Chapter five, continued

“As soon as Amanda was able, she left home. She took a flatboat down the Susquehanna River from our family farm near Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, and ended up in Baltimore. She worked as a housekeeper there for a year, then moved on to Washington City. She told me in her letters that she was tired of farm life and looking for excitement. She took a job as a cook in a boarding house. That is where she met your father; he moved into that boarding house when he was first elected to Congress.”

This was all new to me. I had heard that Father and Mother met in Washington City, but that was all I knew of their courtship.

Aunt Rachel continued, “They fell in love and decided to marry. Your father made a trip up to Wrightsville to ask your grandfather’s permission. Your grandfather threw your father out of the house. He said he wasn’t going to have any daughter of his marrying a slave owner. So naturally, your mother married your father anyway.

“Through all this, I was the only one your mother kept in touch with. Your mother moved to Waterside and you were born. She was living with a husband she loved, and she had a child she loved. She thought she would be happy, but she wasn’t. Once she was actually in the South, seeing human beings enslaved, mistreated and given no freedom, she found that she was an abolitionist after all. That is when the fights with your father began.”

I said, “I never knew.”

“Amanda hoped that you would not. She tried to keep the fighting from you, but she was never sure. From her arrival at Waterside until her death, your mother was a tortured woman. She loved her husband and her children and could not abandon them, but she could not abide slavery.”

We talked for a few more minutes, then Aunt Rachel left me alone to think about what she had said. She had given me a whole new picture of my mother, and it would take a long time to decide what it would mean to my life.

*****

This is where the fragment ends. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. At this point in the story, the background has been established and the main events are about to begin. They will occur in two strands.

(The fragment was written in the late eighties. The outline that follows has been in my mind since then, but has not been written down until now.)

In Aunt Rachel’s house, probably on this same Sunday night, Sarah will come to Matt’s room again because she is hearing voices. Actually, he discovers, she has been hearing them for days but, not really knowing Matt or her Aunt well enough to trust them, she has remained silent. Now she is deeply frightened. Matt goes to her room with her to sit with her until she goes back to sleep, but instead he also hears the sounds she has heard. He is not sure that they are voices, but he thinks they are coming from the cellar. To silence Sarah’s fears he takes her quietly down, carrying a lantern. There is nothing in the cellar, and no noises, but there is a strange, unpleasant smell and a discolored segment of the dirt floor. Matt digs there and unearths a human hand and, tugging on it, realizes that it is attached to a freshly buried corpse.

Needless to say, Sarah is terrified, but Matt suspects that he knows the reason. The walls of the cellar are stone, but built against one wall is a cupboard filled with this season’s pumpkins and squash. The dirt in front of the cupboard appears to have been  disturbed, then brushed out. Matt takes the cupboard in hand and pulls. With a mighty squeal it moves away from the wall and behind, shining in the lantern light, are bright eyes in black faces.

Aunt Rachel’s cellar is a station on the underground railroad.     the outline continues tomorrow