upon a stone by the gate. Preacher-man would shelter him—she knew. And that, reader, is what preacher-man did do.
So come, ask my son to tell you of those days. Will he drum his chest with maddening rage or wipe tears of lament from his clouded eye at the loss of his mama? No, he will not. Rather, he will sing you a joyous melody of the sweet life lived with the English preacher, James Kinsman, and his saintly, good-goodly wife Jane. Do you think that you will be able to go about your day before my son has told you all? Then think that no more.
My son will begin with how Mr Kinsman and his wife procured a wet nurse to suckle him. He will then state how this princely nourishment grew him strong (and doubtless add to this, the feature tall—but even to this day, my son is not tall). He was baptised Thomas—after one of Jesus Christ’s twelve apostles—in the chapel just outside the town. Although he was required to lay his bed within the servants’ hut of the Kinsman household, my son will assure you that he was considered as much a member of that family as their own two sons, James and Henry. Of course he was required to work for his board, but his chores—sweeping the yard, feeding the chickens—were no more burdensome than that of any houseboy. And on Sundays he was allowed to sup at the same table with the family. My son was not a slave, but a freeman from his second year.
‘The salvation of the savage’ was Mr Kinsman’s mission. He believed that even the blackest negro could be turned from sable heathen into a learned man, under his and God’s tutelage. My son was given a Christian education within his school and Mr Kinsman was pledged to write a paper upon the progress of his learning for the Baptist Magazine in London. On the first day of his schooling, my son received a pair of the finest leather shoes. Even today he has those shoes hung from a hook upon the wall in his study. Shoes upon a wall! He will not discard them, for those two tiny cracked-leather boots contain all the dear memories he has of the Kinsmans and his scholarship.
Oh, see my son’s eyes light with merriment as he recalls for you the time betwixt sunrise and sunset of each day that he did spend at that Baptist mission school. He read the scriptures with distinction and accuracy, and could write with considerable knowledge upon both civil and sacred geography. Every Wednesday he was tested upon his understanding of the biblical antiquities, followed by an interrogation—for his general examination—of the emblems, figures, parables and most remarkable passages of the bible. My son could recite every word of 238 hymns—indeed the whole number that were contained within the Sunday Scholar’s Companion. And his arithmetic was advanced as far as vulgar fractions.
A school feast was held every year in the chapel yard beneath the shade of the orange trees, where a gathering of people from about the parish came to observe the miracle of the little learned negroes of the Baptist mission school. Even July came once to stare. And my son—standing in white breeches with his shoes upon his feet, hands clasped at his front, head erect, mouth open wide as a toad and lungs swelling with tune—led the little black-faced choir in the joyful singing of the hymn, ‘Eternal God we look to Thee’.
When Mr Kinsman’s paper for the Baptist Magazine was complete, he published it under the title, ‘Tree of the Lord’s Right-Hand Planting: The Remarkable Effect of the Good Christian Education upon a Negro Foundling on the Caribbean Island of Jamaica’.
My son was that Baptist minister’s boast. Go ask him. With humble hesitancy (that will not linger long), my son will report how often times it seemed that Mr Kinsman and his good-goodly wife, Jane, found more delight in him than they did in their own sons. When it came time for James Kinsman and his family to leave Jamaica for London, after the completion of their mission work, none within that household could conceive of sailing from this island without my son amongst them. And when he journeyed to England with the family aboard a ship called the Apolline, it was not as a servant, oh no, it was as, ‘the remarkable negro boy, Thomas Kinsman’.