THE BOOK OF NEGROES (22 page)

We moved on to sums. One shilling plus another equalled two shillings. Two plus two made four. Lindo shuffled the coins quickly on the table. With one shilling, I could buy ten eggs. With five shillings, I could buy fifty. For two hours each morning and six days a week, we reviewed arithmetic. After adding and subtracting, multiplication and division came fairly easily. Solomon Lindo was making my mind gallop like a horse and I loved the challenge of keeping up with him.

Lindo’s next lessons concerned all the specie circulating in Charles
Town. There was the Spanish eight-reales coin, but it was simplest to call it a dollar. It wasn’t British, but silver was silver and it was one of the most common coins in Carolina. He showed me a Spanish dollar that had been cut into pieces. The eight triangular bits were used because there weren’t enough small coins. A Spanish dollar was worth six shillings, he said, and began to explain the relationship among pence, shillings, crowns, pounds and guineas. There were copper coins and silver, he said, but the guinea was made of gold.

“Guinea?” I said. “That’s the same word you used for my homeland.”

They were called guineas, he said, because they were made from gold taken from Ethiopia.

“From where?” I asked.

“Your land.”

“I thought you called it Guinea.”

“ We call it many things,” he said. “Guinea, Ethiopia, Negritia, Africa—they all mean the same.”

“And you have named your big gold coin after Africa?”

“The guinea. Worth twenty-one shillings.”

My mouth fell open. From my homeland the buckra were taking both gold and people, and using one to buy and sell the other.

I didn’t feel like learning any more that day, and was relieved to see the lesson end. As we stood and prepared to leave his office, Lindo said, “You will make me good money. And I will see that you are properly clothed and fed. You will be treated better than any Negro where you come from, I can guarantee you that.”

“I come from Bayo and I was born free,” I whispered. Solomon Lindo sat back. “I beg your pardon?”

“I was a freeborn Muslim.”

“Well, I was born in England. But we are in the Colonies now.”

I crossed my arms.

He stared at me for a minute, and said, “You will be free enough. You will be free to make extra money on self-hire, as a midwife. And I will collect a return on my investment. I spent a fortune on you.”

I was not a little surprised by the sarcasm of my own words: “And you paid this fortune in coins or chickens?”

Lindo looked stunned. Perhaps such words would not be tolerated. Perhaps I would be terribly beaten. But Lindo shook his head, stroked his beard and began to laugh. It was the first time I had said something to make a white man laugh. But it wasn’t at all funny to me.

LINDO TESTED ME FOR SEVERAL DAYS and decided that I had learned all his lessons about arithmetic and coins. As a gift, he gave me a book called
Gulliver’s Travels
by Jonathan Swift. My eyes fell across these words:

I was instantly full of desire to read the book. “It looks as good as Exodus,” I told him.

“And what do you know of that?” he asked.

I explained that I had been reading the Bible on St. Helena Island.

“We all talk about the Exodus, did you know that?” he said.

It seemed foolish to say too much, but I could not stop myself from blurting out a question: “What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that Jews and Muslims and Christians all have the story of the Exodus in our religious books,” Lindo said. “The Israelites are my people and Exodus is the story of our escape from slavery.”

I listened carefully to Lindo, and thought about what he was saying. The discovery was fascinating, yet confusing. Perhaps Lindo could explain why Christians and Jews kept Muslims as slaves if we all had the same God and if we all celebrated the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt.

How much had been paid for me, I wondered, and who had arranged to have me brought to this land? How were the black men who stole me from Bayo tied to the Christians and Jews who traded in slaves in South Carolina? Just as the world of the buckra was beginning to make a little more sense, it was becoming increasingly confusing. Answers only led to more questions.

Lindo interrupted my thoughts. “I have a hunch that an African can learn anything, if given the opportunity,” he said. “So let’s have an experiment and see how much you learn.”

Lindo placed one hand over the other. My eyes drifted to the ring on his finger.
Guinea
, I thought to myself.
Guinea gold. Use me if you must, but I will use you too.

SOLOMON LINDO HAD VARIOUS FORMS OF INCOME as the official indigo inspector for the Province of South Carolina. He didn’t get a salary, but the House of Assembly paid him five hundred pounds a year to calculate how many pounds of indigo were being shipped to Britain, and indigo producers paid him to grade their indigo mud and advise them about how to improve it. I kept his books, delivered his reminders of accounts due, and began, as a result of an advertisement that Lindo placed in the
South Carolina Gazette
, to be asked once or twice a week to catch babies in Charles Town and outlying areas. Lindo gave me the money to buy a
cloth bag and healing herbs and supplies from a market vendor. To show that I had the right to travel about town on self-hire, and to avoid being harassed or arrested by buckra, I had to pin to my clothes a six-sided tin badge stamped with my name and the year:
Meena. 1762.

At the market, I bought elderberry flowers and stewed them in lard to treat the bites of the chiggers—insects that hid in the Spanish moss hanging from the oak trees. I bought the root of cotton, as I was sometimes asked to stop a child from growing inside a woman, the same way Georgia had saved me when I was set upon by Robinson Appleby. I bought the bark from the wild black cherry tree, which I would soak in warm water to help women whose monthly bleedings were too strong. I acquired the root bark of the Georgia tree and the leaves of the American aloe for rattlesnake bites, because sometimes people came in to complain of such matters when I was helping a woman with her baby. Blackberry herbs were good for stomach pains and the runs, and tea made from the white sassafras root could cure blindness. Dogwood, cherry bark and red oak bark were good for tea to help with the fevers that plagued Negroes working in the swampy, dismal air.

After collecting my herbs and roots, I began to venture out to catch the babies of the slaves in town. I learned to negotiate with their owners as boldly as the women who hawked fish in the streets. I had to give Solomon Lindo ten shillings a week, so I began to charge slave owners twelve shillings for catching a baby. I always tried to have several weeks of payment stored up and hidden under a loose plank in the room where I slept with Dolly. Sometimes I earned nothing in an entire week. At other times, I was hired out a few times the same week and brought home one or two pounds. Masters sometimes refused to pay me in coins, but the only other payments I would accept were Madeira, rum, tobacco and high-quality cotton fabric. I knew how much of each were needed to make up twelve shillings, and I could trade them easily for the things I needed.

AFTER LINDO FINISHED OUR LESSONS about arithmetic, coins and keeping ledgers, his wife began to tutor me in the art of writing. Mrs. Lindo was happy to have me around, and she was a gentle teacher. She taught me how to write in smooth, flowing calligraphy, made sure I learned how to spell, and taught me how to compose words and sentences. I was desperate to learn the things that my father had begun to teach me years earlier, and I ate up every word of her instruction.
Dog. Bone. Cat. Tree. The dog bit the bone. The cat ran up the tree.
It was easy. It was thrilling. As I progressed, Mrs. Lindo left me alone to practise writing on my own.
Ten sea bass cost one shilling in the fish market. Indigo production will increase next year. One day I will go back home.

When Mrs. Lindo determined that I could write to her satisfaction, I began to compose business letters for her husband:

As the months passed and I managed to keep up my payments of ten shillings a week, I was allowed to read more and more books that Solomon Lindo brought home from the Charles Town Library Society. I read other books by Jonathan Swift. I read Voltaire. I read
The Shipwreck
by William Falconer. And while the candle burned late into the night in the backhouse room that I shared with Dolly, I read copies of the
South Carolina Gazette
, stopping always to look at the notices about runaway slaves.

As the time passed in Charles Town, I managed to acquire a fine red scarf, an indigo wrap, a pouch of Peruvian bark, and still save ten pounds of silver. I was not beaten once by Mr. or Mrs. Lindo, but I missed Georgia and Chekura terribly, and Mamadu was never far from my thoughts.

One evening, I had caught the baby of one of the few free Negroes in town. The mother was barely older than me, and her man had flown into the room the instant my work was done to hug her and hold the baby. When I returned home, I found Dolly asleep with her palm on her swollen belly. I sat on the edge of my bed, put my face in my hands and let my grief pour out. Dolly awoke in the middle of my tears.

“What’s the matter, honey chile?” The sympathy in her voice made me cry even more. Dolly got up out of bed and came to put her arm over my shoulders. “One day your man come back and you start all over again,” she said.

A FEW MONTHS LATER, I helped bring Dolly’s son Samuel into the world. The three of us lived together in the backhouse, the baby travelling on Dolly’s back as she went about her house chores and sleeping in her bed at night. It was comforting to have new life in our backhouse, but my body would sometimes ache at the sound of Samuel sucking and gurgling.

The Lindos were so pleased with the reports of my baby-catching that when the time came for Mrs. Lindo to have her first baby, she took me aside for a private conversation. “We’ve heard about the town doctor,” Mrs. Lindo whispered. “He bleeds the women in their labour.”

So I helped Mrs. Lindo bring a healthy boy named David into the world. To my surprise, the Lindos had the boy circumcised, just as we would have done in Bayo. A few weeks later, Mr. and Mrs. Lindo brought me into their parlour, offered me a cordial and asked if there was any little gift that I might like to have.

“Gift?” I said.

“Since you have been such a wonderful help to us,” Mrs. Lindo said. I thought for a moment. I asked if I could see a map of the world.

“Why do you want to see a map?” Mr. Lindo asked.

“She has read dozens of books,” his wife cut in. “She does everything we ask of her. I can’t see how it would hurt.”

“What do you seek to learn?” he asked.

“I do not know from where I come,” I said.

“You came from Africa. You crossed the ocean. We are in Charles Town. You already know these things.”

“Yes, but I do not understand where South Carolina is in relation to my homeland.”

Mr. Lindo sighed. “I don’t see why that is necessary.”

“Solomon,” Mrs. Lindo said, putting her hand on his knee. “Take her to the Charles Town library. Let her see the maps.”

He jumped up from the couch, knocking over his drink. “I had to grovel just to be let into the Society,” he shouted.

“Solomon, please,” Mrs. Lindo said.

I took a cloth from Mrs. Lindo to clean up the spill and kept my eyes on my work. Mr. Lindo had mentioned a few times that Jews had been slaves in ancient Egypt and that his own ancestors had been driven from Spain. He had told me that Jews and Africans could understand each other because we were both outsiders, but even though the man preferred the term
servant
to
slave
, he owned me and he owned Dolly and now he owned Dolly’s baby boy. He had a big house in town and he did business
throughout the low-country. He wore fine clothes and came and went as he pleased. He could sail to London on the next ship if he so desired.

I thought that Mr. Lindo would be embarrassed over losing his temper, but he did not seem able to contain himself.

“I’m good enough to be their indigo inspector, but can I vote in their elections? The Anglicans won’t even have me on their library board.”

I kept my eyes on my hands but could hear the tremor in Mr. Lindo’s voice.

Mrs. Lindo reached up, took her husband’s hand and brought him back to sit beside her. “Nobody has to grovel,” she said calmly, placing her hand on his arm. “You don’t have to ask to borrow the map. Just go in and look at it.”

“And Meena?” Lindo asked.

“Take her with you. She’s your servant.” Mrs. Lindo giggled. “Take a fan, Meena. Keep the flies away during his consultations.”

THE CHARLES TOWN LIBRARY SOCIETY kept its books and maps in a room on Union Street. The keeper of the books sat at a desk at the entrance. He glanced at me quickly and turned away, as if from something distasteful.

“Ah yes, Mr. Lindo,” he said. “I’m afraid we don’t allow Negroes here.”

“Mr. Jackson, don’t you have a brother in the indigo trade?”