The Book of Negroes by Lawrence Hill

Author:Lawrence Hill [Hill, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781409080602
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2010-12-28T05:00:00+00:00

Negroes or other property

THE REBELS HELD MANHATTAN FOR SIX MONTHS. Then the British took it back and held it for seven years. There were no more English classes at St. Paul's Chapel, because the Tories locked rebel prisoners inside and left them there to starve. The cries of white men dying sounded so much like those of captives on the slave ship that I avoided walking anywhere near the chapel.

I was left with just three places to teach Negroes to read and to share news with them: the Negro burying ground for large gatherings; a room in the Fraunces Tavern (for twenty people at most), and a meeting circle in front of my shack.

Canvas Town had been attracting fugitives in twos and threes each day, especially after the Philipsburg Proclamation of 1779. Every Negro I taught learned the words of the proclamation, issued by Sir Henry Clinton, the British Commander-in-Chief: To every Negro who shall desert the Rebel Standard, full security to follow within these lines, any occupation which he shall think proper.

Every Negro who was capable took a job working for the British. This time, it wasn't just soldiers they wanted. They needed cooks, laundresses, blacksmiths and labourers. They needed coopers, rope makers, carpenters and night-soil men.

And they needed me.

Malcolm Waters returned to New York with captain's stripes on his shoulders. I told him his promotion probably had to do with his true calling in Holy Ground, and called him Captain Holiness. The British no longer kept their mistresses in separate houses in Holy Ground, since senior officers had commandeered homes throughout the city. But the flourishing brothels offered women of all types—Negroes in some houses, whites in others, and every kind going in still other places.

I wasn't just asked to catch babies. Often, I was called upon to give doses of tansy or cottonroot and to stay with the women as their pregnancies bled out of them. Men too sought me out for relief for the blisters and excretions on their penises. I kept a ready supply of bloodroot and aloe, and charged everyone who could pay the same one-pound fee. I needed the money and I needed it desperately. Prices were soaring and everyone was cheating—even the bakers. It got so bad that the British capped the price of bread at twenty-two coppers per loaf and ruled that each loaf had to weigh exactly two pounds. To prevent fraud, bakers stamped their initials into loaves.

Each time there were rumours of change, the people of Canvas Town assembled outside my shack, waiting for me to show up with the New Amsterdam Gazette. I read to them about Thomas Paine and his book Common Sense, which made most of the Canvas Town residents boo and hiss. They thought it absurd for any white man in the Thirteen Colonies to be complaining of slavery at the hands of the British.

Sam Fraunces had dropped by for that reading, and said that Thomas Paine had a point. "Say what you will, but the Americans are winning against King George and the English," he said.

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