The Sugar Planter's Daughter (20 page)

I
had always thought
my children would visit Promised Land, the family seat, frequently, but George adamantly refused to return there, and I could never manage to take them on my own. With each new child the possibility of showing them my old home faded more and more into the realms of the impossible. They would be almost adult before we could possibly make it as a family – and then it would be without George.

Something had happened on George's last visit to Promised Land. Some quarrel with Yoyo. A bad quarrel, bad enough for him to vow never to speak to her again, never to set foot in her home.

‘But it's also my old home, George!' I had pleaded, but he was adamant. No.

‘If you would just tell me what happened! I know that Yoyo can be very obnoxious, but surely there's a way to forgive her and start again – things were going so nicely between you. If you'd just tell me perhaps I can'

‘Yoyo,' he said, ‘was insulting towards you. She called you a tame little kitten. You're anything
but
a little kitten.'

I only laughed. ‘A kitten! I like that! So I suppose if I'm a kitten she's a tiger?'

‘Don't you see how she's trying to insult you?'

‘Oh, George! Yoyo is always calling me names. She always likes to tease me. It doesn't matter. If I'm not offended, why should you be on my behalf? I don't mind.'

‘But
I
mind! I won't go back there until she apologises.'

‘Oh, you silly boy! Yoyo will never apologise. She never has, in her whole life, not for anything, even when she was clearly in the wrong. It's totally beneath her dignity – she won't. That's just the way Yoyo is. It doesn't matter. We have to accept Yoyo just as she is, love her just as she is, with all her little foibles. I don't care, so why should you?'

‘I won't speak to anyone who disrespects my wife. It's a point of honour with me.'

‘No, George, it's just your pride. And what does the Church say about pride? Isn't it one of the seven deadly sins?'

‘There's a difference between pride and dignity. I would feel less of a man if I allowed Yoyo to cast aspersions against you without protest. And since she will never take back her words, I cannot step foot in her house again. I'm sorry, Winnie. I just can't.'

‘What about turning the other cheek, George? Forgiving those that trespass against us? It's really very un-Christian of you.'

‘She insulted Humph. She called him a cripple and a half-caste.'

‘Well, the words aren't very nice but it's all true in a way. Yoyo doesn't mince words. She doesn't have a tactful vein in her body. She speaks her mind – that's just the way it is.'

I sighed. George was so very stubborn. He didn't begin to understand Yoyo, wasn't even trying. There had to be more behind this: I suspected that Yoyo had made some disparaging comment about his race. She can be very blunt, and I'm afraid that she still thinks the white race superior, and sometimes says things to that effect. That would certainly have annoyed George – he's very sensitive about race – but I could imagine that he didn't want to tell me.

‘Did she say anything about you, George? Make some racist comment? I know you hate that.' He didn't answer, but hung his head, and that's when I knew.

‘Oh, George! She did, didn't she? Look, she doesn't mean it. She loved Nanny, who was Indian. Deep inside she's got a good heart – really.'

‘Why don't you go by yourself, if you want to see her so badly?'

‘But I want us to go as a
family,
George! With the baby! If I go alone it will look as if we have quarrelled and she will certainly ask questions, and then I'll have to explain that you're being stubborn, and then she'll laugh at you and then I'll be cross with her for insulting you, and then I'll be cross with you for being cross with her… and then it will all be so complicated. Why can't everyone just love each other and be nice to each other and forgive and forget? I will never understand it. Truly, never.'

He took my hand. And squeezed it.

‘I'm sorry, darling, I really am. I know I'm being stubborn but…' He didn't finish the sentence. He just shook his head and looked infinitely sad. It was so tiresome.

But George remained adamant. He would not tell me, and he would not go. And she would not come. As a result I had not seen Yoyo for five whole years. And I missed her.

I
n the meantime Kitty
, Eliza and Tilly had become my
ersatz
-sisters. Yes, in the beginning, they had used me as a ladder up Georgetown's social slopes. But by now it was more than that. With Kitty especially I felt a deep rapport – she had taken over entirely the running of Quintessentials, and she did it well. Profits were better than ever before, and she enjoyed the work. Enjoyed it so much, she said, that she definitely did not want children.

It was Kitty whose life was most dissimilar to mine. She was the only unmarried one of us. Eliza and Tilly were now both well settled: Tilly had married a prosperous up-and-coming businessman named Peter Sawyer, and had a daughter, and Eliza – well, Eliza had married Emily's brother Andrew, and so had achieved her end in ‘catching' a white man. Though she didn't put it as crudely as that: she did love Andrew, and he her; but he was, for her, a trophy, a goal achieved, and her two children could ‘pass for white', a term I heard many a time.

Kitty had suitors enough but had, up to now, held back. I had always wondered why, but Kitty did not readily speak of personal matters, and I felt it rude to ask. But now the information had come freely, and from her.

She had first let me into her big secret when Gordon was a baby. Kitty still lived with her mother, a widow, who had a big house and garden in Waterloo Street, and I often took the children there in the afternoon to let them play and run. And with them all in tow we would walk up to the Sea Wall and stroll along and let the children play in the sand.

On one of those days, Kitty told me her secret. I had dropped a little hint about her own future children, and she had replied, rather bluntly, ‘No offence, Winnie – you're doing a marvellous job and I admire you no end – and I love being an aunty to yours. But I couldn't, and I won't.'

‘You won't have children?'

‘That's right.'

‘But then – you won't marry?'

‘Oh, maybe I'll marry one day,' she said. ‘But it's going to be hard finding a suitable husband, isn't it? They all want children. That's the whole point of marriage, they all seem to think. I do make sure a man who wants to court me is informed right from the start, and they all back away when I tell them. So I don't let myself fall in love. It's that simple. Or that hard.'

‘Oh Kitty, I'm so sorry! I hope you'

‘Don't worry, dear. Perhaps there's someone for me out there. It's finding him that is so hard.'

‘I'm sure you will! Someone as nice as you shouldn't be alone in life.'

‘Well – till then I've got Mama and Papa. And you. And Eliza and Tilly. I'm a lucky woman!'

‘And we're lucky to have you.'

And I was. The isolation I felt in Albouystown evaporated when I was with my friends, and I was beginning to understand that my best efforts to penetrate the barriers made by my race and my class – the fact that it was actually a
former
class did not count – would always be in vain. Too deep and bloody were the wounds the white man had cut into the hearts of the slaves and their descendants, too near the surface the anger emanating from those wounds, too ready to explode. They were not ready to forgive my race, and I had no right to demand forgiveness. Even though it was not I who had made those wounds, I represented those who had, and must accept rejection as a stand-in for the truly guilty. I could be as friendly and warm and caring as I wanted, but I could not cross that divide. The best I could hope for was a polite wariness. Even Aunty Dolly, she who had taken pity on me so many years ago and helped me find George when I thought all was lost, would never be a real aunty. Our lives would always be separate.

But these three, Kitty, Eliza and Tilly, the result of irregular relationships between slave-owners and slaves far back in the past, were my friends. They had crossed the divide by dint of blood. Though the wounds of the slave-women once violated, raped, abused must have been as deep as a ravine, they had no doubt loved the children so produced, and so was born that class of cross-breeds, neither one nor the other, striving for upliftment, insecure because of their black blood but ambitious because of their white blood. I longed to argue that all blood is red, but I knew that those arguments were futile. I had been lonely for female friends, and now they were there for me. It was not my task to change them, or educate them, or teach them. I wanted only their friendship.

Emily played on the sidelines of our group. She had been my only friend back when I was Winnie Cox, the sugar planter's daughter. Emily had been my confidante when I first fell in love with George; Emily had helped me run away. Now, like me, she was a married woman; though her husband, of course, was an acceptable member of English society. Emily and Andrew had never been as snobbish as their parents, and as Eliza's sister-in-law she sometimes joined us mothers when, occasionally, we brought our children together to play. But she played with fire in maintaining a friendship with me.

Emily's mother, Mrs Stewart, once my sycophantic admirer, anxious to win my company for her daughter (and perhaps my hand for her son), had turned her coat and been at the forefront of white society's drive to cast me out. She had been furious when Andrew married Eliza, of course, and had blamed it all on me.

Somehow, she had heard of the party Andrew and his friends had been invited to, the party George had attended and at which Andrew and Eliza had met. It had been something of a scandal at the time, and of course it was all my fault.

A
ndrew and Eliza
, too, had become outcasts; but later on, their children had proved to be a ragged path back to family peace. Eliza, light-skinned as she was, would find reluctant acceptance in white society. It helped that she had a winning personality, quick intelligence and genuine charm. She would make it, as I never would. While a coloured woman marrying a white man could rise into acceptance, it did not work the other way round. I had lowered myself to an irredeemable level in marrying George. Too low, in Emily's mother's eyes, to be her daughter's friend. Yes, we laughed and joked about it, but it hurt all the same. It hurt as did the rift in my own family.

‘So are you still not speaking to Yoyo?' Emily asked one day.

I shook my head sadly. ‘It's not that I'm not speaking to her. It's that I never see her. It's she who's keeping away from me. I would meet her in a wink – but how can I go to Promised Land with all the children, if George refuses to go? I can't drag five children, including two babies and a wild five-year-old, up there. They would all fall – or jump – off the ferry the moment my back was turned.'

‘I still don't understand. Why does George refuse to go? Does Yoyo still reject him, even now?'

I shrugged in frustration.

‘It's ridiculous, if you ask me. Yes, Yoyo rejected George at first, but then it seemed that she was making an effort to get to know him. But you know Yoyo – she can be quite rude when she wants to be, and that's what happened. When I was in Venezuela they had some kind of a falling-out. He won't tell me exactly what she said, and Mama – who was there – is quite vague about the whole thing. All she says is that Yoyo was rather condescending and insulting towards George and me. I suppose he took offence. But I think he should forgive and forget. Yoyo is just the way she is. We have to accept her with all her faults. She's still my sister, and I love her.'