The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation (Volume 2): Part VI

An early and unremitting Attention to the Government of the SLAVES may, I hope, counteract this dangerous Attempt.

He that would triumph over the petty trickery of fate must indite history at its source.

We have heard that he threatened a general manumission of the slaves and to burn Williamsburg in one great conflagration; and that many Negroes were fled to him, and that he sent out raids through all the rivers and their convolutions to seize upon chicken, duck, and beef for his Marines, and to punish those would not swear loyalty to the King.

Serjeant Clippinger gave an insalubrious smile.

So terrified was I that some irregularity would interfere with enlistment—some unforeseen objection—I perhaps answered with too great an exactitude, too punctilious a range of detail—desperate for approbation.

I have spent the afternoon in getting matters settled; being presented to the others of my mess, awaiting judgments upon my situation by sundry officers, and seeking out the Assistant to the Quartermaster to obtain my blanket, rucksack, and such other accoutrements as we are required to purchase on account.

I cannot suppress my rejoicing, and grin full on at these soldiers; who some, regard me in puzzlement; others, in scorn at my excitement; and yet several have returned my idiot jackanapes smile, as if to say, “I know, my friend....I know.”

The rebels hath marched upon us here, spewing their calumnies and declaring their hatred for Lord Dunmore, our liberator, and for this Ethiopian Regiment; but they have been halted by our troops in the swamps below this place, where they remain, facing our stockades.

Many related the stories not simply of antique times, but of their flight from their owners, which seems a ritual of our Regiment, the telling of these tales, of which each of us has one to relate; and among the auditors, there was much laughter at the ingenuity of contrivance, the boldness of deceit, and the gullibility of white hauteur.

And so he dug, and his dear wife was laid upon her stomach and whipped; and as, three weeks later, he dug another trench, this one in which to lay the stillborn child, he knew they would run; that death itself was not terrible; and a month after that, they had lit out for Lord Dunmore’s flotilla at Hampton.

This narrative was greeted with tears and sung expostulations, prayers and awful wailing; and the women began a song, which transfixed me not in small part because the damsel, with modest blushes, chanted with the chorus, and in the midst of it, sang a solo.

I am ashamed at my words before they scape the teeth; I clutch my trencher on my knees; I discover myself practicing all the arts of concealment which I learned in my years of service, when I little wished notice from Mr. Sharpe.

The men now call him Slant, which would be wounding, were it not exclaimed with such an achievement in the “Liberty” that the “Slant” might be righted with balance and equanimity.

While we have been laboring here, raising fortifications around Norfolk, against the rebels break through our lines and assault us, there are daily small actions and sorties in the swamps to the south: houses burned, raids on entrenchments, mortar shelling, a few dead from snipers or volleys from our stockade.

I did not know whither we headed, but I fain would be there, be there—wheresoever there was—desired to be already engaged in confrontation, the terror full and present before me rather than measured out in paces of a foot and an inch.

Within, the stockade was cramped, some five hundred men gathered in a small and incommodious yard between tents.

Many shunned him; a few nodded, and handed him their weapons; he rubbed the unguent on the stock and muzzle, all the while whispering to the firearm coaxingly in some unknown tongue.

I was full of misery at my lie, but I found I could not disabuse him of it—I could conjure no words sufficient.

We were arranged into ranks six soldiers wide; then told to stand without motion until ordered to march, a column of some five hundred men coiled in the belly of the fort, crammed phalanx to phalanx.

The landscape was thus: A bridge stood before us, on the other side of which lay a small island with several houses standing, and several more burnt to heaps; and beyond that, a morass, forded by a causeway; and beyond that, just visible in the purple gloaming, the entrenchments of the enemy.

There was little sign of activity in the village behind the rebel lines, for it was hardly in their interest to appear above their trenches and petty escarpments while the guns were trained upon them.

They marched in time inexorably toward the enemy.

We know not what wrong he might have admitted to the Court-Martial that must have tried him. We know merely what disasters his mendacity occasioned.

When we are permitted to walk the decks of our ship, either for exercise or in the commission of our watch duties, even these tedious rounds are a welcome shift from the lower deck, which is dark and noisome.

We hear that some spake against it and said it was too great an outrage, but the rebels have replied in their broadsheets and papers that it is punishment condign that the damned Tory dogs shall be shackled to the black cattle they consorted with.

He was greatly solicitous of my welfare following the battle, and asked me many sharp questions regarding it; which queries it was not in my power at first to answer.

The Dunmore is a grand ship, not the largest, but renovated for display of its wealth and puissance; and it looked prodigiously fine in the evening, the gilding still catching the last light, the decks lined with Ethiopians of His Lordship’s Company in livery, standing by cressets, facing out implacably at the shore—more impassive in their features than the tritons and dolphins which disported themselves in silver foam upon stern and stem.

The Dunmore is a grand ship, not the largest, but renovated for display of its wealth and puissance; and it looked prodigiously fine in the evening, the gilding still catching the last light, the decks lined with Ethiopians of His Lordship’s Company in livery, standing by cressets, facing out implacably at the shore—more impassive in their features than the tritons and dolphins which disported themselves in silver foam upon stern and stem.

“Gentlemen, if the parties were to proceed upon the second action with the expedition with which they have undertaken the first, notwithstanding the difficulties therein, should we not find that object achieved which cannot but redound to the greater glory of such actants as might disculpate us in even the ungrateful eye of the enemy, rather than submitting us to the excoriations of the same?"

The first bespeaks readiness, gentlemen; the second, foolhardiness. While the former exhibits all the virtues of valor; the latter suggests a profligacy of force; and it should be a terrible issue should waste follow sacrifice.

Dr. Trefusis expatiated at somewhat galling length upon my achievements; which accolades Lord Dunmore received with kind pleasure, saying, “Faith, excellent! Excellent! You are brave boys, all of you.”

I saw their eyes bespeaking confusion at this raillery, sorrow to hear our liberator mocked thus, and anxiety at what His Lordship’s uncertainty might mean.

And still, ruthless fool, I continued: “Sir, you may jest at the foibles of His Lordship—because you are—” (I could not say it) “—because you are as you are, sir—but for us, this expedition—sir, this expedition—it is our sole hope. If it fail, we die. We are transported to the Sugar Isles. We are hanged. I beg you: do not jest with our fates.”

The white officers generally account our sable troops as number without face or footprint, and approach questions of our regulation with indifference and irritable neglect.

I stared down at the page; and well can it be imagined how little I perceived of the meaning of Mr. Locke’s disquisition on space and place; though I shall transcribe and seek to understand.

And after a while, I started to remark that whenever there was some talk of the North—one of the mobs done something he didn’t like, or a reverend arguing for schools, or some Negro gents presenting a petition in Boston for their freedom, or (murder!) that book of poems by the Negress—he’d start all fulminating: Oh, the meddling scoundrels in New England! Their leveling! Their freaks!

They laughed and they gave me the liver of sulphur in a sack, and when I asked, some vitriol oil, too.

Or if one regards an officious myrmidon too lumpen to move for long periods of time, one ceases even to note him until he actually motivates himself and speaks.

“What is a myrmidon?”
“An ant.”

That evening, I present myself at the Palace. I guess I speak to a factotum. It seems His Lordship is not at home; he’s fled on board a ship, but if I wish, the factotum says, I can sleep in the stables with another little crowd of Negroes awaiting His Lordship’s pleasure.

We’ll slip through and we’ll change to who we must needs be and I will be all sly and have my delightful picaresque japes.

At ten o’clock one Sunday night, his master came to him, and demanded he take up a scythe and go down to the chicken-house, for a body of Lord Dunmore’s Negroes was landed and seized upon the fowls for provender.

Pacing the length of the quarterdeck, I thought upon things I could have asked Mademoiselle Nsia: the provenance of the songs and their meanings, who had taught them her.

A strange stillness prevailed over the scene as the stentorian thunder of bombardment yielded to the minuscule cries and commands of distant voices.

We stood bewildered on deck after deck of that irregular fleet—brigs and schooners, sloops and barges, frigates, grand yachts and lowly ketches—soldiers and sailors, families fled from the town, husbands with their arms around their wives watching their homes burn—we all observed the spread of flame.