New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [34]
After I had been talking to him and drinking rum for a while, I noticed a girl of about my own age come into the house. She sat quietly in the corner near where the old man was asleep, and nobody seemed to pay heed to her. But I glanced at her several times, and wondered if she’d noticed me. Finally, she turned her head and looked right at me. And when she did I saw that her eyes seemed to be laughing, and her smile was warm.
I was about to go over to her, when I felt Cudjo’s hand grip my arm.
“You’d best leave that girl alone,” he said quietly.
“Why’s that?” I asked. “Is she your woman?”
“No,” he answered.
“You’re her father?”
“No.” He shook his head. “I own her. She is my slave.”
At first I didn’t believe him. I did not know that a black man could have a slave. And it seemed strange to me that a man whose own father had obtained his freedom would own a slave himself. But it was so.
“You’re looking for a woman, young man?” Cudjo then asked me, and I said I was. “You ever have a lady friend before?” he inquired, and I said I had not.
“Wait here a while,” he told me, and he went out.
By and by he returned with a young woman. She was somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years old, I guessed. She was almost as tall as I was, and her slow, easy way of walking seemed to say that, however other folks might feel, she was comfortable with the world. She came over to the bench where I was and sat down beside me and asked me my name. We chatted a while and drank together. Then she glanced over at Cudjo and gave him a small nod.
“Why don’t you come with me, honey,” she said.
So I left with her. As we went out, Cudjo smiled at me and said, “You’re going to be all right.”
And I became a man that night.
In the years that followed I became friendly with a number of slave women in the town. Several times the Boss said to me that one of the meinheers was complaining his slave girl was with child and that it was my doing. Some of his neighbors said the Boss should send me to work on a farm out of town. But he never did so.
It was always my aim to please both the Boss and the Mistress equally. But sometimes it was not so easy, on account of them not always agreeing between themselves.
For instance, the Mistress did not always like the Boss’s friends. The first she took a dislike to was Meinheer Philipse. You’d have thought she would have liked him, because he was Dutch, and his wife and the Mistress had always been close. They were rich, too. But the Mistress said Meinheer Philipse was getting too English for her liking, and forgetting he was Dutch. The Boss seemed to like him well enough, though.
The second came into our lives the following way.
The Boss loved to be on the water. He was always looking for an excuse. Sometimes he would take the family out to some place in a boat. One time we went to the little island just off the tip of Manhattan, that they called Nut Island, with a big basket of food and drink, and passed the whole afternoon there. Another time we went further across the harbor, to the place they call Oyster Island.
One day the Boss said that he was going to a place out on the long island, and that Jan and I were to accompany him.
We set out from the dock and went up the East River. When we came to where the river divides and we entered the channel that leads eastward, the waters began to churn and rush so violently that I was full of fear. Even Jan looked pale, though he didn’t want to show it. But the Boss just laughed and said: “This is Hell Gate, boys. Don’t be scared.”
Once we passed through, the waters grew calm, and after a while he turned to me and said: “This is the Sound, Quash. On this side,” he pointed to the left, “the coast runs all the way up Connecticut and Massachusetts. On that side,” and he pointed to the right, “Long Island runs out for a hundred miles. Now are you glad you came?”
For that was the most beautiful place I ever saw in my life.