Washington and Caesar. Christian Cameron

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СКАЧАТЬ the winter.

      The wound changed him—as a man, and as a slave. At first, he was so certain he was going to die that he began to work less, and to devise ways of cheating the overseer that would have seemed petty to him once. He rested longer, took slower swings, made simple mistakes. He never broke a tool—that was worth a beating—but he stopped leading the others in his party. He let them return to drifting and asking Gordon for every bit of direction. That was his greatest protest, although he didn’t know it at first.

      Caesar hadn’t appreciated that he had become the leader in his work party until he stopped. It had seemed natural to him to console, prod and help his mates, no matter how dull they were. But he lost interest in them when he hurt himself, and his crew returned, almost without thought, to being a band of lost individuals. None of the other men was interested in leading the work party. Most had been broken before they came; the rest were certainly broken now. If Gordon noticed, he didn’t say anything; perhaps he preferred their puzzled docility to unified work. Perhaps he was himself too stupid even to see the change; Caesar had known his type before, in Africa and Jamaica, and doubted there was much behind those close-set eyes but hatred.

      Caesar had expected a pack of rebels, but almost all the men were broken, except those who had been sent there for being too stupid to work on the big farms of their owners. The smart ones had already run, sometime in the misty past before the overseers were given guns. Mr. Gordon, their overseer, was a brutal man with a terrible fund of energy. Even in the worst of the heat, he continued to hate every black man and woman ever born, and muttered endlessly under his breath. Each time he walked up to a group of men, he made a show of checking the prime in the pistol at his belt. He carried a fancy little flask and reprimed with it often. Caesar noticed these details because he still thought of killing Gordon, but the chance never came.

      Twice they received drafts of new slaves from other plantations, but none came from Mount Vernon or any of the other Washington farms, and Caesar had no news. He rarely even saw Virgil, though he had taken to the man immediately. Virgil had been moved to another crew after a week, and Caesar suspected that Gordon had seen them talking and was wary of allowing them to be partners.

      Sometimes his rebellion hurt him. When he stared down Old Ben because the man wanted his help; when the boy who came and cooked their corn hurt his hand and Caesar simply let him run off injured; a thousand other cuts, tiny abandonings of responsibility. But they were men, and they were not his men; they were slaves. He thought about these things in a distant, unconnected way, as if they were events going on in a fireside story. He couldn’t concentrate on himself.

      After weeks of petty rebellion and hoarded rest, Caesar finally re-emerged from the hell of flies and pain and expected death. As it closed, he began to believe that this wound, at least, would not be his death; and he began to fear from his own action, his carefully developed habit of flinching at the sound of Gordon’s voice, that he had allowed himself to break inside.

      Long afterwards, he thought that the wound must have fevered him, because one afternoon he found himself leaning on his mattock, ankle-deep in ooze but well apart from the others, and he was listening to a voice trailing away:

      “…you jes slow down, boy,” he heard. It was his own voice. He had been engaged in a spirited argument with himself, although the sides and the arguments were slipping away like a dream to a man awakening. But the other voice had sounded more like the preacher’s, he was sure, and it scared him to the bone that he was possessed, or that the whites had broken him at last.

      He shook his head, to clear it, and looked back to where he could see other men working in a line stretching for a hundred yards, with the ancient trees hanging over them and birds in the high canopy. The men seemed to have as much consequence as the birds and again he thought of the preacher, and that he had said that the Lord saw even the fall of a sparrow. Why a sparrow? He thought. Why that bird in particular? Those tiny hummingbirds, now they was small. Smaller than a sparrow.

      And again, he realized that he had been speaking the words aloud, and again he was afraid, both that he was broken like the other broken men, and that he would stand and talk to himself about sparrows until Gordon put a pistol ball in his head.

      Later, he caught himself weeping, and he didn’t know why, but if that was a fever, it broke then, because he didn’t talk to himself again.

      

       Virginia Convention, Richmond, Virginia, March 23, 1775

      “The establishment of such a militia, composed of Gentlemen and Yeomen, is at this time particularly necessary, by the state of our laws for the protection and defense of the country, some of which have expired, and others shortly will do so; and that known remissness of government, in calling us together in a legislative capacity, renders it too insecure, in this time of danger and distress, to reply that opportunity will be given of renewing them in General Assembly—”

      “Make your point, Mr. Henry.”

      “I will, sir.”

      “Rather, Mr. Henry, you have done. You want us to vote an extraordinary militia act because it is unlikely that Lord Dunmore will call the Burgesses?”

      “Yes, sir. May I continue?”

      “If you must.”

      “Sir, I must.” Patrick Henry, the prime orator of the House of Burgesses, raised his papers for a moment, recalling his place, and his voice continued in a deliberately humdrum manner.

      “Ahem…General Assembly, or making any other provision to secure our inestimable rights and liberties from those farther violations…” The rumble from the Convention seat was not all royalist; and Henry’s tempo began to change as he added emotion to his voice. “Violations with which they are threatened. RESOLVED, therefore…”

      Washington’s neighbor leaned over to him. “This isn’t about defending ourselves from the Delaware, is it?”

      Washington smiled carefully, hiding the remnants of his teeth.

      “I think not.” He thought back to his review of the Dumfries Independent Company a few days before. They had their new colors, a company standard with a motto, and a dark blue color with the union in the canton. It was a gesture toward the king’s men in the county, but a far cry from the king’s color that had traditionally graced every regiment of militia, a union flag two fathoms across. They were uniformed in blue and buff, his favorite colors and the traditional colors of the liberal Whig party in England.

      Washington’s other neighbor leaned across him to George Mason, two down on his right.

      “It’s rhetoric like this that costs us support in England. Let this man go on and we’ll lose every friend we made with the Congress.”

      Down on the floor, Patrick Henry raised his face to the men in the benches and drew himself to his full height. He looked around him like a man entering a ball and searching for friends.

      “We must fight.” Uttered with regret, but uttered. A silence fell over the hall; the royalists sat thunderstruck. It had been whispered. Now it had been said. A murmur from the back benches.

      “You do not care for the sentiment? But it is being forced upon us by unprecedented tyranny. It is not our property that is threatened, but our liberties, not the pennies of taxation, but the pounds of chains that this government would load upon us. Did I say we must fight? Perhaps what I should have said is, we must fight. We must fight! There, ’tis said.”

      Mason СКАЧАТЬ