16
Wreckers’ Cay
January 1840
One evening, just a week into the new year, Hannah—usually so good about bedding down for the night—disrupted the peace of our household by looking for her rag doll. We all launched into a search for it throughout the house and garden. Once darkness descended, we soothed her as best we could and promised to look for it at ?rst light.
The weather was still warm; the seas were calm. Brightness glowed from our steady lighthouse beam. And the moon glowed like a polished pewter plate suspended over the water. My bed was still in front of the window, where Andrew had placed it, and I told myself it was high time to stop this foolishness, especially now that the moon was full; I vowed to move it back in the morning.
After mumbling brie?y in a drowsy conversation with Martin, I fell asleep, only to be awakened in the middle of the night by Brandy’s frantic barking. Normally, she kept Andrew company at the tower and dozed off and on throughout the night, so this kind of behavior was highly unusual. Alarmed, I sat up in bed and peered out the window. From where my bed was now positioned, I could clearly see that the beam from the lighthouse was picking up a dugout canoe with a small Indian party, heading toward our beach. My hands began to shake uncontrollably. Most accounts of previous attacks reported that Indians traveled in large groups, with sometimes as many as forty braves in several canoes. I scanned the surface of the water between the palms to see if others were close by, but I saw nothing.
My heart pounding, I hurriedly unlocked the gun cupboard, awoke Timothy, and forced myself to load the ri?es with him. Calmly, I told Martha to keep an eye on Hannah. Then I heard Andrew’s heavy tread on the stairs as he ran up to join us. Thanking God he was there, I handed both him and Timothy a ?rearm and some additional ammunition.
“It’s a small party,” whispered Andrew. “I think we can take them pretty easy.”
“There’s something strange about this,” I whispered back. “There are so few of them. They may just be scouts. And why would they come here when the moon is so bright that they can easily be seen?”
Andrew had been unable to coax Brandy into the house, and she continued to bark frantically. We were poised quietly at the windows of my room, which faced south, overlooking the beach. Patiently, we waited until they landed. The braves came ashore, whooping and yelling. This noise itself was enough to rip our hearts from our chests. The ?rst one to land ran directly to the oil-storage house, and seeing the jugs of oil Andrew had set out for Al?e, he shouted to the others. Then he began to shake the oil around the base of the lighthouse, whooping all the while. My entire body was pulsating with fear, and when I looked down at my trembling hands, I wondered if I could even hold on to my ri?e.
“They’re going to set ?re to the lighthouse tower,” I said, my gun raised. A second brave leaped out of the canoe and the pair of them worked quickly to spread the oil around the tower walls. But still we held our ?re. “Not yet,” I cautioned Timothy and Andrew as they began to aim. “I want to see them clustered closely together before we start shooting.”
The other braves had pulled the canoe up onto the beach and then began to help those already at the tower, spreading kindling at the base. Our dog’s barking became even shriller, lending itself to the general cacophony and confusion. One of the Indians raised his ri?e, aiming directly at Brandy. We heard a shot ring out; she gave one last yelp, then landed in a twitching heap by the door of the oil house. As Brandy had been Timothy’s dog since he was a baby and she a puppy, he could not contain himself; he immediately screamed.
The men below froze. Then a shot whizzed past, shattering the shutter of my window into splinters. The party continued to set ?re to the tower, but now they also shot up in our direction. There was a light but steady breeze that night, and their ?ames raged to life, quickly drawn up the sides of the brick tower walls in a huge smoking blaze.
I looked at Andrew, whose face was knotted in anger. He took aim, and suddenly the Indian who had killed Brandy collapsed in the sand. A strange kind of calm settled over me as I followed suit and aimed my ?rst shot. After that, I remember only the terrible confusion as we exchanged shots with the Indians on the ground, ducking below the windowsill, then quickly aiming and ?ring and ducking back.
Then, as suddenly as it had started, the ?re around the lighthouse went out and their whooping subsided in disappointment.
“They used the bad oil!” whispered Andrew, and I was amazed to see that he was smiling. Taking advantage of their consternation, he took aim at yet another, who fell over in a heap on a thicket of shrubbery near the tower.
The gun?re resumed, and suddenly Andrew ?inched. A bullet grazed the ?esh of his shoulder, only to exit and hit the wall behind him. Ducking down, I crawled over to him, but he waved me away. “I’m ?ne!” he hissed. “Stay over there!”
I moved back to my post, aimed, and pulled the trigger. The Indian who’d shot Andrew fell to the ground; I summoned more courage and hit another one.
Meanwhile, Timothy, enraged at Brandy’s death, had begun to lose control. His shots rang out indiscriminately. “Easy son,” I cautioned. “Conserve your bullets. Make every one count!” But he was not listening. Andrew and I were taking our time and aiming carefully, effectively picking them off one by one. They were making their way back toward the beach now, one running and the other limping along behind him, when Andrew again raised his ri?e and shot them both. I was stunned at his accuracy, despite his shoulder wound, which was bleeding profusely. Beside me, Timothy continued shooting in a rage, spraying his shots across the beach after the Indians until he ran out of ammunition and fell back, sweating.
Suddenly, the night was wrapped in eerie silence. We had killed them all. I did not know how many—perhaps as many as eight or ten. I couldn’t keep track in the dark. Exhausted, I fell back on my bed; the gun fell from my hands onto the ?oor as I took deep breaths to calm myself.
“Look,” whispered Andrew. Alarmed, I sat up, expecting to see more canoes. Instead, an approaching sloop was visible through the trees as it glided along the silvery water and landed at the beach. Andrew raised his ri?e. “Reload!” he commanded us hoarsely. Timothy obeyed, and I picked up my ?rearm and prepared to do battle again.
Timothy had brought his new spyglass into the room and trained it on the beach. In the moonlight, he was able to see the silhouette of a lone ?gure tying his boat to our dock. “He’s alone,” announced Timothy. “I don’t see anyone else.”
The man held aloft a stick with a white ?ag. He waved it slowly as he stepped quietly onto the beach. Andrew raised his gun, but I whispered, “Wait …”
Andrew paused.
“I think he just wants to recover their bodies,” I said. “Give him a minute.”
“Why?” demanded Andrew. Blood continued to ooze from his shoulder, and his face was twisted in pain.
“I don’t want to be stuck with their bodies. They would just send another party back to collect them.” Andrew did not lower his ?rearm, but he was considering what I had said.
For the next ?fteen minutes or so, keeping the white ?ag planted in the sand, the lone brave wordlessly dragged the bodies of his cohorts one by one and placed them on the deck of his boat. Then he tied the dugout canoe to the stern, untied his line, and, catching a good breeze, disappeared silently into the night.
Andrew and Timothy were jubilant, laughing and congratulating each other with slaps and jokes. But I was silent, ?lled with a feeling of dread. It occurred to me that they had deliberately set out to destroy the lighthouse ?rst. Killing us had seemed … almost secondary.
We were about to go downstairs to examine our poor Brandy, when Martha burst into the room. She screamed, “Mama, I can’t ?nd Hannah!”
I froze. Earlier that night, Hannah had been crying over her missing doll. Could she have possibly gone out to…?
Martha was sobbing. “I thought she was in bed, but she’s not!”
Frantically, we all ?ew down the stairs. I rushed through all the rooms of our ?rst ?oor, and I heard Andrew crashing through behind me. When I could not ?nd her, I ran outside. Debris was still smoldering at the base of the tower. The acrid smell of the dying embers and gun smoke assailed my nostrils and dimmed my watering eyes.
My baby—Hannah. She was nowhere to be seen. I screamed out her name. “Hannah!” I was out of my mind, running through the garden without shoes, tearing up my feet as I kicked through the plants, searching for her. I rushed toward the tower, and then I saw her.
My little girl lay on the moonlit turtle grass, which glistened with dew. She was bleeding from her chest. The white embroidered nightgown she’d gotten from Dorothy for Christmas was drenched in crimson. When I reached her side, her bright eyes were wide open in surprise and confusion, but she was perfectly still. There was no pulse and no breath.
A few feet away was her little rag doll.
The pain of losing Hannah was almost too much to bear. A cloud of grief settled over me that night, burrowing into my soul. It was an agony so acute, it sucked the air from my lungs and kept me from breathing. Andrew had to lead me back to my room and place me in bed. I could not move; I found I could not even speak.
We all mourned our sweet little Hannah. And none of us would ever know whose gun had delivered the mortal wound.
The next day, I rose after a sleepless night and tended to Andrew’s injury. Finally allowing himself to give way to grief, he began to sob. “That poor little girl,” he said.
I nodded sadly. “She loved you,” I told him.
Hannah had meant the world to Andrew, I knew. For a man who had been whipped and abused and sold, removed from his milieu, imprisoned and kidnapped, the unconditional love of a small child—a little girl who asked for nothing in return—was an inestimable gift.
Later that day, we buried Hannah in the grave where my dead baby already lay. Timothy and Martha gave short eulogies, and we held candles and said a little prayer together; then we sang “Panis Angelicus,” led by Andrew. Bread of the angels. So appropriate for our innocent little angel.
I could easily have taken to my bed again after that. The anguish was so piercing. The deep wound in the earth we had readied for my husband was instead ?lling with his children. Would there be no end to this grief?
I led Martha and Timothy back toward the house as Andrew gently spaded the moist earth over Hannah’s body.
A few days later, Martha came to me in the cookhouse with tears rolling down her face. “Was it my fault?” she asked.
“Of course not, darlin’,” I said, kissing her forehead as I took her in my arms. “No. Of course not. We thought she was in bed. It was a terrifying night for all of us—except for Hannah. She couldn’t hear the commotion, so she had no idea what was happening till she was outside.” I could only imagine her last terrible moments when she saw the Indians and the ?res.
No sooner had Martha dried her tears than I went past the parlor, where Timothy was supposed to be practicing his violin. The silence drew me into the room, where I saw him sitting on the horsehair sofa, his head bent. I sat next to him and saw anguish etched on his face. “I think I might have killed her,” he whispered. “I just blasted away at those Indians without aiming or thinking. It might have been from my gun.”
I put my arm around his shoulder and kissed him. My son—who in recent months had normally resisted this kind of affections—leaned into me. “Timothy, you mustn’t think that,” I said softly. “It could have been ?re from my gun, or Andrew’s ri?e. Or even from the Indians. We were all so … involved.”
He looked up at me. “You don’t think it was me?”
“No, of course not.”
But in my heart I did not believe the fatal shot was from an Indian. It had to have come from our venue on the second ?oor. And more than likely, it had indeed been from Timothy’s gun. Andrew and I, being less rash, had been more deliberate in our aim. Timothy was still a child, still immature in many ways, despite his many adult responsibilities on Wreckers’ Cay. In retrospect, it had been a mistake to allow him to take up arms. But I took comfort in the fact that we could never truly know one way or the other.
The next day, Andrew helped him dig a special little grave for Brandy. Timothy and Martha both wrote little poems to her, and Andrew marked the grave with a large conch shell.
One evening soon after Hannah’s burial, after Andrew lit the lamps, he and I sat together in the parlor, smoking some of his peculiar weed. The night was cool and he lit a ?re, a cozy fruitwood blaze.
“She was the child I thought I would always have,” I said after a long silence. “When Martha and Timothy would grow up and move away, I saw myself growing old with Hannah by my side. I knew her opportunities in life would be”—I paused—“limited. I wanted to be there for her—and I always assumed she would be with me.”
Andrew stared into the ?re, and ?nally spoke: “Seems like whenever I start to love somebody, they disappear from my life.”
He had never spoken to me about his family. I watched the light from the ?re play over his handsome features and ?icker in his eyes. We were sitting very close to each other, sharing the pipe, and quite suddenly, without thinking, I leaned toward him and kissed him on the cheek. He turned his face toward me and, affected by the weed’s calming in?uence, I kissed him lightly on the mouth. He returned my kiss, ?rst lightly, then eagerly. But then he drew back.
“Come to my room,” I whispered.
He tilted his head, looking at me quizzically. After a long moment, he said, “No … I don’t think so.”
I lowered my head in shame. What had I been thinking? Had my grief ?nally driven me mad?
He brought his hand over to my chin and lifted my head so he could meet my eyes. “You may already know this, Emily, but I do love you very much,” he said simply.
It thrilled me just to have him say my name for the ?rst time.
“I have for some time. But no good would come from it. Believe me.”
“Why not?” I asked miserably; I was feeling so empty.
He kissed my cheek, and I realized there were tears streaming down my face. “I’ll explain everything to you someday. But this isn’t the right time.” He wiped away my tears with another light kiss on the cheek. Then he rose from the couch. “Good night, Emily,” he said kindly, and left for the playhouse without glancing back, leaving me alone in my wretchedness.
“Well, you’ve certainly made a proper hash of things,” Martin chided me when I got into bed. “You foolish woman, have you no pride left at all? Trying to seduce a black slave!”
“Oh, do be quiet, Martin,” I snapped. The weed had muddled my thoughts: I was feeling aggrieved … aroused … and morti?ed. I had wanted the comfort of another person under my quilt. Instead, I was to be rebuked by a ghost.
“You surprise me, Emily,” he continued. “You certainly never tried to seduce me.”
The next morning, and for several days afterward, I avoided Andrew’s glance. I continued to serve him breakfast; I coolly discussed our chores. And I tutored him, as I always had. But something had changed between us. The good-natured banter was gone. In its place were silence, tension, and pain—above all, pain.
But incredibly, I wanted him all the more. Now in my cleareyed mornings, even without bene?t of the strange weed, I fantasized about what it would be like to lead him to my bed. When he was not looking, I gazed at him like a love-struck schoolgirl. I watched for him when he came out of the shower area near the cistern; I feasted on the curves of his body when he worked in the garden. Clearly, I was losing my mind.
At times, I wondered if I should just give up and move back to Key West or New Orleans. There seemed to be little reason to stay; I wasn’t tending the light anyway. I had wanted to remain on the island because I thought it would be safer for my children to be away from the breakouts of diseases that plagued Key West. But I hadn’t counted on raids by warring Indians. Dorothy had been right after all.
Perhaps I was developing these feelings for Andrew because he was simply the only man around and I was still a vital young woman. Maybe it had something to do with having lost another child. I didn’t know anymore. All I knew was that when I heard him talking to the children, laughing with them, I wanted him to hold me, kiss me, explore my body …
Finally, after almost a week, Andrew returned to the cookhouse after supper when the children were asleep and asked if I would like to smoke with him. My heart leaped in my chest and I nodded.
When I joined him, he had lit a ?re in the grate and made room for me on the couch. We sat sharing the pipe, smoking in silence for a few minutes. Outside, I could see night birds ?shing over the water, diving and striking, their squeals cutting through the silence between us.
Andrew put the pipe down. “Emily,” he said. “Look at me.”
I turned, and he kissed me lightly on the lips, igniting a rush of emotion, which I forced myself to hold in check. “You’ve been on this island for too long. You’ve forgotten the rules.”
“But it’s different here,” I protested. “We can make our own rules about”—I gestured at the space between us—“about this.”
“That’s not true, Emily. If it was, I wouldn’t have to go running into the playhouse all the time.”
I considered this. He was right about one thing. This island had become a cocoon of sorts, and perhaps this was dangerous. “Tell me,” I said, “I want to know more about you.”
He turned back toward the ?re. “Well, ?rst of all … I lied. I’m not free.” He stood up and slowly went to poke the ?re, then turned to me with pain in his eyes. “I’m still a slave. I didn’t lose my manumission papers … I never had any. I still belong to the captain of Der Nederlander.”
“How did that happen? You told me you were pressed onto a ship in Savannah.” This confession was a con?rmation of all the suspicions that had played on the edges of my mind since his arrival.
He just shook his head.
“Well,” I managed to say, “as far as I’m concerned, you are free.”
“No. Legally, I’m not. My massa sold me to the Dutch captain when he made a stop for supplies in Georgia. The crew threw me down onto the slave deck with the Africans who were going to Cuba to be sold. I was slated for the sugar plantations over there when I jumped ship.”
He paused, staring into the ?re before speaking again. “Emily, the last time I went to a white woman’s bed, I got into a big heap of trouble—you’ve seen those scars on my back.”
Settling next to me again on the couch, he continued. We passed the pipe back and forth between us, and I listened to his story: His grandmother had come over from West Africa in chains when she was ?fteen. She was raped often by her master, which was how Andrew’s mother was born. Then Andrew’s mother was sold to another plantation, one owned by a tobacco planter named Thomas Watson. He raped her—and she became pregnant with Andrew.
“He got plenty of slave women pregnant,” Andrew said, “so I got relatives up there in Georgia I don’t even know about. Lots of white women liked it if their husbands messed with the slave women. Less work for them in the bedroom. Besides,” he added wryly, “more slaves that way, and for nothing.”
Thomas Watson never acknowledged Andrew as his son, but he did treat him differently. He let Andrew work in the garden and perform chores around the house. When Watson’s wife passed away in childbirth, he was left with a passel of daughters. He soon married again, this time to a younger woman named Sarah, who was from Charleston. She was twenty, and very pretty.
“She smiled at me all the time,” he said. He shrugged. “I just thought she was being nice …”
“How old were you at this point?”
“Twenty-three? Twenty-?ve? I’m not sure what my age is. Slaves there weren’t allowed to get married, but I had started to keep company with a nice slave girl named Ginny. She got pregnant and I became a father …” He smiled. “A little girl the massa named Cleo.”
Meanwhile, Sarah promoted Andrew to work in the house. She bought him good clothes for serving at the table, and even taught him a few songs and hymns. His mama and Ginny kept warning him about Sarah’s attention, but he dismissed their concerns.
“She played the piano, like you.” He smiled at me.
“This all explains why you speak … better than other slaves.”
“I reckon so. I wanted Sarah to think well of me. And she liked that. I think she kind of considered me some sort of experiment. She and massa sometimes had me sing for their guests. I would leave off my work to perform … and I loved the applause.”
Thomas Watson wanted sons, and he soon turned against Sarah after she bore him two daughters. Sarah grew unhappy, and Thomas became abusive. He had Andrew move her things to a bedroom on the other side of the house. Sometimes Andrew found her alone in her room, crying, and bruised.
“Well, one day when nobody was around, I was repairing some shutters, and she called me upstairs. Said she needed me to do something for her.”
“Yes?” I said, urging him to continue.
When he got to her room, Sarah seduced him. (I gathered from Andrew’s expression now that she must not have had a di?cult time of this.) Their relationship went on for quite a while, many months after that—until Sarah became pregnant.
Sarah panicked. She ?gured if she could get Thomas to take her back to bed, then she could let him think it was his and get through most of her pregnancy, leastwise till she could ?gure out what to do. They knew her baby wouldn’t be white, so she planned to leave Thomas around her eighth month or so and have the baby in Charleston. Using her wiles and a few shots of bourbon one night, she got her husband to take her back.
But the baby came almost a month early. It was a little boy, and he looked just like Andrew. There was no point in lying after that. Thomas ordered his foreman to tie Andrew down in the barn and slash him with a bullwhip. “Almost down to the bone,” Andrew said. Then he took care of Sarah himself. He beat her half to death and packed her off to Charleston with her “nigger bastard.”
“How horrible,” I whispered.
“He asked Sarah if I’d raped her. She said no. If she’d said yes, she might have avoided the beating, and I would have been lynched on the spot. Instead, I was arrested.”
“Did you ever see Sarah again?”
“No.”
“The baby?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“And what about your family? Ginny and Cleo?”
Andrew didn’t answer, and I saw tears in his eyes. Finally, he spoke. “He sold them. I don’t know where they went.”
After that, Andrew sat in jail for a year. There were rumors of an illegal Dutch slaver arriving near Savannah. Then, one night, a few members of the crew took Andrew from the jail, dragged him down to the port, and shoved him onto their boat. He was tossed down into the slave deck with all the African slaves on their way to the Caribbean, and they secured him in irons with another slave. Andrew overheard two English members of the crew laughing and saying how they intended to “splice the main brace” in Havana—a reference to rum drinking. And he realized they were headed to Cuba, where he would be sold again.
Andrew’s chance to escape came the night of the bad storm. The crew needed more hands up on deck, so they hauled Andrew up in chains. They unchained him so he could work alongside the sailors, and then they put the chains back on. But before they could return him to the slave deck, the ship was slapped by a rogue wave, and Andrew was left alone while the sailors tried to stabilize the vessel.
“So I jumped,” he said. As luck would have it, he came upon a downed tree that was ?oating and hung on to it. “Then I saw your beam. And the next day, Martha and Timothy found me.”
“And then their mother was horrible to you,” I said.
He slowly shook his head. “No.”
He reached out and touched the tendrils of my hair that had escaped from my hairpins. “Emily, just having me here … it’s not legal. I’m not a freedman.”
“I don’t care about that,” I said.
“And even if we did what you’re suggesting”—he nodded up toward my bedroom—“what if you get pregnant? I can promise you, Emily, that baby would be dark-skinned. What then? And what would your children think?”
I sighed and rose from the couch.
“Good night, Emily,” he said. Then he kissed me gently.
I left him in the parlor and went to bed alone, checking ?rst on my sleeping children and gazing out at the tower and the light beam from my bedroom window. It was many hours before I fell asleep.