Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (28 page)

“What are you on about?” Coote sputters sternly.

“Freedom
to
and freedom
from,
sir. Freedom
from
being another person’s thing to gain the sour rations of survival, rather than rising up to our full statures and filling them, every inch, scab, gland, and hair. This is the freedom Quashey and them died living, in his Jihad.” Coote sees the sweat run down her skinny neck: she raves. “Bishop’s in thrall to Archbishop, Duke to his King …”

He averts his eyes. She is very ill. Her mind is rambling the darkest tunnels where the human mind ought never go.

“Biddy … madam … this is not necessary …”

But she continues, panting.

“I wandered and wandered, listening with younger ears, as if I had the ears of Moya and of Betty, my living daughters, who in a better time would have shared hearth and understanding with their Mam. I listened to the sweat of people who from pot gang to field accident to a cold pallet were valued slightly above beasts only because they could hold the instruments of harvest between their fingers and obey complex instructions, while beasts could not. I saw people lulled, like myself, into sullen confusion by a few jars of rum, a bright bit of clothing, a promise not to sell their best-loved kinfolk away. And I saw people who’d been refused all of these, as punishment.”

“Who? Who did you carry the guns for?” A curl of warm wind blows the stink of her toward him. He is shouting.

In a bell-like voice she answers, “Paudi Iasc.”

“You idiot!” he grates. “Stop your rambling and make some sense. I don’t want the name of some redshank clapped into the Arlington stocks thirty years ago! Tell me who you carried those bloody guns from and to!”

A definite pride rings from her voice. “I have told you. ’Twas Paudi Iasc himself. Returning that silky morning in his log boat, the Maroon told the one he called Bat Fish about the wife of Quaco, a woman who had his same ‘fish-colored’ hair. And one day, even before the leaders of the Jihad were executed, a message came to me. From the headlands of St. Lucy, the parish across the waters to Montserrat—to Bridgetown, where they were taken from me, I carried what arms and maps I could. First a black man was my connection, then an old granny; but the last sir, was one like yourself.”

“English!”

“No, sir, or yes, but when I say like yourself, I mean a gentleman, sir. The sort you’d think would be happy with the way Barbados is run as is. But who can say? There are those here who are greedy, sir. Then again there are those born with the spleen of conscience and a heart for brotherhood, no matter what their class. The Quakers up in St. Lucy are like that. I met some. They seem to stand fair and tall, though they could stand like silk-swathed puppets. Others do … In the end, sir, I think there are two kinds of folk. People who look up, wanting to see themselves in their high-placed betters; and people who find the best of themselves upon the midden of the humble poor.”

There’s a pause; she is seeking something through scarves of fever.

“If you’ve the strength to philosophize, biddy, you’ve the strength to tell me: Where can we find Paud Iasc? Tell me, and I swear it shall go easier with you …”

“Freedom
from.
And freedom
to
follow the cold milling stars in new directions, or to lose the self in the red moon of the hearth, a child’s life burning like a small safe flame in the next room …”

A knock sounds tentatively upon the outer door. Then another. “Lucy. Answer that,” says Peter Coote.

She complies. She returns, leading the wiry Scots lad the Governor sent those several weeks ago with a parchment inviting Peter Coote to become his man at Speightstown Gaol. The door, held open to admit the youth, admits as well the purpled weal of evening. On the freshening breeze comes a faint sound like small fine bones, clacking together, as if chimes were hanging in a tree in the fruit garden.

Eyes on the ground, the lad calls loudly, “Sir. The Gov’nor has sent me.”

Coote holds forth his hand expectantly, but there is no scroll.

“His Excellency’s spoken with the widow, sir. Them shirts ye ordered. They been paid for by the Gov’nor. You need only fetch them first thing in the morning …”

Another fragile gust of sound, as if strung shells were blowing backward, inhaled into one another. “Another way,” the prisoner mumbles, “to see it is that they’re all our ancestors. Quashey had his own, and I have mine, you with your family crest and this lad from the crofts, those who piled up the midden on the St. John’s River—of course everybody comes from his own clan. But in some other way, all the ancestors are ours, and we are theirs—they pick us out and call on us. Yes, if you asked me why I carried pistols in with my papayas, ’tis because Afebwa is as much my ancestor as any Daley. And I have come to know that I too will become everyone’s ancestor. So I must choose the right road for the progeny I’ve mothered: I have chosen where to set my mother’s-feet. That this inverted paradise, sir, might become someday that garden-heaven, where people are at peace and plenty. Free, to discover their very destinies.”

Rising, Peter Coote says, “Thank His Excellence for me,” and searches for a small coin.

But in his rote and piping voice the young man goes on, “You are to come for tea upriver at the mansion once you’ve got the shirts, says the Gov’nor, sir. After you have disposed of the old project. There is a new matter for you to start upon, says he. That is all, sir.” The lad ducks back through the door into the dusk. Bare feet slap down the road. The tinkling has stopped.

“Lucy, get the prisoner out of here. Make her a posset, get her an extra covering. The night is cool, and in her fever she has lost her senses. But I … I am
done
with her.”

In the garden the stiff young fruit trees spread their blanket of lacy shadow. Shutting the door after the messenger sucks the last mote of light from the office. “Send Daniel. I need a lamp,” says the Apothecary. When one comes he will take down the journal where his mercantile hypothesis rests, and write the confused and disillusioned computations this investigation has led him to. Eventually he will grow tangled, melancholy, frustrated. He will never consider changing the hypothesis.

H
e sees them, though he makes as if he hasn’t. They are parallel to each other, the rowboat still tied to the pier, and Peter Coote, as he sets out down the walkway from his lodgings to fetch the crisp new linen shirts. Questioning is over. What a fine fresh day! Free of darkened corners, rotten smells, tainting tales, the solemn discipline of duty; a duty the Governor is rewarding as well done! In the pocket of his surcoat he fingers the sketch he’s made for a new ruby suit of clothes. The widow can take measurements, at any rate. Perhaps the Governor will know a source for ordering the sort of fabric he envisions. Keeping his head down, smiling as much as public dignity allows on this fine morning, Coote notes the dog-daisies popping up along the edges of his path. He floats a glance discretely to the side.

They have already handed her into the boat; Lucy, Daniel, the old black woman who’s gone frail but is a superb cook. Cot Quashey stands patiently, hunched beneath her great black shawl. The jovial boatswain is settling her on a plank across the stern. He wears no black mask this morning; but the six fingers on each hand as he draws the prisoner down are the fingers of the Bridgetown executioner. He who whipped the prisoner only weeks before, while Coote stood by fastidiously, waiting to claim her once she had fainted in the straw.

Of course the prisoner has recognized the executioner too. She knows that she will never see Jamaica’s shores or carry on her huck stering for a few more years. Coote pulls his eyes ahead, placing each newly polished slipper carefully, to avoid the feces of dogs and pigs and humans along the path. He does not see the old couple bending to place calabashes in the slow bilge at the prisoner’s feet. The sea winks and sloshes a pure Prussian blue against red wooden planks. Now Lucy hands down a white clay pipe—a
duidín
—into the prisoner’s lap. If any words are exchanged, they’re soft enough for the calm roll of the sea to wash them all away. Coote only hears the oars squeak in their locks, then their groan and splash as the lethal boatsman rows the vessel forward, away from the three Africans standing silent on the pier.

Several minutes later, just after he has raised his hat in greeting to the deacon of All Saints Church, he hears an amateurish piping. Thin; sour; rusty. His head swivels round in curiosity and disconcerted apprehension.

All the gold and blue of the morning rests on Lucy; kisses the fruity roundness of her cheeks, outlines her turbaned head, halos her kerchiefed shoulders and her high posterior as she follows the old and withered couple along the quay, blowing life’s fragile breath into a dented rusty Irish whistle. Lucy, who after the old bachelor Coote’s death at his small plantation, The Downs, at the turn of the next century, will take the hidden/forgotten bundle of a manuscript from its mouldy leather wrappings at the bottom of a broken trunk and pass it to his only son, who is also her own. This son, a freedman from the age of twenty-one, will make enquiries. Until he finds where Betty has been sold in the northern colonies. Rather, he finds her owner. He has to wait twenty-three months, but finally, per his mother’s wishes, is put in touch with a low deckhand to whom he pays a stolen ring from the house of Coote. He sends the testimony. And he hears God laughing. But that’s another tale: a tale not recorded here.

T
he majority of indentured Irish brought to Barbados between 1630 and 1660 received no contract, but were sold upon the open market. Indentured labor was cheaper than slave labor, hence adoption of the former. In January 1637, fifty-six servants from the ship
Abraham
were sold on the open market at destination’s end for £7 per head. But during Cromwell’s heyday until the mid-1650s, Irish were sold to merchant captains for as low as £3-£5 per head, plus feeding for the voyage. However, by the mid-’60s prices had increased to £10-£14 per head. By 1690, the average price on the open market for an indentured servant from Europe had reached £18. Slave labor became cheaper. By 1660, a typical African slave was going for £23 for
life
(rather than 7-10 years), while any offspring born to an African belonged to its “master” in perpetuity.

Thus economics played a large role in the switchover from Irish indentured labor on Barbados, to African slavery. But there was another reason. By 1640 Scots had begun to be favored over Irish as indentured Euro-labor. The Scot was considered industrious and biddable—not subversive or seditious, as was the Irishman or Irishwoman. (Perhaps the most famous example of a recalcitrant Irishman in bondage is that of Cornelius Bryan, who was flogged 120 strokes in January 1656 for stating, as he ate meat from a tray, that “if there was so much English blood in the tray as there was meat he would [also] eat it.”) By 1660 Scots in Barbados were typically brought in for shorter indentures of four to six years. And by 1690,
only
indentured Scots were to be hired by plantations as militiamen. To serve as militia was a coveted job, for indentured servants were granted remission of half their remaining service time if they fought “manfully” against “the enemy” (rebels and Maroons).

The story of Cot Daley spins itself out of a historic happening: the islandwide Coromantee revolt of 1675. In spite of increasing the militia, another “uprising of slaves in conjunction with white servants was foiled” in 1686. In that year, Governor Stede informed his Parliament that Creole slaves and some of the “Irish nation” had aligned against English interests. Still, another mixed revolt was exposed in 1688, when Bajan parliamentarians passed the “Act for the Good Governing of Negros.” This Act also left the Irish on the island entirely disarmed. Yet in spite of executions, legal action, and overturned coups, in 1692 another foiled slave revolt took place in St. Michael’s Parish.

While Irish people ceased to be forcibly imported to the sugar islands in favor of their African cousins, their descendants, the “redshanks,” help form the poorest stratum of society in Barbados to this day.

1
Hillary Beckles,
White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627-1715
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989), p. 38.

2
Peter Beresford Ellis,
Hell or Connaught
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975), pp. 153-54.

3
Ibid., p. 149.

4
Beckles,
White Servitude,
p. 71.

5
J. S. Hander,
The Unappropriated People
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1974), p. 203.

6
Beckles,
White Servitude,
p. 71.

7
Hillary Beckles,
A History of Barbados
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

8
Ellis,
Hell or Connaught,
p. 161.

9
Ibid., p. 151.

10
Beckles,
White Servitude,
p. 71.

arra:
an Irish interjection, like “well … ,” that introduces an idea

aught:
something/nothing

boherin:
a small rural road (lit. “cow path”)

bonham:
an infant pig

brack:
a bread/cake with raisins or currants in it

by-blow:
a child resulting from casual sexual relations

chimbley pot:
vernacular pronunciation of chimney pot in rural areas

coffle:
a caravan of slaves, usually manacled together

commonage:
a shared agricultural area in Ireland

dast:
a country form of “dare”

drohuil:
the evil eye, a curse that results from admiration or envy