Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (14 page)

“For greed I also hated in myself. It choked the better things, and it grew fat on loneliness. I hated the other slaves for the measure of food that was shared between us; they seemed to leave me less. Hated my skin, which bled and blistered in the sun, wherever my ragged clothing did not cover me. Hated the sun itself; and slow time, and every living, growing thing that I must bend over till a buzz rang in my ear and sun-worms swam before my eyes.

“Hated my father for not coming to rescue me from the tavern or the ship, like Hercules, leading a godlike fleet on behalf of innocence.” The prisoner’s breath catches in her slumped chest as she concludes, “And I hated my mother, for lifting off the cart which covered me in safety as she traded above me at the market; for taking away kind touch, which no one ever laid upon me anymore; and most of all for dying without telling me she could.”

There is silence, but for the rapid labor of the pen. The prisoner watches the Governor’s man complete his record. When he looks up at last, she says, “You might finish your page by noting, sir, that the one thing I never thought to hate was my master or my mistress. For those who harmed me most were also the only ones who could redeem me from worse harm. Them, I did not dare to hate.”

Peter Coote has sent his slave Lucy into Speightstown to negotiate for two hens and a cock. Three laying hens had been devoured by a snake at daybreak, a snake which he has shot and laid out in the garden as a warning, so puffed with venom that the flies will not settle on it. He has been told that the living of any species will avoid a place where one of its own kind lies dead. The slave who will prepare his lunch today is a granny with the complexion, Coote thinks creatively, of an aubergine—purple black, thick, smooth. When she appears at the door to his office, she asks, “Mastah like pig or fish for lunch? A huckstah in the garden wit fresh fish.”

“Which one are you again?” Coote asks. “I prefer fish.”

“Little Mary,” the old woman replies; and as she turns back to the hallway he thinks he sees her chin move into a sort of sliding nod toward his prisoner. But the Irishwoman focuses solemnly ahead; sweating, hands shaking in her lap, though when she speaks her voice is quite composed.

“Big Dinah had a garden plot there by her house,” she begins. “I went up to her cabin only twice without invitation. The Hausas did not like anyone but themselves to come around. The first time I went up, I went to steal from her garden.” In the garden Dinah grew ground provisions—vegetables and nuts. One night the Irishwoman lay sleepless from hunger and from anger: “I could not separate them, for the two often twisted together into one bigger thing.” As she snuck out she heard the forest beasts howling on the hunt. The moon lay old and low.

The houses on the rise stood in shadow layered over shadow. There were no dogs to bark a stranger’s coming: at the Glebe, the only dogs were owned by overseers, except a kennel of gouty hounds kept for Lord Cleypole, should he choose to visit the plantation.

Big Dinah lived on the flat hilltop amidst a cluster of houses inhabited by her countrymen. “Hausas,” the Irishwoman says, which means nothing to Peter Coote: but it might to the Governor.

Here the shivering prisoner almost chuckles. “I still remember squatting there, in the garden by the hut where I had found Big Dinah my first night. There were okras on the bush, not good for eating raw. I had bit into one. But there was also Guinea corn, the kind that when it’s new tastes like a sweet. You can eat the cob and all. So I ripped a couple from the stalk and began to tear the husk when I heard her voice.

“That voice was like a man’s, an older man’s from her own nation rather than Plackler’s, Vaughton’s … yours. Jiba had a voice like that: they called her Sargeant Jiba. They had voices that froze foolishness, all right.”

“Jiba?” Peter asks, brows furrowing together.

But Cot goes on. “That big stony voice said from behind me, ‘What you do to my corn I’m a do, girl, to your head.’ And she did. She lifted me, with the great ham of her arm, until I dangled above the soil. She lifted me by my hair, and some fell out when she left go of me.

“No penalties existed then—as now—for stealing, slave from slave. ‘God laugh when the teef he steal from the teef,’ Big Dinah told me, ‘but mastah laugh when slave he steal from another slave.’ ” Always, Cot Quashey said, she had remembered that.

“I did not know why she was waiting up, although the Hausas had a custom of visiting far into the night. Quietly. Nobody ever heard them down in the houses of the overseers and the wage-earning servants, or at the big house. For the big house was staffed as well, sir; always kept polished in case of his Lordship’s favor, or the visits of his associates. But on the hill above those handsome houses, the people sometimes visited late into the night …”

“Biddy? Were they plotting then? Perhaps assisting those who did?” Coote insinuates softly, thinking to catch her off her guard, so sunk she seems in reverie.

“I wit not, although I never spoke a word of Hausa. I think they talked about their homeland; and certainly they kept watch and protection against the others all the time.”

“Which others?” Coote demands.

“Why Hausa against Ibo, and Ife against Fante against Fon against Yoruba. Those they fought with back in Africa; those who stole them to sell to you, sir, but then got stolen themselves. That enmity between them was what caused them to build their houses in little groupings with alleys close-connecting people from the homeland. They did not trust the other tribes.”

Again her conversation veers. “I have heard it said that never will a Christian understand the thinking of an African. Well that may be so, although thinking is not the only thing to understand. I know I never understood Big Dinah. Who, though she could not have had me lashed or hanged for stealing from her garden, could easily have given me the dirtiest of work, or whipped me in the fields, or shorted on my ration, or even poisoned it. But aside from shaking me; aside from saying in a voice of growling wonder, ‘Oh, I see it on you; it’s there, climbing up your chest,’ and swatting my arse as she sent me back down to my hut, she did not punish me. Instead she took me with her to the market.”

Coote dips and wipes and scribbles rapidly. Sunday was free time for all, except good Scots and English who must spend their day at prayer. But as for Irish bondspeople, “There is no Mass here on the island, as you know; and we can hang if we’re caught gathered, praying. I became quite lost from worship as a young girl in Barbados. As I have said, my own sweet household saints rolled up their eyes and wrung their hands at the cruelties here. They became, somehow, like we lovely maids after our bath upon the
Falconer.
Not able to credit the future that was to befall, they floated in that mystic place where beauty and goodness defeat time and evil.”

On Sunday the bondspeople washed their rags and cooked; they foraged at the forest’s rim for nuts and small fruit, and although the wild game belonged to the master’s larder, they were permitted to snare lizards, spear frogs, and drop birds with stones.

And on Sundays the buzzing voices grew louder in Cot’s head as the day lengthened. Alone she waited to cook her two scant meals, then for the light to wane. Alone she sat, in the dirt before her hut, arguing with herself over dissolution and thievery, cursing the inbred lewdness in herself that must have lured the master of Arlington, the captain of the
Falconer,
even the barmaid at the Donkey and the Tankard. Haranguing herself, she wove free grasses into mats to block the wind and cover the ground. Everyone who passed on errands to the yard stared at her.

Only after she had woven many Sunday mats, hanging a large one for a door across her open wall, Big Dinah said, “Come, I’m a show you what my garden for.”

They walked toward the sea, their tickets in their pockets. Big Dinah had a Sunday pass, trusted driver that she was, and she obtained a temporary one for Cot from Vaughton. “You bring some mats wit you,” said Dinah; and as they wended the forest path, tried to show the younger woman how to roll and balance these upon her head so that her hands were free. “I was right angry when she laughed at me,” remembers Cot. “But later I too learned how to balance awkward loads above me as if they were not my burden.”

Coote can’t resist: “Yes. We have heard of pawpaw bundles full of shot and tinder,” he smirks gently. “Pray continue.”

Cot Quashey describes the market, held at that time in the clearing by the church of St. John’s. “We set up underneath a cottonsilk tree. Hausa women are market people, like my own mother was.” Coote’s fingers race to keep up with the colors that she tells him. In laps of glue-colored canvas and gray Osnabruck, he records yellow lemons, green wild figs, coconut shells spilling amber pigeon peas. Cot spreads a herringboned mat which Big Dinah grunts down upon, placing bundles of Guinea corn and piles of downy okra pods around her. Nearer, nearer to his script Coote bends, stroking out letters for “dried shrimp from the coast,” “oil on the fingers from split oranges.” He captures blue shadows at the edges of white eyeballs, and sparse purple hairs glinting on the shinbones of black women, before he comes to himself. He says, “What has this to do with treachery between you and the Africans? Women from differing plantations at a market?”

As if entranced, the Irishwoman intones, “She taught me not to block out ugliness by giving imagined beauty false dominion: but that on the other hand, in the midst of hatred and ugliness there is color, there is life, and there is … personal usefulness … as well. I traded one of my grass mats for a coconut and a pocketful of figs. Another Sunday as we were walking back to Glebe through the forest, Big Dinah told me about trees. ‘The market sits always by one of these,’ she pointed. It was the kind of tree you call a kapok. She taught me something of this tree, and about the spirits of the market.”

Coote cannot control his reserved and stoic pose: for a moment his lips curve in a sneer. “Spirits of the market, is it now?”

The madwoman winks and sneers back! “Once I thought like you myself. ‘Poor Dinah,’ I told myself. ‘Black as sin, and haunted as a child in Samhain, to boot.’ But later I lay upon my mat fingering my father’s coat and recalling stories of Our Lord, Lazarus and others, always in the marketplace. The healings there. And how in corruption the marketplace got mingled with the Temple; for the Pharisees, who traded in words, were to be found in the no-man’s-land between the two. And then I thought of my abduction: how those who stole the thousands like me were called Spirits. How they ‘spirited’ us away to the servant market in Barbados. Not for the last time did I marvel then, that a simple woman you would say is savage, like Big Dinah, might be awake to more than me. Wherever there’s a market there are hordes of spirits seething.”

“After Big Dinah died I was the only one among the Christian folk who did not believe she died of dropsy, as the apothecary wrote into his ledger. Yes, it is true she faded very rapidly in head and limbs yet swole up in her belly and her feet. But the thing I saw the second time I visited her unbidden, and what she said it meant, left me uneasy all my life as to what killed her.

“Big Dinah was a stern woman. You may think she was fond of me because she took me to their market, and did not beat me but even taught me something. But she was not my friend. It was just that she was … familiar … with the thing we would call hatred which she saw creeping on me.”

“She was a witch? Is that what you are saying? What exactly was her familiar, then?” Coote demands.

The Irishwoman clears her throat and pauses, frowning lightly, for the right words. Coote watches. The heat these mornings holds them all within its paw. A yawn escapes him. His belly rumbles. Down his powdered face run rivulets of sweat.

“No. Big Dinah was not a witch. But she could recognize a spell like hatred, and she … respected it.”

Coote writes: “The Negra respects the vice of hatred in the Irish.”

Cot Quashey continues. “She was so stern she never had to warn me of certain things. There was something … imposing … in her body, the way she held herself at times, that kept younger or weaker people back from her, whether myself or the Africans. She never had to tell me to stay away from the Hausa place at night. A few times, after the market or the field, I would want to walk beyond my hovel after her. But she had a way of stiffening and getting taller; as if her body were a door—part open, then shut in your face without a word. I was angry and ashamed that even a dark savage like herself would not have me in the house. I was doomed to cook my cornmeal in the yard of my stick-house alone, with only myself for conversation. Under the moon I’d sometimes rub the rusting little flute with the shreds of the old surcoat, but I never played it lest one of the others envied me, and stole it away. To say this in another way; to befriend anyone was to risk losing my pitiful all. Yet when I thought to intimate myself with Dinah, she found my risk not worth the having.

“I could not go to market without Big Dinah, for there were no Christian women in that circle under the Sunday cottonsilk. The tribeswomen from all around thought me Dinah’s assistant of some sort. They would laugh and taunt me in their own tongues sometimes, but mostly they ignored me. I would not dare to enter their circle on my own, even if I had a pass. They had so much more power than me, you see.

“Then two Sundays went by without Dinah coming to my hut to collect me for the market. In the fields she looked on me with fierce red eyes when I asked why. ‘Bend your back into that field, girl, and lift them rocks,’ she snarled. I looked up from my heavy task, watching her huge, strong arse rock slowly underneath her skirt as she moved away across the field. ‘Ye dirty hoor ye,’ I hissed beneath my breath.

“Soon after that, one night, I stole up to her hut. I had come just to devil her, for she had picked my trust up and then dropped me, herself a lowly African, while I, though cousin to the race that Masters sprang from, had no recourse against the pagan slut. Thus did I reason.”

Peter Coote, though he continues writing, feels a sudden bitter sympathy for the insult that it must have been to be placed under a heathen’s supervision. One would think such rancor would spawn strict division; how then had these rival groups—Irish and Negro—island-wide, bridged their resentments to plot treason together? It’s this great puzzle which the Governor wants solved.