by Paul Lussier
An article in the next day’s Gazette made things even more confusing. It stated that while this attack on the lieutenant governor’s house was obviously a “high-handed enormity perpetrated by vagabond strangers,” it also implied that letters were found in Hutchinson’s house which proved he was indeed responsible for the Stamp Tax.
It suggested that these letters were the target of the riot, the motivation behind the sorry unleashing of fury. But these letters, it was explained, would never be produced because they had been destroyed (conveniently enough) in the course of the night.
I knew enough by now to see that these were lies.
“The resistance of that day, however,” the article went on to say, “has roused the Spirit of America. Britain best beware its Tax, for the People will fight!” Signed, Samuel Adams.
The journey back to Charleston passed in silence and I resolved never to mention to Papa his running away. Instead, I secretly decided to return to Boston as soon as I could, with Harvard my excuse. Bound and determined was I to rescue that girl.
CHAPTER 9
Rebelhood
In 1769, the Rebel in me was born, inadvertently, as is always the case with a true Rebel. For as it is a Revolutionary’s heart and not his mind which needs be engaged, usually his purpose hits him unawares. When he’s not looking, so to speak, as when, too late on August 15, I realized my father, in heading down the hall, intended to crack my beloved Apollo’s body to bits by slamming her against my bedroom wall.
Actually, in retrospect, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner, because from the moment Father and I returned to Charleston from what he came to refer to as his “little stint in Massachusetts,” four interminable years of uneasy truce between us began.
Father never again conducted business in Boston (“God will sink it, leaving my invoices unpaid”). He had all correspondence and addresses belonging to merchants from “that godforsaken place” struck from his files. And he absolutely forbade me ever to consider enrolling in Harvard.
I never mentioned Deborah to him, which was difficult, since I thought about her morning, noon, and night. Sitting on the edge of the swamp, I took up sketching and must have made five hundred portraits of her hand alone, both sides, driven as I was to have a permanent record of what, with every passing day, felt increasingly like a dream. I found hope in the lifeline on her palm, which I remembered being long (and I drew it longer, extending it down to the wrist) in the belief that the longer she lived, the better our chances of finding each other once again.
I tried running away, but only got so far as the swamp before realizing that without money or clothing I’d wind up sleeping in haystacks or sold into servitude. This is one area in which I differed markedly with the storybooks: I knew that love alone was not enough to keep me alive.
So I was trapped. And I acted like it. My only solace was thoughts of Deborah (I’d talk to her via Apollo, into her blinky red eyes) and the literature I read coming out of Boston, which made taxes, taxes, taxes synonymous with tyranny (I was learning). It was always the same old thing, but it had a quality that captured my attention. Evidently other people’s too, for by 1769, the anti-tax furor had spread to Charleston and seemed to be taking over the town.
It was fun. We set up liberty poles and marched “offenders” (those who paid their taxes, I guess) around it. We said all sorts of nasty things about Parliament. And a boycott was set up to cripple merchants who sold taxable, British goods. I knew my father, for one, would persist in doing so and, hence, give me a chance to fix him but good.
He hadn’t been that horrible, actually, during these years. Sure, he made me clean out the horse stables once a week and empty my own chamber pot, but mostly, thanks to times getting harder economically, he was preoccupied with what he loved most in life—making money—which kept him more or less easy to please.
Here in Charleston, you see, he perceived no threat in this anti-tax furor. That’s not to say that Papa was flamboyant about selling British goods—he just didn’t exactly advertise his oscillating clocks, pygmy dolls, and scented thatch in the streets. He was definitely more covert than that, secretly stowing goods in every available nook and cranny in the house. He conducted the majority of his business deals and deliveries and the unloading of ships from the docks in the wee hours of the night. Still, he was confident enough to let me attend anti-Parliament rallies, as long as I assured him harsh words were never spoken about the king (they weren’t).
It was a bit odd, in fact, how King George was generally spared at these gatherings—never the target, per se, except as the butt of rumor and bad jokes. Certainly he was taken perfunctorily to task for being weak, with a Parliament beholden to mercantile interests. But mostly it was his eccentricities (was it true he dreamed of sex with piebald mares?) and obsessions (is every clock in the palace linked in absolute, to-the-second synchronicity?) that were the subjects of debate and ridicule.
Looking around me, I got the idea that very few people knew what the hell they were talking about, especially as regards taxes. The Stamp Tax, having long been rescinded, had been replaced by a less onerous usage tax on glass, lead, tea, and china, to mention a few items on the list. With the possible exception of tea, these were all luxury items, which few people in attendance at the tavern rallies could afford anyway. Really, now, all bias aside, what business did gypsies, jack-tars, tenant farmers, and yeomen have complaining about surcharges on china? And at the opposite end, for merchants affluent enough to afford such items, what was a few extra pence?
All very confusing, especially when in the same meetings I’d also hear rumblings hailing King George for “knocking down a peg or two the merchant seamen, the plantation owners, the bastard well-to-do”—people like Papa, who took more than they gave.
I understood nothing, nor did I care to. As far as I was concerned, I was on the right side and my father the wrong; he was a tyrant for amorally selling British goods. Heeding Deborah’s words, which I’d etched in my mind—“No, but it’ll do for now”—I simply took it on faith that this hue and cry about taxes would take me where I belonged.
It did.
So it was that in the feverish climate of one of these rallies, I took it upon myself to report my father. “Duty compels me, comrades, to report to you the heinous violation of the current boycott by Henry Lawrence, otherwise known as my papa.”
Oh, didn’t the crowd cheer.
When they raided our home, even though I was watching through the keyhole of an armoire where Papa had stowed me (“for your protection”) and even though their faces were painted black and bodies swathed in Indian garb, I recognized every last one of them. (I think, momentarily forgetting myself, I even said “Hi!”)
First they ordered Papa to dance to “Yankee Doodle” while singing it backward, then demanded he cease and desist from importing “taxable goods” from Britain.
Papa handled the feat surprisingly well under the circumstances (“Macaroni it called and cap his in feather . . .”) and made a litany of promises to do just as these men bade. Not only did he put up virtually no resistance, he seemed relaxed, utterly unruffled by the whole ordeal.
I can’t quite recall exactly how it was that Papa turned the situation around to his advantage. It all happened so fast. I just know it had something to do with quantities of bootlegged British rum and some little Chinese porcelain figurines he retrieved from a trunk in his bedroom and passed out in droves. “One of these could feed the entire city of Charleston bounties of bread,” he bragged.
Not only did not a single comrade object to such decadence, they encouraged Papa to hand over more of the statues because, as one of them remarked, “They make nice gifts.”
Then, after signing a petition of support for my father’s campaign as a delegate to the South Carolina assembly, they left.
Needless to say, I was disgusted beyond words. Where was all that Revolutionary zeal I’d been hoping for? All that commitment? The Cause?
&nb
sp; Father hadn’t locked me in the armoire for my safety after all (I knew that was too kind to be true). He’d done so simply to be free of my interference while he took matters in hand as only Henry Lawrence, unimpeded, could.
Which of course meant two things: (1) From the moment he spotted “Indians” in black face (go figure) coming up the walk, he suspected me of colluding with them; and (2) afterward, should he prove triumphant, I’d have hell to pay.
“Papa! Let me out! I can’t breathe! I’ve had quite enough!” I hollered. Then, playing innocent: “Are they really gone?” and “Are you all right?”
He released me. And for as long as I lived, for the balance of my thirty-two years, I never, ever forgot the look on my father’s face at that moment and all that next ensued. The face and temperament of a wild, rabid dog, a snarling, hissing, snorting, sweating, bloodshot, vicious beast.
He struck me, his ring-bearing fist landing in my right eye.
“Get the point, son! And get it now!” He grabbed me by the scruff of the neck. “You are done!”
I still don’t know exactly what came over me, but all I could think to do was laugh.
Henry Lawrence did not take it well. He kicked me to the floor and smashed a saucer on my head. Which I thought was even funnier.
“When will you learn, sissy boy, that these ideals you espouse aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, that in the end, I will win out—and things will remain just as they are!” he roared, kicking my shin for emphasis.
I don’t know why I bothered to reason with him, but there you go. “Papa, I cannot help but differ. Look, for example, at Apollo and her kind: The oldest living creatures on earth are those who adapt, not those who hold on to antiquated values. Apollo has endured precisely because—”
My next inhalation brought a vision of exactly what was to come.
Father running down the hall to my room.
His only son, now with a bruised leg, giving chase on all fours, screaming, “Please, Papa, no!”
Father at the bath, Apollo in his hands.
“Papa, please!”
He was gripping Apollo’s neck. “Tell me you’re dead wrong. That you’re sorry. That you respect your papa.”
I couldn’t do that. How I wished I could.
So he snapped her neck in two.
He hurled her against the wall, full force, shattering her to bits.
“There!” he cried triumphantly. “So much for its talent for survival—now it’s gone!” And he crushed bits of her shell under his velvet shoe. “Such is a tortoise’s fate!”
My head, heart, and soul were silenced. Nothing mattered anymore.
That night I made a necklace of Apollo’s shell shards, and I kept it with me to my dying day. I took nothing else from Mepkin Plantation when, later that week, I left for Harvard.
I didn’t discuss my decision with my father. Somehow he just knew.
He agreed to pay all expenses provided I never speak, write, or seek to meet him again.
I accepted the terms.
In the course of a single week, my father filled in my swamp with topsoil.
But for the sound of my necklace rattling as I stepped up into the carriage Father had hired, nothing but silence accompanied my departure. Papa and I never even said good-bye.
Silence, but for the rattle of Apollo’s scales, my own personal alarum.
CHAPTER 10
Harvard Days
When I wasn’t escaping the tortures of my beastly Harvard classmates, I spent every moment looking for Deborah, and I made a promise to myself to stay alive until I did.
Things were that dangerous. Keeping one step ahead of the various mobbish factions roaming within and without Harvard’s ivied walls was really and truly a full-time job.
I don’t know what I’d come to Boston hoping for, except to find Deborah and, I guess, fight for something. To be where she and The Cause dwelt; to become a priest or a lawyer; to settle down and be free. This was, I suppose, how the scenario in my mind played out.
I had it all wrong. Deborah was nowhere to be found. And just attending a lecture in the wrong attire amounted to taking one’s life in one’s hands. One day I’d wear an English waistcoat to look very much the gentleman and keep Tory upperclassmen from making me their slave (no exaggeration here: I mean whips and chains!). Another day, unassuming colonial homespun (ostensibly to protest dutied British cloth) to placate those sympathetic to the “Rebel Cause” (although I hadn’t quite figured, outside of the tax argument, which was getting tired, exactly what that was). Never mind that I looked like a sack in homespun flax; if it kept my untimely eradication at bay, I could cope—although I dreaded that I might run into Deborah on one of my dumpy, unfashionable “colonial days.”
I just couldn’t seem to keep the infractions belonging to whichever side straight. One day my crime would be sneaking a sip of Bohea tea in the latrine, another day failing to refuse butter. That, as it turned out, had more to do with protesting the lousy—and I mean that literally—food than with manifesting either a Loyalist or Rebel sympathy.
For the apparently capital crime of sipping tea, would-be Rebel sympathizers (i.e., children of Rebel parents) were forced to renounce all loyalty to George III. In and of itself this wasn’t a big deal. I’d learned quickly enough at Harvard that in order to survive a single day I’d need to tell anybody anything they wanted to hear, and by this point, three months into my first term, I’d already become situationally ambidextrous. Besides, I hated George III . . . I thought. But climbing that lightning rod, blindfolded, at night in a rainstorm—that was tough.
This was punishment for helping a boy, one Tom Troy. Tom had been tarred and feathered by Rebels for writing to his Loyalist father. The Rebel faction on campus was convinced he was a spy. And all I did was give him water after he was dumped, burned and sniffling in pain, on the dean’s doorstep.
“Water is not the issue,” Rebel bully Buck Sweet graciously clarified for me. “It’s for being an accomplice to conspiracy that we’re forcing you to do this,” he explained, prodding me up the rod with a pitchfork. “Up you go now—show us you regret your action!”
I admit that, given the alternatives of jumping from a high window or being hung by the feet for six hours from a flagpole, the option of climbing a lightning rod in a storm was tame, but even so, I deserved better than an “up you go.”
Had my father not forbade contact, I would have written him about the thoughts that crystallized as I was clinging to the rod:
I regret to inform you, Father, that I’ve made a terrible mistake. Please, let me come home.
Where in the name of God were all those high-minded ideas historians afterward touted as having inspired The Cause? Where was the evidence of British policy strapping American commerce?
Who knew? Who understood? Who cared?
And to make matters worse, Harvard looked like play school compared to the ruckus going on off-campus, in Cambridge and beyond.
Big, rusty cauldrons of tar were kept at a boil at the top of Copp’s Hill and Beacon Hill, available and ready to spread on the next victims of the Sons of Liberty—perhaps an unsuspecting Tory shopkeeper, newspaper editor, or defecting partner in organized crime.
Small men were strung up, with scalding imported tea forced down their throats.
A bookseller was stripped naked and tied to a pole with a sign strung about his neck: No friend of Liberty.
And who was it that was behind all this rabble-rousing? Who was it that was ordering shops selling British goods closed, besmearing their shop windows with human excrement and cow piss?
Our esteemed and dignified Founding Fathers, that’s who.
By 1769, the Green Dragon Tavern, having been bought outright by Samuel Adams’s well-heeled friends, was no longer a secret den. These days, the Sons of Liberty met there and plotted openly. College students such as myself would gather there too, to enter competitions for free beers, the most “clever” curse against
British soldiers awarded the three-mug prize (“Your Mother isn’t England, she’s your King George!” . . .).
His black Labrador specially trained to bite at the sight of the color red (as in Redcoats) at his side, Samuel Adams would rail on and on about The Cause of liberty, attacking the Townshend tariffs, which he claimed existed for the “sole and express purpose of raising revenue”—a statement of the obvious, to me, not the nefarious. But didn’t the crowd go berserk anyway, hissing and booing and swearing revenge even as they had to be reminded who Lord Townshend actually was: the obese prime minister who chewed with his mouth open, hated America with a passion, and had much too much influence with the king.
“No Englishman is bound by laws made by a legislature in which he is not represented!”
That one always elicited a toast.
“No taxation without representation!” of course, was a very big seller, normally preceded by a refill of bumpers, which would always produce a cheer—at which point the rowdies and students who purchased no glass and had no business with lead (I think those were the items currently being taxed; it was hard to keep the list straight) would fall into the street, hooting and hollering and carrying on, taunting soldiers, who in turn would raise their muskets in protest, which in turn incited the ladies to turn out and command their husbands and sons to “shut in the name of God up” and get their useless arses home. And they would oblige, until the next night, which always promised another adventure.
Oh, the men from the Green Dragon, they ruled. There was Hancock and Otis and Warren and Church and, of course, the Adamses: Samuel and John. They were merchant and lawyer and doctor and poet and clerk and lawyer again.