Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

  “None. Perhaps God intended her for the marsh.”

  But if Nancy had enjoyed some months of freedom in the cluttered hut, they had not been without conflict. Her original target had been Timothy; he was the only human being with whom she had ever felt much identification. When she was with him they laughed a lot, and once, when wolf hunting was good, he had even paid a fine to prevent her from being whipped.

  But what she did not know was that Timothy already had a wife of sorts, the big Swedish girl whom he had indentured legally, and it was she who had title to the hut. Her child Flora was there, too, and things might have become difficult had Birgitta not been of ample heart. She saw no reason why Nancy should not move in, and if Turlock wanted to lie with her now and then, it was all right with Birgitta, for she had never intended staying permanently with this odious little man. She had been his mate for eight years but had always looked for a practical way of escaping; the presence of this gangling girl was of little consequence.

  The trouble came from Stooby. He had always liked Birgitta; she had never treated him as an idiot and had sometimes tried to tell him of Sweden and the early days at the colony where they found her. He could not understand the nature of foreign countries but knew that the Dutch had been harsh masters and that Birgitta had fled them with enthusiasm. He was therefore irritated that his father should now be treating Birgitta unjustly, taking this new woman into the hut, and after watching the affair in silence for some time, his resentment rose until at last he confronted his father.

  “You send her!”

  “Nance?”

  “Birgitta unhappy.”

  “Who cares?”

  “Unfair.”

  “You shut!”

  “Birgitta—”

  “You shut!” The toothless old man grabbed for his musket and began clubbing Stooby with it, but the noise alarmed the women, who began shouting.

  “Fool,” was all Timothy would say; his son said nothing, but that afternoon he disappeared.

  He was walking disconsolately in the forest when Griscom and Bonfleur came upon him, and the Englishman cried with some excitement, “It’s the idiot!” And they took him to their ship, where they needed someone to clear away the mess created by Paxmore’s black carpenters.

  Stooby worked for the strangers during the time his father was trying fitfully to make salt, and the more he saw of the ship, the more suspicious he became of these men. From his long years in the woods he had learned to note and evaluate everything: the way moss grew, the color of toads, the inclination of pine trees, the roots of the larch. It was this skill that he now applied to the visiting ship, and at the end of a month he knew so much about the strangers that they would have been appalled. “The idiot,” they called him, not realizing that in Stooby Turlock they had brought a natural genius into the heart of their project.

  These were the small things he saw: flecks of dried blood where someone had been wounded; stains on the bulwark suggesting that large stores of powder had been kept there; nail holes where structures had once been attached; marks on the bottom deck where barrels had stood; shreds of rope where hammocks had been suspended, many of them; numerous repairs prior to the ones being made by Paxmore, indicating that the ship had suffered, at one time or another, much destruction; and the frequent utterance of one word he could not understand: Marigot.

  But it was not the ship or the strangers that agitated him. It was his recollection of Nancy, and one afternoon when the strangers were not present he set forth in his canoe and returned to the marsh. Tying the canoe carefully to the rickety wharf, against the chance that he might have to escape in a hurry, he walked purposefully to the hut, kicked the door open and announced that he had come for Nancy.

  She was seated in a corner, half dressed, playing a string game with Flora, and she looked up without concern. “Hello, Stoob,” she said. He ignored her and walked to where his father lay on the floor, watching two bugs as they wrestled with a dead fly.

  “Nancy is mine,” Stooby said.

  “Go away.”

  “You listen. Nancy is—”

  Like a coiled snake, Timothy sprang from the floor, grabbed the musket with which he had once before repulsed his son and began smashing him about the head.

  “No!” Stooby cried in a powerful, throaty bellow. “No more!”

  With violent blows he crashed his father back onto the floor, but Timothy had been in many fights, and using the musket to pull himself erect, he came at his son with every intention of killing him.

  No more words were uttered, only suppressed grunts. The musket flashed out, catching Stooby in the jaw and drawing blood. Then the boy lunged at his father, caught him by the rag used as a shirt and drew him backward. As Timothy struggled to maintain his footing, his son brought his two hands up sharply, caught the gun and jammed it up against his father’s chin, collapsing the old man’s face.

  But Timothy was not finished. Summoning his considerable strength, he swung the musket in a wild circle, hit nothing, bounced it off a broken wall and brought it to rest with a mighty bang against his own ankle. Suddenly he began to wail, as he had always done when being whipped, and his lamentations became torrential. Screaming and shouting, he lunged at his son, who calmly knocked away the musket and struck the old man on the chin with such force that he fell backward over a chair, banging his head on the floor and knocking himself unconscious.

  Ignoring the inert body, Stooby went to the corner where Nancy sat and took her by the hand. “You’re mine,” he said, but as they were leaving the hut Birgitta said, “No need to leave,” and with a sweep of her hand she indicated that they could have one of the curtained corners, and there they went while little Flora peeked to watch their love-making.

  These long days when Edward Paxmore was finishing his corrections on the Martha Keene and repairing the mysterious vessel brought to his yards by Griscom and Bonfleur were difficult ones for his wife. Ruth Brinton, left alone at Peace Cliff, felt driven of God to do what almost no white person in the colonies had so far done: determine what kind of relationship ought to exist between the master and the slave. With all her suasion she had tried to get her husband to grant full freedom to the slaves he had inherited by accident, but he had kept insisting that they were his property, lawfully obtained, and that so long as he treated them humanely, as the Bible directed, he could not be at fault. Always he told his wife, “I was a servant, I obeyed my master, and from him learned an infinite amount.”

  “But thee was not a slave,” she argued. “Thy term was definite.” He could not see where this made much difference because, as he pointed out, “I would have been happy to prolong my indenture.”

  “But always with the chance of terminating it, at thy request.”

  “What difference?” he asked.

  At Patamoke Meeting she encountered the same defeats. On four successive First Days she had ranted, and one member had warned Edward, “Let not thy wife become a common scold.” She was infuriated, that was the only word, that the Quakers, who were so attentive to miscarriage of right, should be so obtuse on this great moral issue.

  As for the other churches, what could one expect of them? They served the masters and preached whatever doctrine the plantations required. Even that noble soul Father Steed, who had done so much good in Maryland, was blind on this fatal topic. “God appoints each man to his proper level,” he said piously, “and like the slave, mine has been a lowly one, ministering to the wilderness. Mrs. Paxmore, I have gone months upon months without accomplishing one good thing. My life ...” Often, for no apparent reason, he broke into tears, and she was not surprised when his younger brother came rushing to the cliff one day with the news that Ralph was near death.

  “He says he would prefer more than anything else to talk with you.”

  “I will come,” she said, thinking: If I were dying, he would surely come to me.

  They had sailed to Devon, but when they reached the creek the wind was against t
hem, so Paul ordered his slaves to row, and as they did, the great black muscles of their arms gleaming beneath the sweat, she could not see them straining; she could see only the three black women who worked for her and an anguish almost unbearable beset her, for she realized that she knew no more of her women than she did of these four strangers. Oh, she knew their names—Mary, Obdie, Sara—and roughly their ages; she was thirty-six and supposed that each of them was younger. Vaguely she knew that Mary was married to one of the men who worked for her husband, but she did not know which, and both Obdie and Sara had children, but under what arrangements she could not guess.

  Dearest God, she thought as she sat in the bow of the sloop looking aft, we bring human beings to live amongst us and know nothing of them. Never once had she heard a Steed or any other owner say of his slaves, “I told Amy and Obadiah to fetch it.” Always they said, “I sent my slaves to fetch it,” as if they existed without names or personalities. Now, as Henry Steed hurried from the plantation house to help dock the boat, she looked not at him but into the faces of the four men who had rowed, and they were visages in a dream, without skeletal bones to lend reality, or blood to keep them warm, or any other substantial quality other than their age and their ability to work. These men are prime, she thought as she gazed into their faces, and that is all we care to know about them, but they are also human beings, and if we allow them to live among us without acknowledging that fact, we are breeding tragedy.

  “Ralph is in sad condition,” Henry said, tears showing in his eyes. “Be not too argumentative.”

  “It is for argument that he summoned me,” she said. Primly, her neck clothed in gray, a Quaker bonnet on her head, her skirts lifted to escape the dust, she walked from the wharf to the house and up the stairs to the added room in which the priest lay. “They tell me thee is poorly,” she said.

  “I’m a small boat headed for the slip,” he said.

  They talked for more than an hour, speaking of every contentious difference that lay between them, and at last she said, “I am sorry, Father Ralph, that no Catholic prelate is available to talk with thee.”

  He tried to blow his nose but was too weak. “May I borrow your speech?” he asked, and when she nodded, he said, “Thee is a priest.”

  “I am a poor woman so tortured with sin that I fear I may not survive the night,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  “Of slavery. I am torn to shreds.”

  “No need,” he whispered. “No need. God saves the sparrow. He tends the slave.”

  “I cannot leave it to God,” she said, her stern face dissolving in tears. “Dear Priest, shrive my soul.”

  “We’ve shared a river ...” His voice trailed off. “My brothers ... call them ...”

  She hurried to summon the Steeds, and soon the small room was filled with brothers and wives and great-nieces. When he saw them—the offspring of Edmund Steed, the faithful Catholic—he wanted to console them but could not form the words. Now Fitzhugh, ever more striking with his golden hair, moved to the bedside and grasped the old man’s hand. “Don’t die,” he pleaded while his elders expressed their shock at his forwardness.

  “Come back, Fitz!” Henry ordered, but the priest held the child’s hand, and with this expression of love for his distinguished family, died.

  For Ruth Brinton the next days were both a torment and a consolation. She turned to the cliff and began the task of discovering who these blacks were that shared the land with her. To her surprise she learned that Mary was thirty-nine, five years older than she had supposed. “How does thee keep so young?”

  “I work.”

  “Is thy husband kind?”

  “Best man God ever made.” Tears came into large black eyes.

  “Does he love your baby?”

  “He sing for her.”

  Obdie had been taken from a village by a river, and her uncle had connived at her sale to Arab traders. “He bad. He have seven wives.”

  She had caused much trouble in the house and despised being told what to do. She said she was twenty-one, but there were serious discrepancies in her narrative: men in Barbados, men from Devon Island, a child born at Peace Cliff—it became quite complicated. Ruth Brinton tried to engage her in serious conversation, but Obdie suspected her of trying to establish some base from which new duties could be assigned, and she pretended not to understand. There wasn’t much anyone could do with Obdie.

  It was Sara who caused the confusion. She said she was about twenty-six and that so far she had had four children, two girls and two boys.

  “Do you miss them?”

  “Long time ago.”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “Do you want to be free?”

  Here Sara looked deeply into the eyes of her mistress and said nothing. A veil seemed to come across her pupils, as if she ran the risk of betrayal if her true thoughts were known. It was not an act of insolence, nor one of antagonism; it was just that subjects were being raised which could never be discussed honestly between white master and black slave, and it was dreadfully unfair of the white to raise them.

  “Thee is the one who could learn, Sara.”

  “Hmmmm.”

  “Does thee want to read?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Again the veil fell across the eyes, and this time Ruth Brinton interpreted it as hatred. “Oh, Sara, thee must not hate us for what we do.” There was no response.

  Some days later Ruth Brinton went to the boatyard to see for herself what work their male slaves were doing. The visit irritated her husband, who was working on Griscom’s ship, for he saw it as an interruption. He watched as his wife went to the sawyers’ pit, and he observed with increased exasperation that she was staying there for the better part of an hour, just staring at the two men sawing planks from the heart of an oak log.

  That night she said, “Do Abiram and Dibo haul the saw every day?”

  “It’s what they’re good at.”

  “But the one down in the pit? Does he work there all summer?”

  “Ruth! We sell the planks they cut—”

  “Sell? Thee means we don’t even need them for ourselves?”

  “Where does our tobacco come from? We sell the planks.”

  She said no more, for it was obvious that she was infuriating her husband. But on First Day she felt compelled of the Lord to speak in meeting. There was restlessness as she rose, and one woman went so far as to whisper, “Would that she might hold her tongue.” But this Ruth could never do:

  “I am lost in a dark alley of my own construction, and I simply cannot see the light. I am ashamed that my meeting has refused to assess the danger of the course we are on, and I think it most unchristian for us to dismiss as of no consequence the issues before us. I pray God for direction. I am a soul lost in sin and I pray for guidance.”

  So many members of the meeting protested to Paxmore that when he and his wife reached Peace Cliff that evening he spoke to her with considerable harshness. “Thee must stop dragging slavery into our prayers. The issue has been settled.”

  “It has only just begun!”

  “Ruth, the Bible has spoken. Our meeting has spoken. Thee heard what Father Steed said before he died. Does thee place thyself above all these?”

  “I do.”

  “Vain and arrogant woman.”

  “No, Edward,” she said softly. “I am beset with anxiety and I am trying to find the light.”

  By common consent they halted conversation on this fruitless topic. These two, who had suffered so much for a common faith, loved each other with a slow, burning fire that would never be extinguished; their four self-reliant children were proof. Edward realized that he would never have loved Ruth so deeply if she had been less stubborn in her beliefs, less willing to endure punishment for them. And she could not forget that this quiet, ungainly carpenter had stubbornly returned to Massachusetts in face of promised death to testify to t
hat same belief. As for his willingness to bear her stripes that day in Ipswich, she did not think of that now, for their love had moved to new levels.

  At such moments of domestic conflict it was Edward’s habit to quit debate and walk onto the porch, where he would stand for many minutes, contemplating the serenity of his river; it provided a calm greater than any he had known before; whenever he saw the marsh and the quiet trees he forgot his quarreling. On this night a dying moon rose in the east, throwing a silvery light over that placid stretch of water from the cliff to Devon, making it a peaceful lake of incredible beauty. “This cliff was saved for Quakers,” he said. Then he returned to the kitchen to kiss his wife.

  Ruth Brinton had discharged her irritation in a different way: she had hurried to her stove and begun cooking frantically, knocking pans and kettles awry, then chiding herself. Between peeling and baking she would think of what they had been arguing about, and she would smile, for she appreciated the fact that truth was revealed to human beings in different ways and at different times. She herself had been allowed, by God perhaps, to witness the future of whites and blacks on this river, and this clear vision impelled her to speak in meeting. If Edward did not see the dangers, if he remained confused over property rights and outmoded biblical quotations and the prosperity of his family at the expense of slave labor, she must be tolerant until such time as he, and other Quakers, saw what she saw.

  She cooked a fine meal. They talked of the strangers’ ship. He told her of how Stooby had quit working for the Englishman to live with Nancy and of how his twin brother Charley had come aboard. And they went to bed. But toward three in the morning, when herons begin to call, she was seized by a terrible shaking and sat upright in bed gasping for breath.

  “Edward!” she cried in panic.

  He wakened slowly and was appalled by what confronted him: his wife, her gown awry, trembling as if shaken by some storm. In a harsh voice she cried. “I am strangled by sin.”

  When many different people through many different generations experience common alarms, it is to be expected that in moments of extremity they will utter cries which are echoes of what has been said before. Ruth Brinton’s confession of sin was phrased almost exactly in words used earlier by Edmund Steed at the conclusion of his unsuccessful attempt to deny his Catholicism: he strangled in sin and saved himself only by public disclosure and exile to Virginia. She cried, “This day we must set our slaves free.”