Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (22 page)

“There came a time,” Cot Quashey relates, “when I was in the family way again. This time Mama Chiva gave me stews of leaves, and they shortened field hours according to my thickening, sending me to draggle after the little ones of the pot gang as these roved the fields and yards each afternoon searching for the grass and worms and things they call the ‘hog’s meat.’ As before, my husband left off his connubial duty when I was with child: but this time he himself called in almost every night, sometimes with Chiva, and he would bring me fowl and roots to grow the babe. Somehow, this time, I bore the bloom of health. There were no seizures. When my time came I felt the first cramp at sundown, and by sunrise held my darling lad, Bin Quashey—‘son of Quashey,’ though he was written in the book of increase as Ben—cradled under my chin. How small and perfect was wee Ben. Even slave children are born with silken flesh and petal mouths, and eyes remote and molten as an angel’s from the stars.”

“This would have been in the year 1669?”

“No, it was in the week of Christmas, ’68. So that I strapped my swaddled son to my chest and set out for the fields in a new year, and felt myself entering a most wonderful period of health. Yes, from that moment of his birth began the happiest epoch of my life.”

His tone as wan as his long face, Peter Coote asks, “Why, pray tell, does his Eminence the Governor need to know about your great happiness in order to understand this Jihad that you speak of?”

Outside in the garden a surly rain begins to spatter sun-packed clay. A sighing shakes the blossoms on the grapefruit trees. “Shameless,” whispers the prisoner. “Happiness is shameless; and a Jihad is the only sort of war which bears no shame. Yes … yes. But you and the one you serve, you shall hear of my happiness because my fall from it, through common failings such as jealousy, brought about a shameful debacle. Ah, is this not the course of every history?”

“History?” snorts Coote. “What makes you think your ilk can speak for history, the history that changes nations, worlds?”

“No doubt, sir, you’ve forgotten that I went to school. ’Twas in the town of Galway, overrun by the steaming ponies and marching metal of the Sassenach … and some nuns took great pains that we should learn the history of how our nation used to be, and how it came to fall to Strongbow, and how it still remains, at heart. But that’s another tale …”

A tale you will not live to tell, thinks Coote, poised with his pen and waiting.

Cot Quashey continues with the story of the circumstances of her years with the rebel leader Quashey. “Most of the language between us, beyond the simplest commands, took place with our hands and eyes. His eyes had nothing but benign tolerance to say to me before I bore my Ben. So what a joyful thing it was to see them fill with speech once our son was born, and he took the baby from my arms at the end of our labors every night. God! I see him, I see him! Jouncing the limpness of Ben’s peaceful limbs on his own purple-tattooed arms until the baby coos and drools. He brought me victuals he had caught or filched each evening, till my milk became as rich as a fine lady’s nursemaid’s. Our child grew in strength and wit, with eyes that gleamed in curiosity, and great fat thighs which kicked and pedaled at the air. I made the two orange cloths my husband had given me into a little robe for Ben. As his father carried him in state to his first plantation feast, I heard Quashey humming in his serious two-note way. And it was I who walked at his side—though to the public mind I was only his third wife. His soft slanty eyes that night shimmered at me with a prideful smile as I danced in the circle, and I gave over the rum ladle early. Quashey and his look, Ben and his sweet suckle, the new kindness of Mama Chiva and Sargeant Jiba—in spite of unremitting toil and little else, these melted my troubles for a time.

“Ah, the tenderness with which he came to look on me as I sat nussing Ben by the cook fire in my hut. Sometimes he called us in to him in the big cabin where he had his sleeping bench, and we lay by his side, the child squawking softly as he wagged his father’s finger in his lovely little fist. Quashey would speak to him in a low rumbling croon, then grasp him tightly and squash him to his breast, rubbing their cheeks together. How startled Ben looked during his father’s fits of passion for him: his little eyes would roll to me, brow furrowed, seeking reassurance. His sire and myself, how we would laugh! Then sometimes Quashey’d stretch his arm and pull me into their embrace, and rub his cheek against my own as well, in the light of the cook fire. He had a tight thick beard. It felt like sun-dried moss. The first word my Ben crowed in triumph was ‘ ’Bu,’ which means Abu, or father in the common tongue of those Africans. Though when he was a baby, he called us both that. ‘Bububu!’ he crowed!

“But although Quashey came to me each third night, I was giving suck and so did not conceive. By this time my son had been crawling for a time, and had begun to pull himself up to my neck, standing and bouncing in my lap. And while Quashey’s eyes showed pleasure with me and he taught me words of the Muslim tongue as he conversed with little Ben, when he lay with me his concern was ever with the child, and he was quiet, quick, and more remote when he made his husband’s duty upon me. Then one evening I came up from the fields to find smoke blowing from the empty hut, the fourth wife’s hut, beside my own. It was Afebwa.”

Of course, the Irishwoman tells Peter Coote, the bondspeople knew that Jack Vaughton and Robert Rigley had gone to Bridgeport with the cart for several days, to inspect a fresh load of Africans that had arrived. “There were many rumors as to where the new boat sailed from. Whydah? The marts of Egypt? When the cart returned, it seemed that there were specimens from all the lands of misery. But for the first time since their acquisition, Jiba and Quashey returned home for their evening meal to hear scolding shouted by a female mouth in their own mother tongue. A half-dozen Coromantee had been captured, and at the Glebe as well as island-wide, the Coromantee were the darling chattel of yourselves.”

“Until the uprising of ’75, you mean …,” Coote corrects angrily.

The program of increase at the Glebe had not impressed Lord Cleypole’s London accountants, who’d sent back a plan to breed more hands, who in turn would ship more sugar to an earlier market every year, which would then command a higher price. Vaughton chose Afebwa right there at the docks for Quashey, Jiba having borne no fruit and himself eager to breed a strain of pure, strong, Coromantee Bajan-born field hands. “Mama Chiva stood in the yard supervising the pot-gang children when the cart came rick eting up the track: Afebwa was handed over to her. From Chiva I learned that in those days, when the overseers relied as happily on Quashey as if he were a willing convert to slavery, Vaughton still sought to please him whenever possible. Our husband, he told Chiva, would be well content with a girl who understood his native speech. Chiva herself knew the Muslim words which were the common lingo between many Africans; but Afebwa knew the language of his very village. And sure enough: as he and his sister, who was working in the fields at the upriver spread, loped up from the landing that night, the new wife crouched at the door of her hut, weeping. He walked over. All of us kept silence as he stared down at her bowed back. Then she muttered something, sobbing. He squatted, eyes growing round and large. She repeated. They began to discourse rapidly. And already that first evening she was brought into the larger cabin, where he and Jiba spoke to her most kindly and comforted her wails while we others cooked. He even took my son and put him on her knee, coaxing wee Ben until he smiled at her.

“Afebwa. As with myself, and Chiva first of all, my Quashey made a ceremony, chanting his prayers, which we all had to attend in peace and welcome with the growing boy kinsman and three new fieldhands who had come with Afebwa from the Coromantee lands. These were her own clansmen. I had to kneel there, head bowed, while they did their hocus-pocus and she became his bride. He painted the same sign above her small hut’s door that crowned the entry to each cabin in his compound.

“Had Mama Chiva felt this way when I had come to share his nights? Had even Jiba felt this ire toward me, knowing she must share her brother’s time and food with an alien bitch? I seethed. Ben drank my rancor through his milk, and cried, colicky, throughout the night. That first night. When my Quashey stayed with her. And afterward everything changed.”

Coote croons, without raising his eyes, “I think not everything. The record shows that you bore him a daughter in ’73.”

“Oh, that is true, in ’73 my Betty came, Lord love her. And before her I bore one more stillborn son, and there was one miscarriage …”

“Which this Phoebe, Afebwa, the one you’re speaking of … I can’t recall that she bore any young.”

“No. That is correct. Afebwa knew a weed whose cousin grows in Africa, and brewed that every month between her courses. Though Quashey wanted to have sons with her, she said that she would mother them only in freedom, after the Jihad.” But, insists the prisoner, her husband was delighted with his new wife. Though he remained fair, according to his Book, to his other two true wives, he went in to his new tribeswoman on both her own night and the night falsely reserved for Jiba, “which had been his night of rest.” According to Cot Quashey, the new Coromantee men were put out on the ground nearby so that Quashey could train them, setting his mark of industriousness upon them. “As time went by they built their huts but remained frequent visitors to the compound where I abode, drinking grass tea out of calabashes as Afebwa served them. And often they all found things to laugh about together. Cudjoe was the name of the one Quashey liked best: they had a sort of fist-fight contest now and then.

“But Quashey was not cruel: although he liked to bring his young son Ben into this company, he did not deprive me. My son learned to walk at my own side before he was turned over to a granny in the daytime, then put into the pot gang when he was a graceful lad of four.

“And now that it is over, I think my Quashey was a good husband to us all.”

Coote lifts his eyes. He studies her; the repulsion, marvel, and curiosity he feels is something akin to viewing a deformed newborn calf or lamb in the straw of the livestock sheds when he was young himself.

“While Mama Chiva was too old by this time to bear children,” Cot Quashey muses aloud, “she was the one among us perhaps most loved by Quashey as his consort. I say that because until the end he took solemn council with her, and they made their wailing prayers together now and then. But most of all I think this because in her presence he was his most … chiefly … self. I think he loved her for calling out that part of him which he was born to, but which Barbados gave no notice to.

“The parts of himself he brought to us others, even Afebwa, were younger, more excitable, less full. He was watchful for his sister Jiba, chiding her gently for her words and ways in situations when he might ignore the rest of us. Many’s the time I knew him to wag his finger, reminding her of what line she had sprung from, and her duties as a woman. Or so Chiva translated. It was himself who took the offers of the Coromantee slave she wed, and he who convinced Vaughton not to sell her off the Glebe but to try her powers of fertility with this new man for one season. With hands, and face, and Mama Chiva’s skills at translating, he confided to Vaughton that while Jiba was a willing wife, he himself could not desire her as he could we others. We laughed about that later on, for Quashey avoided telling lies by coming around the overseer this way.

“As for myself, the Quashey who held my dear Ben in his arms, taught him Coromantee words, and placed his own knit woolen cap upon that wobbling, drooling head to keep it warm—he was the tenderest, wisest father. If he looked upon me with eyes which were reserved, they also said I was of worth. I was the precious wife who again bore him the hope of children in this place across hell’s waters. Before me, he had been a walking, working ghost; an ox, not a bull; a thing for the master. Now, through me, his son’s arms opened wide in greeting every night, and he heard the glad cry ‘Father’!

“But alas, it was Afebwa whose waist drew the brief touch of those calloused hands I so desired, a smothered smile across the pit as he sat feasting with the men. And she drew laughter—even giggles—during his double visits to her. I heard them, and I hated her. But she did nothing to harm me, if I tell the truth. She was silent and indifferent to me, and did not try to woo my Ben away as Jiba did, insisting that this was his auntie’s right. It was myself who could not accept her. I began to spit where Afebwa had passed. When my husband ate with me I’d ‘tchh’ my lips, and with resentful hands and eyes insinuate that only Afebwa’s food could please him.

“At first he tried to laugh all this away, puzzled and bemused. He gave me dogs’ claws for a necklace, and a length of yellow calico from his stored goods. Solemnly he came to visit me and through Chiva told me that all his wives had his regard, but that I was special, for as he said, ‘Heaven lies under a mother’s feet.’ When these things did not placate me, he sent Mama Chiva to tell me in her broken speech about my duties as a wife, and my need to learn gentleness and patience with the married lot. The shouting that I gave her sent her rushing out, and made Ben cry; this anger I felt made me falsely strong, and it was not much time until the thing which Dinah saw had come again, clinging to my moments like an unseen vine. Waiting for its chance to prick.

“Afebwa got the bloody flux. Certain herbs soaked in the urine of a little boy are good for that. I took the leaves which Mama Chiva brought me, but instead of collecting Ben’s pure water, I processed them in the urine of a sow. Still, Afebwa recovered, wormy and thin enough to merit discharge from her gang and join the stock tenders until harvest time. Ah, I wasn’t right in the head those days, those nights. Even, at times, I spoke to my dear son with venom, although I never struck him. Then Quashey held a meeting of us all.”

“These were the meetings which led to treason?” murmurs Coote, dipping his pen afresh.