Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (10 page)

With agitation Coote interrupts. “As I recall, his Grace the Earl of Orkney reprieved the ungrateful Mary Dove from swinging at the side of her man and sons!”

“Ah. Gratitude. She was a Christian, like yourself, yet her life was the Earl’s to bestow or dispose of. And because of his rights over her forevermore, she was gifted to mistress on her wedding day and brought out to Barbados. And anywhere the mistress would go, that was Mary Dove’s destiny too. And if the mistress would give her away, or lash her, or starve her—that too she woke to evade, every day of her life. But be that as it may, Mary could remember our mistress from the days when she was fresh and lovely and gentle. Except in adversity. Not many are gentle in adversity …

“But there was ever adversity by the time Mistress was brought to us at Arlington and I stood behind her shoulder combing the night snarls from her hair. We would look into the glass, she and I, as if into a tableau. From the vase the red lips of hibiscus reflected some color on her gaunt cheek, the purple vine flowers suggested their own color to her deep-set eyes. I could see at such moments that her beauty—now a near-dried-up well—had once been uncommon. But it was in that same glass she too began to see the beauty arising in me.”

Coote is astonished! The tart, the hag! “We are entirely aware of your sluttish escapades with Sir Henry Plackler. Are you hoping to justify your betrayal of your mistress by demeaning his poor Lady’s looks?” A bubble of bile from the Governor’s undigested ham explodes, scalding his throat.

“She herself set the stage for that unnatural relationship,” the prisoner replies, aloof and bitter, but without shame.

Coote changes tactics. Smoothly he urges, “Very well, tell us, how did she do that?” His tones are evoked by a memory of the Governor, licking a gob of creamy nougat from his pouty lips. He ignores a small secret pulsation inside his breeches: “unnatural” secrets, things “to be revealed.”

“As I grew up and my form changed, the Mistress began to grow short with me. Mary Dove bound my chest and bade me hide the coming of my courses. The first time her Ladyship slapped me was on a fine June evening. The Master stayed away a good bit of the time in those days, visiting other planters. All the gentry were conferring then about conversion to the new crop, sugar. We were alone in the house, the gangs still far out in the fields, when a keening came up from the yard. It was Ardiss with her time upon her. The Mistress sent myself and Mary down to tend her in that little shed. How well I remember: the planks beneath us grew wet and slick. So much pain seemed to surprise the Scots lass, her eyes bulging when it came like someone whacked from behind with an axe.

“When the baby was delivered—a lusty son—Mary sent me to the Big House kitchen for rags. The mistress had risen after a nap. Through the window where she liked to sit she watched me crossing the yard. Sometimes she waited a week of afternoons at that window, for Master’s return. ‘What are you about?’ she called that afternoon from the top of the stairs. ‘Please madam, soft rags to wrap the new babby,’ said I. But before I could take them I must tell her of this child—its sex, its vitality, and most pointedly its looks. Indeed, its looks were distinctive, for it was born with Paud Iasc’s ginger curls matted all over its wee perfect head.

“Later when Mary returned wearily to the house the mistress called her also to her side. ‘Fetch the child to me,’ she fretted. ‘I must see for myself.’ But Mary spoke in calming tones: ‘There is no need. ‘Tis an Irish wee’n.’

“ ‘Do you swear it? There is no mark of him in it?’ ”

“ ‘Nil, mawdawm, the child has the hair of Iasc, the fisherman. I swear.’

“At this the mistress quieted. She credited Mary’s word, for they had been together for a dozen years.”

“And in the end see what that trust brought her: almost the loss of life and home!” Coote interposes sternly. “Do not deviate. Continue your dark tale.”

“The mistress quieted,” Cot Quashey repeats, “but was not truly reassured, for that very evening as I plaited her for bed, her eyes narrowed upon me in the mirror. ‘Pray look at you!’ she cried. ‘You’re getting fat. Did I furnish you with fine new clothes just to have you bursting up and out of them? Did I?’ ‘No Lady,’ I said downcast. But she had raised the heavy silver brush from her dressing table, and swung it backward into my face. ‘Your physique does not become you,’ said she. ‘You shall spend some weeks on field rations, I’ll see to that.’

“Thus began the decline of my happier days into the pit of her madness. For she would starve me, clout me, scratch me, then the next day turn and feed me sweetmeats between her own fingers. I grew gawky, so confused I blinked and stuttered. Still, the house ways were much better than the fields, until she lost the last child.

“The master was pleased with Ardiss’s fine son. In time Salome’s daughter bore a child as well, and he beheld this increase in numbers, this generation of his fortune without the slightest effort on his part, as a promising new plantation industry. That summer Paud Iasc was meted his overdue punishment for insubordination, then returned to quarter with the northern lads while Ardiss nussed her wee’n. But in spite of himself, Paud took pride in the child that had been forced out of him, as it learned to laugh, and reach, and touch. The ginger curls of birth fell out, the small head curved naked and perfect under its father’s stroking hand. After the next tobacco harvest, the master stood with Jenks outside the barn and speculated. ‘Now is the time to breed more stock. Put the redshanks Irishman in with the girl again, their breed is strong; and bed the two black females with different bucks. As for the child—Cotleen is it?—another harvest, and she’ll be ready. Perhaps by then our carpenter will have grown more lusty.’

“So once more Ardiss conceived. My mistress, as her own blood-soaked cloths were scrubbed and hung to dry month after month, saw from her window that no longer did the rags lie drying on the bushes round the Scots girl’s shed. After her nightmares she sometimes sang, like a nursery rhyme, ‘Sows and Scots will rear their young, / While ladies lose their babies.’ ” Perhaps his revulsion at these women’s matters shows in Coote’s face, for the prisoner leans forward and says, “In truth, sir, her bewilderment, misguided as it was, would break a heart of stone. For every evening she made the same toilette, applying scented oils to tired flesh to make it gleam in the kind candlelight. We pulled her still-fine braid of hair over one shoulder and bound it with a bright silk cord, in case he came.

“We lay her in the carved, stepped bed, on those chaste, infertile sheets, and if she woke alone in them her mood was rash and foul. But happy were the evenings when he came to call and stayed till day. Then, I believe, they still had hope that something would restore them to the kind of life they might have enjoyed, had their firstborn lived and Henry Plackler, a mere squire, had through paternity become the true master of our lady’s father’s place at Arlington.

“Yes, as they breakfasted at the little tea table in the corner of her room after a night together, there was … conviviality … between them, and if he rode away then to healthier plantations, she often seemed serene. She would nap, then rise to read her little book of common prayer at the window that overlooked the yard. And piteously, long before her courses were due to flow, she would perceive symptoms of a babe within. Mary and myself rode her sweetest hopes, dark disappointments, and reddest rages every month, along with her. In short, surely at times Mary and myself wished as much as Mistress Plackler that she would bear a child.

“And then the miracle occurred. The courses did not come. Mary confirmed the flat dry nipples budding, tender to the touch. After some weeks I ran with a silver urn each time my Lady’s gorge erupted unexpectedly. But after every retching she would smile and sigh, reporting each puke as work well done to Master, who would come to sit upon her sheets and hold her hand as night fell. The change was great: we heard them laughing, saw their heads held close together in the taper glow.”

“Then the day came when Mary and I were in the kitchen, boiling the linens and smallclothes: it was a Monday. In the big houses in the north countries they only do this twice a year, in good drying weather. But as you know, sir, we must launder often in the tropics, for the stench of the body, heated by cloth, develops quickly, even amongst gentry.” Coote flashes with sudden shame upon the shirt he wears, and will have to wear next evening. So strong is his desire to sniff for subtle and insulting odors that he misses some testimony, until, “… there stood the mistress in her nightshift and bare feet, slumped against the pantry door. She said dreamlike, ‘Mary, what is this cold wet thing on my leg?’ and stretched forth a hand full of clumps and blood. I got her into bed, while Mary sent Jenks to the next plantation for the master. But by the time he came it was all over. They figured five full months she’d held this one, much longer than the time before.

“The mistress lost both blood and will. The doctor came from Bridgetown. As we had only fowl and swine, the mistress of another Big House sent a bullock, which the Africans knew how to drain daily for blood, yet keep alive. Our lady had to drink a goblet of warm blood twice daily. I held the crystal cup to her weak mouth, and it sparkled like claret in the firelight of her room. She was always cold, and we sweltered till we felt faint in attending her. The master would not come into her room. Less than one week after her mishap he rode off on his mare to Bridgetown, not knowing full well yet if she’d turn septic as do many highborns in the tropic countryside. But Mistress healed to rise again.

“She rose again at sundown on an evening fair as any other. I was sweeping out the courtyard from the afternoon storm’s blow when Mary, more whey-faced than the mistress leaning on her, came through the open door and in a low voice told me, ‘Get Ardiss.’

“Gaily I skipped through the sunshine of the yard to where the Scots girl, just back from the fields, sat in the door of her shed, dandling the fine fat child she’d borne the previous summer. ‘Ardiss, Mary needs you,’ I sang, and returned to finish swishing leaves into the ditches. Ardiss, baby on her hip, followed along. Meanwhile Mary had sent a pickaninny running for Jenks. He arrived hot and panting, breeches unlaced, blouse in one hand. He had been shaving.

“ ‘What is it, Mistress Plackler?’ he inquired.

“ ‘Take that child from its dam,’ she ordered sternly, ‘and fetch the mule cart.’ There was confusion. One by one we surmised, then rejected, her meaning. Jenks brought the cart around, tucking his shirttails down his breeches. The mule closed its eyes and chewed cud as it waited.

“ ‘Please Mistress … why, Mistress? … No, no, no, Mistress,’ Ardiss cried as Jenks pulled the startled baby from her arms. Up the hillside in their huts the gangs were squatting at their evening rations when they heard the fierce commotion, saw the tugging, heard the child begin to cry. Just as Paudi Iasc reached the bottom of the incline we all saw Jenks thrust the screaming child into the straw on the cart bottom and at the same time, watched Ardiss raise her hand to strike the mistress.

“It was Paudi Iasc who caught that hand in midswing, cursing; he who saved Ardiss from having the new life she carried flogged away. It was Paudi Iasc who leapt toward the cart, almost unseating Jenks with one rough push. For this he earned two nights and one day in the stocks, in the full sun of the yard.

“The mistress gave her orders to Jenks. She told him to command the best price that he could for the baby somewhere along the way. Remember the child’s length of service was to be a full twenty-one years, as a bargain point, she said. Jenks was, in all events, to carry on to Bridgetown, after selling the child, and find his master. He was to bring him home where she had need of him: or else she would sell more of us, her stock. Those were the words she used.

“How, wherever we each are scattered now, will we forget that sundown—the heavens pearly blue and gentle pink—which made all future sunsets haunted by a disappearing baby’s shrieks and its mother’s answering wail?”

“It took a week for Jenks to find the disbelieving master, coax him to come home, and for them to return. In that time Salome’s daughter and her child were also sent to block with the suboverseer of a neighbor, whom the mistress called in to maintain order while her own men were away. Mary said the mistress imagined Salome’s babe exceeding light for Africans. It was like hell, a view of hell down in the yard, the black girl’s man rolling his eyes and sweating as they loaded up his kin, Ardiss shrieking in tongues to condemn the farmhand who drove the cart away. But the mistress was not satiated. That very evening, she had me whipped.

“ ‘Come here you sully slut,’ she said to me, as she watched the yard with one eye from her window. The morning before had been like someone else’s life, her ladyship offering me a jellied bonbon, and as I combed her, holding a silk riband to my cheek and murmuring, ‘Look how well this suits your eyes.’

“I will not lie. I wanted that blue riband, it was true it suited my blue eyes and ginger hair better than it did her own.” Coote frowns up fiercely from his scribbling.

“But I did not take it. And the next afternoon, after she had cloven the young African family apart, she called me to her whilst Mary stood by looking at the wall. ‘Look,’ screeched Mistress, ‘Mary you are my witness, this girl is a thief! Thus she does repay my kindness!’

“My poor poor Mary. Grimly she stood there as the lady lifted the blue silk riband from beneath the gray surcoat-pillow on my pallet.

“How swiftly, how completely, the course of my life changed in that one moment. In the next, despite my croakings, the neighbor’s suboverseer had me by the wrists, dragging me through the yard to the horse stable. My hands were tied to a spike high in the wall, and I received ten of his sound-muscled stripes. Before full measure had been given, I fainted.

“I came to in the straw, my blue bodice folded neat beside me, the grain sticking in my flesh like needles. I was sobbing in the dark when I heard a noise. The door swung inward. The master had arrived with his roan mare. When he perceived me, Master asked me what had happened. Only a child as young as I would have opened her gob and spilled out everything. I told him what the mistress had accused me of, and that she herself had planted the lovely riband in my bed. Wiping down his horse by the silver light that crept through the narrow window in the stall, he laughed out loud at this. But in the end, when the horse was quietly chuffing feed, he came toward me through the bales. He lay his ringed hand on my forehead. ‘You are too warm,’ he murmured.