He rose & assisted me & we [illegible] into the Hall. It was a melancholy Sight for as he led me, at each Turn I thought I saw our Brethren or his Mother in the Days of our Glory, now the Halls are dark & stain’d where once we
Do you recall the Dragon’s Skull? I asked. — I do, sir. — It was broke into a Thousand Pieces by the Redcoats. — I am sorry, sir. — Do you recall your Mother laughing here? Just here — my Jest regarding a Cockerel. — I do not recall the Jest, sir. — I heard you Cry for the first time in that Dining Room, when the Midwife was above. — &c.
We entered the Experimental Chambers to find the wretched Family of Smiths with their Laundry hung over their Sticks of Furniture. A Revelation holding little Surprise.
We came to the Door of the Interdicted Chamber, which had Octavian’s Likeness pasted upon it, the Lock was broke open, I was in a Rage. We entered & Octav. lit the Shelves with his Lanthorn & they were empty.
They were here, said I. The Volumes with your Data, your Diet & Excretion &c. I preserved them, I am not mad.
You are not mad, Octavian said, you did preserve them, sir. Every Day this last Month I have kindled your Fire with them.
Aghast — I beat upon him — I beat upon his Chest & called
He would not
17 Years — 17 Years — you have burnt 17 Years — all lost — no Record — my God! — you Child! — you fool Intransigent —
He put me by as one would a mewling Infant & without him, I fell — he lifted me, he rested me against the Wall. He went to the highest Shelf and from thence drew down two final Volumes.
Are they your Birth? I asked. You have preserved your Birth?
They are my entire Record, said he. I have writ an History of thy Experiment. He gave the Volumes to me. — There is your Narrative of my Growth, said he. By my own Hand. These Volumes replace yours. I will observe while you read them.
I have not read them, I am too weak, I suffered Fits of Shaking & he & the Smith Father delivered me back to my Chamber & there administered sal volatile. Octavian says I shall read them tomorrow.
5 O my dear Boy. Best of Sons.
6 When I finished, I lay them by & could not speak. Tis a cold & brown day & I can little countenance that I shall be alone this Night. It hath been so pleasant these Months with Octavian offering Company.
For some time we sat without Word or Motion. He asked, What thought you of the Narrative?
I asked, If he would forgive me.
He gave no reply & so we sat. I said, Fain would I alter the Past and keep Dick Sharpe from our Company. By his Silence, I concluded that he was displeased. I asked again if he would forgive me, & this time, he gave me a reply, which I cannot repeat, so heavily does all weigh upon me.
He rose to go, & said farewell & thanked me for all I had done for him. I bid him tarry a time & take his Supper but he would not, I could not detain him longer. Then there is one final Matter, my Boy, said I, & I called Aina & the three of us went into the Nursery where all is stored & I bid them move Pieces until the Case was found & I bade Octavian take it. He inquired as to its Contents & opened it, his Violin. It is yours, said I.
He came to me & shake my Hand & I was sensible I shall never see him more.
18 Years ago came his Mother to this House, a Child herself, & we had such Hopes. All Mankind seemed perfectible & we had Painters & Poets & we were indeed Lords of Matter, all number’d cleanly & meetly. I hear her Step above me as she learn’d the Ways of Hoops & I see him as a Lad disporting himself upon the miniature Fiddle we had wrought for him & there was never more solemn Poppet. I do not know how, purposed with so high & noble Aims, we end thus in Ruin. You are a Marvel, my Child, you are my best Years.
That said, he was gone, and I watched him depart in the Afternoon, down the Street, away from this House. I assayed to throw up the Sash, that I might longer watch his Progress, who was the great Work of my Hands, but twould not lift. For a while I struggled in vain, then knowing him already gone, retired two Steps to my Bed. I am sure I could not have seen him by then, had I even succeeded; had I even been able to look.
Thus ends my narrative. I cannot say whether it contain wisdom or folly; nor what moral lies therein. I know only that I wished to recount it, and to speak of those whom I have known and who have striven for virtue and have perished.
I sought Rebellion, and found grim Authority engirded there; I mustered in the ranks of Royal Authority, and found there only Chaos fighting in straighter lines. And so when we reached New-York docks in the Crepuscule, and were set at liberty there, we determined we must find a new route which should secure us from the ire and indifference of both England and Colony. In a crowded ordinary we found one who spake of a different place, and we returned the next night to receive instructions, that we might be conducted there. When I leave this place, I shall make my way to that fastness, and, God willing, shall there be reunited with several of my Regiment, Pro Bono and Nsia Williams first among them. When I see them again, they shall have taken new names of their own devising.
I fear I shall be apprehended, or they shall; but if we do not meet in that place, then, my brother, my sister, who have voyaged with me upon those great rivers of the South, I shall meet you again beyond that last, that profoundest river, the river of Jordan. A river is not a wall, but a gate through which we might pass to freedom.
O my friends, now gone, who have traveled by my side and dropped away, I have told your tales; let me be thy praise-singer, though I, living last, live least: Morenike, called Cassiopeia, most dazzling of mothers, mistress of the mask; Richard Sharpe, who sought profit even in the skies; Pompey Lewis, called Pomp, gentle teller of horrors; Slant Croak, mild Slant, who witnessed the ravages of kindness; Olakunde, lost, who drummed gods into being; and John Trefusis, who loved mankind so fiercely he could not do other than despise it. I sing your tales so that none of this shall pass from remembrance; so our fleet shall always be sailing, shall always be populated by the brave, anxious for fight; and shall never reach its destination.
Heraclitus saith that “War is the father of all things,” for we could not subsist without strife within us and unease. I lament that I can see no flaw in this bitter axiom. I have seen men strive for rectitude, and in the end, take off the vizard of right to discover only self there. And yet Olakunde speaks of ashe, and the vow that doth change all of who you are. We have vowed we shall be different from either of these lumbering powers we have witnessed; and setting out thus into a land where we might discover new bonds of amity and social union, perhaps we shall keep those vows. But winter is long, and need is great, and we know not whether we travel to join the ranks of Edenic vision or guilty brigandage. Yet we have made the vow; and though no other human generation hath done other than despoil, perhaps we shall be the first.
There are some who believe that the mind is a blank tablet, on which experience is writ until the page be full, and the cryptic world is known; but I see rather that my own life hath been one long forgetting, the erasure of what was drawn, a terrible redaction; til all that remains is blank white and comfortless.
I know not what we have been; I know not what we are; but I know what we might be.
And so I light out for the unknown regions.
OCTAVIAN NOTHING
November 4th, 1776
AUTHOR’S NOTE
If this were the fantasy novel it so much resembles, there would be a third volume. In that book, Octavian, Pro Bono, and Nsia would come forth from their place of hiding; they would orchestrate the desperate clash of these two great nations and engineer the toppling of both governments. There would be gargantuan, cleansing battles, and in their wake, our heroes would found a new realm. All people would be free, shackles would fall from every wrist, and bounty would return to the land.
But of course, this is not what happened. Instead, slavery persisted in this country for another four generations. And a full century after the general emancipation, nearly two hundred years after the Revolutio
n, federal legislation finally ensured legal equality for black and white.
Though the characters are, for the most part, either fabrications or composites, the major events recorded in this novel are real. As an example, the disastrous performance of Lieutenant-General Burgoyne’s satirical squib The Blockade of Boston was indeed interrupted by news of a canny Patriot attack on Charlestown, exactly as described, though the episode actually happened a few months later than I have set it. On the other hand, the tragic expedition of Lord Dunmore’s Royal Ethiopian Regiment occurred very much as it is depicted here. In that instance, I tried to cleave closely to the actual time-line of events. My aim was to see the event from a point of view neglected in the extant sources, a process which of course required speculation as well as the combination of facts and stories usually found in isolation. In the interests of filling in the blanks, I attempted to weave together the military history with tales of escape recorded in the early nineteenth century, with legends of Africa and the Great Dismal Swamp told at the time, and with minutiæ about plantation dress, the employment of tortoises, and reports of the effects of slavery, such as the surprising statistic that roughly one in twenty fugitive slaves was reported as having a stutter, the traumatic effect of servitude and punishment. I wanted to combine these elements to imagine this expedition in its early glory and its later defeat.
It has been estimated that some eight hundred African American men joined the ranks of Lord Dunmore’s Royal Ethiopian Regiment, though thousands more, male and female, fled their masters in the midst of Revolutionary chaos. Of the eight hundred who finally reached his fleet and enlisted, an estimated two hundred survived the campaign. Most of those who died succumbed to disease, especially smallpox, which ravaged the African American troops.
Lord Dunmore continued, throughout the rest of the war, to agitate for permission to command an army of freed slaves against the rebels. Even after the final defeat of the British at Yorktown, Dunmore hoped that the tide might still be turned by a more vigorous pursuit of the methods he had implemented in Virginia. As we know, his lobbying came to nothing. He was later made governor of the Bahamas, a post in which he demonstrated exactly the same incompetence and petulance that had made his stint as an embattled governor of Virginia such an abject failure. Eventually, he returned to England. His daughter secretly married one of George III’s sons, which enraged the king and lost Dunmore’s family considerable favor. Dunmore died in the early years of the nineteenth century.
And what of Octavian? What would have happened to him in the years that followed?
At the end of this volume, he flees to one of the so-called “maroon communities” hidden in the great wilderness expanses of the New World. Following the Revolution, there were many of these outlaw villages, most of them concentrated in the swamps of the South. In the early years of the Republic, the majority were found out and raided, the inhabitants hunted down, killed in battle, imprisoned, or executed. We may hope that we do not hear of Octavian’s secret home because it was never discovered.
Others who fought with the Royal Ethiopians continued to fight on the side of the British. When the British finally abandoned their colonies, they took thousands of African Americans with them. Those who were free generally settled in Nova Scotia; many of these, finding the place inhospitable, eventually returned to Africa, where the English government established a repatriation colony in Sierra Leone.
What of the African Americans who fought for the Patriot cause, as Octavian did earlier? There were three exclusively African American units on the Continental side during the conflict: the First Rhode Island Regiment, the Bucks of America, and the Black Brigade of Saint Domingue. Most of the black soldiers in the American forces, however, served side by side with their white brothers-in-arms. Some were decorated for their service to the budding nation, and many were freed. Others remained enslaved.
On the one hand, black freemen in American regiments enjoyed the same pay, the same food, and the same conditions as their white counterparts—the most racially integrated fighting force in the United States until the time of the Korean War. On the other hand, well into the nineteenth century we find African American veterans embroiled in legal battles over their service, their freedom, and their promised pensions. On the American side, as on the British side, policies regarding slavery were more a product of strategy than humanitarian concern. The Americans went so far as to offer slaves as a premium to white men who enlisted in the army toward the end of the war. Thomas JeVerson ratified a bill that granted three hundred acres and a healthy male slave to any Virginian who joined the army and fought for the duration. South Carolina enacted a similar measure. General Thomas Sumter instituted a graduated system of distributing slaves among his oYcers: Majors received three adults, lieutenant colonels were entitled to three adults and a child, and so on.
The question of which side—the British or the American—offered more to the slave is a complicated one. While, on balance, the British approach to African American allies was generally more consistent, it is clear that neither army’s policies were actuated by any concern other than military expediency. The decision to emancipate slaves or leave them in bondage was not based on abstract principles but on strategic interests.
It is startling, perhaps, to consider that the continuance of slavery was so thoroughly interwoven with the politics of freedom. In the course of my research for this book, I have come to believe that the American Republic would not have survived its early years—would not have made it through the War of 1812—if it had not been fueled and funded by two profound acts of ethnic violence: the establishment of slavery and the annexation of Native American land, both of which practices played a major part in the inception and conduct of the Revolution. The freedom—economic, social, and intellectual—enjoyed by the vocal and literate elite of the early Republic would have been impossible if it had not been for the enslavement, displacement, and destruction of others.
As I conducted my research, I watched, appalled, as the term liberty proliferated so many meanings that, in the end, it had none: It meant at once the right to declare independence from the Crown and the right to adhere to the Crown; to some, freedom to own slaves, and to others, freedom from slavery. Cast back and forth in relentless cannonades, it became evacuate of meaning.
And thus one of the great paradoxes I encountered while writing: Liberty was at once a quality so abstract as to be insubstantial—and yet so real in its manifestations that it was worth dying for. It is real every time we enjoy the right to a fair trial, judged by a jury of our peers; it is real every time we discuss our government in a newspaper column, a school report, or a historical novel without fear of reprisal, raps on the door in the dead of night. It is a desperately vital reality, worthy of the wars that have been fought for it.
Yes, our Revolutionary forefathers espoused a vexed and even contradictory view of liberty. But it is easy to condemn the dead for their mistakes. Hindsight is cheap, and the dead can’t argue. It is harder to examine our own actions and to ask what abuses we commit, what conspicuous cruelties we allow to aVord our luxuries, which of our deeds will be condemned by our children’s children when they look back upon us. We, too, are making decisions. We, too, have our hypocrisies, our systems of shame.
On April 19, in the year 1975, my parents woke me up at four in the morning. They took me down to the river and put me in the canoe. I have only the faintest memory of this. My father and mother paddled us down the Concord River to the Old North Bridge, where, in the rushes, we saw some red-winged blackbirds and the president of the United States. President Gerald Ford was standing on the Old North Bridge, delivering a bicentennial address.
On the one bank was a hill where, exactly two hundred years before I arrived there—down almost to the minute—the men of my town, ordinary citizens, men like my father, had come over the rise and had marched toward the river to engage in battle with the most powerful army in the world.
That tim
e, those people, were not mythic; they had once been real, though now historical—just as the year 1975, the year I bobbed on the waters ten feet below the pants of the president of the United States, is now not real, but historical.
History is not a pageant arrayed for our delectation.
We are all always gathered there. We have come to the riverside to fight or to flee. We are gathered at the river, upon those shores, and the water is always moving, and the president of the United States always gesticulates silently above us, his image on the water. Nothing will cease. Nothing will stop. We ourselves are history.
The moment is always now.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book could not have happened without the generous support of countless friends and colleagues. I’d like to thank, particularly: Liz Bicknell, my editor; Sherry Fatla, the designer; Hannah Mahoney, the copy editor; Caroline Lawrence, the jacket designer; the Sales and Marketing Department at Candlewick, who were confronted by a book that had missed its audience by two centuries; my parents and sister; Nicole, for reading drafts; my friends and colleagues at Vermont College, for their encouragement. And for their tremendous assistance on a variety of topics: Laura Murphy; J. L. Bell; Peter J. Wrike; Dr. Dana Sutton of the University of California, Irvine; Josh Graml of the Mariners’ Museum in Newport News, Virginia; Myles McConnon, Volunteer at Minute Man National Historical Park; Ken Wells of St. Mark’s School, Southborough; Robert Howard, former Curator of Technology at the Hagley Museum; Dr. Carmen Giunta, Professor of Chemistry, Le Moyne College; and, as always, the staff of the Boston Athenæum.
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