The Long Song (38 page)

 

 

 

 

C
OME, LET US FIRST find the field negroes who once resided and worked upon the plantation named Amity. We must ride a good way to follow the path they journeyed when they abandoned that place. The trail they travelled—carrying their salvaged mattresses, chairs, clay pots, tin pans—has been worn down over many years by hundreds of bare black feet just like their own. It was walked by negroes who wished to be undisturbed by white men. It was run down by excited slaves chasing wild boar. It was fled down by runaways and hid along by the needful.

But the negroes of Amity escaped by it with flapping chickens hung over their shoulders; with bleating goats tethered together in a line; with the pickney shoved along; and the old, leaning upon sticks or thrown together atop the lumbering carts whose wheels creaked and stuck in the mud; with obstinate donkeys who were coaxed with whips to slip-slow under the load they carried; and vexed cattle struggling under their yokes.

The path they took twists and turns through a thick fern wood, where a dark canopy of furry fronds blocks most the light. But then it rises out of this soft dank dell to become steep and covered with bamboo and logwood. Those are cotton trees that now line our route—bare of their own leaves, but with their spreading branches draped lush with wild fig and creeping plants.

As the land begins to level out, stones appear, and the way is hindered by boulders pushing their jagged way up through the earth. On past those fallen trees and that scraggly sprawl of yellowing banana plants, and there we find our first glimpse of the clearing where our negroes came to rest—the ramshackle camp that was raised upon these backlands just outside the tumbling borders of Amity.

Peggy and Cornet took one look at this woebegone place, packed up their cart, said their farewells, and rode off to Westmoreland. Benjamin left to join his minister-man to work his own piece of land in a place called Sligoville. Samuel could not stay, for he needed the river to be deeper for his shrimp pots and the tributary that trickled through this place could be crossed in a stride. Tilly wept and begged for them to return to the plantation until Miss Nancy slapped her. While Mary Ellis stood silently, looking about, doubting that there was enough land to feed them all.

But Giles spread his arms wide to show the glory of this place with no white men to haunt them. He showed them the sprawl of the overgrown flatlands just beyond the wood. Come, trees over there already abundant with fruit. Soon those lands would be cleared and planted with plantain, cocoas, yam and corn. And they had goats, chickens, plenty-plenty boar, and did not Ezra manage to steal five of the massa’s cows?

James Richards held the plan for the felling of trees, the cutting of wood, the making of huts. While the clearing of the land, where even the old and pickney had a part to play, was driven by Elizabeth Millar, soon known, when she was too far to hear, as the black bakkra.

And, reader, you may only see before you a forlorn clearing in a wilderness where scruffy, hungry, tired and pitiful negro men, women and children laboured long, yet where not even one wall of a hut can be observed. But upon this rough, squatted land, ‘This is free,’ was cried hearty every morning by Dublin Hilton. After the conch was blown for work to commence, that old once-a-distiller-man did raise his voice to yell upon all who now lived there, ‘Wake now, all, for this be free.’

And now we must return to the place they left and ride through the lands of Amity. Through the acres of cane pieces where the poles of cane are already being bound and choked by weeds. Some of the crop lies trampled and flat as discarded trash. Without the negroes, already much of the land has fallen to ruinate, useless ticky-ticky.

See the trash-house door is open, while the flimsy spent cane, being blown by the wind, spills like jumble weed. The wheel is fixed by a creeping vine already, and unable to turn, even if there were still workers or beasts willing to drive its spindles. And there is a breach in the cane juice gutter. If that precious liquor ran from the mill down to the receivers in the boiling house now, it would never reach, but spill half-way into the river and feed the fish its sweetness. And the works—where once the enormous coppers steamed, foamed and bubbled loud with molten liquor turning to granulate as sugar—is quiet except for the scratching and squealing of creatures who now have their home within the bowl of those vacant teaches. And so many rats! With no small boys to trap them, see how boldly they befoul the once clean floor of that boiling house.

Look upon the grey stone of the temper-lime kiln as we pass—it is cracked and half obscured by plants. But shield your nose from the stench, flap your hands to scatter the flies, and be sure to avert your eye as we travel alongside that petrified negro village.

The gate that guards the path up to the great house is hanging broken from its hinge. The watch hut is empty. But as we near the stables there is the sound of laughing. Byron sits playing marbles with Joseph at the door. Both squatting upon tiny three-legged stools, those two long men have their knees up by their ears as they watch the marbles run.

But let us quickly pass by to find Molly snoozing upon her chair in the doorway of the kitchen, her arms folded across her belly, her grey kerchief slipping to one side. There is no need of tip-toeing, for nothing would wake her as we now take those six small steps that cross that vast breach from the kitchen into the great house.

There, in the dining room, Robert Goodwin idly examines the tarnish upon his silver knife as he sits, leaning an elbow casually upon the dining table. While at the other end of that long piece of furniture, his wife Caroline is seated as upright as her chair back demands. He is reciting to her the instructions that he found in the last letter he received from his papa concerning their arrival in England. How his father advises that they should hire a carriage and pair to take them to Chesterfield rather than taking a post or stage coach. While at the other end of the table Caroline recounts for him, with complex hand gestures and very shrill giggling, the details of the last sea voyage she undertook those many years before.

And your storyteller must report—for it cannot be rendered upon paper in any other way—that Robert and Caroline Goodwin are both speaking to each other at one and the same time.

Robert Goodwin is now quite recovered from his malady. After he was brought home from the cane piece, a sickness confined him to his bed. Curled up tight as a fern frond he lay there for many weeks. He would speak to no one, nor open his eyes to look about him. He took no food, nor sipped any proffered water. There was no mortal illness the doctor could find—no yellow, nor denghie fever, no malaria, nor snake bite. But the doctor warned Caroline that, if he continued to refuse water, his grave would claim him just the same.

Yet no matter how Caroline cajoled, wagging her finger upon him to ‘drink or die’, stamping down her foot, squealing, shaking her fist at his unreasonableness, or stroking his brow to beg him, ‘Whisper, Robert, whisper to me what is wrong so it might be put right,’ he remained insensible to her. She sat vigil beside him—day and night—poking and squeezing a dampened sponge against his lips. Yet still his blue eyes sank into the shadow of their sockets as the bones of his face gradually outlined the skull beneath. She wailed upon him, she dropped to her knees to persuade him to live, she even shook him—although the flimsiness of his gaunt torso nearly had her faint.

Then, one afternoon, a baby’s cry broke outside the window and Robert Goodwin was suddenly roused to swivel his eye towards the sound. Within the hour, Caroline had brought his baby Emily to him. She placed the naked baby upon his pillow. At first he made no movement but when that little child leaned over towards him to grab a handful of his hair within her tiny fist, he almost smiled. He raised his hand to gingerly catch the baby’s fingers in his. But she would not let go his hair. Caroline had to pick her from off the pillow. And the baby kicked and fretted so as she was raised away from him that he lifted his hand to his lips to hush her, then waved weakly to her as she was taken from the room.

After that, he would sip water. After that, he would suck upon a mango. When he chewed the tiniest morsel of guinea fowl, Caroline became quite determined that now she could return him to health. He reminded her of the kitten she had once found in London many years before. ‘It was skinny as a pipe cleaner after being near drowned by some brute,’ she told him as she carefully spooned beef tea into his mouth. ‘Edmund had said that it would surely die. But it grew and grew under my nursing.’ However, what she did not disclose to him was that she fed the kitten so much that it died a few months later, a big round ball of fur in front of an untouched saucer of rancid cream.

Come, Caroline would let no one go near her patient except she! Only she must feed him, only she must wash him, only she must take his weight upon her shoulder to walk him about the room. As he regained some strength, visitors came to call and Caroline waylaid them at the sickroom door to jabber her instructions upon them. One visitor may enter at a time only; do not approach him closer than the foot of the bed; resist asking too many questions of him, but do comment heartily upon how much improved he seems. And never, ever, under any circumstances, talk of negroes—for nothing must agitate him in any way.

And fine progress he made under this mighty care—stronger and more contented every day. Until that is, George Sadler from Windsor Hall paid him a visit. Within a second of Caroline having left the room, George Sadler, flouting all instruction, pulled up a chair to sit close beside Robert Goodwin. He wished to speak within his ear, the better to apprise him of the new idea that the planters of the parish were planning—an idea which would end all of their problems with those indolent, feckless, troublesome negroes and return their plantations once more to profit. By the time George Sadler had left that room, Robert Goodwin was sitting up in bed, excitedly talking of coolies.

‘Of course. What a perfect idea. It’s the only answer to our problems. Immigration. We must bring in labourers to work the lands from some other country. And where better to find them than India. Indian workers have proved themselves already upon the island of Mauritius. Yes, coolies must be brought here. George Sadler has ordered one hundred to be sent from India on a seven year-indentureship. I intend to do the same,’ Robert Goodwin told Caroline, before insisting that he should soon leave his bed and go into town to arrange it all. ‘Every planter upon the island is of one mind, Caroline. Boatloads of these men are already upon their way. And George Sadler assures me that those that have already arrived work far better than any negro. They have never been slaves, you see, and have not that antipathy to white men. They come just under obligation to work. Coolies! Coolies are the answer I have been looking for. Coolies will soon have this plantation working again.’