Zack (7 page)

Dear Ms. Song,

Here is my project. I’m sorry it’s so long, and it’s late, long past the due date, but I got very involved in it and I guess I got carried away. I didn’t want to leave anything out. I’m not making excuses, but I read two whole books on the “middle passage” alone, not to mention a book on each of the wars. And I spent a zillion hours (well, almost) poring over archival documents at the museum (Mr. Knox was a big help), searching the title to our property at the land registry office and scanning the Internet for info on a man most people have never heard of.

You have seen the Revolutionary War British document box, the two Butler’s Ranger shoulder straps, the nugget and the slave’s neck iron. This project tells the tale of the man who owned them.

I know a history paper is supposed to be objective, but I decided to write this as a story because the facts are only the beginning, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t stay neutral. I hope I don’t fail because of that, but if I do, it’s okay.

Thanks for letting me try this. Even if I fail, it was worth it.

P.S. Jen helped me type this. I hope that’s legal.

P.P.S. I forgot the footnotes, but it’s too late now.

Your student,

It’s as if the events of his life had been written on cards and tossed into the wind. I’ve gathered the ones I could and tried to arrange them into some kind of order. A lot have been lost. There are many gaps, more questions than answers.

He was born in 1744 in Bondu, Senegambia, West Africa, a river-laced land of steaming marshes and grassy plains. He could have been a Wolof or Mandinke, but was probably a Fulani, the dominant tribe of Bondu State. He was likely Moslem and may have known how to read and write. Senegambians grew cotton, tobacco, maize (corn) and rice; they were cunning traders and expert cattle ranchers. To imagine him as an ignorant jungle savage is as logical as
suggesting the royal family of England at the time wore smelly animal skins and lived in caves.

Land was plentiful but labourers were not, so war and slavery were bitter facts of life. Tribe raided tribe, carried off the human spoils and put them to work planting crops or tending cattle. The European slavers who, during the eighteenth century transported sixty per cent of West Africa’s population across the Atlantic, did not invent slavery. They bought their slaves from Africans.

When he was the age of the average grade-eleven student he was captured in one of those conflicts. Hands bound behind his back, roped by the neck to other men, women and children, he was marched to the broad Gambia River and boated downstream to James Fort, an island fortress near the ocean, and sold to Europeans. Before he was driven aboard the ship that lay at anchor in the estuary, he was grappled to the ground, tallow was smeared on his stomach then covered with oiled paper, and, with an iron heated in a fire until it glowed red, he was branded. He belonged to the Royal African Company. He was cargo.

The “middle passage,” the hellish ocean journey to the New World, took anywhere from two weeks to two months, and it’s hard
to imagine how he survived. He was chained to another man and made to lie hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder on a shelf in the dark, airless, sweltering hold, the next shelf only inches above him. As the ship pitched and rolled under sail, the rough planks ground away his sweat-soaked skin and flesh, leaving open running sores.

The hold was a noxious pit of putrid stench—urine, vomit, excrement and the sour stink of vinegar used by the slavers in a halfhearted effort to quell the foul odours. Men around him groaned and cried out in the dark in their different languages. Many died, consumed by despair. Each day he was hauled on deck with others, chained to the rail, fed, and forced to dance while sailors tossed buckets of icy seawater on him to wash him down. Some slaves broke free and hurled themselves into the freezing ocean.

Of the many who died, most succumbed to the “bloody flux,” chronic dysentery that squeezed the liquid from their bowels in violent, painful spasms and killed them where they lay on the benches drenched in their own reeking waste. On average, the corpses thrown overboard numbered fifteen per cent of the human cargo.

He refused to die. He fought off the virulent
diseases that stalked the ship and the terrible despair that tempted him every minute of every day to give up.

After two months of the horror, a skeleton wrapped tightly in shiny black skin, covered in scabs and sores, his eyes sunken into his head, he was off-loaded, probably in the Barbados, given a salve to rub on his ravaged skin, fattened up for a few weeks and, when he looked presentable, taken to auction on the mainland. Where? In the slave market in Charles’ Town, South Carolina, in Boston, in New York? Whatever his point of entry into the colonies that “belonged” to Britain, he was bought from the Royal African Company by Pierpoint, a British soldier, and named Richard.

When I started this project I thought that a slave was just a person owned by another person, like a wagon, an axe or a horse. A slave was someone with no freedom. But what they took from him was more than that. They stole his home, his family, his roots and, maybe worst of all, his name. His religion was called heretical. His language was “mumbo-jumbo”. His stories and songs were scorned.

There were some things they couldn’t take away, though—his willpower and his intelligence, his courage and his dignity.

If the land of Pierpoint’s birth was one of slavery, the American colonies in 1760 were, in many ways, worse. There were thousands and thousands of captured Africans labouring on plantations or serving in households. Although they did not remain in bondage for life, there were white slaves, too: indentured servants sold to a master for a period of years; convicts transported to the New World and sold as labourers until they had “paid off” the cost of their passage; sailors “pressed” into duty (captured, hauled aboard ship and not released until the vessel was far out to sea). Owning a human being was an idea that was widely accepted. The man who penned the Declaration of Independence was a plantation owner whose African farmhands were his property, and when he wrote that all men were created equal he meant white males only. The man who wrote “Give me liberty, or give me death” owned more than sixty slaves.

In that land of wagons, horses, dirt roads, huge plantations and primitive isolated farms, frontier towns and a few cities that were just tiny dots in a vast landscape of unbroken forest, the sixteen-year-old boy from Bondu must always have felt isolated and alone. He was the personal servant of a British officer who probably looked down on most of his own
troops, never mind his black slave. Richard Pierpoint had to learn a new language and strange customs. But he did it. He did all that, and more.

And he dropped out of sight for twenty years.

Richard Pierpoint turned up again in, of all places, Fort Niagara, just across the river from present-day Niagara-on-the-Lake. By that time he had earned his freedom by enlisting to fight the Americans for King George, the same king whose chartered slave company had bought, branded and sold him. He was Captain Dick now, also called Pawpine, a member of Butler’s Rangers, which was a part of the British army often supplemented with Indian allies.

What had happened in the twenty years? The American Revolutionary War, for one thing. It was still raging when Pierpoint arrived in Fort Niagara. At that time the area north of the Ohio River and west of the Allegheny Mountains was part of British North America, not the American colonies, and with Butler’s Rangers, Pawpine fought the Americans by waging a fierce and cruel guerrilla-style campaign from the Hudson to the Kentucky Rivers to interrupt the supply routes of the Continental Army.

In July 1784, a year after the war ended, he left the army, a seasoned veteran of thirty-six, and disappeared from the pages of history again for four years. He probably stayed in the area working as a labourer or farmhand, because in 1788 he was granted, as a veteran, a 200-acre parcel of land on Twelve Mile Creek, near present-day St. Catharines, Ontario. He worked for three years to clear the land and build a dwelling—required as a condition of the grant—and in January 1791, Lots 13 and 14, Concession 6, became his property. He later sold them. Why? Turning forest into a farm was dangerous, painstaking, back-breaking work. Why go to all that trouble, then sell off the farm?

The Niagara Frontier was populated by Iroquois, Dutch, Jews, Scots, Germans and many ex-patriate Americans loyal to Britain, but few Africans. The government was lily-white and undemocratic, and so was high society. Pawpine, a veteran and a landowner, was still an outsider. He felt that he didn’t belong, that he was unwelcome.

Ms. Song, right now you’re asking, how does Zack know that? My answer is that in 1794 Pawpine and a number of other free Africans petitioned Governor John G. Simcoe. Who were they? Veterans of the “late War and
others who were born free with a few who have come into Canada since the peace.” What did they request? They were “desirous of settling adjacent to each other in order that they may be able to give assistance in work to those amongst them who may most want it.” They asked the governor “to allow them a Tract of County to settle on, separate from the white settlers.” Why would they make a request like that if they had been a part of things?

The governor said no.

To make matters worse the next governor, Peter Hunter, removed Pawpine’s name from the list of United Empire Loyalists. After 1806, Pawpine, who had fought the Americans for the king, was no longer considered a “loyalist”. Why? I think it was because he was African.

Six years passed, and there is no record of him. In 1812 the Americans got mad at the British again and invaded Canada, trying to grab more land, as if half a continent wasn’t enough. And guess who turned up to enlist?

No longer a landowner in Grantham Township, he wasn’t some young guy looking for adventure or itching to get off the farm and carry a gun. He was sixty-eight years old. He wrote to the authorities offering to “raise a
Corps of Men of Colour on the Niagara Frontier.” No, thanks, the British said. But when a British captain named Runchey agreed to lead the thirty or so Africans, assent was given. We’ll let you fight, the British said to Pawpine, but you can’t lead.

It might have been one of the stupidest wars ever fought, so full of blunders and gaffes it would have been comical if so many hadn’t been killed. Pawpine was in the thick of it—the Siege of Fort George, the Battles of Lundy’s Lane and of Queenston Heights. Henry Clay had told the American Congress in February 1810 that “the militia of Kentucky alone” could take Montreal and Upper Canada both. He must have been embarrassed when he learned that part of Washington was burned down and that the Redcoats invaded as far as New Orleans. The Americans won the last battle in 1815—two weeks
after
the peace terms had been negotiated and the war ended. Most of the war had been fought on Canadian soil. Not a single acre of land changed hands.

Pawpine’s name is on the papers that officially disbanded Runchey’s “Coloured Corps” in 1815. He went back to scratching a living as a labourer and slipped out of sight for another six years.
When he was seventy-seven years old, Pawpine was living in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a lonely old man with no family and few friends. Vouched for by the adjutant general of militia, who praised the service in two wars of “a faithful and deserving old Negro,” he petitioned Lieutenant Governor Maitland on July 21, 1821: “Old and without property,” he found it “extremely hard to obtain a livelihood by my labour.”

What did he ask for? Land? Money? A job? No.

“Desirous above all things to return to my native country,” he requested a ticket home to Africa.

Pawpine got a ticket, all right—a “location ticket” for a parcel of unbroken wilderness land a hundred miles as the crow flies from Niagara-on-the-Lake, with the usual conditions—clear the land, build a house.

It took four years, but he did it. His cabin was built on the bank of the Grand River. If it was still there it would be standing in my yard, right behind my house. I live on his farm.