‘None,’ he finally said. ‘My mamma and pop are dead, ma’am.’ His voice was resuming its previous courtesy, despite my lack of it. ‘I had two brothers and two sisters, but I won’t be seein’ them again. And no, ma’am, I leave no wife or children behind me.’
‘I am sorry to hear that, Din’ I replied. ‘Thank you for answering my questions.’
‘Pleasure, ma’am.’
I closed my notebook with a snap and turned sharply on my heel in the desperate hope that something lay on the bench behind me that could occupy my industry for a few moments. Eventually I moved into the gold-leaf booth and the day’s tasks. I watched him from here, and weighed his polite answers in my head. Throughout the morning I found my gaze falling on him when I no longer wished to gold-tool another innuendo-laden title, or répoussé another penis.
And instead of the lists of body parts and sexual practices my brain used to litanise, I turned to the planning of my argument to Diprose about how Din could not possibly be a threat to anyone, for he was polite and gentle, and that after a man had been through what he had, and suffered the loss of his family, what cared he a few smutty stories?
He left again an hour early on the following Friday, and the next.
‘We must watch him next week, Jack,’ I said, ‘and see if he still gives us the slip.’
‘Aye aye, Mrs D.’
But each week, we would forget to stand guard, and when I remembered, something would distract me. Peter would summon me in to cut his nails, or Lucinda would ask for food, or the pot-man would arrive and fill our empty jugs, which always seemed more important than Din stealing a mere hour from us.
Eventually I asked him about his life in America before setting foot on English soil. He told me he had been born there, which banished the images I had envisaged of a small boy being transported from the tropics in the fetid hold of a vast ship. I asked if his parents had been born there; again, the affirmative.
‘So how old were you when you realised you were a – a – when you realised that the choices available to others were not available to you?’
‘As a Negro, I knew it all my life, even before I was captured. But it was a different kind o’ captivity. We knew the evils of captivity in the South, but even the scorn we got in the streets, the curfews, the segregation, told us we were free, at least. When I was caught, it all changed.’
‘Had you escaped?’
‘No, ma’am, not until recently.’ His courtesy was impeccable in the face of a woman who was not understanding him.
‘So when were you captured?’
‘July first, 1846.’
‘Which made you how old?’
‘Fourteen, ma’am.’
‘Please explain,’ I begged, when my obtuseness became unbearable even to me.
Finally he spoke without using my questions as prompts, and I hung on to every word for fear his flow would dry up.
‘I was going to a conference of preachers in Washington DC with my pop.’
‘Your father?’
‘Yes. Pop was a minister, a Methodist preacher. Mamma was a nurse. We lived just outside Baltimore, with my brothers and sisters. So, we were going to DC. It was goin’ to take us two days to get there. Only we got ambushed, by poachers. They took us south an’ auctioned us in Virginia.’ He spoke coolly.
‘Who bought you?’
‘Master Lucas. He was local to Virginia; Pop went to a Texan, a ranchman by looks of him.’
‘You were separated?’
‘Yes. You look surprised. I don’t wish to shock you, ma’am, but they take babes from their mothers. Least I was grown.’ I heard his tone: do not pity me, it warned.
‘Did you ever see him again?’
‘No.’
‘So how do you know he is dead?’ I had never asked so many questions of a man, but the evenness of his honesty emboldened me.
‘Mamma told me.’
‘So you saw your mother?’
He paused, and looked down at the floor with a quiet puffing of breath. He had had enough of me and my questions. I wished I could have erased them all, but there were still so many I wanted to ask. How did he meet his mother again? What of his siblings? Where was the law in all this? Could not the police have helped? If his kidnapping and sale was unlawful, why could they not prosecute, convict, liberate?
But there were really no answers, only the cruel unfurlings of history against which this man was powerless. We sat with our silences for several minutes, listening only to the sound of Jack’s hammer, which resonated a soothing sense of solidity and reliability throughout the workshop.
And then came another shout from inside, and still I thought it might be my Lucinda in danger, less likely though it was these days. It was, of course, Peter, lying far back in his chair, his eyes glazed, his throat rattling. He looked as if he were dying: I felt his brow, and patted his cheeks, but his vital signs were good, his circulation still vigorous. He was not close to death, I surmised, but it was if he had lost his way through the valley of the shadow of it, and was not enjoying the scenery.
‘There it is,’ he gurgled, and a long string of brown, laudanum-scented spittle descended from his mouth and onto his chest.
‘Is it?’
‘There she is.’
‘Is she? And what does she look like today?’
‘She’s got g – g – g – green sk – sk – skin.’
‘Is she a ghoul? A ghoul-ess?’
He nodded. ‘She’s suck – suck – sucking my s – s – soul from my – my – my –’
‘Your . . .?’
‘M – m – m – my m – m – mouth!’
‘It’s the opium, love. It just makes you worse.’ I spoke slowly and softly, as if to a child. ‘It takes the pain away, but it brings you these dreadful women. It’s a choice you have to make.’
‘No, no, no. Stop! Stop!’
His hooded eyes rolled towards their horror as if compelled. But no matter how terrifying she may have seemed today, nothing would stop him from taking his draught of laudanum tomorrow, and as often as possible thereafter.
I might, in the years prior to Din’s arrival at Damage’s, have agreed with Cardinal Manning and others that opium addiction was slavery. But would the most reverent gentleman had made such an equation had he met a man like Din? Or known that William Wilberforce himself was slave to the poppy? That, unlike sugar, poppies were cultivated by those who earned a wage and lived in far better conditions than in the chains of the plantations, farms, and homesteads of America?
‘Have those men been back?’ Peter drooled.
‘No, love, they haven’t.’ I wasn’t sure which men he meant, but then his eyes opened, then narrowed into slits, and he started to mutter.
‘Indolent dandies . . . Turkish baths . . . degenerate . . . British Empire . . . just like the Roman Empire . . . look at the Ottoman Empire . . . bawds . . . lechery . . . villainy . . .’
And I knew which men he meant, and I knew that he knew, and I could say nothing more, only leave him to his rantings, which flowed forth with surprising vehemence for one floating on a laudanum cloud.
I was sorry for him. His manliness had all but gone from him; he could only watch as his wife made an admirable living from his business, working on material to which he felt she should not be exposed and from which he could not protect her, and which further served to remind him of his failure as a real man. My husband had become a molly, a milksop; but it was not his fault.
I tapped the window-pane to catch Lucinda’s attention as she played in the street, and waved at her. Then I returned to the workshop and to Din, and I was surprised to see that he was ploughing the pages of Ovid’s Amores under Jack’s supervision.
‘With care, with care,’ I cried. ‘Do not cut away the margins! You will make an octavo of that quarto without care!’
Wordlessly, Din took it out of the plough and handed it to me to check. The print lay near perfect in relation to the spine and head. I f
ingered the paper-shavings and held them to the light, to make my redundant point. The man was good.
‘These are pieces of history. This paper is a hundred years old.’ I should have stopped, but I could not help myself. ‘What of these crisp edges, when the discolouration of time is removed? Old books need the most cautious handling.’
I handed the book back to Din, and I could see Jack smiling out of the corner of my eye. No doubt he was remembering the time when Peter asked him if he were making a collection of margins, or whether he had been enervated by the author, so profligate was he with the plough. Jack received ten of the best after that, but I doubt he felt touched by the birchen mysteries. I was still daunted by the plough; Din had done very well, and was now demonstrating to me, not without pride, how well the pages opened.
I struggled to find some words of praise to follow my tirade, so I simply nodded in appreciation, and watched Din continue to open and close the book. Then it occurred to me that he was flicking through it, as if he were looking for something. It was mildly comical, but I was not going to laugh at him, not after his earlier revelations to me. I waited for him to finish. For the first time, I noticed the mark on his upper arm, protruding from his rolled-up sleeves. It was a word, written with the same fuzzy dark lines as Sir Jocelyn’s tattoo. ‘LUCA ’, it said.
Suddenly I heard him exclaim, ‘Here it is,’ and he cleared his throat, and said something that I didn’t understand. I wondered if he was speaking in an African tongue that might have been native to his family, a language they possibly spoke at home.
‘I beg your pardon?’ I said, and he repeated it, but I was still no clearer. ‘Let me see,’ I asked, and held my hand out for the book. He gave it to me, and I scanned the page for the quotation, but I was lost. His finger stretched across the paper to show me the line I was after.
‘You can read?’ I asked, unaware in my amazement of how rude I sounded.
‘You mean, can I read Latin?’ he corrected.
‘And you can.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said, unmoved by my insolence. ‘I can’t be a preacher’s son and not read.’
I tried to focus my eyes to where his finger pointed, and slowly read it out loud. ‘ “Suffer and harden: good growes by this griefe, Oft bitter juice brings to the sick reliefe.” But this is not Latin, Din. This is Christopher Marlowe’s translation.’
‘I prefer the original. Marlowe was trapped by his couplets. Ovid is tellin’ us to endure, for some day our pain will benefit us.’
‘Say it again, Din,’ I prompted, still confused.
‘Perfer et obdura: dolor hic tibi proderit olim.’
‘And your translation, again, if you will?’
‘Suffer and endure, for some day your pain will be of benefit.’
‘Some day your pain will be of benefit,’ I repeated, dazed. I stared at the page for a moment longer, before closing the book and giving it to Jack to place between the boards of the standing press. I did not know what else to say. I turned slowly and quietly to Din and said, ‘Your father taught you?’
‘No, ma’am. My mamma.’
‘Your mother.’
We lapsed into silence, until finally I could not help myself.
‘When did you see her again, Din?’
‘I been wonderin’ when you’d ask.’ He grinned, good-naturedly. ‘You women. She did what a mamma does. She waited until her children’ – he pronounced it ‘chillen’ – ‘be old enough to care for themselves, then she came South to find us. Bad choice, it was, but I can’t be blamin’ her. She didn’t find Pop. She heard talk that he be dead. She found me though. She found me.’
‘That must have been remarkable.’
‘Remarkable, yes, ma’am. And no, ma’am. She found me, an’ Master Lucas found her, and said that, she bein’ on his land, she might as well join the rest of his sorry family. She worked in the fields for him until she fell down dead. Then I left. I’d been plannin’ on runnin’ all the time I’d been there. I’d helped hundreds hit that railroad, but I couldn’t run and leave Mamma, and she weren’t well enough to run with me. I helped hundreds of others to run, though.’
‘How did you help them?’
‘Bein’ a reader, and a writer. I wrote hundreds o’ letters an’ free-papers to be carried, documents that said things no one could prove. That’s why they called me Din.’
‘Din? I don’t understand.’
‘Dudish Intelligent Nigger.’ He was smiling; was he playing with me?
‘Is that really why?’ I began, but it wasn’t an important question, not compared to what he was saying.
‘An’ I was goin’ to run once she died, but Master Lucas knew it, an’kept me chained and covered by dogs wherever I went. I wanted to go to New Orleans an’ stow on a boat to England, I wanted to get to England all along, but then I caught the eye of Lady Grenville, and she paid Master Lucas three times more than I was worth to any folk back home, so I got here anyways.’
‘How fortunate.’
‘Fortunate, yes, ma’am. But they was goin’ to do me in anyways, owin’ to my writing those letters. Master Lucas was goin’ to take the money and use it to put a price on my head. They all wanted me done, as they all knew it had been me who wrote the letters.’
‘Couldn’t anyone else have done it?’
Din snorted. ‘You think they had a happy bunch o’ niggers who could read and write? Niggers are folk with no letters, ma’am. We don’t have no books, don’t get no schoolin’, don’t need no learnin’. What were tough – almost tougher than not bein’ back home in Baltimore – was not the work, or the disrespect, it was the not readin’. I had to hide it from them, or they woulda pulped me so hard I woulda lost most o’ my brains and been more use as a vegetable for the pot. If you was a white boy, and you was found to be teachin’ a nigger, you’d be fined fifty dollars and thrown in jail. If you was a nigger boy and you did the same . . . Well, but anyways, there weren’t none of them kinds of white boys where we lived, so some boy had to do it.’
He paused, as if he were wondering whether he had taken out too much time and should be getting back to work. I just wanted to keep listening to him. It was as if a window had opened between us, and we could hear each other breathing the same air in our separate rooms. Jack’s hammer was beating, so I slipped inside its regular sound, and waited.
‘So I come to England,’ Din resumed eventually. ‘I come to England, where Mr Isambard Kingdom Brunel be buildin’ his railroads, and tellin’ folks he wants all his drivers not to be able to read, cos only them who can’t read pay mind to things. Why, there’s some truth in that, ma’am. I don’ see no disrespect there. Words can be traps, ma’am, and drivers don’ be needin’ traps. But I see the traps an’ I can read.’
He spoke with pride. It was only later that I wondered whether I should have taken it as a warning.
‘And now you have come to a place where you can have all the books you could wish for,’ I said.
‘Ain’ it the strangest ol’ world, ma’am.’
‘Ain’t it just, Din.’
‘I’m losing you, Dora,’ Peter said that evening, when his perturbing visions had left him.
‘No, you’re not.’
‘Then I’m losing my mind.’
‘No, you’re not,’ I said again, but with less conviction. For the pain in his brain was nothing compared to the physical torments of his joints without the ease of laudanum, which was taking his mind with it.
‘Don’t take the bottle away.’ But I did, and I put it on the dresser. He closed his eyes, so I took his sore body into my arms and rocked him like a baby. I wished I could have remembered what he looked like when I first met him. Was his nose ever sharp, or was it always this round? Did he always have this porous, pitted forehead, or was his skin once smooth and taut? I had not expected then that it would come to this. I knew the hazards of bookbinding; bookbinders died young, I knew, of pulmonary disease and the like, from all that leather-dust, lik
e my father. But what mattered Peter’s lungs now, when his very flesh was drowning?
At times like these I would catch myself thinking that what he really needed was for me to show him what pleasure really felt like, to distract him for a moment from his pains by straddling him and giving him the sweets of my body, or unbuttoning his breeches and taking him in my mouth, for this is what I discovered minetting actually means, from the French (and, incidentally, I had learnt by now that the clitoris is not in Africa). But it would have killed him, I knew. How many times had I read of lecherous men shuffling on a crimson cunt and shuffling off the mortal coil? Now there’s a story to pass on to Mrs Eeles, I thought to myself.
But wasn’t it strange that my professional life should have been so devoted to a morass of seething sexuality, while my husband, the one person I was legally entitled to firkytoodle, was slumped in the corner, oblivious to the writhing bodies of my work and my imagination? No, in many ways it was not strange at all.
Then came the challenge from Holywell-street. I did the first thing I could think of: I dismissed Din, but only temporarily.
‘Din, you may go. I won’t be needing you today.’
‘As you wish, ma’am.’ He put down his mug of English Burgundy, and gathered his coat.
‘It is no indication of your progress – and, indeed, prowess – in the workshop. I am pleased with your work to date. Still, I won’t be needing you. I trust you will find something to occupy your time suitably?’
‘You trust correctly. I thank you, ma’am. I am grateful for the liberty; I have business to attend to.’
‘Business?’ I smiled, presuming that this was a joke. ‘Just for today, mind?’
He smiled back at me. ‘As you wish, ma’am,’ he repeated.
I think my heart started beating again once the door shut and his whistling receded up Ivy-street. I had been tense since I opened the crate and recognised its contents for what they were; I knew that my immediate instinct to get rid of Din was correct. I tried to pretend to myself that I was only carrying out Diprose’s wishes: the man had not yet been verified, and was still not to be wholly trusted. But I defy anyone to have seen what was on those pages and not have dismissed him too.
The Journal of Dora Damage Page 20
