Washington and Caesar. Christian Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ mah shouldah, suh.” He raised his eyes for a moment, then back down. “I did’n mean no ha’m.”

      Queeny had ordered him to stop speaking his “new way”. It didn’t please him, and he practiced in secret, both the language of his master and the language of the pulpit. But it seemed to work on Bailey, who was more relaxed with him when he spoke like the rest of the men.

      Bailey rode back to Washington. “I think he had a spasm, sir.”

      Washington watched the boy hike his buckets again as if seeking comfort, and a little water trickled out of each and ran off into the dust.

      “I cannot abide rebellion, Mr. Bailey. But I’ll let this pass.”

      Bailey could only put it down to temper. His employer never watched the blacks like some white men Bailey had known, and there was little rebellion to be found at Mount Vernon. Bailey suspected that most slaves were as smart as he—smart enough to know that they would not be as comfortable anywhere else if they were sold from Mount Vernon. The African boy was no more a rebel than the others, but the big man on the horse was in a foul temper, and he didn’t seem to like the dogs boy at the best of times. Bailey wondered why. The boy was quite clearly gifted, and everyone else on the farm knew it.

      

      Martha Custis, as she was then, had two children by Jack Custis before he died and she became Mrs. Washington. He loved them both, though Patsy had been frail and Jack was the very model of a wild rich boy. As Jacky got older and more spoiled by his mother, his demands on his estates grew larger, until Washington had separated them off from the other Custis and Washington holdings so that Jack could only affect his own. But this separation had been on paper only, and the final books that would allow a grown-up and married Jack Custis the full enjoyment of his own estates were a difficult and unrewarding task. Washington didn’t resent the loss of revenue. It was nothing as simple as that. He had enjoyed commanding one of the largest sets of estates in Virginia, and he would miss many of the useful details from Jack’s land. Among other details, Jack had the best farrier in Virginia, and now Washington would have to pay to use him.

      He sought to repair his acreage in the Ohio country, where the grants to veterans of the last war would give him something like a hundred thousand acres of new land, beautiful land with big trees and fresh soil. He wanted to farm on that sort of scale, and he sometimes dreamed about what the Ohio might be like in his old age, if he got to put his schemes into production.

      Selling off Martha’s other child’s estates was also trouble. Patsy’s death had upset Martha very much—so much, indeed, that she was just recovering. Patsy had always been a sickly child and no one who knew her well had expected a long life for her, but as she reached her teens and continued to dance and read, the Washingtons had begun to imagine that she might live a normal life, marry and have children of her own.

      Selling her shares of stock in London would clear the very last of his debts, but the details seemed to drag, and he sat with his pen scratching carefully away on the business of his farms and his livelihood while he could hear the real life of his estate going on behind him—horses being led out and walked, sheep being fed, chickens, and then the distant music of his hounds. The boy was feeding them.

      He got up and walked out, his anger rising from a small curiosity to a rage before he reached the kennel. The boy was rolling balls of bread and soaking them in broth, then throwing them to each hound by name. It was a curious ritual, and not the way he did the feedings himself. It neither slowed his anger nor increased it. It was a subject for another day.

      “Caesar! I told you to call me every day before the dogs were fed.”

      Caesar fairly leapt in the air at the sound of his name, and his sudden tension threw the dogs into confusion. They sensed their master’s anger and the boy’s worry, and some barked. Others milled, biting each other. Caesar recovered and moved slowly, trying for calm. Washington had to look at the scars over his eyes.

      “Sorry, suh.”

      “Is that all, boy? You are sorry?”

      Bailey was hurrying out from the overseer’s house, his coat off, clearly torn from his supper. Someone had seen the Master headed for the kennel and called him out. Washington resented this as an intrusion.

      “Caesar, did you forget, or were you deliberately sullen? Answer me, boy.”

      The slave looked up to him slowly, and his eyes were a little hard—not reproachful or hurt, as might be expected from an innocent slave, nor wary or deceitful, either. Washington was a good judge of men, and this one was hard to read. The eyes held his for one flash, then were cast down.

      “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t do it on purpose.” The sentences were delivered like a verdict; the enunciation was strong and crisp.

      Bailey wiped some crumbs from his chin but stayed mute, waiting for the explosion, worried that the enunciation might be read as rebellion.

      Washington waited with the rest of them, balanced on the sword’s point of his own conflicting feelings of anger and fairness, until fairness won out. The boy had done nothing. If called, he would not have come to the feeding. His business held him, and he was still angry at Muse’s letter, at his stepson’s stubbornness in marrying a Maryland papist without reflection, at the loss of prestige involved in Jack’s estates. It was a witch’s brew of discontent and no mistake; he was fair enough a man to know that the black boy had little to do with it.

      The boy’s way of speaking was another matter entirely, but like his careful feeding of the dogs, it needed to be dealt with another time. The boy was arrogant; arrogance had no place in a slave, a point he had made to Bailey countless times.

      “Look at me, Julius Caesar.” His voice was calm, and as he hoped, the eyes that met his were not hard or rebellious, but concerned now.

      “Always call me before the dogs are fed.”

      “I won’t forget again, suh.”

      Washington shook his head, smiled very slightly, made a small bow to Bailey, and went inside. Bailey stopped a moment longer.

      “For God’s sake, call him next time. Or you’ll be the worse for it, young Caesar. I can’t be plainer than that.” He tried to project a number of pieces of information through those sentences, because he worried about fairness at times. But his dinner was waiting, and his wife. His wife often chided him about slaves. “Catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar,” she said, meaning that a little conversation was often better than punishment. But he lacked the knack of it. She always carried herself above the blacks but spoke to them all the time; he couldn’t do it.

      He wanted to warn the boy, but he couldn’t find any words that wouldn’t betray his own notions of loyalty to the Colonel. So he stood for a moment, a short man in his smallclothes with a napkin tied under his chin, leaning on the rail of the kennel. And when nothing came, he simply nodded to the boy, and went back to his dinner, his spirits lowered.

      

      The next morning dawned with more bad news. His party of indentures and Palatine Germans going to open the farms in his new land in the Ohio was held up by the incompetence of his agent in the matter, and as was all too often the case, only his own intervention could solve the matter. He rode to Alexandria through a light rain and back through a heavier, and the chance to hunt was long washed away by the time he had his riding horse back at the beautiful brick barn at Mount Vernon.

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