Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (19 page)

“She curled her flower-petal tongue between her lips, and squirmed, and fell asleep. Later they gave her an African name. But although there was no priest, no baptism on the island, I named her for my mother. I called her Moya.

“The midwife sent word of the birth out to the field. That night they came to take her from me, before my milk began to flow. They wanted no milk fever on me, but to keep me to the schedule that they had.”

She had shrieked at Pawpaw Jack and the nursing wife he brought along to take the child. “My baby began to wail, and I slapped the woman holding her, bit Pawpaw Jack’s nose hard at the tip, and kicked until my blood drenched the clay beneath our feet, where the flies buzzed. Jack Vaughton was sent for. He came inside the shed and shut the door. I recall his dusty boots, the quirt held ever in his hand; like your pen, sir, in yours.”

Vaughton paced and spoke about the future. Eleven years lay ahead of her at the Glebe: eleven years of fieldwork, though in spite of a recalcitrant background, elevation to the role of driver or stock-ranger was remotely possible. “After that eleven years you will be more old than young,” said he. “But still … if you have not been wasted in the fields, and without half-Negra babes clinging to your skirts reminding him … a freedman of your type might yet marry you. Before you leave this world you might know peace, and some of the contentment found inside a humble home. But what Irishman will take on black offspring, let alone the … she who bore them?”

Jack Vaughton gave Cot Daley eight days’ rest, a length of printed cloth, the promise she would not have to lie with Pawpaw Jack again, and two silver coins. Like Judas, Peter Coote finds himself thinking.

“Like Judas,” the Irishwoman echoes him. “Yet she throve with the Ite. She was with them still when I left the Glebe in ’80. One of Lord Cleypole’s sons was having her raised for himself, and she was proud of it. She got to work in the storehouse. I heard they sent her to Virginia in ’82 when he was lieutenant in the King’s militia there, but he got killed straight after that. I haven’t learned what happened to her after that. My firstborn child. My Moya.”

Now gusts of wind begin to blow dust from the garden through the open window as the afternoon showers gather. Some of Peter’s pages ruffle up and fly across the floor. “Lucy?” he shouts. She should be back by now. But a bowed old man with a grizzled white beard comes instead into the room. “Christ, Daniel, where is Lucy?” Now Peter Coote is angry. The papers are all scrambled, and in his haste to grab them he has caught the lace of his left sleeve on a tiny finishing nail on the desk’s edge. The fragile threads that shape a flower have pulled into a clump of puckered strings, ready to catch on the next thing. “Damn you!” he shouts, whether at the prisoner, the old slave, Lucy, or his sleeve. But within minutes he is soothed and sorted out. The old man closes the shutters and fetches two lanterns to write by, until the rain should pass.

M
usty and sullen dawns the day. Coote bids Lucy open the shutters for the chance sticky breeze: the prisoner’s back smells ever more fetid in spite of herbal washes. The odor makes him vaguely but consistently nauseous. The Irishwoman enters the room this morning leaning on the old slave man whose name he has mislaid. Glancing up at the arched plaster doorway, he sees her framed in tarnished pewter light, but for wisps of coppery hair which resist the dullness. The black wool shawl drawn tightly over her thin shoulders lends her the shape of an unformed girl. The features of her face cannot be seen: only a silvery sheen of light in the wrinkles of her cap and thin tendrils around a raw-boned face hidden as if within a shallow cave. With a gesture of his plume he indicates her seat. Readying the inkpot, parchment, pearl-set box of sand, he notices several heavy flies leave the wall to browse her shoulders, drawn by the cloying odor of decay.

“Begin,” he chokes.

She’s gazing blankly toward the wall. “Can you picture me there, sir? My life … Can you see me day after day, month to year, bent in the fields, cooking my mean ration of cornmeal and weeds at a fire outside my shack? I had built another after the birthing, and Vaughton lent me two black lads and one afternoon, to thatch it. Still it only stood the width of your arms’ span, and the roof grazed my hair. From it I clambered when the field gongs sounded, rolling over on my thin elbows on the gravel, the knobs upon my spine like carbuncles thinly covered with hide. My putty-colored petticoat and waist, stitched without care, shredded more each day from sweat and the pull and heave of sugar work. The cloth was so loosely woven that the flesh of my back broiled in a tiny grid like inflamed mesh when I was forced to bend the whole day pulling shoots. The Christmas gift of one new suit of clothes we kept for funerals and feasts, until our older garments rotted into uselessness. But African women have an eye for beauty, and from them I learned to make bracelets from the hard seeds of the Job’s Tears bush. I bound these round my ankles and my wrists, and hung them at feasts in my clumped and tangled hair. Oh … I can see myself as clearly as if I were a bird flying free above that hank of hair and hide hung with rainbow-colored beads bent tugging at the earth, back itching over the scars of the lash. Rarely did I bathe now. No Pawpaw Jack should look at me again. They’d put me in the other section of first gang once the Irishmen fulfilled their terms and were let go from bondage. I did not have to brush by Moya’s father as I moved up and down the rows year after year, back and forth from the ditches to the sugar yard.

“Arguing with myself and the peopled past, beneath my breath; singing the odd snatch of a hymn whose words had been emptied of belief, I tried to be what they thought ‘good.’ To the drivers, the rangers, all the overseers, especially Jack Vaughton, I bowed my head and stood aside, mumbling ‘How’s yer health, sire?’Trying to gauge the moment to sidle forward with information, or piously agree with them against the lesser folk. But when they weren’t about, splurts of viciousness came out of me against the others of my lot—folk powerless to sort me out.” Cot Quashey’s voice wavers; she turns from the doorframe to the desk and says humbly, “After each spew of abuse I felt, soon or late, a sense of disgust for myself, and great remorse. Yet these twinges of right and wrong from my upbringing, or from the remnants of my human heart, seemed only to impel worse lashings out against the hapless. I might taunt one being flogged, I might sneer at a child staggering under too great a load. And this was how I tried to keep my masters’ wrath off me.

“But though I tried, my days went by as if I was walking barefoot over sharp stones, whilst carrying a large tray laden with the finest crystal goblets. Fear and too much caution … they’ll make you stumble, sir. ’Tis just a matter of time.

“Then came the feast of thanksgiving after the locust plague of 1663.

“Those swarms flew in on brown sheets which darkened the noon skies. They bowed every tree branch at the edge of the forest like vile fruits crawling ’pon the vine. The grapes of hell, with their swiveling heads and twitching horns and the whining, droning song made when they rubbed their sticky legs together.

“There had been a drought and then a flood before the locusts seemed to burble up out of the ground. They took wing and looked down on our helplessness from the high branches. Still, due to hard work and Providence, half the cane crop of the Glebe was standing at the end. The overseers put the first gangs into the middle of the sprouting fields and showed us where to dig. We shoveled feverishly, creating a wide ring trench, then filled it partway with field trash. Two ’seers were circling us on muddy nervous mares, shouting directions. Already the odd locust, having sawed the leaves and tender bark off every branch around the jungle’s rim, was beginning to drop onto the earth to chew the tender stalks of cane, when Rigley and Vaughton galloped up from the yards holding pine-pitch torches high aloft.

“The women and unseasoned males jumped hastily outside the ring, while the men within were given calabashes of water to splash onto the rags tied quickly o’er their faces. Still I can hear the women, screeching for fear the men would be grilled alive. But the overseers knew their work: to their commands, the fire crew forked flaming tinder back across the ditches, or dug the trenches wider and deeper in spots. They coughed and choked; but only one expired from it all.

“But a million insects, drawn to the field, were unable to surmount the smoke and flame. While men fought along the ditches, others took turns plucking the live locusts which had landed from the seedlings. And as I said, a holiday was declared once it was certain the surviving locusts had departed from the Glebe. For half our cane would come to harvest, whilst the crops of many others were devoured to the roots, where the creatures injected new eggs, then went to sleep until their next mysterious hatching.

“It was at the locust feast that I first noticed Quashey the Coromantee, who became my husband.”

Coote makes a wry mouth: husband indeed! A buzzing roars by his left ear. He jerks. The recording of a million locust eyes and waving antennae eeries the skin on his arms beneath the gray-hued linen shirt with its unraveling lace. Flies: three of them, move onto his escritoire from the stenchful shoulders of the hag. “Lucy!” he orders. “Get in here now.” He rises, slamming the shutters closed, tilting the slatted jalousies open from the bottom at such an angle that there will be some light but few flies entering. Lucy swishes into the room, long neck held high, broom in hand. He motions her to stand behind him, invert the broom, and switch away flies while the interrogation progresses. “Get on with it,” he barks at his prisoner. Really! Her stink is sickening!

“I noticed Quashey due to his garments. They marked him as a bondsman of import, for with pantaloons of putty Osnabruck he wore a kind of boot, and though shirtless like all the other men he wore a cloak of wool the sort the navvies used to wear in Cromwell’s time. This was broidered with rainbow-colored seeds, as well as animal teeth.

“He was less than usual height, but lofty in his bearing, with skin like polished wood. An unusual raised tattooing cuffed his mighty arms. I did not mark his face at the time, but as he passed me I heard the faintest buzzing, from deep down in his chest. Quashey was given to humming, he hummed his thoughts. I also noted that a woman trailed him to the roasting pit—a most unusual woman, the one we called Mama Chiva. This woman seemed almost old enough to be the mother of the man, yet from the way he regarded her when she brought him food, she was something else to him.

“She too was garbed unusually, in a bodice which beneath its stains had once been red. Another cloth of red partly veiled her hair. But the marvelous thing about her was her smile. For as they sat upon a log beside the fire she gave a laugh at something said, and flashed her teeth, and what a fine mouthful of ivories she had, herself a granny woman! Yes, it is true! Her teeth were made of a fine ivory, carved with what they call scrimshaw. They glimmered like purest pearls in the firelight. In the daytime, though, you could see the fine etchings of tiny sloops and islands in the sea, mermaids and whales, carved in each one. Mama Chiva had been brought up from Brazil and traded by the Dutch, one of whom had kept her as a concubine for years before she thickened after many childbirths. Each of her children had been sold away by their own ardent, jovial father. Himself it was who’d given her the scrimshaw teeth, when she lost her own across the years. He’d take her on his knee, she said, and touching a tooth, tell a tale about its image. He was a sailing man was he, and had been all around the world.

“They said she had ensorcelled the Dutchman for many years, and he had given her many gifts, and money too. The last was true, for when I was wed to Quashey there came a time when only coin would help his cause, and Mama Chiva, who had been his first wife here on this side of the sea, took out what she had hidden and gave it to him. Gave him everything, with a heart and a half. But these things lay far ahead as we sat around the flames chewing charred flesh and preparing for a dance.

“You have heard how it was with me in those days. At the locust feast while the Africans began to thump their tambourines, I hun kered down with a calabash of rum beside the barrel. And at the height of that feast, when the howling had reached its utmost frenzy, I had to make my water. I had been longing, I recall; rum-dreaming: yearning for the days when I’d known Dinah and for a time went among others, other women, at the Sunday market. So half in wish and half in fantasy, I crept into the wood and crouching there to relieve myself, thought I could make out the path we’d trod to St. John’s Church. Then, rising in the misty, dangerous night forest, I began to stagger toward it. But I got lost, then cold, then curled myself between the roots of a tree against the late-night dew. The last thing I heard before I fell asleep was a strange sound. A sound as if shells or thin animal bones were blowing in the breeze, chinking together like fairy chimes. And there I lay when the rangers Vaughton sent found me in the morn. Not my swimming head, nor my fetid breath, nor my confusion convinced anyone that I had not made to run away. There was a hearing of some sort that afternoon, but I soon shut my lips, for I felt in my belly the futility of trying to reason with the Spirits of the Night. I was given no lashes this time, but a fully renewed servitude of seven years. Now I would not come up for release until 1680, all going well. And my youth would be behind me. I would be a granny woman of forty years of age, if I should live so long.”

The hot tears of pity that rush into Coote’s eyes as Lucy waves away the agitated flies are for himself. He himself turned forty several full months ago, and finds himself still landless, brideless, with no permanent prospects in these lonely tropics. He clears his throat into the silence, sniffing. When composed again, he prompts, “Now you have come to Quashey, the traitor who was hanged for his lead in the heinous uprising of 1675. What part played you in all of this?” He records his own well-chosen words with a flourish.