THE BOOK OF NEGROES (35 page)

“Were you married when this child seeded up in your belly?”

“I sure was. My man is Chekura. Like I told you before, I was supposed to sail with him to Annapolis Royal, but I got pulled off the boat and he had to go on. I don’t know where he is. I don’t even know if he made it to Annapolis Royal. But I was hoping he’d show up today.”

“Today?”

“Yes, that’s what I was hoping.”

“If he was coming, he’d be here already. Take it from me. I know the ways of men.”

“He’s coming,” I said. “I just know it.”

“Why are you so sure?”

“I’ve got to believe in something,” I told him.

“Amen,” Daddy Moses said.

“And now, I have a question for you.”

“Let me hear it, then.”

“If you are stone blind, why do you wear spectacles?”

“I like the way they rest on my nose, and they give me a certain dignity.”

“But the glass is gone.”

“Fell out after I had the pox. I never bothered to replace it.”

“What does it look like inside your eyes?”

“It looks like nothing at all,” he said. “I see nothing. No light. No darkness. It is as if I have no eyes whatsoever, but I remember what things look like.”

We sat in silence for a while. Then I put some water in an old iron pot on top of the stove.

“What that water heats up,” Daddy Moses said, “can you put some kick in it?”

“I have some lemon, rum and sugar.”

“Here in Birchtown, we call that preacher’s lemonade.”

“Why?”

“The sheriff stopped one of our men at a frolick in Shelburne and asked what he was drinking,” Daddy Moses said. “And our man said, ‘Ain’t nothing but the preacher’s lemonade.’”

Daddy Moses and I took our hot drinks and spent hours talking while my contractions grew more intense. Finally, when my body felt ready, I pushed over and over and over again, but I could feel no head with my hand. I didn’t even know how close I was, and I started to fear having that baby stuck forever in me, plugged up and suffocating and killing both of us.

I took another sip of preacher’s lemonade and suddenly my body heaved.

While the reverend held my hand, I pushed and I grunted one more time. Seated with my back propped up and my legs wide open, I pushed for all the life inside me. I felt the head slide through me, and on the next wave I pushed out the rest of my baby.

Looking down, I reached for the newest person in the world and lay back with her planted flat on my chest.

“Land sakes, good woman, tell me what you’ve brought into this world.”

But in that moment I wasn’t thinking of Daddy Moses or of the sex of my child. I felt the heart pounding against my baby’s chest, let my hand drape softly on her back and covered us both with a dry blanket that I had kept ready beside the bed. That little heart hammered right against mine.

I NAMED MY DAUGHTER MAY, after her month of birth. When she had her little fits—perhaps I took too long to bring her to my nipple, or to mash boiled potatoes and greens as she grew older—I called her Little May First, after the very day she was born. I didn’t know what to make of the girl’s temper. Sometimes it seemed that all the wrongs of the world were pent up in her soul, waiting for any excuse to erupt. Before she turned one, she howled and pounded my back to be let down and allowed to stumble about on her own. She loved being held by the other women in Birchtown and especially by Mrs. Alverna Witherspoon, a white Loyalist who came to our aid not long after my daughter was born. But when May had enough of substitute mothers and wanted to get back in my arms, she raised the roof if she met with delays.

Wherever I went—teaching, working in the print shop and catching babies—I kept her swaddled to my back with a fine yard of indigo-coloured
cloth. I talked to her about everything, even before she could understand. I felt that the sound of my voice had to make up for all the things she lacked—a father, and the traditions of my native village. I even explained to her that I had bought the cloth that kept her close to me at Everything in the World in Shelburne and that only a few shops in town welcomed Negroes. “You need to know where it’s safe to go, and where it isn’t,” I said to her.

Alverna Witherspoon came into Theo McArdle’s print shop many times before we got know each other. Her husband ran a whaling business, and Mrs. Witherspoon brought in his advertisements twice a month. McArdle always dealt with her while I remained at the back of the shop, minding misplaced
p
’s and
q
’s and other spelling mistakes in beds of upside-down letters being readied for printing. But one day I was setting type alone in the store when Mrs. Witherspoon came in.

“Is Mr. McArdle here?” she said.

“He has gone out on an errand, Mrs. Witherspoon,” I said.

“How did you know my name?”

“You come in every week.”

“I’ve seen you in here with that baby, but I’m afraid I don’t know either of your names.”

“Well, this little one who likes to try to grab letters out of the composing stick is May. And I’m Meena.”

“I gave Theo an advertisement this morning.”

“Yes, for whale oil. I was just setting the letters.”

“I gave him the wrong price. For a firkin of oil, it’s not two pounds six shillings. It’s three pounds six.”

“I can fix that,” I said.

“Can you correct it before printing?”

“Just a minute,” I said. I removed a few pieces from a bed of letters, let May hold one—she liked to run her fingers over the ridged lines—and replaced them. “Done,” I said.

“Done?” Mrs. Witherspoon said. “Can I see that?”

“It’s rather complicated. The letters are upside down and in a big tray, and I’m rushing to finish up before printing. I can show you another time if you wish.”

She smiled at me brightly. “No, that’s just fine. Tell Mr. McArdle I said hello. You are quite a sight, looking just like an apprentice printer in that lovely African garb, and with a well-behaved toddler beside you to boot.”

“I was an apprentice last year. Theo doesn’t consider me an apprentice any longer. I set the type for him on Mondays, without supervision.”

“Please tell Mr. McArdle that I was by, and that I was taken care of wonderfully.”

May suddenly slipped away from me, ran to Mrs. Witherspoon and put in her hand the upside-down letter
M
from my composing stick.

“She’s normally more shy than that, with strangers,” I said.

“Thank you, dear,” Mrs. Witherspoon said to May. She winked at me and quickly put the letter back in my hand.

“No,” May shouted, pulling at my hand.

Finally, when I relented, she pried open my fingers, retrieved the
M
and gave it back to Mrs. Witherspoon.

Mrs. Witherspoon blew May a kiss, waited till she turned back to me, set the letter down on the counter and sailed out the door.

The following Monday, Mrs. Witherspoon returned and asked, “How many days a week do you work for Mr. McArdle?”

“Mondays and Tuesdays,” I said.

“How would you like to work Wednesdays through Saturdays for me?”

Mrs. Witherspoon and her husband hired me the next day. I did whatever they needed—cleaning their large house on Charlotte Street, ironing, hauling water and wood, setting fires, cleaning the fireplace, buying food and running other errands in town. I even cooked. They paid me a shilling a day to work from dawn to dusk. I preferred
print shop to the physical labour in the Witherspoon household, but the job offered certain advantages. I was allowed to take May with me, and to let her walk about and explore the house as long as she remained well behaved. The Witherspoons had no children but they frequently entertained and had leftover food. May and I were allowed to eat whatever was left or take it with us back to Birchtown. Mrs. Witherspoon showed me any household items that she was planning to throw out—old chairs, tables, buckets and rope. If I couldn’t use them, somebody else in Birchtown could.

My good terms with the Witherspoons left me envied in Birchtown. Many Negroes had indentured themselves to the Shelburne Loyalists for three-year periods. It was better than starving or freezing to death, but not much. A white Loyalist had every motivation to push an indentured Negro to the point of collapse by the end of the period. And some indentured Negroes who had become injured or ill were thrown out when they were no longer useful—with their salaries withheld.

“Don’t get too close to white folks,” Daddy Moses would warn me. “They can be fair-weathered friends.” Fair weathered or not, salaries paid by McArdle and the Witherspoons helped keep my daughter and me alive and often went to support others, such as Daddy Moses. I was still delivering babies in Birchtown, but it had been a long time since anyone could pay me.

May loved coming along when I worked in Shelburne. By the time she was three, she would receive biscuits and milk every week from Mrs. Witherspoon, who would sit with my daughter while she ate and played. One day, Mrs. Witherspoon wrote the letters
M
-
A
-
Y
on a sheet of paper.

“Do you know what—?”

“May,” my child said.

“How did you know that?” Mrs. Witherspoon asked.

“It’s my name.
M
-
A
-
Y
. May. Mama told me.”

“What about this?” Mrs. Witherspoon said, writing again.

“Mama,” May said.

“And this?”

“Papa,” May said. “He is missing some fingers and he loves me.” Mrs. Witherspoon glanced up at me. She knew that with McArdle’s help, I had long ago arranged for newspaper advertisements to be placed in Annapolis Royal, asking information about the whereabouts of Chekura. Nothing came back. Mrs. Witherspoon also knew that when May was one year old, I had enough money to take her along with me on a summer trip to Annapolis Royal, but we took the next ship back home: I hadn’t been able to find a single Negro who had heard of Chekura or knew anything about a ship called the
Joseph
having arrived in the fall of 1783. I had no idea what had become of my husband or where he was, but I still believed that if he was alive and if he was able, he would one day find me. I made sure that every Negro in Birchtown and every friendly white person in Shelburne knew I was waiting for Chekura, so that anybody meeting him or hearing about him could help us find each other.

A few weeks after May’s third birthday, when I was telling her about her father and our homeland, she said, “Don’t worry Mama, we will go back there one day.” I asked her how we would do that. “We will go for a long walk and take along lots of food in case we need to eat lunch and when we get to the end of the woods, we will find Africa.”

Soon after that conversation, my daughter developed a fever and diarrhea that had been circulating in Birchtown. I had to miss two days of working for McArdle, but could not afford to miss more days with the Witherspoons. I decided to take May along, thinking that Mrs. Witherspoon might let me fold up an old blanket so May could sleep while I worked. I carried May on my shoulders, but she was too weak to bend forward and place her hands around my forehead for balance. For
the entire walk into Shelburne, I had to keep my arms up to hold onto her hands. When we got to the household, my arms were exhausted and my daughter’s forehead was burning.

“Goodness’ sakes,” Mrs. Witherspoon said, “what have you done to our lovely May? Hello, May. Can you see me? Can you look at me? Here, dear. Look this way.”

May could barely keep her eyes open, and when I tried to put her down, she could not stand without help.

“Shall I call a doctor?”

“No,” I said, rather sharply. Then I tried to soften my words, because I needed her help and did not want to off end her. “I’m sorry but I don’t trust doctors. May just needs a little rest while I work.”

In a spare room on the main floor, close to where I worked, we put May in a bed, covered her up and brought her water every hour. At the end of the day, Mrs. Witherspoon offered to let us stay the night. I was deeply grateful, and even more so over the three days that it took before May’s fever broke and diarrhea ended and she began to eat again. Mrs. Witherspoon insisted that we spend a fourth night, to give May every chance to recover before the return to Birchtown. By that final day, May had made a full recovery and played with Mr. Witherspoon by trying to tug at his beard. I watched their tender play and wished again that my daughter could see her father. Chekura, I was sure, would have been like that with her. I loved every inch of my daughter and worshipped every beat of her heart, but I was not a playful mother. I did not have a lot of fun in me. I fed her, clothed her, taught her to read before her third birthday and took her everywhere I went, but I was too busy and too tired for games.

The experience of bringing May through the illness brought both of us closer to the Witherspoons. They gave us old blankets to take back to Birchtown, and even let me take an old wooden bed frame so that May
and I wouldn’t have to sleep so close to the ground. Now, each time I came to work, May was greeted at the door by Mrs. Witherspoon, who often entertained May while I worked. Mr. Witherspoon gave me whale lamp-oil until the summer of 1787, when his whaling business closed for lack of markets. The day the business closed, he and Mrs. Witherspoon insisted that we have supper with them and stay the night. I spoke about the long months of waiting before leaving New York, and they talked about having lost land and a good home when they left Boston and sailed to Shelburne during the Revolutionary War.

“Why are so many businesses closing?” I asked Mr. Witherspoon.

“They built this port in too much of a hurry,” Mr. Witherspoon said. “Everybody was convinced it would become the next New York. But the jobs never came. The people have no money to spend, and the businesses can’t sell their goods. This town will collapse nearly as quickly as it was built.”

An unusual heat wave settled over Shelburne and Birchtown in the month of July. The mosquitoes were meaner than any I had met in South Carolina, and bears came to the edge of town to eat berries off the bushes and to root through our garbage. Few of the Negroes had received land, and the British had cut off our provisions. Men hunted deer and moose to salt as much meat as they could for the winter. Most of the healthy men and women of Birchtown looked every day for work in Shelburne, but jobs were becoming harder to find. Mr. Witherspoon’s whaling operation was just one of many businesses to close. Wages were dropping—especially for the Negroes. At nine pence a day, Negroes carrying crates on the wharves made less than one-third the pay of whites. Businesses that did have work were often happy to hire the Negroes at the cheaper rate, but that left growing groups of white labourers—many of them disbanded soldiers who, like the Negroes, had come to Shelburne after serving the British in the war in the Colonies—gathering angrily in the alehouses. From their ragged clothing and worn faces, I could see that many of the
white men endured difficulties too, and I knew that for the Negroes, these were the most dangerous people of all.

One evening in late July, May and I had finished at the Witherspoons’ house and were walking down Charlotte to Water Street. May would usually walk until she was too tired; then I would swing her up on my hip for the rest of the way home.

“How far would you like to walk this evening?” I asked, holding her hand.

“To the first ale,” she said.

“The first ‘ale’ sign? That’s not far enough. How about to the end of Water Street?”

“No, Mama. Too many men. Up, Mama. Up now.”

I picked up my daughter and looked down the street. Near a sign that said milligan’s ale, a group of white men tormented a Negro labourer on a ladder.

“What you doing up there, boy?” one of the men shouted.

“Fixing the roof,” the labourer said, reaching for a hammer hanging off his work belt.

I pulled May out of sight between two stores, and peered around the corner of the building. I could see the men trying to shake the carpenter off the ladder. He grabbed the eavestrough to keep from falling. The men ripped the ladder away, leaving him dangling in the air.

A man in a white smock came out of the tavern. “Hey! Give that ladder back. This boy works for me, and he’s got a job to do.”

Two of the men shoved the tavern keeper back inside. The others taunted the dangling worker until he dropped to the ground. Then the men fell upon him with kicks and blows, carried him over to the wharf and threw him into the harbour.

The carpenter struggled out of the cold water, but they threw him in again and again. The men shouted that they would kill him if he got out one more time. When he did, moving slowly under his wet clothing, the
men beat him until he lay still. When they threw him once more off the pier, he did not come back out.

“Mama, what are they doing?”

“They’re hurting people,” I said. I wanted to hurry back to Birchtown. But the angry mob was growing outside the alehouse to my right, and another crowd was forming to my left on Water Street. I pressed May flat against the side of the building.