The Great Negro Plot (9 page)

So no more but remaining your respectful wife Elezabet Romme even till death.

Superscribed Jor
Mr. John Romme,
QDG

FOR YOUR LIFE AND SOUL

THE KING AGAINST CAESAR and Prince, Negroes." This was the introduction to the trial, but, in fact, it wasn't actually a trial.
It was a ritual. A formality. Mere practice for what was to come. Caesar and Prince stood, doomed. They were black, and came
precondemned. The evidence was circumstantial and hearsay but, for the likes of these men, no more was needed. Nothing was
refuted—there was nothing they could say on their own behalf, because Africans were not even allowed to testify. The jury
was called without challenge. The theft of Hogg's merchandise repeated. The additional charge of entering the property of
Abraham Meyers Cohen to rob him was added for good measure.

If you stand as a black man in a room to be judged by white fear and ignorance, there is no point in looking up. There is
no point in noting the words that Europeans use to sanction their bigotry, no matter how much worth they themselves think
log
they are putting into them. That Mary Burton yapped to the court, or that Peggy Kerry was brought into the room only to prolong
her silence, mattered little. It was an exercise. It was a play. The conclusion was already written, and no two people were
more sure of that than the Africans who were meant to await their fate.

"Not guilty," the two men declared, and it would be the only words the Europeans would extract from them. Two words contradicted
by the thirteen witnesses for the King, a baker's dozen who swore otherwise. Caesar and Prince had three character witnesses
for their own cause, but it was just so much air, so much filler. The evidence was summed and the jury returned from their
deliberation quickly. The verdict was never in question, they just removed the first word of the slaves' plea and bounced
it back at them.

"Guilty!" and that was all the court needed or wanted at the moment. Guilty of theft, guilty of robbery, guilty of disposal
of stolen property. There was no need yet to press the slaves for information about the fires. For slaves, robbery alone stood
as capital offense. So the two men's lives were already forfeit in the eyes of the law.

The two Africans. The notorious, Caesar and Prince, now survived solely at the judges' whim, and the whites would (and could)
do whatever they wanted with them. That would be to wring free of them any juicy information they had, and then dispose of
them in the end like so much pulp.

*    *    *

Arthur Price was a lowlife. What random act places him in our story is that he had already gotten himself locked up for thievery.
Really, the crime Price was incarcerated for was not much more resounding than were the misadventures of Hughson's rogues:
A white servant of the well-respected Captain Vincent Pearse, he had been busted nicking some of the property the captain
was storing for the lieutenant governor since the governor's fire. A crime of opportunity, not the kind the likes of Price
could walk away from easily. And he was white, so it wasn't as if he was going to hang for his indiscretion.

Now though, Prisoner Price had seen the light. Had one of those famous jailhouse conversions. When the under-sheriff came
through on his rounds, Price discreetly called him over, whispered his putrid breath into the officer's ear.

"Listen, mate, I got a story to tell. You let them judges know, good old Arthur Price has got something for them. Information.
You tell them, right?"

When the under-sheriff relayed the message, the judges gave little thought to the certainty that Price's testimony was inspired
by his motivation to save his own compromised hide. Or did they even consider that the opportunistic little whiner was out
to get his undeniably greedy paws on the hundred-pound bounty being paid to whites with information on the fires. The judges
had already made up their mind about what the truth was, so all they were looking for was confirmation. Without hesitation
Arthur Price was quickly and discreetly removed from his cell and brought to the court, where after being duly sworn he gave
his account.

According to Price, he had not sought the information in question. In fact, he said that Peggy Kerry came to
him
at the beginning of the last week. Right to the grate in his prison door.

" T'm very much afraid of those fellows telling or discovering something of me,'" he told the court Peggy had confessed to
him. By "those fellows," it was clear to Arthur Price (and, certainly, the judges as well) that Peggy meant the Africans who'd
been arrested. "But if they do, by God, I will hang every one of them. But, I will not forswear myself unless they bring me
in."

"Peggy, how forswear yourself?" Price asked her, confused, he said, by the expression she had used.

"There is fourteen sworn," Peggy responded cryptically.

"What? Is it about Mr. Hogg's goods?"

"No, by God, about the fire," she revealed.

"Was John and his wife in it?" Price asked, fishing for the Hughsons' involvement in the matter.

"Yes, by God, they were both sworn as well as the rest."

"Are you not afraid that the Negroes would discover you?" Price said he asked Peggy.

"No," she shrugged off, "for Prince, Cuff, and Caesar, and Vaarck's Negro are all true-hearted fellows."

Eager for more, making sure he pulled from her every detail he could, knowing how priceless this information could be, Price
had waited patiently for Peggy to reveal herself further. That moment came when, in reaction to her lover Caesar's trial the
day before, Peggy's anxiety overwhelmed her. After hearing for herself the damning testimony of Mary Burton, Peggy told Price,
"I have no stomach to eat my victuals, for that bitch has fetched me in and made me as black as the rest about the indigo
and Mr. Hogg's goods. If they do hang the two poor fellows below," Peggy said of Caesar and Prince, "the rest of the Negroes
would be revenged on them yet. But if they send them away, it is another case."

Feigning support, Arthur Price offered Peggy false comfort for the wounds inflicted by Mary Burton. "I don't doubt but they
will endeavor to poison this girl that has sworn."

"No, by goddamn, I don't believe that, but they will be revenged on them some other ways." It was in this moment of reflection,
that Peggy noticed something amiss. Looking anew at her confidante, his desperation and eager manner, Peggy immediately questioned
the wisdom of her candor.

"For your life and soul of you, you son of a bitch," she now warned Price, "don't speak a word of what I have told you."

To the assembled jury, Price related her threat as he betrayed she who had uttered it. The judges, for their part, recognized
not only their course forward based on the information relayed to them, but also a new asset in their war. A traitor in the
ranks of the lowly. Look at Arthur Price, standing so smug, so proud in front of them, a rat on two legs, a thief, a scallywag,
one the judges could call their own. A sign that God himself was answering their prayers, delivering the tools this court
needed to bring his justice into being.

*    *    *

Whether the conspiracy was a concrete thing of plans and machinations or simply the product of rational minds boiled in fear,
the effects were starting to be seen. People believed, regardless of evidence, that the Great Negro Plot was a real threat,
and this in itself brought real consequences. White people believed it. Black people believed it. At the same time Price was
relating his little story, replete with line-by-line dialogue, chaos continued elsewhere. Directly across the Hudson River
from New York City, in the New Jersey town of Hackensack, colonists were awoken an hour before dawn by warning calls, and
arose to a scene most frightening. In the early morning darkness it appeared that no less than seven barns in the village
had been set afire and were now burning in full glory. As the fires grew, so did the fear. The conspiracy loomed—it had spread
across the Hudson, and now into the lands beyond. The plot was larger than could be imagined, an army of Negroes intending
mass destruction.

Again, an African was seen emerging from a barn, this time with a gun in his hand.

Caught by the alarmed citizenry who were, to say the least, very conscious of the trouble of their New York neighbors on the
opposite side of the river, the slave caught was recognized as a man enslaved by one Derick Van Hoorn.

"You don't understand," the slave pleaded. "I seen the man who really was responsible for the fires."

"Then what are you doing holding that rifle? Explain that away," he was pressed.

"This gun? This gun was to shoot the man what was responsible. That's what master ordered."

A sly one, the Dutch farmers concluded. Moments later, a second slave was uncovered nearby in his master's nearby house, loading
a firearm of his own, two bullets in his hand ready to be placed inside. The two Africans were both arrested immediately.

The first slave captured eventually confessed to being guilty of the arson in question. The second never admitted to anything,
having done nothing more than hold a gun in his hand. It didn't matter. In New Jersey, the concerned do things fast and right.
Within days both had been tried, convicted, and burned alive at the stake for their crimes.

Back in Manhattan, the judges of the city could only lament that more names had not been pried out of the New Jersey Negroes
before the job was done.

Arthur Price was put back to work quickly, lest his duplicitous nature be revealed before being fully exploited. Margaret
Sorubiero or Salingburgh, also known as Peggy Kerry (depending on who was asking or who was spelling), had proved her nature,
so now the same stimulus needed to be applied to another peripheral player. Young Sarah Hughson, daughter of John, and surely
one with an ear to the occasion, was chosen as Price's next mark. A few days later, having arrived in the courthouse to witness
her mother and father be formally charged, she was quickly detained and removed in bondage from the courtroom. Thrown into
jail, she soon found a talkative Arthur Price conveniently occupying an adjoining cell.

From experience, knowing exactly where to take the discussion, Price started in on young Sarah, asking her pointed questions
about the fires to see her response. The answers she gave at first were indirect, yet weighted.

"I went to a fortune teller," she told the man caged beside her, "who told me that in less than five weeks' time I would come
to trouble if I did not take good care of myself." It certainly seemed a bleak fortune that had already appeared to have come
true. "But after that I will come to good fortune," Sarah assured the informant.

"What of your father's fortune?" Price egged her on.

"My father will be tried and condemned, but not hanged. He is to go over the water," she said.

Price had Sarah where he wanted her. Prodding her forward, masking his way to appear meandering and casual when it was in
fact altogether direct and focused, he finally got to the subject of the rebellion, opening the door by telling Sarah that
some of the slaves involved had been discovered and had already started talking.

"I know nothing of any plot," Sarah responded definitively.

"They that were sworn in the plot had discovered and brought them every one in." Arthur Price lied to the teenager, the effects
of the lie visible immediately, as Sarah blushed at the thought of it. As she nervously replaced her bonnet back on her head
in a tell of her true desire to hide from him and the revelation, Sarah's cheeks lost their red as her face went flush, and
then she blushed ruddy all over again.

"Do you know who it was? What have you heard?" Sarah asked him.

"Oh, I heard it by and by, and it was kept private," Price told her, insinuating an intimate involvement and trustworthy nature
when in fact he possessed neither.

Sarah was frozen. Her mind moving, adjusting to this knowledge of her most primal fears for her fate. It was a long moment
before she could gather enough composure to speak. "It must be either Holt's Negro, or Todd's," she said, thinking out loud,
"for we were always afraid of them and mistrusted them, though they were as bad as the rest and were to have set their own
masters' houses on fire. I wish that Todd had sent his black dog away, or sold him, when he was going to do it." This last
little detail only adding to the credibility of Mr. Arthur Price's later recantation of the conversation when it was discovered
by the investigating judges that Mr. Todd had
indeed
intended to get rid of his slave, as was the custom with unruly human merchandise.

"You had better tell everything you know," Price pressed her, "for that may be of some service to your father."

"No," Sarah insisted, "for they are doing all they can to take his life away. I would sooner suffer death and be hanged with
my daddy if he is to be hanged, than give them that satisfaction of telling or discovering anything to them."

Despite the duplicitous Price's pleading, Sarah was determined, as much as she was despondent.

"I should have gone into the country," she lamented. "Like a fool that I was I did not go up in the country! I stayed to see
what would happen to my mama and daddy, but now I would go. I'll be hanged if ever they should get me in York again." Gone
now was the casual optimism of only moments before. Only fear and anger seemed to remain. And bitterness. Thinking of the
city and its denizens that had now become her persecutors, Sarah had only threats to offer:

"If they had not better care for themselves, they will have a great deal more damage and danger in York than they are aware
of," she warned. "If they do hang my daddy, they better do something else." Adding knowingly, "As for the fire at the fort,
they did not set the saddle on the right horse."

The last cryptic comment, Arthur Price explained to the assembled jury at the end of his tale, meant that the judges had yet
to look in the right direction for the real mastermind behind the fire at the fort.

Of the other Africans mentioned by Sarah, Mr. Holt, a local dancing instructor, already had the foresight to remove his slave
from the city, thereby avoiding losing his costly personal property to a court that very well might decide to destroy it.
Dundee, Mr. Todd's slave, was less fortunate, and was taken up immediately.