Zack

by William Bell

  P.P.S. I forgot the footnotes, but it’s too late now.

  Your student,

  It’s as if the events of his life had been written on cards and tossed into the wind. I’ve gathered the ones I could and tried to arrange them into some kind of order. A lot have been lost. There are many gaps, more questions than answers.

  He was born in 1744 in Bondu, Senegambia, West Africa, a river-laced land of steaming marshes and grassy plains. He could have been a Wolof or Mandinke, but was probably a Fulani, the dominant tribe of Bondu State. He was likely Moslem and may have known how to read and write. Senegambians grew cotton, tobacco, maize (corn) and rice; they were cunning traders and expert cattle ranchers. To imagine him as an ignorant jungle savage is as logical as suggesting the royal family of England at the time wore smelly animal skins and lived in caves.

  Land was plentiful but labourers were not, so war and slavery were bitter facts of life. Tribe raided tribe, carried off the human spoils and put them to work planting crops or tending cattle. The European slavers who, during the eighteenth century transported sixty per cent of West Africa’s population across the Atlantic, did not invent slavery. They bought their slaves from Africans.

  When he was the age of the average grade-eleven student he was captured in one of those conflicts. Hands bound behind his back, roped by the neck to other men, women and children, he was marched to the broad Gambia River and boated downstream to James Fort, an island fortress near the ocean, and sold to Europeans. Before he was driven aboard the ship that lay at anchor in the estuary, he was grappled to the ground, tallow was smeared on his stomach then covered with oiled paper, and, with an iron heated in a fire until it glowed red, he was branded. He belonged to the Royal African Company. He was cargo.

  The “middle passage,” the hellish ocean journey to the New World, took anywhere from two weeks to two months, and it’s hard to imagine how he survived. He was chained to another man and made to lie hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder on a shelf in the dark, airless, sweltering hold, the next shelf only inches above him. As the ship pitched and rolled under sail, the rough planks ground away his sweat-soaked skin and flesh, leaving open running sores.

  The hold was a noxious pit of putrid stench—urine, vomit, excrement and the sour stink of vinegar used by the slavers in a halfhearted effort to quell the foul odours. Men around him groaned and cried out in the dark in their different languages. Many died, consumed by despair. Each day he was hauled on deck with others, chained to the rail, fed, and forced to dance while sailors tossed buckets of icy seawater on him to wash him down. Some slaves broke free and hurled themselves into the freezing ocean.

  Of the many who died, most succumbed to the “bloody flux,” chronic dysentery that squeezed the liquid from their bowels in violent, painful spasms and killed them where they lay on the benches drenched in their own reeking waste. On average, the corpses thrown overboard numbered fifteen per cent of the human cargo.

  He refused to die. He fought off the virulent diseases that stalked the ship and the terrible despair that tempted him every minute of every day to give up.

  After two months of the horror, a skeleton wrapped tightly in shiny black skin, covered in scabs and sores, his eyes sunken into his head, he was off-loaded, probably in the Barbados, given a salve to rub on his ravaged skin, fattened up for a few weeks and, when he looked presentable, taken to auction on the mainland. Where? In the slave market in Charles’ Town, South Carolina, in Boston, in New York? Whatever his point of entry into the colonies that “belonged” to Britain, he was bought from the Royal African Company by Pierpoint, a British soldier, and named Richard.

  When I started this project I thought that a slave was just a person owned by another person, like a wagon, an axe or a horse. A slave was someone with no freedom. But what they took from him was more than that. They stole his home, his family, his roots and, maybe worst of all, his name. His religion was called heretical. His language was “mumbo-jumbo”. His stories and songs were scorned.

  There were some things they couldn’t take away, though—his willpower and his intelligence, his courage and his dignity.

  If the land of Pierpoint’s birth was one of slavery, the American colonies in 1760 were, in many ways, worse. There were thousands and thousands of captured Africans labouring on plantations or serving in households. Although they did not remain in bondage for life, there were white slaves, too: indentured servants sold to a master for a period of years; convicts transported to the New World and sold as labourers until they had “paid off” the cost of their passage; sailors “pressed” into duty (captured, hauled aboard ship and not released until the vessel was far out to sea). Owning a human being was an idea that was widely accepted. The man who penned the Declaration of Independence was a plantation owner whose African farmhands were his property, and when he wrote that all men were created equal he meant white males only. The man who wrote “Give me liberty, or give me death” owned more than sixty slaves.

  In that land of wagons, horses, dirt roads, huge plantations and primitive isolated farms, frontier towns and a few cities that were just tiny dots in a vast landscape of unbroken forest, the sixteen-year-old boy from Bondu must always have felt isolated and alone. He was the personal servant of a British officer who probably looked down on most of his own troops, never mind his black slave. Richard Pierpoint had to learn a new language and strange customs. But he did it. He did all that, and more.

  And he dropped out of sight for twenty years.

  Richard Pierpoint turned up again in, of all places, Fort Niagara, just across the river from present-day Niagara-on-the-Lake. By that time he had earned his freedom by enlisting to fight the Americans for King George, the same king whose chartered slave company had bought, branded and sold him. He was Captain Dick now, also called Pawpine, a member of Butler’s Rangers, which was a part of the British army often supplemented with Indian allies.

  What had happened in the twenty years? The American Revolutionary War, for one thing. It was still raging when Pierpoint arrived in Fort Niagara. At that time the area north of the Ohio River and west of the Allegheny Mountains was part of British North America, not the American colonies, and with Butler’s Rangers, Pawpine fought the Americans by waging a fierce and cruel guerrilla-style campaign from the Hudson to the Kentucky Rivers to interrupt the supply routes of the Continental Army.

  In July 1784, a year after the war ended, he left the army, a seasoned veteran of thirty-six, and disappeared from the pages of history again for four years. He probably stayed in the area working as a labourer or farmhand, because in 1788 he was granted, as a veteran, a 200-acre parcel of land on Twelve Mile Creek, near present-day St. Catharines, Ontario. He worked for three years to clear the land and build a dwelling—required as a condition of the grant—and in January 1791, Lots 13 and 14, Concession 6, became his property. He later sold them. Why? Turning forest into a farm was dangerous, painstaking, back-breaking work. Why go to all that trouble, then sell off the farm?

  The Niagara Frontier was populated by Iroquois, Dutch, Jews, Scots, Germans and many ex-patriate Americans loyal to Britain, but few Africans. The government was lily-white and undemocratic, and so was high society. Pawpine, a veteran and a landowner, was still an outsider. He felt that he didn’t belong, that he was unwelcome.

  Ms. Song, right now you’re asking, how does Zack know that? My answer is that in 1794 Pawpine and a number of other free Africans petitioned Governor John G. Simcoe. Who were they? Veterans of the “late War and others who were born free with a few who have come into Canada since the peace.” What did they request? They were “desirous of settling adjacent to each other in order that they may be able to give assistance in work to those amongst them who may most want it.” They asked the governor “to allow them a Tract of County to settle on, separate from the white settlers.” Why would they make a request like that if they had been a part of things?

  The governor said no.

  To m
ake matters worse the next governor, Peter Hunter, removed Pawpine’s name from the list of United Empire Loyalists. After 1806, Pawpine, who had fought the Americans for the king, was no longer considered a “loyalist”. Why? I think it was because he was African.

  Six years passed, and there is no record of him. In 1812 the Americans got mad at the British again and invaded Canada, trying to grab more land, as if half a continent wasn’t enough. And guess who turned up to enlist?

  No longer a landowner in Grantham Township, he wasn’t some young guy looking for adventure or itching to get off the farm and carry a gun. He was sixty-eight years old. He wrote to the authorities offering to “raise a Corps of Men of Colour on the Niagara Frontier.” No, thanks, the British said. But when a British captain named Runchey agreed to lead the thirty or so Africans, assent was given. We’ll let you fight, the British said to Pawpine, but you can’t lead.

  It might have been one of the stupidest wars ever fought, so full of blunders and gaffes it would have been comical if so many hadn’t been killed. Pawpine was in the thick of it—the Siege of Fort George, the Battles of Lundy’s Lane and of Queenston Heights. Henry Clay had told the American Congress in February 1810 that “the militia of Kentucky alone” could take Montreal and Upper Canada both. He must have been embarrassed when he learned that part of Washington was burned down and that the Redcoats invaded as far as New Orleans. The Americans won the last battle in 1815—two weeks after the peace terms had been negotiated and the war ended. Most of the war had been fought on Canadian soil. Not a single acre of land changed hands.

  Pawpine’s name is on the papers that officially disbanded Runchey’s “Coloured Corps” in 1815. He went back to scratching a living as a labourer and slipped out of sight for another six years. When he was seventy-seven years old, Pawpine was living in Niagara-on-the-Lake, a lonely old man with no family and few friends. Vouched for by the adjutant general of militia, who praised the service in two wars of “a faithful and deserving old Negro,” he petitioned Lieutenant Governor Maitland on July 21, 1821: “Old and without property,” he found it “extremely hard to obtain a livelihood by my labour.”

  What did he ask for? Land? Money? A job? No.

  “Desirous above all things to return to my native country,” he requested a ticket home to Africa.

  Pawpine got a ticket, all right—a “location ticket” for a parcel of unbroken wilderness land a hundred miles as the crow flies from Niagara-on-the-Lake, with the usual conditions—clear the land, build a house.

  It took four years, but he did it. His cabin was built on the bank of the Grand River. If it was still there it would be standing in my yard, right behind my house. I live on his farm.

  As he sat in his cabin door gazing over the grey frozen river at fields of snow, how could he not dream of the hot steamy Gambia, of his village and family and friends? I wonder if he recalled stories and songs, if he even remembered his language. He came to North America alone, and he died alone eleven years after he cleared his land. He was more than ninety years old.

  Some time before he died he took his leather-covered document box and inside it he placed his old Butler’s Ranger shoulder straps. He must have been proud to be a Ranger. He wrapped his slave’s collar in greased leather and put it into the box, too. Why had he kept the collar? Because it was a link to his boyhood? He then added his bit of gold and buried the box where my mother’s lilac bushes now grow.

  Ms. Song, whenever we finish a unit, you always give us a test. You want to know what we learned.

  Although he spent his life in a strange land, I’m certain that in his own mind Pawpine was always an African. He never gave up, never bowed his head to anyone, and never, never forgot who he was or where he came from.

  I wasn’t born in Africa, but my mother’s ancestors were. They were taken from their homes, they survived the middle passage, they lived and died, had families, worked hard.

  I know it sounds crazy, Ms. Song, but I feel linked to Pawpine, as if he was part of my family. He gave me something I never thought I had. And his bit of gold is like a gift that was waiting all those years for me to find it.

  I have a plan that I haven’t told anyone about yet, and the gold will help me carry it out. I think he would have been pleased.

  THE END

  PART THREE

  Chapter 1

  I did have a plan. But I also had a few problems. The scheme came to mind after Mom told me that she had a ten-day gig in Montreal at the Maple Leaf Blues Festival, and that Dad was going too. He hated it when she was away for more than a couple of days. When Mom asked if I’d like to go along, it hit me: while they were gone I could take a trip of my own. So I told her no thanks.

  Since my visit to the Wellington County Museum, I had done a lot of heavy thinking. Probably nothing looked different on the outside, but inside I felt myself changing. It sounds strange, but when Knox gave me the news about the half-rings I felt ashamed and humiliated, as if I had been diminished somehow. I had never given much thought to the fact that my ancestors on Mom’s side had been slaves not many generations ago.

  For the next few days I had been pretty confused. I’d feel low, then get mad at myself—why should I feel bad? I’d ask—then get angry at everyone. Dad thought I was worried about school. Mom raised her eyebrows at me when I grouched at her and gave me one of her patented understanding looks that drove me nuts. Jen told me more than once that she was the only female in the county that would put up with me.

  But by the time I had finished my research on Pawpine I was proud of my African forebears. Maybe they didn’t have a coat of arms, maybe there were no towns named after them, but, like Grandpa had said about the Lazarovitches, they had made a place to stand on.

  I wanted to get to know my maternal grandfather and meet my American relatives, and the only way I could hook up with them was to go to Natchez, Mississippi.

  But I couldn’t tell my parents. Any hint to Mom that I wanted to contact my grandfather would be like throwing a bucket of water on a gasoline fire. Not to mention the fact that my parents would never agree to let me take a trip alone in the family pickup truck.

  It took a lot of persuasion, with many reminders that I wasn’t a kindergarten kid incapable of taking care of myself for a week or so, before Mom and Dad agreed that it wasn’t necessary to send me to live with my grandparents during their absence. I pretended that I didn’t want to be away from Jen—which was true, except I didn’t tell them that Jen was flying with her parents to Calgary for two weeks.

  My last problem was a biggie—money. I had maybe sixty or seventy bucks in a bank account saved from cash birthday gifts and odd jobs, but I would need a lot more than that for gas and food and stuff. I didn’t have to think very hard before I came up with the solution.

  When I entered the jewellery store Mr. Piffard was in his chair behind the counter reading a newspaper, glasses perched on the end of his prominent nose. A cup with a tea-bag string hanging out of it sat on the glass beside the oblong of red velvet.

  He looked up when the bell tinkled and his cigar migrated in jumps from one corner of his mouth to the other.

  “Afternoon,” he said.

  “Hi, Mr. Piffard.”

  “Nice day.”

  “Er, yeah,” I agreed, fingering the gold nugget in my pocket. “Really nice. Sunny. Nice and sunny.”

  I would have gone on with more of the same babble and made a bigger fool of myself but he interrupted.

  “What can I do for you?”

  I placed the gold on the velvet. “I came to take you up on your offer to buy this from me.”

  Beside it I laid a forged letter. Jen had written the note giving me permission to sell Pawpine’s gold and signed it with my father’s name.

  “It’s too neat,” I had told her when she had presented me with the first version. “Dad’s a university prof. You can hardly read his writing.”

  Jen had tossed her hair in agitation. “Then why not do it o
n the word-processor and I’ll just sign his name?”

  “Because it has to look as if he jotted it down quickly, like it’s not that big a deal.”

  “Then why don’t you write it?”

  “What, and do something dishonest?”

  Jen had balled up the letter and bounced it off my nose. It had taken two more drafts to get it right.

  Mr. Piffard scanned the paper. “This is your father’s phone number?”

  “He can be reached there during office hours.”

  That was only half a lie. It was the modem number, in use most of the day. If the jeweller called he’d get a busy signal—that was what I was counting on.

  “You’re sure you want to sell this thing?”

  “Well, er, pretty sure. No, yes I do.”

  “All right, then.”

  I left the shop with almost four hundred dollars in my pocket. As soon as the door clicked shut behind me I knew I’d made a colossal mistake. I had sold off a precious piece of history, a link with the man I had come to admire so much I felt that I knew him. The gold would be melted and made into a trinket, forever lost.

  I turned back, put my hand on the door handle. The bell sounded once more. Mr. Piffard was not in the shop. Thoughts flashed in my mind. Get the nugget back, now! No, keep the money. The nugget is priceless. But I needed the cash. The gold was a gift so I could do what I had to do.

  The curtain at the back moved. A hand appeared, pushing it aside. I turned and ran from the shop.

  Chapter 2

  On the last Friday of June, I hoped my eagerness to get Mom and Dad out of my hair didn’t show. Although their plane didn’t leave until eleven o’clock, Dad was up at six, clanging and banging around, over-organizing things and tripping over his own feet.

  The night before, Mom had packed three guitars into their hard cases—the electric, her favourite six-string and, “in case some old-timers want to jam folksy,” her twelve-string—and one suitcase for clothes. Her toiletries she stuffed into a backpack at the last minute, along with a few novels and her sunglasses. She was a veteran traveller.