Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (21 page)

Coote’s nose wrinkles as he murmurs, “A most repugnant business … ’Twas a human barnyard …”

The light eyes of the prisoner close for a moment. “Ah, so I thought myself at first. But my Quashey lay on me as light as water, moving like a cool clean stream over my limbs. For a long time I made out to myself it was his offerings of food I missed when he did not visit. On Mama Chiva’s visits, he went in to her and I could hear their voices sometimes long into the night. On the nights which belonged to Jiba, he and his black wives ate together, then I saw each woman creep to her own little hut, while he slept alone upon that earthen shelf. Yet sometimes it was as if there were other people, unseen, in there with him; for in the deepest dark I’d hear him moan, imploring, calling out in muddy tongues. When he did so I lay awake in fear and curiosity, but with a blossoming concern that let me know the untoward was coming swiftly: I was filling with a longing for a man I did not know, whose words I could not understand, who treated me with nothing more or less than remote mildness.”

Coote’s lips purse downward disapprovingly: at the same time he becomes aware of a clean heat from Lucy’s gingham-aproned thighs behind him. Her broom sweeps through the air, the delicate air currents lift his itchy powdered hair.

“Then I fell with child. They were delighted! Mama Chiva whispered to them that my flows had stopped, she who counted my intervals upon a stick; and they smiled and garbled to each other. My husband presented me with another orange cloth and went to tell Jack Vaughton. But Quashey left off coming in to me at night, preferring his clay bench although he treated me with courtesy. Mama Chiva was sent to me with fresh fish and wild grapes and such, to help the baby grow. Only I was not allowed to eat salt, for Chiva interpreted that among my husband’s people, salt was thought to make a growing child tend to fevers once it was born.

“I missed his company, I did. But there was the fieldwork which could not be evaded. I returned to our small compound more exhausted every night. As my breasts swelled and belly bloated, Mama Chiva came to squat with me beside the fire. It was from her I finally heard that I was not merely a broodmare but a wife. She told me other things I did not have the … sense … to comprehend in all their depth, though I was twenty-four or twenty-five years old by this time.

“It seemed my Quashey was a Muslim. His very name, twisted unrecognizable by the British tongue, meant “strong one,” after their ninety-nine-named God. A prophet whose visions had ridden across centuries of sand had spoken to Quashey’s father’s tribe. To Quashey, this name both called forth his destiny, and bestowed upon him the extra powers of force needed to carry it out. Mama Chiva said it was that clarity of destiny contained within his name, which let our husband nod so patiently to those who ordered him about. Which let him smile with quiet helpfulness as he lifted their burdens, and led him to discover means of perfecting his work. The overseers of the Glebe and the second upriver plantation took his behavior to mean obedience to them, rather than to his own destiny, and God’s unfolding plan.”

Coote’s head is throbbing now with Lucy’s heat, the prisoner’s stink, and his own unvented excitement. “State what you call ‘God’s plan’ for this rebel,” he commands curtly. Cot Quashey lifts up her wet-sparrow head with a wan smile, and leans toward him. Such a soft smile. Such gleaming eyes in her filthy fevered skull.

“His God allowed him to be named Quaco, which the masters, with their uneducated ears, changed to Quashey; because his destiny was to fight Jihad, the Holy War, against the bonds which keep us from The Unity.”

An abrupt silence hits the room like the aftermath of an explosion. The broom lowers to the floor, motionless. This is a stillness of alarm, disruption, danger. Coote hears his own wheezing breath from the cavern of his brain. He sets the quill down with a flat slap which splatters ink like a trail across some sheets of writing, and speckles his lace jabot. The chair scrapes as he tilts to his feet. “By God! Now we shall have it from you! After my meal and my nap, you shall lay the rest before me, every last bit of it!” he warns the Irish prisoner.

Peter sleeps fitfully after another heavy lunch. A fly has followed him into the stuffy, closed-shuttered bedroom. Its hungry purr bats against the netting by his head. He wakes several times, swatting and thrashing.

He leaves his nightshirt on after his ablutions, there being none but slaves and the condemned to assess his appearance; and orders the old woman Little-Something, when she brings the prisoner to the interrogation chair, to wash his fast-deteriorating lace-cuffed shirt. Tucking the nightshirt’s tails into his breeches and donning his waistcoat, he adjusts the writing implements with a niggle of guilt. He is after all a doctor: the Daley woman is rotting away before his very nose. Yet sweaty and irritated, he hasn’t bothered to treat her festering stripes for a day and a half. From the Governor’s talk he has discerned that there’s no life ahead of her beyond this testimony. The niggle seems to say it’s needlessly cruel, through sudden inattentiveness, to let her know that too. A slyer side of him whispers, and maybe foreknowledge of her death sentence would shut her up. He needs her testimony. I really should make time to tend to the infection, he tells himself. It must itch and burn like holy hell! The pale-and-scarlet mottle of her cheek tells him that her fever’s rising swiftly.

This tangled guilt makes him frown at her. “The Holy War?” he prompts, clearing the phlegm from his throat.

Almost woozily Cot Quashey mutters, “Sure, what can make war holy? What is it that drives a man, a woman, to go to war with bare hands against cannonballs and muskets? But first … many things came to pass. I lost my first son. In the last month I welled up with fluids. Though they took me from the fields when I fainted and put the leeches on me, I swole more and more; until one day I fell to the ground in a fit which brought on my travail. It was a long, hard couching. A dead infant cannot help you. And twice during my pains the seizures came again, which made things worse. Mama Chiva squeezed him out of me still in his sac, and Jiba passed him out the door to his father, who buried him in the woods immediately, beneath tree roots. I do not know the place: we weren’t to speak of it.

“Jack Vaughton was informed. Through Quashey he sent me oranges and wild figs, a bit of rum, some eggs. Mama Chiva said he seemed exasperated, yet he told Quashey to buck up, for a year from thence we’d surely see another pickaninny from myself and one from Jiba too. Of course Vaughton did not know that they were kin: he told Mama Chiva he looked for a special line from Quashey and Jiba, herself stout and strong as a young man, and far from frail of sentiment.

“I did not recover for the field quickly, but the fits ceased when the babe was out of me. At first they sent me ’lolly to stew up for the pot gang at my fireside, but the heat caused me to faint. So then they brought me sewing, and I learned I could recall my father’s way of mending simple harnesses. With Quashey’s influence I did not return to the field until the full time for purification was completed after that useless childbirth. One evening they came again, Quashey and the other two women, and mumbled and sang. Then I was bathed by Mama Chiva, a new mat was placed, a fish and wild plantains boiled on the hob, and he visited me again when the moon rose. My Quashey.”

The very scratch of his quill across the parchment works on Coote’s nerves. It is the same sound as a faint branch scraping distant shutters in a restless wind. The sweetness of the camphor the slaves have burned during his rest is cloying, too. “
Your
Quashey, then,” he says sarcastically.

“One night after I’d returned to fieldwork, a night on which he did not visit me, I heard my husband exit the large hut where he slept on the evenings meant for Jiba. There was a log outside, and he sat there and began to weep with long, youthful sobs. First Mama Chiva, then his sister, came out to him. There was murmuring, then a quiet and weird chanted song. They stilled, went off to sleep, I did the same. But the next night he was due to come to me and he did not, nor the next.

“I would see him in the yard; sometimes he laid scavenged carcasses beside my door and went away. And at this time they had made no steps toward The Unity with me: I was the outsider, those three of one mind. I never heard them fight, although their language had explosive sounds and passionate wavings of the hand. But they were quick to laugh—a rare enough thing among we slaves. When I asked Mama Chiva, in shame and anger, why he no longer came to me, she muttered that I needed my strength. But later, when I asked her why he’d sobbed and sobbed like a grieving Irishman that night, she told me of his heart-fast wife, the one the slavers had stolen away in Africa, along with their four wee’ns. It seemed Quashey had borne this quietly during his years at the Glebe, by dragging his mind away from every memory of them. But our dead baby they had handed him and who he’d buried … it wore the look of one of its lost, far-off brothers, and then the grief roared over him. It became all he could do to rise at dawn with the bland face the overseers and gentry had grown used to. Faith in the Jihad: that was what returned him to mildness and balance as he steered the small sloop up the river, or shoed an ox, or listened to his orders with a cheerful mein. For the Jihad was not ready by a long ways, since it was not only to be the private kind.

“I asked Chiva if he had, from grief, gone off women. Was that why he never came to me? ‘No,’ she replied, pulling the dirty red veil close to her cheek in the grizzled shadow, ‘but you look like
them,
you smell like
them.
He was … terrified … to see a dead thing which should have been his own, his son, emerge from … one of
them.
Don’t worry, Daughter, it will pass … he is learning that no matter how much like the ghost masters you look, your lot in life is his, is mine …”

“When Vaughton began to question trading Jiba for a woman from upriver who had bred, seeing that no issue had come from her in the three years of their residence at Glebe, Quashey returned to me again. Oh I was angry! I was shamed and hurt. I wanted to be beautiful, or gay, or whatever was the quality of that African wife who’d held his heart. For I hated that these black folk spoke and laughed with heart when they were together; but all three became solemn and dull around me. And I so lonely. So hungry for his smooth and silent back, and the times when his hands clutched like blind things at my shoulders, our breaths rasping in the darkness. The fluid human warmth of him as he melted into sweat. One night I sent my tongue tip out like a spy, I found his sweat although I could not see it in that windowless hovel; I drank it, and it tasted like my own tears. ’Twas after that the fondness for him began to grow in me so fast.”

“Please …” mumbles Peter Coote, faintly.

Cot Quashey’s voice gathers into clarity.

“All during this time … well over a year from when I was given to Quashey, I spent very little time with the other wives, Sargeant Jiba and Mama Chiva, except as our paths crossed upon the day of rest, or our few festivals, or the odd evening when Chiva was sent to pull me to their cook fire for a bite of fresh fish netted from the sloop. On days of rest we all fell into the tasks we did the best. Mine was the weaving of new mats, the mending of the old, and I also found that I could cope well enough with the weaving of cane trash into our thatch roofs. I did this several times, Quashey hoisting me upon his shoulders to the housetop, where I crawled onto the bracing poles, testing for rotten straw. I wove new bundles of ratoon to replace it. No matter how tightly I would tie it, though, the first fierce gale and rain would drip onto our clay floors again. Thatching was hard work, dirty too. Cuts from cane trash often fester, and once I was stung on the leg by a brown spider. My whole leg swelled and purpled for a fortnight. But Mama had the cure, she wrapped some leaves that smelled like mildewed cloves in mud, and packed them round my calf and also on my forehead. To balance out the poison was what she said. She was the real curer among us, and the midwife to any who asked for her. Some of the tribes—the Ibo in particular—were afraid of her, and would never suffer her touch no matter how bad off they were. They said she did Obeah, but I tell you she did not. Born in Brazil, she had been reared a Catholic by her Dutch master—the one who fathered thirteen children from her. Later, she told me how she’d come to add many things to flavor the same faith I once knew. Well, not to flavor it, but to give the saints weapons and shields they had not needed on their own tame ground. She knew the Virgin, Saint Anne, and Saint Martha, though she told me once that these had yet to become warriors on Barbados, to earn the name of Mothers.

“But her mumbling and motions, the wailing dedication of animals she slit open for feasts, these were things she took from Quashey’s Muslim ways. For though by the time I met her Mama Chiva was a sagging mound of rags, root-dyed hair, and flashing scrimshaw teeth, she was still keen to know what people thought in different places, and she found something of use on every path.”

“The one called Sargeant Jiba, did she receive that appellation for her part in her brother’s tyranny?” asks Coote.

“No. She was called that for her part in fighting the raiders back in their own place, a place where women ought to fight as hard as men when they were needed. Like Mary Dove. When they brought Jiba here, someone translated her title into English. She was a woman like a thunderbolt. You should have seen her on a Sunday, jabbing her digging stick deep into the soil of the garden, making a contest of how far she could fling the unearthed stones. She also did most of the heavy tasks: she carried loads and water, for she loved the feel of her muscles straining to their utmost. She was also sent with messages, for she liked to run. Though she was in the first-gang crew opposite mine, I always heard that she was tireless in the field: as I have told you, due to this Jack Vaughton waited with great interest for her and Quashey to produce a child. Ha! He is waiting still.