The Book of Negroes

by Lawrence Hill

  After collecting my herbs and roots, I began to venture out to catch the babies of the slaves in town. I learned to negotiate with their owners as boldly as the women who hawked fish in the streets. I had to give Solomon Lindo ten shillings a week, so I began to charge slave owners twelve shillings for catching a baby. I always tried to have several weeks of payment stored up and hidden under a loose plank in the room where I slept with Dolly. Sometimes I earned nothing in an entire week. At other times, I was hired out a few times the same week and brought home one or two pounds. Masters sometimes refused to pay me in coins, but the only other payments I would accept were Madeira, rum, tobacco and high-quality cotton fabric. I knew how much of each were needed to make up twelve shillings, and I could trade them easily for the things I needed.

  AFTER LINDO FINISHED OUR LESSONS about arithmetic, coins and keeping ledgers, his wife began to tutor me in the art of writing. Mrs. Lindo was happy to have me around, and she was a gentle teacher. She taught me how to write in smooth, flowing calligraphy, made sure I learned how to spell, and taught me how to compose words and sentences. I was desperate to learn the things that my father had begun to teach me years earlier, and I ate up every word of her instruction. Dog. Bone. Cat. Tree. The dog bit the bone. The cat ran up the tree. It was easy. It was thrilling. As I progressed, Mrs. Lindo left me alone to practise writing on my own. Ten sea bass cost one shilling in the fish market. Indigo production will increase next year. One day I will go back home.

  When Mrs. Lindo determined that I could write to her satisfaction, I began to compose business letters for her husband:

  William King, Esquire. Funds are overdue to Solomon Lindo, indigo inspector for the Province of Carolina, 55 pounds sterling for consultation on indigo production and 20 pounds sterling for inspection. Remit payment to Solomon Lindo, King Street. Overdue accounts assessed at ten per cent interest per annum. Your humble servant, Solomon D. Lindo.

  As the months passed and I managed to keep up my payments of ten shillings a week, I was allowed to read more and more books that Solomon Lindo brought home from the Charles Town Library Society. I read other books by Jonathan Swift. I read Voltaire. I read The Shipwreck by William Falconer. And while the candle burned late into the night in the backhouse room that I shared with Dolly, I read copies of the South Carolina Gazette, stopping always to look at the notices about runaway slaves.

  Lusty Negro wench new from the Guiney country, run away last Wednesday from Goose Creek with a new osnaburg coat and wrapper and a black striped handkerchief around her head, insensible, cheek pitted with the pox. Ten pound reward for return to owner, Randolph Clark.

  As the time passed in Charles Town, I managed to acquire a fine red scarf, an indigo wrap, a pouch of Peruvian bark, and still save ten pounds of silver. I was not beaten once by Mr. or Mrs. Lindo, but I missed Georgia and Chekura terribly, and Mamadu was never far from my thoughts.

  One evening, I had caught the baby of one of the few free Negroes in town. The mother was barely older than me, and her man had flown into the room the instant my work was done to hug her and hold the baby. When I returned home, I found Dolly asleep with her palm on her swollen belly. I sat on the edge of my bed, put my face in my hands and let my grief pour out. Dolly awoke in the middle of my tears.

  "What's the matter, honey chile?" The sympathy in her voice made me cry even more. Dolly got up out of bed and came to put her arm over my shoulders. "One day your man come back and you start all over again," she said.

  A FEW MONTHS LATER, I helped bring Dolly's son Samuel into the world. The three of us lived together in the backhouse, the baby travelling on Dolly's back as she went about her house chores and sleeping in her bed at night. It was comforting to have new life in our backhouse, but my body would sometimes ache at the sound of Samuel sucking and gurgling.

  The Lindos were so pleased with the reports of my baby-catching that when the time came for Mrs. Lindo to have her first baby, she took me aside for a private conversation. "We've heard about the town doctor," Mrs. Lindo whispered. "He bleeds the women in their labour."

  So I helped Mrs. Lindo bring a healthy boy named David into the world. To my surprise, the Lindos had the boy circumcised, just as we would have done in Bayo. A few weeks later, Mr. and Mrs. Lindo brought me into their parlour, offered me a cordial and asked if there was any little gift that I might like to have.

  "Gift?" I said.

  "Since you have been such a wonderful help to us," Mrs. Lindo said.

  I thought for a moment. I asked if I could see a map of the world.

  "Why do you want to see a map?" Mr. Lindo asked.

  "She has read dozens of books," his wife cut in. "She does everything we ask of her. I can't see how it would hurt."

  "What do you seek to learn?" he asked.

  "I do not know from where I come," I said.

  "You came from Africa. You crossed the ocean. We are in Charles Town. You already know these things."

  "Yes, but I do not understand where South Carolina is in relation to my homeland."

  Mr. Lindo sighed. "I don't see why that is necessary."

  "Solomon," Mrs. Lindo said, putting her hand on his knee. "Take her to the Charles Town library. Let her see the maps."

  He jumped up from the couch, knocking over his drink. "I had to grovel just to be let into the Society," he shouted.

  "Solomon, please," Mrs. Lindo said.

  I took a cloth from Mrs. Lindo to clean up the spill and kept my eyes on my work. Mr. Lindo had mentioned a few times that Jews had been slaves in ancient Egypt and that his own ancestors had been driven from Spain. He had told me that Jews and Africans could understand each other because we were both outsiders, but even though the man preferred the term servant to slave, he owned me and he owned Dolly and now he owned Dolly's baby boy. He had a big house in town and he did business throughout the low-country. He wore fine clothes and came and went as he pleased. He could sail to London on the next ship if he so desired.

  I thought that Mr. Lindo would be embarrassed over losing his temper, but he did not seem able to contain himself.

  "I'm good enough to be their indigo inspector, but can I vote in their elections? The Anglicans won't even have me on their library board."

  I kept my eyes on my hands but could hear the tremor in Mr. Lindo's voice.

  Mrs. Lindo reached up, took her husband's hand and brought him back to sit beside her. "Nobody has to grovel," she said calmly, placing her hand on his arm. "You don't have to ask to borrow the map. Just go in and look at it."

  "And Meena?" Lindo asked.

  "Take her with you. She's your servant." Mrs. Lindo giggled. "Take a fan, Meena. Keep the flies away during his consultations."

  THE CHARLES TOWN LIBRARY SOCIETY kept its books and maps in a room on Union Street. The keeper of the books sat at a desk at the entrance. He glanced at me quickly and turned away, as if from something distasteful.

  "Ah yes, Mr. Lindo," he said. "I'm afraid we don't allow Negroes here."

  "Mr. Jackson, don't you have a brother in the indigo trade?"

  The library man carefully closed a book on his desk. "I'm sure nobody will object this one time, Mr. Lindo."

  "Good. We need some books by Voltaire, and your most recent maps of the world."

  The keeper led us to a table at the far end of the room, brought us two of Voltaire's books and some rolled maps, and left us alone.

  "Keep that fan going," Lindo said.

  "He's not watching."

  "Use it anyway," he said, "it's hot in here."

  While I fanned him, Solomon Lindo untied a string around a large scroll.

  "I have never seen so many books," I said, looking around and wishing that women and Negroes were allowed in the library.

  "They have a thousand books," Mr. Lindo muttered, "and I paid for half of them."

  "Where are we?" I asked, pointing at the map.

  "This is British North America," he said, indicating a mass of land.


  On the edge of the land, right up against a huge swath of blue named the Atlantic Ocean, Lindo put his finger by a dot, beside which was the name Charles Town.

  "And here," he said, "is Africa." Across the blue sea, I saw a strangely shaped mass, wider at the top, curving in at the middle and narrowing at the bottom.

  "How do you know?"

  "You can make out the letters if you look carefully. See here? A–F–R–I–C–A."

  "That is my land? Who says it has that strange shape?"

  "The cartographers who make the maps. The traders who sail the worlds. The British and the French and the Dutch and the others who go to Africa, sailing up and down the coast, mapping the shape of the continent."

  On the map I paused over some squiggles in the form of baseless triangles. Lindo said they were meant to indicate mountains. I saw a lion and an elephant sketched in the middle of the land called Africa. I saw that it was mostly surrounded by seas. But the map told me nothing of where I came from. Nothing of Bayo, Segu, or the Joliba. Not a single thing that I recognized from my homeland.

  "Here on this side of the water, in British North America," I said, pointing, "it says Charles Town. I can see where we are. But there are no towns written on Africa. Only these places along the water. Cape Verde. Cape Mesurado. Cape Palmas. How are we to know where the villages are?"

  "The villages are unknown," Lindo said.

  "I have walked through them. There are people everywhere."

  "They are unknown to the people who made this map. Look here in the corner. It says 1690. This is a copy of a map first made seventy-three years ago. They knew even less back then."

  I felt cheated. Now that I could read so well, I had been excited by the prospect of finding my own village on a map. But there were no villages— not mine or anybody else's.

  "Is there nothing more?" I asked.

  Solomon Lindo looked at his watch, and said we had time for one more map.

  Mapp of Africa, the second one said, Corrected with the latest and the best observations. I checked the date. 1729. Perhaps it would be better than the first. The map showed land in the shape of a mushroom with the stem shoved to the right. Near the top, I saw the words Desert of Barbary or Zaara, and below that, Negroland, and below that, along the winding, curving coasts, sections named Slave Coast, Gold Coast, Ivory Coast and Grain Coast. There were tiny words scribbled where the land met the water, but inland was mostly sketchings of elephants, lions and bare-breasted women. In one corner of the map, I saw a sketch of an African child lying beside a lion under a tree. I had never seen such a ridiculous thing. No child would be foolish enough to sleep with a lion. In another corner of the map, I studied a sketch of a man with a long-tailed animal sitting on his shoulder.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "It's a monkey," Lindo said.

  This "Mapp of Africa" was not my homeland. It was a white man's fantasy.

  "There is some lack of detail," Lindo said, "but now you see the shape of Africa."

  I said I had seen enough. After all the books I had read, and all that I had learned about the ways of the white people in South Carolina, I now felt, more than ever before, that these people didn't know me at all. They knew how to bring ships to my land. They knew how to take me from it. But they had no idea at all what my land looked like or who lived there or how we lived.

  As we walked home, I felt a sense of despair. Not only had I lost my son and husband, but it seemed that I would never find my way home. I did not want to take the route of runaway slaves, escaping to the Indians or the Spanish in the south. Hiding in swamps and forests would get me no closer to Africa. My only choice was to keep listening, learning and reading. Perhaps one day I would understand the world of the white man well enough to discover how to leave it.

  Words come late from a wet-nurse

  YEARS WENT BY AND MY WORK as a self-hire midwife stayed the same, but the losses of my life kept piling up. I never got to see Georgia again after I was sold to the Lindos in Charles Town, and one day final sad news came through the fishnet: Georgia had died in her sleep one night of no known ailment. And my fellow villager Fomba had been killed by a night patroller. Fomba had been fishing in his skiff at night when the buckra called out for him to identify himself. Fomba had never recovered the ability to speak, and the patroller shot him in the head. Rather than learning to feel less disappointment, I found that one insult to my heart just seemed to make the next one worse.

  In the fall of 1774, nearly thirteen years after I had come to live with the Lindos, a smallpox epidemic took the lives of Mrs. Lindo, Dolly, their sons and some two hundred other people in Charles Town. In our grief, Solomon Lindo and I barely spoke to each other. When he passed me coming in and out of the house, usually accompanied as he was by a man from his synagogue, it was as if he didn't see me.

  Stumbling about in the fog of his sorrow, at least Solomon Lindo had friends to visit him and bring him food, but I had nobody to console me over my losses. Negroes were not allowed to come visiting in the backhouse, and most of the friends that I had made over the years were gone— they had left with owners who took them where they wanted, or they had died of fevers or the pox.

  I could not stop thinking about Dolly and her son, who had been my most regular companions during the long years in Charles Town. She had fussed over me like a mother, cooking my meals and cleaning my clothes, and whenever I had given her some of the things that came from my work as a self-hire midwife—a miniature box made out of cherry wood, a small bottle of West Indian rum—her face had lit up like that of a child. She kept the bottle with her old buckled shoes, examining them from time to time as if she were checking in with old friends.

  Dolly had been unbelievably proud to see me reading and writing. Sometimes while I read books in our backhouse at night, she had lain next to me and fallen asleep with her hand resting on my arm. She never opened a book, but liked to sit near and watch while I taught her son Samuel to read. As a result of our late-night lessons, he had become a good reader by the age of ten.

  "You done give him the one thing I ain't got to give," Dolly had said.

  Losing Mrs. Lindo was equally painful. She had never raised a hand against me in all my years of service. I had trusted her more than any other white person, and had come to care for her son David like a child of my own.

  After Dolly, Samuel and David died, Mrs. Lindo herself had taken the fever. Pustules broke out all over her body, causing unspeakable pain on her heels and palms. I was left to care for her, and I knew by the way the pustules all ran together, fusing on her face and neck and back, that she was not long for this world.

  I had cried for a whole week after she died. I was not allowed to attend the shiva or speak to any of the people in the house about how much I had loved Mrs. Lindo, so my only way of saying goodbye was to dust and stroke each of the books she had given me over the years. Long ago, she had settled into a pattern of giving me a gift of one book a month, along with a bottle of whale oil to refill my lamp. I kept the books stacked in thirteen columns—one for each year of my service with her—in a corner of the backhouse. It was safe up there, because no white folks ever came into my sleeping quarters. I had built my own little library up in that backhouse, and sometimes read halfway through my long, lonely nights while Dolly and Sam slept.

  Until the moment that I excused myself for the last time from Mrs. Lindo's bedroom, I had never imagined that I could lament the death of a white person. I would never have thought it possible for my insides to bleed for one.

  Solomon Lindo had people from his synagogue in the house every day for a week, and people continued to come by almost daily for a month. Women from his synagogue brought food of every kind, and his sister—a short, severe woman named Leah who seemed offended by my very presence— often patrolled the house.

  A few weeks after Mrs. Lindo died, Mr. Lindo and I found ourselves alone for a rare moment. "All these people around," he said. "It's suffocating."<
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  At least he had his own people, with whom he could break bread and cry. I had nobody at all.

  THE PEOPLE OF CHARLES TOWN had fallen on hard times. Coins were harder than ever to find, and the British government had passed laws preventing the use of paper currency in South Carolina. People were so angry about the way the British were controlling the shipping and sale of tea that huge quantities of the stuff had been allowed to rot on the docks of Charles Town, and the whites were refusing to drink it in their homes. Lindo and his friends blamed their problems on the British and warned of war if things did not improve. Lindo had told me that Carolina indigo could barely fetch half the price of Guatemalan and French West Indian indigo, and that plantation owners were talking about switching to other crops. To make matters worse, fever, syphilis and smallpox kept people in a constant state of fear and agitation. Charlestonians were often afraid to shake hands or leave their houses. For a time, town officials tried to prevent the spread of disease by barring slave ships from arriving at Sullivan's Island.

  In January of 1775, some months after the smallpox epidemic swept through, Solomon Lindo told me that he would be leaving for a month to do business in New York City, where he hoped to convince British officials to protect the parliamentary bounty on Carolina indigo. He said the mud for dye was selling so poorly in international markets that production might grind to a halt in Carolina if the British subsidy were reduced or eliminated.

  After Lindo left, his sister Leah moved into the house, but she took her meals alone and made no arrangements for mine.

  "There is no food," I told her the day after Lindo had sailed out of the harbour.