Glory over Everything: Beyond The Kitchen House(74)

The next place they sell me to is a preacher’s farm . . .





CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE


1830


James


IN THE EARLY morning I posted the letters, then anxiously boarded the stage. My destination was Edenton, North Carolina, located some ninety miles south of Norfolk. According to the map, Southwood—the plantation where Pan hopefully awaited me—was located some miles north of Edenton. How Henry had obtained the details of where his son was taken he had not said, though he did suggest a strong underground connection by which messages were passed. How reliable this information was, I did not know, yet it was all I had to go on.

I planned to stay in the town to uncover information about the owner of the plantation and hoped that freeing Pan would be as simple as offering a heavy purse. I dreaded the transaction, for I would be obliged to go to a plantation that owned slaves, the thought of which petrified me.

As the coach moved along, I forced myself away from these thoughts and tried to put my focus on what was out the window. At any other time, the road we traveled would have had my full attention, for it ran alongside the canal that had been dug through the Great Dismal Swamp. This waterway was now the major thoroughfare connecting the Chesapeake Bay in Virginia to the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina, and it had been dug by slaves who inched their way through twenty-two miles of impassable jungle. Now large barges, sloops, and schooners all traveled the route, carrying trade and passengers to and from the Norfolk region down into North Carolina.

This vast swamp was so huge that it was said to cover over a million acres. What had interested me since childhood were the numbers of unrecorded botanical and birds species said to be found in the region. So it was that as we rode along, in spite of all my anxiety and emotional turmoil, I began to take note of my surroundings.

Seated at a window on the right of the carriage, I was able to look out onto the canal and was struck again and again by the multitudes of turtles basking on logs that bobbed on the water’s edge. It was already mid-May, and I might have opened my window for some fresh air had I not been so concerned with giving entry to the swarms of biting flies and mosquitoes. I peered across the waterway and into the swamp, but it was impossible to see through the tangled reeds and bushes and into the dense and dark stands of juniper and cypress that reportedly sheltered bear and bobcat and the cottonmouth snake.

Four other passengers were in the coach with me, along with their excess luggage. A middle-aged father and his two daughters, accompanied by a female servant, were returning home from a visit to Williamsburg. Shortly after our journey began, introductions were made, but I soon turned again toward the window and paid little attention to them until, sometime into the ride, I became aware of the older of the two girls making whispered comments to her younger sister.

“Oh, Addy, you don’t think—”

“I do!”

The younger one, dressed in pink-and-blue-flowered calico, looked to the father, whose attention was focused out the window. “Oh, Papa, are we truly in danger?” she asked.

“What?” he asked, shaking himself as though out of a reverie.

“Addy said that we are in danger! Is that true?”

“Certainly not!” he said. “Addy, you must stop frightening your sister.” He frowned at his eldest daughter.

“Father, you know as well as I that there are escaped slaves who hide out in these parts, and that should they ever stop our coach, we would be murdered for our clothing alone.” She rose slightly from her seat to adjust her full skirts, also of calico, but hers of a green color and a larger pattern.

“Addy, I asked you to stop this talk!” the father said.

I glanced over at the Negro servant and guessed she was not yet as old as Miss Addy. Though she did not speak, the young servant’s eyes told me that she, too, was frightened.

“Father,” Addy said, “I would rather we were all prepared to meet our death than to sit in ignorance, should the worst present itself.”

The three girls sat opposite the father and myself; now the youngest of the sisters lurched over to sit between us. As bags between us were set to the floor, the young girl removed her bonnet and handed it to her father before she settled herself against his shoulder. “Oh, Papa,” she said, slipping her arm into his, “you would not let them kill us?”

“Of course not, Patty. I am well armed,” he said, making a show of thumping the traveling bag that sat wedged between his feet. He settled her bonnet on top of the bag. “Any renegades would learn in short order who they were dealing with.”

“So I see, Father, that you acknowledge there is danger?” Addy said.

“Is there, Papa?” the young one asked. “Are there bad slaves hidden out here?”

He sighed unhappily as he gave a dour look to his oldest daughter. “It is rumored so.”

Patty leaned across his lap to stare out the window. “But why here, Papa?” she asked. “Why would anyone come here? Just look! See how dark it is in the trees. And look at the water. It is so brown that it looks like coffee. Why is that, Papa? Why is the water brown?”

“I’ve heard it said that it is because of all the dead Negroes,” Addy said. “The snakes got them.”

“Adelaide!” the father said. “Stop teasing your sister! You know full well that the water is the color it is because of the tannin from the cedars. One more word from you, miss, and that new gown coming from Williamsburg shall be returned.”