Free The Great Negro Plot by Mat Johnson

be capable of the unimaginable?
    It wasn't long before the mob had changed their focus to a new target. Who were the seditionists? they were forced to ask
     themselves. The insurrection, such as it was, could not simply be emanating from the Spanish Negroes, that foreign, hostile
     threat. Nor could such rebellion, under any stretch of the imagination, be limited to one slave. Not even a loathsome Negro,
     such as Cuffee, no matter how ornery and foul his nature.
    No! It was all of the black bastards, the enemy that lived in their very homes.
    Blacks were an easy target to hit, particularly for an entity so indiscriminate. No need to wait for those already in captivity
     to confess to their sins when there was an abundance of Africans walking the streets that could be yanked by their necks by
     New York's concerned white citizens, molested into passivity, and booted through the doors of the local jail with the rest
     of them.
    Let chaos ensue. Let no black be spared, even those who had just minutes before been helping the colony by passing water buckets
     and rescuing personal wealth they could never own. Being black on the streets of New York was enough to qualify for suspicion.
     The disregarding of what little rights the slaves had was no great cost for the cessation of white fear. The Africans were
     in this country solely to serve the Europeans anyway.
    Cuffee was left to stew in his jail cell overnight before the official interrogation was to begin. It would have been a long
     night, too, high on anxiety and extremely low on comfort. As one colonist described his own stay in these accommodations some
     years later, "[N]othing but a bare floor to lay on—no covering—almost devour'd with all kinds of vermin." It could not even
     be called a fleabag cell because that would imply there was an actual bag to sleep on. Not that Cuffee could really sleep
     anyway, given the circumstance. Given what he knew must surely lay in front of him.
    A prison in the colonial world is an expensive indulgence to spend on those in society least deserving of its funds. The cost
     of the building alone was prohibitive, but when you added the cost of maintenance it became a complete extravagance. Food
     had to be bought, prepared, and delivered. Fresh water had to be pumped and made available. Wood had to be chopped and stoked
     on the coldest of winter nights. And of course, someone had to be paid to make sure those inside never got out. In a colony
     based around commercial interests, where ambitious members of the British working class could scarcely be attracted to come
     in the first place, finding a white man content to spend his life babysitting the low life was impractical. The modern prison
     system that would be born decades later in that Quaker city to the south simply didn't exist yet. And even then, incarceration
     was too damn expensive. As said, New York has always been a city based around making money. So New York had no real prison
     in 1741, just the jail. Nobody had the time, or desire, to waste time policing, not if there was money to be made.
    The criminal punishments of the era reflect that this was a colony that was economically focused, as opposed to morally driven.
     Whites who committed societal misdemeanors were punished in their purses. If convicted, whites could post a bond of good behavior,
     their fortunes being held ransom to ensure their future actions. Some were simply fined outright, occasionally losing their
     entire estate for severe crimes. Those without means could find themselves sold into indentured servitude, literally working
     off their debt to society. It always came down to money in New York, and what was most cost effective, boiling down to what
     the majority of Europeans in this society cared about most. Money was the reason they had left their old lives a continent
     away in the first place. But when it came to discipline for severe crimes, or discipline of enslaved Africans who were both