Wild, Beautiful, and Free(26)

It was dark at the small farmhouse that turned out to be our destination.

Silas hopped down, and the man in the green hat opened the door for me. I climbed out and took off my hat, my spectacles, and the poultice. I could breathe deeply for the first time in days. But then suddenly Miss Maude was there. She slipped out of the shadows and approached the carriage. I looked at Silas. How had she managed to get there? Maybe that was why we had gone so slowly—she had been walking along with us.

“Thanks, Charley,” she said to the driver. He turned his horse and went back toward Richmond. To us she said, “This here the Burke house. Come on.” She moved fast. Her steps bounced up from the ground, one right after another. It was all we could do to keep up with her.

Miss Maude knocked on the door softly in a rhythmic pattern and then did something very strange. She ran her hand over my head as though she would press down any errant curls. Who would care what I looked like? The nighttime dew had already done its work, and I helped it along with my sweating despite the chill of the night.

The glow of a candle illuminated the face of the woman who opened the door. She was white.

“Missus Burke, I have a man and a girl with me.”

The woman pulled the door wide open. “Yes, of course. Come in, Maude. It has been quiet for a while. I thought you would be here yesterday.” She pulled out chairs at a wooden table, and I could make out the hearth and the walls of a kitchen. “Sit here. You both must be hungry.”

“Yes, ma’am.” I’d eaten very little on the journey, but I didn’t tell her that the edge of the hunger had kept me going, even when I’d felt sick on the steamer. It made me feel alive, and I was happy to feel my body talking to me. It meant I was healthy, and I had that going for me, if nothing else.

She placed the candle on the table and moved about the room. She put bread on the table and put a kettle over the fire in the hearth. Miss Maude didn’t sit but followed her around the room and whispered to her. I could just make out “need” and “help” and “don’t know.” Silas and I looked at each other. He shrugged.

Missus Burke put cups on the table and filled them with hot coffee. She sat, and Miss Maude sat with us.

“I’m thinking of that family stuck north of here. We could get them all to Philadelphia if we make it look like they belong to somebody, like they’re traveling with a master like these two just did.” She nodded at me, and I stopped chewing the bread. “Or a mistress.”

Missus Burke looked at me and did the same thing Miss Maude had done. She ran her hand over the mess of my cropped hair. “What is your name?”

I hesitated and looked at Silas. Miss Maude nodded and said, “Go on. You can tell her about yourself. She’s a helper.”

By that I figured she meant an abolitionist, so I told her.

“My name is Jeannette Bébinn. I am the daughter of Jean Bébinn of Catalpa Plantation of the LeBlanc Parish in Louisiana. My father was master of fifty thousand acres, and the parcels are named Belle Neuve, Baton Bleu, Siana Grove, Chance Voir, Belle Verde, Mont Devreau. There is a section Papa set aside for me, five thousand acres, called Petite Bébinn. But Papa died, and his wife, Madame, sent me away with a slave broker. That was four years ago. I have been a slave at the Holloway Plantation in Mississippi until Silas here and I escaped.”

Missus Burke listened, but it seemed like she wasn’t listening to my story. She seemed to be studying me. She leaned on her elbows with a hand under her chin. I liked the voluminous sleeves on her purple-and-black dress.

“Jeannette, you speak very well. Do you know how to read? Did you ever have a teacher, I mean, before you were sent away?”

“My papa was my teacher. He taught me all about the land and how to read books and work with numbers. I would listen to him talk about politics and the weather and about how to think about the world.”

“You hear it, right?” Miss Maude said.

Missus Burke nodded. “You have quite a presence, Jeannette,” she said.

Miss Maude pressed on. “She wouldn’t have to lie. She already talks like she would own land—and slaves.”

“Like a diamond in the rough,” Missus Burke said. “We’d have to get her some clothes. And a carriage.”

“I have dresses—nice dresses,” I said. “They are in my trunk. Aunt Nancy Lynne helped us. She made the dresses for me and these clothes we’re wearing now.”

“Oh Lord, what a blessing!” Miss Maude said. “But what about her hair?”

“She will wear a bonnet. No one will see it’s been cut.”

“I’m sorry, Missus, but what is it you want me to do?” My eyes moved from Miss Maude to Missus Burke and back again.

“Yeah,” Silas said. “What’s all this about?”

Miss Maude sat with us. “We got five runaways in hiding, just a little north of here. We were expectin’ one or two, but they all came. From the same family. They won’t separate, and we can’t move ’em all without calling attention to them.”

“Bounty hunters following the Fugitive Slave Act would notice,” Missus Burke added. “They’d be looking for a group that big.”

“What that got to do with us?” asked Silas.

“You’d drive Jeannette to the Quaker house where they hiding,” Missus Burke said. “Tell the people there I sent you, and they’ll know what to do.”