by David Nevin
The French would soon enough kill that nasty little spark of freedom, that madness that said black men could stand against white men and win. Damned dangerous business, way it gave local niggers new ideas. The papers were full of it and some of the black devils could read, more’s the pity; and they spread the word that the French weren’t finding it as easy as expected. The slaves down there were putting up a fight. Of course the French would win, but it was taking too long and they weren’t prepared. That’s how come they didn’t have much in the way of supplies. Figured they wouldn’t need that much, the blacks would fold up and hold out their hands for the manacles and get back to work in the fields, but that wasn’t happening. No one doubted the French would win, but what outraged ’em was the idea that the blacks were putting up a fight at all. They were making the French come out into the rain forest and take them one by one, and they weren’t being taken easily.
Everywhere Samuel went on the box of Miss Danny’s coach he saw white men eyeing him spaculatively. Slavers took to carrying second and third pistols and a surprising number of them had a fellow with a double-barrel nearby—well, slavers didn’t pay extra for guards without a good reason.
The news came in the slightest whisper. “You heard about Tom Jenkins?” Samuel had the carriage in a line outside the president’s house, where Miss Danny was attending a tea. It was already hot and he rigged a canvas over the horse’s heads to protect them and sat in the shade under the boot of the coach ahead. That driver joined him there.
“What about Tom?” he asked from the corner of his mouth. He had formed a light friendship with Jenkins in just such lines as this, not too close; it didn’t pay to get close to anyone in this town. Anyway, free man talking to a slave man, you had to look out what you said. The other driver—also a free black, though Samuel couldn’t remember his name—was slight with owlish eyes and an eager manner. He wanted something and that made Samuel uncomfortable, and usually he avoided him. But now he listened to the low whisper. The fellow’s lips scarcely moved.
“Massa flogged him. Say they caught him reading a paper, tells about slaves carving up those French bastards. Damn! Tom ought to know better than that! Now they say he can’t hardly walk and Massa talking of selling him.”
Samuel turned a harsh stare on the other. Without a word he stood to adjust the canvas over the horse’s head, and when he had it set, he took the shade at the rear of his own coach. Didn’t need to sit around with talk like that! But he was sick at heart. He liked Tom, who was honest and decent and had an easy laugh, and the image of him screaming and finally fainting as the lash fell like a hammer pounding nails, well, that hurt plenty. Yes, it did.
This town ain’t good for us, he thought. He must get Millie thinking on it, start bringing her around. She didn’t want to hear, but it was staring them in the face. Somehow she still saw Miss Danny as the child of long ago; but fact was, Miss Danny was a growed woman looking out for herself and it was time he and Millie looked out for themselves. He had a hidden bag of gold that he’d strained for over the years and it was building up pretty good. Enough to see them all the way to Maine. Of course that scared Millie, but with money you can make your way in this country. He’d have enough to see them a year or even two without work. It would be fatal to go with less because he had no idea how blacks would be received in this northern tier of Massachusetts. It wasn’t slave country, but that didn’t mean white folks would welcome blacks. You take what happened to Tom Jenkins and the fear that the slave revolt seemed to inspire in the white folks and Miss Danny likely as not to marry Mr. Henri. My goodness, it was time to look out for themselves!
He waited till that night to tell Millie about Tom, after she’d served Miss Danny a lonely dinner and then had taken a pot of hot chocolate to the bedroom. She came back with tears in her eyes. “She up there with a candle reading another book on seafaring and shipping and I don’t know what-all when what she needs is a man in that big, lonely bed.”
Proving Samuel’s point exactly! They had to move on. He didn’t quite say it—told her about Tom Jenkins instead and she began to cry. Said she knew Samantha Jenkins from market days—she was cook when Tom was coachman—and she’d never heard Samantha say nothing good about their master.
Well, Millie understood too. She saw the new guards around the marketplace, the suspicious looks, the way whites were ordering blacks about. “Here, you black bitch, why you talking to that wench? You move right along now, give you a rap up side of the head you don’t watch out.” Millie had been asking after Mary Kelly’s sick baby, but she let it go. White folks were scared; that’s all there was to it.
Still, he went out after he’d eaten, ignoring Millie’s protests. Taking Miss Danny down to her office after the tea he’d spied the merchant brig Sallie Mae at a new dock and learned it had landed the day before. Now he must see if Tinker had had any word of Joshua. He slowed till he was walking in a lazy shuffle as he approached the alley leading down to Miss Molly’s, but all seemed quiet. The alley itself looked all right, but he hugged the wall going down to where the candle flickered in the red lantern over Miss Molly’s door.
He slipped in the door smooth and easy; and when his eyes adjusted to the light and the smoke, he saw Tinker across the room standing before some poor bastard on his knees with blood running out his nose. Looked like Tinker was going to kick his chest in, but then he didn’t. Someone who patronized Tinker’s woman when he was at sea, Samuel supposed. He swallowed and walked steadily to the big man’s table. The woman gave him a hard look, but he ignored her and asked Tinker if the voyage had been good.
“Better than good!” Tinker said, and slapped the table so hard the glasses jumped. Samuel saw he was drunk but with that edge of physical alertness that can make drunks dangerous. “And you know why? Because black brothers down on that island, they ain’t laying down. They’re fighting! Hard, too, my friend. They killing Frenchmen right and left.” His voice was loud and Samuel felt a shiver of apprehension. The room had quieted; he realized others were listening to the sailor in from the sea, freshly come from the place of slave revolution.
Tinker’s eyes glittered and he tossed back his tumbler of rum and the woman leaned forward to refill it. Her gown sagged and Samuel could see her big, brown nipples. He looked away.
“Any man says black folk can’t fight, he should go to Santo Domingo and get his eyes opened.” Tinker gave a big laugh. “He’d find you put a machete in a black man’s hand, he sure as hell knows what to do with it. French troops go out every morning and every evening they come in with bodies and every morning the bugle plays and they put some more of ’em in the ground. God Almighty—it’s something to see!”
He peered owlishly at Samuel. “That feller could pass for your brother, he gave me something for you. You ought to see him now. Got him a sword he took off some French lieutenant, two pistols, he’s some kind of general or other, got a couple of hundred men answering to him. Says he’s running the French ragged.”
Joshua a general! Samuel didn’t doubt it. There was a power in his brother that Samuel lacked and just as glad he did, the same power that had driven Joshua to Santo Domingo in the first place. He remembered Junie’s terror when he and Millie had seen her on their last voyage south. Wept the whole time they were there, which was just an hour, all Miss Danny’s brother would allow. Junie was convinced she would never see Joshua again, and you could see the love for him pouring right out of her eyes. Like to broke Samuel’s heart, and Millie’s tears were like her sister’s. Junie was scared for herself and the children too, but he could see that the real fear was that her man wouldn’t come back. He’d die in some way and some place of which she would never know nothing, and she’d have naught but silence.
“You brought me a letter then?” he asked Tinker.
“Naw. Better’n that. A present. He said to give it to you. Said to tell you if he didn’t get out, to remember he was fighting and this would prove it.” He sighed, gazing at Samue
l. “Damn!” he said, “I wish you’d come in last night; you’d have had it. But see, I put it up in a dice game against a huge wad. It felt like a sure shot, felt like I couldn’t miss, but the dice did me wrong.”
“So you lost it.”
“That’s right Sorry.” He gave Samuel a look that asked if he wanted to make something of it.
“Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Samuel said. “But what was it?”
“An ear.”
“Ear?”
“White ear. Taken off a Frenchman. Now, generally, to get a man’s ear you pretty well got to kill him first.”
Samuel was dismayed. An ear, a human ear? That didn’t sound like Joshua. But Tinker read his expression and said, “I see you don’t really understand what’s going on. Way I hear it, back up in the deep woods they’re knocking down Frenchmen, cutting off their balls to feed to the hogs and their whacker to stick in their mouths like a seegar, give the French boys something to think about when they find their friends treated so. What I mean, this ain’t no place for the fainthearted.”
Well, maybe Joshua did have that capacity. Maybe that was part of the power that sent him out to fight, not for himself, but for what mattered.
“Do you mean we’re winning?” he asked, in an awed whisper, scarcely aware he had placed himself with the rebels.
“Naw,” Tinker said. “Blacks, they’ll lose in the end. French got all the power, guns, cannon. They’ll win, but point is they ain’t finding it easy—”
The door opened with a bang. A half-dozen constables, big, burly white men carrying heavy cudgels, the leader with a whip coiled in his hand. Silence swept the room. The white men didn’t speak, just stood there, and presently there was a rustling all over the room as patrons stood and slid away from the tables toward a back door. The white men began a slow march around the room, still not a word spoken, and Samuel got up and joined the movement; and when he reached the door and stepped into another alley still no word had been spoken.
Millie was asleep when he came in and he didn’t wake her. An ear, a white ear. Samuel was repelled and yet excited. His little brother a general, two hundred men following him, taking orders, standing toe to toe with white men. Little brother, grown up, become a man—yet that ear betokened a taste for violence unsuspected in his brother till now, that he knew far surpassed anything in his own nature. Were he in Santo Domingo he would be fighting too, but that ear told him his little brother had grown far beyond him. And suddenly it came to him that he would not see Joshua again. His brother would die in that rain forest. His certainty was stunning; tears filled his eyes as he lay in bed aware of his wife’s gentle snores.
The next day the talk was all over the black community. Tinker had been found in an alley about six blocks from Miss Molly’s. He’d been beaten to death.
This ain’t a town for us, Samuel told himself. This ain’t for us. We got to get out, got to go north. And he had enough gold saved to do it, too … .
Madison was early. He sat alone in the cabinet room, well down the table, fingers drumming on the arm of a chair covered in red leather with brass studs. The president and the others were coming; now he relished the time to think. The steward, a tall black man with an engaging smile, came in with tea on a tray and a platter of crullers, then left him alone.
The French officer the day before had infuriated him. “Bastard!” he muttered in the silent room. But immediately he was abashed. He hadn’t revealed anger then and knew he couldn’t afford it now. Self-indulgence is dangerous.
He poured tea and bit into a cruller, mulling as he chewed. It was ever more clear that Santo Domingo was central. Yet there was that crazy strain too, outer edge of control. Crazy …
Of course French credit was worthless. They were broke, exhausted from conquering their neighbors. For thirteen years since their own revolution they’d been in near constant turmoil or war. Tax collection had almost collapsed. The court glittered still, but the army was being paid with loot from occupied countries. Indeed, with so many men under arms, who was left at home to pay taxes? So why this rash move on Louisiana at huge new expense, why send his favorite general? For grain flowing from the Mississippi Valley, yes, but beyond that a bigger picture was emerging, clever but fatally unreal, conceived in ignorant dreams.
Maybe a bankrupt nation was more desperate than you’d guess. Clearly they needed Santo Domingo to protect the route to Louisiana and Louisiana to support the island. But look beyond that—the Spanish empire had been dying for years, revolution in the air everywhere. Maybe that was Napoleon’s real aim—Cuba with its sugar, Mexico with gold pouring from its mines …
Grain and gold … fuel with which to conquer the world!
Yet it was feckless, wishful thinking pushing dreams, frantic soldiers colliding with reality. In the end reality controls, and Madison had an idea that disaster lay ahead for Napoleon, though better someone else should administer the coup de grace. All America need do was show him that the centerpiece of his plan was forever beyond his grasp. Warn him off …
Madison stood as the president entered the room with Albert Gallatin and behind them, Henry Dearborn, secretary of war. The president settled himself and looked around with a frown as the steward poured tea. He disliked cabinet meetings—they wasted time, invited posturing, set up quarrels, so he said. He liked to sound members individually, then act on his own.
Dearborn, whose suit looked tighter every time Madison saw him, dragged the cruller platter before him and took three with relish. He’d been on Benedict Arnold’s starvation march to Quebec in the Revolution; perhaps something of those terrible days still lived in him. Levi Lincoln, the attorney general, and Robert Smith, secretary of the navy, came in together. Robert was Sam Smith’s little brother, without half his ability.
“Damned blackguard,” Dearborn growled, when Madison described the visitor.
“He was very explicit,” Madison said. “They intend to have a Mississippi empire at our expense.” He looked around the table. “Of course, we won’t stand for that.”
“No, we won’t,” the president said. He glanced at the secretary of war. “Henry, I suppose this falls to your area.”
Dearborn wiped his lips with a cambric kerchief. “Yes, sir, and I hope you won’t take it amiss when I point out that we have cut the army almost in half—from six thousand when we took office to scarcely more than three thousand today.”
Madison heard an edge in the president’s voice. “Meaning,” he said, “that now we must deal with what is.”
“Yes, sir,” Dearborn said. Madison saw a bead of sweat on his upper lip. “As to the state of the army, I asked General Wilkinson to be here. He’s waiting downstairs.”
When Captain Lewis went to fetch the general, some oddity in his expression made Madison wonder what had gone on between them in the past. As the captain opened the door for the general that oddity had intensified. Seemed strange …
Wilkinson bowed when he entered. “Mr. President. Gentlemen.” Late fifties, Madison judged, stuffed into his uniform like a sausage, the saber a cock’s tail jutting out behind. But overall, his usual gaudy uniforms had been set aside in favor of plain blue with cream facings. Not quite a warrior but businesslike. Madison knew better than to judge on appearance alone, but it did strike him that this was a shifty-looking man. Rumor said Wilkinson had been in the pay of the Spanish for years, feeding them information and misinformation. Was he doing the same with the French? Still, rumor was hardly a creditable source. The man did head the army and they were stuck with him, another reason, Madison thought wryly, to avoid war.
Wilkinson laid out the facts well enough. Army of three thousand men, of whom two thousand could be called effective, and one thousand, roughly speaking, could start down the river to challenge the French within three months. A thousand men; Leclerc had twenty-five thousand. They wouldn’t all be available, but he certainly would have ten thousand troops free for combat.
American troops still carri
ed French muskets left over from the Revolution. No replacing them now, but muskets wore out in the field, despite regimental gunsmiths. America had gunsmiths, of course, but few were good for more than fifty pieces a year, each weapon being made individually and fitted by hand. Rearming would be difficult … .
Uniforms already were scarce and would wear out quickly on a march. Powder and shot was short. Medical supplies. Shoes. Frontier posts had vegetable farms and raised livestock for meat. But on the march they would need massive supplies of food. Wilkinson seemed to have no idea of the availability of corn and beans, let alone salt pork and beef in vinegar.
Artillery … well, three pounders were useful for aweing Indians but negligible against professional soldiers. Even the six pounders were small for serious combat. More clearly than ever, Madison saw that the army was a frontier force maintained to discourage Indian raids and keep Indians and settlers apart.
“Of course,” the president said, “ultimately we’ll rely on militia. We could rally fifty thousand militia men on fairly short notice, a hundred thousand in a year. Everyone from twelve to seventy. But they’re prickly, and they’ll take suggestions better than orders. Are you prepared to direct such a force?”
For a moment Wilkinson looked as if he’d peered into an abyss, but then he said smoothly that he would welcome the challenge. With a start, Madison saw that the man was afraid—of war, of field command, of the kind of men he must dominate as commander. He was an arranger, a conniver, not a real commander. The thought jolted Madison back to the idea that they must do all they could to sidestep war—and his belief that the French would swing to his way of thinking yet.
When the general left, Madison said, “Henry, what about these rumors that Wilkinson is—well, too close to the Spanish?”
Dearborn scowled. “I’ve heard them, of course. He lived on the frontier for years before he reentered the army and was an active trader on the river. Still trades, I think. But remember, nothing has been proved. He runs the army well. He’s not popular with his men; he’s a cruel disciplinarian and his personality makes enemies. But after all, he is what we have.”
