Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (20 page)

“My Quashey, peace be with him,” begins the prisoner; and instead of tears of lamentation she smiles the first true smile Coote has seen on her. It’s snaggle-toothed and cracked, yet it dimples, lighting the pale eyes like a measure of sparkling water in a clean glass cup. “Ah, ’twas a long time yet until we came together. As you remember, Vaughton had decreed that I need not go again for breeding after Moya, and he seemed, for several years, to have given me up for that. I hoped I might become like Dora at Arlington: a spinster overseer. But others were chosen.

“Before the Connaught lads were freed they bred with Africans from the Horn, and the Irish house girls were mated with Scotsmen and Brits, except she who held out for a pledge from the overseer Rigley. Me, it was as though I were returned to childhood again, except for fieldwork. I had no fleshly obligations; but because I had no child, my daughter living up on Ite hill as if I did not exist, I had no say and no respect among the slavewomen.

“Quashey. Yes, I learned about him over time. At first he had been placed upon the first crew opposite my own, so I rarely saw him outside feasts. But by the time of the first locust plague, Quashey had been promoted. He had become first mariner of the plantation’s sloop. At this time Lord Cleypole had purchased holdings down the St. John’s River, for the sugar market had grown fierce attractive. Quashey it was who steered the boat from the Glebe’s dock across Conset’s Bay to the new fields, with seedlings, cuttings, tools, and later stock and people. In pleasant weather he brought the overseers and the odd gentry back and forth. In harvest season he doubled as a potter, making the curing pots they use to drain molasses from the fine white costly sugar. These skills had he brought with him from his home in Africa, where all the men, even from chiefly tribes like his own, took pride in knowing self-sufficiency.

“In the year following my sentencing as a runaway something shifted in me, as things tip, then tilt again in all of us. It seemed too much to hope for—the possibility of my return home to Eire at the age of forty; a cottage of my own, a man, a parish of kind homely neighbors near my sister or my brother … if I found them living. I could no longer yearn ahead, yet no longer grieved backward as much, either. Instead, on Sundays and fine evenings now, I began to pull some herbs I recognized from home. Plantain, mullein, dandelion, yarrow; wild garlic and wild mustard. Willow bark, when peeled red and smoked, made a raw throat smooth again. Tea from that winter-smelling thin-needled tree which grows on northern hillsides stopped a cough and lit the fire of life again in an exhausted chest. It became known that I collected herbs: they could be seen drying in the shade of the thatch outside my shanty door. Then came the measles epidemic in ’64 and ’65, and I was called to help. That was how I first had words with Mama Chiva. She had been taken on as overseer of the pot gang although she was too young for that; but the work kept her close to the yards, where she was known as an herbal granny, a leech woman. And as you know, there were not yet apothecaries on plantations in those days.

“Mama Chiva had more and different medicines than mine. Who knows which worked, and when, and why? We lost more than half of the infected; but many who were dosed pulled through. Through a mix of broken English learned from her Dutchman, and the language of the eyes, Mama Chiva and I compared the attributes of roots we pulled and powdered. That was what we held in common, back then.

“There was a little child, a Mbundu girl who first went blind, then succumbed. I don’t know why that one child broke through the hard scab on my heart, but I tried so hard to pull her back to life. The night she passed I brought the old rusty flute of my mother to her pallet, and played, trying to charm her spirit. There was no mother to claim her, perhaps that was the link between us. When she died I didn’t know, and kept on playing while a small crowd of whispering slaves gathered round us. Quashey and Mama Chiva were in that group, I looked up and heard his solemn humming; but it was not they who stepped forward to take the flute away from me and lead me from the site so that the child could be prepared for her travel back to Guinea. They called Heaven that. Guinea. Or Zhenna. Or a mix of both, depending upon their own clan’s belief.”

The testimony rambles on. Coote itches: sweat trickles down his back now that no garden breeze can dry it. The straw broom swishes back and forth, up and down, in Lucy’s hands. The air it stirs tickles his ear. Nausea, lasciviousness, impatience, roil in him. He will have them burn camphor in this room, and will take his noon meal at the table in his chamber.

In 1666, the Irish woman says, they witnessed from afar the Bridgetown fire. The sun went red, the sky deep gray for the best part of three days. Among the bondspeople spread a horrid thrill: this was the Judgment Day which every race had heard about. But no; it proved to be only a small judgment on the merchant storehouses and town mansions in the capital. Next came the hurricane, sucking the pillars from plantation porches. Crops were demolished, rations scantier than ever. The island was replanted by drooping skeletons to the flicking of the whip. But afterward had come new and energetic investments in Barbados: Coote realizes that his own embarkation in 1669 rode the latter curve of this wave of rebuilding and high optimism.

At the Glebe, masons were hired to strengthen slave shanties with fieldstone and wood; a sick-house was built, and a part-time apothecary-surgeon hired between three plantations. From Brazil and the French Islands bounced white-sailed sloops with sturdy new strains of cane. The work fell hard on all, bondsmen and overseers alike. Recognizing the need for wholesale improvement, Lord Cleypole’s advisors in England established a stepped-up program of increase. Breeding-per-head must be increased among all stock, including human, advised the gentry’s agents. And so one day Jack Vaughton called Cot Daley to him and told her to bathe: he had decided to breed her to the Coromantee named Quashey.

“I reacted with as much scorn as fear and exhaustion would let me express,” she remembers now. “But Vaughton dismissed me, repeating, ‘Bathe. Don your Christmas petticoats. You have the odor of a week-dead trout, and the Coromantees are a proud lot. Fastidious, unlike the redshanks.’ Oh how I cursed his mother underneath my breath. But I went down to the river that Sunday and scoured myself with a crisp, spongy weed which grows beside such places. There was aloe on the banks, and I sudsed my hair. But it was too snarled to pull smooth with my fingers: it had twined like African hair around itself into long plaits. I spread it out beneath me ’pon the grass and lay there for a while, enjoying that drowsy lull a person feels when she’s freshly cleaned, and warm. Back at my hut I crouched to boil my corn and chew my dry salt fish. Then, wiping my fingers on my old field skirt, I obeyed Vaughton. I slipped into my newer, unbleached Osnabruck skirt and tied my bodice shut. Then I lay upon my mat awaiting the new stud, as I had waited once for Pawpaw Jack.

“I awoke in that same position, my new clothes rumpled up above my waist. The work gongs were a-throbbing. Quashey had not come.”

“Had they forgotten me? Back into my stinking rags I went, more anxious than ever to shrink from the attention of Jack Vaughton. And he said no more. But when a week had passed I was squatting before my hut on our day of rest roasting a turtle I’d crushed with a stone, and I saw Mama Chiva coming down the hill on bandy legs. I squinted as she stopped. She held out a folded length of orange-dyed cloth to me. ‘Sister,’ said she, ‘I have come from your husband to tell you we will bring you to your new home one week from today. ’ That was the gist of it. I was, you may imagine, astonished. I took the bright cloth from her as she bent, and pushed the turtle meat behind me lest she expect a morsel for the roasting. She must have seen the empty shell nearby …

“That night I lay restless. The new bit of cloth, barely enough for a bodice-vest yet the only colored stuff I’d owned since Arlington, lay folded carefully around my flute in the remnants of my father’s coat—now only a collar, facings, and one dangling pocket flap. These cushioned my head as I wished uselessly that I could keep to my own hut. Let the man come down to
my
mat, he’d be off me soon as I could catch again. Half the night I lay there tossing, beside myself that they could torture me so; an entire week left to imagine the new home and new mating with mounting dread.”

Stiffly, Coote assents, “… it is a fearsome fate for any Christian woman to bear, I should imagine …”

He means to spare her the need to recite details, but on and on she ruminates. How they came for her that next Sunday morning—Mama Chiva, the first among Quashey’s women, and Sargeant Jiba, the madwoman who thought herself a soldier, marching down the hill and barking orders at the air. The Irish girl had watched the two roll up her mats, pick up her iron pot and grinding stones. “I held my bundle of treasures tightly, though, heart pounding dull and fearful as I followed their lead up the hill onto that plateau where the African tribes clustered in their homes.

“Those two I came too late to call my sisters, led me to his compound. There they crawled into a small wattle-and-daub cabin thatched with branches of the coconut tree, and motioned me to follow. Only in the middle of my new cabin could we stand. The cool dim corners, though, were put to use. Along one curving wall Mama Chiva shook my mats open, and the two of them made murmur at my fine designs. Beside the doorway to the left there was a ring of firestones already in place, and there they placed my pot and cooking things. There were clean calabashes from the wild pumpkin shell already waiting, some filled with herbs and dried beans. Over the door someone had scrawled a loopy orange character of sorts: other than that, my small cabin was a dim brown cave with sunlight slanting through the door.

“Jiba and Mama Chiva motioned me to leave my treasure bundle and come outside, but I cowered and showed my teeth, hugging it tight to my chest. After a tussle, Jiba grabbed my ankle as I sat upon the pallet by the wall and surprised me so with her iron clench that I was halfway through the door into the yard again, flute, rags, and orange cloth scattered on the clay behind me, before I knew that I was moving. In the yard, without a word, she hauled me to my feet by the scruff of my Christmas collar. She pushed me behind Chiva. But her push was no rougher than it needed to be, to impel motion.

“I saw that there were four small huts. Quashey had built one for each of his wives according to the instructions of his Book. The one beside mine stood empty. Before these mounded cabins stood a larger one with an awning of straw braced upon poles. I remember, I remember. How sweetly birds were trilling, and that bloom they call hibiscus curled above the entry to this room. We ducked inside. There you could stand and walk about, and there we sat briefly upon a hard-built bench of clay spread with the short navvy cloak I had seen upon Quashey. There were baskets piled along the wall, mats spread to prepare food, a metal basin against the bench, and two stewpots made of iron which I’d only seen issued to overseers. But Quashey, you remember, was at this time already a man of rank among the bondsfolk. As such, he received the confidence of his superiors, and gifts with which they meant to buy
his
confidence. Whence came my bridal cloth of orange—from his own small hoard of riches.

“Once Mama Chiva and Jiba had shown me where to find house water, and which paths into the jungle were useful for my necessities, they took me over to my hut and with a hand-wave bade me enter in and wait. I did so.

“He came to me at sundown, again with those two wives and a young boy, who I later learned was his distant kinsman from the old country. They sat on the floor apart from me, and mumbled something in their tongue, passing the water gourd to me. I was sore frightened with these goings-on. I would have much preferred the quick crawl of a body onto mine, in my own hut down below. I could have looked out to the swimming stars while I was enduring the rut. This hut looked out only on the empty one beside it, and I could not see the sky. When the hocus-pocus had been most solemnly said, Quashey brought from the pouch slung across his breast a jungle hen of the sort they call the Guinea fowl. It has blue wattles and sharp bright yellow claws. Facing the orange mark above the door he bent and sang out more mysterious words, then snapped its neck in one swift motion. He and his kinsman stepped outside into the darkening world. The women came back once to me with coals from a fire to start my own hearth, and pantomimed my plucking. I was left alone again.

“With my stone blade I disemboweled the fowl, which seemed a bedding gift. I crept out for a branch to make a spit, and roasted that young hen, gleeful that from the silence of the yard it seemed I would have her all for my own gob. But as I took her from the greasy branch, the door hole filled with shadow. It was Quashey, squatting there, looking mildly at me. He gazed and gazed, quite calmly. It was his calmness that made me rip one side of the bird’s burned breast from its backbone, and hold it out to him.”

The consummation, says the prisoner, took place that night; but the quickening not for several months. It was the custom among Quashey’s clan that every wife must receive equal attention, so he came to her only every three nights, unless she was in courses. Then he came not at all till she was bathed and her pallet turned. Sometimes he took his meal with her if he came late up from the landing and it was her turn. But other times he supped with Mama Chiva and Sargeant Jiba, who spoke to him with words that rolled like rich tobacco smoke, before he visited his Irish wife. “When I learned a little of the common language, I understood a secret. Jiba, you see, was not Quashey’s wife but his sister. The ruse that she was wife was the only means by which he could bring her to his house and try to keep her safe: this was the proud duty of a brother to his sister in the lands from which they came. And so it was that Mama Chiva laid my monthly rags to dry in the strong sun on my cottage thatch with great anxiety. I had been chosen by Quashey over two maidens because through Moya it had been proven I could conceive. You might say my child would be the distraction to please Jack Vaughton in the program of increase, Mama Chiva being past her age for bearing. I ensured Jiba’s secret a little longer.”