Freedom Stone by Jeffrey Kluger Page A

leg.”
    â€œYou could send him a telegraph!” Lillie said. “I seen the office.”
    â€œAin’t none but white folks allowed to talk by telegraph,” Henry said. “Even free blacks ain’t allowed. Besides, it costs dear, and I don’t got enough money.”
    â€œYou could write him a letter, then.”
    Henry gave off with a rueful laugh. “I was a slave till this summer, girl,” he said. “I can’t read nor write.”
    â€œI can!” Lillie exclaimed, then glanced around and lowered her voice. “I can,” she whispered. “Do you know the farmer’s name?”
    â€œEveryone knew it. A man name of Appleton, in Warren County just outside o’ Vicksburg. We was stationed near his land for three months; took regular runs over there for water and firewood and all manner o’things.”
    â€œName and county’s enough address to get a letter to him.”
    â€œThe mails ain’t runnin’ regular anywhere in the South,” Henry said. “The worse the fightin’ goes, the more the roads get cut off. And the routes that is good are full o’ thieves what steal the mailbags lookin’ for money.”
    â€œI still gotta try.”
    â€œEven tryin’s trouble. You get caught writin’ a letter— never mind sendin’ it to a white man—you’ll get whipped and sold.”
    â€œMaybe,” Lillie said. “But you’re a free man. You can do what you want. S’pose I write the letter but we put your name to it? You can send it from here and say you’re thinkin’ about a friend what died in the war and you won’t sleep easy till you know if he done wrong.”
    â€œI do a fraud like that, and I could be called for helpin’ you escape. How you reckon I’d do back on a plantation or tossed in prison with just the one leg?”
    Lillie felt herself go hot. “But you got your freedom!” she cried. “We’s still slaves and we ain’t s’posed to be, and you got your freedom! This here’s our only chance to get what’s ours before my brother gets sold off!”
    Henry regarded Lillie thoughtfully, and then sat back and rubbed his eyes. He looked tired—tired from his wound and tired from the war and tired, Lillie reckoned, from the things he’d seen there. She reflected that if her papa were alive, this was the way he’d look too. At length, Henry raised his eyes back to her and smiled wanly.
    â€œYour papa was right,” he said, “you is small, but you is a bull. All right, child, I’ll help you.” Lillie started to leap up and hug him, but Henry held up his hand. “Hear me, though. There’s somethin’ you got to do for me in return.” Lillie sat back down. “I got a family on the Orchard Hill plantation—wife and a boy about ten years old. I ain’t seen neither of ’em since before the war, and they think I died in the fightin’. You got to tell ’em otherwise.”
    â€œThey wasn’t freed with you?”
    â€œThey wasn’t even livin’ with me. We was once all together on a farm not far from here, but they got sold off’bout a year before I went to war. That freedom rule don’t hold for split-up families.”
    â€œWhy’d you go fight, then?”
    â€œI reckoned I could come home and earn some money and buy ’em free. Before I went to fight, I asked their master and he said yes. But when I got back from the war and went to tell ’em I weren’t killed, the Master met me with a shotgun. Said I couldn’t never see ’em till I had the money to buy ’em both. He told ’em I was dead and won’t tell ’em otherwise in case they try to escape and join me.”
    â€œYou think he’d let me talk to ’em for you?” Lillie asked.
    â€œCourse not. But if you was there on an errand, you could get to