The Long Song (42 page)

‘Are you July of Amity?’ an English voice said.

July made no reply but that of a sigh. For she was thinking of the heave she must make to see herself lifted from the ground.

‘I know who you are—I have just come from the court,’ this English voice carried on.

She had not will enough to cuss, ‘So why you bother asking me, nah? Cha!’ for even thinking it, tired her. She just stared upon the black polished shoes, then up the grey trousers to the matching cutaway jacket, over the stiff collar of the white shirt with its knotted scarlet silk tie, then gasped. For all at once she was gazing up upon the face of that black man.

‘Are you July?’ this man again said, ‘once a slave, a house slave at Amity? Your mistress was Caroline Mortimer?’

‘No,’ said she, ‘Not me.’ For there was such certainty within the tone of his questioning that she was sure this answer would find least trouble for her.

But the man tipped his head upon her and said, ‘But I believe you are.’ Just that. Two times he said it, before leaning down to assist her so she might rise from the ground. ‘I believe you are.’ As this man touched July’s arm, she shooed him from it. But without sign of misgiving, the man raised his hat to her and said, ‘My name is Thomas Kinsman. Do you know me?’

Perhaps if his face had creased to yell like a mewling baby, she may have known him. Perhaps if he had talked to her of a moonless night, a stony trail and a red kerchief tied at a pickney’s head, she would have begun to think him familiar. Perhaps if he had conjured an ill-begotten black pickaninny abandoned upon a stone, and talked of a Baptist manse, of James Kinsman and of his good-goodly wife Jane, her memory would have been roused. And then, perhaps, if he had seated himself beside her to commence the tale of a small negro foundling taken from Jamaica upon the ship called the
Apolline
to start a new life in England, July may have recognised this Thomas Kinsman as her son.

And his chronicle might have begun with lengthy, excited description of a sea voyage; with men dangling high from the ship’s masts; a raging deep-blue ocean drenching foaming water over all aboard; his shivering body encrusted with a fine layer of salt. But probably not. For Thomas Kinsman would want you first to know the name of the parish where the Kinsman family finally rested when they arrived in England. So he would commence his tale with the word Hornsey (that being the parish), before moving on to give you the name and the precise location (perhaps with the aid of some map) of the village of Crouch End.

Then would come the depiction of a small house upon a street named Maynard. (Sometimes he will call this street Mayfield and frown upon his listener for believing it called anything other than this—but then, within the next telling, Maynard would once again appear.) He will want you to understand that this house was much smaller than the one the Kinsmans had occupied in Jamaica, and that its kitchen was set under the same roof as the house. But no servants did scurry and run there; for Jane Kinsman, good-goodly woman that she was, did perform all the duties required for a minister’s household with very little help.

There was a fire kept lit within a grange and pots and pans did bubble and boil upon that stove all day long. While within a room called a front room, there was a coal fire. Yes, an open fire within a room where all the sitting and eating, and talking and reading, of his family was done. Sometimes the flames of this fire burned blue, owing to the gas that was given off from the mineral. But any listener would be wise to move Thomas Kinsman away from this fine detail, for his knowledge of coal stuffs could weary you before he has told you of bedtime in this little house. How the three boys—James, Henry and Thomas—every evening did run up the stairs to jump into a cold press-bed, where six fidgeting feet, elbows and knees tussled for warmth before nestling down to lock in sleep.

‘Jim, Henry, Black Tom, come out, come out,’ Thomas Kinsman will want you to hear—for this was yelled each morning by the ragged gang of children that lived within the rundown houses—the windows blackened with soot—that sat close to their dwelling across the street. He will then have you run with them to ascend a high hill to the road of Mount Pleasant from where you will watch the farm boys ploughing the fields below and follow the line of trees that seemed to stretch out across a dim-dark London to the cathedral of St Paul’s.

He will have you strolling with him over to the Crouch Hall estate to walk quietly within the park; to view the wildfowl nesting upon the island in the large lake and sit beneath a drooping willow tree where the water running under the bridge fell frothing for thirty feet; or have you crack the ice upon Cholmeley brook to free the ducks to slip-slide across its surface.

And you will watch him fight the bully-boy, John Smith, and feel him pushing his grimacing face down into the icy snow for calling Thomas Kinsman a savage; and the blood gushing from John Smith’s nose will turn that white snow once again into red slush.

And then Thomas Kinsman will see you stand astounded, your mouth agape, as Jacob Walker, leaning upon a freshly whittled stick, saunters into view at the edge of St Mary’s churchyard. For here is another negro within this little English village. You will watch as a skinny black man from the Americas, with his greying hair and deep drawling voice, who was servant to a missus in Highgate, presents a grateful and excited Thomas with a gift; the first of the many
Penny Magazine
s he gave to his ‘little nigger brother’ whenever he chanced him.

And be in no doubt that Thomas Kinsman would joy to take you through each page of each edition of every
Penny Magazine
he read, so you too might marvel at the engravings of Goodrich Castle or Highgate Church, or sit engrossed reading of the fertilisation of larvae, or the use of the goat as a wet-nurse.

But you must rest awhile for once Thomas Kinsman starts you upon the journey through his schooldays at the Crouch End Academy, he will demand all your regard as he talks of his lessons in history, geography and arithmetic, Greek, French and Latin. He may even offer to conjugate some Latin verbs for you, but it would be prudent for any listener to refuse politely this proposal; and be thankful that his school books were lost upon the voyage back to Jamaica, for he would have you perusing each and every one.

All these events Thomas Kinsman would willingly impart to any listener; but the story of his life in England does not truly commence until that keen-eyed negro boy—now fourteen, with shoulders that are restless to broaden, hair that wishes to sprout in parts never before seen and a voice that craves to pitch low—was bound in apprenticeship to a printer near Fleet Street. James Kinsman signed a deed that tied Thomas to a Mr Linus Gray for seven years—not only for instruction into the trade of print, but also to board within his household for the duration.

For Thomas could no longer remain within the Kinsmans’ charge, as liquor had seen them all driven from Crouch End. James Kinsman had declared that he could not minister within a village where the beer shop and the public houses had greater congregation than any Sunday worship. And where the foremost family of the parish shamelessly made their prominence through the distilling of gin.

When James Kinsman had sought to have all dens of inebriation closed down within Hornsey, so the labouring classes might go about their work with clearer heads, a rough and abusive crowd had gathered outside his house in Maynard Street, banging frying pans, pots, kettles, boards, pokers, shovels, to demand that the family depart. And although James Kinsman was forced to leave Hornsey to take up his new ministry in Lewes, in the county of Sussex, the learned, detailed, and very long, pamphlet he wrote upon the riotous intoxication to be found within Crouch End remains to this day, unpublished.

But Thomas Kinsman’s black eyes will not dim when he recounts this leave-taking. No. Rather, he will place his hands together and thoughtfully raise them to his lips while he pronounces slowly, so as to exalt the meaning, that for boys like him—for foundlings—the choice before him for betterment was either employment in service or in trade; and to be a printer, he will say with startling delight, well, ever since he first studied those
Penny Magazine
s, to be a printer was his avid wish.

And, before you will realise, you will be standing within a cramped dusty printing office on the south side of Fleet Street in Water Lane, where the dim sunlight from the window shows motes of dust as big as coins gliding through the air. Linus Gray—a skinny, tall man of about two and thirty with a nose so pointed he could spear a fish with it and a jaw square as nobility—was at a desk with his head bowed, perusing several large sheets of paper with the care of a surgeon examining an open wound, as his new apprentice stepped in.

Linus’s expression, at first dull and bored, all at once changed upon seeing Thomas. He jumped from his seat laughing and clapping his hands. ‘Oh, wait until they see you!’ he sang as he skipped around his desk and spun Thomas to examine every angle of him within the dirty light. Linus Gray was so excited to have a negro foundling as his apprentice—a black boy who was born a slave in the West Indies and yet who could conjugate any Latin verb that Linus could bring to mind—that Thomas Kinsman became this man’s firm favourite from that day on.

However, when Linus Gray’s wife, Susan, first saw the new apprentice who was to lodge with them in their attic room, she screamed. Susan Gray begged her husband not to have a Hottentot board in their house; she thought it bad luck. But Linus ignored her concern and dismissed it with the word, ‘fiddlesticks’.

Thomas wrote to James Kinsman to tell that Susan Gray liked him so little and feared him so much that she carried a broom with her when he was about the house so that if Thomas ever approached her she might hold him the length of it from her. James Kinsman, in reply, promised to pray that Thomas would soon come to regard Susan Gray as his mother.

Alone at the top of the Grays’ tall narrow house that sat adjacent to the print office, in a room whose sloping roof rendered it no bigger than a cupboard, sitting by the dingy light and feeble heat of two coals that burned in the grate, wrapped in a blanket and wiping the black snot that ran from his nose upon his sleeve—Thomas wept.

And you might see a cloud come into Thomas Kinsman’s eye as he recounts those early days in London Town. He may recite for you the prayer he made—the one for the Kinsmans, all of them, to please, please, please, come find him. He may even admit to his listener that he did think to run away. But probably not. Instead, Thomas Kinsman will wave his hand to dismiss your concern. He may even use the word fiddlesticks. For he will not leave his listener to dwell upon sorrow when the print office beckons and he can show you what a good little devil he became.

The print office of Messrs Gray and Co.—a brick house that seemed to lean exhausted upon its neighbour in the middle of Water Lane—became Thomas Kinsman’s real home. For he chased up and down its dark winding stairs, ran in and out of the close, overheated rooms, scuttled about the dusty closets, searched the brimming cupboards, as ‘Black Tom’ was yelled at him from seven in the morning until seven in the evening. People, paper, metal, ink and presses all seemed to demand his devil’s care. Every inch of this engorged five-storey house was so hurly-burly that, when in full spurt, the lungs of men competed with the candles’ flames for air to breathe—and on long nights, neither burned the colour they should.

Parliament was where Gray and Co. found its work. Porters despatched from that magisterial institution arrived all day laden with colonial papers, reports of committees, election returns, statistics and accounts. Reams and reams of handwritten bluster that passed before Linus Gray’s glance, to collate and to folio, to decide upon its worth and to settle upon its price before the four journeymen compositors were commanded to mount their frames to prepare for copy.

Caslon or Garamond or Baskerville is shouted as the compositors search for as many cases of these types as can be found. But never is there enough of those metal letters. The apprentice is charged to clean the ones just used so he can distribute a constant supply, lest a compositor be forced into some fancy spelling for the want of Es. With his upper-case upper and his lower-case lower, the compositor, standing at his frame with his stick held in his hand, like an artist with his palette, looks first to the handwritten copy, before click, click, clicking metal letters into a line. Then, line by line, each page is built up upon a form and the metal words are banged home with a mallet, tightened and spaced with slugs of wood, then locked within this frame by the teeth of quoins. And when the page is set, ‘Proof’ is yelled at the door.