Counternarratives by John Keene Read Free Book Online Page A

the sea or Boston, where the atmosphere fairly crackled with sedition.
Zion—who yearned either to take up residence in Halifax, which he had learned about
during his time at sea as a free man, and from there to ship out on a frigate bound
for parts unknown, or conversely to return to the only settled home he had known,
that of the Wantones, where he would be again among those who knew him best—did not
take kindly to this turn of events, and revolted. After only a week, he fled towards
Boston, following the coastal route and getting as far as Duxbury, where he stole
two cakes of gingerbread, a package of biscuits, and a pint of milk out of a
horse-cart heading north. He secreted himself in a nearby marsh. He was discovered a
week later, arrested and housed in a local jail. He swiftly broke out by eluding his
guard, commandeered a piebald, and headed south by southwest along the lesser roads
and trails. The local authorities again captured, tried and imprisoned him, not only
for his crimes but for his defiance of the social order, yet his realization of his
own personal power had galvanized him, making life insufferable under any
circumstances but his own liberation.
    During Zion’s second incarceration, Pennyman had quick-deeded his
ownership of the slave to a fellow reformed merchant, Simon Warren, of Boston, who
in return promised to pay full, rather than wholesale, price for several cases of
contraband liquor Pennyman was trying to unload. Zion left jail in May of 1772, and
for a brief spell worked agreeably under Warren. Within the year, however, during
which the enslaved man resumed a life of debauchery, including but not limited to
periodic flights to Middlesex and lower Suffolk Counties, allegedly fathering
several children by white, Indian and Negro women, drunkenness and brawling in the
streets of Boston, celebrating on the Sabbath day, breaking curfews, threatening
shopkeepers, openly praising London, and selling wine stolen from his master, Warren
found the situation so unbearable that he gave him to another merchant, his second
cousin, Job Hollis, of Boston.
    Hollis, who had once held positions of prominence in the
shipbuilding trade in Marblehead, was now reduced to running a scrap metal-working
and trading shop on Lynn Street near the Hunt and White Shipyards. Possessed of an
increasingly liberal mindset, and realizing almost immediately that he could only
loosely control Zion, he afforded his charge some berth by giving him traveling
papers. With these the slave immediately took the widest latitude, for had not the
Reverend Isaac Skillman preached in that very year that “the slave should rebel
against his master”? One midday he took Hollis’s horse and a fiddle he had bought
with some of his earnings, and rode out to a cornhusking at Medford. Here his
singing and strumming, striking appearance, and lively manner at the husking hall
attracted the attentions of a number of the local women. The one on whom he set his
sights, however, was a married white lady in her late 20s, Ruth Pine, of evident
gentility. She coldly rejected his serenades all afternoon. By the early evening,
armed with rum, he demanded that she accompany him back to a local inn, a suggestion
that visibly offended her, leading her to denounce him in the strongest terms
possible. He responded by slapping her so hard that she passed out. This led to a
great commotion in the hall, wherein there were numerous calls for the Negro’s
death. He promptly fled. Pine’s husband, a stout local farmer, was enraged that his
wife might be so mistreated by any man, let alone a black one, and even more
incredibly a slave. He pursued Zion on horseback all the way to Boston, where he
finally overtook the offender and engaged him in a battle of fisticuffs in Orange
Street, the city’s main artery. An officer of the courts walking by glanced at the
boxers, then continued on his way. Within minutes Zion had reduced Pine to a heap