I hesitated and looked at Silas. Miss Maude nodded and said, “Go on. You can tell her about yourself. She’s a helper.”
By that I figured she meant an abolitionist, so I told her.
“My name is Jeannette Bébinn. I am the daughter of Jean Bébinn of Catalpa Plantation of the LeBlanc Parish in Louisiana. My father was master of fifty thousand acres, and the parcels are named Belle Neuve, Baton Bleu, Siana Grove, Chance Voir, Belle Verde, Mont Devreau. There is a section Papa set aside for me, five thousand acres, called Petite Bébinn. But Papa died, and his wife, Madame, sent me away with a slave broker. That was four years ago. I have been a slave at the Holloway Plantation in Mississippi until Silas here and I escaped.”
Missus Burke listened, but it seemed like she wasn’t listening to my story. She seemed to be studying me. She leaned on her elbows with a hand under her chin. I liked the voluminous sleeves on her purple-and-black dress.
“Jeannette, you speak very well. Do you know how to read? Did you ever have a teacher, I mean, before you were sent away?”
“My papa was my teacher. He taught me all about the land and how to read books and work with numbers. I would listen to him talk about politics and the weather and about how to think about the world.”
“You hear it, right?” Miss Maude said.
Missus Burke nodded. “You have quite a presence, Jeannette,” she said.
Miss Maude pressed on. “She wouldn’t have to lie. She already talks like she would own land—and slaves.”
“Like a diamond in the rough,” Missus Burke said. “We’d have to get her some clothes. And a carriage.”
“I have dresses—nice dresses,” I said. “They are in my trunk. Aunt Nancy Lynne helped us. She made the dresses for me and these clothes we’re wearing now.”
“Oh Lord, what a blessing!” Miss Maude said. “But what about her hair?”
“She will wear a bonnet. No one will see it’s been cut.”
“I’m sorry, Missus, but what is it you want me to do?” My eyes moved from Miss Maude to Missus Burke and back again.
“Yeah,” Silas said. “What’s all this about?”
Miss Maude sat with us. “We got five runaways in hiding, just a little north of here. We were expectin’ one or two, but they all came. From the same family. They won’t separate, and we can’t move ’em all without calling attention to them.”
“Bounty hunters following the Fugitive Slave Act would notice,” Missus Burke added. “They’d be looking for a group that big.”
“What that got to do with us?” asked Silas.
“You’d drive Jeannette to the Quaker house where they hiding,” Missus Burke said. “Tell the people there I sent you, and they’ll know what to do.”
I reached for Missus Burke’s hand. “Other slaves? And we’d help them?”
“Yes. They could travel with you as if they were yours. You’d look like a lady traveling with her property. Maude, how dangerous do you think it would be?”
“There’s no telling.” Miss Maude sat back in her chair.
Missus Burke seemed to study me even closer than she had before. “Jeannette, what do you think of Maude’s idea? You don’t have to go along with it; it’s your choice. If you’re not willing, it’ll be fine. We’ll still help you get to wherever you’d like to go.”
I was thinking it was kind of her to ask me, but I didn’t have anywhere to go. I didn’t belong anywhere. I didn’t know what to want other than a safe place to lay my head. But if I helped Miss Maude, I would have a purpose, maybe even a purpose God meant for me to have. I thought of Fanny and how I would have helped her escape.
“I wouldn’t be here at all if it weren’t for you people helping. I have no one waiting for me and nowhere to be. If it’s all the same with you, I will do it.”
Miss Maude smiled and pulled a hunk of bread from the plate. “Then we better eat up and get some sleep. Got work to do to get you ready.”
“But I said I have dresses. I can get ready myself.”
“You know how to use a gun?”
I paused, my mouth open. Then I finally said, “No.”
She nodded. “Like I said, we got work to do.”
The next morning Miss Maude and I stood in the backyard wearing long coats to protect us from the cold autumn air. At one end of the yard I saw an old shirt and pants stuffed with straw and tied to a stake. She had planted the stake far from the house.
The gun was small but, Miss Maude said, powerful. It had to fit my hand and the pocket of my dress or coat. “I don’t expect anyone to bother you, but you have to be ready.”
She pointed the gun at the scarecrow and showed me how to raise my arm and aim.
“If you have to fire a gun, most likely it will be hard to think straight, but I want you to be able to fire with your head on right. You have to aim in the right places. Don’t want you killing anyone. Hit a man in the leg if you can.”
She fired the pistol and hit the upper thigh of the stuffed man.
“That’ll stop him from coming after you. If they figure out what we’re doing and you kill a man, you’ll end up swinging from a tree at the end of a rope.” She checked the gun, wiped it with a cloth, and handed it to me. “Even if they don’t catch you, killing anything hurts your soul. Ain’t none of these white men worth you harming your soul. Remember that. They’ve taken enough of us, and they don’t get any more. Your soul is precious. You wound them, and that’ll be just fine. Understand?”
I said I did and took the gun from her. The pearl of the handle felt warm against my skin. When I pulled the trigger, the gun pushed back into my palm as though it needed to brace itself so it could spit the ball out. My arm shuddered. I stepped back and thought I would fall.
“Yeah, it’s got some kick to it,” she said. “You gotta hold your body strong when you fire a gun. Don’t matter if you’re sitting or standing.”
I thought about Madame and how she would behave if she were standing on the other side of this gun. How it would feel to have her at my mercy. I would have entertained this thought further, but what Miss Maude had said stayed with me. I understood. If I killed Madame, I would never be rid of her. She’d be in my blood, itching and impatient—a ghost underneath my skin. I didn’t want that. And more in line with what Miss Maude was saying, Madame didn’t deserve it. She didn’t deserve to have so much of me. But, I decided, that wouldn’t stop me from hoping bad things might happen to her all on their own.
We spent several days at Missus Burke’s property. It was located in a place where no one thought anything about gunfire, because no one came to see about it or wonder why it was happening. Silas wanted to watch my shooting lessons, but Miss Maude set him to work with memorizing the route to the Quaker house, just outside Washington, DC. Once we picked up the family, we would head straight to Philadelphia.
Miss Maude had me try on the dresses Aunt Nancy Lynne had made. I hadn’t had a proper dress since I was a child, so it was a strange thing to wear petticoats again and feel the softness of cotton muslin against my skin. Missus Burke liked the plainness of the travel dress. It was well made but not fancy. I only needed to look proper, like a Southern woman of means. They brought me shoes that fastened with tiny buttons. These made me think of Calista. It occurred to me that if I had to make up a name, I should call myself Calista. I could pretend to be my half sister. If anyone questioned, they would know such a person did exist and from such a plantation. But would it be too close to the truth? I would have to ask Miss Maude’s advice on this. She would know best. I stared into the mirror and wondered what Calista was doing now. Was she married? Did she have children? She’d be about twenty. I could be Calista in the same way that Fanny had told me to be Papa. Papa had brought me this far. I could see how far Calista would take me, maybe even the rest of the way.