The Long Song (8 page)

Sometimes, if the missus was just too weary for spirited reprimand, she might slap July about her face. Mostly one swipe with the flat of her palm. But occasionally, if July had missed the menace in her missus’s eye—those two colourless, vigilant villains that squinted into tiny slits—then she might still be standing to catch the slap from the back of her hand too.

When the missus had first stuck a needle firm into the back of July’s hand, the memory of that earliest smarting wound stayed with July longer than any of the other piercings that patterned her arm thereafter. For it was administered in those early days, when July was only a child of nine years and as constant to her beloved white missus as a newly hatched chick to a fowl.

July had wanted so much to learn how to sew and stitch nicely when she was still that small girl for, at that time, she loved to see her missus pleased with her. Her pink-white cheeks puffing into a grin so wide they looked to span the room as she bounced excited upon her toes. Like the time when July first bent her knee in a perfect curtsey. Come, her missus squealed louder than a trapped pig, ‘Marguerite, you are a good, good, good nigger.’

Yet it was not so much the threading of the little spiky needle with a whisper of yarn thinner than her own hair. Nor that, when July had first started to sew for her missus, she began as she had seen her mama do—with broad stitches that always caused her mama’s stout arm to extend in a wide arc so the long thread may be pulled tight through the rough weave of the Penistone cloth; and that her missus, seeing this lavish movement, frowned and with a wagging finger said, ‘No, no, no, not like that,’ before insisting upon the tiniest stitches upon her delicate fabric; stitches that did cause the needle to nip July’s fingertip, sharp as the bite of a rat, if her eye should stray from its dainty path. No. It was the length of time July was required to sit in almost perfect stillness within her missus’s chamber to perform the task. All day! And July had legs that just did not want to keep her there.

For they were used to spending their working day leading the pickaninny third gang of slaves—their wooden pails swinging easy in their tight fists as they walked, skipped, jumped and dilly-dallied down to the river, twittering like chicks. July, sitting with her missus, would make one stitch, two stitch, three stitch, before her legs would start to jiggle. Four stitch, five stitch, and they would jump up to walk about. ‘Are you finished?’ her missus would call. July, meek as a bullied dog, would sit back upon her seat to begin again. One stitch, two stitch, three stitch, as she did think of those ragged children of the third gang struggling their thirst-quenching loads out to the cane strips of Dover and Scarlett Ponds. How, with their pails full of water, their progress was slow as a line of mourners and they did grunt like crones and strain double to raise the brimming vessels far enough from the ground to carry, not drag, the slip-slopping water upon the long journey to the thirsty mouths of the slaves working the cane pieces.

Six stitch, seven stitch, eight stitch, and she would listen as familiar sounds rode in on the breeze that blew at the long window: the chant of a work song; was that Ned the mule braying? Here them all tramping up to Virgo; that be the ugly driver cracking his long lash; come, is that the massa I hear, agalloping his horse? Why they be yelling? Oh, they be running to catch the cart! And her legs would begin their jiggling once more.

Is it to anyone’s wonder that July, instead of sewing the repair to the pocket of the frock (a small hole made by the missus’s jagged fingernail), took the scissors and carefully cut around the little ear of fabric until the pocket was removed from the dress entirely. Then, hiding the severed pouch away under her skirt, she brightly told her missus, ‘Me done.’

Her missus, inspecting the repair, placed her hand within the pocket, up to her elbow, before she realised that all was not well. Turning the dress inside out so her eye might inspect what her hand already knew, she threw the dress upon the ground and grabbed July by her wrist. With July’s hand splayed in front of her, she picked up a needle, twisted it to perform like a dagger, and stabbed July upon her hand four times with its sharp point.

‘Every time you do something bad when you are stitching,’ her missus said, ‘then I must punish you, or you will not learn,’ before pricking her hand two more times. And July cried out like a man lashed with a cat-o’nine-tails.

‘Mama, Mama, Mama!’ July yelled as she jumped up and down upon the spot. And the little severed pocket of the dress then floated down from where it was hid, on to the floor. All at once her missus’s face began to span the room as she leaned in close to July to yell, ‘Your mama is sold away. She is sold away, you hear me? Sold away. You are mine now.’ And her puffing cheeks were red as Scotch Bonnet pepper as July cried out for her mama once more.

Sitting in a corner of the kitchen, behind the stone of the fireplace under the shelf that held teetering dutch pots and jestas, curled up in as tight a ball as her knees and arms could make, you could always find July in those early days, snivelling and weeping. The longing for her mama became a pain within her fierce as hunger. When anyone came in upon the kitchen—darkening the blazing light at the door like a cloud before the sun—she would look up yearning. For she longed to see her mama standing there; vexed, sucking ’pon her teeth and rolling her big eyes; calling July that her porridge was ready upon the stone and the hut needed sweeping for the wind had blown in a mound of trash while she was in the field and cha! July must come, and come now.

With her eyes tight shut, July could feel her mama beckoning her to leave the sweltering heat of the oven in the kitchen, slapping her hand upon her thigh, ‘Hurry, July, hurry before the missus comes for you.’ Or holding out July’s trash doll—with its stiff gingham skirt and one blue bead eye—to sweet-mouth July home to her chores with a, ‘Peg be frettin’ for you to come.’

But with her eyes wide open, only strangers stood yelling, ‘Come, little nigger, you be sent back to the field if you not behave.’ Yet, no matter whom July kick, spat, clawed and cursed upon, she was never sent home. She ran from the great house nearly every sun-up, searching for a path to the negro village—finding herself enfolded by louring trees or adrift in long grass that tickled at her chin. Yet all that followed this offence was to be chased back by Godfrey’s snarling, slathering hounds before being dragged by her hair to stand before that missus.

Hoping to be lost, then forgotten, in the dews of night she hid in the stables with the horses. Stinking of their dung and rolled in so much straw she appeared like her trash dolly the next morning—yet she was not returned.

Soon the trees near the kitchen were stripped almost bare from switches pulled so Godfrey might whip July’s backside—he complaining all the while of a pain at his shoulder from whacking a piece of tree so often upon her.

And July did count the time: one day, two days, three days she had not seen her mama. Four days, five days, six days, and still her mama never came. Seven days, eight days . . . she counted until all the numbers she had learned were gone. And so she began again: one day, two days, three . . . yet still she remained.

Caroline Mortimer had proved doggedly determined to make a lady’s maid of July (or Marguerite as she believed her named); sure as a turkey seized for the Christmas table, July had been raised, caught and stuffed for the task. For the white girl, Mary, with whom Caroline had sailed across an ocean from England (upon her brother’s instruction), had died a few weeks after she had arrived upon the plantation. It was Florence and Lucy whom the massa had charged to nurse this bag-o’-bones servant girl back from writhing with a raging fever and tortuous pain at her stomach, to full curtseying obedience.

But Mary, who had come from a place called Cork to wait upon Caroline Mortimer, was required upon the ship that sailed from England, to shit squatting with her backside dangling over the side of the deck. Now, no one but her mama had ever seen those two cheeks of hers before, and Mary believed no one but her mama ever should. Although careful to tip Caroline’s full pot over the side every morning of that long journey, Mary had contrived rarely to allow her own shit to fall and held it inside her long enough for it to fell her with a mysterious ailment. She finally parted from Florence and Lucy’s careful physic, and her own life, spewing forth a fetid brown waste that should have been falling all the while from that other hole.

She was buried at the same time as the missus, Agnes Howarth, and her short-lived pickney were laid in upon the ground. The missus, who had died giving birth to a son that lived only two days upon this earth, had a trailing line of mourners that so blocked the lane to the churchyard with their carriages and slaves that three of the finer women (new from England and dressed in black wool for the service) were struck down in the midday heat.

Mary, the servant girl, was laid a short walk from the back of the kitchen, near the provision ground of Florence and Lucy. For Caroline decided, on behalf of her grieving brother, that a Christian burial would not be necessary for her erstwhile maid-of-all-work. So the two negro women dressed in their finest red kerchiefs and, arguing all the while whether a white girl would need rum for her journey home, sang not only a dirge but the melody from a newly learned hymn as they laid her in a hole that delivered her into the proud arms of Godfrey’s late wife. Godfrey did not attend the burial for he feared—as the earth became thin upon his wife’s bones—that she might find reason to scold him from beyond.

And, oh how, Caroline Mortimer had wept in those days. Not in sorrow for the sudden loss of her sister-in-law, nephew and servant girl, for she was scarcely familiar with any of them. No. She sobbed, ‘I hate this house and I hate this island, Marguerite . . . What am I doing here? . . . Did I leave England for this? . . . My brother hardly knows me . . . Oh why must I stay? . . . Because I have no choice, that is why . . .’ for finding herself with not a companion, nor a friend, in the whole world, let alone the wretched island of Jamaica, except one little negro girl named Marguerite.

So menace it all she might, but Caroline Mortimer would never have commanded a militia man, nor redcoat, to take July away from her to break her upon the wheel or lock her within the stocks. July was now sixteen and never spent time in fretting that her missus might return her to the field, no matter on how many occasions that fool-fool white woman did warn it. For what would Caroline do?

Who but July could help the missus with her morning burden of sifting the skulkers from the sick amongst the negroes. With Agnes deceased, Caroline’s brother in such ill humour that he rarely left his chamber or his bed, and the overseer insisting it was a task for a master or mistress to perform, it fell to Caroline to inspect those field slaves that hoped sickness might find them relieved from their work. Dusted grey, limping, their clothes all awry, straggling in a long line, that most pitiable rabble coughed, whined and limped with their assumed ailments up to the great house upon Monday mornings to stand for inspection before Caroline, who trembled and sweated at the very sight of them. Always she insisted that July remain at her side. And with each negro that presented their complaint, July would whisper into her missus’s ear, ‘No. Him jus’ have sore head from too much rum,’ or ‘That black tongue not be sickness, it can be wipe off,’ or ‘Caution missus—yaws!’ whilst holding out a violet-scented handkerchief for her missus to waft back and forth under her nose during this endurance.

And who but July would know to tip a near hogshead of sugar into her missus’s morning coffee? For anything less would see her grimace with the pain of a child flayed or squeal that it was too sour. Or that she liked her sangaree, not with the juice of a lime, but embittered with the peel from a lemon. And that she required salt fish, yam and cured pork at her breakfast table, but no pickled tongue; she could not abide the look, nor taste of it. And that her back needed to be rubbed after she had drank her Epsom salts so as to release, into a belch or fart, the wind that so plagued her. Who but July could the missus call upon to pull her from the cane-bottom dining chair when, once more, it split under her ample strain? And it was only July she requested to nurse her when, with a persistent pimple upon her chin, she was forced to take to her bed.

So when July lifted her head from her sobs that day finally to obey her missus’s command and show her the degree of spoiling the fine muslin dress had undergone, her face was damp with real tears, her imploring hands trembled, her breath whimpered in trepidation, yet, just like Godfrey, our July was not really fretting.