A quartern of rum, and if I got into trouble with Barget I got into
trouble, that was all! David Scott told himself a day of forgetting was
worth the price, but what he truly wanted was the rum. His body wanted
it, having learned to love the taste of it and the thrill of it in the
brain two years before. Wanted it headstrong and hot like a colt,--but
colts may be broken. David Scott did not break his soon enough, and it
turned to the deil’s side, miscalling it Nature and a man’s right. A
big, gaunt, red carle!
I hid the rum and drank it all in two days. I was working with Tom
Tripper at the Narrow Patch. The sun was not yet up, the river mist
heavy, the rows of huge-leaved plants ghostly gray at no distance, thin
as the pipe smoke they would eventually pass into.
“Where did you get it?” he asked and leaned on his hoe.
“That’s telling.”
“If I had a bottle, and I was in London, down by Paul’s, tell you what
I’d do! I’d drink it, little by little, all day, and then when it
was empty and night, down I’d go to river and drop it and myself in
together.”
“It’s empty for you now, and there’s the river, and night will come.”
He had a laugh like a kelpie’s: “No! Thames is your only river to drown
in.”
I worked dull and heavy-headed, but the work got done. I could work. I
could run and fight and read. I lusted to know life and the world, but
I liked not the part of it I was knowing. Months went by, and I did
not get any more rum that gave me gorgeous visions and expanded me to
thinking I had the world to turn and twist and toss and catch!
There dwelled a kind of beauty in Virginia. I was not insensible of it.
They said that under the setting sun it had green hills and mountains
like great walls and small, swift, bright streams. Here was naught of
that. But yet was beauty. I must see it and grant it, though palely and
grudgingly to what Great Nature should have! Morning was the divine
time, though evening, at sunset, and when the moon rose, or when it was
soft, deep blue around huge stars, and against the lower world played
ten thousand thousand fireflies, ran it close. For all the English
clearings of a hundred and twenty-five years, and for all the tiny
Indian clearings of unknown centuries, the forest yet cried, “Mine!
Mine!” It was a strange forest, beautiful in the spring and the summer
and the autumn and the winter, but with a sad beauty. The marshes
had the same, and the still creeks that wound among them, and the
monstrously wide, deeply moving tidal rivers. Mist from the fat land
and broad waters hung in the air and made all colors sheenlike and
melting.
I leaned against the tree I was hewing down, or I straightened from the
earth where I was setting, plant after plant, to the thousands, the wee
tobacco plants, and I saw that there was beauty though it would not
stay, though my heart went hot and sick again. But I had the gleam;
from my cradle I had that gleam.
And David Scott, servant for he could not guess how long on a Virginia
plantation, could not utterly forswear mirth, though the limmer and he
made great spaces between their meetings. But about once in so often
she came to me with the deil’s own slant about her!
When I ran away the second time and after two days and nights was
taken in a marsh twenty miles nearer the sea, Williams and his helpers
carried me before a justice of the peace and I was lashed. To serve
fourteen years and have twenty-nine lashes well laid on the bare
back--I sent for mirth that time, and she came with skirls of laughter.
I was twenty-four. I heard Barget tell two fine guests of Colonel
Amory, riding past Old Mill quarter, that I worked well, but needed
watching. “Runaway. And has spells of darkness.”
So I had! Spells of darkness.
All this time, at Old Mill quarter, the few white men came and went,
but the score of black men stayed. Mingo, Barbadoes Tom, Pickaninny,
Great Joe, Cæsar, Dominick, Bob and Dick and Frank and others.
From time to time Mingo or Great Joe or Pickaninny ran away, were
found--Mingo got as far as Baltimore--returned, and were severely
whipped. You see there is no way a Negro _can_ pay but with his
skin. The white bondservant’s time may be doubled, but Negroes are
already slaves for life. Elsewhere man may be put to forced labor,
but servant and slave already labor from red morn to purple night.
To give them any more would be quite to break down and irremediably
injure--property. Again men may be fined; but from what should
servant-without-wage and slave pay a fine? Culprits may be put in
prison, but if you put servant or slave in prison, it is the master
that is punished, losing the delinquent’s service. The only way
out--since it was nonsense to say that Negroes and white servants did
not transgress--was to make them remember it by bodily pain. Hence the
whip everywhere, ancient Egypt or Chaldea or some antiquity having
found out, for the use and benefit of every country since, that this
was the simplest, easiest, cheapest, everywhere handiest instrument
with which to inflict pain that should warn and deter (and revenge) and
yet not necessarily cripple even for a day. Nothing else could be so
nicely graduated from little to much. If an example were to be made,
it _could_ cripple for any length of time. Pushed far enough, it
might even slay.
One could see the human reason in it--at cool seasons. The lawgiver
might point at vice enough and folly enough among slaves and servants.
Murderous rages, obstinacy against orders and against work, lying,
stealing, wantonness, jealousy, laziness and tale-bearing, I’ve seen
them all, in Guinea Negro and white bondsmen. Not in all Guinea Negroes
nor in all white bondsmen, but in many. The planters may well have
said, “What can we do? It is law and custom and perfectly right that
we own these Negroes, and in a sense and for a time these white men.
We don’t particularly love--no, nor our overseers don’t particularly
love--the whip. But what, for instance, would you do?”
Pickaninny--called so because he was so big a fellow--and Old Hannibal
began to sing, breaking the clods with their hoes. They were born in
Virginia, and Pickaninny’s parents before him.
“When hab I done wid de trouble ob de world,
O-hhh! when hab I done?
Trouble ob de world!
I ask de Lord how long I hold ’em,
Trouble ob de world!
I ask de Lord how long I hold ’em?
I ask de Lord how long I hold ’em?
Hold ’em to de end.
My sins so heavy I can’t get along.
Aahh!
Ah, trouble ob de world!”
Eboe Sam differed from these two. Bought naked out of the
_Albatross_, straight from Bang-alang the same year that I was
bought clothed from the _King William_, we apparently experienced
the same trouble in settling down. I had to face the “seasoning.” He
missed that, his native climate being many degrees hotter and ranker
than Virginia. He had run away. So had I. But he had gone, madly and
desperately, over and over again, chance or no chance. I had not. I was
Scotch and sought straw for my bricks, though bricks in the end I meant
to have, bricks and my fortress and palace! He was, I should reckon,
four or five years older than me. He said he was a chief’s son. “Son
of Mongo--same as him!” He flung his hand toward Colonel Amory who had
just paced by, on his bay mare Cherry.
“African chief!” I said. “I’m the cousin of a Scots chief. Mickle
difference does it make!”
He had little English, and he came under Barget’s wrath continually. A
proud and haughty one! used, that was the trouble, to slaves of his own.
“Ah! Trouble ob de world.
When hab I done wid de trouble ob de world?”
I asked Eboe Sam many questions about Africa. He took a fancy to me,
perhaps because I was at pains to learn a little of his language,
perhaps because I was big of frame and cousin to a chief, perhaps
because I once did him a small kindness. He had as much sense as many
a white man, and there, while we tended tobacco in a blazing July, I
gathered a notion of the things and ways of his country. To him it
was the finest country in the world. Like Scotland. It was totally a
mistake, he said, _his_ being taken and sold.
I had from him my first notion of how, from ancient, ancient time,
African men were the gowden guineas of Africa, aye, and the silver
coin and the note of hand. They did not use metal money; they bought
with men and women and children. How did they get them? It spread as
big as forever, that land; he ran over names of tribes and peoples,
and it was worse than the Old Testament! All warred with one another
for that very money, just like us. Money was money, whether it walked
itself or was carried. Also they battled because of bitter feud and
family quarrel--again similarities!--and they lifted each other’s
cattle and in foray strove always to take prisoners, for prisoners were
money. It was gleeful so to drain the foeman clan’s purse! If there
were dead peace and no good wars going and chiefs were waxing poor,
then was the time _to make one’s own village smaller_. There were
always men and women who could be spared. And children. Plenty people
did wrong. Sell them to the white men! But here he fell into a fit of
rage so sorrowful and righteous indignant that it made one quake.
He--Jarroo--had done no wrong. He was not liable in any way. He was
chief’s son, Great Jarroo’s son. All he could say was that Satan had
been at work. He had slept on his mat after a feast. When he waked he
was out of the village and a rope was round his neck, and so many men
pushed him along whom, when it was light, he found to be Mandingoes. He
killed one, but they dragged him to the coast.
“Kidnapping or Spiriting!” I said. “Don’t you know everything about
that too?”
Yes, he did. But he was chief’s son, Jarroo! It shouldn’t have befallen
_him_.
Another time I asked him what folk in his part of Africa bought with
their money. His eyes gleamed, his tongue moistened his lips, he looked
around the bare cabin--it was at night--with disdain, and began to
describe. Muskets--I made out those at once--knives, cutlasses, powder,
rum, red cloth, blue and white and figured cottons, looking-glasses,
shining ewers and basins, fine coats, bells, trumpets, beads to give
women--all that he craved he told of in a kind of triumph. He had had
them; nothing could take that away from him. England had given them to
him for black and brown, walking ingots. But he liked it not when the
thimble fell in his own lap.
Though he was still a young man he had abundant war scars. Wars must
go on, he said, because there must be slaves for sale. So when there
wasn’t quarrel, pick quarrel. The white men at the castles on the
coast, the factories, helped the chiefs pick them.
The fire on the cabin hearth glared. They were dancing before the long
cabin--Mingo and Great Joe and Pickaninny and others, and Mingo’s wife
and two or three women from Big Field quarter. They had a fiddle;
Barnabas played it. The music screamed and laughed and lilted. All
their voices and their shuffling feet and the flame.