by Jodi Daynard
After Cassie returned to the kitchen, life regained a modicum of stability. I could not say I was happy, but my days assumed a consoling rhythm: Every morning, after breakfast, I would walk down to the market to watch the boats come and go. Sometimes I would rise early enough to watch the ferryman as he rowed Watkins out to Badger’s Island. Cassie told me that for the past year Watkins had worked there as a shipwright, for Colonel Langdon. She also told me that my uncle made five pounds each month on his labor.
I then would return home to take up my needlework or a book of stories for young ladies, neither of which held my attention for very long. What’s more, sitting in the parlor with little to do, my mind kept casting back with great dissatisfaction to that scene with Lizzie. I felt something like remorse, which nothing quelled save arduous activity. I soon rose and found my way into the kitchen.
There was always a great deal to do, even when Uncle or Papa was abroad: pots to scrub, floors to wash, chamber pots to empty, wood to chop, linens to soak and hang to dry, chambers to air and dust, vegetables to boil, and meat and fish to smoke. At first I merely stood and watched Cassie work. But one morning, she turned to me and said, “Well, Mees Eliza, don’ just stand dere.” She handed me a bowl, and I began shelling brown-spotted beans, throwing the empty shells onto the floor by my feet. When I was done, Cassie stuck her nose in the bowl as if she expected to find a bloody finger in there.
By now, it was late October or early November. One chill morning, while I was still in my chamber, I heard a hasty rustling above me; then boots clomped heavily down the stairs. I was still in my shift but hastened down the hall to the Palladian window that faced Deer Street. I soon saw Watkins striding out the front door like one of the family. Over his shoulder he carried a musket and large gunnysack, and around his waist he had tied several heavy ropes.
Watkins’s bearing was resolute, purposeful. Upon his head he wore a wool cap, from which an unruly curl or two escaped. He headed west down Deer Street, and I lost sight of him. I returned to my chamber, dressed, and made my way to the kitchen, where Cassie was preparing breakfast. I entered and tied a smock about my waist.
“Where was John Watkins off to, so early this morning?” I asked.
“Why you call ’eem John Watkins? ’Ee’s just Watkins, to you.”
“Oh, Watkins sounds like an old butler, Cassie. You know, in one of those musty manses where skeletons are found in the attic. John Watkins, now that’s much better for a young fellow.”
Cassie was unimpressed with my reasoning.
“He’s not a young fellow to you, neither, Miss Eliza.”
“But you haven’t answered my question. Where goes he, dressed like that, and with a musket?”
“’unting.”
“Hunting? But for what, exactly?” I asked, impatient for details. I might actually have stomped my foot.
“Food. Maybe ’ee catch squirrels or voles. Maybe ’ee catch a boar.”
“A boar? To what use will we put a boar?”
“Tanksgiving.”
“Oh, yes—of course. I’d entirely forgotten.” That I should be surprised by the idea of a boar and not squirrels or opossums amused me. When I first learned back in summer that we ate those repulsive creatures, my shock was very great. But Cassie was so skilled at tenderizing and spicing these meats that I soon put aside my squeamishness.
I left the kitchen to tidy my appearance and sit myself at the breakfast table. Uncle Robert soon appeared, whereupon he announced, “Good news, all. I have just had a letter from my son, who says he shall join us for Thanksgiving.”
“How delightful,” I said flatly. “When can we expect him?”
“His letter informs me that he will stop in Connecticut and take a coach from there on November twenty-fifth, or thereabouts.”
“Happy news.” I did not begrudge my uncle a visit from his son, but it could afford me no pleasure. First, because my cousin was a British officer now. Second, because I recalled him as an arrogant, teasing youth. Cousin George once stole a silver saltcellar and blamed it on a servant who had been impertinent to him.
Later that day, Mama began to plan Thanksgiving dinner. She and Uncle had invited the Peirces, one of Portsmouth’s most prominent families, to dinner. Apparently they had a son of marriageable age, though thankfully he was on a trip and would not be joining us.
As Mama wrote her menu, I sat with her in the parlor, reading upon a book. The sky grew dark. Cassie entered and said that supper was ready. Mama stood, stretched, and turned to me. “Are you coming, Eliza?”
“Yes, of course,” I said, but I had not yet stood. I had begun to feel uneasy for a reason I could not define. I went in to supper, however, and returned to the parlor before Mama. There, I espied her foolscap on the table. I lifted it and read,
THANKSGIVING WITH THE PEIRCES
November 30 1775
Salade au Crab
Creamed Turbot
Roti du Boeuf au Jus
Minted Peas
Fruit Platter
Floating Island
Mama returned to the parlor minutes later. I held the menu up before her. “Mama. What is this?”
“Why, the menu, of course. Do you approve of it?”
“Approve? The king himself would approve. But surely you realize there’ll be no beef for us this year. Or fruit. Or turbot, for that matter. Surely you understand this?” My voice had an edge of desperation to it.
“I understand no such thing. Your father will be home any day now, and he’ll arrange it all.” She punctuated the sentence by sticking her narrow little chin in the air.
“Father is coming home from a rebellion. It’s doubtful whether he’ll have managed to keep his plantation from ruin, much less turned a profit on it.”
“Nonsense.” She moved to sit down, but I stopped her with an outstretched arm.
“We are even now struggling to put food on the table. Have you not noticed what you eat? We’ve not had beef these six months. Squirrel and opossum and God knows what other vermin have been our daily fare.”
Just then Uncle Robert appeared in the doorway. He looked about him. Suddenly I realized the source of my anxiety: Watkins had not yet returned.
“Where is that blasted nigger?”
Mama shrugged her ignorance, but I said, “He has gone hunting.”
“Hunting? In the dark? After his curfew? As like to shoot himself as anything else. Blast it. If he comes back, let me know at once. I’ll whip him to within an inch of his life.”
“No, indeed!” I exclaimed. My mother and uncle stared at me in amazement. “I mean . . . only that he does us a service. I overheard the servants talking, and it seems Watkins has gone to find game for our holiday.”
But Uncle was implacable. His three chins jiggled with rage: “Well, I didn’t give him leave to do so. Last I knew, I was master of this house. He shall be whipped in the square in the morning.”
His authority reestablished, my uncle marched off, perhaps to have stern words with the other servants. I doubted they would have the courage to tell Uncle Robert the truth: that it was thanks to Watkins that we had been eating meat at all.
My courage—a momentary flare—had fled, and I said nothing more. Mama endeavored to resume her work, but my outburst had ruined the fantastical mood. After a few minutes, she rose, coldly bade me good-night, and left the room. I said good-night but remained in the parlor. Cassie came in to check that the fire was safely gone out and found me sitting there still, though it had grown cold and dark. It was now near eleven o’clock.
“What? Still awake? And in da cold and dark?”
“I’m perfectly well. Some tea and a bit of fire would be good, though.”
“Tea and a fire, at dees time of night?” Cassie looked at me askance but did my bidding. For, even though we now spent our hours side by side in the kitchen, I was still Miss Eliza in the parlor, and she was still my parents’ slave.
Cassie set my dish of tea on the stand by
the wing chair. After she had placed a log on the fire and gotten it going, she remarked, “Drink yah tea and get yah’self off to bed. You up, I up, too.” She made as if to leave the room but then, on its transom, turned to me: “It won’ do. You know ’eet.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said coldly. “Go to bed, Cassie. I’ll make certain the fire is out before I head up.”
She curtsied and left me alone. Ten minutes later, the log burning low, the room going cold, I stood to extinguish the fire when in through the front door burst Watkins.
“Oh!” I said, cringing lest the noise wake everyone in the house. Watkins might then get his beating sooner than Uncle Robert had planned.
Watkins stood in the hall for a moment. His cap was gone and his hair had come entirely out of its plait. His coat was rumpled, and over his shoulder he carried a heavy sack. From it, two curled tusks stuck out quite six inches.
I said, “Uncle Robert is in a rage. I’d steer clear of him if I were you—”
I thought he would thank me for warning him but instead Watkins asked, his eyes challenging, “Where would you have me go, Miss Boylston?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but he had already moved off down the hallway.
“Oh!” I blurted in frustration once he was gone. My eyes smarted at his insolence. At last I removed to my chamber where I tossed and turned, feeling a fool for having waited up.
I awoke early the next morning, just past sunrise, to find Constable Hill at the foot of the stairs. He was a consumptive-looking man, though hardly past forty, with the nervous gestures of one who took little pleasure in his work.
Constable Hill was in the process of leading Watkins out the back door, toward the marketplace. Watkins’s head was down, and he gave no resistance. Hastily, I donned my clothing and cape and ran out across the backyard, through the Whipple property and down Front Street to the square.
Cassie was among a small group already there. When she saw me, she scowled. “What you do here, Miss Eliza?” I said nothing but watched as Watkins was stripped to the waist in the frigid cold. The constable’s man counted the lashes for all to hear: “One! And . . . two! . . . and . . . three!” Never had I witnessed such a thing before, nor had I ever known my father to punish his slaves so. I saw not what transpired on the plantation, but the whipping of John Watkins gave me a small, unwelcome taste of it.
Watkins wept not; he flinched not. He was as stone. Blood flowed down his back, staining his breeches. At one point, his knees folded, yet still he did not cry out.
I did, however. Hearing the cry, Watkins glanced in my direction. His body may have been unresisting, but his eyes blazed with rage and defiance.
That afternoon, we stripped the squirrels and rabbits Watkins had caught for us and hung the meat to dry. If Cassie saw the tears on my face as I did so, she mercifully said nothing. She and Phoebe gutted the boar and stripped it and salted it and hung it to cure in the smokehouse for our Thanksgiving celebration. But I knew I would not eat that meat, not if it was the last food on earth.
17
FOR TWO WEEKS, WATKINS DID NOT GO to the shipyard. From above, I heard only a soft, repetitive chorus of moans. Cassie went up and down the back stairs to tend to him, sighing almost as loudly as he moaned.
I was angry with my uncle, to be sure. But I was also furious at Watkins—why did he need to strut about the house as if he owned it? Why had he defied the curfew without so much as a request to do so, or an apology after the fact? Did he wish to get himself whipped? It seemed so. Cassie’s words echoed in my memory: “He tinks he a white a man.”
Thankfully, I was distracted from my concern with Watkins when Mama burst into my chamber to tell me that Papa was in Boston and would be arriving in two days’ time. She then began perusing the gowns in the room’s corner closet. “These styles are woefully démodées,” she said. “They must be altered, and I’m afraid it falls to us to do the work. Cassie is run off her feet, and the seamstresses tell me that they are all far too busy this time of year.”
I suspected that my mother was not being entirely truthful. We had no money for such work, but even had we, many of Portsmouth’s seamstresses, now of a radical bent, would sooner have sewn our shrouds. And so, with my dead aunt’s old sewing basket between us by the fire and our gowns in our laps, we set to work. We removed the ruffled sleeves and replaced them with buttoned-cuff sleeves. It took a great deal of trial and error to square the shoulders and plunge the neckline so that it bared a seemly amount of bosom. I felt myself to be highly inexpert at this art and sighed continually.
Meanwhile, other preparations were underway as well. Old Jupiter had been given the task of trimming the hedges and clearing the walkway. Poor Phoebe had to drag the heavy Turkey carpets into the yard and beat them free of dust and dirt. As for Watkins, Cassie told me that though his wounds were healing well, he would not return to the shipyard for several weeks more. Instead, he had been put to use as a house slave. It was obvious from his smallest movement that he resented it. He banged down the stairs, kicked at carpets, and came—I thought—perilously close to being beaten once more.
“Cassie, I’m ashamed I’ve said nothing to anyone regarding Watkins’s whipping, which was so unfair, so un-Christian. I am heartily ashamed. Indeed, my soul burns with anguish.”
“You jus’ keep dat burning angueesh inside of you, Miss Eliza, and don’ go telling it to Master Chase.”
“Why do you say that?”
But Cassie shook her head as if only another slave would understand.
The following morning, Mama and I chose to resume work on our gowns in the parlor, for it was the only room with a lively fire. We had just donned our gowns to check the placement of the necklines when, suddenly, into the parlor stepped Watkins. There we stood with our open bodices and no stays, the morning light streaming in upon us.
“Oh, pardon me.” Watkins looked away.
“Get out!” Mama cried, though he had already done so.
I grasped the bodice of my gown and laughed.
“What, pray, is funny? To have the slaves see you half-naked?”
“Oh, Mama, it is funny, even you must admit.”
“I don’t have to admit any such thing, and I shan’t.”
“Don’t, then,” I said, and giggled once more.
That same morning, we received a message that Papa’s ship had been spotted at the mouth of the harbor.
“Your papa!” Mama cried. “He arrives. Hurry!”
We ran upstairs to dress. Then Mama, Uncle Robert, and I walked down to the wharf and waited for his sloop to make its way through the harbor. I thought I could just perceive its distant form, like a feather quill in a vast pool of ink.
“Mama, look! Just there!”
The seas being rough that day, the winds and tide unobliging, it took them near another hour to anchor and then to row passengers over to the dock.
At last, Papa stood before us. Tired, stooped—and far too pale.
“Cursed ship,” he said, hugging us to him in the cruel breeze. He coughed. “Appalling conditions.”
We walked up the hill, Papa still coughing and clearing his throat. Two men from the wharf brought up his trunk, making better time than we did. When Mama inquired how things had fared, my father would not meet her eye. “A bad business. Very bad.”
“Come, come, my love,” said my mother, drawing Papa closer, as the wind was fierce. “Cassie shall draw you a bath and make some hot tea.”
“Oh, for a bath,” he sighed as they made their way up the hill. In the foyer, Papa removed his dirty, heavy overcoat and Mama moved to find Cassie. He called after her, “Tell Cassie she’ll find some real tea, in a blue tin, in my trunk.”
“Real tea!” Mama turned and flashed us a rapacious grin. “That will go so nicely with the cake.” Cassie had made some sort of cake in honor of Papa’s return, though I dared not set my expectations too high, since we’d had no flour for several months.
Ju
st then, I saw, through the foyer’s narrow window, old Jupiter bounding up the path on bandy legs, toward the back door. With him was a tall, young Negress, nearly as tall as he, though far blacker than any of our slaves. She was wrapped in a heavy wool cape, and I could not see her face. Papa allowed himself a mischievous smirk.
“What is it?” Mama asked as she returned from the kitchen.
“You’ll see. It’s a special gift, my love.” We moved into the parlor, and Papa bade Mama sit. He coughed again. In another few minutes, Cassie came into the parlor with the young Negress on her arm. Though dressed in shabby, besmirched petticoats, and weary, this was a healthy girl of perhaps seventeen or eighteen. I stared at her. How beautiful she was! Never had I seen such a regal Negress. Her limbs were long, her neck as long and graceful as a swan’s. She might have been Cleopatra’s daughter, so proudly did she bear herself. She could not have long been a slave, I thought.
“This,” my father said, as if he were unveiling a sculpture, “is Linda.” Linda curtsied shallowly.
“Does she speak English?” Mama asked.
“Oh, yes, though I imagine she’s a little shy, and fatigued from our horrendous journey. We were held up many days because of the rough sea. I know you’ve long been desiring your own maid, since Cassie was so cruelly taken from you last fall.” Here, Papa leveled his gaze upon me, as if somehow he knew I was to blame. “Anyway, Linda is yours if you wish it. If not, you can put her to work with Phoebe, I suppose.”
Mama assessed Linda carefully. She circled her, gazing intrusively upon her every part. Impulsively, I stood up and moved to Linda’s side. The girl seemed surprised by my gesture and shifted her feet.
Mama frowned. “Eliza, why stand you beside the girl? That is hardly appropriate.” She turned to Papa and smiled. “Thank you, my love. She will do.”