Hang a Thousand Trees with Ribbons

by Ann Rinaldi

  "So, then, this letter of mine carries not only a request. But a threat."

  "No threat is intended, Nathaniel."

  "Well, well." He gave a short laugh. "The little black poetess has been doing more than receiving accolades here in London. She has been plotting, is that it?"

  "I have not been plotting, Nathaniel. Just thinking."

  "Not alone, though, I take it. Surely someone has been tutoring you in your rights. Do you care to tell me who that someone was?"

  I bowed my head and kept my silence.

  "It was Franklin, wasn't it? I smelled a rat the day he came to call. Damned upstart Franklin. He does more harm than good. Disgusting old man. Isn't he content with meddling in politics? And bringing us to the brink of separation with the Crown? Must he meddle in personal lives, too?"

  I raised my head. "Nathaniel, I knew about Judge Mansfield's Somerset decision before I came to England," I said softly.

  His eyes narrowed. "Yes, but Franklin must have cleared the path for you. What has he done, offered you asylum?"

  I shook my head no.

  "Don't flummox me. What would you do if I gave you leave to go this day? Where would you go?"

  I felt a shiver of fear. "This day?"

  "Ah. Not prepared for that, are you? Freedom is a juicy morsel to contemplate. But it makes for meager fare on the plate and cannot sustain you."

  "I would make my way," I said with dignity.

  "There's no profit in pride, Phillis." He got up and began to pace. "You can't eat it when you're starving. It will not warm you when the winds blow cold."

  "I can live from the proceeds of my poetry. You always said I would someday be free by the fruits of my pen."

  "I see." He went to look out the window. "You can live from your poetry here. But not at home. They will still not accept you at home."

  "I shall manage."

  "In Boston as a free woman, you'll not be wearing any fancy frocks such as the one you have on now."

  "I seek things more suitable to the immortal mind."

  "How laudable. I have underestimated you. You pretend to be amiable and demure, but you are an independent, ungrateful little baggage."

  I said nothing.

  "Why do I get the feeling you are doing this to punish me because I am marrying Mary Enderby?"

  I faced his back. "You do underestimate me, Nathaniel."

  He turned from the window. "Regardless of your reasons, it will come to ill, this freedom of yours. Mark this day that I have said it. You play with fire. You and the colonies."

  "The colonies?" I gaped. "You liken me to the colonies?"

  "Yes."

  "All thirteen? Or just one?"

  "Don't be saucy. You think I haven't minded all the metaphors of iron chains in your poetry? And wanton tyranny? Boston is a hotbed of sedition. Living there has addled your brain."

  "My brain has never been clearer, Nathaniel."

  "Yes, well then, you will understand when I say that I cannot predict the outcome of this freedom with the colonies. But I can with you. It will be the death of you, Phillis. Your ruination."

  I felt a knell in my bones.

  "Nevertheless, it is my place neither to give it nor to refuse it It is the place of my parents."

  "Then you will write in my behalf?"

  "I shall pen Father a letter this day and mail it. Or would you prefer to take it to him yourself when you sail on the twenty-sixth?"

  I gasped. "We're leaving? But we haven't seen the countess yet. And I am to be presented to the king and queen as soon as the Court of Saint James reopens with the new season."

  "You are leaving, not I." He sat down and began to write.

  I felt something ominous in the air.

  He finished with a flourish. "George the Third and Queen Charlotte will have to muddle through somehow without meeting you. My mother is ailing. I had a letter on the seventeenth. She requests you home. Unless you wish to stay until my father sends your free papers. In that case you will not see my mother again. I strongly suspect that she is dying."

  Chapter Thirty-three

  SEPTEMBER 1773

  I knew something was wrong when Prince did not meet me at Long Wharf in Boston. The Wheatley carriage was there, all right, looking old and in need of repair in comparison to the fancy gold-trimmed coaches I'd seen in London.

  But no Prince.

  A nigra man met me. Name of Bristol.

  "Sulie's husband," he told me.

  "I didn't know Sulie had wed."

  He smiled at me. Why, I thought, he's all puffed up with himself.

  "Lots of things you doan know. Been away awhile, haven't you?"

  "Four and a half months."

  "Things change in that time."

  I did not like him. He knew things that I didn't. And he acted superior about it. "Where is Prince?" I asked him as he commenced to pull away from the wharf.

  Everything was wrong. For one thing, Boston looked smaller. What had happened to it? For another, I had a sense of dread.

  "Prince gone."

  "Where?"

  He shrugged. "Been messin' wif those Sons of Liberty. Gone." It was all he would tell me.

  Sulie opened the door. "So you's home. Good thing, too. I'm tired."

  The house seemed seedy and in need of a good cleaning. Where was Aunt Cumsee? I looked around. No one made a move to take my bags. I had to carry them upstairs myself.

  My mistress lay in bed, looking wan. She held her arms out to me. "Phillis, child, come to me."

  I ran to her and knelt down beside the bed. She smelled of sickness. I noticed a stain on the front of her bed gown. Never would she have allowed such in the past.

  "Where's Aunt Cumsee?" I asked.

  "Oh, Phillis, we were both taken with the fever at the same time. She's so old, you know. We had to send her to her sister's. We have only Sulie now. She and Bristol run things."

  "They aren't doing a very good job of it, from what I can see."

  "Hush, dear, they're doing their best. Now, tell me all about London."

  That night, as a cold September rain slashed outside the dining room windows, I left Mrs. Wheatley sleeping and went belowstairs to seek out my master. In the pocket I wore around my waist was the letter Nathaniel had penned asking for my freedom.

  But I had something to attend to first. I stood in the kitchen. "There's no more wood for the mistress's fire."

  Sulie was spooning some soup into a bowl. "Then get some. Or did you forget? It sits right outside the door there." She turned to face me.

  So, then, I minded, this is how it is to be. But I would not chide her. She was waiting for me to do that. She had been waiting a long time to put me in my place.

  I just stared at her stonily.

  "Oh, I forgot." She cocked her head and put one hand on her hip. "You was supposed to see the king and queen. Well, we can't have you fetchin' wood now, can we? Wouldn't be seemly. Then suppose you bring this to the master in the liberty. And I'll get the wood."

  I put the soup on a tray, sliced some bread and cheese, and fetched a glass of Madeira. I found Mr. Wheatley at his desk before a meager fire, scribbling by the light of a lone candle.

  "Phillis!"

  I set down the tray.

  He got up and hugged me. Then he wept.

  I comforted him. The sight of him weeping like that undid me. He looked so different, so old. His hair was thin and white; there were sagging lines under his eyes. His hands shook.

  "You find me not at my best. My gout has been plaguing me. How was your voyage? Won't you sit and sup with me?"

  "You sup in here?"

  "Sulie says why bother with the dining room when I eat alone anyway? It saves lighting the hearth in there."

  "Sir, forgive my asking, but are we suffering a shortage of funds?"

  "Of course not!"

  "Then why do I find you and my mistress in such mean circumstances?"

  "We're as we always were, Phillis. M
ayhap your sojourn in London has made your blood too rich for our simple tastes. Speaking of which"—and he took a sip of the soup—"go fetch a bowl and sup with me. There are more important things we must discuss."

  "Things are not good," he said, after inquiring after my health and telling me how proud and happy I had made them. "Governor Hutchinson is walking around saying that any union between the colonies is pretty well broken. And I'm afraid it is true. The nonimportation agreement turned us against each other. New Yorkers call Boston the common sewer of America. The Boston Gazette describes Rhode Island as filthy, nasty, and dirty."

  He would talk politics. And I must listen.

  "The king now pays the judges himself. No more are they receiving their salaries from the General Court of Massachusetts. So they now act without regard to the wishes of our local officials."

  "Sir, have you become a Whig, then?"

  "I? No, Phillis. The Whigs are scattered. People are tired of riots and rabble in the streets. But now we hear that in order to save the East India Tea Company from bankruptcy, the Crown is giving it the monopoly on the American market. We must now buy only what tea is sent to us. No more smuggling in Dutch tea. The merchants are terrified. Suppose the Crown does this with Madeira? Or shoes?"

  "Where do your sympathies fall, then?"

  "With Englishmen of liberty everywhere," he said solemnly, "here and abroad."

  It was a vague answer, I thought, from a vague man. He did not seem to know what he was about. He seemed confused. Yet he pored over notes and newspapers on his desk as if he were Benjamin Franklin.

  We talked for a while. He inquired after Nathaniel. I felt the letter in my pocket. Before I had a chance to speak, he smiled at me. "Ah, Phillis, it's so good to have you home. We need you here. Now things will get back to the way they used to be."

  "Yes, sir," I said weakly.

  Then he said he must get back to work.

  "What are you doing?" I asked.

  He smiled at me triumphantly. "I am proposing myself as a consignee to sell the tea when it arrives from England. Only certain shoppekeepers are being selected to sell it. And will make the profit"

  "But you said the merchants are terrified of this tea."

  "Yes, but everyone trusts me, you see. I had a respected merchant house for years. We can't allow the Hutchinsons to be selected. And they are putting themselves forth for the job."

  "'We'?"

  "We're all giving the Hutchinsons a run for their money. I, John Hancock, Will Molineaux, and John Rowe." He went back to his scribbling.

  "But you have no more shoppe," I reminded him.

  "I'll sell the tea from my front parlor if I must." He winked at me. "Nathaniel isn't the only merchant in the family. There's life in this old boy yet. I'll show him."

  So that was it. He had nothing to do with himself; Nathaniel had taken everything over. My master had no more life's work. He sat in this dimly lighted house with his wife sickly upstairs, pushed around by Sulie, lonely, ailing, and confused by the changing world around him.

  "Sir," I asked, "where is Prince?"

  "Prince?" He considered the matter for a moment. "He's taken up with the Patriots in Newport. While you were away he made a trip there and became involved in luring a royal schooner into shallow water, then boarding and burning her. I couldn't have that, Phillis, not with my son a London merchant. I gave him his freedom and let him go."

  "You freed Prince?"

  "Why, yes. I had to. Loyalists were after his hide. I could not have him connected with this house."

  I felt for the letter in my pocket.

  "And he'll come to no good. There are some people who just don't know what to do with this freedom. He'll end up on the end of a rope. Mark what I say."

  Chapter Thirty-four

  I did not give him Nathaniel's letter. I could not do it in the face of the trust those two dear people had in me.

  I tore it up.

  There was too much to be done now for me to concern myself with freedom. Freedom, for white people, was there in the air they breathed the day the good Lord first gave them breath.

  Freedom, for a nigra, was something you got when your master and mistress were finished with you.

  The Wheatleys were not finished with me yet.

  For the next three weeks I settled in to making things right in the house. I cooked special delicacies for my mistress. I bathed her and kept her in fresh bed linens. Nobody asked me to. I just did it.

  One golden afternoon the third week of September, I was rushing home from a visit to Aunt Cumsee, across town at her sister Cary May's house. My spirit was sore. My head ached. It had taken every bit of mettle I had to hide my sadness from Aunt Cumsee.

  That woman might be in the last throes of life, already talking to the angels, but she could still read my thoughts.

  "How did you leave Nathaniel?" she'd asked.

  "Parting sore afflicted us," I lied.

  Her breath was shallow. "So he dallied with you, then."

  "Of course not!"

  "Sweet talk is all it was."

  "He never sweet-talked me. Don't you remember how we used to fight?"

  "Sweet talk has different voices. Does he know you're smitten?"

  "Aunt Cumsee, I'm not smitten. Never was. And he doesn't know. I'd die before I'd tell him."

  "Find yourself another, child. You're only a slave to him. Chattel."

  "I don't want anyone, Aunt Cumsee. I don't need anyone."

  "There's that nice John Peters who has the greengrocer stall at North End Market. He saves the best oranges for Cary May all the time. Said he could get us tea even though they don't let the fool ships unload when they come."

  Her words echoed in my mind as I hurried through the September dusk. Of a sudden, a gang of young urchins came running toward me on King Street. We near collided. And a bunch of broadsides they were carrying fell to the ground.

  "Oh," I said. "I'm sorry."

  One especially ragged urchin handed me a broadside. "Take one home to your mistress," he said. "We gotta post the others." And off he ran.

  I stared after him. I hadn't seen urchins running together like that since the time of the massacre. Then I noticed at least three groups of men gathered on corners, engaged in lively discourse.

  At the same time I minded the smell of pine-knot torches and heard some names. Molineaux. Adams. Hancock. There was a tremor of excitement in the dusk. It passed through the air like Benjamin Franklin's electricity.

  Boston is enlivened, again, I thought. For the first time since the massacre. I hurried along. The town watch passed me, crying something about a meeting at Faneuil Hall. I must pay mind, I decided. I must not let my own concerns blind me to what is happening.

  But my own concerns did blind me. There was no help for it.

  A few days later my book came out in London.

  The only reason I became sensible of it was because Mr. Bell wrote to Mr. Wheatley and enclosed advertisements for it from three London newspapers.

  The day we received that intelligence, I'd spent the morning making a chicken broth for my mistress.

  Sulie had not given me an even time of it in the kitchen. She considered it her domain, though she allowed me to work there if it lessened her duties.

  I heard Mr. Wheatley come through the front door and go into his library. He'll want some cold meat and cider, I thought. Then, after a moment, I heard the library door open and he called my name. I hurried, wiping my hands on my apron. A sense of foreboding went before me, along with my shadow.

  "Your book has been published, Phillis."

  "Oh." I put my hands over my mouth in disbelief.

  "You will soon be receiving three hundred copies." But he was not smiling.

  Something was wrong.

  "There is a matter of grave importance that has been brought before me." He cleared his throat "Do you know what these are?" He was holding some papers up before me.

  "No, sir."

/>   "Reviews of your work, Phillis. They are most complimentary. At least a dozen newspapers and periodicals took note of your book. Here, let me read you part of one review."

  He commenced reading. "'Youth, innocence, and piety, united with genius, have not yet been able to restore her to the condition and character with which she was invested by die Great Author of her being.'"

  He looked at me, waiting.

  "I do not understand, sir."

  "Well, then, mayhap you will understand this one. 'We are much concerned to find that this ingenious young woman is yet a slave. The people of Boston boast themselves chiefly on their principles of liberty. One such act as the purchase of her freedom would, in our opinion, have done more honor than hanging a thousand trees with ribbons and emblems.'"

  He set down the papers and sighed. "Do you understand now, Phillis?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "They chide us for keeping you in bondage."

  I said nothing. Was he angry?

  "Do you wish to be free, Phillis?"

  I could not speak. My heart was hammering so that I had to put my hand on my bosom. I felt weak.

  He drew forth some paper, a jar of ink, and his quill. He commenced writing.

  For several moments all that could be heard was the scratching of the quill on the paper. Then he signed it and sprinkled some sand on it, folded it, and held it out to me.

  I could not move.

  "It is not that we do not have honor, Phillis. It is that we considered you as our own. And not as a slave."

  I nodded mutely.

  "Do you know what I have just done?"

  "No, sir."

  "I have hung a thousand trees with ribbons.'

  "Oh, sir," I said.

  "Take the paper, Phillis. Tomorrow I shall register it with the courts. You may hold it close for tonight."

  I stepped forth and took it.

  He got up. "I must go and pay a visit to my wife. You have been taking good care of her, Phillis. I hope you will stay with us. At least as long as my wife lives. Now that you are free, I hope you will not feel the need to leave."

  "I will stay," I murmured.

  He patted my shoulder and went out of the room and up the stairs. I minded his shuffled gait. He was old.