New York - The Novel

freedmen I knew had all worked for the Dutch West India Company long ago. I had hardly heard of any private owners in New York freeing their slaves. So when he said that, I was overcome.
    “Thank you, Boss,” I said.
    He sucked on his pipe for a while. “I’ll need you as long as I’m alive, though,” he added, and I must have given him a pretty careful look, because he started laughing. “Now you’re wondering how long I’ll last, aren’t you?”
    “No, Boss,” I said, but we both knew it was true, and that made him laugh more.
    “Well,” he said, “I’m in no hurry to die yet.” Then he gave me a kindly smile. “You may have to wait a long time, Quash, but I won’t forget you.”
    It seemed that my dream of freedom was one day to come true.

    So I certainly wasn’t expecting an even greater joy to come into my life just then.
    After the Indian troubles, New York was quiet again. Some rich English planters had come there from the Barbadoes and such places. They mostly lived in big houses down by the East River waterfront, and some of them didn’t trouble to speak Dutch. But many of the Dutch families in the town were still bringing their relations over. So with all the Dutch houses, and Dutch being mostly spoken in the streets, you’d almost have thought Governor Stuyvesant was still in charge.
    Meinheer Leisler was becoming quite an important figure in the town these days, and the lesser Dutch folk all liked him. He’d often come to see the Mistress too, always very polite and neatly dressed, with a feather in his hat. And this attention was most pleasing to her. For the Mistress, though still a handsome woman, was now approaching the end of her childbearing years, and was sometimes a little depressed. The Boss, understanding this, was always considerate toward her, and did his best to find ways to please her too.
    If only the same could have been said for Miss Clara. For since the time of her brother’s marriage, that little girl I had loved had turned into a monster. I could hardly believe it. To look at, she was the same sweet-faced,golden-haired girl I had always known. She was still kind to me and respectful, mostly, to her father. But to her mother she was like the devil. If her mother asked her to help the cook or go to the market, she’d be sure to complain that her mother knew very well she’d promised to go to visit a friend just then, and that her mother was inconsiderate. If the Mistress said anything, Miss Clara said it wasn’t so. Whatever was amiss, she said it was her mother’s fault until at times the Mistress could stand it no more. The Boss would reason with Clara and threaten to punish her. But soon she’d be complaining again. I truly felt sorry for the Mistress at those times.
    One day Mr. Master came by the house in the company of one of the English planters. And they and the Boss were talking in English together. I was there also. By that time I had learned some words of English, enough to understand some of what they said.
    Just after they had started, the Boss asked me in Dutch to find him something, which I did. And when I brought it he asked me something else, which I answered easily enough, saying something that made him laugh, before I went back to my place. But I saw that English planter staring at me, and then in English he told the Boss to mind being so friendly to me, because they had had plenty of trouble with black slaves down on the plantations, and the only way to deal with us was to keep well armed and to whip us if we tried to be saucy. I just looked at the floor and pretended I didn’t understand, and the Boss laughed and said he’d remember that.
    The subject of their conversation, as it happened, was slaves. For Mr. Master had just returned to New York with a cargo of slaves, and some of these were Indians. On account of complaints from other countries about the taking of their people to be sold, Governor Andros had ordered that only black people might be sold as slaves in the market—for all the nations of the world agreed that Negroes should be slaves—and this was an inconvenience to Mr. Master.
    “I’m aiming to sell these Indians privately,” he said. “I have a nice young Indian girl, and I was wondering if you’d like to buy her.”
    Well at that moment in walked the Mistress looking upset, so I guessed that Miss Clara had been causing her grief again. The Mistress would sometimes pretend she didn’t understand English, but she