Redfield Farm: A Novel of the Underground Railroad Read Free

school?”
    “Yes, sir. Seems Charlie and Rad come upon those two Negroes right after me and Ann saw them and told them they’d hide them in the school until it was safe. Then they lit out to Bedford to look for a slave catcher they saw there yesterday. He was offerin’ a reward for two slaves escaped from North Carolina.” Jesse was breathless with telling the story. Then Ben took it up.
    “While we were standin’ there talkin’ to Zeke, along come Rad and Charlie with the slave catcher. He got chains out of his saddle bags and had the two of them chained up in no time. They tried to fight him off, but Zeke and Rad and Charlie helped him. He gave Rad and Charlie a twenty dollar gold piece each! They gave Zeke a dollar for guardin’ them!”
    “Uncle Sammy was furious,” Jesse added. “He didn’t say anything, but you know how he looks when he’s mad. Like a cock rooster, red faced and raised hackles!”
    I listened in silence, my mind racing. So that’s what Pru Hartley was doing down by the creek! She’d seen those Negroes, same as us. She’d gone and told her no account daddy about them, and now look what had happened!
    Papa listened to the boys’ account, expressionless. Once or twice his eyes met Mama’s and looked away. He, too, was full of anger—anger that would come out. This week, next week, a month from now, he would stand up in Meeting and hold forth about the evil curse that was slavery.
    But Rad Hartley and Charlie Marsh wouldn’t be there to hear it. They weren’t Friends—at least not anymore. Rad had been read out of meeting for his drinking, and Mama said the rest of the family had fallen away. I pictured the Hartleys, all twelve of them—all tow headed—standing on an overhang above the creek, with the water eating away underneath them, falling away. Still, Friends would be exhorted to have nothing to do with Rad or Charlie. Not to hire them or buy anything from them or loan them anything. There would be a price to pay for their treachery.
    Jesse’s face was red with anger as he and Ben related the picture of the slave trader riding off toward the south with the two black men in tow, heads bowed, stumbling along, hands shackled behind their backs, metal collars linked by chains about their necks.
    I could see it as sure as if I’d been there. My heart quickened. I knew even then that all human beings should be treated with respect, even the likes of Zeke and Rad and Charlie. Even them—and Pru. Hard though it might be.
    That was the start of it. The first time I ever heard tell of black slaves running away from their masters and white people helping them do it. Little did I know where the knowledge, and my brother Jesse, would take me.

Chapter 2
     

1847
     
    P ru Hartley wasn’t through with me. Not by a long shot. The Hartley clan lived down over the hill on the other side of the creek. You couldn’t see their tumbledown cabin from Redfield Farm, but it was there. The evidence was all around us—a chicken missing from the coop, a sickle left lying around disappeared—Papa said they’d steal anything they could carry. There was plain meanness in that bunch, and, for me especially, Pru. She knew how uncomfortable she made me and relished it.
    Mama died in childbirth with her eighth baby when I was twelve, leaving Papa with seven children to finish raising. The baby, a boy, died, too. Mary was sixteen, so she had most of the work, but I did almost as much. Ben and Jesse helped with the farm, and Mary and I cooked, cleaned and looked after the younger ones, Betsy and Nathaniel, without a lot of help from Rachel, who at ten, had a long way to go toward growing up.
    Mary was kind, a lot like Mama. I didn’t realize it then, of course. It was only later that I would look at her and see Mama in her expression or gestures. But she grew up fast, and by the time she was twenty, in 1844, the young men were coming to court. Once they started standing around looking cow-eyed at