“Really?”
“Placide is considering stagingTwelfth Nightin the spring. You’d make a convincing Feste.”
“You think so?”
“Could be your big break.”
They have arrived in front of the tavern, but Jack is still not sure he can follow Anderson inside.
“Just do what he says,” says Anderson. “And who knows? Maybe two hundred years from now, some git will be talking about how they’ve got no bloody clue who started the Richmond Theater fire.”
GILBERT
Gilbert lets himself into thesmithy just after daybreak and is surprised to find that the shop is empty, save for Marcus, who sits at the table by the fireplace, his head cradled in his arms. “You sleeping?” Gilbert asks.
“Not anymore,” Marcus says, pointing one eyeball in Gilbert’s direction.
“Where is everybody?”
“Some of them upstairs, trying to get some shut-eye. Some still out.”
“What about Kemp?” Gilbert says quietly, in case he’s in the loft, or getting ready to walk through the front door.
Marcus raises his head up into his hands and presses on his eye sockets with his palms. “I don’t think he’s been back all night.”
“He patrolling?”
“Assume so,” says Marcus. “Though it seems to me that, if he’s bent on serving his community, it might have been better to head on over to the green and see what he could do.”
Kemp is one of about seventy men who ride with the night watch, also known as the slave patrol. It’s an all-volunteer force that’s supposed to police gambling, prostitution, and the like, but all any of them ever do is harass Richmond’s Negro population. Gilbert can remember when rich white men—slave owners, all of them—made a point of riding with the patrol at least once or twice a month. But over the years, the makeup of the group’s membership has changed. Now the volunteers are low whites, who do plenty of their own gambling and prostituting, and barely have the money to buy a slave, much less maintain one.
Kemp, of course, is the exception. In addition to Gilbert, he owns Marcus and Ibrahim, who do odd jobs in the shop, and a girl named Fannie, who keeps his house.
Most of the men who work at Kemp’s smithy are not enslaved. There’s Ned, who worked as a whitesmith’s apprentice in Yorkshire before signing an indenture to come to the United States. Now he does all Kemp’s cutlery work in exchange for room and board. There’s Nick, who completed an apprenticeship with Kemp many years ago, but made such a lousy journeyman, traveling the backcountry, that he had no prayer of hanging out his own shingle. Then there are a slew of apprentices—many more than Kemp should ever have agreed to take on. It’s easy to think of these boys, some of whom are barely fourteen, as free labor, but a good blacksmith puts far more into an apprentice than he ever gets out of him. Apprentices require careful tutelage and constant supervision, and Kemp’s apprentices receive neither, but are expected to contribute to the shop’s output all the same.
One night, when Gilbert was up late talking to Marcus and Ibrahim, he asked if they had ever aspired to learn the trade. Ibrahim started to chuckle to himself, and when Gilbert asked what was so funny, Marcus answered for him. “What makes you think we haven’t?”
Gilbert didn’t understand, and when he said so, the men explained that Marcus had grown up working for a blacksmith on a plantation in Nottoway and that Ibrahim was the son of an ironworking family in the kingdom of Jolof, in West Africa, where blacksmiths were revered for their ability to control the earth’s elements.
“So, why does Kemp have you sorting nails?” Gilbert asked, dumbfounded. “He really don’t know you got training?”
“He never asked,” said Marcus, and Ibrahim just shook his head and laughed at the upside-down world where a know-nothing man like Kemp got to be the one in charge.
Gilbert can’t blame Marcus and Ibrahim for wanting to keep their talents to themselves. It’s the same way he feels about letting Kemp know he can read and write. He sees no advantage to telling him, aside from the fact that it makes him feel a little crazy sometimes, pretending not to be able to recognize the words in front of his face.
He slipped up once recently, but—thankfully—Marcus was the only one to notice. An old man had come to pick up a cook pan his wife had dropped off, and when Gilbert turned to the shelf where they kept small finished jobs, there were three pans, all of which looked roughly the same.He asked if the man recognized his wife’s, but of course he did not, so without thinking, Gilbert took hold of a paper tag that hung from one of the handles and read aloud, “Mrs. Fisher?”
“That’s the one,” said the man, and it was only after he was gone that Marcus gave him an appraising stare.
“What?”
“I didn’t say nothing,” said Marcus, throwing his hands in the air.
Ever since that day, a camaraderie has existed between the two men, and Gilbert leans into the intimacy whenever he can.
“You go over to the theater?” Gilbert asks Marcus now.
Marcus nods. “I was at the cockfight at—”
