Chaneysville Incident (51 page)

“Exposure, maybe,” I said, “but not starvation. Remember the Donner Party?”

She didn’t say anything.

“The coffee should be ready now,” I said.

“You can ruin anything, you know that?” she said.

“You haven’t even tasted it yet. Maybe it’s not as good as your coffee….”

She pulled her head away from me and looked at me, then she put her head back on my chest and hugged me again. I maneuvered my cup past her head and took a sip.

“Don’t you want your coffee?”

“Yes.”

I poured a cup for her. She took it, sipped. I settled back and she leaned back beside me, her right hand holding the cup, while her left sneaked out and searched for mine. I shifted my cup and took her hand. I felt the calm come back over me, her hand in mine, the warm whiskey sliding down my throat. I gazed into the red heart of the fire. I squeezed her hand.

“John?” she said.

“What?”

“Will you tell me now?”

“Tell you what?”

“Where we’re going. Not why; just where.”

“I told you where.”

“You told me the names of places; they don’t mean anything to me. You know they don’t.”

I shrugged my shoulders, settling deeper in the blankets to avoid a tendril of wind that had somehow crept over the windbreak. I took a sip of the toddy. “We’re going to see the place where Moses Washington blew his brains out.”

“Do you think that will help?” she said.

“I’ve done everything else,” I said. I felt suddenly colder, and I pulled the blanket closer around me. I sipped at the toddy and stared at the fire, at the flames dancing around in the wood.

“It’s another long story,” I said. “If you want to know, I’ll tell you.”

“I want to know,” she said. “You know I want to know.”

I took a deep breath. “All right,” I said. “Give me a minute.”

It took longer than a minute. I sat there, staring at the flames dancing, and tried to make my mind work, trying to forget everything, all the clashing facts on the red cards and the gold cards and the orange cards, trying to separate out the ones on the white, and trying to forget I didn’t know the why of any of it. It took more than a minute, but after a while the dates were in order, at least as far as they went.

“It starts in 1787,” I said, “on a plantation somewhere in northwest Georgia, when a slave woman, whose name I don’t know, gave birth to a son. Actually, the story must have started at least nine and a half months before, when she managed somehow to come in contact with a full-blooded Cherokee brave, whose name I also don’t know, who according to her was the baby’s father. The master, whose name I also don’t know, must not have been a man of much imagination; he named the child Zack. Or maybe I do him an injustice; maybe it was a large plantation, with lots of births, and he had used up all the fancy names. Or maybe he had gotten tired of having niggers named Hannibal and Caesar running around. Anyway, after a while Massa must have gotten tired of having Zack underfoot: in 1801 he sold him. Zack had been trained as a blacksmith, and he was worth a lot of money—probably a thousand dollars or more—to a man named Hammond Washington, who owned a large plantation near a place called Independence, in Louisiana. And now the story gets a little complicated, because there’s another point where it starts—on Hammond Washington’s plantation, in 1790, when a baby girl was born into bondage, the daughter of a house slave named Marie, who was probably an ex-French chattel; anyway, she was a quadroon. The child’s father, being an educated man, named her Hermia.” I looked at her, but she didn’t say anything. “Evidently, Hermia led a rather privileged existence, possibly due to her mother’s high status as a house slave and concubine, and partly due, of course, to her own relationship to Hammond Washington. She was from the beginning groomed for a position in the house. But somehow she managed to come into sufficient contact with the new blacksmith for a courtship to take place. On September 27, 1803, she was permitted to marry Zack. Although the ceremony had no legal standing, the union was legitimized to a higher degree than most slave marriages, because Hammond Washington, who was evidently a scrupulous and careful man, drew up a license for them. He also drew up a second document, which he gave Zack as a wedding gift, which enjoined the Washington family from disposing of them separately, or of disposing of them at all while Marie should remain alive. In addition to this, Zack was to be permitted, from the day of the marriage forward, to hire his own time and collect his own wages. The stipulations were: that Zack would be responsible for the upkeep of himself and his wife, even though she was to continue working as a servant in the Washington household; that he should pay to Hammond Washington a flat weekly rate of three dollars, and a third of anything he earned beyond what he required for that payment and the upkeep of himself and his wife; and that, should Hermia become pregnant, during the time that was spent in lying in and in nursing the child Zack should compensate Washington at the additional rate of two dollars per week, to be taken out of his profit. Whatever was left in profit could be applied by Zack against a price of two thousand dollars, which was Hammond Washington’s estimate of his value. When that sum was paid, Washington agreed to manumit Zack, at which time the three-dollar flat fee would no longer be payable, although the percentage rate would continue so long as Zack or any of his family would continue to be the property of Washington or his family. After Zack was free he could begin paying towards the value of Hermia, which Washington fixed at eight hundred and seventy-five dollars. There were additional clauses in the document concerning children, which gave Zack the right to pay towards their price, which was to be established by their worth on the open market, and the stipulation was that the children had to be purchased before Hermia could be. Zack obviously understood the implications of the document, even though he was forbidden by law to even try to read it; he knew time was against him. So he went to work, and in the next two years he paid his fee and percentage to Hammond Washington, and made regular payments of about twelve dollars a week towards his freedom, which Hammond Washington scrupulously credited to him in amendments to the document. In twenty months or so he had paid half the price. But time and nature caught up to him, and in the early part of June 1805, the payments dropped off by about three dollars a week, and on August 12, 1805, Hammond Washington amended the agreement to allow Zack to pay, after his own freedom was purchased, on the freedom of a male child who was five-sixteenths black, and a quarter Cherokee, and whom Hammond Washington, evidently an admirer of Jonathan Swift, named Brobdingnag.

“The effect of the child on Zack’s economic circumstances was pretty damaging. It’s possible that Hermia had a difficult time, and wasn’t able to return to Hammond Washington’s house for some time. At any rate, in early September Hammond Washington began to debit the amount he had credited towards Zack’s freedom at the rate of three dollars a week. It was only a temporary setback, however, and the debits stopped in mid-October. But Zack paid no more towards his freedom until January of 1806, and from then on the sums only averaged about ten dollars. Still, he made good progress, and by March of 1807 he had managed to get the balance due to Hammond Washington down to only about four hundred dollars. He probably would have been able to purchase his freedom within twelve months, but sometime that year the Louisiana legislature passed a law limiting manumission to slaves over thirty, thus making the agreement between Zack and Hammond Washington not only technically illegal, which it had been from the beginning, but impossible to execute, even informally. I don’t know exactly when the act was passed, but on December 14, 1807, Hammond Washington amended the document, deferring the manumission of Zack, Hermia, and any children until such time as manumission should be legal under the laws of the state of Louisiana, but stipulating that as soon as the originally agreed upon amount of two thousand dollars should be paid, the flat fee would end, and any sums paid would be applied to the price of the freedom of Brobdingnag.”

“So nothing much changed,” she said.

“Everything changed,” I said. “For one thing, while Zack might have been freed by 1817, and Hermia by 1820, Brobdingnag wasn’t going to be free until 1835, assuming he survived that long, and even if he did, the odds that Zack was going to live to see it were pretty slim. For another, there was no guarantee that Hermia would have no more children; if she did, Zack was going to end up buying his children out of slavery until he died, and probably working himself to death trying. But the crucial factor was Hammond Washington, who from all appearances was as fair as a slaveholder could be. Since he fathered children in 1790, he was probably born around 1775 or perhaps a year or two earlier; it wasn’t likely that he was going to live until 1835 to manumit Brobdingnag, even less until 1838 to manumit a second child even if Hermia had conceived right away. So it would be a question of whether his heirs would honor the agreement; the document, no matter how long it had been in force, had no legal standing at all. So what was basically a gentleman’s agreement, likely to be kept because the person charged with the keeping was the author of the agreement, became a highly unlikely promissory note drawn on somebody else. I don’t know any details about Hammond Washington’s family; it’s possible that he had children and Zack could see that they were unlikely to keep the bargain. Or it’s possible that he had none, and Zack didn’t know who might inherit. It’s impossible to tell what Zack thought, or exactly what he did, but I do know what he stopped doing: paying on his freedom. The amounts credited to him dropped off drastically. By mid-1808 he was making only occasional payments on his freedom, and on November 7, Hammond Washington began to debit the sum already paid at three dollars a week…”

“Hermia was having another child,” she said.

“No,” I said. “No, it just seems that Zack wasn’t able to pay the flat rate. It could have been that he wasn’t working very hard, but on April 27, 1809, Hammond Washington debited a large sum, five hundred and twenty-four dollars, and noted that it was for payment of debts in Zack’s behalf. Exactly what the debts were is hard to say, but since slaves couldn’t own anything or buy anything, Zack must have been involved with something shady, and since the amount was large and the indebtedness honored by Hammond Washington, it’s pretty clear that Zack had been gambling with white men. Anyway, the debits continued, and then, in late May, there is another large debit, two hundred and seven dollars, for payment of debts on Zack’s behalf. On June 4, 1809, Hammond Washington amended the document once again, this time suspending Zack’s right to hire his own time until such time as he should be able to do so ‘to the profit of himself and his master,’ taking over the responsibility of paying the upkeep for Zack, Hermia, and Brobdingnag, and placing what remained from Zack’s freedom payments, the sum of seven hundred and seventy-nine dollars, in trust at a rate of two percent simple interest.

“What happened for the next year I don’t know. But it appears that Zack managed to get back the faith Hammond Washington had placed in him, and on June 12, 1810, Hammond Washington amended the document again, restoring Zack’s right to hire his own time and his responsibility for his own family, using the same percentage rate but eliminating the three-dollar flat rate. Zack could have paid off much more quickly, but it appears that he had given up any dream of his own freedom; the new amendment stated that, at Zack’s own request, the money would be paid against the price of Brobdingnag’s freedom only, which was to be figured at the free market rate in 1835, when Brobdingnag would become eligible for manumission under the Louisiana law. It also appears that Brobdingnag was to be trained as a blacksmith, because the amendment awarded to him the right to hire his own time after the year 1826, on terms similar to those originally granted to Zack, providing Brobdingnag showed himself worthy of trust. Zack began to make regular payments almost immediately, averaging around five dollars a week, which would have meant that, considering the interest, he would have put aside enough to pay over three thousand dollars for Brobdingnag by 1835, regardless of what the boy might earn on his own behalf. Hammond Washington evidently gauged the progress, and on June 12, 1811, exactly a year after the previous amendment, he added a new amendment, making sum in excess of the free market price payable to Brobdingnag on the day of his manumission. He seems also to have been pleased with Zack’s return to respectability; the amendment formally permitted Zack to seek labor in New Orleans for six months out of the year, providing he should not be absent from the plantation more than one month at a time.

“But Zack evidently worked hard and kept his nose clean; no more debits, no more gambling—or at least, if he gambled, he won—and a steady record of payments right into 1812…” I stopped then, letting the facts reorder themselves in my mind.

“You’re not stopping now,” she said.

“No,” I said. “No, I told you it was a long story. And it’s complicated too. Because I haven’t said anything about the Napoleonic Wars, or the economy of Virginia, or—”

“Never mind that,” she said. “Just tell the story.”

“It
is
the story,” I said. “Or part of it. But now it gets complicated. Because what happened was that England and France went to war in 1803, and the British navy was short of sailors, so they kept taking American vessels and impressing sailors, and also, incidentally, lifting the cargoes. Just about the time the Louisiana legislature was passing the law against manumission, a British man-o’-war called the
Leopard
opened fire on the U.S.
Chesapeake
, and Thomas Jefferson, who had enough sense to know that the United States couldn’t win a war with England, but who had to do something since the country was in an uproar, asked for an economic embargo. In December 1807, Congress passed the Embargo Act, which prohibited the export of American goods. The idea was a silly one in some ways, but it worked from Jefferson’s point of view; all the patriots who had wanted to go to war over the
Chesapeake
affair dropped their flags and grabbed their wallets, and Jefferson managed to get out of office and get his candidate, James Madison, elected with no real problems. But it caused a general economic depression of no little magnitude, especially in states like Virginia, which produced a lot of goods, tobacco especially, for the European market. And one of the planters who fell on hard times had to make money by selling his house in Richmond and the slaves that staffed it. At least one of them was sold south, to a Mr. Waters Clarke, of New Orleans. The slave’s name was Lewis Bolah.