Washington and Caesar

by Christian Cameron

  Caesar pointed at the nearest shed, an openwork log barn with a shingle roof. “Tobacco barn,” he whispered.

  Jim nodded.

  Caesar mimed smoking. “Gonna steal some.”

  Jim shook his head in exasperation.

  “Mistuh Hardin’ is waiting for us. You jus’ tol’ him not to take risks.”

  Caesar crawled over the top of the bank and began to run toward the barn. Jim went back to his drawing, but now he couldn’t do it. He was tense. He wanted to follow Caesar, but thought that only increased the risk. He could see slaves working in the fields just beyond the barn, and he could hear a white voice, probably an overseer, shouting in the middle distance.

  Then he saw Caesar at the side of the barn, and then slipping into it, a dark shadow against the near dark of the barn. Then Caesar was out again, and running toward him, his legs pumping. Jim wondered at how fast he was. He’d never seen anyone run as fast as Caesar. In a moment, the man was over the edge of the bank and down beside him. The rain was coming faster. Caesar had two armfuls of tobacco leaf, dry and pungent, and the sweet, dry smell filled the air.

  “You done drawing?”

  “As good as I can get it.”

  “I wan’ get this under my tarpaulin, an’ keep it dry.” Caesar had a fortune in tobacco, at least by the laws of economy on their ship.

  The darkness covered their retreat. It was somehow shorter back to where they had left Harding than it had been sneaking out. Harding looked as if he hadn’t moved, and his relief at seeing them was so great that he laughed aloud. Caesar didn’t pause to greet him, but pulled out his oilcloth and wrapped his precious tobacco in it. Then he slung the whole package over his shoulder and stood up.

  Jim was showing his sketch to Harding, but the dark and the rain made it impossible to judge or add Jim’s work to the map.

  “Must we go back to the beach?”

  “If you want a fire.” Caesar didn’t mention that he had piled firewood that morning, or left it in a dry place.

  Harding nodded. His hat was collapsing in the rain, and the dye from his blue uniform jacket had run into his shirt. He was small and wet and cold, but he still had some indefinable air of command.

  “Let’s go, then.”

  It took them much less time to walk back down the trail, even in the dark and rain, than it had to walk up. Caesar had experienced this before, and knew that careful approaches in unfamiliar ground took much more time than a simple walk down a clear trail. They were all soaked through and shivering.

  The tide was up when they came to the beach, and had come up high, so that the shingle was only a few yards wide at the top before the open woods began. Caesar had to hunt for his woodpile for a while, but he found it by stumbling over the slick old bark. Then he used the bark as a shield while he lit the fire under it. First he got a spark from his flint and steel on his charred cloth, all out of his fire kit and the driest thing he had. Then he used dry punkwood from the center of a rotten log to take the spark and make it a coal, and he carefully built a tiny fire of dry twigs on that one coal, building and blowing until he had a flame, and then adding scraps of bone dry bark and twig, and a twist of paper donated by Harding.

  Through the whole performance, the two boys sat on the wet ground in the rain, only partially sheltered by the trees overhead. Jim fell asleep, despite the cold. He had been out in worse. The white boy had stood his watches on the deck of his frigate in all weathers, and he rested his back against Jim’s and tried to sleep as well.

  If the transition from spark to coal to flame had taken a long time, the leap from flame to roaring fire was swift. Caesar fed his dry wood until he had a blaze, and then he put wetter wood on and it burned regardless. He looked over at Harding, who seemed fascinated.

  “On a dry day, you can build a tiny fire. On a wet day, you need mo’ fire jus’ to burn the damp wood.”

  “We don’t burn much wood on board ship,” said Harding.

  Caesar smiled and nodded. He took his brass kettle, fetched some water from the stream, then boiled some salt pork and biscuit together and woke the two boys. They ate voraciously, but without really waking up. They made him feel old.

  He stretched a tarpaulin across the opening between two trees and lashed it with pine roots. Then he pushed the boys under it, threw a second tarp over them, and prepared himself a pipe of his new tobacco. It tasted wonderful, if a little damp, after a month or more of stale rations and ancient stuff issued by the navy and sold on by the sailors. He drank a little water from his canteen, ate the rest of the salt pork and washed the kettle, and crawled in with the two boys. Mostly, he was content.

  The boat came for them the next day, on time and even a little early. Caesar received his share of praise. It appeared that Mr. Harding’s map was to everyone’s satisfaction, as was the site of the camp and the peninsula as a whole. The governor decreed that they were going ashore.

  Harding came back to thank them that same evening. He gave Jim a metal pencil with some leads and a little book of blank sheets, and he gave Caesar a clasp knife.

  “I’ve never had so much praise from my captain all at once.”

  “What did the governor say?”

  “He told Captain Lovell and the marine officer that he wanted to put the force ashore to keep you all from dying of disease. And then he laughed and said that he could at least be thought to be campaigning in Virginia if he was ashore.”

  Caesar shook his head. “We’re better off here.”

  “Will we make more maps, suh?” asked Jim, and Harding nodded.

  “I’ll ask for you.”

  The British marines were the best soldiers Caesar had seen. They led the landings from boats provided by the navy, dashing ashore and forming loose lines, every man using the cover along the shingle. There was no opposition; the rebels hadn’t smoked the landing and were forty miles away or more.

  Command had responsibilities that Caesar hadn’t anticipated. As a corporal, he knew more than the other men about these landings. He knew that they were not intended as a step in a campaign to reclaim Virginia from the rebels; the sergeants and officers had made it clear that Governor Dunmore had abandoned any real hope of retaking Virginia for the king by force of arms. But taken together, the need of the men for exercise and the threat of disease on the ships mandated a landing. Five weeks’ waste lay in the bilges and around them in the slack water of the Chesapeake. The governor intended to take this little peninsula, hold it, and make it an exercise ground for his army.

  The wind was bitter coming over the open bay. Caesar’s men all had brown wool jackets, but some of the newer recruits had only shirts and navy slop trousers or petticoat breeches. They were nearly blue with cold. They gripped their muskets with white-knuckled hands, and Caesar knew that they would be useless in a fight.

  The whaleboat holding his men landed on the sand with a hiss.

  “Up oars,” called the midshipman, a stranger. He turned to Caesar. “This is as far as we go, Corporal.”

  “Yes, sir.” The midshipman was so young his voice was still high, and he had no real authority. That came from the coxswain, a burly man behind him, who simply smiled and jerked his thumb over his shoulder in the universal sign for “get out”. Caesar grasped the gunwale and leapt over the side into less than a foot of water, and then Virgil followed over the other side, just as they had practiced. The rest of the men walked up the thwarts between the rowers, and the sailors handed them their muskets, which had been stored along the bottom boards. It went very smoothly, and Caesar was pleased to see Lope, his newest man, standing on the beach with his musket, bayonet, and cartridge box, as it meant that his was the first boat unloaded. Caesar enjoyed the little courtesies of command; he touched his hat to the midshipman.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  The boy returned the gesture. “First on the beach, after the marines.” The coxswain, a decent sort who smoked constantly, waved his pipe at Caesar. He had offered a good price
for any tobacco they could “liberate” in the course of their jaunt ashore; had purchased half of what Caesar had brought from the mapping party. The coxswain was sure that the expedition was doomed, and even claimed to know where they were bound next.

  “Marker! Second Section marker!” Caesar called the ritual words, even though his marker man, Virgil, was ten feet away. Virgil pulled himself erect and put his musket on his shoulder with a negligent air, but the completion of the movement left him in the position of a soldier, the very personification of his section.

  “Second Section! Fall in!” The rest of the men, even the recruits, ran to their places in the line, forming two ranks with the tallest in the center and the shortest on the flanks. Caesar’s section was almost a platoon since the latest draft of runaway slaves. He had twenty men.

  The other boats were hanging back in the current. Caesar didn’t know enough about the water to understand what was delaying the second wave of boats. His were the only Loyal Ethiopians on the beach.

  In the manual of arms he had learned, he could remember no order that would enable him to disperse his men in the rocks as the marines had done. He turned to Virgil.

  “Spread them out along the scree, Virgil. I’m going to find an officer.”

  Caesar grasped his musket across the body and ran to where he could see an officer of the Fourteenth, a naval officer, and a man in a blue velvet coat, whom he thought to be Captain Honey of the marines. He stopped a few feet away, uncertain, and then stood at attention with his musket at the recover. It was a position designed to attract the attention of a higher officer; it meant that a soldier was requesting permission to speak.

  The officer of the Fourteenth was the eldest, but apparently not the senior man in the group. However, he was the one man Caesar knew; he had led a company at the disaster at Great Bridge. When he caught Caesar’s eye, Caesar stepped forward.

  “Sir!”

  The man in the blue velvet coat turned and looked at him with distaste.

  “Is this an example of our slave militia, Lieutenant Crowse?”

  Caesar felt the blood run to his face and sweat break out all over his body, as if he was about to fight.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The man looked at Caesar, barely touching him with his eyes as if the sight were too painful.

  “What do you want, darkie?”

  “Where would you like my section, sir? My officer has not yet landed.”

  “Get those men’s guns away from them before they shoot someone, and have them start hauling boxes up the beach.” He wasn’t addressing Caesar, but Crowse. He took a little silver whistle from his waistcoat pocket and blew it twice. The marines rose to their feet and began to move forward. On the far right, Virgil got the Ethiopians to their feet and moved off on the flank of the marines.

  Blue Coat whirled around and stabbed a finger at Crowse.

  “If I wanted those blackamoors stumbling through my skirmish line, I’d ask for them. Now get them hauling boxes.”

  Caesar was still standing at attention. Crowse, a man he barely knew, looked at him with a spark of pity, but that was all.

  “Have your men stack their arms,” he said. “And then get them moving with the stores.”

  “As you say, sir.”

  Crowse looked unhappy.

  Over the next six weeks, Sergeant Peters had them up early to drill with their muskets. It was the only time they handled them; otherwise, the guns were locked away in the magazine by the blockhouse that the Ethiopians had built in the first week of labor. They spent every waking hour building: first sheds for the men to sleep, then the blockhouse and its chimneys, then a set of entrenchments along the front of the camp. None of their officers could change the situation, and the white troops, many of whom had started to fraternize with them, began to grow used to the idea that they could order a black soldier to do all the dirty work. Some of the blacks accepted this; others, especially the veterans of Great Bridge, resented it. The resentment lowered morale, and the men became listless. In fact, to Caesar’s attentive eye, they began to show signs of acting like slaves. They moved more slowly and the joking disappeared, at least when any white soldier was about. The men became furtive.

  Visits from the sailors provided their only relief. The sailors seemed immune to any notion of color, perhaps because so many of their own were Africans or lascars from East India Company ships in the Far East. The ratings of the Royal Navy came in every color of the rainbow. The coxswain of the Amazon continued to pay well for tobacco, and to talk to Peters and Caesar as if they were members of the same mess, as they had been aboard ship.

  The sick were brought ashore to recover from the fever that had them in its grip on the crowded ships. Once ashore, smallpox began to ravage the men who had survived the fevers onboard ship. The white Loyalists seemed to die faster than the blacks, but Jim caught it, and had the fever for almost two weeks. He lost all the weight he had gained since they had joined the army, and then even more, until he looked like a tight leather bag stretched over sticks. The others from their mess group, even the men like Tonny who hadn’t been in the swamp with Jim, took turns bathing him and cleaning him. As he lay there, his bright, intelligent eyes burned with greater intensity, as though he could cling to life by will alone.

  Twice he had loud, angry dreams. Once, when Caesar was minding him, he was somewhere in his own distant past, forced to watch another man being beaten. If the sounds he made in the dream were reliable, the beating had gone on for a long time. The second dream came when Tom was tending him—a reliving of the battle of Great Bridge. Long Tom said it was eerie, hearing Jim say the words again, like being there, except they were lying on the ground in a dark hut.

  The white soldiers continued to get Jesuit’s bark for their fevers but the supply ran short and the black men no longer saw any of it. There was no medicine for smallpox, and the men died, black and white together, and as often as not the Ethiopians were ordered to bury them. The dead men seldom got anything like a funeral, just a deep hole and a few muttered words from an officer with a scarf over his mouth.

  The surgeon hurried to explain to Sergeant Peters that his people were tougher and less affected anyway. It might have been true, as far as any of them knew; certainly, more blacks survived the fever than whites, but it didn’t help the black soldiers with the notion that they didn’t rate quite the same treatment as the whites.

  The winter winds bit through the tents and hasty cabins, that had covered the meadow with a patchwork of rude shelters, military tents, and mud. The constant movement of hundreds of men had worn through the grass. The incessant rain turned the ground to thick mud, and they never had the straw or forage to keep it from their tents. Some of the men went and slept in the woods. As the labor of camp building declined, there was more time for the men to brood on the unfairness of the white soldiers. Caesar began to encounter resentment when taking the men out for early drill. Men who had been eager to learn grew hesitant; men who had had little interest in the work to start with became rebellious. Caesar sensed that even the survivors of the swamp were losing interest.

  Two mornings after Jim raved about the battle, Long Tom went down with the smallpox. Spirits were low as Caesar marched the men early to the magazine and stood them in front of the arms racks. Sergeant Peters was laying out a new storehouse, and Caesar was to command the morning drill for the first time. He was trying to pay close attention to what went on, but his thoughts were with Jim, and now Long Tom.

  “Take up your arms,” he said as if by rote.

  “Ain’t no need, corporal-man,” said Willy, a man from Peters’s old squad of inspection. “We ain’t soldiers. We slaves.”

  “I am not a slave,” Caesar answered hotly. “Now get in line and pick up that musket.”

  “Nope. Not taking no orders from no black mastuh, neithuh.”

  Caesar had no experience with mutiny. His men mostly followed his lead because he had led some of them out of the swamp
and the rest because of the trust of the first. Some of the new men were not so loyal.

  Caesar snapped out of his reverie. He could see that Willy was keyed up, and that he was looking at his mates Romeo and Paget, flicking them expectant glances. He knew that this confrontation had been building since they landed. Caesar was astute enough to recognize that he and his authority might never have been challenged if not for the hostile attitude of the marine officer. As it was, he became the focus for his company’s discontent because he was both the newest noncommissioned officer and in some ways the most demanding.

  Caesar took a step toward Willy but transferred his attention to Paget. Keeping his eye on the other man, Caesar spoke low.

  “Get on the line and take your musket from the rack. Do it!”

  Virgil recognized from his tone that something serious was taking place. Tonny shifted his weight a little, as he was the file leader of the next file over from Willy. The others looked vacant. They might know that something was up, but they had chosen not to take part.

  “Wha’ don’ we jus sit somewheah fo’ a bit?” asked Willy in a slow, almost affected way. It was blatant disrespect. It was also no different from the way half the men behaved every day. Caesar was tempted to ignore it, or to jolly the man along. He expected he could do that; it worked well enough on slaves.

  But these men were soldiers.

  Caesar moved like a cat springing on its prey, his left foot stomping directly on to Willy’s instep and the butt of his musket smashing into the man’s midriff, doubling him in pain and surprise. He collapsed and Caesar stepped past him, thrusting the muzzle of his empty musket deep into the pit of Paget’s stomach and then kneeing him in the face as he bent over with the blow. Paget fell atop Willy.

  “We are soldiers, not slaves. We got some troubles here, but we’ll get through ’em by working harder. On your feet, you two. You ain’t dead, but if I hear a peep about drill again, you’ll wish you were. Move.”