Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (15 page)

“It was very late on the third Sunday of no market. I climbed up to her yard. No one saw me go, though some sat out for the breeze. The weather was sultry, just before the time for summer storms. I kept to the shadowed brush which edged the yard. I came up to her partly open door, its covering mat rolled almost up.

“Everyone knew Big Dinah had a group of little pickaninnies she was raising, but they were not in the room. I thought the whole place empty until I saw the darkness writhing slowly in one corner. I heard the richest grunting and the lightest, softest breath. Standing there, I sent my eyes into the night-filled shack until I picked out a narrow back—certainly not Big Dinah’s—squeezing in and out like bellows. Then I heard footsteps.

“There was a rattling at the side of the house, as of a gourd with seeds dried in it, and something flurried through the darkness. An object hit a stone beside the hut with a cold clink.

“Big Dinah had a fancy man. It was he in there at her, until they heard these subtle sounds and froze their limbs. She rose out from beneath him like a breaching whale. Fat and strong and naked, she was on me at the door, and shook me like a rag: but she was looking past me at the night. The thin-backed man hurried past her, tying on his drawers. It was he who stepped on the thrown thing and made a dismal cry. Then I could tell that he was young—perhaps only the same age as myself.”

“What was this object?” queries Coote.

“The night was dark. I could not make it out as anything I knew; except that tied to the top of it was the raw and glistening organ of a smallish animal. If not for that object she would have clouted me senseless, and worse. But now she ordered me to pick it up. It was wet and cold against my skin. She yanked me in against her hard fatness and whispered, ‘Who throw this in my house? Did you see? Who throw this in my door?’ ”

But the prisoner had seen no one. Then Big Dinah reached inside the room and drew out half a coconut shell. She bade Cot put the thing inside the husk for her. The next evening after fieldwork, Big Dinah took Cot to the woods. “We knelt down under a tree with silvery skin and high boughs, like a massive beech or ash. The birds sang so sweetly—river orioles. I never heard a more dulcet song. They sing like cousins to the linnet.”

They buried the object in the earth, Big Dinah speaking Hausa speech rapid and low. As dark descended and they hurried back again out to the path, she told the Irishwoman that the buried thing was poison. The thrower was an Ibo woman of childbearing age, who had been given to the same young Hausa man Cot saw rocking on Dinah. “I thought then, what did he want with Dinah, fat and mean and ugly as she was?” But there was a custom, Dinah said. A man learned to be brave from war and forest and animals. He learned to be a friend to other men, in secret houses with men his own age where no one else could go. And only from an older woman—a widow—could a young warrior learn to be a man with women, before he took a wife. The men of her people took many wives; the women but one man until they were widowed.

The Hausa warrior had sought out Big Dinah. For many evenings had his tutelage gone on, and then the Ibo woman heard of it. It was time for him to breed with her, make her a cabin: Jack Vaughton had said so. This young Hausa man was liked by many women, Dinah explained. Yet their lessons, instead of coming to an end, became more frequent. The young Hausa groom-to-be spent almost every night with Big Dinah, then all day Sunday, until the orphans she was raising must be sent to visit neighbors for weeks at a time.

The Ibo woman, who spoke some words of Hausa, began to stand beside the path as the crews returned from fieldwork, accusing Big Dinah: “She holds my man by sorcery, until he thinks she’s young and shapely, like myself. She means to wring him dry,” the impatient bride denounced to everyone who’d listen. Many listened. Many laughed. “She has shamed herself, that’s why she hate me so,” Big Dinah brooded to the Irish girl.

Coote writes this with an equal mix of curiosity and revulsion. It was not that the young man meant to reject the Ibo woman (although her words were sour), but that each Big Dinah lesson led to others. The prisoner explains, “As when you ask a question, but the answer holds within it one more question to be asked. On and on like that.” The Hausa youth kept putting off the day when he would go to his appointed woman. Then one evening the Ibo bride stood across the path and shrieked witchcraft at Big Dinah.

“Your overseers, they knew none of this?” Coote verifies.

“No sir. When Jack Vaughton made the pairing of the Hausa and the Ibo, he did so just for issue; but it were better, in the harvest season until June, if every worker could lift and bend far into the night. Thickening women slowed things down. So Vaughton would not come to push the union until late summer. The overseers and the higher servants did not mount the hill unless there was good reason.”

“What sort of reason?”

“A feast, the funeral of a person important to the Africans. If they were looking for a runaway—the like.”

Before Little Mary carries in Coote’s lunch, he has described in feathery script the fading of Big Dinah. How in the fields she had slumped and grayed, till at the end “she always looked afraid. The apothecary came to nurse her, for she was considered very valuable. She knew the tasks of second gang for every season, and in all sorts of disasters. She spoke four languages of the Africans, as well as passable English. She knew every ruse for the sick-house and so never let us slide away from work. In short, though she was past childbearing age—as far as I knew, never had she borne one—Big Dinah was strong and vigorous. To season another for her work was going to be costly.

“But the apothecary came too late. The syrups and elixirs he spooned into her mouth dribbled to the mat as she turned away. He wrote down ‘Dropsy’ as her cause of death, for the master back in England to take note of. But the young folk in the second crew whispered ‘Obeah’ while she still stood over us, gray as a dusty ghost.

“She died on a Friday in the rainy season. She had risen from her pallet and came among us in the field, mumbling orders in some arcane tongue. There was a big wind that day. Jack Vaughton took an African, a Fante named Mercy, from the first gang, and was already touring the yard with her explaining what he wanted, when Big Dinah swayed and dropped. The second gang had gotten behind its work in the confusion of Dinah’s final days. I was afraid to work beneath that woman, Mercy. She was very nervous and had little English. Vaughton had given her a barbed cat-o’-nine-tails to carry in her belt, and even as he pointed here and there from the yard into the fields, she tapped the handle of that whip against her thigh.

“Jack Vaughton told us to remove Big Dinah’s body and prepare it for the funeral. The rain was thick and green. The first gang was, at this hour, still out in the field, digging shallow ditches so that the seedlings would not drown. So we of her own second gang had to lift Big Dinah and carry her up the hill. She was on a canvas sheet, and with the weight of her the cloth began to rend. For a moment the stretcher began to fold shut in the middle, sinking toward the ground. I stepped away, a coward to touch the limbs of death, then felt a splash of shame as the young Africans lunged together to push her back up from the mud.

“We laid her on a plank inside her cabin, and I sat over her and fanned the flies away until the Hausa women came. That was at nightfall, when they could no longer see their fieldwork. Jack

Vaughton came up the hill on his yellow horse and circled it round. The yards and paths were slushy. People were building little fires inside their open doors, in rings of stones. It was a dismal evening. Some of the senior men came out to where the horse was milling. ‘Half-day for the funeral tomorrow,’ Vaughton said. ‘All of the overseers will be in attendance.’ This was a high honor for Dinah. The Africans were jealous that even their enemies should attend the funerals of those principal among them.

“Big Dinah had been principal among her people because of her position as a driver, for the English that she spoke and could interpret, and for the things she could see creeping behind the open eye we know as day. Jack Vaughton told a first-gang driver, Pawpaw Jack, to come down to a shed and bear back to the women in attendance a length of red calico and some rum.

“I did not want to touch her. But I squatted in the shadows until the Hausa women threw me out. Then I went into the garden, and right in front of them I ripped two ripe ears of Big Dinah’s corn from the stem. I placed one on the ground beside her plank, then went below to my own house where I gnawed the second, cob and all.”

At that juncture, Little Mary shambles in with Coote’s meal: a fine fish on a platter with cassava cake and yam. He sighs, throwing his shoulders back irritably. “Does it take this long to roast a fish?” he scolds the old slave.

She retracts her neck between her shoulders in their rags. He wonders how his new shirt is progressing. “Naw suh,” Little Mary ventures so timidly that he is sure his eyes deceive him when he glances up momentarily. The granny-slave is leading the prisoner back to her sick-house pallet. He almost thinks he sees a wrinkled hand scoot from below a filthy apron and pass, by the tail, another, smaller, fried-eyed fish. But then it’s gone, a trick of the Caribbean light. The two women look to be the same elderly age from behind, shuffling along the narrow hall. By the next morning, Thursday, Coote’s humor toward the prisoner will alter somewhat, based on events yet to happen on the night of the Governor’s tensely awaited feast. But at the moment he merely feels spiteful, and longs to justify it.

They are strolling round the garden. Blue twilight sharpens into night. “Your grounds are beautiful, Excellency,” Coote murmurs, humbled by the harmony of elements assembled in this place hacked out of jungle. Clouds of jasmine scent puff past on warm air currents, a rich warble of frogs rises from the artificial pool which ripples with the reflection of the evening’s stars. Stede nods, glancing toward the glowing windows of his house.

“Let us head back to my guests, shall we?” he says, on the tail of a belch. “This has been both an enlightening and refreshing talk. You understand why I did not want to discuss such matters at the dinner table, do you not?”

“Certainly, sir, matters of State don’t aid digestion,” Coote responds, with formal cheerfulness.

The Governor snorts. “If you mean politicking has no place at table, you do not understand the reason for this gathering, sir. No, I mean that among the loftiest at my table there are those who’d like to see my hand before I play it. Who’d like to take my island from me! Yet I must play the ignorant, forever courting their goodwill! Fah!”

They are promenading toward the mansion as the words “my island” jolt Coote into boldness and a sense of time-running-short. He blurts, “Sire, is it true the Orkney lands at Arlington have gone to ruin? If so, with your favor, I should like to make a bid for part of them.”

The Governor thrusts his face mere inches from Coote’s in an attempt to read the younger man’s motivation. “Don’t plague me with your interruptions,” he admonishes sharply. “I was saying! There are those at my buffet tonight who would gladly pull the carpet from beneath my feet. Take your old employer Codrington. Or An-drew Lambert. And Hinkley out from Bristol, too. But I will bide my time. They will not know how firm is my command; how little I need British gunboats. Strength lies in those merchant vessels clustered in the bay to buy our ‘Bajan’ crops. The days of monarchy are a corpse cold as Charles Stuart, though for form’s sake we must bend our knees an inch or two.”

Grasping Coote’s elbow, Stede rants, “More than a few inside there with my hired whores, pretending they are gentlemen with ladies, would give a purse of gold to know that I’m in weekly con sultancy with Willowby of Montserrat. And we’ve now begun relations with the man we’re sure will be the next governor of Jamaica,” he harrumphs.

In the awkward silence after this unwarranted and volatile confidence, Coote seeks the essential words to cloak his shocked sense of propriety. “But Governor Stede, believe me, every gentleman of sense stands in gratitude and admiration of your benevolent administration. We loyally … ,” he scrabbles. The Governor cuts across harshly.

“Men admire profit, not administration. And it is not my ‘benev olent administration,’ ”—in a mincing voice—“good sir. It is my
rule;
and it shall last my lifetime!” he spits. Then lowering his voice, “Do not forget: pull the wench’s tongue and see if you can make it wag. Help me find the link between these black and Irish devils and their island-wide conspiracies, so that”—he points inside his house—“
their
fickle gratitude can swing to me once more. I cannot see that what she’s given so far is of much use. Well, if by Saturday she coughs nothing up, we will get rid of her. Quietly; lest it be marked not only hot-blooded madmen rebel against ourselves, but even weak-witted females, ready to be martyrs. The papist slut!” He glances toward the porch they are approaching. A shadow flat against the wall. “Oh say there, Codrington, I am out showing your ex-apothecary my lily ponds. Would you fetch me brandied port against the night’s humors? I have some private news of water rights especially for you.” The silhouette on the verandah raises its glass in salute and melts toward the French doors of the lit banquet hall.

The Governor quickens his stride, moving ahead of Peter Coote. Just before he climbs the stairs at the path’s end he turns to his retainer. “And Mr. Coote? I myself hold Arlington,” he rasps. “For quite some years, as others were evicted. Or failed. Or despaired and crawled back home to England. Of every smallest opportunity, I have availed myself. And I can see that although you can heal many malaises, you yourself are victim to the same land sickness I have known.” (In
sotto voce
) “I will remember your fidelities, only the first of which, I’m sure, lies with this matter of the Irishwoman.”

Coote bows deeply. Upon unbending, he sees that his mentor has abandoned him to the rich-smelling night. He inhales it deeply before he climbs the steps.