Candle in the Darkness - Lynn N. Austin [116]
The hall clock struck midnight before I finally found the courage to tell God I would do His will, regardless of the cost. Then I lay awake for two more hours, trying in vain to think of a plausible excuse to apply for a travel permit. I fell asleep before I could concoct a plan. But when my grandmother’s servant frantically shook me awake early the next morning, I knew that God had provided a way.
“Missy Caroline . . . Missy Caroline, please wake up,” she begged. “You got to come help me with your grandmother.”
I struggled to wake up after a too-short night, feeling groggy and disoriented. “Why? What’s wrong?”
“Lord have mercy, Missy Caroline . . . I think your grandmother is dead.”
Aunt Anne went to the provost marshal’s office with me to apply for a permit to travel to Hilltop. She pleaded our case more convincingly than I ever could have. “My husband would never forgive me,” she said, “if I buried his mother in any other plot of ground except the family graveyard at Hilltop, beside her husband.”
“Don’t you know that your plantation is likely behind enemy lines by now?” the marshal asked.
“Yes, I know.”
“The Yankees may not allow you to come back to Richmond once you cross over.”
“I don’t care. It was mostly for my mother-in-law’s sake that we came to Richmond in the first place. My husband didn’t want her to see what the Yankees would do to Hilltop.”
In the end, the Provost Marshal reluctantly granted us permission, adding my name and Eli’s to the permit, and giving it to Aunt Anne to sign. When I read the document on the ride home, I nearly fainted with relief and gratitude that the marshal hadn’t asked me to sign my name to it: Permission is hereby granted to Mrs. William Fletcher, Miss Caroline Fletcher, and their slave, Eli Fletcher, to visit Hilltop Plantation upon their honor not to communicate, in writing or verbally, any fact ascertained which, if known to the enemy, might be injurious to the Confederate States of America.
I sent Eli out to purchase a plain pine coffin. The other servants washed and dressed Grandmother and combed her feathery white hair. Eli tenderly lifted her tiny body into the casket.
“God forgive me,” I murmured as I placed Robert’s Bible beneath her folded hands.
Young Thomas threw a temper fit when he learned he had to stay behind in Richmond, so while Aunt Anne soothed him, I gathered my servants out in the kitchen and asked them to pray for Eli and me. Then, when the coffin was finally loaded onto Aunt Aunt’s farm wagon, we headed out the Mechanicsville Turnpike toward Hilltop.
The three-hour journey to the plantation took more than four hours as Confederate troops stopped us repeatedly along the way, searching the wagon, the coffin, and all of our clothes and belongings. But no one thought to search the Bible I’d placed beneath Grandmother’s stiff, folded hands. When we finally reached the last Confederate picket line, the officer in charge begged us not to go any further.
“The Yankees are not gentlemen, Miss Fletcher, they’re animals. I’d hate to tell you what they might do to a pretty young lady like you.”
“I appreciate your concern. But Eli won’t let us come to any harm.”
The officer pulled me aside, whispering, “I don’t want to disillusion you, but that boy is going to bolt for freedom as soon as you cross over to the other side. All the Negroes do. They think the Yankees will set them free.”
“Not Eli. He won’t leave us.”
The man gravely shook his head as he helped me climb back into the wagon. He obviously believed he was sending us to our deaths. “I wish you all the luck in the world, ladies. You’re going to need it.”
Eli snapped the reins and we headed down the road into no-man’s-land. When we’d traveled about a mile, Aunt Anne said, “This is our land. We’re on Hilltop’s property now.”
I thought