The Long Song (4 page)

There is a carriage upon some higher ground, see it there in a distance that is not too far. The heat rising from the earth causes this vehicle’s form to ripple and sway as if it were a reflection caught in water. But with each step of its approach, its character becomes more clear. Several negro children gambol alongside the cart. As the vehicle’s speed increases, their tiny black shapes pick up pace and purpose, as if their progress were now part of some race they were all bound to contend. But eventually the children halt in their running, realising that any race against a horse is surely lost. They commence jumping and waving around their arms instead, while this carriage moves steadily away from their play.

The single chestnut horse who pulls the gig along trips dainty as a cat on hot stones upon the rutted earth. The master of the plantation named Amity, Mr John Howarth, sits holding the reins of this vehicle. His firm legs are spread apart to brace himself as he rides, while the brim of his wide white hat flaps with the bumpy progress of the gig. His passenger is his sister, Mrs Caroline Mortimer. With one hand she struggles to hold up a parasol with which to protect her delicate English skin from the vicious morning sun, all the while pleading with her brother, ‘Please go slower . . . please be careful . . . please stop showing off, John,’ while her other hand grips, fearful, at the side of the gig to steady herself.

Caroline Mortimer has been residing at the great house of the plantation with her brother and his young wife, Agnes, for two weeks, yet already the heat from the Jamaican sun only makes her floppy as a kitten for the hottest part of the day. Twenty-three summers Caroline has lived upon this earth, all of them, until now, spent in the dappled shade of an apple tree by the edge of an English lawn, where the hottest part of the day brought small beads of fragrant sweat to trespass upon her forehead. The ship she travelled in to Jamaica had bucked and rolled her across the ocean so cruelly that, upon her arrival, she had complained to her brother that being strapped to a whale’s back would have been no less arduous a journey. In fact, she repeated this lamentation so often that although at first it raised mirth in her brother, after its considerable tellings it merely caused him to exclaim loudly, ‘Yes, well, you’re here now.’

Her appetite, which she had feared she would never regain after the ravaging voyage—where no food man prepared could stay in her stomach long enough to give any of the required sustenance—was now returning. And fresh and adventurous it was too. Why, she thought the mango the loveliest of fruit—juicy and sweet. True, it did have the taste of a peach dipped in turpentine, and a texture so stringy that she was required to pull at the little threads caught in her teeth for many an hour after, but she was not a timid person, too scared to try these new experiences. And the preserves, what a delight. Everyone knows West Indian preserves are the best in the world. Guava, ginger, sorrel, even green lime. Quite the most delicious she had ever tasted.

‘You’ll prefer strawberry jam from England soon as we all do,’ her brother said.

‘Never, never, never!’ Caroline laughed. ‘May we have punch?’ she requested, and when told, ‘It’s no longer drunk much here,’ she stamped her pink satin slippered foot upon the ground to protest, ‘Why ever not!’

‘It’s not the fashion,’ her brother told her and regretted it almost at once when her voice, rising shrill as the squeal from the hinge on a loose shutter, said, ‘What should we care for fashion. Everyone in England talks of Jamaican punch and I should like to try it. And besides, the rum and water here is milled far too weak.’

Whilst watching pomegranate, paw-paw, naseberry, and sour sop being pushed into her eager mouth by her stout, sticky fingers for most hours of the day, her brother warned, ‘You are eating too much fruit, Caroline. It’s not good for the constitution in this climate.’ He suggested she might consider, until she was a little stronger after her journey, eating more pork instead.

‘Pork! Oh, John, one can eat pork anywhere,’ Caroline twittered. No, his sister said, she was ready, in perhaps a day or two, to try a little turtle. Why not? It looked delightful served in its upturned shell. For did she not eat rabbit, tripe, and pigs’ heads at home? She told her brother, ‘If turtle is considered fine food in this foreign place then I must taste it, even if only the once.’ She wanted to try everything—oh yes, everything. Although not long out of widow’s weeds, she was keen to experience the curious, no matter who counselled against it. Bring on the duck, guinea birds and jack fish, for Mrs Caroline Mortimer was eager to nibble upon their bones. Even breadfruit that was destined for the slaves’ table. ‘Why should I not try it too?’ she asked her brother, who replied sternly that several of his slaves had been whipped for eating dirt—did she propose to try that delicacy also?

Caroline was blessed of a long, pointed nose that, while giving her silhouette a fine distinction from across a dim-lit room, was nevertheless unable to feel what was happening at its tip. Consequently there was often something stuck upon the end of it, of which she was totally unaware; the yellow stain of pollen from the hibiscus she was admiring; a white daub of cream from some milk she was drinking; even a drop of snot from a nasal chill could, like a rain drop caught upon the tip of a leaf, remain dangling and swaying for quite some time. And it was this insensible nose that, her brother began to fear, would be dipping into everything upon this plantation named Amity before too long.

But there was one curiosity which Caroline Mortimer had found herself entering upon with an uncharacteristic trepidation. The negroes. Before she embarked upon her journey, her brother had written to advise that she should be sure to bring with her a maid servant—a steady young woman, respectable, trustworthy, perhaps even of a religious character. For her brother went on to warn that negroes did not always make the kind of servants to which Caroline may have become accustomed.

This extraordinary missive caused Caroline not only to laugh, but to wish her late husband were still alive to read it. For it had always been a source of great aggravation to Edmund Mortimer that his wife’s brother would boast, on his all-too-frequent visits, how many slaves he possessed in the Caribbean and, of that number, how many of those slaves toiled round and about his great house. With a flourish of the hand and the ponderous look of someone who could not quite bring it to mind, he would tell his sister and her husband, ‘Oh there are more than fifty and one hundred upon the land and well, upwards of thirty in the house.’

It would irritate Edmund Mortimer beyond torment when, upon observing their one slatternly, grubby, maid-of-all-work serving at table, Caroline’s brother would eye their situation with something like pity. And there was her brother now telling her that she should bring that one miserable girl across the seas. Dress her up in her cast-offs so she might pass as a lady’s maid, when he had what? Upwards of two hundred slaves at his command! Her husband would surely have turned in his grave at this suggestion, if it were not for the fact that Edmund Mortimer, when buried, was so fat that there was not the required space within the box.

So, upon arrival in this often and eagerly conjured place, Caroline was expecting to encounter several negroes about the house, for it was no more than she had been led to believe. But what she had not foreseen was that, when the door of her brother’s fine property was at first opened, she would find herself quite girdled by a swarm of black faces. While her brother busied himself with an instruction to a ragged black boy upon the veranda of the house on where to take Mary—the requested maid servant who was, after the voyage, really quite sick—three negro women paused in their tasks so they might better stare upon Caroline.

One—wearing a bright-red madras kerchief upon her head and an apron at her waist that was so splattered with stains it did appear like a map—was chewing upon something with her mouth agape. Another picked at the contents of her nose, wiping it upon the filthy rag of her skirt as she angled her head awkwardly so she might better see through an eye that was bruised-bloody, swollen and half closed. The third, a tall, gangly creature, had the bodice of her dress untied, which drooped slovenly at her waist, leaving her arms, like the branches of some dead tree, quite naked. None had on shoes.

But Caroline, unperturbed by the glowering of these slaves, gazed upon them civilly, for she believed they would soon curtsey, then offer her some light refreshment perhaps. She was even unpinning her bonnet, for she was sure they would want to take it from her to set it upon some stand. But they did not. Instead their eyes, which Caroline thought appeared like shining marbles rolling in soot, commenced to peruse her slowly, from the bottom of her brown leather boots to the top of her fleshy blond head. Then, opening her arms wide, the tall gangly one said, ‘Come, see how broad is she!’ At which Caroline took a long step away from them—not on account of this impudent scorning, but in fear of the teeth in their heads that, as they laughed upon her, bared white and sharp as any savage beasts.

Just then a chicken had run by her, wings flapping, squawking loudly, slipping and falling upon the polished floor. It was being chased by a young negro girl, whose outstretched arms made a clumsy grab for the neck of the fowl, all the while screeching, ‘Catch it up quick. Catch it up!’ Soon another chicken appeared, which looked to be chasing the girl. The three negro women promptly joined in this havoc, all running around pell-mell until none could tell who was chasing who.

Caroline at once pinioned herself to the wall, for she feared she might be tripped and trussed in this commotion. Then two boys, barely clothed, appeared upon the scene from who-knows-where to jump around in this sport. All at once a piercing yell, as mighty as a tree splitting at its trunk, cried, ‘Me chicken done gone. Bring back de chicken.’ A negro woman, no larger than a child but with a skin wrinkled as dried fruit, appeared banging a large cleaver against a metal bucket. If it were not for her continuing to screech, ‘Where me chicken don gone?’ over and over, Caroline would scarce have believed that such a diminutive creature could raise so much holler.

Soon all that Caroline beheld were negroes, like solid shadows prancing before her. Oh, how many besieged her there? And where could they all have come from? Chinks in some wall, holes within the floor? Did they reside one-on-top-the-other in some chest? Or scurry like galliwasps under the house? Where? Where? Caroline cursed that the lord only gave her two hands! For which should she do—cover her ears against the calamitous din or her nose? For the stench of their swirling bodies was malodorous as a begrimed mule in the heat.

Her brother, finally appearing, seemed to walk on through this confusion paying it no heed, ‘Come on, I’ll show you to your room,’ he said. Then, noticing the fright which sat upon his sister’s face as if sketched from a comical cartoon, he shouted, ‘Will you all be silent! Be quiet. Do you hear me?’ before guiding Caroline by the elbow through the fleeting breach in the bedlam.

After a few days upon the island, Caroline was moved to enquire of her brother whether all of his fabled upward of two hundred slaves did, in matter-of-fact, reside around and about them in the great house. Her brother had believed it not a serious question and therefore supplied no answer but that of a small smirk. But for Caroline, it was asked in earnest. For there seemed to be no place in that mighty house where solitude was to be found. No corner where she did not find a negro lurking. No room that was free of a negro affecting some task. No window that, when looked through, saw a view that was other than these blackies about some mischief. Even the cupboards, when opened, seemed to contain little more than black boys who, like insects caught in a trap, peered out at her from the inside.

And yet, for all these house slaves that swirled around her every day, Caroline found the summoning of any of them to do her bidding a toilsome task for which she had no skill. They just stared on her entranced, like children upon Bonfire Night before the pinwheel starts to spin.