It was a bright morning, about ten o’clock. Runaway negroes know we’re a station on the Underground Railroad. We live in the small town of Christiana, Pennsylvania, on the Maryland border. Two nights before he’d taken in two runaways from the Harris plantation in Buckstown, Maryland, a state part slave and part free. I couldn’t understand him risking his life for all those negroes who came to our door in the middle of the night looking like something the cat dragged in. He’d been saying a lot of things like that to me lately, because I refused to get involved with his abolitionist doings. For this your mother gave her life when you were born.

“No soul,” he said to me, “you’ve got no soul. It wasn’t so much the words I said as how I said them. “Why can’t they just be told?” I asked her. That morning I was working on a wagon wheel pattern, which Aunt Susan Elizabeth said signaled the slaves to pack everything that would go into a wagon or that could be used in transit. I hated those quilts because I was always having to work on one. She must have explained to me a dozen times the many things those knots meant. The quilts each had a set number of square knots. These square knots were left on the front on purpose. It had to do with the square knots left visible on the front, which Aunt Susan Elizabeth said was usually the sign of shoddy workmanship.īut not with these quilts. What, I don’t know because I could never quite learn the differences.

We had five of those quilts, and the ones on the fence were constantly changed.Įach one had a different message. I know because I put them there for Aunt Susan Elizabeth.

There was always a quilt on the front wooden fence to show we were a safe house for runaways. He went about those doings with an obsession. She drove me to distraction and I would have given anything to be away from her, from that house, yes, even from Papa, who had few words of cheerfulness for me since the day I was born and fewer yet since he’d become involved with his abolitionist doings, which seemed like forever now. She was Papa’s aunt, getting on in years and in grouchiness. I was upstairs in my room in our rambling white farmhouse, sent upstairs by Papa because I sassed Aunt Susan Elizabeth. It is muddled in my brain anyway, maybe because I choose to leave it muddled. I try not to think of that morning in May of this year of 1851.

The Ever-After Bird by Ann Rinaldi