Chesapeake (42 page)

‘I work.’

‘Is thy husband kind?’

‘Best man God ever made.’ Tears came into large black eyes.

‘Does he love your baby?’

‘He sing for her.’

Obdie had been taken from a village by a river, and her uncle had
connived at her sale to Arab traders. ‘He bad. He have seven wives.’

She had caused much trouble in the house and despised being told what to do. She said she was twenty-one, but there were serious discrepancies in her narrative: men in Barbados, men from Devon Island, a child born at Peace Cliff—it became quite complicated. Ruth Brinton tried to engage her in serious conversation, but Obdie suspected her of trying to establish some base from which new duties could be assigned, and she pretended not to understand. There wasn’t much anyone could do with Obdie.

It was Sara who caused the confusion. She said she was about twenty-six and that so far she had had four children, two girls and two boys.

‘Do you miss them?’

‘Long time ago.’

‘Do you believe in God?’

‘Hmmmm.’

‘Do you want to be free?’

Here Sara looked deeply into the eyes of her mistress and said nothing. A veil seemed to come across her pupils, as if she ran the risk of betrayal if her true thoughts were known. It was not an act of insolence, nor one of antagonism; it was just that subjects were being raised which could never be discussed honestly between white master and black slave, and it was dreadfully unfair of the white to raise them.

‘Thee is the one who could learn, Sara.’

‘Hmmmm.’

‘Does thee want to read?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

Again the veil fell across the eyes, and this time Ruth Brinton interpreted it as hatred. ‘Oh, Sara, thee must not hate us for what we do.’ There was no response.

Some days later Ruth Brinton went to the boatyard to see for herself what work their male slaves were doing. The visit irritated her husband, who was working on Griscom’s ship, for he saw it as an interruption. He watched as his wife went to the sawyers’ pit, and he observed with increased exasperation that she was staying there for the better part of an hour, just staring at the two men sawing planks from the heart of an oak log.

That night she said, ‘Do Abiram and Dibo haul the saw every day?’

‘It’s what they’re good at.’

‘But the one down in the pit? Does he work there all summer?’

‘Ruth! We sell the planks they cut—’

‘Sell? Thee means we don’t even need them for ourselves?’

‘Where does our tobacco come from? We sell the planks.’

She said no more, for it was obvious that she was infuriating her
husband. But on First Day she felt compelled of the Lord to speak in meeting. There was restlessness as she rose, and one woman went so far as to whisper, ‘Would that she might hold her tongue.’ But this Ruth could never do:

So many members of the meeting protested to Paxmore that when he and his wife reached Peace Cliff that evening he spoke to her with considerable harshness. ‘Thee must stop dragging slavery into our prayers. The issue has been settled.’

‘It has only just begun!’

‘Ruth, the Bible has spoken. Our meeting has spoken. Thee heard what Father Steed said before he died. Does thee place thyself above all these?’

‘I do.’

‘Vain and arrogant woman.’

‘No, Edward,’ she said softly. ‘I am beset with anxiety and I am trying to find the light.’

By common consent they halted conversation on this fruitless topic. These two, who had suffered so much for a common faith, loved each other with a slow, burning fire that would never be extinguished; their four self-reliant children were proof. Edward realized that he would never have loved Ruth so deeply if she had been less stubborn in her beliefs, less willing to endure punishment for them. And she could not forget that this quiet, ungainly carpenter had stubbornly returned to Massachusetts in face of promised death to testify to that same belief. As for his willingness to bear her stripes that day in Ipswich, she did not think of that now, for their love had moved to new levels.

At such moments of domestic conflict it was Edward’s habit to quit debate and walk onto the porch, where he would stand for many minutes, contemplating the serenity of his river; it provided a calm greater than any he had known before; whenever he saw the marsh and the quiet trees he forgot his quarreling. On this night a dying moon rose in the east, throwing a silvery light over that placid stretch of water from the cliff to Devon, making it a peaceful lake of incredible beauty. ‘This cliff was saved for Quakers,’ he said. Then he returned to the kitchen to kiss his wife.

Ruth Brinton had discharged her irritation in a different way: she had
hurried to her stove and begun cooking frantically, knocking pans and kettles awry, then chiding herself. Between peeling and baking she would think of what they had been arguing about, and she would smile, for she appreciated the fact that truth was revealed to human beings in different ways and at different times. She herself had been allowed, by God perhaps, to witness the future of whites and blacks on this river, and this clear vision impelled her to speak in meeting. If Edward did not see the dangers, if he remained confused over property rights and outmoded biblical quotations and the prosperity of his family at the expense of slave labor, she must be tolerant until such time as he, and other Quakers, saw what she saw.

She cooked a fine meal. They talked of the strangers’ ship. He told her of how Stooby had quit working for the Englishman to live with Nancy and of how his twin brother Charley had come aboard. And they went to bed. But toward three in the morning, when herons begin to call, she was seized by a terrible shaking and sat upright in bed gasping for breath.

‘Edward!’ she cried in panic.

He wakened slowly and was appalled by what confronted him: his wife, her gown awry, trembling as if shaken by some storm. In a harsh voice she cried, ‘I am strangled by sin.’

When many different people through many different generations experience common alarms, it is to be expected that in moments of extremity they will utter cries which are echoes of what has been said before. Ruth Brinton’s confession of sin was phrased almost exactly in words used earlier by Edmund Steed at the conclusion of his unsuccessful attempt to deny his Catholicism: he strangled in sin and saved himself only by public disclosure and exile to Virginia. She cried, ‘This day we must set our slaves free.’

‘What is thee saying?’

‘That before sunset we must divest ourselves of all slaves. It is the will of God.’

He tried to quieten her, intending to reason with her later, but she would not be consoled. ‘We shall set our slaves free,’ was all she would say.

Realizing that from this night there would be no retreat, he attempted several evasions. ‘Let me draft a will which manumits them on my death.’ No, such delay would be mere avoidance of the basic problem. ‘Then let me hire them out to others—men of good deportment who will treat them well.’ No, such hiring would not remove the blemish from us. ‘Then let me sell them. I’ll see Steed before noon. He needs help.’ No, because that would be thrusting on others the sin resulting from one’s own action.

But when he explained in the careful terms of husbandry that there was no conceivable way in which he could operate his business if he
simply gave the slaves away, she stopped arguing and listened, and she saw that her imperative demands were placing on him a burden of moral and economic action for which he was simply unprepared. Tenderly she kissed him and said, ‘Edward, I have forever known that thee will do right. By sunset this night there will be no slaves at Peace Cliff, nor ever again.’

‘What I’ll do—’

‘Don’t tell me. I can bear no more knowledge.’ And she fell asleep.

Early next morning he set in motion his practical solution: he herded the slaves and their children onto a small boat and ferried them to Devon, where the Steeds said they would be delighted to purchase them. ‘We daren’t call it a purchase,’ Paxmore warned, ‘or Ruth Brinton would terminate the agreement.’

‘There’s other ways,’ Steed said, and what he arranged was this: from London, Fithians would send Edward a crate of shipbuilding tools and Ruth Brinton a crate of theological works. ‘And to make the sale more attractive, Edward, I’ll cede you that good land east of Patamoke for a permanent boatyard.’ Paul Steed promised to find such white servants and hired-out slaves as might be required in building the additional ships, and in this manner the Quaker Edward Paxmore divested himself of his slaves, turning a nice profit and acquiring a boatyard. On the morrow, when the
Martha Keene
was handed over to the Steeds, Paxmore would move his business to Patamoke.

There was an interruption, and surprisingly, it did not come from Ruth Brinton; she was satisfied that with the banishment of slaves from Peace Cliff she had accomplished as much as she could reasonably hope for in 1670. Later on, she assured herself, all people will awaken to the problem, and then perhaps even Edward will quit side-stepping moral issues.

The interruption involved violence. Men came running to the Steed warehouse, crying, ‘Pirates have stolen the
Martha Keene!’
And others shouted, ‘They’ve slain our sailors!’

When men from the warehouse ran to the shore they saw their ship, sails high, heading down the Choptank toward the bay, while on the wharf lay the bodies of three dead sailors.

In the next frenzied hours the people of Patamoke made a series of shocking discoveries. Jack Griscom and Henri Bonfleur had for some years been pirates; operating under various names, they had swept the Caribbean, chasing down Spanish vessels heading home from Panama, but accepting any accidental English traders who sailed into their path.

That much was learned from Stooby Turlock, who had watched and listened. When the citizens demanded angrily, ‘Why didn’t you warn us?’
he replied, ‘Nobody asked.’ The day was spent piecing together information about the pirates: they had no crew working ashore in Virginia; they had probably escaped into the Choptank at the end of some long and bloody chase; from the moment they saw the
Martha Keene
they had intended stealing her; and they were doubtless headed back to the Spanish Main for further depredations. Other shocks came as individuals catalogued their losses.

Edward Paxmore’s ship had been stolen. On the eve of turning it over to the Steeds it had disappeared; two years of toil had come to naught.

Henry Steed came, distraught, to report that as the pirates were leaving the Choptank they stopped off at Devon and persuaded all slaves working on the island to join them in a break for freedom. ‘When Abijah and Amos tried to persuade our slaves to stay with us, Griscom killed them both. All of yours fled, Paxmore.’

The wildest complaint came from Timothy Turlock, who rushed up the river in a canoe, shouting monosyllables that could scarcely be deciphered. Stooby did the translating and informed the listeners that the pirates had persuaded Charley to go aboard to help with the sails and had taken Birgitta as well.

‘Did they kidnap her?’ a woman asked.

‘No!’ Timothy blurted. ‘She go!’

He wanted her back, and it was his noisy lamentation that goaded the others into action. Edward Paxmore said, ‘We must get that ship.’

‘How?’ someone asked.

‘Sail after her. Take her.’

‘In what?’

‘In their ship. It’s smaller, but I fixed it well.’

Henry Steed was determined to recover his slaves, for they formed the backbone of his enterprise; indeed, they represented the profit of his plantation, and to lose them would be disastrous.

But the firm reasoning was done by young Earl Steed, intended captain of the ship that had been stolen: ‘If we can put together a crew of sixteen, and assemble enough muskets, we can handle their ship better than they can manage ours, and we’ll overtake them.’

‘Where?’

This posed a problem. The pirates would have a day’s head start, and the faster ship, but they would have only themselves, Charley Turlock and the Steed slaves to handle it. A resolute crew might overtake them. However, the pirates had a hundred possible destinations and the likelihood of locating them was not great.

Now Stooby spoke. Pockmarked, emaciated, poorly clad, he was an unlikely young man to battle pirates, but he had often been insulted by them and they had stolen a woman who had been kind to him. ‘I listened. Often they said Marigot.’

‘Marigot Bay!’ Paxmore exclaimed.

‘Where’s that?’ Earl Steed asked.

‘Of course!’ Paxmore said. ‘That’s where pirates raided the barracoons. It must have been Griscom and the Frenchman who bore down on us when I was there.’

He told them where Marigot was and outlined a plan whereby the Choptank men might slip in and retake the
Martha Keene.
Earl Steed, listening intently, judged that retaliation might succeed. ‘Can we enlist sixteen?’

There was Steed himself, and Tim Turlock thirsting for revenge, and Edward Paxmore determined to recover his property. Henry Steed wanted to join them, but his son said, ‘You’re too old,’ and Henry asked, ‘But what about Timothy Turlock?’ and young Steed said, ‘That one has no age.’

Stooby insisted upon coming and produced three muskets for the arsenal. Twelve others volunteered, including a notable squirrel hunter with two muskets. Captain Steed told them, ‘We must collect all available powder.’

‘Why?’ Paxmore asked.

‘If we cannot recover your ship, I do not propose leaving it for them to gloat over.’

On the long sail to Marigot Bay, Captain Steed, twenty-nine years old, displayed a resolution which those who had known his father and his two uncles would never have suspected he had. He was not gentle like Father Ralph, nor fastidious like Uncle Paul, nor slightly pompous like his father; he was a new breed. To him, England was a respected family memory; he had been educated there, but it was not the
summum bonum.
For Earl Steed, destiny resided in Maryland, and if the mother country was too pusillanimous to protect her colonies from pirates, he would undertake the job.