A Different Flesh (18 page)

“Yes, ma'am,” he said again, this time with something like enthusiasm. He returned to the kitchen, put the pitcher and two glasses on a tray, and went out to look for his master and the overseer.

A big male sim was chopping logs into firewood behind the house. It stopped for a moment to nod to Jeremiah as he went by.

He nodded back. “Hello, Joe,” he said, a faint edge of contempt riding his words. He might be a slave, but by God he was a man!

Joe did not notice Jeremiah's condescension. Muscles bulged under the thick coat of hair on the sim's arms as it swung the axe up for another stroke. The axe descended. Chips flew. One flew right over Joe's head, landed in the dust behind the sim.

Jeremiah chuckled as he walked on. Had he been wielding the axe, the chip would have caught him right in the forehead and probably made him bleed. But sims had no foreheads. Above Joe's deep-set eyes was only a beetling ridge of bone that retreated smoothly toward the back of his head.

More sims worked in the fields, some sowing hemp seeds broadcast on the land devoted to the farm's main cash crop, others weeding among the growing green stalks of wheat. They would have done a better job with lighter hoes, but the native American subhumans lacked the sense to take proper care of tools of good quality.

Mostly the sims worked in silence. Now and then one would let its long, chinless jaw fall open to emit a grunt of effort, and once Jeremiah heard a screech as a sim hit its own foot instead of a weed. But unlike humans, the sims did not talk among themselves. Few ever mastered English, and their own grunts and hoots were too restricted to make up a real language.

Instead, they used hand signs like the ones the deaf and dumb employed; those came easier to them than speech. Jeremiah had heard Mr. Gillen say even the wild sims that still lurked in the forests and mountains two centuries after colonists came to Virginia used hand signs taught them by runaways in preference to their native calls.

Charles Gillen and Harry Stowe were standing together, watching the sims work. Gillen turned and saw Jeremiah. “Well, well, what have we here?” he said, smiling. He was a large man, about the same age as his wife, with perpetually ruddy features and a strong body beginning to go to fat.

“Lemonade, sir, for you and Mr. Stowe.” Jeremiah poured for each man, handed them their glasses.

Gillen drained his without taking it from his lips; his face turned even redder than usual. “Ahh!” he said, wiping his mouth. “Now that was a kindly thought, and surely it's no part of your regular duties to go traipsing all over the farm looking for me.” He rummaged through the pockets of his blue cotton breeches. “Here's a ten-sester for your trouble.”

“I thank you very much, sir.” Jeremiah's trousers did not have pockets. He stowed the small silver coin in a leather pouch he wore on a thong round his neck under his shirt. The hope for just such a reward was one of the things that had made him eager to go to his master. Besides, it beat working.

He did not mention that the lemonade had been Mrs. Gillen's idea. Even if her husband found out, though, he would not take the ten-sester back; he was a fair-minded man.

Harry Stowe kept his glass in his left hand as he drank. His right hand held his whip, as it always did when he was in the field. The whip was a yard-long strip of untanned cowhide, an inch thick at the grip and tapering to a point.

Stowe was a small, compact man with fine features and cold blue eyes that never stopped moving. He snarled an oath and stepped forward. The whip cracked. A sim shouted in alarm, clutched at its right arm.

“Oh, nonsense, Tom,” Stowe snapped. “I didn't hurt you, and well you know it. But damn you, have more care with what you do. That was wheat you were rooting out there, not a weed.”

The sim understood English well enough, even if it could not speak. Its hands moved.
Sorry
, it signed. Its broad, flat features were unreadable. When it went back to weeding, though, it soon uprooted another stalk of wheat.

Stowe's hand tightened on the butt of the whip until his knuckles whitened. But he did not lash out. His shoulders sagged. “In a man, that would be insolence,” he said to Charles Gillen. “But sims cannot, will not attend as a man would. I could wear out my arm, my cowskin, and my temper, sir, and not improve them much.”

“Your being here at all keeps them working, Harry. We shouldn't expect them to be fine farmers,” Gillen replied. “When men first came to Virginia, they found the sims here unable to make fire, with no tools but chipped stones.”

“You are an educated man, to know such things,” the overseer said. “For myself, all I know is that they do not work as I would wish, and so waste your substance. I wish you could afford to have niggers in the fields. I would make fine farmers of
them
, I wager.” He looked speculatively toward Jeremiah.

The house-slave wished he could become invisible; suddenly he was not glad at all he had come out to the fields. He stretched out his hands to his master. “Mr. Gillen, you wouldn't treat me like no sim, would you, sir?” The wobble of fear in his voice was real.

“No, no, Jeremiah, don't fret yourself,” Gillen reassured him, sending a look-at-the-trouble-you-caused glance Stowe's way. “I find it hard to imagine a circumstance that would force me to use you so.”

“Thank you, sir, thank you.” Jeremiah knew he was laying it on thick, but he took no chances. Not only was labor in the fields exhausting, but he could imagine nothing more degrading. Even as a slave, he had a measure of self-respect. One day he hoped to be able to buy his liberation. The ten-sester his master had given him put his private hoard at over eighty denaires. Maybe he would buy land, end up owning a few sims himself. It was something to dream about, anyway. But if Gillen worked him as he would a sim, would he not think of him in the same way, instead of as a person? He might never get free then!

Why, his master had already turned his back on him and was talking politics with Stowe as if he were not there. “So whom will you vote for in the censoral elections this fall, Harry?”

“I favor Adams and Westerbrook: two men from the same party will work together, instead of us having to suffer through another five years of divided government like this last term.”

“I don't know,” Gillen said judiciously. “When the Conscript Fathers wrote the Articles of Independence after we broke from England in '38, they gave us two censors to keep the power of the executive from growing too strong, as it had in the person of the king. To me that says they intended the two men to be of opposing view, to check each other's excesses.”

“To check excesses, aye. But I'm partial to a government that governs, not one that spends all its time arguing with itself.”

Gillen chuckled. “Something to that, I suppose. Still, don't you think—”

Jeremiah stopped listening. What did politics matter to him? As a slave, he could no more vote than a sim could. His head hung as he made his slow way back to the house.

Mrs. Gillen saw him dawdling, and scolded him. She kept an eye on him the rest of the day, which meant he had to work at the pace she set, not his own. That, he thought resentfully, was more trouble than a ten-sester was worth. To make things worse, he burnt the ham the Gillens, Stowe, and he were going to have for supper. That earned him another scolding from his mistress and a contemptuous stare from the overseer.

At sunset, Stowe blew a long, unmusical blast on a bugle, the signal for the sims to come in from the fields for their evening meal. Their food was unexciting but filling: mostly barley bread and salt pork, eked out once or twice a week, as tonight, with vegetables from the garden plot and with molasses. The sims also ate whatever small live things they could catch. Some owners discouraged that as a disgusting habit (Jeremiah certainly thought it was; stepping on a well-gnawed rat tail could be counted on to make his stomach turn over). Most, like Charles Gillen, did not mind, for it made their property cheaper to feed.

“Never catch me eating rats, not if I'm starving,” Jeremiah said as he blew out the candle in his small stuffy room. He listened to make sure the Gillens were asleep. (Stowe had his own cottage, close by the log huts where the sims lived.)

When he was sure all was quiet, the slave lifted a loose floorboard and drew out a small flask of whiskey. Any sim caught with spirits was lashed till the blood ran through the matted hair on its back. Jeremiah ran the same risk, and willingly. Sometimes he needed that soothing fire in his belly to sleep.

Tonight, though, he drank the flask dry, and tossed and turned for hours all the same.

Spring gave way to summer. The big sim Joe stepped on a thorn, and died three weeks later of lockjaw. The loss cast a pall of gloom over Charles Gillen, for Joe was worth a hundred denaires.

Gillen's spirits lifted only when his son and daughter returned to the farm from the boarding schools they attended in Portsmouth, the commonwealth capital. Jeremiah was also glad to see them. Caleb was fourteen and Sally eleven; the slave sometimes felt he was almost as much a father to them as Charles Gillen himself.

But Caleb, at least, came home changed this year. Before, he had always talked of what he would do when the Gillen farm was his. Jeremiah had spoken of buying his own freedom once, a couple of years before; Caleb had looked so hurt at the idea of his leaving that he never brought it up again, for fear of turning the boy against it for good. He thought Caleb had long since forgotten.

One day, though, Caleb came up to him when the two of them were alone in the house. He spoke with the painful seriousness adolescence brings: “I owe you an apology, Jeremiah.”

“How's that, young master?” the slave asked in surprise. “You haven't done nothing to me.” And even if you had, he added silently, you would not be required to apologize for it.

“Oh, but I have,” Caleb said, “though I've taken too long to see it. Do you remember when you told me once you would like to be free and go away?”

“Yes, young sir, I do remember that,” Jeremiah said cautiously. Any time the issue of liberation came up, a slave walked the most perilous ground there was.

“I was too little to understand then,” the boy said. “Now I think I may, because I want to go away too.”

“You do? Why could that be?” Jeremiah was not pretending. This declaration of Caleb's was almost as startling as his recalling their conversation at all. To someone that young, two years was like an age.

“Because I want to read the law and set up my own shingle one day. The law is the most important thing in the whole world, Jeremiah.” His voice burned with conviction; at fourteen, one is passionately certain about everything.

“I don't know about that, young master. Nobody can eat law.”

Caleb looked at him in exasperation. “Nobody could eat food either, or even grow it, if his neighbor could take it whenever he had a mind to. What keeps him from it, even if he has guns and men and sims enough to do it by force? Only the law.”

“Something to that,” Jeremiah admitted. He agreed only partly from policy; Caleb's idea had not occurred to him. He thought of the law only as something to keep from descending on him. That it might be a positive good was a new notion—one easier to arrive at for a free man, he thought without much bitterness.

Enthusiasm carried Caleb along. “Of course there's something to it! People who make the law and apply the law rule the country. I don't mean just the censors or the Senate or the Popular Assembly—though one day I'll serve, I think—but judges and lawyers too.”

“That may be so, young master, but what will become of the farm when you've gone to Portsmouth to do your lawyering, or up to Philadelphia for the Assembly?” Jeremiah knew vaguely where Portsmouth was (somewhere southeast, a journey of a week or two); he knew Philadelphia was some long ways north, but had no idea how far. Half as far as the moon, maybe.

“One day Sally will get married,” Caleb shrugged. “It will stay in the family. And lawyers get rich, don't forget. Who knows? Maybe one day I'll buy the Pickens place next door to retire on.”

Jeremiah's opinion was that old man Pickens would have to be dragged kicking and screaming into his grave before he turned loose of his farm. He knew, however, when to keep his mouth shut. He also noticed that any talk about his freedom had vanished from the conversation.

Nevertheless, Caleb had not forgotten. One day he took Jeremiah aside and asked him, “Would you like me to teach you to read and cipher?”

The slave thought about it. He answered cautiously, “Your father, I don't know if he'd like that.” Most masters discouraged literacy among their blacks (sims did not count; no sim had ever learned to read). In some common-wealths—though not Virginia—teaching a black his letters was against the law.

“I've already talked with him about it,” Caleb said. “I asked him if he didn't think it would be useful to have you able to keep accounts and such. He hates that kind of business himself.”

The lad already had a good deal of politician in him, Jeremiah thought. Caleb went on, “Once you learn, maybe you can hire yourself out to other farmers, and keep some of what you earn. That would help you buy yourself free sooner, and knowing how to read and figure can only help you afterwards.”

“You're right about that, young sir. I'd be pleased to start, so long as your father won't give me no grief on account of it.”

The hope of money first impelled Jeremiah to the lessons, but he quickly grew fascinated with them for their own sake. He found setting down his name in shaky letters awe-inspiring: there it was, recorded for all time. It gave him a feeling of immortality, almost as if he had had a child. And struggling through first Caleb's little reader and then, haltingly, the Bible was more of the same. He wished he could spend all his time over the books.