Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (7 page)

“Servant breeding was strictly controlled on the plantations in those years. Master and overseer would discuss the desired outcome of servant matings as thoughtfully as they would plan which cow to calf, which bullocks to geld for oxen, which stock to raise up dry for meat. I was placed at once under the supervision of Dora, the Scottish overseer of the second gang. Dora lived in a small outbuilding that had been the ox shed, but now there were no oxen—no field animals of any kind. Instead the first-gang bondsmen did the hauling and the plowing with their own thighs and backs.

“Dora and two Scots girls shared this shed between them, but Dora would not have my ‘Irish arse’ amongst them. ‘To kill us in our sleeps,’ she spat at me around her missing teeth, ‘as ye martyred the poor Protestants in ’41.’

“So I was locked up come night into a pantry hung with curing hams. I slept upon the earthen floor, with my father’s woolen surcoat to both pillow and cover me as best it could. Yes, I was safe and covered from the rain. But also … well, I was alone.

“Even though I joined the eight other young people of the second gang in the fields every day but Sunday, I was alone. Jenks and Dora did all that they could to see that bondsfolk went in suspicion of each other at Arlington. I remember that first morning when I walked barefoot behind her, pinching a fold of her skirt whilst hoping if a snake should writhe across the grassy path, herself would step upon it first. The sky was black and soft as we hurried toward the far field that awaited. Then gradually below the slender stars a thin line of yellow began to separate the heavens from the shaggy toss of trees. A calm day was a-dawning. Dora’s low tones carried well as she warned me, ‘Ye’re right to waddle at my tail. Them Africans ahead is cannibals on special occasions. Now that the animals is gone.’ She told the tale of the last ox, found roasted where it was felled grazing in the field. ‘Just the hide and bones, scattered on the ground. Jenks whipped them good but could not make them talk, until Master Henry says Stop, be wise; we must now get the ox’s work out of the Africans.’

“She muttered on, ‘And keep apart from them African girls. Shameless hoors they are, rolling their eyes and laughing, near naked in the fields.’

“ ‘As for us Scots—we’re onto you Irish and your sly tricks, and we’ll have no shite out of ye. And don’t you think that you can trust them new lads from your old place, and get together and whisper this and plot that. I tell you, they’d as soon tip you upside down in the field as would the Africans. You must keep clear of all of them—a little thing like you! If you don’t die from the starvation, you’ll surely not possess the strength to fight off men when their nature is upon them.’

“The sky was filled with rosy light by the time we reached the field. I thought it was a class of corn I saw, silhouetted tall and tas seled against the brimming heavens. ‘All right, set to,’ Dora called out to the others. ‘Here is tobacco,’ she explained to me. ‘Tie this across your face.’ She handed me a broad leaf and a creeper. ‘Here after pick a wide leaf every night. The sun will scar a girl of your coloring without you wear a mask.’ And I suppose I owe her thanks for that, for though the sun dropped me many times in a stroke or fit, the mask has kept me from getting corpse’s lips, as you will see on so many white field-workers.”

He looks vaguely askance.

“Arra, surely you’ve seen the men and women out from Europe who’ve worked the fields without face cover? The sun will burn and blister us in no time, sir, the skin pulling back from the teeth as the face pulls into tight and stringy scars, like any burnt flesh will.” Coote recalls, and nods impatiently.

“Dora taught me how to top tobacco. The taller youths went up and down the rows with little knives, chopping off the flowers and tassels that would mean a slow end to the leafing of the plant, while I and the other smaller girls bent behind them, parting the huge dull-green leaves to look for tender suckers which would sap life from beneath. We pinched these off each day, stopping the cycle so that all the sap went to the leaves, which flourished monstrously. There were over thirteen hectares planted in tobacco at that time.

“Never did Dora call us by our names, but only ‘You!’ and ‘You!’ and ‘You!,’ swishing her hempen cat so that two or three would jump toward the task, not knowing who she meant. All of Dora’s admonitions, and the unsocial way we worked together, frightened by her rope whip and the hefty welts it left, plus the fact that I was quartered every night and Sundays by myself, led me to develop—habits.”

“Thieving, wasn’t it?” Coote asks mildly.

“The habits of a child abandoned to great loneliness. Where I was born there is a saying:
‘Is pol dubh doite e an t-uaigneas, ach ma dhuunann tu suas e, dunfaidh tu amach go leor eile ata go h-alainn chomh maith.’
”

“Pray what does that mean in human speech?” Coote snaps, hiding curiosity.

“We say, ‘Loneliness is a burnt black hole, but if you seal it up you close out all that can be beautiful as well.’ I was a child, though, and knew not how to use the wisdom I was reared around, oncet I was cut off from its source. But anyway, in truth, although Dora and Jenks said things and fomented squabbles to keep us well divided, they but inflamed a divisiveness already in us.

“What I mean, sir, what I want you to record, is that you do not trust even your own, once your own have sold and bought you. And then there’s history; a river of gall that widens with the centuries between those trampled and those whose patience is tried by the constant bucking of the trampled, trying to get up again. Among us there at Arlington, more recent fears were sparked between those of the different Christian faiths. But the greatest differences which lay between those of us who shared that one lot in life, seemed instinctive—natural and therefore insurmountable.”

After a pause Coote drawls with boredom, “Kindly yield up its nature to me.”

“I remember those first mornings in the field,” the prisoner muses, “how hard it was to stay bent to my work—although the air was cooler near the ground—because the Africans were dressed, both lads and girls, in only a brief canvas skirt tied between the legs. And their long gleaming muscles, the bareness of their dark chests and backs and thighs—these were both mesmerizing and alarming to someone from the Christian north. Yet did many masters believe it was the black man’s disposition to go about naked in his native forests; and so the cloth across their loins was first thought an over-nicety, like covering a sheep’s bum with a nappy.

“Of course, as you know, time has revealed the error of this. Because you gentlefolk now each float thousands of fresh, frightened, handcuffed Africans across the sea each year—Africans who have been proved to bleed and chill and die as fast as any farm hand from the northern lands—masters have learned that Africans too want covering, both for health and modesty.”

There is something almost instructional in her tone which Peter Coote does not appreciate. He teeters between amused logic—most assuredly she’s mad—and a deep resentment, when her speech is less than subservient. Still he holds fast to the Governor’s goals: one must be tricky in extracting subtleties. “You wander, b … Mistress Daley. It is, perhaps, useful to hear you state the inborn differences you perceived between yourself and savages. For this natural difference, created by God himself, seems to have been perversely set aside several times by your race and other Christian blackguards in Barbados.”

“No,” she answers thoughtfully, “the difference you are wanting me to speak about was
not
natural. I had been trained to see it. And so at first I thought their colors and their features unrefined, being not narrow, pale, and bright.” Coote notes the Irishwoman frowning to find apt words. Her hands rise from her lap, and draw apart and around, as if trying to form a little globe. “It was like,” she says, “that last time I saw the Captain. As he walked away there was this flooding in my breast as if he was my dearest friend. But all it meant was my fondness for the familiar, the fondness we are trained from our mother’s apron to feel for a clan we learn to recognize as ours. This is … well I suppose it is indeed a lesson the world over. For as I first stared at the huge black eyes and short stiff hair of the Africans, so did they stare at me. And at the Glebe, where I spent twenty years and there were many children, the babes of Africans howled at my smile and smell—which they found unnatural and ugly—and buried their faces in their mothers’ necks. So I believe that every tribe of people think themselves the yardstick of Creation, and feel fear and distaste and suspicion of outsiders. But still, I tell you this is learned.”

“And you unlearned it?” Coote asks in honeyed tones as he ends one full page and sprinkles sand across it. He sweeps a clean sheet toward himself.

“In right circumstances, things like that melt away like morning haze,” Cot Quashey tells him. “We revive them only if we fear some harm, or as a weapon if we have nothing fair to fight with.”

The new morning sings as it passes the Apothecary’s office window. The cicadas begin their anxious chant. Cot Quashey tells the Governor’s surgeon-scribe, Peter Coote, about her first years on the plantation of Henry Plackler, married to Eugenia, eldest child of the Earl of Orkney.

“As I have said, I rarely saw the master during my first three years at Arlington. My days were spent with the second gang—the young gang—in jobs about the place. Dora supervised our labors with the tobacco. We planted it and weeded, we topped the pink sticky suckers, and when it was ripe and harvested by the first gang—the grown, strong men and women—we sat outside the barn, sorting it into batches by the size of the leaf, for hanging in the shed to dry. That was heavy work, the sorting and the tying. It hurt your wrists. The leaves were wet and sandy, and while there were only nine children in second gang, thirteen doughty adults carried the harvest to us in baskets.

“Sometimes Dora brought lanterns to the boards we stood behind, and we worked on in the dark. The leaves must not be left out in the dew once they are cut or mould will spread on them like pox. This meant that someone had to bring the evening ration of corn cake and dried fish as we stood working, and that the first gang must wait in the shed to haul our tied leaves up into the rafters, where they dried. Usually it was the African boys who went for victuals and carried the leaves off to the barn: we young girls were said to have the swifter hands for sorting and for tying, while the lads were said to have the backs for loads.

“When the crop was in, Jenks advised the neighboring planters. Their holdings, so much larger than Arlington, had regular business in town. Someone would take word to our master on the next run to Bridgetown. Master Plackler would come down to the plantation with the buyers, after the harvest had been cured. I see him now—that fine cherrywood coach, the matched blacks frothing up the dust as they galloped down the lane. They tossed their heads and rolled their eyes … I could have told him that the bits and harness were too tight.

“One of Salome’s husbands had known horses well in his own land. He tended the stallions while the master was in residence. And soon, on Master’s heels, would appear the small cart of the buyers, their delicate weights and scales bound in bales of hay for cushioning; and behind them, a chain of wagons to haul the crop down to the ships.

“The buying took up several days after the rains had passed. It was another time we bondsfolk barely stopped to breathe. For we must take the bales down from the lofts and carry them to where the merchants sat under an awning. We lifted the bales into the weighing cradle; then down again; then over to the wagons, where we loaded them under the orders of the draymen.

“Master Plackler had a carved armchair with yellow cushions carried out onto the grass, where he faced the merchants, watching everything most regally. I seldom looked upon him in those years: it was my way of trying, as children will, to be invisible, for it was clear to any observer now that I had lied about my age in ’51. But one morning as I helped to drag a bale to the merchants, I did so. He sat that chair as if it were a throne, fist curled over an ivory stick as if it were a scepter. His hair was brown and as long as the wigs men then affected.” She glances at Coote’s balding brow. “One of the merchants had been smoking a mix of leaves from different bales. They did this to grade the quality, of course, but also to be sure no mould or mustiness had settled in the crop. The merchant puffed, then made a sour face. ‘Ah, Barbados,’ said he. ‘The plant grows well here, but there is something lacking in the soil. Never is the taste as rich as that from the Virginia colony.’

“The master barely looked his way. ‘Nor is the purse you pay as rich,’ said he. ‘Get on with it. You know my terms.’ He seemed so mighty, Henry Plackler. I was proud that he was mine. Or I was his: for as a child I had these things somewhat confused.”

Coote, as he records this, recalls that the prisoner was said to have had a liaison with Henry Plackler when she was sixteen: one that got her sold off for another seven years. Involuntarily he glances at her. She seems so pale and plain. What about her had the Captain of the
Falconer
desired? Why had Henry Plackler looked beyond the fine flanks of the earthy African women? The latter are to Coote’s anticipating tastes. Somehow Lucy’s quietude swells the effect of her voluptuousness; he catches himself thinking of the seductiveness of silence.

“That is what slavery will do, at first,” she interrupts, looking beyond him to the garden. “You search for something to belong to that is high—that can make you
mean
more than on your own you do mean to the world around you. Which is nothing. And does that not seem a way of looking for a new tribe, once one’s own has been ripped away?”

The question catches Coote unawares. For a second he almost considers it. The next evening it will return on scented breeze, through a lace curtain.

Cot Quashey tells him that every year after the crop sale there would be a feed: the master would buy a sheep or a fine heifer from a neighboring herd, and Jenks would have it slaughtered. It was Salome who knew best how to pit-roast the meat: which stones should line the earthen tunnel and not crack when baked in flames. Which leaves to lay over and under the carcass so that it stayed moist, rather than singeing dry and bitter. Cot and the other young folk dug the pit, following Salome’s pointing fingers. Then, while the meat was roasting, they gathered twigs and boughs and fallen branches of the palm, and built a high bonfire against the twilit sky.