A Place Called Freedom (1995)

by Ken Follett

  “I’ll do my best—”

  “Promise me!” she insisted.

  “I promise, I’ll find you.”

  The fat-bellied man said: “Come on, lover boy,” and jerked Mack away from her.

  He looked back over his shoulder as he was pushed down the gangway onto the wharf. Cora and Peg stood watching with their arms around one another, crying. Mack thought of his parting from Esther. I won’t fail Cora and Peg the way I failed Esther, he vowed. Then they were lost from sight.

  It felt strange to put his feet on solid ground after eight weeks of having the never-ceasing movement of the sea beneath him. As he hobbled down the unpaved main street in his chains he stared about him, looking at America. The town center had a church, a market house, a pillory and a gallows. Brick and wood houses stood widely spaced along either side of the street. Sheep and chickens foraged in the muddy road. Some buildings seemed old-established but there was a raw, new look to many.

  The town was thronged with people, horses, carts, and carriages, most of which must have come from the countryside all around. The women had new bonnets and ribbons, and the men wore polished boots and clean gloves. Many people’s clothes had a homemade look, even though the fabrics were costly. He overheard several people talking of races and betting odds. Virginians seemed keen on gambling.

  The townspeople looked at the convicts with mild curiosity, the way they might have watched a horse canter along the street, a sight they had seen before but which continued to interest them.

  The town petered out after half a mile. They waded across the river at a ford, then set off along a rough track through wooded countryside. Mack put himself next to the middle-aged Negro. “My name is Malachi McAsh,” he said. “They call me Mack.”

  The man kept his eyes straight ahead but spoke in a friendly enough way. “I’m Kobe,” he said, pronouncing it to rhyme with Toby. “Kobe Tambala.”

  “The fat man in the straw hat—does he own us now?”

  “No. Bill Sowerby’s just the overseer. Him and me was told to go aboard the Rosebud and pick out the best field hands.”

  “Who has bought us?”

  “You ain’t exactly been bought.”

  “What, then?”

  “Mr. Jay Jamisson decided to keep you for hisself, to work on his own place, Mockjack Hall.”

  “Jamisson!”

  “That’s right.”

  Mack was once again owned by the Jamisson family. The thought made him angry. Damn them to hell, I’ll run away again, he vowed. I will be my own man.

  Kobe said: “What work did you do, before?”

  “I used to be a coal miner.”

  “Coal? I’ve heard tell of it. A rock that burns like wood, but hotter?”

  “Aye. Trouble is, you have to go deep underground to find it. What about yourself?”

  “My people were farmers in Africa. My father had a big piece of land, more than Mr. Jamisson.”

  Mack was surprised: he had never thought of slaves as coming from rich families. “What kind of farm?”

  “Mixed—wheat, some cattle—but no tobacco. We have a root called the yam grows out there. Never seen it here, though.”

  “You speak English well.”

  “I’ve been here nearly forty years.” A look of bitterness came over his face. “I was just a boy when they stole me.”

  Peg and Cora were on Mack’s mind. “There were two people on the ship with me, a woman and a girl,” he said. “Will I be able to find out who bought them?”

  Kobe gave a humorless laugh. “Everybody’s trying to find someone they were sold apart from. People ask around all the time. When slaves meet up, on the road or in the woods, that’s all they talk about.”

  “The child’s name is Peg,” Mack persisted. “She’s only thirteen. She doesn’t have a mother or father.”

  “When you’ve been bought, nobody has a mother or father.”

  Kobe had given up, Mack realized. He had grown accustomed to his slavery and learned to live with it. He was bitter, but he had abandoned all hope of freedom. I swear I’ll never do that, Mack thought.

  They walked about ten miles. It was slow, because the convicts were fettered. Some were still chained in pairs. Those whose partners had died on the voyage were hobbled, their ankles chained together so that they could walk but not run. None of them could go fast and they might have collapsed if they had tried, so weak were they from lying flat for eight weeks. The overseer, Sowerby, was on horseback, but he seemed in no hurry, and as he rode he sipped some kind of liquor from a flask.

  The countryside was more like England than Scotland, and not as alien as Mack had anticipated. The road followed the rocky river, which wound through a lush forest. Mack wished he could lie in the shade of those big trees for a while.

  He wondered how soon he would see the amazing Lizzie. He felt bitter about being the property of a Jamisson again, but her presence would be some consolation. Unlike her father-in-law she was not cruel, though she could be thoughtless. Her unorthodox ways and her vivacious personality delighted Mack. And she had a sense of justice that had saved his life in the past and might do so again.

  It was noon when they arrived at the Jamisson plantation. A path led through an orchard where cattle grazed to a muddy compound with a dozen or so cabins. Two elderly black women were cooking over open fires, and four or five naked children played in the dirt. The cabins were crudely built with rough-hewn planks, and their shuttered windows had no glass.

  Sowerby exchanged a few words with Kobe and disappeared.

  Kobe said to the convicts: “These are your quarters.”

  Someone said: “Do we have to live with the blackies?”

  Mack laughed. After eight weeks in the hellhole of the Rosebud it was a miracle they could complain about their accommodation.

  Kobe said: “White and black live in separate cabins. There’s no law about it, but it always seems to work out that way. Each cabin takes six people. Before we rest we have one more chore. Follow me.”

  They walked along a footpath that wound between fields of green wheat, tall Indian corn growing out of hillocks, and the fragrant tobacco plant. Men and women were at work in every field, weeding between the rows and picking grubs off the tobacco leaves.

  They emerged onto a wide lawn and went up a rise toward a sprawling, dilapidated clapboard house with drab peeling paint and closed shutters: Mockjack Hall, presumably. Skirting the house, they came to a group of outbuildings at the back. One of the buildings was a smithy. Working there was a Negro whom Kobe addressed as Cass. He began to strike the fetters from the convicts’ legs.

  Mack watched as the convicts were unchained one by one. He felt a sense of liberation, though he knew it was false. These chains had been put on him in Newgate Prison, on the far side of the world. He had resented them every minute of the eight degrading weeks he had worn them.

  From the high point where the house stood he could see the glint of the Rappahannock River, about half a mile away, winding through woodland. When my chains are struck I could just run away, down to the river, he thought, and I could jump in and swim across and make a bid for freedom.

  He would have to restrain himself. He was still so weak that he probably could not run half a mile. Besides, he had promised to search for Peg and Cora, and he would have to find them before he escaped, for he might not be able to afterward. And he had to plan carefully. He knew nothing of the geography of this land. He needed to know where he was going and how he would get there.

  All the same, when at last he felt the irons fall from his legs he had to make an effort not to run away.

  While he was still fighting the impulse, Kobe began to speak. “Now you’ve lost your chains, some of you are already figuring how far you can get by sundown. Before you run away, there’s something important you need to know, so listen up and pay attention.”

  He paused for effect, then went on: “People who run away are generally caught, and they get punished
. First they’re flogged, but that’s the easy part. Then they have to wear the iron collar, which some find shameful. But the worst is, your time is made longer. If you’re away for a week, you have to serve two weeks extra. We got people here run away so many times they won’t be free until they’re a hundred years old.” He looked around and caught Mack’s eye. “If you’re willing to chance that much,” he finished, “all I can say is, I wish you luck.”

  In the morning the old women cooked a boiled corn dish called hominy for breakfast. The convicts and slaves ate it with their fingers out of wooden bowls.

  There were about forty field hands altogether. Apart from the new intake of convicts, most were black slaves. There were four indentured servants, people who had sold four years’ labor in advance to pay for their transatlantic ticket. They kept apart from the others and evidently considered themselves superior. There were only three regular waged employees, two free blacks and a white woman, all past fifty years old. Some of the blacks spoke good English, but many talked in their own African languages and communicated with the whites in a childish kind of pidgin. At first Mack was inclined to treat them as children, then it struck him that they were superior to him in speaking one and a half languages, for he had only one.

  They were marched a mile or two across broad fields to where the tobacco was ready to harvest. The tobacco plants stood in neat rows about three feet apart and a quarter of a mile long. They were about as tall as Mack, each with a dozen or so broad green leaves.

  The hands were given their orders by Bill Sowerby and Kobe. They were divided into three groups. The first were given sharp knives and set to cutting down the ripe plants. The next group went into a field that had been cut the previous day. The plants lay on the ground, their big leaves wilted after a day drying in the sun. Newcomers were shown how to split the stalks of the cut plants and spear them on long wooden spikes. Mack was in the third group, which had the job of carrying the loaded spikes across the fields to the tobacco house, where they were hung from the high ceiling to cure in the air.

  It was a long, hot summer day. The men from the Rosebud were not able to work as hard as the others. Mack found himself constantly overtaken by women and children. He had been weakened by disease, malnutrition and inactivity. Bill Sowerby carried a whip but Mack did not see him use it.

  At noon they got a meal of coarse cornbread that the slaves called pone. While they were eating Mack was dismayed, but not completely surprised, to see the familiar figure of Sidney Lennox, dressed in new clothes, being shown around the plantation by Sowerby. No doubt Jay felt that Lennox had been useful to him in the past and might be so again.

  At sundown, feeling exhausted, they left the fields; but instead of returning to their cabins they were marched to the tobacco house, now lit up by dozens of candles. After a hasty meal they worked on, stripping the leaves from cured plants, removing the thick central spine, and pressing the leaves into bundles. As the night wore on some of the children and older people fell asleep at their work, and an elaborate warning system came into play, whereby the stronger ones covered for the weak and woke them when Sowerby approached.

  It must have been past midnight, Mack guessed, when at last the candles were snuffed and the hands were allowed to return to their cabins and lie down on their wooden bunks. Mack fell asleep immediately.

  It seemed only seconds later that he was being shaken awake to go back to work. Wearily he got to his feet and staggered outside. Leaning against the cabin wall he ate his bowl of hominy. No sooner had he stuffed the last handful into his mouth than they were marched off again.

  As they entered the field in the dawn light, he saw Lizzie.

  He had not set eyes on her since the day they had boarded the Rosebud. She was on a white horse, crossing the field at a walk. She wore a loose linen dress and a big hat. The sun was about to rise and there was a clear, watery light. She looked well: rested, comfortable, the lady of the manor riding about her estate. She had put on some weight, Mack noticed, while he had wasted away from starvation. But he could not resent her, for she stood up for what was right and had thereby saved his life more than once.

  He recalled the time he had embraced her, in the alley off Tyburn Street, after he had saved her from the two ruffians. He had held that soft body close to his own and inhaled the fragrance of soap and feminine perspiration; and for a mad moment he had thought that Lizzie, rather than Cora, might be the woman for him. Then sanity had returned.

  Looking at her rounded body he realized she was not getting fat, she was pregnant. She would have a son and he would grow up a Jamisson, cruel and greedy and heartless, Mack thought. He would own this plantation and buy human beings and treat them like cattle, and he would be rich.

  Lizzie caught his eye. He felt guilty that he had been thinking such harsh thoughts of her unborn child. She stared at first, unsure who he was; then she seemed to recognize him with a jolt. Perhaps she was shocked by the change in his appearance caused by the voyage.

  He held her eye for a long time, hoping she would come over to him; but then she turned away without speaking and kicked her horse into a trot, and a moment later she disappeared into the woods.

  27

  A WEEK AFTER ARRIVING AT MOCKJACK HALL JAY Jamisson sat watching two slaves unpack a trunk of glassware. Belle was middle-aged and heavy, and she had ballooning breasts and a vast rear; but Mildred was about eighteen years old, with perfect tobacco-colored skin and lazy eyes. When she reached up to the shelves of the cabinet he could see her breasts move under the drab homespun shift she wore. His stare made both women uneasy, and they unwrapped the delicate crystal with shaky hands. If they broke anything they would have to be punished. Jay wondered if he should beat them.

  The thought made him restless, and he got up and went outside. Mockjack Hall was a big, long-fronted house with a pillared portico facing down a Sloping lawn to the muddy Rappahannock River. Any house of its size in England would have been made of stone or brick, but this was a wood-frame building. It had been painted white with green shutters many years ago, but now the paint was peeling and the colors had faded to a uniform drab. At the back and sides were numerous outhouses containing the kitchen, laundry, and stables. The main house had grand reception rooms—drawing room, dining room, and even a ballroom—and spacious bedrooms upstairs, but the whole interior needed redecoration. There was much once fashionable imported furniture, and faded silk hangings and worn rugs. The air of lost grandeur about the place was like a smell of drains.

  Nevertheless Jay felt good as he surveyed his estate from the portico. It was a thousand acres of cultivated fields, wooded hillsides, bright streams and broad ponds, with forty hands and three house servants; and the land and the people belonged to him. Not to his family, not to his father, but to him. At last he was a gentleman in his own right.

  And this was just the start. He planned to cut a dash in Virginia society. He did not know just how colonial government worked, but he understood they had local leaders called vestrymen, and the assembly in Williamsburg was composed of burgesses, the equivalent of members of Parliament. Given his status he thought he might skip the local stage and stand for election to the House of Burgesses at the earliest opportunity. He wanted everyone to know that Jay Jamisson was a man of importance.

  Lizzie came across the lawn, riding Blizzard, who had survived the voyage unscathed. She was riding him well, Jay thought, almost like a man—and then he realized, to his irritation, that she was riding astride. It was so vulgar for a woman to go up and down like that with her legs apart. When she reined in he said: “You shouldn’t ride like that.”

  She put a hand on her rounded waist. “I’ve been going very slowly, just walking and trotting.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of the baby. I hope nobody saw you riding astride.”

  Her face fell, but her rejoinder was defiant, as always: “I don’t intend to ride sidesaddle out here.”

  “Out here?” he repeated. “What does
it matter where we are?”

  “But there’s nobody here to see me.”

  “I can see you. So can the servants. And we might have visitors. You wouldn’t walk around naked ‘out here,’ would you?”

  “I’ll ride sidesaddle to church, and when we’re with company, but not on my own.”

  There was no arguing with her in this mood. “Anyway, quite soon you’ll have to stop riding altogether, for the sake of the baby,” he said sulkily.

  “But not just yet,” she said brightly. She was five months pregnant: she planned to stop riding at six. She changed the subject. “I’ve been looking around. The land is in better condition than the house. Sowerby is a drunk, but he has kept the place going. We probably should be grateful, considering he hasn’t been paid his wages for almost a year.”

  “He may have to wait a little longer—cash is short.”

  “Your father said there were fifty hands, but in fact there are only twenty-five. It’s a good thing we have the fifteen convicts from the Rosebud.” She frowned. “Is McAsh among them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought I saw him across the fields.”

  “I told Sowerby to pick out the youngest and strongest.” Jay had not realized that McAsh was on the ship. If he had thought about it, he might have guessed and told Sowerby to be sure to leave the troublemaker behind. But now that he was here Jay was reluctant to send him away: he did not want to appear intimidated by a mere convict.

  Lizzie said: “I presume we didn’t pay for the new men.”

  “Certainly not—why should I pay for something that belongs to my family?”

  “Your father may find out.”

  “He certainly will. Captain Parridge demanded a receipt for fifteen convicts, and naturally I obliged him. He will hand that to Father.”

  “And then?”

  Jay shrugged. “Father will probably send me a bill, which I will pay—when I can.” He was rather pleased with this little piece of business. He had got fifteen strong men to work for seven years, and it had cost him nothing.