Freedom

by Catherine Johnson

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Historical Note: The Slave Trade

  The People

  Timeline

  Glossary

  Copyright

  CHAPTER

  1

  JAMAICA, 1783 BARRATT HALL ESTATE

  I swept the paths in the flower garden as if I was the devil cutting down every sinner in hell. But I kept my face cool as an evening breeze. No one would see my anger if I could help it. I screwed up my eyes to stop them prickling. I didn’t want anyone to notice how hard I was trying not to think of Mamma and my baby sister Martha. Would they be on the wagon by now? I’d seen it arrive nearly an hour ago. Mamma had hugged me tight before I left for work, told me to be strong. I didn’t want to let her go. I hugged Martha too but she was grizzling like she knew something was up and there was nothing in the world I could do for her.

  I would probably never see them again.

  Even so, I kept my eyes down, my anger bottled up. I didn’t want Missis Palmer, the housekeeper, telling me my business, or worse one of the Barratts. Either the young master or the old mistress who liked to sit on the veranda with her parrot, Mr Bird, her hand resting on her long hardwood stick. Although the young master was callous, sharp-tongued and nasty, it was his mother, the old mistress who was worse. I gripped the broom tighter. n my right hand there were only four fingers. And while the old mistress hadn’t chopped it off herself, she had stood by while Mr Bird took his great black beak, sharp as a machete, and pecked it clean off.

  Last night the rain had come down heavy as stones, now the hibiscus blooms carpeted the path in every shade of blue and purple, and my job was to sweep up every single one. The roses seemed to have enjoyed the drink and just opened up, white and pink; so much colour. I knew I should have felt joyful at the work of God’s hand, but I did not.

  Oh, I knew that working in the gardens was a nice, nice job. I knew I was lucky I didn’t have to break my back in the fields with Mamma, cutting the sugar cane with baby Martha strapped to her back. So even though I wanted to walk through all the flower beds, stamping on everything, killing it all, I kept sweeping.

  Old Thomas, the gardener, with his bent back and barely a hair on his head, called out to me. I looked up and he waved me over. I threw down the broom. He was taking a cutting from a lantana tree, holding the branch so tenderly it might have been a baby.

  “This is the one, see, Nat? Cut the stem here where it fork.” Old Thomas kissed his teeth. “Are you watching, Nathaniel? How you expect to learn?”

  “Excuse me, sir,” I said.

  Thomas grinned, showing two teeth, one top, one bottom. He shook his head. “You think I don’t know what you’re thinking? Throwing a good broom like that when it don’t do you no wrong!” He took a knife from his pocket with his free hand and cut the branch just so, like it was butter.

  “You wan’ end up like me?” He looked down at his right foot. Cut in two but healed up into half a foot long before I was born. Smooth brown skin patterned with darker scars. No toes.

  “If the young massa or the overseer catch you before you find Maroon Town and freedom, then this what happen,” he said. “You have a good job, decent job, ’member that. No whip on your young back if you careful.”

  “I know that, Mr Thomas, but—”

  “No buts. You go wrong, you run away, they take off half your foot so you no run no more. You no listen to Massa, they whip you ’til the skin fall off your back. Maybe take off your ear, slit your nose so.” He pointed his knife at me and I stepped back.

  “Sorry, Mr Thomas.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Listen. Learn. Your mother told me keep my eye fix ’pon you and so I do. You no worry about her or the pickney no more. You hear? Them sold an’ that the end of it.” He tipped the straw hat back on his head and itched at his scalp. He looked serious. “An’ you an’ I know she probably better off far from here.”

  I didn’t say anything. My eyes stung. I must have had some dust or something in the corner because I had to rub them with the back of my sleeve. I sniffed too. But I knew he was right. Since the old mistress had brought in a new overseer things had got worse for all of us. Earlier, when the wagon arrived, I heard the crying as folk said goodbye. I knew Mamma and my little sister would be gone before the sun rose any higher. Gone to work in a parish far from here on the south of the island.

  Old Thomas shook his head. He snipped off an armful of yellow flowers from the lantana tree and piled them in my arms.

  “Tek these to Missis Palmer. Go on with you, up to the house. Go the long way and you jus’ might see the wagon pass at the long bend.”

  “Thank you, Mr Thomas!” I said, even though I had already started running.

  But I was too late. The big six-wheeled cart carrying Mamma, Martha and the others who’d been sold, was rolling down the palm-lined drive. It was almost at the gate. I dropped the flowers without thinking and waved and waved with both hands.

  “Mamma!” I called out loud, and I swear I saw her head turn.

  It came like a bolt of lightning. The blow across the back of my head sent me reeling. In an instant I was face down on the ground with a mouthful of dirt and a pain so hot and hard across the back of my scalp I thought my head had split right open.

  “Pick those up. Horrid boy!”

  It was the old mistress. She stood above me, a slight woman with a core of iron. She wore a dark cotton dress down to the ground and Mr Bird sat on her shoulder, a tiny chain around one scaly clawed foot. It regarded me with its yellow eye and opened its beak up wide and laughed its horrible laugh.

  “Horrid boy! Horrid boy!” it screeched.

  The mistress had dealt me a blow with her stick. Thomas had told me about the tree it was cut from. How they used to hang slaves in its branches before it fell down in a storm. How the gardener before him had cut a stick for the old master. And how that stick had done a deal of harm for a long time. To man and boy, woman and girl.

  The old mistress swished away, with Mr Bird stretching its wings out.

  “Horrible boy,” she said. “Waving your arms about like that.”

  “Idiot,” Mr Bird said, and laughed some more. “God’s bones and blood!”

  My head felt like it was singing with pain. I got up without making a sound, even though I wanted to yell with the hurt of it. I stopped myself putting my hand up to the back of my head where I could feel the skin broken and something wet, blood maybe, trickling down the back of my neck.

  I began picking up the flowers. I took my time, watching as the old mistress entered the big house and disappeared. I would not give her the pleasure of knowing how much she had hurt me. What did Mamma say? Walk tall, they cannot hurt us. They have hurt us so hard and for so long. What more can one blow do?

  When I’d gathered them all up I walked towards the house, heading to the small kitchen door. From the open windows above I heard shouting. And not just shouting, neither. The young master was fairly raging at his mother. I wondered for a short moment why she did not use her stick on him.

  “You had no right to decide which slaves we sell or which we keep!” the young master yelled. Then the sound of breaking glass. “I am in charge here, Mother. Not you!” Another crash. China smashing this time. Perhaps a vase? A chamber pot?

  Missis Palmer the housekeeper saw me and snapped at me to come in. Her face was a mess of scowling. That woman could cut her eyes at you so sharp you could fall down dead. I thought to get away qui
ck before she hit me too.

  Just then there was another crash from upstairs. Missis Palmer clapped her hands and despatched Bets and Mary Two to clean up.

  Bets shook her head. “I’m not going ’til that noise stop, not for nobody.”

  Missis Palmer spoke low, her voice dangerous. “You better do as you’re told, Betsy Barratt, or I’ll see you’re on the next wagon out of here to Mount Vernon along with the others!”

  Betsy picked up the dustpan and left.

  All I could think was Mount Vernon. That was where Mamma and Martha were going.

  “Have you no brains, Nathaniel? Are your wits shotten? I don’t want those here!” Missis Palmer bought her hand down so hard on the tabletop that the flowers jumped. The pain in my head throbbed harder.

  “And stop your bleeding all over my kitchen floor. It only clean two minutes!”

  CHAPTER

  2

  I was sitting on the low wall by the kitchen garden while Old Thomas cleaned up the cut on my head with some chaney-root water. He was singing while he cleaned, a sad song.

  “Long time, I no see Li-za,” he sang. I wished he would stop as it was making me sad too, thinking about Mamma.

  “Why is it we are the slaves and they are our masters?” I asked. “Are they different from us? Underneath?”

  Thomas laughed. “They the same. But they tell us – and themselves – a load of stories that we deserve nothing else. But really it’s jus’ because they hold the ships and the whips and the guns.”

  “So if we held them they’d be our slaves?”

  Thomas frowned. “Ain’t no merit in making any man a slave of another. You jus’ setting up a load of trouble.” He looked at my cut. “That’s better, now.”

  I stood up. “So why do they do it?”

  Thomas finished putting the tools away. “Money,” he said. “Always money. You go to town, you see. A free man gets paid for his labour. A slave? They get us to work with chains and whips and barely enough food, then they pile up the money in those big white plantation houses. They don’t have to pay us none so they buy themselves horses and carriages and fine, fine clothes. And if we die or starve it ain’t no matter to them. They just go to Africa and steal some more of us.”

  “They don’t think we are human?”

  Old Thomas laughed. “You ain’t learned that much yet?”

  We finished clearing up. The sun was setting and the night birds were starting up calling. We set off for our huts on the far side of the hill, out of sight of the big house. Beyond the plantation the hills rose up to the south, and somewhere beyond them Mamma and Martha might be arriving at Mount Vernon, wherever that was.

  Our huts, and there were more than I could number on my feet and hands together, stretched out towards the north. Enough for the women and men who worked the sugar cane, the children who worked alongside them in the weeding gangs soon as they could walk, and all the folk who worked in the big house cleaning and washing so the old mistress and young master never had to lift one little finger. There was a whole town’s worth of us. All toiling and sweating for those two white folk.

  “Why don’t we just all wake up, Mr Thomas, in the middle of the night and chase those Barratts off? Move into the big house, live free like the Maroons?”

  Old Thomas raised his eyebrows. “You never hear of slave rebellions? Every so often a bunch of us rise up, then they cut us down twice as hard. We kill, or even hurt one white man, they kill twenty of us in return.” He let out a long sigh. “Children, women – it ain’t nothing to them…”

  I kicked a stone off the path. I felt the anger bubbling up inside. “I won’t stay here any more, Mr Thomas!”

  The old man moved surprisingly fast. He gripped my arm and pulled me around.

  “I won’t hear no more talk like that! Those woods full of man traps, take your whole leg off. And if you walk along the road, they see your mark, they bring you right back.”

  I pulled away. I knew he was right, but I kept quiet until we reached the compound where our one-room, mud-built huts were set out around the open-air cookhouse. From the smell of it I reckoned it was roast breadfruit tonight, but I wasn’t sure I was hungry. I looked at Mr Thomas.

  “You were free once,” I said. “What was it like?”

  He leant on his stick. “Coromantee, the west coast of Africa.” He smiled a little. “Nicest farm you ever did see, best cattle for miles.” His smile faded. “I went out to run an errand for my mother. Last time I saw her I was younger than you are now. I was snatched and sold and chained up in one of their stinking boats.” He shook his head. “Sometimes I think we only born to suffer.”

  I said nothing.

  “You thinking about her, son?” Mr Thomas asked.

  I was. But I was also thinking about how much I hated everything in the whole world. Then I saw Bets, the maid from the big house, come out of our hut, shaking a mat Mamma had made out of rushes and tossing it aside like it was a piece of dirt. I wanted to run over and snatch it up, but Thomas put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Time will pass, Nat. Your heart will ease soon enough.”

  I didn’t want my heart to ease. I wanted to scream and shout and fetch Mamma back.

  “We slaves, we live, we die.” Thomas shrugged. “Maybe when we dead in heaven we get the chance to be free…”

  I rubbed at my eyes. They prickled and stung.

  I went to line up for supper with the others, but I could barely eat a mouthful.

  So I gave my food to Thomas. Now that the women had claimed back Mamma’s hut, he’d found me space in the hut he shared with the grooms who looked after the horses. Some of the boys from the weeding gangs were catching peenie wallies – fireflies – and maybe last week I’d have gone with them, caught some of my own to put in a bottle, but tonight I couldn’t settle to anything.

  And when it was time to sleep, I could no more sleep that night than eat. I lay there trying to fix a picture of Mamma and Martha in my mind’s eye. But every time I tried to focus on their faces, they just seemed to be getting further and further away.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Three whole months whistled past. The young master spent a lot of his time in Falmouth Town, drinking; or so the kitchen girls told me. I also knew, probably before the young master himself, that his mother had lined up the daughter of an English duke to marry him, whether he liked it or not. From the loud arguments and broken glass and china whenever he came home, I expected he did not.

  Despite the young master’s rages, a trip to England for the wedding was planned later in the spring. Betsy and the other house slaves, as well as the butler, the footman and even the drivers, were all on their finest behaviour, hoping they’d be chosen to travel to England with the party. Missis Palmer walked around, as pleased with herself as one of those streamertail hummingbirds, smug that she was definitely going.

  One morning, Betsy was told for certain she would not be needed and had a face on her cloudy as hurricane season.

  “Why do you want to go to England so much?” I asked her when I brought some soursop and guinep up to the big house.

  “Were you born yesterday?” she snapped. “Everybody with half a mind know that there no slaves in England, that the country so good and so perfect none of them English enslaved. I heard you put one foot on the ground and you is free, man, woman or child.”

  “Is that true?” I put the basket down and Betsy inspected the fruit. She did not look at me.

  “Truer than true. England is closer to heaven than anywhere else, and in heaven, we all free.”

  I was probably the only body on the whole of the Barratt Estate – and there were near a hundred of us – that did not want to jump upon that boat and sail away. But that was because I had plans of my own. Every day while I worked in the kitchen gardens, planting the beans, or raking the soil, thinning the callaloo seedlings, I plotted and planned. Sometimes, when Old Thomas let me, I looked after the pineapples, which were bette
r cared for than any of us. But even then I thought of finding Mamma and Martha. Of being together and being free.

  I would wait until the Barratts had gone. Then I would leave in the dead of night, one when the moon was hidden and it was darker than the devil’s armpit, down through the cane fields and to the river that bounded the edge of the estate. I would cross the hills that I could see to the south, sleep in the day, maybe up in a tree so no one would find me, and walk at night. If I did get stopped I would say I was running an errand, or something. The important thing was that I would find Mount Vernon – how exactly I was still not certain – but they would be so pleased to see me! And then we’d run, I would carry Martha and Mamma would run behind us, all the way to the wild mountains of Cockpit Country where the Maroons lived in their hidden town. Free and far from any plantation and any overseer.

  I would not spend my life bent and broken like Old Thomas.

  One morning, a week before the Barratts were due to set sail, Thomas was tending the young pineapples.

  “Come, Nat.” He waved me over. “See the leaf? It sharp like a knife. Watch it don’t cut you.” He moved the leaves out of the way carefully and I could see the pineapple flower, purple and red and spiny. “Hard to think something so ugly taste so sweet,” he said. “The pineapple take two years fe’ flower, fe’ fruit—” He stopped suddenly. For an old man, his ears were sharp, sharp.

  It was Missis Palmer, her skirt swishing along the garden path. “Mr Thomas.”

  She always spoke to him with some respect. Mr Thomas said it was because he knew her mammy. She was wearing her most severe dark blue dress, keys at her waist and hair pulled back.

  Old Thomas stood up, took off his hat in a kind of salute. “Missis Palmer.”

  “They need to take some pineapples. To England. Have them ready by the end of the week.”

  Thomas shook his head. “Good few months ’til they ready…”

  She frowned. “That’s not good enough. What Mistress Barrett wants…”

  “Miracles are in short supply around here, Miss P.”

  “Well, can you not wrap and send plants? Four or five, in the hope that a few will fruit?”