The Letter Writer Read online

  She was pulling me toward the kitchen, where the morning dishes were being washed and dried, where preparations were already being made for lunch, potatoes being peeled, fruit arranged in a bowl, cake being mixed.

  Usually when I walked through the kitchen, Winefred the cook would take a piece of whatever she was cooking and give it to me. And I would take it as if it were a sacrament and put it in my mouth. Because it was sort of a sacrament, a sign of friendship and love between black and white.

  This day she was slicing leftover turkey. She turned her back to me.

  Connie was scraping batter for cake into a pan. At this juncture she would always hand me the spoon and allow me to pause and lick the bowl.

  This time she did not.

  We did not hesitate, Violet and I. She pulled me through the kitchen and outside.

  The sky was blue on this hot August morning and there was already a hint of September in the air. In the distance the pond glistened and ducks swam innocently. And slaves were gathering in the orchard to pick the beautiful apples that were bending down to them. I breathed deeply. I would spend this day outside. I would ride. Mayhap I'd take Emilie with me. Do her good.

  "Did you hear me, Harriet?"

  "No, I'm sorry, I was thinking I'd like to ride out today."

  "Look, I think you heard, but you don't want to admit it, so I'll say it again. There was a warning from Nat Turner to Owen, who passed it on. 'Look out and take care of yourselves. Something will happen before long.'"

  I snapped back into reality. "Nat Turner said that?"

  "Yes. That's his message."

  I felt dizzy. "Let me go. I must see him."

  "What makes you think he wants to see a little white girl like you? After that burning the other day, I don't think he wants to see anybody."

  "He wasn't angry the other day. He waited on us. Made us fresh coffee, brought us inside, away from the smell."

  "He's part actor. And he knew he had to do it. And not display his anger. That if he displayed it at the wrong time, he would give himself away."

  I did not understand. "Where is he?"

  "Down at the orchard. Supervising the apple picking. He has strange men with him. Told Richard they are his friends and they'll help for the day. One of them is named Hark, another Will. I don't know if he'll talk to you."

  "He'll talk to me." I broke away from her and ran to the orchard.

  ***

  "Nat? Nat Turner?" I looked up into the apple tree and sure enough, there he was, near concealed by the branches. He was plucking apples and tossing them down to one of his men.

  "Watch yourself, Hark, you almost missed that one," he said. "Can't have bruised apples. Bruised slaves, now, that's something different. But not bruised apples."

  I waited until he came down from the tree, wiping his hands on a towel. "You want to talk with me, little Harriet? Come on over here by the fence. These lieutenants of mine have big ears."

  They said things to scoff at him. He waved them off.

  At the fence he offered me an apple, which I took, and then, with perfect white teeth, he bit into his own.

  "Is there trouble over the map?" he asked.

  "No. But Violet told me this morning about your message."

  "Ah, yes. Did you receive it, then?"

  "Was it for me, too?"

  "Now what do you think? Haven't we been friends?"

  "But what does it mean? 'Something will happen before long.' And 'Look out and take care of yourselves.'"

  "It means just what it says. I do not talk in riddles. What did I tell you I was going to do?"

  "Go to all the plantations and make the people listen while you preach."

  "Exactly."

  "Then why the 'Look out and take care of yourselves'?"

  "Some people don't like to be preached at."

  He was lying. I was sure of it. As sure as I knew that the apple I held in my hands was fresh and just off the tree. But if he was lying, what was the truth? What was he going to do that would make people have to look out for themselves?

  "Do you still have the map?" I asked stupidly.

  "Of course. You gave it to me. I shall keep it, always."

  "But I told you I would need it back for my studies." He said nothing.

  The map. The map was the key to the whole thing he had planned, I decided. And I had given him the map! Suddenly I felt sick, nauseous. My eyes blurred. The apple trees danced in front of them. I had to get away from this man before he could tell that I was frightened of him. "I must go back to the house," I said. "I must help Mother Whitehead write some letters."

  Fifteen

  That night, that warm August night, when the night bugs screamed and the frogs in the pond croaked out their love songs and summer thunder rumbled on the horizon, I learned that Nat Turner and six of his men were going to eat barbecue and drink apple brandy on Cabin Pond.

  I could have considered this an innocent pastime, except that that very night I learned from Owen all about Hark, Nat's "lieutenant," and his past.

  It seems that Hark had been bought from the plantation where he grew up by Mr. Travis. The owner who sold him, sold away at the same time his mother and two sisters from whom he had never been separated a day in his life, and sent them to a plantation in Mississippi.

  For a slave, Mississippi was the equivalent of hell. Slaves didn't live long in Mississippi.

  Then, in the last eight years, Travis had sold off both Hark's wife and his son. Again to Mississippi.

  This kind of story does not make for a good slave. This kind of story makes for the worst kind of anger in a slave. And Hark, being so close to Nat Turner now and planning on "making something happen," was enough to tell me that it was not going to be a good happening. Not at all.

  I lay in my bed, the windows of my room open to admit the August air. Outside, the grounds and outbuildings reflected the light of a full moon. It was like the whole world were a stage and we were waiting for the players to appear. I heard every night sound there was: the barking of the plantation dogs, the screaming of the night bugs, the sound of the hooty owl, some faint singing of spirituals floating up from the negro quarters. I could not sleep, so I lay there inside my mosquito netting and tried to imagine Nat Turner and his men eating barbecue and drinking apple brandy.

  Finally I drifted off, only to see flashes of people and scenes behind my eyelids. It was a disturbed and uncomfortable sleep. I thought I felt someone leaning over me. I opened my eyes.

  Someone was there.

  It was Owen, in the bright light of that Monday morning, August 22, 1831, a day it would take many people a long time to forget.

  "Harriet," he said, as if the mere saying of it conveyed everything he was about to tell me. "You've overslept. Get up."

  I sat up.

  "They're coming. You'd best get up and get dressed."

  "Who's coming?" But I knew. When they came for you, you always knew.

  "Some people. Nobody knows yet. But they've been riding and attacking and burning and killing all night."

  "Killing?"

  "Yes. White people. That's their main purpose. They're killing white people. I ran all the way here to tell you. Couldn't find the others. Word has it that they've already killed Travis and his wife, then the people at the Williams plantation. They've hit six homesteads already. They started with three or five in their band. And now they have a force of fifteen, and nine of them have horses. Come on, get up."

  "They're coming here?"

  "Yes. Where's Violet? And Margaret? I've got to hide them."

  I pulled my blue-and-white-check dress over my head. "She's colored. They won't bother her."

  Owen gave me a peculiar look. "Do you know who they are, Harriet?"

  It had not occurred to me to ask. Nat Turner, of course. But Owen did not know what I knew about Nat. Owen had brought me the warning, but Owen believed that Nat was too good a person to do anything but preach at someone.

  "No," I
said.

  "Nat Turner. He's started an uprising."

  "What does that mean?"

  "If you stay around you'll find out. Seventeen white people have been killed already."

  "How do you know, Owen?" I was sitting on the floor, buttoning my shoes.

  "I was with him. Earlier this morning, he asked me to be with him. I stayed until I saw what he was doing. Harriet, you must run. Into the woods. Go north to the Jacobs place. Warn them. I'll hide Violet."

  "And Emilie? And Pleasant? And baby William?" I asked. And my question went on. "And Mother White-head? And Margaret? Where will you hide them all? And Richard? What about Richard?"

  "Shut up, Harriet!"

  I did as he said.

  "Just sneak downstairs and out back and run to the Jacobs place. Somebody has to warn those on the outside."

  "Can't I get a horse?"

  "No. He's probably got someone stationed in the stable area right now. Just go." He hesitated and looked at me. His eyes went soft and then he did a peculiar thing. "This is in case I never see you again, Harriet."

  And he kissed me on the cheek. A brotherly kiss. Tears came to my eyes and it was then and only then that I knew that everything he'd said was true. It was really happening.

  ***

  I had overslept, so breakfast was already over with. Sleeping late was an unforgivable sin in my house because Richard conducted prayers before breakfast and I'd missed that, too. But this morning no one had come to wake me except Owen. The family was all scattered by now, and the house was eerily silent. They thought they'd done me a good turn by letting me sleep.

  I went out the back door. There, just coming into the barnyard, was Nat Turner and his scraggly army of fifteen men, nine of them on horses. Two of them had pine-knot torches still lighted from the night before.

  When they leave here, I thought, they will all be on horses. They will take ours.

  Nat stopped when he saw me. He was not on a horse but walking in front of his men. He held up his hand and they stopped behind him.

  "Is this the one what give you trouble, Nat?" one of the men asked. "Let me at her."

  "No!" Nat thundered. Then in a softer voice he asked me, "Where is everybody?"

  "I don't know."

  "You mean you won't tell. Heard about last night already, did you?"

  "Nat."

  "I thought you were with us. You hated mistreatment of the negro so. You despised what happened on the Gerard plantation. You hate that nincompoop brother of yours. 'S'matter of fact, you pretty much hate everybody. And you gave me the map. I have the key to the gun room, you know."

  "You gave it back to Richard."

  "You never heard of locksmiths?"

  "They wouldn't make a key for a negro."

  "When you have a forged letter from a white man they will."

  My voice shook. "Did you want to see Richard? I'm sure he's around and will give you whatever it is that you want."

  "I want that sly fox of a sister of yours, who's always flirting with me. I want to rip off her blouse and cut her throat. I want that turncoat playmate of yours, that Violet, that half caste who's forgotten she's negro and panders to y'all, just to make life easy for herself. I want that Mother Whitehead with all the rings on her fingers, whose husband left her and who thinks she can buy me at just the blink of one of her blind eyes. I want to give them all their just due."

  A catbird cried. The air felt like lead. He was carrying a broadax, not a gun.

  "Mother Whitehead's husband died, he didn't run off," I said for lack of anything better to say.

  His yellow brown eyes went over me in sadness. "Whatever you want to believe," he said, "before you die."

  "Are you going to kill me?"

  "I want Richard," he said again. "Where is he?"

  One of his men on horseback had ridden a circle around the house and barn and came back to report. "He's in the cotton field with his slaves, boss."

  "Well, that's a good place for him to be." Nat started around the barn and his men followed. "I want nobody in the house. Yet," he said. "Hark, grab that little girl and bring her along. I don't want her warning anybody inside. But don't hurt her."

  So this was a slave uprising. I'd heard about them all my life, enough to know that plantation owners feared them above flood and fire and insects attacking their crops.

  The slave named Hark looked as if he'd lived through ten of them. He personified the very word riffraff, which I'd heard Mother Whitehead use so often, not only about coloreds but about some whites as well.

  Hark dragged me along to the cotton field behind the barn and there, sure enough, was Richard, picking cotton with about a dozen slaves. You had to give him that. When there was work to be done, he'd pitch right in and work with the help.

  Oh, why hadn't I seen the good things about him before this, and not only the bad?

  He looked up as we approached, saw Nat at the head of this devilish tableau, saw me dragged along by Hark, and stopped what he was doing. "What is this?" he said.

  Nat stepped forward, at the same time reaching out a muscular arm for one of the pine-knot torches. One man passed it down the line. Nat held it.

  "I'm making calls this morning," he told Richard. "We've already visited five plantations and been successfully received. You are number six."

  "What do you want?" Richard demanded in his most commanding voice. "And I'll thank you to have that fellow there unhand my sister."

  My heart quivered.

  "In just a moment," Nat said. "I want her to witness something first."

  "What?" Richard said.

  Nat handed him the pine-knot torch. "Fire the field," he said.

  "What?" Richard was dumbfounded. "Do you know the worth of the cotton in this field?"

  "Exactly. And that, preacher man, is why I want you to fire it. Now. Unless you want to see something terrible happen to your sister."

  Richard took one look at me and did not hesitate. He accepted the torch, turned, and lighted the cotton. In a minute there was a blaze so high that his servants had to get out of the way.

  For me, I thought. He did it for me.

  Dear God, have I been wrong about everything?

  "And now, you spoilt little white girl back there," Nat yelled, "watch this."

  And so fast that I did not know what I was supposed to be watching, one of his lieutenants swung his broadax and cut off the top of Richard's head.

  I screamed. There was fire and blood everywhere. I pulled away from Hark, screaming and screaming. I picked up my skirts and ran. I expected to be pursued, but no one came.

  No one followed. All that followed me was the maniacal laughter from Nat Turner.

  Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nat Turner's men whipping out the fire in the cotton field. I thought, Of course, he doesn't want any neighbors to see the smoke, or they'll come running.

  Then my mental state became tangled again and I couldn't reason.

  What had happened? I did not know. I had slept late and Owen was waking me from a nightmare and telling me to run to the Jacobs plantation and invite them for tea.

  That is all I could wrap my mind around at the moment. That, and the fact that I must run.

  Sixteen

  I wasn't used to running. I was accustomed to riding a horse or being taken somewhere in a carriage. I'd ridden many times on this path to the Jacobs place, to convey a message or invitation from Mother Whitehead. But today it was not an ordinary path, not an ordinary ride, not ordinary woods.

  I knew that in this wilderness they called Jacobs' Woods, outliers came to hide. Outliers were slaves who'd run off for a week or two to hide out from their masters or mistresses just to show them they objected to certain treatment. To live, they robbed nearby plantations of cattle, sheep, hogs, and tools. Some returned within weeks and proved their point. Others were at large for six months or so. And their owners just waited for them to return.

  Owen had been on his way to being an outlie
r when Nat had caught up with him.

  As I ran, stopping every once in a while to catch my breath, I could feel eyes upon me. The outliers were watching, I knew. But they would not concern themselves with me. Likely they already heard what had happened and were hiding now from Nat Turner as well as from their masters.

  I fell once and hurt my knee. I tore my dress at the hem. Mother Whitehead would be unhappy, I decided, and I'd get scolded. Then, running, tears coming down my face, I decided that I would likely never see Mother Whitehead again!

  Tree branches slapped across my face and I covered my eyes. How long had I been running? My heart was pounding. My head throbbed. There, there up ahead was the Jacobs place. I stopped, so out of breath I thought I would faint. I felt in my dress pocket. Where was the invitation to tea? Had I lost it? Where was my horse? Had he wandered away? Why was I here?

  And then it came to me. Somebody had died back home, and I was to tell the Jacobses that if they didn't burn their cotton fields they would die, too.

  I stood looking at the back of the Jacobs plantation, at neat fences and cows grazing and horses meandering about. I saw the workers in the field just like at our place. There was an abundance of late summer flowers and there was a pond and there were crisp white curtains at the windows of the crisp white house and a wide veranda and dogs and cats lying about and for a minute I thought I was home.

  For a minute I thought I could erase all that had happened this August morning and start over.

  Oh, Lord, let me start over. I'll do it right this time. I'll be nicer to Richard. I'll be sorry for my sins. I'll loan Margaret my rose moiré dress that she wanted so. I'll be more patient with Emilie. Lord, try me. Give me a chance.

  I closed my eyes, praying. But all I heard was my ragged breath coming in spurts, the tortured beating of my own heart, the barking of the Jacobses' dogs, who had already picked up the scent of me, and the pecking of wood from a nearby woodpecker on a tree.

  What I saw behind my closed eyes, though, was different.

  I saw five of Nat's men and Nat creeping into the house so quietly that Pleasant, who was upstairs getting William ready for his morning walk, didn't know they were anywhere on the place.