Washington and Caesar

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.

The woman neither looked at him nor spoke to him, but simply walked along, nodding to other slaves, and once dropping a curtsy to a white woman, who smiled at her as they passed.

“Queeny, dear. Is this a new boy?”

“Yeas, Miz Bailey.”

The white woman examined Cese with a careful eye. She noted the narrow rows of scars over his eyes.

“He looks African, Queeny.”

“I says the same to yo husban, Miz Bailey.”

“The colonel may not like it. Still, the boy’s pretty enough. Run over to the well and back, boy.”

Cese was aware that he had been addressed, but the words were too fast, the accent too different. He smiled to show willing, and looked at Queeny.

“You run. Go to the well and come back.”

He set his bundle down and took a deep breath before hurling himself forward. The two women watched as his long legs flashed faster, as he leaned his weight into a curve around the well and pulled himself straight with the grace of a cat. Then he dashed past them, slowed, and came back, making a small bow to Mrs. Bailey as he did so. When he took up his bundle, there was a faint line of sweat on his upper lip, but his breathing was deep and even.

Mrs. Bailey laughed aloud.

“He is splendid, is he not? He runs like a god. Oh Queeny, teach him quickly. The Colonel will make a fortune on those legs.”

“Yes’m.”

Queeny curtsied again and moved off toward her hut. Her position allowed her half of a hut that typically housed a family of six, or up to eight men. She shared it with another woman, the house seamstress, Nelly. Nelly would be up at the big house at this hour, sewing her tiny meticulous stitches under the eyes of the colonel’s wife and treating her disorders.

“You the master’s queen? Is that why you are called Queeny?”

She smiled at the thought that the colonel would have a queen at all, although most plantations did. Some owners used their women as a harem; others took a preference for one woman and that made her queen, often hated by the master’s wife but powerful in her own way. The colonel didn’t seem to care for dark women.

“No queen here, boy. Master don’t chase us. Mr. Bailey, neither.”

Cese nodded, thoughtfully. One of the older men was sitting on the step of his hut, smoking a black pipe. Children, naked or in shifts according to their age, dashed along the central street of the slave quarter. Queeny ducked to enter the one room of her hut, but he stayed in the doorway, looking around him. None of the slaves he could see were Yoruba, like him. Most were southerners or pagan BaKongo from the interior, or mixes from different tribes. It had been the same in the Indies.

“Where are the gates?”

“No gates.”

“You get locked in at night, don’t you?”