It was not always calm, though. He remembered it growing frantic at times when Wedderburn thought he was asleep. Through the darkness, close by his head, came the pleading: ‘Don’t die on me, Joseph. Do not die on me. Please God, do not die on me. Please God, do not let him die. Almighty God and Jesus Christ, do not take Joseph from me. Let him live. Do not die on me. Not you too. Please, Joseph, do not die.’ On and on, for hours, until Joseph really did sleep, and, waking, found Wedderburn still at his side.
Joseph felt something stir in his heart. That this other man should tend him, should so devote himself to his needs, was remarkable. Out there in the Atlantic, master and slave were reduced to this simple humanity: one man caring for another. Wedderburn the master did not chastise, did not curse, did not neglect: as if he were his father, the father Joseph did not remember, he cared for him. Lying unable to speak, Joseph saw that Wedderburn was desperate to love and be loved; but he was denied those things because of the way he was. And Joseph was touched, since it was the same for him: he had been torn from love, and he did not know how to give or receive it. For a moment there on the ship, they were two sides of the same coin.
Once, there seemed to be a space somewhere in the storm. The ship rocked rather than shook, and the waves slapped rather than crashed against the timbers. Joseph was strangely aware of his own serenity. It was as if he were clinging like a bat to the low cabin roof, looking down at his body. He was beyond exhaustion, beyond despair. And there was another man in the room, the ship’s surgeon, talking to John Wedderburn. ‘It is the calm before death, Mr Wedderburn,’ the surgeon was saying. ‘I have seen it often, and not just in negers. The body is defeated, and the mind gives up the will to live. When the sea fever has taken someone the way it has this fellow, it’s common enough.’
‘I agree he is very sick,’ Wedderburn said. ‘That is why I sent for you. But I do not wish him to die. I am taking him home to Scotland.’
There was a silence. Joseph felt the surgeon’s hands moving across his body, checking his pulse, pushing back his eyelids.
‘He cannot die,’ Wedderburn said. ‘I will not allow it.’
‘With respect, sir, there’s very little you can do to prevent it.’
‘I am a medical man, too, sir,’ Wedderburn said. ‘I have looked after him thus far. If you can do nothing for him, I will continue to do what I can.’
‘He’ll be dead in two days,’ the surgeon said. ‘I’m sorry to say it, for he looks a well-built lad, but I’ve seen it too many times.’
Alone again with Joseph, John Wedderburn got down on his knees, squeezed in between the table and the bed. Up above, bat-like, Joseph watched.
‘Joseph, can you hear me? No, don’t speak. Turn your head a little if you can hear me. Look at me.’
The neck of Joseph’s body felt as though it were bound in iron. With immense effort, his head turned to look at John Wedderburn. Joseph was shocked to see that Wedderburn was crying.
‘Joseph, I beg you, do not die on me. This is no place for you to die. There is nothing between us and God out here. If you die, I will die. He will not take you and let me live. He is watching us both on this cursed piece of wood. He is watching me with you. Joseph, if you die He will blame me. He will say it was my fault. Do not die, Joseph Knight.’ He took Joseph’s left hand in his two, brought it to his mouth, kissed it. Joseph was too weak to resist. But he felt the kiss.
And afterwards, when the tempest died away and he began to recover, he did not forget it. He remembered it and he understood it. He remembered it even as John Wedderburn distanced himself again, leaving him alone to sleep while he got out on deck for fresh air, rebuilding the boundaries between them as the ship approached landfall. He remembered the kiss when he looked in Wedderburn’s eyes and saw the weakness masquerading as strength, the fear behind the confidence. He remembered the kindness Wedderburn had shown all through the terrible time of bad weather and sickness, and he despised it.
He had come so close to rewarding that kindness. If Wedderburn had not kissed him, he might even have done so. But the kiss was a mark not of kindness but of guilt. And it flooded in upon Joseph that it did not matter whether Wedderburn was a good master or a bad master. It did not matter whether he was a good slave or a bad slave. Even though Wedderburn had helped him to read and write, had nursed him and perhaps even saved his life, these things did not heal the injury he continued to inflict. In claiming to own Joseph, he destroyed the possibility of goodness between them. Wedderburn’s kindness was conditional. Joseph, sick as he was, saw that, and made up his mind always to reject it.
And he knew now, lying in bed next to Ann, why John Wedderburn had tried to find him. Jamieson was right in saying that Wedderburn had wanted to know if he was dead or alive. But the reason: he had needed Joseph to be alive. When Jamieson had failed to find him, Wedderburn had called off the search. It was better that way. It was better not to know that Joseph was dead. That way he might yet be alive, and John Wedderburn could get to his God, or wherever he was going, before Joseph did. He needed Joseph to survive him; to survive the great wrong he had done him.
Life had been a trial to Wedderburn, a burden. How could that be? – that a man that had been a slave came to cherish every rotten moment of being alive, but a rich man with all he could want in the world looked at life as if it were going to jump up and bite him at any minute, as if it were something best kept at a safe distance? How could that be?
Because for a man like Wedderburn life was like a neger. If you once loosed your grip on it, it would rise up and overthrow you.
His mind was racing now. He would not sleep again before daybreak. The Sabbath was over and the new week’s labour was about to begin. Sometimes he did have pangs of guilt about having brought Ann here, about Andrew growing up to such a life. But they were here now. There was no going back. And they were alive.
He thought of James Wedderburn, his threat to send him back to his ‘old friends’ at Glen Isla. Nearly all those people now, they must be dead. He remembered the kindness he had had from Newman. How Newman used to tell him about Charlie, whom he had once been, and the great days of Tacky’s War, before Joseph was ever in Jamaica. Newman would let him trace with his fingers the scars of the terrible flogging he took for being out in the rebellion, and he would talk about his days on the run. They were the best days he had in Jamaica, he said, even though he was half-starved and faced death every day for months. But you were always hungry as a slave, and death was the overseer of all the plantations, so what was there to lose? Newman schooled Joseph. There were many ways of being free, he said, and none of them was easy. But they were all better than being a slave, so when you saw your chance, you had to take it. All your life before that happened, all your life was just waiting, and all your life after was thinking about it happening again. And they knew that too. If you looked in their eyes you would see it there. The fear. It was guilt in another form. They should never be allowed to rest easy in their beds at night.
That was before the other Wedderburn, the sick one, drove Mary from the house and Newman mad by killing her. The fear was in that Wedderburn, all right. It was in all of them except James. And he was the one that still lived, so Jamieson had said. But even James Wedderburn had found slavery clinging to his back and that it could not easily be shaken off. The black son, Robert, that he had had by Rosanna, had come to Edinburgh to haunt him in the year of Joseph’s triumph. Joseph had never met Robert but he had heard about him. A regular nuisance to his father’s family, and probably still was. Good luck to him, Joseph thought.
Robert’s grandmother was Talkee Amy, that came to Glen Isla once to cure the sickness in Alexander Wedderburn. She cured the sickness but not the weakness. While she was there she told Joseph stories about Anansi. Anansi was the spider, always outwitting the other animals, always getting himself out of trouble. He’d forgotten the detail of the stories but he remembered her telling them. ‘Anansi always win out in the end,’ she sai
d, ‘because him clever and him patient. Him prepared to wait long, long time.’
Joseph thought of the toast they had raised at Indian Peter’s that day. He thought of Newman, and Tacky, and Apongo, and the Maroons. He thought of Toussaint L’Ouverture, whom the French had killed this year with cold and hunger because they could not defeat him in war. These men were heroes. The Scots had their heroes too: Wallace and Bruce and now the young chevalier, Charles Edward Stewart, the one John Wedderburn had fought for. But they were not Joseph’s heroes. They were nothing to do with him. And like all the others, they were dead.
He would go to the coal tomorrow, and Ann would walk with him and the lad too. They would go their separate ways, he and Andrew climbing down the shaft and then crawling deep into the earth while Ann and the other women bore the great creels loaded with coal to the surface. And the men and women he worked with would call him Joe and laugh and girn as always and treat him as one of themselves. It was a sair, sair life but it was true, he was one of them, a collier. Colliers. The only people who had never held out against him. They knew that life was only ever a second away from disaster, from death. They saw him black, they knew him black, and it didn’t make them hate him or love him, they just accepted him. And he understood why this was.
Slavery. It had set them together against their country, against the world. He remembered the time in Edinburgh, in a room in a tavern with John Maclaurin. Maclaurin said, ‘Joseph, there is a man here that wishes tae meet ye.’ A tiny, wizened man in threadbare working clothes had stood up and given him his hand. When Joseph grasped it he felt it rough and cracked and hard, and when he looked at it he saw it black, deep-grained with coal stour. That stour was never going to come out. The man said he was from the colliers at Wemyss in Fife, they had heard of his trouble and they had made a subscription for him. He said he was sorry for the smallness of the sum, but he hoped it might help. Joseph nearly wept at that. The collier said, ‘We aw ken, man, dinna be feart, we aw ken.’
It was true. They were all free now, he and the other colliers, but there was something in them, a deep buried part, that would be slave till the day they died.
Joseph would not welcome death. The men he got on with best, they would not welcome it, hard and grinding and rotten though their lives were. They lived with death every day so they knew its face was ugly and cruel, just as he did. Maybe it was because of that, because of all he had been through, that it made him mad to think of not being alive, of not being on the earth to breathe any more.
Sometimes on a Saturday night his friends would queue outside the cottage and he would draw out his old scissors and razor and trim their hair, make them nice for their wives. He would not take money for it. Some of the men had wee square-rigged yawls that they raced on the sea and caught fish from, and they would give him some fish in return. They offered to take him out fishing but they could never entice Joseph to join them on the great grey waters. Others would buy him a drink, or leave a few rabbits poached from the laird’s parks. That was life, that was heroism: friendship, and trust, and once in a while a little stolen delight.
No, Joseph would not welcome death. Whether it came underground, or here in the bed, or some other way he could not imagine. Whether it took him to Africa, or to Jesus, or just into a hole in the earth. He would not hold out his hand to it. He was alive and he did not want to die. It might not be much, life, but he wanted it all the same, all he could get of it, so death would have to wait. He had beaten Wedderburn and he’d beat death as long as he was able. He was alive and here and now. He was alive.
Acknowledgments
This book is based on true events but it is first and foremost a work of fiction. I have taken many liberties with the historical record and with the characters of historical figures, both famous and less well known, and I have invented entire episodes and characters where the historical record is, to the best of my knowledge, blank.
I could not have written the book at all without the help and advice of many individuals and institutions. The story of Joseph Knight was first suggested to me as a possible subject for a novel by Rob MacKillop. Others who provided information and help of different kinds include Michel Byrne, John Cairns, Angus Calder, Stewart Conn, Douglas Dunn, Amanda Farquhar, Shivaun Hearne, Stuart Kelly, Lindsay Levy, Ellie McDonald, Marianne Mitchelson, David Morrison, Polly Rewt, Ed Scott, Roland Tanner and Iain Whyte.
As ever, the staff of the National Library of Scotland and of Edinburgh City Libraries were extraordinarily helpful. To them, I must add the staff of Dundee City Libraries, and of the National Archives of Scotland. The Keeper of the Library of the Faculty of Advocates granted me permission to consult papers relating to the Knight v. Wedderburn case, for which I am most grateful. I acknowledge the support of the Scottish Arts Council, in the form of a bursary, which allowed me the time to research and write this novel. The Authors’ Foundation, administered by the Society of Authors, also gave me financial support without which I would have been unable to travel to Jamaica for further research.
Finally, I am indebted to my agent Sam Boyce and my editors Leo Hollis and Nicholas Pearson for their consistently encouraging guidance and enthusiasm.
James Robertson
August 2002
About the Author
Joseph Knight
James Robertson is the author of the novel The Fanatic (also published by Fourth Estate), as well as two collections of short stories, Close and The Ragged Man’s Complaint, several collections of poetry, and a book of Scottish ghost stories. He lives in Fife.
Also by the Author
The Fanatic
Copyright
This edition first published in 2004
First published in Great Britain in 2003 by
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Copyright © James Robertson 2003
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