Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (6 page)

“Past them we were led, along a path dug deep and dusty by naked toes like ours, some of which lay molded in the stiffened mud. The residents of Hole Town who came for their first peek sped shouting ahead of us, until we all entered the little square that used to be there. You would not know it; now it has been built over with warehouses and market stalls and offices. But then there were, at the sides, two pens for holding cattle, or Africans, or Irish. Toward the rear was another small rise, which on the day of my arrival served as a natural auction block. In front of this rise, tracks from the north and east and Bridgetown met, and a crowd of servants could gather to tend their masters’ carriages and carts.

“We were taken to a large corral, all the unwilling lads and girls. The volunteers were auctioned first. Right eager did they look, to start their seven years ticking off behind them so they might sooner walk free to sign the forms for their own rich payment-parcel land. But of course, sir, you know that by 1651 no land remained to reward the loyal servants of Barbados.

“Of course no one Barbadosed understood that then; so from the aspirations of those volunteers many of us took what we called hope. But we learned it was not hope. Hope is when there is a real chance that what you long for will come true. Otherwise, we learned, what we’d called hope is cruelest self-deception. But those who sought our labors did not disabuse our hopefulness, for it made us docile; whereas oncet that truth had dashed our hopes, that hope lessness would work against our masters. Docility, sir, among we bondspeople, is a thing that we discourage even little children from. One ought to know it if one cannot better one’s own lot, though every dog must avoid kicks when it can.”

Behind in his scribbling, Coote is looping the final letters of these words when he realizes with a start that here’s information of the sort the Governor has demanded. The temper of insurrection! But it’s too late to stop her: she has turned into another verbal alley where he follows, hand racing, confident for the first time that bit by bit this foolish woman will let her loose tongue betray herself and all her scurvy kind. He feels contempt for her loquacious-ness at the same time that its folly excites him.

“There were about two hundred in the stock pen, plus the sailors with their pistols and swords, guarding us. They sat us down around the railings of the corral and tied the men and boys to the posts. Myself and the black-haired girl spread our skirts together in the dust and watched the auction as it commenced. Throughout the afternoon the gentlemen on horseback, the carriages and overseers with their mules and carts, kept arriving. There were, in those days, only a few women—and no ladies—resident at Hole Town. I saw females fanning on a balcony, but only men strolled under sun-shades on the auction green that day. Although the heat was wilting, they wore tall beaver hats and surcoats of satins and brocade, damask waistcoats, and breeches of the finest wool, buckled at the knee. They wore hose of cloth, not leather, like Spaniole and our Captain.

“The Captain led the auction, crossing and marking in his small book while a skinny lad held a violet umbrella over him. The Captain’s face seemed almost ghoulish in its shade. At first, as I have said, he sold the volunteers. Although they mostly had professions, and so went for more than common laborers, from them we learned the rules of what awaited us. One sale I recall was of a Scots cooper and his son. The cooper was competed for. The Captain displayed barrels and a wheel he’d made on board our ship, with the result that in the end the Scot was sold for £9, and only for five years. This was unusual: almost everyone was sold for seven years. In increments of seven years, sir, the sprites also kidnap folk whose work or beauty they desire.

“The Scotsman’s son, though, was a matter that brought a spasm to my heart, and to the pregnant girl’s who held me in her lap. He was a small lad, eight years of age. And although his father argued that the boy had been apprenticed for two years already at the cooper’s trade, he was sold as child, not adult. Which meant he went for £5 to the age of twenty-one: thirteen years, instead of seven, of his life belonged now to his master, in payment for the food and brogues the master would provide.

“With one hand in the pocket of my father’s surcoat, clasped around my mother’s flute, I whispered my fears to the dark-haired girl. You will remember I was then about eleven years of age. To be sold as child would mean I would belong to someone for almost as long as I had lived already. But sold as adult, my servitude would be for seven years. A?n Cailín Dubh, I call her in my memory: she advised me to carry myself tall and pretend that I was thirteen, full a maiden, not a child.

“They gave us nothing to drink. Thirst made us sleepy and I drowsed upon her shoulder until the Captain called for her and she eased my face off from her sweating neck. I watched her go, and it was like before, her beauty freezing out the hellishness of things: for as they moved the gate aside for her, I admired the green sun through the bushes dappling the coarse weave of her skirt, and how her hair hung clean and sooty to her waist, like the proud daughter of a cottager on Brid’s Eve. They led her to that little hill. She kept her eyes shut while the Captain sang her praises to the gentlemen who plumped and prodded her. I meant to do the same when my time came, but either I forgot, or I was of a different nature—curious. For £8 they went: herself as laborer and wet nurse; and the child to come, for its first twenty-one years.

“Soon after, I was led up to the auction block. ‘Bring the poppet,’ the Captain called out to Spaniole, and smiled. Some of the gentlemen smiled too. Lining the little track up the rise to the auction block, many bent toward my face. I remember how my heart thudded. A fish’s thuds like that once it is caught and knows there is no out—so hard it makes the breast flop. The walk up was again in different time: very slow and floaty, yet not long enough. I had seen brides led to altar in Galway, and always thought that sort of time belonged to them.

“I was a small girl. Except where eyes and teeth bent down to me, I walked through two columns of shiny well-dressed stomachs, reaching hands, jabots and wigs draped around necks and shoulders. At the top the Captain waited, like a most genial host. ‘Gen tlemen, I start the bidding high for this young morsel.’ There was a spatter of laughter from the crowd. The Captain told them I spoke English well and could translate to the other Irish. That because of language and a passive character I was fit to train as lady’s maid—had they any ladies. More laughter at this remark. ‘If not,’ he said, untying my cap and lifting out my matted curls, ‘Twon’t be too long before she’s ready to breed servants—and
you
may choose the father. ’ His eyebrows flew up in merriment at this statement. ‘Hear hear!’ cried someone jovially. ‘How old, then, are you, poppet?’ asked the Captain. I was ready. ‘Thirteen,’ I cried in a loud flat voice. He fixed me with an interested stare. ‘So small for thirteen,’ he whispered. ‘Have you yet begun your courses?’ I lied to the whole hillside that I had. There was some scoffing, but also interest that one so childish might be woman too. One among these became my first master, Henry Plackler.

“They argued over me. ‘So frail,’ murmured Plackler. I knew to not look at his face, but kept my eyes fastened on the needlepoint of roses climbing trellises on his waistcoat. His hands as they ges tured were ivory and small. ‘I seek a girl for dual purposes—to work the fields unless my wife is visiting, and then a lady’s maid …’

“The Captain tilted up my face toward his in the livid light of the violet sunshade. The air was stifling. His face was chalky, like the dead, like Amadan na Briona, the fool of the firth. ‘This little damsel cannot leave my side for a farthing less than eight gold sov ereigns,’ he cooed. ‘I should be paid double for keeping her fresh for the plantations of Barbados, for I was fain to tear a petal from her rose.’

“With every word he spake the laughter round us thickened, a laughter with a stench to it, like rotting teeth. But my new master did not laugh or take up the Captain’s bantering. ‘I will give you eight,’ said he, ‘but you must make me a sound bargain for those two gaolbirds tied to the post, or you are no friend to Barbados and her plantations.’

“They led me to a cart that waited and helped me crawl under a seat for shade. My master never approached the cart. It was the overseer, Jenks, who gave me corn cakes and told me to make my water over the side; ‘For if you step onto the ground the snakes will attack you to settle their score with ould Saint Patrick,’ he warned, waggling his finger. ‘Although this island, where they were banished to, is much more to their liking.’

“I lay there hiding, tucked under a shelf against the corner. The sun was swallowed by the mountaintops, and the land turned blue. ‘Seven-sixpence!’ ‘Ballocks your sixpence! Seven and twelve shillings!’ ‘Seven-fifteen!’ sums were called. The Captain’s voice grew gritty exhorting gentlemen to buy. Feet stumbled in the dust, stepped onto the wheel rim, weighed it down, and hoisted another servant onto the bed of the wagon where I waited.

“It was twilight, glowworms flickering here and there, when the Captain came to settle his accounts. After Jenks had transferred coins from the plantation purse, the Captain asked for me. ‘Oh mouse … my little mouse?’ he teased until he found me. His was the only face around me that I recognized, and I almost loved it, suddenly. He took my hand in his and squeezed it as he winked at me and smiled. It was that old, unclear gesture of my father’s, so that instantly I returned the squeeze, still ignorant of the bargain struck. The Captain turned toward the overseer. ‘You should pay me thrice the sum for her,’ he laughed. And heart racing, terror against terror, I wished the Captain would take me back to the sunny deck, the ghosts of fresh-bathed maidens all around us, and sit me on his lap under the cape, and comfort me, and keep me from these strangers. But when he walked off chuckling to himself, I stoked my pride for comfort. For although I was deserted, I spoke the language of the gentry, I was worth £8, and a man with all the power of a Captain said that I was worth much more.

“God knows I have paid for the innocence of that pride.

“In the end, for Master Plackler’s Arlington, the cart was filled with a volunteered Scots carpenter dressed in black, two Irish lads fresh from gaol for poaching geese, and two English vagabonds sold as common laborers. The Irish lads were called Paudi nOg and Paudi Iasc. Paudi Iasc had been a fisherman in Ulster before his abduction, and he commenced at once, in our own tongue, to advise the other in the stealthiest of tones about escape. They would steal the cart. They would clout Jenks into the ditch and steal his pistol and tinder horn. But then where could they go? They would steal a boat and find the pole star …

“And there was me, lying under the wooden shelf as we jounced through the dark countryside while the bats squealed and dived toward our heads …”

Coote holds up his plume for silence. He refers to the sheaf of notes of the testimony she had given before his own arrival at the gaol. “Where is this Arlington again?” he mutters, searching.

“Ah, ’tis all gone now, sir.”

“Sold? The name changed?”

“No, abandoned. Sunk back into jungle. Already when we came there it was a failing outfit. When the mistress arrived, for a brief while it seemed that they would make a go of it. But Master Plackler was a gambler: that was how he came by the purse to buy us from the
Falconer.
Well, he lost us soon enough, and more. Arlington lay on the rich black soil of St. George’s Parish—flat, without mountains, far enough from the sea that the rivers rarely flooded over, yet there was plenty rain. But at the end I have heard that there was not a mule to plow it, nor a duck to lay the master’s breakfast. When he died of smallpox in the ’60s, his wife Eugenia abandoned all and sailed back to England. No inheritors. She married again over there, but died childless. And there is nothing now, they say: just a cobbled carriage lane leading to columns that no longer hold a roof.”

Peter Coote makes a mental note to inquire of the Governor, at the right moment, whether this acreage is for sale. “Make haste. Make haste, biddy,” he says irritably, detained from scheming toward his future.

“A biddy is a laying hen,” replies the woman flatly. “My name is Cot Quashey.” And suddenly he knows that she is mad. What prisoner who in her lifetime has received almost eighty lashes—whose very life will float, in less than a week now, in the leaky boat of the Governor’s whimsy—would speak so boldly to her interrogator? To the man who will … interpret … her to an indifferent Colonel Stede? Amazed at her imprudence, he clears his throat and smiles. “Is that so, now?”

“I did not see my master Henry Plackler very often the first three years I was his slave at Arlington. He kept residence in Bridgetown, at the town house his wife’s father had given her when they came out in ’45. The best of everything was there. The matched Arabians and the carriage were always returned to the Bridgetown stables as long as my master owned them, some said because he was afraid his slaves would eat them, as they had once done his ox.

“I have heard they had a larger staff at their town house than the twenty-two of us who worked the land at Arlington. They had bakers and grooms, a seamstress who was also a midwife, and a little black castrato who sang French carols at Christmas. But never did I see those fancy servants, nor the chandelier of Spanish crystals, nor the formal garden maze, for Master Plackler gambled his Bridgetown goods away during my third Easter with him. Indeed, that was what brought my mistress home to Arlington at last.

“In some ways those years at Arlington did me the most harm, although until the end I was not physically beaten. Usually a new-bought servant was put out upon the ground of his new home, in a place where he might build a shelter from the twigs and reeds around him once his daily labor for the master was complete. And usually, in the place the new slave was put out, there were other cabins of people like himself—Irish, Scots, English, Fon or Fan or Ibo—to draw toward and cluster to. But that was not my lot at Arlington. First of all, I was a child; not capable of living shelterless, nor knowing aught of how to build a shelter. But also, Arlington was a smallholding. As I have told you, much had already been lost at dice. When I was purchased I became one of only four white female servants. There were other females, members of a family of Africans led by a queenly woman the master had named Salome. Salome had two grown daughters and several sons by her two husbands, who lived with her in harmony. Africans were not yet common in St. George’s Parish, but Master Plackler had won these and a dozen others some years past, during his greatest gaming venture. They say he’d gambled at cards on that occasion with the captains of two Dutch traders bound for High Brazil. Salome’s daughters were in the second gang with me at first, but we were ‘promoted,’ they to the fields, I to the house, as you shall hear.