After a spree which stretched from the city of Boston west to the edges of Middlesex County, the slave played his worst hand when he committed lascivious acts just across the county line on the person of a sleeping widow, Mary Shaftesbone, near Shrewsbury. Having broken into her home and reportedly taken violent liberties with her, unaccountably Zion did not flee the town, but entered a nearby tavern and began a round of popular songs, to the delight of a crowd of locals and the horror of the violated woman. The sheriff arrested him without delay. When he realized the notoriety of the criminal he had in his hands, he suggested to the local magistrate that, although this most recent felony had occurred in Worcester County, the criminal ought to be returned to the General Court in Boston, which had the apparatus to deal with such evil. The magistrate responded that given the current worsening political situation in the capital, it appeared unlikely that the slave’s crimes would receive rapid adjudication. Mrs. Shaftesbone, demanding justice, or at least compensation, therefore had word sent to Job Hollis, who was negotiating the sale of his business in the anticipation of an assault against Boston’s northern waterfront. The violated widow suggested a cash settlement, with the proviso that Hollis sell the criminal out of the colonies, preferably to the French West Indies. Hollis, who still held title to Zion, agreed to this arrangement, and collected him, now restrained in wrist irons, from the town jail. They rode westward, where Hollis’s real plan was to sell the slave down at Albany to assure a good price and guarded transport down the Hudson. But on the way, in the town of Pittsfield, they encountered the Hampshire County sheriff, who claimed to possess warrants for the Negro from Worcester and Suffolk Counties. In the confusion arising over the validity, scope and authority of the documents, Zion, as if aware of the tenuous state of justice for blacks in New York State, seized his master’s musket, knocked both men out, mounted the sheriff’s horse, and rode back eastward.
Jurisdiction
The following day, the Crown’s military authorities captured Zion in an alder wood outside Worcester and placed him in the town garrison under heavy local guard. But at nightfall he inexplicably slipped away. He then committed a series of robberies and violent acts throughout the entire span of the county until his capture on September 17, 1774, again by the military authorities, who pressed to try him under the statutory laws of Britain, though that country’s influence was now nearly at ebb tide. The colonial judiciary objected, and instead rushed this particular case along, despite a growing criminal and civil case backlog. Problems of jurisdiction always mirror much greater crises of authority. At Worcester, Zion was tried and found guilty of rape by a judge who considered the slave’s affinity for civil disobedience and social disruption to be intolerable in light of the present state of alarm throughout the region. He ordered a hanging. Mindful of his rights under the law, Zion implored the court for a “benefit of clergy.” This the General Court of Worcester County, after half a year’s consideration of his records, with documentation from the neighboring courts and his former owners, denied.
Confession
The night before he was to be led to the gallows, Zion sang a dirge that brought tears to the eyes of a townswoman standing nearby. He then gave a short testimony of his life and self-destruction, which ended with the following admonition, in a keening voice, to all bondsmen and women of the colony and of New England: “To all fellow Brothers and Sisters of Africk and other wise in Bondage in this common Wealth of Massachusetts take heart that ye avoid Drunkenness and Lewdness of the Flesh for the only true Liberty lies in holding Free — do keep the Faith—”
This confession was duly witnessed and indited by an Anglican minister from Leominster, who included it among his personal effects when he returned a year later to his home parish outside London. The account was subsequently lost, however; he was the only one of those present who later recalled it.
Theory (Outtake)
The prevalence of the doctrine of liberty may be accounted for, from another cause, viz., a false sensation or seeming experience which we have, or may have, of liberty or indifference, in many of our actions.” David Hume
Eclipse
On the morning of April 1, 1775, the authorities did not find the Negro named Zion in his cell. Given the severity of the crimes and the necessity of preserving the ruling order, another Negro, whose particular crimes are not recorded, was hanged in the Worcester Town Square, surrounded by a sparse gallery of onlookers, among them the widow Shaftesbone; and the newly-married Sarah Wantone Fleet and her husband George, of Worcester, a Lockean and member of a local militia. Also present was Jubal, now calling himself Mr. John Cuffee, a free laborer and leader of a Negro brigade in Boston.
Of their response there is no record. The rest of the town, absent from the proceedings, was preparing, one must suppose, for the swiftly approaching conflagration.
A LETTER ON THE TRIALS OF THE COUNTERREFORMATION IN NEW LISBON
“What is the nature of the recurring irrationality of culture which precludes a victory of modernizing rationality?”
Aby Warburg
“If I could fly to you on the wings of eagles…”
Yehuda HaLevi
“I want the essence. My soul is in a hurry.”
Mário de Andrade
“The disquiet that lurks beneath the placid surface…”
Manoel Aries D’Azevedo
June 1630
TO:
Dom Inácio Lisboa Branco
Sacred and Professed House
Second Order of the Discalced Brothers of the Holy Ghost
in care of the Bishopric of Bahia
São Salvador da Bahia dos Todos os Santos
New Lusitânia (Brazil)
DOM FRANCISCO,
I write you in the expectation that you will soon discover this missive, concealed, as you regularly instructed the members of the professed house in Olinda, during the period that you led it, within the binding of this book that has been sent to you and which you, having discovered the letter, have just set down. The book is the very Lives of the Martyrs you bequeathed to those remaining before your flight in the spring of last year. The Netherlandish authorities under Nassau-Siegen persist in demonstrating toleration, and reason, not only in matters of the Faith, and though they are masters at war, proceed without cunning concerning our vernacular handiwork; and so it is unlikely that they will have seized this innocuous volume as contraband or scuttled it on censorious shores before it moors upon your writing table.
Nor is it likely that they will have laid a finger on the few other and sundry effects of yours, which include a rosary of colored Italian glass, an embroidered muslin handkerchief, a chasuble of black silk, embroidered in resplendant hues of violet, and a tattered and faded red vest of common linen that I am told you once wore faithfully during your conversions along the upper Capabaribe River. These effects I have entrusted separately with Amaro (Gaspar) Leite, the messenger who sails to your city under a letter of safe passage, and who, upon seeing you, shall pass on the shibboleth that confirms the existence of the very communication your eyes now feast upon.