“Did the mistress die?” Lara persisted.
“No, she did not die.”
“Then what happened? What is wrong with you?”
I saw the magic man glance at her. His cream-and-coffee eyes sharpened a bit as he turned them on me, as he looked between us.
I took the warning as it was meant.
“Go back inside,” I told Lara softly, shooing her with my free hand, the one not gripping the leather bag to keep it balanced on my sore shoulder. “You and everyone else will know all about it, soon enough...”
***
I heard the same rumors as the rest.
Being unnoticed, particularly when I wished it to be so, I slipped back inside the house once my duties to the magic man had been completed, under the guise of aiding my father in his own duties to bring the house back to order after that ordeal. We accomplished this mainly by ensuring the birthing room had been cleaned and appropriately aired of evil spirits and the like, while also keeping an ear to the floorboards, so to speak, of the talk circulating among those who had been present for the birth itself.
That circle of talk was already widening, and it had only been a few hours.
Mistress D’Alendria had been returned to the master’s bedroom, more or less clean and as silent and white as a ghost. The mistress slept for a time, but perhaps the knowledge of her own impending trials brought her awake shortly after—or perhaps the master himself could not stand her silence any longer and shook her awake himself.
There are those who forget the slaves have ears and eyes, who speak of them in the same room while forgetting they might have an opinion on what is said. There are others of the white race who seem to fear ears in every room, on every wall and in every empty cane field...as well they should.
Our master was both of these, depending on the day.
Master D’Alendria, like others of his kind, told himself it is the Maroons he fears, not the slaves under his “protection.” The whites pretend we are of a different species than those who live in the hills, that the Maroons could infect us like a plague if allowed, but that they are ostensibly cut of a different cloth or perhaps simply of incongruous breeding stock, like the monstrous child himself, who the English doctor quickly took with him from the main house under cover of blankets once its color was known.
The whites couched these suppositions in expert-sounding labels that mean nothing to those of us who occupied the slave quarters. They called us Eboe and Coramantee, Chamba and Uganti. They talked of our languages, Mungola and Uta, breeding traits and perceived habits and whatever else lodged in that largely fanciful base of knowledge regarding our “kind,” but really, it is clear to us—to most of us—that they know not at all of what they speak.
As I say, Master D’Alendria could be both of these, at times.
I wondered on that day, however, if our master was too much lost in that feeling of shock to be able to think with much effect on the vagaries of his household and whether they might be observing him. Surely all I saw in his eyes that day could be characterized as fear—that same fear that steals over both animal and human in the face of such shock as he must have felt upon witnessing the characteristics of his newly-born “son,” and on a day that he likely expected to bring him much joy, as well as a festive atmosphere both on the plantation and in the neighboring harbor and town.
The whispers occurred around him, regardless.
Truly, it was the whites who spoke most often and the loudest.
The rest of us knew better. Even in regular circumstances—which these, most assuredly, were not—the slaves’ real communications mainly happened after dark, as well as in the cane fields far away from the main house. Even then, our true opinions often got expressed more in the way of eye movements and hand gestures and quoted scripture than overtly incriminating words.
We occasionally exchanged phrases in those native tongues that we knew and bastardized for our own purposes, too—the ones the white masters pretended to know but only understood what we wished them to hear.
The big question on all of those whispering lips, of course, was
who
had done the crime.
Which among the master’s cattle had been lured into the mistress’s bed?
Had Mistress D’Alendria been taken by force?
Would she cry rape, even if she hadn’t, simply to save herself?
We all heard the whispered stories of white women who had done this, seducing the stock and then crying violent defilement when found out. All of us feared being so named.
No one could take seriously her claims of ignorance, of course.
Master D’Alendria’s wife cried. We heard her plead with the master that she had no idea how such a thing could have occurred. When he answered her in low, angry words, we heard her scream through the walls, wails of protest and terror as it sank in that he wouldn’t believe her—that no one would believe her.
We could hear it in her voice. We could hear that she knew this would not end well for her, whatever Master D’Alendria’s final decision.
I had been there when those conversations began on the lower floor.
More than that, I had been there when they first handed the child to the master’s wife in the birthing chamber fashioned of that upstairs guest room. They had shown Mistress D’Alendria her own child only after she demanded that they do so four or five times, her anger and confusion evident when no one would answer.
I had seen, firsthand, the shocked look in her hazel-flecked eyes, the pallor that had come to her already deathly pale face. That pallor seemed to suck the remaining life from our mistress, as if from the very marrow of her bones, as her mind caught up with the information her eyes gave her.
Even I knew the futility of these signs, no matter what they stirred in me.
I did feel for her, though.
I could not help it.
I also knew I could relay the genuine confusion I’d seen on Mistress D’Alendria’s finely featured face with its rust-colored freckles to as many who would listen, in as many ways as I knew how to speak...and in as many languages and tongues as I could manage...and it would make no difference.
Nor would it alter in any way Master D’Alendria’s or the town’s eventual verdict regarding her guilt.
She had gone from treasured and revered wife to the basest of animalistic harlots. Nothing I said now would change that.
Nothing anyone said would change it.
Not only was I perceived as an underage slave, well-spoken or not, at least to those who bothered to ascertain that fact—the facts would speak for themselves. No one who had been in that room could dispute the truth of what Mistress D’Alendria had birthed. Not a one of those who heard me speak of what I had seen in the eyes of my mistress on that day would ever be persuaded to believe that her confusion and ignorance had not been contrived by her to save herself.
Further, they might only blame Mistress D’Alendria more if I attempted to communicate my observations—for, in their eyes, my education was my mistress’ doing, too, and many on the island still viewed an educated slave as a greater threat than even the spells of the magic men, who they at least knew better than to try and stamp out. The white townsfolk and plantation owners feared educated livestock more than they feared the Maroons themselves.
So I kept my silence on that day, too, on my hands and knees as I scrubbed the stained floors of what had been Mistress D’Alendria’s birthing room, listening to the sobs of the same through those hard-wood planks mixing with the calls of tropical birds outside and the distant sound of surf pounding the beach.
I listened to my African father hum a cane-cutting song under his breath, without him seeming to know he did it, inhaling the scent of lye as it slowly ate away the remaining metallic taste and the softer scents of brine and burning sugar through the shutters now flung wide to the arms of the dark blue sea.
***
It didn’t take them long to get around to suspecting Chaote.
Someone had seen him enter the house one day, it was said, and roughly in the appropriate number of months in the past. Someone had wondered why someone like Chaote would venture inside at all, it was said, his being a field slave...and therefore without any legitimate duties indoors.
It was a fortuitous observation, in terms of discerning the truth.
Truthfully, it was not one I had expected.
It is rare that crimes are actually witnessed, with so many comings and goings as occurred on a busy plantation such as ours, with hundreds of our kind roaming all over on various errands.
In any case, that witness sealed Choate’s fate.
The missionaries had renamed Chaote ‘Christopher,’ but none but the local priest and Master D’Alendria called him that, and then usually to create distance, and reinforce that he was less than, rather than more of, an equal in their eyes.
Choate was tall. Chaote was also handsome, with lighter skin than many who worked the fields, and eyes such a deep black they could cause you to blink and stare, as if trying to see past them, or maybe to better discern the black dot in their center. All of the slave women seemed to get lost in that strong-featured face. I knew—we all knew, really—that even many of the white women admired him and found him handsome, however well they tried to hide it.
Chaote had fine features for an African. Occasionally, they spoke of him being a mix-breed himself, colored rather than full-blooded, or perhaps hailing from one of the higher, more civilized regions of the Dark Continent.
Chaote had high cheekbones, thinner, sculpted lips, muscular shoulders and arms and a back that rippled as he worked, stretching the cotton fabric of his shirts, or even when he merely stood still.
Despite his base simplicity and lack of education, Chaote wore a thoughtful expression much of the time, as if he lived somehow deeper inside himself than most. When not working, Chaote could often be found on the cliffs at the boundaries of the plantation property, his face unmoving as he stared off on a serene meditation of the ocean’s waves.
Like myself—in my own, far different way—Chaote drew the eye.
I knew that was what the magic man had been trying to tell me that day, why he had given Lara to Chaote and not another. The magic man had been trying to protect Chaote—protect both of them, perhaps, since Lara had already begun to pull stares, too, and not only from the other slaves.
I understood such things all too well.
Youth kept me out of that limelight in all of the ways that might be dangerous for me later, but not Chaote. He clearly had the body of an adult, so those pulls got translated differently, and truthfully, made the white men notice him, too, and not in a way that flattered either Chaote or themselves.
I hadn’t seen Mistress D’Alendria in days when the murmurings began around Chaote.
The initial theories as to the baby’s probable parentage had centered on Maroons, on marauders stealing in during the dead of night and taking Mistress D’Alendria while the master was away, perhaps making her too hysterical and traumatized to remember the occurrence.
Those theories dimmed when no one could find evidence that the house had been breached, apart from the baby itself. Arguments that the tropical rains would have washed away any footsteps did no good, for it was believed that a Maroon entering the house would have undoubtedly taken more than merely our mistress’ virtue, and none of the animals nor Master D’Alendria’s gold had gone missing during that time, either.
Somewhere in the dismissal of that first and most charitable (to the mistress, at least) “marauding Maroons” theory, Mistress D’Alendria herself disappeared.
It happened in the night, we presumed, since none of us had definitely seen her go, although old Durwi claimed he heard the carriage come up in the early hours before dawn, while he’d been up with a painful bladder ailment and smoking his pipe to try and bring on sleep.
In the township, subsequent rumors circulated that Mistress D’Alendria had gone to the mainland “for her health”—which could even, at its base, have been true—although we all knew she would never be allowed to return to the island or to our master, improvements to her health notwithstanding.
That was a development I had not foreseen either, truthfully, but one that provided me with some measure of relief.
I overheard folks who had been in town, who whispered about what the other whites were saying, about what Master D’Alendria should do, even criticisms that his soft heart for his young bride had made him a fool. The township whites spoke of Mistress D’Alendria as an animal, as a being without conscience, who had dirtied or at least allowed to be dirtied the bloodlines of both species. They seemed to think our mistress should have killed herself rather than be a vessel for such a thing—a rather large hypocrisy from the perspective of the quarters, given the number of half-white babies that the slave women had birthed over the years, but one in which the worst offenders often appeared the most vehement.
The township whites advised and devised a variety of punishments to visit upon Mistress D’Alendria’s fair and freckled skin, and worse...but it seemed the master hesitated, perhaps because he had seen the same thing in his wife’s tears and shock that I had, or perhaps for some less noble reason.