No boyhood, for before he was twelve he had been alone,
an oversized hostler in the old Quiet Woman Tavern in Philadelphia,
brawling with the Negro grooms,
gambling with them for the casual coins flung to them by travelling gentlemen.
At first a runway from his bondage,
and then a men on his own: furrier, hostler, stableboy, groom, barman, cuckholder,
in an endless succession of inns and posthouses on the rutted roads of Pennsylvania –
The Crooked Billet,
The Penny Pot House,
Wench & Serpent,
the King of Prussia,
the Jolly Post Boy,
the Good Ox,
even the old Indian Queen,
where they now said Thomas Jefferson had written the Declaration.
And beyond that, no more than piecemeal recollections of his time as a child inChester County.
A rare glimpse of the fat grainlands,
returning with prankish clarity,
or of the work- and sun-ravished face of old Pigot, his first master.
He had forgotten, if indeed his child’s brain had ever recorded, the village tale
that he was the foundling son of the daughter of a secretary to the governor of Pennsylvania,
and of an itinerant barber and dancing master up from the Indies,
probably French, or at least had run away like a Frenchman. (17)
