The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “Maybe,” he says.

  “Maybe. Maybe not. But it’s a long time.”

  “Long time. Maybe.”

  “We’re coming to the end. Not much more farther,” she says.

  The underground passage is not pitch-dark, as he had thought it would be. There is a strange kind of light in this passage below the ground. And a strange angle in the way the light strikes the wall, then bounces off the white cement and touches her face.

  As she talks, and their two bodies move in the light thrown by the lantern, her face takes on an animated look. It is all excitement in her voice, and in the story she is telling him. She tells the story with such gruesome detail, as if she is reading and getting its horribleness from a book of narratives about slaves.

  But there was never any slaves in Bimshire, Sargeant argued only a few days ago. “I wasn’t taught nothing-so at Sin-Davids Elementary School. Nor in Sunday School at the Church, when we listened to stories of the Israelites in the Bible. Mr. Edwards never tell me ’bout slaves, to my knowledge.”

  Manny who lived and travelled throughout Amurca for a couple of years, and returned with an Amurcan accent, calling a man “a main”; and using boy instead of fellar and chum; and who had visited many cities in the South, including Nashville, Macon and Louisville, and Lynchburg, without picking up the connection, Manny never told Sargeant very much about slaves or slavery in Bimshire; and all he said about that was that some of the “Nigg-rahs” he met in towns in South Carolina, talk with something like a Bimshire accent; but he didn’t know why. “For-sure,” Manny told Sargeant, “the nigg-rahs I butt-up-with, down in the Amurcan South, were former slaves.” And yet, once in jest, he called Golbourne “you blasted nigg-rah, you just-pass to sixes! How-come you got another six in your hand?” And Golbourne said he never thief at dominoes; and laughed at the word, and its strange sound. And Sargeant laughed at the funny name. And Pounce laughed at the word and said, “Why you bringing that Amurcan foolishness ’bout-here? People who was slaves are called nigg-rahs. Slavery never touch Bimshire. We don’t have insurrectionaries nor nothing-so, ’bout-here. Anybody ever was-lynch’ in Bimshire . . .”

  And Manny, who had used the word, and who was the only one who lived in Amurca, said, speaking in a Southern Black Amurcan accent:

  “When you’re white,

  “You’re right.

  “When you’re brown,

  “You can stick-around;

  “But when you’re bleck,

  “You gotta stay a waaaay beck!”

  And they all laughed, and went back playing cutthroat dominoes; and drinking rum chased with ice water.

  “Those Amurcans could talk real sweet!” Sargeant said. “My daughter up-in-there, now six months, and you shouldda hear the way she talk! Pure Yankee twang.”

  “I prefer to hear Amurcans, more than the English, talk. Those Limey bastards’re always talking-down to a man. The Amurcans, now, with the real low-down twang they speaks, puts you in the same category as them!”

  “Except for their love of lynching Nigg-rahs and coloured men!” . . . Mary-Mathilda stops suddenly. She releases Sargeant’s hand. A hardness comes over her face. And in this subterranean light, with its dramatic picking out of detail in the most cruel manner, Sargeant sees now, for the first moment in the long day, with a force that frightens him, that Mary-Mathilda is really not a very attractive woman. He sees her hardness in this light below the ground, in light that is really no light at all, and he thinks that Mary Gertrude Mathilda is a very ugly woman. “You are wrong . . .”; but it takes Sargeant a moment to realize that she is talking, and that the silence, the hum, the strange reverberation of sound in the underground tunnel is not the wind, nor the echo that tombs and caves and sepulchres give off: it is her voice. “Let me and you sit down here and rest for a while, whilst I tell you a story that Ma told me, to let you know that the names that the Plantation-people in this Island used to call us by were the same names the Southerners used in Amurca, showing, as Ma always said, that there is no difference between those brutes who enslave us here in the Wessindies, and the ones that enslave other coloureds in Amurca. They could be our brothers and our sisters.”

  “You feel related to them?”

  “Most do not feel we are related. And in a way, we are not. We eat English food, and they eat Amurcan food. Is a case of pudding-and-souse versus hot dogs. But the name they use to address us by, is the same. Negro is just a soften-up term for nigger, spoken with a English accent! So, nigger for them in Amurca. And nigger for us in the British Wessindies. Though here, the word is spoken under the breath.

  “We don’t remember being called that, because our memory is short. And the lash was not delivered as frequent or hard and didn’t bite-in in our backsides, with the same sting. But a lash is a lash. Whether it be delivered by a cowskin, a balata, a bull-pistle, here in Bimshire; or by a cat-o’-nine tail, as they did to Nat Turner in Southampton. Or with a lash from their tongue. Or their lips. Remember Mark Anthony and Judas . . .

  “And how many different Southamptons do you think they are? There is only one. Up in Englund where they used to stop-off with the slaves in mid-shipment to the Wessindies. From that one branch, that one root, from that Southampton in Englund, sprung-up all the other Southamptons in the world; Southamptons in Amurca and Southamptons in the Wessindies, and oh-loss, Southamptons in Brazil. There must be Southamptons all over the world!

  “Ma told me a story, as I said, before I got distracted by the name of Southampton, to prove to you that a white man in Bimshire and a white man in Georgia is one and the same white man, from the same branch and the same root.

  “For instance. Mr. Bellfeels has a brother, by father—not by mother—in Englund. In Buffalo, where I travelled with Mr. Bellfeels to, some years ago, there is a Mr. Bellfeels, right there in Buffalo-New-York, who is Mr. Bellfeels great-uncle. And it was this Bellfeels who told Mr. Bellfeels during that visit—I didn’t hear it for myself from his lips, because Mr. Belfeels stayed in a hotel, whilst I stayed in a house called a “bread-and-breakfast,” owned by a coloured lady; so, I didn’t hear the words straight from Mr. Bellfeels great-uncle lips; but I was told that the main branch o’ Bellfeelses come from Southampton in Englund; finally settling in South Carolina where they had five cotton and sugar plantations, populated with thousands and thousands of slaves.

  “That is how Mr. Bellfeels was able to link the little disturbance here in Bimshire to the bigger Amurcan insurrection that Nat Turner started in Southampton.

  “Just as these people keep photographs and snapshots of their life, and write-down every damn thing that happen to them in a book, good and bad, keeping records, and writing journals day-by-day, it is for the same reason they write letters and send signals to one another, all over the world where they keep slaves.

  “I won’t be surprised if this little underground passage that we are walking through now doesn’t have some link and terminal, some connection, to the United States of Amurca, travelling unknown to every person in this Island, under the Carbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean, ’cross all those miles and miles of sea, to some secret port, some cove, all the way up in South Carolina. Charleston.

  “Stranger things have happened in this Island.

  “Ma told me that her mother, my great-gran, was a slave on this very Plantation. Ma didn’t know where she come from, neither. Africa-somewhere. Or Charleston-South-Carolina. They sent all the rebelling slaves, following the Southampton Resurrection, I mean Insurrection, here to Bimshire, which has the reputation, Ma say Great-gran told her, of having the most cruel slave overseers and slave-drivers, famous throughout the world of slaves, for successfully breaking slaves that the Amurcan plantations didn’t have the skills to break.

  “So, I don’t understand how anybody, particular a coloured person, could have the gall to say there wasn’t slaves in Bimshire!

  “Perhaps, not in the droves they had in Amurca. But to put a thing like this in two scal
es and weigh one against the next don’t make sense to me. They must think I is a cunu-munu, or something.

  “Slaves is slaves. Bimshire slaves are Bimshire slaves. And Amurcan slaves are Amurcan slaves. But slaves are slaves.

  “I was telling you of a narrative told to me by Ma, which she heard from her mother, Gran, who I am sure, heard it told by my great-great-gran, and finally handed down to me. These narratives are the only inheritances that poor people can hand down to their offsprings. The rich people and the Plantation-people have land and trees, pigs and cows, money in Barclays Bank, Dominion, Colonial & Overseas, and money hidden in.Wells all over this Island, on this very Plantation and throughout the Village, to lavish-way on their inheritancies. But all that we possess to hand-down is love. And bitterness. And blood. And anger. And all four, wrap-up in one narrative. Stories I would hear at night, in kerosene oil light, with mosquitoes coming and going, like commas and punctuation marks, and I under my crocus-bag blanket, shivering from the cold and from the blackness in the stories, and . . .

  “We are halfway in our journey. We don’t have much more to go . . .”

  The underground tunnel turns left, not a sharp left, but left-incline, going away now from the cellars of the Great House. They are walking slowly. The closeness of the air, the strange light that seems to come in through the pores in the coral stone and the grates give a magical, timeless feel to the surroundings.

  It is this left-incline turn that she points him in; and the moment his body is dealing with this change of direction, he smells the smell of the sea, fresh and raw and with the taste of saltiness. It is a surprising sensation: to smell seawater when he is underground. And the breeze that lives over the sea, comes into the cavern, and he feels less anxious about where he is. And about her. The previous, burning sensuality she drove into his body has dissipated. He walks now, as if he is entering the short lane that comes off the main road leading to the clump of hard, short, deciduous trees at the edge of the sandy beach, at the edge of the sea. And he knows he shall enter the sea, and let the rich, warm water crawl over his body and overwhelm him, like a womb. And he feels as if he will not return from facing the horizon in his long bath, swimming in the welcoming water.

  “But even if we in this Island do not see ourselves as slaves, the treatment that Ma tell me about that she suffered through, and what my great-great-gran went through, you would have to invent a new name for it, if not slavery.

  “Thomas Jefferson, named after his master, and bearing his master surname,” she says, “is only one story of a case from Georgia; but if you substitute Flagstaff for Georgia, um is the same narrative. So, listen to this, and tell me if you don’t see a connection? As I said, Thomas was born into slavery, and at the age of fourteen, escape and walked all the way from Waycross-Georgia, way-way up North, until he found Canada, with the help of some people on the Underground Railroad. His master was about to whip him the second day running, because a pepper-coated Smithfield ham went-missing from the curing house; and the day before, the master had-give him forty-two lashes, four-two, with the cat-o’-nine tail, when, wuh-loss!, the slave master wife came running, out-o’-breath, from the Main House, and tell the master that is she who had-take the Smithfield ham, and had-give the ham to her brother who live on the neighbouring plantation. The next day was the Fourth of July.”

  She is leading him to a door. The door is made of wood. It is roughly hewn, with large nails securing the horizontal strips of unpainted wood to give the door more strength, to make it impregnable. It is like a door Wilberforce told her about, in an Italian palazzo in Vincentia which he visited. Through the spaces in the wood come shafts of light. It is like the light of moonlight. Or of the high beams of a car. The light similar to the blueness of dawn. Or like smoke clearing from a cane fire.

  “This is the secret passageway leading to the sea. Years ago, when Ma was still in the fields, this gate was used to smuggle men wanted by the police, and hide them in neighbouring islands. And to bring in contraband goods, particularly during the First World War. And I understand from Mr. Bellfeels that some Germans who used to live in the Island, who, when War broke out, this is the Second World War now, these Germans were renamed as enemy spies; these Germans, the four of them, were smuggled through this passage to a German boat waiting outside the Careenage, in deeper waters, out in the Harbour.

  “There was a English boat full of foodstuffs that was in the Harbour once; and all of a sudden, the whole island was black with smoke and burning oil, and shaking to its foundations, after a shot from the same German boat used to smuggle spies hit the blasted merchant ship, as a signal that the four Germans was now safe on board, and to show all o’ we living in the Wessindies, and in the Island of Bimshire in particular, that Churchill and the Allieds, our allies, were nothing but hypocrites. They left we Wessindians starving and at death’s door: whilst ship after ship in a long convoy of food was bypassing the Wessindies and heading straight for the various theatres of war to feed Europeans.

  “This simple little underground tunnel played a very important role in the outcome of the War. Simple as it is . . .

  “But it was put to more bigger uses in the history of this Island. Thieves who dressed in white shirt and collar-and-tie, clerks and managers, specially Englishmen, stole millions of pounds whilst working for Barclays Bank, Dominion, Colonial & Overseas, for Plantations Limited, for the Lumber Yard, for the various sugar plantations all over this Island, even for Cave Shepherd, and were smuggled into the Plantation Main House, hidden in secret rooms, and then taken through this passage to a waiting yacht, which would take them later to a schooner laying at anchor, which would in turn take them to Trinidad, and from Trinidad to Venezuela, to their final destination, Brazil.

  “Brazil is full of Englishmen who have stolen from Barclays-Bank, DCO, Cave Shepherd and the hotels, whilst they lived in luxury here in Bimshire. Mr. Bellfeels know all of them.”

  She opens the gate. The hinge creaks. She lowers the wick of the kerosene lamp. And places it on the ground. A burst of air, like cooling wind, comes in from the darkness outside.

  Sargeant looks up, although he is not yet outside, in the wide, dark night, to see if he can see the stars. There are no stars. They are still in the underground tunnel, although they are climbing the ten cement steps to reach the exit.

  She smells the night. It is like it was hours ago, when she took the ten-minute-long walk from her own house to the Plantation Main House, to confront Mr. Bellfeels as he lay slouched in rum, and heavy from food, on the verandah. From that same verandah, Mr. Bellfeels could see the hills to the north that cut off the parishes which touch the sea in that part of the Island; and to the south, he could see right down onto the beach, over the plains and lands and fields of Indian corn, and Guinea grass and sugar canes grown privately by small landholders and farmers; and beyond, to the sea; if it was a clear day, he could see a merchant ship, or a ship filled with “tourisses” coming over the placid Carbean Sea. Farther to his right, south-southeast, he could see the Union Jack flying on top of the Aquatic Club. From his verandah, Mr. Bellfeels could see three-quarters of the Island.

  “There was a time when this Plantation owned three-quarters of all the land and property in the whole of Bimshire.”

  Now she is before the second wooden gate. It is stiff. Its hinges swing inwards, towards her. There is a roughly made handle. The nails that hold it are now loose, from age and rust. She pulls, and pulls, and it seems as if the gate will hold its secrets and remain shut, and block her entry into the wider world that lies before her, buried in the darkness and the vast fields of sugar cane, wide as the Carbean Sea, vast as the Atlantic Ocean itself . . .

  And, all of a sudden, the gate swings open. A new world outside this wooden gate opens and faces them.

  There is the smell of the earth, after rain. The soil. Thick, wet, black soil. The fields planted in yams are like waves.

  The smell that greets her is a smell she thinks i
s of flowers.

  If it were not so dark, she would be able to see these flowers. That Sunday afternoon she had lingered over her lunch, and could find no appetite for the dry-peas and rice, boiled chicken, local sweet potatoes, pulped eddoes, cucumber sliced as thin as the pages from a book and pickled in lemon juice, fresh red hot peppers and generous amounts of fresh parsley; she had sat watching the steam from the other serving dishes rise like fingers of smoke she would sometimes see moving over the North Field, when the canes were on fire; sitting and “studying”; and she had found, sitting there, some solace from the thoughts that were interrupting her appetite for her Sunday lunch; thoughts that provided a temporary postponement of the suggestion that entered her head: that after all these years, she should choose this Sunday to correct the injuries she had suffered, swollen through the passage of the years themselves; find the motive, and prove to herself that he had, through the narrative of her mother’s life, and the tales handed down from her great-great-gran’s life from a time even before that; that in spite of the Great House in which she lives, the reward for his use of her body; giving him three children, two dead before they hardly saw the light of day; and all the gifts for which a woman would normally kiss the dirt on which the giving-man walks; or kiss his arse; but no; not she, after all these years of success, in the eyes of the entire Village of Flagstaff, in the eyes of Sargeant who always loved her, and who wants her now, but could not have had her then; not because of her circumstances, but because of her own decision—she could have sneaked him a foop even in spite of Mr. Bellfeels’ “following and reporting” eyes; no, nothing had erased from her mind, the way the riding-crop moved from her neck, from the neck of the cotton frock which belonged to his own daughter, Miss Euralie . . . She has been in this underground passage before. Mr. Bellfeels brought her here, once a week on Fridays, when he was repairing the green-painted gate she has just closed, when he had first promoted her to work in the kitchen of the Main House.