THE BOOK OF NEGROES (36 page)

“Let’s burn their homes,” one man shouted.

“Let’s torch Birchtown,” another said.

“It’s time to teach the niggers a lesson,” said one man. “Let’s start with that big bastard down there.”

Many of the men were drinking beer, and others carried muskets. The two groups of white men merged as they moved away from May and me, crossed Water Street and headed toward a Negro who was well known in Birchtown. Ben Henson, a tall, thick-set man, was stationed at his usual post to the side of Water Street, sawing logs at the rate of one penny a foot. Ben had the biggest arms in Birchtown, but I wished that he would take off and run before they got to him. I didn’t want him to prove his strength. I wanted him to be safe. But as the men advanced, Ben kept working on his thick log.

“Why don’t you haul them logs back to Nigger Town?” a man leading the crowd called out.

Ben did not look up from his sawing. The leader walked closer to him, musket pointed at Ben’s waist. Ben kept working until the man was within reach. In a flash, Ben grabbed the musket, seized the man and flung him to the ground. Two more men jumped him, but Ben tossed them off like cats. While he was dodging the knife of a fourth man, yet another slid behind him, raised a musket and shot him through the head. Big Ben Henson dropped like a sack of hammers. I felt nauseated at the sight of blood pooling around Ben’s shoulders.

Then the men turned away from Ben Henson and saw me. I grabbed May in my arms, turned back to Charlotte Street and ran up the hill to pound on the Witherspoons’ door.

“Who’s there?” Mrs. Witherspoon called out.

“Meena and May.”

She opened the door, hurried us in and slid the bolt behind us. “I’ve been watching through the window. I was worried they had you too.”

“They’re killing folks,” I said.

“They’ve gone crazy,” Mrs. Witherspoon said. She led my daughter to the kitchen to distract her with ginger and molasses cookies. I looked out through the window toward the harbour. I could see Ben Henson, lying by his broken sawing tripods. From a distance, it looked like he was napping. There were no other black people in the street. The band of white men had moved on.

“I saw two men killed,” I whispered, when Mrs. Witherspoon brought me a shot of rum.

“Take this,” she said. “And stay with us until this madness ends.” Mrs. Witherspoon fed us and put us up for the next three days. Her husband brought more news: the white men were still rampaging. Roaming bands of unemployed workers had killed at least four Negroes and beaten many others. There was talk of rape. When the whites descended on Birchtown, they had been beaten back, but they had only returned in larger numbers to tear down some houses and set fire to others, attacking anyone who resisted.

Throughout the days we stayed with the Witherspoons, I kept to my regular duties while May played. Each night, I climbed into bed with my daughter and tried to calm myself by following the rise and fall of her breathing. How would I take care of us if our cabin had been destroyed? What if all of Birchtown had been torched? And what about Daddy Moses and other people who needed me?

Every evening, I asked Mr. Witherspoon for a report. Four days after the riots began, he told me that they had stopped. There were no more bands of men roaming the streets, he said, and no more reports of violence in Birchtown. I wanted to be sure that it was safe to take May back to Birchtown, and thought it would be best if I first went there alone.

I arranged to leave May in the Witherspoons’ care for two days. In that time, I planned to find out if my home still stood, fix it if I could, help Daddy Moses and my other friends, and then rush back to Shelburne for my daughter.

I slipped down Charlotte Street early in the morning, turned onto Water Street and saw no Negroes working in the town. A ship was at a wharf, but only white labourers moved about the docks. Some men stopped working, put down their loads of lumber and glared at me, but nobody approached me or said a word. I got out of town without incident. Usually I passed four or five people on the way between Shelburne and Birchtown, but on this day I saw only one Negro, and he was dead—hanging from a tree to the side of the path. He had on a pair of breeches but no shirt and no shoes. I shuddered, yet did not feel that I could keep going without stopping to see if it was someone I knew. I spun the feet and looked up at the face, but the man had been so badly beaten and bloodied that I could not recognize him.

Daddy Moses had arranged to have his Methodist chapel built on the east end of town; no visitor could arrive from Shelburne without taking notice of it. As I rounded the bay and crossed the bridge over a creek, the charred remains of the chapel came into view. It had been burnt to the ground. Three old women stood outside praying, and another was cooking over a fire near the ruins. As I headed into town, I could see that many of the shacks had been torched or knocked over. Gardens had been trampled, and people walked about ragged and bent. I found Daddy Moses sitting on his cart at the graveyard. His glasses were missing, and I saw a welt on his cheek. I put my hand in his.

“I’m glad you’re alive, sister,” he said. “Nobody knew where you were.”

I pulled Daddy Moses to his own cabin. The door was gone, a wall had been bashed in and the roof looked like it would cave.

“Were you there when they attacked your house?” I asked.

“Sitting on the front step, waiting for them. I heard them drinking and laughing and carrying on, so I looked straight in their direction as they came my way. I told them, ‘If the Lord wants me, the Lord will come get me. So go ahead and shoot an old blind man, if killing is in your blood.’ Somebody hit me with a gun butt. Another man kicked at my ribs. ‘I can’t see you,’ I told them, ‘but I know you. I know each of your voices, and when I meet your Maker, I’m going to tell Him of your carnage. Shoot me if you are so brave.’ But they didn’t. Cowards, all of them. ‘Blind man,’ somebody called out to me, ‘tell your people to keep out of Shelburne. Stay in your place and there won’t be no more trouble.’”

In my own cabin, someone had kicked the door off its hinges and thrown all my things to the floor. I thought of the men who had surrounded Ben Henson, and shuddered to imagine them tearing apart my home. Outside the cabin, Daddy Moses and I met with a group from his chapel. We agreed to first fix up the houses that had been least damaged. People who needed their cabins mostly or completely rebuilt moved in with others.

I spent that day and night in Birchtown and much of the next morning, working with a group of ten people to fix up two other cabins and mine. I helped move Daddy Moses into a spare bed in my front room, and at noon, promising to return before dark with my daughter, I headed back to Shelburne.

I passed the burned remains of the chapel, crossed over the bridge and set out on the path back to town. It was a long way to be walking alone. The wind whipped through the trees to my left, and out on the bay to my right, whitecaps lifted and crashed over and over. Up ahead around a bend in the trail, I heard the loud voices of men. I ran into the forest, and
moved quietly forward until I saw saw five men with knives, guns, rope and liquor walking toward Birchtown. There was no point in going back, because they would find me there. But it was dangerous to go on, because they might hear me thrashing through the woods. So I climbed high into a pine tree, pulling myself up onto one sticky branch after another. Then I sat perfectly still. My heart pounded in my chest. My fast breathing, at least, was drowned out by the shouting and laughter of the men.

They were talking about “shack busting in Nigger Town,” when Jason rounded the curve in the trail and found himself surrounded.

“Where you going, boy?” one of the white men said.

“I am going to Shelburne.”

“Birchtown where you belong.”

“My mama is in Shelburne. I am going to fetch her.”

“Why is your mama in Shelburne?”

“Taking in laundry.”

“Taking a white person’s job, is she?”

“She is just washing clothes.”

Another man smacked Jason in the head with a rifle butt.

“You’ve gone and spoiled my fun,” said the first man.

“What fun?”

“I was gonna play with him a little. Teach him a lesson. Kill him slow. Now you gone and knocked him clean out and spoilt my fun.”

“Let’s tie him up and have our fun with him later.”

The men dragged Jason off the path, tied him up to a tree close to mine and continued on the path to Birchtown.

I waited a few minutes to see if anybody else was coming. Jason slowly came to and started moaning. I climbed down, ran to him and hurried to loosen the knots binding his wrists to the tree.

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Good thing you’re here,” he said.

“So you’re going to see your mama?”

“Mama died in the riots. She just up and died, without anybody even beating on her.”

As he got up from the ground, I gave him a hug. “That’s awful news,” I said. “Is there anybody else at home?”

“No. It was just Mama and me.”

“Why are you going to Shelburne?”

“Need food. Need work. Need a place to sleep. My mama’s dead and gone and our shack’s too tore up for living.”

“Those men will kill you if you go back to Birchtown. Come along with me and see what you can find in town.”

We began walking together to Shelburne.

“All the time we been in Birchtown, you never talked about writing me up in the Book of Negroes.”

“Heavens,” I said. “Did I write you up too? I’m sorry, Jason—I worked on so many ships and wrote down so many names that I’ve just forgotten some of them.”

“I was in an all-day lineup on that ship, and all the coloured folks knew who you were. Little bitty pint-sized fast-talking African woman writing down the names of half the Negroes in Manhattan. You didn’t know all of us, but we all loved you.”

“You did?”

“Because you were taking care of us.”

“And you say I wrote you up in the Book of Negroes?”

“You did, missus.”

“What did I write?”

“Don’t know, missus. Couldn’t read then and still can’t now.”

“Why didn’t you come to my reading classes in Shelburne?”

“I’m already nineteen,” he said. “It’s too late now.”

“It’s never too late,” I said.

When we got into Shelburne, I noticed that the ship had left. Jason went to look for a man who had hired him before, and I turned up Charlotte Street.

I knocked on the Witherspoons’ door. Nothing. I knocked again. I tried the door. It didn’t budge. I wandered from window to window, to the wood shed, to the well, to the back door, but saw no signs of activity or people inside. I pounded again on the front door, until the woman in the nearest house opened hers and asked me what in tarnation I thought I was doing.

“I want my daughter, but nobody’s home,” I shouted.

“Would you calm down?” the woman whispered. “Hasn’t there been enough trouble lately?”

“The Witherspoons have my daughter, but nobody is home. Do you know where they are?”

“Goodness, woman, stop all that racket.”

I tried to contain myself. Perhaps if I could control my breathing, the woman would tell me what she knew. “Where,” I sobbed, “is my daughter? She’s three. This high. Named May.”

“That little thing is yours?”

I crossed the street and brought my face within inches of the woman’s. In my terror and anger, I wanted in the same instant to throttle her and to get down on my knees and beg for help.

“Where is May?”

The woman stepped back and cleared her throat. “The Witherspoons left on a ship. You and that girl are none of my business.” She closed the door in my face. I heard the bolt sliding.

I crossed the street again, found a rock, and smashed open the shutters covering a window of the Witherspoons’ house. I crawled inside. Every room was empty. The tables, dressers and beds were all gone.

“May!” I screamed over and over again. But no one answered.

I stumbled down to Water Street. A number of white workers moved about the docks. I marched up to them.

“I’m looking for my daughter. Three years old. Named May. Have you seen a little Negro girl? Perhaps with some white people?”

One of the labourers spat near my feet. Others kept working.

“Please. I just want my daughter. Can anyone say if they’ve seen a little Negro girl?”

None of them would speak to me. I wandered out on the pier toward a young man working with rope.

“Please,” I said. “I am looking for my daughter. A little girl. Three years old.”

“I haven’t seen any Negro girl,” he said.

“Have you seen the Witherspoons? A man and a woman, who lived on Charlotte Street?”

“I don’t know any of those rich people,” he said. “But some sailed out this morning, on the ship. There were three or four families on it. That’s all I know.”

I ran off the pier and burst into Theo McArdle’s shop. McArdle looked up from his printer.

“Meena!”

“Where is my daughter?”

“Did anyone see you come in? It isn’t safe for you here.”

“I can’t find my daughter. The Witherspoons are gone.”

“If anyone thinks I am paying you, they—”

I picked up one of his newspapers and threw it at him. I grabbed a bundle of papers, opened the door and hurled them out into the street. “What happened to my daughter?”

McArdle rushed past me to bolt the door and lower the curtain. He brought me a chair and motioned for me to sit, which I did, and he stood with his back to the door.

“The Witherspoons were preparing to leave for some time,” he said. “I thought you knew. And as soon as the riots ended, they decided to get out.”

“But where is my daughter?”

“When the disturbances settled down, they hired twenty porters to carry their things to the water. Within an hour or two they were gone.”

“White porters, or black?” I asked. Negroes, at least, would be able to tell me something about May.

“White.”

“Was May with the Witherspoons?” He could not speak, but nodded slowly.

“Tell me,” I screamed. “Tell me with words. Did my daughter go on that ship?”