Washington and Caesar Read Online Free PDF

when they saw him and his escort. None were chained. Most of the men had shirts and trousers, most of the women had a shift and petticoats, and several, like Queeny, sported jackets or gowns. She had a jacket of India cotton, far better than anything he had seen on a Negro in the Indies, but she was probably the queen, mistress to the master. She was old to be a queen, he thought, but her shape was fine and her face good.
    The woman neither looked at him nor spoke to him, but simply walked along, nodding to other slaves, and once dropping a curtsy to a white woman, who smiled at her as they passed.
    “Queeny, dear. Is this a new boy?”
    “Yeas, Miz Bailey.”
    The white woman examined Cese with a careful eye. She noted the narrow rows of scars over his eyes.
    “He looks African, Queeny.”
    “I says the same to yo husban, Miz Bailey.”
    “The colonel may not like it. Still, the boy’s pretty enough. Run over to the well and back, boy.”
    Cese was aware that he had been addressed, but the words were too fast, the accent too different. He smiled to show willing, and looked at Queeny.
    “You run. Go to the well and come back.”
    He set his bundle down and took a deep breath before hurling himself forward. The two women watched as his long legs flashed faster, as he leaned his weight into a curve around the well and pulled himself straight with the grace of a cat. Then he dashed past them, slowed, and came back, making a small bow to Mrs. Bailey as he did so. When he took up his bundle, there was a faint line of sweat on his upper lip, but his breathing was deep and even.
    Mrs. Bailey laughed aloud.
    “He is splendid, is he not? He runs like a god. Oh Queeny, teach him quickly. The Colonel will make a fortune on those legs.”
    “Yes’m.”
    Queeny curtsied again and moved off toward her hut. Her position allowed her half of a hut that typically housed a family of six, or up to eight men. She shared it with another woman, the house seamstress, Nelly. Nelly would be up at the big house at this hour, sewing her tiny meticulous stitches under the eyes of the colonel’s wife and treating her disorders.
    “You the master’s queen? Is that why you are called Queeny?”
    She smiled at the thought that the colonel would have a queen at all, although most plantations did. Some owners used their women as a harem; others took a preference for one woman and that made her queen, often hated by the master’s wife but powerful in her own way. The colonel didn’t seem to care for dark women.
    “No queen here, boy. Master don’t chase us. Mr. Bailey, neither.”
    Cese nodded, thoughtfully. One of the older men was sitting on the step of his hut, smoking a black pipe. Children, naked or in shifts according to their age, dashed along the central street of the slave quarter. Queeny ducked to enter the one room of her hut, but he stayed in the doorway,looking around him. None of the slaves he could see were Yoruba, like him. Most were southerners or pagan BaKongo from the interior, or mixes from different tribes. It had been the same in the Indies.
    “Where are the gates?”
    “No gates.”
    “You get locked in at night, don’t you?”
    “No.”
    “Why don’t you run, sister? Are you all cowardly BaKongo, too stupid to escape?”
    She glared at him from the darkness of her hut.
    “You’ll learn, African boy. Shut your mouth now, and listen to me. It is my job to teach you the talk, and I will. I’ll teach you more than that, if you let me. There are dogs, there’s militia, there’s the hunt, all out for any Negro that thinks to run. There is ways to run, hear me? But you don’ know them and you better learn. Now get in here this instant. I want to teach you to speak and to stay alive.”
    He ducked his head and entered, his thoughts still outside. Most of the slaves he could see were Ebo and Luo, ignorant southern BaKongo from the interior who were prey to superstition, carried inferior weapons—pliant. Luo women