Counternarratives Read Online Free PDF Page B

her native
Akan
. Then her eyes rolled back in her head and she expired. Lacy uttered a
benediction in that same language, and thereafter presented the infant to her
master, Mr. Wantone, as was the custom in those parts. When he saw the
copper-skinned newborn, eyes blazing, upon whom the darkness of Africa had not
completely left its indelible stamp, the master, adequately versed in the
Scriptures, promptly named him Zion, which in Hebrew means “sun.”
    Knowing his servant not to have been married or even betrothed at the
time of the child’s birth, Wantone rightly feared the sanctions laid down by Puritan
and colonial law, which in the case of illegitimate paternity included whippings,
fines rendered against the mother of the child, its father, and quite probably the
master, be he same or otherwise. Wantone also might have to put in an appearance
before the General Court. Though not a gentleman by birth (he was of yeoman stock
and self-read in the classics), Wantone had fought admirably among his fellows in
King George’s War and had by dint of many years’ toil built up an excellent estate.
Moreover, he subscribed unwaveringly to the Congregational Church. And, on all these
accounts, he declined to have his reputation or standing in the slightest besmirched
by such a scandal. He had therefore conspired to conceal Mary’s condition for the
full length of her term by keeping her indoors as much as possible and forbidding
her to venture out near the local roads, where she might be spied by neighbors or
passersby. He also forbade his servants and children to speak of the matter, lest
their gossip betray him. Toward neither plan did he meet with rebellion; so it is
said that one’s sense of the law, like one’s concept of morality, originates in the
home. The child’s father, whose name the taciturn girl had refused to speak, Wantone
identified as Zephyr, a sly black-Abenaki horsebreaker in the service of his
neighbor, Josiah Shapely. Among the members of his own household, however, he
himself was not entirely above suspicion, especially given the child’s complexion.
In any case, Zion would, according to plan, officially be deemed a
foundling
.
    Wantone’s wife,
née
Comfort and descended from an
unbroken line of Berkshire Puritans who had arrived in the Bay Colony not long after
the Mayflower, had for several years been growing ever more austere in her faith,
and to the achievement of a glacial purity of relations. As a result she abhorred
all spiritual and fleshly transgressions, especially bastardy, in which the two were
so visibly commingled. Upon learning of the infant’s imminent entry into the sphere
of her family’s existence, she ordered that it be kept out of her sight altogether.
    Music
    W hen Lacy had first
passed the infant Zion to her master for inspection, the child began to cry
uncontrollably. Wantone order him to be placed in a small wooden crib on the second
floor of the house above the buttery: thereby he might learn peace. This weeping,
which soon became a kind of keening, persisted for several weeks without relent.
Meanwhile Wantone ordered his slaves Jubal, a native-born Negro who tended his
livestock, and Axum, a young mulatto of New Hampshire origin who served as his
handyman, to bury the deceased slave girl Mary near the edge of his south grazing
fields. At her interment, the master recited over the grave a few lines from the Old
Testament, and wept.
    Lacy was nearing middle age, yet this chain of events soon bound her
into assuming the role of the child’s mother. Otherwise she was engaged in
innumerable chores about the house or attending to her mistress, Mrs. Wantone, who
did not like ever to be kept waiting. Lacy had not seen her own child since shortly
after his sixth birthday nearly fifteen years before, because her previous master,
then ill with cancer and disposing of his Boston estate, had sold the boy north to a
merchant in Newbury, and