One afternoon around the time of Zion’s thirteenth year Jubal heard fiddling out near the cow barn. On investigation, he found the boy creditably playing his master’s violin and singing a sorrowful tune in accompaniment. The horses stood in their stables, unbrushed. Because he liked the saturnine child, Jubal waited until Zion had finished his performance. After reproaching him, Jubal seized the violin and returned it to the music room. When he returned to the barn, the boy was missing. Several weeks later Jubal again found Zion playing the violin in the afternoon, when he should have been at the chicken-coop feeding the hens; this time he threatened to tell on the boy if he took the violin again, to which Zion only laughed and dared Jubal to say anything. Jubal returned the violin without incident. The third time Jubal encountered the boy fiddling in the barn, he rebuked him vehemently, but before he could snatch away the violin, Zion smashed it to smithereens on a trough. For this, he eventually received stripes from both his master and his master’s son, and a ban on singing of any sort. The boy’s wild mood swings and moroseness waxed from this point, to the extent that the other slaves, particularly Jubal, took care not to offend him. Wantone himself remained unconcerned, as he was the master of his manor, and an oak does not quiver before ivy.
Around the time of his fourteenth birthday, Zion, now so strapping in build and mature in mien that he could almost pass for a man, ran away for the first time. Absconding in the dead of night, he got as far as the town of Dedham, some nine miles away. There he remained in the surrounding woods undiscovered for a week, until his nightly ballads and lamentations betrayed him to a local Indian, who reported the melodiousness of the voice to the town sheriff. Returned to his master, Zion received the following punishment: he was placed in stocks for a night, and then confined to the grounds of the estate, with the threat that any further misdeeds could result in his being temporarily remanded to the custody of the local authorities. Within a fortnight the boy had run away again, this time with one of Wantone’s personal effects, and a pillowbeer of food. A search of the surrounding towns turned up no clue of him. As a result, Wantone was forced to advertise in the local gazette for the return of his lawful property.
Flight
From the New England Weekly News Letter, June 18, 1768:
Ran away from his master Isaac Wantone gentleman of the country town of Roxbury in Suffolk County, in Massachusetts Bay Colony, a likely Negro boy aged fourteene years, named ZION, who wore on him [an] old grey shirt homespun and pair of breeches of the same cotton cloth, with shoes only, and a kerchief about his head, carrying a silver watch, clever, who sings like a nightingalclass="underline" WHO shall take up said likely ZION and convey him to his MASTER above said, or advise him so that he may have him again shall be PAID for the SAME at the rate of £4 1s.
To Pennyman
Three months had advanced when the sheriff’s office of the town of Monatomy, in Middlesex County, returned to the Wantones the fugitive child, who had been arrested and detained on a series of charges. These included but were not limited to breaking the Negro curfew in Middlesex County; theft (of various small articles, including watches and food); disturbance of the peace; brawling, gambling and trickery at games of chance; dissembling about his identity and provenance; and masquerading as a free person. Most seriously the young slave had beaten up an Irish laborer outside a public house in Waltham, and threatened the man’s life if he reported the beating to the authorities, local or the King’s. For this series of offenses, which broke the patience of the Wantones, the General Court of Middlesex County arraigned, tried and convicted the slave, to the penalty of thirty-five stripes, and a fine of £10, payable to the victims. After the boy received his public lashes, his master settled the fine and issued an apology for his slave’s behavior to the General Court, which was printed in all the local papers. He then promptly flogged Zion himself before restraining the boy in a stock behind the cow barn. During this time, the Wantones considered their options, and agreed it would be in their best interests to sell their intractable chattel, who, they supposed, still had arson and murder waiting in his kit. This they promptly did despite the rapidly deflating nature of the local currency, for the sum of £5, to a distant relative of Wantone’s, the merchant Jabez Pennyman, then living on a small estate in the Dorchester Neck.
Pennyman, a widower and veteran, ran general provision shops in Dorchester and Milton, the latter purchased at a sharp discount from a Loyalist recently emigrated to Canada. A native of the Narraganset Plantations, he had earned a reputation for probity in all matters financial, and rectitude in all matters moral, and had acquired Zion both because of the low cost and because he required the services of a slave of considerable strength who could read English and reckon figures. The menagerie of Pennyman’s home, the slave soon learned, was utterly different from that of the Wantones’. Instead of sleeping in his master’s small but bearable attic, his quarters now consisted of a windowless, zinc-roofed shack, which might once have been a toolshed, furnished only with a pallet bed and a rusted chamberpot, several hundred yards away from the main edifice. His daily routine also diverged markedly from that of his earlier life in Roxbury: for Pennyman expected him to ride out with an assistant to one of his shops six days a week, and spend the entire workday lifting, lading, packing, unpacking, registering and moving stock, such as apparel of all sorts, furniture, books, kitchenware, provisions, yard and garden tools, and farm and estate implements. There were no other Blacks, or even Indians, in Pennyman’s household; only his Irish maid, Nellie, a Welsh manservant, James, and his assistants in the shops, all boys of English or Yankee heritage, none of whom showed the least inclination towards socializing with a Negro. Unless the situation demanded it, in fact, none of them, including Pennyman, spoke to him at all.
Although Zion worked commendably at his new post for almost six months (without even the smallest infraction beyond purloining several bottles of Malden rum), the long rides, the isolation and lack of companionship, his continued bondage, and the lure of the nearby ocean had begun to affect him perniciously. He especially bridled at Pennyman’s austerities: the provision of a minimum of food, and no spices at all, at meals; a moratorium on singing or celebrations of any kind, particularly during those hours that he set aside for his ledger books or to read the Gospel; and the requirement of clothes of a plain nature especially on holy days, for Pennyman had not been awakened by the preachings of Edwards or any other deliverer great or small. One morning, after unloading cases of sugar, flour, molasses, salt, suet, cranberry bread, sweet currants, and apples, and casks of rum, French brandy, Boston beer, and Madeira wine, Zion began singing aloud one of the songs he had learned from New Mary to pass the time, when he thought he overheard one of the shop assistants noting how perverse it was that “music should arise from a tarpit.” Confronting the man, who peppered him with epithets, Zion could no longer restrain himself and flattened the man with one blow. A bullet, once fired, cannot be recalled: Fearing the repercussions of his action, he fled on horse northward to Boston, tinderbox of liberty. After abandoning his mount in the marshlands near Boston Neck, he ran until he had reached the famed Beacon Hill portion of the Tremountain. He concealed himself in a stand of box, waiting for the cover of darkness before proceeding to the home of a cousin of Lacy who lived in Green Street, near the Mill Pond. Here and at another safe house run by free blacks he remained for several weeks, before shipping out without a permit from Hatch’s Wharf on a clipper bound for Nantucket.