Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (23 page)

“You would say so, sir. Though at that time Quashey’s intent was that they, the Africans, should study their faith, remembering it completely, to pass on to their young …”

“What year would that have been?”

“Why, my son Bin Quashey was scarcely four … it would have been before sugaring in ’73. Ah, what a lovely lad was he … famous among the bondspeople for his thick brown curls and snapping eyes, his love of the dance when I piped him a tune outside our little cabin …”

“The meetings! The meetings!”

“Well yes … my husband began to call meetings in the evenings. The people brought their loblolly and dried herring rations to share when they met. It was all the Coromantee men on Glebe—six of them plus Quashey—and sometimes the two they’d sent to the new holdings up the river where he sailed the sloop each day would clamber along the riverbanks and enter the light of the fire late, like shades. Afterward—by the second year—more began to join in. These were Coromantee from the neighboring plantations. Also there were women: Chiva, Jiba, and Afebwa, but also there were other ’Mantee women at the Glebe from the shipment that the thorn in my bed, Afebwa, came from.”

“And what transpired?”

“At first the Coromantee came together to eat. From time to time there were the wailing sessions ’mongst the men, which meant that they were praying, stretching and bowing as they did. The women sat together on one side of the fire, mumbling and sometimes breaking into high-pitched songs or laughter. I was the only one there with a child: how proud I used to be when Ben bent his little legs and whirled and bounced to the women’s choir. But otherwise, they left me sitting on my own. I never learned their language: in fact ’twas Mama Chiva who explained to me they took pains not to share it. For already they had seen that they could mind their tone and speak about anything in front of the masters and overseers with no fear of being understood. You might say, then, that their way of speech—being set up nothing like yours nor mine—worked like a code. And they were loath that anyone outside their clan should know much of what they were thinking, or how they saw the world. But when the ’Mantee wanted to come across to other Africans they had the Arab speech of their Prophet among most of them, as we have Latin. As for me … I was suffered in their presence as Quashey’s woman and as Ben’s mother. They ignored me, just as you do not see your maids or menservants from day to day, sir, although they stand beside you.”

Except for Lucy that is true, he thinks. I cannot hold their names.

“Mama Chiva it was who told me that they came for company, and to pray, and because in their own place men of like generation formed a society which was as tight in duty and loving bonds as are blood-kin ties. And truly Quashey liked to have his son on the men’s side of the fire during these meetings, moving from knee to knee, playing with this ‘uncle’ and that. But I misliked it. I saw my little lad barely at all, working as I did from dark to dark down in the fields. I was often too far from him, or too knackered, to visit him at midday break. I misliked hearing his baby voice whisper their thick words through the darkness, myself once again excluded. However, these meetings did not happen every night. My Ben and I looked to the nights when we had his father to ourselves, though often enough I could not control my resentments and drove Quashey away without one caress between us. More than once when he left he carried Ben in his purple tattooed arms till I calmed down.

“You would not call him comely, Quashey, but once I came to know him I came to look for nighttime in his eye, the fullness of his mouth and how he pursed it when he was thinking hard and humming. His hands were small, his fingers short, the insides like old ivory in color and tough as brogues, but very warm and very capable. When he spoke, he sculptured what he told of from the air with those strong hands. And when he laughed he tipped his chin back to the sun and rumbled mirth from the belly upward. His arms, as I have told you, were tattooed in patterns of raised purplish welts that formed bands like bracelets of ivy over his muscles. But his shoulders and his back were smooth and supple, his wide chest bare of any hair …”

Peter Coote glares at her. “We need not hear the anatomy of your Negra, biddy,” he grates. “Move quickly please, to the center of rebellion.”

“Ah, how quickly, how quickly we moved toward rebellion,” echoes the Irishwoman. He marks the sweat upon her brow, the palsy in her hands which twist her shawl. The reek of her! Truly: he cannot bear much more of this!

“You must remember, sir, that I made you a bargain. I said that I’d reveal what you were seeking, but that in the end you must meet my needs. These matters, as I know them, do not fall together as you might prefer. Perhaps the rising was not a plot of savage Africans and Christian traitors, foiled by finer British minds and weapons, as you now see it. Perhaps it was the lifted weapon of a Holy War, raised by a god who teaches freedom as a duty. But it was foiled from the inside by small infections such as grief and jealousy and vengefulness.

“At any rate, after I nussed my son several of my teeth went bad. In fear of the blacksmith and his forceps I waited much too long to have them pulled, and by the time my husband forced me down into the smithy yard one Sunday, my whole jaw was infected. In spite of all the rum they gave me, Jiba later scoffed that my shrieked curses could be heard to the top of Slave Hill. The able smith held me between his knees, my husband grasped my hands, and the five rotten stumps were yanked out of my head.

“But there were abscesses, you see. The pus spread in a red line down my neck and up into my ear. For many days I wandered in fever, and when I woke there on my cabin pallet the pain had me demented. I was laid up for three weeks, from which I lost all hearing in my right ear here”—she tugs it with a slow and bony finger—“and the poison spread to two other teeth, which then had to be pulled. Jack Vaughton said, as he watched the rum administered again, ‘What does she need them teeth for with soft rations? It is best to take them all and get it over with.’ But my husband, walking him outside the hut, interceded, and I got to keep these I have left.

“The thing was that during my illness, Afebwa watched my son by night. Yes, they moved his pallet in there next to hers while I was wandering with fever and with pain, and in those few short weeks she enticed him, as she had his father, to run in through her door with merriment and boyish secrets, looking for her every day. How I would scream for him, once I heard his babble coming from her shanty. So that he came back to our yard—my yard, for truly the whole compound was his—with downcast eyes and sullen mein. Still, he was such a soft lad, easy to get around you might say: I would tootle him a tune or tell him a mighty tale, or give him aught important-seeming to do, and soon he would be making faces of delight and laughing up at me. My Ben …

“I went back to the fields, then to the sugar house when the season came upon us, and that year the yield was wonderfully high. You should have seen the overseers standing there on the rise by the master’s house, watching the carts tote off strapped barrels of muscavado, casks of rum, the precious load of clay pots my husband had curved and stoppered in the yard, full of fine bleached sugar for sale to noble households across the sea. We heard the healthy creak of harness, clop of hooves, groan of shifting wagon beds, rattle of strapped cargo, as they rounded the road’s bend and headed down into the St. George Valley, which wound across the island to Bridgetown and the waiting ships. How gay was that day, the colors round us clear, a fresh breeze to the morning in spite of the storm season almost upon us. All the bondsfolk were given the rest of the day off, except for primary workers like the livestock rangers. The fields were bare, but for the scruffiest of cane trash to be picked up another day. It was a Friday. On the Sunday there was to be a feast. We needed that feast, I tell you now.

“The season had gone on almost a full extra month. That is; seven days a week, sometimes eighteen hours a day, we worked at loading, grinding, boiling; stirring, straining, drying; packing and brewing; whilst cutting, baling, loading, and carrying in more cane. Too tired: many got too tired, too hot, too hungry. There were deaths. One man crushed to death down at the mill; six failed hearts; a pregnant woman felled by steam in the rum vat, she and the child suffocated by the fumes. And there were horrid burns that led to death and two amputations, and withered limbs. Oh God: we were done in! So on that Friday, when we had slept, the Coromantees came to share their rations. And one had trapped a sort of rodent, with meat like a rabbit, but very large, very fine. We roasted that, letting the fat drop down into the kettle of loblolly, and we sprawled around the yard dipping our fingers into our calabashes and sucking them clean. Ben raced around the circle, standing with his belly out, his knobby little arms behind his back, waiting until each adult held out his calabash to share. Then Quashey suggested that the next day, Saturday, we walk downriver to a place he’d seen from the sloop, and have a picknick. Like yourselves might have, sir, on a fine day in the early summertime.

“Early the next morning he got permission from the overseers to walk along the riverbank with his wives, that they might bathe in privacy and wash the clothes. The other Coromantee were to join us if they wished to take the risk: as you know, any unauthorized movement into the forest could be taken as an attempt to escape, punishable by flogging. But it was not possible for Quashey to
ask
that any but his women be authorized to go together downriver. You know well that the overseers suspected the conjoining of many slaves, and for what purpose. D’ye see? Alerted, they might also become vigilant about our gatherings several nights a week. Best not to draw their interest, Quashey and the others all decided.

“So we of Quashey’s household arose and walked along, single file, through the thick soft leaves and red-belled bushes which lined the riverbank. How the water winked at us that day, as it swirled and plashed on its unquestioned way. Quashey went first, our Ben upon his shoulders like the Christ Child on Saint Christopher’s. He was pointing and calling out questions in his father’s tongue which I heard Quashey answer in his patient way. Jiba was next, singing to herself and carrying a small fishnet from Quashey’s sloop over her smooth shoulders. Then I came, for I had squeezed closer to himself than Afebwa. I was carrying one of Quashey’s broken sugar pots containing coals from my house fire. We were going to catch our meal from the river. Afebwa, behind me, had picked up Jiba’s melody and they were singing in a sort of round or counterpart as we waded through the bush. The birds had quieted to listen. At the end of our small band came Mama Chiva, peering on each side for herbs and simples. It was a Saturday at the waxing of the moon. Saturday is a good day to gather plants, while those taken on Sunday have no cure in them at all.

“What I remember best about that walk was the generous sigh of breeze: how it tossed the boughs above us so that the cool shawl of shade would part to let a spot of sun warm my back and chest, then close again to pleasant coolness.

“Quashey led us down a brackened bank to a site that first looked like a rubbled strand. Fronting the water was a sweep of fine blond sand. But on each side lay tall mounds which, I saw later, were thousands of thousands of thousands of shells, bleached by the sun. There were pinky clamshells and purple-black mussels, and oysters’ fans as wide as Quashey’s hand. But the shells were mostly in shards, except a few we dug out from the cool inside of the pile to examine late that afternoon.

“It was the simplest of days. Jiba strode into the brown current up to her thighs, swooping the net around her, while Mama Chiva searched the forest’s edge for a digging stick. I went with her, collecting twigs and dead branches, and back on the beach I dug a pit and placed the coals for my small fire. There were Afebwa and little Ben, holding hands and splashing in stumbling circles at the water’s edge. ‘It’s cold! It’s cold, Mammy,’ he called out to me. ‘Then come and help me build the fire,’ I invited him. But he would not leave Afebwa and the teasing river, not even when he tripped on a stone and plunged in. Laughing, his father hauled him out and carried him under one arm, like a loaf. He took our darling son around the next bend where they bathed and frolicked and called out to each other in African, their clothes drying on the rocks.

“Jiba had netted three fat fish and Chiva dug up a pile of shells and crabs. Afebwa was squatting in the loincloth we wore beneath our clothing in our monthlies, at the water’s edge, slapping her petticoat on a slick green stone, then kneading the fabric between her two fists. Slowly, I looked at her. How her back bunched and rolled over her skinny wing bones as she worked. She’d had a yellowy cast to her skin ever since the bloody flux, and there were scars on her buttocks. I thought of her face—it was dimpled, but still spotted each month with the blemishes of childhood. There came a wince of pity in my heart … a pity for her youth, my narrow jealousy, our human lot. And right after that surge of pity followed peace. For that day at least, my hate for her was gone.

“You would have to know the rareness of the day! My man and child calling out to each other in glee, we women working slowly on the beach. Afebwa took Mama Chiva’s overskirt, her red veil and vest, and began to scrub these too, as Mama, droopy and naked, slid an obsidian knife between the clenched lips of the shells and Jiba and I gutted fish. The sun drew the river up into a shimmering ray. All human discord was stilled; beyond the human, birds zipped by scolding, bees buzzed, and there was a lovely light tinkle, as of wind chimes made of glass or shell.

“When the sun was rolling down from the heights of heaven, my son began to shriek. I halted my work. We were roasting the fish and mollusks by then. I prickled with fear: but this was a scream of mock terror, he was playing at something. They came back through the bushes, my man, our child, in their sun-stiff clothes, and told a wild story in Arabic. ‘Bin Quashey has seen a crocodile,’ Mama Chiva explained, ‘but he and his father have scared it away!’