Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (8 page)

“At Arlington the master never attended the feast days of his bondspeople. Jenks would appear with a little barrel of spirits which he handed over to Salome’s husbands. In spite of her moralizing, Dora could not be trusted with drink; and the rumor was the Irish and low sort of English servers would guzzle till insensate. But I tell you,” said Cot Quashey, “Salome’s men liked the spirits well enough. They would not part with the little keg, I remember that. If the two Paudis went to beg to take it up and pour a measure, they would shrug their shoulders as if they didn’t understand, and sit upon it. There were at that time eleven African men, and only five Christian bondsmen. Salome’s men shared the liquor fairly among the first gang; we of the second gang were judged not to have earned, yet, such a pleasant gift.

“At Arlington there was no fist-fighting among the people, which was somewhat unusual, for we were as different from each other as Clydesdales from Arabians from Kerry ponies. Five languages were present, and a great hibber-jibber and rolling of the eyes and waving of the hands when people needed to communicate. The quirt of Jenks stood between raised fists. Still, while there were no blows, at the feeds on holidays, people pulled as they will into little factions. Voices dropped and eyes peered at each other across the flames as night grew late and the keg sank low.

“There was no music there at Arlington,” she wandered. “If the Glebe was a place of sudden, unexpected violence, it was also a place where people’s liveliness rose up from time to time. At Arlington once, one of the Africans had built a drum out of a fallen tree and the skin of a creature that had been roasted. But Jenks had hacked the drum up with a small axe. Abomination, he called it, saying it would call to serpents and other things of Satan.

“On one occasion, Salome and her older daughter sat on the ground swilling palm juice they’d distilled, from a calabash. That daughter was only after her conscription to the first gang. They began to sing. It was a song that sounded much like taunting, and the new husband and the single men not of Salome’s clan answered it melodiously. Then the other daughter rose and shuffled in the shadows. With her back turned she made her legs stiff and twitched her rump quickly, like a peacock will in May. Salome growled something and they laughed among themselves. I sat alone, admiring that language between them—the mood they’d entered, all with music. Many was the time, in my six years among the folks at Arlington, when quick excitement would wash through my chest, and I would want to steal to my sleeping shed where my father’s surcoat lay wadded, the brass ha’penny pipe deep in its pocket. I wanted, too, to be a girl making music and dancing. But I never did. For as soon as I imagined myself twirling out of that shed, whistling a reel, I would imagine someone searching my earthen bed under the mouldy rashers once I was in the fields, and stealing my whistle away. I never played my mother’s flute at Arlington until the night I left its sight forever.

“The only music we heard at Arlington was caroling at Christmas. Jenks and Dora urged the Scots people to sing, lined up in their rags like beggars while all the others felt embarrassed for them, and turned away their eyes. The English rakes knew a good few tavern tunes and they would sing them on Sundays if Dora and the Scots maids were going for a walk around the place. Like proper ducklings they walked out, the fools. But these Englishmen ran off after a year, stowing on a vessel Cromwell had sent to subjugate the other islands of the Indies … please, I must pass my water.”

Coote directs her to the garden and shakes out his wrists. In the background, he hears her meager stream. He draws out his pocket watch, queasy from the heat but in need of food to replenish him after the restless, moody night. It’s almost one. Surely Lucy should be coming with his dinner.

“Enough news of the entertainments under your first master,” Coote says peevishly when she has resumed her stool. “What intercourse beyond the musical had you Irish with the Africans of Arlington, or of the other plantations which surrounded you?”

“As I have said, we did not mix with them at all, unless we hoed the same row or helped in the felling of a tree or carting of a bale. We did not share a language. They had been given house-land on a different spot than the Irish lads, so that there was no commonage where their lives might cross on Sundays, as they tended their little gardens, or roasted the small birds we were allowed to snare.

“On the big plantations it’s a more usual thing for slaves to visit others in the evening in the slow season. At the Glebe, the first-gang men and women were sometimes rented or lent to other sugar houses too, once our own crop was in. And trusted women workers there kept a Sunday market at a crossroads between the houses, having passes to do so. But at Arlington … by the time I came there, the only animal stock left on the place were fowl and swine: we had no need to bring the animals to stud at other farms, and no stock to sell at mart. We numbered only twenty-two at Master Plackler’s holding: twenty, once the English rogues ran off to join the navy. We were too few to work the land. There were thirteen hectares in tobacco, and some in indigo, and the master had us clearing more to try out cotton. Altogether there were fifty-eight hectares and only twenty folk; so the master never lent a soul to another harvest, nor had he silver to rent the slaves of others. It was ourselves who took the place of oxen and drays in ploughing land and carting loads around the place. For all these reasons we never met anyone from another place. And ’mongst ourselves—beyond the usual human clannishness—I have told you thrice now that our overseers kept us apart through inspiring fear and loathing. We were a little colony of suspicious factions there, in an Arlington that the ghost of ruin-to-come already lay over. Bad will hung thick, as if something angry was watching us, and just about to fly into our midst.”

Coote stares at her.

“It was like the
siogue
had been riled; yet we could not see them on this new island. Where I come from, although we may not want to, folks
can
see them. What you can see, you have a better chance to appease or foil …”

Coote’s stomach rumbles. The Irishwoman rubs sweat from above her lip. Is it the heat? Her narrow cheeks have taken on the faintest flush. For the first time he notices the small soft cleft in her chin.

“Nor was anybody sent off the grounds for breeding,” she adds. He tips the nib of his quill to the side: a neat man, he wants it to last the morning; and his letters are already becoming wide and slightly blurry. Where is Lucy? “The first year I was at Arlington, one of the Scots girls died. It was consumption. Dora said the lass brought it with her from the highland croft they took her from, for Barbados air is warm and soft. But I have known many, including Africans, who succumbed to the consumption, and they fine and hearty their first years here. At any rate, once that girl had died, there was only Dora, exempt from childbearing by her overseer rank; myself, a young slip not yet in her courses; and the other Scots girl, to breed between four men. In those days they only bred Christian with Christian unless a master or an overseer made a by-blow.

“The surviving Scots girl was named Ardiss. She would have been fifteen or so at the time. After the second harvest of tobacco had been taken and the indigo was in the ground, the master and Jenks decided to increase the Plackler stock by breeding two females—the Scots girl and Salome’s daughter. A man among the single Africans was chosen, and he moved into Salome’s cabin with the daughter. Those people test the way of things between a man and woman anyway before they build a hut, even in their own nation. The Scots girl, our betters determined, would best be mated with the Scots carpenter, who now served as joiner, cooper, and cobbler as well. Wheels he mended, and a gate; he made forks and locks, such things.

“I see him now, that Scotsman. Every Christmas we were given lengths of simple undyed canvas. The Africans were given less, to wrap around the waist and through the legs, the tag-ends hanging down. But Dora and the Scots lasses and I would stitch new breeches and jerkins, and petticoats and waists, for those who had been brought out from Europe. I myself, I only got a skirt, not yet being formed like a woman. The Scotsman, who had come over in a suit of stiff black wool, did his work like all the other northern men in bare chest and canvas breeches. But he had kept his black surcoat, as raveled and mouldy as it was. At the harvest feed and holidays he would don this jacket. He was a slight fellow, and he grew slighter on our rations, for he was not much at hunting birds, and he would not taste the lizards the Africans cooked as victuals.

“He was smaller and shorter than Ardiss, the Scotswoman they bred him to. But once when he stood at a fire eating roast, the fat dripping down his poet’s wrists, his hair and eyes as black as his suit coat, he smiled at me with all his teeth and I found him right handsome. Dora said, ‘He keeps that surcoat for the day his time’s worked off. He says he’ll walk free in it, the eejit.’

“When girls were old enough to breed, they were also considered strong enough to join the heavy workers, the first gang. Jenks took the Scots girl from the ox shed and put her, alone, into another. I was in the yard one night, getting water for helping Dora with the loblolly, when Ardiss came in from the field. Her step was jaunty! The shed she had been given, she said, had a floor of dry planks to lie on. The first gang seemed a real promotion to her; ‘my own housheen,’ she laughed. She had lovely dimples when she smiled, that one.

“Then one evening Jenks told the Scots carpenter to get his things and billet with the lass. I saw the two men walking down the hill from where the slave cabins stood, through the yard past the big house and Jenks’s cottage—which the master stayed in for the few days of auctioning the crop—to the work sheds. In one of them, Ardiss, unwitting, waited.

“Each day before dawn, when the morning star hung over all,” Cot Quashey tells Coote, “the Scots girl threw back the door to her shed and stepped out to fetch a bucket from the pump. Over a little fire before her place she boiled water for their breakfast gruel in a broken pot her man had mended. Sometimes she sang. ‘That Ardiss is a right hoor,’ grumbled Dora. ‘She takes to it like rats to corn.’ When the first gang passed on their way to the fields, the Scots girl joined them. The carpenter did not, if there was a job awaiting in the yard. But it was whispered that when he too went to the fields, they took their midday rest together in the grass, his head upon her lap while she stroked his hair. At night we heard them laughing.

“So it was with surprise that folk began to mark, in spite of all the signs of love, that the Scots girl’s belly was flatter after six months than it had been before. Then the master came for the third sale of crops.

“On the afternoon when the merchants lumbered off down the road, their wagons laden for the London ships, we slaves were sent to clean out the tobacco sheds of mildew, rats’ nests, snakes, the like. As we carried out the trash to burn, we saw Jenks and the master seated underneath the trade awning, deep in conversation.

“After some time they called Ardiss to them; and Dora also, to question her. Next the Scots carpenter was summoned. The story was brought back: never in all those months had they lain together but as a sister with her brother. The carpenter said he would not force her. ‘Master Plackler, I would marry Ardiss when I am free,’ Dora mimicked, as if this were something cunning and posh to say. But Jenks had answered with a guffaw: ‘Yer willy will not function better when you’ve put a ring upon her finger.’

“Dora said the master spoke with impatience. ‘You have wasted almost the entire time of parturition for one child,’ he cried in disgust. ‘We could have had two off this lass by the time she now bears one.’

“We in the shed did the best we could to catch the tale unfolding in the yard. The Scotsman was sent down to their little shed. We watched him trudge, shamefast, up the track to the cabin he had left six months before. The black coat was underneath his arm. Bad sprites hung in the air like mist. You can take a green reed and make a ring of it. If you look through it, you can see what those who bring the ill luck look like. But it will blind you in the eye you see them with, and seldom is it worth that much to know. Yet to foretell what brought Ardiss and the Scot, and Paudi Iasc (he notes that she says
iasc
means “fish” in the Irish tongue) so much bad luck, they might have gladly paid an eye to know.” The Irishwoman jerks her head, as if she has been nodding off with her eyes open.

“Suddenly Jenks moved toward the barn. We hustled inside and made busy. I can see them on the rafters, Paudi nOg and Paudi Iasc, standing with their legs balanced akimbo, dirty toes curled around the beams as they bent to haul the bales of fodder we were hoisting to them on the forks. That fodder was for the dry season, after which, by the grace of God, two sows would litter. These would be gorged before and after, and the bonhams soon weaned for sale.

“Paudi nOg and Paudi Iasc were strapping men—twenty-one? twenty-four? at the time. They had been gaoled for poaching fowl—Paudi nOg because the hunger came on him as he walked the land, looking for a
spailpin
’s place. Paudi Iasc went a-poaching, though, because he’d married his sweetheart, got her with child, and had been trying to keep her fed. But he was a fisherman. And the mackerel had not swum up the bay that year. He had no land to sow. No stock to breed. Yet all around his cottage ran rabbits, the streams were choked with salmon, the
boherin
shone speckled in the morning with the spoor of roe deer. And gobbling and pecking through his cabin yard waddled the sleek flock of His Lordship’s geese …”

Before he hears Lucy turning from the cook shed into the corridor, Peter Coote sniffs the scent of ham. At last, he sighs, his right hand crampy. But the Irishwoman rambles on.

“ ‘You! Paud Iasc!’ Jenks cried out as he entered the dim barn. Everyone turned, stopping in their own shadows. Jenks picked me out among the others. ‘Cotlin. Tell Iasc to get down at once and come with me before the Master and the lass.’