Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (24 page)

“We reclined there on that beach, nibbling soft sweet flesh from leaf platters. And as my son curled against my side sucking on poached winkles, that tinkling sound came again, sudden and louder. Mama Chiva’s face went alert and quiet, and Quashey looked over his shoulders quizzically. But I felt great peace, for I knew what that music was. We were sitting in a midden of the old ones, where since ancient times they had come to catch and cook their prey. It was in quality somewhat like that midden on the banks of the Shannon, where my parents took me each ripe-apple autumn when I was a tiny child. The air was thick with spirits that once had been human, and with their happy industry. So through Mama Chiva I said to Quashey and them all, ‘Ye need not be afeared, we have such places in the land I come from. The old ones can bless us, even though we are not of their blood. At least while the sun is shining down. I know this in my bones.’

“I cannot say why, but from that afternoon my husband’s eyes began to shine upon me, looking far beneath my red, parched skin to something else. Looking into my eyes as I in his; both of us seeking to find a clearing ampler than we found up on Slave Hill, or in the cane fields, or when we looked upon our own lives back in time.

“In the weeks to come, Quashey questioned me through Mama Chiva. How that delighted me! I told him of my ancestors; of how they never left the land they loved, but hovered above the ground in stones and underground in tunneled halls, the even-older ones living inside the mountains except at special times.

“His words in turn rumbled to Chiva, who explained that Coromantee ancestors also walked with them, and were a part of their community, and hovered bodiless above their lands. Oh yes! I cried. And told them about Samhain, when the dead, the living, and those from different planes all shared the earth. But, Chiva conveyed, the Coromantee were worried that being stolen so far away from their own lands and streams, their special stars, trees that were whole kingdoms on their own, their ancestors could no longer find them till they were dead and buried and journeyed home again. Yes, they were terribly afraid that their ancestors could no longer guide them in this new condition, this new place.

“ ‘Ah husband,’ I told him, ‘I cannot see my mother’s face; only her rough hands reaching, reaching toward me. It is the same with my saints, they whose wells we used to dance about; who blessed our hearths each morning. I remember, I said, many holy charms and tales: but the heart has gone away from them. My saints can no longer find me.’ Quashey nodded then, and straightened. His ancestors might not sniff them out, he said; but his God could find them anywhere if they would call on him in the right way.

“Through Chiva I told him how I, all alone in my practice, had lost the way to my God’s side. My childhood prayers, said all alone, were useless as milk teeth at a bone. Those old words seemed drowned out by the ringing heat of this inverted Eden, this … Barbados. Only that day, in the midden of the old ones who had fled away before the slavers’ ships; there I felt the holy confidence I’d known as a small child. I struggled for the words: it is, I said, as if these days of hell are only a small corner part of some world that will ever be preserved, and we must put our confidence in that. ‘Yes! Yes!’ cried Quashey: ‘this is why my own clan has to meet, remembering the good ways we were taught, trying to practice them together. Someday’—he spread his arms on high—‘there will come a different dawn.’

“But on the strand that afternoon, during our first talk about such things, the tinkling picked up again although there was no wind. Down on the shore, Afebwa strewed a pile of fish guts into the water and began to sway and dance to that faint music. I let her. To dance to fey music is the beginning of the end. Still, I let her. But when Ben made to join her, I grabbed him to my side and bade him rest and take a nap. His little head lay on my hip, my hand wandering his hot, dry curls as his eyes drooped, then slept.

“Before the sun went low we started back. We dawdled in the dappled wood. Ben once again rode on his father’s shoulder down the path, I right behind. Quashey’s body sent waves of feeling back to me. My breasts felt heavy, full of rich song, like the nests of river orioles in the jungle trees above. The air lay charged between us, though we spoke not.

“At the compound Afebwa and Jiba leaned against each other whispering. Mama Chiva stirred the fire in the large hut’s pit and sent them off for water. Soon the bland smell of loblolly rolled on smoke across the yard. Things seemed as they had been. But Quashey came to my hut that night, his eyes searching, searching. He gave me words, translated, from the Coromantee tongue, words he was teaching Ben. Only a few, but I wore them like a necklace for the rest of his life, with the rare others that he gave me. We sat up late, a pool of patience dark and shimmering between us, until our son lay sprawled in sleep upon his mat, lips and legs apart—tall infant that he was. Then we went to my pallet, and looking each into the other’s eyes as if we stared into a double well of clear, sweet, healthful water, we made my baby girl.”

Coote shifts his back to right, to left, and cracks his tired neck. The tedium of it! “The meetings, biddy!”

“By the time my Betty came, in ’73, more people were attending. I cannot tell you what they said, for, as I’ve told, I never learnt the language. And once himself took an interest in me I took the meets for an annoyance. No longer did I care to fit in with these folk, or be accepted. I wanted all the visitors to go away so I could have my husband to myself. I wanted to forget the fields, the hunger, wet, drought, what have you, with my head held to his, like a mango to the mouth of the hungry.

“Jiba left us in the time after the storms, and married the ’Mantee who had asked for her hand.”

“The one called Cudjoe?”

“Yes.”

“The same Cudjoe who was Quashey’s first lieutenant during the uprising?”

“The same. And she proved fertile before planting time, which made the overseers pleased as they prepared their report of increase and accounts for England. So now I had only the wife Afebwa to divide me from my man. For Mama Chiva, while still he visited her and took her council every third night, had become a go-between for us. When my belly swelled, keeping him off me in consideration for the child, he brought her to my cabin at night that she might translate our words.

“How we delighted in all we found in common, we two people separated so by tongue, by race, by nation, creed, and history! Beneath the skin of differentness, we held so many of the same things to examine in the twin lights of belief and trust. There were the ancestors, who still dwelt among us and whose intercession we implored, although you think of these as ghosts. There was the high place of music, song, and dance among our peoples. I mean how both our peoples know that music calls—calls the spirit of things, the angels and the faeries, the sprites of earth and sky, and animals. We knew that there are spirits everywhere, in the land, the stones—truly, the air is full of them, and animals have magic too, though maybe crocodiles and snakes for Coromantee folk, whilst hares and cows and wise fish for myself.

“For each of us, coming to any crossroad is different than it would be for you; and the magic properties of certain trees, though you would not want these in your renowned gardens, are legendary. Each knew exactly what the other meant about the disorientation of this place: of how we must be buried East if we were to face the kingdoms of our ancestors. Yet if we were home we would be buried facing West. For Quashey and I both knew that West has a different character than East, no matter what East faces: something beyond directions. Truly, the dead go home to the West. But oddly the most … invigorating … discovery between us was the history of war amongst our peoples: of how neither buckled or succumbed, but against polished sword and harquebus fought with bare knuckles for our freedoms and our lands.

“Ours was a late and lovely courtship, coming when already we shared two children between us. It was a courting of growing friends, through eye and handclasp, shared smile, knowing sigh. And rather than watch my man across the fire in heated speech I could not understand with some Coromantee, I was fain to have him woo me more. Fain to feel his chapped lips graze my forehead as we tumbled into sleep, and his hand seek mine in dreams. No, I can tell you nothing of those early meetings except the tone was changing to an urgency, and shadowy faces I had never seen before were stepping to the fire to clasp hands in odd patterns with Quashey, their harsh whispers keeping us awake till all hours when we needed our sleep for the fields.”

Coote takes note that the child registered as Betty was born in the last days of 1673. The mother had been given eight days in bed, a jar of rum to bring on the milk, and several pieces of fruit. A chicken had been given to the compound to provide eggs, but had been stolen and cooked by another slave, later flogged for stealing a hen from his overseers’ fowl yard. Betty’s father had been given two pieces of silver, one for each child he had produced.

Then in early ’74 the child Bin Quashey sickened. The sickness began with a pain in both legs. He lost his breathing powers. The prisoner becomes agitated as she describes this, saying, “Certain I was that he had the
drohuil
laid upon him. And I was sure that Afebwa, who’d no child of her own, who encouraged my Ben’s visits every day, had coveted him so much that she had laid the evil eye upon him.

“And still I am not sure that she was innocent, though I know now she was unwitting of her harm. But Quashey would not hear of it. I went out, I collected medicines, and Mama Chiva stayed up tireless nights making poultices of them. But Ben grew frailer, frailer, all in a matter of days, until he could not catch his breath unless propped up in somebody’s lap. Quashey raised his beard to the moon and wailed his prayers, while I went collecting
lus-more
leaves in morning dew to brew into a tea. Finally, when all hope seemed gone Quashey agreed: he took Afebwa by the hair and pushed her into my small overheated hut. He made her spit. The Coromantee do not give their fluids away, so he was forced to slap her. But I had seen her dance to the music at the midden, and she longed so for my son’s company … and sure, the only way to cure the evil eye is that they who cast it spit upon their victims to break the spell.” Cot Quashey’s breath is coming ragged now, though she is only whispering.

“But it was too late. He died. Bin Quashey died. How vividly I see my baby Betty, lying in the crook of my arm and peering startled round the shadows of the hut as we wailed for him. There came forty days of mourning. My son’s thin body folded into the soft clay, facing East for Ireland’s West and for his canoe journey from Guinea to that other paradise. Once I tried to beat Afebwa with a hoe handle as the two gangs trudged up Ibo hill after fieldwork. I was constrained; but no one punished me.

“At night I sat alone with my new daughter. Mama Chiva sat by me. He did not come to me during my mourning: it was his mourning too, he did not go to anyone. But when the forty days were done the precious thread he and I’d been weaving had turned gray, bedraggled, lifeless. It was cut. All had unraveled, and we could not go back.”

T
he final interrogation begins quite late the following morning. First came the great flurry and clatter of a coach and four on the cobblestones outside Speightstown Gaol. The interrogation room has been rearranged by the time the prisoner is brought in to be seated. Now the Apothecary’s cherry escritoire, instead of sitting with its back to the window, faces the bright garden from across the room. There’s a wide space between Coote’s desk and the prisoner’s chair, set under the wide-flung windows. Their shutters are tied back so the sea breeze might carry off the odor of her wounds. A red velvet chair of state has been unloaded from the roof of the coach and placed in the dim recesses behind Coote’s station. There sits a man with pouting chest and belly above thin legs crossed at the white-stockinged ankles. He lolls in utter silence, a dull ray here and there penetrating the shadows to highlight the lustrous nap of velvet on his chair. The same rays shoot thin cylinders of radiance over his sky-blue satin suit and limn the left edge of his curly nut-brown wig. Over his face he holds a full-length mask of dark blue velvet, made for such occasions and padded with camphored herbs against the pestilence and reek of foul places.

Coote’s voice, as he begins, is somewhat faltering. At the same time he is resolute and stern in his demeanor. “This is the joyful day when you will come to the point, biddy,” he declares. “The Coromantee uprising of 1675, the execution of the blackguards who fomented it, and how you came to join their cause. Posthumously. Which ended you here, your life in peril, for your disloyalty to your rightful government of fellow Christians.” Rapidly he strokes these words for all posterity.

The Irishwoman clears her voice. Her voice slides and slips, as if upon her own sweat. “Sir, I’m so woozy,” she croaks. This time Coote bids Lucy bring her tea with rum. She must not fail me now, he thinks, not with His Eminence seated behind me, and Arlington or someplace like it shining in my future. I won’t have her fainting away. In the corner, the satin-suited man squints at the prisoner as she drinks the mug which Lucy proffers. He coughs and pulls a pomander from his reticule to hold before the nose holes of his mask.

“Although my life has had many endings and new starts, my tale yesterday brought me to the end of the scant joy I knew in it. My son, Bin Quashey, had his nose plugged up with the clay of his grave. And in the days that followed, though we continued to work from dark to dark, and the cane flowers continued to bloom, and my tiny daughter continued to suckle and coo and become both more lively and more bonny, death’s pall lay upon everything. As if even inside the sun-fed grass there hid a core of … As if … lurid … the days like moving through the worst seasickness, our squeamishness not of the belly but the heart.

“I blamed Afebwa, with her yearning toward my lad which drew the evil eye upon him. For it lives everywhere. The only haunt whose like can’t be found the whole world over is the Ban Sí: otherwise … the sprites and faeries shape change everywhere. But my husband Quashey blamed many other things. He blamed how far he was from his clan’s lands—so far that his ancestors could not smell the blood of their own small kinsman, and guard him. Bit by bit he came to blame how far he himself had come from what he had learned were the right ways. He chastised himself for getting a little drunk on days of rest instead of praying, and for trying to find his greatest pleasure in his women and his son, instead of living for the
tawhid
—the Unity of all who knew his God. Bitter he was, indeed. One family lost in Africa. Now, another slipping away in Barbados.