The Polished Hoe (17 page)

“Mr. Bellfeels, as white as he looks today, is really not pure white. He mixed. He doesn’t like to be in the sun too long. And he never bathes in the sea. Saltwater, he used to tell me, tans the skin, and turns you too black. Isn’t that man a foolish son-of-a-bitch! Pardon my French, Sargeant.

“Then, he was made manager-acting. And from manageracting to his present position. Manager of this Plantation.

“The Main House, as you know, is the biggest house on this estate. It is just the distance of a four-hundred-and-forty-yard race, from this Great House. But with the fruit trees and the fields and the turns in the road, you can’t see it from here, and it look more farther from where we are. The Plantation Main House is the power on the estate.

“Yes! So, he was eventually made Manager, and it take exactly the number of years Wilberforce born for Mr. Bellfeels to rule this Plantation.

“But that taste I was talking about. That taste, that taint, that mouldiness like the soil of the North Field; that sickening smell of dirt and wet dust, reminding you of something that is dead, perpetually rotting . . . I suppose our bodies go through that kind of disfiguration,
‘earth to earth: duss to duss’
; the mould carrying in its smell, the smell of a million centipees crawling in one thick, neverending dark-brown wave of nastiness and stinging disgustedness, disgusting to people, all people, not only infants and boys like Golbourne. Disgusting to animals, too. That smell of wet, black soil, is his smell, is Mr. Bellfeels smell. Yes.

“And it will always be lingering-’bout here; inside this house; on these curtains and blinds; inside the wallpaper; on the pictures and picture frames; in this front-house parlour where me and you sitting on this Sunday evening, in question. It is lingering in the kitchen with Gertrude, poor soul, as she does her housework; in all the rooms upstairs, my dressing room, Wilberforce bedroom and his study; and even after all these years, in my bedroom.

“Don’t even mention in my bed, or inside the mattress. It is like the rot that grows from dampness. Regardless of the amount o’ Jays Fluid, blue soap, white-head bush, bleach and kerosene oil that you pour over certain stains, that kind o’ spot will never come out. Will never leave delicate material, like muslim or sea-island cotton, which it has stained with its stubbornness.

“My boy, Wilberforce, a doctor of Tropical Medicines, calls this kind o’ stain, indellable. Indellable.”

“Indellable,” Sargeant says, with a smile on his face. “Like the ink we have to use in the writing-up of Confidential Reports and Statements! And in our promotion examinations.”

“Like that.”

“Like Quink Ink, Royal Blue in colour.”

“Like Royal Blue Quink Ink. We used it in Penmanship classes at Sin-Davids Elementary School for Girls.”

“We still uses it in Reports and Statements, that is official. And in our promotion examinations.”

“I have seen Mr. Bellfeels use that same ink to write in his ledgers; and he would try over and over to wipe out certain figures, before he felt safe-enough to present them to the owners up in Englund, his superiors; before he could justify his personal statements of how the Plantation money was handled; yes, to the Board of Governors living in Bimshire, and the overseas owners, up in Englund. I have seen Mr. Bellfeels struggle many a night, sweat and perspiration pouring down his face, lose his temper, curse stink-stink, ‘. . . these fecking Limey-bastards! They think all o’ we in Bimshire is slaves?’; having the nerves and anxious moments, shortening-tempers, as he struggled to change a hundredPounds loss, into a seven-hundred-Pounds loss; and pocket the difference struggling to make his figures written down, coincide with his verbal statements, in telephone conversations to the local Board of Governors; and with the cablegrams he sent overseas to the owners in Englund.

“So, I know about Quink Ink. The Royal Blue tints and tinctures, as Mr. Bellfeels himself was in the habit of calling it by.”

“But what a lovely ink, though!” Sargeant says. His face is beaming. Perhaps it is the perspiration on his cheeks. “I have a Watermans fountain pen that the Commissioner o’ Police give me, the day I made Crown-Sargeant. And I won’t be caught dead without my Watermans, always full o’ Royal Blue Quink ink. I even got it with me, now!

“Once in Standard Four, a afternoon, round half-pass two, we was doing Penmanship; and the Teacher was telling we how to write the
t
more shorter than the
h
; and he show we on the blackboard . . . blackboards in them days not only was to write on, but they was used as dividers of one class from the next. Behind our blackboard was Standard Five. On our blackboard, though, the Teacher was writing,
Manners Maketh Man.
The Teacher went to the blackboard to show us how to write; and he had a prettypretty writing-hand; and every time he write a
g
, the chalk make a shrieking sound like a squeak; and the boys would laugh. I was the only boy to get catched laughing. And the Teacher screeled at me, ‘
Stuart! One mark off! For cackling like a hen in class! Lines
!’ And I start crying. And the rest of the boys start laughing.
‘You will write out
Manners Maketh Man
, fifty times. In your English Grammar Exercise Book! In Quink Ink, Stuart! Quink Ink.
’ That is why my writing-hand is so good today.

“I know ’bout Quink Ink. And fountain pens. I carries my Watermans clip-on in my inside-pocket, whether it is this uniform, or the shirts I knocks around the house in; whatever I am wearing. My Watermans is in my black suit I wears to weddings, funerals and Services-o’-Songs. My Watermans! Or in the insidepocket of any suit I wear to church, when I singing tenor in the Choir.

“I don’t leave home without it. Not my Watermans. It travels with me, wherever I go.”

“I know. I know it. And I have seen you wearing it, too. In a short-sleeve sports shirt, one Saturday afternoon, watching cricket on the Pasture. Just like my wishbone.”

“Your wishbone?”

“Yes. My wishbone.”

“This is something I should take-down and add-on to your Statement? It may be something extenniating.”

“You can get it from the Constable. Me and him talked enough already about that wishbone, a wishbone I carried around for years, the same way you carry around your Watermans pen. But mine was like a talisman, a word I hear Wilberforce use.”

“I would not know that word, Miss Mary-Mathilda.
Talisman?
”

“You are a Crown-Sargeant in the Royal Constabulary of the Island of Bimshire, and you should know the word, Percy DaCosta Benjamin Stuart?”

“Well . . ...Well, I have my thoughts . . .”

“On Friday nights over their fried dolphin steaks and dry-peas and rice, Percy Stuart, what you think they does-talk about? The crops? The thrildren? Church? Or even school? For one thing, they don’t talk nothing about education, cause the majority of them didn’t get too far in school!

“They talk about you. Not meaning you, personally. But, about you. In broad terms. And me. The labourers. The maids. The cooks. The messengers. The men who tend the stocks and the stables. Cane cutters. Lorry drivers. And the women they foop and rape, on the Plantation. And breed.

“They lambast politicians who they don’t like. And
everybody
coloured, or that black. Yes.

“And they talk about taking their next Home-Leave, in Englund. They all born
here
, mind you! But home is still Englund. So, every year, they head straight to Englund. You see what that mean? Yes.

“They hate all o’ we. Me. You. Gertrude, out there in the kitchen. Everybody.

“Regardless to colour and complexion. So long as we are not white like them, and belongst to a Plantation.

“Percy Stuart, I have served and I have listened, and pretended I didn’t hear nothing that pass their lips in their condemnation of the black people of this Island.

“I watch them iamming fried dolphin steaks, and fulling their mouths with dry-peas and rice, wash-away in thick, brown gravy; and I smile to myself. But I listen with my two ears prick.

“I have washed their plates, their cups, their glasses and their silvers; and I have listened. And I would pretend not to hear, nor be interested in hearing their stories; have no concern with nothing; aside from concentrating on the sting of the blue soap in the water, and the tightness from the detergents clogging-up my veins as I wash their clothes.

“In my mind was nothing but the sound of the washing.

“I have washed their clothes, yes. I have washed their drawers, their shifts and their panties, their underwears and their monthlyrags, and I have seen their stains, and blots and blood; and I have not pointed a finger at, nor singled-out, the owner of those stains or blots or blood, in judgment.

“Nothing but the sound of washing took my attention, as my two hands rub the clothes on the jucking-board.

“I have cleaned their rooms. Their bathrooms, their bedrooms, their beds, under their beds, seen the stuffing of their mattress, where I have come face-to-face with their true colours: the things they have left, the mess and the messages. And I have closed my two eyes against all temptation to broadcast that evidence. I have cleaned their topsies, their bedpans and chamberpots when they are laid up; and when they are poorly, at death’s door.

“But I always knew the day would come. I lived always with the hope that
my
day would come. When my knowledge of that evidence was seen by me, I knew then that my knowledge of their ways, their behaviour, and their secrets, would be my education and my deliverance.

“We, to them, are all labourers, Percy. You, me, Manny, Golbourne, the Constable. The Headmaster and the Headmistress of the elementary schools. Gertrude. All o’ we. Common, low-class workers. Discardable, Percy. They talk about how to keep you and me in our place. Constantly. And the fact that I have a son, fathered by one of them, Mr. Bellfeels; plus the fact that he treats Wilberforce no different from the way he treats his two girl-thrildren, the inside-thrildren, Miss Euralie Bellfeels, who I call ‘the Duchess,’ and Miss Emonie Bellfeels, ‘the Lady’—not to mention the other lady, his wife, Mistress Bellfeels, formerly Miss Dora Blanche Spence—it still don’t mean that Mr. Bellfeels carries any respect in his heart for me. Does Mr. Bellfeels respect Wilberforce? Perhaps. Because he is a doctor of Tropical Medicines. Does Mr. Bellfeels respect me, the mother of his son-and-heir? Not on your blasted bottom-dollar!
Never!

“There is a distinct difference in the way Mr. Bellfeels see me, and the way he was brought up to see me, from the way he see Mistress Dora Blanche Spence Bellfeels. Yes.

“One is wife. The other is harlot. One is Mistress. The other is the whore. One was. . .”

“Did you say
whore
, Miss Mary?”

“Is there a difference, Percy?”

“Are you referring to your hoe?”

“They are both the same, and sound the same.”

“Well, one is a thing; and the other . . .”

“So, at those Friday night dinner parties, I got to know more about you than you could ever imagine. And the strange thing about this kind of information is that I know more about you as a thing that you stand for in their minds, than as a person. Than as a man. A full person who plays his piano on Friday nights, and takes a snap regularly, as anybody else, at the Harlem Bar & Grill, in the Selected Clienteles Room. You understand now, what I mean?”

“You know
all
this ’bout me, Miss Mary?”

“You understand now, the difference between how you see yourself, and how somebody else who don’t know you, or like you, see you?”

“I understand. But the source of your knowledge of me, frightens me! This is dangerous knowledge that you are in possession of, Miss Mary-Mathilda.”

“I was telling the Constable about the music Mr. Bellfeels used to play in this House. It was like a Victorian parlour in the olden days. Like the ones in the
London Illustrated News.
And like the Friday night magic lanterns that the Department of Social Development and Culture put on, that always had pictures of drawing rooms up in London-Englund, with pictures of the King, George-the-Fiff, sitting in a wing-back chair, playing with a dog, listening to music, on His Master’s Voice.

“But I don’t encourage the dog inside the house!”

“But, Mary-girl,” Sargeant says, in a burst of exuberance followed by contrition. “I don’t mean to be so personal. But, Miss Mary. You mean to tell me that in all these years, as a woman, you was so interested in my tinklellings of Do-re-me-fa-sol-la-tee-do?..Well, God bless my eyesight, this Sunday evening! What I am hearing at all, though?”

“Some things are things that don’t bear repeating two times. One time is enough. So, one chance is all I am offering you, Percy.”

“I tekking that one chance.”

“In a short time from now, in the circumstances, I may not be able to talk to you no more. This is the last time, maybe, we’ll be in the same room.”

“I hope not, Miss Mary-Mathilda. I know you are in possession of certain knowledge that will never come my way. Regardless to my rank.

“This is a case of the possession of knowledge, and having that knowledge conceal from me. Unless you come to my aid, Miss Mary-Mathilda, this is one case I will never crack. So, I have to listen to you, with both o’ my two ears wide open.

“But I have to axe you
one
question, first. What caused you to say, a minute ago, and I quote,
‘This is the last time, maybe, we’ll be in the same room’?”