The air grew colder. Fuel being scarce, and the Staniford Street house being draughty, I offered my services to a work crew in exchange for wood. The soldiers were similarly in need; my work-detail was given orders to assist them in pulling down rows of houses and wharves in the South End, where these structures should be replaced by a line of defensive works.
Demolishment was an excellent sport for me; I welcomed the savagery of axe and beetle. The peril of being trapped within the city, without hope of change until some calamity, weighed heavily upon me. I thought drearily on the clamoring of rebels in the streets of Williamsburg, the flight of royal authority from that beleaguered capital; I thought on the rebels who surrounded us, baying for liberty and offering none themselves; and I, rehearsing the indignities suffered by my people of Africk hue; the tortures; recalling the ships still plying the waves with more of us in their holds; the howling of rebels anxious to see us bound; their brutal Congress, full of men who spake of vaunted reason; examining the need, the anger, the infant wail and grasping which allowed them to cast aside logic and enthymeme, the valid and the true — I was full of fury.
Destruction, therefore, was apt divertissement; and with each blow of the hammer upon the beams, I forgot further my former years and my present predicaments, and rather occupied myself in calculations of stress and impact, and how I might best avoid nails.
I was sensible of a new excitement. I had waited and hid, and what I had ever feared was conflict: first, in the rebel camp, dreading the issuing forth of the Royal Army to destroy us; then, enchained, anticipating some dire fate in the College of Lucidity; and finally, here, surrounded in this city invested by rebels with no action taken, awaiting the summation of this siege — always constrained — always inert — but now I desired justice eruptive.
I now imagined violence — the bayonet-thrust, the detonation — the report of a musket — as the hard sublimate of speech I had curtailed through years, all the moments when I had silently inclined my head, these suppressed words of outrage now become indurated into some dire rhetoric, an oration so loud and so decisive, ’twould cause bodies to topple, and walls to fall, and I might surge forwards with the others — for so I saw us now, Negroes of the King’s Army, unleashed at last, our fury speaking, and never more to scrape before the cruelties of gentlemen. This, from one who was ever pacific in nature.
So doth a man change from one moment to the next. So did I change, and become by degrees, without knowing, a soldier.
Beneath maples turned scarlet, scarlet soldiers sawed, as fire turns upon itself, devouring.