I was a prisoner of the Shawnee.

I am Pompey. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus Jerome Chandler. I was born in the year of our Lord 1741 in the county of Culpeper in the colony of Virginia.

THE LIFE OF POMPEY BY WILLIAM TAMPLIN 34THPARALLEL MAGAZINE ISSUE 115

I found this manuscript in the basement of my late grandmother’s apartment in Louisville, tucked behind the frontispiece of an old copy of Dryden’s translations of Virgil. She inherited the Virgil from her mother, who in 1894 salvaged it from a house fire in Henry County, Kentucky that left her grandparents penniless. That fire was memorialized by Wendell Berry in his novel, A Place Beyond Time. I have edited the Pompey text for clarity, abounding as it does in misspellings, erasures, and Latinisms. Frustratingly, prolonged study of it has even begun to affect my own style.

In my younger years I sought to consolidate the East and civilize it, and through ill-luck, hard work, and an Achillean sentimentality, I have unwittingly accomplished what I set out to do, thus damning myself and my brothers.

I am Pompey. Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus Jerome Chandler. I was born in the year of our Lord 1741 in the county of Culpeper in the colony of Virginia.

My father was my master, Cornelius Logsdon Chandler, descended from stock as base and barbarous as the cattle he bred: lowland Scots and northern English, liminal folk who brought their border wars and incorrigible disorderliness with them wheresoever they trod.

My mother Fatima was his slave, a light-skinned African woman the other Negroes regarded as a princess, and a Mussulman to boot, the sole memory of whose bright kindly face was her cooing me to sleep, her breath heavy with cider, and humming me a tune from the Koran that went something like: walakad zayanna assama ed dounya. That peaceable song is all I can recall of her Arabic tongue.

Upon the appearance of the first fruits of my moral sentiments, I espied my half-brother John pilfering an apple from the cellar and, unfastidious as his forbears, leaving the door ajar for the greater convenience of rabbits and other vermin. Cornelius noticed this and his interest in me as an agent endowed with moral and spiritual faculties increased.

For his domineering nature, my father had a poetical sense, evidence I daresay of a Welsh strain. Father sang me an old ditty from his native Pennsylvania, eliding the last word and allowing me to complete the lines with improvised terminal words from my own fecund imagination. And complete them I did.

If human eyes happen upon this text, may their owners remember that for all his shortcomings, Ole Corny Chandler did not impel me to dance and sing alongside the other Negroes. Perhaps because I was his progeny or that of a soi-disante Mussulman princess, he held me in a certain esteem.

Father procured me a Latin tutor, a hapless, itinerant man with strabismus and a twitch, said to have been taken captive in his youth by the Shawnee during one of their easterly encroachments.

One year later I had finished my second translation of the Gallic Wars, and in the summer of my 11th year my father, upon the insistence of my tutor, and following the death of my half-brother John, Cornelius’s only true heir, appended a “Jerome” to my compendium of forenames and, in imitation of the local gentry, sent me in John’s stead to be educated for an indeterminate amount of time at St Roderick’s at Richmond. For Cornelius was a new kind of man, valuing merit and heart, contemptuous of rank, and yet ambitious to a fault.

I boarded at St Roderick’s for only one year before my father recalled me, pleading ill health and my aid in the right management of his estate. My mother, he added, almost as an afterthought, also suffered from an ailment, although I surmised that to be no more than a surfeit of cider, her indomitable malady.

In the coach to Culpeper, I caught a first conversational whiff of the cattle blight that had decimated my father’s herds, and barely out of the trap, I was clapped in manacles and brought stoic and unsurprised before my sentimental father, weeping before me on the floor of his frontier cabin.

Not even the stench of his expired livestock–or his expired dreams–lingered in the thick July atmosphere of Virginia. My mother, it turned out, had been sold. My younger half-sister, Flora, had been temporarily sent away so as not to witness Fatima’s sale and mine.

The next week, after trading the remainder of his progeny-chattel, Cornelius Logsdon Chandler, inebriated, bid me farewell as my new owner–Calloway I will call him, so as not to honor his name with the kleos aphthiton of historical record, however repugnant the circumstances–marched me to his settlement in the western mountains.

Before the base man could extract a cry of capitulation from the teeming tongue of his new slave, the buzz of an arrow turned his haughty speech to a gurgle, and I was then a prisoner of the Shawnee. Or a slave still? I knew not, and at 11 years of age the slave I was had long learned to suppress expectation.