The Tubman Command Read online

  Master Brodess just stood there counting his money. “You said $400,” he told the man, whose partner grunted and pulled out another $10 bill in response.

  Harriet ran to Linah and grabbed her arm. “No,” she yelled. “No!”

  The man with the money tried to push her aside, but she clung for dear life. Linah almost tripped on the chain since his partner had by then secured the band around the other ankle. The trader had broad arms, and he shoved Harriet so hard the second time that both she and Linah stumbled. A button popped off her sister’s sleeve as Harriet fell onto the rough gravel.

  There was no uglier sight under Heaven than one human locking chains on another, or a mother looking at a child for the last time, as both Linah and Mama did when the traders’ wagon rolled past the white Methodist church and turned into the forest. Ashamed, Harriet felt she should have done something more to save her sister. But her grip hadn’t been strong enough, her voice not powerful enough. So gentle Linah—who knew how to nudge a comb through Harriet’s stubborn hair in a way that never hurt—vanished into Georgia, leaving behind two children and the button that Harriet picked up off the ground.

  John just didn’t understand. He sometimes ribbed her for being too serious. “Always last to get the joke,” he once said in annoyance, when she’d fretted so much during a Saturday supper with Isaac and Mary that she failed to smile the whole evening. This time, though, she thought he was the slow one. If history repeated itself, as was its tendency, she might be separated from her baby forever. Still, John wouldn’t hear of making a break for Pennsylvania. It would mean pulling up roots sunk by his grandparents a generation earlier and abandoning the business. And she could hardly go alone or take a newborn. What sort of woman exposed her infant to patrollers if she didn’t have to or deserted her husband to live on the run? In nightmares, she heard hounds baying. When she awoke, John held her to his chest until she stopped shaking.

  “You asking too much, Hattie. You my woman, and you staying put,” he said in sterner moments—one moment humble as a kitten, the next angry as a bear—when the sun came up over Cambridge, and it was time to face the day. So Harriet prayed instead for Brodess to change his ways. But then he took $350 for her cousin when he got a notion to buy some acreage, and she pleaded with God to let scrawny old Edward Brodess sicken and die. The wish became a chant in her head as she chopped firewood on the plantation, slaying one stump at a time, though she knew the prayer wasn’t Christian. Each morning, Harriet scrubbed her face in the horse-trough with extra vigor, trying to wash her soul clean, trying not to forfeit God’s grace.

  A bang interrupted Harriet’s troubled reverie. The tin mug bounced across the floor as a black and tan blur leaped from the windowsill and dashed through the open doorway. Bits of dough flew off the lip of the cup. Harriet threw the dishcloth over her shoulder, snatched a broom, and ran to the threshold. “Shoo!” she said, though all she spied was a swaying clump of ferns near the stable. She shook her head with disgust.

  Harriet whisked the debris out the door and returned the broom to its corner. She picked up the fallen mug since Septima couldn’t touch the floor any longer and handed it to the tall Sea Islander, who stowed the object on a shelf too high for the cat. Even Harriet would need a crate to stand on.

  “Evuh see your man again?” Septima asked.

  “I went back for him the next year,” Harriet said. “By then, I knew folk on the Railroad. I bought John a suit a clothes, thinking he could pretend to travel north for a funeral in case anyone asked why he wasn’t hauling his usual load. We’d pass through Bal’more. I got as close as I could, but he’d found already himself another wife.”

  Hurt thickened Harriet’s throat as she lifted the tray. Anger and sorrow, braided tight as a pigtail, yanked her back to that instant when everything that made life sweet turned sour, and her heart broke beyond repair. The messenger she’d paid to find John had had to restrain her. She’d wanted to raise Cain. Bang on her husband’s door and make him explain, regardless of who heard. Even now, she couldn’t get over the way John had cast her aside. He wouldn’t even talk to her, as if she were lower than the path down to the swamp and deserved nothing at all for the years they’d been married. She’d thought of him as the answer to her prayers. Then he betrayed her.

  No man could do that ever again.

  “He married a free woman,” Harriet added. She reminded herself that he had found someone of greater value. That’s what happened when you reckoned a wife in dollars.

  Septima’s mouth fell open. “Ki! A free lady? To replace you? I’s sorry, Miz Harriet. You deserve bettuh. Dat man gafa!”

  Harriet shook her head. “Not evil. Jest weak.”

  Most people were. A friend claimed that the blow to Harriet’s forehead at thirteen had knocked a higher moral sense into her that others didn’t possess. But she’d been able to see the right and do it even before an overseer brained her for defending another child. As Daddy said, “Hattie come with gumption for two.” Others accepted how things were. Harriet asked how in the world they could be.

  The future would be better. She resolved to keep that thought foremost for the rest of the day as she gestured with the metal tray toward the oven. “Get the door?”

  Septima took the rag from Harriet’s shoulder and held the cast iron handle as Harriet slid in the pan.

  “Why don’ you find yourself a new man? A bettuh one,” Septima said as she closed the oven. “Alfred sho make me an my boys happy. I made my X, and now I’s a lawfully lady. Married right under de Union flag. Wish you had someone like him, Miz Harriet.”

  But Harriet knew she was best off relying only on herself, so she shook her head and smiled. “A new man? Why, I get new men all the time. I got six right now. Hunter’s scouts keep me plenty busy. I’d find jest one man boring.”

  Septima laughed and laid an arm across Harriet’s shoulders. “You always got an ansuh. Dat must be why folk listen.”

  Harriet slipped her arm around Septima’s waist. She didn’t always have the answer—half the time she didn’t know which way to jump—but she knew that a husband made life complicated. And Harriet had no use for that kind of trouble.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Go Down, Moses, way down in Egypt’s land,

  Tell old Pharaoh, “Let my People go.”

  Spiritual

  “CONTRABANDS BELONG IN BACK,” THE SOLDIER repeated with a scowl that cottoned no sass. He tilted the barrel of his long-shanked musket to indicate the path leading around the porch to the refugee camp and beyond it, the rows of silky white cotton for which Hilton Head was famous. There were dark half circles under the sentry’s armpits. Summer came early to the islands that hugged South Carolina’s coast. May was August on a low boil.

  Being female wasn’t particularly useful, except as a disguise, which was another reason Harriet had mostly given it up. Frustrated, she gazed up at the blue-uniformed sentry who blocked the entrance to army headquarters. Here was her chance to free more people in a day than she had in a decade. Raise an army. Turn the war around. Make up for all she’d sacrificed. This man stood in her way, and he wasn’t the first. Harriet drew herself as tall as five-foot-zero would allow. She knew she looked no different from other former slave women in her gingham dress and yellow headscarf, despite the regulation musket.

  The soldier tilted his barrel toward the path again—and slapped a mosquito on his neck with his free hand. “Damn!” he cursed in a brassy Boston accent. “Off the porch, I said. Now.”

  Harriet guessed he was another collegian come south to serve as an officer and assigned guard duty to learn the business of soldiering. Sunburn glowed on his cheeks where his blond beard still grew in patches, somewhere between the full whiskers fashionable among white soldiers and the smooth shave preferred by colored ones. She saw he was only a handful of years older than Margaret and it mitigated her impulse to kick him in the shins. His mother must worry about him, too. She had probably woken alongside the bo
y’s father year upon year. They’d seen him take his first step, say his first word, jump his first puddle. Everything Harriet and John had missed and could never get back.

  “The general’s expecting me,” she said in the confident, storyteller’s tone she used with people who must be convinced to mark her words despite believing she could have nothing to say. In Boston years before, crowds curious about the Underground Railroad had pressed into theaters to hear thrilling tales of midnight raids and brazen reconnaissance missions from someone they would not have noticed folding their laundry. Northerners listened more attentively after the gentlemen of Charleston set fire to the Constitution and eleven states bolted the Union.

  The sentry’s expression toward Harriet wasn’t hostile—she was only a woman after all—but his gray eyes narrowed. “General Hunter’s in a meeting.”

  “Uh-huh. I supposed to be there,” Harriet said.

  The sentry leaned forward, casting a shadow across her face. “Orders are no interruptions. Except for a scout named Moses.”

  “That’s me,” she said.

  He snorted. “You’re Moses? Well, if you’re Moses, I’m God Almighty, and I’m telling you, get your fanny off this porch. Field workers started five hours ago, mammy.” Before Harriet could reply, he snatched her musket with his free hand, quick as a copperhead in slack water. “And I don’t know what you’re doing with this,” he said, “but you’d best let go before you hurt somebody.”

  Harriet couldn’t believe she hadn’t seen him coming. She must be wearier than she realized. No Massachusetts toy soldier, no matter his height, could compete for grip with a woman who could pull a hysterical runaway from a swamp after dark.

  Most assumed the scout everyone called Moses was a man. When strangers met her, they saw a woman. Once they knew she was Harriet Tubman, they saw a neuter without personal needs or soft spots. Saintly John Brown had called Harriet him. He meant it as a compliment. “I want him—General Tubman—leading my right flank,” Brown had told a meeting of their supporters in Boston before he got himself killed. His comment stung, but she knew better than to disturb a notion that allowed her to do things otherwise unseemly. On the Underground Railroad, the name Moses had kept bounty hunters looking for a man.

  The soldier rested the butt of Harriet’s musket on the porch with a hand around the barrel. He appeared to relax now that he had the gun and eyed her with dawning recognition. “Hey, aren’t you the one who sells gingerbread? I saw you last week, when we came off the steamer in Beaufort. Your helper ran out before I got to the head of the line.”

  “Sho am, sah,” Harriet said, sliding into her deepest Maryland drawl to humor his expectations. She had always known how to stir men’s interest or pass beneath notice, depending on need. When to look them in the eye, when to study her bootlaces. A generous smile cut dimples in her high cheeks and turned a plain face into an attractive one, despite the gap where she’d fixed a troublesome tooth with the butt of her pistol. Harriet had an unexpected, animated beauty. “Fine looking,” said the advertisement offering a reward for her capture. With her lithe movements, minute waistline, and musical voice, no man would guess Harriet Tubman was close to forty. When she wanted to disappear, she simply let her inner light wink out.

  Harriet’s expression warmed. She lifted her small, pointed chin. “You partial to gingerbread, lieutenant? I add orange peel. Folk say mine the finest on Port Royal.”

  “Partial I am, indeed,” the sentry said. “And I haven’t tasted anything edible since we sailed from Boston two weeks ago.” His nose wrinkled like he’d gotten a whiff of vinegar. “Hominy, peas, and salt pork is about it.”

  “You like some, sah?”

  The youth’s lips parted. Harriet pictured him at one of the pastry shops on Boston Common where students mobbed the counters and lady abolitionists had taken her for tea and apple cake. The boy was a long way from home.

  “Why, I got some right here. Made mo’ this morning,” Harriet said sympathetically and lifted down the leather satchel she carried over one shoulder. She hitched up her dusty hem and bent over to search the heavy bag. She prayed he didn’t have a hair trigger. The Rebels had taken down their artillery. Lucky breaks wouldn’t hold still. The thought made her fingers clumsy, and she fumbled with the buckle before flipping it open.

  Harriet dug around a small package wrapped in sailcloth, a leather pouch of gunpowder, a filigreed but practical pair of sewing scissors received as a parting gift from the Anti-Slavery Society when she’d sailed for South Carolina, and the button that had belonged to Linah. Harriet hesitated. Fear washed over her. Then she slipped her hand around the wooden butt and her finger through the cool brass loop.

  “Here you go,” Harriet said as she drew out the Colt revolver, straightened swiftly, and aimed it at the boy’s chest. “Now let me in. I need to see General Hunter.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  To the [Congressman’s] first question I therefore reply that no regiment of fugitive slaves has been or is being organized . . . There is, however, a fine regiment of persons whose late masters are fugitive rebels, men who everywhere fly before the appearance of the national flag . . . So far indeed are the loyal persons composing this regiment from seeking to avoid the presence of their late owners that they are now one and all working . . . to go in full and effective pursuit.

  Major General David Hunter to Secretary of War Edwin Stanton

  THE DOOR BURST OPEN. THE STARTLED sentry jumped sideways, and the heavy muskets clattered together. The youth dropped Harriet’s on the porch. She swept up the gun with one hand.

  “Moses. I thought I heard you,” Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson said. “Where the hell have you been?”

  The commander of America’s first colored regiment—and Harriet’s old friend—stopped short. He looked from her, holding two weapons, to the rattled sentry. “Is everything in order, Lieutenant Nickeson?”

  With a poet’s high forehead, Colonel Higginson was born looking heroic. Although he had thickened around the waist and acquired a dash of gray at his temples since they’d first met in Boston—where Thomas adopted every humanitarian cause from abolitionism to women’s rights—he still glowed with youthful idealism. Like most Northerners, he had a limited notion of all they were up against, yet he had done what few white officers would even consider. When the war started, he became first to lead former slaves into battle. By way of thanks, Confederate President Jefferson Davis signed a death warrant for any white man caught doing so.

  “I been showing the lieutenant the new Colt that Uncle Sam sent us,” Harriet said, her heart still thumping. She tipped the barrel of her musket skyward and leaned it toward the soldier. No sense making a fresh enemy when they had so many, or letting Thomas know she’d pointed a gun. “Watch my musket whilst I join the meeting?” she asked the sentry. “I’d be obliged, sir.”

  The youth’s sunburn became general, reddening his neck and ears, and he answered the Massachusetts officer without looking at him. “Yes, Colonel Higginson. Everything’s well.” Not taking his eyes off Harriet, he took the gun and stacked it against the wall. “I’ll keep it here, mam—Moses.”

  Harriet stooped for her satchel, tucked the pistol back in the main compartment, and pulled out the item wrapped in sailcloth. She handed her provisions to the sentry. “Welcome to South Carolina. Hope you like my gingerbread.”

  Thomas waved Harriet through the door, and she passed close enough to catch the fragrance of lemon verbena on his clean skin. It had been his favorite tonic as long as Harriet could recall, and she’d come to think of it as the smell of righteous indignation. “Did you get some rest?” he asked as they crossed the anteroom. A clerk stood and saluted, and Thomas returned the gesture without giving the man his full attention.

  “Plenty,” she fibbed as Thomas opened the door to the general’s office, through which blue cigar smoke curled.

  Major General David Hunter sat at the end of a long conference table. An older man w
ith two stars on his shoulder and six decades of experience under his belt, Hunter stared gloomily at the map of South Carolina’s coastline. Someone had pinned it to the wall when the Union wrested the Sea Islands from the Rebels a year and a half earlier, after the dust-up few expected to outlast the summer of ’61 settled into civil war. Looming beside the map was tall James Montgomery, a pious and lethal Kansas Jayhawker who had ridden with John Brown himself. Light from a window touched the back of Colonel Montgomery’s head and turned his unruly hair into a burning bush. A second window faced the alley, which Harriet automatically noted as a getaway if she needed one.

  “With respect, General Hunter, your timidity confounds me,” Colonel Montgomery said. “All we had to show for the Jacksonville raid was thirteen bales of cotton and a couple dozen contrabands. Not worth spit.” The hawk-nosed former preacher avoided the cuss word many white soldiers would have chosen. He angled his head aggressively at the faded chart. “What are we waiting for when the prize is right here?”

  The Southern sun had glared at the map so long that it looked like it had gone through the wash. Harriet recognized South Carolina’s serrated coastline and the adjoining Sea Islands. Hilton Head, Port Royal, Lady’s, St. Helena, and a handful of smaller lily pads were the Union’s refuge from Confederate forces on the mainland. As the chart indicated, and gunshot occasionally proved, much of their turf lay within musket range of the Rebels. When Harriet first arrived, she’d been astonished to learn they were hardly islands at all. More like clumps of green that had broken off, leaving watery cracks between them and the main. Hunter and his officers had puzzled endlessly over the map that showed the isles they must defend and the coastal positions they might attack if they could avoid being trapped.

  Listening for cues, Harriet took a chair against the wall. If a woman hoped to convince a roomful of men of anything, she must pick her moment.