Chesapeake (97 page)

‘Chain him, Mr. Beasley? Do you expect a fine boy like that to mutiny? Look, he’s as gentle as a lamb.’ Mr. Arbigost poked Cudjo in the ribs, and he was gentle.

The three slaves were led to the wharf, and the long, easy sail to Devon began. Cudjo would remember every detail: the bigness of Baltimore harbor, the multitude of ships resting there, the spaciousness of the bay, the beauty of the Eastern Shore as it rose gently on the horizon, the calm of Devon Island. He also studied the four half-naked slaves operating the boat, and thought: I sailed a ship larger than this. But he noticed that the men seemed at ease, and their backs were not striped like his.

Upon delivery at Devon he was assigned to one of the outlying plantations from which the two men who had been caught learning to read had come, and there, far from the clement eye of the Steeds, he was placed under the supervision of a Mr. Starch, fiercest of the overseers. All incoming slaves served their apprenticeships with Starch, who had a knack for breaking them into the Steed system. When he first saw Cudjo and his impressive physique, he assumed that here was a man who might prove difficult, but during his weeks in Georgia the big Xanga had mastered the strategy for being a slave.

He obeyed. Grasping situations more quickly than most, he studied to determine what pleased an irascible overseer, and he provided it. He did so for a powerful reason: he was determined to learn. His thirty-three days in command of the
Ariel
had taught him a lifetime of lessons; that he could operate a complex machine, that he could handle people, that he must learn to read, that he must learn to figure, that his life would be meaningless unless he learned somehow to be free. Most of all, he had acquired that inner confidence which can make a man infinitely more powerful than the accidents of birth would normally permit. No amount of temporary abuse was going to divert him from his twin goals of learning and attaining freedom.

Slavery he did not understand, except the fundamental truth that blacks were slaves and whites were not and that whatever the latter said was correct. Even during his brief stay at Savannah he had watched with amazement as white men gave blacks the most faulty and ineffective instruction for doing a job; even the stupidest black could see that it wouldn’t work, but even the wisest black could not correct the white master. ‘Yassah! Yassah!’ was the first English word Cudjo had learned, and he used it constantly without feeling any sense of debasement. If ‘Yassah’ was the password to existence, so be it.

Whites and blacks alike were fascinated by this stranger from Africa, the former hoping to find proof that blacks were born savage and rescued only by slavery, the latter trying to discover something about their origins. He disappointed both groups, for he was not savage, nor was he interested in Africa; his problem was America. During his apprenticeship in Georgia he had picked up enough English to communicate, and as soon as he was settled in as one of Mr. Starch’s field hands he began asking questions: ‘Who d’big boss?’ ‘Where he live?’ ‘Anybody here can read?’

When this last question was asked, the other slaves showed fear. They explained that Cudjo’s predecessors had been caught reading and had been sold south. With a hundred stories they impressed on him that the worst thing in the world that could happen to a slave was to be sold south, and after he had listened to a plethora of such tales he said, ‘I been south.’ And he indicated that there were many things worse.

Whenever he saw a scrap of writing he studied it, hungrily, trying to decipher its mystery. His first solid instruction came when barrels were packed with goods for London. Then a slave from the cooperage appeared with an iron stencil and a pile of wood shavings. Lighting a small fire, this man threw on heavy timbers until he had a fine blaze, into which he thrust the iron stencil. When it was red-hot, he pressed it against the head of the barrel, allowing it to sizzle until the notation was deeply burned: DEVON PLNT FITHIANS LONDON 280 LB.

He memorized the rubric, unable to decode even one fact it represented. Nevertheless, he could reproduce it, letter for letter, which he did in the sand when no one was looking. Then, from something Mr. Starch said, he deduced that this barrel was intended for London, and he felt a strange sensation of triumph, for he had been in London. That much he knew.

He also heard the overseer from another plantation say, ‘I wonder, Starch, if that far barrel contains a full two-eighty pounds,’ and Mr. Starch had gone to it, tapped on the figures and said, ‘When we brand it two-eighty, we mean two-eighty.’ Cudjo looked quickly away, but as soon as the men left, he hurried to the cask, studied the marks that Mr. Starch had struck, and learned that 280 was said two-eighty. In the next
few days he wrote these symbols in the dust many times and pronounced them. They were the opening wedge.

When the next barrel was filled, and the lid was about to be hammered down, he stood by the barrel and asked, so that Mr. Starch could hear, ‘This one got two-eighty?’

Without thinking, the overseer responded, ‘It better.’ Then he stopped, looked at Cudjo and shook his head. But he remembered him.

The sense of power that came with knowing that this barrel was headed for London and that it contained two-eighty was so exciting that Cudjo looked for other writing to decipher; there was none. So he began to inquire as to how the two banished slaves had learned, and slowly he discovered that a white woman named Mrs. Paxmore had taught them. Quickly he dropped all questioning, lest some clever slave deduce his plans, but in an entirely different part of the field he asked in subtle ways who this Mrs. Paxmore was, and he was told.

One day in early December 1834 he slipped away from work, ran down to the bank of Dividing Creek, swam across and ran along the eastern edge of the creek until he came to Peace Cliff. Without hesitation he ran up the hill, reached the back door, banged on it and waited.

A woman appeared, middle-aged, thin, dressed severely in gray. The thing he would always remember was that she was neither surprised nor frightened, as if accustomed to the arrival of disobedient slaves. ‘Yes?’

‘I learn read?’

‘Of course.’

Carefully closing her kitchen door, she led him to the shed in which she had given earlier instruction and placed him on a chair. ‘Which plantation do you come from?’ This was too difficult, so she asked, ‘Who d’big boss?’

‘Mastah Starch.’

She leaned back, made a little temple of her fingers and said quietly, ‘Does thee know the words
sold south?’

‘I been south.’

She bowed her head, and when she raised it Cudjo could see tears in her eyes. ‘Thee still wants to learn?’

He nodded, and without further comment she took down a hornbook—a shingle into which the alphabet had been burned—but before she could say anything, he wrote with his finger the words branded on the tobacco casks. She could not follow him; fetching a pencil and paper, she said, ‘Write.’

For the first time in his life Cudjo put words on paper: DEVON PLNT FITHIANS LONDON 280 LB. She smiled. She could guess with what effort this illiterate slave had memorized those letters, and she was about to explain them when he stopped her and pointed to 280. ‘Two-eighty,’ he said, and she congratulated him.

She then went to each group of letters, and he exulted when he discovered which of the symbols signified London. He repeated the name several times, looked at her and laughed. ‘I been London.’ She thought this unlikely and assumed that he was confusing the name with some locality in the south. Carefully she explained what London was and where, and he cried, ‘I been London,’ and with a few words and gestures he convinced her that he had indeed been in this great city which she had never seen, but when she asked how he had got there, some inner caution warned him that no one must ever know, and he feigned an inability to comprehend her question.

She shrugged her shoulders and proceeded with the lesson, pointing to the five Ns, and demonstrating that this symbol had the same sound in each of the four words in which it appeared. Cudjo repeated the instruction, and on the second repetition a light actually broke across his face, irradiating the room. That was the secret! All these symbols carried their own sound, and reading was nothing but the decipherment of those sounds.

All that afternoon he and Mrs. Paxmore went over the letters of the rubric from the barrels until he had mastered each. Intuitively she knew that it was more important to do this than to start with the alphabet, for Cudjo himself had brought her this problem; it stemmed from his life, so its solution would have treble meaning.

When day ended she returned to the hornbook and made the sounds of the letters, and he already knew letters like the D in Devon and F in Fithians, but when she got to L he was confused. In LONDON it had been pronounced the way she said it now, but in LB it had the sound of P. He repeated the sound: ‘Pound. Pound.’

She stopped, looked at the rubric and realized that there was no simple way in which she could explain what an arbitrary abbreviation was. ‘You see …’ She retreated to the word PLNT and explained that this was merely a short way of writing
plantation,
and this he understood readily. But then there was the problem of LB meaning
pound.

‘Learn the letters,’ she said, thrusting the hornbook at him, and before he left she asked him to read the alphabet, and he got twenty-one of the letters right. He was, she told her husband that night, one of the brightest human beings she had ever tried to teach.

Now it was Christmas, and the slaves had their week of holiday. While others gorged on roast pig and drank their whiskey, Cudjo stole away to Peace Cliff, spending hours on the lessons Mrs. Paxmore set. He met Mr. Paxmore and their handsome young son Bartley, and was invited to have Christmas dinner at their table. It was a sober affair, with silences he could not understand, but there was a spiritual warmth and the food was plentiful. Bartley was especially attentive, a boy of fifteen eager to know about the world.

‘Thee was in the south?’

‘I been.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Work, no food, Mastah whip.’

‘Is it better here?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will thee get married some day?’

This was beyond Cudjo’s understanding, and he looked down at his plate, the first he had ever seen. ‘Get him some more turkey,’ Mrs. Paxmore said, and as soon as the meal was over, Cudjo wanted to go back to the learning shed.

‘Bartley will take thee,’ she said, and the boy proved as capable a teacher as his mother. His pleasure was to have Cudjo recite the alphabet as fast as possible; they had races, and it became apparent that Cudjo had mastered every letter, every sound, but when they reached the numerals he was confused.

Bartley was good at arithmetic and had often helped his father calculate tonnages at the boatyard, so he was able to explain it, and if Cudjo had been noteworthy in his ability to learn letters, at figures he excelled. In three intensive days, during which he saw little of Mrs. Paxmore, he mastered the principles of simple figuring.

‘He’s quite remarkable,’ Bartley told his parents as the black man hurried back to the plantation at the end of the holidays.

It was remarkable, too, that Cudjo could continue learning when he had so few materials to work with; he knew every grain that marked the hornbook. He could write in his sleep the message burned onto the back: ‘Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.’ Mrs. Paxmore had informed him that this sentence was unusual in that it contained every letter of the alphabet; he recited it to himself at all hours, seeing the twenty-six letters pop up in order.

But he required something more substantial, and in March of 1835 Mrs. Paxmore said, at one of their infrequent meetings, for Mr. Starch had become suspicious of his new hand and was keeping closer watch, ‘Thee can return the alphabet now. Thee’s ready for a book.’ And she handed him a small, poorly printed volume called
The Industrious Boy’s Vade Mecum.

Cudjo held the book in his two hands, stared down at it, read the title almost accurately, then raised it to his face and pressed it tightly against his cheek. ‘I gonna know every word.’ And he pointed to
Industrious
and Mrs. Paxmore explained that he was industrious in that he studied and learned so well. He then pointed to
Vade Mecum
and she started to explain that this was Latin, but she realized from teaching children that this was supererogatory; all he needed to know was the meaning. ‘It means
go with me.
It’s your helper.’ But when he opened the book it fell
to a page containing mathematical problems, many of which Bartley had already taught him, and he began to rattle off the answers at a speed that Mrs. Paxmore could not have matched.

‘A miracle has happened in that shed,’ she told her husband that night. Then she smiled at her son and said, ‘Thee is a better teacher than I,’ and she burst into tears. ‘Imagine, preaching to people that Negroes can’t learn.’ She sat quite still for some time, then started tapping the table nervously with one finger. ‘I shall never understand,’ she said.

It was the book that became Cudjo’s undoing. It was so small that he could hide it in his trousers, not in the pocket, since his pants had none, but along the flat of his left rump, held there by a string passed between the middle pages. He was able to share his secret with no one, for he knew that if it were discovered that he could read, he would be sold south, so he looked at the book only when he could find a few minutes alone.

The book had been written for boys nine and ten years old and told of selected heroes upon whom the boys should pattern themselves: Robert Bruce and the spider; Roland and the last battle; George Washington at Valley Forge. The level of difficulty was exactly right for Cudjo, but his quick mind soon absorbed the moral messages and he yearned to talk with someone about Robert Bruce, and why he was fighting. There was no one. So he memorized the selections, finding great pleasure in the simple poems which adorned the text: