Addendum — next day

At the barracks last evening, a grand ball, which convocation was attended by soldiers of all companies and by many of the women attached to the Regiment. These Sabbath-day dances are the long custom among the plantations and farms of this Colony; but I have never seen the like. My delight may be imagined.

The music was loud and joyous in the extreme, sung, beaten upon drums, and played upon simple lutes and chitarrones; the dancing, though marked with great bizarrerie in its movements, was intoxicating in its strangeness and exhilarating in its exultation; and, despite what I had been told at the College of Lucidity of the dancing of slaves, it was executed with complete propriety: There was no intermingling of the sexes, but each maintained its separate steps and songs. There was great commerce and discussion between each dance, often beyond the scope of my understanding, the whole room a very Babel of rich tongues and alien conversation.

Though most speak English as their mother tongue, there are some, newer fetched from their country, who spake two languages or three before ever they heard our British speech. When I think upon their excellence of parts, their facility in the vaguaries of our Anglo-Saxon cant, I am ashamed at the pride with which my masters regarded my own slender accomplishments.

Some here have not spoken their own tongue for ten years, for twenty, separated in the auction-yard from their countrymen and sequestered, that they might not conspire; and now they are reunited with those who know not merely the same verbs, but the same cities, the same rivers, the same gods; and so everywhere one hears English overthrown with delight, and alien discourse entered into with ardor.

When in English, ’twas thus: “No, sir, this, this — Aye, you, this”— There was much negotiation, and a tune played or sung, taken up by others, learned by those newly hearing it. Observing these exchanges (and too timid to speak or sing), I at last understood the full breadth of their endeavor: These drummers, these dancers were ripped from nations more distant from one another than Lapland and Spain, speaking a wealth of tongues, praising different gods; singing different songs with instruments only alike as violin is to viol. And in the thatched quarters of the plantations had these people of disparate nations gathered once weekly to sing their songs in a foreign land, though they are but sojourners here; not the songs of one nation, but the music of many, sung in as many tongues. Each plantation hath thus strummed and beat out its own peculiar suites, its own lively airs, its customs negotiated through use. These plantation festivals are become an act of general composition, wherein dances are forged from the rites of different cities, tunes taken from one kingdom and given new words in the language of another, codified if applauded through weeks of repetition. And here, in Lord Dunmore’s Regiment, the singers meet and exchange and bicker over variations, all eager to have their song known.

Some sang burlesques upon their masters. Others honored Lord Dunmore, our liberator, most generous of Governors, bravest of commanders. One of the regimental drummers played most miraculously upon a drum of his own fashioning. Those near me informed me that he made the drum speak, and that it chanted the praise-songs of his people in ancient times and their exploits martial.

His praise-song being completed, the women sent forth a maiden to sing who must be a favorite among them; being graced not only with elegance of gesture, but symmetry of feature and comeliness of form; and she sang a lamentation in her tongue which could not have been more interesting and affecting.

I cannot write too much praise of this girl. Her every movement was fascination. Her hair was close-cropped; her dress was modest; her voice compelled attention.

I would gladly have heard more of her solemnity; but following her performance, the music ceased, the fire was banked up, and conversation became general.

There were many stories this night; several recounted in tongues I knew not to groups of four or five; a few sung; some ancient tales told. 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. To wit, Will and John told again of their turkey call. One man told of his flight that he had stolen not only some few silver buckles, but also a bridle from his master’s stables; and so far from him proceeding in dead of night, in silence and stealth, he walked through the woods in open daylight shouting, “Bellerophon!” as loud as he might; and when white men approached him, he explained that his master’s horse was fled, and he sent out to capture it. Another man was a day from home when he espied the slave patrol approaching upon the road; and he repaired into a yard and split wood until they passed. Others spake of boats stolen, of rivers navigated, of days spent humming on smacks.

Following these tales, a man rose with his wife held close to him, and both spake their tale; how the wife had lately been great with child; and how as she grew, she was beset by new hungers, there being no meat allowed the slaves in that place, but only corn. She worked in the master’s kitchen, and could not forbear to snatch some few shreds of chicken from the preparations she was daily engaged in, to ward off the terrible famine that wracked her gravid frame. She was taken in this theft, and condemned to be beaten. The master seeing that she could not well support herself under such duress, he determined that she should lie upon the ground while receiving her punishment, with a small ditch dug for her stomach so the child should not be harmed for the crimes of the mother.

The husband told us, “He give me the shovel. He give me the shovel, and he say, you dig the place for the belly. And I weeping; I weeping, and no wise could dig. But Mr. Spritely, he say he whip her more if I don’t dig; he say more strokes if I don’t make the hole; and so I takes the shovel.”

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 inquired of those around me what the maiden sang; and found finally one who spake the language; he informing me that ’twas a praise-song, as men would sing of their forebears; but that she sang not for deeds done, but for those as yet undone.

The maiden sang the praise of our Regiment, a prayer to her gods for our victory; she sang that we should be remembered by our descendants, and that, triumphant, we should be those who would lead the dead home from their long exile, and end at last their hungry wanderings.