The Pox Party

by M. T. Anderson

  Such I did with Speed, finding Prince some Half-Mile off, in a Ditch. Surprise yielded firstly to Suspicion, & he asked me the Name of the Man who had issued this Commission; but, he having heard of Mr. Turner as a Dancing-Master in the City before the Conflicts, he assented to listen to the Rest of the Request.

  I rendered its Outline & then urged it upon him, saying, “Prince — here your gifts shall not be hid beneath a Bushel — but you shall render Signal Service to our Cause, the Cause of Freedom, with that Instrument dearest to thy Heart.”

  He baulked, i’faith, at the continual Deception he would needs support; the danger of the initial Entrance into the Town & the Consequences of being Found Out, which could not be more Dire — but it was, I trow, because of the Brutality of the Commission & its unforgiving Nature that he agreed.

  “Now,” said he, “I shall strive.”

  “Indeed, Friend,” said I, and well can you imagine with what Fervor I shook his Hand.

  The Escort came forwards to conduct him to Mr. Turner. I walked a Ways with them. Prince’s Eyes were quick and green — as did they already spy the Gates open before him & the City a-glitter & hear the Whisper of Trumpeters ripe with Secrets & the Fall of all this that had gone before & the Glorious Advent of Liberty.

  The Spectacle of his Resolve & Bravery melted me, as does it now — O Prince, noblest of Men, willing to risk thy very Life for thy Country, when thou been Enchained these long Years, & know all thy People to wait for Liberty!

  Moved by such Transports, I caught up his hand & asked him what in Life he wished for most.

  He did not reply at first, saying, “I have few Desires, sir.”

  This Modesty was too much, & I urged him that he must reply. “All Things — all — are open to you — and you need not deserve, but simply Pluck.”

  Prince then, collecting his Wits, & with Resolve said softly, “I know what I wish. I wish some Day that I might live by a River — one that is strong of current & silent; & above it, in the Pines, the Hawks shall call; & I shall live there in a small House of one Room & play the Violin, & Someone Else shall play the Harpsichord, & we will be far from all Human Habitation. We shall walk by the Banks of that River, & listen to the Buzzing of the Rushes, & that alone shall be our Company.”

  One of the Escorts begun to laugh, saying, “Rushes don’t buzz.”

  Another said, “Just the simple Things, Friend: Your Harpsichord.” And they both exchanged Looks & laughed.

  But O Prince — Prince — good Heart — for thee the Rushes shall buzz — for thee shall Forests abound with sylvan Harpsichordists — for thee be Peace & Justice — & so for all.

  & thus we parted Ways, me & Prince, and he was taken into the Garden of the House where Mr. Turner awaited him, & his bright and glorious Future.

  I forwent Supper and walked by the shore of the Charles until I could see Boston.

  Already, at that Hour, the Sky over the Sea was dark. The final Part of the Sun set to the West. There was some Wind, as I think that a Storm arises up. The floating Artillery Batteries heaved on the Water. The Sun caught the Spires of the South End, the gray Water that roils under the Docks, the Grasses on Beacon Hill; & all was in Motion & Ferment.

  Above us all — Patriot & Tory, Citizen & Soldier, our tiny, covered Heads — the Clouds in their Herd browsed the green Skies.

  As above the Tricorne of

  your Humble & affectionate Brother,

  Private Evidence Goring

  [From Mr. Richard Sharpe, of the Novanglian College of Lucidity, to Mr. Clepp Asquith, Esquire, of the Virginia Colony.]

  Canaan, Massachusetts

  June 29th, 1775

  Dear Mr. Asquith —

  ’Tis with the greatest pleasure that I report the return of the fugitive slave-boy Octavian Gitney to the fold of the Novanglian College of Lucidity, though no pleasure should be gleaned from an act so strictly necessary and, given the expertise of our body and the kind emoluments of our Trustees, so assured in its execution.

  Some three days hence we heard a report from a member of the Canaan Militia encamped at Cambridge that he had witnessed a rousing performance on the fiddle by a Negro youth of considerable achievements, who displayed a familiarity not only with melodies of common truck — contra-dances and such like — but also with the work of European masters, with whose flourishes he endeavored to entertain the soldiery at the completion of their martial supper.

  Hasting speedily to the scene of the encampment, I distributed agents to determine which Negro work detail employed said fiddler; being frustrated in this design, I eventually drew in one Private Evidence Goring of Kedron, cooper, reputed to profess friendship to the fiddler. His description of the youth and the dates all assured me that the matter was beyond doubt; at which, I dispatched my agents to draw Octavian away from his detail into a secluded place and clap irons on him and conduct him to my carriage, which we rode post-haste back to Canaan.

  I do not believe that this Pvt. Goring colluded in obscuring Octavian’s identity for these months; legal retribution against him would, I believe, gain little and lose much, the confusion of the courts being such as it is, and the dangerously leveling sentiments of many Massachusetts jurists being so opposed to the right to own human chattel. Prudence occasions us to restrain where anger might bid us assault. The man is, in any event, by all accounts a fool: too fantastical of temperament and childish of observation to merit trust; but too trusting to merit confidence.

  Octavian had no occasion to struggle. His hands and feet were bound quite quickly in a grove hard by a house seized by the Cambridge Committee of Safety; and, after initial aggression, he fell into a grave quiescence which has not lifted nor lessened. During the coach-ride back to Canaan, he several times moaned; but gave up even this paltry attempt at protest, and has since remained almost inert. It appears that his senses are disordered.

  We have nonetheless restrained him with (a) shackles on his hands, (b) shackles on his feet, and also with (c) an iron mask with a bit that prevents him from biting or speaking. We maintain a constant watch over the chamber where he is held, and I have every felicitous expectation that within a week, his senses will be restored and we may resume our course of study and experimentation. It has occurred to me that, far from being a setback only, this interlude affords us a chance for reprimand and correction which might themselves be observed, with an eye to establishing general regulations for chastisement and reform, and the observation of which disciplinary actions most efficaciously bid fair to reformulate the creature and establish submissive principles.

  Once again, it is with entire satisfaction that I report the issue of this episode. I might make a special mention of the gratifying compliance of several key Patriot functionaries to our inquiries despite the qualms of some whimsical officers; from our sizeable donations, they know us staunch supporters of the twin causes of (a) liberty and (b) property, and impressed thereby with our zeal, they offered every assistance which could be requested. You may find it eases the anxiety of our other Virginian trustees to inform them that even here in Massachusetts Bay, amidst revolution, the principles of property are upheld with such assiduity; officers keep strict account of which Negro soldiers are free, and which bonded; and of the bonded, who is the owner, that they may be returned upon the cessation of hostilities.

  While I must own that there is a spirit antithetical to the continuation of bondage in this Province — especially among the rank-and-file of the citizens’ army — the institution is so fundamental to the health of the whole of these colonies that I foresee no contest in assuring its continuance. Our only fear at present is that the Crown seeks to stir up the Negro against his master, and that those enlisted in our ranks might employ our own firearms against us; for which reason, there is much hope that our Patriot army will disbar the African race from service soon — which, though sadly diminishing our assaultive force, will be of great relief to us all.

  I present you, sir, with our compl
iments, and our hopes that we shall soon throw off the yoke of Tyranny and enjoy the exercise of reason and the pursuit of our interests untrammeled by the interference of kings or foreign courts. At such a time, however, as far as degree shall persist, I shall remain,

  Your humble & affectionate servant,

  Richard Sharpe

  [A letter between slave catchers]

  Canaan, Massachusetts

  June 29th, 1775

  Lew —

  We ketched him. Mr. Sharp and me. There ain’t no need to kepe serching.

  He dont have meny fine wayes now. He dont eat. He dont move. He dont do anything. He lyes on the floor with his hands shakled and his feet shakled and a metal mask over his face.

  I shuld like to see him playe a minuette now.

  And P.S. who is £5 richer? It is

  yr great friend,

  Davey

  They bound me hand and foot; they placed me in a solitary darkness. They put a mask upon my face, with a metal bit between my lips to silence me.

  They gave me a tongue; and then stopped it up, so they would not have to hear it crying.

  That the body, thrown, hath solidity, extension, resistance, measure, motion, color; hurtled into the darkness, or set there by the unseen hands of boys, still it hath these qualities; chained in shackles; vizarded with metal; that a body continueth thus to exhibit these qualities in the absence of sense or sensation — this in itself is perhaps not remarkable.

  That in the absence of motion, I should lie unmoving and become unaware of floor and wall, sky and earth, and all the forces that bind; that after a time, even the sensation of the iron bit projecting into the mouth, biting the palate with every motion to gag — that even this sensation should vanish — this is of interest to those who treat not simply of pain and punishment, but of perception and essence themselves; for the mask itself came, after a time, to seem an extension of the flesh; the space between the lips occupied by the bit no more foreign in its intrusion than lip touched to lip, or wrist to wrist, or floor to belly, once the mouthpiece had warmed and the sour tang of metal had suffused the mouth, pacifying the clamor of the tongue. There was no position in reference to matter or objects; not the recognition of surfaces; the senses themselves collapsed and abrogated their wonted distinctions; and the body was left aware but bereft. In this way, matter’s division ceased, and, as the ancients professed, substance was returned to its originary unity.

  At long last, you may no longer distinguish what binds you from what is you.

  A lesson on solidity from my childhood: Mr. 03-01 sits before me, and holds an egg near his ear. “How,” he asks me, “do you know it exists?”

  “You’re holding it,” I answer.

  “Because,” says he, “it has solidity and form. Matter extends in space, and within this coordinate space, it offers resistance.” He taps the shell with his ring.

  “It will offer less resistance if served with bacon,” says my mother. “May we eat?” They all sit around the table, their plates before them.

  Mr. 03-01 hurls the egg at me. Unsuspecting its abrupt motion, I do not catch it, but it hits upon my face and falls to my lap, cracked and oozing; my lip and cheek sting, and are wet.

  I put my hand to my cheek and press.

  Mr. 03-01 shows no sign of amusement or remorse. He asks, “Is it a chicken?”

  I look down, confounded. I shake my head. I want to cry; indeed, I want greatly, very greatly, to cry, but I know I must not.

  Mr. 03-01 explains, “It hath the substance of a chicken, but not the form.”

  They told me of substance and form; they told me of matter, of its consistency as a fluxion of minute, swarming atomies, as Democritus had writ; they told me of shape and essence; they told me of the motion of light, that it was the constant expenditure of particles flying off the surfaces of things; they told me of color, that it was an illusion of the eye, an event in the perceiver’s mind, not in the object; they told me that color had no reality; indeed, they told me that color did not inhere in a physical body any more than pain was in a needle.

  And then they imprisoned me in darkness; and though there was no color there, I still was black, and they still were white; and for that, they bound and gagged me.

  Oh, to be cast back in that house — with all the motion away from it, the escapes and flourishes of freedom, wholly negated — as if I had gone nowhere — as if there were no motion. Oh, to be back in that house where my last sight had been the

  When last I had been imprisoned, in my childhood, she had been at my side; we had been stashed in the ice-house. I was not, then, alone, for she loved me; she was with me then and spake comfortably to me.

  Oh, to be returned to that house of death —

  There is no

  He is gaping,” said one of the boys.

  “Leave it,” said the other.

  They put something before me.

  I felt something hit my teeth, and discovered it was the bit for my mask. It swung up before my eyes. My mouth was at liberty; my lips worked in the air. I smelled warm pudding.

  “Is he awake?”

  I do not recall the remainder of this interview.

  I was become so Observant that I could observe nothing. I know not whether my senses were shut, or thrown so far open that there was no latitude for thought and recognition.

  As my senses returned, I became aware of light all around me. Perhaps previously, I had awakened only at night; or perhaps in my distraction, my sight as well as my other faculties had been rendered inoperative.

  I was not shut up, as I had thought, in a cellar, but rather in an upper bedroom. The heat in the room was great, it being the height of summer. I could hear the sour histling of the cicadas in the trees around the house, the crickets in the field. I imagined that should I look out through the shuttered window, I would see the willows that stood at the back of that desolate estate. Outside, the country men called to each other on the road that went by the house, and I heard, too, the daily round of the servants and family.

  That I was dragged back to the place from which I had fled; back to a scene of the utmost degradation and horror, was a fact constantly before me. In my Observant state, I had even fancied that the sensation of shame inhered in the manacles, I could feel it so acutely in them; I had believed the manacles an extension of my wrists, and shame a quality radiating from them like the heat from the walls. I had been sensible of its pulses spreading throughout my arms, across my chest like the ramifying systems of artery or nerve.

  My arms were shackled before me with only three links of chain between them; my feet had to suffice with four, making perambulation impossible. That I longed or rather thirsted to put my arms out straight, to swivel my legs — with a physical ache not simply the discomfort of the musculature — this may be said without surprise; yet it was the simplicity of this need which confounded me so. In other days, to raise an arm, to lower it, would be the merest twitch; to yawn, to stretch would be accounted no great freedom; and now, as in thirst we dream of water, the body told me tales of what comfort those simple actions would provide, but they were rendered the most impossible phantasy.

  We believe that the body hath its rights — to move in a reasonable ambit — to raise, to lower its limbs — but across the face of this earth, there are every day those who suffer unforgivable torments, strapped or chained, confined in boxes or in the holds of ships. May the Lord remind me of this always as I walk free upon paths, and may I thus always give thanks unto Him for the strange, small gifts of gesture, of simple tasks done with requisite care and sphere of action.

  Once, as I have narrated, Mr. Gitney punished me for penetrating the secret chamber of the College by forcing me to hold wide my arms, with volumes recounting the data of my life stacked upon them; and at the time, he spake of punishment as freedom. Now, imprisoned with the weight of my childhood ever more dismally heaped upon me, I longed for that earlier stint with the arms spread wide.

 
Such a punishment, indeed, would have seemed a freedom.

  You have not eaten for three days,” they said.

  “I am Observing,” I replied, “as you taught me.”

  “What have you observed?”

  “The solidity of shackles. They increase the solidity of the body. When I walk free, I am not conscious of my solidity.”

  “Yes. Shackles, like all matter, are defined by resistance.”

  “Do not tell me,” I said to them, “what is defined by resistance.”

  I should like to be able to pronounce that I ate none of their food; that I drank none of their water; that I remained absent from their inquiries and entreaties; but after the space of some four days, when oatmeal was placed before me, I could not resist it, and I broke my fast, figuring that abstention to the point of death was an heroic, but withal a futile, stratagem, perhaps more cowardly to affect than manfully to face the adversities that surrounded me.

  Lying without motion, I had nought to do but consider how I was arrived at such a pass. My suspicions in this matter were terrible to consider.

  Nothing was clearer than this: I had been returned to the Collegians and to captivity as a favor by Sons of Liberty grateful for the College’s donations to their cause.

  I had spent several weeks applying myself to the cause of liberty. I had dug trenches and hacked at roots with mattocks. I had worked upon my hands and knees, stooped it seemed for days, fortifying Breed’s and Winter’s Hills, raising works upon the scarred streets of Roxbury near Boston Neck. The hafts of the tools were stained black with the sweat of us all, our contributions, black and white alike.