Washington and Caesar. Christian Cameron

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      “You take care, now. Mr. Washington, he sell black boys wha’ try to run.”

      Cese nodded. He looked out at the shore for a moment.

      “Maybe I go England.”

      “Go to England, Cese. Maybe so. You know who Somerset was?”

      “No, suh.”

      “He was a black man like you. He run from his master in England. Got caught, got beat, got a white man to take him to court. He won. No slavery in England now.”

      Cese had heard a little of the story, but not so plain, always told elliptically so that an overseer wouldn’t understand. He thought it remarkable that a black man had got into a court at all, much less that his case should be heard. In the Indies, a slave couldn’t even give evidence, a fact of life that every slave knew all too well.

      “Maybe I go to England,” he repeated.

      “You take care, boy.”

      King nodded to Jones and they stood, Jones carefully wrapping twine around his pipe and putting it into a fitted tin. Before the mate could call them aloft, they were standing at the base of the mainmast, ready for the last tack into the bay, the boy and the other slaves forgotten.

      Cese watched the shore and thought about the raid and his last moments as a free man. He thought about it often, but now he tried to think about what England must be like, a land where men became free just by touching the ground, or so he had been told. He tried to imagine how to get to England, but he couldn’t see it. What he could see in his mind’s eye was the musket butt coming under his shield, into his hip and groin, the point of his spear going into the other man’s innards, his hand turning the blade as he had been taught. One kill. It didn’t seem like much of a tally against a life of servitude, and sometimes he wondered if he should just have died when he went down. And he thought about his father, a war captain of renown. He had probably taken another wife and forgotten Cese. Cese shook his head to send the memories away. He seldom thought of his father.

      He looked at the coastline, nearer now, and decided to do the very best he could. Other slaves said Virginny was different from the Indies, the whites better, the living easier, and fewer folk died. Perhaps he could win his freedom.

      “Hunt-ar.” He savored the word. “Eng-land.”

      

       Williamsburg, Virginia, March 4, 1773

      She meant trouble, that was plain. Martha’s eyes sparkled as they always did when she had mischief on her mind, but her voice seemed serious when she asked him to explain the day’s events. Of the men in the room, only Washington understood his wife’s message: they had already talked politics enough. Young Henry Lee, just graduated from Princeton, did not hear the irony in her voice or catch her meaning, and he leapt to explain with a simplicity that damned him as a patronizing animal to every woman present.

      “It is not a complicated matter, ma’am.” Wiser heads turned to watch the man charge to his doom; his implication that she might be unequal to a more complicated matter lost him the support of the crowd.

      “I’m sure you’ll make it all plain to me, Mr. Lee.”

      “Indeed, ma’am. We have settled on choosing a committee of eleven men to obtain the most early and authentic intelligence of all such acts and resolutions of the British Parliament, or proceedings of administrations, as may relate to, or affect the British Colonies in America…”

      “So you intend to form a Committee of Correspondence, as Massachusetts has?” Martha smiled at the younger man. She was quite short, but her immense dignity and the memory of her beauty, as well as her reputation, gave her a presence that only a few of the men could match, and Lee was not one of them.

      “…to keep up and maintain a correspondence and communication with our sister colonies.”

      “Mr. Lee, I believe you are repeating a speech that most of my guests have already heard.” Martha Washington said “Mistah” with the man’s name, and the drawl lengthened a bit each time she said it. “It certainly sounds like you have chosen a Committee of Correspondence.”

      Lee looked at her as if he had just perceived that she was mocking him.

      “I was endeavoring to explain, ma’am.”

      “I think you were making a speech, sir. And what I wish to understand is, why? Why must we join a league with the good wives of New England? Why have you censured our governor for bringing to justice a counterfeiter whose work threatened every person of account in this colony? Why this incessant attack on Parliament?”

      “Surely, ma’am, your husband has explained…” He looked about him with the assurance of a man of twenty, expecting allies against the assault of one small middle-aged woman, but he saw only stony stares, and this stung him. His opinion of women was not very high, but his standard of rhetoric had much to recommend it, and he felt sure he could defeat her, if only he chose the right arguments.

      “That the counterfeiter needed to be brought to book no one here contends, ma’am. But the governor used methods that the House of Burgesses cannot condone without it impugning our stand on a larger issue, to wit, whether Americans can be taken out of our continent to England to be tried. This counterfeiter was in Pittsylvania County. The court there was competent to execute justice on him, but our governor chose to send a special sheriff and bring him to Williamsburg to justice.”

      “And now he can no longer pass counterfeit five-pound notes that cause my steward to suspend business.” Martha smiled at him again, a happy smile that made it difficult for him to believe that he was being led to slaughter.

      “But the legality places us awkwardly, ma’am. If the governor can write a warrant to take a man from his county to Williamsburg for trial, then the Admiralty in London can write a warrant for a smuggler to be taken from Boston to London for trial.”

      “What of it? Are we not all English? Or is it your meaning that Americans will give their own a ‘fairer’ trial? Perhaps the smuggler will never be found guilty in Boston, Mr. Lee? Because if that’s your meaning, I can’t help but think that my steward is happier that this counterfeiter did not get a ‘fairer’ trial among his friends in Pittsylvania.”

      Lee looked like a man who had just discovered a deep pit yawning at his feet. Arguments against the tyranny of the Crown were so popular in Virginia that he was not really ready to argue cases; he generally expected approbation in reply to any reasonable assault on the Government. Martha Washington, however, was of far too much consequence to ignore, and it struck him, then, that he could forfeit his standing either by offending her, as one of the richest landowners in the colony, or by losing the debate, which would not increase his stature with the House of Burgesses, to which her husband belonged, and to which he aspired.

      Lee felt doubly ambushed in that Washington himself rarely spoke in the House, and was firmly a friend of liberty. It seemed astonishing that he should allow his wife to make such statements. He turned and looked at the tall colonel, who nodded gravely at him. He was actually expected to debate with her. Very well, then.

      “Are you familiar, ma’am, with the Gaspee incident?”

      “Perhaps you will help me understand it, Mr. Lee.”

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