New York - The Novel

if they knew anything of Hudson.
    “He was sold to a sea captain, but we don’t know who. He could be anywhere. I’m sorry, Quash,” she said. “You may have lost him.”
    I couldn’t speak for a moment.
    “It was good of you to come for me,” I said.
    “I had to pay quite a price for you,” said young Henry Master with a laugh. “The old planter knew we wanted you, so he did me no favors.”
    “We know you were supposed to have your freedom,” said Miss Clara.
    “Hmm,” said her husband. “I don’t know about that. Not after what I just had to pay. But we still have to decide what to do with you, Quash.”
    It seemed that the difficulty was the Mistress. Recently she had gone upriver all the way to Schenectady, intending to live there. She chose that place on account of the fact that it had a strong Dutch church and a town with hardly any English in it. “So long as she stays up there, we can keep you with us, or at my brother’s,” explained Miss Clara. “But my brother doesn’t want her coming back and finding you back. It might make her angry, and she still controls everything at present. I’m sorry you can’t be free,” she added.
    “It don’t matter, Miss Clara,” I said. For I was better off with them than with that planter. And besides, what was freedom to me now, if my son was still a slave?

    Through that spring and summer I worked for Miss Clara and her family. And since I knew how to do most everything about the house, I was very helpful to them.
    In particular, I took pleasure in her son Dirk. He was a mischievous little boy, full of life, and I thought I could see something of the Boss in him. He had fair hair and blue eyes like his mother, but you could see already that he had a quickness in him; though when it came to his lessons, he was a little bit lazy. And how that child loved to go by the waterside. He reminded me of my own son. I’d take him down there and let him look at the boats and talk to the sailors. But above all, he liked to go round past the fort so he could look up the river. That river seemed to draw him somehow. For his birthday, which fell in the summer, he was asked what he would like, and he asked if he could go upriver in a boat. So on a fine day young Henry Master and the little boy and me all set out on a big sailing boat; and we went up that mighty river, running before the wind and with the tide, all the way up past the stone palisades. We camped for the night before returning. And during that journey, Dirk was allowed to wear the Indian wampum belt, which we passed round his body three times.
    “This belt is important, isn’t it, Quash?” Dirk said to me.
    “Your grandfather attached great value to it,” I answered, “and he gave it to you special, to keep all your life and to pass on in the family.”
    “I like the patterns on it,” he said.
    “They say those wampum patterns have a special meaning,” I told him, “telling how the Boss was a great man and suchlike. I believe they were given to him by Indians who held him in particular affection. But that’s all I know.”
    I could tell that boy loved to be on the river. He felt at home there. And I hoped that he would make his living on the river rather than with the slaving ships.
    And it may be, as it happened, that I was able to affect his life in that regard. For one day, when I was washing in my room in the attic, and thinking myself alone, I heard little Dirk’s voice behind me.
    “What are all those marks on your back, Quash?”
    The whipping at the farm had left terrible scars all over my back, which I always concealed, and I would not have had the boy see them for all the world.
    “Something that happened a long time ago,” I told him. “You just put it out of your mind, now.” And I made him go back downstairs.
    But later that day, Miss Clara came by when I was tending some flowers in the garden, and she touched my arm and said, “Oh Quash, I’m so sorry.” A couple of days after that I was serving the family at table when little Dirk pipes up, “Father, is it ever right to whip a slave?” And his father looked awkward and muttered, “Well, it all depends.” But Miss Clara just said, very quiet, “No, it is never right.” And with her character, I knew she wouldn’t be changing her mind about that.
    Indeed, I heard her say to her husband once that she wouldn’t be sorry if the whole business of slavery came to an end. But he answered that as things stood, he