THE BOOK OF NEGROES (38 page)

After the meeting, the lieutenant hoisted Daddy Moses onto his cart and the two men came to my cabin for a visit. We ate apples, buttered bread and cheese that Theo McArdle had given me for the occasion, and we drank my own hot libation of mint, ginger and honey.

“My stars,” Clarkson said, “this sure clears out the nasal passages, doesn’t it?” He peered at the stove rigged up for cooking and heating, looked over the utensils hanging on the wall and bent over to examine the books on my shelves.

“They look well read,” he said.

I told him that I had read each book many times.

“Isn’t reading a fabulous escape from the world?” he said.

I laughed, surprised at his directness.

“Don’t tell me you’ve read
Gulliver’s Travels
?” he said.

“Many times,” I said.

“Don’t you just love that term ‘Lilliputians’?” he said. “Where on earth did Swift come up with the word?”

“They may be small but they do wreak havoc,” I said.

“Sounds like the English,” he said.

Daddy Moses and I laughed, and I served Clarkson another hot drink.

“How would you like to be my assistant?” Clarkson asked me. “I need someone to take notes, communicate with the Negroes and help me organize the adventure.”

“I will help, but I cannot go with you.” I said.

“Perhaps I can help if you are indentured or in debt,” Clarkson said.

“I am free and have no debts,” I said. “But I am waiting for my husband and daughter and could not leave without them.”

Clarkson asked what I meant. He listened carefully and tapped his fingers together while I told him about Chekura and May.

“I don’t know what to say about your daughter,” he said. “Given that the Witherspoons are wealthy, they could have taken her to any number of
cities or countries. But let’s talk about your husband. You say that his ship was called the
Joseph
?”

“Yes.”

“And that it was bound for Annapolis Royal?”

“Yes.”

“And that it left New York City on November 10, 1783?”

“That’s right.”

“Then I should be able to dig up some naval records. When I’m back in Halifax, I’ll see what I can do.”

I agreed to work for Clarkson for three shillings a day, plus room and board. Clarkson said that he would be needing me night and day until the departure for Africa. He would get a room for me at the Water’s Edge Inn in Shelburne, and after a few days of work we would sail to Halifax to finish the job.

“Could I have another spot of that tea?” he said. “It is the most marvellous drink.”

Perhaps one day, I thought, I would tell him about drinking mint tea with my father in Bayo. But for now, I wanted to know more about the men who directed the Sierra Leone Company.

He said the Company included some of the leading abolitionists in London, his brother Thomas Clarkson among them. They wanted to create a profitable colony in Africa, where liberated blacks could live productively and in dignity, and from where Great Britain could build a profitable trade with the rest of the world—trade, he said, that did not rely on the evils of slavery.

JOHN CLARKSON APPLIED HIMSELF EVERY WAKING HOUR to the details of registration. “Necessary civilities,” he called it when we paid a courtesy trip to the Shelburne mayor, knowing that he opposed the adventure. The
mayor predicted that the Negroes would die en route, or be consumed by tropical diseases, or cannibalize the naive Europeans who took them to Guinea.

John Clarkson heard every imaginable objection in the five days that we registered Birchtown residents for the trip, and I heard every term under the sun for people from my homeland. People called us Ethiopians, darkies, and those of the “sable race.” They called our land Sierra Leone, Serra Lyoa, Negritia, Negroland, Guinea, and the dark continent. They called us ingrates for wanting to leave Nova Scotia. Knowing that slaves, indentured workers and debtors would not be allowed to sail with Clarkson, some people accused Negroes of having debts or of being indentured to them. My job was to ensure that every Birchtown resident who wanted to leave showed up to register at the Water’s Edge Inn, and to find evidence to disprove false allegations.

Although we had to rush through our work, Clarkson always took a few moments to ask if I needed anything—food, drink, ink or quills. When I was tired, he told me that he felt the same way. And when we had a few minutes alone to eat at the end of our long hours of work, Clarkson entertained me by mimicking some of the people we had met that day. The man could pick up any person’s accent. But ultimately he was completely serious about his assignment, and I liked the fact he respected my efforts to help him.

The nights, however, were difficult for Clarkson. I don’t know how he had survived naval battles with his mind intact. The slightest insult or provocation set his anger simmering for the rest of the day and night, and either prevented him from sleeping or plunged him into nightmares. The walls at the Water’s Edge Inn were as thin as parchment and each night his screams awoke me.
“No,”
he would shout out,
“I said, let her go right now.”
After the first eruption, I understood that these were merely nocturnal anxieties. I had had my share of nightmares too, so I did not judge him.

Over tea in the morning, he would tap the table, ask me to remind him to write a letter to his fiancée that night, and fuss over the Negroes who were being prevented from leaving for Africa. When a tavern owner claimed that one Negro still owed him five pounds for unpaid beer and fish, Clarkson paid the debt himself and warned the adventurer not to set foot in any more taverns for the rest of his stay in Nova Scotia. Clarkson wore his worries on his face, and sometimes dissolved into tears while we were discussing unfinished work. But neither Clarkson’s tears in the day nor his outbursts at night prevented him from carrying out his long hours of work. I admired him for persevering in the face of his own struggles, and I made a private vow to support him to the best of my abilities.

When we finished the registration process in Shelburne, Clarkson advised the six hundred adventurers who had been accepted for the journey to Africa that he would send ships to bring them to Halifax. After reminding Daddy Moses and Theo McArdle to keep their eyes open for Chekura or May, I set sail with Clarkson.

I had a cabin of my own on the two-day trip to Halifax, and felt an odd sense of relief to be leaving the place I had inhabited for eight years. I had time to think during the long nights alone, and it struck me that good white men weren’t likely to stay sane for very long in this world. Any white man who wanted to help Negroes “raise themselves up,” as Clarkson liked to say, would be an unpopular man indeed among his peers. I hoped that Clarkson would retain his faculties long enough to get us safely to Africa. His tantrums and outbursts worried me. He was just too concerned about Negroes. It didn’t seem natural.

HALIFAX WAS A FLEDGLING TOWN when I arrived in November 1791. It was not as attractive or meticulously laid-out as Shelburne. It lacked the array of storehouses and public buildings that the black people of
Birchtown had built in Shelburne, but it was a gentler place to be, and far less menacing for Negroes.

I moved into a room at The King’s Inn, among a set of ramshackle wooden buildings along a busy street by the water. I had only a few minutes of free time every day, and liked to start my mornings in solitude by eating breakfast in my room while I read the newspapers. Henry Millstone, who ran the tavern in the hotel, brought me the
Royal Gazette
and a bowl of fish chowder at seven o’clock every morning. He always liked to pause and chat.

“Lieutenant Clarkson tells me that you are the most literate Negro he has ever met,” Mr. Millstone said. “Is that true?”

I was discovering something intriguing about white people. It seemed that they wanted either to sing my praises or to run me out of town. But sometimes it was difficult for me to make the transition from one sort of person to the other.

“There are some literate Negroes, Mr. Millstone, and over time there will be many more in Nova Scotia, where they are not prevented from reading.”

“I wouldn’t mind learning with them,” he said with a laugh. “So are you going with the others to Guinea?”

“Africa,” I said.

“Yes, that’s what I meant.”

“For the time being I am just helping the lieutenant,” I said.

“Dangerous place, Africa is,” he said.

I put down my soup spoon and looked him in the eye. “So is Nova Scotia.”

A few days after I arrived in Halifax, three Negroes pounded on the door of my room at ten in the evening. They had just spent fifteen days walking through the woods from Saint John. An agent in that town had refused to register them for the departure, or to allow them to embark on a ship bound for Halifax, so they had no choice but to set out overland
for the city, hoping to arrive before the ships departed. Clarkson agreed to admit the men.

Within a week, another hundred cold and hungry Negroes drifted by foot into Halifax. I saw men without coats, women with nothing but ragged blankets around their shoulders, and children without any clothes at all. By mid-December, boats from Shelburne and Annapolis Royal had transported more people to town, bringing the total of Negro adventurers to more than one thousand.

Clarkson lodged people in warehouses by the water, brought blankets so they wouldn’t freeze at night and hired dozens of women to boil up cauldrons of food every evening. He worked all day and through half the nights, buying clothes for the naked and arranging medical care for the sick between his long hours at the docks. While I spread the word about what the Nova Scotians were allowed to take to Sierra Leone—no more than one dog for every six families, fowls but not pigs, a trunk of clothing but no tables or chairs—Clarkson oversaw the provisioning of ships. He spoke daily of the health of the travelling Negroes, and in each ship ordered pitch boiled, decks scrubbed with vinegar, and all sleeping quarters refitted to allow for a minimum height of five feet. He even posted a Bill of Fare to reassure travellers that they would be properly fed. At breakfast and supper, we would eat Indian meal with molasses or brown sugar. At dinner, we would have salt fish days, pork days or beef days, and eat turnips, peas or potatoes.

Clarkson arranged to have nearly two hundred turkeys slaughtered, dressed and cooked for a feast on Christmas Day, and for each man or woman to have one cup of beer or wine. During the course of the meal, he took me along as he walked from warehouse to warehouse to address the adventurers. He prayed with each group and repeated his “Rules and Regulations for the Free Black People Embarking for Sierra Leone.” He usually dealt respectfully with individuals, but had a tendency to speak to
groups as if they were children. I flinched when he instructed the assembled travellers to pay attention to divine worship, to use soft words to prevent broils and not to make friendly with the seamen. However, none of the Negroes objected to his lectures. They venerated the man who was leading them to Africa.

The Governor and his wife invited Clarkson and me to dine with them for Christmas. As we entered their palatial home, Clarkson whispered to me that Government House had been built at a cost of twenty thousand pounds, and that the same amount would have employed one thousand Negro labourers for a year. Clarkson and I joined sixteen other guests in the dining room. Mrs. Wentworth was a loud, cigar-smoking woman, and we were barely into the meal when she turned the conversation to the migration.

“I’ll say, Lieutenant, it’s quite the voyage you are cooking up.”

“It means a great deal to the Negroes,” Clarkson said.

“Do you honestly believe they’ll have a better go of things in the tropics?” she asked.

I was tired of letting them debate as if I wasn’t there, so I added a comment of my own: “We have waited eight years for land, and most of us still don’t have it.”

“Every Nova Scotian can tell stories of delays in getting their land,” she said. “It’s not just blacks who are clamouring for acreage.”

“It’s about more than land,” I said. “It’s about freedom. Negroes want to make our own lives. But we are wilting here.”

“You take our provisions and our handouts when it suits you,” she said. “That doesn’t sound like wilting to me—”

Governor Wentworth cut in. “Speaking of freedom, may I propose a toast to His Majesty the King?”

After fruit and cheese were served, a butler showed up to offer guests a tour of Government House. Clarkson and I followed some of the others
up and down endless flights of stairs and in and out of rooms full of portraits, but only the map room caught my attention. The butler said there were maps from every conceivable place in the world. When the tour left the room, Clarkson and I stayed behind. I thumbed through a thick wad of maps while Clarkson complained that the dinner had wasted his time.

“It’s doubtful that you could get much work done on Christmas,” I said.

Clarkson said he still had to finish outfitting the ships and look into finding another ship’s surgeon. He had asked Wentworth if he could take one of the royal surgeons from Halifax on the mission to Sierra Leone, but the governor had refused. Clarkson nearly choked with anger as he described the situation. One surgeon for a flotilla of fifteen ships was grossly inadequate, he said. What if the ships got separated on the voyage? What good was a surgeon on one ship if somebody was dying on another?

“Plainly,” Clarkson said, “he doesn’t want me to succeed in my business. He would prefer that the free blacks stay right here to prove that they are content in Nova Scotia and that their complaints of ill treatment are groundless.”

Clarkson was breathing heavily and starting to wave his hands wildly. I sat with him for a minute and managed to calm him down by urging him to take steady, regular breaths, and breathing along with him. When he settled down to join the other guests for a drink, I had the maps to myself.

Somebody had taken the trouble to organize them into categories: British North America, Nova Scotia, the Thirteen Colonies, England, Jamaica and Barbados, and Guinea.