
Chapter Four
South of Lexington, Virginia
Millie Turner’s Life
1836
The little girl was only three years old, but she knew something terrible was going on. The word “uprising” did not mean anything to her yet, but she heard her daddy had somehow become involved in one. Everywhere except in the Turner family’s little hut, the world seemed filled with noise and confusion.
All through the day, while she and her mother remained inside, people ran past in all directions outside, their feet pounding this way and that beyond the door. Later men on horses rode up and pointed guns at them, but hurried away when shots were fired somewhere nearby.
Through all the tumult, the child’s mother held her close, crouched the whole time in a corner of the room; twice more, white men they did not know opened the door and peered inside, saying nothing, looking very menacing and angry.
The worst thing of all, however, was when daddy never came home from the fields.
“Mama, what’s going to happen?”
“Don’t know, Sugar. Everybody all scared an’ confused. I do ‘spect Daddy’ll be back directly. We just have to be calm and quiet.”
Her mother caressed her hair, and wiped the sweat from her face, but the hours passed with more shooting in the night, and the sky outside took on an ominous glow of fire, up in the direction of the Big House, and the smell of burning wood and other things best not imagined filled the air. White men kept passing by, again stopping to nose around the hut, their faces visible only by the lurid glow from the fires.
The little girl and her mother spent a hopeless night, because Daddy never did return. Little by little, they both faced the unthinkable, they would never see Daddy again.
The white men came for the last time just before daylight, practically tearing the door off its hinges. Now, they no longer showed their faces but wore white gowns and pointed masks, and made “boo” sounds like ghosts, and spoke threatening words. Mama backed away from them as far as she could go, holding her baby tight, but the costumed men stomped right up to her, guns waving in her face.
“No, no, we didn’t do anything,” Mama said, keeping her voice calm, reassuringly caressing her child’s hair. But the men dragged them both out of the house, and tore the child away from Mama.
“No, my baby, please—”
“Shut up, darkie!” One of the men slapped Mama hard across the mouth, knocking her sprawling. The little girl was in their hands now, and she was no longer calm and quiet. Kicking hard and screaming, she tried to tear away and go back to Mama, but they hog-tied her hands and feet then wrapped a big burlap bag over her. Even when they shook her and hit at her, she still screamed and cried, stopping only when her strength gave out and she went limp.
Soon, she felt herself flying through the air, landing hard, so hard the breath was knocked out of her. By the sound, other bundles seemed to land around her, causing the ground, or whatever surface she lay on to shake. Men were talking and laughing, but in the distance, women were screaming and more shots were fired and the smoke-smell was stronger than ever, even from inside the bag.
Suddenly the world began moving and the little girl realized she was lying in a conveyance of some sort, a wagon, probably.
Minute by minute, she felt herself being taken away from her old life, away from everything she knew. As difficult as that life may have been, at least it had been familiar, but now, so suddenly, she was without a family, and it seemed to her, without a life.
Lying as if dead, feeling as if dead, wishing she were dead, the girl bounced along with what she imagined must be other newly unfortunates like herself. After an hour or more of travel, someone pulled her down from the wagon, unwrapped her from the bag and carried her, still and un-struggling, to a hut not unlike her old home.
“This little thing is yours now, Molly,” the man who had unwrapped her told a woman seated in a rocking chair by a dim fire. “Her family was involved in an insurrection on the other side of Lexington, several people escaped but she and her mama, and a few others were left behind. The Massa took away all the babies and women who were left and split them up.
“Take care of her, they say she’s smart and might make a house girl, too. You’ll get extra food for having her.”
“Oh my, look at her. Isn’t she precious. How old do you reckon she is?” the woman named Molly asked.
“About three year or so, I guess,” the man said. “About the same age as Precious George in The House, maybe. And they didn’t give a name for her, either. Just wanted rid of her.”
“No name?” Molly asked.
“You know the white folks, they don’t care, long as she comes to some name when called. So I guess you can ask her and if she knows, then that’s her name. If not, you can name her what you please.”
“She’s sure quiet, isn’t she?”
“Now,” he said, chuckling. “But I guess she put up a considerable ruckus, before.”
Molly nodded.
“Good. Nobody ought to be taken away without a fight. I’ll teach her to remember that.”
Molly took the little girl out of the man’s arms.
“Sweet thing. And pretty. We’ll be fine,” the woman told him. “Thank you, Terrence, she’s just what I need to get over Ethel. Thank you, I mean it.”
“I know you do. I’ve been looking for something to help, and I’m sorry for this little one that it has to be this way, but I figure you both need each other. If’n I was a praying man, I’d pray she ends up a damn sight better off than her own mama.”
“I have a feeling it wouldn’t take much to do that. But God knows what’ll come of us all.”
“I hafta go, you know how the Old Man is.”
“Oh yes, I know how he is. Don’t get yourself in any trouble, Terrence, you’re all we have to protect us.”
The man bent and kissed her hand then excused himself.
Now, the woman turned all her attention to her new daughter, quickly learning the little girl not only knew her own name but her age, and the name of her mother and father. Yes, she was a smart one.
Scrambling to find scraps of paper and a nub of a pencil, Molly wrote down everything the little girl could tell her.
When the time came, she would turn the information over to the little girl, now known to be Millie Turner, in hopes that she would maintain her own life history. It was something so few slaves had the chance to do; but then just how many things did slaves have a chance to do that white people could? Perhaps this little girl would at least be able to pick her husband one day.
That was about the only real freedom she could even dream of. But it was enough: for a slave, family was everything, and when that was taken away, little of life remained.
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