Washington and Caesar (7 page)

“That un’s yours, John,” Caesar protested.

“An’ you jus’ take him down to Vernon. I come by latuh, pick him up, I don’ miss all the pahty jus’ because Missah French be tired. Right?”

“If’n you say,” Caesar said with some hesitancy.

“I do say. Run ‘long, now.”

Caesar headed down the hill, the little stranger trying to worm his way back to his own pack for a few moments. Caesar prevented him, though not without some fellow feeling; the young dog was alone, and he felt for it. But the Rose Hill pup did not care, for soon enough he ran with the Vernon pack as if born to them.

“It was the fastest chase, gentlemen—a young fox, and a fast one. But we kept him in view, and he never turned, just ran till the hounds had him by the heels.” Lee held his horse through a little curvet, done deliberately to show his horsemanship.

“You split the pack, Mr. Lee.”

“At least I caught a fox.”

“Perhaps we’ll leave you to hunt on your own in the future, then, Mr. Lee. Clearly the company of your elders oppresses you.”

Lee had expected praise, and the dashing of his hopes and his second rebuff in a day from Colonel Washington was more than he could bear. He tried to meet Washington’s eyes and fight, but failed, and his shoulders slumped. His horse felt the change and sidled a little until he curbed her with a vicious jerk at the reins, and then he turned on his dog handler.

“Didn’t you see the pack was split, Hussy?”

The boy stood paralyzed. Lee’s tone held the threat of
violence—adolescent humiliation that couldn’t be borne.

“Why did you let the dogs run off, Hussy?”

Washington thought it likely that the master had run off and the dogs boy followed, but it didn’t matter now; the lad was in for a thrashing. Lee never thrashed heavy, anyway; his father had a humane reputation, and the son was thought overfriendly with his blacks.

He saw Lee let the lash fall free from the stock of his whip and then slash with it, a blow quick as the strike of a cat’s claw, and his dogs boy cowered away with blood welling between his fingers where they clutched his face. The other members of the field took pulls on their flasks or headed for the house, distancing themselves from young Lee.

Old John from Rose Hill came running down the long slope from the north. Washington had missed him; he was widely known as the best and most knowledgeable of the dog handlers in the neighborhood, and Washington valued his opinion of young Caesar. But the man had his whole attention fixed on the Stratford Hall boy with a look of hatred.

“Stupid Negra!” John threw himself on the boy, pulling him to the ground and pushing his face in the dirt. The dogs ran in circles, yelping. Most of the white audience had gone, but Lee was poised above the struggling pair, his arm cocked back for another blow with his deadly whip.

Caesar was shocked by the sudden violence, and the more shocked by Old John’s sudden attack on Lee’s slave. Caesar didn’t even know him, except as the slower of the running boys, and one without shoes. John appeared to be beating him savagely, and Lee hovered over them, his mare stepping carefully to avoid treading on the pair.

“Get clear, you bastard!” said Lee, raising the whip again. Washington’s hand seized his wrist and pulled his whip clear of his hand, disarming him so quickly and easily
that it looked as if the two men had planned the whole thing.

“Never strike another man’s slave, young Lee.”

Lee looked at him with something like loathing for a moment.

“Come into the house and have a little uncustomed brandy, Master Lee.” Washington spoke in an even tone, as if nothing had happened and he didn’t have Lee’s whip in his hand.

“He’s useless!”

“Come along.” Washington thought of other men he had known whose admonitions he had heard and accepted, or resented in his own youth: Lord Fairfax, General Braddock, his brother Lawrence. All had the touch, the ability to admonish with the most result and least pain. He knew himself cold and distant—perhaps too distant for this sort of thing—but someone had to bring young Lee into line with responsibility, and today God had ordained that he be the gentleman to try.

As they rode away, Caesar could hear his master speaking softly to the violent young man, and then they reached the gravel path and turned into the outbuildings and were gone. John sat up in a moment. Caesar had the dogs under control, his own, the Lee dogs, and the remnants of several other packs and partial packs.

“They gone?”

“Yea, John. They gone.” John was Ebo, through and through. Smart, though, and with a winning smile. The hint of duplicity was pure Ebo, and that he had seen a thousand times. The man winked at him and rose to his feet, dusted his fine black cloth breeches and helped the other boy to his feet. The whip had left a bright mark on his cheek, and a deep cut, but no gash, and the blood was slowing. The boy was weeping through the mud and blood.

“Why’d you hit him, John?”

“Keep that white boy’s whip off’n him, I think. Li’l whip
like’n that one, it can take an eye or split you nose.” Caesar was still a little shocked by the violence of it, so different from battle because there was no resisting the hand that held the whip.

“I didn’ huht him none, did I, boy? Jus’ roll roun’ atop him.”

Caesar looked the boy over. He was weeping so hard he couldn’t speak.

“He’ll live.”

“Bettah get you home wi’ they dogs, boy. Get cleah ‘fo Missuh Lee get on you ‘gain.”

The boy nodded, still sobbing.

“Le’s get they dogs settled, see what the black folks get to eat. Massa French say I can be heah to eat.” He winked at Caesar again.

“You done good, boy. I see you have mah pup theyah.” He whistled and the pup betrayed his new allegiance and ran to the older man’s heel.

“You like the hunt, boy?”

“I liked it fine, suh.”

The man laughed. “No one calls a black man suh. Not heah.”

Caesar opened the gate into the kennel yard and shook his head to himself, savoring the moment on the grass when he and the tall master had spotted the fox together. Then he shook his head again, as if embarrassed at his own thoughts.

The wind continued to rise, and it dished the outdoor festivities. The slaves did dance, but it was in the cart shed. Jacka played his fiddle, and played it well, and some of the house servants came. Old John danced with every girl who would have him, smiled on all, ate well, drank better, and took his leave early and with a good grace. Caesar knew the reels that he had learned in the Indies, and the Mount Vernon women took it upon themselves to show him other
dances—country dances they learned from the whites, and variations on their own dances, from Africa and from the Indies. Queeny showed him steps he’d seen whites do, the complicated steps and minuets that she made into excuses to show her legs. Food came down from the House. The scraps from the hunt breakfast were scarcely a feast, but they made a change, and Mrs. Bailey passed a ration of meat and some eggs to enrich the supper. It was better than the fish and corn that they ate every day. And the estate’s corn liquor flowed.

The ties that bound the house and field staff and the gulfs that kept them separate were too complex to be taken in at a single social meeting, but Caesar had begun to see them. It was plain to the simplest understanding that Nelly, the house seamstress, was attached to the white servant, Bishop; they fought and simpered in too meaningful a manner. Billy Lee, Washington’s personal slave and the only slave he knew who had a surname, was seldom seen with the other blacks, but he came down for a mug of liquor and Caesar saw instantly that he wasn’t so much aloof as he was a leader. He singled Caesar out.

“You were very good today,” he said.

Caesar warmed to the praise. He would have kept Billy to discuss the field, but Billy was gone, first talking to Queeny and then passing through the others with a word for each.

Caesar had learned that there were other farms, other blacks on them, all satellites of Mount Vernon. The men and women who lived in the Greenhouse and the cabins behind it were the elite: house slaves, trusted hands, skilled men and women. He was lucky to be included, but with his share of the estate’s corn liquor in him, he didn’t feel so lucky. Billy’s praise had cheered him at first, but it soured.

Queeny seemed to dance without a care in the world; Old Tom from the house could jab his pipe at Billy Lee and
laugh. The carpenters and the bricklayers were telling tall tales of their activities and their value.

What he resented the most was their proprietary notions. When Old Tom said Mount Vernon was the “fines’ gentleman’s estate on the rivah”, he said it with relish, as if the estate were his own. The house girls were the same. Cook spoke of meals as if she ate them, and the sewing crew were filled with pride at their ability to alter the finest English gowns. It all sickened him because none of it was theirs or ever would be. Every pull from the jug seemed to add to his resentment.

But the hunt had been something, a challenge that he had enjoyed. The fox had never fooled him, and the run had been worth the effort. Caesar was open enough to understand that his triumph at the day’s hunt might be of the same order as that of the sewing crew over an English gown. The thought that he himself was sinking into the same proprietary habit of thought made him sad, because he wasn’t even sure that Washington had noticed his success, and it made him angry and sad that he wanted the master’s praise.

He didn’t realize that he was pounding the doorframe of the carriage house with his hand until it hurt, and there were Queeny’s hands on his arms, and her mouth on his, pulling him into the dark.

“If you jes’ goin’ to get drunk like a fool, I got bettah plans.”

She was wearing stays and a gown that made her waist even smaller than usual; it excited him. She stayed just out of his reach, flitting in to kiss him and away.

“Sho’ you ain’t too drunk?” she taunted.

He swayed drunkenly to mislead her, shifted his weight against the great horse barn’s wall and caught her effortlessly with both hands around her slim waist, lifted her a moment and stepped through the stable door.

“Only the horse boys ‘lowed in heah,” she whispered,
but his hand was running up her naked leg under her petticoat and he wasn’t drunk at all, though his mouth tasted of pipe smoke and corn liquor. He settled a saddlecloth under her with a consideration for her best clothes that would never have occurred to most men, and he did it without pausing in his other attentions. A fondness for him entered into her, and then she was lost in other matters.

Truro Churchyard, Virginia, January 1774

The churchyard at Pohick was complete, with a breasthigh brick wall surrounding a graveyard devoid of graves and the four walls of the church proper. Washington sat on his horse in the winter rain and contemplated the empty churchyard and the costs of ambition; the coveted post of warden had cost him a hefty subscription to an Anglican church to which he felt only social allegiance. All the first men of the county attended the Upper Church. Most of their business was transacted in the yard after sermon, and the vestrymen and wardens had a certain advantage, as if they were “to home” and the others visiting. In Virginia, the sacerdotal meaning of the positions was scarcely spoken of in the community.

He didn’t fancy deep enquiry about the state of his soul. It sufficed him that he did good works for his peers and subordinates, that every man called him generous and that even his slaves remembered that he had treated them by hand when the pox hit his plantations. He didn’t enjoy the sort of searching often pushed by Reverend Massey; he wasn’t really sure that an afterlife existed, or that it was important that one should search. He had felt from his youngest days that such things were beyond his control, and lay in God’s hands, and he believed in God as he believed in the king and the empire. A pre-eminent spirit
controlled all, as he controlled his plantation and his tenants controlled their farms, all the way down to the dogs boy controlling the dogs, all the way up to the burgesses and parliament and the king…and God.

Wolfe had been devoted to Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” which Washington had looked at without a spark of interest. It remained a title to him, but he looked at his own red-earthed country churchyard and wondered if Gray had seen the same things he saw: the value of the building, at 579 pounds Virginia currency; the bricklayer’s time and the value of the land; the work to “view and examine” as the wardens were enjoined. Washington doubted that a poet saw the value of things, or the work that built them.

By some freak association, his thoughts went from the churchyard to Townshend, who had loathed Wolfe and still did. If Wolfe had won Quebec by luck, where was the justice in providence? It was the one aspect of war that had sickened him above all others—that neither courage nor hard work were necessarily rewarded or justly served by the results. Braddock’s expedition could be smashed and Forbes’s succeed, despite their relative merits; and while he strove with all his might to succeed, James Wolfe took Quebec by luck.

Farming did not work in such a way. Farming required planning and work, acceptance of occasional defeat…but the farmer who worked would be repaid in time. War should repay work and interest, like farming. It was a matter of reducing it to principles, but it was unlikely that he would ever be called upon to do so again. The thought left him a little sorry, but the rain was beginning to go through his greatcoat, and he turned his horse’s head and trotted toward Truro Church, with time in hand to dry off when he arrived.

Pompey, behind him on a pale nag, was soaked through and cold. He was missing the Reverend Cleve, who was
speaking to the slaves at Mount Vernon. He only came one week in five, and Pompey was always sorry to miss the event, as he held his soul dear.

Reverend Cleve was a wholly new experience for Caesar—a black minister, and a free man. He spoke beautifully, as Caesar himself hoped to speak. His clear diction rolled through the cart shed, and his challenges brought out the strongest responses in his congregation. His sermon was simple and direct, and on a theme calculated to appeal most strongly to his listeners: that salvation would come for the worthy, regardless of color or station; that God’s house had many doors, and that all of them were open. He never went so far as to say that worldly freedom was unimportant, but his listeners were able to note that eternity would outlast life, and freedom and grace defeat bondage in their own souls’ lives.

Caesar was a baptized man, brought to Christ’s Table when fresh from Africa and newly enslaved, but no part of the religion had moved him like the preaching he heard from the Reverend Cleve. He raised his voice in response, affirming his loyalty to Jesus. Neither his glass of rum at the dance nor his frequent tumbles with Queeny troubled him. Later in the sermon, when both acts were denounced by the minister, Caesar felt some surprise that the gentle, new-light Jesus had time for such small stuff, but he responded that he would not do such things again. He meant it, at the moment the words were spoken. And when they reached the responses in the creed, he tried to form his responses exactly as the Reverend Cleve had spoken them, syllable by syllable. He heard his own voice speaking the words so well, above the cart-shed din, and he knew he could do it always, if he practiced.

Because, though an eternity of heavenly bliss appealed to him, he still wanted freedom while on the earth.

At Truro church, Reverend Massey droned on toward the completion of his sermon, the attention of most of his congregation taken up in the recurrent thunder and worries about their horses or shays outside. His theme had been warm enough, and well taken at the outset, but only the parish’s philosophers were still on the scent with the minister’s theological pack as they finally began to pull down their ethereal fox.

Washington was elsewhere, his mind making an orderly survey of the new black children and how best to house them, the question of drainage in a new field on the upper parts of Dogue Run, the health of Old Blue and whether the African boy was all he seemed with the dogs, and most of all his stepson’s coming marriage and its consequences, which were great enough, for all love.

Marriage with the Calverts of Baltimore was pleasant enough, and the girl seemed comely and proper, although a certain element of papishness clung to the family. Jack liked her out of all mind, had neglected his expensive studies at Columbia, and wouldn’t be satisfied until he had her, so have her he would. Martha was insistent. In this, she reminded him too much of his own mother, and made him writhe, but there was nothing for it.

Providentially, the event was planned for Mount Airy; nothing he had to do but get on a horse and cross at the ferry. The effect on the estates would be negligible as long as everyone understood the precautions he had taken, and should his wife’s son, Jack Custis, decide to build himself a manor house, he now had the means to support one. Washington had worked hard on the Custis estate, which was really his wife’s and would now be Jack’s. It pleased him that Jack was now going to enjoy the work, but Washington hoped he didn’t enjoy it so much that he took either to spending his capital by selling lands or interfering with the excellent managers that Washington had installed.

He could tell by Massey’s tone of voice that the end of the sermon was near, and he began to cast his mind toward his Maker in the sort of symbolic prayer the Masons taught. That was more real to him than all the talk. He thanked his Maker for the favor of the making and the providence that made him what he was, and turned by the congruence of names and ideas to look at his friend George Mason, who was nodding like a musician at someone else’s concert. George probably had a point he wanted to dispute. Then he felt Washington’s attention, turned, and gave him a significant look, and a long one. Washington had no idea what it meant, but it almost caused him to miss the closing words and the signal to rise.

The closing, the admonition to go with God to love and serve him, a spartan procession, not like the papist affairs in some Anglican churches, a moment of silence, and he was walking in the yard, the rain past, with George Mason, who clearly had something urgent to communicate. They walked a distance from the others.

“Boston has spoiled the East India tea.”

Washington looked at him, fumbling for words and understanding simultaneously.

“A group of men thinly disguised as Indians went on board the Indiamen and threw the tea in the harbor rather than pay the tea tax.”

Washington tapped the church wall with his crop.

“Idle fellows? Or a decision taken by the gentlemen of the town?”

“Not known.”

“I…I don’t think it was well done.”

“Would you have us submit to the tax?”

“Is the tax so illegal, Mr. Mason?”

“It is an external tax. We have resisted Parliament’s attempts to impose such up till now.”

“I mislike…I very much mislike the notion that men can take such an act against property into their own hands.”

“So must all propertied men.”

“And I fear that the Government’s reaction will be strong. We must await events.”

But Mason’s eyes burned with the evangelical zeal of the true believer.

“You still avoid English goods?”

“Within bounds. I bought a pianoforte, I must confess.”

“Oh, that’s nothing. It is the daily stuff we must learn to do without if we are to break this legislation.”

Washington looked away. His lack of response had disappointed his friend, and his friend’s dejection at the reception of his news was spreading. Washington found prating about the injuries of the colonies rather like searching his soul; it didn’t accomplish very much.

“This is, what, the fourth time we’ve embargoed goods?”

“It works well enough, if all comply.”

Washington winced slightly. In the earliest embargoes, he had consistently misunderstood the complex system by which the embargo of some goods “supported” the prohibition on “taxed” goods. But the picture of property destroyed by a mob did not please him at all, and it roused him to speech.

“I still fail to see how cheaper India tea makes us slaves. I see how it harms the interests of the Boston smugglers, and this morning I resent such merchants raising a mob to destroy property—it could as easily be my tobacco or my wheat. Doubtless, my friend, you will lead me to see the error of my ways another day. Today, I see the cost of Pohick Church rise before me beside the cost of Jack’s wedding, and I think that our troubles with England can wait until my crops are in the ground and spring is here.”

“You’ve other business, sir, and I will not detain you. The news is not so ominous, I allow, but the reaction of the Government to this check is likely to affect us all.”

Washington shook his head solemnly. Other men had gathered to hear the last of the exchange—men with greater
debts in England, men with more love, or less, for the mother country—and in a moment the yard was abuzz with it. Washington left Mason retelling the dumping of the tea, motioned to Pompey for his horse, and looked at his watch. Slow.

“Care to pass me the time?” he said, bowing to the elder Mr. French, watch in hand.

“Your servant, sir. Hmm, a quarter past twelve.”

Washington opened the face of his watch and put an elegant gold key to the fuzee, and then to the hands. French caught the engraving on the key and smiled, closed his case with a sharp snap, and bowed; Washington eased his over the catch to save wear, but his bow was just as neat.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Bought that brig, did you?”

“I hadn’t much choice. I took her in lieu of a debt, you know.”

“Good buy, though. Will you send a cargo north, do ya think?”

“I may. First the Indies with my flour.”

“If she goes north, I’d be happy to help make a cargo.”

“Thankee. That’s something to think on. Good day to you, sir.”

“’Servant.”

He rose from the bow and turned to find his horse to hand, mounted in one athletic movement, nodded to Pompey, and was gone before the next rain cloud opened.

Mount Vernon, Virginia, January 1774

Washington’s library had a more martial character than its master admitted, these days. Charles XII of Sweden, Voltaire’s beau ideal, gazed angrily down from a column that faced his ideological child, Frederick the Great of Prussia. Julius Caesar and Alexander locked gazes in the other corner, an unceasing contest between youth (Alexander and Charles) and age (Caesar and Frederick).
Or sometimes the masters of war divided other ways, classical versus modern.

The other furnishings of the room were to the latest taste, if a bit much by native English standards—drapes a little too plum, carpets a little too bright. All together, it was the room of a man of immense wealth, and the books that lined the shelves catalogued all his interests. A 1740 Humphrey Bland on military exercise, as well as a new subscription copy of Stevenson’s
Advice to Officers in Command of Detachments,
and a shelf of manuals of arms, directions on fortification with plates or without, Muller on artillery. The owner of the library had the most complete interest in war to be found in a library in Virginia.

Farming filled other shelves. The foundation of the collection had come with his wife, being her former husband’s books on the subject. He added to the collection every year, books such as Duhamel’s
Practical Treatise of Husbandry
and Young’s
Annals of Agriculture,
Thomas Fairfax on sports and dogs and the preservation of game, Tull on the new English plowing,
The Farmer his own Mechanic,
and dozens of other titles. The newest were newer than the military volumes, and on the whole more plentiful.

Sport for the sake of sport had its place as well: fishing, shooting, riding and keeping horses. There weren’t many of the classics: some schoolbooks, an uncut Ovid, a muchthumbed Epictetus in English and Latin—much thumbed because the owner knew that Frederick the Great had a copy and praised it. Washington liked Epictetus, because he had been a slave and spoke well of it. When Washington spoke to a slave, he tried to remember the precepts that Epictetus laid down. There was also Homer in translation by Pope—all the volumes save one, which his stepson, Jack, had lost while still in school and never replaced.

They were well kept and their leather gleamed with solid worth; their master read most of them, whether to farm or make war. He had been a soldier, and now he was a
farmer—head bent over a careful drawing of a drainage canal in the Great Dismal Swamp as he laboriously traced out his plans for further drainage. The Great Dismal was a watery fortress built by nature on the south coast of Virginia to keep farmers at bay. It would take more slaves, more effort, and more money to drain the swamp and till the ground, but the result would be thousands of acres of prime farmland reclaimed from the wilderness right on the coast, where cargoes would fetch the best price. The plan had started almost ten years before; it had never quite succeeded or failed, and its demands seemed to increase every year, no matter how much effort the original investors expended.