Washington and Caesar

“Why did you let the dogs run off, Hussy?”

Washington thought it likely that the master had run off and the dogs boy followed, but it didn’t matter now; the lad was in for a thrashing. Lee never thrashed heavy, anyway; his father had a humane reputation, and the son was thought overfriendly with his blacks.

He saw Lee let the lash fall free from the stock of his whip and then slash with it, a blow quick as the strike of a cat’s claw, and his dogs boy cowered away with blood welling between his fingers where they clutched his face. The other members of the field took pulls on their flasks or headed for the house, distancing themselves from young Lee.

Old John from Rose Hill came running down the long slope from the north. Washington had missed him; he was widely known as the best and most knowledgeable of the dog handlers in the neighborhood, and Washington valued his opinion of young Caesar. But the man had his whole attention fixed on the Stratford Hall boy with a look of hatred.

“Stupid Negra!” John threw himself on the boy, pulling him to the ground and pushing his face in the dirt. The dogs ran in circles, yelping. Most of the white audience had gone, but Lee was poised above the struggling pair, his arm cocked back for another blow with his deadly whip.

Caesar was shocked by the sudden violence, and the more shocked by Old John’s sudden attack on Lee’s slave. Caesar didn’t even know him, except as the slower of the running boys, and one without shoes. John appeared to be beating him savagely, and Lee hovered over them, his mare stepping carefully to avoid treading on the pair.

“Get clear, you bastard!” said Lee, raising the whip again. Washington’s hand seized his wrist and pulled his whip clear of his hand, disarming him so quickly and easily that it looked as if the two men had planned the whole thing.

“Never strike another man’s slave, young Lee.”

Lee looked at him with something like loathing for a moment.

“Come into the house and have a little uncustomed brandy, Master Lee.” Washington spoke in an even tone, as if nothing had happened and he didn’t have Lee’s whip in his hand.

“He’s useless!”

“Come along.” Washington thought of other men he had known whose admonitions he had heard and accepted, or resented in his own youth: Lord Fairfax, General Braddock, his brother Lawrence. All had the touch, the ability to admonish with the most result and least pain. He knew himself cold and distant—perhaps too distant for this sort of thing—but someone had to bring young Lee into line with responsibility, and today God had ordained that he be the gentleman to try.

As they rode away, Caesar could hear his master speaking softly to the violent young man, and then they reached the gravel path and turned into the outbuildings and were gone. John sat up in a moment. Caesar had the dogs under control, his own, the Lee dogs, and the remnants of several other packs and partial packs.

“They gone?”

“Yea, John. They gone.” John was Ebo, through and through. Smart, though, and with a winning smile. The hint of duplicity was pure Ebo, and that he had seen a thousand times. The man winked at him and rose to his feet, dusted his fine black cloth breeches and helped the other boy to his feet. The whip had left a bright mark on his cheek, and a deep cut, but no gash, and the blood was slowing. The boy was weeping through the mud and blood.

“Why’d you hit him, John?”

“Keep that white boy’s whip off’n him, I think. Li’l whip like’n that one, it can take an eye or split you nose.” Caesar was still a little shocked by the violence of it, so different from battle because there was no resisting the hand that held the whip.

“I didn’ huht him none, did I, boy? Jus’ roll roun’ atop him.”

Caesar looked the boy over. He was weeping so hard he couldn’t speak.

“He’ll live.”

“Bettah get you home wi’ they dogs, boy. Get cleah ‘fo Missuh Lee get on you ‘gain.”

The boy nodded, still sobbing.

“Le’s get they dogs settled, see what the black folks get to eat. Massa French say I can be heah to eat.” He winked at Caesar again.

“You done good, boy. I see you have mah pup theyah.” He whistled and the pup betrayed his new allegiance and ran to the older man’s heel.

“You like the hunt, boy?”

“I liked it fine, suh.”

The man laughed. “No one calls a black man suh. Not heah.”

Caesar opened the gate into the kennel yard and shook his head to himself, savoring the moment on the grass when he and the tall master had spotted the fox together. Then he shook his head again, as if embarrassed at his own thoughts.

The wind continued to rise, and it dished the outdoor festivities. The slaves did dance, but it was in the cart shed. Jacka played his fiddle, and played it well, and some of the house servants came. Old John danced with every girl who would have him, smiled on all, ate well, drank better, and took his leave early and with a good grace. Caesar knew the reels that he had learned in the Indies, and the Mount Vernon women took it upon themselves to show him other dances—country dances they learned from the whites, and variations on their own dances, from Africa and from the Indies. Queeny showed him steps he’d seen whites do, the complicated steps and minuets that she made into excuses to show her legs. Food came down from the House. The scraps from the hunt breakfast were scarcely a feast, but they made a change, and Mrs. Bailey passed a ration of meat and some eggs to enrich the supper. It was better than the fish and corn that they ate every day. And the estate’s corn liquor flowed.

The ties that bound the house and field staff and the gulfs that kept them separate were too complex to be taken in at a single social meeting, but Caesar had begun to see them. It was plain to the simplest understanding that Nelly, the house seamstress, was attached to the white servant, Bishop; they fought and simpered in too meaningful a manner. Billy Lee, Washington’s personal slave and the only slave he knew who had a surname, was seldom seen with the other blacks, but he came down for a mug of liquor and Caesar saw instantly that he wasn’t so much aloof as he was a leader. He singled Caesar out.

“You were very good today,” he said.

Caesar warmed to the praise. He would have kept Billy to discuss the field, but Billy was gone, first talking to Queeny and then passing through the others with a word for each.

Caesar had learned that there were other farms, other blacks on them, all satellites of Mount Vernon. The men and women who lived in the Greenhouse and the cabins behind it were the elite: house slaves, trusted hands, skilled men and women. He was lucky to be included, but with his share of the estate’s corn liquor in him, he didn’t feel so lucky. Billy’s praise had cheered him at first, but it soured.

Queeny seemed to dance without a care in the world; Old Tom from the house could jab his pipe at Billy Lee and laugh. The carpenters and the bricklayers were telling tall tales of their activities and their value.

What he resented the most was their proprietary notions. When Old Tom said Mount Vernon was the “fines’ gentleman’s estate on the rivah”, he said it with relish, as if the estate were his own. The house girls were the same. Cook spoke of meals as if she ate them, and the sewing crew were filled with pride at their ability to alter the finest English gowns. It all sickened him because none of it was theirs or ever would be. Every pull from the jug seemed to add to his resentment.

But the hunt had been something, a challenge that he had enjoyed. The fox had never fooled him, and the run had been worth the effort. Caesar was open enough to understand that his triumph at the day’s hunt might be of the same order as that of the sewing crew over an English gown. The thought that he himself was sinking into the same proprietary habit of thought made him sad, because he wasn’t even sure that Washington had noticed his success, and it made him angry and sad that he wanted the master’s praise.

He didn’t realize that he was pounding the doorframe of the carriage house with his hand until it hurt, and there were Queeny’s hands on his arms, and her mouth on his, pulling him into the dark.

“If you jes’ goin’ to get drunk like a fool, I got bettah plans.”

She was wearing stays and a gown that made her waist even smaller than usual; it excited him. She stayed just out of his reach, flitting in to kiss him and away.

“Sho’ you ain’t too drunk?” she taunted.

He swayed drunkenly to mislead her, shifted his weight against the great horse barn’s wall and caught her effortlessly with both hands around her slim waist, lifted her a moment and stepped through the stable door.

“Only the horse boys ‘lowed in heah,” she whispered, but his hand was running up her naked leg under her petticoat and he wasn’t drunk at all, though his mouth tasted of pipe smoke and corn liquor. He settled a saddlecloth under her with a consideration for her best clothes that would never have occurred to most men, and he did it without pausing in his other attentions. A fondness for him entered into her, and then she was lost in other matters.

3 (#ulink_6278b712-0a72-50d2-b93b-685bc54d7b75)

Truro Churchyard, Virginia, January 1774

The churchyard at Pohick was complete, with a breasthigh brick wall surrounding a graveyard devoid of graves and the four walls of the church proper. Washington sat on his horse in the winter rain and contemplated the empty churchyard and the costs of ambition; the coveted post of warden had cost him a hefty subscription to an Anglican church to which he felt only social allegiance. All the first men of the county attended the Upper Church. Most of their business was transacted in the yard after sermon, and the vestrymen and wardens had a certain advantage, as if they were “to home” and the others visiting. In Virginia, the sacerdotal meaning of the positions was scarcely spoken of in the community.

He didn’t fancy deep enquiry about the state of his soul. It sufficed him that he did good works for his peers and subordinates, that every man called him generous and that even his slaves remembered that he had treated them by hand when the pox hit his plantations. He didn’t enjoy the sort of searching often pushed by Reverend Massey; he wasn’t really sure that an afterlife existed, or that it was important that one should search. He had felt from his youngest days that such things were beyond his control, and lay in God’s hands, and he believed in God as he believed in the king and the empire. A pre-eminent spirit controlled all, as he controlled his plantation and his tenants controlled their farms, all the way down to the dogs boy controlling the dogs, all the way up to the burgesses and parliament and the king…and God.

Wolfe had been devoted to Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which Washington had looked at without a spark of interest. It remained a title to him, but he looked at his own red-earthed country churchyard and wondered if Gray had seen the same things he saw: the value of the building, at 579 pounds Virginia currency; the bricklayer’s time and the value of the land; the work to “view and examine” as the wardens were enjoined. Washington doubted that a poet saw the value of things, or the work that built them.

By some freak association, his thoughts went from the churchyard to Townshend, who had loathed Wolfe and still did. If Wolfe had won Quebec by luck, where was the justice in providence? It was the one aspect of war that had sickened him above all others—that neither courage nor hard work were necessarily rewarded or justly served by the results. Braddock’s expedition could be smashed and Forbes’s succeed, despite their relative merits; and while he strove with all his might to succeed, James Wolfe took Quebec by luck.

Farming did not work in such a way. Farming required planning and work, acceptance of occasional defeat…but the farmer who worked would be repaid in time. War should repay work and interest, like farming. It was a matter of reducing it to principles, but it was unlikely that he would ever be called upon to do so again. The thought left him a little sorry, but the rain was beginning to go through his greatcoat, and he turned his horse’s head and trotted toward Truro Church, with time in hand to dry off when he arrived.

Pompey, behind him on a pale nag, was soaked through and cold. He was missing the Reverend Cleve, who was speaking to the slaves at Mount Vernon. He only came one week in five, and Pompey was always sorry to miss the event, as he held his soul dear.