Becoming Americans

by Donald Batchelor

  After their fifth day of walking through mud and cow dung, Stephen told Willy they were stopping early. The next day would bring them to the Nansemond, anyway. And, since they'd have access to real rum the next day, there was no need to be sparing of the brandy. By nightfall, the small cask was nearly empty and, as Stephen had a far greater taste for alcohol than did Willy, he was far drunker. Soon after he had emptied the cask—long before midnight—Stephen was asleep, leaving Willy and Tony alone with the peaceful herd.

  In the middle of the night Willy was awakened by movement in the herd. He could tell in the faint moonlight that some of the cattle were on their feet, lowing softly, but acting nervously. He sent Tony to calm them and tried to wake Stephen. Stephen wouldn't budge; he could not be awakened. Willy waited for Tony to calm the cattle and return, but when heavy clouds blocked out the little moonlight, wolf howls sent the cattle stampeding toward the camp the men had set up. Willy grabbed Stephen by his feet and pulled him behind a clump of trees that were felled beside the road, and lay beside him as the cattle jostled each other in their attempt to flee the wolves. But, there were no wolves attacking and the cattle scattered into the woods.

  Stephen had been jarred to semi-consciousness and was pulling himself up as Willy quieted his horse and untangled its bridle that was twisted and wrapped around a tree that held it. Stephen saw what had happened and stumbled up to regroup the cattle, calling out for Tony to come help. Willy came to help, but Tony didn't answer.

  Nancy stood up in the garden and wiped her hands on her apron. She took off her hat to fan her face, then put it back on, adjusting the brim to shield the back of her neck. She looked around, then lifted her skirts to wave cool air through her legs. She squatted, again, to pull the weeds from her peas.

  She should be combing wool, she knew, but she had Junior doing that and the garden needed weeding. She saw that several shoots at the end of rows had been nibbled down and she looked around the fence to find where the hole was so she could fix it. The days weren't long enough.

  She stood again to ease her back. If she had more children she'd have more help. She moved down the row and squatted.

  It wasn't God's will that she have more children. The sickness that came with the birth of Junior had killed the thing inside her that made children. It was the passion that had killed it, she'd decided. With Charles there'd been no passion. Union with her first husband had been a sacred act of making children. Or, maybe something had died in Stephen.

  When they came back from visiting his family in Deep Creek and started preparation for the move to Bertie, Stephen had become more sullen. He spent more of his time and earnings at taverns in Edenton, or sitting by himself at home with a jug of whatever was most handy. More and more often, the drink kept him from work. His quiet drinking was more painful to Nancy than if he'd beat her. She was powerless to help him, as she'd been powerless to help Charles. At night, in bed, Stephen turned fitfully and snored while Nancy cried in frustration or got up to do needlework by the fire. She worried that Stephen didn't have any patience with Junior's high spirits and had once, in drunken mutters, referred to him as "the little bastard."

  Junior tapped the last peg flush with the hinge and swung the door back and forth, free of the floor. He was tired of doing chores for his mother and wanted to do men's work. He'd chopped the block, and carved the two sets of hinges for the door the previous day. Then he'd shown his mother what he'd done and convinced her to let him put on the new hinges. He was anxious for his father to see the work.

  His father would never have fixed the door. His father didn't care if the hinges worked or didn't. Junior loved his father, but he didn't understand him. Junior had asked his father why it was that everyone he knew had brothers and sisters but him. The answer was, "One of you is enough!" His father didn't seem to want any more of anything and he didn't care about what he did have. Junior had decided that when he grew up he wanted more of everything: more land, more horses, more slaves, more children. His father didn't work the land he had, he didn't work Tony very hard—his horse even less—and he didn't like children. His father played cards and drank with his friends, Junior knew, but he never seemed to be having a good time. Junior liked having a good time, and that was another thing he wanted more of.

  He limped to the door of the smokehouse and stuck his head inside, just to get a whiff of the smoked meat and sausage hanging there. He heard Amos barking at a coming horse and latched the door shut to see who was riding by. It was his father and Uncle Willy, riding on the one horse, coming from the wrong direction. Tony wasn't with them.

  Nancy ran to meet her husband while Junior waited by the hitching post. By the time his parents got to him they were silent.

  "Pa, you didn't sell Tony, did you?"

  Junior was afraid. Tony was his friend and his father had said he'd never sell the slave. Tony would be Junior's, one day, he'd said, come down from his Grandpa Williams in Virginia.

  "Let me in the house, first, Boy. Willy and I been moving for two weeks."

  Willy bid a somber good-bye to the Williams family and rode off.

  They went into the house, Junior's father not noticing the repaired door.

  "The boy shouldn't have broke that leg. We needed more hands with the cattle," Stephen explained to his wife. "The rascal just ran off."

  "Run off? But why would Tony run off, Pa? He's happy here. No slave's got it better than Tony has. I bet he was stole," Junior said.

  It was incomprehensible that his friend would run off and leave him alone with no one to fish and hunt with, no one to talk to. His Uncle Willy kept Tom busy working, so he didn't see him but once or twice a month.

  "Could be he was stole," Stephen said. "We ran up with a slave trader that morning, headed to Edenton. That's where we went after Nansemond. Went to the Bertie Courthouse then to Edenton to report him run away or stole. They put out a hue-and-cry in Nansemond, but I don't know. I expect he's in the Dismal. Probably eat up by a bear, by now."

  Junior rejected that.

  "He was stole, Pa. Tony wouldn't run off from his home."

  "They asked me lots of questions at the courthouse."

  Stephen spoke to his wife with some concern in his voice.

  "They wanted to know where I lived; was I a freeholder or a tenant. Wanted to know had I paid my quit rents and poll tax."

  "He was all we had, Stephen," Nancy said.

  She hadn't been listening.

  "All that set us apart from the squatters."

  She saw their fortunes going downhill. She'd had hopes for their new beginning when they'd left Deep Creek with a slave. Now, they'd be just another set of poor and powerless settlers living in an increasingly distant society of large slaveholders and their blacks.

  Junior looked up at his parents. They were looking away from each other, both looking sad. He'd never seen them looking sad, before.

  A runaway slave was a threat to everyone's property. The number of large slaveholders was increasing as abandoned land was amassed by large Virginia planters. One of them, Elisha Battle, had bought ten adjacent farms, three of them touching Stephen's land. With him and his wife he'd brought nineteen slaves, but no white settlers. There were too many black faces, many people said, and men worried for the safety of their wives and children should the slaves unite and revolt. Tony's escape was an alarm to all the slaveholders in Bertie and Edgecombe Precincts. Owners came to the Williams house to express concern, admitting that search parties would be futile since the boy had run off in Virginia. The men were united in their indignation and in their determination that it wouldn't happen to them, agreeing among themselves that Stephen Williams had been too lax in his treatment of the slave, and that he'd acted foolishly in taking the boy out of the province. Stephen hadn't concerned himself with worrying about slave uprisings, he was more concerned about the large planters moving in, and about the increasing number of Scotch Highlanders and Scotch-Irish moving in from the Cape Fear.

&nb
sp; Nancy worked in furious silence.

  In March of 1744, Willy Biggs rode from the river landing to tell Stephen the news that a big change was happening to their part of the colony. When the Crown bought out the Proprietors in 1729, making North Carolina a Royal Colony, John Lord Carteret—recently become Earl Granville, with the death of his mother—had refused to sell his one-eighth of the province. In 1742, King George II had commanded that the district be surveyed, and finally that was happening.

  Earl Granville's portion was the eighth part of North Carolina that was included from the Virginia border to a line about sixty miles south of it, having no western boundary. This private holding included the oldest settled parts of North Carolina, with two-thirds of its population. Granville's agent, Francis Corbin, was already in Carolina to supervise the survey and had opened an office in Edenton to collect quit rents and issue patents, thereby re-establishing some of the prestige to the town that had gone when the Assembly moved to New Bern. Stephen had been sent an offer to join the survey party. Edward Moseley was one of the Commissioners for this survey, too.

  Edward Moseley continued to be among the most powerful men of the colony and, like many of his class, had moved south to the Cape Fear region as the center of power and of opportunity had shifted there. Since 1739 the former precincts had been made counties and the Assembly had been meeting more often in New Bern than in Edenton. Governor Johnston had large land holdings near the Cape Fear. The competition between the old Albemarle counties and the Cape Fear counties had increased and was growing more bitter. Legislators from the southern counties were determined to lessen the hold of the older region, and were pressing to make a southerly town the seat of North Carolina government. In one small effort to assuage bitterness, Mister Moseley had called upon Albemarle residents to join the survey team. Stephen Williams was a logical inclusion, Willy explained.

  Stephen was desperate for the wages and was desperate to be away from the silent rage of his wife.

  By the end of 1744, the southern boundary of the Granville District had been drawn from the Outer Banks, through the old Machapungo pines of Richard Williams, to a point just north of Bath. Bath, itself, had never acquired the status that was hoped for it, but Reverend Thomas Garcia, of Bath's Saint Thomas Church, was always ready for a chance to exhibit the church.

  Stephen sat quietly, his eyes following a line of square paving tiles as they passed his pew, up the aisle to beneath the alter. Two silver candelabra and a chalice sat in shining relief to the rough brick walls of the unfinished church. Reverend Garcia's heavy voice was slow and thickly accented. Stephen understood that "duty" was the sermon topic, but the voice had become sound without words, but sound with rhythm; a rhythm like footsteps. Walking and cutting, cutting and walking. He looked at his leather breeches and torn hose.

  Richard Williams nudged his nephew and smiled. Stephen wiped his eyes. It would be no good to snore at Reverend Garcia while seated as a guest in a vestryman's pew. He glanced past his uncle to Samuel Swann, then back.

  Richard Williams was an old man. He wore no wig, but his long white hair was bound and tied as elegantly as Mister Swann's peruke.

  Not all of the survey team had stayed in Bath for the prayer of celebration offered by Reverend Garcia. Some of them were in a great hurry to return home, others were alienated from the Established Church by other church loyalties or by disbelief. Stephen had stayed to be with his uncle. He felt this would be his final time with the last of that Williams generation.

  When the service was over the congregation filed out, stepping carefully around piles of brick and sand that were going into the bell tower over the front door. Men came to greet Mister Swann and to talk of the survey and of raucous affairs in the New Bern assembly, others came around Richard to talk of their land speculations and to swap stories of old times. Some of the men had known him before the Indian war.

  Stephen felt like an old man, himself, when he'd come into Bath. Little was as it had been when he was there before. The church was new; a small but solid structure that might eventually be beautiful. Other buildings were gone or had changed beyond recognition. He wasn't sure if the Lawson house was gone or remodeled. Hannah and her children were gone, he'd been told. Old, rotting pilings stood in the creek, and other, new wharves lined the bank.

  Richard pointed out faces to him in the crowd that were people he'd have heard of, but Stephen stopped looking when he saw two faces that made him catch his breath. Two of Teach's men were among the congregation, and the old instinct of flight took Stephen for an instant. The faces of the pirates were different from what he remembered. They were cooler, calmer faces. They were happy faces. That thought was puzzling to Stephen, and he avoided eye contact with the men.

  When the time was right, the three guests went to an ordinary for meat and drink. Stephen was thirsty and he felt stupid with these men of accomplishment, so he drank his dark rum punch as the other two talked. The rum softened the older man and he spoke freely. Richard wanted Stephen to move south with him. He had sons about the age of Stephen, Junior. They'd be a big family. Samuel Swann had become Speaker of the House, a powerful man, the first Speaker from outside the old Albemarle, but Swann was taken back to his younger days by the rum, and the exploits he'd shared with a younger Stephen made him speak as if they were equals.

  "The Granville District will be trouble, mark my words. Earl Granville's quit rents detract from the common good," Swann told him.

  "The southern counties, Nephew. That's where you want to be. Boundless opportunity for a man with your experiences. Building everywhere. Traders and merchants tripping over each other in search of help. Surveying! Town lots, grants, wills…."

  "Pirates! The King's ministers are robbing us like pirates. Taking what they can because they can. It isn't right!" Swann's voice carried around the room.

  "It's more like South Carolina than it is Albemarle." Richard was less motivated by politics.

  "If the Crown proclaims that a hundred pounds of my tobacco will bring me ten shillings of Proclamation money, why is it that with that bill I cannot buy over two sterling shilling's worth of sugar on the Brunswick dock?"

  Stephen heard the men talking but his thoughts were elsewhere. Seeing the two old pirates in church had been a surprise. Men who'd stolen anything not tied down, who'd burned ships, and who'd killed others many times were sitting at peace in church, old men with their wives. Something was wrong. They shouldn't look so at peace with themselves, he thought.

  At their parting Stephen promised Samuel Swann that he'd return in March to continue with the Granville District survey. He embraced his Uncle Richard, thanking him for his lifetimes' affection and friendship and promising to consider the idea of moving south.

  In the summer of '47, the Granville line survey stopped at the Haw River,

  200 miles from the ocean, and Stephen Williams rode home to bad news.

  Nancy's brother, Mathias Manning, had stopped to visit while moving with his family to the three-hundred-and-fifty-acre grant in he'd bought in Edgecombe County. Elizabeth, his wife, was ill and had lingered with a daughter, Mary, as Elizabeth Manning regained her health.

  "I'm pleased that you're better, Elizabeth, and glad you've been here to keep my Nancy company," Stephen told her.

  Nancy and her sister-in-law sat on the bed. Mary and Junior sat on the bench by the table. The women were silent after telling Stephen why the visitors were there. The children kept still, with downcast eyes.

  Junior spoke up.

  "Mary and I are to be wed."

  Stephen sat in his chair. He was confused at first. He'd spent such little time with his son that there was no immediate reaction. Was he to be angry at the impetuosity of his seventeen-year-old son, or was he to congratulate the boy? His reaction came more as an effort to please his wife and their visitor than from emotion for his son.

  "A beautiful and wise choice, for so young a man," he said. "I look forward to many beautiful grandchild
ren."

  The women blushed and Junior slid forward on the bench.

  "Your first grandchild will come in January," Junior said, then slid back.

  "I see," Stephen said, and glanced at Mary's smooth stomach, counting backwards on his fingers.

  "And when Father Manning returns to fetch his women, I'll be leaving to work his land above the falls," Junior said.

  "I see," Stephen said, and looked around the house. His eyes stopping on the many examples of Junior's work; work that Stephen had seldom appreciated. He felt old, again.

  He left the house—"To look about the fields," he said—and went to a secluded, sandy opening by a branch that drained his fields into the local Deep Creek, a tributary of Fishing Creek, which flowed into Tar River. Cold water rippled over the sandy bottom of his three-foot stream. He owned fields in two colonies that fed two Deep Creeks. His past. His future.

  He raised his eyes to see a flock of turkeys grazing for acorn and pine nuts. Two old cocks threatened each other on opposite sides of an opening, their beards flowing on the ground, their two-inch spurs ready for combat. Junior came through the brush and the turkeys flew away, with much noise.