Freeman, page 3
The first is that I love you. Never doubt that, Mrs. Kent. I love you more than words can ever say. My heart has ever, and only, been yours.
The second thing I want you to know is this: If I should fall in this crusade, I did not die in vain. I beg you do not mourn me as one who lost his life senselessly. Do not let them say of me that mine was a tragic death. Oh, Prudence, would that I could convey to you how far from tragic, how far from senseless, such a demise would be.
Please don’t misunderstand me, dearest. It is not that I seek death, nor that I would welcome it. It is, rather, that if I am to surrender my life, I can think of no more glorious cause in which to do so. You know that I hate Negro slavery with all my being, Prudence. What we have done to that poor, unfortunate people is a stain upon our national honor that will not be cleansed before centuries were done. If they are the lesser race, it were our sacred duty to lift them up, to civilize them, to instruct them to the limits of their abilities. If they are not lesser, as I know you and some others firmly believe, then our crime is so much the greater, for we have done this awful thing to those who, but for the shading of their skin, are exactly like ourselves.
Either way, Prudence, it is a sin before our Creator that some of his children are so haughty, so filled with grand opinion of self, that they have thought themselves justified in enslaving the Negro. Our Southern brethren forget that for all their humble station in life, for all their defects, the Negroes are also children of God.
I have long been on fire for the abolitionist cause, as have you. But I have always supported it from afar, always given my money and my time, but never my self. This war has changed all that, has given me the chance to support this glorious cause at the hazard of my very life. As a result, I feel more alive, more firmly centered in the rightness of my cause, than ever I have before.
So should I die, say only that I did so willingly. Say that I died in the service of that which I believe and, if given the opportunity, I would do so again. Say that I died fighting on the side of good and eternal God.
I am at peace, whatever comes. No man can ask for more.
Well, dearest, I must close now.
All my love, all my life.
Jamie.
He was killed twelve hours later in a place called Gettysburg.
Prudence refolded the letter and put it back in the box. She brushed at the tears on her cheek, noting absently that the trees in the square were leafing out quite nicely.
Tomorrow, she was going to the South. She did not know if she would ever return. The realization left her feeling oddly weightless, like a dancer suspended in mid-leap, not yet knowing where she might land. Her uncertainty must have shown on her face, because Bonnie stopped in the doorway and asked, “Are you all right, there, Miss Prudence?”
Prudence smiled. They were as unalike as two women could be. Bonnie was slender and pretty, with skin the color of walnut shells and a cautious, deliberate manner. Prudence’s skin was pale and flawless but for a dusting of freckles on her cheeks. She had hair the color of October leaves and where Bonnie was careful and thoughtful, Prudence was driven by a native impulsiveness that (so she had many times been told) bordered on suicidal. Yet, for all their dissimilarity, there was no one in the world to whom she was closer. Not even her own sisters.
Prudence sat on the bed. “I am well, Miss Bonnie,” she said.
It was an old joke between them. They had known each other since they were little more than toddlers, since the day Prudence’s father, the late John Matthew Cafferty, had brought Bonnie home with him. The two girls had taken to one another from the start, had grown up together, roughhoused together, trusted one another with all the secrets of their hearts. But the Negro butlers and cooks and footmen who hiked over every morning from their side of the Hill to wait upon the wealthy whites on this side had seen this relationship and worried over it, wanting Bonnie to know that all white people—most white people—were nothing like the Caffertys.
So they had sought to school Bonnie in habits of deference, to prepare her to take what they assumed would be her place in the world. The result was that after a time, Bonnie had stopped addressing Prudence simply by her name and had begun calling her “Miss Prudence” instead, and nothing Prudence could do or say would make her stop. Finally, fed up, she had started calling her friend “Miss Bonnie” to teach her a lesson. We’ll see how she fancies it.
As it turned out, she fancied it just fine.
Bonnie had never found that “place in the world” the colored servants assumed she would. Instead, she had remained in the Cafferty household all her life, becoming John Cafferty’s fourth daughter in all but actual fact. But she and Prudence still used the stilted honorific in the privacy of their friendship; it amused them to do so.
“You do not look well, Miss Prudence,” said Bonnie now.
Prudence smiled. “Is that so?”
“Are you troubled with second thoughts?” asked Bonnie. Her voice lifted with hope.
Prudence shook her head. “No second thoughts,” she said. To emphasize the point, she closed Jamie’s letter in its box and dropped it into the steamer.
“It grieves me to hear that.”
“Miss Bonnie, this is something we must do.”
“We,” said Bonnie.
It was all she said, but it was enough. At Prudence’s insistence, they were traveling south together, but Bonnie did not want to go. Young as she had been when she left there, she had no memories of the South, but what she knew of it, what she had read and been told, had filled her with loathing and primitive fear.
Prudence tried to jolly her. “You would have me go down there alone?” she said, fluttering her eyelashes like a coquette. “Fair and delicate flower that I am?” Prudence’s lack of delicacy was legend in Boston society.
Bonnie would not be jollied. “I would rather if neither of us go down there, ever. The best day of my life was the day I left Dixie behind.”
Prudence sighed. “And my father, who brought you out of Dixie, made me promise before he died that the moment the war was over, I would go down there and build a school for colored.”
A lean, leathery face, a voice reduced to a rasp by the depredations of cancer, leaning close to her, the eyes alight, the stench of death on his breath. “Mark my words,” he had said. “When this war is finished, when the Union is restored, this government will do nothing for the colored man. It will free him and then it will leave him to fend for himself in a hostile and resentful land. It will require people like us, people of means, to fill in the gaps.” He had fallen back into his chair then, as if exhausted by his exertions. There followed a racking cough, and the sputum he spat into his handkerchief was flecked with blood.
John Matthew Cafferty had arrived in America penniless and alone as a boy, his mother having died on the journey from England. On his third night of wandering the docks, he broke into a warehouse, seeking only a warm place to sleep. Instead, he found a life.
He had awakened to find the warehouse owner hovering over him. John tried to run, but the man snatched him by the collar before he had taken the second step. His name was Cyrus Campbell and he was a genial free colored man who had become quite wealthy as a furniture maker. To the boy’s great surprise, the black man didn’t box his ears or call the law. Instead he took pity on him. Over breakfast, he offered him an apprenticeship.
“What do you think, lad? Or have you a better offer somewhere else?”
Campbell had regarded him with a puckish expression. The boy understood the man was having sport at his expense and he replied with grave dignity. “I have no better offer, sir,” he said.
Cafferty remained with Campbell for 30 years, first as apprentice, then as an employee, and finally, as a partner and a kind of surrogate son. Several years after his benefactor died, John Cafferty, by now a wealthy man himself as the sole owner of Campbell & Cafferty Fine Furnishings, had gone to Buford, Mississippi, where Cyrus had lived on a cotton plantation until he escaped to the North, leaving his mother behind. Campbell had intended to buy her freedom, but had not been able to earn enough soon enough and never saw her again. So Cafferty had bought that plantation and freed every slave on it. And thus began a tradition: every year on the same day in June, in memory of Cyrus Campbell, he went back to Buford and bought a slave.
He could never say how he chose them. He simply waited for some look in a dark eye or tilt of a woolly head that gave him the sense that here was a woman or a man not yet crushed by a lifetime of being owned, one with gumption and guts who would, if set free in a free place, be able to make a life. Sometimes, he bought entire families on the basis of one woman’s prideful posture, one man’s fierce glare. Some chose to stay on in Mississippi. Those that so desired, he took to Boston, helped them find lodging and gainful employment, and set them free.
Twenty-six years before, the very first beneficiary of his largess had been a woman named Mildred. He embarked from Memphis with her and her daughter, but Mildred took sick on the journey and died, as his own mother had so many years before. He buried her near St. Louis and brought her baby with him to Boston, where he raised her as his own. Bonnie Cafferty—when she was 10, she had asked if she might take his name—had come to love the tall, raw-boned man like the father whose name she never knew, for saving her from a lifetime of scars. When he died, she had mourned him unreservedly.
But she did not want to go back to the South, not even to honor him. She hated the South. Even more, she feared it. Its current state of devastation and defeat did not change that. In some ways, she thought, it made it worse. What is meaner and more hateful than the haughty brought low?
“There must be another way,” she told Prudence. “Find an agent down there you can trust. Why not volunteer for one of the schools organized by the Freedmen’s Bureau? In that way, at least, you would act under the imprimatur of the federal government. You would have protection.”
“That is not what my father asked,” said Prudence.
“Well, he didn’t ask me, Miss Prudence.”
“I know,” said Prudence. “I am asking. Will you deny me?”
Bonnie sighed. She sat on the bed beside Prudence. “I deny you nothing. You know that. But do you not think it foolish to rush down there so soon after the fighting has ended? Things may still be unsettled.”
Bonnie shook her head. “We shall travel by steamship down the Mississippi River. The Mississippi has been in Union hands for two years now. Any danger from marauding rebel armies is nonexistent, particularly with the surrender at Appomattox.”
“We ought to be concerned about more than just the armies,” said Bonnie. “What of the people?”
“What of them?”
“The people—the white people,” she amended, “will be bitter because of their defeat. It might be wise to allow that news to sink in, give them more time to get used to the way things are now before we go gallivanting about down there.”
“We do not gallivant, Miss Bonnie. We travel on a sacred mission. Do you really think we should delay simply because a few rebels may be walking around with bruised feelings and their lips poked out?”
“It is more than that, Miss Prudence.”
Prudence went on as if she had not spoken. “And how long do you think we should defer to the rebels’ tender feelings? Two weeks? Two months? A year?”
“You are sporting with me.”
Prudence put a hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Not at all,” she said. “I just want you to see how impractical your suggestion is. We can wait. We can wait a month. We can wait a year. And while we wait, colored people will be suffering. Do you not care about that?”
Bonnie’s dark eyes flashed. “Do I not care? Of course I care. How can you ask me that?”
“Why are you so reluctant, then? Is it just fear?”
“Perhaps,” admitted Bonnie. “Perhaps it is. But if we are examining motivations now, let us consider yours. Is your haste to travel to Dixie just a sign of loyalty to your father? Or does not grief for Captain Kent also cloud your judgment?”
Prudence sighed. Something came into her eyes, then, something Bonnie could not read. “I loved my husband,” said Prudence. “I grieve him still. You know that.”
She did. For all the years Prudence had been courted by Jamie Kent, Bonnie had been her friend’s confidant. It was Bonnie to whom Prudence had first confessed her feelings, Bonnie who had nursed Prudence through the inevitable spats, Bonnie who had been closer even than Prudence’s two older sisters. “Of course I know,” she said. Her voice was soft.
“One of the things I loved about him was his passion for the abolitionist cause. Other men went to war saying they fought only for Union. Jamie knew what he was fighting for from the beginning. He was fighting to free the slaves. You know what that means to us Caffertys.”
Bonnie smiled, remembering a night as girls no more than five years old when they had snuck down a narrow passageway lined with garden implements and jars of preserved foods in the basement of the big house. At the end of the passageway, Prudence had given her a meaningful look, then took hold of a brick in the wall, pulling it to the right. To Bonnie’s amazement, the very wall itself lumbered heavily open.
All she saw of them was eyes, three pairs of them, wide and frightened in the flickering light of the candle Prudence held. A woman, a man, and a boy, sitting—there was no room for them to stand—in a tiny compartment Bonnie had never known was there.
“It’s all right,” Prudence told them. “We are friends.”
Bonnie gaped. “Who are they?” she asked.
The boy had piped up then. “We’s run away from ol’ Marse,” he said.
“Father helps runaways,” Prudence had said. And she had given her a look Bonnie had always remembered, a gaze clear as water and righteous as judgment itself.
Prudence gave her that same look now. “I know you think me reckless,” she said, “but I promise you, I am aware of the dangers. A woman with a Yankee accent traveling with a Negro into the South to set up a school for free Negroes? I know there will be…objections. But the spirit of the two best men I have ever known compels me. Besides, as you well know, I can dish out trouble as well as receive it.”
And at that, Bonnie could only smile. Prudence’s father had often joked that his youngest child was the least-appropriately named person in all of Boston. She had been a tomboy when she was a girl, a scrapper, a marble shooter, a feared hitter in base ball. People who didn’t know her were always surprised to learn these things; her features were delicate, and it was impossible to see in her the reckless, dirt-smudged girl she once had been. It made people underestimate her. She had learned to use that to her advantage.
“I know,” said Bonnie, “you are not a frail little thing to be knocked over at the first stiff breeze. But those people,”—a pause, a look—“well, we will need to be careful. That is all I am saying. Not every place is like Boston.”
“You said, ‘we.’”
“Of course I did,” said Bonnie.
Prudence smiled her relief. “Of course you did,” she said.
And so it was the next morning that they stepped down together from the house where Prudence had lived her entire life, ready to leave the only city she had ever known. The tears had been cried, the farewells had been said. Now Bonnie watched as Prudence’s sister Faith held both her hands and spoke earnestly while the third sister, Constance, directed Rogers, the houseman, in loading their three trunks on the wagon.
Constance, Prudence, and Faith, thought Bonnie with a private smile as she gazed upon the three auburn-haired women. Mister John had never been subtle about preaching the virtues of life. How she had twisted and fidgeted through all his long lectures about thrift and honesty, chastity and patience. How she missed him now. She had known no other family than the Caffertys. And she loved them as much as she could love anyone.
Still, she thought, and not for the first time, it would be nice if she had someone of her own who might be heartbroken by this leave-taking, someone who would miss her and mourn her absence. But there was not. Oh, there had been suitors from time to time, but nothing that ever threatened permanence. It made her wonder sometimes if there was something wrong with her. Other than the Caffertys, she was alone in the world.
“Bonnie? Have you heard a word I said?”
She started. Constance had been speaking to her. “Forgive me,” she said. “I was preoccupied.”
Constance sighed heavily at the prospect of having to repeat herself. She was the oldest sister—her husband, David, now ran the family business—and she took seriously (too seriously, Prudence often said) the responsibilities of her station. “I simply asked you,” she said now, “to please govern Prudence. You know our sister can be”—a delicate pause—“headstrong. We shall depend on you to curb her reckless tendencies. And take care of yourself as well,” she added.
Then it was Faith’s turn. “In a way, I envy the two of you this adventure,” she said.
“It is not an adventure,” protested Prudence. “It is not a lark.”
Faith lifted her hand. “I know that, sister,” she said. “What I meant is, I admire your courage. Be careful down there. Return to us safely.”
“This is not easy for us,” said Constance.
Bonnie surprised herself. “This has not been easy for any of us,” she said. “It has been difficult on all of us. The war, I mean. But something tells me the peace is going to be just as bad.”
They looked at her. She met their eyes. Around them, the square went about its quiet business. A woman entered the park pushing a baby in a carriage. Two women wearing hoop skirts promenaded on the opposite side of the street. A wagon rattled past on Mount Vernon Street, going uphill.
“Well,” said Constance finally, “let us hope you are wrong.”
But they knew she wasn’t. She could tell.
In the awkward silence that followed, Rogers opened the door of the coach and gave them his hand as they climbed inside. Bonnie and Prudence settled into the plush, upholstered seat. Rogers returned to the seat above, then flicked the leather reins lightly over the horses. The wagon rattled forward, and Bonnie watched as everything she had ever known disappeared behind her.
