Chesapeake (99 page)

There had to be an inquest. A judge and a sheriff from Patamoke studied the facts, heard from Mrs. Cline herself that the slave had threatened her, and quickly reached a verdict which the clerk did not even bother to record: ‘Mr. Cline did only what had to be done.’

In the following days he vented his wrath especially on Cudjo, for he sensed that whereas he had terrorized the big Xanga, he had not really broken him; the Steeds had many plantations, and if he did a good job on Cudjo, he could expect repeat business. So he watched Cudjo constantly, thrashing him without reason, depriving him of his share of food and assigning him the most onerous tasks. One June night toward eleven, when Cudjo had been working since five that morning with only ten minutes’ rest at noon, Mr. Cline caught him nodding at the special task of washing down the farm boat, and he leaped upon him with the cowhide, thrashing him for his indolence. Cudjo finally fell to his knees, unable to bear any more, and as he lay in the mud by the wharf, Mr. Cline said, ‘Now maybe you’ll tend to what I say.’ And Cudjo was left to crawl back to the shed, sleep on the bare earth and be ready for work in the early dawn.

What was the effect of eleven months of such treatment? Each morning Cudjo rose with the determination that he would compose in his mind before noon a dozen sentences, using as many difficult letters as possible. And this he did: ‘The lamb see the fox and jump quick to the stove.’

In the afternoon he reviewed the histories of Robert Bruce, Roland and George Washington, inventing incidents which happened to them while they were slaves: ‘Roland say to Mastah, “Horse run down there.”’

And after grabbing from the swill bucket such mush as he could, and gnawing on his end of bacon—which no other slave ever touched, not because they feared punishment but because this was a decency all had agreed upon—he did sums in his head, adding lengthy columns.

And one September night, as he lay on the cold earth, he imagined that it was shifting under him and that he was again on the rolling ship. He recalled those splendid days with Rutak when they were meeting and solving so many strange problems, and the old sense of competency returned and he consoled himself with the idea that he was an able man, and he said aloud, ‘This gonna end. I gonna be free once more.’

He had barely uttered these words when an intractable slave new to the Cline farm told him in the darkness, ‘Place to run, ever you get a chance, Pennsylvania.’

He had heard this name before. Among all slaves in the south this was the sacred word, for if you got to Pennsylvania, which lay to the north,
there was hope. Cudjo told the newcomer of Mrs. Paxmore, and the man assured him, ‘In Pennsylvania many peoples like her.’

‘How you know?’

‘I been there.’

‘How come you here now?’

‘White men capture me. Sell me back.’

To this awful news Cudjo had nothing to say. To be free and then to be betrayed must be the worst experience of all, but he began to whisper to himself, as thousands of slaves did in the night, ‘Pennsylvania.’ He tried writing it in the dust, when no one was looking, and he got most of the letters right. Freedom lay to the north. You reached Pennsylvania by escaping north.

Whenever he said the word he had difficulty getting to sleep, no matter how exhausted he might be, for he kept thinking of those days when he was captain of a ship; then, too, escape lay to the north, and sometimes he would rise from his earthen pallet and look at the north star and feel it luring him on.

In November 1836 Mr. Cline loaded Cudjo in his boat and sailed north to Devon, where he marched him, obviously subdued, up to the office. ‘Mr. Steed, I bring you a corrected nigger.’

‘Did he prove difficult?’

‘One of the worst. Surly.’

‘But you broke him?’

‘I did.’ He stood uneasily in the presence of gentry and waited for Mr. Steed to broach the subject of money, but Uncle Herbert took perverse pleasure in discomfiting this white trash. He pretended to go back to his papers, then looked up as if surprised to see Cline still standing there.

‘What was it you wanted?’

‘The money. Mr. Starch said …’

‘Oh, of course! But Mr. Starch isn’t here at the moment.’

Cline saw this as an attempt to evade a just obligation, rather than the teasing it was, and his face darkened, his hands tightening as they did when he faced a difficult slave, but before he could engage in any stupid act, Mr. Steed called, ‘Mr. Starch!’ and while he waited for the head overseer to report, he smiled condescendingly at Cline.

When Starch arrived, Steed asked, ‘What arrangements did we make for paying Cline?’

‘Fifty now. A hundred later if the nigger’s broken.’

The slave-breaker sighed and relaxed his fists. Contemptuously Mr. Steed counted out fifty dollars and with a ruler shoved the money at Cline, who gathered it up, nodded and started back to his boat.

‘Horrible type,’ Uncle Herbert said as he disappeared.

‘But necessary,’ Mr. Starch said. Then, remembering that he had not asked Cline one important question, he ran to the door and called, ‘Cline, in your opinion, what’s the nigger good for?’ and the man called back, ‘Fixin’ things.’

A year before, Mr. Starch had discovered Cudjo’s mechanical ability and was now pleased to have Cline confirm that judgment. ‘We can use him on the far plantation,’ he told Uncle Herbert. ‘We need mechanics there.’ But this plan was frustrated by an intrusion that neither man could have anticipated.

Paul Steed, increasingly aware of his uncle’s advancing years and waning energy and realizing that he must himself soon resume management of the vast holdings, had begun to take interest in various decisions. So when Eden said that morning, ‘I hear they brought that man Cudjo back. They say he good at fixin’ things,’ he limped down to the office and asked, ‘Have we a slave here called Cudjo?’

Uncle Henry, surprised at Paul’s appearance, said yes, there was such a man, adding, ‘But Starch is taking him across the river.’

‘No,’ Paul said crisply. ‘I shall need him at the forge.’ And when the slave was removed from Starch’s sloop, Paul led him to a small dark building well to the west of the mansion where a very old slave called Hannibal operated a smithy, sharpening scythes, mending wheels and shoeing horses. In one corner stood a forge, square and solid and close to the earth; it was activated by a great bellows made from two cowhides and fed from a pile of charcoal stacked in another corner. It was a tight, unified place, blazingly hot in summer, protected in winter, and Cudjo quickly mastered the intricacies of working iron. One day as he hammered on the iron rim for a wheel he looked up to see in the doorway to the smithy a handsome woman, older than himself, smiling.

‘My name Eden,’ she said. When he made no response, she said, ‘You can read. Mrs. Paxmore tell me.’ And from her skirt she produced a book, which she offered him.

It terrified him. A book no different from this had sentenced him to a year in hell; he had barely escaped with his life. But she held it out, a gift from her and Mrs. Paxmore, and with trembling hands he took it, and after a long moment he brought it to his cheek and held it there, and hot tears ran across its binding.

‘What book is it?’ she asked.

He spelled out the letters:
Lessons from Plutarch.
With great pain he handed it back. ‘No,’ he said.

‘Cudjo, you can have it. Mastah say all right.’

‘Mastah Herbert?’

‘No, Mastah Paul.’ And she said, ‘He want to see you—now,’ and she
led him to the big house, which he had never before been allowed to approach, and at the entrance Tiberius, an old man now but still impressive in his blue-and-gold uniform, told him, ‘Son, yo’ keeps yo’ hands at yo’ sides, and yo’ doan’ bump into nothin’.’ He brought Cudjo through the door and into the stately grandeur of the hall. ‘This way,’ he said, leading the two slaves into the gracious western corridor built generations earlier by Rosalind Janney Steed.

At the entrance to a beautifully proportioned room, with sunlight streaming in through lace curtains, the old doorman announced, ‘Mastah Paul, Missy Susan! I has the hona’ to present yo’ two slaves, Eden and Cudjo.’ Bowing grandly, he retired.

In the room sat two thin, proper-looking people. On the table at the master’s elbow lay a stack of books; the table at which Miss Susan rested in her ponderous chair held a tea service. ‘Mastah Paul,’ Eden said, ‘this here Cudjo. He be the one can read.’ Her forebears had lived on Devon Island for more than one hundred and fifty years and in that time had evolved the charming speech patterns used by slaves and poor-white farmers, with its truncations, its special words, its simplified verb forms and musical cadences. It was an imaginative speech, and Cudjo had acquired the rudiments.

‘Come in, Cudjo.’ The frail man held his head to one side; with a pale hand he indicated where Cudjo should stand. ‘I’m your master, Cudjo. From now on you’re to do as I say.’

‘Yes, Mastah.’

‘Is it true what Eden tells me? You can read?’

It was a moment of anguish. Before, when a white man discovered that he could read, he had been sent to Mr. Cline for a year. If he confessed now, he might be sent back, with little chance that he could survive, for Cline would have lost his fee. He stood dumb.

The small man in the chair took the book from Eden and pressed it upon his slave. ‘Read the title,’ he said, pointing to the letters.

To be able to read was a gift almost as precious as freedom itself, and desperately Cudjo wanted to exhibit his knowledge, but he was so terrified of Mr. Cline that he could not move his lips.

‘It be all right,’ Eden said, and proudly Cudjo read
‘Lessons from Plutarch.
’ He pronounced the last syllable to rhyme with
starch,
and Paul corrected him.

Susan asked from her chair, ‘Do you know who Plutarch was?’ and only then did Cudjo see that she was crippled, for she moved in her chair with difficulty and seemed unable to use her legs.

‘No, ma’am.’

‘Are you a good workman?’ And before he could reply, she added, ‘I mean with tools … machinery?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘I want you to build me a chair …’ And she explained her long-cherished dream: a chair which she could propel about the room with her own hands and which would assist her in standing whenever she felt strong enough, and she had barely finished her instructions when Cudjo fell on his knees, peered under the chair and began making suggestions as to how her desires could be fulfilled.

‘My God, Paul,’ she said with enthusiasm, ‘he’s the first to understand what I’ve been trying to say.’ Then she laughed and said teasingly, as if she loved her husband, ‘No, Paul. Don’t posture. You didn’t understand, either.’

Paul blushed, then said to Eden, ‘You told me the truth. This man is skilled.’ And to Cudjo he said, ‘You may have the book. My wife will give you others if you can build her chair.’

But on the way back to the forge books were forgotten. Eden, speaking rapidly and with tremendous force, said in low, guarded words, ‘Cudjo, I know ’bout you.’

He became afraid, supposing that somehow she had learned of his part in the mutiny. No. She was speaking of how he had managed to survive Cline. ‘Slaves sends the word. You very pigheaded.’

He said nothing. Then, to his surprise, he felt her taking his hand and pressing it to hers. ‘Cudjo, you, me, we’s gonna run away.’

He looked straight ahead, for these were hanging words when spoken by the wrong person. She had seemed so familiar with the big house that she could well be a spy, the kind that betrayed those blacks who sought escape. But she kept talking in that low, imperative voice. ‘You look hard on everythin’ in the big house. Learn everythin’. You, me, we gonna run to Pennsylvania.’

The word exploded through the afternoon shadows. Pennsylvania! How many times had he whispered that magic name!

Now she said hurriedly, ‘We neva’ rest, Cudjo. We got to be free. I has money saved … pistol… knife. Never I come back here.’ She spoke with a fury that he had never before heard from a woman; she was like great Rutak in the mutiny, a force of irresistible moral power. She was prepared to kill—herself or others. She was a wild animal in her determination to be no longer caged.

‘I been waitin’ for you, Cudjo. I see Cline ’most kill you in the boat. I watch and tell myself, “If’n he come back alive, he be the one.”’ She fell silent, and began to tremble with the fire of her long-suppressed resolution to be free. Then she clasped his hand tighter and whispered, ‘I needs one body to help me … to look … to tell me when.’ She hesitated. ‘You is the one, Cudjo.’

Now he was able to speak. ‘I knows Cline’s farm. Look my back. I afraid.’ He was not fearful of flight or of punishment if he failed; what he did fear was admitting into his confidence any other human being. He
could trust no one, for he could hear deep within his memory that slave talking in the night at Cline’s farm: ‘White men capture me. Sell me back.’ There was only one power in the world that he could trust, and that was himself.

So he rejected Eden’s proposal, turned her away coldly. With fury she threw the Plutarch to the ground and ridiculed him as he scrambled to recover it. ‘What for you learn to read? What good it do you, you ain’t a free man?’

The first meeting ended dismally, but next evening, as Cudjo washed up after his work at the forge, Eden came again to the door and said boldly, ‘Hannibal, you ever go fishin’ yonda?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘Go fishin’,’ and when the old man was gone she came to Cudjo and pulled him down to the straw on which he slept and began kissing him and fumbling with his clothes, and when for the first time in his tortured life he experienced the mystery of what a woman could be, she pulled his hands across her naked back so that he could feel her scars, and quietly she asked, ‘You think on’y you’s been whipped?’ As his hands lingered there, she resumed her litany: ‘We gonna go north. Mastah Paul try to stop us, Mastah Starch try, we gonna kill ’em.’

So the plans were laid, and when Hannibal straggled back from the creek with no fish, he looked down upon the lovers and said, ‘That’s nice. Miss Eden, ever’one been axin’ when you gonna ketch yo’se’f a man. I mighty pleased this night. I mighty pleased.’