Though Waters Roar

  Bebe knew that her mother was trustworthy—but her mother was sitting right beside her. It was much harder to trust a God she couldn’t see.

  There was very little shade along the road, and the sun grew hot as they traveled. Bebe’s hair felt sweaty beneath her bonnet. Buried beneath all that wood, Mary and Katie must feel like two loaves of bread baking in the oven. Bebe turned around to see if she could glimpse them between the logs, and her heart seemed to stop beating when she noticed a dark silhouette in the middle of the road on the horizon behind them. She watched it for a moment, and the shape seemed to grow larger—which meant that it was moving closer, catching up to them.

  She tugged at Hannah’s sleeve. “Mama, someone’s following us.”

  Hannah glanced over her shoulder. “Yes, I see. Don’t worry, dear. Let’s recite a psalm together. ‘God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble . . .’ ”

  Bebe tried to do what her mother said and not worry, but it was impossible. She kept her gaze straight ahead, watching the horses’ rumps until she could no longer stand the suspense. When she turned around again, the shape had split into two figures. They rode horseback and were galloping toward the wagon, quickly closing the gap. Bebe felt like throwing up.

  “They’re coming closer, Mama. Two of them.”

  “Can you tell who they are, dear?”

  She turned to look behind her again. “I think . . . th-they look like the two men who talked with Papa the other day! Hurry, Mama. Go faster!”

  She wanted her mother to lay the lash to the horses and try to outrun the men. Instead, Hannah drew the team to a halt and waited for the riders to catch up. When they finally did, the bounty hunters had rifles strapped to their saddles. Three dogs bounded out of the bushes alongside the road and pranced around the horses, barking at the wagon. Bebe huddled beside her mother in fear.

  “Good afternoon. Are you gentlemen lost?” Hannah asked above the clamor.

  “Quiet!” one of the men shouted. The barking stopped.

  “We’re looking for a pair of escaped slaves, ma’am. They’re very valuable. We’re offering a reward for information.”

  The dogs circled the wagon while the man talked, sniffing loudly enough for Bebe to hear them. The biggest dog stood on his hind legs with his front feet propped on the tailgate and sniffed the wood. He looked as though he might jump up. Bebe began to cry.

  “Would you kindly control your dogs?” Hannah asked. “My little girl is frightened.”

  The man whistled and all three dogs ran over to him. “Have you seen two Negro women anywhere around here?” he asked again.

  “I wouldn’t tell you even if I had seen them,” Hannah said quietly.

  The man stared at her in surprise. He removed his hat and wiped his brow with his forearm. “Well, according to the law, you’re required to hand over fugitive slaves.”

  “I know. But according to the Bible I’m commanded not to. It says in Deuteronomy chapter twenty-three, verse fifteen, ‘Thou shalt not deliver unto his master the servant which is escaped from his master unto thee.’ So tell me, whose law do you think I should obey, yours or God’s?”

  “Listen, ma’am—”

  “No, you listen. What you’re doing is wrong. You’re disobeying God’s Word.”

  “We’re just trying to make a living.”

  “Will that be your defense on Judgment Day when you stand before the Almighty to give an accounting of your life?”

  The man’s face turned red. He looked very angry, but he pressed his lips together and didn’t reply.

  “If you repent and ask the Lord to forgive you, He surely will,” Hannah continued. “I would be happy to pray with you right here and now, if you would like me to.”

  The men looked at each other, then turned their horses around and trotted back the way they’d come. The dogs followed, noses to the ground, sniffing eagerly. As the dust settled around the wagon again, Bebe buried her face in her mother’s lap and sobbed. She had been certain that she and her mother and the two slaves were all going to jail, and the relief she now felt was as real as if the jailer had unlocked the door and set her free.

  Hannah flicked the reins to start the horses moving, then wrapped one arm around Bebe to comfort her. “You don’t need to be afraid, Beatrice.”

  “Why did you talk to them, Mama? I was so afraid they would find—”

  “Hush now. You learned a valuable lesson today. When you obey the Lord, He will always be with you, no matter what happens. Even if I had gone to jail, the Good Lord would be there, too. As the psalmist wrote, ‘The Lord is on my side; I will not fear: what can man do unto me?’ ”

  Bebe thought of several things the men could have done, but she didn’t say them out loud. Instead, she wiped her tears with the heels of her hands and decided that she didn’t want to be a coward anymore. She would ask God to help her be a woman of faith like Hannah; a woman of courage like the two slaves hiding beneath the firewood. She never wanted to feel afraid again.

  A few hours later they arrived at a farm that was much like Bebe’s. Hannah helped the elderly farmer push aside the firewood to set Katie and Mary free. The two women were so drenched with sweat they looked as though they had stood outside in a rainstorm. The farmer’s wife—a woman with gray hair and a bent spine—made the slaves hurry inside her house to hide.

  “Good-bye,” Hannah called to Mary and Katie. “Godspeed!” When she told the farmer about the bounty hunters, they decided that he should keep the firewood in case Hannah encountered the men on the return trip. Bebe helped her mother and the man unload it, tossing down one log at a time until her arms and shoulders ached and splinters pricked her fingers.

  Late that afternoon, Bebe and Hannah returned home again. As soon as the wagon stopped, Bebe jumped off and ran down the path that led to the river, feeling as though she could draw a full, deep breath for the first time all day. She halted by her brothers’ rope swing. It looked inviting as it swayed gently in the wind. Bebe glanced all around, then lifted her calico skirt to climb onto the swing for the very first time.

  She had watched her brothers kick with their feet, then lift up their legs, pumping higher and higher in the air, but her legs were much shorter than theirs were and her feet barely reached the ground. She closed her eyes and let the wind twirl her gently on the breeze. She had been right about riding on the swing—the wind did feel nice on her face. She held tightly to the rope and tilted her head back to look up at the sky, her feet outstretched. She wondered what it would feel like to soar high in the air—not too high, not with abandon the way her brothers did, and certainly not out over the river—but high enough to feel as if she were flying. She imagined that she would feel the same way she had when the paddyrollers had turned around and trotted away. She lifted her face to the sky and tasted freedom.

  I had thought of Grandma Bebe’s story last night as I set out on my own secret errand. Like Great-Grandma Hannah and the prophet Elisha, I also prayed that the Lord would blind my enemies’ eyes so they wouldn’t see the cargo I was carrying.

  When the patrol car stopped me, I tried to act calm even though my entire body was trembling. Much to my surprise, the officer who stepped up to my car window was Tommy O’Reilly—the constable’s son and notorious bully, the boy who had made my school days miserable. Of all the policemen who patrolled our town, why did he have to be on duty last night?

  “Would you step out of the car, please?” he asked.

  I could barely stand. I had to lean against the fender for support. Tommy looked into the back seat, which was filled with cases of bootleg liquor, and his eyes grew very wide. He stared and stared, blinking in amazement as if he had been struck blind and couldn’t quite make out what he was seeing. I thought God surely had answered my prayer. Then Tommy uncorked one of the bottles and sniffed, and I knew I was in trouble. Why hadn’t I prayed that his sense of smell would be taken away along with his eyesight?

  “I’m going t
o have to arrest you, Harriet.” He seemed truly surprised.

  Reasoning with him had been a waste of time last night, just as it had been for as long as I’d known him. I didn’t think a kick in the shins would accomplish anything, either. He put me in the back seat of his patrol car and drove me to the police station.

  So here I was, in jail. I had remembered to pray before venturing out with my hidden cargo just as Hannah had. I had been convinced that I was doing the right thing for all the right reasons— just like Grandma Bebe.

  Now I stared up at the sagging bunk above me and wondered where I had gone wrong. How had I ended up here, so far from where I thought I was headed? And how was I going to find my way back to where I should be?

  CHAPTER

  5

  Grandma Bebe’s attic became a refuge for runaway slaves at least half a dozen times that she could remember. “My mother may have sheltered a good many more runaways that I never knew about,” Grandma told me years later. She and I had been talking about slavery as we sat on her porch swing one sticky summer night when I was eleven, gently rocking back and forth, sipping lemonade and swatting mosquitoes. “I think my mother stopped confiding in me once I started going to school all day,” Grandma said with a sigh.

  I pushed my foot against the porch floor to keep the swing moving. Grandma was so short her feet barely reached the floor. “Did your brothers ever find out about the runaway slaves?” I asked.

  “No, they did not.” Grandma grinned as if she were still a small girl keeping a very big secret. Her dark eyes gleamed. “My brothers thought they were so smart—and to this day it tickles me to think they had no idea what Mama and I were up to.”

  We were looking through Grandma’s box of keepsakes, and she showed me a photograph of her father and mother. They sat side-by-side, their shoulders barely touching, Henry’s huge farmer hands splayed on his thighs like a pair of shovels. He wore one of those silly beards that covered his chin and the sides of his face, but without the mustache. Great-Grandpa Henry’s wide, generous mouth and full lower lip looked exactly like Grandma Bebe’s—although she smiled all the time, and he looked as though he didn’t know how to smile. He appeared to be so uncomfortable in his ill-fitting suit and lopsided bow tie that he might have been sitting barelegged in a patch of nettles.

  “The suit and tie weren’t his,” Grandma explained. “The traveling photographer provided a rackful of clothing that you could borrow to get your picture taken.”

  The photo of Great-Grandmother Hannah intrigued me after hearing so much about her. No one would ever guess from the calm, serene look on her face that she was capable of facing down a pair of armed bounty hunters. Her hands rested on her lap as if they had no bones in them, and there was such an expression of meekness in her pale eyes and faint smile that I thought she probably spoke no louder than a whisper.

  I searched her face for any resemblance to my own, hoping I might have inherited some of her fine moral qualities too, but to be honest I didn’t see any. I didn’t resemble Grandma Bebe either, nor did I look like my beautiful socialite mother, who might have sprung to life and fluttered off one of the pages of the fashion magazines she read so religiously. I not only looked plain and ordinary, but I worried that my life would be ordinary, as well. I wasn’t brave and hardworking like Hannah, and I didn’t have Grandma Bebe’s passion for fighting injustice, and I certainly didn’t want to inherit my mother’s useless life, even if I did turn out to be as beautiful as she was. I couldn’t figure out who I was and how I would ever fit into my illustrious family’s story.

  “Don’t worry dear, I’ve been a misfit all my life,” Grandma said. “I’m sure you’ll do just fine. At least you have pluck and spunk. When I was your age I was as jumpy as a baby rabbit and twice as shy.” She showed me a photograph of two dozen children lined up outside her one-room schoolhouse and asked me to guess which one she was. I spotted Grandma Bebe easily. Not only was she the shortest child, but with her shoulders hunched and her head lowered, she looked as though she was trying to disappear.

  “Going to school with a bunch of prankster-prone farm boys added to my fears,” she said, “making me even more timid than I already was. My goal of becoming a woman of faith like my mother Hannah seemed as distant and unreachable as Canada. . . .”

  By the time Bebe turned thirteen in July of 1861, the issue of slavery had become a huge, boiling cauldron that finally grew so hot it overflowed. War broke out between the states. As soon as Bebe’s three oldest brothers finished harvesting the fall crops, they marched off to fight. James was twenty-two, William was twenty, and Joseph was eighteen.

  “We’ll lick those Rebels and be home by Christmastime,” William promised as he waved good-bye. All three of Bebe’s brothers displayed the same courage and bravado they’d shown as boys, making the Rebels seem like nothing more than a nest of black snakes hiding in the grass.

  In a way, Bebe envied her brothers’ adventures as they marched off to war. What would it be like to travel beyond the farm and visit new places? But a much wiser part of her thanked God that in His wisdom He had seen fit to make her a girl. She never could have summoned the courage to stand shoulder to shoulder in a line of soldiers and calmly aim her rifle as a horde of angry Rebels charged toward her with bayonets fixed. Bebe had prayed for courage, but so far God hadn’t given her any.

  With the three oldest boys gone, only sixteen-year-old Franklin remained behind to help Henry with the farm work. And Bebe, of course. The day after her brothers marched away, her father shook her awake before dawn.

  “Get up. It’s time for you boys to do your chores.” He seemed to have forgotten that she was a girl.

  “You mean . . . me, Papa?”

  “Yes, you. Now hurry up. The cows are waiting to be milked.” Bebe rolled out of bed and marched out to the barn to do her part, telling herself that the war would be over soon and her brothers would return. Everyone had agreed that the Rebels would be beaten in no time.

  Everyone was wrong.

  Six months later, when spring came around again, Bebe had all but forgotten that she was a girl, too. Meanwhile, her brothers were on their way to Virginia to conquer the Rebel capital of Richmond.

  “Wish I were fighting with them,” Franklin said as he and Bebe pitched a load of newly cut hay into the barn loft.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  “Sure do.”

  Bebe paused to lean against her pitchfork. “Aren’t you reading their letters, Franklin? All they do is complain about the rain and the mud and the mosquitoes. The food is bad, everyone has a fever, and the Rebels have real bullets in their guns. Why would you want to be a part of that?”

  “At least it’s something new. I don’t want to stay here, pitching hay and milking cows forever. Don’t you ever get sick of this place?”

  She could only stare at him. Why would he want to go anyplace else?

  “Oh, that’s right, you’re a girl,” he said after a moment. “I keep forgetting. Girls can’t move around from place to place whenever they feel like it.”

  Bebe lifted her pitchfork and stabbed it deeper into the hay.

  “Can to! I just don’t feel like it, that’s all.”

  Franklin shook his head. “That’s not how it works for women. First you need to find a husband. Then you have to move to wherever he wants to live.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everyone says! That’s just the way the world is. Don’t you ever pay attention to these things?”

  She returned to her work with a fury she didn’t understand, stabbing the hay and hurling it aloft. Stubble rained down on her, sticking in her hair and dropping down the neck of her blouse until her body felt as prickly as her mood.

  When the last of the hay was loaded off the flatbed wagon, Franklin grabbed Bebe’s pitchfork and leaned it against the barn wall beside his. “Come on, let’s go jump in the river and cool off.”

  “But Papa said—”

  “He won
’t know we’re finished. Come on! One quick swim before dinner.”

  Franklin shed his scratchy shirt, shoes, and socks on the way to the tree swing, dumping them in a heap beside the path. With a whoop of pure joy, he swung out over the river and dropped into the water below.

  “Come on in, Bebe! It feels great!” he hollered up to her.

  Bebe hadn’t felt so hot and itchy since she’d had the chicken pox. She caught the dangling rope in her hand and sat down on the board. She was finally tall enough for her feet to touch the ground. But even though she longed for the cooling relief of the water, she simply couldn’t bring herself to leap from the swing and drop all that way down into the river. She twirled in halfhearted circles for a few minutes, then got off the swing and picked her way carefully down the path to the river, still wearing her shoes in case of snakes.

  “Why don’t you jump in?” Franklin called to her. He floated on his back a few feet away, his bare toes sticking out of the water.

  “I can’t swim.” Nor could she take off her clothes as Franklin had done. She was a girl.

  Bebe sat down on the riverbank and dribbled water through her fingers, splashing it on her face and neck, aware for the first time of her limitations. She was still hot and prickly, while Franklin floated with the current, cool and refreshed. Bebe was forced to do the same work as a boy, but she couldn’t have fun like a boy or travel wherever she wanted. It didn’t seem fair. She stood and started hiking up the path away from the river, back toward home.

  By the time summer ended, her brothers had marched close enough to Richmond to hear the church bells tolling, but the Union generals made them turn around and march all the way back down the Virginia peninsula to where they’d started. Bebe couldn’t believe it. It seemed like the war was going to go on forever. She helped her father and Franklin bring in the harvest and slaughter the hogs. Winter came again.

  Bebe rose before dawn on a frigid Sunday morning in 1863 and put on an overcoat that Franklin had outgrown and a pair of his worn-out boots and followed him and her father out to the barn through fresh shin-deep snow. The farmyard looked beautiful in the predawn light, buried beneath a sparkling blanket of pristine snow, unmarred by footprints or wagon tracks. Her breath hung in the air in front of her, as if she could grab it and put it in her pocket.