Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (11 page)

“ ‘No Master, I am very cold,’ I shuddered. And he commanded me to make myself a nest in the hay, he would send Mary to bring a blanket and tend my wounds. ‘You are a worthy lass,’ he told me. ‘I will not see you spoiled, you can rest certain of that.’

“Poor Mary came to wash and heal me in moments stolen from the mistress. Ah, how she begged my pardon for the part that she was forced to play, in witnessing a theft that never happened! Though in the shed he’d laughed when I told him of his lady’s plot against me, when his wife accused me to him he was most serious, Mary said, of mein. ‘My dear,’ he told her, ‘you must not be vexed by such inconsequentials. The maid must be returned to fieldwork; trouble no more about her, but rest so that your health returns.’ ”

Coote has a notion. He indulges it. “Did you report Mary Dove’s plot because she had borne false witness against you?”

“Did I take vengeance? No! None of us owned the right to tell the truth, we all understood that,” says Cot Quashey. “The truth was the creation of our masters. Everybody knew. But we also had a duty to, in small silent ways, do what we could to behave
other
than the masters’ truth.”

“You babble,” Coote reminds sternly.

“For not keeping right behavior—this is why I’ve had to bear the guilt of Paudi Iasc these many years. For once my back had healed and I returned to second gang, I found the other bondspeople accepted me in a way they had not done before. It was the welts upon my back. A kind of respect had come from surviving the ceremony of the whip, like some reversed communion of unjust pain between us. But also, those higher in rank who might have used Eugenia Plackler’s ire as excuse to wield the whip, desisted. For the master had begun to favor me.

“Oh, not one word was said directly, but Dora and Jenks could sense that he did not want to see another mark upon me. Yet even from this dually strengthened position, when Paudi Iasc called out to me for a sip of water on his second day in the stocks, I lowered my head and skirted his suffering without reply. Even the Roman soldiers gave Christ a sponge of vinegar. But I would not chance to help my countryman the least, and even glared in anger at his face. For I was afraid.

“I was afraid,” the Irishwoman cants, “to lose all I had gained. For once again I felt the manic demiurge called hope. The master had begun to visit me most nights. From the open stable to a disused stall I moved, and Master Henry bade me use whatever was at hand to make myself comfortable. I dragged bale after bale of old honey-scented hay to build my roost. I made a bed of sorts, raised knee-height from the floor to discourage rats; and pushing bales up onto this first platform I made the seat where Master came to sit and talk. From my deserted pallet Mary brought me my father’s coat, my mother’s whistle hidden still in its deep pocket; and also brought a coverlet which had been set aside for polishing. At my master’s orders she brought a sconce for tallow wicks. We hung it from the very spike I had been tied to for my chastisement. Which slowly, so desperate was I, I began to bless; for it was the flogging that had brought me to my master’s eye.

“Who do we love, as much as the deliverer?” she muses. Coote glances up acutely. The Irishwoman’s staring into some deep void in front of her. “And what pain lingers longer than being despised?

“From my mistress and her recurring madness, he brought me laughter. The first door to shut since I had been trepanned: there was a half-door on my disused stall—this was the door I proudly opened when I heard his boots approaching in the dark. I was a child, a girl child. The first bauble he brought me was the riband, the very blue riband I had not stolen: he fetched it to me. ‘There Cot,’ he said, ‘that justifies something.’ He tied it in my hair, then pulled the ribboned coil toward him and sunk his nose in it. Only one week before had he first unbound my cap to touch my curls. ‘I remember you,’ he said then, dreamily, spreading one hand through my ringlets and snarls. ‘That afternoon in Bridgetown when they brought you from the ship, and I bought you, gray rags and all, even then I took note of this hair.’

“In the stable I learned about my looks. My master owned me, truth, labor, and looks. Thus he commanded me to bathe in the stream every Saturday afternoon, and in the stable to keep my cap off, my hair unbound, the riband looped to tie it up. Keep the first buttons of my bodice undone because he found the white flesh at my neck startling: ‘That such a one should have such skin,’ he murmured, as I sat upon his knee.”

Coote’s lips tighten and turn down at her words. His trousers rub uncomfortably against his thighs.

“Yes, sir, I sat upon his knee, as he bade me do. I took off the faded too-tight bodice, and laced on the ivory cambric corselet that he brought to me, and by the end I bit my lips and slapped my cheeks for color, just to see him pause outside the pool of tallow light as I held the stall door open, and whisper, ‘Beautiful! Beautiful! ’ But what you think, sir, did not happen.”

Coote sniggers, instantly angry for demeaning himself by showing such expression before a hag of lower race. He is, according to the evidence, only four or five years younger than herself.

“Nay, it did not. For Master Henry did not crave the natural from me, though with his croonings and his touchings I came to want to offer it. Wanting to feel the hand of comfort more, to keep it longer with me in that sea of fear which was my life in bond. But no, Master Henry liked to talk. To talk and diddle.

“The night he brought his lady’s corselet to me he spoke of those fond days when his Eugenia—he called her Jenny then, said he—had been his bride of love. She had defied her father, the Earl of Orkney, with her youngest brother’s help, to slip away and marry him. And had gotten away with it, the only girl ’mid four strong sons all bickering for land. In shame to see her married down, the Earl had sent them out to govern his Barbados holdings. The youngest brother got her hall near Nottingham.

“I sat so still upon his lap, my heart thumping with desire to be like pretty Jenny. To inhabit her place in the story so that he would run away with me though we were landless, penniless, because he could not resist my beauty. What power anyone would have, if they were truly irresistible. Rich or poor, we women dream of this road, and of how we’ll win it!

“But as I sat there, barely breathing as he absently stroked my soft new bosom above the corselet’s fine silky stuff, he grew quite angry under me. Talked about his lady’s father; how he, my master, had been hobbled like a slave, by a pittance of retainer in Barbados. ‘They say it is my gambling,’ he sneered to the darkness of the barn. ‘But what galls them is that I’m a man! Not a niggardly merchant, but a man! Willing to risk all for a change of luck they’ll never know, with their prudent caution. And now … ,’ he uttered low, ‘they mean to break me because my wife cannot bear a living child, an heir of our shared blood. But I will not be broken! I will not find myself evicted from this estate on the day her coffin lowers to the ground. Her great bullocks of brothers will not oust me!

“ ‘I have a plan! I only need a little credit from this one or that among my neighbors … then I
will
risk all, you’ll see.’ Can you imagine my youth, the innocence? Of how I timidly touched his dark long curls, for I was certain he meant me. I was the risk, I thought, or bound up with it in the everything he wanted for himself.”

Peter Coote lays his quill down in its holder. He is charged with sudden fury. “Who do you think to deceive with your rantings?” he demands. “The Governor? Or only me? Good men may slip in the grease of a slattern’s skirts for reasons of no import. But what freeman, let alone a gentleman, would reveal his plans and secrets to a tart, a cow, a lowly slave? What do you take me for, you frowsy hag?”

Now it is the prisoner’s turn to appear incredulous. After a moment she clears her throat, and in a voice so mild it’s almost kindly, says, “Why sir, the preferred confidante of the master
is
the slave. Who else can be trusted not to turn dark secrets to a tumbling of power? Who else will listen patiently, uncritically, endlessly, admiringly—expressing no objections or opinions? Who else provides the truly captive audience, which never asks for discourse, or even reason, but must agree? Why, masters are not masters because they wish to share, or to collaborate …”

Before the storm comes to wash the glumness from the afternoon, the Irishwoman tells her gaoler of that night when Mary Dove crept to the shed before the master. “I thought that he’d come early, and somehow I had missed the sound of his boots on the pebbles of the yard. Quickly I slid a finger to unhook the two top buttons of my blouse. With the other hand I slapped each cheek as I bit down on my lower lip. The wick was in the sconce already, lit by a coal from my cooking fire behind the shed. The door creaked slowly inward, the horse uneasy, nickering, then still again.

“I had not heard her for she was barefoot, as all bondspeople were. Now she held a finger to her lips to caution silence, and moved forward. I remember the oddest things, even now, about that visit. She, herself forced to condone the weaknesses and concede the lies of those who held her life in hand, had never once, during the months after my flogging, asked if he’d had his way with me. I suppose there would have been no point. Surely it was assumed. A bondsmaid has no right to withhold aught from her owners. And Mary would have had no way to help me, any more than she could help Ardiss, or Salome’s girl, or myself when I was flogged for growing comely.

“But now she came toward me in the candle glow, and put her hand on my forearm, and said blandly, ‘Look at you, gotten up as for your betrothed.’ Her hand was icy cold.

“I mistook her at the first, mock-curtsying because I thought she was admiring me, as did himself. I smiled. ‘Beautiful. The master calls me Beautiful.’

“She shook my arm once, sharply. ‘From this night forward you need not suffer him again,’ she said low but stern. ‘We will go far from here, no one will know, you will forget, you will have a new life.’ She told me of her plan. At first they’d thought that when he left me tonight, I should tip the wick into the hay and run, and meet them in the jungle. But now they had decided not to fire anything. The neighboring plantations would see the flames and smell the smoke. No; they, the plotters—the two Pauds, Salome and her man, several Africans including the small pickaninny who brought my tin of loblolly each evening, and Mary herself—they would hack the enemy in its bed. My only task was to untie his horse, the last steed on the plantation, and lead it quietly into the bush. Someone else would bring the donkey, tethered for pasturage at the forest’s edge. That way, no alarm could be swiftly raised, should anyone escape the butcher knife.

“I argued with her,” the Irishwoman insists. Coote peers fiercely at his prisoner, then nods in agreement as the scene runs before his mind’s eye. “I pleaded for my master’s life, for I loved him, the savior on whom I had staked every desperate hope. I told her how impossible it would be—a dozen ill-fed, exhausted serving folk; with what? Stones to throw? A garden hoe, a cotton baling knife? The master and Jenks were said to sleep with brass-fitted pistols and cedar bags of shot beside their beds. Never! Never would we scare-crows see the sun rise if we dast raise hands against our masters.

“And Mary. How she looked at me with pity. A pity which moved her hand over my cheek, cupping my chin in the secret gesture which, ever since my mother, I have hungered for. ‘You do not understand yet, Darling. How going free can make us suddenly a match for any gun,’ she said, so gently. ‘But it’s all right. You do not need to understand. Just untie the horse and lead it to the wood, when himself has finished with you for the night. We’ll find you there.’

“She never doubted me, my Mary. She was not taken so young that her moral bones were yet unformed. But I had been. And when my master, who’d been cupping my small chin in his hand for many weeks, came to my stall, I found his favor more valuable than hers, or any of my kind.”

“By ‘your kind’ do you mean those of the Irish nation?” he clarifies busily, without looking up. There is the slightest pause.

“Well. Of the Irish nation: or the female nation: or of the nation of all chattel,” replies the prisoner. “At any rate, that night when he arrived master brought me a cutlet from his plate, and held a cup of wine, and found no fault with me, but was youthful and merry. He held me round the waist and talked about his plan. It was to stake Arlington—the crops, the slaves, the animals down to the last hen’s egg—for wager against a large plantation in Brazil, once its owner—too fond of cane whiskey—returned to Bridgetown. And all the while I was thinking.

“By now, over six years of my bond had passed, according to the Captain’s deal. I did not want to risk my release in a year: that lay, sir, at the very bottom of my hot, cold, reasoning. I told him everything.”

The interrogation pauses. Peter Coote looks his prisoner up and down with a pursed smile before he asks, “So, biddy, would you say that you were Mary Dove’s wren?” The mad bitch spits onto the floor. He masters himself before he asks coolly, “What happened then? Was he displeased with you as well as with your comrades? For soon, I know, you were sold off to the Glebe.”

Cot Quashey shakes her head. “Not that it matters, what happened between livestock dealers long ago, but never was I sold to that plantation. This is what happened. In the morning, they led the plotters off hobbled, Mary amongst them. Jenks had run the horse into a lather the night before to raise militia at the next plantation, while the Master had loaded all his firearms and sat in the vestibule to wait. He doused the lights for bed and let the rebels give him time to enter a peaceful sleep. Salome’s man was the first to creep in through the door, then Paud nOg. They each received a bullet for their welcoming. I was not there, but I imagine it still, the mistress screaming from above, the master laughing as he often did at moments that seemed not to call for it. The first two rebels different shades of blue in the moonlight, then the tarry blood seeping from them, the loud clatter on the porch as Jenks with the hasty raggle-tag militia leapt out of the bushes with guns and swords at hand. All night I huddled in the hay within the barn, not certain who would take the lead, and fearing either side. I prayed desperately to my fading saints to defend me, then defended myself hotly to those tired saints. But they kept still. Nothing stirred but a rat, munching old chaff. I wafted from the strain of prayer’s dry words told on the rosary of my fingertips, to the likelier image of a master I might cosset and persuade: one who could, with his gratitude, wash away my ever-whelming dread that I had murdered my only friend when I gave him her secret.