Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (12 page)

“Toward morning they were leaving; two ranks of plantation volunteers, the brave of Arlington between them. The master stood there to review them. I opened the barn door to peer at the condemned, already doomed to the remorse that gnaws my gizzard still, almost thirty years after the day. The morning was as mild as milk. Dora spilled the corn about the yard to feed the fowl: I saw pregnant Ardiss tied shank to shank with the other daughter of Salome in the file.

“The birds sang silvery tunes as a soldier on a mule swung the flat of his rifle into Mary’s kidneys. Then the group began to march forth through the dust.”

“Woman, why did you go wrong?” Coote inquires with intensity, hoping to shorten this interminable testimony. “In your early years it seems you knew your duty …”

“Ah no. That I did not. But I have spent these last years trying to right the errors of those days.” It’s an alarming and ambiguous statement: also one that he can see the prisoner will give no swift explanation to. He sighs and dips his quill and waits.

“The master was not rife with me, nor was he glad. The plantation work was abandoned for some days for want of hands. Then other masters thereabouts lent some men to Arlington for the cost of their board, so pleased were they with Plackler’s foil. That was how they called it. Meanwhile my own days spread about me, aimless and afraid. Only the children were left at Arlington. And Dora, you might guess. No one came to me, except the pickaninny with the rations, who somehow had escaped notice during the revolt. He kept his eyes lowered as I took my share. I could not tell if he avoided me, knowing my treachery; or if he had known nothing of the role Mary wanted me to play. By the time Master came to visit me again, six days and nights of lonely and remorseful agony had passed. Six eons, in which I tied a limp riband in my hair and sucked my lips to make them rosier to a discerning eye, but no one came, not even the horse to its stall. Then he was there, though brusquer, not pulling me toward his knee, not stroking my cheek and breast, but set on other things, though jolly enough in speech. ‘My Cot, how unlike your fellows you have turned out. They who gambled all, it must be said … ,’ he smiled.

“ ‘Where are they gone, Master Henry?’ I asked him timidly. And he told me who had died of shot, of Mary and Salome and two more bound for the gallows tree. Salome’s son-in-law and Iasc had escaped for the time, though they’d be caught and made example of. But the rest, he said, had gone to block at Bridgetown to try some other master’s hospitality. ‘And we will go to Bridgetown too, my little Cot, in only two days’ time. For word’s come back that my associate, the Dutch planter, has come up from Brazil. So Cot; ready yourself to see the fine houses of Bridgetown. Down to the river in the morning with you, to bathe these lovely tresses. When Dora has finished tending my poor wife, I’ll send her with a fresh skirt and waistcoat for you to wear. My girl,’ he said, rising to leave, ‘you will enter Bridgetown all in finery.’ And I was fool enough to giggle, and curtsy deep. He bade me bundle up my other things—my gifts from him, my father’s coat—we would not trouble to hurry back from the festivities, said he. I was certain that I was being raised to him in favor even more. Yes: I knew what was a concubine.

“But for some hours my spleen lurched after Dora brought the new clean clothes. She passed them to my hands without a word, but I felt the scorn pour from her like a foul wind. When she had left as silent as she came, I shook the items out. They were my Mary’s annual allotment, sewn at Easter but saved for colder weather. I had helped her stitch the bodice up. We’d laughed and mocked fine fashions on the island then; her scent now hovered in the air around me, like the fey. But I had to put them on, though it was like putting on a ghost. I sat there in the sweltering shed, on the straw throne I had constructed for a Master’s courtship, until he himself came to fetch me. I was to bind my hair under my too-small cap to keep the dust of the road out of my shining locks, said he, considering me with his head aslant, a distant smile on his graceful lips. Master was uncommon handsome; but at that moment he seemed cousin to the Captain I have told you of.

“I took up my bundle; the old gray surcoat wrapped around a blue riband, a dimity corselet, my own faded skirt and bodice, and followed meekly to the harnessed cart. The mule was braying at his own demons. Up onto the driver’s seat jumped my master, and I scuttled till I sat as close as possible behind him in the box. Across the way, tied to the handle of the rear flap of the cart, a sullen African child they called Hugo slumped with eyes downcast.

“Dora came to the cart with a small list of errands for our mistress, and Jenks spoke quietly about arrangements for the hired crew. How jovial was the sun! Not hot yet, but strong enough to catch the dew prisms on new flowers and leaves, and make the whole clean world flash. To make the buildings around the yard and up the hill seem calm and pleasing, well set out. Then something caught my eye at the window above the circled drive where we sat waiting in our cart. It was the Mistress, drawing back the curtain; she who, in my childish mind, had brought these days of horror on us all. And so, as my master bent forward, shook the reins, and shouted the beast into motion, I reached into the bundled surcoat and pulled out my mother’s pipe. I put it to my mouth, and remembered a baby song all children learn in Ireland. I whistled it out, and my master turned askance, then laughed quite raucously. I whistled bright and smart. I wanted the mistress to see I had been saved from her, and was going off now with my lovely master to know better days, because I had been loyal, and completely true. Truly his thing.

“But as I tootled down the road I did not heed that we clipped along the same route taken first by Ardiss’s child, by Salome’s kin, then by the rebels I had betrayed. I realized it later. For when we came to Bridgetown, my master tied me, like the African, to a tree. We were in a Spanish courtyard, I remember that my tether let me reach a bush of trumpet flowers when I had to make my water. There was all the time and more to think then.

“They played at cards all night. Finally we sat, tied together, the wordless African lad and me, and kept a numb vigil. Then a master staggering with spirits came out to get us ready for the road ahead: not Master Plackler, nor any Dutchman, but a small angry cock of a man, the overseer of the Glebe. My master had gambled all—his final mule, the cart and harness, the African youth called Hugo, myself, and those still back at Arlington—the carpenter and Salome’s lads as well. I never saw his face again. Thus I was sold anew, for seven more years in bondage.”

“
T
he Glebe was my next plantation. It lies in the parish of St. John which rolls down to the eastern sea. The Glebe was seven times the acreage of Arlington and run by companies of slaves who numbered in the hundreds. There were four gangs, and the first gang was split in two, there being many distant fields to attend. Each gang was urged on by Africans—there were no white drivers then at most of the plantations. Men drove the adults in the two sections of the first gang; women drove the younger people in the second, third, and fourth. The fourth was called the pot gang.

“The pot gang were the tenderest of children. They could not cook yet for themselves, so a granny too old for heavy work was charged with boiling up a pot of mush for their midday meal. When the gong was sounded those children used to race from every direction where they’d been pulling fodder or feeding fowl, to the pot of loblolly. What child is not hungry? I remember them so well! Mostly they were young Africans, though a few were European, and some a mix of both. They called out in so many tongues with their birdlike voices, and our pride in them gave us cheer and laughter as well as worry.

“ ‘Every mouth that does not suckle must earn its feed,’ said Jack Vaughton, the overseer of the sugar fields. He and the other overseers had been brought out from England, except for Robert Rigley, who oversaw the sugar mills and the distillery. He was a Scotsman, and renowned at brewing spirits. There was one Ephraim Lye, I remember, who oversaw the yard—the smithy, cooper’s shed, the cobblery and pottery and all; and William Butler, who oversaw the tending of the stock. I knew these last only by sight. Because I was gambled for the value of a second-gang fieldhand, Vaughton was the one I must abide.

“It was he who drove me to the Glebe from Bridgetown after Master Plackler gambled me away. He who turned me out onto the ground with the name ‘Big Dinah’ as his only instruction before he turned the cart back down the lane for Arlington. He lost no time in fetching his master’s other goods—two of Salome’s younger sons, the carpenter, the sag-backed mule to work the grinding mill—and setting them to work. That man was like an accountant on horseback with a bullwhip.”

Peter Coote notes that she is huddling her shawl around her tightly, yet the morning is exceeding warm. He lays his pen in its painted porcelain holder and looks closely at her face. Her forehead and neck are flushed and sweaty. For the first time he notices small rusty wisps of hair sticking to her brow from beneath the wilted cap.

“Have you much fever?” he asks.

“A touch,” she mumbles. “The back. Lucy says ’tis not healing at all.”

Peter Coote makes a “tcch” sound to demonstrate doctorly concern. “I must see to it myself, then, before you leave me for the day,” he replies. The warm swelling comes into his chest; he always feels it when he bends to help someone, no matter how lowly. It is a sensation that embarrasses him, womanish rather than sound and manly. He never heard the teaching physicians tell of it, this almost overwhelming wave; and he keeps its secret softness to himself. Now he leans toward the woman for intensity. “Biddy, as you feel low, and I have many other duties, it would help both of us if you could … tailor … your testimony on this day to your encounters, your relations, with the Africans.”

But she replies, “My entire life at the Glebe, from that first evening unto twenty years, was an encounter, a relationship, with Africans.”

Coote sighs. “So be it then. You like your gab,” and picks up his implement.

“Vaughton put me on the ground. In this way all slaves and servants were settled in, except those purchased for the house, and ones too small to fend for themselves as I’d been first in Arlington. Thus, as I said, the cook shed and the stable where I slept at my first plantation were luxuries, for they were ready-built.

“In general, though, when slaves arrived for seven years or for a lifetime, they were set upon a spot of earth; and on that spot it was their task, after a day in field or sugar mill, to build themselves a shelter of what materials they might find at hand. I was put out of the cart just below a rise. A track led up over that rise. The time was evening, but the gangs had not come in yet from the fields.

“I went into the bushes by the track and made my water, and took off the tight corselet my Master Henry gave me. Then I stood peering through the leaves and curling vines. And still it seems right odd to me that among all that strangeness I felt not desolate; only numb and dumbstruck. I looked about the Glebe. It seemed a village, not a farm. There on a low plateau to my left stood the three-storied manor, with a circular lane of crushed red stone leading to its pink marble half-moon steps. Two black girls with suds and brushes were on their knees, washing the mud of the afternoon showers from the porch. At Arlington, blacks never worked at the house.

“The house was freshly plastered, I recall, one white wall lit coral by the waning sun. Roses were planted along a walkway near it, and lemon trees and limes, cut into boxy hedges.

“The work yard was central to my view. At day’s end, from that vantage point, I could hear the clank of hammer on hot iron coming from the smithy. There stood an open square of wooden and stone sheds. In front of the one which I learned was the pottery, a lone African in a patterned orange cap sat at a wheel slapping clay he spun. There was a well in this yard, a small pond, and two larger ponds, fenced in although their gates swung open at the time. Down further in a small declivity there stood sheds my nose told me housed animals. Later I learned which ones were for cattle, which for horses, which for sheep. There were also small houses for the fowl and another one for pigs. Pigs thrive well on sugar trash. Their flesh turns sweet and cooks up crispy.

“But that evening as I spied the holdings from the brush, the animals were out to field. I heard ewes bleating to their lambs now and again. These were the first sheep I had heard of in Barbados. They made me sick with longing for Ireland even after six years away, and seemed treacherous, like trusted beings from a peaceful realm who lead the dreamer, unsuspecting, off of nightmare’s cliffs.

“Further below, toward where I stood, was the heart of the plantation—the sugar works. I saw the offices, the gray stone mill beside the muddy river; the great boiling house, the curing barns, the still. Many small paths crosshatched from that enterprise to the cottages where the few white house servants and the overseers lived, just below the blind where I was crouching. A dozen servants—waged after indenture, this being 1657 when kidnapping Irish, Scots, and poor English was already giving over to kidnapping Africans—slept in long rows of pallets inside their houses. Not so the overseers.

“Their houses were two-storied, whitewashed, with bright chimbley pots. The overseers had use of slaves and servants, so their yards were planted with vegetables and native flowers, the grass cut back with sugar knives to keep out snakes and rats and those brown spiders who nest in sheds and shadows, and whose sting can kill a six months’ pig.

“All about me and above me on that dusty hill, the shacks of Africans and the few indentured field whites were built; and just below them I could build my own, Jack Vaughton said. I was looking down at my hands in a puzzlement that blocked all thought or action when I heard the folk returning from the far-off fields. How to build? What to build with? I was wondering. But no answer passed through my mind. Only wind, and the image of my body lying under it while the rain soaked into me. In this vision I had nowhere dry to go, and the strangers in their strange abodes would not open their doors to me.