Free Assassin by Anna Myers Page B

answers.
    Over the sound of the ocean, I began to recite the speech from the play I had just performed, the words that announced the death of Caesar:
    “Liberty! Freedom! Tyranny is dead!
Run hence, proclaim, cry it about the streets.”
    I wondered why the words resounded so in my memory. They certainly did not apply to my life. Tyranny was not dead in America, where a tyrant had just been elected for a second term. I began to shake uncontrollably, and yet I was perspiring too. I thought bright orange lights came from the ocean.
    Finally my head cleared. I hailed a cab, went to the train station, and caught a train back to Washington City.

9
Arabella
    HER STORY
    The winter of Willie’s death passed. I went back to the White House, working in the kitchen and picking up my lessons. For two years I studied dressmaking with Mrs. Keckley, and for two years I listened and watched for news of the war. How torn I was, a girl who worked in the White House and who admired Mr. Lincoln beyond my weak ability to express, yet whose heart remembered tenderly her old life in Richmond and the long-ago father who now wore the uniform of gray.
    I discussed the torment caused by my divided loyalties only with Steven. During those many hours of letter writing, I had discovered that the tongue-tied girl of my childhood could, with a pen in hand, express herself well. And so our letters became the foundation for our alwaysdeepening friendship, one between two young people who knew and understood each other profoundly.
    I wrote to Steven about how Union victories in the South had brought former slaves to Washington City by the thousands, carrying with them almost nothing. They were called contrabands because they were considered to be property seized during war.
    They lived in camps set up by the government down by the soggy, stinking Washington Canal, entire families huddled beneath a makeshift shanty roof that did not even keep the rain out. They were hungry and often cold and sick. Mrs. Keckley worked long hours speaking in various churches to raise money to help them, and she worked in the camps with other women to teach the children to read and to encourage the adults to plant vegetable gardens.
    “Weren’t they better off as slaves?” I asked her once as she told me about the terrible conditions under which the people lived.
    We were sitting at a table, sewing, and she leaned toward me. “Oh, no, Bella, never. We have to think of the future, of the next generation. The first steps to freedom may be very hard, but those steps must be made! It is better to starve as a free man than to eat well as a slave.”
    On January 1, 1863, the president had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, which said that all slaves in states in rebellion against the Union were officially free. Of course, as Steven pointed out to me, the Confederacy paid no attention and freed no slaves, and the proclamation didnot free the slaves in the border states where some people still owned them.
    Before the Emancipation Proclamation, the war had been about secession, not slavery, but the proclamation settled for all time the fate of slavery in America. If the Union won the war, slavery everywhere would end. The proclamation also stated that men of color could now be used in the Union Army and Navy.
    Steven and I discussed all of that in our letters. He sent me a tintype of himself in his school uniform. He had grown taller, and there was a serious look in his blue eyes. We had not seen each other in three years, and to help me feel closer to him, I frequently leaned the picture against a pitcher that stood on the table where I wrote letters.
    I told Steven of my changing attitude toward Mrs. Lincoln. “Yes, she can be difficult,” I wrote, “but I’ve come to appreciate some things about her, for instance, the way she works in the hospitals caring for the wounded. It has helped her deal with her grief over Willie.”
    In the fall of 1863 a letter had come from my