Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (3 page)

“When they came to find me they told me I’d been lost. I said nothing, thinking how I’d go back again soon as I might, and even if it were her
phuca
—her ghost, you’d say—I’d be with her. But after that my father kept me in with him on holy days and Sundays, and I forgot the looks and ways of the streets which I had moved in safety through with my mother, for she was like the queen of the market folk, I think.

“When I set out a-wrenning that Saint Stephen’s Day, my father, Mihawl Daley, tucked my mother’s brass ha’penny whistle into the pocket of the big gray coat I wore, that I might play a tune for charity. ‘Do you recall your old mother playing a jig on that for you when you was small?’ he asked. But I didn’t. Later, on the boat and in my early years on this infernal island, I tried and tried to imagine those same thick stiff fingers that sought my face in the dim storage space beneath the stall, curling around the shaft of golden metal. Lifting, curved; tapping down again so neatly on the close-set holes. Music, my mother, abandonment, betrayal, more—all wound into a druid’s knot within my mind.

“Disembodied: in the dark—floating detached from her sturdy arms and her warm skirts—that was the only way I could summon up my mother’s hands, or imagine them playing a tune to comfort me.”

“First we wrenned for my father. There were several of us, I among the largest, and we milled in circles in the dance as someone behind a wolf’s mask beat a drum. Another played the pipes. But always at the corner of my memory, most vividly, is the swirl of a girl’s striped cotton petticoat. It was pink and gray, though once it may have been red and white; and it flared from her bare legs and the brogues tied to her feet as she twirled. The drummer thrust a broken cup out to my father. “Ah, may God bless us all,” Father said, morose and tender. He put a coin into the cup. Then we ran on down the narrow street with voices shrill and thumping feet; with sticks clacking and two tunes played at once on different whistles. One by one or all together we cried out, ‘The wren is the king of all the birds!’ and ‘Give us a penny to bury the wren.’ We swooped to the doors of market vendors, the midwife, a joiner and his apprentices out sawing planks before their shop in the crisp air. The wife of a seaman lived where the lane swung off in two directions: she gave us a penny and a great chunk of brack for our hunger. And so we danced along. There was … was it Nell, whose Mam was a fowler … ?”

The Irishwoman’s voice fades. Her eyes search the dim sepia corners of the Apothecary’s office. “Was that her name? Sure, I can’t remember now. Their faces were all masked in straw or motley, or as goats and bears and horses and the like … The street was run neled thick with mud from the winter rains, laden carts, and horses’ treading. There must have been peat smoke in the air on a cold afternoon like that, and the rich smells of Christmas meats a-roasting. But no. I try to clutch onto those last moments in the place that I was born to, but I was so busy
living
them! How was I to know I’d have to capture everything I ever wanted to remember of Eire for the rest of my life?

Then the afternoon was growing dimmer. Some children turned toward home again after the seaman’s woman’s house. But those of us still singing, jumping, clanking coins against the cup, turned down a lane I had not seen before. Dusk came upon us suddenly in that narrow street, its sky blocked out by overhanging balconies. But fire glow shone through open shutters and half-doors beneath a row of signs a-swing. I looked up and saw a donkey and a tankard, blue and gold, on the sign whose door we ran toward next.

“There was a woman standing in it, fine and big, just like a mother. Her rough strong fists were bunched at her waist on either side of her red skirt. ‘Come in, ye little wrens, come in to us,’ she laughed. The chins of two men leaned over her shoulders, making round eyes at us and jesting.

“At this point the little drummer ran away. Perhaps it was good luck, or else his saints were with him, but he shrieked with laughter and was gone, cloak swirling round his dirty feet. The girl with the striped petticoat was with us still. She and I locked elbows and swung high as someone tootled on the pipes. That girl wore a mask like mine, a mask of the field: the mystery of both harvest’s bounty and winter’s death, and the dry silent seed that lies behind everything. When our tune ended the little drummer with the broken cup had not returned, so the men behind the woman at the door reached pennies down into our upcurled palms.

“Then the woman moved to stand aside. A fireplace blazed in the stone wall to the left of the door. Her skirt was taffeta and caught the orange and purple flutters of the flames. She bent a little forward from the waist and held her tankard down. Her bodice was unlaced, her breast powdered and sweaty, and her teeth tiny and even. In the firelight her eyes, dark eyes, sparkled with mirth. She found my own eyes underneath the mask and held them.

“ ‘Will ye not come in for a cup of punch, my dears?’ she smiled as we shuffled in the street. There was a smaller lad in front of me as we pressed past her: I recall his head, masked as a goat, jutting ahead as he peered around the room. I crept close to that safe, gay skirt and taking out my brass whistle made as though to play it. But only squeaks and squawks came out. The woman set her drink quickly on a bench. Her hands dipped suddenly like heavy birds. She raised my mask as one hand swept under and behind my hair, lifting it to drape over the shimmering green stuff of her sleeve. ‘Ah, yes,’ she cried. Of the publican she commanded, ‘You Baldy, mix up your finest Yuletide posset for this child.’

The little lad who had entered the tavern before me was taken up onto the knee of an old seam-faced seaman with one leg, who sat at a sort of low bench. I remember the brownness of that man’s face. Even on that cold winter’s eve he wore a waistcoat with no sleeves; his iron arms were covered with wavery blue-scrolled designs. He was tickling the boy who began to squirm away, when suddenly he lifted him into the air by the scruff of the neck, as if weighing a sack of goods. While the merry din went on around me the lad dangled, goat mask askew, face purpling, from the seaman’s fist. ‘Somewhat too small, this one, for work,’ the seaman mused. ‘Pity though. He’s a beauty, ain’t he?’

“The woman saw me watching this. From outside the voice of the girl in the striped petticoat called ‘Seamus? Seamus!’ The woman inside snapped her fingers. ‘Baldy, the punch! Simon, put him down if he won’t do.’ The one-legged man dropped the little boy from a height above his own head onto the rushes of the floor. As the child knelt coughing for his breath, the sailor reached down absently to fluff up his brown curls. ‘Ye’re a lovely boy altogether,’ he murmured.

“I saw all of this. Yet she had taken up my hand, and I stood lulled by the fire, the bright heavy skirt of shimmering colors, frozen with longing; not wanting her thick warm fingers to leave me go. Once, after the lad had crawled across the floor and pulled himself up on the open half-gate, he turned to look at me, child-to-child. He hesitated. But then a slender arm reached in from the darkened street and tugged his coat. There was a swing of striped petticoat, and he was yanked out into the street again. At that same moment the woman bent down, holding a warm cup to my lips. Ale and cloves poured from her breath as she cooed, ‘Never mind, drink this now, darling.’ And that was the last cup I drank on Ireland’s soil.”

The Irishwoman pauses. She lifts her shawl to adjust it and a pus tulant odor wafts from her direction. Peter Coote flexes his fingers, wrinkling his nose involuntarily. He glances up. What an exceedingly pointless tale, he thinks. A waste of time and good foolscap. The only possible value might be that reverie will make her careless, and then secrets will out. “All well and good,” he says blandly, “but will you soon get on to the conspiracy?” He reflects a moment. “The traitorous and murderous conspiracy which you knew about and aided?” he amends, writing this down for all posterity. Looking up he notices her eyes are blue. Raised to the light: a pallid, plain, and empty blue they seem to him, shot with red veins. “Biddy?”

But she is staring out the window at the becalmed garden. “The ship,” she says, “was the
Falconer,
a slaver out of Bristol. I woke up in a cabin, on the floor, in a sort of nest of rags. I had been sick in them. There were nine females on that journey, all in the one cabin. I was the youngest, the last to be brought aboard just before we sailed. The others slept two to a bunk. The Captain locked us in each others’ company against the crew and the men who’d sold themselves, or had been stolen. He wanted we girls fresh, he said, to command a higher price. Besides, he said, nine women would not go far among his crew, randy lads that they were.

“But there was one man of the crew he sent each morning for our slops, each midday with dry biscuit and salt meat, and each evening with our ration of water. This man was a castrate called Spaniole. No matter how we cried his name as we heaved our bile, or water slithered from the bilge over our ankles, or rats squealed at us from the corners, or a woman slid against the wall and gashed her head in the storm, he would not open the door except at the appointed times. Spaniole’s nose had been lopped off, and then his private parts, the Captain said. He attended us in silence, but for the air sucking in and out of those great black tear-shaped nostrils.

“We saw the deck of the
Falconer
only twice during our journey. The first time we’d been out from home for several weeks already. One night, after Spaniole brought the water, we noticed that the sea rolled us less like live fish in a barrel. The next morning Spaniole tied us loosely to each other, the last to his own wrist, and led us up the shallow steps to air. The ship had anchored.

“The Captain came on deck to us. He stood at the railing in a fine blue coat with golden buttons, his hair tied back in powdered curls. His face was powdered too. It made his lips seem red and swollen. His eyes seemed rimmed in blood, he was so white. He looked diseased and elegant. He was a young man for a Captain.

“ ‘For those who speak English,’ he called in cultivated tones, ‘we have put in here to take on fresh supplies. This,’ and he swept his arm out to the side, ‘is the Virginia colony.’

“ ‘Sir, is this where we will be put ashore?’ one girl called.

“ ‘Did you sign on for here?’ asked the Captain sternly, turning to stare at her. But none of us had signed on at all. We whispered and translated among ourselves, and looked down, confused.

“ ‘If you did not sign on for Virginia, then Virginia is not for you,’ he said. ‘But if you were taken by the Spirits of the Night, then you belong to Night, and I shall deliver you to Night itself.’

“The Captain went away up to his deck with the spyglass. ‘Come here to me,’ Spaniole wheezed through his black holes, ‘I am to show you some’at of the colonies.’ He drew us over to the railing by our common lead. The day was fine, the sea hard blue in choppy peaks. Before us the land lay, a strip of beach and gardens—toy roofs, a fort, a quay, pressed against by the dark flank of forest that led into those unfathomable lands. ‘Look!’ cried Spaniole. ‘Do you see the fort? Can you mark our soldiers walking on the walls? There is a trading post within those gates …’ One of the women began to wail at the sight of human habitation. I peered into the slapping waves, willing the merman or the white seahorses who can tip a boat, to strike at evil and take us off upon their backs. But they did not swim so far from home …

“Our gaoler paid no notice to our frantic babble. ‘Over there!’ he directed, ‘at the quay. D’ye see our dinghy? They are taking on fresh meat. Wild fat hens are found a-plenty, and deer by the hundreds, such as some of those lads below deck was sold away for poaching. But here we trade the savages a handful of gewgaws for an entire carcass. Haw! And freely given is the water from that little crystal river leading inland … see it there, right by that copse of elms?’

“ ‘Please? Pleasepleasepleaseplease please,’ sobbed the last girl, tugging the rope that bound her to his hand. Another girl called fu tilely to the shore. ‘Help! Help me!’ A half-mile of stern sea rolled back at her.

“Then the Captain was at our side again, folding his spyglass into itself. From the hold below the stolen men kicked and pounded at the ceiling the deck made. The Captain said, ‘I see Virginia colony appeals to you wenches, and you would fain remain here. Well, you will find the Indies even more to your taste. You have been sent out to begin a new life. And which of you,’ he asked, looking us each slowly up and down, ‘is not ready for a new life? Slatterns all!’ He reached forward and tugged my hair, winding his hand in it up to the wrist then spreading the strands on top to peer into my scalp.

“ ‘Nits!’ he exclaimed in disgust, flinging my locks away. Then he began to pace. Wailings and pleas turned to quiet shiverings under his indifference. ‘You will eat. We are taking food on board and you must fatten. You must look like you are good for clearing trees and planting fields and working like a man. The rough seas are behind us in this season; let your weeping and puking be behind you too, and wax well, for remember—the master who pays least, values least; and that without value is treated roughly the world over.’ ”

“It was early February when we lay off the Virginia colony. They let us scrub our cabin with icy seawater. Then Spaniole barred the door again and we heard the hold open and the lads led out, as they had been each day the storm was not so fierce that it would blow a man not tied to the mast into the sea.”

Peter Coote yawns. The heat makes him sleepy. It ruins his appetite; on the other hand boredom piques his desire to roll something refined and memorable on his tongue. He feels the stirrings of both nausea and hunger, and belches discreetly into a cuff.

“The next time that we came to deck was on the final day but one. Already we stood anchored out of Hole Town Harbor in the Parish of St. James. And I knew not which I wanted more—to stop and step out onto firm land, or for the ship to heave the seas forever.

“Oh, it was a great surprise, to find that Hell is fair. Like Tir na nOg or paradise or Eden it appears. A great part of its torment is that it is so lovely.