Chesapeake (96 page)

No one could ever see all the Steed slaves. Some worked in fields so remote they rarely encountered a white overseer. Others tended the various stores. The fortunate ones, insofar as food and clothing were concerned, worked in the four mansions. Others specialized in trades requiring the most sophisticated skills; they stayed in hidden shops all their lives. But most worked the plantation crops: wheat, corn, vegetables, a little tobacco. They hoed and weeded and harvested, and they did this till they died.

They lived, for the most part, in collections of rude, dirt-floored wooden cabins whose boards did not fit and through which the winds of winter swept. They were allowed some wood to burn, but not much. They were given some food to eat, but never much. They were medicined when they fell ill, but only by the overseer or his wife. And they were given clothes, one reasonably good outfit for special occasions, one fitting of work clothes for all other days of the year. They had no church, no hospital and, above all, no school.

The first slaves had reached Devon island in 1670; it was now one hundred and sixty-three years later and almost nothing had changed. If those first blacks could come back and walk up from the wharf some Tuesday night, by Wednesday morning they would find themselves fitting easily into the system. Actually, no slaves direct from Africa had reached Devon in more than eighty years; new arrivals had been born in America, often on plantations noted for their success in breeding blacks.

At Devon their lives were governed by overseers; on remote plantations a Steed slave might spend three years clearing new fields and breaking them in without ever having actually seen a member of the Steed family. Overseers were usually German or Scot; they had a pragmatic approach to life, and the Lutheran religion of the former and the Calvinism of the latter prepared them to believe that sinners should be punished. Thus they were always ready to chastise the tardy slave and keep the field hands working; also, they tended to be honest.

On the island itself in the year 1833 the overseer was a Mr. Beasley, a Scotsman with an impeccable reputation for strictness and fairness. He knew each of his slaves by name and tried to assign them tasks for which they were preeminently suited. In his early days on a Virginia plantation he had often whipped slaves, because the master there demanded it; but after he fell under the influence of the Steeds, he never struck a slave again. He did, however, demand instant compliance, and if a slave
proved refractory, Mr. Beasley recommended sale to some other plantation. He also liked to see his slaves attending the prayer meetings he conducted—‘The word of God is soothing to a troubled spirit.’

Some of the distant plantations had known overseers of quite a different stripe; some were true horrors, lashing and beating and knocking down; but when verified reports of their savage behavior reached Mr. Beasley, he dismissed them on the spot, so that the Steeds were justified in boasting, as they did repeatedly, ‘Our slaves are the best treated in Maryland. They’re not beaten and they’re not abused.’

The pitiful fact about slavery as it existed on the Steed plantation was its banality. On white and black alike the heavy encumbrances of custom pulled everyone down to a mournful level in which the most extraordinary situations were accepted as inevitable. An unbroken chain of black men and women was purchased for the plantation or bred there, and they existed through the centuries without family names, or recorded histories, or education, or variation, or hope. The male field hands formed an interminable succession of Toms, Jims, Joes; at the big house classical names were preferred, for these gave a kind of distinction to social life: Pompey, Caesar, Hannibal, Napoleon, Brutus. Women in remote fields often bore names that were rarely spoken by their white overseers: Pansy, Petty, Prissy, Pammy, Puss. Generation after generation they were judged to be alike: treated alike … dressed alike … ignored alike … and buried alike.

The whites who supervised this system also became alike in their ways. Most wives were kind and condescending, but also careful to ensure that a new crop of seamstresses was growing up in the slave quarters. The plantation owners were aloof but considerate; they would be shamed if anyone circulated reports that they were treating their slaves poorly: ‘We endeavor to be good masters, and we discharge any overseer who touches a slave.’ The fact that at Devon the master himself had gone mad for a spell and had actually whipped his slave girl Eden was referred to only obliquely: ‘We ran into a small problem but corrected it.’ The real burden under which the white masters lived was psychological: they came to believe that they were inherently superior and that they were ordained to hold in their hands the destinies of those less fortunate.

The white Steed overseers occupied a curious position, half slave, half free. In a hundred years no overseer had ever eaten a meal at a Steed table, nor had any ever sat in the presence of a Steed without having been invited. It would have been unthinkable for Mr. Beasley to break either of these customs.

Along the Choptank there were five levels of social life, and the members of each understood their place. First came the Steeds and similar planters; infinitely below them came the slaves. In town there were the merchants and artisans such as the Paxmores, referred to by the slaveholders
as ‘those poor unfortunates.’ In the country lived the solid farmers on whom the society depended; and everywhere there appeared the unspeakable white trash, like the Turlocks, often referred to as ‘Oh, them.’

One aspect of slavery baffled explanation: along the Choptank only one family in eight owned slaves, yet all believed that their existence depended upon the continuance of slavery. It was as if the Steeds had used witchcraft to persuade the slaveless farmers to defend a system which benefited not them but the rich, and when George Paxmore tried to argue that the economic life of the river would be enhanced if black men were set free to work for wages, he was considered an irresponsible fool, not only by the Steeds, who owned slaves, but especially by the Turlocks, who owned none and whose relatively low position was caused primarily by the region’s insistence upon slave labor.

‘All I need to know about niggers,’ Lafe said when the mutiny aboard the
Ariel
became known in Patamoke, ‘is that they murdered my cousin Matt. One of ’em looks at me with a crooked eye, he dies.’

The Steed system of slavery was a gentle one, and it bore satisfying fruit. It was seen at its best at Christmastime; then, by long tradition, the slaves received one week of holiday, and Mr. Beasley saw to it that in each of the communities hogs were barbecued over a pit fire, with dozens of chickens roasting on the side. At the big house candies and pies were made. Hundreds of loaves of bread were baked, and the Steed women took care that every slave got his new set of work clothes; boys who had reached eighteen during the year were given their first suit of good clothes and girls of that age were given two dresses.

Mr. Beasley, strict teetotaler though he was, allowed bottles and even kegs of whiskey to be brought onto the grounds, and festivities were endless: cockfights, races, wrestling matches, sewing bees, baking competitions and all sorts of games for children. Each plantation had at least one man who could fiddle, and sometimes he played for nine hours at a stretch. Often the white folk from the big houses would come to watch the dancing; chairs would be brought out and the owners would sit approvingly as their slaves enjoyed themselves.

No work was done during this festive period, only the inescapable routines like milking cows and gathering eggs and carrying out the chamberpots from the big house. It was a joyous time, and fifty years later blacks in some far part of the nation would remember plantation life: ‘If’n no Christmas, I think I’da died.’

The Steeds enjoyed the holiday almost more than their slaves; it enhanced the illusion that they were good masters. The gaiety in the dark faces proved that life in the shanties could be tolerable, and the obvious delight when the new clothes and the extra food were distributed proved that on these plantations at least, the slaves loved their masters.

There was only one ominous cloud: Elizabeth Paxmore, the Quaker lady, had been caught teaching black children how to read and write. She did not, of course, admit them to the informal school she conducted for plantation whites at Peace Cliff, but she did welcome them to the shed in back of the telescope house, even though this flouted local custom. What was worse, she had allowed two older blacks to slip into her classes and was teaching them how to read the Bible, and each of these students belonged to the Steeds.

When word of this criminal behavior reached Uncle Herbert, who now supervised the entire Steed operation, he was aghast. He asked his nephews if he was correct in assuming that slaves had never been taught to read the Bible, and they assured him he was. He then summoned Mr. Beasley, who stood with hat in hand to receive his instructions: ‘You’ve got to go and reason with that difficult woman. We can’t afford a scandal … God knows we’ve sent our own children to her. But we do want a stop to this pernicious business.’

So Mr. Beasley got into his sloop and sailed over to Peace Cliff. Bowing politely, he said, ‘Mrs. Paxmore, I come on unpleasant business.’

‘Thee always does,’ she said crisply, but with a touch of dry humor. She was now forty-nine years old, trim and erect as an elm tree, and almost as pretty. Her features had attained a lovely calm, as if conforming to the gray dresses she wore, and her manner had softened. She was disarming, a woman of middle age who had the alertness of a girl. Smiling warmly, she invited Mr. Beasley in, sat him down and faced him in a straight-backed chair. ‘Now tell me thy problem.’

‘Ma’am, it’s about those two slaves you’re teachin’ to read the Bible.’

‘Is it wrong to teach another human being to read the Bible?’

‘Mrs. Paxmore, you don’t seem to understand that since the trouble with Nat Turner over in Virginia … Things aren’t the same, and this meddling with slaves has got to stop.’

Elizabeth Paxmore folded her hands in her lap and said firmly, ‘It will not stop.’

Mr. Beasley ignored this challenge and pleaded, ‘You’ve also got to quit teaching our nigger children.’

Mrs. Paxmore started to respond, but the overseer said hurriedly, as if he had memorized his arguments, ‘All the states agree that slaves must not read the Bible. They center on certain verses and it disturbs them. The proper thing is for a white minister to explain the Bible … or the master of the plantation.’

‘Don’t they center on certain verses?’

‘But they give a balanced view. That God ordered the world. That some were intended to be slaves.’

‘And that the slave must obey the master?’

‘Of course. The Bible says that specifically.’

Mrs. Paxmore looked at the overseer compassionately and asked,
‘Does thee think that I will stop disseminating the word of God?’

‘You’d better. The word of God must be taught only by those capable of explaining its true meaning.’

They had reached an impasse. Mr. Beasley had nothing more to say. Politely he excused himself, placed his hat on his head and walked down to his sloop. At first Mrs. Paxmore felt that she had bested him, but in the end he triumphed, for she never saw any of her students again, men or boys. She waited for them to appear in the shed behind the house, but they never came. One day in Patamoke she stopped a Steed slave to ask where her students were, and the woman was too frightened to reply, there on the street where she could be seen by the Steed personnel at the store, but with a movement of her eyes she indicated that she would meet Mrs. Paxmore later, behind a wall.

‘They was sold south.’

This phrase represented the ultimate terror among slaves—the sugar plantations of Louisiana, the cotton fields of Mississippi—and Mrs. Paxmore, suddenly weak, leaned against the wall, her hands over her eyes. The two young men so hopeful, the children just beginning to learn their letters …

‘They was all sold south.’

It was into this society that Cudjo came in mid-December 1833, and his arrival created a sensation, for he was the first native from Africa that anyone then living at Devon had ever seen.

He reached the Choptank illegally. After Mr. Beasley expelled the two Bible-learners, he hurried them to Baltimore, along with four children separated from their parents, intending to sell the lot south. But as he approached the auction hall he was intercepted by a slave dealer from Savannah who introduced himself as ‘T.T. Arbigost, with a most interesting proposition.’ Mr. Beasley did not like such men or their connivings, but Arbigost whispered, ‘Why pay the auctioneer an unnecessary commision?’

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘Sell your slaves to me, privately.’

‘You won’t offer as much.’ Mr. Beasley had good reason to be suspicious of Georgia traders, and Mr. Arbigost, with his white linen suit and silver toothpick dangling from the corner of his mouth, seemed especially suspicious. But he offered an attractive barter: ‘Now, I know that the niggers you want to dispose of are troublemakers. I can see that. But I’ll take them off your hands in a way that you’ll come out ahead. For the two men, I’ll give you one of the finest prime niggers you ever saw, docile, good at machines. And for the four children, I’ll give you my two women.’

‘That hardly seems—’

‘Plus four hundred dollars.’

It was a trade, and after Mr. Arbigost shifted his silver toothpick, he confided, ‘Tell you the truth, Mr. Beasley, I’d put the two wenches at work in the fields. Proved themselves a little sassy in the big house.’

‘You have the same kind of trouble with your buck?’

‘No, sir!’ He moved close to the overseer and dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘I personally smuggled him in. Right off a ship from Africa.’

Mr. Beasley had never worked a slave direct from Africa, and asked, ‘Is that an advantage?’

‘Yes, yes!’ Mr. Arbigost cried enthusiastically. ‘Means he hasn’t learned the ways that get niggers into trouble.’

Enticed by the prospect of dealing with a new kind of slave, Mr. Beasley inspected the man being offered. Looked to be about twenty-five, sturdy, good teeth, huge biceps. His face had that placid gaze of complete resignation which overseers preferred. ‘Shall I chain him to the boat?’