Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (4 page)

“Once more we were tied and brought up from that sewer where we lay, moaning and squabbling like dogs. Up the narrow ladder, stumping our bare toes against the splintery steps. We had lived for months now in a world of brown and black; the only light a beam of amber soaked up by a wallboard or the folds of a filthy sheet, through the door that opened twice daily behind Spaniole. Now he led us up the stairs, lifting his forearm against the hatch as we emerged into the quivering, singing air. And I knew then—though I forgot it later under necessities that seemed more pressing—that the world here on this island was inverted. For if we were delivered up to the Spirits of the Night, they wore the cruel motley of a summer’s day.

“Even now, I remember the colors of the island that first morning. The smooth glass stripes of the sea, ink-blue where we lifted and sank on the waves, but paling to the brightest robin’s egg where the water frothed and tugged the strand. Proud mountains loomed from behind a fringe of one-stemmed trees. They lifted my heart and tricked me, for they were green and ripe and gay as the mountains of Sligo where I had gone to horse fairs with my father. Why is it that the scent of the air, the tweet of birds circling the mast as if it were a maypole—why is it that every sense seemed to have a color? And they were the happiest of colors!

“This was February the seventeenth, in 1651. A morning like the first, or perhaps the last, in Eden. Our eyes stung with so much light. Spaniole bade us step behind some screens of canvas hung between two of the masts and strip off all our clothes. During this the Captain stood on the bridge, squinting his glass at the small harbor away to our left where two toy ships like our own bobbed at peace.

“Spaniole ushered us into this canvas cranny, curtained off from the deck and the sailors but open on the wide side to the land. He pointed to three large tubs of water, each with a cake of lye soap and a thick brush laid beside it. ‘Take those caps off,’ he ordered, ‘and help each other wash your hair. Off with your smallclothes, now. Off! Put them in the buckets there, and touch them not again till ye are told.’ We were all distraught. Unused to complete nakedness since childhood, even with ourselves, there were pleas and whimperings. Arms were not long enough to gather into hiding all that flesh. There were no bawds among us.

“Spaniole moved to stand guard outside our bath, his pistols drawn against the crew and the few self-sold bondsmen who assisted for the landing. And except for the plashing of the sea against the hull, a few low calls and laughter from the men, the playful harrying of a gull, the morning was fresh and calm. An older girl helped me to bathe. The sun had warmed the water in the tub: fresh water, saved from Virginia for this. I took some in my mouth and tasted soap, and the oils and ashy flavors of the skin of girls who’d bathed before me. After the bath, we sat upon the edges of the tubs, on upturned buckets, on an inverted lifeboat. I rested on the salt-scoured deck, knees tight to chest. We lifted our hair modestly, one handful at a time, to dry; for it was our only covering. But every maiden there had hair which let loose past her hips. Yellow it was, and sandy; even the plainest brown held gold and purple lights, and there was sooty black, and an orange like winter flames, and mine, like apple cider in the sun.

“No one harmed us as we waited on that deck for the next word from our keepers. So that we grew lulled, rocking there together as the sun pinked arms and cheeks. Time lied. It seemed to liquefy and flow until there came a feeling as if harm could never come to us. As if we were nine women in a myth; for between ourselves and what we could see of land, all seemed so innocent, and clean. And beauty has a quality all of its own that seems supreme; that seems above mere men with slaving ships and pistols …

“But then the Captain parted our canvas drapes and stepped inside carrying a chair. There was a cringing and a scatter. One girl ran to pull a corner of the canvas over her belly. Another screamed. The one who’d bathed me reached toward a clothes bucket, tossing out three caps in an effort to find a covering cloth. But I did not move. The sun had languored me. I squatted underneath my hair, which in that crouch hung to my ankles, and willed myself invisible, by all the power of Our Lady of the Seas.

“The Captain sat him down. He bade Spaniole to keep without; and to the men who paused in their work, whose heads we saw lifted toward us as the curtain closed, he called in a dry voice, ‘Carry on there, gentlemen, no sense to draw the lash or pistol when so near the fleshpots of the shore.’

“The Captain made each of us come near him, one by one. The second lass cursed him in our tongue, and though he knew not her words he took her by the wrist and twisted it up behind her back until she squealed for mercy. The Captain examined each in her nakedness, gripping the arms and the thighs for muscle. He looked into our mouths and up our noses. ‘The black-haired wench is with child,’ he called out to Spaniole as he regarded her nipples.

“ ‘Wet nurse then, sir, shall she go for,’ the cheery reply came on the tangy breeze.

“I was the last. The Captain held his hand forth with a smile and bade me rise. He pulled me close, parted my hair, and passed his hand down the front of me from crown to knee. He squeezed my kneecap hard; and I laughed, startled, for it tickled. Under his powder in that scouring sun I could see the purpley marks of pox. He grinned. His teeth were slick and yellow in that powdered mask.

“ ‘Ah, but you, you are the prettiest of all,’ he murmured. ‘Bend down.’ He checked my head for nits. ‘Better. This is lovely hair. You speak English too, do you not?’

“I nodded yes. The Captain took me on his knee. One arm about my waist, lightly, he raised the other to unbuckle his short cape. He swung this around my shoulders. ‘Translate,’ he ordered. All the while that, through me, he ordered the women to wash their garments in the bathwater and turn them to dry quickly now, he ran his hand idly up and down beneath the cape. The woman who had bathed me stared at him with hot malice all the while she rubbed cloth at the tubs. But I willed her not to do so. As I tell you this, my heart remembers: it pumps in guilt and fear again. For I looked toward shore and all the lovely strangeness there, then I looked at the Captain’s face so close to mine. And I willed him to keep me, just me, and not send me off to that broad strand where hundreds like him, like Spaniole and the crewmen and the men below held off with ropes and chains, could get at me. This is why I smiled up into his chalky face and yellow teeth.

“The Captain murmured ‘Mmmmm? Mmmmmmm? My filthy little mouse?’ And then he set me down. With a smack against my buttocks he lifted his cape and pushed me toward the others round the tubs.

“Our clothes dried quickly. At the end, to hurry us along, the Captain sent Spaniole inside the nook to watch us, with his heavy breathing. Spaniole took us back down to the hole. Our sun-stiff petticoats scratched against our sunburnt legs as we went down the stairwell. In the cabin’s close darkness, the bile and blood and slops and tears and phlegm of the journey were conjured up again by the high heat of Barbados. Later we heard the men taken out and walked. Along toward evening the sea shifted beneath us; and later all among us stopped our frenzied unsuccessful prayers and speculations to listen to the faint but clear strains of some sailor’s concertina, above us on the deck.

“I have heard that on the night before great battles soldiers often do not sleep, but under the eye of death take on a last wondrous animation. That was not so with us. We slept. We tossed and snored and spluttered; whether in exhaustion from the unaccustomed sun, or in hiding from the shame of prying hands and the memory of the crew’s eyes, glimpsed through a slit in the canvas drape, which shone with the same empty muscular hunger as a bucketful of living eels. We slept until Spaniole thumped a longboat oar against the door. He opened it and cried, ‘Freshen up, demoiselles. Your hour is come.’

“There were four sailors in the small boat below the sisal ladder. Each wore an unsheathed dagger at his waist. Spaniole explained to us with gestures what they and we must do. As the ship bobbed above the black hills of the sea, we were carried down the rope ladder and set into the boat. I think it so strange now that although we all believed in a better life in Heaven to come, there was no inkling of hastening that day by leaping to our deaths. I never thought of such an avenue until I met up with the Africans. No: we had been taught to see ourselves as Heaven’s supplicants, not Heaven’s instruments. Not Heaven’s tools emerging from the fire and the blows.

“In silence we were carried down and set on benches by our guards. We were left untied, for we must wade ashore from the swells and not pull one another down like awkward weights. Hope … hope it was, bred into us, that made us think a better day surely must wait onshore. What the Africans have is more … apt, wiser … than hope.”

Peter Coote gives his head a little shake. He has almost fallen into a doze to the lilt of her unceasing voice. He’s stopped writing; but now he hastens pen to pot and then to paper, for he has heard her link herself with Africans for the first time. “Stop,” he commands. When he has caught her missing words or what he imagines them to be, brusquely he says, “Continue.”

“Water,” the woman Cot replies.

A wave of ill humor washes over Peter Coote. The breakfast fruit has soured his mouth and furred his tongue. His hand is cramped, the top knuckle of the middle finger stained with ink. He flips his cuffs well back. “No,” he insists. “You will speak until I have had enough, and then be done for today.”

The woman is silent. He finds her wide mouth sullen. “Don’t try me, biddy,” he warns.

“You are right,” she says. “ ’Tis ye who are trying me, is it not? On behalf of your … master.” She draws herself in under the shawl until she seems to have no shoulders: she has a slight back to hold so many lashes, he thinks. He sits there, pen poised, prepared to learn of Africans and the treachery which took root in her small, primitive Christian soul, sent to be obedient to her betters on the island of Barbados. But she returns to the story of the girls: “We put out in the small boat. We were going to our doom, and we knew it; the black-haired girl called out to Christ to receive her.

“Yet how could doom be upon us? For the sailors were conversing merrily as they rowed. And halfway to shore a silver school of dolphins joined the skiff and danced beside us. There were two longboats of indentured men already up ahead of us toward shore. Those few who had signed on sat unmanacled, rowing beside the crewmen. The others leaned, lashed together loosely at the waist. Some held their heads down, some looked bold and brave ahead. One man cursed steadily as if he told a litany. One young lad, I remember, was singing about a place named Drummossie. I recall that place-name although not one of the girls’ names I billeted with on that long voyage to hell. Only the colors of their hair, sprayed out around their caps by the sweet breeze.

“Yes, I remember best the colors. For there is a glow to hell, and from it came so much light that while my mouth stuck shut with fear, and many of my fellow humans made noises like grieving animals, I was transfixed by the blue bath of the sea and the gilded arcing fins of fish which sliced the air then plunged again.

“I felt nothing, save for cool spray on my forearms.

“I heard the clacketting of palm leaves on the shore over the tears of women in my boat.

“I marveled at a thread of yellow in the rigging of a sloop in the bay ahead of us; an orange banner snapping crisply above a Dutch low-bellied trader; the tan sand below the ever-paling water, which our prow now shot onto.

“ ‘Take hold! Clasp hands!’ a sailor called, as he leapt out holding the line, up to his waist in water. When the next swell had sucked back out to sea, we jumped and lifted our soaked skirts. In my small fists I clenched the hands and skirts of women on either side. When the next wave came they lifted me between them and kept running. I remember how one called, ‘
Fair amach dos na miola mora!
Look out for the shark! Look out for the shark!’

“Then there we were on the beach. But even then, while the men waited tied in a coffle ahead of us under a guard of seamen who pointed muskets and pistols, even then I looked away from our certain plight. Looked toward loveliness. For fanned around my feet—yellow and red and coral pink, pearliest white and the black of Vulcan glass—were tiny stones and curly shells which the clear water waved and winked at me like baubles …”

“Thus came ye to the island of Barbados on February eighteenth, in the year of our Lord 1651,” overvoices Peter Coote. “And a long morning’s telling of it too. You give your history great importance, biddy. Return now to your mat. Dip the cloths I left you in the medicine and wrap them over your back; but take care to remove them before they stick to your weals, or you will rue it.”

The woman stands, but does not thank him for his expertise. This sours his remaining bit of goodwill. He screws the lid onto the inkpot at an angle. “Lucy! Lucy!” he shouts. When the slave appears, far too soon to have been at her appointed tasks in the garden cooking shed, he orders, “Take the prisoner back to the sick-house, then fetch my lunch. I shall want lemon in the water when I bathe my hands, to get off this blasted ink.”

W
hen he was twenty-five Peter Coote came out from Oxford to make his fortune in the Indies, after investing the entire younger-son’s portion of his father’s holdings in an up-and-coming shipping concern with offices in Bristol. The company provided him with a post as ship’s surgeon for the passage to Barbados. That had been fifteen years ago, in 1669; a year when excessive rains hard on the heels of drought resulted in a scourge of epidemics among plantation workers. Coote had judged he was arriving at a most propitious moment, for while hundreds of lives were lost, hundreds more were saved through treatments like his own tonics and cuppings, purgings and lettings, and luck, of course, herself. The value of good medical men to plantation economics was thus established. Coote had been appointed Apothecary to Codrington and Cornwall—two of the largest holdings, with hundreds of acres in sugar and tens of thousands of pounds invested in primarily African bondsmen.