THE BOOK OF NEGROES (29 page)

“Any Negro man?” I said.

He swallowed a sip of coffee. “Yes, well, there’s that,” he said. “Yes. Negro men is what he intended, for his fighting forces. But there are other ways to serve. There are other things a trained and trustworthy person might do.”

I looked down at my glass of coffee and waited for him to continue.

“I need to speak with you in utmost privacy,” he said.

The dining room was empty except for us. Sam Fraunces stepped in to check on us, and I asked if he could arrange to keep his workers out of the room for a while.

Sam raised his eyebrows and shot me a look that seemed to say,
I hope you know what you’re doing.
But when Lieutenant Waters turned around to see him, Sam said, “Certainly,” and left us.

Lieutenant Waters said, “Just the tact I need at this juncture.”

“And what is particularly critical about this juncture?” I asked. His mouth dropped open. “Has anybody told you that for an African woman, you have the most astonishing—”

“Diction.”

He grinned. “I guess they have.” He let a moment pass, and then began to speak again. “I’ve got myself in a bit of a pickle.”

I sipped my coffee.

“You are a midwife,” he said.

I nodded.

“Caught many babies?”

I nodded again.

“Have you heard of Holy Ground?” he said.

“I wasn’t far from it when you saved me from that attacker,” I said.

“Yes, there’s that,” he said. “A rough area. You will know that there are many ladies of the night in Holy Ground.”

I looked at him calmly and let him go on. He leaned forward, elbows on the table, chin in cupped hands, face close to mine. “I’ve got myself in a little too thick with one of them.”

“You have a lady friend,” I said gently, “and she needs my services.”

“I think the most of her, but she is … she is … how best to put this … a coloured girl. From Barbados, to be exact. Lovely girl, perfectly gentle, pretty as can be, and I’m afraid she is in need right now.”

“How pressing is her need?”

“I was rather hoping you would come and judge for yourself.”

“My fee is one pound in silver.”

“That’s a small fortune.”

“It’s my fee.”

“You’re not telling me that a Negro in Canvas Town coughs up a pound for you,” he said.

“It’s my fee,” I said again, resisting the temptation to add the words “for you.”

“Ten shillings,” he said.

“It’s my fee.” I was already thinking of warm clothes that I would buy. I needed thicker socks, a woollen sweater and a coat.

“Fifteen shillings,” he said.

I met his eyes.

“Fine,” he said. “One pound. Can we go?”

“When?”

“Well, now. The situation is pressing.”

ROSETTA WALCOTT HAD A CREAMY COMPLEXION and dark brown freckles all over her cheeks and a huge, swollen belly to go with her thin arms and slender legs. She had come over from Barbados with the white family that owned her. Not long after they settled in New Jersey, she fled on foot one night and ended up in Holy Ground. She was thirteen years old and eight months pregnant, and she said she loved Lieutenant Malcolm Waters.

“He never beat me one single time,” she said, “and he gave me clothes and food, but now he say I gots to go. I can come back when I’m skinny again, but I can’t come back with any child.”

“What do you want to do?” I asked.

“Drown this child in the river and come back for Lieutenant Waters,” she said.

“That feeling may change when the baby is suckling you.”

“The lieutenant loves me,” she said.

“How do you know that?”

“All this time he took care of me. Set me up in this little room, and I didn’t have to go with any of the other officers. He kept me for himself, and came to see me every week.”

“If he loved you,” I told her, “he wouldn’t tell you to get rid of the baby.”

“He said I couldn’t come back with the baby. But I don’t need no baby. I loves him and he loves me.”

Lieutenant Waters offered to walk me back to Canvas Town. I refused. He tried to insist, but I told him to let me be if he wanted me to come back and deliver his child.

“Shh,” he said, even though we were standing alone. “You are delivering
her
child, and that’s all that needs to be said about it.”

Wishing I had made him pay five pounds instead of one, I let him walk me back to Canvas Town. It had taken Solomon Lindo some time
to reveal an uglier side, but the shine had worn off Lieutenant Malcolm Waters the very same day that we shared a meal.

“How old are you?” I asked.

“That’s an impertinent question,” he said.

“If you want me to help you, tell me your age.”

“Twenty-two.”

“Well, she’s thirteen,” I said.

“She’s old enough.”

“For what?”

“To know what she’s doing.”

“She thinks you love her and that you’ll take care of her,” I said.

“Holy Ground is no place for babies.”

“You just don’t want any baby around.”

“Do you know a place where she can stay?” he said.

“Why don’t you do something for her? Why don’t you help her?”

A look of frustration came into his eyes. “I did grow fond of her. I wasn’t thinking it would come to this.”

“So why don’t you help her now that it has come to this?”

“That’s where you come in.”

“One pound to catch the baby, and three more to move them both to Canvas Town.”

“That’s outrageous,” he said.

“What’s outrageous is that you’re making her leave with your baby. And I’d like to see you build them a shelter for three pounds.”

A FEW WEEKS LATER A MESSENGER from the British barracks—a Negro lad who aroused no suspicions—tracked me down in Canvas Town and asked me to come with him immediately to Holy Ground. I caught
Rosetta Walcott’s baby, and used the money to pay Claybourne and a crew of men to steal, buy, carry and hammer together materials for a shack big enough for mother and daughter. There was no space next to my shack, as it was already taken. Fifteen more lean-to shelters had been built since I had moved in, so Rosetta and the baby were set up at the end of the haphazard block.

I caught another ten babies in Holy Ground over the next few months. I despised the British officers, but knew that their women would suffer without my help. Among the officers in the British barracks at Broadway and Chambers, I became known as “One-pound Meena.” With the money, I bought food, clothing and scraps of lumber to make it through a long, cold winter.

In April of 1776, a year after I had arrived in New York, I returned from teaching at St. Paul’s Chapel to find Rosetta Walcott weeping at my shelter.

“They’re all gone,” she told me.

“Who?”

“The Brits, that’s who. Haven’t you noticed? They’ve been rowing out to the ships for days, and the last ones left last night. I went up with the baby to see Lieutenant Waters.”

“You call him ‘Lieutenant’?”

Rosetta looked at me impatiently. “He’s only seen her once before. But the barracks are empty. The Brits are all gone. Soldiers, officers, all of them. And he’s gone with them.”

The entire British military had retreated from New York City. The
New Amsterdam Gazette
said that even Governor William Tryon had taken refuge in a ship in the harbour. Rebels streamed down Broadway, shooting guns and tipping back bottles of gin.

Customers sang and cheered and drank until late in the night at the
Fraunces Tavern. I felt lucky to have work in the kitchen, but now that the British were gone, I wondered how I would earn enough for food, clothes and repairs to my shelter.

“What?” Sam said. “You think the rebels don’t have brothels? As long as there are fighting men, there will be work for girls like Rosetta—and work for you as well.”

THE REBELS HELD MANHATTAN FOR SIX MONTHS. Then the British took it back and held it for seven years. There were no more English classes at St. Paul’s Chapel, because the Tories locked rebel prisoners inside and left them there to starve. The cries of white men dying sounded so much like those of captives on the slave ship that I avoided walking anywhere near the chapel.

I was left with just three places to teach Negroes to read and to share news with them: the Negro burying ground for large gatherings; a room in the Fraunces Tavern (for twenty people at most), and a meeting circle in front of my shack.

Canvas Town had been attracting fugitives in twos and threes each day, especially after the Philipsburg Proclamation of 1779. Every Negro I taught learned the words of the proclamation, issued by Sir Henry Clinton, the British Commander-in-Chief:
To every Negro who shall desert the Rebel
Standard, full security to follow within these lines, any occupation which he shall think proper.

Every Negro who was capable took a job working for the British. This time, it wasn’t just soldiers they wanted. They needed cooks, laundresses, blacksmiths and labourers. They needed coopers, rope makers, carpenters and night-soil men.

And they needed me.

Malcolm Waters returned to New York with captain’s stripes on his shoulders. I told him his promotion probably had to do with his true calling in Holy Ground, and called him Captain Holiness. The British no longer kept their mistresses in separate houses in Holy Ground, since senior officers had commandeered homes throughout the city. But the flourishing brothels offered women of all types—Negroes in some houses, whites in others, and every kind going in still other places.

I wasn’t just asked to catch babies. Often, I was called upon to give doses of tansy or cottonroot and to stay with the women as their pregnancies bled out of them. Men too sought me out for relief for the blisters and excretions on their penises. I kept a ready supply of bloodroot and aloe, and charged everyone who could pay the same one-pound fee. I needed the money and I needed it desperately. Prices were soaring and everyone was cheating—even the bakers. It got so bad that the British capped the price of bread at twenty-two coppers per loaf and ruled that each loaf had to weigh exactly two pounds. To prevent fraud, bakers stamped their initials into loaves.

Each time there were rumours of change, the people of Canvas Town assembled outside my shack, waiting for me to show up with the
New Amsterdam Gazette.
I read to them about Thomas Paine and his book
Common Sense
, which made most of the Canvas Town residents boo and hiss. They thought it absurd for any white man in the Thirteen Colonies to be complaining of slavery at the hands of the British.

Sam Fraunces had dropped by for that reading, and said that Thomas Paine had a point. “Say what you will, but the Americans are winning against King George and the English,” he said. The rebels just wanted to control their own affairs, Sam argued, and that’s all Paine meant when he went on about Americans being slaves in their own land.

The Negroes of Canvas Town adored Sam Fraunces for his donations of leftover food after parties and banquets, and they were proud to see one of their own running the most popular tavern in town. However, that day they shouted him down.

“What freedom they need, that they don’t already got?” Claybourne called out.

Bertilda took Claybourne’s hand and jumped in: “They is free enough to bust in here and lock us up by the neck and drag us right back out of here and all the way down south, right to the rice fields,” she said. “Y’all know they’s busting in here just as often as they can.”

Some two hundred people roared in agreement.

“Nobody taking me down south,” Claybourne said. “I up and dead first. Someone slap an iron around my neck, my heart up and stop. I looks down and I tells my own heart, you all can take a permanent rest now. Knock it off and go off to sleep.”

Everybody laughed.

“Ain’t no foolin’,” Claybourne said. “All this time the rebels and the Tories been shooting each other up, I been teaching my mouth to run messages to my heart. I say stop, and it stop. I tell my heart it done lost its job. Time’s up, baby, you out of work. You unemploy. You get quiet, now, and lie down and die. And my heart obey, just like a dog. And that’s why nobody taking me back down south.”

A man called out from the crowd, “Hey, Claybourne, what kind of dog you got for a heart?”

“It’s a British retriever, that’s what it is.”

Sam Fraunces walked away in disgust. To him, Claybourne was nothing but a clown, and the kind of man who would never rise a step above slavery.

“It’s only clowns and Claybournes who have reason to fear the Americans,” Fraunces said. “The rebels demand their own freedom, and are more honest than the British. Liberty is coming to this land. And soon enough, freedom for all Negroes will follow.”

In 1782, I read to the people gathered around my door that the British had decided to end the war in surrender. It was a large crowd that night and people sat silent and thoughtful long after our talking was done. We clung to the words of the Philipsburg Proclamation:
To every Negro who shall desert the Rebel Standard, full security to follow.
Even I hoped against hope that they would take me to London. From there and only there, I imagined, would I have the chance to sail to Africa.

On March 26, 1783, the whole of Canvas Town ground to a halt. The people who had been washing clothes for the British wandered back home to their shacks. The three dishwashers and two assistant cooks working in the Fraunces Tavern walked off the job and camped out in front of my lean-to. Blacksmiths put down their metal, coopers abandoned their barrels, labourers left the wharves, and it seemed that every man, woman and child in our community huddled together in horror.

For those who hadn’t already heard the rumours, I opened the
Royal Gazette
and read aloud the notice of the peace treaty from the commander-in-chief of all His Majesty’s Forces in the Colonies.

In Canvas Town, the only part of the treaty that mattered was Section VII, which said:

White people in New York exulted over the news, but for anyone who had escaped slavery, the treaty spelled disaster. By agreeing not to take with them “Negroes or other Property,” the British had betrayed us and condemned us to fall into the hands of American slaveholders.

Emboldened by the British capitulation, plantation owners began sending their men into Canvas Town on raids. We set up a system of men who took turns on guard duty to watch for strangers, white and black. Usually, our own patrols managed to catch the raiders and beat them and hold them until their arrest at the hands of the British. But slave owners and agents from Virginia to Georgia kept prowling the city, in larger numbers than ever before, grabbing fugitives whenever they could.

It was dangerous to stay in New York. But it was even more dangerous to leave. This was the last place in the Thirteen Colonies still run by the British, and until they left completely, we still had some measure of protection.

A few days after everyone began talking about the British betrayal, Waters came to see me as I was giving my regular Monday morning reading at the Fraunces Tavern. He had matured into a good-looking man, and was even more attractive dressed in full regalia, with epaulets, silver stripes, shining buttons and all. But on this day, I did not greet him as Captain Holiness. I was in no joking mood. The British had once before abandoned the people they had pledged to protect, and now it appeared that they would leave us again. I vowed to refuse to help Waters now, no matter how desperately he pleaded or how much money he offered. I was tired of making life easier for British officers by catching the babies of their mistresses.

Everyone seemed to share my disappointment and anger.

“What’s the good of serving you?” Claybourne called out to Waters. “What kind of men are you, selling us to the rebels?”

“You’re jumping to conclusions,” said Waters. “Meena, could you come with me?”

“I’m not working today.”

“It isn’t what you think.”

“I’m not working for you any more, Captain Waters.”

Waters stepped closer and lowered his voice, so only I could hear. “This is not about Holy Ground. It’s different and it’s urgent.”

“I’ll be back shortly,” I told my friends.

“Don’t count on it,” Waters said.

IN AN OFFICERS’ ROOM in the British military barracks, I was brought tea with milk and sugar, an apple, some fresh bread and a slice of Stilton cheese. I drank the tea and ate the bread and cheese but slipped the apple into my handbag.

Waters introduced me to a man named Colonel Baker, who had stripes all over his shoulders, a regal bearing, and enough confidence to swallow up both of us.

Colonel Baker shook my hand forcefully. “I’ll skip to the point, as you have little time to waste and I have less,” he said.

Following his example, I sat again, and waited for him to continue. “Captain Waters says you are Guinea-born, correct?”

“I am from Bayo, in Africa.”

“And that you are thoroughly literate and produce flawless handwriting.”

I nodded.

“And that you have kept ledgers and understand how they work. Columns, rows, numbers and names in the right places, and all such details.”

Once more, I indicated that his information was correct. I could only
imagine that Waters had learned this last bit of information from Sam Fraunces, whose books I had kept over the years.

“Most important, I understand that you are said to know most of the coloured element of Canvas Town, and that most of them know you. And that you speak two African languages. And that, wherever you go, you have earned the respect of men and women in your community. Yes? Good. You are required for service to His Majesty the King. We must bring you into our employ, and haven’t a day to waste.”

For a moment, I wondered if this was an elaborate plan for me to catch babies of the mistresses of the most senior British military officials in New York.

Colonel Baker asked if I was familiar with Section VII of the Provisional Peace Treaty.

“I have taught half of Canvas Town to recite it from memory.”

“I know the coloured element feels betrayed by it,” Colonel Baker said, “but there is no cause for panic. You see, Section VII says that we agree not to make off with any Negroes or other property of the Americans. ‘Property’ is the operative word.”

Colonel Baker paused for a moment and then leaned toward me. “Understand? The coloured element is not the ‘property’ of the Americans. If you have served the British for one year at minimum, you have already been liberated. You are no man’s property.”

That was easy for him to say, since he didn’t have to fend off slave catchers in Canvas Town. But it didn’t seem wise to challenge him, so I said, “You mean to say you’re keeping your promises to the Negroes?”

“When we remove you to Nova Scotia, which is what we fully intend to do, we will not be violating any terms of the Peace Treaty.”

“Nova Scotia?” I repeated. I hoped it wasn’t a penal colony. “Not London?”

“Nova Scotia is a British colony, untouched and unsullied by the Americans, at a distance of two weeks by ship from the New York harbour. It is a fine
colony indeed, on the Atlantic Ocean but north of here, with woods, fresh water, abundant animals and rich forest just begging to be converted to farmland. Nova Scotia, Miss Diallo, will be your promised land.”

I had more questions to ask, but the colonel pressed forward. The British forces had agreed to vacate New York before the end of November. That left a scant eight months, and there was much work to do. Thousands of Loyalists would be moved to Nova Scotia, by dozens and dozens of frigates, transports, royal vessels and private ships. Property owners would be moving too, of course, and in far larger numbers than the Negroes.

“And in this place you call Nova Scotia,” I said, “will we be free?”

“Entirely. You will be as free as any Loyalist. But be forewarned. It will be hard work. You will be given land and expected to farm it. You will need seeds and implements and provisions, and all of those things you shall have. There will be plenty for everyone in the vastness of Nova Scotia.”

Like almost every Negro in Canvas Town, I was desperate to leave with the British before Americans—slave owners among them—took over New York City. I wondered if the things Colonel Baker promised were true. But when it came down to deciding whom I could trust with my tenuous liberty, my decision was already made.

“Why have you brought me here?” I asked. “Why are you telling—” He cut me off again. “You will spread the word among your people. You will help us register them. In due time, you will collect names, ages, and how they came to serve the British. We can only help those who have been behind British lines for a year. We need to know how many wish to travel. And we need to begin embarkations almost immediately.”

Colonel Baker stood up to leave the room but caught sight of my hand, index finger raised.

“Colonel, with due respect, I have not yet accepted your offer.” I heard the smallest exhalation from Captain Waters. I did not look his way but was certain he was stifling a laugh.

“I know you have a reputation for expecting fair pay, Miss Diallo. You will be compensated fairly.”

“I too want to go to Nova Scotia,” I said.

“You have my word,” he said.

“Then I accept.”

“Stupendous. Speak to Waters for details.” Colonel Baker shook my hand once more and left the room.

I turned to Waters. “What about the others?”

“If they have served one full year behind our lines and if they can obtain a certificate to prove it, yes.”