He listened all the while to the boys climbing in the ropes above and the men shouting across the deck. Some of those men were given the job of seasoning the new slaves, teaching them the basic skills necessary to make them salable. In their new lives, most of them would live under one roof with their masters, expected to abide by their customs. So they had all learned the functions of chamber pots and laughable bits of clothing; he alone had learned to pick his way neatly through the dense thickets of his captors’ language.
When the sailors figured out he was listening, they began teasing him, tossing out twisted snippets of truth and lies: He had been the prime slave in that first ship, sold for a king’s ransom or an amorous queen’s bedroom; he was refuse they could not give away to a rat. He would be boiled into stew; he would be made the chief cook of such stews. Their taunts grew so thick that the captain had heard about him, had strolled over to indulge in the curiosity of speaking with a half-wild African.
From the captain, he learned what has proved to be the truth. He was bought as a present for the chief priest of a temple, a man greedy for gifts, who had long made known his desire for a prime slave: adult, male, intelligent.
“He will get a deep well of slow-burning anger into the bargain,” the captain had added.
Later, another sailor tossed another snippet his way—the only one that managed to truly alarm him: that this priest whom he must serve battled daily with hosts of demons and witches. This, he hopes fervently, was a lie.
That very morning they had sailed into the harbor that laps at this city. Two men had walked out to the ship: not on the water, but on the longest of the many wide wooden roads that stretch from the city into the sea like fingers grasping for treasure. The floating road had been crowded, but even from a distance, he saw that these two men were different, swathed in power and respect. They hailed the captain, who herded him off the ship and into their company. Then the two men together with the captain had led him to this house and presented him to his new master, the priest whose title is reverend doctor. Whose name is Cotton Mather.
For all their evident power, the threesome who brought him here not only admire this priest, they fear him: he saw it flare in their eyes.
By his new slave’s estimation, the Reverend Dr. Cotton Mather is ferociously intense, his body always pulled taut, fairly humming, like wire pulled almost to the breaking point. As for intelligence and slow-burning anger: the young man has rarely seen their like before. But he refuses to fear him, telling himself that he will fear only the demons and witches this Mather battles, if indeed he battles them.
It did not seem likely, at first. For the reverend doctor is one of those men who must battle to hurl the words from his throat. When this Mather first opened his mouth to speak, it seemed he might be choking. But the priest had closed his eyes, slacked his jaw, and then, as if some floodgate had opened, the words had spilled out in a slow, almost sung cadence of power and beauty. “Henceforth,” he had chanted, “your name is Onesimus.”
Newly named, Onesimus was so astonished that he barely registered the information that streamed out, though he remembers it well enough now: that the name belonged first to another slave of another chief priest, of the Mather’s god: a man named Saint Paul.
Once the reverend doctor had begun, he had no trouble flowing on through words, though they remained curiously distinct and measured, as well as melodic. He began singing out questions. Onesimus’s age?
Seventeen or eighteen, near as Onesimus can tell.
His tribe?
Then it was Onesimus who hesitated. Not, as the Reverend Dr. Mather clearly thought, because he did not understand the question, but because he did not trust the consequences of his answer. He feared that these men drawn so close around him might send others to round up everyone from his village, if he betrayed too much.
But he had to say something. “Coromantee,” he blurted out.
An inexplicable look of rapture crossed Mather’s face. “Garamante!” he exclaimed, changing the word a little, hardening it.
“Coromantee,” corrected Onesimus, but Mather heard the word he wished to hear: a word, he said, that until now he has heard only in books—the slender boxes filled with layers of leaves that store the voices of far distant and sometimes long-dead men. “Virgil, Lucan, Strabo, Pliny,” chanted Mather with reverence. They have all spoken to him of a warrior race in Africa called the Garamantes, a race known by the Pharaohs, the Greeks, the Romans.
At once, Onesimus realized the implications: some of the information in those books concerns the place where he comes from. And if that is so, perhaps somewhere inside one of them lurks the information he needs to get home: where home is; where he is.
Even as he wondered how to make those books speak to him, the Reverend Dr. Mather perceived his interest and promised to teach him: a crucial step, he said, in learning to worship his god.
Up in his garret, Onesimus frowns. He wants no part of a deity who devours color and heat.
But the reverend doctor did not perceive his dilemma: oversensitive to some things, he is strangely blind to others. He sped on to another subject that still, several hours later, startles Onesimus: wanted to know, do his people suffer from the spotted disease? Smallpox, as they call it here, though what about it might be thought of as small, he cannot fathom.
A silly question, he thinks. He frowns again, thinking about it, just as he frowned that afternoon at Mather. “When it gets in among us, people die like rotten sheep,” he said.
“Like rotten sheep,” the priest repeated happily, scratching black marks on his white sheet. “Have you had it?” he asked, looking up.
“No,” said Onesimus. “And yes,” he added triumphantly, even as his new master’s face began to fall.
And then he held up his arm, showing his scar. “In my country, no person dies of it who has courage.” Once bitten, forever after safe. He, Onesimus, this scar proudly proclaims, has dared the hot speckled wrath of the earth god and survived. He is safe.
That is when it happened: across the Reverend Dr. Mather’s face flashed a look of confusion that curled through suspicion into respect. It is a look that Onesimus will treasure till he dies: for though Mather did not see his courage, he saw something else.
Up in the dark, Onesimus stretches with the pleasure of it. For the look in the priest’s eye told him, for the first time since all his confusion and sorrow began, that the pale demon-men are not, even here in their own land, entirely dominant in the possession of knowledge. He, Onesimus, possesses knowledge that one of them—a chief priest no less—envies.
In his mind, he watches it all over again: sees their eyes meet, sees the flash of incomprehension in the other, and then something still more exquisite: he sees Mather perceive that he, Onesimus, has seen his ignorance.
The priest does not shout, or kick, or beat, like many other men might. Instead, he looks down again and begins making the magic designs that will transfer the voice of his, Onesimus’s wisdom, into one of those books.
In the cold, dark room at the top of the stairs, Onesimus curls his body around that memory. In a warm secret flush of satisfaction, he falls fast asleep.
Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord, 1716, on a hot, bright New England morning in July, the Reverend Cotton Mather—Doctor of Divinity (Glasgow), Fellow of the Royal Society of London, and minister of Boston’s Old North Church—lies on the floor of his library, weeping.
His fifty-three-year-old figure, stretched, as he likes to say, prostrate in the dust (though the maid, indignantly, disagrees) is gaunt from frequent fasting, punishment for myriad sins not only of the flesh, but also of the spirit. For he has been specially marked out by God to bear a terrible burden of pride, anger, malice, and even hatred; lately, he has been marked out, also, to bear the rare burden of prosperity—a most wonderful Prosperity! A valuable Consort! A comfortable new Dwelling! A kind Neighborhood! Health and Strength!—which blessings he must atone for by discovering so
me certain way to improve himself, his family, and his flock in their piety.
Staggering beneath this load, he rises early each morning and reads a chapter from some pious book to his new wife—that collection of a thousand lovelinesses, the best of American women—Lydia Lee George, now Mather, thanks be to God. He lost his first two wives to wracking disease—Abigail to the slow gnawing of breast cancer, Elizabeth to a sudden conflagration of measles. They had been quiet, dutiful doves, but Lydia—Lydia!—is a falcon whose wingbeats whip his blood to froth.
Such lust, even in marriage, is not becoming in a minister. So he spends ever longer hours up here in his sun-flooded sanctuary at the top of his spacious new four-story house, as near to heaven as he can get, wrapped in light and submerged in secret prayer.
Prayer is not enough, of course. It must be allied with action. “G.D.,” Mather thus begins each day’s entry in his diary: “Good Devised.” For, as he continually urges his flock, “We all came into the World upon a very important Errand, which Errand is, To Do and to get Good!” He knows that some of the young bloods mock his way of making capital letters, italics, and exclamation points audible in his exhortations, though his dramatic emphases spur their better-schooled elders into weeping frenzies of piety. “In a Good Man,” he tells his congregation, “the Grace of GOD overcomes Ill Temper; ’tis a Burden to him; and he takes a Revenge upon it by multiplying Acts of Goodness that shall repair the Errors into which Base Passions have betrayed him.”
In revenge for evil, he shrills tightly to himself, Do Good.
The vengeful good he has devised for this week involves writing. So he rises to his knees, which creak and pop, and pushes himself to his feet, creaking even more. As the tears dry on his cheeks, he settles at his desk, flipping the skirts of his coat on either side of the chair back. Later, at nine o’clock, Lydia, the children, and the servants will knock and enter for an hour of family prayers, after which Onesimus will carry in cups of hot, sweet chocolate, and they will all break the night’s fast together, giving thanks to God.
Meanwhile, he has a few precious hours for the private doing of good. He draws out a clean sheet of paper, and dips his pen into the ink.
To the learned Dr. John Woodward
Secretary of the Royal Society
July 12, 1716
Boston, in New England
Curiosities of the Small-Pox
Sir,
The history of that grievous and wondrous disease, the Small-Pox, would no doubt be as grateful to the learned as the distemper itself is loathsome. However, I shall presume at this time to entertain you with no more than two or three American curiosities upon it.
He pauses to reflect on the unexpected ways the world unwinds. A few months back, ships from the old country spilled a plague of grumbling Scots onto the wharves of Boston. Grateful for the doctorate of divinity that the University of Glasgow has seen fit to bestow upon him (purely on the merits of his writings, since he has never crossed the sea, much less set foot in Glasgow) and impressed, too, by the severe piety of the Church of Scotland as well as by the visitors’ letters of introduction from famed men of learning, Mather welcomed them to town, throwing open the doors of his church, his home, and his library.
The Scots proved a needling blessing, sharp as the teeth of weasels. For debate, it had to be said that they were excellent fellows. But they did not know when to concede. Where reverence was due to superior learning and age, they offered only spleen and spite. One, even, had twisted his words to lies.
Still, on balance, the encounter had been profitable. In exchange for the use of his library—notably large and deep, he thought proudly, even by European standards—he had had free perusal of the books they had brought, some of them new to him, especially those in the collection of young William Douglass, M.D., late of Bristol, but born and bred in the Scottish town of Gifford, tucked between the Firth of Forth and the Lammermuir Hills, just east of Edinburgh.
Small but select, my son, Mather had murmured, thinking briefly that the phrase might as well describe the owner as his library. Douglass’s round face belied long years of study at four universities of Edinburgh, Paris, Leiden, and Utrecht. His scowl, Mather had heard his fellow minister Benjamin Colman say, on the other hand, attested to even longer years of dyspepsia, or perhaps ill-fitting shoes. If Douglass had scowled at Mather’s assessment, Mather did not see it; he was engrossed in the man’s books.
Among them, Mather had come across recent numbers of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society—the most learned journal in the world. In its pages were papers garnered from the far corners of the earth, deemed by the Royal Society—the most learned body of men in the world—to be of sufficient importance to broadcast to the reading public.
Several years before, in 1712, Mather had sent to the Society a series of letters he called Curiosa Americana; to his lasting delight, these pages, unworthy as they were, had been so well received that the Fellows of the Royal Society, presided over by Sir Isaac Newton, had voted to welcome him into their membership, adding the precious “F.R.S.” after his name, following the Glasgow-given “D.D.” As was only just, however, the Lord had seen fit to bestow honor only to turn it into a trial: the Society had since then unaccountably omitted his name from their list of members. For several years now, he had failed to receive copies of the Philosophical Transactions, though he heard the letters that had so impressed the Fellows had duly been printed.
Bearing up under the cross the Lord had laid down for him, Mather had not informed the Society’s secretary of this lapse. Instead, he sent in a second series of curiosities. He was waiting patiently for them to correct the error on their own, or until some angel deemed it time to nudge them toward justice.
Leafing quickly through the pages of Latin, English, mathematical equations, and astronomical charts, in Vol. 29, No. 339, for April-June 1714, Mather at long last found, on page sixty-two, what he had been yearning to see: An extract of several Letters from Cotton Mather, D.D., to John Woodward, M.D., and Richard Waller, Esq.
Scanning it, he had felt hot pleasure and pain suffusing across his skin—so sharp that he can feel it again, even in memory. True, they had printed his diligently researched and reported letters, but they had also mutilated them, whittling a hundred pages down to ten: Here, cast up like so much flotsam and jetsam amid the wreckage, were brief, teasing details of giants’ bones found buried deep in the earth near Albany, Indian medicinal plants, bird behavior, the force of imagination, monstrous births (“nothing very observable,” someone, presumably the publisher, Dr. Edmund Halley, had commented), people cured of wounds that should have been mortal (“In this, little of philosophical information”). Here were his Indian time-keeping, rainbows, mock suns, prophetic dreams, rattlesnakes, thunder and lightning, earthquakes, hail big as hens’ eggs, ice storms, exploding trees, and people living to great old age.
Burning and freezing with the honor of it, with the horror of it, he turned the page. And read:
An Account or History, of the Procuring of the SMALL POX by incision, or Inoculation; as it has for some time been practiced at Constantinople. Being an extract of a letter from Emanuel Timonius, Oxon. & Patav. M.D., F.R.S. dated at Constantinople, December, 1713.
Communicated to the Royal Society by John Woodward, M.D., Professor of Medicine at Gresham College, and F.R.S.
A twinge of doubt, a flush of fascination. He read on, greedily. Pangs of pride and envy and disappointment swirled through him: his long-researched, carefully written series of thirteen letters had been chopped down to ten pages; Timonius’s single offering had been “extracted” to ten and a half. If only he had thought to include that bit of knowledge, which after all, he had been privy to long before Timonius ferreted it out from Greek hags: perhaps he, too, would have been printed at length, without the sniping commentary. But he turned from that thought; he would not rail against Dr. Timonius. He would try harder, labor longer and more clearly, on his own part.
It had taken him a while, but he had an intimation of what he must do: he would write another series of letters.
It could only be seen as a glorious, even wondrous, challenge to his spirit, a blessing indeed, guarding him from becoming too proud.
In revenge for evil, Do Good. That was when he knew what he must do. Not only would he return to writing letters, he would comment as proper upon the other submissions to the Philosophical Transactions.
Now he turns to that task:
The Small-Pox has usually proven a great plague to us poor Americans, and getting among our Indians hath swept away whole nations of them, and left not enough living to bury the dead.
We have been ready to suspect a peculiar agency of the invisible world in the infliction of the Small-Pox upon our city of Boston, when we saw that from the first foundations of it in the year 1630, down to the year 1702, the distemper observed the precise period of twelve years in its mortal visits unto us. Now and then a vessel would, in the intervening space, bring in the distemper among us. However, it would not spread. But on the twelfth year, no precaution would keep it off: it must be epidemical—so raging, so reaching, that it would come at unborn children: They have been born full of it upon them.
But at last, two years ago in 1714, when a seventh period for a variolated twelfth year was arrived, our observation has met with an interruption. The compassion of Heaven would not add that calamity unto what we suffered the year before in the measles, which at once arrested almost the whole city, and proved so strangely mortal to a multitude of people that we buried above a hundred in a month, among whom were no less than five in my own family.
Five gone in two weeks. He cannot help counting them over in his head: his beloved second wife, Elizabeth, her two-week-old twins, Martha and Eleazar, born prematurely in the labor of nursing and the oncoming fever of her own terrible bout with measles, two-and-a-half-year-old Jerusha, and their maidservant. He remembers drawing up a list of his children. A terrible list. Of fifteen, nine dead.
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