Washington and Caesar
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The woman who appeared around the log barn with Jim was the first that he had seen in some time, and that may have added to her appeal. She wasn’t wearing a jacket; most girls didn’t, in the little farms around the swamp. She had the sun full behind her and he could see the shape of her legs and most of her top through her shift, and her breasts, outlined in sweat, made him smile. She had a tiny, pointed face, too small for the body, but nice.
Jim had a small sack of meal; far more precious, he had a brass kettle like the ones the whites gave to Indians to store dried goods in. He was almost bouncing as he crossed the grass, and the woman stood with her hands on her hips and watched the boy go.
“Ol’ Nellie say those men be aftuh us!” said Jim, ducking into the brush. Virgil watched the girl, who walked along behind the barn with deliberate coquetry.
“You nevuh said they was a gal,” Virgil hissed.
“They wasn’t, las’ time. Maybe they bought her?”
“Ol’ lady say they slave-takuhs?”
“That what she say.”
“They got dogs?”
Jim looked guilty. “I didn’ ax.”
“Don’ fret. You done good on that kettle. If’n they had dogs, I reckon we’d know by now. We gone have to do some walkin’ round befo’ we goes to camp. Jus’ in case they follow us.” He smiled back at Jim and rose for a last look at that handsome girl, but she was gone.
“Let’s git.”
Cambridge, Massachusetts, July 3, 1775
He sat on Nelson and watched his army, a chaotic mob, as they attempted to form themselves in battalions. Men ran from company to company, yelling for their own officers; in fact, several approached him directly. Some had the sense to look for their militia banners displayed in the center of their regiments, but the lack of uniforms and the total want of standard places for assembly told against them. It was over an hour before he had six regiments formed and marching on the roads; he had failed to find any of the ranger companies that he knew abounded to scout the way, and the Massachusetts general officers were conspicuous by their glacial inefficiency or by their absence. It seemed possible that General Ward resented him more than he hated the British; it seemed that Israel Putnam was nowhere to be found. Washington sent his own aides as scouts to keep watch on the enemy, but eager as they were, they were untrained and talkative, and he waited in the summer sun, baking in his uniform, and watching his motley army of militia while imagining his outworks stormed, his camp taken, and his reputation ruined before he had learned the names of his own staff.
His six battalions marched slowly, the sixty different companies all marching with different steps when they marched at all. Gaps opened and closed all down the line, making any thought of complex maneuver impossible, and Washington began to wonder if he could actually form a line and fight if he had to. He could only hope that a show of force would be sufficient.
He rode up to Dorchester Neck at the head of his staff, the six battalions fifteen minutes behind him and strung out for a mile and a half. If the British were assaulting the Neck, he had fifteen eager gentlemen to stop them, all mounted. He was half-tempted to try, and avoid the consequences of disastrous defeat; indeed, he had thought of ordering the troops back to Cambridge rather than face the British with them. The truth of the battle at Breed’s Hill was obvious. Unless these untrained men were sent into entrenchments, they would never stand in the field, or even form; they lacked the ability to march up in column, form line under fire, and give their volleys.
But no thick red column ascending the Neck met his eyes. The Neck was empty. Away toward the British lines and their south battery, two companies of light infantry were drilling, their files extended wide. Washington was comforted to see that they did not appear overly proficient.
“Where is this column?” Washington looked over the Neck, relieved that he would not have to fight today with such a clumsy instrument. No one answered. A single understrength company of Marbleheaders stood farther down, where a rough tangle of felled trees had been thrown across the Neck to slow an enemy approach.
“Captain Poole’s company?” Washington asked, sitting his horse easily.
The man smiled and nodded.
“Where are the British?” Washington waved his crop down the Neck toward Boston.
Another man came up, smoking a pipe. “Oh, they formed up, right ‘nough. Jus’ a field day, I’d say. A walk in the pahk.”
“Where is your captain?”
“He went to find the Virginny general.”
Washington shook his head, and the smoking man wandered off. He rode back to Lee.
“Turn them around and march them home. Tell the general officers I want a complete muster and a complete return of military stores tomorrow.”
“What do you want me to tell the churchwarden, General?”
“I fail to take your meaning.”
“General Ward, then.”
“Tell him the same as the others.”
“He should have turned to with the rest. Sir.”
“That will be enough, General Lee. I mean to have absolute command, but I will not stoop to personal remarks about my officers.”
Lee, unfazed, looked back where the first four companies, hundreds of yards ahead of the rest of the column, were wandering toward them, each company a small crowd of men without formation.
“I imagine the only way to use them would be to ride up and down, showing each man his place and how to load his musket.” Lee laughed at his own sarcasm.
“On your way, sir.” Washington tried to sound cool; Lee both amused and irritated him. Lee swept him a bow from horseback and was gone.
It was a byword among farmers that often you had to make a tool before you could even start a job.
He would train the army and officers, and bring the Massachusetts men to heel. They would obey and respect, and men would not smoke pipes while talking to generals. It would all be a great deal of work, and it wouldn’t succeed if the British attacked him before any part of it was done. He headed back to Cambridge, already composing his notes on the drill of the army, but as he began to pass through the chaos of the leading battalion, a thought occurred to him and he pulled up.
“You there,” he shouted at a man in a good coarse smock and proper military equipment. The man looked something like a soldier.
“Sir?” The fellow at least had the sense to come to the recover, still the manner of a soldier.
“How many cartridges do you have, soldier?”
“Ten rolled, sir! Powder for six more.”
Sixteen rounds. Washington saluted and rode on, checking soldiers as he went. By the time he reached the end of the column, he knew his Massachusetts men a little better, and he knew they averaged only nine rounds a man.
Sometimes, before a farmer built a tool, he had to get the materials for it. Washington started a new set of notes. He was still dictating to his secretary when he climbed the stairs to his rooms and flung himself in a wingback chair.
“What can I get you, sir?” asked Billy.
“An army, Billy. Saving that, a staff of professional officers, sixty thousand rounds of ball cartridge, and ten thousand muskets.”
“I’ll just get goin’ then, sir.”
“I’ll settle for brandy and water.”
“They have ice from an ice house, sir. It’s prime.”
“Better and better. Iced brandy, then.”
Washington turned to his secretary. “I’ve led you a damned chase today, sir, and you’ve held up well. Put down the notes about sashes as badges of rank and then get yourself a glass downstairs. I won’t trouble you again today.”
The young man bowed and retired. In a moment, Billy returned, with a glass and some Naples biscuits. Washington devoured the biscuits and drank off half the glass. “They have no concept of discipline,” he said.
Billy polished a silver salver quietly.
“They do not seem to believe in subordination. Every man must have his say, no matter how half-witted.”
Billy nodded to him.
“I do not intend to discuss every notion of fortification with some Yankee captain who has read a book on the subject. Braddock may not have been the greatest general of the age, but his staff was a tool in his hand, an extension of him. He thought out the plans and gave orders. When will I reach a state where these men will obey me? I doubt that General Gage shares these troubles in Boston.”
“You want to get those boots off, sir?” asked Billy, unmoved by his master’s tirade.
“I thought that commanding this army would be like running a plantation, Billy. I would plan, dictate my orders, and the army would execute my designs. I’m not sure these men even know how to obey!”
Billy looked up from the boots and smiled. But he didn’t speak his mind, and Washington didn’t note it.
3
Great Dismal Swamp, September 1775
Caesar peered through the fringe of magnolia at the arm of open water stretching north from their new camp.
“Where’s Virgil?”
“Don’ know.” Old Ben looked shifty when he said it, and he probably did know. Something was going on; all the men smiled when they looked at Virgil or tried to cover his absences. Caesar shook his head, and rose carefully to his feet, the fowler crooked in his arm.
“What are you all smiling at?” he said to the other men. “Come on. I’m gon’ teach you to use this gun.”
It was by no means the first attempt, and Virgil and Old Ben had at least passed the stage where the guns scared them, but Caesar was determined that they would all learn to use the fowler well, even the boy. In a corner of his mind, he had considered trying to hit the militia for more muskets; if he had one for every man, and they could shoot, he would have a force to be reckoned with in the swamp. The militia was wary, and hadn’t come as deep in after the first foray, as if by the killing of one slave they had justified themselves and could go home.
He led them, single file, well away from their camp to a sun-drenched clearing in the high tree cover. Some time back, a storm had knocked two big trees down, and their huge, dirt-clogged roots made pyramids at either end of a clearing long enough to run a horse.
Two men lit pipes and sat down, and the rest stood in a loose knot. Caesar wondered idly where the tobacco came from; he suspected it was of a piece with Virgil’s forays, but only today did it strike him that the tobacco smelled fresh. He also wondered if he should have a man out watching the trail from the settlements. That would have been Virgil’s job.
“Everyone look at this gun,” he began. “This is the butt, where you place her against yo’ shoulder. Not yo’ chest. Not yo’ arm. Like this.” He suited word to deed and tucked the fowler into his shoulder. He was quite familiar with it now, having fired it more times than he could count and killed any number of birds and several deer. He still preferred to get right up close to them, though.
“This is the lock. She make the gun fire, and she mus’ be dry an’ clean all the time. This part, with the flint, be called the cock.”
He looked up. Several men were smiling. Long Tom had taken out his folding razor and begun whittling at an old stick.
“Bigger ‘an yours is, Lolly,” Long Tom said.
Caesar rolled his eyes with the earnestness of the young and plowed on.
“The cock holds the flint. She strikes against the hammer, like this.” He pulled the trigger so that the flint in the jaws of the cock struck the hardened face of the hammer and made sparks. “Them sparks fall in the pan, heah…here, and touch off that powder.”
He took the small horn out of the pouch that had come with the gun, a tiny thing that barely filled his hand. He twisted the stopper out with his teeth and tapped the lip of the small horn against the pan of the lock until he had filled it with powder. Then he shut the hammer so that its “L” shape covered the pan, drew back the cock past half cock to full cock, and pulled the trigger. The cock flashed forward, struck the hammer, and snapped it back from the pan while making a shower of sparks that fell into the exposed pan. The priming powder went up with a small whoosh and a finger of smoke that trailed away over Caesar’s shoulder.
He held the priming horn and the fowler out to Jim, the youngest.
“You try, Jim.”
Jim set his face in a look of concentration made a little comical by the fact that throughout the operation his mouth opened and shut slowly like a fish under water. He balanced the long weapon in his hand and found it lighter than he had expected. Then he pulled back the cock as Caesar had told them and took the stopper out of the little horn and tapped powder. It took him a long time to get the right amount of powder, much longer than it had taken Caesar, and his careful attention was almost spoiled when he saw the mermaid carved generously into the little horn. Then he shut the hammer on the pan, raised the fowler to his shoulder, and tugged at the trigger, turning his face away from the expected flash of the priming. Nothing happened.
Caesar hit him lightly on the shoulder.
“Nevah turn yo’ face away.” He scowled for a moment. “Never turn your face away.”
Jim forced his head down over the fowler’s barrel, and pulled at the trigger again. The whole barrel moved, but nothing happened.
“You’re still on half cock,” said Caesar, indicating the lock.
“He still only got a half cock!” called Lolly, laughing.
Caesar glared at the man, and the laughter died slowly.
He knew he wasn’t old enough to give them orders, but none of them seemed to want to be in charge; they all simply wanted to make his life hard for trying to give orders. Joking when he was talking was common; if he fought it all the time, it just made things worse. Usually he laughed with them. Today, he wanted them to learn.
Jim pulled at the cock, and it came back far more easily than he had expected, clicking home into the full cock position with a small and sinister noise. Jim was afraid of the gun, and more afraid now that it was full of potential to fire; the cock looked ready to leap at the hammer with the smallest provocation. He was very hesitant when he pointed the piece; he jerked the barrel several inches when he pulled the trigger. But the pan flashed, and it didn’t burn him, and he felt a glow of satisfaction.
“You has to keep the barrel pointed at yo’ target. No pulling it. Like this.” Caesar aimed over the barrel and pulled the trigger, and the barrel stayed steady. Jim watched.
“When you can flash the pan without twitchin’, I expec’ I’ll give you powder an’ shot.” He smiled at Jim, then at the rest of the men.
“Jim can do it, I expec’ the res’ of you have no trouble at all.” Caesar held the fowler out like a dare. “Who wants to try next? No one wan’ to step forwar’?” He looked at them all. They weren’t scared; it was just that years of slavery had eliminated any tendency to volunteer. He looked at Lolly, the joker, sitting on a downed giant and puffing at the blackened stump of a clay pipe.
“Lolly. You try. Here.” He handed Lolly the fowler, and Lolly shrank away until he felt its sleek wood and the lightness of the thing, and then he held it with an almost proprietary air. Jim handed him the little priming horn, and Lolly smiled at him.
“There’s somethin’ I haven’ seen none of in a whiles!” laughed Lolly, looking at the horn and the mermaid’s breasts.
“I tink Virgil be lookin’ at dat now,” murmured Tom, normally a silent man.
Lolly was determined to excel, and he thumbed back the cock, pulled the stopper off the horn with his teeth, and primed the piece in seconds, then shut the hammer on the pan and pushed the stopper back into the horn and tossed it to Jim. Then he raised the fowler to his shoulder, seating it firmly where the muscles of the arm and shoulder knit together. The fowler looked tiny in his hands.
He pointed the fowler squarely at Caesar and pulled the trigger. The pan flashed, but no one laughed with him.
Caesar didn’t glare. He took the gun away from Lolly and looked away for a moment.
“Don’ never do that. Not even in fun. Man don’ know whether it be loaded or not. If’n the pan flash, man might turn some pair of breeches brown.” He said it all with such solemnity that it took them a moment to realize that he had made a joke of it. While they laughed, Lolly leaned over to him and hit him on the arm.
“Didn’ mean nothin, Cese.” He looked sheepish, as he always did when a joke went wrong or no one laughed with him.
“No harm done, Lolly.” Any rancor Caesar might have felt was expelled by the man’s obvious competence. Joking or not, he had watched and learned.
Next it was Old Ben’s turn; although he had fired the gun before, he wanted the practice. Caesar gave him a ball and enough powder to drive it; Ben had earned a real shot. He put powder in the pan, spun the musket in his hands and put powder in the barrel and pushed a ball down atop it, seated on a little patch of oiled muskrat hide. He had to push hard on the ramrod to seat the ball, and he looked carefully at Caesar’s mark on the ramrod to make sure the ball was fully seated. Then he took careful aim at the billet of wood across the clearing and fired. He didn’t hit the wood, but sandy soil flew in the sun close to his point of aim, if a little short. The others cheered his shooting.
Caesar swayed a little as he recovered the musket. He coached Tom through the motions of loading, but he looked green and seemed to be struggling with his body to stay upright.
“You sick, Caesar?” asked Ben directly.
“Somethin’ I ate. I feel like somebody kicked me.”
“You get out o’ the sun, then, an’ don’ be foolish.” Ben took control of the gun and its associated pouch and began to move the whole party back toward their camp. By the time they reached it, Tom and Lolly had to carry Caesar.
She never closed her eyes, not when he was in her, not when he stroked her, not even when she crooned to him at the end of her passion. But those odd golden eyes looked at him with some intent, and he could lose himself in their light. When they were in the half-dark barn, those eyes seemed to have a slight glow, like the last of a sunset, and the first time he had loved her, he had put a hand in front of her eyes to see if they really cast some light. It was like that for him; she scared him a little.
At first he had thought that tremor of fear came from his long abstinence. It had been a year or more since he had been in a woman—any woman at all—and his wife, a fine woman, had never had the fire this one had, or the shape. But as he came back for her again and again, against his own judgment, he began to be afraid that she had taken something of his soul, or had bound him. He even wondered if it was all the power of her eyes.
The men at the camp knew he was with a woman. Jim had been quick to tell them about the first encounter and had probably watched the second. Caesar didn’t know; he lay on a pile of brush under a bower in the camp, and they had to carry him back and forth to empty himself. Virgil tried not to think that Caesar was probably dying. He lost himself in her eyes again and reached beneath her to slip his hands under her and raise her body into his strokes. She liked to be touched constantly when he was in her, and pouted if he paid her too little mind, but she never talked. In fact, he didn’t know anything about her, except that the slave-takers owned her.
But just as he lost himself in the act again, that last thought burned through him, so that his whole body stiffened a little and she made a little grunting noise like a question. She was very good at reading him.
She belonged to the two slave-takers. He knew their names, now: Bludner and Weymes. And he wondered why two white men owned the most beautiful black woman near the swamp and didn’t use her.
It was his third time with her, and only now, at the brink of his own vast satisfaction, did he really wonder why she lay with him. It might have unmanned him completely—the icy hand of betrayal on his prick—but she opened her eyes wide, and her cunny gave a little pulse, as if grabbing him to her, and he was past his fear, and she seemed the only thing in the world. He pinched her nipples, hard, and held her face in his big hands, and they both spasmed together, beyond ecstasy for a moment. Then he didn’t know where she went; he went straight back to the fear of betrayal.
He rolled off her, stroking her with his left hand to keep her passive while he looked out of the long crack between the barn’s boards. He could see down into the yard. The old slave couple were willing conspirators, warning them when anyone approached the barn, but Virgil had known from the first that the old woman didn’t fancy young Sally one bit. Perhaps her man wanted Sally, old as he was. That would be no odd thing. Or perhaps Sally didn’t talk to the old couple any more than she talked to him. She was odd, a sort of magical creature, too handsome for the dirt and tangle of real life. Even now, as he watched for the two white men with the long guns and assumed that she had betrayed him, he wanted her.
“Them slave-takers comin’ fo’ me?” he asked, suddenly.
She turned her face a little away.
“Sally,” he started, and then couldn’t think of what to say. A profession of love didn’t seem appropriate; he lacked the will to threaten her. He turned her head to face him, and stared into those deep golden eyes that seemed guileless. “Sally, I need to know. Wheah ah they?”
“Don’ know.”
“Is they comin’ fo’ me?”
“They don’ wan’ you.” She turned on her side so that her heavy breasts rolled on to the straw, a movement that always caught his eye. She smiled when she saw how he watched her, even now.
“They know I’m heah?”
“They don’ wan’ you. They wan’ the otha’ man, the one killed all the white folk.”
“They know wheah he is?”
“They follow you, big man. An’ they wan’ follow you today, to be sho.”
He stopped stroking her. Somehow, she had said too much—enough to let him know how well she knew the slave-takers, how much of their plans she understood, how little she cared about him. He didn’t really expect her to resist them; it was too hard for a slave woman to resist a man, and he knew it too well. But there were other ways to rebel, and she wasn’t following them. He thought now that he could guess why the old woman disliked her. He pulled his breeches on and his shirt; he had laid the shirt under them to keep her off the scratchy old straw, and it smelled of her. She just watched him, naked. The first woman he had ever known for whom nakedness seemed to mean nothing, as if she preferred it to clothes. His wife had been much shyer.
“I won’ be back. You need to get clear of they two slave-takers, girl.”
“I may. Fat lot you know about me.” She wasn’t sullen, just direct, and again he wondered at how little he knew her. He still had one of their two pistols, and he checked the prime, stuck it in the back of his waistband. Then he jumped, caught a beam and swung to the hard-packed floor of the barn, avoiding the creak of the roped wooden ladder that let on to the little loft. He didn’t know where they were or how they were watching him; for all he knew, she was signaling them even now. That didn’t seem so bad, if he could get one of them before they got him, but he suspected they knew he was armed. He suspected they knew all about him. The barn had only one door and he slipped through it and into the tall weeds in seconds, expecting a rifle ball in the back as he moved, but there was no shot, no movement, no call for a chase. He began to breathe a little easier, and then he realized that there was no sound of voices anywhere; that the farmer and his old male slave were still in the field, but no one else seemed to be around. He had expected to find the boy, Jim, who waited for him every time. He wanted, suddenly, to know, and he looked for Jim in the brush at the edge of the clearing. Failing that, he moved as cautiously as he could into the brush pile behind the little windowless cabin where the two old slaves lived. He slipped up on the little cabin from the big cabin’s blind spot and scratched the door with a stick.