Remember the Morning (5 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: Remember the Morning
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Johannes said something to the old man that troubled him. The word “will” was mentioned several times. Cornelius gazed at his surviving son in a heavy mournful way. I recognized the same discouraged look my Seneca mother had often cast on her white daughter. She loved me but there was always the wish that I were different, more attractive and popular. Cornelius wished his son was a better man.
I watched my grandfather struggle to overcome the regret that was engulfing him. “Well, at least I have the consolation of seeing this beautiful creature before I die,” he said in Seneca, gazing fondly at me.
Gertrude Van Vorst said something harsh to Cornelius. I saw that my grandfather disliked his daughter-in-law. I watched as she began lecturing him in a sharp voice. Now I know she was warning him that I was a savage who would need constant watching and discipline if there was to be any hope of civilizing me.
“Is she telling you that I tried to stab my cousins with that little knife?” I said in Seneca. “I thought they were going to torture me with the strange metal thing they tried to strap on me.”
“I understand, my darling,” Cornelius said. “You will come home with me now—I'll explain it all later.”
“What about my friend Clara?” I asked as Cornelius led me to the door. “They've treated her very badly. I don't know why. Can she come to your house with us?”
Cornelius asked his son Johannes a sharp question. His reply included that baffling word “slave.” He gestured to the basement door to explain where Clara had gone.
Cornelius shook his head angrily and pointed to me. After several tense exchanges between the father and son, Johannes summoned Clara from the basement. Gertrude Van Vorst made one more attempt to protest her release.
“She will live with us!” Cornelius thundered. It was another sentence I found easy to remember, although I did not understand it at the time.
Clara and I departed with the old man, followed by the yellow-haired giant and his father, who continued to gaze sadly at us. Johannes and Gertrude Van Vorst said nothing, but their eyes were livid with dislike or fear—perhaps both. Why?
“
S
LAVE?” CLARA AND I SAID, ALMOST in unison. “I still don't understand.”
Grandfather had tried to explain slavery to us a half dozen times. He finally decided only seeing was believing. On our second day in his house, he bundled Clara and me into his coach and we rumbled to the East River docks. There we watched black men emerge from the hold of a ship. Many of them were strong-looking young warriors—except for the lack of flesh on their bodies. Their bones were almost visible beneath their skin. They resembled Senecas during a bad starving time. Grandfather explained the ship had captured them in a place called Africa and carried them across the Great Ocean to New York.
One by one the black men were led to a platform in the center of the dock, where many white men clustered. Another white man stood on the platform and pointed to each black man and made a speech to the crowd. The white men in the crowd shouted back to the man on the platform and eventually the black man was handed over to one of them, when he gave the man on the platform a certain number of gold and silver coins. The buyer marched the black man to a carriage or a wagon and rode away.
“They buy them exactly as you buy a dress or a horse or a plow,” Grandfather said. “They own them in the same way.”
“Did her father buy me?” Clara said, looking at me for the first time with unfriendly eyes.
“No. He bought your mother and your father from me. But under the law, you too became his property. When Catalyntie's father and mother died, under the law you became her property.”
“What kind of law is that?” Clara cried.
“A bad law, my dear girl. But a law nonetheless. A law that men enforce with guns and whips and penalties.”
“Then I must do Catalyntie's bidding forever?” Clara said. “She has become my mother and father?”
“The stupid law means nothing to me,” I said. “I'll never order you to do anything. I love you. I'll always love you.”
“As soon as it can be arranged, I hope we can free you,” Grandfather
said. “It can't be done immediately. You must learn some trade, so you can support yourself. Otherwise you'll starve. White men don't share their food and clothing like Senecas.”
“Why should I believe you?” Clara said. “Maybe it would be better if I ran away now. There is a warrior in Shining Creek who loves me and wants to marry me.”
“Your father Joshua was my brother,” Grandfather said. “Together we went into the wilderness, long before you were born. We brought back the furs that began the New Netherlands Trading Company.” The old man's voice grew thick with sorrow. “He was a great warrior, as brave as any Seneca. I promised him one day his children would be free.”
Tears poured down Clara's cheeks. She clung to Cornelius Van Vorst. Her
orenda
told her he had a truthful heart. “You shall be my father now,” she said.
She embraced me too. “You will always be my sister,” she said.
“Always,” I said.
If either of us knew how much pain those words would cost us, would we have refused to speak them? Probably not.
Looking out the windows of Grandfather's house that evening, we saw two women standing on the corner wearing brightly colored clothes. Whenever a man walked by, they raised small tin lanterns to their faces, which were covered with red and white paint. We asked what they were doing.
“They're whores,” Grandfather said. “They're trying to sell their love to those men.”
I remembered Uncle Johannes using the word on the sloop. Neither Clara nor I could grasp the idea of a woman selling herself for money. “Without hope or interest in a husband?” I said.
“Whores don't marry,” Grandfather said. “They're considered bad women by respectable people. But I've known a few in my time who were as good in their own way as any Christian in the pews of our best churches.”
“Why are they considered bad women?” Clara asked. “If they haven't married, they can't be unfaithful to their husbands. Did they refuse to work in the cornfields? Did they neglect their children?”
With a groan of exasperation, Grandfather called for his coach. Together we rumbled to a winding road called Pearl Street, which ran along the river on the eastern side of the city. On corners in the twilight stood dozens of these women with red and white paint on their faces. Grandfather said they took a different man into their beds each night for a silver Spanish dollar—perhaps two dollars if the woman was pretty. Clara and I could only exchange bewildered, appalled looks.
So much to learn, so much to understand! Grandfather hired Harman
Bogardus, a young Dutch divinity student with thin shanks, a solemn mouth, and cheerful eyes to help Clara and me shed our Indian identities. From the start, at my insistence, he treated us with complete equality. Clara had no interest in learning Dutch, however, while I spent extra hours struggling with that tongue as well as English. I also showed a surprising proficiency in arithmetic. Within a few weeks, I could look at a column of numbers and add them at a glance.
At first we learned with a certain reluctance, determined to compare Seneca knowledge with white knowledge. That changed when Bogardus showed us a map. We had never seen one of these wondrous things, which enabled a man or woman to look down on the world with God's eyes. Clara was especially fascinated. For her a map was a magical thing. She ran her finger along the wide line of the Hudson and followed it north to the Mohawk, retracing our journey from the shore of Lake Ontario. The lake was a great eye with our Seneca village a tiny dot on its lid.
The map convinced us that white power was greater and wiser than Indian power. Somehow, the whites had entered the mind of the Master of Life and brought his knowledge down to earth and printed it on paper.
But white politics, which the map was supposed to introduce, proved to be almost as difficult for us to understand as prostitution and slavery. When Bogardus said the province of New York was owned by the King of England, we asked to see a picture of him. We were astonished to discover he was a fat old man in a grey wig.
“Was he a great warrior when he was young?” Clara asked. “Has he many scalps on his war belt?”
Bogardus shook his head.
“How did he become king?”
“His father was king before him. The crown belongs to him by divine right. It's God's will.”
I could see Bogardus did not believe a word of this.
“Has the king ever come to America to claim his power over us?” Clara asked. “Has he led war parties against our enemies, the French and the Ottawas?”
Bogardus shook his head.
“Why do we owe him any allegiance?” I asked.
“He's the father of the country,” Bogardus said. “His navy, his army, his judges and governors, keep order here and in the other provinces of his empire, just as a father governs a family.”
“A mother can govern a family far better than a father,” I said, speaking from my Seneca heritage.
I thought even less of the king when my grandfather told us how a British fleet had seized New York from the Netherlands in 1664, when he was a boy of fourteen. “That was nothing but thievery!” I said.
Grandfather explained that the two countries had been at war, which permitted such conquests. “Perhaps there'll be another war and the Dutch will take it back,” Clara said.
Grandfather shook his head. “Our power has declined while England's never ceases to grow. Their merchants rule the trade of North America. If a man is Dutch or any other nationality, he must be careful not to offend them. They can ruin his business overnight.”
“They're tyrants, like the ancient Romans,” I said. We had just finished reading about these people in a history book Harman Bogardus gave us.
Grandfather laughed and lit his pipe. “A good comparison,” he said. “The English talk more about liberty. They claim to be very proud of it. But they never had to fight for it the way the Dutch fought the Spanish.”
He told us about the series of wars the Dutch had fought in Europe for almost a hundred years to drive the Spanish out of their country. “The Dutch are the real lovers of liberty. Never forget that.”
The next day, I pursued another branch of this conversation. “What is a merchant?” I asked Grandfather.
“A man or woman who buys goods in one place and sells them in another place for a profit.”
“There are women merchants?”
“It's always been a tradition among the Dutch. My mother kept the books and managed our store on Pearl Street while my father was away on trading voyages. She made more money from the store than he ever did from his voyages and loaned it out at interest. No one got higher rates.”
I found the idea of interest on money especially fascinating. “If it's well sown and watched, money will grow like corn or squash,” Grandfather said. “It can be as fruitful as an apple tree or a cornfield.”
“A Seneca woman is trained to do such things well,” I said. “But if I become a merchant, I'll never bow down to the English!”
“If I become one, I'll never bow down to white people!” Clara said.
Grandfather looked alarmed. He threw his big arms around us. “Let me tell you both the secret of making your way in the world. You have to bow down now and then to those who are richer and more powerful. But you must never bow down in your heart. That's the great thing to avoid.”
Clara disagreed with this advice. “I can never be false to what my heart speaks,” she said.
“The world will break your heart, my dear, if you try to live that way.”
I heard sorrow in Grandfather's voice. Did he know that the world would probably break Clara's heart, no matter what she did? Perhaps that was why he did not press the argument. Instead he returned to describing the merchant's life. He said it was full of risks and anxiety.
A merchant had to be prepared to make long dangerous journeys in search of new goods to sell; he had to fight rivals for a share of the market.
“That's why I sent your father into the Mohawk country,” he said to me. “To fight the Albany merchants for a fair share of the fur trade. They were on their way to creating a monopoly of it—always a bad thing in business. Now that I know from you the full story of what happened, I think the Senecas who raided the house that day were sent on purpose by men who were ready to commit murder to protect their profits.”
“A Seneca would never kill for hire!” Clara said.
“White men from Albany told them lies that persuaded them to do it for honor,” Cornelius said. “If my health improves, I hope we can journey to your village next summer and speak to warriors who were in that war party. Perhaps we can find out the names of these Albany murderers and bring them to justice.”
Murder for profit
. The words burned themselves into my heart, leaving ugly scars. I lay awake nights for a week, remembering the terrible day in the house on the Mohawk, grateful to Grandfather for removing the blame from the Senecas, hungering for revenge against the faceless merchants of Albany.
Harman Bogardus had even more trouble explaining the Christian religion to us than he had had describing the British empire. As soon as we could read, he gave us the New Testament. We found Jesus a very confusing figure.
“Sometimes he talks like a warrior, sometimes like a sachem,” I said. “Which was he?”
“He was neither. We believe he was the Son of God,” Bogardus said. “The Great Spirit, the being Indians call the Manitou, the God above all gods, inhabited his flesh during his time on earth.”
“We're all sons and daughters of the Manitou,” Clara said. “Many times he enters our flesh and speaks with our tongues.”
“No, no,” Bogardus said. “Only once in history has this happened. Without faith in Jesus as the only true Son of God, there is no salvation. If you lack faith in Him, you'll go to hell.”
The cheer vanished from Bogardus's eyes. He meant every word of this pronouncement. Both greatly upset, Clara and I asked Grandfather what he thought of Jesus. He shut the doors to the parlor and made us promise we would never repeat what he was going to tell us. With great uneasiness he confessed he did not think Jesus was a god. He was a good man, a kind man, a wise man, who was betrayed by his enemies and died a painful death.
“There are many in this city who would blacken my name if I admitted this in public,” Grandfather said. “Profit by my example and go to church
now and then and pretend to believe what they preach from the pulpit. In your heart believe what you please.”
I decided I did not believe in Jesus. I was not even sure I accepted a Manitou who permitted my parents to be murdered so brutally in front of my eyes. Clara, on the other hand, admired Jesus deeply, the more she read about him. She decided he was one of those rare spirits through whom the Master of Life spoke profound truths. She was especially moved by the passage in Luke where Jesus proclaimed the heart of his teaching.

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