Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (2 page)

Lucy perches the pan on her hip and rolls the wooden slats almost closed with her free hand. When she has left the room, he goes to the escritoire and notes his observations of her “docile slowness” in the margins of the Apothecary’s Journal. Then he takes down another ledger which contains the treatments given the sick at Speightstown Gaol and tallies the expenses for the medicaments dispensed this morning. Finished, he puts the ledgers back upon their shelf and pours himself tea before setting out the materials for the upcoming testimony. A batch of parchment. A small pot of squid ink. A wooden box of quills. A tray of white sand.

As he organizes himself he hears the water from the basin being hurled onto the hard-packed clay of the yard. It makes an oval slop, the sound of the shape of its shadow. The sudden action in the sleepy garden disturbs the dozing parrots. They craw and rustle for a moment. The sound their wings make flapping is the sound of something much larger than Peter Coote knows parrot wings to be.

When he is ready he steeples his hands, which emerge from their cuffs of flower-patterned Irish lace, on the thin sheaf of paper. His elbows lean lightly on the arms of a fruitwood chair. When the slave and the prisoner come to the door he says, “Lucy, you may take the tea things.” To the other he says gravely, “You may sit down.” He has removed a small velvet-backed chair from its place facing the escritoire because he knows the Irishwoman’s back is at a stage of suppuration, despite his washes of comfrey and alum. Silk velvet stains easily—he has placed a low backless stool in its place. The prisoner slumps upon it now.

Lucy gathers his tea things onto a tray. Without a word she moves into the shadow of the fieldstone hall. Peter Coote watches her go, marveling at why her buttocks, beneath the rough-spun indigo-dyed petticoat, seem to swell immediately below her waist, perhaps six inches above the position of his own or those of the white woman seated now before him. He has noted this formation in African men as well as women, and postulates that it denotes, or perhaps leads to, a deformation of sensuality.

“Now,” he says to the white woman. “You are wise to come forward under the circumstances. The flogging is over and done with, but the exile is yet ahead … as it says here, ‘in the Caribbe islands, according to the Governor’s
pleasure.
’ ” He looks up at the woman. He sees nothing; nothing memorable. An aged face and slight body, clad in a gray Osnabruck petticoat bedraggled at the hem. A rough wool shawl draped across the festering shoulders. Skinned-back hair under an unbleached cap makes her cheekbones jut like a red Indian’s. The eyebrows are a faded cinnamon, eyelashes so blond they’re almost albino. A few snaggled teeth, large pale eyes. To this nothingness he finishes, “And you will want to incur the Governor’s pleasure when it comes to selecting your future home. A civilized place like Jamaica, perhaps, where a woman like yourself can earn a living from small barters …”

Peter Coote smoothes the lace of his cuffs back from his wrists. He uncaps the jar of ink, positioning it to the upper right of the stack of parchment, and intones, “So then, biddy. Kindly begin your testimony concerning the plot which our Governor has foiled. In which the Irish and the Africans together on this island”—he is writing his own words—“planned to rise up against the masters which God gave you in this life.” From the hallway through the open door comes a slight rattle of silver against china. “Lucy! Go away from there,” he calls sternly. Bare feet recede down the corridor until their slap diminishes entirely.

“I care not which rock I end my days on,” the woman before Peter Coote says suddenly. “But I will tell my story, for my own purposes.”

Coote chuckles dryly. “You are hardly in a position to further your own … purposes,” he remarks after a pause.

The haggard prisoner before him insists, “I am indeed.”

“Well what then?” asks Coote, choosing the path to amusement over that to annoyance.

“I will tell the Governor, Colonel Stede—or you as his man—I will give you testimony on one condition.”

“And that, pray tell?”

“That it be
full
testimony. That you record everything I say, not simply what you seek.”

“That is the trade?”

“If I’m to sing I must be given your word.”

“But … what if I don’t want to give it?” smiles Coote, lifting his powdered eyebrows toward her quizzically.

“I am ill, sir, who knows that better than yourself? I may have a hard time in the remembering of details,” replies the woman curtly.

Everyone knows the transparent craftiness of the Irish. Coote refuses, now, to let his future fall into her hands. The task he’s taken on is to serve the Governor by obtaining revelations from the captives who were involved in the latest plot.

“All right. Let us begin,” he shrugs, dunking and wiping his quill, “at the beginning. Tell your full name and how came you here, unto this island.”

“They call me Cot Quashey now, or Quashey’s Cot, but I was born Cot Daley, in the city of Galway, in the nation of Ireland. That would have been some time before the massacre of the Protestants, for I was above ten years of age when I was stolen for Barbados.

“The Daleys were a tribe for journeying. In the times of kings in Ireland”—here Peter Coote raises his eyes and smiles indulgently, as if at a child’s fable—“the Daleys were
seanachies,
what you call bards. They traveled the world in all its strangeness and brought back its songs, its tales and poetry and wisdom. There are Daleys, I have heard, in Galicia in Spain, in France, in Egypt—wherever there were people who valued the stories of the world. But by my time, or my grandfather’s time, those who sat on their fine rumps in Ireland’s courts no longer marveled at the stories told by those they deemed of lesser worth. And so, like everyone else, the Daleys learned to hold their tongues.

“My father’s name was Mihawl, my mother’s name was Moya, and I had one older brother, Martin, who had gone as apprentice to the quarries near Athlone. I had a sister Breed who married to Kill corrig before I was born, for I was the last sparkle in my father’s eye, as they say.

“My father was a saddler and my mother kept a stall, selling viands in the market in Nun’s Island there in Galway City. I remember so little of her. But on market days the farmers came to our house to sell her meat while the morning star still hung in the sky. Ours was a narrow house, double-storied above the workshop where my father had his saddlery, and I would wake sometimes, the cold steaming over my pallet, as my mother bent out the open window hauling up a haunch or side she had just purchased, with a rope. She was strong and sturdy, right up to her death. The license to sell victuals had been in my mother’s family for a long time, and was handed down to her.

“My mother took me with her to market and sat me underneath an upturned cart. This was her stall. I squatted on a hessian sack with extra cuts of meat around me. Sometimes the market cats would crawl under with me, too. They kept the rats away but I must swat them when they tried to gnaw more than the scraps I fed them. The meat smelled like cold clean flesh and blood, only dead. The cats smelled nervous, dirty, and alive. I recall my mother’s voice above me as she weighed and sold the meat. She spoke in Irish with our own sort of people, rich and poor. She spoke in English with the soldiers of the Sassenach.

“When I faced the street from below that stall, peeking through the loose weave of hessian sacks she hung to protect me from the weather, I saw the white hose and satin petticoats of the wealthy, the muddy boots of the militia, the bare feet and raw brogues of townspeople and farmers. The horses shat as they clipped by; the dogs lifted their legs to claim the smell of raw meat with a spray of urination.

“Away from the street I faced the boundary of my mother’s skirts. They were brown and plain, except on holy days when she donned a scarlet overskirt. When I sidled close, the heat of her came through the cloth. And every now and again, even whilst she might be talking with a customer, her hand would slip beneath the cart’s edge and seek my face. Her hand was coarse and thick and often cold; and it seemed very large, for it could cup my entire jaw from ear to ear. I still remember the scratchy gentleness of her fingers on my cheek. Through contrast, her hands taught me my own young smoothness. The smell of mortal meat was always on her hands; in summer they were oilier and darkened.

“As a wee’n my whole world revolved between our alley in Galway, the market of the victualers, and an annual pilgrimage of thanks and merrymaking which my parents always brought me to. This feast happened on Saint Kieran’s Day, September ninth, down in Clonmacnoise; and its being close to Athlone there were times when my brother Martin got leave to join us. We made the pattern to Saint Kieran, spiraling his well as the bashful cattle stared from the margins of the field. People dunked their hands into the black scummed water to banish warts and carbuncles. Along the roadside, tinkers lined their orange and yellow painted carts, selling potatoes, boiled eggs, fortunes, relics, and the like. Our own cart we parked in a field beside the Shannon, where I collected swan feathers in the morning fog, when the tide breathed out. Close by the banks where our cart sat was a midden where my father liked to fish, saying that the old ones knew the deepest pools where the biggest fish had made their cities from time untold.

“We went to Clonmacnoise to keep a vow: my mother had been barren for six years after her wedding, till a neighbor brought her to Saint Kieran’s pattern day. They took her to a holy stone at midnight, where she hiked her skirts, sat on the rock, and prayed.” Cot Quashey snaps her fingers once. “Like that, the children came—first Breed, then Martin. And twenty years later, Saint Kieran still kept them in mind: for when the field seemed dried up, I sprouted into their lives.

“My old ones would attend the Masses and the rosaries, while I scrambled up the midden. This was the place where the old forest dwellers, who wore skins and roamed together, came to catch their fish, dig mollusks from the mud, and trap the unsuspecting deer. There, in the mound we call the
fulachta fiadh,
they roasted their catches and their kills, and feasted all together. I played there, poking sticks into the mound, piling the Shannon’s slick gray stones and shells around its base, pretending I was mother of a tribe, a-feasting. ’Twas there I basked inside the child’s wordless, humming confidence that the sun, the river and the breeze, the folk, the fish, the bawling cows—all would provide for me.

“But then my mother died when I was six or so, of brain fever, and I was left to the care of my father. I cannot tell you much of him either. He bade me eat and be quiet, and sit by the hearth to fetch him this and that. My father was renowned for his harnesses and especially for the collars that he made. A collar must fit close so as not to rub; yet not too tight, for a horse’s neck swells beneath a heavy load. They said he made a bit that sat in a horse’s mouth like a sugar-teat in the mouth of a teething child, so that the horse would come to take the pressure as helpful in its travail, and not treat the bit as an enemy. It was like this too with the harnesses he made. They were systems for guidance, not prisons for the head. You wit that I learned something of horses from my sire.

“He was a man uncommon thin, who mostly sat in the corner stitching leathers, pounding nails, while firelight and brown shadows played over his bones. I would watch him. He was so frail I was often frightened that he would follow where my mother’d gone, and leave me all alone.

“He liked a drop or two as well, and I remember that he used to squeeze my hand and nod and wink, when he was at the jar. I used to feel confused, for I never knew what the nod agreed to, or what bargain the squeeze was meant to seal.

“Two autumns after my mother died, my father sent me to the convent to learn from the sisters there. I returned home every Sunday and every holy day and cooked a meal for him. He loved his stirabout and a fine lump of meat, and praised my cooking. The nuns taught me English, and to read and write and cipher to a degree. I remember that the abbey kitchen smelled like cabbage. The chapel smelled like cold ashes and doused fire. But my father’s house smelled like bacon, and leather scraped and twisted. Leather smells like animal sweat: the scent of the animal partly wakens once again under the heat of human hands.”

“It seems you lived by your nostrils when you were young,” Coote remarks dryly. “Pray get on with it.”

“The nuns were like old aunts to me, because I had no Mam. I did shy duty by my sire and he by me. We went no more to Clonmacnoise, but he took me to two horse fairs up the country, for he needed help with the young colts along the way. And the fifth summer after my mother’s death—my last in his keeping—he took me to Cruach Padriag, where I scrambled barefoot up the scree to ask peace for her soul. But I was glad to return to my Galway convent, and the waiting nuns with their female smells and softnesses.

“And so my small years passed, until the Yuletide when I was about eleven years of age. That year some women in our street prevailed upon my father that I should go a-wrenning on Saint Stephen’s Day with their children—children who had been my playmates before my mother died, though I knew them only by sight since I had gone to live at the convent. Do you know the Lá Droilean, sir, and the custom of the wren? In the countryside the bands of people might go off into the bushes, and catch the wren, and break its pretty neck. For the wren it was who led the Roman soldiers to the bush where Christ knelt hidden, and betrayed him, and did the same to poor Saint Stephen. But in the city streets and alleyways we children only donned the masks of animals and wilder sprites, and danced along the streets, seeking charity in the name of the Lord.

“My father made my mask. He wove it of thick straw, a square sort of cage like the spirit of a byre in winter, come alive. It had slitty-slanty holes which my own eyes stared through. Over my woolen petticoat and bodice I wore a surcoat of my father’s. I remember it was gray, and the skirt of it was tied into a knot behind me like a tail. My hair hung down all goldy-red in the mirror in the winter’s light, and like a lion, mane and all, my father said I looked. He stood in the half-door as I joined the neighbor children. I did not know them really anymore, for since my mother died my time was spent with nuns, or in the saddlery. I was not allowed out of the house on my own. Once, when I was eight, my father had sent me off to buy some eggs at market, but I made my way to the laneway of the victualers. I thought I saw her there, hefting the dark joints of beef and hams above her cart. A cat came to wind and purr about my legs. I was afraid to cross the lane and come closer, in case, because of my approach, she turned into a stranger. But I was also afraid to go away, in case this time she’d leave forever. So I stood in the gutter in the rain while the cat whinged round my ankles.