Washington and Caesar (8 page)

He was a farmer, and yet he planned his assault for the year on the Great Dismal like a soldier: considering each drainage ditch an approach sap on nature’s fortress swamp; marshalling the forces of slaves and pressed labor available to the investors; planning against the day when the scheme would turn a profit and the siege would end.

He was a farmer, and all his thoughts were on the coming planting, on drainage and foaling, water tables and wheat prices, and the extent of the herring run, and yet none of his heroes had ever excelled as farmers. They had all been soldiers, soldiers of the type that won their fame for the glory of their arms and not for the kingdoms that they built; indeed, Charles, Alexander and Frederick shared a failure to build very much at all. But they were his chosen companions in his library, as his pen gradually worked its way into the defenses built by nature to keep the European farms at bay in the Great Dismal Swamp, where ten years of labor had yet to yield a single crop. He looked at his new network of ditches without confidence, laid his pen carefully in a ready holder to avoid inking the map, scattered some sand on it, and rose.

A house slave appeared instantly, looking expectant, but Washington waved him away.

“I’m going out to the dogs, Jack.”

“Yes, suh.”

“Build up the fire, if you please.”

“Yes, suh.”

He walked out through the library hall and around the drive to the kitchen, nodding courteously to the cook, the maid, and the little black girl who helped with the kitchen and was clearly terrified by his appearance so late at night. He paused for a moment and looked at the stars, missing the child streaking by him down toward the deer park, bound for the kennel to warn the young man there that Master was headed that way, so that he was pleasantly surprised to find Caesar up, with a small rushlight in the kennel, sitting with Old Blue.

“She still in a bad way, Caesar?”

“She bin bettah…
better,
sir.”

Her coat was not as dull as it had been, though, he noted, and she had her head in the boy’s lap, looking at him with some interest.

“She eating?”

“Eats a little, if’n I feed it to her slow.”

“She’s a good dog—used to be the best in the pack.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’d like to shoot tomorrow.”

“How many dogs, sir?”

“Just a pair. You work hard on your speech, don’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Washington smiled, though the subject didn’t really please him very much. He had worked hard to sound English when he joined Braddock’s staff; Lord Fairfax had helped him lose the provincial speech that might have marked him. Slaves who spoke too well, though—that was another matter.

“You did a very good job on the hunt. Here’s a crown. That’s a quarter of an English pound. Spend it wisely.”

Delighted smile, deep bow, genuine admiration. “Thank you, suh! Thank you,
sir.”
The black face beamed with
pleasure and willingness to please, but Washington noticed that in his flurry of spirits, Caesar’s pronunciation had slipped, which was to be expected.

“But I desire you to take care, Caesar. You can be overfamiliar. Do you understand me?”

“No, sir.” The light went out. Washington had never been good at admonition; he was too cold, and it always came out as criticism without leniency. It had hurt him with his regiment.

“You should not smile at me, or at Mr. Lee, as if we were your familiar friends.”

The boy looked hurt and confused. He’d recover.

“Talk to Queeny, boy. Tell her what I said. Both things. You are a good hunter, and you can have a good life here. But you must know your place.”

“Yes, sir.”

Washington thought of clasping his shoulder, but he didn’t. A slave should not need comforting when the Master had spoken to him. Washington tried to regulate his slaves in the tradition of the ancients. His firmness would not have offended Epictetus, he was sure.

Mount Vernon, Virginia, late January 1774

“Coward! Drunkard! That he would dare…”

Washington’s voice trailed off as he realized that his angry words had been audible throughout the house and that the girl who had been tending the fire was now cowering in the corner. He colored in embarrassment, and within a moment Martha appeared from the back stairs and their own apartment just above, her pretty face a picture of concern.

“Hush there, husband. You’ll wake the neighborhood.”

He all but stuttered his apology; it shamed him to be so uncontrolled in front of his wife. His hand was still clenching the letter and his knuckles were white. He opened his hand as he realized how he must look, and the letter fell free to the desk.

“I think you should tell me, my dear.”

“Nothing. I was a fool. Apologies.”

“Nonsense, my dear. No one shouts in that manner at half past ten on a winter’s night unless moved beyond the capacity of the human frame to resist.”

Portraits never did her justice; she was uncommonly pretty, even now, a little thing with an elegant carriage and a firmness of purpose. He could dislike her when she was an overprotective copy of his own mother, but when she was like this, she was the woman he wanted, his partner.

“Do you recall my mentioning George Muse?”

“He admitted to cowardice at Fort Necessity, I believe. I expected to hear his name—we don’t number so many cowards among our acquaintance.” She smiled.

Her turn of phrase, so much wittier than he could manage, made him smile through his anger, as she had known it would, and he saw her relax as if she had expected more difficulty. It struck him that she was handling his temper, that he was being managed and that he could resent it but didn’t. He knew in that moment that he had shouted the words to get her to come to him. And she had come.

“He has had the effrontery to send me a perfectly odious letter, suggesting that my interest in the veterans’ grants in Ohio is all self-interest—that I have attempted to cheat him and others of my former officers. Utter rot. It sticks in my craw, madam.”

She turned her head slightly, at the pistols in the case on the desk.

“Washingtons don’t fight Muses, my dear.”

He looked confused for a moment. Then he saw it. She thought the cleaning of the pistols went with the letter.

“I won’t fight him unless he calls me. But I’ll write him such a letter, and make my feelings plain. To bear such an affront is beyond me. I’m speechless.”

“You are not, dear. Come to bed.”

“I think I will read, madam, if only for a bit.”

“I’ll wait for you, then.”

She came and kissed him, a social kiss, and his temper cooled some, but just the sight of the letter on his desk made his pulse race again.

The room was cold, despite the fire, and the girl hadn’t really done much but stir the coals and add logs that hadn’t caught. He crossed the room in front of his desk and pushed the logs around until they made a blaze, smiled to think of Martha and her wit, and went to his wall of books, looking for an old friend to calm his mind. He knew that George
Mason and other more learned men turned to the ancients in moments such as these. He’d never really learned his Latin and now he regretted it, because they were farmers as well as soldiers.

Another packet on his desk brushed at his attention, and with deep pleasure he withdrew careful drawings of a plow from England, with a letter from a scientific farmer there. The letter and close consultation on the plow eased him out of the worst of his temper; fifteen minutes’ study required to understand the harness and he was quite ready to face her again, and bed.

It was a troubling time. He woke with the specter of Muse’s letter in his mind, and it stayed with him as he was shaved and had his hair prepared by his valet. It left him sharp all day although it couldn’t contend with the cares of the estate. He was up with the dawn, and an hour later ahorse with nothing but a cup of chocolate in him, riding down the lane to see his farms with a small staff of men behind him: two slaves, Bailey, and a secretary. All the men were working. Washington noted with surly pleasure that the herring nets were out on two farms, and the work of repair and restoration going along smartly. He handled the English-made linen twine himself; experiment had shown that there was no substitute for it, despite the relative expense and the trouble of keeping it stocked. Prices for herring were falling, but the fishery provided a reliable cash crop that cost him nothing but net repair and the labor of slaves. If no one bought the fish, he could feed all his farms on them for the whole year, although that might require more clay for jars. He jotted a note in his daybook.

Twice he met neighbors on the road. Both made sure to congratulate him on Jack’s marriage, and both asked if he would hunt the next day, or if preparations for the wedding would keep him away. He smiled at both and gave nothing away, although most of his acquaintance knew he
felt ill-used in the matter. He did the civil thing, and assured both gentlemen that he would indeed hunt, and that his dogs (the best dogs in the county, except perhaps the Fairfax pack) would be at their service. Both men commended him on the slave Caesar. This didn’t entirely please him. Something about the boy irritated him; he did not wish to be unfair, and that annoyed him the more.

Caesar worked with a will, washing every dog in the pack, even the gun dogs that would spend the next morning at home. He was not in his fine clothes; he was dressed in a pair of cast-off breeches and an evil cotton shirt of a weave so coarse that he could feel the sun right through it on his back.

Old Blue was better—there couldn’t be much doubt of that, although whether the mineral or the broth baths or her own animal constitution saved her was open to question. He washed her and scratched her head; of all the dogs, he now knew her the best. He wondered if she’d take the pack from the temporary leader now that she was back—whether they’d fight (not likely) or if some hidden signal of speech would pass between them, like him and Pompey, where the fight was just the symbol of the thing.

When the dogs were clean, he changed their straw, mucked out the kennel until it was as clean as Queeny’s cabin, swept the front of the building, and put water out for all the dogs. He was just yoking up a second pair of buckets in the yard by the stables when the Master came riding down the road between the overseer’s house and the new dung pit. Most of the slaves went right on with their tasks, which was odd to Caesar. In Jamaica, they would all have stood and tugged their forelocks until the Master passed. But this was a freer place, so he raised his face and smiled before realizing that he had been warned against just such, by both white and black. It caused an
odd spasm to cross his face, which stopped his master in his tracks.

“Bailey, find out what Julius Caesar means by that long face of his.”

“Stop there, boy.”

Caesar stood in confusion, knowing he was in the wrong but resentful, as well. He was only seeking to please, even if that thought didn’t sit well. He kept his buckets on the yoke and his head down. This generally worked in Jamaica.

“I saw that look, Caesar. What did you mean by it?” Bailey sounded more concerned than angry. He was reputed a fair man among the blacks, not like some awkward bastards they all knew.

A few seconds gave Caesar all the time he needed.

“Yoke bit mah shouldah, suh.” He raised his eyes for a moment, then back down. “I did’n mean no ha’m.”

Queeny had ordered him to stop speaking his “new way”. It didn’t please him, and he practiced in secret, both the language of his master and the language of the pulpit. But it seemed to work on Bailey, who was more relaxed with him when he spoke like the rest of the men.

Bailey rode back to Washington. “I think he had a spasm, sir.”

Washington watched the boy hike his buckets again as if seeking comfort, and a little water trickled out of each and ran off into the dust.

“I cannot abide rebellion, Mr. Bailey. But I’ll let this pass.”

Bailey could only put it down to temper. His employer never watched the blacks like some white men Bailey had known, and there was little rebellion to be found at Mount Vernon. Bailey suspected that most slaves were as smart as he—smart enough to know that they would not be as comfortable anywhere else if they were sold from Mount Vernon. The African boy was no more a rebel than the others, but the big man on the horse was in a foul temper,
and he didn’t seem to like the dogs boy at the best of times. Bailey wondered why. The boy was quite clearly gifted, and everyone else on the farm knew it.

Martha Custis, as she was then, had two children by Jack Custis before he died and she became Mrs. Washington. He loved them both, though Patsy had been frail and Jack was the very model of a wild rich boy. As Jacky got older and more spoiled by his mother, his demands on his estates grew larger, until Washington had separated them off from the other Custis and Washington holdings so that Jack could only affect his own. But this separation had been on paper only, and the final books that would allow a grown-up and married Jack Custis the full enjoyment of his own estates were a difficult and unrewarding task. Washington didn’t resent the loss of revenue. It was nothing as simple as that. He had enjoyed commanding one of the largest sets of estates in Virginia, and he would miss many of the useful details from Jack’s land. Among other details, Jack had the best farrier in Virginia, and now Washington would have to pay to use him.

He sought to repair his acreage in the Ohio country, where the grants to veterans of the last war would give him something like a hundred thousand acres of new land, beautiful land with big trees and fresh soil. He wanted to farm on that sort of scale, and he sometimes dreamed about what the Ohio might be like in his old age, if he got to put his schemes into production.

Selling off Martha’s other child’s estates was also trouble. Patsy’s death had upset Martha very much—so much, indeed, that she was just recovering. Patsy had always been a sickly child and no one who knew her well had expected a long life for her, but as she reached her teens and continued to dance and read, the Washingtons had begun to imagine that she might live a normal life, marry and have children of her own.

Selling her shares of stock in London would clear the very last of his debts, but the details seemed to drag, and he sat with his pen scratching carefully away on the business of his farms and his livelihood while he could hear the real life of his estate going on behind him—horses being led out and walked, sheep being fed, chickens, and then the distant music of his hounds. The boy was feeding them.

He got up and walked out, his anger rising from a small curiosity to a rage before he reached the kennel. The boy was rolling balls of bread and soaking them in broth, then throwing them to each hound by name. It was a curious ritual, and not the way he did the feedings himself. It neither slowed his anger nor increased it. It was a subject for another day.

“Caesar! I told you to call me every day before the dogs were fed.”

Caesar fairly leapt in the air at the sound of his name, and his sudden tension threw the dogs into confusion. They sensed their master’s anger and the boy’s worry, and some barked. Others milled, biting each other. Caesar recovered and moved slowly, trying for calm. Washington had to look at the scars over his eyes.

“Sorry, suh.”

“Is that all, boy? You are sorry?”

Bailey was hurrying out from the overseer’s house, his coat off, clearly torn from his supper. Someone had seen the Master headed for the kennel and called him out. Washington resented this as an intrusion.

“Caesar, did you forget, or were you deliberately sullen? Answer me, boy.”

The slave looked up to him slowly, and his eyes were a little hard—not reproachful or hurt, as might be expected from an innocent slave, nor wary or deceitful, either. Washington was a good judge of men, and this one was hard to read. The eyes held his for one flash, then were cast down.

“I’m sorry,
sir.
I
didn’t
do it on purpose.” The sentences were delivered like a verdict; the enunciation was strong and crisp.

Bailey wiped some crumbs from his chin but stayed mute, waiting for the explosion, worried that the enunciation might be read as rebellion.

Washington waited with the rest of them, balanced on the sword’s point of his own conflicting feelings of anger and fairness, until fairness won out. The boy had done nothing. If called, he would not have come to the feeding. His business held him, and he was still angry at Muse’s letter, at his stepson’s stubbornness in marrying a Maryland papist without reflection, at the loss of prestige involved in Jack’s estates. It was a witch’s brew of discontent and no mistake; he was fair enough a man to know that the black boy had little to do with it.

The boy’s way of speaking was another matter entirely, but like his careful feeding of the dogs, it needed to be dealt with another time. The boy was arrogant; arrogance had no place in a slave, a point he had made to Bailey countless times.

“Look at me, Julius Caesar.” His voice was calm, and as he hoped, the eyes that met his were not hard or rebellious, but concerned now.

“Always call me before the dogs are fed.”

“I won’t forget again, suh.”

Washington shook his head, smiled very slightly, made a small bow to Bailey, and went inside. Bailey stopped a moment longer.

“For God’s sake, call him next time. Or you’ll be the worse for it, young Caesar. I can’t be plainer than that.” He tried to project a number of pieces of information through those sentences, because he worried about fairness at times. But his dinner was waiting, and his wife. His wife often chided him about slaves. “Catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar,” she said, meaning
that a little conversation was often better than punishment. But he lacked the knack of it. She always carried herself above the blacks but spoke to them all the time; he couldn’t do it.

He wanted to warn the boy, but he couldn’t find any words that wouldn’t betray his own notions of loyalty to the Colonel. So he stood for a moment, a short man in his smallclothes with a napkin tied under his chin, leaning on the rail of the kennel. And when nothing came, he simply nodded to the boy, and went back to his dinner, his spirits lowered.