The Book of Negroes

  "Can't I go sooner?" I asked.

  "It's not walkable, girl."

  "I will walk as far as it takes to find my husband."

  "It's not walkable. Not in the winter, for sure, and not with a baby. You would both perish. To get to Annapolis Royal, you have to take a ship. And if you're like the rest of us, you don't have money for ships. Right now you just need to keep yourself and that baby alive. Your husband will take care of himself until the two of you can catch up."

  I tried to ask if he had heard whether the Joseph had sailed into Annapolis Royal, but he got impatient.

  "I don't know about any ships coming and going elsewhere in Nova Scotia," he said. "It's the most I can do to tend to my own flock."

  WHEN WE ARRIVED IN BIRCHTOWN, I found a dusting of snow on the ground, and much more swirling about in the cold wind. About a thousand free Negroes lived in the area. Some had shacks, but others dug deep pits in the ground, covered them up with logs and evergreen boughs, and huddled together to stay alive through the winter.

  Daddy Moses and his wife, Evangeline, had a one-room shack with a curtain down the middle. They slept in the back. The front half was where parishioners met privately with Daddy Moses. It also became my temporary sleeping quarters.

  Theo McArdle employed me to write advertisements for importers selling silk, tobacco, molasses, fruits, flour, duck and rum. He gave me food to share with my hosts in Birchtown, but what I most liked was the chance to read the Shelburne Crier. I scoured the pages for news from other places, hoping to catch some word about Annapolis Royal or the Negroes there. But I saw no notices at all about free Negroes. Just about the only news that I read about my own people had to do with runaway slaves. In an old issue of the Nova Scotia Packet and General Advertiser, which Theo McArdle also sold in his shop, I found such an advertisement:

  FIVE DOLLARS REWARD.

  Runaway from the Subscriber, on Saturday, the 22nd . . ., a NEGRO WENCH, named DINAH, about twenty five Years of Age: had on when she went away, a blue and white Ticking Petticoat, a purple and white Callico short Gown, and an old blue Cloak. Whoever will apprehend and secure said Wench, so that the Owner may have her again, shall receive the above Reward, with reasonable Charges. Robert Sadler, Shelburne, Mowat Street, July 24, 1783. Makers of Vessels and Others are hereby forbid to carry off or harbour said Wench, at their Peril.

  BACK IN BIRCHTOWN, people told me that Dinah had indeed been caught and returned to her owner, who then whipped her. I came to understand that if you had come to Nova Scotia free, you stayed free—although that didn't prevent American slave owners from sailing into town and attempting to snatch back their property. However, if you came to Nova Scotia as a slave, you were bound just as fast as our brothers and sisters in the United States.

  Within my first month in Birchtown, I caught two babies and was hired by a British group called the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. They paid me three shillings a week to teach people in Birchtown how to read. I gave lessons in the Methodist church, huddled around a stove with my students. I worked as much as I could to buy warmer clothes and to purchase a bear hide for my bed. I didn't have much. I had less food and fewer comforts than at any other time in my life. But I was in Nova Scotia and I was free.

  When Daddy Moses didn't need it for his own transportation, we all shared the cart that had been used to pull him from Shelburne to Birchtown. With my savings, I managed to cover that cart with three loads of old lumber, nails, tree trunks and scraps of canvas sail. With the help of Jason and three other young men that I taught, I erected a shack. We pounded poles into the ground, bound crossbeams to them, filled the gaps with moss and scraps of wood, wrapped canvas around the whole thing to break the wind, and lugged a pot-bellied stove in through the door. There was just room in that shack for a bed, a chair and table, the stove and me. The stove made me something of a curiosity. I was one of the few people in Birchtown to own one, and that was only because Theo McArdle knew a white Loyalist who didn't need his any more, having just received a shipment of supplies from England.

  While Daddy Moses tended to our souls, his wife Evangeline looked after our stomachs. When I was settled in my own shack, I went to see her for provisions supplied by the British. Evangeline was a big woman who carried a hatchet on her belt. Anybody who even dreamed about breaking into her supply shed would have to face her wrath. She counted her supplies daily and itemized the goods that she gave to me. A saw. A hammer. A sack of nails. A pound of dried beans, a lick of salt pork, and a sack of rice or potatoes.

  I hesitated. "I don't want the salt pork," I said. "Can I have something else?" She gave me salt fish, instead.

  I asked if it was better to take the potatoes or rice.

  "Take the rice," she said. "Easier to keep, easier to stretch out. Rice, you can add to. Get some pepper, toss it in. Find some greens, toss that in. Dice up chicken livers or a hog's ear and toss that in. Folks round here find bitter apples off the tree or on the ground and cook them up too. If you dress it up with condiments, rice stands up and talks right back at you. But potato is the same, day in and day out. Take the rice, I say, and watch it like your own baby. Wrap it good and keep it out of the rain."

  Evangeline was a pious woman who believed that whatever trouble Negroes got into at night was their own fault. She attended every sermon her husband gave and called for swift punishment for any coloured people caught drinking and dancing in violation of Shelburne's official ban on "Negro frolicks."

  In the Shelburne Sessions Court, people from Birchtown were sentenced once a month to a variety of punishments: a flogging here for dancing in a Negro frolick, a lashing there for drunkenness and vagrancy. One Negro who stole a loaf of bread and punched the store owner who tried to stop him was lashed twenty times at each of three intersections along Water Street. At whipping posts stationed at the corners of William, Charlotte and Edward streets, crowds formed to cheer and throw peanuts as the man's back was whipped to all corruption. A woman was hanged at the gallows at the foot of Charlotte Street for stealing silverware from a man to whom she had been apprenticed. The runaway slaves who were caught were brought into the court session and always returned to their owners, although we in Birchtown were adept at concealing fugitives and blending them in among us as if they were family.

  Nobody had a thing in Birchtown, in our first months. Never a coin was passed among us. I helped one man write a letter to his wife in Boston, and he helped shore up one of the rusting iron legs of my pot-bellied stove. I caught the twin sons of an eighteen-year-old girl from Georgia, whom I remembered registering in the Book of Negroes in New York, and her husband hacked down and sawed up four trees in the forest to enlarge and reinforce my shack. The people of Shelburne paid me when I worked for them, and I needed their money to buy other goods in town. But the Birchtown residents had so little that some of them traded their own clothes for food. The mother of Jason—the one who had pulled Daddy Moses in the cart to Birchtown—had to kill her own dog after going two days without eating. A woman who had boasted to me about coming to Nova Scotia on her own bottom found herself so hungry and cold that she placed her x mark on indenture papers, giving up her freedom for two years in exchange for the promise of room and board and—when she finished her contract—a payment of five pounds.

  I talked to the baby growing inside my belly of my trials and tribulations. "Child of mine," I said, "I will never indenture you or me to live. I am just getting enough to keep you and me alive these days. The first thing you're going to learn from me is where your mama comes from and who your people are. The second thing you're going to learn from me is how to read and write. Think you can learn that round about the same time you start to walk?"

  Whenever I heard that someone from Annapolis Royal was visiting Shelburne, I asked if they had heard of the Joseph, or met Chekura. Nobody could help me. I sent letters with two or three people who were travelling by ship to the town, and asked them to hand them out at taver
ns frequented by the Black Loyalists. But nothing ever came back to me. It was too far to walk, I had no money to pay for ship's passage, and I was busy trying to stay alive and healthy for the baby growing in me. Wherever he was, I knew that Chekura would want me to take care of our baby, first.

  BIRCHTOWN WAS A LONG, HARD, MUDDY WALK from Shelburne. It took a good two hours if you were "on the hoof," moving as quickly as two legs went. We had no horses or wagons—nothing but our own calloused soles to carry us back and forth. In Birchtown, apart from the cabins and the tents and the holes in the ground, we had music and laughter in our churches. We took rum and rye, when we could get them. It was dangerous to drink in Shelburne taverns, but no white person would object to a frolick in Birchtown. White people rarely set foot in our community.

  At night in Birchtown, many of the men and women roamed from bed to bed. Despite the clucking of Evangeline Wilkinson, who muttered about the sin of fornication, couples formed and split up and switched partners and reassembled. Wandering about the muddy laneways of Birchtown, I heard deep-chested moans and high-pitched wails coming from the shacks at night and chapels in the day. At his pulpit, Daddy Moses sometimes asked—but always in vain—for people to conduct themselves with more daytime modesty and to offer up more silent nights to Jesus.

  MY FIRST WINTER IN NOVA SCOTIA, disease streaked through Birchtown. When the land was too frozen to dig, the dead went straight into the bog. The living took the clothes of the dead, and prayed that when their own time was up, it would come in the warmer months when soft ground would permit a decent burial.

  I caught four more babies, but two of them died in their first month. I wondered how any baby could survive infancy in such weather, and felt fortunate that my own child was not due until the spring. People in Birchtown had no money or goods to pay for my help, but they would give me a rabbit and potato stew, because there were always a few bushels of potatoes and some of the youngsters were adept at trapping snow-coloured hares.

  In Shelburne, for catching the baby of a white woman who declared that the doctor in town was a quack with a two-pound fee, I received two loaves of bread, twenty apples, a bag of rice and an old toboggan. I put the food on the toboggan and hauled it back to Birchtown. Jason fortified the toboggan and attached a stronger rope, which gave him a better way to haul Daddy Moses over deep snow.

  Twice a week, I attended Daddy Moses's services. While leaning on his pulpit so that he could stand unassisted, he thundered and wailed until his voice grew hoarse. Sometimes his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell back into the arms of two waiting deacons. In the pews, worshippers jumped up, thrashed about and collapsed. I never found myself born again like that, but while others were in the throes of ecstasy, I thought of my father reading the Qur'an and wondered what he would think about such fits of piety. Thoughts of my father led to thoughts of my mother, and while the people of Birchtown sagged in one another's arms and sang out to Jesus, I sat on the pew and let my sadness erupt. To the sounds of "Praise the Lord" and "Hallelujah, sister," I drew from my own well of tears, confident that nobody would embarrass me with solicitude. Many times that winter, I slid onto my knees and called out the names of my parents, my son and my husband, crying for them as if they had just gone missing with my most recent exhalation. Arms around my belly, rocking back and forth, I prayed for the gift of a healthy child.

  On the spring day that my labour began, most of the people in Birchtown had left to meet a ship on the wharf in Shelburne. Every man and woman with a strong back and good arms could earn two shillings for carting boxes and crates from morning to night.

  I didn't want to have my baby all alone. What if something went wrong? What if I needed help? Back when I was a child in Bayo, people used to say that bad luck befell any baby who was caught by his own mother.

  Nobody answered when I banged on the preacher's door. I pulled it open and watched it swing on its rusty hinge.

  "Daddy Moses! Evangeline!"

  Evangeline, who dressed and shaved her husband each morning, was not in the front room. In the back, Daddy Moses was snoring.

  "Daddy Moses. Evangeline!"

  I pulled back the curtain. The preacher was lying fully clothed on his bed, on top of his blankets. He was alone. There was a cup of tea on a table by his bed. It was lukewarm. I concluded that Evangeline had dressed her husband, made tea and then left to spend the day working in Shelburne.

  "Daddy Moses!"

  He sat up with a start. "Who's that?"

  "It's Meena."

  "What time of day is it?"

  "Morning."

  "What you doing in my bedchamber, woman?"

  "My time has come, Daddy Moses."

  He didn't appear to hear me, or to understand. "Where is my wife?"

  "Looks like she already got you dressed and fixed you tea, Daddy Moses."

  "Yes, yes, that's right. She's in Shelburne today. Where are my glasses?" he said.

  I grabbed the spectacles off a crate and placed them in his hand. He adjusted them on the bridge of his nose.

  "Say again why you've come this morning?"

  "I'm ready to have my baby."

  In church, the man was so vivid and alive that people could not contain themselves when he thumped the pulpit and carried on about Moses taking the Hebrews to freedom. They were chosen to settle in Palestine, and we too are the chosen people. We too, brothers and sisters, are chosen for freedom, right here in Birchtown, Nova Scotia. But without his wife to take care of him, the man who made so many parishioners jump up and shout seemed vulnerable at home.

  "If you've got a baby coming, we have things to do." Daddy Moses sat up and swung his legs off the bed. "Go find some boys to lift me up."

  I left, and returned in a few minutes with four boys who had been left behind in Birchtown to care for younger siblings. They carried Daddy Moses out of the shack and onto the community cart. After pulling him to my cabin, they lifted him inside and sat him down on the stool that I had brought along.

  When we were alone again, I said: "I don't know if I can do this all by myself."

  "Let not your heart be troubled, and neither be afraid."

  I chuckled. "The whole time I'm having this baby, you're not going to carry on like we're in church, are you?"

  Daddy Moses stretched out his legs and tapped his cane on a wall. "Suppose not. Don't worry, girl. You're sturdy like a ten-foot tree."

  "I'd feel much better if the women came back from Shelburne soon."

  "I'm been meaning for some time to ask you a question."

  "Well, go ahead and ask, then."

  Daddy Moses turned his face toward mine, as if he could really see me. "Were you married when this child seeded up in your belly?"

  "I sure was. My man is Chekura. Like I told you before, I was supposed to sail with him to Annapolis Royal, but I got pulled off the boat and he had to go on. I don't know where he is. I don't even know if he made it to Annapolis Royal. But I was hoping he'd show up today."

  "Today?"

  "Yes, that's what I was hoping."

  "If he was coming, he'd be here already. Take it from me. I know the ways of men."

  "He's coming," I said. "I just know it."

  "Why are you so sure?"

  "I've got to believe in something," I told him.

  "Amen," Daddy Moses said.

  "And now, I have a question for you."

  "Let me hear it, then."

  "If you are stone blind, why do you wear spectacles?"

  "I like the way they rest on my nose, and they give me a certain dignity."

  "But the glass is gone."

  "Fell out after I had the pox. I never bothered to replace it."

  "What does it look like inside your eyes?"

  "It looks like nothing at all," he said. "I see nothing. No light. No darkness. It is as if I have no eyes whatsoever, but I remember what things look like."

  We sat in silence for a while. Then I put some water in an old iron pot on
top of the stove.

  "What that water heats up," Daddy Moses said, "can you put some kick in it?"

  "I have some lemon, rum and sugar."

  "Here in Birchtown, we call that preacher's lemonade."

  "Why?"

  "The sheriff stopped one of our men at a frolick in Shelburne and asked what he was drinking," Daddy Moses said. "And our man said, 'Ain't nothing but the preacher's lemonade.'"

  Daddy Moses and I took our hot drinks and spent hours talking while my contractions grew more intense. Finally, when my body felt ready, I pushed over and over and over again, but I could feel no head with my hand. I didn't even know how close I was, and I started to fear having that baby stuck forever in me, plugged up and suffocating and killing both of us.

  I took another sip of preacher's lemonade and suddenly my body heaved.

  While the reverend held my hand, I pushed and I grunted one more time. Seated with my back propped up and my legs wide open, I pushed for all the life inside me. I felt the head slide through me, and on the next wave I pushed out the rest of my baby.

  Looking down, I reached for the newest person in the world and lay back with her planted flat on my chest.

  "Land sakes, good woman, tell me what you've brought into this world."

  But in that moment I wasn't thinking of Daddy Moses or of the sex of my child. I felt the heart pounding against my baby's chest, let my hand drape softly on her back and covered us both with a dry blanket that I had kept ready beside the bed. That little heart hammered right against mine.

  My children were like phantom limbs

  I NAMED MY DAUGHTER MAY, after her month of birth. When she had her little fits—perhaps I took too long to bring her to my nipple, or to mash boiled potatoes and greens as she grew older—I called her Little May First, after the very day she was born. I didn't know what to make of the girl's temper. Sometimes it seemed that all the wrongs of the world were pent up in her soul, waiting for any excuse to erupt. Before she turned one, she howled and pounded my back to be let down and allowed to stumble about on her own. She loved being held by the other women in Birchtown and especially by Mrs. Alverna Witherspoon, a white Loyalist who came to our aid not long after my daughter was born. But when May had enough of substitute mothers and wanted to get back in my arms, she raised the roof if she met with delays.