Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (17 page)

“They made the
olagon
like we make in Eirann. Until the corpse is laid out, women keep their silence, tending it. But then, caring for the dead as if it were a helpless child, the loss, the terrible sorrow that the dead have left us all, builds up in a keening cry straight from the hearts of the women. In the midst of all that crackling and blackness, shrieking and warbling, Big Dinah was set upright in her grave, facing toward the east. Her hands were drawn up by her cheek as if she were sleeping. To one side, in a loud dull voice, Robert Rigley read verses from the Scriptures in an accent no one but a Highland Scot could comprehend. In front of my eyes, bodies darted to the grave and back. I saw arms place a loaf of cassava bread, a noggin of rum, a gourdful of tobacco in the pit. Then Jack Vaughton himself stepped forward to lay a new white clay pipe at the graveside. I knew this custom. At home the common people prize the
duidín,
that little clay pipe with long curved stem and flat-bottomed bowl. Later Quashey—himself a Coromantee—had Mama Chiva explain to me how Big Dinah was placed to face the old port of Benin, where the dead find their canoes waiting to carry them across the sea to the spirit world beyond the sky. He told me they’d put sensible treasures into the grave with her, that she might enter the kingdom of her ancestors well-prepared for traveling.

“But at the graveside then I did not understand their ways. I looked with contempt at their savage differences. Yet at the same time, the whole crowd keening cried out to something with no name that had been growing in myself day after day on this island of Barbados, or maybe even since I had been orphaned by my mother’s death. Oh, I felt most riled up and confused.

“After they had closed the hole, the overseers handed over a jug of rum. The Hausas spilled most across Big Dinah’s grave and drank the rest off, no thought of sharing with we who stood there watching. Then we all draggled back to our own abodes, except the Hausas, who had rituals to keep through that long night. This had been the first interment of an important bondsman I had seen, since landing on Barbados.

“Whilst I was at Arlington, Salome’s older husband had expired. He was important to his own, but not enough to warrant killing a scrawny pig and furnishing rum for. And Eugenia Plackler could not bear the sound of tambours. When she heard them, she dreamed, eyes open, of spirits coming for her. But the Saturday evening of Big Dinah’s interment at the Glebe we wandered to our skimpy rations knowing that on Sunday, folk would rise to prepare a great funeral feast.

“I could not sleep that night with them screeching up there. The shadows on my hovel walls seemed unfamiliar. On my mat, covered by another mat, I lay holding my bundle of rags and whistle to me as if it were a child. Alone in the close darkness I speculated on the first gang.

“At the Glebe, as I have told you, the first gang was split with over fifty men and women in each crew—each a rough and wiry lot in order to survive, for none could look out much for another in the cane fields with the overseers pushing all to reach the quotas. I lay there as the stars scooped round the world outside my cabin, and a waking nightmare of evil sights and tales came back to me. Women puking and fainting in the ditches, struck down by the sun while the harvest hummed on brightly about them. Once when I was herding kine, a driver hurried to the yard with a young man, bent over, holding a big leaf to his eye. ‘I spear up in a cane top, I spear up in a cane top,’ the hurt lad screamed, blood spurting from beneath the leaf. The sharp cut cane had stabbed him through the eyeball. Arra, they laid him in his hut and sent to Bridgetown for the apothecary. We had no sick-house like yours then: the sick were only given leave to return to their cabins, where their kind might care for them at night. But I have told you that the ordinary slept on clay itself; or at best on bare planks above the ground. And you yourself, sir, know why you do not. Crawling with vermin were the cabin floors. And something wet about the air here—the swelter of the afternoons—the body sweats continually, wounds fester open like evil blossoms.

“He lost that eye. On a Sunday morning while the birds drew song across the cane fields Vaughton brought a jar of whiskey, then rode back down the hill. In a worker’s shanty his menfolk soused him with the liquor, but his roar still shook the valley when they dug into his flesh and burned the socket clean.

“And everyone knew of others who had simply disappeared, put to ground without a ceremony. These would be folk like me, folk without kin or clan who had been taken by pestilence, snakebite in the ditches, or by slow starvation. The managers tried to keep such cases from us lest we run amok.

“Had I not also seen the man called Yeaboy howling in the yard until his voice went hoarse, holding his ear? Which had been cut half off by another African working as his partner—one in the cane row, the other in the trash row. A partner who, beneath the broiling sun, cane rash crosshatching from his forearms to his armpits, blistered fingers, back pulled from bending low, had grown impatient when clumsy Yeaboy tripped him and he fell upon his sugar knife. In an instant his arm arced against the sweet blue of the sky, and Yeaboy’s ear fell to the trash ditch.

“So I was afraid, sir, to go into the sugar field with first gang.

“But also, as I lay there, it was as if the sod of my dank black grave weighed upon my chest. For I ceased breathing when I thought about the breeding. Then all things together whirled, until the shrieking and shrilling that knifed the air from Dinah’s wake both expressed and heightened my worst fears.

“In the breeding we went to whomever they chose for us, and that was that. No thought of sacrament or family, as we were raised. No choice or right to stay with the same stud from child to child, though we had heard of mergers: servants who, bred, were allowed to stay on with each other, and after servitude took to the road together as a team.”

Coote sees a team of oxen, pulling, on all fours.

“But the breeding was an extra duty after a full day in the fields. Once the woman stopped her courses the man who fertilized her would be taken from her cabin once again. It was the woman who bent over a thickening waist to the same field tasks, who ate the same small rations while something inside sucked them from her. It was the woman who must force the stony skull of a child from between her thighs without drowning in her own blood. Who, upon her pallet on the damp clay floor must evade putrefaction and get back to the fields within a week. Still, a week for parturition was a new privilege in my day, brought in to coax the Africans to breed, for they were wont to lighten their bellies with spells and herbs, or bury birth-wet infants in the woods.

“Over in England our master, Lord Cleypole, and the merry clerks who advised him on such things, had read their ledgers and deduced an unprofitable infertility of stock. So they’d decided on a program of increase. The accountants of England advised that we be given eight days’ rest before returning to the fields, and special foods—chocolate if we felt weak, a taste of rum in the last month—and one length of cloth to coax us toward the future. As for myself, I got two silver coins, but my case was somewhat different, as you shall hear.

“So the night Big Dinah went into the earth, in my own way I waited with her spirit too, picturing bloody heads like cannon hot exploding my flesh from inside, while in the night outside the Hausa women trilled and cried. Christ, how I wanted to escape my fate, which stretched its arms to take me.”

Coote almost smiles. From this point on we’ll trace her mutiny, he thinks. He puts his quill down, flexes his back discreetly, and baits her, hoping to break his boredom. “But your saints, biddy, is it not true your idols can wreak miracles to defend you—virgin martyrs and the lot? Your nation has killed Protestants on their advice. Why not call to them for aid?”

She bristles. “I have told you. Even the most stalwart saints were shocked dumb at the horrors of these lands.” Her odor and her shabbiness try him more each hour. She is so … failed. He takes his quill again and drones, “Shocked. I see. Let us proceed.”

“In the afternoon two drivers, Pawpaw Jack and Bacchus, riding donkeys, dragged a slaughtered ox and five boars o’er the hill to the slave quarters. There was much elbowing and trilling among the African women as to who would roast the meat. I saw that I, an outsider, would be given nothing choice whether I labored or not. So although I remembered Salome’s roasting pits at Arlington, I did not help to cook Big Dinah’s funeral meal. Instead, I crouched upon a fallen log to watch the goings-on.

“At first I sat there talking to myself in the way I had grown used to. Under my breath I was arguing, as I’d not dared to with the Hausa women who had chased me from the corpse of Big Dinah. Now I told them, great hussies in my mind, what great friends she and I’d become. I whispered the story of the object she and I had buried in the wood. And when I saw that Ibo woman slinking round the meat, arms folded tight across her naked chest, I pointed at her, raised my voice, and cursed her as
an tAbhirseoir,
the Devil. As usual, sir, no one paid my madness any heed.

“But as the evening darkened the men passing round the tin cups full of rum from the big full barrel Jack Vaughton’d sent handed one down, unheedingly, to me. And I had my first taste.”

Why does he want to needle her? For daring to assume that he and she share a kinship through common feelings, such as fear? Coote inquires, “You were then … around twenty? You who come from that nation famed for drunkenness expect me to believe this was your first acquaintance with spirits? Next you will tell me you brought forth your bastards through virgin birth.” The depth of contempt in his tone jolts him inwardly: where has such bitterness come from? He was not reared to speak so to any female, underling or not. “But go on. Do.”

Young Cot had drunk and drunk, empty of belly, empty of heart and hope, fear trickling through her every cell. “In later years when I was drunk I lost the memory of episodes, and nights, and weeks. Yet I remember well that night, my first grand burial feast, with hundreds in attendance all milling by the tall red fires. I clasped each cup and drank it fast, hoping for courage to do something very wrong. Something to make the Hausas scorn me publicly, that I might fly into the faces of those I thought more bestial than myself. But instead, what seemed like magic happened.

“On my tongue, rum was a foul stinking thing, like the mouth tastes after a long fever. It made me flinch and shiver. But once it sank below my gorge, my blood began to dazzle. Never had my limbs relaxed so. I was reclining, long and heavy on the stony ground, yet my limbs seemed light as hair.

“Every cup that passed within my reach I clutched at, and between them thought about Big Dinah. From the angle of the grog she seemed ever more kind and friendly. When in fact she was not friendly but concerned for the survival of her own, and only meant to tame that thing she saw on me, for it endangered all of us.”

“Biddy, do you say she saw you were possessed?”

The prisoner’s impatience with him is almost rude as she responds, “For Christ’s sake no! I only say the rum and I were ardent since our tongues first met. There I lolled as the mourners gathered in their clans around the food pits. It was somewhat like a Galway market day … legs and feet going by. Some dark and bare and dusty, or in floppy canvas trousers, or inching along under hiked petticoats. A driver strode past in his unlaced boots. I saw the knobbledy knees and bloated belly of a lost child, crying in a strange tongue for a parent in that moving forest of Africans. Now and then some redshanks passed.

“They dug up the meat. I saw as in a dream Big Dinah’s people cut the carcasses and place the best parts on her grave. I watched them splash gourdsful of rum onto the mound. Then they took charge of carving, handing chunks of seared flesh round to all the people. But I, though always ravenous, cared nothing now for dripping roasts. I roused myself, and weaving through the crowd I searched for drink. The head people, however, as the rum barrel drew low, bore the rest away to their huts for the rites still to come. I found no more.

“Instead I found their faces, as before I had seen only legs. A sea of heads and faces swiveling to every angle, bodiless below the shoulders; or rather, become one undulating body set below the bobbing wave of shoulders and heads that talked and chewed and looked about. The Hausa group began the rhythmic chant. A woman sang a line. The other Hausa, all together, sang the same. They went on, taking turns, until those who spoke in different tongues began to imitate or hum.

“Quite soon the tambour men who’d squatted on the earth between the crowd and the tomb took up their thumping, and the whole group drew back to form a ring at the very edge of light. We stood not in a clearing, but formed a tight oblong, backs pressed against the bushes on either side of the path down to the sugar works as we surrounded Big Dinah’s grave, now strewn with gourds and meat, and a death-blind ox’s head. We bridged the empty space that divided the Hausa from the next tribe’s compound.

“The drummers, Hausa men, rapped and tapped on logs set upright or laid flat like miniature canoes. We, the ring of bondsmen, stood back from them. At the long narrow center of the group sank the grave, framed by flame. Now, to the rapid slap and slub of wood on skin, people began clapping. A child in a woman’s arms jogged back and forth. And suddenly a young man leapt onto the sandy soil of the mound. His dancing had been summoned by the drums. Even I could see he and the drum were conversing, but that the drum was master.”

Coote’s stomach rumbles. The lunch seemed greasy. He is bored, irritable, fascinated, in different layers of himself. He sees the garden of the night before. He and his Governor, the common appearance of two colonial gentlemen conversing; but beneath the image of mutual respect, the Governor, dissolute, rapacious, is master. Shocked, he drives the vision off.

“Many people danced before me, one by one. Strong agile youths; old women who limped around the yard by daylight feeding the fowl, yet lifted from the waist and swayed like princesses once they partnered with the drums. The hands kept clapping, voices chased each other eagerly in song. Two hundred sets of feet stamped the ground. Something rose in me.”