New York - The Novel

money. For from time to time, the Boss would give me small coin for spending, if he was pleased with me. Or if he hired me out for a day, as was often done, he would give me a little of what he received. And I had been putting this money by in a safe place. So I was thinking it might be necessary to expend some of this money on a lady of that kind in order to become a man.
    One evening I slipped out in the company of some other slaves, and they took me along the Bowery road to a place some distance above the town, where most of the free black people had their dwellings.
    We went to a wooden house, which was larger than the others, that was like an inn. The man who owned that house was a tall man, and he gave us some sweet cakes and rum to drink. There were about a dozen black people there, and some of them were slaves. And we had only been there a little while when I noticed an old man asleep in the corner, and wearing a straw hat, and realized that it was the old man I had met in the market when I was a boy, that told me I could be free. So I asked the tall man that owned that house who the old man was, and he said, “That is my father.” He talked to me for a while. I was very impressed with him. He owned the house and some land besides, and he had people working for him, too. He was free as any white man, and had no shortage of money. His name was Cudjo.
    After I had been talking to him and drinking rum for a while, I noticed a girl of about my own age come into the house. She sat quietly in the corner near where the old man was asleep, and nobody seemed to pay heed to her. But I glanced at her several times, and wondered if she’d noticedme. Finally, she turned her head and looked right at me. And when she did I saw that her eyes seemed to be laughing, and her smile was warm.
    I was about to go over to her, when I felt Cudjo’s hand grip my arm.
    “You’d best leave that girl alone,” he said quietly.
    “Why’s that?” I asked. “Is she your woman?”
    “No,” he answered.
    “You’re her father?”
    “No.” He shook his head. “I own her. She is my slave.”
    At first I didn’t believe him. I did not know that a black man could have a slave. And it seemed strange to me that a man whose own father had obtained his freedom would own a slave himself. But it was so.
    “You’re looking for a woman, young man?” Cudjo then asked me, and I said I was. “You ever have a lady friend before?” he inquired, and I said I had not.
    “Wait here a while,” he told me, and he went out.
    By and by he returned with a young woman. She was somewhere between twenty and twenty-five years old, I guessed. She was almost as tall as I was, and her slow, easy way of walking seemed to say that, however other folks might feel,
she
was comfortable with the world. She came over to the bench where I was and sat down beside me and asked me my name. We chatted a while and drank together. Then she glanced over at Cudjo and gave him a small nod.
    “Why don’t you come with me, honey,” she said.
    So I left with her. As we went out, Cudjo smiled at me and said, “You’re going to be all right.”
    And I became a man that night.
    In the years that followed I became friendly with a number of slave women in the town. Several times the Boss said to me that one of the meinheers was complaining his slave girl was with child and that it was my doing. Some of his neighbors said the Boss should send me to work on a farm out of town. But he never did so.

    It was always my aim to please both the Boss and the Mistress equally. But sometimes it was not so easy, on account of them not always agreeing between themselves.
    For instance, the Mistress did not always like the Boss’s friends. The first she took a dislike to was Meinheer Philipse. You’d have thought shewould have liked him, because he was Dutch, and his wife and the Mistress had always been close. They were rich, too. But the Mistress said Meinheer Philipse was getting too English for her liking, and forgetting he was Dutch. The Boss seemed to like him well enough, though.
    The second came into our lives the following way.
    The Boss loved to be on the water. He was always looking for an excuse. Sometimes he would take the family out to some place in a boat. One time we went to the little island just off the tip of Manhattan, that they called Nut Island, with a big basket of food and drink, and passed the whole afternoon there. Another time we went further across the