Mustard Seed Read online

  The interior of the train car was cheery, with shiny crimson paint that perfectly matched the velvet-covered benches and made a lovely contrast with the yellow upholstered ceiling and bright-yellow shutters. Currently the car was nearly filled to capacity, but the number of riders changed at every stop. They were surrounded mostly by men, but Lisbeth was not the only unaccompanied woman.

  Matthew had assured her this was a safe form of transportation, but it seemed unbelievable that traveling forty miles per hour wasn’t harmful to their health. By the miracle of this modern invention, the five-hundred-mile trek from Columbus, Ohio, to Washington, DC, on the B&O Railroad would take less than twenty hours. She had never traveled this far without Matthew and hoped that they would not run into any unforeseen difficulties that she could not handle on her own. She wanted to appear confident to her children and took comfort in their company, but she continued to question the wisdom of bringing Sammy and Sadie on this journey.

  They were scheduled to arrive at the capital before dark. In Washington, DC, they would stay in a hotel for the night and then travel the following day on the Richmond and Potomac line to Richmond, Virginia, to her parents’ new home.

  In reality it wasn’t a very new home for them. They’d been living there since being forced to sell Fair Oaks eight years earlier. When Lisbeth had made the decision to escape from the plantation, she hadn’t considered that the family she left behind might be shunned by their neighbors, causing them enormous financial hardship. She had entirely overestimated her parents’ place in society and underestimated the cruelty of the Cunninghams, the family she’d nearly married into. Lisbeth never regretted her choice to leave, but she felt shame for the harm she’d brought upon her parents and her brother, Jack.

  Sammy was bent over, his brown hair practically touching the pages, reading a printed brochure he’d picked up at the train station. “Did you know that the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad provided transportation for Union soldiers during the war?” he asked. Without waiting for an answer, he continued. “It was raided by the Confederacy a bunch of times! Bridges were blown up, and then they had to be rebuilt.” He looked up at the closed shutters. “I wonder if we will be riding over some of the new bridges.”

  Despite herself, Lisbeth smiled at her son’s enthusiasm. For him the battles were like a grand story, but she was painfully aware of the human cost of the war. It had been taxing to have Matthew away for months, fighting for the Union while she tended to their small farm. She’d lived in constant fear while he was soldiering, but she had done her best to shelter her children from her anxiety, carrying on as if it were but an adventure. Matthew had returned home with all of his limbs and only a small cloud over his spirit. So many families were not as fortunate. Too many were devastated by the conflict, their men coming home beaten down in body or soul, or never returning at all. When a man simply disappeared, and the family members never learned the circumstances, it was especially haunting.

  “Sammy and Sadie, I have a request,” Lisbeth began, and Sammy’s hazel eyes and Sadie’s blue ones jumped to her. She’d been wrestling with how to bring up a difficult subject, but she knew she had to address it before they arrived. “Do not mention the war when we are in Richmond. It is a disturbing topic that will be painful to our family. Please do not speak of it.”

  They nodded. Sammy asked, “Uncle Jack was a Union prisoner, wasn’t he?”

  “Yes. It cannot have been pleasant. And Aunt Julianne lost her father and two brothers. As you can imagine they are not very sympathetic to our cause.”

  Sadie’s eyes got big. “Did Poppa kill them?”

  Lisbeth took a deep breath. “No. The One Hundred and Fiftieth Infantry defended Washington, DC. Poppa was not stationed near her home. My understanding is her father and brothers were killed in North Carolina.”

  “She must be very sad,” Sadie said.

  Lisbeth nodded in agreement. “One never gets over a loss such as that. You simply learn to live with the ache.”

  “We’ll meet our auntie, won’t we?” Sadie asked.

  “Uncle Jack, Aunt Julianne, and Cousin Johnny live with Grandmother and Grandfather Wainwright,” Lisbeth explained. “We will be staying with all of them.”

  “Is their house grand?” Sammy asked.

  “I haven’t ever been there,” Lisbeth replied, “so I can’t say, but they have servants’ quarters, as well as room for us, so it must be quite large, though Mother describes it as cramped.”

  “Why did they leave the home you grew up in?” Sammy asked.

  Once again Lisbeth wrestled to find an honest, but discreet, answer.

  She spoke carefully. “You know that I did not marry the man my parents chose for me. When I went to Ohio with your father, it was like I chose to be on another team.”

  “The Union team?” Sammy wondered.

  “I didn’t realize there would be a war when I left,” Lisbeth explained to her children, “and that we’d be on different sides, but, yes, that’s essentially what happened. They are angry for all that they lost, and blame me. They became bitter and scared.”

  “Why is it your fault?” Sammy asked.

  Lisbeth took a deep breath. It was hard to put into words. Her son stared at her, waiting for an answer.

  “I said yes to an engagement to a man named Edward Cunningham, which is a promise to get married. When I broke that promise everyone shunned the family I left behind in Virginia.”

  “What’s shunned?” Sadie asked.

  “Their neighbors ignored them, wouldn’t buy or sell from them or invite them to parties. Your uncle Jack lost all of his friends.”

  Sadie’s mouth turned down in empathy. “Poor Uncle Jack. He must have been very sad.”

  Lisbeth nodded in agreement. It was hard to admit to her children that her choice had hurt her brother.

  “You broke a promise?” Sammy looked like he’d learned a precious secret about his mother. Her lessons about keeping one’s word had sunk in.

  Edward’s traumatic betrayal was something she avoided speaking of or even thinking about, and she had certainly never told her children. Lisbeth considered her words carefully. “I broke a promise because I found out that Edward did something horrible to someone he should have protected,” she explained.

  “What did—” Sammy started to ask.

  Lisbeth interrupted. “You are too young for the specifics, but know that it was so awful that I knew that I could not have a husband like him.”

  “What did he do?” Sadie looked so curious.

  The horrible image of Edward raping a field hand forced its way into her mind. Picturing the desperation in the young girl’s brown eyes caused a knot in her stomach and made her physically ill.

  Lisbeth steadied herself with a slow breath. “When you are fifteen I will tell you,” she said firmly. “You are too young to learn about such things. Breaking my word was a very hard decision, but it was the right one given the circumstances. Keeping your word is important, very important, but sometimes you learn new information that makes breaking your promise the right thing to do.”

  “I was almost born in Virginia?” Sadie asked, seemingly excited and fascinated by this possibility.

  Lisbeth smiled, glad to be moving to a new topic. Realizing she was about to challenge her daughter’s understanding of herself, she gently replied, “You would not have been born at all if I hadn’t married your father.”

  Sadie drew her eyebrows together, evidently wrestling with the possibility of her own nonexistence. She stared at Lisbeth, her face changing expressions as she thought through the implications of this information.

  “That hurts my head to think about,” Sadie finally replied.

  “It hurts my heart to think about no you!” Lisbeth replied, smiling at her daughter. She looked at Sammy. “And you too!”

  “Did you tell them about the bad thing that man did?” Sammy asked.

  “Who?” Lisbeth asked.

  “Your parent
s,” Sammy replied.

  Lisbeth flashed back to Mother’s utter disregard when Lisbeth had told her about the scene under the willow tree. She had insisted that part of becoming a mature woman was accepting that this behavior was a common part of life for men, which had added to Lisbeth’s horror. Edward’s actions and Mother’s casual acceptance of his brutality utterly shook Lisbeth’s understanding of the world and ultimately led her to abandon that community along the James River.

  “I told my mother, but she did not share my concern,” Lisbeth explained.

  “Oh,” Sammy said, worry in his eyes. “Like they didn’t understand that slavery is bad.”

  Lisbeth nodded. “Yes.”

  “Do they understand now?” he asked, still looking concerned.

  “Let’s hope enough time has passed for them to come to peace with my decision,” Lisbeth said, sounding more confident than she felt.

  “Cousin Johnny won’t be mad at you, will he?” Sadie asked, putting her own priorities first, as children so often did. Sadie planned on being dear friends with her cousin.

  “No.” Lisbeth chuckled.

  “You don’t think Cousin Johnny has a baseball glove already, do you?” Sammy asked.

  “Unlike Ohio, baseball is new to Virginia,” Lisbeth reassured Sammy. “It is unlikely he will have one, and I think he will be very excited to have something as modern as a baseball glove.”

  “I promise I won’t talk about the war. Now can we watch outside, please!” Sadie begged.

  Sadie’s enthusiasm was infectious. Lisbeth nodded and opened the shutters. Blurry cornfields rushed by. Her children watched ahead to where they were going with excitement, while Lisbeth gazed out at where they had been with trepidation, preparing herself for what was to come.

  CHAPTER 2

  JORDAN

  Oberlin, Ohio

  Jordan slipped the opened letter into her pocket and opened Harper’s Weekly on the wooden table in front of her. She read news from the world beyond Ohio while her mother cooked bean soup and biscuits for supper. When Jordan came across a story about the treatment of freedmen anywhere in the South, she read out loud, Mama hanging on to every word.

  Jordan didn’t share her mother’s interest in the former Confederacy. Many years had passed since Mama had carried her daughter to freedom, but despite the abolition of slavery, her mother was still obsessed about the safety of their last remaining relative in Virginia.

  Jordan was educated enough to understand that the conflict was over and they had won. The war ended three years ago, and the federal government was righting the wrongs of the past. Despite the last few gasps of protests by backward-thinking Whites, equality was now the law of the land. The Thirteenth Amendment had abolished slavery throughout the United States, not just in the ten states in rebellion covered by the Emancipation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment would soon grant equal protection to all Americans. America was moving forward.

  She read out loud an article about the Freedmen’s Bureau that proved her thinking. It concluded:

  Congress is providing that the Bureau, which was in its nature temporary, shall cease its work. It has taught the freedmen that they are citizens of a government which recognizes their equal manhood. It has taught the late master class that all men have rights which must be respected. Clad in the armed authority of the United States, it has been a true minister of peace, and as the occasion for its service disappears, the Freedmen’s Bureau passes into history with that highest crown of praise, the pious gratitude of the poor and unfortunate.

  “They closing up the bureau?” Mama questioned, panic in her caramel-brown eyes. She rushed over from the stove to look at the paper, as if she could make any sense of the letters. She pointed to the paper with her dark-brown finger and asked, “When they gonna do that?”

  “It doesn’t say, but, Mama, there is no need for concern. So long as Grant is elected president, the liberty of the Southern Negro is assured.” Then, to assert her deepest interest, she added, “At least for the men.”

  While she was speaking Samuel entered the room. Like Jordan, Samuel had been one of the few Negroes to attend Oberlin College, though he had studied law, not education. Born ten years before her, at thirty he was settled into life as a husband and a father. He married Nora soon after he returned from fighting in the war. Their baby, Otis, was the most cherished member of their household. There wasn’t much demand for lawyers in Oberlin, so Samuel used his hands as well as his mind, working part-time as a lawyer and part-time with their father, making high-quality furniture.

  “Are you fussing about women’s suffrage again?” Samuel asked, his deep voice somewhere between taunting and teasing.

  “Men—their rights and nothing more! Women—their rights and nothing less!” Jordan retorted, citing her favorite slogan from The Revolution, the women’s rights weekly newspaper.

  “You don’t need the vote.” Samuel shrugged. “I’ll vote on your behalf, Sister.”

  “And your father gonna vote for me,” Mama said, giving her two cents. “It just fine so long as Negro men get to vote . . . everywhere.”

  “I wish to express my views for myself,” Jordan responded, her cheeks heating up.

  It was infuriating that her family cared less for her own rights than the rights of faraway freedmen. For her, women’s freedoms mattered as much as those of the formerly enslaved. She had even memorized Sojourner Truth’s magnificent speech, “Ain’t I a Woman”—the original one delivered spontaneously at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron in 1851, not the version revised and popularized by Gage more as an argument for abolition than women’s rights. Jordan’s favorite lines were from the opening:

  Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ’twixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the White men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

  Her family appreciated the eloquence and passion behind the words, but they did not share her devotion to women’s suffrage. Mama wished Jordan were more enamored with Harriet Tubman and less devoted to Sojourner Truth.

  Mama ignored Jordan’s comment. “Your sister say they closing the Freedmen’s Bureau,” she said to Samuel. “It gonna get ugly—well, uglier. We gotta go back to Virginia to get Sarah out safe.”

  Jordan shook her head. For years Mama had been begging her “niece”—Jordan’s “cousin” Sarah—to move from the plantation to Ohio. Sarah’s mother, Rebecca, had been taken into Mama’s family when Rebecca was bought by the Wainwrights, and Mama called Rebecca her sister even though they didn’t share any blood. Rebecca had died suddenly a few years back, but Mama was determined to bring her last remaining Virginia relative to freedom, even though Sarah had been freed by the Emancipation Proclamation for five years.

  Mama gave Jordan a sharp look and scolded, “You owe everthin’ to Sarah. Your cousin wrote the pass that got us free. Never forget that!”

  “Mama, she is not going to come live with us. How many times have you had me write to her, asking if she wants to move to Ohio?” Jordan said, keeping her voice calm and respectful, though she wanted to shout. “She can still read. When she writes back she never even responds to your suggestion to relocate.”

  “If’n we go with a wagon, she gonna say yes,” Mama said. “I feel it in my bones.”

  Jordan looked at Samuel. He shrugged. Typical Samuel. He pretended to go along with Mama, but then he just did what he wanted, leaving Jordan to take care of their mother. Mama’s “feeling in her bones” was nearly impossible to reason with, but Jordan was going to try.

  “It will take weeks, maybe a month, to get there. Virginia is more than five hundred miles away,” she reminded her mother.

  Mama stiffened and tipped her head forward. Jordan saw a quiet storm was about to rain down on her.

  “I may not knows how many miles we is from the James River, but I know just how far away i
t is,” Mama chastised, putting on her thickest dialect. “I done walked most of the ways . . . with you on my back. I don’ need you to tell me it will be a hard and long journey.”

  “Yes, Mama,” Jordan said, annoyed at being reminded, once again, about the hardship her mother had endured to bring the two of them out of slavery. The way Mama talked about it you’d think it happened last year, not nineteen years earlier.

  Seeing her mama’s mind was set on this fool’s errand, Jordan switched strategies so she would not have to go along on the journey. She did not want to take up the rest of her summer break traveling to Virginia to rescue a reluctant stranger. “We can take care of everything here no matter how long you and Pops are gone.”

  Mama shook her head slowly. “We all gonna go. You gonna get a chance to see what you come from.”

  Dread trickled into Jordan’s stomach. The set look on her mother’s face told her that she had to come up with a compelling reason to remain behind. Quickly she thought through counterarguments.

  “I fear I’ll miss the start of the term if I travel with you,” she said. Nothing mattered more to Mama than education.

  Mama retorted, “Well, then, we better get goin’, so we gets you back in time.”

  “All of us?” Samuel asked. “You want to bring Otis to the South?”

  Mama shook her head. “No, we ain’t taking my precious granbaby on that long trip. Your son and wife can stay back. They gonna be fine without you for a bit.”

  “Pops just got a big chair order,” Samuel said. “He asked me to work extra time until it’s done. He won’t want either of us to be gone for weeks.”

  It sounded like Samuel had finally realized Mama’s plan might affect him too. Jordan was glad to have an ally in her brother.