The Secret of the Black Bushranger

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The Secret of the Black Bushranger Page 9

by Jackie French


  I said, ‘Mr Caesar, it’s me. Don’t you remember? Barney Bean.’

  For a moment I thought Black Caesar didn’t care who I was. But then his grin changed. ‘The little bean boy! Who would have guessed that little bean would grow? Is this your farm now? Or are you a servant here?’

  ‘It’s mine. I didn’t tell,’ I added quietly. ‘Me and Mr Johnson. We never said anything about your visit that night.’

  ‘And you gave me your pasty too. Black Caesar doesn’t forget.’ He lowered his musket, looked at mine, then smiled and put it back against the wall.

  ‘Where’s your gang?’ I didn’t like the thought of a mob of cutthroats on my farm. John Black Caesar might remember me kindly, but they wouldn’t. One of them might even shoot me before their leader could tell them not to.

  Black Caesar shrugged. ‘I told them to go. Trim their beards, cut their hair, so no one recognises them as bushrangers, and sneak back into Sydney Town. There’s no reward out for any of them. They should save themselves.’ He grinned again. ‘But everyone knows Black Caesar. Even if I could change the colour of my skin, I can’t disguise my size.’ Black Caesar lifted his head, still proud. ‘Nor do I want to hide. I am who I am, who I have always been. I will not change now.’

  I felt the terror leave my body. Something flooded in instead, so many emotions they were hard to work out.

  Anger, because I had worked hard for all I had, and didn’t want to lose any of it. All the farmers John Black and his gang had stolen from must have worked just as hard as me.

  Pity, for John Black Caesar was a human being hunted across the land, while I had my farm and my future. I knew what John Black Caesar’s future must be, and I knew by his face he knew it too.

  This month, next month, next year perhaps, Black Caesar would be shot for those five gallons of rum, or captured and hanged by his neck until he was dead. I was free, but there had been no freedom for Black Caesar, nor would there ever be.

  But there was something else too. I liked this man, would like to get to know him. He was big and I was smaller; he was black and I was white. He was a convict, bushranger, and I was a farmer and had been free all of my life.

  We had both been strangers to this land we were now part of. It had changed me, and I was changing it with my sheep and cornfields.

  I had never been a slave, though. All the times when others had power over John Black Caesar’s body had scarred him too deep. I had always been free, and knew it. But John Black Caesar would never be free while the memory of his slavery chained him.

  I wondered what John Black Caesar had seen as he ranged the bush, what stories he’d have to tell now, like he had told Mr Johnson and me the story of his childhood and slavery that long-ago night by the fire.

  But Black Caesar looked too tired to talk that night. His great body slumped, not just from weariness but from the years of being hated, hunted. This was no Caesar now, I realised, with a gang of men to follow him. Just a man who was hungry and needed sleep.

  I said, ‘Take my bed, Mr Black, and I’ll bring you some food and drink.’ I hesitated. ‘I only have sarsaparilla tea, not rum.’

  ‘Tea will do fine, boy.’ He sank onto the bed, letting his musket fall to the floor.

  Tears stung my eyes. I was glad there was only moonlight and he couldn’t see them. I could have shot him then. John Black Caesar must have known it. I could shoot him while he slept.

  He trusted me, like I trusted him.

  The pot of tea was still warm by the fire. I handed it to him. He drank it thirstily, every drop, while I hauled out a hunk of damper from my chest and used my knife to slice up the haunch of kangaroo. I slipped out while he was eating, bolting his food as fast as if he was starved, which I think he was. The moonlight was bright enough to dig up a pail of potatoes. I carried them back and threw a handful of twigs on the fire and put the pot on to boil.

  Black Caesar ate half the pot of potatoes, one by one. I sat on the floor and watched him eat.

  Who was the true John Black? The desperate man, longing to be free? Or had he changed in the years since I’d last met him? Could I really trust him? Would he take my food and bed, then in the morning cut my throat and take my musket and dig up my potatoes?

  I didn’t think so.

  At last John Black looked up from his food. He smiled. ‘The best food and the best company I’ve ever had while I ate, lad.’

  ‘I didn’t say anything at all,’ I said.

  His grin was wicked then and his deep, rich voice coloured with amusement: ‘Which is why it was the best company. Most men lead small, boring lives, lad. Their words are small and boring too. But you do things. Good things, like this farm here.’

  ‘I thought you didn’t like farming.’

  He laughed. ‘Not for me, lad. But I am glad that others do.’

  ‘I had a good teacher in Mr Johnson.’

  ‘He is a good man too.’ John Black Caesar yawned. ‘Will you thank him for me, when you see him again?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. But he was already asleep, the last potato slipping from his hands.

  I was tired, but I didn’t sleep. Instead I sat in the doorway, listening to the night. Men can travel by moonlight, hunting other men by moonlight. Many of them must be hunting John Black Caesar now, hoping for the five gallons of rum.

  The cuckoos sang at last, and then the dawn turned the sky grey, but no hunters came. The kookaburras called as the sun popped out behind the gum trees. John Black Caesar still slept.

  I let the sheep out. The grass was good, despite the heat, so I knew they wouldn’t go far and I could tempt them back to the fold with hay that night. I’d meant to spend the day digging potatoes, hanging them in nets so the rats couldn’t get to them as they dried. Instead I sat in the doorway of my hut, plaiting stringybark string to make more nets, the way Birrung had taught me and Elsie.

  The hunters came just as I finished my first net and was folding it away. Two men, with muskets, and flasks of powder and shot at their belts, and the look of men who hunted other men, not kangaroos.

  ‘Ahoy, lad,’ called one of them. An o’possum could have nested in his beard. The other man’s beard was like a goat’s, all straggly, and his nose the red of a rum drinker’s. I could smell his breath even as they came up to me.

  ‘Ahoy, yourselves,’ I said, getting to my feet and making sure my body blocked the door. ‘I’m Barney Bean.’

  O’Possum Beard snickered. ‘You growing beans here, lad?’

  ‘Beans and corn, but I’ve harvested that.’ I didn’t mention my sheep. Sheep are easier to shoot than kangaroos, especially as mine would come up and eat hay out of your hand. I was glad they were out of sight beyond the trees.

  I held out my hand.

  O’Possum Beard shook it, then Goat Beard.

  ‘I’d offer you a drink,’ I said, ‘but I haven’t even fetched water from the creek yet.’

  ‘Water,’ snorted Goat Beard. ‘You got any rum?’

  I shook my head. ‘Can’t even offer you meat or damper. My fire went out.’ I’d carefully not built it up again, in case hunters like these men saw the smoke. They must have followed the blazes on the trees Bill had cut to mark the way home.

  ‘It’s more than drink we’re after,’ said Goat Beard. ‘You seen that black bushranger?’

  ‘Thou shalt not lie,’ Mr Johnson had said. And so I didn’t.

  ‘Do I look like I’ve seen a bushranger?’ I asked.

  Goat Beard laughed. Even his laugh sounded like a goat. He he he. ‘Reckon you’d be wetting your trousers if you’d seen the likes of him.’

  ‘You think Black Caesar’s nearby?’ The fear in my voice was real.

  O’Possum Beard shrugged. ‘He goes from farm to farm.’

  I waited for them to warn me to keep a watch out, to be careful, to hide my musket and powder and shot away so the bushranger couldn’t steal them, or to keep my musket with me so I could shoot Black Caesar as soon as I saw him. But they d
idn’t. These men wanted the reward themselves, not someone like me turning John Black Caesar in.

  ‘Tom Whinney’s place is up by the big rocks,’ I said. I looked up the river, hoping they’d think I meant his farm was in that direction. ‘Seems like the sort of country a bushranger might hide in. I don’t have anything here that would interest thieves. Not yet.’

  Goat Beard narrowed his eyes, then smiled. ‘You might be right, lad.’ He tipped his cabbage-tree hat to me. I watched them walk off, with the easy stride of men who had no real work to do, and never intended to find any. If they got that reward, they’d drink it, not use it to buy sheep.

  I began another net, twining the string. I’d run the string through the fire later, when I’d lit it again with my flint and stone. Once you run stringybark string through a flame it never rots, no matter how many storms drench it. I heard the hunters’ voices grow fainter. There’d been no sound from them for as long as it takes a pot to boil when Black Caesar stepped out of my hut and spoke.

  ‘You saved me again, Barney Bean.’

  I turned and looked him full in the face. ‘I’ll not turn a man in to people who’d sell him dead or alive, for five gallons of rum. But I’ll not help him steal either.’ I hesitated. ‘There’ll be a meal and a bed for you here whenever you need it, John Black.’ I might have to convince Bill to say nothing, but I’d cross that bridge when I came to it.

  Black Caesar looked at me without speaking. At last he said, ‘They could arrest you for helping me, you know? Chain you up. Hang you, even.’

  ‘A good man taught me: if a man thirsts, give him water. If he is hungry, give him food.’ It was the lesson I had heard from Mr Johnson, over and over. But I had never realised how hard minding it might be till now, nor that it might cost me my freedom too.

  ‘I must go. There’s no Tom Whinney’s farm, is there?’

  ‘There is. But not in the direction they went.’

  ‘Then they’ll be back this way. They’ll know you’ve lied.’

  I shrugged. ‘I’ll tell them they went the wrong way, which is true. You could hide a hundred farms in this country.’ I met his eyes. ‘And a hundred men.’

  ‘But what can a man eat, away from the farms, unless he has enough shot and black powder? And the sound of a shot will bring the men who hunt me.’

  John Black held out his hand, so big, so black, but paler on the palm just like Birrung’s had been. As I shook it, I wondered if I’d have been as happy to help this black man if I’d never known Birrung, and loved her. It had been a boy’s love, not a man’s. I loved her now in a different way, as a memory, and a link to this land.

  I bundled up cold corn for him, and some strips of smoked kangaroo meat that I kept in a jar to gnaw on if I had to round up the sheep after a thunderstorm or when my fire went out. I watched him go, half running into the trees, his shirt and pants ragged, his boots tied up with string, no hat on his black hair. The sunlight flickers through the gum leaves darkened as he passed. At last even his shadow vanished.

  CHAPTER 17

  Capture

  Bill came a week later. He didn’t bring the convict gang — he’d reckoned the flood would have washed the crop away, and besides, the rainstorm had caused damage and there’d be no convict workers free for small farmers like me till it was put right. But he did bring back a package from Elsie and letters too, written small and then crossways on the page, as paper was so precious. I didn’t have any paper to write back, but some of the bark I’d collected was almost as thin as paper. I wondered if I could write on that. I should be able to find some feathers big enough to make a pen, and I knew how to boil wattle gnarls for ink.

  I made fresh damper, and Bill and I ate it with a roast haunch of kangaroo and boiled beans and fresh cucumbers. I read the letters as we ate. Mr Johnson had sent me more fruit seeds to plant — apple and orange and lemon and tangerine and pear too. (Those trees are almost as tall as my house now.)

  ‘And the governor’s got some new scheme going with your Mr Johnson, to look after orphans,’ said Bill, telling me all the colony’s news. (He had never really taken to Mr Johnson, mostly because Bill used the kind of words Mr Johnson didn’t approve of and drank a tot of rum now and then, but also because he said his Sundays were for sleeping, not for sermons.) ‘Oh, and they shot that bushranger fellow, Black Caesar.’ Bill grinned at me. ‘Now we only have to worry about dingoes and brown snakes and black spiders.’

  I’d never told Bill that I’d met Black Caesar. I didn’t tell him now. It was too big a secret for sharing.

  ‘What happened?’ I asked, keeping my voice as casual as I could.

  ‘John Wimbow shot him at Liberty Plains. He’d been tracking Black Caesar awhile.’

  I wondered if John Wimbow was O’Possum Beard or Goat Beard. They had never given me their names.

  ‘Wounded him — Black Caesar was such a big brute I reckon it’d take more shot than he was worth to bring him down proper. They carried him to Rose’s hut, and he died there. Did you hear the price of wool is up? You’ll make enough money at the next shearing to double your herd, with luck.’

  I forced myself to think of sheep, not John Black slowly bleeding to death, knowing he died captive not free, his only companions the men who had hunted him, who’d sell his body for their reward. Sheep were good things to think about.

  My sheep were more than doubling in number each year by their own efforts. Maybe after shearing I should ask the governor — or his secretary — if I could have the hills that rose behind my farm. And convicts to shepherd the sheep, so they could graze more widely, and I could build huts for the convict shepherds to sleep in.

  Slaves, whispered Black Caesar’s low voice in my mind. John Black Caesar who’d died in agony, knowing he had been sold one final time, a man’s life worth five gallons of rum.

  No, I said, to him and to myself. Not slaves. The convicts who worked for me would serve their time and then get land of their own, if they wanted it and had worked hard, like I had. They might even get a grant before their sentence was up, as I was pretty sure Bill would do this year maybe, or the next. A slave is forever.

  Forever, agreed Black Caesar’s deep whisper. Once you have sold a man as a slave he can never truly feel free.

  And that was the end of the story. I heard that John Black’s wife never took his name. She died the year after him back on Norfolk Island, but his daughter went to Van Diemen’s Land in 1813, and I couldn’t find out what happened to her after that. I never spoke of John Black Caesar again, not even to Mr Johnson, not to anyone, not just for fear I might be got up for helping a bushranger, but because, even now, I wonder if what I did was right.

  Thou shalt not steal. Yet John Black Caesar stole, time and again, and never repented either. He was proud of stealing, proud of besting the white people who thought of themselves as his masters. But he did not kill or shoot anyone, even if he threatened to, except that time he attacked Pemulwuy and cracked his skull — and Pemulwuy had launched the attack on the men in the work gang that day in 1795, and he recovered from John Black Caesar’s wounds.

  Was John Black Caesar a good man, or bad? Or was the bad part of him made by the men who had sold him?

  I broke man’s law. But I kept God’s law, feeding the hungry, doing unto others as I would have them do unto me, knowing a man in want was my brother, even though he was black and a bushranger.

  It is a long time ago now, as I write this. It will be a longer time still before you will read it. Mr Johnson is past being imprisoned for breaking man’s law and I will be too.

  Did we do right, or wrong?

  You decide.

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  When I first began this series, I had no intention of giving Mr and Mrs Johnson, people from our history whom I deeply admire, two young wards entirely from my imagination, Barney Bean and Elsie No Name. I intended that Barney and Elsie should stay briefly with the Johnsons, as the Johnsons cared for many orphans, then move on, n
ot playing a major role in their lives. If the Johnsons did have long-term wards, there would have been some mention of it, in their letters or in the writings of someone else at the time. But there is no evidence that they did.

  But — somehow — Barney and Elsie stayed with the Johnsons, and for this I must apologise, as for the first time I have done more than wriggled through the gaps in history to add some fiction. Perhaps it is because, if Barney and Elsie had existed as I have written them, I believe the Johnsons would have taken them into their household as they did Birrung and, once there, they would not have abandoned them.

  But this does mean that I need to state there is no historical basis for either Barney or Elsie, nor have their histories been suggested — as in the case of Tom Appleby, Convict Boy — by true stories of the past. The most I can say is that it is possible that a boy and girl, like Barney and Elsie, might have existed at that time, and done the things that I have shown them doing.

  John Black ‘Caesar’, on the other hand, did exist, and as far as possible I have kept to what we know of him, his words as they were recorded, his appearance, his possible origins and tragic end.

  Had Black Caesar ever been a slave? There are no records that he was, but neither is there any reason why the records should mention it. Most people with dark skin in England at that time — and there were thousands — had been slaves, and either had been freed, or had escaped to England as the crew on ships.

  Even if John Black had not been a slave himself, he must have known slaves, or ex-slaves. Most people would have assumed from the colour of his skin that he was, or had been, a slave.

  Many thanks to Kim Pacheo for pointing out that neither John Black Caesar’s stature nor his repeated defiance, determination and ability to charm people in authority over and over again were likely for someone who had been born into a culture of slavery, and for her research into where John Black may have come from, and how he might have come to be in England. Slaves were bred for size, but poor diet meant that few achieved it. As Kim told me, if John Black — or whatever his true name was — had been a slave, he probably hadn’t been born a slave, nor been a slave for long.

 

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