New York - The Novel

together, and we always stayed friends. As for his baby sister Clara, that was the prettiest child you ever saw, with golden hair and bright blue eyes. When she was little, I would carry her on myshoulders, and she would go on making me do this even when she was ten or eleven, laughing all the while, just to vex me, she said. I loved that child.
    I was always very fast at running. Sometimes Meinheer van Dyck would set myself and Jan and little Clara in a race, with Jan well in front of me and Clara near the finishing line. I would usually pass Jan, but when I came up with Clara I’d hold back just behind her so she could win, which used to delight her very much.
    Some Dutch masters were cruel to their slaves, but Meinheer van Dyck and the Mistress always showed me kindness in those years. As a young boy I was only given light work. As I grew a little older, Meinheer van Dyck would give me many tasks to do. I always seemed to be fetching and carrying something. But the only time he ever whipped me was after Jan and I had broken a window, and then he took a strap to us both, each getting the same.

    When I was about fourteen years of age, Meinheer van Dyck became a more important man of business than he was before, and everyone started to call him Boss, including myself. So from now on I shall call him by that name. And about this time it entered into the mistress’s mind that I should look well dressed up in livery like a servant in a big house. The Boss laughed, but he let her do it, and I looked very well in that livery, which was blue. I was very proud of myself. And the mistress taught me to open the door for guests and wait at table, which pleased me greatly. And she said, “Quash, you have a beautiful smile.” So I made sure to smile all the time, and I was in high favor with her, and the Boss too. One day, the old Dominie Cornelius came to the house. He was a man of great consequence. He was tall, and always dressed in black, and despite his age, he was still very upright. And even he remarked to the Boss’s wife upon my smart appearance. After that, I could do no wrong with her. So I suppose that on account of all this good treatment, I had too great a conceit of myself. Indeed, I believe I thought myself more like an indentured servant than a slave, for a time. And I often thought about what I could do that would cause that family to hold me in higher regard.
    It was about a month after his visit to the house that, on an errand for the Mistress, I saw that old dominie in the street, dressed in black and wearing a big pointed black hat with a wide brim. Now it happened thatjust a few days before, I had conceived a notion of how I might raise myself in the estimation of the Boss and his family; for I remembered that old black man telling me how the freedmen had been allowed to become Christians in the Dutch Church. And so when I saw the old dominie, I went up to him and said, very respectful: “Good morning, sir.” And he gave me a somewhat stern look, because I was interrupting him in his thoughts, but he recognized me and said: “You’re the van Dycks’ slave boy.”
    “I am, sir,” I said. “And I was wondering,” I went on, “if I might ask Your Reverence something.”
    “Oh? What’s that?” he said.
    “I was wondering,” I said, “if I might join the Church.”
    He looked at me for a moment as if he’d been struck by a thunderbolt.
    “You wish to become a member of my congregation?”
    “Yessir,” I said.
    Well, he didn’t speak for a while, but he just stood there looking at me, in a cold, considering kind of way. When he did answer, his voice was quiet.
    “I see you for what you are,” he said. And I, being young and foolish, supposed that this might mean something good for me. “You seek,” he asked me, “to better yourself?”
    “Yessir,” I said, very hopeful, and giving him my best smile.
    “As I thought,” he murmured, more to himself than to me. And he nodded. “Those who join the congregation,” he said, “do so for love of God, not in hope of any reward.”
    Now, on account of living with the van Dyck family, and knowing how their children were raised, I reckoned that I knew a little of the Christian religion. And, forgetting I was only a slave and that he was the dominie, I was disposed to argue.
    “But they do it to escape hellfire,” I said.
    “No.” It seemed to me that he did not want to have any conversation with me, but being a dominie, he was