That’s how it is; I must reply to Mr Lee but I am reluctant and impatient. Oh, how briskly his proposal has come, so soon after I have changed my widow’s mourning clothes for the bright colours of a new life. He wants one word, he says; just one, sent back to Virginia by the first boat. The first boat has gone, the second and third also. Our friendship, and our close relation as neighbours, demand a reply. There are two words I can write, but only one of them is the one he looks for and expects. And he shall have my word and my reply in good time. Yet, upon examination, I find that first I wish to write something else. I want to explain my decision more amply than in a single word surrounded by politeness.
Being alone in this tavern in the evenings, it comes to me that every story wants a listener to bring it into being, just as every life leans towards others for an acknowledgement; even such a life as mine is, known only to myself. Strange it is that memory, too, inclines towards a listener if we do not check it. I am not a fool. I know that not so far away in my mind there is indeed a listener, a man who long ago suggested to me that I write something of my life, though I had nothing then to say and few words at my command. No matter. I do not write for him now, but for myself, in my own voice.
For so long I was silent, not having the means to speak out, and keeping myself close for preservation of what little I had. Now I have a voice, both in the world and on the paper before me. I have often used the first, especially in the last years; but never yet the second. To write my story – or just so much of it as I wish to write – not for Mr Lee, or any other man, but for myself: how joyful, and how hard, that is. No person but one who has been voiceless herself will understand.
Mr Lee’s proposal has drawn my story out, and the evenings are long and hot in this town. I will write down some of it though I shall likely never tell it to another face to face, and may not even preserve it once written.
One thing that Mr Lee cannot know about me, no matter that we dined alone in the last year a dozen times with crystal glass and silver on the table: that this simple act of writing is of great importance to me. I have practised it for fourteen years. When I grasp the pen, dip it in my ink and form the letters, I am filled with pride, and with a happiness that comes from the days when I learned to write, another by my side.
These curling signs, so ordinary, that many read and make without a thought, are to me the marks of a freedom that I won myself. The double half-circles of the E at the beginning of my name, I form expansively, flicking up the tail into a lingering curl. The L strikes strongly down, the I rises up softly; and then the Z, as strong as any letter in the alphabet, snakes down below the line, where I lift the pen off and so conclude with the A. I write my whole name with a flourish that describes me, and with the power that writing and reading have given me.
Had I not been able to pick up a book and read I should never be sitting in New Amsterdam, able to call for wine, send my maid to buy ice for it and settle to writing. These black lines, straight and curled, can tell tales and recount proposals, and more. They make lists and contracts, surveys and accounts, such as I deal in every day; and still they fill me with a pleasure that does not lessen, but rather grows, as the years go by.
So I shall write, but I shall not go back to the beginning. I came from a place where the life was wretched and sickness commonplace. The ague took my parents and rich men took the whole place. The land was improved and destroyed, as I was. Had it not been destroyed I would not be here in America now, though I played no more of a part than knowing that the time had come, the rest being all the work of nature with a little help such as my people know how to give. Besides, it was in vain and it is now long gone, too far away to be visible. Looking back is a game for fools and not one that I like to play.
So there is no beginning, except the one I made here. My past is just the start of my present, which began some dozen and more years ago, when I stepped up onto the quayside by the Hampton Roads in the Virginia colony. Then I knew not where I was, but not even the hatred in my heart, so hot and flaming that it lit me up, prevented me from seeing the beauty of the country. That quayside, and the voyage that took me there, are as far into my past as I choose to go.
This is America. It is the land of arrival. Those who prosper here are those who do not look back. Besides, no person that I know has ever left America except in failure, and most who fail in this place have no way out, no ship to take them off, just the earth to cover and forget them.
In America, in the Colony of Virginia, I have been translated; changed to something else. Here I came out of the shadows and into the bright light of the New World. All I had was my courage, and it turned out that was all I needed. I made myself a shape to fit the noonday of this new land. Now it lies stretched out in front of me; yes, even here in this tavern where down below me Dutchmen sing songs from Holland and smoke from the pipes comes up through the floor.
It was not like this when I first landed, but already my passage in that stinking ship had shown me that a person in my place, as lowly as it was, might have hope. I met the jetty in Virginia with a strong forward step. I looked into the blinding sun and round about me, to notice how things lay in this new place. First whether I might escape, and that being straight away dismissed, how I might live.
I had been marched aboard that ship with my head covered. I had closed my ears to the call of my name, knowing that if softness stayed in my heart it would eat me from within. I remember little about the start of the voyage, confined in the hold, and do not wish to bring any of that back now. I lost count of the days and nights since they did not matter to me. In the first weeks we sailed south in the cold, and I saw nothing except the damp slope of the hold by my head and those confined with me, women I did not know.
We put in at some islands that I never saw, then turned and sailed into the great ocean towards the New World. This I learned from the sailors who came down to the hold with food and new slop buckets. Two of the women fell sick with fever and died. Their death was my salvation. In the confusion of their sickness I took their shoes, or more particularly, one pair of tolerable shoes and one pair of leather boots, patched but serviceable. These latter I eased off the body of a woman dead less than an hour. She did not need them. I knew that our feet support us, that to walk is to take the first steps towards life. Though I did not know what awaited me, it was never like to be a soft life. The shoes I hid behind a loose plank in the hull. The boots I wore from that time on.
The women’s bodies were taken and thrown out to sea. We said nothing, neither fought nor complained. We eased round to fill the space of the dead women; a little more for each of us, more of the miasmic air, food and foul water. My limbs stretched out and helped themselves to extra life.
I lay in the bilges and pretended to the same station as the others; but I already had more, in my boots and shoes. Each morning I checked the shoes, snug behind the planking. Women without chattels, clothes or a single penny between them are near to slaves. I was something different; taking and having these possessions gave me another story to tell myself.
After a long time of sailing we were allowed up on deck, two or three of us women at a time. Some were sick and afraid, not being used to the water, but I had no fear of the bottomless sea. Up in the open air I put my back against the mast and all around was the sun glittering in the water. It was a new sun to me, huge and bright, a fireball to heat up the world. I opened my arms to it, spread them as wide as I could. Each time I came on deck I grabbed another thing, no matter that there seemed no use for it. A nail. A rotted sailor’s shirt, hung drying in the rigging, that I pulled down and concealed in my skirt in an instant as I passed. A length of twine. A pair of scissors fallen between the planks of the deck. Down in the hold my hoard grew, and my determination. I set myself a task of accumulation: find something; conceal it; keep it. Each visit into the sunlight grew this purpose, and my spirit with it. Thus do we find ways to trick ourselves to live.
There was little to se
e off the boat, not a seabird or another ship, just black rafts of seaweed that floated in the ocean. After some weeks porpoises began to accompany us on our way; the same sort of creature as I see now in the Chesapeake River towards the sea. I watched them leap and curve out of the water as if enquiring about the ship, or asking it to join their dance. They played for delight of life and this understanding brought me the first spark of joy since I had gone on board. If such a creature could think to make the filthy ship a playmate, so might I insist that fortune come along with me.
Indeed, I have never been a woman to stand still while life streams by, but what happened to some of us on that ship is not to be written. Though we did not then know why, we were locked in the hold except for the times on deck. The masters we were going to did not want us heavy with child and unfit to work. But the locks turned easy for men with money. A hundred men on that boat, and ten women. The youngest girls had the worst time of it, and it made them mad, and two with child by the time the voyage ended.
I had to give something away to protect against a greater loss. I chose a man by the name of O’Brien, orange-haired and marked with the pox, going indentured to the New World. He was trained in fighting and that was what I liked. O’Brien was an Irishman lately labouring on the works where I had lived. Before that he went for a soldier he told me, though whether for country or king or from starvation I never asked. Caught up a prisoner, he ran away when he had a chance, was taken again and now sent out indentured, shipped out of the way.
I chose O’Brien and he fought off other men for me. It was little to hand over in return for safety. He was a drinking man, and worked to get on the right side of the ship’s mate, who kept the list of all the indentures and which planters had bought them. One night the mate lent O’Brien the list and he brought it to me. There was my name, among those of all the women by me. I learned I’d been indentured to a Captain Maybrick. By his name were the words Norfolk and James River, so that I knew my destination, at least the way it was written.
I followed O’Brien and spoke to the ship’s mate, who then allowed me on deck when I wished, the weather continuing hot and fine. I sat by the mast and learned the life of the ship. Though I would never have a use for it, I put that learning into memory and so occupied my mind. I added also to my stock of goods; one day a compass forgotten on the foredeck, another day a glove dropped near the captain’s cabin.
The ship’s captain walked about the deck or occupied himself in his cabin with his log and charts. The mate took daily charge and treated the ship as if it might be a workshop or manufactory. Their task together was to command it safely across the ocean and with the least loss of life, these two being the greatest hazards a captain faced. Fear of disaster and sickness kept all the sailors and ship’s officers at their work. Gunner, carpenter, boatswain, rope maker, caulker, sail maker, cook, cook’s mate: all of them had a part to play, none effectual on its own, but all joining to make the ship sail well. I watched what each man did and made notes to the purpose in a book given to me by the mate.
I soon understood that the captain was not in possession of the whole ship, but only in the sailing of it. Another man owned the ship, though I never discovered his name, just that he did not make the voyage. That man’s desire was for profit and the captain worked the ship for him just as a labourer works the land for a farmer. He who owns the land or the timbers of the ship itself is he who really commands, though he is rarely seen and never puts himself to hazard. This notion impressed me and I stored it, as the objects I found, for future use.
The captain of the Hart, as the ship was named, had with him an apothecary to deal with outbreaks of sickness. He was not a man fit for the job. Many died from fever, their bodies thrown overboard, and recorded by the captain in the log for the purposes of reckoning up with the men who had paid their passage. I learned then from the mate that a man who paid the passage of an indentured servant could claim the land that came with the passage if the servant died.
I did not care how long the voyage took except that I felt curiosity turning inside me to know what was coming, what might be on the other side. Not a man or woman knew me where I was going, or knew what had passed in my former life. I would have charge of my own self in America, there being no person there to tell my story but myself. Yet I understood that these days at the foot of the mast were the last days of liberty and the life that I knew. My name was all I took with me to the other side of the ocean. Look after yourself, stay alive, O’Brien told me, and after seven years they have to make you free.
The New World came soon enough. A sailor high up the mainmast shouted sight of land after sixty days of sailing. A week later we came into the mouth of a great river to land by the Hampton Roads in the Colony of Virginia. They herded us indentured men and women off the boat straight onto the quay. We stepped into new sunshine that fell bright as knives. I stood there with one thought in my head, to keep the shoes that hung under my shift on a stretch of hemp unwound from ship’s rope. Inside the shoes my other things lay packed. I wrapped my arms around my own waist and protected the bulge that they made, and thus in all probability preserved my life, or so it felt then.
A man came with a paper in his hand, and gathered those belonging to Captain Maybrick. He tallied the list with the ship’s mate, heads together, and crossed off the two women who had died on the voyage. Then he took us and tied us one to the other. I had seen that in another place and thought to run, but knew myself helpless though anger rose in me at the rope round my ankles.
Straight away I made myself used to the fact of my indenture and opened my eyes to look about me. A river flowed fast past the wharf, so wide that the far bank was a hazy band of green. I knew about water, and saw that the river, though wide and swift, was shallow enough to be a place of plenty.
From the quayside we were set straight away in a smaller boat, the ten of us, and tacked upriver against the wind. In a few hours the river narrowed and I saw rich woods on either side, and places of cultivation between them. The trees stood in water in a way familiar to me, but taller than any I had ever seen, with crevassed trunks and roots that reached out under the surface.
When the moon came up that first night we sailed in its light to the shore. I fell asleep on the deck still tied up, with no thoughts more than the next day, when we set off again and made two turns into smaller rivers and then the man in charge told us we were near. I never saw the Master that had contracted for us when we arrived at the landing stage of Bellevue, though I knew his name and that of the James River that we had sailed up.
They took us off the boat, set our feet on land and untied them. Then past a tidy group of barns to a kind of village with small huts either side of a path and bigger houses at each end. Every window watched another. Gardens stretched out the back of the huts. All of us new arrivals were separated one from another and each taken to a different hut or cabin, except for one man who was marched away to the big house as I learned after, he having the skills of a carpenter. That was that and where this life began.
I had no reason to look back. In the whole world that I left there was only one person I wished for, and I was parted from him. If I turned round then I would see other figures passing back and forth, but they were already dim and seen through gauze. Why pull their spirits to this new place? I was from that first day busy, and kept my eyes on every person that I saw and all that happened. I was not one for being left behind, or tripping over myself, or even thinking of others who ran beside me. From the beginning I preferred things brushed off and clean and everything gathered in my own hands, and to this day I have remained the same.
Chapter 2
New Amsterdam.
Blossom’s Tavern on Beaver Street by the Broad Way.
The 21st day of July, 1664.
I continue the writing of my life having left myself that first morning at Bellevue on the James River, only a day after I set foot in America. Most here remember the boat that rowed them ashore and t
heir first step onto the New World. The stories are recounted over and over for the young. The way they are told hangs on whether a person arrived in hope or in sadness.
I left the old world unwillingly, yet never allowed myself to despair, my situation being little worse than the one I left behind, and in some fashion better. I jumped up onto the wharf at Hampton Roads though my feet were tied the minute after.
Many people here, even of the middling sort, have never entered the dwelling places of the hands on an estate. Everything is left to an overseer, only the profit and not the labour being of concern to all other persons in the colony. I know the cabins from the cramped dark of their insides and the rustle of bugs in their walls. Six women lived in the hut I was led to, three on one side of the door, three on the other. I was put in with Ellen and Tetty, to share one bed, and they explained how things were at Bellevue.
‘You just arrived?’ That was Ellen, who had no more thought in her head than seeing out her seven years.
‘Yes.’
‘Your name, then?’
I wondered whether to tell my name, but saw that Ellen offered no threat to me, being frank and open-faced to look upon.
‘Eliza; Eliza is my name.’
I took pleasure in sounding it out loud in this new place and found I had no desire to change it, though I might at that moment have taken a new name like a cloak and hidden under it.
‘Eliza. And you signed freely?’
‘Yes.’
In truth I had not signed, and was little better than a slave; but since Ellen wished it to be so I gave her the lie. Without any telling my history fell behind. I stepped out of it as a person steps from the shade and into the sunlight, there to be seen.
Tetty was a sturdy girl with cropped pale hair and a canvas shift. She asked if I knew the contract for those who come out indentured; the seeds, and the cow and all? ‘And the new clothes, Eliza, they are what we long for, with the cow,’ she added.
The Great Level Page 19
