Washington and Caesar Read Free

brush. He spooked your horse. And I hit him with my club, but you were moving away. Indeed, I took him. Since I already had my captive, I thought I would kill you. I looked down the barrel and pulled the trigger, and the pan flashed, and no shot came, and still you rode. Then I looked down at the lock, as one does…you know?”
    Washington nodded, a brother in the fraternity of men frustrated by the vagaries of flintlocks.
    “When I had the priming back in, you were gone.”
    The old man was done before Nicholson, and he looked at Washington and smiled. He pointed to a young man in an old French coat.
    “It happens often to Gray Coat here when he hunts deer, but not to me.”
    Most of the warriors laughed, although the one man looked sour.
    “I should have ignored the boy, although he made a good slave, for a while. My mother adopted him, and he was with us until the Pennsylvania men made us send him away.”
    Washington smiled, but he had rather the look of Gray Coat the moment before. The old man raised his hand, and smiled a feral smile.
    “I should have killed him and taken you. I still wonder what kind of a slave you would have made.”
    Mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, November 6, 1773
    “You clap on to that line and haul, laddie. That’s it. Handsomely now, you lot. Pull. Pull, you black bastards. Belay there, King. Right.” High overhead the newly fishedspar rose into the dawn light and was seated home against the mast. The black men on the deck hauled and sweated, but the sailors sweated just as hard.
    The squall had hit them inside the capes, laying the vessel on her beam-ends, stripping off every scrap of sail and cracking the fore-topsail yard. The sailor called King, a free black, had cut the broken yard away from the rigging it threatened to shred, standing on the canted deck with the ropes’ ends pounding him like a dozen fiendish whips.
    The ship’s master, Gibson, had shipped a small cargo of West Indies blacks to augment the rum and molasses in the hold. They were skilled men: two bricklayers, a carpenter, a huntsman, and a gunsmith, all likely to fetch first-rate prices among the Virginia gentry. In the meantime, they could haul ropes in an emergency.
    High above them, King waved at the captain and leaned out, grabbing a stay and sliding for the deck. Something King saw at the last moment of his slide halted him, and he ran his eyes over the group standing in the waist of the ship, still holding the line that had raised the yard. One young man had scars over his eyes, hard ridges that told a story, if the watcher knew what to read. King wandered over, acknowledging the praise of his shipmates and some good-natured abuse. He turned to the man with the scars, a wave of homesickness hitting his breast and slowing his breath.
    “Hello, cousin.”
    The man’s eyes widened for a moment, then his white teeth flashed in an enormous smile.
    “Greetings, older cousin.”
    The man looked young, young to have left home with the scars of a warrior and already have a skill worth selling in America. His face was not yet hard or closed as the slaves’ too often were.
    “I honor your courage in the storm, older cousin.” Nicelyphrased. King smiled himself, but turned away, headed for his hammock. It didn’t do to associate too much with slaves, at least where white men could see you. It gave them ideas.
    King returned topside at the changing of the watch, to see the familiar low Virginia shore clear to the southwest. The Chesapeake had become confused in his memories with Africa, where great rivers ran deep into the woods, and he thought of Virginia as home, the place where he had a wife and a family. He stood by the heads watching the shore for a moment, and then moved into the waist. The sails were set and, barring a disaster, wouldn’t need to be touched until the turn of the tide. Until a crisis came, sailoring was an easy life, and King liked a crisis here and there. They made good stories.
    The young one