Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (18 page)

“… Something came upon you?” Coote asks, dipping for fresh ink.

“No. It was my own, of me, but it would have had no way out had it not been invoked by Africa, that way of dancing, which set it free into the world. The music let me speak with people whose words I could not understand. One moment I stood peering between nodding heads. The next I elbowed forward, my legs were flipping me across the swath of earth toward the drummers.

“The Africans I’ve seen dance from the shoulders and the waist—a looping, leaping sort of thing; all looseness and free movement. The dance of Galway was straight up and down. The last time I’d had call to dance it had been on Wren’s Day when I was kidnapped, though I still recalled its merry and sweet steps. But now, to Hausa drumming; to four hundred hands beating against each other. I felt a deeper language in that dance. The marriage, sir, of wordless protest with high spirits and with grace.

“Over and over I kicked. Rigid neck to hips, but lashing out with feet. With my feet I refused! Refused the first gang’s dangers, and the breeding; refused our mouldy rations, the hours bent to pluck the sun’s gifts for another’s bounty. I kicked over the table of gamblers who had traded my life for a throw of dice in Bridgetown, and I stamped on the inconclusive lusts of Henry Plackler. My legs lifted higher, thumping down firmly as the mistress told Jenks, ‘Whip her.’ My heels stomped ‘no’ as the ginger-headed baby was dragged screaming from Ardiss’s breast. Whirling, I spun off the Captain’s knee on the
Falconer.
Knocked his cloak onto the deck, and leapt into the sky.”

She stops. Peter Coote looks up. “And then?”

“Then … then … that was all. As something had drawn me out to dance, it left me crumpled in the sand when it had finished. I went down to my stick-shed in an hour, for the ceremony became wilder, my head was aching, and my stomach sick. Once the dance was out of me, despair began to settle once again like dust.”

“Once the rum was out of you, you mean,” Peter Coote corrects rather primly.

The next part of the testimony is confusing but quite brief. Cot Daley, he notes at the end of it, has only patchy memories of several years. Could there have been an alcoholic swelling of the brain with prolonged consequences? An undetected fever? he questions in the margins.

The day after Big Dinah’s funeral dance, the Irishwoman had gone straight into the first gang, where she stayed for several years. Because already the overseers suspected networks of rebelliousness building among the men of Ireland, she was kept from the crew where the Connaught lads worked. That had been in August 1659. In March of 1660 the prisoner had stolen food from an unlocked storehouse. A large cheese, a crock of butter, smoked salmon, a fine-milled loaf, and a large, sharp silver knife. For twenty years the law had stood that thievery of goods worth twelve shillings or more must be tried as a capital offense. Not only were the goods in question worth more: Jack Vaughton had gone pale at the proceedings, for the foods, imported all the way from England for an Easter dinner at Lord Cleypole’s largesse, were irreplaceable at that time in the colony.

Cot Daley was found guilty, her accurate penalty death by hanging. Jack Vaughton argued long and hard with the tribunal, concerning this servant’s worth as a worker, to be increased by issue as many years of breeding stretched ahead of her. In the end they concurred: if by her execution Lord Cleypole would suffer double theft, that was not just. The Irishwoman received seven years’ added indenture, plus twenty public strokes in Bridgetown once the harvest was complete. “There was a roaring in my ears as I stood at the whipping post the second time,” the prisoner tells Coote. “I did not faint so easily as when Jenks fell to, but seemed to float away and watch myself, writhing, begging, as a crowd of gentlemen and ladies, tended by their servants, watched with me.”

“What did you take the knife for?” Peter Coote asks.

“To spread the butter, sir,” she grins.

Later that year, when her wounds had healed, Jack Vaughton ordered Cot Daley to prepare to breed. By that time planters and their managers had begun to reconsider the wisdom of breeding purely Irish stock. Since her years at Arlington, two island-wide uprisings had been masterminded by the Irish, and uncovered just in time. For this and other reasons, Jack Vaughton hesitated to appoint her stud. Recently the first experiment of offspring bred between Irish and Africans had reached early maturity. Lighter-skinned and softer-haired than pure blacks, the girls among them showed especial promise to be handsome, thus more suitable for special duties than ordinary girls.

Therefore, after consideration, Jack Vaughton bade her submit herself to Pawpaw Jack, the driver of her field crew. “But I could not,
could
not, bring myself to do this,” Cot claims tersely. And silently Peter Coote approves.

“He was a small and thickset man who watched me all the time. Whilst scolding me to cut cane faster, or having words with other Africans, his eyes had a skinned stare when they fell on me, as if they might pop and explode.

“I have told you that I was alone there at the Glebe. I had no friends as once I’d had in Mary Dove. I was the only Irish in my field crew, so I had formed the habit of talking to myself. Sometimes as I worked away, babbling in Irish to myself, Pawpaw Jack would hunker down beside me. ‘What you say, Red? What you say?’ he whispered. I slashed away beside him with no answer.

“That was all he wanted from me, at least at first: to know what I was talking to, although I would not speak with him. He was a man who liked those best who liked him least, while Master Plackler, for example, was the opposite sort of man: the slightest deviation from his whims, spoken or not, he found tiresome.”

Coote sees no point in commenting on the idiocy of comparing African and Englishman, slave and titled planter, as if they were the same thing: Man. He writes on, with pinched nostrils.

She tells how she had held off Pawpaw Jack until almost Christ mastime. Up on the hill, in the Ite compound, he had an indeterminate number of Ite women: they satisfied his needs.

“I tell you, he repulsed me. My brain stewed in confusion, seeking this way and another to avoid his clasp. I thought to lure one of my countrymen by creeping to his pallet in the middle of the night, and achieve the breeding that way round. But the lads from Connaught had less than two years to finish out, and turned me back to my own hut. The only other way I came upon was to get sold off again; but then everything would sink to the beginning once more. Myself the outsider, upon the ground again, perhaps worse rations, perhaps a vengeful mistress, a randy master too, a stud even more devilish than Pawpaw Jack himself. The breeding, at my age, must take place anyway. So I gave in.”

The prisoner cannot remember how she first succumbed or why, but it was in a shed, not her own hut, nor in Jack Pawpaw’s, for there were other women—Ites—living there. The mating only happened twice until Eastertide of 1661.

Easter was anticipated more than Christmas by the bondspeople, Africans and Christians alike, for Christmas fell in wintertime. Winter work was slower, preparing for the crop season to come. Field tasks were routine ones—the tending of the livestock; manuring of the fields, repairing sheds and outbuildings, clearing drains and ditches to expose the nests of rats and snakes to birds of prey. The work was usually predictable then, the field day only from sun to sun. But Easter fell in the middle of crop time. During that time—January to May—gangs worked strenuously in the fields and mills for eighteen hours a day. Accidents happened in this season, when overloaded, sleepless, hungry workers severed not a cane stalk but a thumb. When millers mashed their own arms between grinding stones; and in the boiling-houses, inhaled steam dropped grown men and women to the ground like folded paper, instantly. So Easter was a four-day holiday in the midst of an inferno.

From Good Friday afternoon through Easter Monday, the slaves and servants of the Glebe were released from their labors except to tend the stock. On Easter Monday night of 1661 at a pig roast and dance Cot Daley had swilled several jars of rum, when Jack Vaughton and William Butler, overseers, rode into the quarters to advise their people to settle down, for another workday would soon be upon them. The weather had been even finer and warmer than usual, and a field of cane stood overready for its harvest. The revelers seemed reluctant to cease cavorting, but slowly, under Mr. Vaughton’s eye, they began to leave the yard and straggle toward their shacks. Mr. Vaughton himself then turned his beast and prepared to return down the hill, when the Irishwoman called out, “Feck ye, we have till midnight!” and picked up a stick to lash the horse’s withers. Due to her inebriation and the starless dark the horse was facing into, the blow did not connect. But Jack Vaughton had her clapped in stocks right then. In the morning she was given an extended indenture of two years, according to the new Act for the Ordaining of Rights between Masters and Servants, and promised another public lashing when the harvest was all in.

The Irishwoman recounts vomiting the rum out in the stocks, then realizing as the night wheeled to gray dawn, what her life had come to.

“Truly, this is what rum will lead to, especially in the female humors,” Peter Coote affirms.

“You’ll rarely see a happy person besotted,” Cot Quashey replies bitterly. “I cannot describe how the sinking of the night into a dismal dawn pulled me further down in spirit. With the pale coming of the sun people skirted round me with their small yard duties as I had skirted Paudi Iasc a lifetime before, and I understood that I was broken. I would refuse no one, no more.”

The prisoner decided that her best course was to pay careful attention to the managers, obeying them to the letter or beyond, if possible. Otherwise, she began to understand, she would not leave her servitude alive. “It was 1661,” she counted out for Coote. “I had been spirited away in ’50, sold in ’51. Ten years, already, had dragged by like the chains of Hades. And now the thing Big Dinah had seen crawling over me had bought me hell till 1673.

“I was twenty-one: I would be the age of Christ when he was done to death when I was released, if I pleased everyone who stood above me from now till then. They let me out to work the fields after two more days. I went straight to the river, where I bathed and washed my hair in the suds of the aloe plant. I also washed my canvas clothes, and slept in the old corselet, lying on the final rags of the old surcoat. The next morning—how can I tell you? I felt queasy with relief. When he came along the row where I was scooping cut cane for the mill, I mumbled to myself as usual. He bent over, closer, closer, staring at my face as if he saw the fey. ‘What you sayin’, Redshank? What you say?’ he asked. ‘I’m saying Pawpaw Jack, you come to see me on my mat tonight,’ I told him without lifting up. He made one sound. It was like the first bugle note of a rooster’s call at dawn.

“I worked late that night in the mills, feeding the boilers. When I crept into my shack, he was waiting. He had brought salt fish wrapped in a banana leaf, and an orange. Afterward I told him rum would make it easier for me. ‘Greasy,’ he said. ‘Rum will make you greasy, I like to slide.’ He was with me every night. I meant to bind him to me so he would protect me. Give me easier work out in the field, train me for a second-gang driver, and stand between me and the whip.

“He drove the cart to Bridgetown when it came time for me to take my lashes for speaking up to Vaughton. There were errands for the plantation. Jack Vaughton knew I had accepted Pawpaw Jack, and it mollified him. I took only fifteen lashes, and an apothecary tended to me afterward. We stayed in Bridgetown for two days, while Lye and Vaughton took Pawpaw Jack and Bacchus to inspect a shipment of new slaves from Guinea. These were the Coromantee. On behalf of Edward Cleypole and on his letter, they purchased seventeen. Quashey was among them, and Jiba, and the rest. But Mama Chiva, being from Brazil, did not come at that time. She was brought months later. And Afebwa arrived later still.

“I was driven back with the supplies, and the wagon emptied out before they returned for the new slaves, so I did not see the Coromantee then.”

Coote has memorized the notes the Governor has given him, taken during the first interrogations of this prisoner. “Go back to Pawpaw Jack,” he commands. “Your relations with the Coromantee we’ll return to, you can be sure. But first, did you not have his child?”

She stares straight ahead. “Yes. Pawpaw Jack came to me almost every night. His women hissed at me as I passed in the fields, but I felt a warped pride. He brought me tidbits and rum, and I did the things he told me. They hurt no worse than bending to plant shoots all day, or lifting boulders from the fields. Because he kept his women off me and returned almost every night, I mistook him. I thought he loved me, for I knew nothing yet of love, so I meant to use him. But he came because it stirred him so, that one who hated him would yet do his will.

“I had a child of Pawpaw Jack at the end of ’61.” The custom was that every child, African, Scots, English, or Irish, would grow up with its mother. But Pawpaw Jack came from a group of people with whom children belonged to their father. A woman could leave or be put aside, but her children would then be taken from her and given to her husband’s female relatives to raise. “He told me all along that he would take the child,” she says, “but I had never had a babe. In my state, dull, confused, and overwhelmed, he might have said that he would take away my food ration for the day that I gave birth. What did I care?”

The birthing was a long one. They moved her to an empty shed and sent a midwife down to her, for Cot Daley knew nothing of these things in human beings. The lambs fell quickly. Even a cow could birth a long-legged calf from dark to dawn. First she prayed to her mute saints; then gave over and howled. Eventually it was the howling that opened her, so the child could press through.

“But when I took her in my arms there in the shed, the sun rose here, inside my chest”—she points—“and I would not let her go. I knew then that to suffer breeding was not important if it gave me this. Holding my own perfect wee’n … and to be a woman … under all it was a wondrous, a mystic thing.