Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (5 page)

But the thrifty managers of these plantations took great care that outside services were utilized with parsimony. Fifteen years had passed, Coote attaching himself to one owner, another manager, most recently an Anglican priest with a wealthy congregation; yet he barely eked along between the goodwill of them all. He still held no acreage of his own.

Then at last year’s Christmas ball the Anglican—one Reverend Aynes—had introduced him to a weathered man in rose peau de soie and a lustrous brown wig.

“Governor, may I present the finest young apothecary to come to us from London in many years? Presently he tends the slaves at Codrington, and … Colonel Stede, Doctor Coote.”

To Aynes, Peter noticed, as to all the wealthy planters he had met, his own existence on the island seemed to begin at the moment he made their personal acquaintance. Peter held out his hand and bowed. His fingers were not taken, and he curled them back toward his chest in a graceful gesture. When he straightened he found the new Governor chewing a sweetmeat and gazing at him with wet black eyes.

“… the latest in surgical techniques as well,” muttered the minister.

“How do you regard your labors with these creatures, sir?” asked Colonel Stede, catching a drop of nougat on his lower lip and sucking it in, froglike.

“Your Excellency, I feel I am protecting our investments … guarding our profits … ,” the younger man began.

“You say ‘our,’ Doctor Coote. I don’t recall your holdings: Is your family here upon the land?”

“My inheritance lies with a consortium of shippers based in Bristol, Lordship, and my investments, in that sense, depend upon the land. But when I say ‘our’ I mean all Englishmen, whose colony this is.” His voice, in this utterance, swelled boldly in proud affiliation.

“That it is
not
!” the Governor snapped. “Many an English rogue shipped here in chains has been freed from servitude to foul our shores. Up in the northern parishes they multiply like hares … thieves, swindlers, lewd livers. Problems. Problems, to be sure.”

“That ilk, of course, sir,” Coote hastily replied. “Though Cornwall and Codrington have, conversely, successfully employed English freedmen as militia against the ill will of the blacks.”

The Governor shook his withered jowls and incongruous ringlets from side to side. He dabbed his lips with a lace-edged handkerchief and tucked it up his sleeve.

“Yes—a necessity,” he mused. “Chancy. One that must be dispensed with soon. ’Swounds, how am I to watch it all, to hold them all in check out here at the ends of the earth? Yet with the blessing of Divine Providence, it will be accomplished.”

The Reverend Aynes nodded with pursed lips. “There must be limits. Strictest limits.”

To what, to whom, did he refer? Coote mused. His own plan, back in ’69, had been to rise up quickly through the ranks in Barbados. To become a landholder, not merely to increase and guard the wealth of others. But to date his own options had been limited—just enough to keep him in the required sort of lodgings; just enough to stable a nag to ride out on his weekly calls to the sick of the two plantations, and for medicines to carry on rare visits to the gentry. There was scarce enough left to keep up the necessary appearances—a beaver hat, fine linen shirts, and satin waistcoats by which one gentleman could recognize another sweating gentleman.

The merchant company in Bristol was foundering. Suicide and sickness among the trepanned Africans had devastated its anticipated profits. Pirates had attacked an important cargo of ivory off the Gold Coast, and only two years ago three ships laden with barreled rum and muscavado sugar had sunk in a squall off the Car olinas. The income gained in other years was reinvested. Coote had agreed to this rather than take on more investors who would only share the profits of the future, while he had shared the losses of the past.

Then suddenly last month a messenger had appeared in Bridgetown at the rooms of Peter Coote. “I mus’ bide for your reply, sir,” said the youth. At his desk Coote slid a tapered fingernail beneath the thick red sealing wax. He read,

“Doctor Coote, I am in need of an Apothecary-Surgeon at the Speightstown Gaol. This post will hold my utmost confidence, for some of the prisoners here are high traitors from the northern parishes. A great deal is hoped to be learned from their testimony. They should be kept alive until it has been given. Please consider. Your part-time duties at Codrington and Cornwall might be continued if so desired, but need not be, as this position brings with it a commission and an annual purse of 60 gold guineas: also a house and carriage, two fine mares; fowl, slaves, sows, and other stock to provide for your needs. Should you accept, I must know at once. An important batch of prisoners has recently been delivered. I am most anxious to learn what they will, or what they will not, tell of matters of a planned rebellion.”

There had been nothing, really, to consider. To gain a commission without soldiering in the disease-ridden jungles of the Indies was amazing luck. But to become the King-appointed Governor’s own man was best of all, given Coote’s Anabaptist family roots in England. After the restoration of Charles II to the throne, these had become the wrong roots.

“Your Excellency,” Coote scripted hastily while the lad tossed stones idly in the dust outside the door, “I shall be pleased to serve you in this and all things. I shall plan to quit my lodgings and await your word on my removal to Speightstown and the Gaol.”

Now on this Tuesday morning, after a night with little sleep due to clicking lizards, whining insects, and the infernal heat, Coote feels peckish. He bids Lucy bring him a glass of hot coffee, well sugared. His impulse is to interrogate the Irishwoman as roughly and quickly as possible. She’s the last surviving rebel: why humor the bold jade by penning her full and dismal tale? But an inner voice warns him: be cautious. The Governor is seeking subtle links between the Irish and the Africans. No more names, really. By the time Peter Coote had ridden into Speightstown that first August morning, the bodies of eighteen rebel leaders already dangled overhead like sides of beef, twisting black and amber in the sun. He pushes the memory of flies feeding, of beaks pecking cartilage and ripping human gristle, from him now. “Lucy,” he mumbles around the acid rising in his mouth, “Get the Irishwoman.”

“Cot Quashey,” Lucy replies, looking down upon him as he struggles with his bile behind a napkin. When she leaves the room, he reviews what he knows about the case. The proven slave leaders had been hanged for conspiracy to treason and revolt. Three Irish abettors had been executed down in Bridgetown. One Irishman had also been held here in Speightstown; but tortured too vigorously, he had expired before Coote’s arrival, his lips still sealed except for “Feck yeese. I commend my soul to Christ.”

The Governor thinks the Irishwoman, having been in bondage twenty years, having been bred with Africans, and by her female nature weaker and more fearful than the men, might provide information useful to future governance. Coote is to attempt to accumulate some understanding of how and why England’s vassals in Barbados have thrice gone against their fellow Christians to align, against God and nature, with black Africans.

The woman had been apprehended two hours outside Six Men’s Fort, a bundle for market perched on her head like an African wench. She approached steadily, past soldiers, past four black prisoners being led under the noon sun down to Speightstown for certain execution. The foot soldiers, parched, inquired of her burden. “Only green fruit of the paw tree, sirs,” she’d replied. They were thirsty, hungry, bored. “We’ll save ye the long walk to market, you smelly hag,” one offered. But she would not hand the bundle down and retreated, muttering, when they went to take it from her. They requisitioned it with bayonets. When they set it on the ground and opened the unclean cloth, they found four pistols and a small swamp-cedar box of shot at the bottom, hidden by the bulbous fruits which leaked orange milk and wet black seeds. The Irishwoman was then tied to the file of agitated blacks, and marched along to gaol.

All lies, her first testimony that an unknown Irish huckster had traded her the weaponry for food, and that she was now bound for the capital to sell these pistols to some fine gentleman she knew only as “Ned.” For over thirty years the Irish on this island had not been permitted to buy, or trade, or own, or sell a gun: any gentleman would know this, would report a breach, and would confiscate the guns.

At first the Governor insisted on the truth. His tack had changed, however, after eighteen dangled; yet each day the interrogators brought new names, in an ever-widening jigsaw of treason between Africans and the indentured, free Creoles, and those released redshanks who now lived under bushes and foraged for survival. In briefing Coote, the Governor had said, “I’ve hanged enough now to make clear the futile consequence of rising up against me. Better, perhaps, that the dregs who swarm this island believe a paltry, mad eighteen made mutiny, instead of ten score like themselves. D’you see? But between ourselves, man, we must find the links that give them the same vision …”

Coote himself had cut down the Irishwoman after the ritual of public whipping for violations of the Proclamation of 1656. He himself prescribed unguents for her lashes and powders against the fever that was inevitable, given the island humidity and the shock effect of thirty cuts. That day on the platform, sweltering in his plumed hat and brushed dove-colored gloves, Coote, as the Governor’s representative, faced the crowd in front of the platform while behind him the prisoner was tied, her scarred back bared for the spectacle like a used canvas awaiting palimpsest. Cut down, she sagged face-first onto a mound of straw. So only yesterday, during the interrogation, had he assessed her full-face across his desk, eyeball to eyeball. A tough and stringy nothing, he’s decided; without the strength or wit to mastermind rebellion.

Now he hears them coming, feet patting the stones. As they enter his presence, Lucy is guiding the smaller woman lightly by the elbow.

“Sit down, biddy,” Coote orders irritably. “Lucy, you must make haste. Before you bring my lunch, you and the old man must drag the pallets into the sun, scour the flags, and lime the sick-house walls.” During the night there have been two more deaths due to the bloody flux.

Lucy nods once, humming lightly.

“I will take a thick slice of that ham which Colonel Stede sent, for my noon meal,” he instructs her receding back. Then, hurriedly, he turns to write, for the Irishwoman has begun to speak without his prompting.

“At first I thought this was the Devil’s island. Look there”—she is pointing through the open shutters to where the sapling fruit trees shiver lightly in the morning breeze. Involuntarily his eyes follow her finger to the soft blue sky. An oriole draws slowly into shape within a leafy recess, tilting its black eyes from side to side.

“There were signs that seemed so definite,” she explains. “Each day dawned with perfection, even in the rainy months. Birds caroled and the air threw perfumed nets of fruit and nutmeg. Every time the sun rose, it lifted my heart high with it—only to dash me further down with the full remembrance of my plight like blood returning to a sleeping limb. Desperate, the pain of that returning life.

“I was sure this was the Devil’s land, for through his tricks with light Lucifer is Prince of Darkness. In a like way, although Barbados is a land bathed in warmth and sunshine, here, sir, do dark perversions bloom. I came to know the fierce vertigo of panting up into a blameless sky, only to meet the black swoon that came from too much heat, too much work, too little food. I came to see how, on this island, fertility becomes a monstrous thing. Day after day we whacked at crops and weeds that sprang back overnight. Ah, how beautiful, those scarlet-flowered vines that choked the trees to death; and orange and violet butterflies, lilting on leaves as sheer as silk, that tempted our eyes from work to pleasure, and drew the sudden shearing of the whip. Things brought the opposite of what they promised. And sometimes, when I had been betrayed again by beauty, I saw Satan’s pet, the serpent, swimming away through the tree branches …”

Coote pulls toward the vision her words paint. He knows she speaks a truth he shrinks from, for he has ridden empty plantation roads at jasmine-scented noon, heart thumping with an inadmissible fear. But hearing her soft, full, wrinkled lips describe it now makes him angry. That this common slut should touch his own experience …

“You need not demonstrate your bardic family tendencies,” he drawls. “Move toward the purpose we are in this room to accomplish, if you please. You stood in soggy petticoat on Hole Town strand when last we spoke.” He dips a new nib in the ink and draws it toward him across the blotting sheet. It catches on a fiber in the paper and two tiny globules fly into the lace at his wrists, unnoticed.

“Arra,” she mutters, “there were spirits—weren’t we spirited away? And the best folk here, there, and everywhere draw the evil eye—and what about the number seven? Quashey’s people also hold it sacred, they walk seven times around the holy stone … But I misread the signs, I held up the wrong lantern …”

“Biddy!”

“We were on the strand, then. It was a moment like forever. We turned toward the water whence we came. The young browned sailors in their red kerchiefs and rolled knee breeches were drawing the longboats tethered in their fists to shore. The Captain stood making notations in a small leathern book as Spaniole counted off the men tied neck-by-neck together. Before them marched the fourteen wretches who had volunteered for servitude. Wretches: for they would find their rations and their shelter, their work hours and the lash, the same as we who were impressed.

“The females followed all, flanked by Spaniole and the Captain. We were not tied. Our captors understood better than ourselves that fear was our tether: we would not even think of springing away into the trees, or forming colonies in caves in the mountains. Alas, we knew less of how to survive the wilderness than we knew how to survive in servitude to men. And with all that there were the scents of fruit on the air, and the nuts of the tree we learned was the palm clustered and crowded on their stalk, and certainly the sea behind us writhed with fish for the taking, including some that skipped and whizzed a ways above it—in spite of all this bounty, you see, so strange was the land that we turned in terror, with no argument, toward the rise above the strand. For there we saw Christian humans like ourselves, or more verily like our Captain; and they were bent over the edge to espy us, like curious people anywhere.