Washington and Caesar

“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.