Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons (10 page)

He stopped and felt my brow again. "Sulie looked after you, Phillis," he said. "She sailed through the inoculation with little or no affliction. She's as strong as an ox, that girl. I know no old Bettie."

I stopped in my tracks and gazed up at him. Tears came to my eyes. "Dr. Sprague sent her around."

"Dr. Sprague sent no one. You must have conjured her in your fever."

The vaulted blue sky seemed to explode above me. And in an instant, I knew what I must do. I ran after him and grabbed the soft velvet of his coat sleeve.
"I'd like you to do something for me, Nathaniel."

He sighed. "Very well. What is it?"

"I'd like you to write to my friend, Obour Tanner, for me. I'd like to know how she is. Would you do that for me?"

"No, I won't." His mouth curved downward in a dour smile. "I won't because you can do it yourself. You know how to write. I think it's time you wrote your first letter. Don't you, Phillis?"

Letter writing was not as simple a task as I'd supposed it to be. How often had I sat watching Nathaniel scrawl a note on expensive vellum and finish it with a flourish?

Now I sat at the table Mrs. Wheatley had set up for my studies in my room, laboring over the effort.

"Dear Obour," I wrote.

I wrote it three times before I got it right. The first two times I dribbled ink on the paper. Oh, I'd learned to write with a quill pen. Nathaniel and Mrs. Wheatley had both seen to that. But now it was different. This was a
letter.
It would take my words across miles to my friend.

I labored all evening. I told Obour how we'd all had the inoculation and were now well. I told her about how I saw my mother in my dream. And my mother had sent old Bettie to me to tell me to correspond with my friend. "She also told me to pour some water out before the sun in the morning for Aunt Cumsee, who is still ill," I wrote. "So I rose early again this morning and did so. Oh, Obour, now I know that though I am learned in the Koomi ways, my mother wishes me still to remember the old ways, too."

I told her about my lessons and how Mrs. Wheatley said we might plan a trip to Newport soon.

"Can you read and write?" I asked her. "Oh, if you can, please tender the kindness of a return. Your dear friend, Keziah. Oh yes, they now call me Phillis, Phillis Wheatley."

At the end of the evening Nathaniel came into my room and asked to see the letter. I gave it to him. He read it and scowled. "You must write it again."

I felt dismay. "Why?"

"This business about old Bettie being sent to you by your mother. It puts forth a belief in expired souls and their ability to have an influence on events in the natural world."

"We believe that," I said.

"'We'?" he asked.

"My people."

"You don't belong to those people anymore, Phillis. You belong to us. You are studying to be a Christian. We expect you to act accordingly. My father has a position to keep in the merchant community. So do I. Mr. Tanner is a business associate. We can't have it bandied about that we allow you to believe such things. And as for the water ceremony—well, we can't have you writing about that, either, Phillis. And you must not perform it again." He set the letter down.

It sat there on my desk like some unclean thing.

"As for the rest of it, you have done well. I told you you could write a letter, didn't I? Writing is a privilege. A freedom not allowed to most of your race. Don't abuse it, Phillis. Write the letter again, and I'll post it for you tomorrow. Come now, don't give me that face. You want Obour to know how learned you've become, don't you?"

And with that he turned and left the room.

Something was not right. I sat at my desk and mulled the matter. Then I got up, letter in hand, crossed the hall to Nathaniel's room, and knocked on the door. It opened.

In the flickering candlelight I looked up at him. "You know how you always say I should think problems through until I have a satisfactory answer?"

He nodded.

"And that if I keep getting questions, it isn't thought through?"

"Yes."

"Well, I keep getting a question, Nathaniel."

"Go on."

"If writing is a freedom, then why must my words be approved by you?"

"Because you are a child, still under our jurisdiction."

"Well, remember when you told me how your father was one of the merchants who petitioned the Massachusetts Court against the writs of assistance?"

"I recollect, yes."

"Remember how James Otis got up there and said the writs were against the fundamental principles of English law? And that man's right to liberty is inherent and as inalienable as his right to live?"

Nathaniel sighed deeply. "I'm tired, Phillis. To what aim is all this?"

"'And so it is with his right to property,' Otis said, 'be it only the eel, the sculpin, the smelt he takes from his net. Bond servants have these rights, Negroes have them, even the poor slave against his master.' That's what Otis said, didn't he, Nathaniel?"

"Otis is a troublemaker. He's also a bit mad."

"He said Negroes have rights, Nathaniel."

He ran his hand through his hair. "In heaven's name, Phillis, don't go about saying such things. Massachusetts has five thousand Negro slaves and. thirty thousand bond servants. You'll start a panic. And it will be the end of your learning and my teaching you."

"But why give me the freedom to write if I can't properly use it?"

"I'm granting you a privilege, you little simpleton. One does not abuse a privilege. Can't you understand that?"

I just stared at him.

"Negroes shouldn't be taught to read or write, Phillis. And they have no rights under English law."

I felt slapped. I reeled back, as if under a blow. My lips trembled. "I'm sorry, Nathaniel," I said. "I forgot myself. Please forgive me."

I turned and walked back across the hall.

"You will make me say these things, won't you, Phillis?" In the flickering shadows he looked agitated. "You can never accept a favor with grace. Always you must push for more. It isn't enough that my parents gave you a home. You want freedom! It isn't enough that I am teaching you to correspond. You want to write troublesome things!"

"You taught me to think. I'm thinking."

"Well, there's a proper time for it!"

"I'm sorry—I haven't learned the proper time to exercise that right!"

He swore under his breath. I slammed my door. Then I wrote the letter over again, the way he wanted it.

It was the way of things with us. We had moments of excitement when he opened the whole world to me, when he laid it out before me on his desk.

He had taught me about the writs of assistance. And all about James Otis's wonderful speech in the old Council Chamber upstairs in the Town House three years ago. He had been there with his father.

He told me about the Proclamation of 1763, in which the Crown determined that no British subject could settle or purchase land beyond the Allegheny Ridge.

He told me about the new Sugar Act and how it reduced the tariff on sugar, but made stricter laws against smuggling.

"The king is my sovereign," he'd said, "but Parliament is bottling us up between the mountains and the sea. The Sugar Act will ruin our trade with the islands, and if we look west for goods to barter in a world exchange, well, they've shut that door in our faces!"

Now he was bottling me up. As Parliament was bottling up the colonies. Yes, he was teaching me. My mind was growing. And I had nowhere to go.

Because I had nowhere to go, I went inside myself. If I did not take such a course of action, I fair would have died.

The next morning, again, I awoke extra early, dressed, and went into Mrs. Wheatley's garden to pour water before the sun.

Aunt Cumsee was still behind the closed door of her room. I'd paused outside that door before going to the garden. But there was only an ominous silence.

"She's improving," was all Mrs. Wheatley said at breakfast. "You must continue to pray for her, Phillis."

"I do," I said.

Nathaniel cast me a dark look. "Tell my mother how you pray for her, Phillis."

My heart turned to a cold clump of ice.
Oh, Nathaniel, to think that you are so angry that you will betray me.

"Very well, if you don't speak, I will. She's been going to your garden every morning, Mother, to perform some heathen task. Some ritual from Africa."

"What are you saying, Nathaniel?" It was his father who asked, not Mrs. Wheatley. She was too taken with shock.

"Tell them, Phillis," Nathaniel said.

I twisted my apron in my lap.

Nathaniel never took his eyes from me as he went on. "She takes a pitcher full of water from the kitchen and pours it out before the sun. It's called sun worshiping. It's often practiced by African tribes."

I heard Mrs. Wheatley gasp.

"Is
that
what my friend Jonathan Cripley was talking about?" Mr. Wheatley's voice was disbelieving. "He said the fishmonger saw someone praying in our garden yesterday."

"Likely half of Boston saw it," Nathaniel said. "I've spoken to her about it, but she won't stop."

"How could you, Phillis?" Mary asked. "When Mother is teaching you to be a Christian?" Then a thought seized her. "Mother, Daddy, if John hears about this, I'll be mortified."

"Phillis, what have you to say for yourself?" Mr. Wheatley's voice was gentle.

I cared not for what Nathaniel thought of me. Right now I could kill him with my bare hands. And Mary was acting like an insipid little hen. But I ached at having hurt my benefactors. "I was praying for Aunt Cumsee," I said. "When I was sick I dreamed of my mother. And she told me to make the morning offering. The way she did every morning at home."

Mrs. Wheatley gasped. "But I taught you to pray as a good Christian, Phillis. And you said you believed."

"I do," I whispered.

"But you cannot be a good Christian and keep the old practices, dear. We cannot hold with such."

I burst into tears.

Mrs. Wheatley became distraught then. She pushed back her chair and held her arms out to me. "Poor child. It was the sickness and dreaming of your mother. We still hear you cry out for her at night. I know you are sorry. And you won't do it again, will you?"

"I should hope not," Mary said.

I ran to Mrs. Wheatley. She held me on her lap and patted me while I cried.

"When people have been in such a dolorous situation they take a notion to do strange things," Mr. Wheatley said. "It's over now, forget it. The child isn't going to do it anymore."

"No, she isn't," Nathaniel said. "Because I'm going to have the fountain removed."

"Don't you think that a bit severe?" his mother asked.

"No," Nathaniel answered. "I don't."

I still made my morning offering. In my own chamber. Only now I used the pitcher of water placed there every morning for washing. I stood in front of the window when the sun was up, and I poured water from the pitcher into the bowl.

I suppose I should thank Nathaniel for bottling me up so that I turned inside myself to find what was there.

I started to write.

At first I just started writing fragments of thoughts down on paper as they came to me in the middle of my studies. I suppose I did it in rebellion against Nathaniel. Because he wouldn't let me write what I wanted to Obour.

I wrote how angry I was at him. And how, at the same time, I missed him, my old friend—because though he still oversaw my lessons, we could never be friends in the same way again.

I kept the paper with my thoughts on it in a special drawer in my desk. Then, after I got rid of the bad feelings, I wrote the good ones.

I wrote about the sunset. And the sounds of the street that filtered in my window of a spring night, when all was quiet and peaceful in the house and the sound of Mary's harpsichord drifted from belowstairs.

I wrote about my happiness at seeing Aunt Cumsee well. And my delight in the first letter I received from Obour. And my surprise and happiness at finding that she could write. My own letter, from Obour, come all the way from Newport!

When I wrote, I felt better, as if I had remade the world all of a piece, the way I wanted it to be, not the way it was.

So I wrote some more. And the paper piled up in the drawer of my desk. Oh, what a delicious feeling to know that all my thoughts did not have to be approved by Nathaniel!

I could scarce contain my own excitement. The more I wrote, the more excited I became. I felt like Columbus must have felt when he just discovered America. Only the land that I had sighted was myself.

In a way, my own way, I was free.

Mrs. Wheatley, Mary, and I were returning from a morning's shopping and a midday repast at the house of family friends.

All morning we'd shopped for linens and laces for Mary. For the past six months, she'd been stitching her dowry.

Mary and John Lathrop were betrothed. But no marriage date had been set yet. And from the way the two of them argued these days, my mistress was fearful none ever would be.

Mary was not much for politics. And John was fast becoming known as a firebrand Patriot preacher.

Mrs. Wheatley bade Prince stop the carriage at a small shoppe next door to the Old Colony House.

"Come, girls, I want you both to see something," she said.

Inside, before a large multipaned window, sat a young nigra man at an easel. "Mrs. Wheatley, how good to see you!" He put down his paints and stepped forward to draw up chairs.

"This is my daughter, Mary, Scipio. And my young ward, Phillis. Girls, this is Scipio, an African painter."

The young man smiled, showing gleaming white teeth. When he bent to kiss our hands, I saw Mary draw back in badly concealed revulsion. Scipio winked at me. And we became immediate friends.

"I'm thinking of asking Scipio to draw both your likenesses," Mrs. Wheatley told us as he showed us around. "What think you, Mary?"

Mary did not think much of it. Not at all. She sniffed. "Where did you learn to draw?" she asked.