THE BOOK OF NEGROES (28 page)

“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.”

“Good,” Claybourne said. “Can I have your apple?” Bertilda slapped the man playfully. “You is a right nasty cuss, you know that?”

“I’ll keep my own apple, thank you very much, and just to spite you, Mr. Claybourne Know-It-All,” Miss Betty said.

As the summer wore on, Miss Betty attended every class, even when I started teaching two evenings a week. She always sat beside Claybourne, and seemed to look forward to bickering with him. When she failed to show up for two lessons in a row, Bertilda put on her best clothes, asked me to come along to Miss Betty’s owner’s place, and we knocked on the door.

A white-haired white man opened the door, holding a gun. “If you’re hooligans,” he said, “I’ll shoot holes through your hearts.”

“We’re here for Miss Betty,” I said.

“Who are you?”

“I’m her teacher.”

“Teacher? What foolishness is this?”

“Her teacher, at St. Paul’s Chapel.”

“Teaching her what?”

“To read and write.”

“Silly bat. She didn’t tell me anything about that. She said she was going for religion, and I had no objection. Well, she’s taken ill and I don’t expect you’ll see much more of her.”

We asked to visit with her. The man, who said his name was Mr. Croft, let us into a room at the back of the house. Miss Betty was lying in bed under a thin red blanket and could barely whisper.

“Haven’t had no visitors before,” she said, gasping.

“What’s the matter?” I said.

“Old and dying with no more to say,” she said.

I felt her weak pulse and put a hand on her forehead. There was no fever. “Can we get you anything?”

“Teach me a lesson,” she said.

I showed her a few lines from the
New Amsterdam Gazette
, and we read them together. It was a story about how rebels had raided an arsenal at City Hall and dumped provisions from a British ship straight into the river.

“Trouble coming,” she said.

“Looks like it,” I said.

Mr. Croft came to stand in the doorway. He wanted us to leave. Before we went, I made him promise that we could come back.

“Thank you, chile,” Miss Betty said. “Your mama done raised you right.”

I wished I could sit through the night with Miss Betty. I wished I could stay with her and hold her hand until she departed from this earth. But the best I could do was squeeze her arm and say that we would return soon.

BERTILDA AND I BROUGHT CLAYBOURNE to visit Miss Betty two days later, but we had to knock endlessly at the door before Mr. Croft came to open it.

“How’d you know?” he said.

“What?”

“She died this afternoon. I went to the Trinity Church, but they don’t take Negroes in their cemetery any more. I don’t know what to do with her.”

“We’ll take her,” Claybourne said.

Mr. Croft clasped his hands together. “I’ll give you something for this. You can fetch her in the backroom.”

Bertilda and I dressed Miss Betty in her church clothes. Claybourne picked up the trunk with her belongings, but I made him put it down, opened it, and retrieved some beads and glass bottles that she had kept in a leather pouch.

“These are going with her,” I said.

Mr. Croft let us take the linens and blankets from her bed. We folded them into the trunk, except for the best one, which we used to wrap around the body. Claybourne carried the trunk to Canvas Town and returned later with a shovel, a lamp and several men and women.

Miss Betty hardly weighed a thing. Carrying her on our shoulders, we took the long walk north on Broadway, past Chambers Street and into
the woods. On and on and on we walked until we reached the Negroes’ burying ground. While the men dug the hole, Bertilda and I removed the linen cloth, arranged Miss Betty’s hair and placed the beads and bottles on her belly.

None of us had really known Miss Betty, but we sang and held one another’s hands and said goodbye to her as we hoped someone else would do for us, one day.

“Our Lord and Saviour Jesus,”
Bertilda sang out,
“take this woman over those cold green waters, and take this woman home.”

After we laid her into the shallow grave and covered her up with earth, Claybourne and the men scrounged for rocks in the moonlight, and clustered them into a round pile.

“Why do you do that?” I asked.

“I don’t know, exactly,” Claybourne said, “but I done seen it on all the other Negro graves, and it seem fitting and proper.”

We walked back south into Manhattan, then broke into little groups and disappeared into the darkness.

That night, my bed seemed colder and lonelier than it had since I had come to New York. A year had passed since Chekura slipped in to visit me for one night in Charles Town. Had he ever come back to look for me? If so, any Negro fruiterer or huckster in the Charles Town market could have told him that Solomon Lindo had gone off with me to New York City.

BY NOVEMBER, THE WEATHER HAD BEGUN turning cold. I had a hat and mittens from Miss Betty’s trunk and wore them day and night. I kept the hat on, even inside the tavern.

“You don’t need that in here,” Sam said, watching me sit on a stool with the
New Amsterdam Gazette.

“I want to keep all the heat in, so it lasts longer when I go back out,” I said.

He brought me a steaming coffee. According to the newspaper, war had broken out between the Tories and the rebels. What would happen to the Negroes in New York, I wondered, if the rebels chased out the British? Sam whispered that he believed the rebels were the better people. He didn’t trust the British, even the ones who came to dine in the tavern. They were too friendly, too enthusiastic about his food, and half of them owned slaves, he said. For my part, I suspected it was best not to trust anybody.

I sipped my coffee, which was flavoured with molasses and milk, then put down the glass and stared at the paper. On the front page was a proclamation by Lord Dunmore, governor of Virginia, promising freedom for any Negroes who agreed to fight for the British in the war.

“To the end that peace and good order may the sooner be restored,” Dunmore’s proclamation said, “I do require every person capable of bearing arms to resort to His Majesty’s standard … and I do hereby further declare all indented servants, Negroes, or others (appertaining to rebels) free, that are able and willing to bear arms, they joining His Majesty’s Troops, as soon as may be, for the more speedily reducing this Colony to a proper sense of their duty to his Majesty’s crown and dignity.”

The British were promising us freedom if we fought for them. Questions flooded my mind. I wondered how they would make us free, and where, and how they would let us live. The proclamation spoke about people bearing arms. It looked like that meant only men. Surely they wouldn’t let a Negro woman bear arms. And if all the Negroes who bore arms got themselves shot by rebel bullets, what good would freedom do them?

Sam came back into the kitchen.

“Did you see this?” I asked.

“It will get your Canvas Town crowd all worked up,” he said, “but I wouldn’t give it much mind. The British keep dying and need more men to fight, so they’re calling on the slaves. It makes the rebels crazy. They are all fuming about it. They say it isn’t fair, stealing Negroes from good men.”

“But this offer of freedom,” I said. “What about that?”

“Sooner or later the British are goners, and when they leave, do you think they’ll be taking you?”

In the chapel that night, my students jumped up when I showed them the news from the
New Amsterdam Gazette.
They made me read the proclamation over and over again.

“What that-all mean?” Bertilda said.

“It means,” one man said, “men that fights for the British, gets their freedom.”

“It means men what fights for the British, dies with five bullets in the brain,” Clayborne said.

“Why should we fight their fight?” another man asked.

“You want to be free, don’t you?” Bertilda said.

“Free to die,” Claybourne said. “Thanks very much, but I’m free already.”

“You is free until some fat rice-growing white man show up here and place a ring round your neck,” Bertilda said. “Get up off your bony butt and fight, man.”

“Why don’t you fight too?” Claybourne said.

“I would,” Bertilda said, “if they let me. They give me a musket, and I would shoot down them plantation owners one after the other. I dead them faster than a voodoo chief.”

“Take a shot for me too,” Claybourne said.

A WEEK LATER, I WAS WALKING up Broadway on a cold, windy night, with Trinity Church behind me and St. Paul’s a few blocks ahead, when a strong hand covered my mouth. I tried to look behind me, but my neck was seized and locked. My face was shoved into the crook of a big man’s arm and I was dragged into a lane. I could hear no footsteps or voices, only the rough breathing of the man who flung me to the ground. Flat on my
back with the breath knocked out of me, I saw a young white man, trousers already unbuttoned. I tried to roll to the side but he pounced on me. I began to shout, but he clamped my mouth again and used the other hand to strike me. He dropped all of his weight onto me, and pinned me in the cold, wet mud. I spat at him and bit his hand but could not move under his weight and his force, even as I heard and felt my own clothes ripping.

Footsteps, finally, and then shouting. One man’s angry voice in the night. “Hey! You. Ruffian lout! Let that woman up. Let her go, or I’ll shoot.”

Still my attacker pawed at me. He was hard and trying to find his way inside me.

Only when a pistol went off did he pause. “Next one goes straight into your brain.”

The weight rolled off me. My attacker got to his knees, scrambled to his feet, tugged his trousers up and ran away with them unbuttoned. “What a disgrace,” said the man with the pistol. I didn’t look at his face, but heard his British accent. “One more instant and I would have shot him. Here. Let me help you up.” I was grateful he had warded off my attacker, but whoever he was, I wished he would leave me alone. Skin was showing through my torn clothing. I just wanted to make it the last two blocks to the chapel, where someone could help me. I kept my face down. “Thank you,” I said, “but I’ll be fine now. You can leave me—” “You speak English very well. I’ve heard of you,” he said. “You teach the Negroes in the chapel. You’re the one they call Meena.”

I looked up to see a young man in a British Army uniform. He reached out his hand, which I shook.

“Lieutenant Malcolm Waters,” he said, releasing my hand. He had blond hair, cropped and pushed to one side, and a rugged face with staring eyes. “Believe it or not, I was speaking about you just the other day,” he said.

“Thank you, but I really must go.”

“I can’t leave you alone like this. Were you on your way to the chapel?” I nodded. “Then I will accompany you there. And while your friends are helping you, I will get you a blanket.”

I began walking with him.

“The minister at the chapel said you are the teacher, right? And a midwife too, I hear?”

I wondered why on earth he had been speaking with the minister about me, but I just nodded again and kept walking. When we reached the chapel, he left me with my friends, who took me into their arms and cleaned the cuts on my face and clucked that I shouldn’t be foolish enough to walk the streets alone at night. Claybourne wasn’t there that night, but after an hour Lieutenant Waters showed up at the church with a blanket, which I wrapped around myself. He offered to walk me back to Canvas Town.

“You ain’t taking her,” Bertilda said. “White man like you, dressed up so fine. You can walk on into Canvas Town but you might not come back out.”

“I’ll walk with both of you for a spell,” he said.

So Bertilda, Lieutenant Waters and I began the long walk back to Canvas Town.

“Who you is?” Bertilda asked.

“I’m a lieutenant with the British Navy,” he said.

“What you want with my Meena?” she said.

“I have some things to ask her,” he said.

“What sort?” Quietly, he said, “It’s a private matter.”

“Humph. That man who messed with her had a private matter too.”

“Well, it’s not that sort. I’m an honourable man.”

He had an odd sort of singsong voice, and he seemed amused, rather
than off ended, by Bertilda’s questions. He offered to buy me dinner at the Fraunces Tavern the next day, then left us at the edge of Canvas Town and disappeared in the darkness.

“What kind of foolish white man want to walk into Canvas Town in the middle of the night?” Bertilda said.

“Same fools we are,” I said, “to be walking around the streets of New York at night.”

“That man Claybourne, always telling us not to walk at night, he’s a fool hisself,” Bertilda said. “How’s a woman expected to get around, except on her own two feet? And I ain’t got a man in my bed, or one to walk me home at night.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“Got your eye on Claybourne?” she asked.

“Nope, I’ve got my own man.”

“Where he at?”

“I don’t know. And you,” I asked. “Do you have your eye on Claybourne?” Bertilda’s mouth curled up and her eyes widened in the darkness. “I been spending my nights waiting on him and wondering if the plain fool’s ever gonna ask me for a little bit of loving.”

“Maybe he needs to know you want it,” I said.

“You ain’t got nothing going on with him?” she asked.

“Nothing at all,” I said.

“Good. Don’t you go changing your mind on me, then.”

ROASTED DUCK. BOILED POTATOES. String beans. Coffee with molasses. I ate a fine meal on Lieutenant Malcolm Waters’ account, and he didn’t come to any particular point during the whole time we ate. He had been stationed in New York for a year, he said, and was well regarded by his
commanding officers. The war was proving difficult with the rebels, he acknowledged, but yes, absolutely, Lord Dunmore was perfectly serious in offering freedom to any Negro who would take up arms for them.