Wantone’s wife, née Comfort and descended from an unbroken line of Berkshire Puritans who had arrived in the Bay Colony not long after the Mayflower, had for several years been growing ever more austere in her faith, and to the achievement of a glacial purity of relations. As a result she abhorred all spiritual and fleshly transgressions, especially bastardy, in which the two were so visibly commingled. Upon learning of the infant’s imminent entry into the sphere of her family’s existence, she ordered that it be kept out of her sight altogether.
Music
When Lacy had first passed the infant Zion to her master for inspection, the child began to cry uncontrollably. Wantone order him to be placed in a small wooden crib on the second floor of the house above the buttery: thereby he might learn peace. This weeping, which soon became a kind of keening, persisted for several weeks without relent. Meanwhile Wantone ordered his slaves Jubal, a native-born Negro who tended his livestock, and Axum, a young mulatto of New Hampshire origin who served as his handyman, to bury the deceased slave girl Mary near the edge of his south grazing fields. At her interment, the master recited over the grave a few lines from the Old Testament, and wept.
Lacy was nearing middle age, yet this chain of events soon bound her into assuming the role of the child’s mother. Otherwise she was engaged in innumerable chores about the house or attending to her mistress, Mrs. Wantone, who did not like ever to be kept waiting. Lacy had not seen her own child since shortly after his sixth birthday nearly fifteen years before, because her previous master, then ill with cancer and disposing of his Boston estate, had sold the boy north to a merchant in Newbury, and her south to Wantone. Taking frequent quick breaks, she nursed the infant Zion from a suckling bottle, on warm goat’s milk sweetened with honey and dashes of rum, of which there was no shortage in the cellar. She also sang to him the lively songs she remembered from her childhood along the lower Volta, in the Gold Coast, as well as Christian hymns when any member of the family, especially her mistress, was in earshot. Eventually the child calmed down appreciably, and Wantone allowed him to be carried about the entire house and grounds when the mistress was away.
Though these were years of increasing privation for many in the Colony as the noose of the mother country tightened, Wantone prospered. Not long after this time he purchased a likely young Negro woman, named Mary, for £11 from the Boston trader Nicholas Marshall, to replace the deceased Mary, who had attended primarily to the four Wantone children, Nathanael, Sarah, Elizabeth, and Hepzibah. New Mary was also expected to afford Lacy more time for Mrs. Wantone by also watching Zion. This became the only task to which she took with even a passing enthusiasm. She had been born in the region of the Gambia, where all were free, and quickly chafed under the weight of her new status. She ignored orders; she talked back. Moreover she was given to spreading rumors and painting her face and fingers gaily with Roxbury clay and indigo on the Sabbath, while declining to recite the Lord’s prayers, as well as to other acts of idleness, gossip, lewdness, and truculence. For these offenses, to which the boy was a constant witness, she was routinely whipped by her mistress, who took a firm and iron hand at all times. Naturally, New Mary ran away, to Brookline, where she was captured by the local constabulary, and returned bound to the Wantones. She received ten lashes for her impertinence, another ten for her flight, still a third ten for cursing her mistress before the other slaves, and an interdiction not to leave the grounds of the estate under any circumstances. One can only temporarily keep a wild horse penned. For several years, as the child Zion was nearing the age of his autonomy (seven), New Mary endured these constraints, peaceably rearing the child with Lacy and the several Negro male servants, Jubal, Axum and Quabina. And then she ran away again, this time getting as far south as Stoughton, on the Neponsit River. Again she was returned, duly punished, ordered to comport herself with the dignity befitting the Wantone household. Repeated incidents of insolence and misbehavior followed, however, including acts of a lascivious nature with a local Indian, the destruction of several volumes of books, and an attempted fire. The Wantones sold New Mary to a Plymouth candlemaker for £4. Zion was, for nearly a year, inconsolable.
Even during New Mary’s tenure Zion had often shown signs of melancholy or unprovoked anger. Frequently sullen, he would often sequester himself in the buttery, or at the edge of the manor house’s Chinese porch, singing to himself lyrics improvised out of the air or songs he had learned from Lacy and the other slaves. Or he would declaim passages from the local gazette which Axum or the Wantone children had taught him. At other times he would devise elaborate counting games, to the amazement of the other slaves. When caught in such idle pursuits on numerous occasions by Mrs. Wantone, who spared no rod, he did not shed a tear. Her punishments instead appeared only to inure him to discipline altogether. He began singing more frequently, and would occasionally accompany his songs with taps and foot-stamps. His master took a different tack, and hedgingly encouraged the boy in his musical pursuits, so long as they did not disturb the household or occur on the Sabbath. As a result the idling musical sessions abated — temporarily. Even so, Mrs. Wantone relinquished Zion’s correction to her husband and eldest son.
As soon as Zion was able he began performing small tasks about the house and estate, such as restuffing the mattress ticks, mucking out the stables, replacing the chamberpots, polishing the family’s shoes, and feeding the hens. His intermittent disappearances and musical-lyrical spells soon reappeared. At the age of ten, he entered an apprenticeship to Jubal, and then at eleven to Ford, the Irishman who oversaw the extensive Wantone holdings, which included twenty acres of home lot, fifteen acres of mowing land, twelve and a half acres fifteen rods of pasture land, twenty acres ten rods undivided of salt marsh, ten acres of woodland and muddy pond woods to the south, and six acres of woodland to the west, all in Roxbury and Dorchester; as well as a plot of forty acres of woodland in Cambridge, recently bequeathed by his late brother-in-law, Nathanael Comfort, Esq., a graduate of Harvard College and a gentleman lawyer. From Ford, Zion learned a number of Irish melodies, which he performed to the delight of all on Negro Election Day and other holidays. During the late summer evenings, he would accompany a nearby slave fiddler, and soon developed a name throughout the neighborhood as a warbler.