The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  Here, in this underground tunnel, Mr. Bellfeels did not make love to her, if he could ever call his rapid “firing of blanks” making love; when he brought her here it was to foop her; but not foop her in the normal sense, the sense she knew by instinct, and by listening behind the cloth curtain in her house to the stories Ma and Gran told about women on the Plantation.

  Mr. Bellfeels brought Mary-Mathilda here into this underground tunnel, and pulled up her dress, and pulled down her cotton panties, and pushed his index finger on the left hand as high into her pussy as it would go; sometimes beyond the second joint. And then he put the same finger into his mouth; licked it dry, noisily, regardless of her time of month; and then he took the flask of rum from his khaki jodhpurs, which he always carried, and held his head back, and let the strong, burning white liquid fall into his mouth. When he put the flask back into his side pocket, the silver in the flask gleamed; and she could see the initials, DARB, marked deep into the beautiful sterling of the flask. He drank only white rum. The rum he himself would learn to cure.

  “Young pussy and mature white rum, the best anecdote for a man! Eh, Mary-girl? What you say?

  “I grooming you for later. I waiting till you get more riper, girl,” he told her always, on these Fridays.

  He would put the flask back into his jodhpurs, push the whip into his waist, and with his hand round her shoulder—she reached him to his chest—they would walk back through the one-mile underground tunnel, with him pressing her head against his strong virile body, not saying a word, just breathing; he with a more pulsating rhythm, as she could feel from her closeness to his body; she, in the rushed, uneven pulsation of fear.

  “Good night, Mary,” he would always say as he locked the entrance, the trap door which led into what is now her kitchen, in the Great House.

  “Next Friday again, hear?”

  “Friday,” she would tell him.

  “Don’t tell your mother.”

  And he would smile. And she knew. She knew enough of life that she knew she could not tell her mother. And if she did, she knew what would happen.

  “I forget,” he said one time. “Sorry, Mary-girl. Not next Friday. I seeing May.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  May was her mother’s name. Everyone who worked or who lived, except Mr. Lawrence Burkhart, on the Plantation called her Miss May.

  “Friday’s May’s time. When you get home, tell May I want to see her. Hear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good night, Mary.”

  “Good night, Mr. Bellfeels, sir.”

  “I am taking you this way, leading you through this gate, to show you something you wouldn’t probably’ve seen before,” she tells Sargeant now, closing the gate behind them, but not latching it.

  They are now walking in a passageway cut out like a deep trench at the side of a road, but much deeper; and covered. Their heads do not reach halfway up the sides. The sides are of concrete. It is plain, rough concrete. It has the toughness of a fortress. It is like the trenches described by the BBC as the place where English soldiers and soldiers from the British Commonwealth fought in the War.

  It is dark in this trench. The path on which they are walking is hard, packed mud; hard almost as concrete.

  “Field hands were lashed and tied to a stake out in the hot sun; and one afternoon I saw, with my two eyes, how Mr. Lawrence Burkhart the Driver brought a bucket of water and placed it three inches out of that poor man’s reach; and the Driver stood there, laughing and smoking a cigarette, with his whip under his right armpit; and every time that that man made a attempt to reach the galvanized bucket of water, Mr. Lawrence Burkhart snap his balata, plax!

  “Ma say that when bad field hands were beaten, just for fun, and when they were no longer any use to the Plantation, this is the road the Plantation had them take, while waiting to be carried out in the sea, to feed to the sharks. Ma say this was the way things were, in my gran’s time, because for one thing, as damaged goods and spoil-property, it was more cheaper to throw them to the sharks than to pay a doctor, if there was one on the Plantation, or pay the gravedigger to dig-down six feet; or the carpenter to nail-together planks of deal board for a coffin, to bury them in. To-besides, the graveyard, christened Coloured Valley, was getting full-up too quick, during slavery, with dead black people.

  “We had five great tragedies in this Island of Bimshire. The Typhoid Fever Outbreak. Was like a epidemic. Killed great and small. The firm and the infirm.

  “Then the Hurricane. The weatherman out on the Hill didn’t have time, the hurricane lick-down summuch property so quick, to think of a name to christen it by. We did that ourselves. Darnley! What a brute-beast! It devastate practically half the Island. Flagstaff Village almost didn’t exist the third day. All the houses where the poor people live, were toss-’bout, and went flying all over the place, like dry leaves. Houses near the sea went in the sea like kites that pop their cord. And the waves from the sea left the sea, and came over the land and destroyed all that the hurricane winds had spared. Ma say it was as if God had-christen Bimshire by a new name, a Biblical name, and called it Sodom and Gormorrah.

  “After the Typhoid Fever Outbreak, and Darnley the Hurricane, there was the Hunger. Caused by foodstuffs becoming, all of a sudden, scarce; scarce-scarce-scarce. Churchill wanting all the food for the Allieds to fight the Nazzies on the beaches, in the lanes, on the high seas, in the air, and on the ground with; all over. Ma say all that effort took food to be successful with, so Churchill send the food up in Englund for the Allieds.

  “We had to cut and contribe.

  “Even the inferior salt fish that Canada, a member of the Commawealth of Nations, and as a consequence our Commawealth sister, sent down here was scarce. Lining up for three hours in Miss Greaves’ Shop to buy rotting, stinking salt fish, with such a awful smell to it that when you put it in a skillet to boil it, it was like cooking offal. But it showed, Ma say, what artists black people are. I don’t only mean in singing and acting, like Miss Ella Fitzgerald, and Billy Eckstine, Nat King Cole and Fat Swallow, Cab Calloway, Jesse Owens, Count Basie, Joe Louis and Duke Ellington . . . incidentally, I wonder if Duke Ellington is a real Duke like the ones up in Englund, or if he is using the Duke as a alias or a nomenclature, one of those names common in Amurca, amongst Negroes? Or Trinidadian Calypsonians. But we were artists in a lot of other ways, too.

  “Sweet potatoes which we only boiled or roasted before, was now grated and made into flour. Flour remained on the merchant ships that stopped here, but was not off-loaded. Churchill ordered the ships to stop here, only to take-on fresh, clean water; and rum; and then run straight for Englund.

  “Cassava, which we used only to make starch to starch clothes with; or cassava-pone, or cassava-hats, a local delicacy; or sweet-cassava boil and serve with dry food, we now realized we had the genius and had-possess the same stamina, ability, and determination as the English of Englund, and we could turn this cassava into flour, cassava flour.

  “We turned poison-cassava into starch.

  “And we turned ordinary sweet potato and the other variety of cassava, sweet-cassava, into flour.

  “And had a hell-of-a-time eating ‘hats’ cooked in a iron buck-pot, yes! We ate to our hearts’ content! Forget Winston Churchill, man!

  “The tamarind, gooseberry, puh-paw, all the fruits that we used to take a bite outta, and then throw-way,..Well, we now turned those fruits into preserves and preservatives, rivalling the best from Englund, Seville Orange Marmalade made by James Keiller & Son, Dundee, and them-so. Yes!

  “How did I get on to this? The mind, Sargeant-boy, the mind going . . . Sometimes I sit down, and call-to-mind travelling on journeys; and then, the more I am studying, I afterwards realize that I could not have been on those journeys at all, because I don’t even know where the particular country is. But it is the mind. It is in the mind. My mind, when not occupied with Gertrude, would take me on these journeys, and then I would have to tell myself that
it is purely imagination.

  “I have never really left the shores of Bimshire.

  “Uh lie! Once. Once, though, I travelled to Buffalo with Mr. Bellfeels. I remember landing in Miami-Florida, and travelling by train all the way up to the North. I remember the coloured women in the same comport—partment . . . compartment as me. Mr. Bellfeels, being a businessman, had to sit with other businessmen, to talk business. Sugar-cane yields, machineries for the Factory to get larger yields with. He taught me to look at life as a matter of yields. Everything have its yield. Or its possibility of yields.

  “So, the businessmen sat in a different comportment, compartment, talking about yields; and smoking cigars. Apparently, cigars were not permitted in the compartment where I was, with the other coloured women. God, I loved the way those coloured women talked, though; so slow. We coloured people in this part of the world talk fast-fast.

  “And when we reached Buffalo, we were serrigated in two different places again, because as I said, businessmen have a way of talking about yields long into the night, and I was a woman in-the-family-way, pregnant then, with my first child, and I needed my rest. And I surely didn’t want, through pregnant complications or something happening, to have to remain in Buffalo, and have a child of mine born under the Stars-and-Stripes! Oh-no!

  “My child had to be English.

  “So, Mr. Bellfeels went his way with his businessmen-people, and I spend my time in the place called a ‘bed-and-breakfast’; and at night I sat me down in a little restaurant to eat, and hear a coloured lady with a voice like Marian Anderson, singing ‘It’s Nobody Business,’ and other blues. From then on, I fell in love with the blues. Give me the blues any morning; for breakfast, for lunch and dinner; and before I go to bed at night, give me the blues as a nightcap . . . with a lil brandy. Give me the blues anytime, before I would listen to this hilly-billy music from the South, or to cowboys from out in Western Canada.

  “I related this journey many times to Wilberforce. And Wilberforce tell me that I am imagining things, that I am conducting a psychological recall, spurn-on by certain things. I am conducting a journey of imaginary reality. I ask Wilberforce, ‘What the hell are you telling me? What language you speaking?’ That’s the trouble with having thrildren who are more brighter than their parents! They embarrass you all the time.

  “Wilberforce tell me that there is a section of the mind, or the brain, that holds things that the person in question cannot control. He actually didn’t use the word person. He said patient, insinniating that something was wrong with my head, although he didn’t come right out with a diagnosis, and say that something was wrong with his mother’s head! That would be convicting him too, won’t it?

  “A person can be anywhere she wants to, Wilberforce tell me, even if the person has never actually been there. And this is the kind of journey I am taking you on.

  “We are at the end of the passage, and what you see in front of you is the field in which I started my life.

  “Ma started her life here, too. My grandmother, Gran, started her life here, and before Gran, my great-gran, who was taken from a different place. And Ma never really found out if Gran came straight from Elmina-Africa, or was transship from Waycross-Georgia, and then here. I used to hear Gran sing ‘Steal Away to Jesus,’ and ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariots.’ And many a night, as I had occasion to tell the Constable, I sang ‘Ole Liza Jane.’ I told the Constable this.

  “Ma always told me narratives about life in the barracks of the men and women who didn’t work in the fields, or in the sugarcane fields, the house servants, some of who were coopers and carpenters and blacksmiths; and Ma say that in the barracks of this very Plantation, Saturday night was the night that the master visited his slave woman down in the barracks, to get his weekly dose of his thing. Pum-pum time! Driver-time. Overseer-time. Bookkeeper time. Assistant Manager time. Manager time. White-man time . . .

  “Ma’s time came. And she had to deliver. Either stanning-up behind the shack where she lived with Gran; or inside the house, with Gran inside the house, too, hearing every move, every push, every juck, every cry which was muffled, because the massa, the driver, the overseer, the bookkeeper, assistant manager, manager had-place his two hands to cover Ma’s mouth, as he did it from behind . . . and Gran pretending she wasn’t hearing nothing, nor her own history repeated; spend the hush, wet, soiled time pretending she wasn’t hearing nothing.

  “Performing just like two animals.

  “Every Saturday night, when things were sweet, and Wilberforce was at Harrison College, Mr. Bellfeels, as his habit was, as the custom was, would visit the Great House. And on these Saturday nights, there would be so much food. Good food. Rich food. Chicken fricassee. Long-grain rice that was clean, you hardly had to pick or wash it; not like what Demerara exported here. Ham. From that place I told you about, in the South. Smithfield. Bully-beef. If a ship hadn’t come in with beefsteak from the Argentyne, ’cause the Argentyne being Latin-Amurcan, was always a favourite of Germans. And fried pork chops. You wouldda thought we were having a feast. And that it was Easter or Christmas. Or Wilberforce birthday. Yes!

  “Only the three o’ we. Little Wilberforce, Mr. Bellfeels and me. And Gertrude serving.

  “I must confess that Mr. Bellfeels wasn’t a bad-looking man, being not pure-blood. He had the same body, that nice, strong, sexy —is that the word young people use nowadays?—mannish body that you and Golbourne and that I remember Pounce having.

  “So it wasn’t all that bad, absolutely. It wasn’t a choice that I made. It was more like one of those Indian arrangements of marriage where the woman have no voice in the man she will get in bed with.

  “Ma chose Mr. Bellfeels for me: and vice versa.

  “On Saturday nights, you shouldda seen me and my son, with me holding my son’s two hands and we turning round and round, spinning; with our mouths wide open, laughing; at the top of our voice, doing these dances. Jigs, Wilberforce call them, after travelling in the South himself, to a conference in Tuskeegee. Tuskeegee was named after an Amurcan slave who told other coloured people to follow agriculture and learn how to grow crops, and that when slavery abolish, the very white people would come buying the crops that these same ex-slaves produce. But you know all this. Yes. Tuskeegee!

  “I wasn’t even thinking of the man from Tuskeegee when I mention the habit of contriving, during the War years. It must be something in us, in we people, coloured people, Negroes, whatever you want to call us, that connects us together, no matter which Plantation we are to call home-prison, as Ma always referred to her life, on this Plantation, as.

  “Dancing those Saturday night jigs caused Wilberforce to see the likeness of me and him in Little Black Sambo, a book he happen to buy in Tennessee.

  “Wilberforce could not wait till he returned from Tennessee. He send Little Black Sambo by airmail, special delivery, with this note attach: ‘I have marked page 150 of this book to show you how we used to behave. Isn’t it ironical?’”

  They are standing now at the edge of a large field. There are no lights from the labourers’ shacks surrounding them. The houses are too far away, behind the phalanx of mahogany trees, down the slope, down the long drift of land that leads gently and gradually in the distance, into the sea. And on the other side, the side that could have afforded them a vision of the Main House, the distance is too far.

  The noise now, of her feet and Sargeant’s, on the dried trash, even at this time of night, when dew is already forming, is still sharp and loud.

  But when she thinks of the way her feet strike the trash, and the way the trash responds to her weight, it carries her back, farther back in her childhood, to the time when Ma would shake her mattress every evening before spreading it back onto the six pieces of board that were placed crosswise, in place of bedsprings, after the mattress had been hanging on the clothesline in the sun all day; to get rid of bugs, chinks and other little things that bite during the long, sweating, tossing-and-turning humid night. Wal
king on the trash in the field now, takes her back to those evenings when it was her duty to spread the mattress, stuffed with dried Guinea grass, evenly over the six boards.

  The night has begun to get chilly. It is a skin-piercing chilliness that is noticeable because the day was so hot, and now the sudden change in temperature is like a change in disposition, from passionate confidence, to sly gossip and deceit.

  It has changed from a night of passionate confidence, to a night of deceitful negotiating.

  She pulls the neck of her dress and the shawl tighter round her neck, but there is no relief from the chilliness of the night.

  Sargeant tramps on the trash in the same way he would track a suspect. With silent, deadly determination. But Sargeant never calls them suspects: they are all criminals to him, even before proven guilty. It is with this steadfast determination that he is walking now. He no longer feels the power she had over his body. His flesh is no longer weak. He is going along with her, out of courtesy. And because he is a policeman.

  “We’re going to stop here,” she says.

  “I think I know where we are,” he says.

  He looks around into the thick, heavy darkness.

  “I think I know where we are.”

  “The North Field.”

  “That field?” he says, still looking around.

  “You should be.Well acquainted with this field, Percy.”

  “Why?”

  He does not see the sarcasm.

  “Why?” he says again.

  Perhaps, he does not want to see it.

  “Are you a bat?”

  “Bat?”

  “A night-bat?”

  “As against a day-bat, like in cricket?”

  “Seeing in the dark, Percy. Seeing in the dark.”

  “You had me there, for a moment.”

  “This is the spot,” she says. “The best spot.”

  They are standing now. The trash comes up to their ankles. Each time they move, change a posture, the trash grumbles.

  “Wilberforce will be thirtyfive, tomorrow,” she says. “What a funny thing to come into my head, at a time like this.”