The Great Negro Plot

by Mat Johnson

  Now that—that there could be a white man so reckless and wrong—that was a thing to be feared indeed.

  Jumping into immediate action, a gang of these judges headed to their own jail, where the one white colonist sat imprisoned who might have intimate knowledge of the Negro conspiracy. A white person connected to the evil, but not so personally responsible for it that she might be utterly unwilling to divulge its horrific truth. Standing en masse outside her cell door, the right proper gentlemen of the colony of New York stared in at the lowly whore that was Peggy Kerry, for the moment, needing something quite a deal more than what men like them would usually ask of such a woman.

  "Margaret Sorubiero, this does not have to be your fate. Talk to us. There is the possibility of a pardon from the attorney general himself and the benefits of the court if you tell us what we desire to hear."

  Peggy stared back at them. By this point in her life, she knew more about the nature of their desire than they did. And so she gave them nothing but her glare and denials.

  Still they persisted. "Any fool can see the larger conspiracy here, Margaret Sorubiero; why not name it and begone? Who, what are you protecting? Why did you lie so easily with your persistent refusals?"

  They coaxed. They bribed. They threatened. And, ultimately, they failed. Despite the dangling of amnesty, Peggy faced them, and maintained her denial of any knowledge of their imagined revolt.

  "If I should accuse anybody of any such thing, I must accuse innocent persons, and wrong my own cause," she insisted. Her protests only serving to solidify her guilt in these inquisitors' minds.

  Not long after, a curious note was intercepted, heading out of the city by courier. It was written in Dutch, by a female hand. Translated by the suspicious British (whose relations with the their Dutch neighbors could often be strained), it echoed conspiracy, betrayal, subterfuge. The message apparently had been meant for the recently absconded John Romme, the Dutchman, and, probably written by the wife he'd abandoned. In English it read:

  Beloved Husband John Romme,

  This is to acquaint you that I have received your letter by the bearer hereof and understand out of it that you intend to return home again. My dear, I desire that you make the best of your way to go further and not to come to New-York and not to make yourself known where you are for John Hughson is this day to have his tryal as also his wife, their servant maid is giving evidence against both and she has brought your name likewise in question and I am afraid John Hughson and his wife will be hanged by what I can hear and the sheriff and bailiffs seek for you every where, Vaarck's negro he keeps his word stedfast for you Brother Lucas is chosen one of the jurymen and he hears how it is.

  So no more but remaining your respectful wife Elezabet Romme even till death.

  Superscribed Jor Mr. John Romme, QDG

  FOR YOUR LIFE AND SOUL

  THE KING AGAINST CAESAR and Prince, Negroes." This was the introduction to the trial, but, in fact, it wasn't actually a trial. It was a ritual. A formality. Mere practice for what was to come. Caesar and Prince stood, doomed. They were black, and came precondemned. The evidence was circumstantial and hearsay but, for the likes of these men, no more was needed. Nothing was refuted—there was nothing they could say on their own behalf, because Africans were not even allowed to testify. The jury was called without challenge. The theft of Hogg's merchandise repeated. The additional charge of entering the property of Abraham Meyers Cohen to rob him was added for good measure.

  If you stand as a black man in a room to be judged by white fear and ignorance, there is no point in looking up. There is no point in noting the words that Europeans use to sanction their bigotry, no matter how much worth they themselves think log they are putting into them. That Mary Burton yapped to the court, or that Peggy Kerry was brought into the room only to prolong her silence, mattered little. It was an exercise. It was a play. The conclusion was already written, and no two people were more sure of that than the Africans who were meant to await their fate.

  "Not guilty," the two men declared, and it would be the only words the Europeans would extract from them. Two words contradicted by the thirteen witnesses for the King, a baker's dozen who swore otherwise. Caesar and Prince had three character witnesses for their own cause, but it was just so much air, so much filler. The evidence was summed and the jury returned from their deliberation quickly. The verdict was never in question, they just removed the first word of the slaves' plea and bounced it back at them.

  "Guilty!" and that was all the court needed or wanted at the moment. Guilty of theft, guilty of robbery, guilty of disposal of stolen property. There was no need yet to press the slaves for information about the fires. For slaves, robbery alone stood as capital offense. So the two men's lives were already forfeit in the eyes of the law.

  The two Africans. The notorious, Caesar and Prince, now survived solely at the judges' whim, and the whites would (and could) do whatever they wanted with them. That would be to wring free of them any juicy information they had, and then dispose of them in the end like so much pulp.

  * * *

  Arthur Price was a lowlife. What random act places him in our story is that he had already gotten himself locked up for thievery. Really, the crime Price was incarcerated for was not much more resounding than were the misadventures of Hughson's rogues: A white servant of the well-respected Captain Vincent Pearse, he had been busted nicking some of the property the captain was storing for the lieutenant governor since the governor's fire. A crime of opportunity, not the kind the likes of Price could walk away from easily. And he was white, so it wasn't as if he was going to hang for his indiscretion.

  Now though, Prisoner Price had seen the light. Had one of those famous jailhouse conversions. When the under-sheriff came through on his rounds, Price discreetly called him over, whispered his putrid breath into the officer's ear.

  "Listen, mate, I got a story to tell. You let them judges know, good old Arthur Price has got something for them. Information. You tell them, right?"

  When the under-sheriff relayed the message, the judges gave little thought to the certainty that Price's testimony was inspired by his motivation to save his own compromised hide. Or did they even consider that the opportunistic little whiner was out to get his undeniably greedy paws on the hundred-pound bounty being paid to whites with information on the fires. The judges had already made up their mind about what the truth was, so all they were looking for was confirmation. Without hesitation Arthur Price was quickly and discreetly removed from his cell and brought to the court, where after being duly sworn he gave his account.

  According to Price, he had not sought the information in question. In fact, he said that Peggy Kerry came to him at the beginning of the last week. Right to the grate in his prison door.

  " T'm very much afraid of those fellows telling or discovering something of me,'" he told the court Peggy had confessed to him. By "those fellows," it was clear to Arthur Price (and, certainly, the judges as well) that Peggy meant the Africans who'd been arrested. "But if they do, by God, I will hang every one of them. But, I will not forswear myself unless they bring me in."

  "Peggy, how forswear yourself?" Price asked her, confused, he said, by the expression she had used.

  "There is fourteen sworn," Peggy responded cryptically.

  "What? Is it about Mr. Hogg's goods?"

  "No, by God, about the fire," she revealed.

  "Was John and his wife in it?" Price asked, fishing for the Hughsons' involvement in the matter.

  "Yes, by God, they were both sworn as well as the rest."

  "Are you not afraid that the Negroes would discover you?" Price said he asked Peggy.

  "No," she shrugged off, "for Prince, Cuff, and Caesar, and Vaarck's Negro are all true-hearted fellows."

  Eager for more, making sure he pulled from her every detail he could, knowing how priceless this information could be, Price had waited patiently for Peggy to reveal herself further. That moment came when, in rea
ction to her lover Caesar's trial the day before, Peggy's anxiety overwhelmed her. After hearing for herself the damning testimony of Mary Burton, Peggy told Price, "I have no stomach to eat my victuals, for that bitch has fetched me in and made me as black as the rest about the indigo and Mr. Hogg's goods. If they do hang the two poor fellows below," Peggy said of Caesar and Prince, "the rest of the Negroes would be revenged on them yet. But if they send them away, it is another case."

  Feigning support, Arthur Price offered Peggy false comfort for the wounds inflicted by Mary Burton. "I don't doubt but they will endeavor to poison this girl that has sworn."

  "No, by goddamn, I don't believe that, but they will be revenged on them some other ways." It was in this moment of reflection, that Peggy noticed something amiss. Looking anew at her confidante, his desperation and eager manner, Peggy immediately questioned the wisdom of her candor.

  "For your life and soul of you, you son of a bitch," she now warned Price, "don't speak a word of what I have told you."

  To the assembled jury, Price related her threat as he betrayed she who had uttered it. The judges, for their part, recognized not only their course forward based on the information relayed to them, but also a new asset in their war. A traitor in the ranks of the lowly. Look at Arthur Price, standing so smug, so proud in front of them, a rat on two legs, a thief, a scallywag, one the judges could call their own. A sign that God himself was answering their prayers, delivering the tools this court needed to bring his justice into being.

  * * *

  Whether the conspiracy was a concrete thing of plans and machinations or simply the product of rational minds boiled in fear, the effects were starting to be seen. People believed, regardless of evidence, that the Great Negro Plot was a real threat, and this in itself brought real consequences. White people believed it. Black people believed it. At the same time Price was relating his little story, replete with line-by-line dialogue, chaos continued elsewhere. Directly across the Hudson River from New York City, in the New Jersey town of Hackensack, colonists were awoken an hour before dawn by warning calls, and arose to a scene most frightening. In the early morning darkness it appeared that no less than seven barns in the village had been set afire and were now burning in full glory. As the fires grew, so did the fear. The conspiracy loomed—it had spread across the Hudson, and now into the lands beyond. The plot was larger than could be imagined, an army of Negroes intending mass destruction.

  Again, an African was seen emerging from a barn, this time with a gun in his hand.

  Caught by the alarmed citizenry who were, to say the least, very conscious of the trouble of their New York neighbors on the opposite side of the river, the slave caught was recognized as a man enslaved by one Derick Van Hoorn.

  "You don't understand," the slave pleaded. "I seen the man who really was responsible for the fires."

  "Then what are you doing holding that rifle? Explain that away," he was pressed.

  "This gun? This gun was to shoot the man what was responsible. That's what master ordered."

  A sly one, the Dutch farmers concluded. Moments later, a second slave was uncovered nearby in his master's nearby house, loading a firearm of his own, two bullets in his hand ready to be placed inside. The two Africans were both arrested immediately.

  The first slave captured eventually confessed to being guilty of the arson in question. The second never admitted to anything, having done nothing more than hold a gun in his hand. It didn't matter. In New Jersey, the concerned do things fast and right. Within days both had been tried, convicted, and burned alive at the stake for their crimes.

  Back in Manhattan, the judges of the city could only lament that more names had not been pried out of the New Jersey Negroes before the job was done.

  Arthur Price was put back to work quickly, lest his duplicitous nature be revealed before being fully exploited. Margaret Sorubiero or Salingburgh, also known as Peggy Kerry (depending on who was asking or who was spelling), had proved her nature, so now the same stimulus needed to be applied to another peripheral player. Young Sarah Hughson, daughter of John, and surely one with an ear to the occasion, was chosen as Price's next mark. A few days later, having arrived in the courthouse to witness her mother and father be formally charged, she was quickly detained and removed in bondage from the courtroom. Thrown into jail, she soon found a talkative Arthur Price conveniently occupying an adjoining cell.

  From experience, knowing exactly where to take the discussion, Price started in on young Sarah, asking her pointed questions about the fires to see her response. The answers she gave at first were indirect, yet weighted.

  "I went to a fortune teller," she told the man caged beside her, "who told me that in less than five weeks' time I would come to trouble if I did not take good care of myself." It certainly seemed a bleak fortune that had already appeared to have come true. "But after that I will come to good fortune," Sarah assured the informant.

  "What of your father's fortune?" Price egged her on.

  "My father will be tried and condemned, but not hanged. He is to go over the water," she said.

  Price had Sarah where he wanted her. Prodding her forward, masking his way to appear meandering and casual when it was in fact altogether direct and focused, he finally got to the subject of the rebellion, opening the door by telling Sarah that some of the slaves involved had been discovered and had already started talking.

  "I know nothing of any plot," Sarah responded definitively.

  "They that were sworn in the plot had discovered and brought them every one in." Arthur Price lied to the teenager, the effects of the lie visible immediately, as Sarah blushed at the thought of it. As she nervously replaced her bonnet back on her head in a tell of her true desire to hide from him and the revelation, Sarah's cheeks lost their red as her face went flush, and then she blushed ruddy all over again.

  "Do you know who it was? What have you heard?" Sarah asked him.

  "Oh, I heard it by and by, and it was kept private," Price told her, insinuating an intimate involvement and trustworthy nature when in fact he possessed neither.

  Sarah was frozen. Her mind moving, adjusting to this knowledge of her most primal fears for her fate. It was a long moment before she could gather enough composure to speak. "It must be either Holt's Negro, or Todd's," she said, thinking out loud, "for we were always afraid of them and mistrusted them, though they were as bad as the rest and were to have set their own masters' houses on fire. I wish that Todd had sent his black dog away, or sold him, when he was going to do it." This last little detail only adding to the credibility of Mr. Arthur Price's later recantation of the conversation when it was discovered by the investigating judges that Mr. Todd had indeed intended to get rid of his slave, as was the custom with unruly human merchandise.

  "You had better tell everything you know," Price pressed her, "for that may be of some service to your father."

  "No," Sarah insisted, "for they are doing all they can to take his life away. I would sooner suffer death and be hanged with my daddy if he is to be hanged, than give them that satisfaction of telling or discovering anything to them."

  Despite the duplicitous Price's pleading, Sarah was determined, as much as she was despondent.

  "I should have gone into the country," she lamented. "Like a fool that I was I did not go up in the country! I stayed to see what would happen to my mama and daddy, but now I would go. I'll be hanged if ever they should get me in York again." Gone now was the casual optimism of only moments before. Only fear and anger seemed to remain. And bitterness. Thinking of the city and its denizens that had now become her persecutors, Sarah had only threats to offer:

  "If they had not better care for themselves, they will have a great deal more damage and danger in York than they are aware of," she warned. "If they do hang my daddy, they better do something else." Adding knowingly, "As for the fire at the fort, they did not set the saddle on the right horse."

  The last cryptic comment, Arthur Price expla
ined to the assembled jury at the end of his tale, meant that the judges had yet to look in the right direction for the real mastermind behind the fire at the fort.

  Of the other Africans mentioned by Sarah, Mr. Holt, a local dancing instructor, already had the foresight to remove his slave from the city, thereby avoiding losing his costly personal property to a court that very well might decide to destroy it. Dundee, Mr. Todd's slave, was less fortunate, and was taken up immediately.

  Peggy Kerry must have sensed Arthur Price's deceit soon after allowing her tongue to slip in his presence, having spent a life around characters of his order. Seeing him back in his old cell, she hissed through the bars, "Do not discover anything for your life, for if you do, by God, I will cut your throat."

  But despite her brittle bravado, momentum had continued to gain on Peggy Kerry, and soon it would be she herself speaking to the judges directly, beseeching them, making compromises to appease a court whose hunger had yet to find boundaries, bartering with the truth to save her own skin and the skins of the people she loved above all else.

  THEY DIED VERY STUBBORNLY

  BY THE TIME PEGGY, alleged prostitute and known companion of Negroes, stepped forward with a confession of her own, she held little doubt that Arthur Price, the accused thief, was already doing enough talking for the both of them. If Peggy was to save her own life, she knew, she must turn storyteller herself, regardless of either past oaths or lack of knowledge. Reaching out to the court before Price could offer any more damning testimony on her behalf, Peggy volunteered the following statement for dictation by the jail secretary:

  That I was several times at the house of John Romme, shoemaker, and tavern-keeper, and saw several meetings of the negroes from time to time; and in particular, in the month of December last past, I saw assembled there in or about ten or twelve in number, vz.—Cuff, belonging to Mr. Philipse; Brash, Mr. Jay's; Curacao Dick, a negro man; Caesar, Pintard's; Patrick, English's; a negro belonging to Mr. Breasted in Pearl-street, (Jack) Cato, Alderman Moore's.