March 1850

Chapter 76

Sarah

My fingers cramped from clutching Henry’s hand, squeezing with joy but also with guilt and grief and fear. Riding away was like a dream, but the whole way I kept wondering how the next day was gonna be for Red and the others. And how long Bessie’d hang there. And every few miles I’d look over my shoulder for someone coming to snatch me back. All my life, freedom had been too much to hope for. That night, leaving Jubilee, it was too big to feel all at once. Even now sometimes it hardly seems real.

We got to the Quaker’s place in the middle of the night, and by the time the wagon stopped, my heart was racing. His green house was about the size of the overseer’s cabin, but there was a friendliness to it, ringed with flowers and smelling of strawberries.

“I can make up a bed with blankets in front of the fire,” the Quaker said. “Or I can offer the hayloft above the barn.”

Henry looked at me and I looked at him. We read the answer in each other’s eyes. We wanted that night for ourselves, even if it meant lying above the cows and the pigs.

“The hayloft,” we both said, and I smiled for the first time since leaving Jubilee.

When we lay down in the straw, Henry was still Henry and I was still me, but everything was different. The weight that had been holding us was lifted, and when we came together, it was like flying to the stars.

In the morning, Henry left to get my free papers. I wanted to come with him, but it would’ve looked strange and we didn’t want to go raising eyebrows.

I was a bundle of nerves the whole time he was gone, thinking on one thing after another that could go wrong.

Hours passed before he got back. When he did, he lay the thick, sturdy paper in my hands. All those loops and dashes on it made me a free woman. I ran my hand over the smooth cream surface and a relief washed over me so strong it numbed me. I clutched the paper to my chest, weeping over marks I couldn’t even read.

We stayed with the Quaker for the next two weeks, trying to get news about Isaac and Momma. Seems Momma got sold after Isaac and me, but there weren’t no word on where either one of them went to. Being free with no way to get to them tastes bitter, but finding them was always gonna be like catching smoke.

From Aaron Newman, we learned that I couldn’t stay in Virginia. They made a law that if a freed slave doesn’t leave the state inside of a year, she can be arrested and dragged back into slavery, so we headed over the state line into Maryland.

On the first night we struck off on our own, we stopped at an inn and Henry ordered a room for himself while I waited outside. Then he came out to fetch me. We knew they’d never let me in as a free woman, and as his wife they’d have had the law on both of us, so when they stopped him asking what in tarnation he was doing, we had a different story ready to go.