The Book of Negroes

by Lawrence Hill

  Wherever I went—teaching, working in the print shop and catching babies—I kept her swaddled to my back with a fine yard of indigo-coloured cloth. I talked to her about everything, even before she could understand. I felt that the sound of my voice had to make up for all the things she lacked— a father, and the traditions of my native village. I even explained to her that I had bought the cloth that kept her close to me at Everything in the World in Shelburne and that only a few shops in town welcomed Negroes. "You need to know where it's safe to go, and where it isn't," I said to her.

  Alverna Witherspoon came into Theo McArdle's print shop many times before we got know each other. Her husband ran a whaling business, and Mrs. Witherspoon brought in his advertisements twice a month. McArdle always dealt with her while I remained at the back of the shop, minding misplaced p's and q's and other spelling mistakes in beds of upside-down letters being readied for printing. But one day I was setting type alone in the store when Mrs. Witherspoon came in.

  "Is Mr. McArdle here?" she said.

  "He has gone out on an errand, Mrs. Witherspoon," I said.

  "How did you know my name?"

  "You come in every week."

  "I've seen you in here with that baby, but I'm afraid I don't know either of your names."

  "Well, this little one who likes to try to grab letters out of the composing stick is May. And I'm Meena."

  "I gave Theo an advertisement this morning."

  "Yes, for whale oil. I was just setting the letters."

  "I gave him the wrong price. For a firkin of oil, it's not two pounds six shillings. It's three pounds six."

  "I can fix that," I said.

  "Can you correct it before printing?"

  "Just a minute," I said. I removed a few pieces from a bed of letters, let May hold one—she liked to run her fingers over the ridged lines—and replaced them. "Done," I said.

  "Done?" Mrs. Witherspoon said. "Can I see that?"

  "It's rather complicated. The letters are upside down and in a big tray, and I'm rushing to finish up before printing. I can show you another time if you wish."

  She smiled at me brightly. "No, that's just fine. Tell Mr. McArdle I said hello. You are quite a sight, looking just like an apprentice printer in that lovely African garb, and with a well-behaved toddler beside you to boot."

  "I was an apprentice last year. Theo doesn't consider me an apprentice any longer. I set the type for him on Mondays, without supervision."

  "Please tell Mr. McArdle that I was by, and that I was taken care of wonderfully."

  May suddenly slipped away from me, ran to Mrs. Witherspoon and put in her hand the upside-down letter M from my composing stick.

  "She's normally more shy than that, with strangers," I said.

  "Thank you, dear," Mrs. Witherspoon said to May. She winked at me and quickly put the letter back in my hand.

  "No," May shouted, pulling at my hand.

  Finally, when I relented, she pried open my fingers, retrieved the M and gave it back to Mrs. Witherspoon.

  Mrs. Witherspoon blew May a kiss, waited till she turned back to me, set the letter down on the counter and sailed out the door.

  The following Monday, Mrs. Witherspoon returned and asked, "How many days a week do you work for Mr. McArdle?"

  "Mondays and Tuesdays," I said.

  "How would you like to work Wednesdays through Saturdays for me?"

  Mrs. Witherspoon and her husband hired me the next day. I did whatever they needed—cleaning their large house on Charlotte Street, ironing, hauling water and wood, setting fires, cleaning the fireplace, buying food and running other errands in town. I even cooked. They paid me a shilling a day to work from dawn to dusk. I preferred McArdle's print shop to the physical labour in the Witherspoon household, but the job offered certain advantages. I was allowed to take May with me, and to let her walk about and explore the house as long as she remained well behaved. The Witherspoons had no children but they frequently entertained and had leftover food. May and I were allowed to eat whatever was left or take it with us back to Birchtown. Mrs. Witherspoon showed me any household items that she was planning to throw out— old chairs, tables, buckets and rope. If I couldn't use them, somebody else in Birchtown could.

  My good terms with the Witherspoons left me envied in Birchtown. Many Negroes had indentured themselves to the Shelburne Loyalists for three-year periods. It was better than starving or freezing to death, but not much. A white Loyalist had every motivation to push an indentured Negro to the point of collapse by the end of the period. And some indentured Negroes who had become injured or ill were thrown out when they were no longer useful—with their salaries withheld.

  "Don't get too close to white folks," Daddy Moses would warn me. "They can be fair-weathered friends." Fair weathered or not, salaries paid by McArdle and the Witherspoons helped keep my daughter and me alive and often went to support others, such as Daddy Moses. I was still delivering babies in Birchtown, but it had been a long time since anyone could pay me.

  May loved coming along when I worked in Shelburne. By the time she was three, she would receive biscuits and milk every week from Mrs. Witherspoon, who would sit with my daughter while she ate and played. One day, Mrs. Witherspoon wrote the letters M–A–Y on a sheet of paper.

  "Do you know what—?"

  "May," my child said.

  "How did you know that?" Mrs. Witherspoon asked.

  "It's my name. M–A–Y. May. Mama told me."

  "What about this?" Mrs. Witherspoon said, writing again.

  "Mama," May said.

  "And this?"

  "Papa," May said. "He is missing some fingers and he loves me."

  Mrs. Witherspoon glanced up at me. She knew that with McArdle's help, I had long ago arranged for newspaper advertisements to be placed in Annapolis Royal, asking information about the whereabouts of Chekura. Nothing came back. Mrs. Witherspoon also knew that when May was one year old, I had enough money to take her along with me on a summer trip to Annapolis Royal, but we took the next ship back home: I hadn't been able to find a single Negro who had heard of Chekura or knew anything about a ship called the Joseph having arrived in the fall of 1783. I had no idea what had become of my husband or where he was, but I still believed that if he was alive and if he was able, he would one day find me. I made sure that every Negro in Birchtown and every friendly white person in Shelburne knew I was waiting for Chekura, so that anybody meeting him or hearing about him could help us find each other.

  A few weeks after May's third birthday, when I was telling her about her father and our homeland, she said, "Don't worry Mama, we will go back there one day." I asked her how we would do that. "We will go for a long walk and take along lots of food in case we need to eat lunch and when we get to the end of the woods, we will find Africa."

  Soon after that conversation, my daughter developed a fever and diarrhea that had been circulating in Birchtown. I had to miss two days of working for McArdle, but could not afford to miss more days with the Witherspoons. I decided to take May along, thinking that Mrs. Witherspoon might let me fold up an old blanket so May could sleep while I worked. I carried May on my shoulders, but she was too weak to bend forward and place her hands around my forehead for balance. For the entire walk into Shelburne, I had to keep my arms up to hold onto her hands. When we got to the household, my arms were exhausted and my daughter's forehead was burning.

  "Goodness' sakes," Mrs. Witherspoon said, "what have you done to our lovely May? Hello, May. Can you see me? Can you look at me? Here, dear. Look this way."

  May could barely keep her eyes open, and when I tried to put her down, she could not stand without help.

  "Shall I call a doctor?"

  "No," I said, rather sharply. Then I tried to soften my words, because I needed her help and did not want to offend her. "I'm sorry but I don't trust doctors. May just needs a little rest while I work."

  In a spare room on the main floor, close to where I worked, we
put May in a bed, covered her up and brought her water every hour. At the end of the day, Mrs. Witherspoon offered to let us stay the night. I was deeply grateful, and even more so over the three days that it took before May's fever broke and diarrhea ended and she began to eat again. Mrs. Witherspoon insisted that we spend a fourth night, to give May every chance to recover before the return to Birchtown. By that final day, May had made a full recovery and played with Mr. Witherspoon by trying to tug at his beard. I watched their tender play and wished again that my daughter could see her father. Chekura, I was sure, would have been like that with her. I loved every inch of my daughter and worshipped every beat of her heart, but I was not a playful mother. I did not have a lot of fun in me. I fed her, clothed her, taught her to read before her third birthday and took her everywhere I went, but I was too busy and too tired for games.

  The experience of bringing May through the illness brought both of us closer to the Witherspoons. They gave us old blankets to take back to Birchtown, and even let me take an old wooden bed frame so that May and I wouldn't have to sleep so close to the ground. Now, each time I came to work, May was greeted at the door by Mrs. Witherspoon, who often entertained May while I worked. Mr. Witherspoon gave me whale lampoil until the summer of 1787, when his whaling business closed for lack of markets. The day the business closed, he and Mrs. Witherspoon insisted that we have supper with them and stay the night. I spoke about the long months of waiting before leaving New York, and they talked about having lost land and a good home when they left Boston and sailed to Shelburne during the Revolutionary War.

  "Why are so many businesses closing?" I asked Mr. Witherspoon.

  "They built this port in too much of a hurry," Mr. Witherspoon said. "Everybody was convinced it would become the next New York. But the jobs never came. The people have no money to spend, and the businesses can't sell their goods. This town will collapse nearly as quickly as it was built."

  An unusual heat wave settled over Shelburne and Birchtown in the month of July. The mosquitoes were meaner than any I had met in South Carolina, and bears came to the edge of town to eat berries off the bushes and to root through our garbage. Few of the Negroes had received land, and the British had cut off our provisions. Men hunted deer and moose to salt as much meat as they could for the winter. Most of the healthy men and women of Birchtown looked every day for work in Shelburne, but jobs were becoming harder to find. Mr. Witherspoon's whaling operation was just one of many businesses to close. Wages were dropping—especially for the Negroes. At nine pence a day, Negroes carrying crates on the wharves made less than one-third the pay of whites. Businesses that did have work were often happy to hire the Negroes at the cheaper rate, but that left growing groups of white labourers—many of them disbanded soldiers who, like the Negroes, had come to Shelburne after serving the British in the war in the Colonies—gathering angrily in the alehouses. From their ragged clothing and worn faces, I could see that many of the white men endured difficulties too, and I knew that for the Negroes, these were the most dangerous people of all.

  One evening in late July, May and I had finished at the Witherspoons' house and were walking down Charlotte to Water Street. May would usually walk until she was too tired; then I would swing her up on my hip for the rest of the way home.

  "How far would you like to walk this evening?" I asked, holding her hand.

  "To the first ale," she said.

  "The first 'ale' sign? That's not far enough. How about to the end of Water Street?"

  "No, Mama. Too many men. Up, Mama. Up now."

  I picked up my daughter and looked down the street. Near a sign that said milligan's ale, a group of white men tormented a Negro labourer on a ladder.

  "What you doing up there, boy?" one of the men shouted.

  "Fixing the roof," the labourer said, reaching for a hammer hanging off his work belt.

  I pulled May out of sight between two stores, and peered around the corner of the building. I could see the men trying to shake the carpenter off the ladder. He grabbed the eavestrough to keep from falling. The men ripped the ladder away, leaving him dangling in the air.

  A man in a white smock came out of the tavern. "Hey! Give that ladder back. This boy works for me, and he's got a job to do."

  Two of the men shoved the tavern keeper back inside. The others taunted the dangling worker until he dropped to the ground. Then the men fell upon him with kicks and blows, carried him over to the wharf and threw him into the harbour.

  The carpenter struggled out of the cold water, but they threw him in again and again. The men shouted that they would kill him if he got out one more time. When he did, moving slowly under his wet clothing, the men beat him until he lay still. When they threw him once more off the pier, he did not come back out.

  "Mama, what are they doing?"

  "They're hurting people," I said. I wanted to hurry back to Birchtown. But the angry mob was growing outside the alehouse to my right, and another crowd was forming to my left on Water Street. I pressed May flat against the side of the building.

  "Let's burn their homes," one man shouted.

  "Let's torch Birchtown," another said.

  "It's time to teach the niggers a lesson," said one man. "Let's start with that big bastard down there."

  Many of the men were drinking beer, and others carried muskets. The two groups of white men merged as they moved away from May and me, crossed Water Street and headed toward a Negro who was well known in Birchtown. Ben Henson, a tall, thick-set man, was stationed at his usual post to the side of Water Street, sawing logs at the rate of one penny a foot. Ben had the biggest arms in Birchtown, but I wished that he would take off and run before they got to him. I didn't want him to prove his strength. I wanted him to be safe. But as the men advanced, Ben kept working on his thick log.

  "Why don't you haul them logs back to Nigger Town?" a man leading the crowd called out.

  Ben did not look up from his sawing. The leader walked closer to him, musket pointed at Ben's waist. Ben kept working until the man was within reach. In a flash, Ben grabbed the musket, seized the man and flung him to the ground. Two more men jumped him, but Ben tossed them off like cats. While he was dodging the knife of a fourth man, yet another slid behind him, raised a musket and shot him through the head. Big Ben Henson dropped like a sack of hammers. I felt nauseated at the sight of blood pooling around Ben's shoulders.

  Then the men turned away from Ben Henson and saw me.

  I grabbed May in my arms, turned back to Charlotte Street and ran up the hill to pound on the Witherspoons' door.

  "Who's there?" Mrs. Witherspoon called out.

  "Meena and May."

  She opened the door, hurried us in and slid the bolt behind us. "I've been watching through the window. I was worried they had you too."

  "They're killing folks," I said.

  "They've gone crazy," Mrs. Witherspoon said. She led my daughter to the kitchen to distract her with ginger and molasses cookies. I looked out through the window toward the harbour. I could see Ben Henson, lying by his broken sawing tripods. From a distance, it looked like he was napping. There were no other black people in the street. The band of white men had moved on.

  "I saw two men killed," I whispered, when Mrs. Witherspoon brought me a shot of rum.

  "Take this," she said. "And stay with us until this madness ends."

  Mrs. Witherspoon fed us and put us up for the next three days. Her husband brought more news: the white men were still rampaging. Roaming bands of unemployed workers had killed at least four Negroes and beaten many others. There was talk of rape. When the whites descended on Birchtown, they had been beaten back, but they had only returned in larger numbers to tear down some houses and set fire to others, attacking anyone who resisted.

  Throughout the days we stayed with the Witherspoons, I kept to my regular duties while May played. Each night, I climbed into bed with my daughter and tried to calm myself by following the rise and fall of her breathing. Ho
w would I take care of us if our cabin had been destroyed? What if all of Birchtown had been torched? And what about Daddy Moses and other people who needed me?

  Every evening, I asked Mr. Witherspoon for a report. Four days after the riots began, he told me that they had stopped. There were no more bands of men roaming the streets, he said, and no more reports of violence in Birchtown. I wanted to be sure that it was safe to take May back to Birchtown, and thought it would be best if I first went there alone.

  I arranged to leave May in the Witherspoons' care for two days. In that time, I planned to find out if my home still stood, fix it if I could, help Daddy Moses and my other friends, and then rush back to Shelburne for my daughter.

  I slipped down Charlotte Street early in the morning, turned onto Water Street and saw no Negroes working in the town. A ship was at a wharf, but only white labourers moved about the docks. Some men stopped working, put down their loads of lumber and glared at me, but nobody approached me or said a word. I got out of town without incident. Usually I passed four or five people on the way between Shelburne and Birchtown, but on this day I saw only one Negro, and he was dead—hanging from a tree to the side of the path. He had on a pair of breeches but no shirt and no shoes. I shuddered, yet did not feel that I could keep going without stopping to see if it was someone I knew. I spun the feet and looked up at the face, but the man had been so badly beaten and bloodied that I could not recognize him.

  Daddy Moses had arranged to have his Methodist chapel built on the east end of town; no visitor could arrive from Shelburne without taking notice of it. As I rounded the bay and crossed the bridge over a creek, the charred remains of the chapel came into view. It had been burnt to the ground. Three old women stood outside praying, and another was cooking over a fire near the ruins. As I headed into town, I could see that many of the shacks had been torched or knocked over. Gardens had been trampled, and people walked about ragged and bent. I found Daddy Moses sitting on his cart at the graveyard. His glasses were missing, and I saw a welt on his cheek. I put my hand in his.