The Pox Party

by M. T. Anderson

Black and white together, we ate our rationed meals; both black and white received the same portion, and if we sat near the fire of those of our own race, it was by dint of habit, rather than stricture of government.

  We did not speak much as we labored. Heaving dirt from a pit, I would hear on another man’s breath some song half-sung in time to his swing; the engineers called their instructions, wending their way through our deep, loamy fosses. When we ate, we did not much speak, but rather watched one another or the fire.

  Quite often, the King’s Army launched their artillery towards our works without hope of the shells reaching us. After the first shell in the distance, calls would go out from the crest of the hill that we should seek shelter; and we would file behind the half-built fortifications and hunch in the dirt, arms limp at our sides. Some would sleep while the shelling, futile, echoed along the summer roads; some would wind stalks of grass around their fingers; some would mutter to friends.

  I was never free from dirt. It was on my hands and in my mouth, and my food crackled with it; my eyes were full of it, after days of examining it, exhuming stones like bone. I smellt dirt in my dreams. We were constantly begrimed.

  Some nights, a friend and drinking-companion of mine of the Patriot forces, a Mr. G—ing, would seek out my fire and would conduct me back to his regiment, with whom I had briefly served. We would form a small band of music and play songs requested by our fellows. These were sweet times. Mr. G—ing would look about him and would proclaim the joyous equality of all, the liberty that would soon overtake us.

  And was he right to celebrate?

  Indeed, we worked side by side, white knuckles as scored and darkened as brown; and yet as we labored for liberty, applauded by men in silk waistcoats who came to observe our unity and diligence, I noted thus:

  The Africans amongst us risked our lives for liberty, and yet had no assurance liberty would be ours; our pay, in many cases, came not to us, but to our owners — for it was reckoned that we belonged to them, and so our labor was theirs, so they should receive compensation for our absence from their farms, their dining-rooms, and their cellars.

  Mr. G—ing might speak in sanguine tones of imminent freedom, but he did not know of the secret colloquies we held when no white men were by, where we whispered to each other the rumors we heard: that the other colonies would only join the rebellion if it were declared that “property” was secure — that there should be no general emancipation. Mr. G—ing talked with fire of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, a noble experiment in human dignity; we heard it was peopled with slave-lords, men who bewailed their enslavement to Britain while in their rice fields, thousands of their bonded servants toiled without pay in the mud, the sun above, the air swarmed with insects, and the water red with scum. We heard of their fear of slave rebellion, women bereft of their husbands sleeping with their grandfathers’ blunderbusses shrouded in the bedsheets, children weeping and running at the sight of footmen who had stood by them since infancy, afraid of the hatchet or razor. We heard that such an insurrection was planned, though the reports never mentioned the same colony, nor the same date, but only details obscured by hundreds of miles and the hearth-tales of countless households: a name such as Pompey or Quash; an outrage, as the whipping to death of an infant for wailing or some unspeakable indignities practiced upon a slave by his lustful master; and sometimes, a hint of a sign by which we should know the time was come, such as the cry of the conch or tracks from a horseshoe inscribed ARISE.

  The times, the seasons, the signs may have been mythical; but the sufferings were not. I lay in the dark with the breathing of men around me and knew that then, at that selfsame moment, where dawn groped across the sea, my brethren lay bound in ships, one body atop another, smelling of their green wounds and fæces; I knew in dark houses, there was torture, arms held down, fire-brands approaching the soft skin of the belly or arm; and still — there is screaming in the night; there is flight; mothers sob for children they shall not see again; girls feel the weight of men atop them; men cry for their wives; boys dangle dead in the barn; and we smoke their sorrow contentedly; and we eat their sorrow; and we wear their sorrow; and wonder how it came so cheap.

  It was for this that we labored and fought, risking our very lives. And yet some of the men who worked alongside of me or who died upon the bayonets of the British at Bunker Hill had been enlisted by their masters without promise of freedom; with no offer of emancipation; and they fought in lieu of their masters, who were acclaimed generous patriots for supplying men for the cause.

  My companion Mr. G—ing hath a generous heart — a heart so filled with light that I could scarce desire to cloud it — but he did not think on this much when he came to visit me in the evenings. He little noted the lists of slaves made up by regimental commanders, that no runaways should enlist, or the careful tallies of monies to be paid to men who stayed at home and sent their bonded Negroes to the wars instead. He little noted the notice that was taken of Negroes who moved about the camp at night. Had he seen such, his heart would have melted; he should have bellowed with outrage; and for that, may God bless him; but still, it would have been the outrage of a white man, unthreatened by these hypocrisies.

  After the battle was fought atop Bunker Hill, I saw a Negro man upon the road from Charlestown. He was tall and stout of build, and he had a hole so broad upon his chest that the bone of his skeleton was shown. He used his musket for a walking-stick. His smock was scarlet with his blood. He stopped in his ragged pilgrimage only to lift his hat to white men who fled past him.

  A passerby stopped and required directions of him. I saw him gesture and explain a route.

  Being satisfied with the response, the passerby thanked him profusely and went onwards, toward the tea-room he sought; and I took the slave by the arm and helped him limp to the physicians’ tent.

  There, we sat him upon the hay and the doctor examined his wounds. Being questioned by the doctor, the man responded that his name was Hosiah Lister, the last name being his master’s name, and that he fought in his master’s stead, but that he should, upon the completion of the war, be freed. The doctor recorded his regiment and company and dressed his wounds, but without much hope of success; the loss of blood being great, it was supposed he would soon give up the ghost.

  I went to sit by his side. He watched the flies.

  “You have fought bravely, sir,” I said.

  He recited from his youth a recipe for a concoction to dull flying insects; he told me that he stood on chairs with a glass full of this ammoniac water sweetened, and pressed it up against the ceiling where the flies sat, they falling into the concoction, drunken. So, said he, did he spend long boyhood afternoons; this was his duty.

  I asked him a few questions regarding his family, that I might take a message to them, but he gave no certain answer, and fell silent. I called the surgeon. He came and stooped by our side, feeling Hosiah’s wrist. After a minute, he shook his head; he lifted his thumbs to Hosiah’s eyes and closed them.

  Rising, he went to his table and opened a great account book, dipped his quill in the ink, indited a company and regiment, and recorded this, the man’s only epitaph:

  Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec’d his freedom.

  Octavian,” a voice demands. “Octavian Gitney.”

  I do not respond to that name.

  “Octavian, have you received any communication from Pro Bono?”

  I shook my head.

  “He is fled his master in Virginia.”

  This is cause for rejoicing; but I do not call it so.

  “It is believed that he has fled to the palace of Governor Dunmore of Virginia. We find it a matter for surprise and interest that his flight coincided so closely with your own. Did he at any time advert to such a plan in a letter you might have received? Or did you at any time post a letter to him once he was delivered to his Southern master?”

  I could not but shake my head; knowing not where Pro Bono had been this seven months.
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  “Octavian. You will tell us if there has been some collusion?” When I again did not reply: “Will you relate where he has fled, to the Governor’s mansion or some other retreat?”

  Alas, my wretched brother, torn from me so quickly!

  Now and forever, hail and farewell.

  It is not entirely clear why the College of Lucidity held me so long in such brutal conditions, hobbled and yoked, save to break my will so I should no longer attempt to flee even this scene of desolation. I know not what further scheme they would have enacted upon my already distracted frame had events not transpired which changed considerably the issue of this incarceration.

  As it occurred, I was told by one of the Irish boys who they had, it appears, hired in my absence, that in the afternoon they would see me and speak with me about my future in the house; and that I should prepare for this interview.

  How might one prepare, locked in most complete immobility? I prepared only through the gathering of rage. I thought on their hypocrisy, too easy a mark, even, for argument, so howling it was — that I had been apprehended as slave through the capitulation of those who fought for liberty.

  I thought of the deaths of those slaves who fought in other men’s steads; I thought on Hosiah Lister, whoever he had been, who tasted only the freedom of negation; whose dark body received the death meant for his master, the scripted wound, as if he were the doom-shadow of that man, divided through some blasphemous design from the white man’s body so the death might die and the man live on.

  There, where I saw them, toiling in lines, the bonded, they were like ranks of white men’s deaths, substitutes, the shadow that was to come upon a master, waiting to take the contagion within them, or the bullet, the blow, or the final cut.

  The Latin for “slave”— servus — as rendered in English literally is “the spared one”; slaves being those taken prisoner in battle, who should, therefore, by all the rules of engagement, have been slain. In antiquity, slaves possessed no rights as citizens because, though spared, they were accounted dead, and as the dead, could not be admitted as living men; and so, for generations, the dead toiled and bred in Rome; the dead taught Rome’s children the secrets of philosophy; the dead built Rome’s great monuments and tombs; until the Romans themselves joined the dead, and all that remained were tombs, and monuments, and half-remembered terms.

  So were too these men I worked beside: transformed against their will into the dead; and asked to die again so that they might be free.

  Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec’d his freedom.

  Consider, then, the full measure of my sadness, reading this inscription; not merely for Hosiah Lister, but for all of us; consider the dear cost of liberty in a world so hostile, so teeming with enemies and opportunists, that one could not become free without casting aside all causality, all choice, all will, all identity; finding freedom only in the spacious blankness of unbeing, the wide plains of nonentity, infinite and still.

  This it was that Hosiah Lister had found.

  I thought on this, lying in my shackles. Thus, my anger mounting, I awaited my interview.

  I waited but a few hours. The Irish boy appeared again, helped me to my feet, and led me shuffling forward.

  “They will see you now,” he said.

  They met me in the experimental chamber. Lately, we had danced there, skeleton and snake pressed against the walls. Now, amongst the apparati, there were couches and settles and, on a table, things for tea.

  The Irish boy led me into the room. My heels scraped across the floor in short stints, hobbled by links of chain, as it is said that the young gentle-ladies of Japan walk, hobbled by subservience and feminine humility. The Irish boy helped me sit, and then withdrew. The windows were mostly shuttered. Outside them, in the yard, someone played a country tune on a whistle, a melody redolent of orchards and sun.

  Mr. Gitney went to the door and locked it. Those present were Mr. Gitney, Dr. Trefusis — who sat against a wall, his chair tipped back on two legs — and Mr. Sharpe, who rose as I sat, ready to begin a lecture, I perceived.

  They regarded me for some time. In my rage, I had found a new insolence, and surveyed each of them without remorse for my forwardness. The look on Dr. Trefusis’s face was wry and amiable. Mr. Gitney could not meet my eyes.

  Mr. Sharpe gazed as only he could, with an air of assessment and calculation.

  Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Gitney exchanged looks, as if in brief converse. I awaited with interest some hint of their motivation and intent.

  Abruptly, Mr. Gitney began. “Phaëton, son of the god Apollo,” he said, “decided once — against his father’s orders — to steer the sun’s chariot one day across the sky. That most brilliant of parents remonstrated, urging his son not to attempt the crossing . . . because the boy was not yet ready to struggle alone with such vast forces. Yet the youth persisted . . . ,” said Mr. Gitney, looking at his thumbs, and not at me. “The youth persisted. . . . He launched the chariot on its fiery course through the sky. . . . But he could not control the flaming steeds that pulled him . . . and he was dragged left and right . . . and he fell . . . and as he fell, he burned the earth, too, until forests were kindled and seas turned to steam. . . . It is recounted by Ovid that in this conflagration, the peoples of Africa were all seared . . . their skin scorched. . . . Which is why, said the Romans, that the Africk nations were black. . . . So Phaëton fell, and the world burned. . . . And all of that, my boy, all of it because he could not curb his juvenile desire for speed and escape.” Mr. Gitney measured one thumb against the other.

  I had read this story; I had no desire to hear this story; I felt fury so great at this story that I gladly would have tumbled the chariot and consigned the fields of New England to the flames. I asked, “What do you intend to do with me?”

  Mr. Sharpe spake. “You have considerably inconvenienced us and caused us a great deal of expense we cannot well afford.”

  “You support the cause of liberty,” I said.

  “We do,” agreed Mr. Sharpe.

  “Then —”

  “Are you going to rail about ironies? Hypocrisies?”

  “How can you call yourselves —”

  “Sons of Liberty? Because we support an experiment in government that is like to revolutionize not just this nation, but the world. A country where we may follow the dictates of nature without the interference of tyrants or princes. Where we are free to pursue our business without the artificial strictures of dukes and lords.”

  “This is outrageous,” I said. I could scarce contain my invective. “How could you think —”

  Mr. Sharpe held up his hand for silence. He had turned, as was his wont, to the side, and was preparing for his talk in profile, when Mr. Gitney, wracked, it is clear, with guilt, broke in: “Octavian, we do not believe in slavery any more than you. We would abolish it, if we could. I would free you and the others tomorrow, if I could. . . . But you must understand, there is an expense for everything. . . . To manumit you, I would have to pay a bond . . . grievously expensive. . . .”

  “In short,” Mr. Sharpe interrupted, “there are complications of national œconomy far too complicated, involved, and tenuously balanced for a sixteen-year-old youth to comprehend. Did we all free our slaves, America would be thrown into the most abject monetary crisis, commerce would become impossible, and, in the midst of that chaos, we would have roaming about the streets thousands, hundreds of thousands, of Negroes without home or employment, themselves starving.”

  Mr. Sharpe turned in the other direction. He continued, “It is our duty, now that you and your dusky brethren have been brought hither, to ensure that you are given employment and sustenance. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the African is, by nature, (a) shiftless and (b) rebellious, requiring constant supervision to remain productive. Indeed, reports written on your progress in my time at the College —”

  I saw the end of this sentence, and groaned.

  “Reports written on your recent progres
s have, in fact, aided in the scientific establishment of the inferiority of your race. You have done us a wonderful service, through your failure. We have publicly noted the decline in your abilities —”

  “Octavian,” Mr. Gitney pled, “we never intended that —”

  “You will allow me to finish, Mr. Gitney. Octavian, you have been instrumental in the effort to understand African capacities and propensities. You must understand, God has determined —”

  “Shall I pour the tea?” asked Dr. Trefusis.

  “— that some creatures are less, and some more, potent on this earth, and has given to us the stewardship of all, according to our place in the Great Chain of Being.”

  “I need not be informed,” I said, “about chains.”

  “It is common sense —”

  “There is nothing commonsensical about what you have done to me.”

  “We have all done what we needed.”

  “Needed for what purpose?”

  “To maintain the stability of the nation, boy. You do not understand the subtleties of business.”

  “This is not business.”

  “If a nation’s profits shrink, then it is every man’s business.”

  “Where is my profit?”

  “In the common good. Which is common sense.”

  “Kindness is common sense.”

  “Kindness is nothing of the sort. Kindness without the promise of profit is an impossibility. It is a physical impossibility. You must want something if you are to act. Otherwise, it would be like movement without motivation. Reaction without action. Kinesis without stimulation. Motion without energy. Kindness without profit is like a teapot hovering over a table, held by nothing.”

  “Yes. Tea?” said Dr. Trefusis, holding out a cup.

  Mr. Sharpe snatched it and drank. Dr. Trefusis dispensed one to Mr. Gitney.

  “Am I offered tea, sir?” I said, now simply insolent.

  “You should not have tea in your state,” said Dr. Trefusis. “You appear already to twitch.”