by Sally Watson
Jade wriggled her bare toes, rejoicing in their freedom, and slithered off the branch—displaying the rest of her petticoat. They were a distinct handicap, petticoats. If only she dared wear those hidden breeches, in which she had conquered most of the trees near Monsieur Maupin’s house.
“Dear Melanie!” cried Aunt Louisa again, enfolding her niece to her soft bosom and seeming hardly to believe that she was unbroken. “So dangerous, love, and unladylike, too! You mustn’t do it again! Besides, what if a snake should get you? And anyway, your dear uncle has asked your dear father to go into town with him to look at some very special slaves Mr. Bottlesford is saving for special customers, and he wondered if you’d like to go, too; and although dear Thomas said he didn’t think you would, I thought it would be nice to ask you.”
Jade flinched away from the very idea. Which, of course, was the precise reason she had to go. “Yes,” she said, glowering.
Her father stared. He never would understand her! “Very well, then, go have Fidelia make you presentable. But we’ll not have any scenes when we get there, young lady; remember that!”
The carriage stopped before a shabby building, square and Spanish-looking, with an eccentric red-tile roof looking as if it had never been repaired since the earthquake. Dust lay thick in the road, and the slave stench poured over Jade as she stepped out of the carriage. She instantly shuttered her face, and stood there like a very young sphinx with extremely green eyes, while the men got out.
Mr. Lennox paused uneasily at the entrance, glanced at his daughter, murmured something to Uncle Augustus, who looked startled and amused.
“Himmel, next you will want us to clothe the pigs and cows before she is allowed to see them,” he commented; but spoke good-naturedly to the scrawny, gray-headed Mr. Bottlesford, who blinked, stared, nodded, and went back inside. Presently he appeared again, and they all went in. Jade’s fists were clenched in the folds of her skirts, and her chin was high, and she wished she were somewhere else.
The fifteen or so slaves in the small hot courtyard had been hastily and skimpily clothed in assorted loincloths and shifts. They wore chains as well, for these were the pick of the lot, and therefore stronger and more inclined to violence. They didn’t look much inclined to it just now. They were gaunt with the ordeal of the slave ship, and their eyes dulled with shock and hopeless misery. They could easily become like Fidelia, Jade decided, hoping she wasn’t going to be sick here and now and all over the floor.
“Hardest to tame, these are,” murmured Uncle Augustus, feeling muscles and examining teeth and eyes with a practiced air. “But rather good specimens, all the same. Here, take a look at this fellow, Thomas. What do you think?”
Mr. Lennox glanced sideways at his stone-faced daughter, wishing he hadn’t let her come. “They don’t really mind, you know,” he muttered, almost as if he were convincing himself as well as her. “No more than horses do. They’re only Blacks.”
Jade looked at him, coldly accusing. Of course they minded! How could he lie like that? They minded just as wild horses minded, and William’s fox, and any other free creature in captivity—before their spirits were broken. She saw herself in all of them. She hated everybody!
At her expression, her father tightened his lips and turned away to join his brother-in-law, leaving Jade to stand there near the door, poised to leave and determined not to be a coward.
And then she saw the girl, standing with the four other women, but infinitely aloof, dwarfing them in size and spirit. She held herself like a queen: ignoring chains, ragged shift, her own bare satin flesh, and everyone in the courtyard. Her face was swollen from a blow—but beneath the swelling was great beauty. A slender black column of throat rose proudly to meet the curve of a long delicate jaw; the head was beautifully shaped; and between high cheekbones and a strong lovely arch of brow were clear intelligent eyes—eyes like William’s fox: proud and angry and unyielding. Except for those eyes, the face was a mask of composed indifference.
Jade stood transfixed, her own eyes wide with shocked recognition. She knew that look! It was her very own after-a-whipping expression, and for a moment she had the dizzy sensation of meeting herself in someone else’s skin. Or meeting someone else in her own? Suddenly she was sharing the searing humiliation of being discussed and marketed like a farm animal . . . the savage desire to kill her captors, or foil them by killing herself . . . and the pride that kept her calm as a statue because the final degradation would be to show that she cared. . . .
With a jolt she was alone in her own skin again, staring a startled question into the brown eyes in the mask. Had she felt it, too? Such a thing couldn’t be one-sided—could it? But there was not a flicker of the black lashes.
Jade found her voice, tugged distractedly at her father’s fullskirted ochre coat. “Father!” Her voice was oddly hoarse. “This one. Father, I want her.”
He stared. “Are you out of your mind, Melanie? What are you talking about? You can’t have a wild slave out of Africa!”
“I want her,” repeated Jade as if she hadn’t heard him. It was most peculiar behavior for her, who—for all her other faults—never asked for presents. She could see amazement on her father’s face and then thoughtfulness. She didn’t care what he thought—so long as she had her way.
“I’ll buy you a nice, docile, well-trained handmaid before I go back home,” he suggested. “You’re old enough to have one of your own.”
Jade shook an intractable head. “This one.” Her eyes glittered. Her father’s mouth set in a line very similar to her own, and he turned his shoulder away.
“Impossible.”
Jade did what she had thought she’d never do. She used Lavinia’s tactics. “Please, Father, please! I could train her myself. Please!” She wasn’t very good at wheedling, being unable to imitate Vinnie’s melting smile or beguiling ways, and looking rather more like a desperately earnest young witch. But it was so extraordinary for her to plead at all that her father stared uncertainly.
And then, surprisingly, Uncle Augustus came to her support. “Ach, why not? Let her try. We can make sure of her safety, and it will be good experience. If she fails, I put the slave to work in the fields. Quite probably you will fail, Melanie Liebchen, for I have seen this sort before, such stubborn mules, ungrateful for food and bed. Sometimes I think they die on purpose rather than obey, just to spite their owners.”
Jade refrained from saying that she didn’t blame them. She turned beseeching eyes to her father, instead. “I’ll never ask you for anything else,” she promised, more truly than she dreamed.
He hesitated, while Uncle Augustus made encouraging faces indicating that this was the best way to cure her of all that nonsense about slavery. Father, less optimistic, frowned at her. “There’ll be no nonsense about trying to free her, as you did with Joshua, you know.”
“No.” Jade lowered her eyes so he wouldn’t see her anger—at herself for stooping to wheedle, at him for making her. She did intend to free the girl, too, if ever she could figure out how to do it; and she had no scruples at all about the lie she was telling.
“Well, if you think so, Augustus—Let’s see if we can get a reasonable price. We’ll call it an early Christmas gift, Melanie.”
And finding Mr. Bottlesford, the men began haggling.
Jade’s Christmas gift was duly delivered that afternoon, still in chains, and put for safe-keeping in the slaves’ punishment hut behind the kitchen garden. “We must get her cleaned and de-loused first,” Uncle Augustus explained kindly. “Then we probably will need to starve her for a while to make her more tractable, and grateful to you when you bring her some food. Remember, she is only a savage, and you must handle her as you would a wild horse or dog, not expecting intelligence. You will also have to teach her English, remember.”
Jade maintained a deceitful silence, causing her father and uncle to suppose quite mistakenly that the acquiring of property had already given her an entirely new outlook on things. They
exchanged looks of great satisfaction, which Jade didn’t fail to notice. Within an hour she had coaxed some food from the good-natured cook and was out in the gold of late afternoon: through the kitchen gardens and to the bolted door of that small prison shack—where she paused. Unexpectedly her heart was pounding at her ribs, and the shack seemed to be throbbing, too, with silence.
It was bolted on the outside; not, thank goodness, padlocked. After all, who would want to break in? Jade looked at it for a moment, savoring her own half-fear. Then she went in.
Sunlight striped the dark in narrow slices, and a trenchant stillness lurked in the far corner. It didn’t move while Jade leaned against the door waiting to be able to see in the dimness; didn’t move even after it had materialized into the tall darkness of the African girl. Jade waited for a moment, trying to recapture that earlier contact. But it was gone, and the space between them filled with wrath.
It made it very difficult, not to be able to talk. Jade crossed the space, smiled up at the set face. “Food,” she said simply and produced it.
There was no response whatever. “Food!” repeated Jade coaxingly, and held it closer. “Aren’t you hungry? You must be!” She regarded her offering anxiously. A bit of cold chicken and ham, some bread, one of those yellow tropical fruits that Aunt Louisa had called papaya, or perhaps banana: Jade hadn’t got them straight yet. “Food,” she said a third time, and stopped, afflicted with the stupidity of her conversation. Savage or not, the slave wasn’t a total idiot: she knew it was food. And she was hungry. And she was having none of it.
Jade finally left, defeated. She didn’t even dare leave all of the food behind for Uncle Augustus to find: only the smallest bit of bread. The eyes glittered at her as she left.
They glittered again the next morning. The girl had been well scrubbed and presumably de-loused now, and was dressed in a clean shift and the same expression of remote disdain. But the bread was nowhere to be seen.
“Oh, you have eaten it?” cried Jade, delighted. “More food!” She held out her new offering—and found herself confronted with yesterday’s bread, untouched. With it there was a glimpse of white teeth in what looked suspiciously like a malicious smile, vanished so quickly that Jade couldn’t be at all sure. She stared at her property, baffled and exasperated.
“Oh, don’t be like that! Can’t you see I want to be your friend? I’m on your side! We—” But the brown eyes refused even to look at her, stared with impassive hostility at nothing at all. Jade stamped out this time feeling considerably less sympathetic and charitable than she had.
But she was back as soon as Jamaica had settled down for its afternoon siesta, under a sun that beat hot fists on her bare head. How unfair to be angry, when she’d probably be acting the same way, herself. . . . At least she hoped she would. It was not a small thing to refuse food if you were hungry.
The striped dark this time tended to spin a bit giddily with the effect of the sun. Jade was forced to close her eyes for a moment and brace herself against the door while she got her vision back. Just for an instant she thought she caught a wave of longing and misery—but doubtless it was her own. She’d never break through! The girl was going to starve herself to death, refusing all friendship.
“Oh please!” she begged, forgetting the language difficulty. “Please let me try to help! You might at least try! I do know how you feel; I want to be friends; you could always starve later, if—” She had started toward the girl, but the shack hadn’t stopped whirling, and Jade found herself forced to stop and sway, reaching into emptiness for something to hold on to. She’d been warned about midday sun! She—
Something at once soft and powerful scooped her from the middle of nothing and seated her gently against the wall of the shack. When the dizziness subsided a little and she opened her eyes, it was to see a heart-shaped black face glaring into hers with a look of concern, and annoyance, and a kind of wry amusement. Jade needing help had at last penetrated the slave’s pride, as Jade the benefactor could never have done.
Dimly sensing this, Jade smiled rather shakily. “Thank you,” she mumbled, trying to sit straight, and subsiding without much of a struggle when that strong shapely arm pushed her firmly back again. “Food?” she suggested, remembering her mission.
The girl unexpectedly gave a small chuckle—and then looked amazed at herself. “Food,” she agreed in a husky voice that probably had not been used for some time. And she helped herself to a chicken leg, politely offering the wing to Jade.
The slim wrist was raw where chains had cut it, and Jade caught her breath sharply with new anger. The girl paused, her eyes searching.
“Well of course I care!” Jade answered the unspoken remark with hot passion, and then sat absorbing several things while the slave applied herself to the food. She had courteously offered Jade some, though she must be ravenous; and she was eating with firmly controlled dignity, not gobbling. No savage acted that way! Moreover—it occurred to Jade that the girl must have hidden that bread the other day with shrewd foresight, knowing that no one else must see it.
The food finished, they looked at each other with appraising eyes, quite used now to the dim light. Jade felt that she was being invited to communicate.
“Jade,” she volunteered, touching her chest.
The slave stared hard, brows level. Then she nodded, pointed at herself. “D’hom’no,” she said, with a combination of sounds that never happens in English.
Jade did her best. “Domino?” It didn’t sound the same.
The girl chuckled again, more easily. “Domino,” she agreed, tolerant of this unfortunate race’s linguistic handicaps. Then she leaned back against her own hands and tilted her head, studying Jade. “Melanie?” she suggested at last, looking puzzled.
Jade gaped. “What? But how— Oh, you must have heard Fa—” She stopped the useless one-sided conversation with a sigh of frustration. “Melanie,” she conceded. She would explain later, when Domino could speak English, that Jade was a kind of secret name.
“Two name?”
Jade’s mouth flew open and her head jerked around to stare at Domino, whose eyes glinted with mischief.
“Learn little,” she confessed, having evidently decided to give Jade her full trust. “Come man my city, teach. Not speak them!” And her gesture indicated the entire world of slavers and Jamaica. Her lip curled in a near snarl.
“No,” Jade agreed instantly. “Not tell them anything.”
Their hands met. Domino took a whole new look at life. It was not the look of someone who had been tamed by kindness . . . or anything else.
“Not slave!” she hissed.
Once Jade had—with appalling difficulty—persuaded Domino to pretend to be a slave temporarily and in public, it was a perfect conspiracy between them. With others around, she was grudgingly submissive (though with a spark in her eye that strongly reminded the nervous Aunt Louisa of a half-trained tiger she had once seen). Alone together, the two girls were equals without question. Or if there was a question, it sometimes seemed to be whether Jade was Domino’s equal, being merely a pink-skin. As for Joshua, Domino clearly had her doubts about anyone who would submit to slavery for some thirty odd years.
The grown-ups were delighted. Jade was far too busy conspiring with Domino to have much time left over for rebellion or mischief, and they mistakenly put this down to her new status as slave-owner. Splendid idea, that was, they told each other contentedly. Made a new child of her. Responsibility, that was it. Mr. Lennox sailed back to Virginia some six weeks later a deluded but happy man.
And as a matter of fact, trouble didn’t start for some weeks after he left.
“Why does your Domino not obey your aunt?” demanded Uncle Augustus one hot autumn evening when an order of Aunt Louisa’s had been received with a hostile blank wall of a face.
There was a very simple answer to this, but it was not one that could be given to Uncle Augustus in terms that would be even slightly acceptable. Jade, who was perf
orce becoming rather good at lies for other people, invented one on the spot.
“She doesn’t understand,” she explained hastily, thankful for the dimness of the candles that flickered in the breeze from the slave-worked fans above. A careful look at Domino’s expression would instantly have disproved her words. But no one looked closely, and for the moment this explanation seemed reasonable to her aunt and uncle.
But the problem was only postponed, of course. She faced that fact later that evening, when Fidelia had been dismissed and Domino was theoretically preparing Jade for bed. In practice, any help that Domino gave was purely nominal and because she felt so moved. She felt moved now to help Jade slip out of her voluminous contouche and to pin up the heavy hot curls, while Jade grumbled that Domino was far more comfortable in her single garment and cropped hair. Then they sat together on the window seat, staring out through the netted window at the silvered garden below, hotly fragrant in the tropical night.
Domino broached the subject herself. “He beat me soon; I kill him,” she announced, not in the least backward about assessing the situation.
“I’ll help!” cried Jade, carried away for the moment. Then she came back down to earth. “He will beat you, too, if you ever refuse to obey him,” she realized slowly and helplessly.
Domino’s magnificent body stiffened; she lifted her small shapely head even higher. “I not his,” she pointed out with a masterly grasp of essentials. “I belong me!”
“I know that, but they don’t!” cried Jade for the twentieth time. “And you know I’ve promised to free you somehow the very minute I can. But I can’t now. They just wouldn’t pay any attention. And Uncle Augustus expects you to obey him even more than me, because he’s a man, and in charge of me, and—”
Domino interrupted with smouldering eyes. “Pink man, pah! Pink women slaves too. You belong your men, your property belong your men, not?”
Really, for someone just learning English she was remarkably pithy and effective! And astute, as well. There was no denying this succinct analysis, and Jade didn’t even try.
