by Gigi Amateau
Gabriel turned the iron bar now and again until it glowed a devilish white. He rested the iron at a sharp angle against the face of the anvil, making sure to keep his hand firm so that no light, air, or heat could escape. Then Gabriel hammered the end, drawing the iron out long and thin. When the plain bar felt the weight of a nail to him, he used a small wedge to mark the cut and hammered until the thin piece fell away; then he set about turning the iron sliver into a sharp nail.
Clang, clang, clang. Ping. Clang, clang, clang. Ping. Gabriel hammered out the tip with an even, steady pace, never missing his mark except on every fourth strike, to settle the hammer in his left palm. Even when Gabriel’s hands started to cramp from gripping the hammer and the iron, he kept on heating, turning, hammering, and setting the shape with water.
Soon, four edges emerged. With great patience, he drew out an even square. When the square met with his satisfaction, Gabriel pressed one edge hard against the anvil. With perfect pacing, his hammer drew forth a perfect tine tip. Then he slipped the nail through the pritchel hole at the anvil’s heel, upsetting the iron into an almost-square nail head. After giving it a final dip in the water, Gabriel presented the nail to Jacob.
The master blacksmith shook his head. “Know smiths who’ve worked for years — smiths been on their own for a good long while — who still can’t hammer so well.” Jacob took the nail from Gabriel, heated it, and smoothed the metal clean. This was how Gabriel learned — by doing what needed doing and presenting the work to Jacob.
When a farmer from Varina, east of the city, brought in scrap metal to sell or trade — for Jacob Kent believed everything could be reused — Gabriel stood near the teacher to learn all he could about the properties of old steel or iron. When the governor’s aide brought His Excellency’s steed for shoeing, Gabriel knew to stack the old shoes in the great pile for melting and repurposing later.
What he loved most about the forge, though, was that Jacob and his customers were patriots. Even more than Gabriel enjoyed swimming or fishing in the James River, he craved the bold talk of the men who filled the dark smithy. While visitors to the forge brought with them new problems to solve, they also often brought new thoughts on the building of America or the spreading of freedom.
All sorts of men gathered there. Artisans, black and white, free and slave, used the forge as a sort of trading place. When coopers and carpenters stopped in to have their tools sharpened or repaired, they borrowed and bartered in the smithy yard while they waited. Bonded hammermen spent short residencies in the forge, too, whenever Jacob needed help with big jobs — such as anchors or chains for ships in port. Free black men searching for work by the river counted on Jacob for odd jobs. All of these men and their business at the forge kept Pa’s spirit present and constant before Gabriel.
Gabriel and Solomon grew into fine blacksmiths, and each brother made what he could from the trade. Smithing soothed Solomon’s worried mind into a still and easeful peace. Hammering set Gabriel’s active mind afire.
GABRIEL WORKED his anvil in the spot nearest the door so that he could see and hear everything. Richmond was growing from a small town into a global port, and all the while, the wildfire of liberty jumped across the oceans from nation to nation. Patrons with jobs for the smithy or simply with mouths to run and hours to fill rendezvoused daily at the forge to debate and argue and persuade. Local artisans spoke longingly of the ongoing political upheaval in France, while country planters and city merchants whispered fearfully of the revolution on Saint Domingue. In Virginia, the planters and merchants had led the revolution. But on the small Caribbean island, it had been slaves who rose up to declare their freedom, crying, “Death or liberty!” A bloodbath, the merchants called it.
At night, Gabriel and Solomon talked about the world and their work. They lay side by side beneath the window in the small room off the forge where they shared a bed. They had long ago stopped arguing over whether to leave their window shut at night, and with the sash wide open, they heard the usual Friday-night joking and singing from the street. Even the washerwomen were out there, crowded onto a single stoop beneath the flickering light of a street lantern, hooting and hollering this evening instead of quarreling. He heard the laundress Nanny out there with them.
Solomon lay on his back, looking at the ceiling. “When I hammer,” he told his brother, “I think ’bout each strike; that’s all. I watch the fire and, for once, don’t worry ’bout you findin’ trouble or Ma takin’ ill. When I hammer, I even forget they took Pa.”
Gabriel fidgeted in the bed; he wanted to be out dancing with the people by the river. He thought how the spray from the broad, rocky falls of the James would keep him cool. He figured a mug of grog, or maybe two, would loosen his fear of Nanny. Maybe tonight he would start a conversation with her, talk about something more than making fire or drawing water. He often noticed how the skinny, long-legged laundress watched him while she pretended not to. Just the other day, she fell right into Shockoe Creek when Gabriel and Solomon walked past. The older women around her had laughed at the girl when it happened. Now Gabriel could hear all of them out there in the street, and he longed to hear Nanny’s laughter. He dared not hope to hear her say, “Wish Gabriel would come on and join us tonight.”
Solomon interrupted Gabriel’s yearning. “What is the forge like for you, Brother?” Solomon asked.
With enough heat, I can turn iron into whatever I please, Gabriel thought. “Fire changes everything,” he said. The moon bathed his brother’s face, and Gabriel saw Solomon’s confusion. He went on. “Hammering helps my mind make sense. If I face a problem, I go to the anvil. I hear and see so much in the city. When I bend over the anvil with my hammer, our people, our worries, and our river all melt together, and all my questions come out like a plan. Do you understand?”
He kicked off the bedsheet. The sounds of the girls and the banjo and the drunkards of August poured through the window and quenched his skin. The sounds of the James tumbling over the bedrock eased his spirit.
The James sets its own course.
He wanted Solomon to understand how his heart was growing and changing from working in the forge, from living in the city. “The tavernkeep next door — the one who sneaks us grog out back — told me a constable arrested the free woman Mrs. Barnett for harboring runaways,” he said.
Solomon yawned and scratched his crotch. “That’s news to you? Even the free aren’t free, Little Brother.” Solomon stretched out his legs and took up even more of Gabriel’s space in the bed. “Everyone knows Angela Barnett will hang at the gallows. She killed the constable who broke into her house!”
Gabriel sat up. “No, what I’m telling you is, she will live! The laundresses whisper how Mrs. Barnett turned up with child at the jail. I overheard that Nanny tell how all the Richmond ladies have taken up that free woman’s cause.”
“Your hammer’s got good ears, but why bother thinkin’ ’bout that? The well-born ladies would never take up for Gabriel or Solomon. The sight of us, just the whiff of our business, offends the well-born ladies. The stench of you is likely what made your laundress, Nanny, end up falling in the creek.”
Gabriel started to push Solomon out of the bed, but suddenly he caught among the sounds outside his window the determined voice of his laundress, sticking up for herself, fending off an unwanted advance. “You might be a free man, but you best keep your free hands to yourself. Only I decide who touches me. I decide,” he heard her say.
The crowd of people came to her defense, and he soon heard a boatman apologize. Gabriel smiled to himself. Uh-uh. No trifling girl for me. Even the laundress knows in her heart what it means to be free. The next time I see Nanny, he vowed to himself, I won’t shy from talking.
Fiddling and drumming and voices from the riverbank filled the brothers’ tiny room. The moon had made its way westward and left the room dark. Gabriel let the street song flood over him then. While he dreamed, from the city’s every corner, every hill, and every hill bottom
, a single petition arose in Gabriel’s soul: All over the world, men are taking up the cause of freedom. Who will take up our cause?
The next morning, Gabriel trotted down to Shockoe Creek to fetch water. As he did every day, he looked for Nanny, but she had vanished. He asked after her of the older women.
“Nan gone to Wilkinson’s farm in Henrico,” they told him. “The old colonel’s her master. He bought her when she was just a little thing, bought her and took her away from her three sisters in Bedford. She never even met Wilkinson till this morning when he put her in the cart.”
“How could that be? She lives here in the city with us. Since the day I got here, Nanny’s been here, too.” Gabriel rubbed his brow.
“Child, you still a baby inside that grown man’s body? Nanny been hired out here in town for all these years. If the colonel says he needs her in the country more than he needs the money he gets for hiring out her sewing and washing, then so it is. A man like you could put some money in his pocket hiring out. You know about hiring out, don’t you? But women like us? We just go where we’re told. Today, your Nanny was taken away to the country.”
Like that, the laundress was gone from the city.
Her Friday-night words rang and rang inside him. I decide. She had said it with such conviction that Gabriel had believed her. I decide. The offending boatman had believed, too, and all the riverside people. The new day mocked all of them.
GABRIEL LEFT Jacob’s forge when he was almost seventeen, returning to Henrico a trained blacksmith, ready to take Pa’s place. Throughout his years of absence, he had visited Brookfield during Christmas and, most years, once or twice more.
An unfamiliar distance had grown between Gabriel and Ma, though, either from living in different worlds or from his having grown up without her.
“You’re a man now, Gabriel,” Ma had said when Gabriel returned. “Nothin’ left for me to do but pray the Lord’ll keep you safe and grant you some way better than He did for me and Pa. But I’m too tired for much prayin’.”
Gabriel saw from the vacancy in Ma’s eyes and the heaviness of her step that the years in the field and nights alone had emptied her out. To revive Ma’s heart, he told her about life in the city, living and working among all sorts of people, and he told her all he knew about the fight for freedom on Saint Domingue. “Slaves rising up on their own, Ma,” he said. “Pa was right. We could, too.”
Ma turned away from his talk, but Gabriel persisted. “Slaves, Ma! Doing what Pa dreamed of — winning freedom,” he told her. But Ma no longer spoke of Pa or freedom or even much of God. He wondered if she still believed. He did not know for sure if he believed, or exactly what he might believe in. Then he saw his laundress at Young’s spring.
The people from Young’s and Prosser’s and old Colonel Wilkinson’s had gathered at the spring, as they were permitted to do on Saturday afternoons and Sundays. The young men fished from the bridge while the young women washed clothes or sat sprawled across the bedrock, talking. Gabriel knew all but one of the girls from the countryside.
When he first saw Nanny again, she wasn’t laughing or flirting or drawing attention to herself with the foolish antics displayed by Venus and the other girls. She was sitting beneath a great live oak, plaiting her friend’s hair, while Isaac, Jupiter, and Solomon pretended to fight, pulling each other down into the creek. All of Gabriel’s friends were clamoring for Nanny’s attention, and he couldn’t fault them.
He tried to will Nanny to look up at him, but Venus noticed him staring down from the bridge. “Well, well. I see Mister Gabriel up there, spying on us.” Venus goaded Gabriel by calling him mister. “Why’re you comin’ down here to the creek? I thought you better than all us now.”
Gabriel waved at Nanny; she nodded and glanced away.
Still vying for his attention, Venus teased him again. “The young master been askin’ after you, Gabriel. You better get up to the house before too long, now.”
Since the day Thomas Henry had beaten Gabriel, then run away, Gabriel had avoided his milk brother. On all his trips back to Brookfield, he had stayed in the quarter or kept to the woods. Never once did Gabriel ask for Thomas Henry or go looking for him. He was not about to go now just because Venus said to, so instead he hollered down to her, “I’ll be up sometime to see your ma. We got our birthday coming up. I made her a new ladle; seems Dog run off with her good one.” Then he added, for everyone to hear, “I’m done with Thomas Henry Prosser. I’m done calling any man my master.”
When he said that, his friends stopped horsing around and looked about nervously to be sure that neither Prosser’s man nor Young’s was near. But Nanny looked up and smiled.
“Hush yourself, Gabriel,” Venus warned. “Or you’ll follow in your pa’s footsteps, for sure. I don’t need to know how to read to tell that truth.”
Emboldened by finding Nanny again, and certain, just from the way she looked at him, that she knew his heart, Gabriel took yet another risk. “Anybody told you about the French island, Venus? All those slaves are free now — they know what my pa knew, and what I know, too.”
Venus would not quit. “Oh, you have a master, all right. You’re not foolin’ nobody.”
Nanny defended him. “Venus, what Gabriel means is, a man can never own another man. His spirit soars free as every bird you see,” she said.
She knows me, he thought. He tried to move toward her; he tried to speak to her, as he had told himself he would the very next time he saw her. But here in the now of this moment, his wobbly legs and rusty tongue disobeyed his heart.
Gabriel’s best friend, Jupiter, set down his fishing pole and tried to talk the girls into a game of chicken-in-the-spring. He pleaded for them to swim with him and Isaac.
“Maybe later,” Nanny said without looking away from Gabriel.
Jupiter and Isaac started splashing Nanny. “Come on in here, now, and cool off some,” Jupiter said.
Venus urged Nanny to be done already with her hair. “Come on, Nan. Let’s go in the water with the boys.”
From the bridge, Gabriel watched the foursome, and when, at last, Nanny did stand up and walk to the spring, Gabriel wanted to go with her. He knew Jupiter would have stepped aside and given him this chance with Nanny, but Gabriel had returned to feeling shy. So instead, he stood and watched Jupiter’s strong shoulders carry Nanny, and Jupiter’s hands grip Nanny’s thighs as she pulled Venus and Isaac down into the spring.
Gabriel left his friends and Nanny standing in the creek and ran up to find his ma — to tell her about this girl.
“You sure this girl’s not a made-up girl? You sure?” Ma kidded.
He was relieved when Ma teased him.
“The heat from the forge gettin’ to you? Makin’ you see pretty visions?”
Gabriel didn’t try to explain to Ma how the forge gave him not visions but solutions to problems that he faced with the metal, with his friends, with the world.
He knew that before he could truly court Nanny, he would need to settle up with Jupiter, and so he took that problem to the forge and the fire. Now he was a man, a blacksmith, like Pa, and worked in Brookfield’s forge, Pa’s old forge, his now, too. He drew and upset and punched and cut every sort of iron while he turned his dilemma over in his mind, over in the heat. While he fixed the scythes meant for cutting wheat, he welded the facts and his feelings into one simple act: Tell Jupiter of my heart for Nanny and keep our friendship true.
When they next met up in the woods, Gabriel confessed to Jupiter, “You’re my friend and we go for brothers, but I think I love Nanny.”
“I know,” said Jupiter. “It’s all right. I might could love her, one day, but I don’t yet.”
The two friends walked in silence together along the footpath in the forest that connected Brookfield to Colonel Wilkinson’s place. The narrow path forced them to walk in a line; Gabriel led the way.
“What if she doesn’t love me back?” Gabriel said after a while.
Jupiter st
opped. He draped his arms around Gabriel. “Nanny will love you; you’re Gabriel. We all love you, my brother.”
Once Gabriel had made his peace with Jupiter, he started his courtship of Nanny. Every Saturday afternoon, after he closed up Prosser’s blacksmith shop, Gabriel went down to Young’s spring, hoping to see her. He took his fishing pole or he carried Ma’s wash. Some days, he walked there with his friends, but he went only to find the girl who could look into his smile and see the deep and secret life inside him. He went to the creek for Nanny to make him right.
GABRIEL ASKED after Nanny each Saturday that arrived without her at the spring. To the women from Wilkinson’s — the older ones especially — he’d say, “Nanny coming down tonight? How’s Nanny been this week? Expect I’ll see my Nanny soon?”
Each Saturday the women answered the same: Nanny had too much work under orders of Wilkinson’s man, or her work was done but because he could, the man kept her back. Each passing Saturday, Gabriel sent the women back to Nanny with a gift from the forge — a slotted spoon, a soup ladle, a brand-new hoe.
By the time Nanny showed back up at the spring, the women had predicted that Gabriel would be waiting, and he was. From then on, whenever they could, the two met under the apple tree. They fished and worshipped and danced, always together — Gabriel and Nanny.
“Dolly’s boy, Joseph, got sent off to Richmond,” Nanny told Gabriel one night. “A six-year-old boy! I held on to Dolly, and we watched the cart haul her son away. I couldn’t let her run after him, could I? She has a baby girl still on the breast. If I’d have let Dolly follow after Joseph the way she wanted to do — screamin’ and carryin’ on — the old colonel’s man might have put her in the cart, too.”
Gabriel clenched his mouth. What could Nanny have done? he asked himself. What could I have done? Nothing. Nothing any of us can ever do. He picked up a twig from around the tree. “Then what happened, Nan?”