Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl (13 page)

“Then I heard them singing: one clear male shout and an answering chant behind him. Marching from a field beyond the big house came half of the first gang, hoes, digging sticks, and shovels perched upon their shoulders. This crew was about three-quarters men, the rest women. In those earlier days of planting sugar, few women were imported. The masters did not know then that the men were lazy.”

A little laugh. She disguises it straightaway as a cough. Coote is astonished. A feeble woman, fevered with festered lashes, discrediting the diligence of men. Incredible. But then, she is demented. There is documentation attesting this.

“Big Dinah told me, and Quashey too, God rest him, that where they came from, women made the fields. Did the planting and the weeding, the harvest and the cure, and the preparation of new seed. But the slavers did not know this. They’d brought in women—whether Irish or Ibo—mainly for the breeding and the housework. That was it, so.”

Quill scratches over paper. The third morning flies by. Coote sprawls across his desk, braced upon his elbows. For a while the rhythm of her telling and the rhythm of his writing join like breath. The Irishwoman, Cot—then seventeen years of age and relatively coddled at Arlington, so that she knew not how to build a house, nor had anyone to help her—talks of sleeping under a banyan tree the first six nights. Of hiding her belongings—the surcoat of her father with her mother’s whistle, an extra apron and cap, the corselet, a fraying dark blue ribbon—under the bushes while she worked. She tells of asking for Big Dinah, the overseer of the second gang, which she had been assigned to. Accosting a younger girl from the third gang, “the hog’s meat gang,” who trudged up the path past where she hid in the bushes that first evening. Straggling behind the others toward the village of small shacks rising over top of the hill, this child gave a little shriek when Cot hissed and grabbed her elbow. She seemed to know no English, though when she heard “Big Dinah” she pointed, trying to break free.

Cot held to the girl’s arm for safety’s sake among the unknown people. In the yards of the mud hovels on the hilltop the laborers were gathering for supper. The light had drained, and now the orange glow from small, crackling cook fires illuminated faces. The people where the young girl led were dark people. Squatting beside the walls of mud-daubed houses, bending over a fire to stir a pot, kneeling at an open log to smash dried corn with rocks. Passing one yard Cot saw a man rinse his hands in the basin where a baby was being bathed. The man splashed the child and they laughed. His woman looked at Cot in silence, lifting the infant from the water. “I half-raised my arm in greeting, but saw myself through her eyes for a moment. So pale I seemed glowing in the dark, a huge glow worm.”

Big Dinah stood before a shack with a small garden plot at the side, pressing her knuckles into her wide back. She answered in English. “Vaughton say you for my fields? You sure?” she muttered, frowning. Cot asked for a place to sleep the night but was refused. “The night looks clear,” Big Dinah said. “You rest under the banyan, we find you when we go out early.” With foreign words the woman sent a pickaninny into the cabin. He came back to the doorway holding a small dried fish to Cot. “Some pawpaw by the ditch down there,” the big woman said, pointing.

Cot Quashey tells the Governor’s man that she had joined the second gang, a group of more than fifty youths. “I was with them until Big Dinah died almost three years later.” The second gang weeded sugarcane—“It was similar to topping tobacco,” she says—and planted food crops—corn, yams, potatoes, pigeon peas. They tended livestock of the various kinds, and during harvest season moved up and down the rows collecting cane trash to fuel the furnace at the boiling house. Outside of harvest, they took the sugar trash to rethatch the cottages of the slaves, and to sweeten the meat of the hogs.

On those first evenings before dark the Irish girl stole around the edges of the yards, shivering as she noted the structure of the houses. Through the treetops she could glimpse the wide sea flowing home. Sometimes someone threw a stone at her or yelled, and she slunk away. By Sunday she had gathered enough sticks to poke into the ground for a three-walled shed. “I remember how my back ached that Sunday night; but as the evening star began to wink, I crisscrossed piles of long fresh branches across a portion of my narrow walls, and made a bough roof to lie under. I had no science then; the walls and thatch became the nest for beetles, flying roaches, scorpions. The Africans know to pat mud and dung over all to keep away insects.

“No one helped me, though they watched me from the corners of their eyes. I was the only Christian in the second gang at that time. The Africans thought I had done something severely wrong, for white female servants were often used for housework by this time. They looked more natural in an apron, the masters thought, and knew a tea cozy was not a hat, and the like. So … that was my first housheen. I was bit upon the neck by a centipede just before it was blown over by a storm a fortnight later. But the next time I built faster, and someone from the cooper’s shed lent me a hammer. He showed me how to pound the sticks into holes prepared in the ground. You fill the holes with pebbles then, and pack them shut with soil. I never knew his name. The shacks I built myself were never large enough to stand in. Just tall enough to store my rations and my pot and tinder sticks, my father’s shredded jacket, and to crawl inside for sleep after the field.

“At the end of that year, Cromwell had several hundred Irishwomen spirited to Barbados. The Glebe bought two for breeding with the Irishmen on the first gang, and they both could weave, cut cloth, and sew. I was so happy when first I saw them unloaded from the cart after the auction; when I heard the silvery sly jokes and barnyard complaints in our tongue which they made about Jack Vaughton right before his unwitting face. Those girls were lively! I cannot say what changed in me so that one day I was planning how we three could build a little cottage altogether, but the next I drew away from where they stood. I averted my eyes as I passed by them. ‘The dirty Irish mares,’ Vaughton called them, and suddenly I felt them so. One lives at the Glebe still. She married Robert Rigley after his first wife died, dirty Irish mare or no, and was given paid work in the house.”

“At the end of the hurricane season in 1657 a rider in a dove-gray suit and hat came out the lane one afternoon. Jack Vaughton, Ephraim Lye, Robert Rigley, and the others, they were gathered on the half-moon stair up to the mansion as we came in from the fields that evening. We had been draining land. There had been a lot of rain, and we were getting ready to plant new sugar shoots. The drivers stood along the path. They were tired too. They told their people there’d be no supper until the gentleman had spoken, both to those who knew the English and to those who could but stare blankly when it was spoken. The rider had brought the Proclamation of 1657, sir.”

“I have read it; it serves as the foundation for the laws we keep today,” replies the doctor.

“I stood there in the crowd,” she murmurs. “A crowd of various black folk, but here and there the new Irishwomen, two men from Connaught who labored in the first gang, the Scots carpenter I’d known at Arlington. I watched them as the government messenger proclaimed from a scroll that people of the Irish nation, being slothful and dissolute, lewd, evil, and pilfering, should have placed upon them corrections for their idle, wandering ways. It was read that if any of us were found out on the road without a written ticket signed by master or by mistress, the nearest overseer was to whip us as much he deemed fit, then convey us to a constable. Constable to constable we would go, whipped, until returned unto our masters. And if any Irish should be stopped, suspected of a counterfeited ticket, that person must be sent directly to a Justice of the Peace, considered in theft of his master’s chattel, and liable to hanging.

“On and on the paper read: if any of us should run away we should be flogged and our service lengthened between two years and double. And even after freed, if we were found with no fixed abode the Justice was to take us off the road and whip us sound, and send us for a year to a plantation at whatever wage he chose.

“When the messenger read off the last condition against the Irish race, I felt the proclamation to be in part inspired by the plot Mary had begged me, that night in the barn at Arlington, to partake of. A backlash, if ye like. No arms were to be sold to any freed Irish from then on, and any arms they legally had purchased were to be seized by citizens and neighbors, and turned over to militia field officers in each precinct of Barbados.”

Coote focuses carefully on the words she has remembered from the Proclamation. He wonders if there is a way to lead her tale, so that the route from early armed uprisings of the Irish can be traced directly to conspiracy—“Negroes and Irish versus Planters, Free Inhabitants (non-Irish), and Other Servants on the Isle.” He writes himself a note of this across the blotting page.

But she changes tack and he feels himself, for some reason, unwilling yet to yank her sharply by the reins. “Up to that time when the Proclamation was read out I had had a bad time with Big Dinah. I could not accept that a savage had been set over me, and with a whip to boot. Were we not taught at Arlington that although we wore the same rags, starved on the same ration, and were all born to serve ye British, that still we Christians were created higher than the African? Was not a ‘dirty papist’ better than a pagan? Were we not Christian cousins to your King?”

“Sound reasoning on that, at least,” Coote murmurs, finishing the page.

But no: Cot Quashey shakes her head. “ ’Twas thoughts like that made me their puppet for so long.”

“Whose puppet?” No reply. Fever, Peter thinks, she’s rambling. Wordlessly he stops and pours a goblet of water for the prisoner. Such secret indulgence of his tenderness for the sick in general gives him a fine feeling about himself. The water is not fresh. A mosquito floats upon it which he lifts and flicks away with the feathered portion of his quill. After she has sipped, wincing as she swallows, she continues in a lower voice.

“I pushed Big Dinah to the limits. I spat in her direction and mocked her voice, and once I cried out, ‘Here, then, bitch. Strike me!’ But she would not, although she made me do my work in any case. Later she told me, ‘Something was upon you. I could see it crawling on your neck and shoulders. I knew better than to hit you while you was carrying that.’ And she was right. For hatred was upon me.”

“Hatred against your master!” Coote exclaims, prepared now to get to the bottom of a conspiracy fueled by animal hatred.

“My master, Edward Lord Cleypole, came to Barbados only twice in the twenty years I cut his cane,” the prisoner replies almost impatiently. “For as you know, he was a great favorite at court.

“No; Big Dinah said, after she heard the Proclamation, that she watched me and saw my hatred flying loose as a whirligig. She helped me put a shape around it, for I stood enchanted in the center of it, unable to recall, except as empty words, the movements I had made away from my own heart.

“The first movement you might say occurred when the
Falconer
stood offshore of Hole Town, or when we landed on the strand. And all I would see was the beauty of the place, the soft beauty of the black-haired girl as she was led from the cattle pen, the lovely cloth in the breeches and the waistcoats of the gentlemen. The next remove I made when I deserted my countryman in his stocks, as others once deserted Christ.

“Further I strayed, straining to woo and coddle those unsound, ungenerous beings who held my young life in their hands. The Captain. Mistress and Henry Plackler. I stumbled from false hope to betrayal to numbness. And suddenly, with Big Dinah, a woman who would not be a mother to me, I arrived, a creature surrounded by a forest full of hate.

“Hatred, like loneliness,” she muses, “is composed of many things. Yes, I hated the man who proclaimed from the cold stone steps that his nation would rein my bestial spirit unto death, if I, as Irish, did not bend. And I hated the Scots and the English gaolbirds in the crowd because they were not so proclaimed.” But the worst thing, she tells her interrogator, was how deeply and obediently she hated herself, for the laziness and dissoluteness, lewdness and thievery, said to have been bred in her: those qualities, all said, which added together made her of lower quality, lower race, fit only to serve her betters.

Coote is puzzled. “But dissoluteness, lewdness … those are sins. All Christians have been commanded to hate sin,” he interjects. “You do well to hate those in yourself, biddy. Why does your voice ring with such passion over this common burden, while you have shown no remorse at abetting murder and sedition?”

“No! No!” she cries. And then a bit more calmly: “It was not sin I hated, but myself as sin’s favored vessel, my race singled out as the dirtiest of the lot. And I came to such a hatred because each night, lying in my small stick-hovel, I searched and searched for how I was at the bone, and found these things truly festering in me. There
was
lewdness, for I liked Master Plackler to look on me in my corselet, while I played the maiden who had never seen the bull upon the cow. And dissoluteness was at my very core. I could find more examples of it than suckers on the sugar plant: look how I had turned away from Mary Dove and Paudi Iasc …”

“You are possessed with Paudi Iasc,” Coote nearly shouts.

“… yet curtsied to Eugenia Plackler, told her she looked lovely, listened to her woes about the children, when in my heart I felt terror and loathing and was always looking for a door in her madness that I might escape through.

“And my thievery had begun by then, though Big Dinah once told me that the Africans had a proverb: ‘It makes God laugh when one thief steals from another.’ ”

Peter Coote underlines this emphatically as he writes it down.

“But to steal from one’s master is also inviting death. And my own God told me not to steal no matter how great the need, instead to pray for redemption from my hungers—and my greeds.