Ecco
ISBN: 0-06-053916-X
Chapter One
Ten years after the surrender of George III’s army to General Washington
at Yorktown, British Freedom was hanging on in North America. Along with a
few hundred other souls – Scipio Yearman, Phoebe Barrett, Jeremiah Piggie
and Smart Feller among them – he was scratching a living from the stingy
soil around Preston, a few miles northeast of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Like most of the Preston people, British Freedom was black and had come
from a warmer place. Now he was a hardscrabbler stuck in a wind-whipped
corner of the world between the blue spruce forest and the sea. But he was
luckier than most. British Freedom had title to forty acres, and another
one and a half of what the lawyers’ clerks in Halifax were pleased to call
a “town lot.” It didn’t look like much of a town, though, just a dirt
clearing with rough cabins at the centre and a few chickens strutting
around and maybe a mud-caked hog or two. Some of the people who had
managed to get a team of oxen to clear the land of bald grey rocks grew
patches of beans and corn and cabbages, which they carted to market in
Halifax along with building lumber. But even those who prospered – by
Preston standards – took themselves off every so often into the
wilderness to shoot some birch partridge, or tried their luck on the
saltwater ponds south of the village.
What were they doing there? Not just surviving. British Freedom and the
rest of the villagers were clinging to more than a scrap of Nova Scotia;
they were clinging to a promise. Some of them even had that promise
printed and signed by officers of the British army on behalf of the king
himself, that the bearer so-and-so was at liberty to go wherever he or she
pleased and take up whatever occupation he or she chose. That meant
something for people who had been slaves. And the king’s word was surely a
bond. In return for their loyal service in the late American war, the
Black Pioneers and the rest of them were to be granted two gifts of
unimaginably precious worth: their freedom and their acres. It was, they
told themselves, no more than their due. They had done perilous, dirty,
exhausting work. They had been spies amidst the Americans; guides through
the Georgia swamps; pilots taking ships over treacherous sandbars; sappers
on the ramparts of Charleston as French cannonballs took off the limbs of
the men beside them. They had dug trenches; buried bodies blistered with
the pox; powdered the officers’ wigs; and, marching smartly, drummed the
regiments in and out of disaster. The women had cooked and laundered and
nursed the sick; dabbed at the holes on soldiers’ bodies; and tried to
keep their children from harm. Some of them had fought. There had been
black dragoons in South Carolina; waterborne gangs of black partisans for
the king on the Hudson River; bands of black guerrillas who would descend
on Patriot farms in New Jersey and take whatever they could, even (if the
Lord was smiling on their venture) white American prisoners.
So they were owed. They had been given their liberty, and some of them
even got land. But the soil was thin and strewn with boulders, and the
blacks had no way, most of them, to clear and work it unless they hired
themselves or their families out to the white loyalists. That meant more
cooking and laundering; more waiting on table and shaving pink chins; more
hammering rocks for roads and bridges. And still they were in debt, so
grievously that some complained their liberty was no true liberty at all
but just another kind of slavery in all but name.
But names counted. British Freedom’s name said something important: that
he was no longer negotiable property. For all its bleak hardships, Preston
was not a Georgia plantation. Other Prestonians – Decimus Murphy, Caesar
Smith – had evidently kept their slave names as they had made the passage
to liberty. But British Freedom must have been born, or bought, as someone
else. He may have shaken off that name, like his leg irons, on one of the
eighty-one sailings out of New York in 1783, which had taken thirty
thousand loyalists, black and white, to Nova Scotia, for no one called
British Freedom is listed in the “Book of Negroes,” which recorded those
who, as free men and women, were at liberty to go where they wished. There
were certainly others who changed their names to reflect their new status:
James Lagree, for instance, the former property of Thomas Lagree of
Charleston, became, in Nova Scotia, Liberty Lagree. It is also possible
that British Freedom could have found his way to Nova Scotia in one of the
earlier loyalist evacuations – from Boston in 1776 or from Charleston in
1782. In the frightening months between the end of the war and the
departure of the British fleets, as American planters were attempting to
locate the whereabouts of escaped slaves, many of them changed their names
to avoid identification. British Freedom may just have gone one step
further in giving himself an alias that was also a patriotic boast.
Whichever route he had taken, and whatever the trials he was presently
enduring, British Freedom’s choice of name proclaims something startling:
a belief that it was the British monarchy rather than the new American
republic that was more likely to deliver Africans from slavery. Although
Thomas Jefferson, in the Declaration of Independence, had blamed “the
Christian King” George III for the institution of slavery in America,
blacks like British Freedom did not see the king that way at all. On the
contrary, he was their enemy’s enemy and thus their friend, emancipator
and guardian.
Looking to the King of England as a benefactor had a long tradition. When
plans for a slave uprising in Raritan County, New Jersey, were discovered
in 1730, one of the black informers told a Dr Reynolds that the cause …
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Rough Crossings
by Simon Schama Excerpted by permission.
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