Cion

by Zakes Mda

  Although Mr. Fitzhugh normally practiced as a criminal lawyer he was particularly suited for this case because of his interest in slavery. He had written extensively in such papers as the New York Daybook, De Bow’s Review and the Richmond Examiner on the subject. His position was that slavery was a natural and rightful condition of society.

  The Owner’s position in this case was that the slave in question, a mulatto male of undetermined age, was his rightful property. He brought witnesses, his own happy mulattos who were present when he purchased the said property from a white man on the banks of the Guyandotte. He produced papers and a receipt with a mark made by the former owner, a Mr. John Tyler. There were guffaws, as the name belonged to the President of the United States, a son of Virginia no less, but also a man who had lost favor with all political parties, including his own Whig Party, for exercising the veto indiscriminately. He had lost even more favor with the Democrats for his public declaration that in principle he was opposed to the perpetuation of slavery. This was much further than the Whigs of the South were prepared to go for they were lukewarm on slavery. As far as his fellow Virginians were concerned Tyler had clearly adopted the radical anti-slavery position of the northern Whigs. He had therefore betrayed their trust.

  The similarity in names was a mere coincidence, the lawyer assured the judge. Another coincidence, said the lawyer playing to the gallery, was that the John Tyler from whom the slave was purchased was also a Whig. There was further mirth among the counselors and the officials of the august court, who were obviously Democrats. Derisive hisses of “His Accidency” were heard from the gallery.

  The Quaker abolitionist knew immediately that among these old boys his man had no chance. As a “Negro” he was not even allowed to give evidence on his own behalf. The abolitionist spoke for him and outlined his whole journey from Tipperary County in Ireland and his misfortunes in the new world. He pleaded that they allow the poor fellow to utter a few words so that they could hear his accent was clearly Irish.

  There was absolute silence when Mr. Fitzhugh made his closing remarks. His client had proved that the man in question was his mulatto slave, and the Quaker minister should in fact be charged with theft of an honest man’s property. But that was not the end of it, he said. It was important that his countrymen should note carefully what he was about to say, because he was talking on behalf of many property owners of the South whose rights were being gradually eroded by the new order.

  “The man is clearly a mulatto, your honor,” said Mr. Fitzhugh, “and we know that there are many like him who can easily pass for white. In any event poor whites are better off as slaves. Class rather than race should be the determining factor for slavery.”

  The gallery of property owners could not help applauding. The bailiff ordered silence in the court. But it took the lawyer a few more seconds to resume his speech.

  He went on to outline these ideas to the fascination of The Owner and his fellow owners in the gallery, many of whom already kept white slaves in any case.

  His position was not based on the inferiority of the black race, Fitzhugh argued. The principle of only enslaving the descendants of Africans was an antiquated one. The time had now come, as was the case in Greece and Rome, to embrace slavery of every race and variety of complexion. This was to protect the interests of the affluent class of whites in the slaveholding states. There was a sense of helplessness among these privileged classes because the South was breeding slaves that were now indistinguishable from pure whites. “If slavery was to be at all vindicated,” he said, “it must not now be on the narrow basis of color but on the broad grounds that there is an inherent right in the stronger and more wealthy classes to reduce the poorer and ignorant orders to a state of perpetual bondage.”

  The perplexed judge asked if such ideas would not instill the rebelliousness that was already apparent in the Negro. Would the Negro not think that he now ranked on the same scale of humanity as a white man? Would ideas like these not reinforce the arrogant attitude that was already evident in the free Negroes who even owned slaves themselves?

  “It is obvious to all, including to the Negro himself, that he should be a slave for he is fit only to labor and not to direct,” said Mr. Fitzhugh. “But the principle of slavery is, itself, right and does not depend on difference of complexion.”

  These views, of course, had by now become commonplace among the literate. Mr. Fitzhugh and others who thought like him had put them on the national agenda through articles in the newspapers. Those who were alive a decade later saw these ideas published in his famous book, Sociology for the South.

  But in court that day the judge emphasized that whatever decision the court reached would not be on the basis of whether whites should be slaves or not, since that was not yet the law of the Commonwealth of Virginia. It was clear to him from the evidence presented that the complainant was a fraud. He was a mulatto male, rightful property of Mr. David Fairfield. The poor Quaker minister had been duped by the mulatto, and this illustrated that ministers who often did these things from the kindness of their heart in their service to God needed to be careful. He, as the judge of the Commonwealth, therefore, did not blame the poor minister at all. The mulatto slave was obviously a scoundrel. He had mastered an Irish accent from his previous master where he had been a house slave and was now using this to cheat his way into the world of free men. The Honorable Mr. David Fairfield should therefore take his property and go home in peace. The Quaker minister should be grateful for the mercy of the court and of the Honorable David Fairfield. Otherwise he would have been charged with the theft of someone else’s property.

  The slave screamed and uttered Irish profanities to no avail.

  The Owner took his mulatto slave back to Fairfield Farms where he became an African again.

  To the slave’s surprise, after this episode he was not treated harshly anymore. He resigned himself to his fate. He performed his duties well, and soon he was promoted to a supervisory position at the vegetable gardens. By this time he was free to mingle with other white slaves, including the aristocratic ones who worked in the household. But he always preferred the company of the Africans. He was more at home with the field slaves and shared in their folklore. He found that some of the stories they told in the evenings were very similar to the folk stories he used to hear as a child back in Ireland.

  One favorite story told over and over again was about a woman called the Abyssinian Queen and how she herself used to tell stories. She was so beautiful that The Owner ran mad with desire for her. She was powerful too, for the ancestors who lived in her stories protected her and even The Owner was in awe of her. She had two sons, Nicodemus and Abednego. They were as wily as Ananse the Spider of their mother’s stories. One day the sons escaped and crossed the River Jordan. She was punished severely for their escape and for weeks or even months she lay sick on her bed, and was nursed by blind matriarchs. One day a big blue fly came and hovered over her. For the first time her pain seemed to go away. She laughed and whispered: “Thank you, Lord. Oh, thank you, my sweet Lord!” The sound of the blue fly seemed to lull her to sleep. She died smiling a broad smile.

  The white slave was fascinated by the beautiful death of the Abyssinian Queen. He vowed that one day he would retrace the steps of her two boys. One day he too would cross the River Jordan. The plantation grapevine had brought the news back to Fairfield Farms: the Abyssinian Queen’s boys lived in a paradise called Tabler Town, a day’s journey from the River Jordan. Both were crowned chiefs of Indian tribes. And both had vowed that one day they would come with their Indian braves to free everyone at the plantation.

  The white slave was not prepared to wait for that day though. Even if it took him years he would find his way to Tabler Town. He would bide his time. He would not leave anything to chance next time he escaped. He would study the methods that were used by the boys. He would learn about the quilts and the secret messages they contained. He would study other escapes recorded in folk
lore. He would take time to work out an elaborate plan. Next time he escaped, he vowed, no one would catch him.

  He had been a slave for eight years when slave stealers from Ripley, Ohio, secretly visited the region. As usual the message was relayed through songs, and the white slave, now adept at the ways of the slaves, was one of those who were able to escape.

  The Tablers of Tabler Town welcomed a new resident, a craggy Irishman by the name of Quigley. The family employed the man as a farmhand, and in the evenings listened to his stories of slavery. He told them of his escape from Fairfield Farms assisted by the sons of the Reverend John Rankin of Ripley, Ohio, of the succor he received at the home of the same Rankin overlooking the mighty Ohio River, of the insistence that he wanted to proceed to Athens County and to find two Africans he regarded as his brothers though he had never met them, namely Nicodemus and Abednego, and of his final journey to Tabler Town as a fully fledged white man after he had spent about six months with the Rankins recovering from the scars of slavery.

  He was not sure whether he actually experienced the journey to Athens County or whether he dreamed it. He remembered or dreamed an intersection where he had great difficulty turning onto the road that would lead him to Tabler Town. There were many wagons, carts and carriages that moved very slowly, blocking the road. There were also many people selling their wares and blaring bullhorns. Among them he saw his slave dressed like a Native American in a black hat and a Navajo blanket worn poncho-style. The slave looked quite different though, his formerly skeletal figure filled with glistening flesh. The slave walked among the people selling scrolls and cloths that were red and white in color. He dashed from one side of the road to the other showing his wares to people who were hurrying about. The slave approached Quigley and Quigley shouted, “Hey, you ninny, how much are those scrolls?” The slave said they were ten dollars. One year’s savings for a working man! Quigley felt there must be something about the scrolls.

  “What are they used for?” he asked.

  “As a room divider,” the slave said, stretching one so that the prospective customer could see its full length and breadth. The slave did not recognize his master, and the master did not reveal his identity.

  Although Quigley thought the scrolls were too narrow to use as dividers he still bought one. One day he would have a bedroom of his own. And a wife. He was determined not to go back to his old life of whiskey, whores and gaming. He would use the scroll to demarcate his territory so that his wife would know which side was his and which was hers. He had become very territorial from his experience of sleeping in slave quarters.

  When he stretched the scroll he discovered that it was very long. It was made of fluffy feather-like material. On it were symbols and figures. He did not know how he learned to decipher such inscriptions, but he read them and discovered that the scroll contained the story of his life—from his past to the present. He could actually read the very present—reading about himself reading the scroll. There were other symbols that he tried to decipher but with great difficulty. He assumed they contained the story of his future and of the generations that would emerge from his loins. But he could not be sure about this.

  After this the only thing he remembered vividly was an early morning after a particularly rainy night. He was waiting for a flood to subside with a group of people who were on their way to Tabler Town and beyond. Even as he stood there he was not sure if he had experienced the crossroads incident or dreamed it. No one among the people waiting knew anything about any such crossroads anywhere in the region. Yet he still had the scroll with him.

  If Quigley happened to be at his house when he told the story he would take out the scroll and show his listeners. They would marvel at the symbols and the figures and he would tell them what they meant. Right up to the time he was telling the story.

  “One day I’m gonna know what the rest means, and when that happens I will tell the future,” he said with conviction.

  The first thing he did when he got to Tabler Town was to seek out Nicodemus and Abednego. He found Abednego and wept when he learned of the death of Nicodemus. Quigley suggested to Abednego that one day they should set out to avenge Nicodemus’s death, in memory of the fellow Africans that they left behind at Fairfield Farms and of all those who had been captured and sold and tortured and killed.

  At first Abednego thought this was just idle talk. He had never really entertained any thoughts of vengeance. He was happily married to one of Harry Corbett’s beautiful daughters and was immersed in his father-in-law’s experiments with growing pawpaw in his orchards. He spent most of his days sitting there, staring at the trees as if willing them to grow, sometimes talking to them, egging them on and promising them the world if only they would show a peep of flowers. This was beginning to show results. Trees that had been growing slowly in the five years since the enterprise was started were almost the height of a man and had bloomed. Later the leaves would grow compact and dense. The plants looked healthier than those that grew in the wild. There was reason to celebrate, for the challenge of growing pawpaw as transplants had been won.

  These were the beautiful thoughts that occupied Abednego’s mind, not vengeance. The white man was not making sense, although Abednego suddenly felt ashamed that he had forgotten about Nicodemus while he established his new life in Tabler Town. But vengeance was not part of his makeup. He did not see how it would help his dead brother. Surely it would not bring him back to life. He doubted if his mother would have wanted him to commit such an act. To get rid of Quigley he promised him he was going to think seriously about it, and Quigley said that he was keen to help. He was still angry about what had been done to him and he had to take out that anger on someone.

  Abednego heard for the first time from Quigley how the Abyssinian Queen died laughing and praising the Lord after the return of Massa Blue Fly. It was a good thing, thought Abednego, that she never knew that Nicodemus did not quite reach the Promised Land. She must have been surprised on reaching the Otherworld to find Nicodemus there, newly arrived as well. Or did the Abyssinian Queen arrive before Nicodemus? There was no way of knowing how long it took Massa Blue Fly to reach her.

  As months went by a strong bond developed between Quigley and Abednego. They went hunting and fishing together. Sometimes they were brave enough to venture to Athens to watch college students play a new version of rounders called baseball. It was always dangerous to go to Athens because lurking behind the friendly face of a college town were the likes of William Tobias who were now resorting to abducting free blacks and taking them across the Ohio into slavery. Men like these were a law unto themselves. Since 1831 there were penalties for kidnapping free blacks, but that did not give any comfort to blacks because slave chasers were not deterred by such laws.

  Abednego was the best man when Quigley married one of Harry Corbett’s daughters. People talked about the wedding for a long time, but not because it was particularly grand. On the contrary it was meant to be a quiet affair at the Methodist church. What people talked about was not how beautiful the bride looked, but how her uncle, Harry Corbett’s hothead brother, caused a commotion outside the church by preaching his own sermon denouncing what was happening in the church.

  People generally dismissed the man as a rabid Indian nationalist who felt that the Negro had degraded and destroyed his Indian race by marrying into it, to the degree that it was no longer respected by other races—by which of course he meant by the whites. He also said that the Indian claim of the Tabler Town area as an ancestral land would be rejected by the state of Ohio on the basis of what he called mongrelization. But no one had thought that the man would also denounce a marriage between a daughter of the tribe and a white man. Was it because this particular white man identified more with the black people? Or did the man disburse his hatred equally without fear or favor? He had an audience too. Those citizens of Tabler Town who could not be accommodated in the small church had no choice but to listen to his sermon.

  At th
e same time another sermon was being delivered in the church. Perhaps the minister thought it best to take advantage of the presence of people of color—who didn’t normally attend his church, but who had now gathered in great numbers for the wedding of this important community member—and preach a sermon on issues that had been bothering him. He was a liberal man, well-beloved by the colored community. So people gasped when he preached against the Underground Railroad. His grounds were that it worked against the attempt to keep the races separate in America. He emphasized that he was saying all this because he was a friend of the Negroes. It was in the interests of the Negro to keep the races apart. People knew that he supported the move started a decade or so before to send all black folks to Africa. He was active in collecting funds from the wealthier citizens and in staging fund-raising events to pay for their passages. If the Negroes married other races—be they races of European origin or Indian—they would see no need to return to their continent, and the continent would then be deprived of their skills and of the civilizing influence they would have on the hordes of savages still roaming naked in the jungles of that unfortunate continent.

  Both the groom and his best man found the sermon disgusting, although it was not their first time to hear such ideas. They had read in newspaper articles where liberals—some of whom were even stationmasters of the Underground Railroad—were roundly condemning such communities as Tabler Town for promoting “the amalgamation between white and black races, which was not desirable and was not in the interests of the Negro.” What made Quigley mad was that the minister chose the occasion of his wedding to preach such garbage. It was obvious to him that the minister had agreed to solemnize a marriage between an Indian woman and a white man in order to use it as a platform to propagate his ideas. Or perhaps he approved of the “amalgamation” of whites and Indians but not of Africans and the other races. And he was saying all these things because of his brimming love for the black races of the earth.