THE BOOK OF NEGROES (26 page)

“One hundred and seventy-five feet,” Lindo said.

Climbing the steps, we passed black men, women and children with palms outstretched. I felt uncomfortable about having nothing to give them, and hoped that bad luck didn’t drive me to join them anytime soon. Lindo fished six pence from his pocket, dropped them into a woman’s hand and took my arm. His token gesture angered me. If he thought that it would lead me to write his letters dutifully the next day, he would soon discover his error. Inside the church, I saw a handwritten notice posted on a wall:
Volunteer needed, for teaching Negroes.

We took seats in the first pew, and when the concert began, I sat close enough to the cellist to almost reach out and touch the hairs on his bow. He was a young black man with a neatly trimmed brown beard, and acorn-brown eyes that scoured my face as he played. He knew the music by heart, and instead of casting his eyes at the written sheets of music, this man, whose name was given on the program as Adonis Thomas, looked at me. As
he leaned into his instrument, backed off, leaned into it again, dipped his head to punctuate a change in the music, I felt that he was speaking to me. I have always had difficulty listening to the frenzied sound of many instruments together. In Charles Town, on occasion, I had heard flutes, oboes, horns and violins all rise together, but they always seemed like voices at war. Here, though, I could befriend the cellist, fall into his music, heed the melodic urgency, and be touched by the way it dipped low like the voices of village elders and skimmed high like singing children. Adonis Thomas’s cello whispered to my soul.
Do not lose hope
, it said.
You too can make something beautiful, but first you must be free.

LINDO HAD INSTRUCTED ME TO MEET HIM at eight o’clock the next morning in the hotel’s breakfast room, but I arrived a few minutes early, to find Sam Fraunces.

“How was the concert?” he asked.

“Music to lift my spirits,” I said.

“Let’s hope it lifts his spirits too,” Sam said.

“Whose spirits?”

“Why, those of Adonis Thomas, the cellist.”

“What’s wrong with him?”

“Didn’t Mr. Lindo tell you that he is the slave of a wealthy man in town?” My jaw fell open. “He played so beautifully,” I said.

“With real longing, I would expect,” Sam said.

Lindo came down the stairs and took me into the dining room. I had never eaten with a white man in a public place, and was surprised that they let me in. But it was a Negro who came to take our orders, and he simply gave me a little smile. Lindo ordered buns and eggs for both of us, and asked for coffee.

I asked the waiter for tea with milk and sugar.

“We have coffee and beer this morning,” the waiter said.

“Coffee with milk and sugar, then,” I said.

“The patriots are furious at the British, and are weaning themselves from tea,” Lindo whispered to me. “Now they say it weakens the tone of the stomach, inducing tremors and spasmodic affections. Can’t say I blame them. The British have united the patriots in anger over the Tea Act and soon enough, if we lose the indigo bounty, they’ll stir up even more resentment in South Carolina.”

I wasn’t hungry but felt that I should eat. I had to keep myself strong and healthy now, and sensed that soon I might spend a long time between meals. Lindo said that he had prepared a letter to William Tryon, the governor of New York, about why the British bounty on indigo should be protected. Perhaps the governor could convince the right people in London.

“I have it in draft form, with corrections in the margins. I need you to write it properly so I can deliver it tomorrow,” he said. I didn’t want to agree, but it didn’t seem wise to refuse.

“Where is it?” I asked.

“In my room. I’ll leave you the key. There is a large desk in there, with all the writing materials that you should need.” I nodded. “How long will you be out today?”

“I have meetings until the evening,” he said. “It will take hours of persuasion to get an appointment with the governor. The man dines and golfs all day with the Anglicans.”

I sipped my hot, sweet, milky coffee.

“Did you know that Adonis Thomas is a slave?”

“Who?”

“The cellist from last night.”

“Of course. Do you think a Negro could learn to play like that without instruction? And where do you think he’d get such instruction? Living in Canvas Town?”

“I would have thought—”

“I don’t have time for that right now,” he said, getting up from the table. “Make sure that letter is ready by the end of the day. Somebody in London needs to know that indigo is rotting in barrels on the wharves of Charles Town.”

After breakfast I could not bring myself to enter Lindo’s room. I rested on my bed until the sounds through my window beckoned me out. My feet felt light, as if they were already touching free ground. People rushed in every direction, and nobody took objection to me. When I rounded a corner and the sun splashed on my face, I felt impossibly optimistic. I could walk in any direction I chose, so I headed over to Wall Street. When I got there, I heard shouting and looked up toward Broadway. Outside a fine, two-storey wooden home, I saw an odd crowd of white men, all agitating with arms raised: ruffians, labourers and well-dressed men too.

“We’ll bust the door,” someone shouted. The crowd hummed with nasty energy.

The house was painted white, and had a neat stone path leading from the door to the street. A house like that in Charles Town might contain a man, a woman, their children, and one or two slaves. I wondered if slaves were in this house. I wondered if, for some reason, these angry men wanted to put their hands on Negroes.

“Down with the British,” someone shouted.

A pack of men surged forward to kick and pound the door. Others began throwing rocks at the shuttered windows. The door opened. A white butler appeared. He was dragged out, struck in the face and knocked to the ground. The mob surged over him—bleeding nose and all—and into the house. I felt that I should run, in case they came for me next, but no other residents—white or Negro—emerged from the house. I saw only the rioting men, some still shoving in through the door and others struggling back out with vases, fine mahogany boxes, chairs and rugs. Inside,
shutters were broken and silk curtains thrown out the windows. It was almost hypnotizing to witness their frenzied anger, but after a few minutes, when looters emerged with a cask of rum and sucked the liquor thirstily from their own palms, I couldn’t help thinking about the horror that a person like Mrs. Lindo or Dolly might feel to be trapped in a house with such livid men.

The butler managed to get up onto his feet. Rather than taking flight, he stood to the side with his fingers on his temples. More and more people surged up Wall Street, shouting news that I could not understand.

A white boy no more than seventeen stood next to me and hollered for the whole world to hear, “Blood spilt at Lexington and Concord.”

In the excitement, I risked a question. “Whatever do you mean?”

“Rebels fought the Tories in Massachusetts, and the rebels won.”

He was shouting so loud that I took a step back. He could see that I couldn’t quite follow him, but all he really wanted was to be heard proclaiming himself in public.

“Rebels, that’s me,” he said. “Tories, that’s … are you a Tory?”

“What precisely is that?”

“You talk fancy, for a nigger,” he said. “You better not be a Tory. It’s war now and we shall have freedom.”

“Freedom? For the slaves?”

“Niggers, nothing. I’m talking about us. Rebels. Patriots. We shall be free of the British and their taxes. Never again shall we be slaves. Are you with the rebels or the Tories?”

“Does it matter?”

“Pick the rebels if you know what’s good for you,” he said, and ran off with his friends.

The streets were teeming with people who sang and shouted and shot muskets in the air. By the time I got back to the Fraunces Tavern, pandemonium had erupted inside. Men were drinking, falling down dead drunk,
cursing the British and vowing that they would one day see freedom. They were eating, too, and Sam and his crew were busy serving them.

“What’s happening, Sam?”

“If you help me get this mob fed and out of here,” he said to me, “I’ll pay you back.”

I longed to get somewhere safe, away from the boiling anger, but the offer was too good to pass up.

I worked in the kitchen, pouring beer from kegs into pitchers, making punch with rum and lemonade and bits of orange, arranging plates of meats and cheeses and fruit, and passing it to the men who were serving. Customers were shouting so loud that I wondered if they would riot. But as wild as they had been on the street, they loved Sam Fraunces and his tavern and seemed at home. Drunk and boisterous though they were, they didn’t break a thing.

Eventually the crowd thinned and the patriots headed back into the streets to celebrate. Sam took me by the arm.

“Meena, make a run for it,” he said.

“Now?”

“War is inevitable, and the Brits are in for the surprise of their life. They have no idea how angry people are. If you flee now, Lindo won’t have time to hunt you down.”

“Why?”

“I’ve just heard that the British are talking of closing the harbour. Your man will want to return to his own home or business, because people could be rioting there too. If he doesn’t get out today, he may not get out at all.”

I never wanted to see Lindo again, but the idea of fleeing him terrified me.

“Where am I to hide?” I said.

“Go north for now. Go up Broadway and into the woods.”

“What about Canvas Town?”

“No. Not yet. He may send an agent after you.”

I felt paralyzed. What was I to do alone in the woods? But Fraunces was tossing apples, bread, a strip of salted beef and a small blanket into a sack.

“Take the bag. Go now. Do not return to your room, and do not wait any longer. North. Up Broadway. When you come to the end of town, keep walking deep into the woods.” Out on Pearl Street, men were pouring more rum from another stolen cask into their palms. “Come see me in a few days,” Fraunces whispered. “Come in the darkness. Tap three times at the door to the kitchen, in the alley out back.”

Out I went into the insanity, venturing among the drunks and the laughing, cursing, brawling men who were breaking into all the fine houses on Wall Street. I got up to Broadway, passed the Trinity Church where I had been just the night before, and kept walking up Broadway to a smaller church called St. Paul’s Chapel. Seeking a quiet place to think, I climbed the steps to peer inside and saw a few Negroes in a meeting. They turned around and stared at me. I turned and left the church. On the street, an old black man took my arm and said, “I wouldn’t head that way if I were you.”

“Which way?”

“That way you’re going. Into Holy Ground.”

“What’s Holy Ground?”

“The church owns the land, but it’s full of ladies of ill repute. You look like you’re new in town, so you ought to know.”

“Which way is safe?”

“Ain’t nowhere safe these times,” he said. “North you’ll find woods. But be careful out there.”

I changed direction and headed north as the man had suggested. The crowds thinned and the sounds of the revellers died down. After a time I crossed over the last street and entered a wooded area. I kept walking. I was frightened by the darkness and the lonely sound of my feet on dry
leaves, but I kept on going. As I walked, I wondered if Solomon Lindo had ever imagined that I would escape.

Passing through a clearing, I noticed some whittled sticks pushed into a rectangular pattern on the ground, near a mound of stones in a perfect circle. Farther on, I saw more sticks and stones in the same pattern. When I finally believed that I had walked deeper into the wilderness than Lindo could ever imagine, I sat on the ground, laid the sack from Sam Fraunces by the thick trunk of a tree for a pillow and lay down to stretch out my legs. It was late in the afternoon of April 23, 1775, and I had taken back my freedom.

I visualized that sometime around that moment, Solomon Lindo would be arriving back at the Fraunces Tavern, expecting his revised letter to Governor Tryon. In the madness and revelry on the streets of New York, he would not find a soul to point to me. Indeed, if he stopped to ask anyone, he might be taken for one of the men who owned a fine house on Wall Street and put himself in danger. I wondered if Sam Fraunces was right—if Lindo would take the first ship sailing south from New York. If Fraunces was wrong, Lindo would look around town for me, but surely he would not come this far. Nearly twenty years had passed since I was seized in the woods outside Bayo, but here I was, all alone and surrounded by the trees of another continent—and I was free again.

I slept fitfully that night, huddled under my thin blanket. In my dreams, rabbits chased across paths and stopped in mid-flight, wide-eyed, to stare at me. There were two thin crescent moons in the sky. And I heard an owl calling for me.
Aminata Diallo
, it called over and over. I awoke often and each time I fell back to sleep, the strange images resumed.

In the morning, I was aware of light touching my eyelids, and I heard voices calling again. Voices of Africa. Could they be calling my name? I opened my eyes. The ground was wet. The blanket was still over me, and the small sack of food sat against my belly. From where did those voices come? I got up, stuffed the blanket in the sack, shivered in the cold, damp
morning, and stepped past a few trees, back in the direction of the city, toward those sounds.

They weren’t voices of danger. They were voices of mourning, voices from my homeland. After another minute, I put my hand on the trunk of a tree at the edge of a small clearing and stared. There, near the sticks and the round mounds of rocks that I had passed the night before, was a small group of Negroes chanting African songs. It was no language that I knew, but it was from my homeland, deep and threaded with longing. The people had formed a circle, and they danced as I had seen before, arms raised, hips rotating, barely moving their feet. I drifted into their midst like a child drawn to her mother.