by Zakes Mda
“He’s good for breeding,” Quigley insisted. “Like all men of his race he’s more robust in love than any white man.”
At this he displayed his penis, which was quite sizeable.
But the auctioneers and prospective buyers dismissed the whole idea. They didn’t think the children sired by the slave would be big and strong.
“Nobody’s gonna buy me, you ninny. You’re stuck with me,” said the slave with much glee.
There were no takers even when he wanted to exchange the impertinent fellow for a mere bottle of rum.
The concerns of the slave owners about breeding good healthy slaves gave Quigley an idea. He was going to invent a potion that would make slaves breed faster; a fertility drug that would ensure multiple births. He would take his example from nature. If dogs and rabbits could give birth to so many young ones at the same time, why not humans? Right there at the auction rooms he shared the brilliant idea with his slave, who merely laughed it off as the most ridiculous thing he had ever heard.
Quigley was not to be discouraged by the slave’s lack of faith in human credulity. Thus he became a snake-oil salesman, except he didn’t sell any snake-oil but a slave-breeding concoction of his own manufacture. He traveled from plantation to plantation meeting breeders and interesting them in his invention. Its main ingredient was extracted from the most fertile bitches, he told his customers. It was the same chemical substance that made dogs give birth to many puppies at the same time. The white drug was to be mixed with water and given to the females twice a day. In no time they would conceive. Not only would the potion induce multiple births but the period of gestation would be decreased by half. Quigley embellished on the powers of the potion as he went along and as more greedy plantation owners bought it.
Once more signs of health returned to both the man and his slave. Their cheeks began to fill out and their faces gleamed as they walked the countryside, the leashed slave carrying a sack of the powder and following the master. The leash was not to stop the slave from escaping. He had no intention of doing so for it was good enough for him that they shared the spoils. They were malefactors and scallywags of equal standing. The leash, therefore, served a symbolic function. It reminded the slave that he was a slave despite the companionship, and the master that he was the master despite the partnership in crime. The leash also showed the customers that the great inventor of the magic potion was a man of substance and a property owner. The fact that they were walking the countryside instead of riding on steeds was a matter of choice; so he made those who wondered believe.
Alas, the plantation owners discovered to their cost that the Irishman had duped them. They bayed for his blood, but it was too late because he had moved westward in the direction of Kentucky.
A plantation owner in Putnam County did not give up. The owner’s name was David Fairfield of Fairfield Farms. He had returned from carousing in Charleston one evening to find his wife excited about a purchase she had made from a wonderful salesman—a potion that would make their breeding business the most profitable ever. She showed him the white powder for which she had paid a lot of money. The Owner was suspicious at once. Unlike those who had discovered the chicanery months after trying the potion, The Owner was smart enough to know that no such mixture existed anywhere in the world, let alone in Virginia. He set out after the salesman with a posse of three of his trusted mulattos.
They caught up with the scallywags on the banks of the Guyandotte where they had set up camp and were barbecuing meat on an open fire. The Owner was very friendly. He joined the pair while his mulattos stayed mounted a short distance away. He introduced himself as The Owner of Fairfield Farms where they had so kindly sold their wonderful potion. Unfortunately he had been away on business, otherwise he would have loved to entertain them for the good service they were providing to the slave breeding industry. As the biggest slave breeder in the region he needed more of their wonderful potion. That was why he had followed them. He wanted to buy all the stock in their possession and order more for future delivery. Quigley was pleased to hear this. Most of his customers only bought small quantities to experiment with the potion first. He was surely going to strike it rich. He invited The Owner to join him at his meal. The slave was ordered to serve the two masters and then stand aside while they ate. He would have the bones afterward. The slave did all that willingly for he knew why the whole charade was necessary.
“Oh, I have lotsa whiskey for you,” said The Owner. He stood up and walked to his mulattos, who were still on their horses. He called the slave to come and take the bottles and bring them back to his master.
Quigley did not ask himself why they spent such a long time taking out whiskey from the saddlebags or what The Owner was talking about with the slave so animatedly or why the mulattos broke out laughing and the slave displayed such a big toothless grin. He was preoccupied with counting the tens and even hundreds of dollars he was going to receive for the bag of baking soda mixed with salt and any other white substance he could find on the cheap. He was already planning how he was going to use the money. The first thing he would do would be to celebrate with his trusted slave at the nearest bordello they could locate. Or perhaps the wise thing would be to buy two horses first, and maybe a cart, and then the bordello, and then find the nearest big city where he would buy more baking soda, and then cross the border to Kentucky to find new customers.
He was lost in this beautiful dream of a beautiful future when The Owner returned with the slave and two bottles of imported Irish whiskey. The Owner invited the slave, who had become timid all of a sudden, to join him and his master for a drink to celebrate the great transaction that was about to be made.
Barbecued meat went very well with whiskey and soon Quigley and The Owner were singing Irish and Appalachian songs. The slave was clapping and the mulattos looked on in amusement from their horses. Over the hills and far away, the drunken pair sang, and after an out of tune rendition they burst out laughing and shamelessly embraced each other. Then they lunged into the next song. By the time they got to singing Black, black, black is the color of my true love’s hair; her lips are like a rose so fair, Quigley’s eyes were misty. There was a deep longing in them. When the song came to an end the singers broke out laughing again and the slave couldn’t help but jump up and perform a stupid jig that nevertheless increased the volume of the masters’ laughter.
“Tell you what, mate,” said The Owner, “I wanna buy your slave.”
“Can’t sell him, mate,” said Quigley. “He’s a great help on the road.”
“I am talking to him,” said The Owner pointing at the slave. “I am buying you from him. You are the slave, ain’t you?”
Quigley laughed at the joke.
“It ain’t no joke, you ninny,” said the slave. And then to The Owner: “What’s your offer?”
“For how much are you selling me, you ninny?” asked Quigley, getting into the spirit of the joke. The whole situation was indeed funny and he burst out laughing once more. This new friend was proving to be such a bundle of fun. All of a sudden the friend was no longer laughing. And the mulattos had dismounted and were slowly walking toward the revelers.
“Ten dollars,” said The Owner.
“Fifty,” said the slave.
“Twenty,” said The Owner.
“Thirty,” said the slave.
“Sold,” said The Owner.
Things were looking serious. The mulattos closed in. They grabbed him. He fought back and kicked and scratched and bit. They pinioned his arms tightly behind him with a rope. He watched as The Owner counted thirty dollars and gave it to the slave. The Owner asked the slave to sign a receipt. Since he could not write he made a cross.
“He ain’t no free black,” said Quigley. “He’s a slave. He won’t get far.”
“You’re the slave,” said The Owner. “I’ve got his manumission papers.”
He reached for the papers in the saddlebag.
“What’s your name, fella?
” asked The Owner. When the slave hesitated he turned to Quigley and asked him the name of his former slave. It was only then that Quigley realized that he never really knew his slave’s name. He was just a slave. He should have given him a name. The saying goes that you can never exercise full power over anything until you name it. If he had named him he would not have betrayed him like this. He would have owned him totally. The property would have been in awe of the master.
The slave had no memory of a name that ever belonged to him. The Owner named him John Tyler after the President of the Union and signed the papers. He also wrote John Tyler next to the X the slave made on the receipt.
“You’ll never get away with this, you ninny,” screamed Quigley. “I am a white man born and bred. I can’t be a slave.”
“You ain’t no white man, you ain’t,” said The Owner. “You are a mulatto. You are a fugitive from my plantation and now I am taking you back.”
When the mulattos got mahogany chips from their saddlebags and boiled them in water on the very fire on which he had roasted his meat and then forcibly washed his face and hands with the concoction until he was brown, it became clear to him that The Owner had planned this whole thing even before he left his plantation. With the same fire The Owner heated an iron rod and the mulattos used it to curl the new slave’s hair to imitate the African kink.
The look of his erstwhile master as a brown man with nappy hair brought a burst of toothless laughter to the erstwhile slave. He emptied all the white powder into the Guyandotte, took the bundle of clothes and provisions that previously belonged to the master but were now obviously his and bade everyone goodbye.
“Fare thee well, Mr. President,” said The Owner, giving him a mock salute. The mulattos stood to attention and saluted as well. They watched him hobble away until he disappeared in the woods. Then they rode back to Fairfield Farms with their new slave securely tied with ropes.
The Fairfield Farms community marveled at the new lackadaisical slave, a mulatto who kept on insisting that he was a white man. There were stories that he had been purchased from Alabama, though he kept on insisting that he was tricked and sold by his own slave to Mr. Fairfield. How could a slave have a slave? It was obvious to all that he had delusions of grandeur. That was why he had cultivated a white man’s accent. And that was why he did not want to mix with other slaves.
From the time he arrived deep in the night and was chained to the wall in the guardroom, black slaves had made overtures of friendship toward him, as they always tried to assist the new arrivals to adapt to life at Fairfield Farms. They attempted to talk to him, but he sneered at them and faced the other way. Even when they brought him something to drink he gulped it grudgingly and did not even say thank you. When he was unchained after three days or so, and was assigned his duties, they continued to try to make him feel at home. They were rebuffed at every turn.
The community thought that as a mulatto he believed he was better than everyone else. Yet unlike other mulattos, who were a privileged lot, he worked with the black men in the fields. The community did not know why he was being treated so harshly. They did not understand why every week the man was forced by the faithful mulatto house slaves to take a secret bath in the guardroom, and why he hollered and cussed to the heavens every time he undertook these ablutions.
How could they believe his reason for smarting? After all, it was a known fact at the plantation that some of the slaves designated mulatto were in fact white. Even as The Owner registered them as his mulatto property after acquiring them, the authorities knew that they were white. Why would The Owner disguise the fact that the new slave was in fact white? Another thing: all the white slaves at Fairfield Farms were women, and were there for breeding mulatto children. What would The Owner be doing with a white male slave? If he was meant to mate with black women why was he never at the mating bays? The man must be delusional. He was clearly a mulatto. He just needed somebody to take him back to mother earth from the clouds on which he seemed to be floating.
Though the slave failed to convince the inhabitants of the plantation of his racial pedigree he knew that deep down under the brown dye of the mahogany chips he was a white man, as pure as The Owner himself. For many days after his capture he sank into a deep depression and stayed unwashed and stinking. Then he took to marching outside the big house singing Irish songs and demanding justice as an Irishman. The community was convinced that the new slave had gone raving mad. House slaves found this entertaining, especially when he took to calling The Owner names and demanded to see the lady of the house. They let him go on with his hollering for a while, especially when both targets of his invective were away. When everyone was tired of the entertainment the burly mulattos seized the slave, gave him a few whacks and then sent him to the guardhouse where they chained him to the walls.
Once the lady of the house came out to see what the commotion was about. Immediately the man saw her he threw himself at her feet and pleaded that she tell the truth. When the burly mulatto guards rushed forward to protect her she asked them to let the man speak. She was enjoying the mortification of the rogue who had exploited her naivety and almost cheated her of a fortune. The brown tone on his skin, the curly hair, the tattered calico pants and shirt, the black shoeless feet and the smudges of filth on his face arms and legs gave the lady of the house much satisfaction.
“You know me, you do,” said the slave. “I sold you the potion and I’m sorry about it. You’ve humiliated me enough with the brown paint. Please ask your man to set me free, madam. I’ve learned my lesson.”
But the lady of the house said she did not know what the lunatic was talking about. She denied ever setting eyes on him. She knew nothing about the potion either and did not understand the gibberish about brown paint. She ordered the guards to take him back to the guardhouse and chain him to the walls until he came to his senses. Only then could he return to the field to work with the other black men.
It was much better to be in the field than to be chained. Soon the slave calmed down and stopped his nonsense.
He seemed to get into the groove of things at the plantation and everyone thought he had accepted his lot like a man, though he kept to himself. Even the guards got careless and sometimes left his pen unlocked.
One day he took a chance and escaped. He told his story to white men he encountered outside the boundaries of Fairfield Farms. They did not believe him. Or they pretended not to believe him. Instead they brought him back to The Owner. He received a few lashes for that. Yet he tried again. But the slave chasers caught him before he could get far. He was, after all, ignorant of the art of flight and since he did not mix with the others, who he felt were naturally inferior, he did not learn anything about the message of the quilts and of the spirituals and about the slave stealers and all the lore surrounding freedom.
For a long time he steadfastly refused to socialize with other slaves. Until it became necessary to do so in order to get the hooch that the blacks covertly brewed or distilled. He realized that he had missed the communion of other men and women. For his survival he gradually developed the habits of Africans. By now he was no longer brown but white. The Owner and his minions had finally got tired of browning him with mahogany chips. They had humiliated him enough. But of course the change of color did not mean his situation had changed. The Owner still insisted that he was a mulatto and he was no different from the other white slaves who had been declared mulattos. To the Africans his white complexion did not matter anymore. What mattered was that he identified with Africans and therefore he was an African.
He became even more African when he was introduced to a mysterious fellow who lived by himself in his own cabin. It was known by now that he was Mrs. Fairfield’s toy. Even small children knew that. The Owner himself knew that. The plantation gossip had it that The Owner had no choice but to let his wife have a male concubine because he had lost his potency after indulging himself with all and sundry until his penis shriveled into a small worm b
ecause of disease. Some believed that the disease had affected his head. Otherwise why would he turn a blind eye when the big black fellow imported from Louisiana some years back serviced the mistress of Fairfield Farms?
Sometimes he was seen walking his tiger on a leash, a gift from the lady of the house purchased from a circus in Richmond after it had become too old to perform tricks. The fellow was quite friendly to the white slave when he first met him on one of his rounds with his tiger. And the white slave thought the fellow was a good man. Until he saw him being rude and arrogant to the black slaves, people the white slave had come to consider his friends. The big man was too good even to return their greeting. It was in reaction to the behavior of this pitch black fellow who felt superior to other blacks just because he slept with a white woman that the white slave resolved to be even more African than ever before.
Although he was now armed with information about the slave stealers who occasionally visited the region to whisk away slaves across the Ohio River, he was too impatient to wait. In the second year of his slavery he tried to escape again. This time he had learned a few tricks and was gone for a few days. The slave chasers searched in vain. Yet he was not far from Fairfield Farms all that time. He had taken refuge in a church in Winfield. It was his good fortune that the Quaker minister was an abolitionist.
The minister nevertheless respected the law of the land and did not play an active role in assisting fugitives. When he heard the slave’s story he believed it and chose to take the legal route. He took the matter to the Supreme Court of Virginia.
The case became a cause célèbre. Mr. David Fairfield engaged the services of a well-known lawyer from Port Royal, Virginia, Mr. George Fitzhugh.
