Chesapeake

by James A. Michener

“Young men often think,” Sir Fairleigh said, “that they can play any game, if only they keep their hearts pure.”

It was indeed perplexing, as if the Englishman had a film over his eyes which prevented him from seeing the excellence of an Indian.

“Have you a sincere calling?” He proposed that they go to the chapel, and when they were inside, with bluebottles buzzing against the thick glass imported from Holland, he asked his son if he had ever heard of the Blessed Edmund Campion, and for some hours he spoke of that luminous spirit. He recalled the folklore of the subterranean Catholic movement in England, and especially of how he himself had for a brief period denied the church until that moment when he wakened near strangled with remorse. It was under such circumstances that he had decided to come to a new world where he could practice his love of God in the ways God Himself had decreed.

He asked them to kneel and opened his missal to the ceremony which binds Catholics, but when he saw the words and the three sons he realized how inadequate an ordinary ritual would be in this frontier of the human spirit. “Heavenly Father,” he prayed, “let us join on earth what You have already joined in heaven.” And he told them, “You are married.”

From one plantation to the next, word spread that revolt had started. Like a fire burning wildly across dried evergreens, this dreaded message went; this was the consequence that all masters feared, the rebellion of either their servants or their slaves.

“Look after the other man’s belly and your own conscience.” She said, “If a man comes to your door plainly starving, Henry, don’t preach, feed him.”

“Thomas Kenworthy, it is my duty to pass sentence upon you.” “God has already done so, and thy words are nothing.”

“Do you then nominate yourself a minister, that you comprehend the teachings of God?” “Each man is minister, yes, and each woman too.”

“Does it hurt, the lashings?” “In Virginia, I wept and cursed, but in Ipswich, God came to me and asked, ‘If my Son could bear His crucifixion, cannot thee endure a mere whipping?’ ” Paxmore asked if he could touch the scars, and Kenworthy said no. “It would make them too important. The dignity of my back lies in my heart, where I have forgiven the whipmen of Virginia and Massachusetts. They were like the Roman soldiers, doing their duty.”

“Bring forth the prisoner!” the governor shouted. It was clear that he intended to supervise personally the death of this obnoxious dissenter. When Kenworthy was produced, the governor went to him, thrust his face forward and demanded, “Are you satisfied now that we have the power to silence you?” “My voice will be stronger tomorrow than it ever was,” Kenworthy replied.

A minister who had watched the whipping ran to the scaffold and cried in fierce, condemnatory accents, “Heretic, separatist! God has shown us the true religion and you traduce it. You have a right to die.”

He thought of this statement a long time and wondered why people so attached to God should take such positive delight in crucifying a man who had precisely the same love for God, but with a different manner of expressing it. He even understood the punishment, for he had observed that all people allied to a church seek to protect it, but he would never understand the pleasure the Puritans took in the infliction of punishment.

“In Massachusetts we do not meet like this,” he said quietly. “There is a law, written down, which determines that Quakers are heretical and treasonous, and when caught they are tied to the tailgate of carts and dragged from village to village and whipped as they go.” He dropped his voice and added, “Women and men alike, stripped naked to the waist and whipped.” He stood silent, trying to control his emotions so that his voice would not rise, and no one in the shed made a sound. Finally he coughed ever so slightly and concluded, “A meeting like this, in peace, sitting with Friends, is beyond the imagination of Quakers in Massachusetts, who sit in jail with their feet bound by chains. This is not only the First Day of the week. It is the First Day of my new life.”

In his personal life Edward Paxmore had discovered that a man lived best when he maintained some central belief upon which he could hang all action and to which he could refer all difficult moral problems; he was then vertebrate, with a backbone to sustain him, and he had observed that men and women who failed to develop this central belief wandered and made hideously wrong decisions because in time of crisis they had nothing to which they could refer instantaneously. He had found his backbone in obedience to God, in the simplest form possible and with the most direct access.

“They belong to us. They’re our slaves.” Ruth Brinton rose, wiped her hands, and studied the women. She could remember when she was that age, burdened with perplexities, and thought: How much greater theirs must be. To her husband she said, “It would be quite improper for us to hold slaves. It would be against the will of God.” And then began the great debate which would ultimately invade every legislature, every church and every home.

“Edward,” she said with iron force in her soft words, “does thee not realize that the whole teaching of Jesus is opposed to the slavery of one man to another?”

I am convinced that one day all churches will see the immorality of slavery and will condemn it.

CATHOLIC: Let me understand what you’re saying, Mrs. Paxmore. You believe that on some day to come, the religious leaders of this world are going to convene and state that what the Bible has condoned since the days of Abraham, that what Jesus Himself approved of and against which He never spoke … You believe that our leaders are going to tell the world, “It is all wrong”? QUAKER: I expect to spend my life, Neighbor Steed, trying to convince my religion that slavery is wrong. CATHOLIC: Aha! Then even your religion doesn’t condemn it? QUAKER: Not now. CATHOLIC: And you would presume, one frail human being and a woman at that, to negate all the teaching of the churches and the Bible and human codes? How can you be so arrogant? QUAKER: Because God speaks to me as directly as he does to your Pope. And if I see that slavery is a dreadful wrong, it may simply be that God has spoken to me first. I am the weak vessel He has chosen, and I can do no other than obey.

It is quite possible to love Jesus but to wonder about Paul.

“I see a day when the members of any Christian church will be ashamed to hold another man or woman in bondage. They will know without being told that so long as they keep one slave in their possession they are acting outside the will of God …

“I see a day when every member of this meeting will voluntarily award freedom to any slave within his or her possession. There will be no talk of selling them to gain a small profit, nor any talk of manumission after death. The freedom will be granted now, and totally, and without reservation, and on the day this is done every master will tell his wife, ‘On this day we did a good thing.’

“I see a day when every black human being along this river is taught to read the Bible, and write his or her name, when families are held together and children are educated, and every man works for an honest wage. And this r...

“I charge you now, ‘Go home from this place and set your slaves free.’ I command you in God’s name, ‘Set them free and hire them for a wage.’ I call upon you, ‘Stop using black men and women to earn a profit. Start embracing them as brothers and sisters in God, endowed with every right you have …” “We are a little gathering, a few people among many, but let us show the way to all.”

As for the other churches, what could one expect of them? They served the masters and preached whatever doctrine the plantations required.

Dearest God, she thought as she sat in the bow of the sloop looking aft, we bring human beings to live amongst us and know nothing of them. Never once had she heard a Steed or any other owner say of his slaves, “I told Amy and Obadiah to fetch it.” Always they said, “I sent my slaves to fetch it,” as if they existed without names or personalities. Now, as Henry Steed hurried from the plantation house to help dock the boat, she looked not at him but into the faces of the four men who had rowed, and they were visages in a dream, without skeletal bones to lend reality, or blood to keep them warm, or any other substantial quality other than their age and their ability to work. These men are prime, she thought as she gazed into their faces, and that is all we care to know about them, but they are also human beings, and if we allow them to live among us without acknowledging that fact, we are breeding tragedy.

she appreciated the fact that truth was revealed to human beings in different ways and at different times. She herself had been allowed, by God perhaps, to witness the future of whites and blacks on this river, and this clear vision impelled her to speak in meeting. If Edward did not see the dangers, if he remained confused over property rights and outmoded biblical quotations and the prosperity of his family at the expense of slave labor, she must be tolerant until such time as he, and other Quakers, saw what she saw.

When the sun rose on the stormy scene, Edward found her shivering there, contemplating the spiritual disasters which the good people of this river would always bring down upon themselves.

To her unlistening slaves she cried, “It’s awful for a woman to be put up for sale.”

when you plant trees, you’re entitled to believe you’ll live forever.