“You goin’, then, is you?”
“Yes, Prince.”
He was bringing out the horse and hitching it to the chaise. I stood and watched.
“Sure she’s goin’.” Sulie pushed past me with a pan of chicken food in her hands and stood in the yard tossing it about. “Can’t wait to take her little behind over to that governor’s mansion and talk her fancy talk to all those mens.” And she mimicked what I’d said to Nathaniel at breakfast. “‘You couldn’t bear my confidences, Nathaniel. I can scarce bear them myself! Oh!’” She slapped a hand against her forehead in a mock manner of a white girl about to faint. Chickens clucked around her feet.
“Shut your mouth, Sulie.” Prince glowered at her. “Leave her be. She’s doin’ what the Lord intended her to do.”
“The Lord intended her to scrub pots and iron the master’s shirts,” she flung back. “An’ all her poetry be is a way to get outa doin’ it.”
“Least she’s got a way,” Prince replied.
“Ain’t natural.” Sulie spoke as she flung food at the chickens. “She’s gettin’ above herself. It’ll bring the wrath of the Lord down on us all.”
“Leave the Lord outa this,” Prince told her. “You is just jealous, Sulie.”
“Got nuthin’ to be jealous about.” She finished her chore and came up the back steps to stand beside me. Hatred runs deep in Sulie. She is thirty and blessed with a bosom and looks I do not have. Yet she outright hates me, ever since my poetry writing got me excused from household chores.
“Aunt Cumsee gotta work twice as hard since you ain’t in the kitchen no more. Last year or two didn’t matter none. Now she gettin’ old.”
“I said leave her be, Sulie.” Prince came out from around the horse and chaise.
“You’re the one best leave her be. ’Lessen you’re plannin’ on havin’ her sit up next to you on the carriage seat agin today. I heard Mrs. Wheatley say you do that agin and you’ll be sold off.”
Prince moved toward her. I stepped down quickly, between them. It wouldn’t have been the first time they’d come to blows. Both would be punished if that happened. The Wheatleys do not hold with servants fighting, as do many other families in Boston.
Yesterday I’d been sent to call on Mercy Otis Warren, who wrote plays. The weather took a turn for the worse and my mistress sent Prince to fetch me home.
“It was my idea to sit up on the front seat next to Prince,” I told Sulie.
“Then you should know better.” She spit at me. “Fool girl, got him in trouble. You heard what the Missus called him. ‘Saucy varlet.’ ‘Impudent,’ to have you sit next to him. You git him sold off and you’ll answer to me,” she hissed. “I’ll kill you. I’ll put poison in your chocolate. I know where to get it. I know Robin on the wharf.”
“You crazy, you!” Prince lunged for her. “Doan even say such!”
To make matters worse, she was smitten with Prince. And he not with her. So she was jealous of me on that score, too. She hated me because Prince and I were friends.
Sulie pushed past me and went into the house.
“Doan mind her none,” Prince said. “She’s crazy!”
“Does she know Robin?” My voice shook.
“Everybody does. Doan mean nuthin’. Robin learned his lesson.”
Robin does odd jobs for Dr. Clark, who owns the apothecary shoppe on the wharf. In the fifties, when the notorious slaves Mark and Phillis murdered their master, John Codman, it was said they got the arsenic from Robin.
Mark and Phillis were hanged and burned. People still talk about it in Boston. Mark’s skeleton still hangs in a cage on Charlestown Common.
Robin has never been brought to trial. He still roams the wharves, dressed like a dandy. What lesson has he learned? I wanted to ask.
“She just takin’ on ’cause she be jealous,” Prince said. “You please these mens this mornin’ wif your white people’s learnin’, and your words be in a book. She heard Aunt Cumsee say it.”
“Maybe she’s right, Prince. Maybe I am getting above myself. And it will bring the wrath of the Lord down on us all.”
“She don’t care a fig for the Lord, ’ceptin’ when it please her.”
“Surely Sulie’s right about Aunt Cumsee. She is getting on.” I minded how cumbersome she’d seemed while serving breakfast this morning. “Threescore and ten Aunt Cumsee is now. All that lifting and carrying could kill her.”
“Only thing that’ll kill her would be if’n you didn’t make use of your mind. It’s all she talks ’bout, Phillis, you makin’ this book . . . An’ I do the liftin’ and carryin’ for her.”
“If I make this book, everything will change, Prince.”
He moved back to the horse and chaise. “I know. No more you’ll be plain ol’ Phillis. You’ll be miss Fancy Phillis then, and you’ll never talk to Prince no more.”
He was making sport of me. But tears came to my eyes just the same. “I’ll always be friends with you, Prince. And I’ll always speak to you. I promise.”
“Phillis!” Mrs. Wheatley came out the back door. “I slept late. Come, let me wish you well.”
I ran to her. She embraced me in the folds of her sky blue morning gown. Her delicate face, like a flower about to open to the sun, closed with distress at seeing me talking with Prince. But all she said was, “Phillis, dear, do your best this day. My prayers are with you.”
I smiled. “I’ll make you proud,” I said. Then I got into the chaise with Nathaniel, who had just come out behind his mother. And, two-faced wretch that I am, I did not look at Prince as he hopped up front to drive.
“I noticed you were conversing with Prince,” Nathaniel said to me as we rode through Boston’s busy streets.
“Prince is my friend.”
“Be careful. For one thing, it displeases Mother. For another, he has unsavory friends. Need I say more?”
“No.” I’ve long known that Prince is running with the Sons of Liberty. We all know. The Wheatleys do not question him about it. Though they keep their own counsel, it seems to me that they have leanings toward these new Patriots and countenance Prince’s activities.
Nathaniel does not. As an upcoming merchant, stepping into his father’s shoes, he is still not declaring himself.
“He’s my friend,” I said again.
Nathaniel sighed. “Just don’t hurt Mother,” he said.