The whites who supervised this system also became alike in their ways. Most wives were kind and condescending, but also careful to ensure that a new crop of seamstresses was growing up in the slave quarters. The plantation owners were aloof but considerate; they would be shamed if anyone circulated reports that they were treating their slaves poorly: “We endeavor to be good masters, and we discharge any overseer who touches a slave.” The fact that at Devon the master himself had gone mad for a spell and had actually whipped his slave girl Eden was referred to only obliquely: “We ran into a small problem but corrected it.” The real burden under which the white masters lived was psychological: they came to believe that they were inherently superior and that they were ordained to hold in their hands the destinies of those less fortunate.
The white Steed overseers occupied a curious position, half slave, half free. In a hundred years no overseer had ever eaten a meal at a Steed table, nor had any ever sat in the presence of a Steed without having been invited. It would have been unthinkable for Mr. Beasley to break either of these customs.
Along the Choptank there were five levels of social life, and the members of each understood their place. First came the Steeds and similar planters; infinitely below them came the slaves. In town there were the merchants and artisans such as the Paxmores, referred to by the slaveholders as “those poor unfortunates.” In the country lived the solid farmers on whom the society depended; and everywhere there appeared the unspeakable white trash, like the Turlocks, often referred to as “Oh, them.”
One aspect of slavery baffled explanation: along the Choptank only one family in eight owned slaves, yet all believed that their existence depended upon the continuance of slavery. It was as if the Steeds had used witchcraft to persuade the slaveless farmers to defend a system which benefited not them but the rich, and when George Paxmore tried to argue that the economic life of the river would be enhanced if black men were set free to work for wages, he was considered an irresponsible fool, not only by the Steeds, who owned slaves, but especially by the Turlocks, who owned none and whose relatively low position was caused primarily by the region’s insistence upon slave labor.
“All I need to know about niggers,” Lafe said when the mutiny aboard the Ariel became known in Patamoke, “is that they murdered my cousin Matt. One of ’em looks at me with a crooked eye, he dies.”
The Steed system of slavery was a gentle one, and it bore satisfying fruit. It was seen at its best at Christmastime; then, by long tradition, the slaves received one week of holiday, and Mr. Beasley saw to it that in each of the communities hogs were barbecued over a pit fire, with dozens of chickens roasting on the side. At the big house candies and pies were made. Hundreds of loaves of bread were baked, and the Steed women took care that every slave got his new set of work clothes; boys who had reached eighteen during the year were given their first suit of good clothes and girls of that age were given two dresses.
Mr. Beasley, strict teetotaler though he was, allowed bottles and even kegs of whiskey to be brought onto the grounds, and festivities were endless: cockfights, races, wrestling matches, sewing bees, baking competitions and all sorts of games for children. Each plantation had at least one man who could fiddle, and sometimes he played for nine hours at a stretch. Often the white folk from the big houses would come to watch the dancing; chairs would be brought out and the owners would sit approvingly as their slaves enjoyed themselves.
No work was done during this festive period, only the inescapable routines like milking cows and gathering eggs and carrying out the chamberpots from the big house. It was a joyous time, and fifty years later blacks in some far part of the nation would remember plantation life: “If’n no Christmas, I think I’da died.”
The Steeds enjoyed the holiday almost more than their slaves; it enhanced the illusion that they were good masters. The gaiety in the dark faces proved that life in the shanties could be tolerable, and the obvious delight when the new clothes and the extra food were distributed proved that on these plantations at least, the slaves loved their masters.
There was only one ominous cloud: Elizabeth Paxmore, the Quaker lady, had been caught teaching black children how to read and write. She did not, of course, admit them to the informal school she conducted for plantation whites at Peace Cliff, but she did welcome them to the shed in back of the telescope house, even though this flouted local custom. What was worse, she had allowed two older blacks to slip into her classes and was teaching them how to read the Bible, and each of these students belonged to the Steeds.
When word of this criminal behavior reached Uncle Herbert, who now supervised the entire Steed operation, he was aghast. He asked his nephews if he was correct in assuming that slaves had never been taught to read the Bible, and they assured him he was. He then summoned Mr. Beasley, who stood with hat in hand to receive his instructions: “You’ve got to go and reason with that difficult woman. We can’t afford a scandal ... God knows we’ve sent our own children to her. But we do want a stop to this pernicious business.”
So Mr. Beasley got into his sloop and sailed over to Peace Cliff. Bowing politely, he said, “Mrs. Paxmore, I come on unpleasant business.”
“Thee always does,” she said crisply, but with a touch of dry humor. She was now forty-nine years old, trim and erect as an elm tree, and almost as pretty. Her features had attained a lovely calm, as if conforming to the gray dresses she wore, and her manner had softened. She was disarming, a woman of middle age who had the alertness of a girl. Smiling warmly, she invited Mr. Beasley in, sat him down and faced him in a straight-backed chair. “Now tell me thy problem.”
“Ma’am, it’s about those two slaves you’re teachin’ to read the Bible.”
“Is it wrong to teach another human being to read the Bible?’
“Mrs. Paxmore, you don’t seem to understand that since the trouble with Nat Turner over in Virginia ... Things aren’t the same, and this meddling with slaves has got to stop.”
Elizabeth Paxmore folded her hands in her lap and said firmly, “It will not stop.”
Mr. Beasley ignored this challenge and pleaded, “You’ve also got to quit teaching our nigger children.”
Mrs. Paxmore started to respond, but the overseer said hurriedly, as if he had memorized his arguments, “All the states agree that slaves must not read the Bible. They center on certain verses and it disturbs them. The proper thing is for a white minister to explain the Bible ... or the master of the plantation.”
“Don’t they center on certain verses?”
“But they give a balanced view. That God ordered the world. That some were intended to be slaves.”
“And that the slave must obey the master?”
“Of course. The Bible says that specifically.”
Mrs. Paxmore looked at the overseer compassionately and asked, “Does thee think that I will stop disseminating the word of God?”
“You’d better. The word of God must be taught only by those capable of explaining its true meaning.”
They had reached an impasse. Mr. Beasley had nothing more to say. Politely he excused himself, placed his hat on his head and walked down to his sloop. At first Mrs. Paxmore felt that she had bested him, but in the end he triumphed, for she never saw any of her students again, men or boys. She waited for them to appear in the shed behind the house, but they never came. One day in Patamoke she stopped a Steed slave to ask where her students were, and the woman was too frightened to reply, there on the street where she could be seen by the Steed personnel at the store, but with a movement of her eyes she indicated that she would meet Mrs. Paxmore later, behind a wall.
“They was sold south.”
This phrase represented the ultimate terror among slaves—the sugar plantations of Louisiana, the cotton fields of Mississippi—and Mrs. Paxmore, suddenly weak, leaned against the wall, her hands over her eyes. The two young men so hopeful, the children just beginning to learn their letters ...
“They was all sold s
outh.”
It was into this society that Cudjo came in mid-December 1833, and his arrival created a sensation, for he was the first native from Africa that anyone then living at Devon had ever seen.
He reached the Choptank illegally. After Mr. Beasley expelled the two Bible-learners, he hurried them to Baltimore, along with four children separated from their parents, intending to sell the lot south. But as he approached the auction hall he was intercepted by a slave dealer from Savannah who introduced himself as “T.T. Arbigost, with a most interesting proposition.” Mr. Beasley did not like such men or their connivings, but Arbigost whispered, “Why pay the auctioneer an unnecessary commission?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Sell your slaves to me, privately.”
“You won’t offer as much.” Mr. Beasley had good reason to be suspicious of Georgia traders, and Mr. Arbigost, with his white linen suit and silver toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth, seemed especially suspicious. But he offered an attractive barter: “Now, I know that the niggers you want to dispose of are troublemakers. I can see that. But I’ll take them off your hands in a way that you’ll come out ahead. For the two men, I’ll give you one of the finest prime niggers you ever saw, docile, good at machines. And for the four children, I’ll give you my two women.”
“That hardly seems—”
“Plus four hundred dollars.”
It was a trade, and after Mr. Arbigost shifted his silver toothpick, he confided, “Tell you the truth, Mr. Beasley, I’d put the two wenches at work in the fields. Proved themselves a little sassy in the big house.”
“You have the same kind of trouble with your buck?”
“No, sir!” He moved close to the overseer and dropped his voice to a whisper. “I personally smuggled him in. Right off a ship from Africa.”
Mr. Beasley had never worked a slave direct from Africa, and asked, “Is that an advantage?”
“Yes, yes!” Mr. Arbigost cried enthusiastically. “Means he hasn’t learned the ways that get niggers into trouble.”
Enticed by the prospect of dealing with a new kind of slave, Mr. Beasley inspected the man being offered. Looked to be about twenty-five, sturdy, good teeth, huge biceps. His face had that placid gaze of complete resignation which overseers preferred. “Shall I chain him to the boat?”
“Chain him, Mr. Beasley? Do you expect a fine boy like that to mutiny? Look, he’s as gentle as a lamb.” Mr. Arbigost poked Cudjo in the ribs, and he was gentle.
The three slaves were led to the wharf, and the long, easy sail to Devon began. Cudjo would remember every detail: the bigness of Baltimore harbor, the multitude of ships resting there, the spaciousness of the bay, the beauty of the Eastern Shore as it rose gently on the horizon, the calm of Devon Island. He also studied the four half-naked slaves operating the boat, and thought: I sailed a ship larger than this. But he noticed that the men seemed at ease, and their backs were not striped like his.
Upon delivery at Devon he was assigned to one of the outlying plantations from which the two men who had been caught learning to read had come, and there, far from the clement eye of the Steeds, he was placed under the supervision of a Mr. Starch, fiercest of the overseers. All incoming slaves served their apprenticeships with Starch, who had a knack for breaking them into the Steed system. When he first saw Cudjo and his impressive physique, he assumed that here was a man who might prove difficult, but during his weeks in Georgia the big Xanga had mastered the strategy for being a slave.
He obeyed. Grasping situations more quickly than most, he studied to determine what pleased an irascible overseer, and he provided it. He did so for a powerful reason: he was determined to learn. His thirty-three days in command of the Ariel had taught him a lifetime of lessons; that he could operate a complex machine, that he could handle people, that he must learn to read, that he must learn to figure, that his life would be meaningless unless he learned somehow to be free. Most of all, he had acquired that inner confidence which can make a man infinitely more powerful than the accidents of birth would normally permit. No amount of temporary abuse was going to divert him from his twin goals of learning and attaining freedom.
Slavery he did not understand, except the fundamental truth that blacks were slaves and whites were not and that whatever the latter said was correct. Even during his brief stay at Savannah he had watched with amazement as white men gave blacks the most faulty and ineffective instruction for doing a job; even the stupidest black could see that it wouldn’t work, but even the wisest black could not correct the white master. “Yassah! Yassah!” was the first English word Cudjo had learned, and he used it constantly without feeling any sense of debasement. If “Yassah” was the password to existence, so be it.
Whites and blacks alike were fascinated by this stranger from Africa, the former hoping to find proof that blacks were born savage and rescued only by slavery, the latter trying to discover something about their origins. He disappointed both groups, for he was not savage, nor was he interested in Africa; his problem was America. During his apprenticeship in Georgia he had picked up enough English to communicate, and as soon as he was settled in as one of Mr. Starch’s field hands he began asking questions: “Who d’big boss?” “Where he live?” “Anybody here can read?”
When this last question was asked, the other slaves showed fear. They explained that Cudjo’s predecessors had been caught reading and had been sold south. With a hundred stories they impressed on him that the worst thing in the world that could happen to a slave was to be sold south, and after he had listened to a plethora of such tales he said, “I been south.” And he indicated that there were many things worse.
Whenever he saw a scrap of writing he studied it, hungrily, trying to decipher its mystery. His first solid instruction came when barrels were packed with goods for London. Then a slave from the cooperage appeared with an iron stencil and a pile of wood shavings. Lighting a small fire, this man threw on heavy timbers until he had a fine blaze, into which he thrust the iron stencil. When it was red-hot, he pressed it against the head of the barrel, allowing it to sizzle until the notation was deeply burned: DEVON PLNT FITHIANS LONDON 280 LB.
He memorized the rubric, unable to decode even one fact it represented. Nevertheless, he could reproduce it, letter for letter, which he did in the sand when no one was looking. Then, from something Mr. Starch said, he deduced that this barrel was intended for London, and he felt a strange sensation of triumph, for he had been in London. That much he knew.
He also heard the overseer from another plantation say, “I wonder, Starch, if that far barrel contains a full two-eighty pounds,” and Mr. Starch had gone to it, tapped on the figures and said, “When we brand it two-eighty, we mean two-eighty.” Cudjo looked quickly away, but as soon as the men left, he hurried to the cask, studied the marks that Mr. Starch had struck, and learned that 280 was said two-eighty. In the next few days he wrote these symbols in the dust many times and pronounced them. They were the opening wedge.
When the next barrel was filled, and the lid was about to be hammered down, he stood by the barrel and asked, so that Mr. Starch could hear, “This one got two-eighty?”
Without thinking, the overseer responded, “It better.” Then he stopped, looked at Cudjo and shook his head. But he remembered him.
The sense of power that came with knowing that this barrel was headed for London and that it contained two-eighty was so exciting that Cudjo looked for other writing to decipher; there was none. So he began to inquire as to how the two banished slaves had learned, and slowly he discovered that a white woman named Mrs. Paxmore had taught them. Quickly he dropped all questioning, lest some clever slave deduce his plans, but in an entirely different part of the field he asked in subtle ways who this Mrs. Paxmore was, and he was told.
One day in early December 1834 he slipped away from work, ran down to the bank of Dividing Creek, swam across and ran along the eastern edge of the creek until he came to Peace Cliff. Withou
t hesitation he ran up the hill, reached the back door, banged on it and waited.
A woman appeared, middle-aged, thin, dressed severely in gray. The thing he would always remember was that she was neither surprised nor frightened, as if accustomed to the arrival of disobedient slaves. “Yes?”
“I learn read?”
“Of course.”
Carefully closing her kitchen door, she led him to the shed in which she had given earlier instruction and placed him on a chair. “Which plantation do you come from?” This was too difficult, so she asked, “Who d’big boss?”
“Mastah Starch.”
She leaned back, made a little temple of her fingers and said quietly, “Does thee know the words sold south?”
“I been south.”
She bowed her head, and when she raised it Cudjo could see tears in her eyes. “Thee still wants to learn?”
He nodded, and without further comment she took down a hornbook—a shingle into which the alphabet had been burned—but before she could say anything, he wrote with his finger the words branded on the tobacco casks. She could not follow him; fetching a pencil and paper, she said, “Write.”
For the first time in his life Cudjo put words on paper: DEVON PLNT FITHIANS LONDON 280 LB. She smiled. She could guess with what effort this illiterate slave had memorized those letters, and she was about to explain them when he stopped her and pointed to 280. “Two-eighty,” he said, and she congratulated him.
She then went to each group of letters, and he exulted when he discovered which of the symbols signified London. He repeated the name several times, looked at her and laughed. “I been London.” She thought this unlikely and assumed that he was confusing the name with some locality in the south. Carefully she explained what London was and where, and he cried, “I been London,” and with a few words and gestures he convinced her that he had indeed been in this great city which she had never seen, but when she asked how he had got there, some inner caution warned him that no one must ever know, and he feigned an inability to comprehend her question.
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