A Way in the World (36 page)

“At one time I would have liked to hear that. I thought that Picton had done me much harm and I thought I had a score to settle with him. But I don’t think like that now. You can waste too much time settling scores. You can forget what you really have to do. He’ll appeal, of course.”

“He’ll appeal. But he’s ruined. And the planters who sat in the jail and had the people tortured, and devised ways of burning people alive—they’re free men. Picton didn’t build the jail. It was there when he came, with the jailer and the torture chambers, the special hot rooms. The planters had set it up. They paid the jailer fees for torturing or flogging Negroes. For the torture of the mulatto girl the planter who was the chief magistrate at the time paid the jailer sixty reales, about six dollars and sixty cents. Nobody’s been investigating that planter, or the others. They’ve not been on forty thousand pounds bail. They’re loyal to no one except themselves, those French aristocrats. If you stay here long enough your mind begins to go. You lose faith. You lose your way.

“I’ll tell you. We had an invasion scare here last year. First it was the French. Then it was the Spaniards. The Spanish admiral Gravina appeared in these waters with quite an armament. I don’t have to tell you how small our military establishment is, and how vulnerable we are to any sustained assault. We clearly can’t defend the whole island—two or three hundred miles of coastline, some of it very difficult, and so much of the island is uninhabited anyway—so I thought we should decide in the Council what we were going to try to defend. I thought it made more strategic sense to
defend the naval harbour at Chaguaramas. It’s a small area and it’s very defensible. If you defend the ships, they live again to fight another day. The planters said no, the duty of our military establishment was to defend property.

“Now, General, you have been following the debates about slavery and the slave trade in England. And I don’t have to tell you that when planters talk about ‘property’ and ‘the free transfer of property’ and ‘a free supply,’ they are simply finding a way of not saying ‘Negroes’ or ‘slaves.’ They are not even talking about land. Most of them got the land free when they came. The Spaniards, to develop the island, offered a settler sixteen acres for every Negro he brought in. A white settler got thirty-two acres for himself, a free man of colour sixteen acres. Many of the people who came in, to put themselves under Spanish law, were running away from debts they had in other places under other flags. Many of the Negroes they brought in were mortgaged up to the eyes.

“So these refugee aristocrats were saying, in fact, while a big war was going on, that it was my duty as governor to prevent them from losing their Negroes. And they had powerful friends in London. So, after spending seventy-five thousand pounds on fortifying the harbour at Chaguaramas, I had to stop and think about fortifying the city and the plantations around it. That is why the Treasury is empty, and my servants and soldiers are in rags. I thought of enrolling a company of Negro Rangers, faithful and well-disposed ones, it goes without saying. The planters said they didn’t want to lose their Negroes. I said, ‘We’ll have them fairly valued. You will be recompensed if they are lost or damaged.’ They said that after Haiti they didn’t want their Negroes to handle guns. I said, ‘Very well. At least lend me some of your Negroes to work on that hill fort we are building west of the city.’ They said they couldn’t spare them. So where were we? What was the point of doing anything?”

“But you built your fort?”

“I had to. That was my duty as governor. I used Negroes owned by people of colour. The people of colour didn’t like that at all, and the whites crowed over them. And now, of course, since the news about Picton’s conviction, some of those people of colour are after me. One man of colour is already suing Picton for forty thousand pounds for wrongful arrest. I wait for something like that to be done to me. Night and day I cast my mind back over things that have been done in my time. I accuse myself, I defend myself. It’s like a sickness. Those Negroes whose ears were cut off last December and January—they were also given a hundred lashes. In the Spanish time the limit was twenty-five. Picton raised that to thirty-nine—and that was under the influence of the French. Why did I let those planters tell me that those men should be given a hundred? After fifty lashes a man is half dead.”

“General, General. A domestic misdemeanour is quite distinct from rebellion against the state. You are tormenting yourself needlessly.”

“You think so? One man whose ears they cut off was a free man of colour. They were very down on that man. They said that a free man of colour associating with the Negroes was the most dangerous kind of man. They decided he was to be returned to slavery. They cut his ears off and sold him out of the island. It’s what they do in the islands. As a punishment it is one step down from hanging, because that man’s life isn’t worth living afterwards. How could they do that to a free man? I should have asked them to show me the laws. Now the investigator will ask me that question. The laws of England wouldn’t like that, making a free man a slave and cutting off his ears and selling him cheap to somebody outside who is going to work him to death. That is all you can do with a Negro whose ears have been cut off. You can’t sell him.

“And I had actually forgotten about that until the Picton news came. Now I think about it five, six, ten, twelve times a day. When my time comes and I am asked about that man all I would be able to say is that the planters at that enquiry last December got me thoroughly alarmed and told me this was what had to be done. Of course I also tell myself that the poor man is now in no position to get in touch with London lawyers. He is not going to live long. You see, General. Having done that injustice to that man, or allowed that illegality to be done to him, I now wish for his death. I want to be free of this place, General. I feel I am sinking here. I feel I can no longer see my way. I told you a while ago that it is easy to see the past. My life up to ten years ago is absolutely clear to me. But now I am clouded. I no longer know why I do things. Ideas of obedience to my lawful superiors no longer answer. Those were the ideas that as a military man I was bred up in.”

“It isn’t the Picton case that’s worrying you. I think it’s the weather. I think it’s your inactivity. As you say, you’ve been a jailer for too long. You are fighting phantoms.”

“General. I haven’t told you. There is a case that stands absolutely foursquare with the Picton torture case. It happened three and a half years ago, almost in the week I arrived. The chief magistrate, a planter, came right here late in the afternoon. My boxes were still being unloaded from the carts. He was in a little frenzy, the magistrate. He said they had discovered that a free mulatto had had dealings with a Negro sorcerer. The mulatto had been pestering a Negro woman, somebody’s house servant, to sleep with him. She had turned him down. He had then offered his hand in simple friendship. She had taken his hand, and he had scratched her palm with his fingernail. She had right away started to have spasms, and her hand and arm had begun to swell. She screamed, and the other Negroes in the street became very frightened. Negroes here are always frightened of poison. Some of the Negroes
ran for an alguazil and an alguazil came and took the mulatto off to the jail. The old jail, the one of Picton’s time, with the hot-house torture rooms—we pulled it down two years ago.

“The magistrate went as soon as he could to the jail, to investigate. The mulatto said he hadn’t poisoned the woman at all. He had only scratched a love potion into her palm. He had got the potion from an old plantation Negro. The potion, mixed with grease and quicksilver and nail-clippings, had already made two women love him madly. This time, he said, he had probably made the dose too strong. The Negro who had made up the potion for him had told him that there was this danger. The magistrate didn’t find the story funny. He ordered the jailer to take the mulatto up to the attic, for torture. It was the place where, oddly enough, they kept white people. There was an Italian sailor there. He saw everything. The torture there was the piquet, the old cavalry-regiment torture. You tie a man’s leg back, right leg to left arm, say, to convert him into a dead weight, and you suspend him by the left wrist until he can just rest his toe on the tip of a sharp piquet.

“Under torture the mulatto gave the antidote. Rum and asafoetida, I think it was. Of course it didn’t work—it’s amazing the magistrate thought that there could be an antidote. The woman remained swollen, and she kept on screaming, getting everyone thoroughly frightened. Old Vallot, the French jailer, strung the mulatto up again, and this time the mulatto fainted and lay for a while in a pool of cold sweat. When he recovered he changed the story about the plantation Negro. He said he had got the potion from a Negro sorcerer who had been banished from the island. I know today that as soon as a planter hears about sorcery he panics. I didn’t know that then. It was my first week. The magistrate insisted we should get the mulatto off the island right away. He wanted the man banished there and then.

“And it was done just like that, right here. No papers,
nothing. I didn’t actually forget about the case. But what I remembered more was the love potion and the asafoetida and the rum, not the sorcerer. And now I have had to dig it up from my memory, all the details of the conversation that day with the magistrate. Because since Picton’s conviction they’ve all reappeared—the mulatto, and even the Italian sailor. Somehow they’ve all made their way to London, somehow they’ve found people to get them lodgings and pay their expenses, and somehow they’ve all been put in touch with lawyers. And all the people who supported the Picton prosecution are now behind them.

“The free people of colour are passionate about it. There are six thousand of them here. They can raise money. What is upsetting to me is that I’ve always been a friend to the people of colour, like Tom Picton before me. He was always against the legal humiliation of the people of colour, in spite of what you hear. He wrote many letters to London about that. Because that legal humiliation is what people intend when they speak, as you will hear them speaking, about the need for British laws and a British constitution and representative government here. We use words in a special way here, and what they mean is that they want to be their own legislative council and executive council and to set up their own laws.

“I’ll tell you what some of those laws are going to be. They want to prevent people of colour from owning Negroes. That’s pure malice. You make it illegal for a man of colour to have Negroes and you impoverish him at a stroke. There is no way he can run a plantation or make a living on his own in this kind of place. People do everything for themselves with their own Negroes. We have no free journeymen. The only respectable thing a free man of colour can do, if he has no Negroes, is to become an alguazil for the Council, a kind of general watchman. As in the Spanish time. He keeps an eye on the docks and the Negro yards in the
town and he looks out for Negroes breaking the curfew. Sometimes he lends a hand in the jail. He isn’t allowed to own Negroes, and for good reason. There would be all kinds of abuses—kidnappings and disappearances of new arrivals, and so on. There are only six alguazils here, anyway. It’s all the Treasury can afford. And there are six thousand free people of colour. If it becomes illegal for a man of colour to own Negroes, he will have to sell those he has for what he can get, or they will be confiscated. Either way there are some people here who are going to make a great profit. At least half the Negroes here are owned by people of colour. So we are talking about a lot of money. And we are talking about a great deal more if, as is almost certain, the African trade is stopped next year, and ‘supply,’ as our friends say, becomes purely local.

“There is something else the Du Castellets and the Montignacs and the Montalemberts are planning. They want to prevent people of colour from buying houses. It’s a piece of antique French legislation from the islands. Where do they expect the people of colour to live? And what is their definition of a house? Do they mean an estate house, or a house in the town? I will tell you: it will mean what they want it to mean. It will become a simple means of persecution. You take away people’s livelihood. You plunder them of their little capital, and then you degrade them.

“There is something else. It’s so terrible you won’t hear about it while you are here. The French are not going to tell you, and the people of colour are too frightened and ashamed to talk about it. The white planters are letting them know, very quietly, that when British laws come in, they, the people of colour, will be liable to be whipped for misdemeanours. Only Negroes are whipped now. So the people of colour, who are now free men and proprietors, will be indistinguishable from Negroes. They will have no money, no resources, and many of them will certainly be enslaved again. And all
this will be done in the name of law and the rights of man and the clemency of a British constitution.

“They know I’m against it. So they’ve blackened my character in London and up and down the islands. I’m a tippler, a sot, too fond of the pleasures of the table at Government House, dead to the world after dinner. Too little dignity for a governor. The pleasures of the table—red, salty butter, no vegetables, and this ship’s food.

“You will see now that the worst thing I could have done was to have allowed that man’s ears to be cut off. A free man reduced to slavery, and treated as the worst kind of Negro. It’s really what the French want to do to all the free people of colour. They infected me at the time of the enquiry. They talked to me about Martinique and Haiti. They talked to me about having to burn Negroes when they became too steeped in sorcery and magic. One man told me that a friend of his in Martinique had had to burn four of his Negroes. They told me that a free man of colour who habitually mixed with Negroes was very dangerous. They made me want to hurt the man very badly. After all the evidence at the inquiry, after hearing those simple-looking people talking very calmly about murdering people as though it was a continuation of their king-and-queen play at night, I saw the island and the town going up in flames. I never asked to see the laws. I never saw the man or what they did to him in the jail or asked how they sold him out of the island. I wonder now whether I would have even thought more about it if the Picton conviction hadn’t occurred. The turpitude, General. The turpitude I’ve lived with these past three years.”