The Pox Party Read online

  I felt a new bitterness in my heart; from whence, I knew not; and even as I retired to my seat, I assayed to address it through prayer to the most comfortable and equanimitous of Beings. Violinists from the orchestra shook my hand warmly, but my thoughts ran only to how I had, in anger, entertained the Serpent. I sent up hasty orisons, that the crabbed muscle within my breast be spread with balm by the hand divine, and so lose its present clogged flaccidity.

  It little alleviated my disgust at the easy blasphemy I had entertained that the rest of the program consisted of excerpts from Handel’s oratorios, selected on the theme of liberty, programmed so that the assembled might reflect upon the need for action in the present confrontation with the representatives of Parliament. Succeeded by the choir’s acclamations and triumphal assurance, my grim melodic turns and bitterness showed themselves to be mere tantrums.

  At the close of the program, Mr. Gitney greeted me warmly, telling me how deeply interesting had been my rendition; that it had chilled him quite pleasantly; my mother embraced me; and Mr. Sharpe took my arm, dug his fingers deeply into my flesh, and told me that I should sit back and recline in my chair while I could, for in a half an hour, my back would be too striped to admit of any respite whatsoever.

  It is, however, with pleasure that I write — and at the time, with pleasure that I marked — that many in that convocation had found my rendition not without merit; though I cannot imagine that their compliments were not due in part to their pity for my obvious distress, rather than any sympathy for a performance distorted by pride and pique. Young men pressed my hand, vowing I had spoke more of the vile institution of slavery in my few moments of sonata than all the preachers in Boston in a year; I bowed my head and thanked them, though I little believed myself responsible for stirring their sympathies.

  It was the memory of these compliments which I brought before my eyes and held, engraved so deep and with so metallic a sheen, when that night Mr. Sharpe whipped me with the rod: a hand extended, a smiling youth — and then a blow upon my back — a lady with her fan — and then another blow — a child peering with wonder — the visions standing out in negative intaglio as the birch-wand hit and smarted.

  “Now,” said he, laying aside the rod, “prepare my hair.”

  He sitting, I tucked my shirt into my breeches and, trembling, moved to assist him. I untied the silk ribbons in his hair, and released his queue from its bag. It uncoiled sluggishly upon his back, and, with a shudder, I lifted it with my fingers so it might be combed out.

  “You are not so grand now,” he said. He did not face me.

  My back stung; I prepared his hair for retiring.

  Thereafter, Mr. Sharpe hired me out to play only simple dances, the impresario at Faneuil Hall disrelishing my acerbities; and several times I went, habited in my ebon frock-coat, and played country tunes and minuets while the gentry skipped it in a banquet hall. The country dances I found pleasant in the highest degree; the minuets too pretty for my taste, and dry.

  Not infrequently, the others who played the British jigs and hornpipes with me on fiddle or pipe were of my Africk race. We were not permitted to speak much, there being little time for conversation; and so we were reduced to nods and watchful eyes. With each, I wondered, Who hath taught thee these English tunes? Do you ask the same of me? We all have our tales. What music do you hear when you sleep?

  But most asked few questions, being content to play what the dancing-master demanded; and most, like me, found pleasure in the old tunes and their enlarging. And so the many turned, and bowed, and I played, and this was gratification enough.

  Music hath its land of origin; and yet it is also its own country, its own sovereign power, and all may take refuge there, and all, once settled, may claim it as their own, and all may meet there in amity; and these instruments, as surely as instruments of torture, belong to all of us.

  The tumults of the times are oft passed by in records of the private memoirist; for our days consist not of the Senatorial speech and the refracted solar beam cast through heroic cloud, but rather of bread eaten, and ink blotted, and talk of the sermon, and walks along the whiskery avenues in the garden.

  And yet, in the town, in that year, there could be no avoidance of history, for the streets were full of her assaults and confusions. Many nights, bells were rung throughout the city, and we knew that somewhere, a mob had formed; a house was being stoned; on some street corner, malcontents hurled branches through shop windows with cries of “Liberty and Property!” Harvard men were standing amidst the crowds, inciting them to burn, to terrify, to beat, to batter.

  We would hear the steeples ringing. Those who slept with windows on the front of the house would hear a small phalanx of apprentices run past on the cobbles, going to join the fracas, planning riot with verve.

  The next morning, we would hear reports of a milliner’s shop battered for importation, or an affray in a coffeehouse, gentlemen bruised, or a boy in a crowd shot mortally.

  All the while, our gaunt house by the garden descended ever more into penury.

  I am no believer in the fatal power of the stars; I do not hold with those ancient superstitions regarding the spiritual threads strung from the celestial bodies that tug us helpless as the spheres revolve; but nonetheless, I sometimes reflect that that most prodigious conjunction, the Transit of Venus, put a period to any simulation of happiness and ease amongst us. After Venus passed over the face of the sun, a new age began.

  In the summer, we had stood on the shores of the lake, amidst the birch groves, and we had laughed like some new pantheon preparing for Creation. It seemed to me, bewildered as I was, that the world should go on unchanged in its course forever.

  So little did I imagine, as I stood on the warm shores of that lake beside an English lord and heard the crickets sing, that only nine months hence, the Empire should receive its first blows; that I should hear bells rung all night, and cries of “Fire!” and lie awake in my frigid bed unable to warm myself; while outside, in the square near the Customs House, a crowd of hundreds would gather, shouting abuse at the Redcoats who stood on guard there; that this mob, full of false assurances that the King’s soldiers could not fire upon citizens, would yell their spiteful taunts —“Fire! Fire at us, you cowards!” —“We ain’t afraid!” —“Molly-boy! Bugger! Shoot for the heart!”— throwing fragments of ice and trying to knock the bearskin hats from the soldiers’ heads. The crowd would surge forward; surround the Redcoats; one would raise a plank to beat in a soldier’s head — whereupon a private stumbled, felled by thrown wood — and the soldiers, at long last, fired into the crowd.

  Five citizens lay on the ice, their mouths open, their hands filled with slush.

  The next day, two of them were on display, one in an apothecary shop, another lying on a table in a nearby tavern. Bono went to see the latter corpse, paying threepence.

  “That ain’t much,” he said, “to pay to see history.”

  “Worse than war,” saith Seneca, “is the dreadful waiting for war.”

  I have no desire to speak of the next several years, the years that conveyed me from childhood to youth. I take no pleasure in their memory.

  The house was quieter — or, no, not quieter, for there were still shouts up and down the hallways — than what? I do not know. The very wood of the walls seemed darker, more worn and chipped.

  Mr. Gitney was but rarely restored to his previous excitement about the pursuit of the sciences. He still directed philosophic operations, but it was clear to all that he was answerable to Mr. Sharpe, who lived in his house, apparently as a guest, but verily, as a master.

  Mr. Sharpe, we divined, represented a consortium of investors. He had trained in the natural sciences himself, and so was considered fit to act as the under-writers’ representative in the College. Some several of the new investors were merchant relatives of Mr. Gitney’s, the Young Men whom I had seen about the house in earlier days, but whose presence had never amounted to much. Now they came
by not only to dine and partake of the arts — of which there were fewer in evidence all the time — but rather to tour the facilities and pronounce upon progress. Most of the investors were in absentia, gentlemen from Philadelphia or the southern Colonies who corresponded regularly with Mr. Sharpe, but who never saw our Novanglian academy.

  In those years, there was little pleasure of any kind in the house.

  My mother, without her coterie, was often almost as silent as me. Her beauty did not fade, but she did not advertise it so in the passages and chambers. She read romances and slept much of the day. Mr. Sharpe employed her in sewing for the household.

  When we attended the Meeting House of a Sunday — for we went no longer to King’s Chapel, Mr. Sharpe finding the Anglican faith disgustful and near Papistical — my mother wore not the finery of former days, but sober garments of simple linsey-woolsey in sad colors. Seated in the Negro gallery amongst other servants, Indians, and white boys banished for whispering and tricks, she appeared no different, no more peculiar in her circumstances, than any lady’s maid.

  Her manner was languid, and her gestures without that gayety which had so marked her before. Some vital principle in her was compromised. She did not regain it, and, in truth, became almost immobile for some weeks after it was announced that the Chief Justice of the King’s Bench had decreed (as we heard it then, conveyed by the mouth of rumor) that slavery was illegal on English soil; that any American slave there who sued in the British Isles for his or her freedom should be emancipated, for so long as they remained on those shores.

  The day she heard of this determination, my mother walked as if in sleep to the room where Bono and I sate, shining boots.

  “You have heard of the Somerset decision?” she said to Bono. “Freed. All of them, I suppose.”

  He nodded.

  “Had I gone to London . . . and taken you all . . . Had I submitted to Lord Cheldthorpe’s infamous . . .” She waved her hand. “Three years of bondage. Then release.”

  “Don’t say this,” said Bono. “I don’t wish to hear any of this.”

  “Are you sensible of what I’ve done to my son?”

  “Your Highness,” said Bono, jerking a shoe towards me in a gesture of reminder. “Hold. Please.”

  I had stopped brushing a boot, and regarded her fixedly. She came to me and put aside the boot, and held on to me as though I were not a boy of some stature, but an infant, and she rocked me; singing me a crying song, again and again, that she was sorry; she was sorry; she was sorry that she had not —

  But she couldn’t find a verb which could describe with decency what had been demanded of her.

  Bono himself became more quiet in those years. Always circumspect when addressing the white inhabitants of the house, he ceased to speak to them at all unless speech was demanded of him by his master. This was not defiance, but watchfulness. He would say nothing that gave them insight into his intelligences and stratagems. They, of course, did not notice.

  Bono had been trained to read and write, as contributing to his usefulness as Mr. Gitney’s valet. Shortly after the coming of Mr. Sharpe, Bono began to peruse the gazettes and papers when Mr. Gitney was quit of them; and he would tear out certain articles and paste them onto paper, making, after some six months, a sizeable book.

  One day, Mr. Sharpe and I chanced to enter the kitchen while Bono pasted. Mr. Sharpe was sufficiently canny to see that Bono attempted to direct his attention elsewhere, towards the cook, who was laboring over beets. Mr. Sharpe would not be shaken.

  “What are those papers?” asked Mr. Sharpe.

  “I am a fashionable man,” said Bono. “It’s a catalogue of fashions.”

  Mr. Sharpe held out his hand.

  Bono handed over the sheaf. “There ain’t nothing illegal,” he said, “about being devilish handsome.”

  Mr. Sharpe flipped through the pages. I stood behind him, but could not see Bono’s miscellany. I could perceive, however, Mr. Sharpe’s agitation. “For what purpose do you collect these?” he demanded.

  “I’m part of the bo mond. I fancy seeing what your man on the street is wearing.”

  “Do you know where Mr. Gitney is?”

  “I believe he is in the garden, sir.”

  “Let’s go and fetch him.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “To authorize your whipping. You,” he said to me, “go call one of the grooms. Tell him to bring a riding crop and meet us in the garden.”

  Bono walked out of the kitchen, slamming the door behind him. Mr. Sharpe followed, saying, “Three more lashes for the slam.”

  I went to the table where the papers had been left. I lifted up the first, blank, page, and surveyed those beneath, to see, as Bono quoth, what the man on the street was wearing.

  It was a catalogue of horrors. Page after page of Negroes in bridles, strapped to walls, advertisements for shackles, reports of hangings of slaves for theft or insubordination. He had, those many months, been collecting offers for children sold cheap, requests for aid in running down families who had fled their masters. For the first time, I saw masks of iron with metal mouth-bits for the slave to suck to enforce absolute silence. I saw razored necklaces, collars of spikes that supported the head. I saw women chained in coffles, bent over on the wharves.

  Mr. Gitney burned Bono’s fashion catalogue an hour later.

  “Let us rid ourselves,” he said, “of this noisome object.”

  But I could not rid myself of it. It was the common property of us all.

  That night, after I had weighed my fæces and recorded their mass in the book which I had been given for that purpose, I paused; I set down the chamber-pot and replaced the lid.

  I was sensible of a growing revolt of the spirit that suffused the whole of my frame, which would no longer be stifled or mollified. I saw again the instruments of torture before me.

  I proceeded along the passage to my mother’s chamber. She and one of the maids sat before the fire, sewing. She asked me what had brought me there at so unseasonable an hour. In response, I merely passed to her my record book, which with quizzical countenance, she turned through. Coming to the last page and finding it unremarkable, she looked at me for explanation.

  I could not speak; and so merely shook my head. I shook it slowly and with finality.

  She put a thread in her mouth and wet it with her lips. “Then go speak to him,” she said. “For what little good it will do you.”

  I went out upon the landing. I went down the stairs. I sought out Mr. Gitney. I found him in the experimental chambers, burning hair.

  “Sir,” I said, “I am delivering my ingestion book.”

  He indicated that I should put it down on the table. He was absorbed in his calculations. “Is it full?” he said. “The book? That seems quick.”

  I did not answer.

  He looked up, saw my face, and ceased his experiment. He drew the book to him across the slats of the table. He flipped through. “It is nearly half empty,” he said.

  I did not move. He watched me. He frowned, and he arranged his coat-tails around his thighs.

  I could not look at him, so I cast my eyes down; but I shook my head as I had for my mother in clear refusal.

  “That is not for you to say,” he explained.

  For a long time I revolved what I should next say. At long last, I hit upon, “Why are you doing this to me?”

  “It is not to you, Octavian. It is for you.”

  “Sir —”

  “We have noted that your attention lags. Your ability to comprehend Greek and Latin seems to have declined over the course of the last two years.”

  “I am given only fragments to read.”

  “Reading is but reading, Octavian. We are disappointed in you.”

  Our business was done. I wished heartily to withdraw. (O turncoat heart, which in retirement speaks of great deeds, and then in the fray, whimpers for retreat and quiet!) Yearning for the door behind me, the passage, the darkness of my chamber and
the assurances of Bono, I began almost to weep; but instead asked, voice husky with tears, “Why can I not study with Dr. Trefusis?”

  “The investors have determined that he skewed the experimental results by introducing incentives. The material he had you study was deemed impractical.”

  “Who are the investors?”

  “This is not relevant.”

  He waited for me to take my leave. I did not. I stood in that closet, before the books recording my defecation and the engraving of my mother naked, and I did not step from that space.

  I said, “You wish me to fail.”

  “Octavian.”

  I did not move.

  He said, “I wish no such thing. I have watched over your education with affection and benevolence.” He leaned back in his chair. “In the formulary of Diocles the Physician, we are told that in the selfsame toad there are two livers — one poisonous, and one which brings instant health. We might consider: Is not this like unto —”

  “Why does Mr. Sharpe interfere with my education?”

  “He does no such thing.”

  I thought of the fragments he taught me and the whippings. I nodded without words; I would not stop; I could not while the lie still prospered.

  “Octavian, I dislike this impertinence. Mr. Sharpe is impartial. He wishes neither your failure nor your success. That is the nature of an experiment. He is making a rational inquiry into your capacities.”

  “He wishes me to fail.”

  “That would counter the dictates of rationality.”

  “In Bono’s catalogue, I saw devices . . . the ones which hobble the legs . . . so flight is impossible. . . .”

  “I wish you had not seen that.”

  We stared at each other in the brown evening. Mr. Gitney could not hold my gaze. He looked away. “I could wish,” he said, “that Mr. Sharpe had not instituted these regulations respecting your learning. I am sensible they do seem . . .”