Authors: William Dietrich
To go from the dazzle of the sunlit yard to the dining room was like entering a cave until our eyes adjusted, but once inside we saw a reasonable replica of England. There was a massive mahogany table and sideboards, fine china, heavy cutlery, prints of hunts and battleships, and silk wallpaper spotted with mold. The table legs rested in pans of water.
“Keeps the ants off the meat,” Lord Livingston explained, settling into his chair at the head of the table with as much weighty deliberation as starting a day of work. “I daresay if the Garden of Eden had so many bugs, Eve would have spent her time scratching instead of eating apples.”
“Governor, what a silly thing to say,” his wife scolded.
“I’ve no doubt Mr. and Mrs. Gage have made that observation on their own, eh? This island grows all things crawling, hopping, creeping, biting, and stinging, and grows them bigger, and faster, than any place civilized man is born.” He waved his arm and flies orbited our table. “You boys there, fan faster, will you?” Two young black domestics put a minute of brief energy into waving large palm fronds before going back to their usual desultory pace.
“The island certainly has lush beauty,” Astiza offered. “The forest is completely opposite my native Egypt.”
“Egypt!” Lord Lovington exclaimed. “Now that’s a place I’d like to see. Dry as toast, I hear.”
“Even hotter than Antigua,” I said.
“Hardly possible, what?” He laughed. “But we have our own advantages, too. No frosts. No coal fires. Rains in buckets, but stops like turning off a tap. Some good horse racing; maybe you’ll have time to see it.”
“I think our mission will force us to hurry on,” I said.
“Our three-year-old son is in the hands of a renegade French policeman on Saint-Domingue,” Astiza explained.
“What? Frogs have your boy?”
“They want to exchange him for a secret,” I said. “Trouble is, we don’t know what the secret is, and we need to find out.”
“That’s the most damnable thing I’ve ever heard. The French! Do you know we held Martinique for a time and were pounding English sense into it when we gave it back in the last peace? Foolish thing to do. Go back and bombard it, I should think.”
“What we really need is information and passage,” I said.
“Yes, yes. Well, let’s have a bite, and then I’ll show you the sugar factories, Gage. Plotting strategy, I think, works better after digestion.”
Like the room, our feast was a partial replica of England, a ridiculous cornucopia of rich food in limpid heat. There was lamb stew, hot and cold cuts of beef, hot and cold fish, turtle soup, pickles, white bread, ginger sweetmeats, roasted plover and doves, a ham, and slices of pineapple. There were sweet jellies, a bread pudding, cream, coffee, tea, and half a dozen wines and liquors. One servant was dressed like an English butler, his face beaded with perspiration, but other male and female blacks shuttled in and out dressed in secondhand calico and with bare feet. The huge palm fronds continued to fan the flies, while the open windows and doors allowed in not just island breezes but cats, dogs, skittering lizards, and a chicken that pecked at crumbs on the floor and was ignored by all involved.
“This new war is our chance to chase the French out of these islands once and for all,” Livingston went on. “The fevers are destroying their troops in Saint-Domingue. Their defeat is God’s will, I believe. Punishment for the reign of terror.”
“They hope to sell Louisiana to the United States,” I said.
“Do they now! To America? And whatever will
you
do with it?”
“President Jefferson estimates it will take a thousand years to settle.”
“Let England take it, is my advice. You Americans are having trouble enough governing what you have. Vicious elections, I’m told. Lies, pamphleteering, and demonstrations by the rabble. You’ll want the Crown back someday, mark my word.”
“We have some loyalists here on the island waiting for that happy day,” Lady Lovington added.
“Our independence was confirmed twenty years ago by treaty.”
“I’m still correcting mistakes I made forty years ago!” Our host guffawed.
It was five, the shadows lengthening, by the time the governor took us on a tour of his plantation. His wife had offered to entertain Astiza at the house, but she’d demurred, preferring to come with me. I knew why. She found domestic chitchat boring. And after the botched sale of the emerald in Paris, she didn’t trust me on my own.
I’d merely picked at my food but still felt bloated in the heat. I was not alone. Three-quarters of the food was sent back untouched, presumably consumed by slaves happy to benefit from European attempts to maintain home customs.
We mounted horses to tour the fields, the epic blue of the sky hazed by field smoke and dust.
“Sugar, Mr. Gage, is the one thing that turns a profit here,” the governor said as we rode sedately toward a mill. “Up to eighteen months to grow, excruciatingly difficult to extract, and expensive to ship. What makes it possible is slavery, and the British abolitionists seeking to end the trade are seeking, sir, to end the prosperity of the empire’s richest colonies.”
“Captain Dinsdale said the same thing.”
“It’s why the revolt in Saint-Domingue is so worrisome.”
“How many slaves do you own?” We were three pale, sweating inspectors white as frosting, touring a dark chocolate of earth and skin.
“Two hundred, and they represent most of my capital. More than my herds, more than my horses, more than my sugar mills, and more than my houses. Even L’Ouverture insisted the freed blacks of Saint-Domingue continue to labor on the plantations. He knew there was no alternative. He needed money to buy arms and powder from America, and the only source of money was sugar. To strip the blacks away would be like dismantling the masts, sails, rigging, cannon, and ballast of a ship. It cannot be done, sir. It cannot be done, for their sake and ours.”
We came to the bare crown of a hill. The windmill rose there, its sloping stone walls fifty feet high. Opposite the blades of the mill was a huge timber as long as a mainmast. It led from the axle of the great windmill sails at the top of the tower down to a track in the ground. Now I saw how every tower’s blades had been aligned so neatly to the prevailing wind. The timber worked like a great tiller, pushed along the ground so that it turned the mill’s top to face the breeze’s direction. From within the structure came the great grinding, as cane was fed into the mill’s presses to be squeezed of brown juice.
We dismounted and went into the dimness. It was even hotter there, the trade winds not penetrating. Donkeys were led laden into the gloom with the last of the season’s harvest, their backs carrying a small mountain of harvested cane weighing more than two hundred pounds. A release of the hemp ropes that secured it, and their burden cascaded onto the mill’s floor. Then the cane was fed by the slaves into the gears of the windmill, the juice squirting to be caught in a tin trench below.
It’s my habit to be friendly, and I thought I might say something to these sweating laborers, but they ignored us as completely as working ants, their eyes only for their ominous, enormous black overseer in one corner who held a curled whip. The laborers’ movements were choreographed by gears and rollers. I couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other; their jargon was a broken mix of English and African, with bits of French and Spanish littering as well, all thickly accented.
It nagged at me to try to communicate, to somehow bridge our gulf of humanity, but what could I say? I was observing a brutal workshop from which no hope of deliverance was possible. The quips of we masters—and by the color of my skin I was one of those—were as irrelevant to these slaves as Marie Antoinette’s blabbering about baked goods. The French had succeeded in crushing a revolt in Guadalupe inspired by the language of the French and American revolutions, but only by roasting the ringleaders over open-pit fires like spitted pigs. Liberty was restricted to one color only.
My own country’s Constitution says much the same thing: no black man or woman can vote. So I felt inadequate to the heat, stench, and cruelty, a participant in a system I’d no say in inventing. Morality suggested I talk like an abolitionist, but practicality suggested I keep my mouth shut. I needed Lovington’s cooperation—meaning passage on a ship to the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue—to rescue my son. I cast about for something to say.
I was surprised to see a bright, well-sharpened cutlass hanging near the mill rollers. “You risk giving your workers a weapon?” I finally asked the governor, pointing to the sword.
“It’s for the overseer to chop off their arms,” he said matter-of-factly. “If they reach too far forward, the rollers catch their fingers and the pressure inexorably draws them all the way in, their heads crushed like melons. I lose valuable property, and a trough of juice is ruined by blood. A one-armed slave, on the other hand, can still be trained to do light chores. I keep the sword burnished to remind them of the danger. Stupid, some of them. Or careless. I let them know there’ll be whippings if there is any blood sugar.”
“Surely you could invent a safer mechanism,” Astiza said.
He was annoyed. “I am not a mechanic, madam.”
“Hot work,” I said more diplomatically, attempting to change the topic. I felt I was on a tour of Dante’s Inferno.
“Bearable for Africans. They’re lazy, actually, caring nothing about my profit, no matter how much I exhort them. They don’t really want to work at all.” He seemed perplexed by this, flicking his riding crop against his own thigh. “Come, I’ll show you where it really gets warm.”
We walked next door to the boiling house, a rectangular stone building shaped like a barracks. The air above it quivered from the heat within. Inside was a long, shadowy, luridly lit gallery. “Here’s the truly hot work, Mr. Gage. Israel there is my most valuable possession, because the boiler man makes or breaks the quality of the sugar.”
Five huge copper kettles hung over a trench of glowing charcoal. This Israel, stripped to a loincloth, moved between the steaming pots, ladling the cane juice into the first and biggest, skimming out the impurities that boiled to its top, and then ladling the purified remainder to each smaller pot in turn until the sugar juice began to turn thick and ropy.
“From a gallon of juice we can get a pound of muscovado sugar,” Lovington said. “The syrup is tempered with lime to become granular. Just before it crystallizes the boiler must judge the moment and ladle it into a cooling cistern. This work is more dangerous than the mill, because the hot syrup can stick like tar and burn its way down to your bones. Israel there moves like a minuet, does he not? In fact, I orchestrate at Carlisle a great dance. The cane must be crushed within hours of cutting lest the sugar deteriorate, and then the juice has only hours to be fed to the boilers before it ferments. We’ve been operating here day and night for three months now.”
“What happens when you’re not harvesting?”
“We plant, burn, weed, manure, and repair.”
“Do the slaves have religion?” Astiza asked. It seemed a digression, but she had great interest in that subject.
“African witchcraft, mostly, with scraps of Gospel they’ve absorbed. We try to discourage it, but they do their own ceremonies in the woods. It was after one of those woodland Sabbaths that the revolt broke out in Saint-Domingue, you know.”
“Do you believe slaves have souls?”
He squinted at my wife, clearly not accustomed to a woman asking such questions, or having a woman along at all. “I am a planter, not a preacher, Mrs. Gage. We do try to introduce them to their Savior.”
“So there are slaves in heaven.”
The governor decided to ignore her and turned back to me. “Now. We mostly ship muscovado, or brown sugar, which is further refined in England, but if we seal the cooling pot with a moistened clay cap with holes in the bottom for the molasses to run out, we can make clayed sugar of the purest white. It’s a four-month process, however, and only Barbados has abundant clay. On Antigua we mostly just drain off the molasses from the brown sugar and use it to make rum. I run both farm and factory, herds to feed us all, and supervise coopers, carpenters, coppersmiths, blacksmiths, and domestics. Free blacks are going to sustain this on their own? I think not. The white man guides, and the black labors. The African, Ethan, is happiest in servitude. Each race to its place.”
“Yet when given the choice, they seem to prefer not to do the work of animals,” I observed. “They become tradesmen. Or soldiers. And by all accounts, in Saint-Domingue they are beating the finest troops that France can send against them.”
“Disease and climate are beating the French. We English beat superstition and savagery out of the Negro. It’s God’s work, what we do.”
I’ve noticed that whenever men want to justify what they desire, they attribute their choice to God. The meaner the ambition, the more they swear it is the Almighty’s desire, and it is the very greediest who insist most vigorously that their covetous hoarding is the Creator’s will. Judging by what’s claimed, God blesses the armies of both sides, kings indiscriminately, and the poor not at all. Ben Franklin and Tom Jefferson were both skeptical of this truck, but even they seemed to hope there was some divinity or destiny to make sense of life. Some slaves, I knew, had converted to Christianity, but their new god didn’t seem to have improved their lot, and I wondered what they thought about fate. What was life like, laboring like an animal, with no hope of change? “It certainly must be complicated to organize,” I said, needing Lovington as an ally.
“Only condemn us when you’re willing to stop eating sugar,” the lord replied. “Your Southern Americans understand what I mean. Ask your Virginians. Ask your President Jefferson. The French are oscillating between anarchy and tyranny, Gage, and must not win. You and I will not let them.”
“Which brings us to Saint-Domingue.” I had not just the fate of races but a missing son to worry about, and every minute of factory tour slowed my search for Harry.
He nodded. “Let’s ride where we can’t be overheard by the blacks.”