Property(41)

It took almost ten days to rout the negroes. The governor called out the militia and every patrol in fifty miles. It cost the state so much the treasury was bankrupted, and the reimbursements had to be paid in installments. Father told Mother, when he thought I was asleep, though I was listening breathlessly on the landing, that the heads of the leaders were strung up in the trees all along the river from New Orleans to Major Andry’s plantation, and many a planter took his negroes out to see this display.

That was when our housemaid Celeste disappeared. Father went back to the city and made inquiries until he learned that she had a brother among the insurrectionists. He was in fact one of the leaders. Father took a room in the hotel and spent several days following every rumor he could scare up. In the end he found Celeste hiding out in the restaurant kitchen where her mother worked as a cook. “You have comforted one another mightily,” Father told her, “but now it is time to come home.” She did not resist, returned to our house and stayed with us, always useful and even-tempered, until Father died.

I doubted that Sarah would be so tractable on her return. And if she made me spend much time or money tracking her down, I would not be so lenient.



HOW WAS I to remember exactly what she was wearing? I was running for my life. Sarah’s costume didn’t present itself as a remarkable feature of the evening. “She had three dresses,” I told my aunt. “One very like the other. What does it matter?”

“Well, it would help,” my aunt said, with a testiness that suggested she was wearying of my difficulties, though not so much as I. “It is usually included.”

I closed my eyes and tried to recall the sleeve which I had clutched, endeavoring to stop her, the skirt rising in two puffs over the saddle as she rode away. “It must have been the brown linsey,” I said. “And she had the baby wrapped in her shawl, indigo wool; it was an old one of Mother’s.”

“Very well,” my aunt said, bending over the page on which she was writing out the notice. “That will have to do.”

Aunt Lelia was convinced that Sarah was in the city, though my husband’s horse had been found wandering on the levee a few miles north of here. “She probably rode up to the landing at Bayou Sara, spent the night in hiding, and got on the ferry the next morning. She wouldn’t have been so foolish as to ride south into the fracas. She will need money if she hopes to get anywhere, and she will doubtless call on Mr. Roget for help.”

“Perhaps he has already provided for her,” I said. “She had half a dozen opportunities to spin out a scheme with him when Mother was ill.”

But my aunt remained convinced that Sarah would not leave the area without meeting Mr. Roget. “She will try to pass for a free negro,” she said. “With her color, she can easily bring it off.”

“Are you putting that in the notice?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

There were moments when I thought Sarah had plotted the entire insurrection, she and Mr. Roget whispering together under my mother’s house, though that was surely unlikely. She would not have been as frightened as she was, nor taken the precaution of getting her baby outside the house at the start. She only took advantage of the confusion, and of that event she must have longed for, my husband’s death. She assumed I would be murdered as well and it would be several days before anyone would think to look for her. “Number the slaves at the master’s funeral,” my uncle is fond of saying. “There is always one who will bolt.”

“I think this will do,” my aunt said, blotting her page. “Shall I read it to you?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“ ‘Seventy-five dollars reward,’ ” she read.

“Isn’t that rather high?” I asked.

“No, I think not. I have seen rewards as high as one hundred dollars for a house servant. They are often difficult to apprehend.”

“Go on,” I said.

“ ‘The girl, Sarah, about twenty-seven years old, and her eight-month-old baby girl, called Nell, ran away October 27 from R. P. Gaudet plantation in Ascension Parish, tall, slender, fine-featured, light complexion, speaks English and some French, wearing brown linsey dress, indigo woolen shawl, no shoes, very likely, has scar behind left ear . . .’ ”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“She fell into a fence when she was small,” my aunt said. “It was mentioned in the title.” She continued her reading. “ ‘Well spoken, of good address.’ ”

“I wouldn’t say so,” I said. “I would say she was of sullen address.”