Chaneysville Incident (52 page)

“Bolah was not that old a man, probably in his late twenties. He got around pretty well, it seems, and was fairly well known by the black community in New Orleans, well enough so that in 1812, or perhaps early in 1813, some of them came to him and, so he later claimed, offered him a captaincy in a rebellion that they were planning. Exactly what part Bolah played in later events is not clear, but at the very least, he informed the authorities of the existence of the rebellion, and they apprehended the leaders of the rebellion and placed them on trial, found them guilty, and executed them. The usual form of execution in these cases was to behead the slaves and place the heads on stakes along the Mississippi as warnings to other insurrection-minded slaves. Bolah’s part in it all brought him a lot of credit, and on February 13, 1813, the Louisiana legislature passed a resolution emancipating him and instructing the state treasurer to pay Mr. Waters Clarke the sum of eight hundred dollars…”

“What’s all that got to do with…”

“Zack?” I said. “Zack was one of the ones they executed.”

I brought the mug up to my face and drank down the last of my toddy. It wasn’t much of a toddy anymore; it was as cold as ice.

“So they killed him,” she said.

“They killed him,” I said. “Not that they had much choice. It was a major revolt, five hundred slaves involved, and they were scared about that kind of thing, anyway. I don’t know what the slave population of Louisiana was then, but it was probably about a third to maybe two-fifths of the total population. There was no way the whites were going to keep all those people in line just with force; they had to use propaganda, and they had to use terror, and putting sixty-six black heads on stakes was a pretty good way to terrorize people.”

“I guess so,” she said. “But I didn’t mean that. I meant they killed him when they passed the law against manumission.”

“Oh,” I said, “that. Maybe. But then, there’s nothing to prove that he was really conspiring. Maybe he was. But maybe not. Maybe he had made what you psychiatrists call a good adjustment and was contented with his lot and the hope that his son was going to be a free man, even if he himself wasn’t going to be. Maybe he just got caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t know; there aren’t any real facts one way or the other. Unless of course you want to believe in Louisiana justice.” I leaned forward and picked up the bottle. I mixed myself another toddy and settled back, sipping it.

“I don’t know what happened to Hermia and Brobdingnag. Not right away. I know that Hammond Washington took care of them, and I know Brobdingnag spent a good bit of time in the house, even though he was officially a field hand—”

“Wait a minute. He was eight years old.”

“That’s right. He had probably been working since he was six. Anyway, I know he was favored enough to spend some time in the house, because when he was twelve he was discovered in Hammond Washington’s study with a copy of
Gulliver’s Travels.
Hammond Washington had pointed it out to him one day, to show him where his name had come from, and he went back in alone to look at it. He couldn’t read, of course, but it didn’t matter; he was discovered, and he was punished, although Hammond Washington was minded to go easy on him; he was only given three stripes. I don’t know what effect the flogging had on him, but it certainly wasn’t the desired one. Three years later, when Brobdingnag was fifteen, he was found drawing in the dust, and even though he tried to scuff out what he was doing, part of it was left to be seen; the letters C and
K.
Hammond Washington was not minded to be merciful this time: he had the boy heavily flogged and, as a reminder, branded with the letters.

“From then on, it seems, Hammond Washington had no more trouble with him. But not because Brobdingnag stopped his rebellious ways. His mother had made the error of giving him the document that Hammond Washington had drawn up, and by the time he was sixteen he had memorized every word of it, letter by letter, punctuation mark by punctuation mark. He had no idea what the words meant—he didn’t really understand that they were words—but he knew the order of the letters and could reproduce the whole thing, date by date and amendment by amendment, with a stick in the dust. But that seemed to satisfy him. He worked well in the fields, and Hammond Washington spoke to Hermia about the possibility of having him trained as a blacksmith as his father had been. But that never happened, because in 1822 Hammond Washington caught cholera and died.

“That changed everything for Brobdingnag. Evidently Hammond Washington had a wife, and his wife was not terribly happy about the special place Hermia had held in the household. As soon as Hammond Washington was dead, she put Hermia to work as a field hand, at age thirty-two. Hermia died a year later. By this time Brobdingnag seems to have managed to learn the rudiments of writing and reading; he forged a pass for himself and ran away. It wasn’t a terribly complicated thing to do, since most whites couldn’t read or write either, and no slave could; the assumption was that if a slave had written authorization, it came, at the very least, from a white man. At any rate, he doesn’t seem to have had much difficulty. And it’s possible that he never would have had any had it not been for the fact that he somehow also wrote a check and withdrew seventeen hundred dollars from the local bank. That was just about what the money Zack had paid against his freedom would have amounted to, with interest. Probably, Hammond Washington’s wife would have been happy enough to get rid of him if it hadn’t been for the money. In any case, she sent slave catchers out after him, and they managed to track him, since he didn’t know the first thing about woodcraft, and he had to kill two of them, and three dogs, in order to make his escape.

“I don’t know what happened to him precisely for the next few years. It’s fairly certain that he didn’t stay in that area, and it’s likely that he didn’t go to New Orleans, either, since although it was a big city it was fairly well organized, and a black with a brand on his shoulder would have been easy to spot, especially one with money. But he managed to stay free and he rejected the name his grandfather had given him and began to think of himself as C.K. And he managed to learn more about reading and writing; enough so that by 1825 he could look up the trial proceedings and the acts of the legislature relating to Lewis Bolah. And then I know exactly what he did. He began to hunt for Bolah.

“Bolah was a free black, and the one thing the South kept very close tabs on was the movement of free blacks. They were all scared to death that too many free blacks would upset the balance between the poor white yeomen and the aristocracy. Which made sense, since racial superiority was the bone the planters kept throwing to the poor whites. They had tried various schemes to get rid of free blacks. The North didn’t want them; as late as 1860 the good citizens of western Pennsylvania were petitioning the state legislature for more laws restricting blacks, and just about everywhere else a free black had to put up a good behavior bond, or something; anyway, the North didn’t want the excess. So the South got the federal government to set up the American Colonization Society, and to buy land in Africa, and send the free niggers back. But there were still enough left in the South to scare the white folks. So they kept real good track of them. There was hardly a state they could settle in without the permission of the legislature. So all he had to do was to go to the capital of each state and look up the records of petitions by freedmen to remain in the state. So he went North on a riverboat—”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “He was passing as a white man?”

“Not exactly,” I said. “He was, after all, nearly half white to begin with, and just a little more than a quarter black. But he didn’t try to hide the black blood, although he did profess to be ashamed of it. What he did was to mix up the way he was descended, claiming that it was his mother who was half Cherokee, her mother, a white woman, he claimed, having been raped by an Indian. His father, he said, was a half-breed, the son of a planter and one of his slaves. Which made C.K. a quarter black, but which also made him free, since slavery was based on the legal principle of
partus sequitur ventrem
, which means, basically, that if your mother was a slave you were a slave, but if your mother was free, even if you were black as the ace of spades, you were free too. It didn’t work out that way in practice, but the principle was there—and it helps explain why white Southerners were so worried about the possibility of black males copulating with white females. So C.K. carried forged papers attesting to the fact that his mother was a free woman of mixed white and Cherokee parentage, and that his father had been a mulatto, and nobody wanted much to do with him, but he got to Cincinnati and then made his way east, and eventually got to Washington, D.C., where he began to search for Bolah in the records of the American Colonization Society. But he hadn’t really expected Bolah to go to Liberia—he was certainly hoping he had not. What he wanted was the experience of looking up records at a place where he could pose as a newly freed black looking for a relative and not have to worry about trying to pose as a white while he polished his reading and learned how to use records. By the time he had exhausted the possibility that Bolah had been relocated in Liberia, he was ready to tackle the most likely source of information. He went to Richmond, where Bolah had come from, and searched the records of petitions from blacks desiring to remain in the state. He didn’t have to look far. On December 6, 1824, Lewis Bolah had begged permission to reside in the state of Virginia, citing his service to the state of Louisiana and his service in the War of 1812 under Commodore John Shaw, and saying that he was afraid to go to Liberia or Haiti because he was afraid of what might happen to him in any country governed by ‘persons of colour.’ The petition had been granted.

“So in the spring of 1826, C.K. found Lewis Bolah. He tracked him down to a small town called Dinwiddie. Bolah was living in a cabin in a little area just east of the Post Road—Route One, it would be now. C.K. waited until the middle of the night, then set fire to the house. When Bolah came running out he jumped him, tied him, cut his head off with an ax, and planted it on a stake.”

I stopped then, to sip at the toddy before it got cold. She didn’t say anything. “You know Dinwiddie?” I said.

“My family used to own land near there,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “this happened a long time ago.”

“We owned the land a long time ago,” she said. She drained her mug. “What did he do then?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t have any information on what he did for nearly a year and a half.”

“He must have done something.”

“He must have. But I don’t know what.”

“Well, God, John, that’s the interesting part. Here he is, he’s managed to escape from slavery, and it sounds like ever since he was young he’d been focused on this man Bolah, and he escapes and he tracks him down and he gets his revenge, and then he must have just felt…empty. I mean, can’t you imagine—”

“No,” I said. “I can’t imagine.” I sipped my toddy, sucking at the warmth of it.

“All right,” she said. “Tell me what you know.”

“I know that in the spring of 1827, C.K. Washington, which was what he had taken to calling himself, arrived in northwest Georgia and presented himself to the tribal elders of the Cherokee Nation, claiming citizenship in that Nation by right of his grandfather’s membership in the tribe. I don’t know what the procedure for such things was, but evidently the situation was confused by the fact that the Cherokees were changing their form of government, and just that year they had adopted a constitution that called for an elected chief, a senate, and a house of representatives, but the elections had not yet been held. So while they got their government running, C.K. lived with them, learning how to be an Indian, how to hunt and how to fish, how to find shelter, all the elements of woodcraft that no slave knew or was permitted to know, simply because it would have made running away so much easier. The things he learned were to him as important as reading and writing. But he studied too, because the Cherokees had a written language, and he found that the best way to learn it was to study it in written form. At that time, in fact, he read and wrote the Cherokee language better than he read and wrote English. The rest of his time he spent searching up and down the Cherokee country, looking for someone who might remember his grandfather and be willing and able to testify. But he found nobody. What he did find was gold. I don’t know exactly where, but it was river gold, washed down from a mother lode somewhere. He found it one day while he was fishing in a creek, and he panned for it whenever he could, and he hid it. Because he wasn’t sure about what the Cherokee elders were going to say about his membership in the tribe, since nobody had ever heard of a Cherokee brave and a slave woman who had had a child together; the Cherokees were proud people, and there were quite a few who weren’t happy about his mixed parentage. I suspect he believed that, in the final analysis, he might use the knowledge of the gold to prove his loyalty to the tribe when the case was finally decided. In 1828 the Cherokees elected a principal chief, a man named Kooweskoowe. He was of mixed blood. C.K. believed that the mixed heritage would make him more sympathetic. But C.K. forgot that the half of Kooweskoowe that wasn’t Indian was white and Southern and named John Ross, and that John Ross had served with Andrew Jackson in his wars against the Creeks, or maybe he didn’t know; but when the case was decided, in December of 1828, the tribal government determined that the man calling himself C.K. Washington was not a Cherokee because his mother was not a Cherokee, and his father’s mother was not a Cherokee.”

“So they kicked him out?”

“C.K. was strong and able-bodied; he’d been free for several years, taking good care of himself, eating well, so forth. By any standard he was a top-grade field hand, and top-grade field hands were worth a lot of money. So no, they didn’t kick him out; they made a slave of him.”

“You mean they
sold
him?”