Washington and Caesar

“You gonna jabber some more o’ that black cant, King?” asked Jones, the mate.

“I might, then.” King looked at Jones, who was smaller but loved to fight.

“Now then, King, boyo, don’t you glare at me. I’m all for your talkin’ any lingo you like. It’s just funny to hear from you, that’s all I’m saying.” Jones was from a part of Britain called Wales, where they seemed to sing instead of talk. King was on the edge of a retort about Jones and talk, but he smiled to himself and let it pass. Instead he motioned to the scarred youngster, who rose from his squatting position against the mast in one fluid, athletic movement and walked across the deck to the sailors.

“Speak the King’s English, boy?”

“Little, ya.”

“The better you speak it, the better you will be treated. You have a name, then?”

“Cese. Cese Mwakale. My father commands a thousand warriors—”

“Not here, he doesn’t. What were you called in Jamaica?”

“Caesar.”

King nodded. He knew a dozen Caesars in Williamsburg. “How long ago were you taken?”

“Four years, older cousin. You?”

“Twenty-five years, young one. But I was a fool, and walked to their landings to see the world. Who was king when you left?”

“King of Benin, sir? Or of my province?”

“Benin will do.”

“Callinauw was king when I last heard, sir.”

“And where do you hail from?”

“Eboe, in Esaka. My father commanded the regiment there.”

King nodded, curtly. It took him back to hear the words, to know that a man he had hated once was lording it in Benin, but it all sounded very far away. He smiled at the young man and held out the other sailor’s pipe.

“Smoke, Cese?”

The lad seized the pipe greedily and sucked a great draught into his lungs. Jones watched in amazement as the inward breath went on and on. Cese held the breath for a moment and returned the pipe with more gravity than he had taken it.

Jones looked into the bottom of the pipe bowl and mimed using a glass. “Tobacco is cheap in Virginny, but not that cheap, Blackie.”

“Call him Cese.” King smiled at the boy.

“How were you taken?”

“My father’s regiment was away in the north. You know of the Northern War?”

“I had heard. It was a small trouble in my youth.”

“It is a great war now. So many young men are away that kidnappers, criminals, can steal children and young people from their homes; larger towns have militias of old men and women.”

“And the king tolerates this?”

“The king fears Muslims more than he cares for us. Listen, then. I was at the camp with the youngest men, those unblooded, just training. We were drilling with spears when the shots were fired, and our officers led us straight out after the raiders. The old men and women turned out with swords and shields, but the raiders shot them down with muskets.”

“Where were your own muskets? We had hundreds in my youth.”

“All our muskets were away with the regiment. Nor had we ever fought against men armed as our men were. So we charged them, like fools. In moments they were all around us, in the brush on our flanks. Some of us were shot, and some stopped charging and ran. When I saw that, I knew we were done. I determined to die, and charged on. My spear bit deep into one, and then I was clubbed down. When I awoke, I was a slave.”

“You killed one. That’s good.”

“I paid. Perhaps I’m still paying. Some of the men who were taken were ransomed later, but I was not. I think my father took another wife. I do not know.” He crossed his arms to indicate that this was not a topic he wished to discuss. “Now I am here. Tell me about Virginny.”

“What yo’ skill, Caesar?”

“Be a huntah, suh.”

“Hunter. Was your father of the Embrenake?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And weren’t such men distinguished by their speech? So it is here. Say hunter.”

“Hunt-ar.” The other slaves had edged closer. As the foreign speech was replaced by English, they gathered courage to join in.

“You goin’ to Jamaica again, then, Mista’ King?” asked one, a bricklayer.

“Yaas. I go twice a year, weather allowing. Mostly I sail wi’ Mr. Gibson.”

“You carry a message to my woman?”

“If’n you give me a good idea where to find her. I don’ go too close to some plantations. I been a slave twice an’ I don’ mean to go that way ‘gain. Won’ sail again till spring.”

Others asked for messages carried, or verbal messages, which King refused. He told them where to find a Quaker clerk in Williamsburg who would write out short messages for slaves, if asked nicely. Cese watched him eagerly, his head cocked a little to one side like a smart puppy awaiting instruction. King began to pass along whatever came to his mind, but they had questions of their own.

“Mista’ King, you know who we go be wo’kin’ fo?”

“I expect you be wo’kin’ fo Mr. Washington, if’n you be on his boat.”

“What he like?”

“They betta, an’ they worse. He be fair, and that somethin’.”

“He fair? Do he let us’ns buy freedom?”

“How ‘bout marriage? Do he abide black folks as marry?”

“Is it true that Christian folk can’t be slaves in Virginny?”

They were clamoring now, and their different accents were hard for him to understand. He shook his head at them. West Indian slaves were the most ignorant; they were kept in pens and didn’t get to hear much news.

“No. Many Christian folk is slaves.”

“Is you free if you gets to England?”

“So I hear. I been there, and I ain’t seen no slaves.” It was common knowledge that a man was free if he could reach England. Sometimes a man could get free by enlisting in the Royal Navy, too. King had bought his freedom the first time, saving pennies from his fishing to buy his way free. The second time, he’d taken one beating too many and run, joined a navy ship hungry for men, thin on the decks from the yellow jack in the Indies and with a hard first officer not liable to ask a man questions.

He looked back at the boy.

“You wan’ be free, Cese?”

“I will be free, Mista King.”

“You take care, now. Mr. Washington, he sell black boys wha’ try to run.”

Cese nodded. He looked out at the shore for a moment.

“Maybe I go England.”

“Go to England, Cese. Maybe so. You know who Somerset was?”

“No, suh.”

“He was a black man like you. He run from his master in England. Got caught, got beat, got a white man to take him to court. He won. No slavery in England now.”

Cese had heard a little of the story, but not so plain, always told elliptically so that an overseer wouldn’t understand. He thought it remarkable that a black man had got into a court at all, much less that his case should be heard. In the Indies, a slave couldn’t even give evidence, a fact of life that every slave knew all too well.

“Maybe I go to England,” he repeated.

“You take care, boy.”

King nodded to Jones and they stood, Jones carefully wrapping twine around his pipe and putting it into a fitted tin. Before the mate could call them aloft, they were standing at the base of the mainmast, ready for the last tack into the bay, the boy and the other slaves forgotten.

Cese watched the shore and thought about the raid and his last moments as a free man. He thought about it often, but now he tried to think about what England must be like, a land where men became free just by touching the ground, or so he had been told. He tried to imagine how to get to England, but he couldn’t see it. What he could see in his mind’s eye was the musket butt coming under his shield, into his hip and groin, the point of his spear going into the other man’s innards, his hand turning the blade as he had been taught. One kill. It didn’t seem like much of a tally against a life of servitude, and sometimes he wondered if he should just have died when he went down. And he thought about his father, a war captain of renown. He had probably taken another wife and forgotten Cese. Cese shook his head to send the memories away. He seldom thought of his father.

He looked at the coastline, nearer now, and decided to do the very best he could. Other slaves said Virginny was different from the Indies, the whites better, the living easier, and fewer folk died. Perhaps he could win his freedom.

“Hunt-ar.” He savored the word. “Eng-land.”

Williamsburg, Virginia, March 4, 1773

She meant trouble, that was plain. Martha’s eyes sparkled as they always did when she had mischief on her mind, but her voice seemed serious when she asked him to explain the day’s events. Of the men in the room, only Washington understood his wife’s message: they had already talked politics enough. Young Henry Lee, just graduated from Princeton, did not hear the irony in her voice or catch her meaning, and he leapt to explain with a simplicity that damned him as a patronizing animal to every woman present.

“It is not a complicated matter, ma’am.” Wiser heads turned to watch the man charge to his doom; his implication that she might be unequal to a more complicated matter lost him the support of the crowd.

“I’m sure you’ll make it all plain to me, Mr. Lee.”

“Indeed, ma’am. We have settled on choosing a committee of eleven men to obtain the most early and authentic intelligence of all such acts and resolutions of the British Parliament, or proceedings of administrations, as may relate to, or affect the British Colonies in America…”

“So you intend to form a Committee of Correspondence, as Massachusetts has?” Martha smiled at the younger man. She was quite short, but her immense dignity and the memory of her beauty, as well as her reputation, gave her a presence that only a few of the men could match, and Lee was not one of them.

“…to keep up and maintain a correspondence and communication with our sister colonies.”

“Mr. Lee, I believe you are repeating a speech that most of my guests have already heard.” Martha Washington said “Mistah” with the man’s name, and the drawl lengthened a bit each time she said it. “It certainly sounds like you have chosen a Committee of Correspondence.”

Lee looked at her as if he had just perceived that she was mocking him.

“I was endeavoring to explain, ma’am.”

“I think you were making a speech, sir. And what I wish to understand is, why? Why must we join a league with the good wives of New England? Why have you censured our governor for bringing to justice a counterfeiter whose work threatened every person of account in this colony? Why this incessant attack on Parliament?”

“Surely, ma’am, your husband has explained…” He looked about him with the assurance of a man of twenty, expecting allies against the assault of one small middle-aged woman, but he saw only stony stares, and this stung him. His opinion of women was not very high, but his standard of rhetoric had much to recommend it, and he felt sure he could defeat her, if only he chose the right arguments.

“That the counterfeiter needed to be brought to book no one here contends, ma’am. But the governor used methods that the House of Burgesses cannot condone without it impugning our stand on a larger issue, to wit, whether Americans can be taken out of our continent to England to be tried. This counterfeiter was in Pittsylvania County. The court there was competent to execute justice on him, but our governor chose to send a special sheriff and bring him to Williamsburg to justice.”

“And now he can no longer pass counterfeit five-pound notes that cause my steward to suspend business.” Martha smiled at him again, a happy smile that made it difficult for him to believe that he was being led to slaughter.

“But the legality places us awkwardly, ma’am. If the governor can write a warrant to take a man from his county to Williamsburg for trial, then the Admiralty in London can write a warrant for a smuggler to be taken from Boston to London for trial.”

“What of it? Are we not all English? Or is it your meaning that Americans will give their own a ‘fairer’ trial? Perhaps the smuggler will never be found guilty in Boston, Mr. Lee? Because if that’s your meaning, I can’t help but think that my steward is happier that this counterfeiter did not get a ‘fairer’ trial among his friends in Pittsylvania.”

Lee looked like a man who had just discovered a deep pit yawning at his feet. Arguments against the tyranny of the Crown were so popular in Virginia that he was not really ready to argue cases; he generally expected approbation in reply to any reasonable assault on the Government. Martha Washington, however, was of far too much consequence to ignore, and it struck him, then, that he could forfeit his standing either by offending her, as one of the richest landowners in the colony, or by losing the debate, which would not increase his stature with the House of Burgesses, to which her husband belonged, and to which he aspired.

Lee felt doubly ambushed in that Washington himself rarely spoke in the House, and was firmly a friend of liberty. It seemed astonishing that he should allow his wife to make such statements. He turned and looked at the tall colonel, who nodded gravely at him. He was actually expected to debate with her. Very well, then.

“Are you familiar, ma’am, with the Gaspee incident?”

“Perhaps you will help me understand it, Mr. Lee.”

If he heard the warning in her voice, he ignored it.

“In June of last year, a British armed cutter of that name, engaged in the suppression of the smuggling trade, ran herself aground in Narragansett Bay. A group of men boarded the cutter and burned her. An Admiralty court of inquiry was given jurisdiction over the case, and is understood to believe it has the right to send Americans to England for trial.”

“And this would be harmful because…” She drawled the last word as she had drawled his name, a deliberate provocation.

“They would never receive a fair trial in England! And an attack on the rights and privileges of any one colony are an attack on them all!” His voice was powerful, and declaimed well. The words were Jefferson’s, but he said them with complete conviction.

“But…” She smiled again, that happy smile that seemed to deny any possibility of open conflict. “But Mr. Lee, those men actually did burn that ship, did they not?”

The laughter was pained. Lee had the sympathy of the entire audience, many of whom had also labored under delusions about Martha’s native intelligence at one time or another. Washington simply looked absent, as if he refused to be a witness at another execution.

“The burning of the ship is not the issue,” he began, but she closed her fan with a snap that distracted him, and she stepped up close for the final assault.

“No, sir, it is not the issue, and you do the friends of liberty no service to pretend it is. The issue is that we smuggle because Great Britain chokes our own trade and won’t let us carry our own cargoes. That is the issue. And that they try to tax us beyond our ability to bear in prosperity, to pay her debts and ours from the Great War. That too is the issue. These are the issues, in trade, that will drive us to separate—that and the arrogance of our motherland, whose representative said at my own table that we are a race of cowards who could not stop five hundred of them from marching across our whole continent. That is the other issue. It is on these—trade, taxation, and the force of arms—that our arguments will rest. But not on the actions of law, or Dunmore’s taking of a counterfeiter.”

There was, quite spontaneously, a small round of applause, and Lee’s training as a gentleman triumphed over his adolescence. He not only avoided showing resentment, but smiled and bowed deeply.

“I hope you are always as passionately devoted to our cause as you are now, ma’am. You would be a devilish opponent in the House, and we’re lucky your husband does not speak more often, if he has trained you to this pitch of argument.”

Washington laughed aloud, a single bark that was completely different from his usual closed-mouthed laugh.

“Trained her? Trained her?” He barked again. “Perhaps, Mr. Lee, you now have a taste of why I’m so often silent.”

2

Mount Vernon, Virginia, November 1773

Queeny watched the new men come ashore from the plantation’s brig; West Indians didn’t hold much interest for her. They were usually so cowed by the comparative brutalities of Jamaica that Virginia seemed like paradise, and the Master bought only skilled men, tradesmen who were too old for her tastes. His field hands came only from America, as they were less apt to run.

She patted the sides of her cap of crisp white linen that she had made from one of Mistress’s cast-off shifts. The breeze was hard on caps, and Queeny was too vain to wear a straw bonnet like a field worker. She was tall and strong, but she had always been pretty enough to draw white eyes and clever enough to satisfy white mistresses. She had never done field work.

One of the new men was clearly young; he seemed to bounce with anticipation as the longboat came up to the plantation dock. He leapt from the thwart and helped moor the craft with a lithe agility that made her smile. The other blacks shuffled ashore, one kneeling to kiss the ground, one staring around him at the alien vegetation and neat brick buildings as if he had been delivered to another planet. The youngster looked left and right like a bird, his glance never stopping.

“You stick by me, Queeny, and we’ll have this lot sorted in no time.”

“As y’ say, Mista Bailey.”

A senior tenant farmer for the Washington and Custis farms, Bailey was in charge of the plantations while the Master was away in Williamsburg on business. Bailey was not a hard man, and had never offered her the least trouble, unlike the other senior tenant, whose hands never stopped. She often translated for Mr. Bailey.

Queeny was American born, but she had grown up on a plantation where most of the slaves spoke only African tongues. Her father and mother were upcountry Ebo, and she spoke almost all the coastal languages. It was a skill that made her valuable, and like her looks and easy manner, it kept her from the fields. Queeny followed him down the gravel path to the dock, a demure three paces behind.

“Captain Gibson.”

“Mr. Bailey.”

“A prosperous voyage?”

“Well enough, sir, well enough. I lost a spar in the roads of the Chesapeake, and the new customs officer in Jamaica led me a merry dance on our bills of lading, but all told, why, here we are.”

“I’m sure the colonel will be pleased. I see you got the slaves he asked for.”

“That I did. Jones here can tell you their trades, although this one, Red Scarf, is a gunsmith. He touched up the flints on my pistols, took the locks apart and put them together neat as neat. I wanted to try him.”

“An’ he put right the cock o’ King’s barker what he bent,” put in a sailor.

“So he did. And they all worked with a will to get a new spar up for me, so I’ve given them a penny a piece and two for the smith.”

“Colonel likes his people to have a little cash. No harm in it, nor do I think. What do you have for me besides a smith? Did Colonel Washington order a smith?”

“I don’t think that he did, sir, at that. But the whole lot were going off an estate sold for debt, all skilled men, an’ we took the lot.”

“Fair enough.”

“This one’s a bricklayer, answers to Jemmy.” The man nodded obsequiously.

Bailey didn’t like the look of the man, but the good lord knew they needed bricklayers. “Welcome to Mount Vernon, Jemmy.”

Jemmy bowed his head and smiled at the tone. Queeny fixed him with a stare. He was second or third generation, she could tell, and like as not had some white in him. She couldn’t see his tribe in anything obvious. Nothing for her to do here—he understood Bailey, was already seeking his approval.

“Smith, answers to Tom.”

“I hope he’s an improvement over the last Tom, eh, Queeny?” She shook her head and smiled. The last Tom had been a man. He was gone, sold to the Indies, and she missed him in her bed and in her thoughts.

“Welcome to Mount Vernon, Tom.”

“Yes, suh.” Tom was short and swarthy, with a red flush on top of pale brown skin, and curly, lank hair. He was eyeing Queeny appreciatively. She gave him no encouragement.

“Huntsman, answers to Caesar.” The young one. He, too, was looking at her and he smiled, a young man’s smile.

“Huntsman? We asked for a man good with animals.”

“Yessir. That’s your man. He got the boat’s pigs and goats here in fine fettle. They say he’s good with dogs.”

Bailey looked at Caesar, as this was the slave the colonel had ordered himself and the dogs boy would be close to the colonel many days in the field.

“Can you run, boy?”

He looked blank. It was an intelligent blankness; he didn’t squirm or babble.

“What is your name, boy?” she asked in the lingua franca of the Ivory Coast. He looked at her, concentrating hard, squinting his eyes slightly, then smiled.

“Cese, madam.”

The honorific expressed age and successful child rearing, and if it was meant to flatter her, it failed completely. Old indeed.

“Cese, the white man wants to know if you can run.”

“I speak Benin. Please, ma’am, I do not understand this talk you make.” The last phrase rolled off his tongue smoothly, the product of frequent repetition.

“My Benin not good.”

“I understand you.”

“White man ask you. Can run?”

“Like the wind in the desert. Like an antelope with the lion behind.”

Queeny rolled her eyes at the difficult words, the poetic suggestion.

“Mista Bailey, this boy say he run plenty fast. He from Africa, though. Masta don’t like African boys, Mista Bailey.”

“Right. Well, tell him he’s welcome to Mount Vernon.”

“You from Benin, then?”

“Yes. Obikoke. I am Yoruba!”

“White man says you welcome here.”

The boy looked surprised. “Why is he talking to us at all?”

“They like to be polite, boy. It don’t mean you aren’t a slave.”

Bailey looked interested. “What’s he saying?”

“He jus’ on about how he run.”

“The others seem to speak well enough, Queeny. You take the boy and teach him some English, and make sure he knows the rules before the colonel comes home.”

“Yes, Mista Bailey.”

“You others, come with me and I’ll show you your quarters. Captain Gibson, perhaps you could join me in a quarter hour for a glass.”

“I’d be that pleased, Mr. Bailey. I’ll just see that this lot get the unloading started.”

The two white men bowed slightly, and parted.

Cese followed the Ebo woman up the long gravel path from the dock toward her hut. The slave quarters were like nothing he had ever seen: a long elegant brick building on one side, with dormitories for the unmarried house slaves, and a neat row of cabins on the other, larger and more open than he expected, set farther apart, the whole having more the air of a village than a prison. In Jamaica, his quarters, the “barracoon”, had been fenced and locked every night. At Mount Vernon, there wasn’t even a wall.

Some of the blacks smiled when they saw him and his escort. None were chained. Most of the men had shirts and trousers, most of the women had a shift and petticoats, and several, like Queeny, sported jackets or gowns. She had a jacket of India cotton, far better than anything he had seen on a Negro in the Indies, but she was probably the queen, mistress to the master. She was old to be a queen, he thought, but her shape was fine and her face good.