Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (25 page)

“On the surface he and I held the same picture of death: children die because they’re sweet and pure; very often people envy that; so God, who loves them best, brings them home to his happier gardens. We knew our young lad was in Heaven: what had he wrought on earth but sparks of glee and love in the hearts of all in misery around him? But in truth, rather than feeling happy that Ben was free of a life of toil and punishment ahead, I myself felt further from grace and kindness, love and holiness, than I had ever felt before. And Quashey, while he’d been schooled to accept all death as the will of God, and therefore destiny, with Ben’s death began to doubt that his death was destiny. Like a fist uncurling after sleep he began to unfold into a driving purpose to
fight
for the freedom to know and live one’s full god-given destiny.

“In the Jihad many die, but that is different. In the Holy War you stand forward and put yourself in God’s hand as a weapon for the fight. That is better than a life wasted for want of food, and care, and healthy living, and respect. I once asked my husband if he was not afraid to fight against so well-equipped and organized a foe, but through Mama Chiva he answered with a smile that those who die in Jihad will go to Zhenna.”

“And where is this Zhenna?”

“It is a sort of garden, the garden of perfection which humans were evicted from with Adam and Eve’s mistake. The place, the way the Creator had it in mind for people to live till they grew greedy, and preferred to take, rather than to receive …

“Right from the funeral feast the Coromantee meetings in our compound took on a different fervor. All the bondspeople of the Glebe roared and feasted wee Ben on his way, whilst I drank myself into such a stupor that some Fon woman took my Betty off me and gave her suck. A few times I roused myself, croaking out lone shrieks of the
olagon.
But then, as I lay sprawled there in the soil beside the grave, the wet nurse handed my loose-limbed sleeping baby over to sober Afebwa, and I rose up off the ground in one motion. I publicly accused her, and pulled my one remaining child into my arms so roughly that I stumbled back against the crowd, the baby waking, flailing, sobbing with such fear that Quashey himself guided me all the way back to my hut.

“Mama Chiva stayed that night with me. When I awoke, crawling over my skirts for a ladle of water from the calabash, then out the doorway to vomit it up, they were still there. The men; Coromantee and others too, sitting in a weary red-eyed circle under the palm panoply while Mama Chiva stirred the morning ’lolly. There were new faces among them. More came later.

“These men came from the big houses along the St. John’s River, all the way up to St. Andrew’s and St. Lucy’s Parish, and from a house called Brighton in St. Michael’s on the road to Bridgetown. Not all at once. One would bring another, and another link was added to the chain. Yet their faces, their lives, seemed somehow interchangeable when I saw them in my time of mourning, dragging along with Betty strapped to me. I moved past them from the field on the way to my own hut, to nuss her and to sleep, then to the field again. All was in mist. The men around the fire, the messengers coming to find Quashey late at night to lead him to some midway point out in the wood where men from upriver or down were waiting to add their force to his. At times he was with me when they came to speak with him in gravelly mutters. Protected, I suppose they felt; for I had never learned their African tongue. Once, I remember, we heard a soft scuffling down the path while my husband lay upon me, both of us trying to take some silent comfort from our simple animal closeness. But when the visitor called out their common greeting, my Quashey halted, raised upon his quivering arms, and controlling his breath called out low that same greeting. Then, brushing his hand over my wet forehead and his mouth over our daughter’s sleeping cheek, he sprang to his legs, wrapped on his loincloth, and took his warmth from us again. So that, when Mama Chiva came to tell me of Jihad, the Holy War, I felt rancor, ill will, and contempt toward all of them who meant to steal my family”—here the prisoner begins to weep brief gritty tears—“the only family I would ever have, from me.”

The observer in the satin suit shifts on his chaise, and says, “Ahem,” theatrically.

In tones both anxious and exasperated, Coote exhorts her: “Pray do not wander with your fever so, Cot Daley. Finish now with what you know of the treachery of ’75, then go and have a rest while we take our meal.”

“There came a time when Mama Chiva came to me, as I have said. And she was sent by Quashey. At this time I lay upon my pallet once again, for I had conceived almost at once after the period of mourning but had lost the embryo, with much of my own blood, after scarce three months of pregnancy. Suckling is meant to keep a woman from catching while her strength is needed elsewhere; but suckling Betty was like feeding a feather, and … well, there I was. So while I lay upon my pallet, wordless, weak, and white, my husband in his compassion decided. He decided to see me not as one of
them,
that’s to say one of
ye,
sir; but as one of
his own kind.
For my health was ruint in trying to bring forth and maintain his children, and he felt that through them I had become flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. Because of his decision, which Jiba, Cudjoe, but not Afebwa stood against, Mama Chiva began to explain things to me. From her lips I first heard that those who joined with Quashey were building an
umma
.”

“A what!” demands Peter Coote.

“The
umma
is the brotherhood of those who band together under the eye of God—a brotherhood which also invites women warriors for Jihad. And this Jihad, the Holy War for God, begins with a lengthy period of self-purification. So that before a Holy War against the slavers, the Spirits of Night, could begin, each rebel had the task of warring with himself for self-control, bringing himself to the obedience of God, who would protect him unto triumph. My husband, Mama Chiva said, would call upon Betty and me, and would be asking for my help and patience as our cause developed. But he would remove himself from my bed—and the beds, Chiva hastened to assure me—of his other wives. As much as possible, he would try to consume even less of the special rations we were given, though because Betty depended upon my milk he would still bring me fish and little wild animals when he could net them. But he implored me to purify myself as well, letting go all of my jealousy of Afebwa, and to give over letting my loneliness and longing for him turn to spite. Oh! Here I cast my eyes down in mortification, shame, and the very raging spite he spoke about. For those three were my alchemy, in bondage. Quashey could see to the quick of me. He knew my battles without my being able to say them.

“In the days to come other faces arrived at the midnight fires,” said the prisoner. “Africans who spoke with a Scots burr; two Irishmen who spoke Arabic words. I was at one hasty hushed gathering in the woods when the
umma
met an African Maroon who’d sailed all the way from Montserrat and told of won uprisings on that little island. The Maroon from Montserrat lived in a mountain fastness with his wives and children, and a dozen other men and women: this was their
umma.
And Chiva translated what he told the hesitant among us. Smiling kindly, nodding wisely, listening to objections first, he quoth from the holy Book they shared, urging, ‘Fight in the cause of God those who fight you … let there be no hostility except to those who practice oppression.’ We are both taught this—Muslims or Irish—that the cause of oppression is against the cause of God. For God’s cause is the cause of equality, of the commonage, of work together. Whether we knew it in the lands we’d come from or not, in this new garden where we find ourselves now growing—tangled, twisted, but still growing—in this garden we must plant the equally created seeds of God.”

Cot Quashey says, “Among us at that meeting there were also white-faced men who came to see about joining their cause to Quashey’s. And some Africans demanded of the Maroon man from Montserrat whether these Christians should not be kept out from the Holy War, not being Muslims. But our visitor, looking at the paling sky, said as he rose to leave, ‘Doesn’t the Exalted One say … “ah, what will convey unto thee what the Ascent is! It is to free a slave!” My friends,’ he told us, ‘those words don’t pick out this slave, that slave, just my family. No! They mean that all of slavery is a condition against holiness! And all of us who fight it—for another, for our families, within ourselves—whether we follow this way or that, we begin to rise to God.’

“We watched him lift his little anchor and slide the carved log boat into the glassy water. As he saluted us from its prow and rowed away, my wee dote Betty jogged upon my hip, and crowed and waved to him.

“We made it back to our loblolly, then to the fields with the other hands. The overseers, they knew nothing. And though that day seemed long for want of sleep, it flew fast on wings of inspiration. I never saw that man again, though Quashey and Cudjoe met up with him in the parish of St. Lucy just before the end.

“Shortly thereafter, Quashey sent Mama Chiva to me. They wanted me to come into the woods one Sunday morn, to meet with men from the European islands who did not speak the African. Mama Chiva came with me, my Betty tied around my back kicking me with her strengthening feet. But every step we took, my son Ben haunted me. I was not with the living, but with him that wondrous picknick Sunday when, single file, I followed him upon his father’s rolling shoulders through the singing wood.

“Now, on this mockingly lovely day, Chiva led me to a path I had not walked before. It wound inland from the river and the coast. We came upon the men seated on the ground at the base of a natural circle of tall cottonwood trees.”

“And what did you interpret to them, and from them?” comes the one rheumy question from the blue-masked man in the chair of state behind Coote.

“They were Englishmen, though indentured. I mistrusted them greatly, though they had brought weapons which they gave us as a gesture of goodwill. I told Chiva what they said, but it wasn’t much. They mostly murmured into one anothers’ ears.”

“They
gifted
the Coromantee with weapons, you say? No payment was involved?”

“Sure, what payment had we to offer?”The prisoner smiles dully, rubbing sweat from her cheek with a fist. Mosquitoes and flies whine and hover over the sick banquet beneath her shawl. The Governor suddenly slumps in his chair, bends a bit forward, tugs a crystal vial from inside his waist, and pulls the cap off his smelling salts. He takes one vast gulping breath; and another.

“No, I suppose they wanted to wait and see: if the ’Mantee enjoyed success, and took these lands from the hands of Darkness, they would expect to join forces, or at least hope to call on support for their own plots and frays.

“That day turned a corner for me. I saw the seriousness of the thing. For although those British strangers who met us in the forest added no numbers to Quashey’s soldiery, in one of the high trees I first saw the arsenal. Our men had built a tree house high up in the branches, and Cudjoe and another were busy sorting inventory out that day.”

“What did you see?”

“There was the rake that had gone missing on Vaughton, and there the three cane knives that had been misplaced. I saw hoes whittled to sharp narrow points, and several poles of hardwood with spikes retrieved from the floor of the smithy, bent through them for gouges. There were also cudgels with spikes hammered in all around them, like pikes or maces they were. The British rebels, as I’ve told ye, had brought along pistols: two pistols, and a small deer horn stuffed with shot.

“How odd that morning was: my baby girl creeping over the soft dry forest bed, men coming to and fro, climbing up and down, Mama Chiva smoking her little white clay pipe and gazing into the future. And I, the fool, was only grateful that Afebwa was nowhere to be seen so I could feel my husband’s tired strength, smell his worry, hear the hum that at times accompanied his thoughts, all by myself. At that time, the plan was for the overthrow to take place almost a year from thence. The children of the Prophet were not to start a war, you see, during three months of the year …”

“Which months? Name them!” interrupts Coote, eager to gain strategic knowledge. But she answers, “I do not know. For their months spin round, and are never the same from one year to the next. At any rate, who can say if we’d be seated in this arrangement today if they had kept to their plans.” Coote’s masked guest inhales with a hissing sound like a waking snake. “But four months later came the hurricane of ’75, and overnight the Jihad was begun. For as you know, sirs, this cyclone came in February. You yourselves would call it a freak storm. It ripped the seedlings from their tender moorings, the roofs from the sugary; it gouged the windows and doors from the big house like the eyes from one’s foe. Whole herds of cattle were dashed against buildings and trees and I saw, Lord save us, a four-year-old pickaninny shooting through the air like an arrow, his eyes wide in conscious terror! The slave cabins were demolished into piles of rubble. But though the whipped river dashed the sloop onto the muddy shore where it mired, the boat was saved. Quashey hurried ourselves, his small family—then the rest of the
umma
of the Glebe—into the fringe of the forest. Most of the slaves took refuge there, moaning and calling throughout the night. But it proved the safest place, for the young trees at the fringe were supple, not stiff: dense-seeded like grass blades, with little room to fall and without much weight to bring them crashing to the ground. Yes, we at the forest’s edge were drenched, and scratched, a broken limb here and there, but again we survived to do the overseers’ work once the watery sun had reappeared.

“When the wan-faced overseers came to gather us in midmorn ing, our small encampment had already cast their sticks and decided. The Coromantee saw the unseasonable cyclone as a miracle from God. A cover of pandemonium, in which hammers and axes and cane knives were gathered up and relayed to the forest, as if by swirling winds. That the sloop was saved, said Quashey, was as in the age of Noah. It was meant to take us to a new and righteous place. Mama Chiva related all this, stirring loblolly from the overseers’ own stock of corn. But as soon as we had eaten, bedraggled and exhausted as we were, Vaughton was circling on his butter-colored horse, urging us to a million tasks.