Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Dedication

PREFACE

Acknowledgements

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

EPILOGUE

AFTERWORD

NOTES TO THE PREFACE

GLOSSARY

VIKING
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First published in 2002 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.
Copyright © Kate McCafferty, 2002
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McCafferty, Kate.
Testimony of an Irish slave girl / Kate McCafferty.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-101-17682-5
[http://us.penguingroup.com] http://us.penguingroup.com
For Patrick, Peter, and Suzanne
PREFACE

B
etween the reign of Elizabeth I of England (1558-1603) and the restoration of the monarchy with Charles II in 1660, an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 Irish men, women, and children were shipped to Barbados as indentured servants. Under Elizabeth, the British Empire expanded its labor market through a statute which called for the conscription of “tinkers, jugglers, peddlers, wander ers, idle laborers, loiterers, beggars, and such as could not give a good account of themselves.”
1
After the Battle of Drogheda in 1649, The Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, stepped up the forced indenture of Irish political foes to the Crown, Roman Catholic priests, peasants whose farms had been appropriated as plantations and war spoils, and the unemployed or “dissolute” of the towns. During the 1650s, Peter Stubber, Governor of Galway, held as “usual practice … to take people out of their beds at night and sell them for slaves to the Indies.”
2
In 1656, Lord Henry Cromwell, when requested to send “1,000 Irish Wenches,” responded that “while we must use force in taking them up … you may have such a number of them as you shall think fit to make use upon this account,” and added that 1,500 to 2,000 Irish boys aged twelve to fourteen could also be captured and sent.
3

Obtaining the labor urgently needed to clear the rain forests of the colony of Barbados for plantation crops such as indigo, tobacco, and cotton had posed a serious problem since its foundation in 1627. The typical colonial method of enslaving aboriginal peoples was not practicable in Barbados. The Arawaks, native to the island, had abandoned it almost two centuries before for reasons still not understood by scholars. However, after the Battle of Drogheda the requisite labor force was available at £3 to £5 a head, payable to the mercantile companies whose ships transported the kidnapped, trepanned, or exiled slaves.

And slaves they were. The usual initial indenture was for a period of seven years, after sale in Barbados. During this period of time, the indentured’s master determined the amount of food to be given, when and if medical attention would be called for, and what sort of corporal punishment would be meted out. Not until the Act for Ordaining the Rights Between Masters and Servants (1661) were bodies of dead servants ordered to be investigated with an eye toward the master’s culpability.
4
While scholars have argued that the bodies of slaves belonged to their master while only the labor of indentured servants was his, noted authority on global slavery Orlando Patterson insists that this distinction “makes no sense whatsoever in real human terms.”
5

For indeed, masters sold and traded their servants (thus lengthening their terms), gambled them away, flogged them occasionally unto death, and in other ways demonstrated the ownership of their bodies. Irish indentured servants were referred to as “stock,” were matched for forced breeding—indeed were designated as a subhuman species. In an example of this, historian Hillary Beckles chronicles a woman who was traded at market for a pig: she was weighed and valued at sixpence a pound, the pig at less per unit.
6

Before the Restoration the planters of Barbados found indentured labor cheaper than African labor, although from the 1650s the latter was on the rise.
7
Until the 1660s the sanction which authorized African slavery was that the enslaved were pagans. Along that same line, Christians, it was held, should not technically enslave fellow Christians though this was never scrupulously followed. In line with this rationale, Africans were stolen to become bondsmen in perpetuity, while Europeans were stolen to be indentured for a finite period. However, legal acts and proclamations were easily enforced which extended the indenture of the bondservant for one, two, or three years, or which doubled her/his bondage. One escaped servant, Esquemeling, “had known many who had served thus for fifteen or twenty years.”
8

The same source, in 1664, informed the world that during indenture, “white servants” were treated as inferior chattel. Because they were cheaper and easy to obtain, “the toil imposed upon them [is] much harder than what they enjoined the Negroes, their slaves, for these they endeavor to preserve, being their perpetual bondsmen, but these white servants they care not whether they live or die, seeing they are to serve them no longer than seven years.”
9

History has proven that the Irish were not docile bondsmen, whether at home or abroad. The novel which follows is the story of a fictional Irishwoman trepanned to the island of Barbados in the year 1650 and sold into bondage; and of her imagined participation in one of the historically verifiable plans, undertaken jointly between Irish and African slaves, to overthrow the plantocracy of the island. The Irish perspective is important to the history of resistance to colonialism. It is also important because involuntary indentured servants “laid the foundation for African chattel slavery in Barbados.”
10
But perhaps it is most important, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, as part of a little-known history of affiliation, across race and ethnicity, between groups conventionally defined as incompatible.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A passing comment by Nate Mackey, writer, musician, and professor at UC Santa Cruz, impelled the first footstep, in 1989. I found another hint in the poetry of Edward Brathwaite, of the University of the West Indies. Pondering year after year what Harry Berger Jr. has to say about ascribed and achieved difference helped me examine expectations of both “race” and affiliation in a manner that seems more authentic. Gus Claffey of Creevagh, Clonmacnoise, taught me about generations of St. Kieran’s pattern-day celebrations. My neighbors in the Kerry
gaeltacht
were great about translating the odd word or phrase into Gaelic for the text. And when I lost half the original manuscript from my hard drive during a gale, my good friend and neighbor Alice Hannafin saw that it was like losing a person I loved, and stood by me. A wandering Korean professor seeking shelter from another rainstorm encouraged me to rewrite, citing Tom Payne’s experience, and insisting that the second take would be even better. I listened to him. Mary Reynolds of Ma lin Head was so matter-of-fact about the book’s relevance that I had to believe it myself. While teaching at Dar Al Hekma College in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, my colleagues Omarine Rafie, Dr. Aladin, and Suhair Al Qurashi taught me wonderful viewpoints on women, Islam, and history, which are lamentably still not available to the Western world. I was able to clarify the import of verifiable history to this fictional work through presenting a portion at a conference organized by my friend and colleague Dr. Maher Bahloul of the American University of Sharjah.

I want to thank my energetic and knowledgeable agent, Barbara Braun, who match-made my relationship with Kathryn Court of Viking Penguin. Kathryn, my editor, restores faith in postmodern publishing by harmonizing business acumen with visionary aesthetic sensibility. I am also indebted to Viking Penguin editors Ali cia Bothwell and Sarah Manges.

There have been many whose critical appreciation has inspired the development of my work: among these, John Chandler, Marti Ainsworth, Lucille Clifton, Joy Harjo, Scott Momaday, Larry Evers, Betsy Breault, Laurie Voeltz, D. Coryat, and Andy Lynch, Bonnie Bassett and Greg Steltenpohl. The image is of guide ropes beside a swinging bridge. I most often cross that bridge, trying to both enter and question alternative worlds, with Judith Neva Johnson. To all of these, and you, I tell Cot’s story.

I

W
hen he has finished attending the select sick of Speightstown Gaol, Peter Coote retires to his office to wash his hands. The slave named Lucy holds a basin of tepid water as he rubs his long fingers with soap, then rinses them. He raises his wet hands as she bends to set the pan on the fieldstones of the floor. Water trickles down his fingers and over his pulse, soaking the thickness of rolled-back linen and lace cuffs, as he waits. The pan scrapes on the floor. The water feels unclean; she moves too slowly, but he tries never to show impatience before an African.

Behind Coote the shutters stand open for any breeze from the garden of fruit trees. His back is to the light coming through the window, so that as Lucy straightens she cannot see his features, only a dark shape of head and body with a thin aura of light around the head. She cannot mark him staring at her hands, pink on the palm, earth-brown and tough from labor on top, as she takes the blue-and-white towel from her shoulder and offers it. She waits in silence as he wipes his hands in the cloth. Then from the dark shape that is his face his thin but pleasant voice says, “Lucy, when we are done, fetch the white woman to me.”

“Cot Quashey,” Lucy says.

“I believe the only white female on the prisoners’ roster is named Cot Daley,” Peter corrects cheerfully. He rolls his clammy shirt cuffs down. Lucy tosses the towel over her shoulder once again and bends to lift the basin of soiled water, humming softly. “Before you leave,” Coote instructs her, “close the jalousies. No damn use to wait for a breeze. Even the parrots desist their squawking in this heat. Listen …”

The slavewoman holds the basin motionlessly. With no reaction at all to his instruction, she stares at the wall to the left of his shoulder and continues to hum. Filtered sunlight limns the soft curve of her young cheek. He feels the usual twinge of irritation at a lack or slowness of response, but turns the feeling into evidence for his hypothesis. Coote is conducting a firsthand inquiry to advise his merchants’ group in Bristol, concerning which of the lower races brought to bondage have the ability to focus, concentrate, think, obey, multiply, perform brute rote activity, etc.—and to what degree. Would it not be sound business to know which type of servant to purchase for which sort of work? Near fatal mistakes have been made in the past. He waves toward the window.

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