THE BOOK OF NEGROES (21 page)

Dolly whispered, “Got some African in her.”

I didn’t believe her. Nobody would let an African become boss woman of the whole land.

All the market vendors knew that Dolly worked for Lindo. She usually got her vegetables and spices from a Negro who sat alone on a stump that he hauled to market every day on his cart. He went by the name of Jimbo, and he had hair all over his face. A big, thick matting of hair. “He look bad,” Dolly said, “but he treat you right.”

“Hairy dog,” I whispered back to her.

“What Mr. Lindo want today?” Jimbo called out to Dolly.

“Best vegetables you got,” she said.

“Always de best for Mr. Lindo,” Jimbo said. “He keep me in business.

He is my kind of white man. I give you okra, snap beans, tomatoes and three chicken necks.”

“Lindo don’t eat your chicken necks,” Dolly said.

“I give ’em to you, so you loves me more,” he said.

“I been loved already by a runaway dog,” Dolly said, laughing and patting her belly, “and I don’t need no man no how. Put them necks here in this basket and I’ll cook them up for me.”

“Who is your little friend?” Jimbo asked.

“Don’t ask her African name. I can’t say it. We just call her Meena. Nice. Sweet. But she straight from low-country and don’t know a buzzard from a bathtub.”

“Why sure I know,” I said, sliding into the conversation. “Buzzard done drop his business on your head and bathtub what you done need yesterday.” Jimbo slapped his thighs in laughter.

“So what you do, Meena chile?” he said. “What you good at?”

“I am helping Dolly ’cause she getting big as a house.”

“Good gal,” he said. Turning to Dolly, he worked out the amount due.

“I don’t do numbers,” Dolly said to me. Turning back to Jimbo she added, “Mr. Lindo be by to pay you tomorrow.”

As we left the market we saw a white man leading five young Negro boys—all about eight years old with shaved heads and light complexions—along the street. As the boys walked, they danced, sang and clapped. A sixth boy—taller, bigger, about my age—walked behind them with a sign that read: COLOURED QUINTUPLETS. FOR HIRE. HOUSE PARTIES. ENQUIRE WILLIAM KING, WATER STREET.

I spotted William King with his fine clothes and upright posture. He glanced my way but looked right past me. The man who had once sold me to Robinson Appleby now had no idea who I was.

King’s coloured quintuplets wrapped chains around their ankles and then danced out of them. They took an orange and tossed it back
and forth, always dancing and half the time airborne. Emptying their pockets, they each began juggling three oranges. They sang something crazy, happy and meaningless, something that sounded straight from my homeland, although the words didn’t mean anything to me. “
Bokele bokele bo. Bokele bokele bo. Awa. Bokele bokele bo.”
They sang and clapped their hands while the oranges were looping through the air. Then they returned the oranges to a wooden crate, bent over and began walking around and dancing upside down and clapping their feet together as if they were hands.

A young bare-chested white man, perhaps just eighteen or so, ran into their midst and began hollering and dancing with the younger Negroes.

“White folks love these boys,” Dolly said.

“Why is that white boy acting crazy?” I said.

“Rum, I expect,” Dolly said. “There are fighting men all around town, drinking and waiting to get out and go home.”

“Who are they fighting?”

“Each other. The English and the French were killing each other and the Indians too.”

I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine such a thing. I had never seen white men fighting each other.

“White men fight about any old thing,” Dolly said. “Lindo tell me that a long while ago white folks went to killing themselves just because one of them cut off the ear of the other. Jenkins the man got his ear cut off, so they called it War of Jenkins’ Ear.”

The man who was leading the Negro boys chased off the bare-chested white dancer, and we watched the procession reach the end of the block and turn the corner. Dolly said she had heard that the man who owned the coloured quints made money by renting them out at house parties. I said it seemed strange to me that white people would take Negroes to a party.

“White folks is strange,” Dolly said. “They like their party-niggers light,
mixed up, mulattoes and mustees. The things they like is strange, and the things they don’t like is stranger.”

On the way back to the Lindos’ house, Dolly had to stop and rest. “My feets shouting loud as a churchman,” she said.

I loved the way Dolly spoke. Although she had a different way of speaking than Georgia, she still made me think of folks in St. Helena around a fire at night, poking the logs with sticks and telling stories. I had become entranced by the books of the buckra, but was equally taken by the languages of Negroes—tongues that made me feel at home. As I unfastened Dolly’s buckles, the words flew from my mouth.

“Your feets too swole fuh them red shoes,” I said.

“Shoes jes’ fine an’ I ain’t swole,” she said.

“I done catch babies all over the low-country. You get big wit’ chile, you feets swole up.”

“Young thing like you gwine catch my baby?”

“Come five moons,” I said.

“Gawd help me. You kill me sure as dog kill cat.”

THE LINDOS ATE THEIR MAIN MEAL in the middle of the afternoon. Dolly had to cook the meal and wash up afterwards, but once she got her tasks done she could spend her time as she pleased. She did not have to work on Saturdays, as that was the Lindos’ Sabbath, but she was expected to prepare their Sabbath meal the night before. The Jews in Charles Town had taught one of their slaves to butcher meat according to their beliefs, and Dolly stopped by the shop where he worked to pick up meat and chicken. Solomon Lindo and his wife also avoided pork. Perhaps he was right in saying that we were similar. I resolved that for as long as I lived with the Lindos, I would try to take meat in the way that they had it prepared. Dolly and I were often allowed to take the Lindos’ leftover food
and eat it in our back house, and Mrs. Lindo frequently gave us pomegranates, figs and cheese.

The land of Charles Town was shaped like a finger, bordered by the Cooper River on one side and the Ashley on the other. The tides rose and fell twice a day in town, and when the water pulled out, the mud flats could stink to high heaven in the broiling sun. Sometimes animals were found rotting in the flats. On other days the bodies of Africans washed up on shore, or were discovered when the tide went out. Whenever commotion erupted by the waterside, I knew better than to join the crowds. I couldn’t bear the sight of the bloated bodies.

One Saturday, Lindo allowed us to go to a fair out of town. Like the very Negroes I had watched with such confusion after coming off the slave ship, Dolly and I walked there without a thought of running away. At the fair, we watched bear-baiting and cockfights, and saw white men wrestling greased pigs while onlookers shouted and laughed and threw coins. The first man to wrestle a pig to the ground got to take it home. Dolly seemed relaxed, but I didn’t feel comfortable in the crowd of shouting and drinking white men. I worried that their boisterous happiness could erupt into anger at any minute. If it did, I’d be pressed right among them, just as I had been on the ship.

On the way back through the town, we passed the Sign of the Bacchus punch house. It had a written notice: White Negro Girl, grey eyes and white hair. I tried to spy her through the swinging doors, but only caught a glimpse of light-skinned Negro women drinking at a counter with white men.

“Buckra like their niggers white,” Dolly said. “High yellow, washed out, with just a little taste of African.”

I didn’t entirely believe Dolly. I remembered Robinson Appleby. And many men stared at me in the streets of Charles Town.

Walking through town, especially on the days that Dolly was too tired
to join me, I had found that I had to be careful. In plain daylight, a white man tried to grab me and pull me into a tavern. I wrenched my arm free and ran away. The very next day, a tall Negro man in the fish market put his hand on my breast and tried to pull me by the wrist. “Come to my boat,” he said, “I have a gift for you.” I fled from him, too.

SOLOMON LINDO LET ME GROW ACCUSTOMED to Dolly’s routines and learn my way about Charles Town. I grew attached to my new comforts. I slept more and ate better than at any time since I had left my homeland. One day, Lindo called for me to join him in his parlour. He said his wife was out discussing books and music with her friends, but that she knew he had been planning to speak with me. Lindo fixed me a glass of lemon cordial with three pieces of ice—I loved ice more than anything else on those hot, sticky Charles Town days—and looked at me once again.

“I am not sure how you managed to learn to read,” he said.

I sat a little more rigidly in the hard-backed chair.

“But I don’t have to know,” he said. “You are keeping that confidence, and you must keep this one too. I am prepared to teach you to read even more than you can read now.”

He asked if I would like that. I nodded. He said that he and Mrs. Lindo were going to give me lessons in sums and writing. Charlestonians would not take kindly to any Negro reading, he said, so this would have to remain a secret in the house.

“Yes,” I said.

“Dolly says you’re not one for cooking,” he said.

“That’s right, sir.”

“Not to worry. I have something else in mind for you. How do you like being a servant in this household?”

“Like it right fine, Master Lindo.”

“Good. Then I want you to start paying your own way.”

“Paying?”

“There are ten thousand people in this town, and more than half of them are Negroes. You are going to start catching babies in Charles Town.”

“Whose babies?”

“The babies of Negro servants,” he said, “although I know some Jews who might want to use you too. I’m putting you on the self-hire system.”

I sat forward in my chair. “Self-hire?”

“You will work in the mornings on my books, keeping accounts. I’m going to teach you how to do that. And when you are not busy with that, you will start catching babies. With what you earn from that, you are going to start paying me ten shillings a week.”

Solomon Lindo began teaching me for two hours a day, early in the morning before his long days of work. He promised to give me a book of my own if I could learn all about money in South Carolina. And he showed me a notice he had placed in the
South Carolina Gazette:
“Skilled midwife. Obedient, sensible Guinea wench. For hire. Enquire of Solomon Lindo, King Street.”

“What does ‘midwife’ mean?” I asked him.

“A woman who catches babies.”

“And what is a ‘wench’?”

“Woman,” he said.

“Is Mrs. Lindo a wench?”

He sat up straight. He rubbed his hands, then looked at me directly. “She is a lady.”

“I’m not from Guinea,” I said suddenly. The anger in my own voice surprised me. I jumped up from the table, knocking over an ink pot. “And I’m not a wench. I had a baby and I would have it now but Master Appleby stole him away. I am no wench. I am a wife. I am a mother. Aren’t I a woman?”

Lindo righted the ink pot, patting paper over the spill. He gave me
a little smile. “It is only a term for the newspaper. Calm yourself. I will avoid the word if it causes offence. But what’s wrong with Guinea?”

He was peering at me brightly. He seemed to be enjoying himself. I didn’t like the way his eyes paused on my body.

“Guinea means nothing to me, so how can I be from it? I am from Bayo. It is my village. Have you heard of that?”

“It’s a big, dark continent. I don’t know it at all. Nobody does. Enough chatting, Meena. We have work to do.”

A ledger was a record of what you had. Keeping books meant writing down what you spent and what you earned. That was where things got complicated. Lindo said you could get something in one of two ways. One way was to pay for one item by offering something else in return.

“Like Georgia gets rum or cloth for catching a baby,” I said.

“Exactly why I purchased you,” Lindo said. “I knew you would catch on fast. I saw the intelligence in your eyes and I wanted to lift you up.”

“Lift me up?”

“Give you a chance to use your God-given abilities.”

No white person had ever spoken to me like this, and I didn’t trust him.

“Do you have a religion, Meena?”

“My father used to pray to Allah,” I said, “and I was learning from him.”

“So you are a Muslim and I, a Jew. You see, we are not so very far apart at all.”

I fiddled with the quill and the ink pot. I did not feel like meeting his eyes. But Solomon Lindo kept speaking.

“Our religions come from similar books. Your father had the Qur’an, and I have the Torah.”

It astounded me that Solomon Lindo could name the book my father had shown me, in Bayo.

“In my faith,” he said, “it is considered a very good thing to give another person what they need to become independent, and to take care of themselves in the world.”

Then why, I wondered, didn’t he set me free?

I believe he sensed the coldness in my eyes, because he turned abruptly back to our lessons.

LINDO EXPLAINED THAT I COULD either barter for an object, or pay with copper, silver or gold coins. This confused me. It made no sense to me that someone would prefer to be paid with a useless metal coin than with five chickens or a tierce of corn. Lindo put some coins in my left hand and told me to imagine that I had a live chicken in my right. I was to imagine myself going to market with only these two possessions, he said. A person selling oranges would gladly take my coins, but only a person who needed the chicken would accept it as payment.

“But what if the coins become useless?” I said. “People will always want a chicken, but will they always want an ugly metal disc? It has no beauty and it can’t be eaten. If
I
were selling oranges, I would take the chicken.”

Lindo tapped the table. “This is not a debate. It is a lesson. Are you ready to continue?”

I nodded.