The Book of Negroes

  Out I went into the insanity, venturing among the drunks and the laughing, cursing, brawling men who were breaking into all the fine houses on Wall Street. I got up to Broadway, passed the Trinity Church where I had been just the night before, and kept walking up Broadway to a smaller church called St. Paul's Chapel. Seeking a quiet place to think, I climbed the steps to peer inside and saw a few Negroes in a meeting. They turned around and stared at me. I turned and left the church. On the street, an old black man took my arm and said, "I wouldn't head that way if I were you."

  "Which way?"

  "That way you're going. Into Holy Ground."

  "What's Holy Ground?"

  "The church owns the land, but it's full of ladies of ill repute. You look like you're new in town, so you ought to know."

  "Which way is safe?"

  "Ain't nowhere safe these times," he said. "North you'll find woods. But be careful out there."

  I changed direction and headed north as the man had suggested. The crowds thinned and the sounds of the revellers died down. After a time I crossed over the last street and entered a wooded area. I kept walking. I was frightened by the darkness and the lonely sound of my feet on dry leaves, but I kept on going. As I walked, I wondered if Solomon Lindo had ever imagined that I would escape.

  Passing through a clearing, I noticed some whittled sticks pushed into a rectangular pattern on the ground, near a mound of stones in a perfect circle. Farther on, I saw more sticks and stones in the same pattern. When I finally believed that I had walked deeper into the wilderness than Lindo could ever imagine, I sat on the ground, laid the sack from Sam Fraunces by the thick trunk of a tree for a pillow and lay down to stretch out my legs. It was late in the afternoon of April 23, 1775, and I had taken back my freedom.

  I visualized that sometime around that moment, Solomon Lindo would be arriving back at the Fraunces Tavern, expecting his revised letter to Governor Tryon. In the madness and revelry on the streets of New York, he would not find a soul to point to me. Indeed, if he stopped to ask anyone, he might be taken for one of the men who owned a fine house on Wall Street and put himself in danger. I wondered if Sam Fraunces was right—if Lindo would take the first ship sailing south from New York. If Fraunces was wrong, Lindo would look around town for me, but surely he would not come this far. Nearly twenty years had passed since I was seized in the woods outside Bayo, but here I was, all alone and surrounded by the trees of another continent—and I was free again.

  I slept fitfully that night, huddled under my thin blanket. In my dreams, rabbits chased across paths and stopped in mid-flight, wide-eyed, to stare at me. There were two thin crescent moons in the sky. And I heard an owl calling for me. Aminata Diallo, it called over and over. I awoke often and each time I fell back to sleep, the strange images resumed.

  In the morning, I was aware of light touching my eyelids, and I heard voices calling again. Voices of Africa. Could they be calling my name? I opened my eyes. The ground was wet. The blanket was still over me, and the small sack of food sat against my belly. From where did those voices come? I got up, stuffed the blanket in the sack, shivered in the cold, damp morning, and stepped past a few trees, back in the direction of the city, toward those sounds.

  They weren't voices of danger. They were voices of mourning, voices from my homeland. After another minute, I put my hand on the trunk of a tree at the edge of a small clearing and stared. There, near the sticks and the round mounds of rocks that I had passed the night before, was a small group of Negroes chanting African songs. It was no language that I knew, but it was from my homeland, deep and threaded with longing. The people had formed a circle, and they danced as I had seen before, arms raised, hips rotating, barely moving their feet. I drifted into their midst like a child drawn to her mother.

  In the middle of the circle stood an African woman, wailing and holding the body of a child. The child's head was uncovered, but the body was wrapped in an indigo-coloured linen. Around its waist was a set of blue, green and white glass beads. The woman lowered the child into the ground, and a man with a shovel covered up the hole. Around it, other women arranged a perfect, circular mound of rocks, while more placed whittled sticks into the earth in a rectangular form the size of the child.

  I moved forward with the wailing, and finally I was right up among the people, sobbing and moving with them. Some of the men and women had sculpted faces, but none had my moons, and none spoke Bamanankan or Fulfulde. They took me into their dancing, and did not ask where I came from, for all they had to do was look at me and hear my own sobs in my maternal tongue and they knew that I was one of them. The dead infant was the child I had once been; it was my own lost Mamadu; it was every person who had been tossed into the unforgiving sea on the endless journey across the big river.

  When the dancing was over, an older man turned back toward the city and the others walked behind in single file. I fell in with a woman at the back of the line.

  "Where do you live?" I asked. She did not speak English, so I spoke to the woman ahead of her, repeating, "Where do you live?"

  "Everywhere there are Africans," she said. "Some in Canvas Town, you know that?" she asked. I nodded. "Some with white folks who own us."

  "Some free, and some not?" I asked.

  "None of us are truly free, until we go back to our land," she said.

  "And where is your land, in Africa?" I asked.

  "We are from everywhere," she said, motioning at those walking ahead of her, "but I am Ashanti."

  I did not know that word, so I repeated it.

  "And you?" she said.

  "Fula," I said, "and Bamana."

  "Little bit of everything?" the woman said. "It like that over here."

  "You live in Canvas Town?" I asked.

  "No," she said. "I work in house for man from England who say he make me free one day. But there is no free in this land. There is only food in your belly and clothes on your back and roof to hold off the rain. Home is only place that's free. That baby we done buried is on her way home. You see the coloured glass?"

  "The beads around her waist?"

  "They bring her spirit clear across the water, and take her home where she belongs."

  As I smiled at the woman, I stopped walking. We were coming closer to the edge of the city than I cared to go.

  "Good place for hiding," she said. "The toubabu don't come to our burying ground."

  She raised her fingers in salutation, and turned away. The Africans kept walking south through the woods, and none looked back at me.

  AFTER TWO MORE DAYS AND NIGHTS in the woods, I knocked at the back of the Fraunces Tavern. I waited, knocked again, and Sam finally opened the kitchen door.

  "Look at you," he said.

  I was shivering, and my clothes were wet and filthy.

  "Is he here?" I asked.

  "Gone, the day of the outbreak," Sam said. "He came here an hour after you left, raged for a few minutes and then took the first ship south."

  "Could I have something to drink and eat?"

  "I'll get you something while you get into clean clothes."

  "He didn't take my things with him?"

  "I hid your bag and told him that you had taken it with you."

  "I am in your debt," I said.

  He put a hand on my shoulder. "You will no doubt sink a little deeper. But no worries. You will work it off."

  I struck a deal with Sam Fraunces. He gave me five shillings a week, let me stay on a makeshift bed in a cramped storage room and take my meals with the kitchen staff, in exchange for working six hours a day for him. I washed dishes, swept floors, cleaned vegetables, emptied chamber pots and wrote invoices and receipts, but I knew that the arrangement was temporary. The Fraunces Tavern was hardly a safe place to hide from Lindo.

  At the Trinity Church, I found out that the teaching of Negroes took place six blocks to the north, at St. Paul's Chapel. The chapel was tiny in comparison to Trinity, but it was a charming place and more suitable to o
rdinary folks. The white minister clasped my hands when he heard that I could read and write.

  "Just the person I've been looking for," he said.

  He sent out word through some Negroes he knew, and that Tuesday evening I taught my first class. Six Negroes drifted into the sanctuary as darkness was falling. In a private room lit with lamps and candles, they told me their names, huddled around me, put their hands on my shoulders and arms and back, and peered at the words taking shape under my hand.

  "What's that?" asked a tall thin man of about twenty.

  "Your name," I said. "Claybourne Mitchell."

  "Well, I can't read, so how do I know it from any other name?"

  "I'll teach you," I said.

  "I can cooper you a barrel of any size," he said, "but I ain't teachable."

  "Sure you are," I said.

  "Ain't not. My master saw to that. It's why I run from him."

  "You can do it," I said.

  Hand on my shoulder, he kept watching me write. "Claybourne the only name they done give me," he said. "Mitchell is a name I done took. Heard a man called that once, and liked it so much I decided when I got here I was gonna be a new man. Free man. With two names, both for myself."

  Another woman of about the same age, much shorter than Claybourne but twice as wide, pushed in closer.

  "Y'all giving that man too much time," she said. "What about my name? When you gonna write it down?"

  "Right here," I said.

  "Where?" she said.

  "Here," I said, pointing down the list of names. "Bertilda Mathias."

  "It's the name I done got, and I don't see no reason to change it like Claybourne. The man got a mouth the size of a drawbridge."

  "Who you calling bridge mouth?" Claybourne said.

  "Y'all think this here African woman just for you?" she shot back.

  I got Bertilda to tell me a little more about herself, and wrote that down too for her to see. "Laundress at British barracks."

  "Y'all not writing down how much they pay me," she said.

  "No, you didn't tell me that."

  "Good. 'Cause I want more. Write it down when I gets a shilling a day. That's what my mama got, till she up and died."

  "How about if I write 'I want one shilling a day'?" I said.

  "You do that, sister. Show me what that look like."

  "You done run from the master too?" Claybourne asked her.

  "No, I ain't," she answered. "Doan you call me no slave. Ain't never been, and ain't never gonna be. Mama got herself free before she had me, and she was laundressing for the British since my early days."

  I wrote down a few more words—"I was born free"—while all six people jostled to get in closer.

  After I wrote down the names and a few circumstances about each person, we practised repeating the sounds of each letter. Then I wrote a few other words: New York. Canvas Town. Tories. Patriots. Negroes. Slaves. Free folks. White folks. After two hours, the minister brought in bread, cheese and apples.

  "Good bread," Claybourne said. "Fresh. Last bread I had was tougher than a rum barrel. Would have busted the teeth of a rat." Everybody laughed, including Bertilda. Claybourne told the minister I was a good teacher.

  "You better treat her right, then," the minister said, "'cause she's teaching you for free."

  "She the best teacher I ever done had," Claybourne said.

  "Y'all ain't never had no teaching before," Bertilda shot back.

  "Yes, but I can read my own name now," he said.

  "Soon you'll learn to write your names," I said.

  "How do you write 'no rats allowed here'?" Claybourne asked.

  Everybody looked at him, uncomprehending.

  "I'm gonna write a big fat sign and put it up in Canvas Town."

  They laughed all the way out of the chapel. In the street, the group splintered and disappeared in the night.

  After two more weeks of lessons, Claybourne offered to show me how to go about getting materials to build my own shack in Canvas Town. He said he would bring a hammer and crowbar, and told me to bring a few shillings and a lamp. We met at dusk one evening on Pearl Street, outside the Fraunces Tavern, Claybourne with a cloth sack hanging from his shoulder.

  "Where are we going?" I said.

  "Gonna find a house busting," he said.

  We spent an hour or two walking up and down the streets, avoiding horses and their droppings. Each time we turned a corner, I noticed a group of young Negro men trailing a block behind us.

  "Don't pay them no mind," Claybourne said.

  We kept walking up and down the city streets until, up ahead, we saw a mob of white men running out of a two-storey house with lamps, silverware and casks of liquor.

  "We waits till the bees leave the hive," Claybourne said.

  We circled around and returned half an hour later. Darkness had fallen. The door was broken. The shutters had been kicked off the windows. Two barrels were turned over in the street, the last drops of spilled wine glistening in the moonlight.

  "Our turn now," Claybourne said.

  "What if someone's in there?"

  "Mob like that come and go, ain't nobody left and hardly nothing left neither," he said.

  I didn't want to break into somebody's home, even if it had already been damaged. I thought about my own mother. If she knew everything I had been through, what would she say right now? Claybourne saw me hesitating at the door.

  "Everybody get their turn and the trick is knowing when to take it. Come on, girl, it's now or never."

  I followed him in through the door. The house had been ransacked. I saw shattered vases and wine racks emptied and kicked into splinters. On the wall was a portrait of a man and a woman, each sitting in a fine chair. Someone had ripped through the canvas with a knife.

  "Who lives here?" I asked.

  "They gone now," Claybourne said.

  "But who are they?"

  "Tories, I suspect," Claybourne said. "Rebels been trashing Tory mansions ever since Lexington and Concord."

  While I held the lamp, Claybourne slipped the sack off his shoulder, removed a crowbar and pried the legs off a fine table. In a closet with no clothes left, he found two woollen blankets. In a kitchen where the only food remaining had been strewn on the floor, he slid three drawers out of a counter. He moved quickly from room to room, prying posts off beds, gathering a cloth mattress stuffed with straw, and busting apart an odd green table with pockets along the sides and coloured balls inside the pockets.

  "What's that?" I asked.

  "Found one of these before," Claybourne said. "White folks' game is all I know."

  "How are we going to carry all this stuff?" I asked.

  "Did you bring your five shillings?"

  "Yes."

  "Good."

  After we piled everything at the front door, Claybourne slid two fingers into his mouth and let out a piercing whistle. Four teenaged Negro boys came from around the corner and ran up to us.

  "Canvas Town, and make it quick," Claybourne said.

  They stood waiting.

  "One shilling each," he said.

  I dropped a coin in each of four hands. The boys grabbed everything they could and took off in the night. I had a bundle of table legs in my arms, and Claybourne had the tabletop balanced on his back. We struggled down the dark streets, but after a time were relieved by the boys, who ran back to help us lug the rest.

  The next day, on Claybourne's instructions, I gave another shilling to a dock worker, who let me take away a roll of several yards of ripped canvas. With the help of three other men who had been learning to read and write at St. Paul's Chapel, Claybourne built me a little shack on the back edge of Canvas Town. It didn't seem possible that a home could be created out of the items we had stolen, but a few people brought extra wood from broken tables and from studs ripped out of walls, and in a matter of days I was able to move from the Fraunces Tavern into a leanto shack just big enough for me. The legs of the green cloth-covered ta
ble with the hanging pockets were neatly sawn off, and it was laid down flat to keep my straw mattress off the ground. I had room enough for a chair, a lamp and the three drawers stacked one on another. If I managed to find a book or two, I would keep them there. Canvas was hung from the door for a bit of privacy, and Claybourne promised to build me a swinging door to help keep out the cold.

  "But get yourself a man before the snow falls," he said.

  "I've already got a man, and I hope he finds me," I said.

  "And where's he at?"

  "Can't say right now. Somewhere in South Carolina."

  Claybourne shook his head, but said no more.

  SOLOMON LINDO DID NOT RETURN to New York City and so it felt safe for me to keep returning to the Fraunces Tavern. Sam let me take my meals, relieved me from chamber-pot duty, and gave me more work writing his letters and keeping his ledgers. He increased my pay to seven shillings a week, which was enough to keep me clothed. When travellers left books, clothes and old shoes in their rooms, Sam turned them over to me. Word got out that I knew how to catch babies, and I caught two of them at no charge in Canvas Town. As spring turned into summer, the group of Negroes attending my Tuesday evening classes grew from six to ten and then to fifteen. Sometimes, the minister watched for a few minutes from the back of the room, but then he retreated to let us have our lessons privately. Nobody paid me, but once every week or two somebody came by my little lean-to with more wood, nails or canvas.

  "Gotta fix this shack up good and tight," Bertilda said, "to get our African teacher through the New York winter."

  Under my instruction, a seventy-year-old white-haired Negro woman named Miss Betty learned the alphabet in three lessons, and was reading a month later. I asked if she was free, and she told me that she was too old for any of that foolery. She had belonged to the same white man for thirty years—a man, she said, who worshipped King George and had moved recently from Boston to New York. Now that she was old and useless, he didn't mind her learning to read.

  "You need to get yourself free," Claybourne said to her.

  "And live in that pigpen you call Canvas Town?" Miss Betty shot back.

  "We's free," Claybourne said.

  "Free with the fleas is what you is," she said. "I got me a clean bed under a roof that don't leak and I don't need no charity meals at St. Paul's Chapel."