The Kingdom on the Waves Page 7

“She was perhaps fourteen when she sang them for me,” he said, his voice unsteady. “Her voice was like a child’s. In her eyes . . . I saw reflections . . .”

  He held the candle close to the music again. “Hum it,” he said. “I have been waiting so long. Hum the tunes.”

  I did not stop to think why he did not hum the music himself; I merely leaned close and picked out a few notes, murmuring them.

  “Quietly,” cautioned Mr. 13-04.

  I had only murmured a few more when the inner door opened, and a Redcoat in his shirt, with his jacket hung about his shoulders, demanded, “We’re sleeping.”

  The music-master explained to me, “My landlord has let out my room to soldiers.”

  “Who rise at dawn,” said the soldier. “With the first light.”

  “Begging your pardon, sir,” said the music-master. “We did not wish to disturb your tranquility.”

  “He’s humming,” said the soldier.

  “He is singing me the songs his mother sang.”

  “He the one, then?” said the soldier. “With the mother?”

  “Indeed,” said the music-master.

  The soldier did not return to his bed, but swore lazily and sat down with his back against the doorframe, observing us.

  I turned back to the music. While the soldier and Mr. 13-04 conversed quietly of small things — cheese eaten which had to be replaced — I surveyed the pieces. Most were songs for one voice — though perhaps in their native land, they would have been sung by many. In a few, she had indicated some harmony, and in one, counterpoint. I could not thank Providence sufficiently for the trove here bestowed upon me. I sang a few more notes, giddy with anticipation, until I came upon a smudged symbol which I did not recognize.

  I turned to the music-master. “What is this, sir?” I asked him.

  He looked at me with expectation. “Yes?” said he.

  “I cannot descry all of your marks,” I explained.

  He looked at me with some confusion; he examined the wall. “That,” he said, “yes, that symbol. She made, do you recall, a scratched noise — a noise in her throat?”

  I regarded him with bewilderment.

  “It brought the note . . .” He did not finish.

  I awaited explanation.

  “You recall,” he urged.

  Ignorant of his meaning, I hesitated.

  “This is why my desire has been so great for you to see these sheets,” he said. “You shall be able to interpret for me all of these marks . . . recalling the songs.” He smiled at me; and it was a smile of slowly growing desperation. “I could not record what she sang; there was no notation for it, all the peculiar . . .” He moved his hand fishily in the air, unable to describe what he imagined. “It was not . . . there were not symbols enough to depict what she sang. The tuning was too alien in its accents . . . so deliciously strange . . . and there was no key as I could understand it to many of the songs. So I made marks . . . but later . . . I could not recall what they signified. There were so many marks . . . ambiguously drawn. . . . And later, when I asked her, she would deny all knowledge of the music. . . . So you, knowing the songs, may tell me . . . what . . .”

  He ceased speaking.

  “She never,” I said, and hesitated. “Sir, she never sang these songs to me, in my memory. I was an infant. You are the only one who heard them.”

  Stricken, he took in the pages on the wall, their cryptic lines drawn to depict oscillations in the voice, cries and dips lost to both of us. “You must recall,” he demanded. “Perhaps by your bedside? She . . . ?”

  “Sirs,” came a cry from the other room, “we are sleeping.”

  “They’re sleeping,” said the soldier crouched by the door.

  Ardently, I believed that could I but read these tunes, I would hear her again. Her voice should speak, and I have proof of lullaby and tenderness.

  With fervent desperation, I scanned them, seeking one firm melody; only too sensible that my mother’s voice inhered in these pieces, strung between these notes, frayed to the point of snapping — could I only find the line of it, and grasp it — her mouth, her throat, her lungs, her teeth, her tongue — all of these frozen in concert in the crude lines before me —

  Vainly, I cast my eye over the sheets; but like the first, I saw that they were rife with equivocations and parentheses, notes that Mr. 13-04 had made in ignorance, attempting to capture turns of melody and vocal tricks that could not be rendered. One song was written clearly in harmony, runs of thirds; but she had also beat a rhythm which he had assayed to reproduce, and this was nothing but scratchings and clumsy scribblings, revisions he had not ever returned to review and apply methodically. Many were scarcely legible. The words of none had been set down with care.

  One of the soldiers called, “Did you tell the fiddler, ’twas us nimmed his cheese?”

  “Aye,” said the soldier leaning against the door, and to Mr. 13-04: “We’ll buy one for you new.”

  From the dark, a voice explained, “We et rarebit.”

  With frantic eye, I sought my cradle-songs, the songs of comfort she might sing for me again, dandling me in her arms. My gaze leaped from bleary note to blotted slur, none yielding music, none quitting me of clamor.

  “Does any of you have a powder tester?” asked one of the soldiers. “I’ll need one tomorrow in the forenoon.”

  “Hughes has one. The handle’s off, though. Almost. So wear a mitt.”

  I could not apply myself fully with their speaking; I lifted my hands to my ears and pressed my fingers in.

  “Does any of you have a mitt?” the soldier asked.

  I could not block their chatter; all awake, now, as they were (“Robbins burnt his thumb purple on Hughes’s gadget”); and sobbing once, I pressed my hands to the paper — seeking in these scraps, some memory that might have snagged — as strung therein were all the secrets of my childhood erased, that life I might have lived: ceremonies and dances, what women wailed for in the marketplace, the sweep of ancient grasses; and I fancied that if they would simply let me sing, I would hear the voices of my forebears; I would hear their tales, which they wished still to tell me; I would smell the hides of beasts of burden, twitching from the flies; taste the savors of my family’s confections; and I might see the lips of those who had sung these songs to my mother in her infancy: a grandfather, his hair an unimagined white; a grandmother, sitting in a grove and laughing. I considered, scarcely daring to entertain the prospect, a father might hold me swaddled in his arms, and raise me to his sister’s lips.

  “‘If I forget thee,’” she had hissed to her invisible homeland, “‘if I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I prefer not my nation to my chief joy. . . .’”

  But when I looked upon the music, it did not sing for me; my tongue did not move; for it was not my past. It signified nothing. These tunes were silent. I knew only the graces and mordents of Europe.

  “It is all lost,” said Mr. 13-04. “Is it not?”

  I turned to him. “Most,” I said. And added, at long last, “Sir.”

  “I shall make you copies.”

  I nodded; knowing that the copies would be even further from these scribbled originals which hung upon the wall.

  The soldiers, sensible, perhaps, of my anguish, did not speak.

  “I shall walk you to your dwelling,” said Mr. 13-04.

  “You needn’t, sir,” said I, desiring no conversation. “I do not wish to trouble you.”

  “It is after the curfew. A Negro will be detained by the watch,” he said.

  He spake the truth. I thanked him and bowed my assent. We took our leave of the soldiers, who with some warmth indicated the pleasure they had in making my acquaintance, so much having been recounted about myself and my mother in previous months.

  Mr. 13-04 and I made our way through the darksome streets. At one moment he could not restrain himself from declaring, “I loved her”; which news could not but inspire weariness and i
ndifference.

  He never wrote out fair copies of these jottings for me, fugitive as were the marks and impossible of interpretation. I never returned to the rooms on Mount Whoredom — or did walk by the door, one afternoon, but could not bring myself to knock and be once again confronted by the vaguaries of those imperfect staves, those ballads without text.

  I was sensible even that night of the folly of my expectations — that notes on a page might restore her voice to me. What is the voice, I meditated, but an expulsion of air, a few vapors scented with the curdled decoctions of the stomach, vegetables mulching and pulverized beef? What is a song, but an instant evaporation?

  It is as futile to seek the past there as in a refuse of dishes encircling a table, each with its own crust of gravy, its own tale of bone and crackling. One might as well weep over Mrs. Platt’s dry orts, thinking they might restore what was lost, what had been swallowed, all that had, in times of feasting, been cut away and devoured.

  Conformable to Mr. Turner’s announcement, we were engaged in rehearsing the airs and curtain-tunes for the satire upon the siege called The Blockade of Boston, penned by Major-General Burgoyne, famous for a notorious dandy and foppish blade, which play the officers themselves would present in Faneuil Hall come the end of October; the suite of music for this piece being supplied by the Corps of Engineers’ sapper-composer, whose previous efforts in the concert hall had met with such prodigious success, his fame, as it were, tunneling so broad a swath with so assiduous an effort through the dross of obscurity, and propped now securely against all assaults, that no detonation of critic or carper could knock him into disarray.

  We played through his overture and sighing airs, his rowdy hornpipes for inebriate barbers-general; and yet, there were days when every scene which opened itself to our view as we walked about the streets seemed a coarse satire upon the siege. ’Twas not acted upon a stage, but upon the Common, upon Marlborough Street. We played comical songs for lieutenants regarding bombardment, and then issued forth to discover that, on Frog Lane, cannonballs and shells lobbed from Roxbury had tackled wooden walls and burst them through, or plowed strips in the slates of a roof, and citizens stood about, looking wonderingly at the progress of shot through wood.

  These are such sights as greet the view of those who suffer siege in cities: the anxiety of violence mingled with the antics of incongruity.

  I saw military washerwomen dressed in fine silk waistcoats for men, brocaded with water-stains and grime. I saw a child dead of the pox buried in a pie-cabinet. Passing through Cornhill Street alone on a misty morning, I heard a voice calling out commands in the square, with none to obey. There was no ghostly regiment, responded to those orders; just the gray stone, the blue mist, and an officer alone, hanger raised, bawling formations.

  I saw Old North Meeting House pulled down for fuel. I saw Old South Meeting House stripped of its furniture and transformed into a riding-school for the cavalry so as to chagrin the rebels, who had oft let loose their rhetoric there; now gravel was strewn over its floor, the pews hauled out to make pig-troughs; and dragoons rode fierce circuits through the sanctuary, roused on by an officer screaming in the pulpit while ladies in the balcony whisked themselves with fans.

  I saw men whipped for complaint or desertion; I saw men hanged, their bodies freshly at a dangle.

  When it was ordered that the soldiers should bathe in salt-water twice daily to fend off disease, I saw a regiment walk into the sea at dawn.

  The ocean was ruddy, as were they, and some passed into the sea from the shingle, and others rose from the sea and waded to shore. They came forth dripping, shivering, naked, and made for the land, lit by the first sun, as if the Creator had determined to make a new race of men from the foam, this one perfected, gentle, and dandled by light.

  Believing the siege of long continuance, and impatient of news, I wished greatly for another interview with fellow members of my race, that we might discuss how best to secure our indefeasible rights, so cruelly taken from us. I was soon to receive both interview and news.

  One night I played at a ball held for privates, petty officers, and their camp followers in a factory once devoted to the rendering of fish-oil. The hall was dark and briny, the couples smeared with soot and joy. A great vat was overturned, and our little band of music stood upon it as upon a stage, our instruments accompanied by the unison tread of the company assembled.

  From that vantage, the line-dances of these men who might tomorrow march in rows into battle had a look of impossible complexity: ranked arms interwoven, circles formed and broken, bodies filing in curious design, confrontations met and swept aside. And those of us who stood atop the fish-tub received the jolts of their ecstatic rhythm through our feet — and we played the more wildly for the dancing of these men beneath us — filling the solemnity of their hours of watch and sally with last dances, last embraces, a final chance, mayhap, to feel the world spinning beneath them before it stopped and swallowed them whole.

  There being a call for a halt to the music, so that a collation might be laid out and eaten, my fellows and I retired from our instruments and sat upon our tub, articulating our tired fingers.

  That we might become better acquainted, I inquired of Sip whether his children were as musical as he; for he was prodigiously knowledgeable, acquainted with the tunes of five nations.

  He replied six nations, for he knew a China tune, brought back by the Jesuits from the palace at Peking, which lilting melody he then fiddled for me; that song, he explained proudly, bringing his national tally up to six. He ate some bread, and said, “My girls, they do like to dance. Little one, Shirley, she going to dance like a courtier when she’s grown. The big one, she wants the graces.” Wreathed in the smiles of paternity, he related, “She mainly buffet Shirley around in circles and step on her toes like a rummy dragoon.”

  I inquired if he played for them, which he answered gratefully that he did, he had that pleasure; I inquired whether he knew any tunes of Africa, and he said, no, saving a few his grandfather tried to remember; and I inquired whether he might play them for me; and thus we would have continued, had not the two other members of our little band — who were white, and of the 64th — approached us and requested the honor of speaking to us outside the hall.

  At the severity of their countenances, I felt a chill.

  Sip excused us, saying, “Sirs, we is enjoying some bread.”

  With looks of veiled significance, our two white companions bade us follow.

  Follow we did, anticipating some disaster. Sip and I exchanged glances of no little concern. We made our way out the door.

  After such an eve, the crush and dance, utterly awesome was the silence of streets abandoned by all.

  Our breath issued forth in steam. We stood, abeyant, ready to receive what shock fate should administer.

  The bassoonist, a man of sallow and heavy cast, said, “You carry tales.”

  Both Sip and I were silent, knowing we both had conveyed rumors to our fellows in the Negro work-parties. I was fetched up by terror, and surveyed the street for escape, did this encounter become a beating.

  “I says a thing,” the bassoonist accused softly, “and you report it to others of your race.”

  “We heard —” said the flautist.

  “We hear a great many things,” said the bassoonist.

  “Sirs,” said Sip, in tones confident of his lie, “sirs, I know not what you’s aiming at.”

  The two looked at each other, as if embarking on some dangerous course; and the bassoonist said, “We hear news from the South, might be of interest.”

  “To the others,” said the flute.

  “If you wish to repeat it.”

  The flute nodded, and leaning toward us with look of sharp conspiracy, said, “Lord Dunmore.”

  “As is Governor of Virginia,” explained the bassoon.

  “He’s writ a letter says he’s been hounded from his own palace by the rebels.”

  “Fled.” />
  “Onto a ship. They chased him off the shore. And here’s this: He threats manumission for all loyal slaves.”

  “He don’t dare land. He’s trapped out in some bay. The entire Virginia Colony —”

  “It’s in a monstrous uproar.”

  “Chaos.”

  “Rebels running through the streets of the capital.”

  “So he says he’ll free whosoever joins him. I says, says I, if he issues that decree, every Virginian of property is going to throw in against the King’s right, see? Every Virginian of property. They’ll enlist in the militia.”

  “But we says to each other, Them Negro violinists in the orchestra should know. Because if Lord Dunmore frees them in Virginia, General Howe might too, up this way.”

  “A body can’t play a symphony next to a man, without compassionating with his woes.”

  “As soon as ever we heard word, we says, We’ll tell them violinists.”

  The bassoonist asked us, “Where do you boys reckon the Negroes will put their loyalty?”

  I was much distracted at this news; I knew not what to say, for my thoughts were engaged wholly in considering this story and the name of Dunmore, which appellation was not unfamiliar to my ears.

  Sip did not answer their question; saying only, blankly, “I’s already a free man.”

  At some length, I responded, “If you are asked, you may relate that most of our numbers shall swear fealty to whoever offers emancipation with the greatest celerity.”

  “The rebels, they don’t want you. You heard? They don’t.”

  Said I, “You shall find, sir, that whoever takes such a measure and releases us from bondage will be amply rewarded with the most zealous of followers.”

  The men appeared anxious; Sip was not wholly pleased with my frankness and probity. The white men nodded, and we peered about in the dark and the cold, the white men still nodding; and then, there being nothing more to discuss, returned within to play more dances for the troops.

  We played for an hour; but as may be imagined, my faculties were not wholly trained upon my part, but rather in reflection upon what I had heard; for I had been informed, during my late period of incarceration, that Pro Bono was like to have fled to Dunmore’s palace, and I pictured him now, standing upon the prow of a ship, serving, perhaps, as valet to the Royal Governor of Virginia.