But that was before. How my life has bloomed like a strange flower. Since I met my Mary. Skin of my skin. Soul of my soul. I was told of steel horses. But that is less pleasing to me than this: once my freedom earned, my term of service done, my freedom fee collected—no more lashes to drive me to the field before the cockerel’s crow—I bought Mary’s freedom and the contracts of five men to work my will. And in the way of the good laws of this land—King Charles’s laws—gathered a fifty-acre plot for each manservant. I claim this stretch of God’s land as my own. And I work as I please.
Rising the path from the riverbank, I find a small bush. Not a bush but a deer melting back to earth. Feasted on. Nature’s way. But I gather a few leafy branches, cover the critter, and cross myself. My hand comes to the right side of the cross, where Jesus’s palm hung bleeding, when I freeze for leaves crunching behind. I don’t have my musket or my scythe. But I have hands. I clinch my fist.
“Pap!” the voice says. My youngest, Walter, runs in the bramble, his knees bouncing in the dew. “Quick! Come see.”
“Such a call!” I say, rubbing Walter’s head. “Respect your old father.” His mouth moves. His eyes dart. But he does not bend his head. I squeeze his shoulder in pride of him. His nerves ride him. That is his spirit. But his body is coming on strong, less bedeviled by bad humors in his lungs. The ones that took his older brothers when they were cubs.
“That white man, one of the brothers Parker. He walking in the patch.” Walter leads along the creek trail, the beery nose scent of sassafras everywhere. Turtle climbs a log. Reeds and rushes brush my legs. Many acres. God’s land. My land. To be Walter’s land.
My tobacco field with a ghost mist on it. The man stoops here and again. He touches my leaves as if they are born of his labor. Robert Parker. Some of these fields were his father’s. But today the Parkers have only one man under contract and a few hay acres upriver.
John Casor, my third man, holds the rein of the Parker horse and holds a roped calf. John fears his old master, Robert. John stands on the path by the field, his look goes everywhere except to Robert.
“You let a fox in my patch,” I say. I send Walter to the cornfield to give word.
John dips his head. “He wouldn’t listen to the likes of Poor John.” We have the same outside color, but his insides are smoke to me. He shows dumb, but I know he is cunning. He shows weak, but he has a lion inside. He works less well than he can, so I task him to my fields longer.
My hands on my sides, I say, “You come out from there.”
“Look ye here,” Robert says, his sweaty hair dripping onto his shoulders, a long dagger in his belt. He has a false manner of speaking, a squire’s manner. They call Robert a freeboot who betrayed the crown during his journeys. Other men would be in stocks if not in servitude. But here he stands. Free as clover. “It’s my old mate, Antonio.”
I step into my patch. When he came before, he did not smile as I picked at his body for flea beetles that eat tobacco. But that plague is gone, or I would pick again. “You know my chosen name is Anthony, after the saint.”
“So it is,” he says.
Colin, my best field man, gallops to the field’s edge and dismounts. White-skinned. A big man, a head above us.
“I came as soon as I heard, Mr. Johnson. Now, this one wouldn’t be bothering you today, would he? I’ll toss him in the shuck if that’s the matter.”
“If you would have your head cleaved from your shoulders, papist.” Robert spits in the dirt. Touches his dagger.
“No,” I say. “I have need of an animal.” My oldest daughter, Eliza, is to be married to a freeman like myself called Wiltwyck of New Sweden. I chose a fatted calf as her gift. A fat calf would mean a strong union and hardy children. But disease spread among the many beasts of the colony last spring. Robert has the last ones.
“I assure you this is finest of my stock, valiant Moor.”
A fine calf announces itself the same as people, by temper. I run my hand across the babe’s glossy coat. I place my finger at its teeth, and the creature suckles, its ears moving. A fine calf. I give Robert a leather pouch of forty shillings. He counts each one.
Colin passes to me a legal paper that I unroll. The village justice made this. I am not learned in the work of scribes, but my Mary, who has eyes of stars, is and smiled at it. My daughter Eliza, who is as learned of work of scribes, will also smile when she has her calf. I show the paper to Robert, who does not look at it.
“I need not sign a deed for the likes of you!” Robert pushes the paper away. “Take the animal as he stands. That is your proof of possession.”
“The Lord covers me and mine in eternity, and the king’s law covers me and mine here. I keep my papers.”
Robert spits again. Part of it hits his own boot. He mounts his horse and pulls the calf behind. Down the path, he dismounts. His dagger flashes in the sun and disappears by the animal’s neck. The calf falls to dirt. Robert rides off. Colin shakes his head. John Casor shows his teeth. Colin says Robert has my shillings, and he is right. The calf’s tail twitches in the dirt.
“What now, sir?” Colin says.
I am back on the ship in the hold. But my sons and daughters and their sons and daughters are with me in the dark. Chains clink on their legs. We are on the shore. We are in the woods. A girl in the mist of tomorrows watches me from a coach tied to one of the steel horses I was told of. She laughs like she is happy to meet me. And behind her in the coach are her sons and daughters and their sons and daughters.
“The calf dies,” I say, “but the law will always hold me. And my Eliza will have her calf.”
1649–1654
THE BLACK FAMILY
Heather Andrea Williams
In 1649 three hundred Black people lived in the English colony of Virginia. Even fewer Black people lived in the more northern Dutch town of New Amsterdam that later, under British rule, would become New York City.
Slavery had not yet evolved into the pervasive institution that would devour the labor and lives of millions of people of African descent. Still, during these early years, among the small numbers of Black people who were free, enslaved, or lingering in some degree of unfreedom, it is possible to glimpse evidence of family formations and priorities that would become far more visible as slavery expanded.
By the time they reached an American colony, most captives had already experienced forced separation from their families and communities, some of them more than once. They had been taken from families and communities in West and Central Africa and may have lost contact with a close shipmate after the Middle Passage journey. Some lost the family and community they created while they sojourned in the Caribbean or South America before being taken to North America.