She glanced at my work. “And you need to be more careful with how you do things. Like you need to pull out them crooked stitches on that hem and do ’em over.”
I put a hand over my eyes and sighed. I started picking out the thread. “Yes, ma’am.”
“She right!”
Silas startled us. We heard his voice at the open window before we saw him. He came striding in and sat at the table.
“How long you been out there listening to business that ain’t yours?” Aunt Nancy Lynne asked.
“Long enough to make it mine.”
He looked at me and said, “I been thinking about Montgomery and Laney—about what the rest of their running woulda been like. No matter where they ended up, it woulda been trouble. They didn’t look like nothin’ but a couple of ragged runaway slaves. The kinda work you doin’ there?” He indicated our sewing. “That’s the key.”
Aunt Nancy Lynne stopped and stared at Silas. Her eyes got really small, like she wasn’t looking at him. She was thinking.
“When Massa take me with him somewhere, what the first thing he do? Make sure I’m cleaned up, wearing good clothes. Nobody say a thing because people see we’re together.”
“Yeah, but he white—” I didn’t finish the sentence. I gasped and looked down at my sewing and then my hands. Aunt Nancy Lynne and I were now staring at each other.
“You can do it,” Silas said. “If you wearing the right clothes, people would see nothing but a white gal.”
“I could.” I stood and paced around the kitchen. Aunt Nancy Lynne closed the window and checked that no one else was outside. Then she opened the drawer of the desk Missus used when planning menus for her parties.
“Girl, stop that. Come write some things down for me.”
I went to the desk, and she called out types of cloth and measurements and colors. I wrote down types of buttons and lace.
“Silas.” She gave him the list. “Don’t make no special trip. It’ll call attention to yourself. And don’t take it into town. Wait until the next time Massa send you to Monroe. The mercantile man there won’t ask no questions.”
She checked the window and the door again, then went into another room. I looked at Silas and shrugged. When she came back, she was holding some paper bills.
“I’m gonna have to trust you with this. You gotta have it with you all the time. No telling when you’ll get to go.”
“But isn’t that the money for . . . ,” I began.
“You hush now,” she said. “I told you this was gon’ take time. Now time might be our friend. You’ll see. It’ll be fine. We’re gonna have a plan.”
Chapter 5
September 1855
The plan came together slowly, as did the clothing. Aunt Nancy Lynne and I had to make it on the sly on top of all our other work. Silas would join us in the middle of the night for fittings and to refine the plan because, out of the blue it seemed, he was going with me.
“You need to be thinkin’ about how a massa can travel up and down every mile and every state, North and South, and take his slave with him. You’re better off if I go with you.”
Aunt Nancy Lynne and I looked at each other, and she smiled slightly.
“You’d be traveling with me,” Silas said. “I know which way to go. Been waiting for a chance like this. Waitin’ for years.”
“I’m making a respectable-looking dress for her. She’d look just like Missus.”
Silas shook his head. “Don’t see too many white women from the South traveling alone. Can’t stay out of sight like that. But we can make her look like a man. Nobody pay us no mind if she a man.”
That was how we decided I would be a man—a sickly man who was dependent on my faithful man Henry, which was what I would call Silas on the road. It took some getting used to the idea. It seemed too big. I had doubts whether I could maintain the charade for miles, days, weeks. But I had to try and soon. I was sixteen, and as I was so light skinned, Aunt Nancy Lynne said it was just a matter of time before I was sold off as a fancy girl, forced to service men until I ended up like Fanny or grew too old for anyone to be interested in me. I had to go. She figured it best to keep me out of Boss Everett’s sight as much as possible. If she saw him coming from down the lane, she would send me upstairs with a chore or two that had to be done right away for Missus Holloway. But Aunt Nancy Lynne didn’t know that, really, she was keeping Boss Everett safe from me, not the other way around. Maybe she did. I was no longer awkward with a knife the way I’d been when I’d first come to the plantation. More than once I thought about slipping one of the smaller kitchen knives into the pocket of my apron and hiding it under my pallet. But she kept a close eye on me and even closer attention on where all her knives were.
We kept working on the clothing, which now included a suit for me as well as a nice outfit for Silas. But Aunt Nancy Lynne said I should still have a couple of nice dresses. I would need them once we got to where we were going. “You just gon’ have to be patient,” she told me. “The better we work this, the better chance you have of getting away and staying away.”
She worked on a travel dress, navy blue, which I liked very much. There was also an everyday dress, made of plain gray cloth, and a nicer dress meant for evenings, but it wasn’t formal. Just brown silk with black trim, keeping with my station. She taught me how I would keep them clean, with carefully placed rags between my legs, when I bled each month. It was vitally important that I not ruin the clothes, the suit especially. It would give away the disguise.
The changes in my body embarrassed me. Maybe this was why Calista had kept to herself so much before Papa had died. It felt like all I wanted to do was cover myself up. I think those were the loneliest days of my life. If this was what it meant to become a woman, then the condition didn’t have much to offer, as far as I could see.
We were finally ready that October. Silas had the idea to ask for consent to be away for a few days, as he sometimes did, to do outside jobs in other homes. This would give us a head start. No one would miss me right away, and it would be at least three days before anyone realized Silas hadn’t returned. It was decided Silas would take the clothing with him the night before, and the next night, I would go to Silas’s place. We would make my transformation there and begin our journey.
On the last night, Aunt Nancy Lynne and I were carefully packing the clothing into a large sack so that Silas could look like he was carrying bedding or some other laundry back to his cabin. When we were done and waiting for him, she pressed money into my palm. It was $250.
“I told you I would buy somebody’s freedom. It’s gon’ be yours. I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
I didn’t protest—we would need the money for the journey. I put my arms around her and held her tightly.
“Thank you. I’ll never forget you.”
She smiled, then pulled away from me and looked out the window.
“Silas is sweet on you.”
“I know.”
“He’s a good man.”
“Yes.”
“So how it gon’ be when you get up north and he figures out you ain’t gon’ be his wife?”