He slipped his hand from her breast to under her arm, and pulled her to her feet. As he did so, the watching boy sensed a movement among the men, a shift in the atmosphere, and glanced over there. The sailor felt it too and turned quickly, still gripping the girl tight. One of the African men, across the wooden barrier, had half risen from the deck – as far as his chains would allow him. There was a low murmur of protest from those around him, but the boy could not tell whether it was caused by the action of the sailor or that of their companion.
The sailor let the girl go and took half a dozen paces across to the barrier. He stretched across till his face was an inch from the face of the half-standing man. ‘Dinna you flash your een at me, my son. Ye’re at sea noo, this is sailors’ country. My country. Ye better learn that. It’s the only way life’s gaun tae be worth the livin for ye, frae noo on. Ye dinna ken whit I’m sayin, div ye? But ye will, freen, ye will.’ He flipped the cosh into his hand and smashed it into the black face, sending the man crashing to the deck. ‘Aw white men’s your maisters noo. Aw richt, my son?’
Then he turned back to the women, among whom a soft crying had begun in the wake of the blow. He seized the girl, much more roughly than before, and pulled her out from among them.
That was the start, Joseph saw. That was where the taking, the smashing, the raping, the torturing, the killing started. It started there and it would go on for years, until every single person on the ship was dead. It had gone on for centuries so why would it ever stop?
‘Pick one for yourself,’ the sailor said to his young companion. ‘They’ll dae your biddin fair enough and it’s a lang haul ower the Atlantic so you may as weel get the benefit.’ He saw that the other sailor was watching the prone body of the man he had struck. ‘Dinna fash aboot that. That’s a lesson for you as much as for him. That’s whit they’re like, your African. They’re a kind o horse, or some ither animal ye can train up a bit. Your male neger’s a docile, daicent beast when he’s broke in, but ye must never forget the wildness lurkin at the back o him. When his ee lichts up like that, he’s like a horse aboot tae buck or kick. That’s when ye hae tae act, and act fast. It’s you or him at that point, mak nae mistake aboot it. There’s planters in the Indies let their negers get above themsels, they try tae treat them the same as us, and it disna work, it disna work at aw, and it makes problems for awbody – them, their neighbours and the negers. Teach them hoo tae see richt frae wrang and they’ll choose wrang every time. There’s a badness in them and ye canna get it oot, no wi books nor baptisin nor fine claes nor naething. Ye can tak them thoosands o miles across the ocean but ye canna get Africa oot o them, ye jist canna. It’s in them and if ye try tae get it oot like as no ye’ll get a blade in the back for your trouble.’
Joseph shifted his weight, trying to ease a slight pain in his shoulder without waking Ann. He had run that scene in his head so often that he heard the sailor like a bell now. Maybe over the years his dreams had put words in the sailor’s mouth. Maybe, but he knew they were not far wrong. This was how it had been: the start of very bad times; the start of a war. And now, in this bed in a tiny cottage on another, colder coast, he felt the truth held in the sailor’s evil words: Africa was in him, had always been in him.
This was a bed. No rough timber board, no bodies rank with sweat and shit fettered together in the darkness in the stinking belly of a slave ship. This was a bed. They were lying in a bed, their bed. He had slept with Ann, night after night now, for how long? Near on thirty years. And he would never get used to it, the sheer joy of the bed he shared with his wife.
This was a bed and he was Joseph Knight. He had not been Joseph then. He had been someone else. There was a time when he had hated that name, but he had made it his and no one was going to take it away now. But neither would they take away his other, older name. It was the one thing he had left from that other beginning, the one thing that was his and his alone. And he had never uttered it. Not since he was on the ship. Not since Captain Knight favoured him with his own name. He had known – a ten-year-old but he had known – that he must keep it from everyone. They could not take it if they did not know it. Not even Ann knew it.
She used to ask him, ‘Whit was your name? Whit is your real name? Ye must hae an African name.’ At last she wore him down, and he admitted it, he had. But it was his, and he would not give it to her. ‘Dae ye no trust me?’ she said. But it was not about her. It was about himself. He had to keep his name whole, away from others, away, especially, from white people. Even her. She thought hard about that for a day or two. It must have hurt her, because it surely hurt him to keep it from her. But it was necessary. Eventually she saw that. She never asked again.
He thought of a conversation he had once had, a long time ago now. A man had told him: ‘People don’t see you any more, because you are free.’ He hadn’t believed it then, and he didn’t believe it now. Freedom was the very opposite, it was being seen and recognised and acknowledged and still let alone. Being named and taken as a whole. He didn’t believe that this country he had ended up in was ready to dispense that kind of freedom. Not yet anyway.
Prejudice could have one eye closed, or it could be blind. Justice was sometimes depicted as blind. He wanted a country, a world, which saw with both eyes open.
That man he had met. He had forgotten his name but he had heard it again recently. Peter Burnet. Another black man. They had gone for a drink in the court house. Burnet had had on a fine velvet waistcoat and he had paid for what they drank. Joseph had told Burnet what they were – invisible – and he had been right about that too. He never saw an African face these days, not here. Even the Africa that was in his own son, Andrew, was diluted by the blood of his mother. His daughter Sarah was married and had given him a grandson who, apart from his tightly curled hair, seemed not to bear a trace of him. In another generation or two his blood would be swirling unseen and unrecognised through the veins of men and women who had never set foot furth of Scotland.
But although there were no other African faces around him he was not alone. He was surrounded by the faces of men who had also once been slaves, near as damn it. They were all around him, and when they went down to the shore and into the earth together there was a joining of their souls that was like no other feeling.
Where he had met with Burnet, that was the scene of what he used to call his triumph. The old men peering down at him and Wedderburn. Wedderburn’s counsel goading him, and Maclaurin – Lord Dreghorn, dead now – holding him back. ‘Steady noo, Maister Knight.’ It was that ‘Maister’ that had saved him. Maclaurin had always treated him with respect, right from when they first met. Sometimes he would call him Maister, sometimes sir, sometimes Joseph, but there had always been politeness and respect in the address. It was the way one man ought to speak to another, when they were equals.
He remembered sitting in that room, waiting for the judges to come in. And looking across at Wedderburn. There was, briefly, a crush of finely dressed white bodies that obscured his view. A strong smell of snuff was in the air, and wig powder, and somebody’s shirt or maybe their entire linen and person could have done with a thorough wash. But Joseph hardly noticed – it was the moment that was important. An ending; maybe also a beginning. And as he thought that, it became important to see Wedderburn again, before the judges entered and the moment changed. He leaned forward and with his right arm carefully but firmly pushed aside one particularly large silk-wrapped belly, clearing a line of vision.
And there he was: Sir John Wedderburn of Ballindean. Wedderburn was staring at the ceiling, and Joseph expected to be enraged at the sight of him, proud and cold and unyielding, but it was not like that. When he saw the weary lines on Wedderburn’s face, he was utterly amazed to discover in himself a feeling he never expected to have. He felt sorry for him.
Why? Because Wedderburn had lost his wife? Because he looked exhausted? No. Then why should he feel sorry for him? It flashed across his mind then: because Wedderburn had failed.
Wedderburn had been planning ever since he got off the boat in Kingston: planning and scheming and preparing and building and becoming hugely rich and trying always to make everything secure. But nothing was secure. Life was a step, a second away from disaster. And he felt sorry for Wedderburn because he understood this, and Wedderburn did not.
But that feeling lasted for only a moment. For just then the court rose, and they were enemies again, one trying to beat the other.
It was a cold day but it grew hot in that courtroom. The place was thick with people, their combined breath and body heat and body smells rising to the beams under the gallery and filling up the whole room. And as Maclaurin and Dundas stepped clear to make their speeches, Joseph began to be revisited with memories of the slave ship – those same memories that he still had: the packed, chained filth and nakedness of the people; the rancid smell; the slittery mess of shit and piss and puke running back and forth with every shift of the vessel; the groans of men and the crying of women; the groans of the ship, the sounds of people dying. What terrible waste was that? – people taken for slaves who would never even reach the plantations, who would be thrown overboard, waste literally, when they expired. He tried to block those sounds out and concentrate on the speeches, the fine white words being uttered on his behalf, but they would not disappear. Maclaurin finished. Dundas began. Monboddo interrupted. Then there was a pause, while Wedderburn’s lawyers consulted among themselves. His own lawyers formed a huddle, discussing how they had done. Maconochie was complaining that Dundas had omitted some important point. Joseph was outwith their circle. For a minute, even Maclaurin had forgotten him.
And even Maclaurin, good and well-meaning though he was, could be insensitive. His Latin motto, designed to impress the court, hurt. His invitation to the old men to look on his client and see if he were a man or a thing, that hurt. The heat, the close air, the backs turned against him – Joseph had to get out.
He went right through the great hall, past the bookstalls and the coffee shop, out into the Parliament Close. Ann would have come down from the gallery, perhaps, would be back in there looking for him, but just now he didn’t want anybody, not even her.
Outside it was wonderfully, sharply cold. There was an empty spot in a corner formed by one of the buttresses of St Giles’. He stood there, eyes closed, breathing in the fresh air, regaining control. He realised how tired he was. Tired of everything.
‘Hello, Joseph.’
For a second he thought John Wedderburn had followed him out. He jumped forward, wide awake again. It was not John Wedderburn. It was his brother.
‘Hot, isn’t it?’ James Wedderburn said, smiling. He was blocking him, so that Joseph would have to push him out of the way to leave. Joseph did not wish to touch him. ‘I mean, in there,’ Wedderburn said. ‘Not out here. Brrr! But in there – almost as hot as Jamaica at this time of year. But it’s always hot there. You’ve not forgotten that, have you?’
‘Lea me alane.’
‘You’re getting a right Scotch accent, Joseph. You’d almost pass for a native.’
‘I dinna wish tae speak wi ye.’
‘But I wish to speak to you. And if I were you, I’d listen. For your own good.’
Joseph made as if to get past him but Wedderburn stopped him with a hand to his chest, pushed him back against the wall. And now he began to speak very hard and very fast, and there was not a trace of a smile on the handsome face any more.
‘You’re not thinking of going back in there, surely? That would be very foolish. Because you know what’s going to happen, don’t you? You’re going to lose. All the fine words of Maclaurin and his cronies won’t save you. They’re done, finished. All that’s left is the law. And that’s what they do in there – law. That’s all that matters. You haven’t a chance. But just to make sure, we’ve taken a gentle line with their lordships. We don’t want to alarm them. Even if they say you are not to be a slave here, we’ve asked them to accept that you were a slave there, as a point of principle. Of course my brother, your master, has said that he has no intention of sending you back to Jamaica, but he’d like to establish that he has the right to do so. They can’t throw over Jamaican law any more than Jamaica can throw over Scots law.
‘So my advice to you, Joseph, is to do what you’re good at. Start running. Start now. Don’t go back in that room. There’s a ship leaving Greenock in less than a week, bound for Savanna-la-Mar. You’re going to be on it if we catch you. And we will catch you. We’ve got your place booked already with the agents. I’d happily see you safe on board and bound for your old friends at Glen Isla. But as it happens, somebody else has volunteered to escort you.’
Now he stood aside. Across the close, standing below the statue of King Charles and staring over at them, was Aeneas MacRoy.
‘I’m going back inside now, Joseph,’ Wedderburn said, ‘to hear the arguments against you. It’s up to you whether you come in, or set off running. Maister MacRoy will keep an eye on you either way. Goodbye, Joseph.’
If it had been John Wedderburn, he might have struck him. He might have elbowed him out of the way and gone back to the court. But James Wedderburn was different. There was a fire in him. He held you with the intensity of his look. He did not pretend.
For a moment Joseph thought he was going to run. For more than a moment. He began to walk towards the High Street. At the corner of the kirk he stopped and turned. MacRoy was behind him, at a safe distance. Joseph took another twenty paces.
Then he stopped. This was exactly what the Wedderburns wanted. They wanted him to act like a slave, they expected it. Whereas Maclaurin expected him to act like a human being.
Joseph turned round. He broke into a run. As he passed MacRoy, heading towards the Great Door, he dropped his shoulder and caught him a glancing blow, sending him staggering to one side. Joseph was furious: with himself, with MacRoy, with the Wedderburns. Mostly, though, he was furious at the thought of the Court of Session deciding his fate without him. Which was why, when the judges looked askance at his reappearance, he had stared back at them without flinching, refusing to be cowed.
He did not see either MacRoy or James Wedderburn afterwards, when it was all over. He never knew if John Wedderburn had countenanced what they had done, and he did not want to discuss it with Maclaurin. Along with Dundas and Maconochie and Annie, and Mr Davidson down from Perth and a number of other well-wishers, Maclaurin insisted on celebrating the victory at Indian Peter’s, and raising a glass to him and to freedom. And Boswell was there too, Auchinleck’s son, fretting at the edge of the circle, and complaining to Maclaurin because in their pleadings none of them appeared to have used Dr Johnson’s argument, that Boswell had gone to considerable trouble to take down when last in London. And Maclaurin said, calmly enough, ‘Och, Jamie, we used some o it, I’m sure. Onywey, oor arguments had enough weight without bringin in the English, did ye no think?’ Everybody laughed except Bozzy, who thought that was a remark that did little honour to Samuel Johnson, who had been much taken with Maclaurin, did he not remember? At this Maclaurin grew quite short with his friend, and said, ‘Whit would ye hae had us say, James? Should we hae gien their lordships Johnson’s Oxford toast: “Here’s tae the next insurrection in the West Indies"? Dae ye think that would hae clinched it?’ Everybody else roared, and then Maconochie, seeing the other side coming out past them, raised that toast anyway, very loud: ‘Here’s tae the next insurrection in the West Indies!’ And of course several of them, Joseph and Annie the loudest, repeated it, and they all, with the exception of Henry Dundas, who looked embarrassed, drank.
John Wedderburn was subjected to this as he and his counsel went past, and he could not ignore it. He refused to acknowledge Joseph, refused even to look at him. Instead, he turned on Henry Dundas, who was nearest to him. ‘You are a rank hypocrite, sir. You attacked me, who never mistreated that Negro, and you attacked slavery, yet I do not see you move against it elsewhere, where it matters. Why are you not calling for abolition in
the House of Commons? You accuse me of expediency, yet it seems you are one man here and quite another in London.’
Dundas tried to brush it off – ‘Mr Wedderburn, we had aw thae arguments jist noo in court’ – but Wedderburn would not move on. Cullen’s gentle attempts to persuade him only further infuriated him.
‘Mr Cullen, I am done with you, sir, apart from your fee.’ Cullen held up his hands, glanced at Dundas and shrugged, then walked off. Wedderburn stayed. ‘Well, Mr Dundas, are you to present a bill in the House to wind up the rest of my property?’
Dundas shook his head. ‘Mr Wedderburn, I am not blind to the situation in the West Indies. I am not unaware of the wealth that comes frae them, or the advantages they bring tae this country. But that is a different maitter frae whit we hae resolved this morning. I am a practical kind of man.’
‘As I said, you are a hypocrite.’
Wedderburn stormed out. Those were the last words Joseph ever heard from him.
All this was pouring through his mind as he lay in the half-light. Although the dreams of Africa came often to him, he seldom thought of Wedderburn these days, but he was thinking of him now because he had heard that he was dead.
Yesterday, Saturday, he and Andrew had come out of the pit as usual with the other men. Their bodies were aching and soaked from hours of toil; soaked, too, from the water they had laboured in up to their knees after the steam-driven pump broke down. The mine shafts were down by the shore: one of them, the main one, went down a hundred and eighty feet, out under the sea. This was the shaft Joseph, his son and another sixty or seventy men had been working twelve hours a day since the early spring.
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