Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (16 page)

The meal is at once a cornucopia of colors, flavors, noise, and a disjunctive display of dainty objects imported to a land beyond their use. Coote, seated between a senator and a lady of the night in satin gown, at first lets his nervous senses float on the bright bounty of the table. The light of three-foot tapers and lanterns in wall sconces shines golden on the crested linens which took precedence above his own new shirts. Behind each carved oak chair a servant stands: sculpted black face under powdered wig, clad in the livery of the Governor. Each holds a six-foot fan: flamingo feathers mounted in bamboo, with which he slowly waves mosquitoes, flies, flying cockroaches, and other pests, aside. The lice, the fleas, are not so easily moved.

The food servers and bearers and footmen at the door are adult men. But the Governor takes great pleasure in the slave who fans his sweating majesty—a lad of thirteen years, in miniature uniform and too-small powdered wig. A castrato, Colonel Stede titters, reaching back to tuck a morsel of roast lamb between silent lips. Soft, and wonderful of voice at Advent time, his master brags.

Coote drinks more than is his wont; but nowhere near as much as everyone at table. So that hours into the feast, when he glances up to see the Governor’s face in hot conversation with an Edinburgh trader through a frame of peccary ribs picked clean on a greasy platter, an uneasy and unbidden image comes to him. The quiet fanning servants seem dignified; the wealthy of the island, porcine and debauched. His mother and father, his uncles and his aunts: never would they break bread with such moral riffraff. But … he is here now. And of course these raw, rough colonizers in court silks must make their way …

The table grows littered with the glut of brilliant food ripped into chunks, then abandoned as something new is set forth. A discreet slave steps forward to sprinkle salt from a silver cellar whenever someone slops wine on the tablecloth of State.

“Look at him, fanning, fanning, as if in a trance,” the Governor’s companion dimples at the slave boy who continues to stand perfectly still, waving rhythmically now for hours in the heat. And the Governor does look, humoring his Cheapside jade.

“His whole life is a trance,” Stede quips. They collapse into a heap of brocaded laughter. The young servant fans on and on without expression. Coote can see the muscles of his forearms quivering with exhaustion. The senator beside Coote says, “Do you not think this claret of the best?” while his lady of the evening yawns, dropping a hand into Coote’s lap and tickling him halfheartedly. “His Excellency says you’re up and coming,” she murmurs in a Midlands accent. “Cot, is it? Peter Cot?”

And something creeps across his grave. “Coote,” he insists, and leaves soon after.

The Governor accompanies him to the steps and they wait as his horse is brought around. Stede sags with his arm around the woman he has chosen for the night. He appears to be very drunk. Yet his eyes narrow shrewdly, assessing Coote. Something about Coote.

“Pity you must leave before the music and the games. I have had two of my Negras trained on violins, and one will play a harpsichord.” His speech is slurred but his speculative gaze seems sharp. “Can you imagine? On a harpsichord!” the street wench shrieks admiringly. Coote looks away from her. Her accent tells her provenance—herself till recently in bond; but time expired, she’s been released, thousands of miles from the crumbling hearth where her family of beggars returns each night to cling together. Released to harlotry in order to survive, with arid hopes of attracting a protector to ward away the whip and gaol cell which here await the vagrant. Something is stifling Coote although the air is fresh. He looks away from her flushed, disheveled breasts. They heave with laughter as the Governor presses his head to their soft pillow. From that soft, sweating shelf, His Excellency peeps out of his eye’s side like a wily bird. “Dr. Coote is not enjoying my party as well as you are, my dear,” he says coyly, “or he would not leave so soon. Ah, but Coote. There’s a long dark road ahead of you. Is there not? Let us meet again on Friday.”

Then the horse is drawn around and Coote bows, praising the meal, the hall, the grounds, extravagantly again. But the Governor interrupts, “Come my dear. Let’s have a sip of rum from Lord Codrington’s finest batch,” and the couple lurch inside.

Coote mounts the fine gelding which the Governor furnished only weeks before, letting its calm alertness rein in his own unwarranted sense of panic. The moon is bright, half-full upon the dark clay of the road. Its blue light dwarfs the little golden beam of lantern which the servant hands up. A heavy knot coils inside Coote’s belly. He tries to unravel it as he clucks the steed into motion. It is a knot of revulsion toward his social betters on this island: their behavior has not been refined or gentlemanly. Particularly the Governor. There is a grossness, an uncouthness; his father would not have kept a stablemen that loutish about the place.

But this knot of revulsion is cinched with a tight sinew of fear. Suddenly Peter Coote, come out from Oxford fifteen long years ago to become a merchant prince, though landless still, sees himself strolling with notable gentlemen through a series of lavish tropic settings: Codrington; Cornwall; the Anglican named Ayres; so many others. In waking vision, he matches their diverse paces, their tones of speech. Hoping to fall in with them, the unimpeachable band who rule this primitive place with letters of credit, muskets, grim brutality. The vision proceeds to this very evening, in the darkening gardens of Colonel Stede. Coote sees himself, slim still, bent to listen, over the splash of water from a marble cupid’s mouth. The Governor at first conversing sensibly enough. But suddenly he’s glaring, spittle flying through the air as he rants about affairs of State, coalitions with the ruling class of other wild colonies against Coote’s homeland. Where civilization had been born. Their dear England.

How smoothly the Governor had turned from his tirade to greet a courtier upon the porch! As if they had indeed been discussing lily ponds.

The placid mount approaches a bend ahead now in the midnight lane. Cool moonlight bathes only the highest sighing limbs of trees. Below, the path into the future lies buried deep in shadow. Coote hears a gecko click, insects whirring, a brush like air through wind chimes, suddenly. Why does the horse seems to be moving slower, almost rocking its head from side to side, with a dancing gait? Sweat sprouts from Coote’s neck. He remembers the prisoner’s testifying words. Her faded robin’s eyes as she fixed his in bewilderment, insisting, “Why sir, the preferred confidante of the master is the slave. Who else can be trusted not to turn dark secrets to a toppling of power? Who else will provide the truly captive audience, which can do nothing but agree? Masters are not masters because they seek their equals among servants.”

Or some such rubbish. He shakes his head, to clear it. But the reasons she’s given as proof keep hissing through Coote’s ears, which begin to hum and deafen as if he’s going to faint. He induces vomitus. Afterward, he feels weak but stabilized, although the weak flame of the lantern snuffs out in the process. The horse, oddly unperturbed by human tensions, ambles forward into the tunnel of a night that could hold anything.

“
J
ack Vaughton rode his butter-colored horse into the fields that Saturday,” the prisoner relates. “The land lay under white mist after the cool rain. People working saw a dark hat, blond mane, wide wheat-colored chest muscles galloping through the fog toward them. He had gone to inspect the third gang first, and seven African children jogged behind him, the new driver Mercy urging them along. She shouted Fante words none among us understood.

“These children had been taken from the meat-pickers gang. Their work was light work: picking livestock ‘meat’—grasses, reeds, vines, beetles, and grubs—and tending smaller stock and fowl. Jack Vaughton had examined the entire crew, and determined that the seven trotting through the mist were strong enough now for the work of second gang.

“We of the second gang were damming up a ditch with stones, the shortest standing waist-deep in muddy waters that had overflowed a side branch of the river. It was crucial that the ditch not flood the field roods below, a field planted with fragile cane, already in danger of red rot due to the cold that came in with the storm.” Cot and the taller workers of the second gang saw this apparition galloping toward them over the banks of the drain. The mist had muffled the animal’s hoofbeats until Vaughton was practically upon them.

He did not dismount, but waited until Mercy’s body, running behind him, caught up to her disembodied shouts. She lined the seven children straightly on the bank. Cot heard them panting. The horse snorted. “Get out of there a minute,” Vaughton told the second crew in his flat voice. In their mud-soaked clothing they struggled up the ditch bank, clutching at roots and the branches of small bushes. Some helped each other wordlessly. There were thirty-two of them, Cot Quashey tells Peter Coote: it is the fourth day of interrogation.

“He never touched us. He pointed with the quirt. Those who were tall, or even squat but robust, he sent to Mercy. She had been trained well—or perhaps remembered how she herself had been chosen—for she felt our necks and arms, looked in our mouths, had us bend and stoop, and then she shook her head or nodded. If she nodded she said one word: ‘This.’ And we were drawn aside.

“They took two lads before me, and then it was my turn. But I knew not what for: just that I had come to his attention, a place I did not want to be. Because you see, just as Arlington had protected me in ways from the full measure expected from a slave, whether for seven years or for life, so had Big Dinah’s second gang been a better corner of the house of misery.

“Oh, I knew what the first gang did, from eavesdropped tales and my own eyes; and also that the lot of mature bondsfolk was to join them. But I was slight, and like a child in that my emotions—petulant and sulky—were weak. I knew myself not strong enough for adult dealings, to wit I had no impact on the adult folk around me. They seldom spoke to me except to curse my clumsiness or push me out of the way. Do you remember, sir, that I told you once about the last day on the
Falconer,
when we kidnapped maids were bathing and looked, naked, on this island glowing in the sun? How time lied and seemed to say, ‘Forever: ye’ll be like this, enchanted here forever, nothing can harm you’? In second gang, time seemed similarly frozen. My three years of work with Dinah were not dangerous, and with her helping me start to shake free of hate’s spell, I believed Providence had hidden me from the most evil eyes. Real harm had passed me by.

“But when that woman Mercy grabbed me by the arm, the world flew up in shards all around me again, the way it had when I was whipped, or when I was gambled off. Do you know extremes of fear like these yourself yet, sir?” she leans forward to ask Coote.

How dare she affront him so! As if her base and ravaged sentiments and his were linked in any way! But then a sudden image of himself last night upon the horse, immediately before he made himself empty the banquet from his belly: a thought, a mood, a terror he’d had then but could no longer grasp. Gone. It was gone, thank God. Related to the Irishwoman, though. That much his flesh recalls. Something shifts. He feels both cowed and resentful. To compensate, he lifts his quite-patrician chin and peers down at her sternly.

“When two more had been culled, Jack Vaughton stated, ‘Ye will join first gang, come Monday,’ and rode away. We went back down the ditch, then, all of us. The mist burned off into a strained, bleached sky. Mercy shrieked and pointed orders at the small new workers, who stumbled under heavy rocks. It was late afternoon when the dam held sound and we straggled back across the field to our slave huts on the hill. And though I walked among the rest, somehow it seemed that I was also watching from above, behind; as if I were a spectator on a hill viewing a procession during Holy Week whose meaning is unknown.

“Suffering. Fear and suffering. Hunger, ailments, desperation. Those were what I saw. A nightmare procession which could never disappear beyond the mind’s horizon; for it moved with us: we carried it.”

“There was tension at the time of Dinah’s death among the African drivers and the Northern overseers: if more heavy rains came soon, the new seedlings could wash off, or at the very least decay. The fields themselves might soak with water and the damage come much later from drowned roots. Yet Big Dinah was important to the Hausa. And even if the Hausa were enemy to other tribes upon the hill, a slight to an important funeral would have been a slight to all the Africans. Work had to stop. A proper wake had to proceed.”

“I imagine such a slight may have … united? … them?” Coote probes.

“Yes. So we were given time to wash with river water. The adult Africans tied on fresher clothes if they had a change. I myself followed the motions of the others. I put on the rags of my Arlington house-waistcoat, for it had color, and tied Mistress Plackler’s riband in my matted hair. Then I went on up the hill.

“The Hausa women had sat up with her all night, and now they ringed the open pit which had been dug. I was pushed aside somewhat by the crowd who groaned and keened, until I stood beside the Irishmen from Connaught. One tipped his chin at me in greeting. He said in Irish, ‘It should’ve been the boss.’

“Big Dinah was carried out on a canvas sheet. She wore her double petticoat and canvas waist, which tied across the front. But she had over that a new vest of pretty red calico, with thick black swirls almost like writing over it. Around her head, in place of the canvas cap which all we women wore, a hank of those red goods was wound and tucked. They bore her to the edge of the hole, which was dug beside her garden; in fact, in the middle of a route or walkway the Hausa used to move between their houses. There were people carrying palm branches, waving them. Others lit two bonfires at both sides of the grave, for the evening was now deepening to night.

“The men of her people stooped and strained, setting her bulk into the grave without a mishap. She was a queen, that night. They had wrapped her still-fat neck with several strings of beads striped like the rainbow. These come from the Job’s Tears plant. She also wore bracelets of palm oil tree nuts, interspersed with carved dog’s teeth. The teeth shone like ivory in the firelight, I remember. The men adjusted her while the wailing of the others grew to ululations that waxed and waned, like fire fanned by breeze.