The Book of Negroes

by Lawrence Hill

  Solomon Lindo cut me out of his bookkeeping work, and began to take meals in his sister's home. For the first time since I had come to Charles Town, I felt gnawing hunger every day. White people in the markets mumbled to each other about being enslaved by the King of England, but I had stopped listening to their complaints. Liberty to the Americans. Down with slavery. They weren't talking about the slavery I knew or the liberty I wanted, and it all seemed ludicrous to me.

  Against all reason and logic, I waited and hoped for Chekura's return. He had said he might be coming back. But no voice called out my African name, and no feet climbed the steps to greet me in the night. I watched for him in the streets and the markets, but Chekura was not to be found. I even looked to the Charles Town newspapers, in case anyone was advertising for a runaway "servant" by the name of Chekura. But the papers said that the British had taken over the Spanish lands to the south. In a hostile town and with a highly patrolled low-country filled with sentries, guards, man-traps and plantation owners who shot Negro trespassers, I knew that he was as unlikely to make it safely to Charles Town again as I was to travel undetected to Lady's Island. There was nowhere to go and no place left to hide.

  Three months after he had returned from New York City, Solomon Lindo told me to join him in his parlour. I hadn't set foot in his house in ages, and couldn't remember the last time I had eaten to my fill.

  "It would appear that we are both suffering," Lindo said, "and I am going to end this standoff. I must travel again to New York City. I have one more opportunity to argue in favour of the indigo bounty." Lindo handed me a platter of bread, cheese and fruit, as well as a bundle of clothes. "Take this food and these things to cover yourself, for it is not right for me to let you wither away."

  I thought he was going to sell me, but the man who claimed that he was not white surprised me one more time.

  "The ship sails tomorrow at ten in the morning," he said. "Make yourself ready for eight o'clock sharp. I have decided to take you with me. We will be gone for a month. I will ensure that you are fed, and that you are clothed for the northern climate. You will write letters, do my books and run errands. Perhaps we can thus repair the damage between us. But go now, please, for I have work to finish."

  I decided to travel with him in the morning. It would be my Exodus. With a bit of luck, I would never return to the Province of South Carolina.

  Book Three

  Nations not so blest as thee

  {London, 1804}

  THE ABOLITIONISTS SUSPECT that my time left is limited, and I cannot deny it. It is as if my lungs have been granted a precise number of breaths. Now that the limit draws near, I can almost see the number written in the patterns of the clouds at sunset. In the morning, I awaken faintly troubled. The sunset remains in my mind at all times of day, but I try not to dwell on it, or to let it prevent me from taking each day as a new gift. I have not embraced a God as might be imagined by a Muslim, Jew or Christian, but in the mornings it comforts me to imagine a gentle voice saying, Go ahead, that's it, take another day.

  I am no longer worked to the bone, nor do I struggle every hour to fill my belly or cover my head, and I find it easy to make one new discovery every day. Recently, I discovered that something happens when people realize they may never see you again. They expect wisdom from you. And they want you near to them during great moments.

  Yesterday the jolly abolitionist—Sir Stanley Hastings, as the rest of the world knows him—finally prevailed upon me to accompany him to Sunday service. He had been at me for some time, and I could procrastinate no longer.

  We attended his church, which, he said, was the only respectable house of worship in the city. True to his word, he kept vigil over me throughout the ordeal, propping me up on every leaning side. On our way into the building, passing under an archway of timeless stones and echoes, men and women of every persuasion and under every imaginable wig or hat flocked toward me for an introduction.

  "We have heard they will be bringing you out soon," one said.

  "We hear the date is nearing for the parliamentary committee," another said.

  "We hear that you can quote from Voltaire and Swift," a third said.

  "Only when my own words fail me," I replied, which earned a round of laughter.

  When the bishop stood, I finally got to rest my weary backside on a pew. The first pew, no less. Sir Stanley whispered that nearly a thousand people sat behind us, and I had the sensation of twice that number of eyes boring into the deep brown skin of my neck. Suffice it to say that mine was the only skin of that hue inside that sacred building. I found it enervating to be stared at by the bishop as he took to his pulpit, and by all the congregationists behind me. I sought nothing but sleep and the comfort of a quiet, solitary room. My eyelids dropped like bricks, and yet I strove to hold them up. I had no wish to disgrace my valiant host, so I sat as still and erect as the white Anglicans of London, dreaming with eyes open of a warm bed and a feather pillow.

  The people of Great Britain and other seafaring nations have devised unspeakable punishments for the children of Ham, but in that moment and in that time, none seemed worse than their own self-inflicted torture: to sit, unmoving but forbidden to sleep, in a cavernous room with arching stone and forbidden windows while a small man adopted a monotone for the better part of a villainous hour.

  I did my level best to remain upright. If I closed my eyes only halfway, surely nobody could tell that I was escaping through dreams of other lands and other times. I thought of my mother, who had seemed so wise and old to me when I was but a child. Even as one takes the last steps of life, one seems still to long for the slow, rocking movement of a mother's arms. Rocking. My body was rocking. I had a moment of a nightmare, in which the rocking of a mother's arms turned into the rocking of a ship. I lurched in the pew. Sir Stanley's hand briefly touched my arm. I bolted up, hot, alarmed, embarrassed. My eyes lifted open. The bishop was still droning in a voice invented solely to tempt an old woman with sleep.

  The mass of people rose about me, and I followed them. I stood when they prayed, waited while they sang, kneeled when they did, and sat back on the pew with what little grace I could muster. No wonder there wasn't a single solitary man or woman of African extraction in the church. If allowed to come, would they endure this hour of purgatory?

  Could every Anglican ear possibly be tuned to the ever-mumbling bishop, who now offered words about resurrection and the everlasting? I heard something about the Israelites and the Promised Land, but my body ached for a horizontal position. One day soon I would tumble into that bed and from it rise no longer. But not yet. My eyes opened a little wider. Not yet, please.

  I would need energy and vigour when speaking to the parliamentary committee. I would need lift in my legs, that day, and a whiff of my old passion. Alas, I had reached that fine age when it was easier to speak than to be spoken to. At that point in the service, it struck me that the last person on earth with a right to speak to any other was a diminutive Anglican bishop with no rolling of the eyes, no flailing of the hands, no kick in his legs and no crashing into the arms of Jesus. Come hell or high water, I would not be talked back into any Anglican church in this lifetime. If God had to be saluted, let it be among the Baptists of Birchtown or Freetown. At least they danced when they called out to Jesus, and hollered loud enough to keep the half-dead awake.

  I managed to keep my chin up, and my eyelids sufficiently open to avoid detection. It was not pleasant to sit still in church, but that was no reason to embarrass Sir Stanley Hastings, his wife and five children.

  Near the end of the service, I was shaken from my stupor one last time as the masses rose to sing. And I stood among them, fully awake this time. My heels were throbbing. They felt like they had been stripped of all padding, and now consisted of bone and bone only. As I stood righteously awake, with heels and every other part of me aching for the service to end, something happened to ease my discomfort and to prick up my ears. I heard voices. A thousand vo
ices. The voices of all the good Anglicans were coming together.

  When I caught the melody, it seemed faintly, distantly, impossibly familiar. Where had I heard it before?

  When Britain first at Heav'n's command Arose from out the azure main; This was the charter of the land, And guardian angels sang this strain . . .

  The voices went on, and I dug deep into my memory. Was it in Charles Town that I had heard that song? No. New York? No, not there either. Where, then?

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves: Britons never never never shall be slaves . . .

  Britons? Slaves? What nonsense was this? I listened again. The words were impossible. But it was not the lyrics I remembered. It was the music. What on blessed earth could this song be, and how was it that I somehow recognized its lift and its optimism?

  The nations not so blest as thee, Shall in their turns to tyrants fall; While thou shalt flourish great and free, The dread and envy of them all . . .

  I tried to hold on to the words and turn them over in my mind. Nations not so blest as thee, Shall in their turns to tyrants fall. I glanced to my right. Sir Stanley Hastings was singing passionately, mouth like a baby robin in the spring. And then it came again. The chorus. The part that seemed most familiar of all. A sound that brought rousing passion to the good Anglican churchgoers and made them sing as lustily as I had ever heard white people sing.

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves Britons never never never shall be slaves . . .

  That was it. There. Now I remembered. It wasn't New York. Or Charles Town. It was earlier, much earlier. It was on the slave ship. In the cabin, beneath the decks, with the medicine man. He used to like to sing sometimes, and I had no idea whatsoever of his meaning. He was ailing, I supposed, and perhaps even mad, and sometimes in the middle of the night, when he had taken too much from the bottle and already soiled another woman from my homeland, he would lie in his bed, facing the low ceiling, and over the thrashing of the waves and the slapping of the sails he would shout out the chorus over and over again. For an audience, he had only the parrot in its covered cage, and me, lying rigidly beside him.

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves Britons never never never shall be slaves . . .

  Unaware of English, and unaccustomed to white folk, and not even a woman yet but dangerously close to becoming one, I would lie as still as I could in the medicine man's bed and wonder what he was singing. Let him sing, I thought, because his hands don't touch me when he sings. Let him sing, I thought, hoping to spend just one more night out of reach of his thick, hairy fingers. Let him sing, I thought, ashamed that he spent himself on women from my land. The misfortune of those women was my good luck, their misery my escape.

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves Britons never never never . . .

  Never never never were the last words I heard, until perceiving shouts of alarm from the men and women all around me. I must have fainted dead away. Sir Stanley Hastings had clearly caught me in my fall, for as I came to I was laid out straight on the wooden pew. Finally. The position I had sought for a full hour. Never never never . . . I was no longer with the medicine man, no longer a six-foot toss from the coldest grave on earth, but back in the Anglican church, stretched out on a hard wooden pew, under the protection of the most venerated abolitionist in England. Sir Stanley Hastings' firm hand kept me from sliding off the pew. I kept my eyes shut and wondered what to do. The Anglicans were in a state of vocal agitation, and Sir Stanley Hastings the most. I plead with you, people, please stand back. Please. Back. Our noble visitor has fainted, surely due to the excitement of our faith, but fear not. We shall revive her. Here. She has a pulse. She is still breathing. Stand back please, and we shall aid her. All she needs is a little air.

  I kept my eyes closed until they carried me into the sun.

  They come and go from holy ground

  {Manhattan, 1775}

  SOLOMON LINDO AND I SAILED from Charles Town on the Queen Charlotte. Through day after day of sailing, the waves rose and tumbled and foamed at the mouth as if calling out to me, you will never see land again. The water looked dark and menacing enough to kill a person with its chill. I dreaded retreating into my tiny apartment below deck, and would have stood day and night above water level had it not been for the air that grew increasingly cold as we sailed north. Lindo tried every day to speak with me, but I excused myself from any discussions about his correspondence.

  Negro servants in white breeches and red vests served boiled crabs and roasted peanuts to Charles Town merchants who were happy enough to make friendly with them out on the open sea, but I wasn't allowed to enter the dining hall for white passengers and refused Lindo's invitations to join him in his private cabin. He seemed bent on taking the trip as a time to relax and socialize with me, and was miffed that I kept my distance from him.

  On the third day of the voyage—the only mild and sunny part of the trip—men and women from planting or merchant families lounged in chairs on the deck, attended to by Negroes bringing Madeira, cigars and oranges. Lindo unpacked his portable chess set and asked me to sit with him, which I accepted only because my legs were too tired to stand any longer. People thought it a novelty that I could play. Lindo challenged a man in a straw hat and with red, sunburned forearms to play me, and they wagered two guineas on the outcome. Lindo had shown me all the strategies years ago, when our relations had still been cordial. Dominate the centre of the board, at first. Aim your bishops like cannons, and place your knights like spies. Leave the enemy no room to move. Control, attack and pin the king. It was an ugly game, I thought, but it kept me from having to chat with Lindo or to hear him drone on about the evaporating indigo market. The man with the sunburn was astonished to find himself checkmated and enraged to see Lindo turn the guineas over to me.

  "She earned them," Lindo said, shrugging.

  I knew better than to look into the eyes of my opponent, and slid the gold into my clothing.

  We sailed into the harbour later the next morning. It was only upon approaching land that I saw that New York was an island, like a long leg with all the people shoved into the foot.

  "They call it Manhattan," Lindo said, "after the Indian word for 'hilly island,' Manna-hata."

  My spirits had been low during the entire trip over. However, as I looked out at the streets choked with buildings and counted some fifteen church steeples—the tallest of which grew as high as a giant tree—the weight of the past began to lessen. Manna-hata offered a comforting sort of chaos. Island or no island, perhaps it would be the sort of place in which I could take refuge.

  On the wharf, we were swarmed by a shouting mob. A Negro threw my valise and Lindo's trunk on a cart and demanded a shilling from Lindo, who complied. Following the baggage man, we headed into streets packed with people, carts and horses. There were wooden buildings, but ones made of brick too. The buildings were sharp and rectangular, neat and trim. We hadn't travelled for long when we passed the outskirts of an area that had no proper buildings, but rather an odd collection of shanties, shacks and tents with corners poking out at all angles, like broken bones. Moving in and out of the mud alleys and paths were Negro men and women, some carrying scraps they must have pillaged from the shipyards: broken spars, ripped sails and long strips of wood bent like ribs.

  "Canvas Town," Lindo said. "Stay away from it, if you know what's good for you."

  "Who are those people?" I asked.

  "The Canvas Town Negroes," he said. "A ne'er-do-well lot always willing to relieve you of your goods."

  "Are they free?" I asked.

  "The question is how they live," he replied.

  I took another look in the direction of the Negroes entering and leaving their shacks, hauling canvas and water. One woman even had a pot cooking over a low fire. They appeared to move about unmolested.

  "Let's not tarry now," Lindo said, and asked the baggage man to hurry up.

  We left the edge of Canvas Town and entered another built-up
area. I read the names of every street. Broadway. Wall Street. William. We came to Broad Street, and then Pearl. Under a hanging sign that said The Fraunces Tavern, our porter opened the doors to a hotel.

  A tall, well-built and light-skinned Negro with a blue chintz shirt and a watch on a chain stood behind the registration desk, smiling. "Welcome," he said, in a lilt that was neither American nor African. "Sam Fraunces," he said, shaking Lindo's hand, "but you can call me Black Sam or just Sam if you prefer. I know you haven't been here before, because I never forget a guest." He turned to me and shook my hand too. "And I know, without a shadow of a doubt, that I haven't seen you before. I've been wanting to meet you, though, for a long time. Yes I have."

  I grinned.

  West Indian, that's what he was. Probably Jamaican. I had heard Jamaican accents in Charles Town, but no Jamaican or other Negro could have owned a tavern there. And this wasn't just a tavern. It was a ten-room hotel in a two-storey redbrick building with a reputation for good food so widely established that people had mentioned it on the ship from Charles Town.

  "I'm afraid I don't know your names," he said.

  Lindo introduced only himself.

  "From your bags, I surmise you have come a distance," Sam said.

  "Charles Town," Lindo said.

  I saw a smile tug at the corners of Sam's fine, wide-lipped mouth. Steady and solid, calm and confident. "Will the lady be requiring—"

  "Yes," Lindo cut in, "separate rooms. I require a spacious room and please bring up a table and chair, as I have business to conduct."

  "We'll see to that, sir," Sam said.

  Lindo began to sign a registration book. He wrote, Solomon Lindo and servant, lost his patience, and said he had to get cleaned up and tend to some affairs in town before the close of business.