I should like to be able to pronounce that I ate none of their food; that I drank none of their water; that I remained absent from their inquiries and entreaties; but after the space of some four days, when oatmeal was placed before me, I could not resist it, and I broke my fast, figuring that abstention to the point of death was an heroic, but withal a futile, stratagem, perhaps more cowardly to affect than manfully to face the adversities that surrounded me.

Lying without motion, I had nought to do but consider how I was arrived at such a pass. My suspicions in this matter were terrible to consider.

Nothing was clearer than this: I had been returned to the Collegians and to captivity as a favor by Sons of Liberty grateful for the College’s donations to their cause.

I had spent several weeks applying myself to the cause of liberty. I had dug trenches and hacked at roots with mattocks. I had worked upon my hands and knees, stooped it seemed for days, fortifying Breed’s and Winter’s Hills, raising works upon the scarred streets of Roxbury near Boston Neck. The hafts of the tools were stained black with the sweat of us all, our contributions, black and white alike.

Black and white together, we ate our rationed meals; both black and white received the same portion, and if we sat near the fire of those of our own race, it was by dint of habit, rather than stricture of government.

We did not speak much as we labored. Heaving dirt from a pit, I would hear on another man’s breath some song half-sung in time to his swing; the engineers called their instructions, wending their way through our deep, loamy fosses. When we ate, we did not much speak, but rather watched one another or the fire.

Quite often, the King’s Army launched their artillery towards our works without hope of the shells reaching us. After the first shell in the distance, calls would go out from the crest of the hill that we should seek shelter; and we would file behind the half-built fortifications and hunch in the dirt, arms limp at our sides. Some would sleep while the shelling, futile, echoed along the summer roads; some would wind stalks of grass around their fingers; some would mutter to friends.

I was never free from dirt. It was on my hands and in my mouth, and my food crackled with it; my eyes were full of it, after days of examining it, exhuming stones like bone. I smellt dirt in my dreams. We were constantly begrimed.

Some nights, a friend and drinking-companion of mine of the Patriot forces, a Mr. G—ing, would seek out my fire and would conduct me back to his regiment, with whom I had briefly served. We would form a small band of music and play songs requested by our fellows. These were sweet times. Mr. G—ing would look about him and would proclaim the joyous equality of all, the liberty that would soon overtake us.

And was he right to celebrate?

Indeed, we worked side by side, white knuckles as scored and darkened as brown; and yet as we labored for liberty, applauded by men in silk waistcoats who came to observe our unity and diligence, I noted thus:

The Africans amongst us risked our lives for liberty, and yet had no assurance liberty would be ours; our pay, in many cases, came not to us, but to our owners — for it was reckoned that we belonged to them, and so our labor was theirs, so they should receive compensation for our absence from their farms, their dining-rooms, and their cellars.

Mr. G—ing might speak in sanguine tones of imminent freedom, but he did not know of the secret colloquies we held when no white men were by, where we whispered to each other the rumors we heard: that the other colonies would only join the rebellion if it were declared that “property” was secure — that there should be no general emancipation. Mr. G—ing talked with fire of the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, a noble experiment in human dignity; we heard it was peopled with slave-lords, men who bewailed their enslavement to Britain while in their rice fields, thousands of their bonded servants toiled without pay in the mud, the sun above, the air swarmed with insects, and the water red with scum. We heard of their fear of slave rebellion, women bereft of their husbands sleeping with their grandfathers’ blunderbusses shrouded in the bedsheets, children weeping and running at the sight of footmen who had stood by them since infancy, afraid of the hatchet or razor. We heard that such an insurrection was planned, though the reports never mentioned the same colony, nor the same date, but only details obscured by hundreds of miles and the hearth-tales of countless households: a name such as Pompey or Quash; an outrage, as the whipping to death of an infant for wailing or some unspeakable indignities practiced upon a slave by his lustful master; and sometimes, a hint of a sign by which we should know the time was come, such as the cry of the conch or tracks from a horseshoe inscribed ARISE.

The times, the seasons, the signs may have been mythical; but the sufferings were not. I lay in the dark with the breathing of men around me and knew that then, at that selfsame moment, where dawn groped across the sea, my brethren lay bound in ships, one body atop another, smelling of their green wounds and fæces; I knew in dark houses, there was torture, arms held down, fire-brands approaching the soft skin of the belly or arm; and still — there is screaming in the night; there is flight; mothers sob for children they shall not see again; girls feel the weight of men atop them; men cry for their wives; boys dangle dead in the barn; and we smoke their sorrow contentedly; and we eat their sorrow; and we wear their sorrow; and wonder how it came so cheap.

It was for this that we labored and fought, risking our very lives. And yet some of the men who worked alongside of me or who died upon the bayonets of the British at Bunker Hill had been enlisted by their masters without promise of freedom; with no offer of emancipation; and they fought in lieu of their masters, who were acclaimed generous patriots for supplying men for the cause.

My companion Mr. G—ing hath a generous heart — a heart so filled with light that I could scarce desire to cloud it — but he did not think on this much when he came to visit me in the evenings. He little noted the lists of slaves made up by regimental commanders, that no runaways should enlist, or the careful tallies of monies to be paid to men who stayed at home and sent their bonded Negroes to the wars instead. He little noted the notice that was taken of Negroes who moved about the camp at night. Had he seen such, his heart would have melted; he should have bellowed with outrage; and for that, may God bless him; but still, it would have been the outrage of a white man, unthreatened by these hypocrisies.

After the battle was fought atop Bunker Hill, I saw a Negro man upon the road from Charlestown. He was tall and stout of build, and he had a hole so broad upon his chest that the bone of his skeleton was shown. He used his musket for a walking-stick. His smock was scarlet with his blood. He stopped in his ragged pilgrimage only to lift his hat to white men who fled past him.

A passerby stopped and required directions of him. I saw him gesture and explain a route.

Being satisfied with the response, the passerby thanked him profusely and went onwards, toward the tea-room he sought; and I took the slave by the arm and helped him limp to the physicians’ tent.

There, we sat him upon the hay and the doctor examined his wounds. Being questioned by the doctor, the man responded that his name was Hosiah Lister, the last name being his master’s name, and that he fought in his master’s stead, but that he should, upon the completion of the war, be freed. The doctor recorded his regiment and company and dressed his wounds, but without much hope of success; the loss of blood being great, it was supposed he would soon give up the ghost.

I went to sit by his side. He watched the flies.

“You have fought bravely, sir,” I said.

He recited from his youth a recipe for a concoction to dull flying insects; he told me that he stood on chairs with a glass full of this ammoniac water sweetened, and pressed it up against the ceiling where the flies sat, they falling into the concoction, drunken. So, said he, did he spend long boyhood afternoons; this was his duty.

I asked him a few questions regarding his family, that I might take a message to them, but he gave no certain answer, and fell silent. I called the surgeon. He came and stooped by our side, feeling Hosiah’s wrist. After a minute, he shook his head; he lifted his thumbs to Hosiah’s eyes and closed them.

Rising, he went to his table and opened a great account book, dipped his quill in the ink, indited a company and regiment, and recorded this, the man’s only epitaph:

Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec’d his freedom.