I told him my name, and said that if he would give me his I would buy him a drink in the nearest tavern (indicating it). He said he would prefer to go to one a hundred yards further away, since it was the scene of a great triumph of his and as he was not often in Edinburgh he was minded to recall to himself the day of that triumph. I agreed, and asked again for his name. ‘They call me Joseph Knight,’ he said. And without another word he strode towards the law courts, and I went after him about half a step behind.
I knew at once who he was, and of what triumph he spoke. It had taken place some eleven years before, and there had been a great stir about it in the west. Although I was not then residing in Scotland it was scarcely possible that the cause of Joseph Knight should not have reached my ears within a few months of my arrival. I heard of it both from my friends the Tannahills, who regarded it as greatly creditable to the Scottish law, and from other black men in Glasgow and thereabouts whom I chanced to meet from time to time. Its effect, of course, did not apply to me as I had always been free, but the name Joseph Knight was spoken of with reverence, as belonging to one who had liberated not just himself but all African people in Scotland. (Mr Tannahill, however, tells me he has heard of at least one poor African who continued in servitude until his death about five years since in a distant part of the country, not, it is true, maltreated, but certainly unable to leave the old house in which he was an unpaid servant, because he would have been like the madman let out from the bedlam after fifty years, who starved from not knowing how to be sane.) And so I hurried along beside Mr Knight, eager to hear what he might have to say.
We turned into the Parliament Close, and my companion, without a faltering step, marched up to and through the Great Door into the old Parliament building itself. I had been in and out of this place once or twice myself, but never lingered much, preferring the light of the street to the gloom within. Here, as you will know, there used to exist – I do not know if they still do – a number of shops and booths, and a place where men of business and law would sit absorbing coffee and the day’s newspapers. This establishment went by the name of INDIAN PETER’S COFFEE HOUSE, but it was a house only in name, since it was really little more than a series of compartments propped up against a wall, the internal dividers made of the thinnest of materials, including, if I mind right, some of brown paper. Mr Knight drew up a seat at a vacant table in one of the ‘rooms’ so formed.
‘I like this place,’ he said. ‘Indian Peter is a man after my own heart.’
This was the proprietor, Peter Williamson, who also went by the name ‘Peter Williamson from the Other World’, a reference to his having been among the savage Indians in his youth. He was kidnapped when a boy in Aberdeen and sold into slavery to America, and was then captured by the Indians, who treated him most cruel. But he made his escape, and came to Edinburgh, where he became a celebrated figure, and set up the penny post.
‘He was sold by his own kind,’ said Mr Knight, ‘then fell among those who cared little whether he lived or died, so he had a notion what my feelings were. When I came here with those who helped me, he took my hand and treated me with great civility. There was an argument used in the court that I should be happy with my lot, which they said was a comfortable one, but Mr Williamson would have none of that. “If you are bound with silken cord you are as wretched as he who is bound with hemp,” he told me, and he was right.’
I will not attempt to represent the sound of Mr Knight’s voice. I myself, though born a British subject in America, have acquired a fair smattering of Scotch words and noises over the years, so that my speech is an odd enough mix. But Mr Knight’s was a veritable patchwork. There was, if I may express it in this way, a rich Jamaican ground, overlaid with Scotch sounds and occasional Scotch words, probably pronounced in the tones of Dundee or Perth; and I daresay the stitching itself may have been done with an African needle. Listening to him was like listening to a ship’s company all speaking at once, yet in a kind of harmony. I must, though, leave the resulting effect to your imagination, and reproduce only the general run of his words.
Mr Williamson was not in his shop that day. A waiter approached and asked what we required.
‘Coffee,’ said Mr Knight, ‘and rum to chase it with.’
‘The same for me,’ I said, and the man took away our order.
I was aware that our entry had caused something of a stir. Two black fellows together in such a place was an uncommon sight, and not a few glances and whispers flew around, so that I half expected my companion to roar out at somebody, ‘What are you looking at, man?’ He did not, indeed he hardly seemed to notice the attention we were getting, but sat flaring his nostrils and breathing in deep, noisy breaths, while I amused myself with the conjecture that we might be thought an advance party of Jacobins come to overthrow King Harry Dundas (the French Revolution was then in its earliest stages), and that the City Guard would shortly burst in and haul us away to the tolbooth. But we were left undisturbed, and in a while the waiter returned with what we had requested.
‘Well now,’ said Knight, inhaling strenuously. ‘Did you ever smell the like of that? Coffee, rum and sugar all in the one breath. The smell of riches, the smell of blood!’
I could see, of course, what he drove at, but he spoke so loud that I really feared his talk of blood might bring the Guard upon us, so, making a jest of it, I implored him to lower his voice lest we be taken for conspirators against Mr Dundas.
He smiled at me – and this time it was a real, shining smile. ‘You are nervous, man,’ he said. ‘You’ll not find me plotting against that gentleman. What he does in the Government is his own concern, but I owe him for his part in my triumph – just in through that door there – so he need have no fear of designs from me.’
‘Henry Dundas spoke for you?’ I asked.
‘He and others,’ he said. ‘Lord Dreghorn was the leading counsel.’ (This was Mr John Maclaurin, who had just in that year been appointed to the Bench.)
‘You were well represented, then,’ I remarked.
‘So was the other side, according to what the papers wrote of it.’ This was said with a certain bitterness, which was confirmed by what followed. ‘They were more impressed with the quality of the arguments than with the result, I think. Than with my triumph.’
‘Well,’ I said, ‘that may be, but what I have heard is that the Scottish people were proud and pleased that you won.’
‘It wore off pretty quick, then,’ he said. ‘They forgot me in a month.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘they were still talking about it when I first came to Paisley, and that was two years after.’
‘Ah, weavers,’ he said. ‘Aye, they would remember. Weavers and spinners and black folk like us, it would mean something to all them. But the high and mighty, they soon found other things to talk about. Whether apes might be a kind of man, for example. But I think they did not much entertain the idea of an ape who might be a white man.’
I did not follow this, and asked him what he meant. It turned out he was speaking of one of the judges in his case, Lord Monboddo. ‘A small monkey himself,’ he said. ‘He voted against me.’
He had a precise memory – much more precise than mine now, I confess – of exactly which of the Fifteen had been for him, and which against. Those against were four in number. One was the President, Lord Amiston, who said that the coming of master and slave to this country did not alter the fact of that relationship. Another was Monboddo, who said there was nothing in this country’s statutes to stop the master taking his slave back to Jamaica, where he had been a slave by law, contract or no contract. And what vexed Mr Knight most, this judge seemed to base his vote for slavery on the fact that the Romans had it – I am recording these things as best I can remember them, and from a few notes I made later that day, which I still have for I thought Mr Knight worthy of notes. ‘When Monboddo said that,’ he told me, ‘I saw why he was such a shrunken, shrivelled wee man. It was because he was fifteen hundred years
old.’
On the other side, Lords Gardenstone and Braxfield – nearly all these judges were still alive at the time I met Knight, though they are all dead now – said that whatever had obtained in Jamaica, it was quite beyond the master’s power to carry Mr Knight back there from this, a free country. And old Lord Kames said it was not the court’s job to enforce the laws of Jamaica, but to enforce right, not wrong. It was, however, Lord Auchinleck of whom Mr Knight spoke most warmly. He gave his opinion in less than half a minute, apparently, and it was this: ‘Is a man to be a slave because he is black? No. He is our brother; and he is a man, in a land of liberty with his wife and child. Let him remain there.’ Mr Knight raised his glass of rum, tossed it off with a toast to Lord Auchinleck, and signalled to the waiter for another. Naturally, I could not do other than join him.
‘Well, anyway,’ I said, ‘a law court is for arguing points of law, however disagreeable. I suppose you must have been happy that a majority of the judges upheld your cause.’
He looked at me coldly. ‘I was happy to be found a free man,’ he said. Then his voice suddenly rose. ‘I was not happy that it took fourteen old men four years to decide it – fourteen old men in a country I never wished to be in, when the best of my youth was over.’
A few nearby heads were raised again, and I begged him to calm himself.
‘I am calm,’ he said. ‘I have learned since that day what it is to be free. It is not to be free at all. I am well used to it now, so I am quite calm about it.’
‘Not free?’ I said, astonished. ‘What do you mean? We are free, both of us. This is where we can be free.’
‘You said yourself you were born free,’ he replied. ‘I was made a slave before I knew what freedom was, and when they gave me my freedom they left me stuck here. I could not go back to Jamaica. I could not go back to Africa. I could not go home. They had left me no such place.’
‘But you have a family? Are they not your home?’
‘That is not the same. John Wedderburn, he came home. When I think of the grievous wrong he did me and all those other people on his plantations, it makes me angry even now that he, who was a rebel against his country, should be welcomed back. Even the Government call him Sir John these days, though they took the title away from his father. But as for me, once they had used me as a symbol of their justice, they did not care about me as a man.’
I said, ‘Perhaps that is what freedom is. People do not care, they don’t see you any more, because you are free.’
‘How could they not see me?’ he said. ‘Look at me. They still don’t care about all those others, the ones making them rich. They do not see them. They had to take notice of me when I stood out among them. But once that was over, well, you are right, I became invisible.’
‘Like all the other free men and women of Scotland,’ I said.
‘No,’ was his reply. ‘Invisibility is not freedom if you are black. I’ll tell you what it is to be black and invisible in this country: it is the proof that they choose not to see us. They want us growing sugar for them in Jamaica, but they do not want us here.’
I was much saddened by all this bile. I felt it demeaned him. I felt that his freedom had festered like a wound, had not healed him.
‘No, Mr Knight,’ I said, ‘I cannot agree. When I came to Scotland, I came because I had met good Scots people in America, and I came knowing I would be safe here from kidnap, from enslavement, which was ever a threat to me there. But I was a free man. Now all men here are safe, whatever their colour or condition – because of you. They set you free, Mr Knight, and that ought to make this place special to you.’
He only sneered, and said, ‘Am I supposed to feel grateful for the honour and the riches they have heaped on me?’
‘No, but feel grateful for the bounty of God,’ I said. ‘I don’t believe I am invisible to them, as you say, but if I were, what of it? When I was in Paisley I was a weaver, like other weavers. When I go back there, I will be a weaver again. I will be among friends. If times are good or hard, I will prosper or suffer as a weaver, the same as the rest – not as a black man. They are good people. This is a good country for people like us.’
‘I grant you,’ he said, ‘there are some good people here, some who helped me then and some who are friends to me now; but there are good and bad people everywhere. Every country has its share of evil men, and Scotland is no different. Scotland has been good to you, you say. Let me tell you what Scotland has been to me. It has been the source of my tormentors and the wellspring of my torment.’
I could not persuade him out of this mood, and I wondered why he chose to sit in this place, to savour his old triumph, since it seemed to bring him no happiness. We spoke a little more, and had more rum, for which he offered to pay but then found that he had not enough money. I was just able to pay the reckoning, though it put an end to our stay at Mr Williamson’s, and we went back out on to the street. I asked him if he still lived in Dundee, and he said, ‘We’ve not been there some years.’ I took it from this that he lived nearer to Edinburgh, with his wife and family, but the truth is he never gave a hint of why he was there that day, nor where he was living, and that was fourteen years ago.
We parted then, with another shake of the hand, and I felt again that odd harsh texture of his palm. Then he continued walking up the High Street, almost as if he and I had never stepped aside for an hour to have our talk. I thought of what he had said, that we were invisible, and it gave me the fanciful notion that I had not met with him at all, that he was an illusion. I was much disturbed by this, and went up the Castlehill and stood on the ramparts looking over the city, turning over in my mind all that he had said.
I felt that, had I known I was going to meet Mr Knight before I did, I would have been filled with a great expectation of meeting a contented, proud, grateful and courageous man. Well, I do not doubt that the pride and courage were there, but gratitude and contentment were not. I felt a disappointment that this was the case.
I was so moved by this that I lingered at the Castle well into the afternoon, and it made me late for rejoining Mr Clerk. He was not angry, however, when I explained what had happened. He said, ‘Well, Peter, perhaps he needed to be thrawn to achieve what he did. You are naturally a cheerful and optimistic fellow and so think others are always downcast. Mr Knight may be happier than you think. There’s many of us Scots are happiest when we are at our most miserable. Perhaps he has simply become a native.’
It was a joke, of course, but I cannot help but think that there may have been a truth in it. Mr Clerk often made such pithy and interesting observations.
I find, sir, having given all the information I can recall anent Mr Joseph Knight, and as my friend Mr Tannahill has for some while now been obliged to rest his pen and stretch his fingers between sentences, it is time to end this very long letter. I fear I have not helped you in your quest, but I am, for myself, pleased to discover that it has enabled me to unburden my mind of many thoughts and impressions which had long lain dormant there, and which I had seldom considered in recent years. Mr Tannahill declares that the story is most interesting, and reminds me that Mr Robert Burns, the late poet, in whose memory he intends to establish a club here in Paisley, penned a touching song in which a slave laments being torn from the sweet shore of Senegal and sent to Virginia. I, a native of Virginia, came to Scotland of my own will, and Mr Knight, against his, from Africa by way of the plantations of the Indies. Mr Tannahill reminds me also that Burns was about to leave Scotland for those plantations when his muse burst upon the Edinburgh scene, assuring him of literary fame. One wonders how such a man could possibly have acted as the oppressor’s lieutenant: Mr Tannahill is of the opinion that either he would have been on the first boat home, or he would have begun a rebellion among the Negroes. He wrote the lament, apparently, in Dundee, at which place I trust this will find you. Such are the many strands which connect us all together.
I could never say I was a friend of Mr Knight, but we we
re acquainted, however briefly, and should you ever meet with him, I would be obliged to you for reminding him of that acquaintance, and of the deep conversation he once had with his fellow man, and fellow African,
Peter Burnet.
IV
Knight
FOR BLACK RIVER AND SAVANNA LA MAR, JAMAICA, to call at Madeira. The Coppered Ship AjAX, Alexander Maclaurin Master, is now ready to take goods on board, and will sail in November. For freight or passage apply to BEGBIE & MILNE.
N.B. Tradesmen, Husbandmen, &c, will meet with good encouragement to go by the above ship. Leith, Sept 24, 1802
CALEDONIAN MERCURY, 9 OCTOBER 1802
JAMAICA JULY 24
The French have abandoned the island of St Domingo to the blacks, who now reign victoriously there, and hold out a dreadful example to this colony. And, accordingly, a few days ago, a conspiracy was discovered in a miraculous manner among the negroes of this island. A slave having displeased his master, was sent to the house of correction. His companions knowing he was in the secret of their plot, and fearing he might confess, sent him some victuals which were poisoned. The unsuspecting negro ate of the victuals, when finding the poison beginning to operate, and knowing whence it came, enraged at the treachery of his companions, he confessed the plot which they had laid to set fire to Kingston, and massacre every white inhabitant.
If they had succeeded in this, their intention seems to have been the extermination of all the whites in the island. Some of them have already paid the forfeiture of their lives, and we are now quiet, but still under apprehensions.
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