African Bio
Name: Oliver March 2017
Humanities Africans in NY: Creative Narrative Assignment
Free Life
By Oliver Eig
Hello. I am Deborah Squash, and I was an enslaved Angolan for General George Washington. I am 22 years old. I would tell you how great it was to have been working for him, but it wasn’t. These men did not think of me as human, but property. When I came here from Angola, they exchanged me for rum. All I did is work, and if I didn’t work, I would get punished. I was not the General’s personal slave. No, all I did was work in the kitchen, and occasionally the field if my master sells some of the field workers away. But, at least in my opinion, I am an excellent cook. The General always told me to cook certain traditional meals that his mama used to make for him. But one day I decided to try to impress him by making my mama’s curried chicken. He was outraged and disgusted. He whipped me so hard I lost feeling in my back for eleven days. He was not a very nice man. This was why, two weeks later, I decided to run away from him to New York. The other reason was that I did not want to be owned. I was not the only one that tried to escape. Sadly, many people got caught and were punished worse than I would like to imagine. At this time, New York was a Royal Colony. So my husband Harvey and I got to live under a British loyalist man under the name of Lynch. Harvey belonged to Lynch, while I still belonged to George Washington. When we worked for Lynch we used to farm in the bouwerie I remember praying that the Loyalists won the war because if they didn’t we would have to go back to that devil of a man Washington. My heart crushed when we lost the war, I was so excited to live with Harvey without fear of being taken away to Washington. Luckily, our British saviors did not give us back to them. General Carleton fulfilled his promise of not giving the blacks back to the Americans, regardless of the outcome of the war. He came up to me and Harvey, and said, “Washington and his men may come looking for you and the other negroes that belonged to him. There is a ship leaving for Nova Scotia in 45 minutes at the New York harbor. Be there.” So as he directed, we went to the ship 10 minutes early because we were so eager to get away from New York. After we arrived in Nova Scotia, Harvey built a cabin for me and him to live together as a peaceful, free, and happy couple. That is exactly what the cabin did for us.
Yesterday, I went into town to buy some herring, Harvey’s favorite. I despise the stuff. He says it tastes good because of how salty it is and it makes him feel like he is in the ocean. Whenever he says that I just say, “Why do you need to feel like you are at the ocean by eating a fish if you can feel that way by actually being there?” Sometimes Harvey just says anything.
When I got into town I saw the Robinsons, A family that came over on the same boat as us from New York. They have two beautiful boys that love going shopping with their mama. Their mama, Renée, is from St. Lucia, which is an island in the Caribbean. Before coming to Nova Scotia, she never knew what being free felt like, she was born a slave, unlike me and Harvey. I scanned around the market for the fish stand. I found it and made my way over there. I scooped up a few pounds of herring and one pound of king salmon, my favorite. I gave the man working the stand 10 shillings and made my way out of the market and started walking down the street towards my home. People walked past me, buzzing with conversation. Nova Scotia is so beautiful, with the large, looming, bushy trees and the cobblestone roads that highlight the bright green grass. Eventually, I reached my lovely home and when I opened the door I was enveloped by a hug from Harvey. This is what a free life looks like.
I am very proud of this piece. The part of this piece I am the most proud of has to be the second half of the piece, because it entirely fictional except for the part that Deborah and Harvey moved to Nova Scotia. I have learned a couple of things while writing this piece too. An example of one of these things is how I developed a newly found understanding about how enslaved people were not only treated poorly, they were treated poorly most of their life. The part of this piece I need to work on would be the first half, since I feel like I force a bunch of fiction in with the non-fiction and it does not have nearly as nice of a flow as the second half.