by John Keene
Even during New Mary’s tenure Zion had often shown signs of melancholy or unprovoked anger. Frequently sullen, he would often sequester himself in the buttery, or at the edge of the manor house’s Chinese porch, singing to himself lyrics improvised out of the air or songs he had learned from Lacy and the other slaves. Or he would declaim passages from the local gazette which Axum or the Wantone children had taught him. At other times he would devise elaborate counting games, to the amazement of the other slaves. When caught in such idle pursuits on numerous occasions by Mrs. Wantone, who spared no rod, he did not shed a tear. Her punishments instead appeared only to inure him to discipline altogether. He began singing more frequently, and would occasionally accompany his songs with taps and foot-stamps. His master took a different tack, and hedgingly encouraged the boy in his musical pursuits, so long as they did not disturb the household or occur on the Sabbath. As a result the idling musical sessions abated—temporarily. Even so, Mrs. Wantone relinquished Zion’s correction to her husband and eldest son.
As soon as Zion was able he began performing small tasks about the house and estate, such as restuffing the mattress ticks, mucking out the stables, replacing the chamberpots, polishing the family’s shoes, and feeding the hens. His intermittent disappearances and musical-lyrical spells soon reappeared. At the age of ten, he entered an apprenticeship to Jubal, and then at eleven to Ford, the Irishman who oversaw the extensive Wantone holdings, which included twenty acres of home lot, fifteen acres of mowing land, twelve and a half acres fifteen rods of pasture land, twenty acres ten rods undivided of salt marsh, ten acres of woodland and muddy pond woods to the south, and six acres of woodland to the west, all in Roxbury and Dorchester; as well as a plot of forty acres of woodland in Cambridge, recently bequeathed by his late brother-in-law, Nathanael Comfort, Esq., a graduate of Harvard College and a gentleman lawyer. From Ford, Zion learned a number of Irish melodies, which he performed to the delight of all on Negro Election Day and other holidays. During the late summer evenings, he would accompany a nearby slave fiddler, and soon developed a name throughout the neighborhood as a warbler.
One afternoon around the time of Zion’s thirteenth year Jubal heard fiddling out near the cow barn. On investigation, he found the boy creditably playing his master’s violin and singing a sorrowful tune in accompaniment. The horses stood in their stables, unbrushed. Because he liked the saturnine child, Jubal waited until Zion had finished his performance. After reproaching him, Jubal seized the violin and returned it to the music room. When he returned to the barn, the boy was missing. Several weeks later Jubal again found Zion playing the violin in the afternoon, when he should have been at the chicken-coop feeding the hens; this time he threatened to tell on the boy if he took the violin again, to which Zion only laughed and dared Jubal to say anything. Jubal returned the violin without incident. The third time Jubal encountered the boy fiddling in the barn, he rebuked him vehemently, but before he could snatch away the violin, Zion smashed it to smithereens on a trough. For this, he eventually received stripes from both his master and his master’s son, and a ban on singing of any sort. The boy’s wild mood swings and moroseness waxed from this point, to the extent that the other slaves, particularly Jubal, took care not to offend him. Wantone himself remained unconcerned, as he was the master of his manor, and an oak does not quiver before ivy.
Around the time of his fourteenth birthday, Zion, now so strapping in build and mature in mien that he could almost pass for a man, ran away for the first time. Absconding in the dead of night, he got as far as the town of Dedham, some nine miles away. There he remained in the surrounding woods undiscovered for a week, until his nightly ballads and lamentations betrayed him to a local Indian, who reported the melodiousness of the voice to the town sheriff. Returned to his master, Zion received the following punishment: he was placed in stocks for a night, and then confined to the grounds of the estate, with the threat that any further misdeeds could result in his being temporarily remanded to the custody of the local authorities. Within a fortnight the boy had run away again, this time with one of Wantone’s personal effects, and a pillowbeer of food. A search of the surrounding towns turned up no clue of him. As a result, Wantone was forced to advertise in the local gazette for the return of his lawful property.
Flight
From the New England Weekly News Letter, June 18, 1768:
Ran away from his master Isaac Wantone gentleman of the country town of Roxbury in Suffolk County, in Massachusetts Bay Colony, a likely Negro boy aged fourteene years, named ZION, who wore on him [an] old grey shirt homespun and pair of breeches of the same cotton cloth, with shoes only, and a kerchief about his head, carrying a silver watch, clever, who sings like a nightingall: WHO shall take up said likely ZION and convey him to his MASTER above said, or advise him so that he may have him again shall be PAID for the SAME at the rate of £4 1s.
To Pennyman
Three months had advanced when the sheriff’s office of the town of Monatomy, in Middlesex County, returned to the Wantones the fugitive child, who had been arrested and detained on a series of charges. These included but were not limited to breaking the Negro curfew in Middlesex County; theft (of various small articles, including watches and food); disturbance of the peace; brawling, gambling and trickery at games of chance; dissembling about his identity and provenance; and masquerading as a free person. Most seriously the young slave had beaten up an Irish laborer outside a public house in Waltham, and threatened the man’s life if he reported the beating to the authorities, local or the King’s. For this series of offenses, which broke the patience of the Wantones, the General Court of Middlesex County arraigned, tried and convicted the slave, to the penalty of thirty-five stripes, and a fine of £10, payable to the victims. After the boy received his public lashes, his master settled the fine and issued an apology for his slave’s behavior to the General Court, which was printed in all the local papers. He then promptly flogged Zion himself before restraining the boy in a stock behind the cow barn. During this time, the Wantones considered their options, and agreed it would be in their best interests to sell their intractable chattel, who, they supposed, still had arson and murder waiting in his kit. This they promptly did despite the rapidly deflating nature of the local currency, for the sum of £5, to a distant relative of Wantone’s, the merchant Jabez Pennyman, then living on a small estate in the Dorchester Neck.
Pennyman, a widower and veteran, ran general provision shops in Dorchester and Milton, the latter purchased at a sharp discount from a Loyalist recently emigrated to Canada. A native of the Narraganset Plantations, he had earned a reputation for probity in all matters financial, and rectitude in all matters moral, and had acquired Zion both because of the low cost and because he required the services of a slave of considerable strength who could read English and reckon figures. The menagerie of Pennyman’s home, the slave soon learned, was utterly different from that of the Wantones’. Instead of sleeping in his master’s small but bearable attic, his quarters now consisted of a windowless, zinc-roofed shack, which might once have been a toolshed, furnished only with a pallet bed and a rusted chamberpot, several hundred yards away from the main edifice. His daily routine also diverged markedly from that of his earlier life in Roxbury: for Pennyman expected him to ride out with an assistant to one of his shops six days a week, and spend the entire workday lifting, lading, packing, unpacking, registering and moving stock, such as apparel of all sorts, furniture, books, kitchenware, provisions, yard and garden tools, and farm and estate implements. There were no other Blacks, or even Indians, in Pennyman’s househo
ld; only his Irish maid, Nellie, a Welsh manservant, James, and his assistants in the shops, all boys of English or Yankee heritage, none of whom showed the least inclination towards socializing with a Negro. Unless the situation demanded it, in fact, none of them, including Pennyman, spoke to him at all.
Although Zion worked commendably at his new post for almost six months (without even the smallest infraction beyond purloining several bottles of Malden rum), the long rides, the isolation and lack of companionship, his continued bondage, and the lure of the nearby ocean had begun to affect him perniciously. He especially bridled at Pennyman’s austerities: the provision of a minimum of food, and no spices at all, at meals; a moratorium on singing or celebrations of any kind, particularly during those hours that he set aside for his ledger books or to read the Gospel; and the requirement of clothes of a plain nature especially on holy days, for Pennyman had not been awakened by the preachings of Edwards or any other deliverer great or small. One morning, after unloading cases of sugar, flour, molasses, salt, suet, cranberry bread, sweet currants, and apples, and casks of rum, French brandy, Boston beer, and Madeira wine, Zion began singing aloud one of the songs he had learned from New Mary to pass the time, when he thought he overheard one of the shop assistants noting how perverse it was that “music should arise from a tarpit.” Confronting the man, who peppered him with epithets, Zion could no longer restrain himself and flattened the man with one blow. A bullet, once fired, cannot be recalled: Fearing the repercussions of his action, he fled on horse northward to Boston, tinderbox of liberty. After abandoning his mount in the marshlands near Boston Neck, he ran until he had reached the famed Beacon Hill portion of the Tremountain. He concealed himself in a stand of box, waiting for the cover of darkness before proceeding to the home of a cousin of Lacy who lived in Green Street, near the Mill Pond. Here and at another safe house run by free blacks he remained for several weeks, before shipping out without a permit from Hatch’s Wharf on a clipper bound for Nantucket.
The sea momentarily opened a new chapter in the book of Zion’s life. He sailed on a Kittery-based sloop, the Hazard, which ventured as far south as the English Caribbean, and on which he experienced the freedoms and vicissitudes of the maritime life. Next came a whaling tour, during which he served in a variety of capacities for a year, enduring an ever-rising tide of depredations that culminated in his being chained belowdecks, without food or water for weeks, for theft, attempted mutiny and insulting the honor of the whaler’s drunken captain. Only the intervention of a galley slave from the Barbados, who held the captain’s affections, and most importantly, brought him fresh water and salt cod at twilight, saved his life.
Liberty
The 1770s: great changes were blowing through streets of the colonial capital. The Crown’s troops had irrevocably stained Boston’s cobblestones with the blood of Attucks and others; the promise of freedom sweetened the air like incense. When Zion was freed by his captain upon return to Sherburne, in Nantucket Island, instead of a duel to restore his honor, the young man stowed away on a brigantine returning to the port of Boston. Penniless, carrying on his person only a pocket pistol and several cartouches he had stolen from the whaler captain’s wares, and finding that both Lacy’s cousin and the safe woman had moved or been moved from their residences, leaving no place to stay, for the town appeared to his eyes to have evacuated its entire black population, Zion grew restless and proceeded to rob a tanner’s store. He was captured within hours by the Crown’s authorities and confined, pending his arraignment, to the city prison on Queen Street. After a short period of time, the under-magistrate discovered that he was a fugitive slave, and returned him, pending his trial, to Mr. Pennyman, now thriving handsomely with five shops throughout Suffolk and Bristol Counties. Pennyman determined to get rid of him. His personal scruples, however, did not permit him to entertain simply manumitting the slave. He must first earn back his investment.
After Zion’s conviction and brief imprisonment, he was again returned to Pennyman, and the businessman ordered him to be flogged for his effrontery, which to his preoccupied and rigid mind had assumed the character of outright treachery. He then sent him south to work in a shop in Attleborough, far from the negative influence of the sea or Boston, where the atmosphere fairly crackled with sedition. Zion—who yearned either to take up residence in Halifax, which he had learned about during his time at sea as a free man, and from there to ship out on a frigate bound for parts unknown, or conversely to return to the only settled home he had known, that of the Wantones, where he would be again among those who knew him best—did not take kindly to this turn of events, and revolted. After only a week, he fled towards Boston, following the coastal route and getting as far as Duxbury, where he stole two cakes of gingerbread, a package of biscuits, and a pint of milk out of a horse-cart heading north. He secreted himself in a nearby marsh. He was discovered a week later, arrested and housed in a local jail. He swiftly broke out by eluding his guard, commandeered a piebald, and headed south by southwest along the lesser roads and trails. The local authorities again captured, tried and imprisoned him, not only for his crimes but for his defiance of the social order, yet his realization of his own personal power had galvanized him, making life insufferable under any circumstances but his own liberation.
During Zion’s second incarceration, Pennyman had quick-deeded his ownership of the slave to a fellow reformed merchant, Simon Warren, of Boston, who in return promised to pay full, rather than wholesale, price for several cases of contraband liquor Pennyman was trying to unload. Zion left jail in May of 1772, and for a brief spell worked agreeably under Warren. Within the year, however, during which the enslaved man resumed a life of debauchery, including but not limited to periodic flights to Middlesex and lower Suffolk Counties, allegedly fathering several children by white, Indian and Negro women, drunkenness and brawling in the streets of Boston, celebrating on the Sabbath day, breaking curfews, threatening shopkeepers, openly praising London, and selling wine stolen from his master, Warren found the situation so unbearable that he gave him to another merchant, his second cousin, Job Hollis, of Boston.
Hollis, who had once held positions of prominence in the shipbuilding trade in Marblehead, was now reduced to running a scrap metal-working and trading shop on Lynn Street near the Hunt and White Shipyards. Possessed of an increasingly liberal mindset, and realizing almost immediately that he could only loosely control Zion, he afforded his charge some berth by giving him traveling papers. With these the slave immediately took the widest latitude, for had not the Reverend Isaac Skillman preached in that very year that “the slave should rebel against his master”? One midday he took Hollis’s horse and a fiddle he had bought with some of his earnings, and rode out to a cornhusking at Medford. Here his singing and strumming, striking appearance, and lively manner at the husking hall attracted the attentions of a number of the local women. The one on whom he set his sights, however, was a married white lady in her late 20s, Ruth Pine, of evident gentility. She coldly rejected his serenades all afternoon. By the early evening, armed with rum, he demanded that she accompany him back to a local inn, a suggestion that visibly offended her, leading her to denounce him in the strongest terms possible. He responded by slapping her so hard that she passed out. This led to a great commotion in the hall, wherein there were numerous calls for the Negro’s death. He promptly fled. Pine’s husband, a stout local farmer, was enraged that his wife might be so mistreated by any man, let alone a black one, and even more incredibly a slave. He pursued Zion on horseback all the way to Boston, where he finally overtook the offender and engaged him in a
battle of fisticuffs in Orange Street, the city’s main artery. An officer of the courts walking by glanced at the boxers, then continued on his way. Within minutes Zion had reduced Pine to a heap of bloodied flesh and linen. To celebrate, he mounted Pine’s horse, his own having galloped off, and proceeded to Cambridge, committing a series of burglaries of homes and carriages along the way.
Bounty
Items stolen: a bottle of rum, several pieces of jerky, a tricorner felt hat, nine pounds sterling four shillings, suttler’s markee, some chocolate, twenty pounds sterling, a flask of French brandy, a pair of moreen small clothes (which did not fit and were thus discarded in the Charles), a man’s white linen shirt, a leg of mutton, two weight of salt pork, eleven pounds sterling six shillings, five pence, a carbine and two pocket pouches, a magnifying glass, a map of the easternmost British provinces in Canada.
Advertisement
A likely Negro Man aged about 18 or 19 years,
that speaks very good English
of great strength and brawn
sings and plays the violin
sold on reasonable terms by Mr.
Ebenezer Minott, trader over against
the Post Office in Cornhill, Boston.
(There were no takers.)
Spree
After settling this most recent plight with the Middlesex County magistrate, Job Hollis arranged to place Zion on board a vessel bound for Virginia where he would be sold at auction and his wildness might finally be whipped or worked out of him. Only under such conditions would this slave learn respect for the common and hardworking citizenry in whose colonies he had been fortunate enough to dwell, Hollis reasoned, and if Zion continued in his ways down there, the penalties would be swift, and ultimate. Hollis walked Zion, hands bound, the requisite papers pinned to the slave’s tattered coat, all the way to Hancock’s Wharf, where the South-going vessel was to dock. He wished the young bondman a safe passage to the southerly port, saying a prayer for his soul as they stood before the open water. To drown out his master’s voice, Zion began singing. On this note of defiance, the exasperated Hollis departed. For an hour or so the slave stood there singing and whistling on the wharf as the bailor and a customs official sat lubricating in a nearby ale house. When the ship, a frigate, did not arrive at the stated time, Zion charmed a Dutch whore strolling by to untie his bindings, whereupon he set off to find the first loosely hitched horse. As he ran he proclaimed himself free. Under duress one’s actions assume a dream-like clarity. An unattended nag stood outside a tavern, and off Zion rode.