Fifteen years ago, he had married. His wife was a slave in the Masters’ house. Her name was Cleopatra. At least, it had been when she arrived, until Mercy, thinking the name inappropriate, had made her change it to Ruth. Hudson and she had a daughter, then a son. When Hudson called his son Solomon, and Mercy asked him why he chose this biblical name, he told her it was because King Solomon was wise. But to his wife afterward he’d added quietly: “And old King Solomon was a rich man too.” Since his wife was a slave, his children were slaves too. But Master had made a straightforward arrangement.

“You can buy them out for a fair price now, Hudson, or they can be mine until they’re twenty-five. After that, I’ll set them and their mother free.” Since the children were fed and clothed, and Master saw to it that Solomon was taught to read, write and figure, this wasn’t a bad deal.

“For it ain’t so good to be free and black in New York,” Hudson reminded Ruth. “Not these days, anyhow.”

There were still black freedmen in the city. But the last half-century had certainly been bad for Negroes. The old days of the Dutch, when white farmers and their black slaves might work in the fields side by side, was not even a memory. As England’s mighty sugar trade had grown larger than ever, so the numbers of slaves being sold in the markets had risen. Since the days when Hudson’s grandfather was a boy, the West Indies had sucked in almost a million slaves, and the whole African slave trade was now in British hands. With such vast numbers in the market, the unit price of a human being dropped. Most city tradesmen and craftsmen could afford to go down Wall Street to the slave market by the river, to buy a household slave or two. Farmers came across the Brooklyn ferry from Kings County to buy workers for their fields. There were more slaves as a percentage of population in the New York region than anywhere north of Virginia.

And if all these black people were chattels, why then—most people nowadays agreed—it must be that God had created them inferior. And if they were inferior, then it stood to reason that they shouldn’t be free. Besides, people hadn’t forgotten the slave disturbances, like the burnings of 1741. Blacks were dangerous.

So if most people assumed that he was John Master’s slave, Hudson didn’t much care. “At least that way,” he pointed out, “people don’t give me no trouble.” All he could do was count himself lucky and hope, one day, for better times.