When the baby finally cried, thin, fuzzy, and completely alive, Josiah approached the bed, tears already streaming down his face. He held the child as if he were a kingdom.
They named him Thomas, after the grandfather’s middle name, the man who would never meet this child and yet had made him possible.
Eleanor watched Josiah hold his son to his chest and thought, with a ferocity that almost frightened her, “Let anyone who calls him a brute bear witness to this.”
Four more children arrived over the years. William, in 1860, solemn and observant. Margaret was born in 1863, as the war transformed the nation before their windows. James was born in 1865, flushed and with a triumphant cry. Elizabeth was born in 1868, observing everything and missing almost nothing. Their apartment expanded as the blacksmith shop prospered. They moved twice, each time to a slightly larger house on a street filled with families who knew what it meant to survive and didn’t waste energy on trivial wonder.
They weren’t free from prejudice. Far from it.
White customers were sometimes scandalized to see Eleanor sitting at the counter next to her Black husband. Children from wealthier neighborhoods pointed openly. Women in the market streets stared at children for longer periods, as if the mixing of races made visible some national contradiction they preferred to ignore. Once, in 1861, a rock pierced the blacksmith’s window at dusk, with a note wrapped around it calling Eleanor a disgrace and Josiah an animal. Josiah read the note twice, burned it in the stove, and replaced the glass before breakfast so the children would never see it.
But there was also friendship. And laughter. And neighbors who brought soup when they were sick, who helped lift Eleanor’s chair when the snow made the street impassable, who addressed Josiah as Master Freeman because his skill and constancy had earned him that title long before law or custom had bestowed it upon him.
During the war years, Freeman’s blacksmith shop did more than generate profit. Josiah repaired wagon parts for Union-sympathizing supply haulers. Eleanor kept discreet accounts for her abolitionist contacts who moved people around town. Once, in 1862, she hid two brothers who had fled Maryland in the warehouse, behind sacks of coal, for an entire night while their pursuers searched the wrong district. She did it sitting in her chair, with a revolver in her lap and a composure so cool that even Josiah looked at her afterward with renewed astonishment.
“I told you once you were strong,” he said as dawn streamed through the back window.
“You told me I’d always been strong,” she corrected him.
He smiled. “That’s right.”
In 1865, after years of sketches, measurements, and musings about iron and leather, Josiah built her something that changed her life once again.
He had spent months studying the orthopedic braces worn by wounded veterans returning from war, then adapting them to her body. The contraption he had crafted was a blend of blacksmithing and unconditional love: metal supports tailored to the shape of her legs, leather straps, a belt cinched at the waist, and a pair of crutches precisely adjusted to her reach and balance.
When he first brought the contraption home, Eleanor laughed in disbelief.
“You’re thinking of putting me in that?”
“I want to offer you a new way to deal with gravity.”
He put the splints on her himself, kneeling on the living room floor with the concentration of a surgeon. The children watched from the doorway; Thomas, now older, understood that something important was happening. When he fastened the last strap, Josiah stood up and held out both hands.
“Lean on me first,” he said.
Eleanor pushed.
For a terrible instant, she felt only pain and the fear she remembered. Then the splints locked, her arms bore the weight as they were already strong enough to do, and she stood up.
Not gracefully. Not firmly. But she stood up.
The room went blurry.
See next page
