The community thought that as a mulatto he believed he was better than everyone else. Yet unlike other mulattos, who were a privileged lot, he worked with the black men in the fields. The community did not know why he was being treated so harshly. They did not understand why every week the man was forced by the faithful mulatto house slaves to take a secret bath in the guardroom, and why he hollered and cussed to the heavens every time he undertook these ablutions.
How could they believe his reason for smarting? After all, it was a known fact at the plantation that some of the slaves designated mulatto were in fact white. Even as The Owner registered them as his mulatto property after acquiring them, the authorities knew that they were white. Why would The Owner disguise the fact that the new slave was in fact white? Another thing: all the white slaves at Fairfield Farms were women, and were there for breeding mulatto children. What would The Owner be doing with a white male slave? If he was meant to mate with black women why was he never at the mating bays? The man must be delusional. He was clearly a mulatto. He just needed somebody to take him back to mother earth from the clouds on which he seemed to be floating.
Though the slave failed to convince the inhabitants of the plantation of his racial pedigree he knew that deep down under the brown dye of the mahogany chips he was a white man, as pure as The Owner himself. For many days after his capture he sank into a deep depression and stayed unwashed and stinking. Then he took to marching outside the big house singing Irish songs and demanding justice as an Irishman. The community was convinced that the new slave had gone raving mad. House slaves found this entertaining, especially when he took to calling The Owner names and demanded to see the lady of the house. They let him go on with his hollering for a while, especially when both targets of his invective were away. When everyone was tired of the entertainment the burly mulattos seized the slave, gave him a few whacks and then sent him to the guardhouse where they chained him to the walls.
Once the lady of the house came out to see what the commotion was about. Immediately the man saw her he threw himself at her feet and pleaded that she tell the truth. When the burly mulatto guards rushed forward to protect her she asked them to let the man speak. She was enjoying the mortification of the rogue who had exploited her naivety and almost cheated her of a fortune. The brown tone on his skin, the curly hair, the tattered calico pants and shirt, the black shoeless feet and the smudges of filth on his face arms and legs gave the lady of the house much satisfaction.
“You know me, you do,” said the slave. “I sold you the potion and I’m sorry about it. You’ve humiliated me enough with the brown paint. Please ask your man to set me free, madam. I’ve learned my lesson.”
But the lady of the house said she did not know what the lunatic was talking about. She denied ever setting eyes on him. She knew nothing about the potion either and did not understand the gibberish about brown paint. She ordered the guards to take him back to the guardhouse and chain him to the walls until he came to his senses. Only then could he return to the field to work with the other black men.
It was much better to be in the field than to be chained. Soon the slave calmed down and stopped his nonsense.
He seemed to get into the groove of things at the plantation and everyone thought he had accepted his lot like a man, though he kept to himself. Even the guards got careless and sometimes left his pen unlocked.
One day he took a chance and escaped. He told his story to white men he encountered outside the boundaries of Fairfield Farms. They did not believe him. Or they pretended not to believe him. Instead they brought him back to The Owner. He received a few lashes for that. Yet he tried again. But the slave chasers caught him before he could get far. He was, after all, ignorant of the art of flight and since he did not mix with the others, who he felt were naturally inferior, he did not learn anything about the message of the quilts and of the spirituals and about the slave stealers and all the lore surrounding freedom.
For a long time he steadfastly refused to socialize with other slaves. Until it became necessary to do so in order to get the hooch that the blacks covertly brewed or distilled. He realized that he had missed the communion of other men and women. For his survival he gradually developed the habits of Africans. By now he was no longer brown but white. The Owner and his minions had finally got tired of browning him with mahogany chips. They had humiliated him enough. But of course the change of color did not mean his situation had changed. The Owner still insisted that he was a mulatto and he was no different from the other white slaves who had been declared mulattos. To the Africans his white complexion did not matter anymore. What mattered was that he identified with Africans and therefore he was an African.
He became even more African when he was introduced to a mysterious fellow who lived by himself in his own cabin. It was known by now that he was Mrs. Fairfield’s toy. Even small children knew that. The Owner himself knew that. The plantation gossip had it that The Owner had no choice but to let his wife have a male concubine because he had lost his potency after indulging himself with all and sundry until his penis shriveled into a small worm because of disease. Some believed that the disease had affected his head. Otherwise why would he turn a blind eye when the big black fellow imported from Louisiana some years back serviced the mistress of Fairfield Farms?
Sometimes he was seen walking his tiger on a leash, a gift from the lady of the house purchased from a circus in Richmond after it had become too old to perform tricks. The fellow was quite friendly to the white slave when he first met him on one of his rounds with his tiger. And the white slave thought the fellow was a good man. Until he saw him being rude and arrogant to the black slaves, people the white slave had come to consider his friends. The big man was too good even to return their greeting. It was in reaction to the behavior of this pitch black fellow who felt superior to other blacks just because he slept with a white woman that the white slave resolved to be even more African than ever before.
Although he was now armed with information about the slave stealers who occasionally visited the region to whisk away slaves across the Ohio River, he was too impatient to wait. In the second year of his slavery he tried to escape again. This time he had learned a few tricks and was gone for a few days. The slave chasers searched in vain. Yet he was not far from Fairfield Farms all that time. He had taken refuge in a church in Winfield. It was his good fortune that the Quaker minister was an abolitionist.
The minister nevertheless respected the law of the land and did not play an active role in assisting fugitives. When he heard the slave’s story he believed it and chose to take the legal route. He took the matter to the Supreme Court of Virginia.
The case became a cause célèbre. Mr. David Fairfield engaged the services of a well-known lawyer from Port Royal, Virginia, Mr. George Fitzhugh.
Although Mr. Fitzhugh normally practiced as a criminal lawyer he was particularly suited for this case because of his interest in slavery. He had written extensively in such papers as the New York Daybook, De Bow’s Review and the Richmond Examiner on the subject. His position was that slavery was a natural and rightful condition of society.
The Owner’s position in this case was that the slave in question, a mulatto male of undetermined age, was his rightful property. He brought witnesses, his own happy mulattos who were present when he purchased the said property from a white man on the banks of the Guyandotte. He produced papers and a receipt with a mark made by the former owner, a Mr. John Tyler. There were guffaws, as the name belonged to the President of the United States, a son of Virginia no less, but also a man who had lost favor with all political parties, including his own Whig Party, for exercising the veto indiscriminately. He had lost even more favor with the Democrats for his public declaration that in principle he was opposed to the perpetuation of slavery. This was much further than the Whigs of the South were prepared to go for they were lukewarm on slavery. As far as his fellow Virginians were concerned Tyler had clearly adopted the radical anti-slavery position of the northern Whigs. He had therefore betrayed their trust.