THE BOOK OF NEGROES (37 page)

He turned away and looked to the floor. “Yes.”

“Where did they go?” I whispered. He did not hear me, so I repeated the question.

“Boston.”

“And you did not stop them.”

“I tried,” he said.

“What happened?” I said. “Tell me!”

“I left the store and followed them down to the docks.”

“My daughter, was she crying?”

“No.”

“Was Mrs. Witherspoon talking to her?”

“Yes, she was saying that you’d be along soon. I tried to speak to Mr. Witherspoon.”

“What did you say?”

“I asked if it wouldn’t be better to leave the child with me. Until you could come back to get her. There were guards on the docks, because of all the riots. Mr. Witherspoon told them I was causing a disturbance. I
backed away then, Meena. I shouldn’t have done it, I should have complained louder. But I backed off the pier when the guards came my way, and the Witherspoons left with your daughter.”

“Were there any Negroes by the docks? Any people who could speak to me?”

“No,” he said.

“And my daughter all this time?”

“In Mrs. Witherspoon’s arms.”

“Not crying or upset?”

“No. She had a tiny abacus—just a toy—and was pushing all the pieces.”

I could think of no more questions, and Theo McArdle had no more to say.

“I have barely eaten in days,” I said, “and I have friends in Birchtown with nowhere to live. Give me some food and I will leave you in peace.”

“I don’t have much.”

“Give me something to eat, Mr. McArdle. You let them take my daughter, and I need something to eat.”

From the back of his shop, McArdle brought me a two-pound bag of rice, a ham hock, a bag of peas and a loaf of bread. I took the food and left.

JASON WAS WAITING FOR ME at the edge of town. He had no food, but he did have a cut on his face. There was no work in town for him and no place to stay. Nobody but disbanded soldiers with guns ready, fists clenched, boots for kicking. Jason asked where my daughter was. I couldn’t answer. He didn’t ask again.

We trudged through the mud back to Birchtown. The woods were eerily silent, and free of marauding men.

“I have lost my daughter,” I whispered finally. “My last child.”

“Never say last,” Jason said. “Don’t say that, Missus Dee.”

“She
was
my last, Jason, and I am saying it because it is true. Don’t look for me to keep you alive again when we set foot in Birchtown. Because I am in the mood for dying.”

Jason slipped the load off my shoulder and hoisted up my sacks of peas and rice. I didn’t even think to protest, and I don’t know where the next thirty minutes went, except to disappear into a fog of despair. When we arrived we saw that more homes had been destroyed in Birchtown, but at least the white raiders were gone. Daddy Moses was sitting outside my cabin on a fallen log, waiting for me. Jason raised the old man up and we went back to my shack. Miraculously, it was still standing. The shack had more strength than I did.

For the next few weeks I was in such agony that I could barely speak. I tolerated Jason and Daddy Moses staying in my shack until they had their own place built, but I couldn’t think of teaching the Birchtown children, or catching any babies, or working again for Theo McArdle, or doing anything at all. I feared that if I expressed my feelings, so much pain would erupt from within that I’d lash out and kill somebody. I had no money to pay for a trip to Boston, and when I finally asked McArdle or any other whites in town about going there, they insisted that I could be arrested—and possibly enslaved—if I showed up in that city with no money and no person to stand up for me.

“We don’t know that they stayed in Boston,” McArdle said. “They could have gone to Philadelphia, New York or Savannah. They could have gone to Jamaica, Barbados, St. Domingue or England.”

With McArdle’s help, I placed newspaper advertisements in Boston, Philadelphia and New York, offering a small reward for any information about the whereabouts of the Witherspoons, formerly of Shelburne, Nova Scotia. I asked every white person who would speak to me in town, but not
one of them had any details about what had become of the Witherspoons. I even wrote to Sam Fraunces, care of President George Washington, Mount Vernon, Virginia. After six months, I got a friendly letter back, but Sam Fraunces hadn’t been able to find out anything, either.

My children were like phantom limbs, lost but still attached to me, gone but still painful. I stopped cooking, working and eating. For the first time in my life, I had no desire to read. I even stopped thinking about Chekura. Perhaps Daddy Moses was right. If Chekura had meant to come back, he would have returned long ago.

Daddy Moses asked if I was ready to let Jesus into my heart. I told him that I had had a faith when I was a young girl, that I had had to give it up, and that I wasn’t thirsting for another God in my life. He took my hands and turned to me as if he could see deep into my eyes. “But you are good, Meena. So many people love you.” Perhaps that was true, but I couldn’t see it and couldn’t feel it. All I knew was that the people I had loved more than anything else in life had all been torn from me.

I started attending Daddy Moses’s services again. I can’t say that they changed a great deal. People were kind, bringing me food, sitting to eat with me when they noticed that I would never eat alone, bringing by fresh lumber and branches and nails, when they could, to help fix up my little place. Jason and Daddy Moses dropped in on me every day. When they set up a class for me, I resumed teaching, and even though I didn’t really feel it, I tried to act like I loved the children I was showing how to read.

Eventually Theo McArdle persuaded me to come back to work for him, and I tried to be interested in the copy I wrote. When I was alone, I read whatever books McArdle could get for me. He found me a map of Africa, but in the interior there were only sketches of hills, lions, elephants and monkeys.

About a year after I lost May, I got a little lamp and a gallon of whale
oil in exchange for catching a white woman’s baby in Shelburne. It was the first baby I had caught since losing my own. The pain of my losses never really went away. The limbs had been severed, and they would forever after be missing. But I kept going. Somehow, I just kept going.

OVER THE NEXT FOUR YEARS, I could find no information about May. I believed that she was alive, but had no more idea about where she or the Witherspoons had gone than I did about the whereabouts of Chekura. Shelburne’s heyday had come and gone, and many Loyalists closed their businesses and returned to the United States. The blacks of Birchtown stayed, however, and I stayed with them.

Nearing what I assumed was my forty-fifth year, I had no objection to the silver threads slowly taking over my hair, and wasn’t embarrassed to be seen using spectacles with blue-tinted glass that I now needed to read newspapers and books. Theo McArdle had helped me order the spectacles from England, after explaining that they were double-hinged and contrived to press neither upon the nose nor upon the temples. The spectacles cost me two months of savings, but I had little else to do with extra money. I had no husband, no children, and no home other than
the cabin in Birchtown that I fortified each summer against the coming winter. Twice I had the opportunity to visit other churches in Nova Scotia with Daddy Moses and members of the congregation, but each time I refused. I lived in hope that my daughter and my husband would return, and did not want to be away on the day that they came looking for me.

In the spring of 1790, the Methodists crammed into Daddy Moses’ chapel to listen to a visitor from Annapolis Royal. He was a short, stocky fellow who looked a little older than me, and he spoke in a tone so flat that some parishioners fell asleep. But he seemed to have something urgent to say, so I slipped into the first pew to hear him better.

“My name is Thomas Peters,” he said. “Fourteen years ago I ran from the man who owned me in North Carolina. During the war I served the British in the Black Pioneers, and anybody who doesn’t believe me can come on up here and see my regimental papers. I’m just the same as the rest of you: I came to Nova Scotia seven years ago and I’m still waiting for my land. But now I’m tired of waiting and I’m going to do something about it.”

Thomas Peters said he was taking up a collection to travel to England. There, he said, he hoped to speak to members of the British Parliament about the landless Black Loyalists and the perpetuation of slavery in Nova Scotia. None of us imagined that anything would come of it, but contributed what we could. I admired Peters’ determination, and gave him ten shillings. After the meeting, I helped him write the conclusion to what he called his Memorial. “The poor friendless Slaves have no more Protection by the Laws of the Colony … than the mere Cattel or brute Beasts … and … the oppressive Cruelty and Brutality of their Bondage is particularly shocking, irritating and obnoxious to … the free People of Colour who cannot conceive that it is really the Intention of the British Government to favour Injustice, or tolerate Slavery in Nova Scotia.”

“Make no mistake about it,” Thomas Peters said as he thanked me. “I am going to England. And while I am there, I will not for one day forget the situation of our people.”

Peters’ boldness and ambition made me aware of how much my own will had weakened. There had been a time when I wanted nothing more than to go to England, and from there to find a way back to Africa. But now I would not travel. I stuffed moss in the spaces between logs to protect my cabin from the wind, and hauled wood from the forests to keep my stove burning through the nights. I had little left but the cabin, and worked each day to keep it clean and dry for Chekura and May. If they ever returned, I wanted the comforts of home to hold them forever. I tried to distract myself with work, but memories of Chekura and May shadowed me.

In Birchtown, we soon forgot about Thomas Peters. But the next year, he returned to our church to say that he had been to England and had met some white folks who were prepared to send us to Africa. It seemed ludicrous. He had no details to back up his story, and none of us believed him. Before he left, however, Peters promised that more information would come to us soon.

A few days later, while reading the
Royal Gazette
, I came across a notice from the chairman and twelve directors of the Sierra Leone Company in London, England: FREE SETTLEMENT ON THE COAST OF AFRICA.

The notice claimed that the Sierra Leone Company was willing to receive into its African colony Free Negroes who could produce testimonials of their character, “more particularly as to their honesty, sobriety and industry.” It said that every “Free Black” who could produce such a written testimonial would have a grant of twenty acres of land in Sierra Leone for himself, ten for his wife and five for every child. Blacks and whites would have the same civil, military, personal and commercial rights and duties in Sierra Leone, and it would not be lawful for the Sierra Leone
Company to hold any person in slavery or to traffic in the buying or selling of slaves.

Once I started reading the notice to people in Birchtown, others asked me to read it over and over again. I read it in Daddy Moses’ Methodist chapel. I read it in the Baptist church. I read it anywhere and everywhere that folks wanted to hear about it. I read the document aloud enough times to memorize it. Still, I could not understand who would be allowed to travel to Africa, how they would get there, how they could pay for the journey, or who was behind this scheme and why they were offering it. Everybody asked me where Sierra Leone was, but I did not know.

We soon discovered that it was unsafe to discuss the scheme publicly. In Shelburne, three men beat up a Negro cooper who stepped into a coffee house with a copy of the
Gazette
in his hand. Some people in Birchtown worried that all the talk of moving to Africa would amount to nothing more than an excuse for white people to riot against the Negroes again.

A few days later, an Englishman named John Clarkson rode into Birchtown on his horse, wearing his full uniform as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy. He was a young-looking man. I was about 46 that year, and he appeared to be half my age. Young, but earnest. He had a boy’s face, small nose, pursed lips. He was clean shaven but with wildly bushy sideburns. He asked to address Daddy Moses’ congregation. Hundreds of people crammed into Daddy Moses’ chapel and just as many crowded outside the doors, so we all moved outside. John Clarkson stood with his back to the ocean, brushing the hair out of his eyes. We gathered around him in a giant horseshoe shape, looking out at the bay.

John Clarkson had a high-pitched voice but it carried well. We stood motionless and silent so as not to miss a word.

“Reverend Moses, ladies and gentlemen, my name is John Clarkson, and I am a lieutenant with the British Navy. I am not here, however, on a
military mission. I am here on a civilian purpose, which is to offer those of you who are interested and eligible passage to Sierra Leone, in Africa.”

The people cheered so loudly that Lieutenant Clarkson had to wait for the roar to subside. I was stuck by his paleness, and could see a blue vein near his temple. His eyes were lively, however, and appeared to study all the people before him while waiting for them to settle down. His gaze fell on me. I imagined that his eyes were lingering on the orange scarf wrapped around my head. John Clarkson’s own hair was blond and receding. Bald spots extended back from the top of his forehead. He wiped sweat from his brow and buried his eyes in his palms, like a man who was fighting sleep because he had too much work to do.

When the crowd had grown quiet once again, Clarkson said that he had been born in Wisbech, a small port some ninety miles from London. He and his relations believed that the slave trade was a stain on Christianity. He said that he had become acquainted with the fact that Negroes who had served the British in the war against the rebellious Colonies had been denied land and opportunities in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

“I am here to tell you today that I have been authorized by the proper authorities in England to offer loyal Negroes passage to a new life in Africa.”

Clarkson went on to issue numerous promises to those who wished to found a new British colony in Sierra Leone. “Adventurers,” as he called them, would have the freedom to govern their own affairs. They would enjoy political and racial equality. They would have seeds for crops, implements to tend to them, and land to call their own.

“We don’t even have our own land here,” someone yelled.

“I cannot alter your circumstances in Nova Scotia,” Clarkson said, but the Sierra Leone Company would give free passage to the colony and land to all who went there.

“Where is this place you call Sierra Leone?” Daddy Moses called out.

Clarkson asked if he should draw a map. Everybody demanded one. “You realize,” he said with a grin, “that I failed all art classes in school.”

“So did we,” Daddy Moses said, to loud laughter.

Clarkson removed a quill and some paper from his carrying bag, and quickly sketched the contours of Africa. He drew it like a long oval, with the bottom left corner chopped out. North of a spot where the continent bulged to the west, he drew in a big dot and called it Sierra Leone. To the west, he said, was the Atlantic Ocean. To the northwest, something he called Wolof country. To the southeast, areas known as the Grain, Ivory, Gold and Slave coasts. When he had finished, he passed the paper through the crowd.

Clarkson said, “I did fail art, but I had to learn a little about maps in the Navy.”

I liked the warmth with which Clarkson spoke, and I liked that he said that many of us could teach him a lot more than he could teach us about Africa.

“Draw us a lion,” someone yelled.

“But it might look like an elephant,” he said.

When the laughter died down, Clarkson grew serious again. He said that all adventurers to Sierra Leone would have to refrain from dishonest, disagreeable, unchristian, and immoral behaviour. And reading from his notes, he said, “Criminality, drunkenness, violence, theft, licentiousness, adultery, fornication, bawdiness, dancing and any other displays of uninhibited emotion will be strictly forbidden.”

A few groans went up in the audience. One man standing near to me muttered, “Hell, man, we go all the way back home and can’t dance about it?” A few people sniggered, but Clarkson ignored them and continued.

Criminals and disreputable people would not be allowed to join the trip. Single women would not be permitted to journey alone, unless a man could vouchsafe for the integrity of their character and promise to ensure their welfare.

Clarkson asked for an assistant to take minutes of the meeting. Several people shouted my name.

“And who is this Meena?” Clarkson asked.

I stepped forward, so he asked me also, “Would you point me to Mr. Meena?” “I am Aminata Diallo.”

He scratched his sideburns and looked bemused.

“My name is Meena, for short,” I said. “You wanted a note taker, and I can help.” “You can?” John Clarkson lowered his hand.

His face lifted into a smile the likes of which I hadn’t seen in years. It was an
I am so indescribably happy to meet you
sort of smile. It was an
I think the two of us could be friends
sort of smile. To my great surprise, I felt the same way. I liked the man from the instant I met him.

I was given writing materials and a stool to sit on, and I took notes as the meeting continued.

Clarkson asked for the names of the leaders of the community, so that he could quickly obtain and relay information in the coming weeks. He was given the names of three ministers. He asked if anyone was opposed to the idea. One Birchtown resident named Stephen Blucke argued that Negroes should make the most of what they had in Nova Scotia. Why risk losing everything on a dangerous journey to an unknown land?

Rather than taking offence, Clarkson merely urged Blucke and any others who felt they were doing well to stay put in Nova Scotia. I liked the way Clarkson was confident enough to let folks speak their minds.

Clarkson took pains to answer every question. Word by word, he gained my respect. No, he said, the ships would not be slave vessels.

He raised his finger to emphasize a point. “Slavers of many nations still trade in men on the coast of Africa. Some of them do their vile work in Sierra Leone. But there will be no question of slavery in the colony we create.”

The Sierra Leone Company was directed by men whose life’s passion was to abolish slavery, he said. The ship or ships would be outfitted with modern conveniences and stocked with proper food so that every man, woman and child could cross the ocean in decent conditions.

Clarkson said he hoped that the adventurers would be on their way within two months, and said that it would take about nine weeks to sail from Halifax to Sierra Leone.

The Sierra Leone Company, he continued, would spare no expense in removing us from Nova Scotia, out of the twin sentiments of duty and patriotism. Duty, because black people had a right to live free of slavery and oppression, and what better way to set them on the right footing than to send them back to Africa, where they could civilize the natives with literacy and Christianity. Patriotism, because we, the black colonists of Sierra Leone, would help Great Britain establish trading interests on the coast of Africa. No longer would the empire have to depend on slavery for enrichment. The land was so fertile, Clarkson said, that figs, oranges, coffee and cane would leap from our farmlands. We would meet our own needs easily and help the British Empire bring to market all the rich resources of Africa.

There was the small matter of those who had gone before us, Clarkson said. Some black people from London had settled five years earlier in Sierra Leone, but their colony had failed to prosper. However, we would have use of their old townsite, on which we could expand and make improvements.

I found myself believing that Clarkson’s promises were real, but felt that I could not go with him. If I travelled back to Africa, I would never see my daughter or husband again. And so, as Clarkson held forth, I found my attention wandering a little and I missed one or two of the questions and answers that I was supposed to be writing down. The dream of my lifetime was finally within reach, and yet it didn’t seem right to take it.