Washington and Caesar

5

Great Dismal Swamp, September 1774

The trees were larger than anything he had seen since he had left Africa, and the swamp smelled a little like the land by the great river where he had been born. But any notion of home, any similarity that might have recalled a better time and made the place bearable, was instantly erased by the crushing weight of the work.

He was back in the barracoon, locked down at night with chains, sweating to move great clods of mud all day. No woman lay beside him; he did not have a natty jacket and fine leather boots to show his calves. He was naked but for a loose cotton shirt that was gray with dirt and sweat, and some Russian linen trousers that had been old before he had arrived. The last man had died in them.

They rose before dawn, cooking tin kettles of corn meal in the early gray light, forced to endure the first torture of the day as the smell of the overseers’ bacon wafted down the slight breeze. Caesar had not eaten meat since he arrived. He ate his corn meal in silence, as did the other men. Every one of them was a “cull”, a slave that was so troublesome, or lazy, that his master would give him to the reclamation project for the swamp rather than have him at home. Few of them talked; most looked deeply stupid. Caesar couldn’t help but notice that he was the only Ashanti, and that most of the rest were Ebo. It seemed his lot in life to fall among Ebo and still be considered less than they.

What little coolness the night generated was gone long before he took his shovel and mattock and followed the file of slaves down the trails into the swamp. They were cutting the drainage ditches envisioned by Washington, a few feet at a time. The overseer was stupid, and often drunk, and the neat trenches that Washington designed were executed in a very haphazard manner, never deep enough and often running in curves. The easy days they simply cut trails, or attempted to till the fetid ooze they brought up in digging and piled behind them in neat fields. They might some day be neat fields, but so far looked like small lakes of mud.

When he first arrived, Caesar was almost overwhelmed by the futility of it, and the almost-certain knowledge that he would die here, cutting into a swamp. But as time went by, he saw tiny changes despite the corrosive atmosphere, the incompetence of the overseer, and the complete obstructionism of the slaves. Bit by bit, they were claiming land from the swamp. Some of what they drained actually stayed dry. It almost seemed a further offense, that his labor would, in fact, build more fields for his master to till. But another part of him rejoiced that the work was not utterly wasted.

No one spoke. The men with him sang, sometimes, but their songs were badly sung and he didn’t know the words, which were a mixture of African and local patois. They needed a caller, but any slave talented enough to control the pace of the work as a caller in the fields would never end up here. He would be leading the workers in some happier place.

The daze lasted Caesar for some time-time he was never able to reclaim in his mind, until in later years he wondered if he had had a sickness or a fever that kept him from thinking clearly. He remembered leaving Queeny, and her pressing his store of coins into his hands as he left; he remembered Washington dismissing him with the wave of his hand, as finished business, his thoughts elsewhere; he remembered arriving, and some hazes of work and sleep and the smell of the corn meal in the morning. He remembered thinking that before this he had never fully realized what being a slave was. But then he awoke, so to speak. He never forgot that waking because he was swinging the great ill-balanced pick, the only one they had that wasn’t broken, and another man was trying to pull the stump before he had even cut the roots with the pick, just the sort of inefficient work that typified the whole. And then a new man began to sing a song he knew a little of, a hymn he had heard in the carriage barn. He knew the song and he began to sing with it, swinging the pick over his head and down into the morass and the roots, gradually breaking them to the point that his partner for the day could wrestle the whole mass out with a snap and a sucking noise. Water pooled into the hole left by the stump, and with that water Caesar’s will returned, all in a rush. The man who told himself that today he was a slave returned, and the mindless automaton who had swung the pick recoiled forever.

He couldn’t really remember the time that had passed, except to know that he had lost his place on the plantation for laughing at the Master, a knowledge that finally and fully exposed to him his foolishness and filled him with rage that he had fallen so easily into the snares of the fine clothes and Queeny’s embrace. The swamp was different only in details. He was a slave, and the property of another man.

He sang and sang that whole day, and in the evening he met the new man, a BaKongo man who had served the Lees. He was called Virgil, a tall, strong man with large eyes that seemed always asleep.

Caesar had all but lost the habit of speech, though he still sought to enunciate. Habits die hard.

“You look too good to be here, Virgil.”

“I ain’t, though. I ain’t. I lucky be alive.”

“What’d you do, man? Kill someone?”

“Tried. Tried with a pitchfork.” When Virgil said it, it sounded like “pithfoak.” He had missing teeth on top of his thick patois.

Virgil shrugged. “He took my woman once too often. Let him stay with his own white gals, that’s all I says.”

“And did you hurt him?”

“I nevuh even ma’ked him, the white bastu’d. He had a little sword, cut me up.”

Other men, the less stupid-looking ones, nodded, though none of them was talking. It was as if Caesar and Virgil were alone with a group of ghosts who murmured and ate, but never spoke.

Virgil leaned over to Caesar and whispered.

“You have plans to run? You seem the smaht one, heh?”

Caesar was at once chagrined that he did not have plans to run and instantly focused on them. Yes, he would run. There would be no more money and no chance of working his way free from here. He realized in an instant that he had seen things, even in the daze.

“We are locked down each night, Virgil.”

“Yeah. Barracoon. I see it. And day?”

“Overseer has two guns, fowler and a pistol. Both loaded. Means business. Shot a boy before I come. He has another man and another party off north, not far. There be more of ’em than we can see, too.”

“So we needs to go at night, get a start. You go with me?”

Caesar thought a moment-thought that Virgil might be a plant to lure him-but he couldn’t imagine any punishment worse than where he was. And it was time to change, time to strike out.

“No, Virgil. Not how I see it. We got to take the man and kill him, get his guns. Then we run.”

“Whoa, boy. We do that, we dead if they take us. No whipping. My back plenny hahd, you see? But no hahd ‘nough for no musket ball.”

“You look and see. We have lots o’ time, man. Lots o’ time.”

It was several days before the overseer shot a man, the first time it had happened since Caesar came to the swamp. Caesar never knew why-whether the man tried to run or whether he was shot for poor work, or on a whim. They heard the sharp, high-pitched sound of a pistol. Later, another slave, Old Ben, said he’d seen the body. Caesar worked with Virgil now. He looked at Virgil while Ben told the story, and when the other man was gone, Virgil looked determined.

“You got it right, Mr. Caesar. Boy gotta die.”

“How?”

“I don’ know. We think, then we get him. But he gotta die ‘fo he kill us all.”

Philadelphia, October 1774

Washington’s parlor was not all he could have asked, and the size and bustle of Philadelphia so greatly outran that of his native Williamsburg or Alexandria that he had had trouble sleeping his first few nights with the constant rumble of carts and the calling of wares. In time, the habits of his military youth won out, and he slept better.

The business of the Continental Congress crept along, each faction hesitant of the others, each region jealous of its own case and its own traditions, but a few men, like Franklin, kept the business of the continent moving, and with that, Washington had to be content. He did his bit to keep the factions happy, but he could not speak in public. He sometimes felt that it was a mistake for the Virginians to have sent him, the more so as Virginia was now fighting the Indians in the very territory that he had just ridden over. In his absence he had missed the opportunity to command the last major expedition of his time. He regretted the talk of massacres-indeed, the Philadelphia Quakers made it sound as if Governor Dunmore had provoked the war himself to suit his own ends-but the campaign might have suited him.

It didn’t matter now. But the short campaign had revealed any number of predictable defects in the Virginia militia. Washington had before him on the table a letter from some of the officers of Fairfax County, asking him to procure muskets, drums, and a pair of colors for their companies, which he had every intention of doing for them. He would want the militia of his county to appear to advantage, just as his parish church should, if compared to others.

The phrase that caught his eye, had made him rise and pace the room, was one of the last.

“We leave it to you, sir, to determine whether it may be proper or necessary to vary from the usual colors that are carried by the regulars or militia.”

Colors were the life’s blood of a military unit, the flags around which they rallied, the sacred symbols of their country’s trust. Roman legions had built temples to honor their eagles; the regulars of Great Britain were not so much different, lodging and bringing out their colors with elaborate ceremony. And in Virginia, the better militia did the same, learning from local regulars or veterans like Washington.

He looked out on the bustle of his continent’s largest city, and pondered on varying the colors of the Virginia militia from those carried by the regulars. It was a most sobering thought-it gave him more hesitation than all the empty talk of the congress, all the moving speeches by Patrick Henry or young Jefferson-the thought of troops, troops he might yet command in Virginia, serving under colors other than the king’s.

Men in the Congress talked of war with England. It was that open now. Most of the men who talked and talked had never seen a day’s service and had no idea what such a war would entail. Every member was convinced that as native sons, their own valor and honor would stand any affront. Washington thought of the regulars he had seen, of the Fairfax Militia’s lack of coats or muskets, and the desire to know what pattern the flags should be. It was a question vexing much of the continent, and until war struck them, Washington preferred to endure the Congress. He feared the talk of war from men who hadn’t seen one and wouldn’t have to pay the price.

Charles Lee, who had been a guest of the Lees in Virginia but was no relation, had already offered to raise a battalion for the defense of the Congress. His offers hadn’t been accepted; neither had he been sent away.

Men asked Washington questions, ignorant questions for the most part, about war. He resented them; he resented how little they knew about the supply of a battalion, or its feeding. He bought several books to help him answer the questions and to drive home his points, that war would be expensive, that the continent lacked some of war’s most basic necessities. Men listened to him, or didn’t, as their inclinations went; and he sat in his window, and tried to imagine a body of Virginia men without a king’s color, and for the first time since the whole sad business began, he hesitated. But around him, the pulse of the city beat faster, and increasingly, it beat a martial air.