As I have been told, one evening when I was very young, Mr. 13-04 was lingering below-stairs, discussing harmonics and Pythagoras with 03-01 and 09-01, when he heard my mother singing me some lullaby from her homeland through an open door.
None of them spake. They sat, unmoving, while she sung, and then, without excusing himself, 13-04 rose and rushed above-stairs, and sought her out along the corridors.
He asked if she could recall other songs of her race. She had been gone then but two years, perhaps, and could. He asked her whether she would sing them for him, and allow him to write them down, so that they might not be lost. In this, she agreed.
I do not believe, had he asked her even a year later, she would have given her assent. As I have said, there was a reluctance in her to speak of the kingdom of her birth, or to allude in any way to knowledge of its practices; and this reluctance grew swiftly in the years of my childhood.
So, as I understand it, in exchange for his lessons on the harpsichord, she sang him the songs of her homeland — my homeland, if my homeland were not these drab and rocky coasts, these marshes, these plains cut flat from forest for the growing of corn.
I cannot doubt that at first his interest in her songs was forensic, nothing but fodder for an article to be published in a forthcoming issue of the Philosophical Ephemera of the Novanglian College of Lucidity. As he listened to her Africk monodies, though, their unaccountable rhythms, their outbursts and their alien allusions, he grew passionate about them, and would often importune her to sing them again; which she did not, after she reached the age of sixteen or seventeen. She would always demur, saying, “You would not hear those olden, shrieking things.”
“From your lips,” he said, “even a shriek would be the very call of the nightingale.”
“And a howl,” she said, behind her fan, “like the song of the titmouse.”
“You mock me, Mademoiselle.”
“Don’t tire me, sir. We’ll sing something about cheeks, roses, and the garden swing.”
On one occasion, 13-04 took me aside and requested that I try to coax her to sing the songs in private, and record them in my memory. I was perhaps eight.
That night, when I was brought into her presence before my bedtime, I asked her if she would sing for me. She said she would, one song, one aria for her darling son — which reply made the men in the sitting-room murmur, “Ah! Music!” and clap. She bowed her head before them graciously. She asked me for a request, and I said I would hear the royal songs of Oyo.
“You have been, I see, speaking to Mr. 13-04.”
I remained silent.
“Have you not?”
I said not a word.
“Come along with me. To your bedchamber.” She turned to the scholars, and said, “You must excuse my absence, sirs; if I favor this young gentleman above you, it is only because he wants manners you have already been taught. And he is prettier.” She kissed me coyly upon the forehead. I was sensible of danger in the air. She was trembling with anger.
“Mademoiselle,” said one, in the dry and oft-repeated jest, “to see you depart from our circle is to see the sun cast off its planets and roam. What shall we, massy bodies, do, left bereft?”
She pressed me towards the door. “You flatter me, sir. If there is any wayward sun, it is this boy here. Move along, Mungo.” She snapped me at the base of my wig.
As we left, they clapped at her jest.
When we got to my bedchamber, her smile was gone. She helped me off with my frock-coat and sat me down. “Tonight,” she said, “a reading from the Book of Psalms.” And she drew down my Bible from the shelf, leafed through with her thin fingers, and began to recite:
“By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down and wept, when we remembered thee, O Zion. On the willows there, we hung up our harps, for they that carried us away captive required of us songs, saying, ‘Sing us one of the songs of Zion.’
How can we sing the songs of the Lord in a foreign land?”
She removed my wig, and laid her hand on my bare scalp. Then she continued:
“If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither.
If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy.
O daughter of Babylon, you devastator! Happy shall be he who requites you with what you have done to us!
Happy shall be he who takes your little ones and dashes them against the stone.”
Her hand was spread on my bald scalp like a compass rose; and I was astounded, and did not know what country lay there described.
Shed no tear for me; for I shed none for myself.
I should find it mortifying in the highest degree if those hearing of my childhood believed this record to be one of complaint; and if, swayed by some description of my circumstances, their hearts melted without cause, due more to the novelty of my situation than its rigors.
When I review this epoch, however it may seem to others, to me it appears a period of singular bounty; for having seen what I since have seen, I recognize how merciful Providence was in supplying me with luxuries: the sumptuous foods upon the table, the glory of music, the gift of literacy, the opportunities to survey the advancement of learning; but more than these, I look about me now — notwithstanding the terrors I have seen — and I declare it well befits me to thank our God for simpler pleasures than these, than teak or gold or India cloth. Daily, in my youth, should not I have fallen upon my knees and thanked Him who died for us upon the Cross for the warmth of kindled fires, for the freedom to swing my hands in the air? Should I not have praised Him for the liberty to open doors and pass through them, for the escape from drudgery, and most, my mother’s hand to hold?
I consider those numberless of our race huddled beneath the rudest of roofs, lying amidst brackish water, skulls abuzz with sickness, knowing that tomorrow they shall rise and shall labor at some pitiless industry — those who have not had the blessings of warmth or liberty or family or friend — reduced to animal want and groans — and then I turn from my sufferings as mere trifles. I was fed and clothed in silks.
And know I did not weep then for myself; I did not know how one might. I looked upon my being as did those who raised me; I accounted myself an experimental subject to be observed and noted; and even within me, in my moments of sorrow or fear, there were two discourses: one which cried, and one which recorded that cry without compassion; one intelligence which wished warmly for an embrace; and the other which did not grant it and did not speak, but Observed, watchful, hands folded, inactive, and stylus at the ready.
If one massy Eye regarded me coldly from behind my back, it was my own.
09-01 and 13-04, eager to show me things outside the compass of my poor experience, would of a time take me to an oyster house or the court-house or a drilling of the regiments, that I might see the commerce of the world.
It was Dr. 09-01’s way to use all that we gazed upon as a lesson, and so demonstrate to me that knowledge and inquiry curled larval in all matter, awaiting release. As we passed the shipyard where the loftsmen raised the shape of a hull according to the measurements of a model, he taught me the secret of numerical proportions and scale. As we watched sailors and stevedores laboring up and down gangplanks, unloading cargo, or men and women smoking their pipes before shops that lined the wharf, or the haggling in the marketplace at Faneuil Hall, he posed me questions about expense, or told me of the trade of wood or molasses.
As we walked through the evening crowds, he was often distracted by activity, and countered my many holiday questions with enigmatical answers, as was often his wont. When I asked why time moved forward, he answered, “Because we have eyes on the front of our heads”; when I asked why we clung to the Earth, he answered, “Because the Earth tries so hard to hurl us off”; and when, my hand clinging to his cuff, I asked him why he was not a father, he answered, “Because there are many uses for sheeps’ guts.”
I asked him about color, and of what it
consisted; and he told me that color — brown, black, white — resides in the eye of the beholder; that it does not inhere in the object itself, any more than pain dwells in the needle. So we spake as we walked amongst the servants purchasing their masters’ dinners at the market.
Those were not easy times, in that city; the signs of disquiet were everywhere apparent. Soldiers were constantly among us, dispatched from far corners of the Empire to watch us; they did not stand easy upon the street corners, but stood in groups of two or three, their red coats bright in the bitter, falling snow, blowing upon their hands near hostile alleys; and they watched carefully those who passed, and they whispered jibes about the girth of fat men, the staleness of widows, and the bosoms of girls.
On some summer nights, when it was hot and the atmosphere itself seemed cut with anger — the buzzing of the cicadas in the trees of the avenue harsh with it, broiling — on those nights, we could hear mobs go by in the streets, issuing out from the docks. There were riots there, and men tumbled off the piers, pushed by crowds; wealth would not deign to pass through those quarters, for fear of what was yelled and what was thrown.
I gave little thought to the debates regarding taxation by our Parliament. When the King’s ministers demanded that the Colonies pay the costs of the Indian and French wars, wherein the armies of our nation had fought with such abandon in my extreme youth to secure our borders from, as they said, the incursions of savagery, I had no memory of the conflicts, and no property with which to pay, and so taxation or no seemed all the same to me. I little could comprehend the ire these measures raised. I did not understand the complaints of Mr. 03-01 and his merchant brothers, uncles, nephews, and cousins, the others in the 03 series.
I did not understand the nonimportation compacts which my countrymen in their anger had raised against English products. I did not understand the measures some took against merchants who still carried British goods.
I did not understand the cries of “Liberty and Property!”
I did not understand when I saw a dry-goods store which had been besieged: the windows broken, the bolts of cloth lying half-unraveled out in the slush while rain fell upon them and the curtains blew out of the casements. The draper sat upon the cobbles of the street, his hair lank, and a daughter of perhaps my age wandered about through the wreckage, picking up silks and attempting to drag them back inside.
I did not understand when I saw boys urinating on the stone stoop of the store while men stood about and approved their micturation.
“Higher, boy,” said one. “Write ‘Tyranny’ upon the door.”
I did not understand these scenes of strife. I did not understand why men were hanged in effigy, or a boat dragged through town and burned on the Common, as if on grassy swells. I did not understand why a man dressed in a grinning mask rode through the streets publishing forth elegant threats — this last being a figure of our town’s Pope’s Day, who rode on an ass accompanied by imps, whistling high and eerie to draw rowdy boys from their sheds. I was told he was called Joyce Jr., and that he was a lord of chaos, possessed by the spirit of him who had cut off the crowned head of the King of England in the days of Cromwell. I understood none of these prodigious things.
I did not comprehend that my own domestic scene was threatened by these tumults; that Mr. 03-01 kept us in our finery and excellent foods through revenues from trade and speculation, and that these were suffering grievously. His young nephews and cousins — a brood of Gitneys he called “The Young Men”— would come to dine with grim faces. They brought word of ships waylaid for smuggling by Customs men, goods that could no longer be imported, and sundry losses.
The merchants of Boston had for some decades made some portion of their fortunes through smuggling, the Young Men of the Gitney family being, in this respect, no exception. In their circle, it was held to be no disgrace to import goods illegally, but rather sharp practice was accounted a sign of canny business acumen. They cursed Parliament roundly for interference in their business.
I did not understand that these interviews, so tedious to the young, did not simply regard numbers, but extended to the table we ate around, the excellent paneling on the walls, the paintings that looked down upon us.
Blithely, I believed business was not my business.
What I did understand was that there was a movement abroad for liberty from oppression and from bondage; and that the promise of such a struggle could not but dilate the honest heart with hope and excite the spirits with the taste of future felicities; and in some hours, when I heard this discussed at table loudly or in whispers by the kitchen hearth, my frame trembled with the possibility that God worked His mighty will for all of us through these unrests, and that soon, the bondage I but little understood that encompassed Bono and my mother and so many others of my acquaintance should melt away, and kindness be found in the hearts of men; and that we should then have our own soirées, and tears be put behind us, and we should, if we wished, sail back to Africa to visit those I had never known, and we would work in our own fields, in our own shops, on our own wharves; and most, that we should have final proof that the human was made in love for the operations of magnanimity and fairness, reason and excellence, and that we all, unfettered by passions, could work together for the perfection of man.
One evening, Dr. 09-01 took me to walk up and down Long Wharf. We saw the schooners at rest in the Bay, and Castle William upon its island, the militia just visible as they made rounds upon the battlements.
We stood in the shadows of a ropewalk and observed the men dragging their cranked engines up and down the long corridor, twisting fibers into cord. He whispered, “They walk some ten miles a day along this track, half of it backwards. Note that man there. He is perhaps approaching my great antiquity. If he is, let us say, seventy, and has worked here since he was fifteen years of age, drawing rope six days a week, how many miles has he walked?”
I having little strength in calculation at that age, Dr. 09-01 led me through the steps to a solution, which was some one hundred and seventy thousand miles. While he spake, we walked outside into the dusk and made our way through the streets.
I asked Dr. 09-01 how far it was around the Earth.
He considered. “We have estimated some twenty-five thousand miles.”
I tallied upon my fingers. “Then,” ventured I, “in that man’s life, he has walked backwards around the Earth three and a half times?”
Dr. 09-01 was very pleased with this, and laughed, tugging upon my lapel, saying, “Indeed! Or a third of the way to the moon!”
I delighted in the thought of the man plowing backwards through the seas, the cord stretched before him, or stalking the deserts of Cathay or the Indian jungles, oblivious to tigers, pausing for his tobacco in the shadow of some heathen shrine or suspended near a mountain peak.
At this time, our discourse was interrupted by the rattle and squeak of a cart upon the dirt of the alley; which conveyance rolled before us, a strange and distracting pageant: Pulled by two silent boys, their heads bowed, the wagon had in it a large, balled form of black char, heaving, furred patchily in white; an obscene form that lolled upon the cart; and amidst its cracked and gory surface, caked with feathers, I saw a reddened eye which seemed quick.
The cart came to rest before us; upon which, the boys raised their heads and to the closed, tight doors around us hollered, “Liberty cart!”
The mass shifted and moaned, and, my curiosity enflamed to no small degree, I asked my mentor, “What is it?” and he replied, “It is John Withers, a Customs Inspector.”
I had no time to assemble the tortured frame into human organization — the cracked, tarred surface; the red, gaping mouth; the fingers that clutched and crawled across the stinking, feathered skin — before a door opened and a man came out with a length of wood, bowed before the boys, shook hands with them both, and moving to the side of the cart, began to beat the miserable creature where it lay.
The Customs Inspector made some enfee
bled attempt to roll away from the blows, but was hindered in its retreat by the extreme pain of its burns from the tar and the utmost necessity of keeping its legs clenched and its hand across its privities, which were otherwise exposed, a mass of tar clumped about the pudendo and pubes.
The legs were so bruised beneath their integument that even the light blows served upon them made the man scream, at which his tormentor cried, “D’you sing ‘Mercy,’ royal nightingale?” to which the wretch howled inarticulate assent.
One of the boys raised his head and twittered, “Philomel. Philomel.”
I was gone Observant, my body rigid; and Dr. 09-01 had his arm about me, and was with great effort trying to turn me away, though my gaze remained locked upon the awful spectacle.
I could say nought but, “What has he done, sir?”
My mentor murmured in Latin, “We Americans are not fond of the customs duties. We do not appreciate taxation.”
“What,” I asked, “are customs duties for?”
He answered almost too quickly for me to translate, “These? For the Crown’s protection against the French and for the extermination and rout of the Indians so we might settle. We forget men must be paid to kill. Even an act as simple as leveling a village is costly; rapine is not cheap; and children, I am afraid, will not burn themselves.”
The man stopped with his beating and turned. “What did ye say, sirrah?” The man stepped closer, brandishing his hickory. “Ye speak a pretty tongue.”
“’Twas Greek, sir,” Dr. 09-01 lied. “I was telling the boy that according to Plato, man is defined,” he said, smiling affably and gesturing to the cart, “as a featherless biped with broad nails, receptive of political philosophy.”
When I was eleven years of age, an event transpired that changed considerably the course of things at the College of Lucidity.
The Pox Party Page 5
