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Property(60)

By:Valerie Martin


He called his men, hired a closed carriage, and arrived at the crowded wharf early on the morning of the ship’s sailing. There these three were met by an actress, paid and coached in advance. When Sarah arrived, accompanied only by Mr. Palmer, Mr. Leggett was sure of success. He had one of his men begin to abuse the actress just as the couple approached the gangway. He relied upon Mr. Palmer’s religious principles to distract him, and he was right. Mr. Palmer turned away from his charge and attempted to interpose himself into the quarrel. Immediately the couple turned upon him, beating him cruelly. There were cries for help, all eyes were riveted on the violent scene. Mr. Leggett and his other man came up on either side of Sarah and grasped her by her arms. “It’s time to go home, Miss Sarah,” Mr. Leggett said. She cried out to Mr. Palmer, who was unable even to hear her through the noise and confusion. Mr. Leggett and his man led her quickly to the carriage, shoved her inside, and drove away.

“You are right,” I said, when my aunt had finished. “It is a remarkable story. What I wonder is what it will all cost. I suppose I will have to pay for the actress and the strong men.”

“Your uncle thinks Mr. Leggett acted properly. It is cheaper to pay an actress than bribe a bailiff.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“Mr. Leggett is waiting in Savannah for three other runaways who are being transported from a jail in South Carolina. Then he and a trader who has six more slaves to bring to market here will drive them all on foot overland very cheaply.”

“That will take weeks,” I complained.

“Yes,” she said. “It will be a long walk for Mr. Maître.”

I sniffed. “What a name.”

“Your uncle cautions you that Sarah may be very different when she returns,” my aunt said. “She has passed as a free woman, and that experience is generally deleterious to a negro’s character.”

“She has done more than that,” I observed. “She has tasted a freedom you and I will never know.”

My aunt looked perplexed. “What is that?” she said.

“She has traveled about the country as a free white man.”



WHATEVER MR. LEGGETT saved by sending Sarah overland was swiftly paid out to Dr. Landry, for she arrived more dead than alive. They had cropped her hair close somewhere along the way, and with her sunken eyes and cheeks, her bony limbs, she looked like a skeleton. She had a racking cough that kept the whole house awake all night. In the trek through the swamp she had contracted some manner of foot rot, which smelled as bad as it looked. When Dr. Landry’s treatments proved ineffectual, my aunt suggested sending for Peek, who arrived straightway with her poultices and infusions. She set an iron pot boiling in the courtyard which sent a stench over the whole neighborhood. She put Sarah on a cot in the kitchen with the fire going and kettles boiling day and night until it was like a steam bath and Delphine nearly fainted from the heat. Dr. Landry disapproved, but he advised that sometimes negroes could only be cured by other negroes, which proved correct. I didn’t burden him with the information that all her life my mother had followed every palliative he offered with a dose of something Peek had mixed up. Gradually Sarah began to eat, the cough abated, even her feet dried out and crusted over.

Mr. Leggett’s bill was two hundred and fifty dollars, which I thought outrageous. He had itemized it completely, down to the actress’s cab fare and the charge for shackles at the jail in Savannah. He and my uncle determined to find a way to convict Mr. Roget of abetting Sarah’s escape. Mr. Leggett wanted that reward as well, and my uncle had his own reasons.

They had no luck trying to trace the tickets, but it didn’t take them long to learn that Mr. Roget had commissioned a slave-catcher named Pitt to bring in the talkative Midge, so notorious on the Eastern Seaboard for her intense interest in the health of Mr. Maître. It seemed Midge had found the North so much to her liking that she refused to return to her master. “We will trap him through his own arrogance,” my uncle declared. Mr. Leggett departed to collect sworn testimonies.

As for Sarah’s baby, no one seemed to know what had become of it. When I asked Sarah, she coughed a few times and said, with her usual forthcomingness, “She dead.”

My uncle was wrong; Sarah was not much changed. She was as sullen as ever. As her health improved and she was able to work again, she performed her tasks without comment or interest, but she was more competent than most, certainly better than Rose, who had a more pleasing manner. No one could dress my hair so well as Sarah, nor care for my clothes, nor arrange the rooms. She continued to evidence an aversion to Walter.