by Mike Ashley
Blanket and satchel chafed his sweaty shoulders and the baby cried in his ear as he trailed the Sakonnet River. He found a rocky defile split by the brook, then a shack made from tarred and barnacled lumber salvaged from shipwrecks. A large black woman washed clothes in the stream while a brood of dark children worked in the shade or splashed in the brook.
The infant’s crying made the woman abandon her washing. Her face stayed blank as a slate, but her yellow eyes quickened as she took the baby and tugged open her bodice. Joseph glimpsed a pink Y branded on her right breast as she cradled the child to nurse.
“You know this child?” asked Joseph.
“Yea, mon. He be the boy-child of Cuffy and Hazel, and an orphan both ways soon.” Her voice dripped with molasses from the Sugar Islands. She wore a claret-coloured skirt and bodice like any English woman, but a yellow turban covered her head above big gold hoop earrings. “How’d’joo get him?”
“I bought him for two shillings and sixpence.”
“Bought him? You be a bad bargainer, white man. Black babies dey give away like puppies. Storeman should’a paid you to take him.” Irony rang bitter. “Poor unfortunate, but not as unfortunate as his parents be.”
“These parents who murdered their master by making him swallow a snake?”
“Yea, mon.” The large woman swung towards her shack, the baby gurgling at her breast. “They ’ministered a snake to Marsa’ Pearson, or snake poison. Caught red-handed. ’Course, she had good reason, de way she was used so ill. But she’ll return to Ah-frica soon, lay her burden down.”
Joseph trailed her across the river-rounded rocks of the defile. “When she dies, you mean.”
“Yea, mon. Cuffy, don’t know where he’ll end up, but it be to glory somewhere. He was a gen’le man and no two ways ’bout it. ’Course, no one knows de human heart. I can’t keeps dis child, you knows.”
“Eh?” Shuffling ideas in his head, Joseph found himself surrounded by children with brown-white features and kinky red-brown hair. “No, I expect you can’t.”
The shack had no windows. Summer glare through the doorway showed a room fitted like a ship’s forecastle with bunks along the walls and a table that hinged down. The floor was dirt strewn with cattails. Nursing with one arm, Maroca shooed children hither and thither to wash their hands, sweep the table, lay out wooden bowls and spoons.
“I’se a freewoman. My husband’s white. He sails on de slavers. He fancied me and bought me. My chillun was born free, and we’ll stay that way, long’s as we stay close to home where ever’body knows us. We journeys elsewhere, we likely collect a chain on our laig.” Introduced, she fixed Joseph with bulging yellow eyes.
“Um, I am called Joseph Fisher. I was captured young in the late war,* raised by Penobscots, trained by Jesuits in Quebec. Peace returned me to the English sphere, and they sent me to Harvard to be a missionary to Indians. Lately I . . . wander.”
“I’m not surprised,” Maroca snorted. “You been blown ’bout so much, you almost a black white man. ’Stead’s you red and white. You ever think dem Penobscots what raised you might’a killed your folks?”
A boy fished in Joseph’s pockets, caught a rap on the skull from his mother. “I have meditated upon that. But I was young and they were kind. They called me Monminowis, Silver Cat.”
“I call you to supper. You care for one of ours, you share our food.” Maroca nodded to the table. The children hopped to their places, packed as herring, hands clasped, eager to see Grace done. “And since you comes from Hahvard, you say de blessing.”
There was only fishhead chowder, pickled sorrel, and ship’s biscuit. As the children devoured their portions, Joseph settled for a biscuit and spring water. Maroca nursed the child, which wouldn’t get a proper name until its first birthday: it was just “the baby”. Supper was quiet, the children shy before a stranger. Joseph absently gazed about the room. A fat-bellied grotesque on a shelf was adorned with chicken feathers: a voodoo fetish.
Abruptly Joseph said, “Do you believe a man could be forced to swallow a snake?”
Maroca’s thoughts and emotions were sealed like brandy in a dark brown bottle, but she shrugged. “De man died. He was all swoll up, dey said, like when you gets bit. And he screamed ’bout snakes, and tried to claw his own belly open till they had to tie his han’s. Dere’s timber rattlers here’bouts. Men’ll dig a cellar, come back de next day, de hole swarmin’ wid ’em, have to kill dem with shovels. You should have a snake charm you’self. Hang four buttons around your neck, ward off de consumption.”
Joseph nodded, half-hearing. “Did anyone actually see the snake? Did anyone think to – open him?”
Even Maroca, who’d seen everything, blinked at the idea of dissection. But she nodded. “Dere was a snake. De mistress seen Cuffy wid it in his own han’.” Sweat ran off her round face in the evening heat, the droplets splashing the baby’s flat black hair.
“ ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,’ ” Joseph murmured. “Do you know aught of the murdered man?”
Another shrug of round black shoulders. “Marsa’ Pearson was a merchant-man. Dey’s the richest in Newpoht. Owns a fine house and warehouse and ships and docks and six slaves – four now. His ships travel all over de world, dey say. Includin’ Gambia.” In the six years since the British Parliament had legalized the slave trade, Newport had boomed. Gambia on the Ivory Coast was its chief port of call.
“So a man who lived by slavery died by it, eh?”
“Mebbe so. But Cuffy, he was a gen’le man, good in the heart. He plied cures on all de coloured folk here’bouts. Learned dem from his mother. But I don’t wants to be talkin’ about de dead. Nor ’bout Hazel, neither, poh thing. And poh thing you.” She bobbed the near-orphan at her breast.
“Hazel . . .” Joseph pictured a slave woman alone in an oven-hot cell, fearing the flames that would lick her thighs the next day. “Has a minister attended her?”
“No minister for coloured folk. We stand at the back of the church, behind a curtain, is all.”
Suddenly animated, Joseph reached for his clumsy satchel, extracted a King James Bible, its black leather cover worn white. “ ‘There is no salvation outside the church.’ Will someone show me the jail, please?”
Maroca ducked her head to peer out the door. “Evenin’ comin’ on.”
Slaves were not allowed out after dark, Joseph knew. “But I thought you were freemen.”
“Freedom’s for white folk, and not all of dem.”
“I’ll show you. I can help.” The eldest, a womanly girl, Quamino spoke with only a trace of brown sugar. Her mother opened her mouth to object, then sighed and nodded.
Toting his heavy bible, Joseph stroked the baby’s head for luck. Black girl and white man passed into the gathering gloom.
At the last corner, Quamino hung back in the shadows, so Joseph went on alone. Newport’s jail was near the waterfront, handy for rowdy sailors or captive pirates. The old wooden building tilted alarmingly over the street. A torch-lit crowd watched the oak-barred windows of the second floor for a glimpse of the murderess. All were white, many drunk, faces sweat-shiny under tricorn hats and mob caps. “We’ll burn your hide blacker tomorrow, witch!” “Fat’s gonna be in the fire!” “Stuff an apple in your mouth before the pigroast!”
Disdaining the crowd, Bible in hand, Joseph glided nose-high towards the jail like a Harvard don. Not recognizing him, the crowd nudged one another. Ducking inside the cockeyed doorway, the student almost collided with a jail-keeper and two lackeys who crowded a small stifling hall. The keeper of the keys perched on a three-legged stool with a noggin of ale. Obviously they guarded against the villainess being seized and lynched before her appointed time – and a proper crowd.
The jailkeeper barked blearily. “What the hell are you about? Get out!”
The two lackeys unfolded arms and iron-tipped batons, but Joseph stood firm with the Bible in his hands. “I would see the slave wom
an Hazel. Despite her heinous crime, she has yet a chance to enter into a personal covenant with God, to grasp at the keys to the kingdom of Heaven. To save her soul.”
The lackeys looked to their boss, who stared at Joseph. “Uh . . . She ain’t allowed any visitors. Besides, nigger ain’t got no souls. They’re animals, like.”
Pompously, Joseph snapped open the Bible where his finger marked. “You would block God’s work? You would contradict the Bible, breathed by God, therefore infallible and stamped with God’s own authority? Consider the parable of the sheep and the goats. ‘I was in prison, and ye came unto me. And the King shall answer, inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ Else, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels. Everlasting punishment!’ ”
Threats of doom made the tipsy jailkeeper squirm. “All right. T’ain’t no harm, I suppose. Take him up, John, but watch him. Don’t let ’im slip her a knife to end it early.” Joseph fought down a grin as he marched up the lopsided stairs.
The second floor had four cells with stout oak doors broken by thick slats. In the last cell huddled a black figure wrapped in a bodice and gown so faded they had no colour at all. African-black, the woman’s skin glistened like an oiled whetstone in the heat, yet she shivered uncontrollably as she rocked on her knees. Bloodshot eyes, stark white in her black face, stared at the corner.
Joseph leaned on the oaken bars. “Hazel. Child.” He called her name repeatedly without result. “Hazel, please listen. Your baby is safe. He’s with Maroca. She’ll care for him.”
The white eyes flickered, and Joseph pressed. “Hazel, for the sake of your child, can you tell me why – your husband – had the snake? What did he intend with it? He was a gentle man, we know, and wouldn’t kill Master Pearson. But what was the snake for?”
Hazel whispered, a shuddery hiss like a teakettle come to a boil. “Cuffy, he – he had a dream. ’Bout a snake. A snake read his – heart. Snake tole him, someone’d kill him. Did kill him . . .” Choking on sobs, she curled into a black ball of misery.
“Dreamt of a snake?” Joseph was electrified. He called, “Bear up, Hazel. God is many things, but above all, love, patience, and mercy.”
He barely heard the turnkey’s order to leave, or the crowd’s questions. He walked into the hot night in a daze, muttering, “– The baby has straight hair. Straight hair.”
Quamino hissed and he slipped into an alley beside her. “Why didn’t you tell me Cuffy had Indian blood?” In his excitement, he named the dead man.
He felt the girl shrug. “He didn’t look it, hardly. His mama was a red woman.”
“It shows in his child. One-quarter Indian, it has lank hair, not kinked like an African’s. I couldn’t see the dead man’s features for the tar, yet the storekeeper mentioned it. Can you show me Master Pearson’s house, please?”
The girl squeaked. “That’s a hoodoo place! Mama said Mars’er Pearson’s death’ll fetch all his slaves with him. Like the cannibal kings in Dahomey what files their teeth and takes a thousand slaves to their graves. What d’you want there?”
“I want to rifle a king’s midden.”
It felt strange to Joseph, a child of two cultures, to see through the eyes of a third, the African slaves of New England who remained unseen until summoned. For instead of walking the thoroughfare, Quamino led a torturous path through dooryards and gardens that reeked of garbage and privies and apple trees that gave off a winey perfume in the summer night. The third time Joseph tripped over a sleeping pig, he opined, “I dislike this. Pigs have a passion for snakes.” Quamino said nothing, though her white eyes were large and luminous.
Threading apple trees and gardens and outbuildings, she approached the back of a tall square mansion, pressed her ear to a window, rapped an erratic tattoo.
A bar slid aside, and a young black in a shirt and bony knees stuck his head out. He’d obviously been sleeping on a pallet in the corner. “Quammy! What’choo doing here? You wanna – eh?” He froze upon spotting Joseph’s wan face, skeletal in the summer night.
“Hush up, Prosper! This here Indian gots a order for you! So you do it or he’ll tomahawk that wooly poll a’yours and hang it for the crows to peck! Fetch the spade you uses to turn the midden! Gittup!”
Agitated, Prosper blundered down the stairs, remembered he wore only a shirt, stumbled back and grabbed his shabby breeches and ancient shoes, fumbled into the barn where horses nickered. Fetching a punched-tin lantern and a spade, he threaded a small orchard. Silky leaves rustled at either hand.
Prosper moaned, “I din’t wish you’d make me work the night long too, Quammy. I works enough durin’ the day. At night, I’d a thought you’d come for somethin’ else.”
“Day I needs what you gimme is the day I die,” snapped the girl. “Hush up.”
The back of the property was screened by a woven-wicker fence. Prosper stopped at a baulk of half-rotten timber and thumped his shovel on it. Quamino slapped his shoulder for silence. The girl struck the candle alight, then lifted her skirt and set the lantern between her ankles to obscure the glow. The silhouette of her legs and hips distracted the men, but Joseph tipped up the flat cover of wood. A sour reek fermented by summer sun gushed up in a wave.
Gasping, Joseph asked, “Why this baulk?”
“Mistress don’t like pigs in the garbage, not hers nor nobody else’s. Say if she’s eat pork, she’ll know what the pig’s et first. Our pigs stays in the crib. Eat better’n me, most days.”
“Serves you right for wasting your substance with riotous living, and devouring thy living with harlots,” quipped Joseph. Prosper just stared at the cadaverous white man who came in the dark to pick at rubbish. “Tell me. Have you seen a dead snake in the past days?”
“T’was a snake killed Master Pearson,” whispered the boy.
“If so, and I doubt it, that snake was interred with Master Pearson.” Since ashes went into a hopper for potash, vegetable and table scraps to the pigs, and bones to the dogs, the trash was mostly dried stalks and fish bones and lobster shells. And fragments of glass, expensively cut. “What is this crystal?”
“Master Pearson took sick at the table. He fell out of his chair, kicking and yelling and clawing his belly. He pulled down the tablecloth and broke some goblets. I would’a got whupped for it, ’cause I sets the table, but Mistress Pearson was so upset I din’t. I’s always getting whupped for no reason a’tall.”
“You hush up or I’ll flatten your thick head with that spade,” spat Quamino. “I never saw such a whiney –”
“Eureka!” Joseph’s hand stabbed down, plucked up a snake. Scarcely a foot long, dark green with long yellow stripes, lacking a head, it resembled a thick bracelet. “Cuffy discarded this, didn’t he?”
Prosper shook. “I dunno, I dunno. He catched it in the garden, under the hubbard squash –”
“After your master took sick, no?” Excited, Joseph’s French intruded. “He plied this snake on Master Pearson –”
“No sir! Beg pardon, but he plied it to hisself! T’was t’other snake he voodooed on Mas’er Pearson!”
“What? What other snake?” Joseph’s deepsunk eyes glittered like a skull on a spike. “No, there couldn’t be another snake.”
“There was! I seen it! Cuffy took sick, and he catched that snake and drank the blood!”
Now everyone was confused. Joseph persisted, “No, he gave the blood to Master Pearson!”
“No, he drunk it himself! He was crazy! I stayed clear’a him!”
“Oh!” Quamino blinked. “He’s right! Cuffy came to see my mama! He had the stomach cramps, and she dosed him with hellebore. He puked the night long, kep’ all the chillun awake!”
“Cuffy took sick? When was this?”
Quamino didn’t hesitate. Reared in oral tradition, Africans had phenomenal memories. “Monday last, day after meet-in’.”
Joseph rolled the flaccid snake in his fingers as if
hunting a hidden message. “But this is fresh, a day or two. So there must be two snakes . . . Hazel could attest, but . . . Oh, Lord, I see! Cuffy was seen bleeding a snake, and someone assumed he poisoned the master with the snake!”
“Tha’s what happened, master, ’xactly!” breathed Prosper. “Mistress seen the snake in Cuffy’s hand and screamed to wake the dead! She were screaming, crying Cuffy had to get out, then she flung herself out the door with the chillun afore her! Us niggers was huddling close, trying not to get whipped! Sheriff’s men came and they beat Cuffy so bad he couldn’t stand, and when he tried to talk they smashed his mouth with clubs! And Hazel they kicked in the stummick, and tooken her babe away and her shriekin’ –” The boy stopped, his voice shuddery.
“Fie on people with short sight!” rasped Joseph. “But if Cuffy . . . How?”
Unknowingly, Joseph stroked his chin with the dead garter snake. He hunkered, silent, so long that Quamino gave an experimental push to his shoulder. Roused, he shielded his eyes from the lantern light and looked east. “Dawn not two hours off, and Hazel to be burned at noon.” Coiling the dead snake in his coat pocket, he took the lantern.
Prosper tipped the baulk over the midden. “Please don’t tell no one I was out here, sir. The mistress she’d have the bulls take off my hide a strip at a time –”
Quamino chopped the air, imitating a tomahawk. Prosper peeked at Joseph’s back and felt his head. “Scalped, whipped, an’ all. Be lucky if’n I don’t go to the stake ’longside poor Hazel too.”
Trinity Church perched on a hill that it might overlook Newport. Behind it stood the parsonage, a solid, fresh-painted, proud building connoting the congregation had money to spend. Joseph found the church empty, the front door of the parsonage unresponsive, the kitchen open to the morning heat. In the back yard a black woman plied a long-handled paddle to turn baking bread in a beehive oven. Joseph waited patiently by the picket fence. There was no seawind this morning, and heat lay like a wool blanket higher than his head. Still, rather than clog his lungs with consumption, as was thought hereabouts, the warm salt air seemed to bake his lungs and clear the phlegm, as water is baked from a clay jug by a kiln. Yet Joseph had been up all night, pacing and thinking, and felt tired both inside and out.