‘Tetty came out with me three years ago when just a child,’ Ellen said. ‘Mr Hawker let me keep her close, though most from the same place are separated.’
‘Mind the ague here, Eliza,’ Tetty said. ‘It carries so many off, especially in the autumn rains. Some take the ague and survive, but it’s a fearful thing.’
‘I know it,’ I said, and then regretted that I spoke.
‘Where are you from, then?’
‘Nowhere.’
‘Nowhere. You want to leave it like that?’
‘I do.’
‘We don’t have secrets here,’ Ellen said, ‘but maybe you have good reason to keep quiet, Eliza, so I won’t ask further.’
They showed me the hut, what there was to show, the mud chimney to serve both rooms, the water tank and privy, and the garden out the back. Such a hut is a hard place for those who have entered servitude willingly and expect better. For me it looked like no hardship, being quite dry and not liable to flood. For such a person as I was, it was the work and not the living that was like to break me. Tobacco is a greedy plant and wears out both land and people.
Soon enough I learned that the terms of indenture confined me to the plantation and the only thing given was the hope of liberty at the end. Many in England had signed on golden promises, and the life of a bound slave soon took them. A few with lucky dispositions swallowed disappointment easy, or had likely left a worse life behind. Some looked at death and the labour and determined to take some fun of it, there being four men for every one woman in the Colony of Virginia. Few men wanted a single life or always to lie with a native woman taken into captivity. Every man was looking for a wife and scrambling over others to get her. A woman could wait and weigh the offers that came her way.
It was not hard to size up the men, being out in the fields every day side by side and seeing the strength of them and their humour, whether they had the disposition to get up each day in the heat, and how their eyes roved. For such as Ellen those things weighed in the balance with the assets a man was like to have at the end of his service.
In this place, as with all others maybe, it is the land that counts most, the acres that come at the end. A man may be of good standing with a boat to ferry goods and people, or be a merchant with goods to sell. Yet without land he is a poor prospect. Land to put your feet upon and title to it, the right of ownership so that it can never be taken away; that is the promise of the New World.
They put me to work right away under the overseer, Mr Hawker, who lived at the top of the village and had charge of all the hands. It was then spring and the job was to take the tobacco plants out of the frames and plant them in lines. Tobacco looks fine from a distance, with its big bold leaves and starry pink flowers. But it is a cruel plant, viscous with sap and tiny hairs. Though I tied rags round my hands the sticky roughness got through and took the skin right off. At night I soothed them in a bucket of water and rubbed them with fat I scraped from the pot.
In time my hands healed brown and calloused; my feet also, that had softened on the voyage. I rejoiced to feel them tough as leather and forced myself to the rhythm of the land and labour. Days passed one after another, no difference between them until Sunday, a day given to prayer and rest. I never took to worship but walked to the church with Ellen and Tetty, sat quiet in the pew and looked about me. The sick prayed; the seven years seemed an age.
Ellen and Tetty had eyes only for one sort of future.
‘See there, by Mr Hawker,’ Ellen said after a few weeks. ‘That’s Henry Vine, and a good man he is, I tell you, free next year and knows the ways to get the best from the land and not exhaust it with tobacco every year.’
I looked closely at Henry Vine and said nothing. A month later the ague got into him. He lay in the hut and cried for the mother he had left in England. Many are those who shun the sick, fearing the bad air that hangs about them. I cared not for that, just nothing for Henry Vine, and kept away from indifference. Ellen sat with him till the end, and wept, though his place was soon filled and he forgotten.
After Henry Vine, Ellen took to pointing out another man.
‘Over there,’ she said, as we lugged wooden pails of water from the river to the fields, two at a time, hung on chains from a yoke across our necks. I was raw and chap-necked. I knew other ways to get water to the fields and raged inside at my imprisonment.
‘Put your pails down for a minute, Eliza. Mr Hawker isn’t in sight. That there is Jem Kincaid,’ said Ellen. ‘Arrived a few months ago from Scotland, taken for a soldier, captured, I heard, and shipped out against his will. Works up at the house and mends things in a general way, being a very ingenious man.’
‘What is he doing here?’ Tetty asked, putting her buckets down next to ours.
‘Punishment, I reckon,’ said Ellen, shrugging, for punishment was common and used by Captain Maybrick at the time to lengthen the service of his indentured men and women. That was put a stop to later, as making men and women both bad workers.
‘Kincaid’s run off several times,’ Ellen added. ‘But there isn’t anywhere to run except to the woods or the natives, and then like to be killed. He’s been brought back each time, exchanged for something I know not what, liquor maybe. See that mark on his neck? That’s the brand as can never be covered. He won’t run again, but he’s a strong man and will make something of himself if all that anger doesn’t burn him up inside before his time is out. You’d be a wise thing to get him, Eliza.’
I stood there with the sun beating on me and the earth eating into my skin and did not even smile. The easy way, so they thought. Find a man and shelter under him till release comes. Seven years. Then you’ve a few acres somewhere upcountry if he has that coming to him. Add two cows, tools, seeds and corn and what do you have? A lifetime of drudgery like the old country, and a child a year. And that’s what Ellen urged, a woman who never used her head.
Well, I took a good look at Mr Kincaid, and a pretty man he was, golden all over from the sun, and with a beauty a woman might lose herself in and forget this life. But though I talked to him, coming up with a quiet I learned long ago, neither my heart nor my head urged me on. I was not yet free of everything I had left behind. I had given myself to a man before, and he was still in me enough that I did not have full possession of myself. That stopped me just as much as my own judgement.
The summer came hot and hard and the tobacco plants grew high as our heads. The hands made a line to the river and passed buckets up and down. Our shoulders ached from the weight of them. In the evenings and on Sundays we tilled our own gardens. Food was the first thing; those who could not get more than the ration fell sick soonest. I made myself mistress of the garden patch and grew greenstuffs to boil over the fire.
At night I hid myself by the shore. The river drew me from the beginning, being a person accustomed to live on water, and to know it. The James River bubbles and swirls more than the sluggish brown channels of the place I come from; but water has its constant habits. It insists where it finds weakness and insinuates where it does not, and these powers that it has are the same here as thousands of miles away. So first I stood in the shallows and listened to the river. I felt fish brush past me and the water grasses turn with the tide.
I learned the composition of the river from the water on my tongue and very soon I set to work. The moon gave me light enough to tie the reeds together in a way I knew and lay an eel trap quite unseen. Soundlessly I lowered it under the water and tied it to a stake. My heart lifted when I returned to find the trap heavy with a catch. I took the eels back to Tetty and made her swear silence so we might share them. From that day I caught fish and lobster in my traps also, but never found a way to snare the birds that slept on shallow water.
In those first months I often sat out the back in the evening after the garden work was done. Time passed drop by drop, warm in the half-light. I’d watch the sun go down and think of the natives who were the only people to live in these parts before men arrived from
the old world. I saw them sometimes and knew them to have arms and to be a warlike sort of people though much plagued with disease and like to die easily. I heard they never fought hard for their land, yet, they are such as I was once, in possession of the place. This I cannot think of, it being like to soften me.
The natives have no idea of improvement, though the planters also did little enough, especially those from inland parts. The planters thought only of their lost estates and wanting to make the New World like to the old; setting villages and making fields. Even then I saw differently, and started with the river. Pretty soon I knew the shape and extent of the plantation, the slope up from the water and the river, warm and gentle in the summertime and busy with fish. The fields lay flat and easy along the swampy shore, and the whole was bounded by fine woods behind.
The big house that was forbidden to me, Ellen said, lay a little upriver from our huts with an aspect that looked away from us. I crept there one night, taking care to keep my distance, there being dogs at guard. The house stood upon the grass, raised up and open to the breeze, all made of wood, and white in the darkness. Curtains blew across the windows. After that I went up from the river, kept off the open grass, and sat with my back against the wooden wall of the house as I had against the mast on the journey over.
I longed then to be through the front door and inside, though it was not the house I wanted. On a moonlit night I looked through the windows, and saw fine china and damask on the chairs, I supposed brought from the old country. I did not wish for them, nor the bright night jasmine nor lilies that grew round the house. I saw only a softer life and a step towards liberty.
‘Who works out their indenture at the house?’ I asked Ellen when we were both bent over in our garden patch, and fit to break after a day topping the tobacco flowers to thicken the plants.
Ellen straightened up.
‘None such as us. The better sort as can read or are useful with a needle. Them as talk well or know housework already. Some up there came out with the Captain, from his estate that was taken after the wars.’
‘He paid their passage?’
‘So I’m told; and wanted them with him as coming from the place he lost.’
Then came the harvest: men and women together cutting, piling; cutting, piling, palms and fingers raw again from the rough and sticky undersides of the leaves. No job harvesting tobacco is a good one; out in the fields or in the barns, laying out the leaves on shelves to dry in the heat of the furnaces. Then tying and packing, hoping for respite, but getting none, with new seeds to plant in trays, fallow land to dig, exhausted land to clear. How many died in the heat I never took a count of. New arrivals filled the gaps.
One evening after the harvest, I slipped away from the huts into the falling light. I had my own way to the house by then, barefoot from tree to tree, then round the edge of the meadow. That evening as I ran silent, I saw her close to me, quite alone. She slept on a bench under a spreading oak, her shawl fallen to the grass and a book beside her. Her hands lay on her lap, white and soft. I looked at them and marvelled. They were hands that never knew the roughness of tobacco stems, the sting of salt water, or twisting willow branches into baskets and traps.
I came up and sat next to her, being sure to keep a little distance. I took the book and began to read it aloud. Hesperides, it had written inside the cover, and never having seen a verse then, I did not know it for a book of poems, just read the words one after another until the lady woke up and turned to look at me – and I gathered up her shawl and spread it round her shoulders. Then our eyes met and she spoke to me without fear in her voice or wonder that I was by her side. I have a way to come on a person in silence and it seem nothing strange.
The lady asked how I knew to read, which question I did not answer that a man taught me, but said, ‘I learned in the old country.’ I could see she was drooping and weak and in a moment she asked me in her soft voice if I could help her to the house. She lived there, she said; Damaris Maybrick was her name.
She was the Mistress and that was my start with her. In a few weeks I was up at the house, at work in her chamber. I straightened sheets and the muslin curtains round the bed and learned to read to her smooth as cream, with no curdling the words.
That was the end of huts and fields, the tobacco plants and burning sun. I had been in the New World half a year and I was away from Ellen and Tetty. Tetty died of the ague soon after I left the hut. Ellen got her freedom and walked out from Bellevue I know not where. I never saw her again.
Damaris, my mistress, was kind and gave me every way to please her. I took pains to find other ways also. By the river I found trees that from their bark and smell I knew to have the properties of a willow. I pulled the brown bark from the trunks, then made an infusion in the way I learned long ago. This liquid lowers fevers and takes away the pain of headaches. I gave it to the housekeeper Mrs Lyle and so earned her friendship. She allowed me then to draw water from the well and heat it in the outhouse copper. Two by two I carried the pails to my mistress’s chamber and filled the tub high up. Then I coaxed my mistress out of her tight shift and petticoats to bathe naked, a pleasure quite new to her.
As my mistress sat in the copper tub I warmed her back with water from a sponge and talked of things that I had seen. I told her of the herons’ habits, which came familiar to me, and made their creaking sounds for her to smile at. I brought the whole sparkling river inside for her, with the loons that dipped and made their strange cries, the round black eye of the tercel, and the flash of the kingfisher as it skimmed the ruffled surface. And though my duties only took me from there down the back stairs, into the kitchens and up again, I became a precious thing to her, to have by her more than the others who worked in the house.
‘Stay by me, Eliza,’ the Mistress began to say as the winter came in and the air carried a chill that weakened her. ‘I cannot leave the house today. Stay and talk to me.’
And so I did, and bided my time. She must have sent word to Mr Hawker that I was with her, but I knew nothing of that. I stayed all through the winter, rarely going out and living in the house all day with the Mistress. Sometimes I read to her, but more often I listened to her stories and told her of the world beyond the windows when she tired. About the Captain I knew nothing, and hardly ever saw him. My future lay with my mistress, and I stayed in her bedchamber and her upstairs parlour, never attending her to dinner when the Captain was at home.
My skin grew soft and pale as it had never been. When the spring came the Mistress gave me a gown.
‘Take it, Eliza,’ she said. ‘I no longer have any use for it.’
The gown was of dark silk, brought with them from the old country years before, the Mistress told me. I lifted it up from the great cedar-wood chest with two arms, like a child, then held it by the shoulders and shook it out.
‘Hold it against you, Eliza, so that I may see it.’
I set the dress against my bosom and the Mistress smiled and sighed.
‘Take off your shift and put it on.’
So I dropped my shift to the floor and let my mistress see me naked as I laced the gown up and turned my back to her to pull the ties tight.
‘Move into the light by the window.’
I did as she asked, and saw as I looked down that the gown was cut low at the bosom and high above the ankle.
‘Now, keep it, Eliza. That was how we wore our gowns in the late King’s reign.’
I let the gown out to fit me for I was more ample than the Mistress and delighted in it, wearing it constantly and using my old shift only when she and the Master were away. The Mistress gave me a white kerchief to spread over my bosom and shoulders so that I looked like no other of the house servants and might have earned their resentment had I not taken care to do more than my own share of the work.
The sight of the gown upon me brought the Mistress to remember the days in the old country before the Captain had fought for the King, and in her stories everything was easy and be
autiful. There was a cool garden and she a young bride, whose head had no room for hatred or war. The estate, she told me, was folded into green hills where sheep grazed. Combe Down was her home, built by the Captain’s father, sparkling with glass. Box hedges lined the parterre, bushes were turned into birds by pruning. She and the Captain walked the gravel paths, arm in arm, in the evening. She never saw the sea, and cared not, thinking only of making the estate beautiful and doing her duty as a wife. Twenty servants attended them.
At the thought of Combe Down and her old life my mistress brightened with remembrance. The light came and sat in her eyes. An exile longs to be called back home, to be embraced and returned to familiarity. A person such as I am cannot feel that longing, knows no hope of return and does not want it. My mistress called herself an exile, but after a little, when she spoke of Combe Down and England, her voice turned low and sad. No one called her back. The loss ran through her, and made her weak and sick. Then I saw her for a kind woman and too gentle to last much longer in this new place.
When summer came again, the servants shuttered the house against the sun so it might breathe cool, though it was mighty hot until the river breeze sprang up in the evening and fanned the muslin curtains. In the day the shade collected by the trees in the meadow before the house, where the Captain had built a seat all round the biggest trunk, a thing I never tired of from that day on. Oh, how fine an invention that is, out in the air yet shaded from the sun, raised up from the bad airs that haunt the ground and giving in that way a view of everything round about. From the trees I looked down the grass to the river and across to the far shore, where now I know lie Golden Manor and Tulip Hill, and upriver to Charleville that I could see in the distance, a cluster of houses against the blue of the trees. Captain Maybrick had a boat of his own with two sails and an awning on the deck for shelter from the sun. I sat with the Mistress and watched it come and go from the landing stage. Once when I was alone I observed Captain Maybrick walk up the lawn to the house. A pearl glinted in his ear. I never was at table, nor close up to him that first summer; but I looked about me. No man should think because I am a woman and slighter shaped, that my eyes and my thoughts are smaller than theirs. That is a mistake easy to fall into, as others have done.
The Great Level Page 20
