* * *
The next morning Hartley woke up early to a rooster outside his window trumpeting the daybreak, which came over the land with a startling suddenness. But as he lay in bed listening to the blaring rooster, Hartley heard someone moving in the house and decided that he’d better get up in case it was Meredith. He went downstairs and found his friend at breakfast. The two men ate, settled their bill, and stepped into the dawn which was already oppressive with the morning heat. They walked into the town square where the wagon loaded with their trunks was waiting for them, and with the night lingering in pockets of thinning coolness that brushed against their cheeks, they set off for the plantation with two black men—a middle-aged driver and a sideman of about twenty-three. The wagon was drawn by four mules, with Hartley and Meredith sitting beside the driver and the sideman slouched in the rear of the wagon bed.
They took the one primary road that led out of town running east and west. It started out as a rutted path grooved by the wheels of numerous wagons and carriages, followed the seacoast with a steady stream of wagon traffic going in both directions, piercing through a swampy terrain thick with mangroves, and crossing the Martha Brae River that spilled brown water into the estuary. Along the way the driver was chatty with Meredith. Hartley only half understood what the men were saying, and it was only by carefully listening that he was able to catch a crude gist of their meaning.
At regular intervals the driver stopped to rest the mules. On one of the stops, Hartley struck up a conversation with the sideman and was haltingly talking to him when the driver ambled over and said in his best English, “You want buy him? Him for sale.”
“You mean, he’s a slave?”
“Yes, sah, and me selling him cheap.”
The boy, who was ragged and barefoot, looked sullen. “Slavery days soon done, now,” he mumbled defiantly.
“But you’re a black man just like he,” Hartley protested. “How can he belong to you?”
The driver scowled. He held out his arm beside the boy’s and snapped, “Look how much lighter me skin is dan him. Him is a black man. At a certain time o’ day, me favor a white one.”
“You do what?”
“He says when the sun is just right, he looks like a white man,” Meredith interjected.
“I didn’t know black people could own slaves,” Hartley said lamely.
“Who do you think sells blacks into slavery in Africa?” Meredith asked. “Other black people.”
“If you see me at, say, six o’clock dis evening, you going think is one white man you looking at,” the driver said boastfully.
“Him look like a white man because him stand so dat de sun dazzle you eyes and you can’t tell horse from mule or mule from donkey,” the sideman added tartly.
Without warning, the driver lunged and slapped him hard on the side of the head, nearly knocking him off his feet. The sideman rubbed his head and stared at him murderously.
“All right now,” Meredith said, stepping between the two men, “enough of that. Let’s be on our way.”
For a tense moment, the two men were locked in a long, hard look of mutual hate.
“Try and sell me like me is a piece of yam,” the sideman grumbled.
“You’s my slave,” the driver retorted. “Me own you like me own dem four mule.”
“Slavery days over,” muttered the sideman.
“Buy him, nuh, sah,” the driver pleaded with Hartley. “A bargain. Only fifty pounds.”
Hartley hesitated, pursing his lips as if trying to make up his mind. He looked around at the thickly overgrown hillside through which the road had been hewed and could scarcely glimpse a familiar tree. He would ordinarily have said a brisk “No,” but being in a new country crammed with strange sights and oddities that almost seemed theatrical gave him the distinct feeling that anything was possible, even something so bizarre as owning another human being. Meredith looked at him with a troubled air.
“You can’t just buy him and tie him to a tree like you would a cow, you know,” Meredith cautioned. “You have to feed him.”
“Me don’t eat,” said the sideman tersely.
“He’ll need a place to sleep.”
“Me don’t sleep.”
With a sudden decisiveness, Hartley declared, “Done, for fifty pounds.”
The driver gave a loud belly laugh and extended his hand for Hartley to shake. Hartley pumped it vigorously. Assuming a serious expression, the driver glanced at Meredith, gave Hartley a quick, measuring scan, and asked, “Him just reach Jamaica?”
Meredith nodded.
“First trip?”
Meredith nodded again.
“Dis must be cash money. We better settle up dis business when we reach de estate.”
“Why?” Hartley wondered.
“Because you’re alive now, but who knows about tomorrow. You don’t season yet.”
“What do you mean by season?”
“It means you’re not yet accustomed to the island, its food, its atmosphere, its ways,” Meredith said smoothly.
“Plenty man come here and dead,” the driver said, chuckling. “You have to be strong to survive in Jamaica.”
“I’m strong,” Hartley said confidently, still unclear about what the man meant.
“Me not worth fifty pounds,” the sideman interrupted sullenly. “Is thief him thief you.”
“What’d he say?” Hartley asked Meredith.
“He says he’s not worth fifty pounds, that the driver has robbed you.”
“Shut up you mouth before I box you down,” the driver threatened.
“You can’t touch me. You don’t own me anymore,” the sideman gloated.
“Enough, I say,” said Meredith sharply. “We’ve still got a long way to go.”
The four men climbed back onto the wagon and resumed their journey.
The road scaled the hillside in crooked, lunging humps and soon became pitted and fissured like someone had bitten chunks out of it. All around them was a woodland so dense with trees that it loomed over the trail like a green wall and occasionally appeared impenetrable. The wagon rocked like a small boat in a choppy sea, and the road became so steep at times that the men had to get out and walk. The day wore on and the sun beat down on them pitilessly and in some particularly bad stretches of the road they all had to get behind the wagon and push to get it over a steep hump.
Left to his own thoughts, Hartley was intermittently regretting his impulsive purchase, but as the road got worse, the hill got steeper, and as the going got slower and more difficult, he didn’t care if he had bought a hundred slaves, for his mind began to seem as reckless as their journey. The more cracked and wild the roadway got, the more sense buying his own slave seemed to make. Darkness fell, and the surrounding bushes and trees slowly became grotesqueries of night. As the darkness grew thicker and the road more difficult to see, they crested a hill and there below them in a valley glittered a handful of flickering lights.
“Mount Pleasant,” Meredith breathed with relief.
The mood of the travelers brightened instantly. The sideman spontaneously began to sing.
“Shut up!” the driver barked over his shoulder.
“Oh, let him sing,” Meredith said. “In fact, I feel like singing myself.”
And he and the sideman started singing as the lights of the plantation puncturing the darkness drew comfortingly nearer and brighter.
CHAPTER 8
The plantation loomed like a monolith in what appeared to be an enormous area of desolation that might have been the dark ends of the earth. Yet among this vast, shrouded wilderness rose an imposing mansion boasting delicate gingerbread, impressive doors, mullioned windows, ornamented pediments, and Ionic pillars that combined, at first sight, to make the entire structure look out of place and ridiculous. There was a portico fit for welcoming the most elegant phaeton but was more likely there to shelter a grubby dray cart. The whole structure was encircled by a defensive wall punctured by gunpor
ts.
When the wagon rattled up to the main gate of the plantation, the mules blowing hard and a feeble light leaking from two dangling lanterns, the travelers were challenged and stopped by three night watchmen armed with pistols and machetes. After that, word quickly spread over the dark compound of the arrival of the backra. Candles flickered on throughout the main house and people poured out of the front door bubbling over with the welcome of homecoming.
The greeting party consisted of white faces mingling with a few brown and dark ones. Thoroughly confused about who was who, Hartley was soon shaking hands with a small circle of strangers whose names he was afraid he would not remember. So spontaneous and lively was the impromptu assembly that Hartley was reminded of a gathering at Christmas. Then he was sitting down at a large banquet table in a cavernous dining room and eating a hurriedly warmed-up meal among a babble of voices while dead ancestors peered down from stylized oil paintings on the wall. Outside, the driver and the sideman were served food that they ate sitting in the wagon.
During the height of the chatter, Hartley slipped outside to look at the night covering the earth with a thick velvet of darkness. It rang with the sounds of cicadas and crickets, and from deep within its dark unseen heart came a peculiar loud staccato noise of a hundred baby rattles. His new slave suddenly appeared at his elbow.
“What’s that sound?” Hartley asked.
The boy listened for a moment or two before responding, “What sound, Massa?”
“It sounds as if someone’s trying to clear his throat.”
The boy cocked his head attentively before breaking into a wide grin. “Is croaking lizard, Massa.”
“Why’re you calling me that name?”
“Because dat’s what slave in Jamaica call dem master.”
Hartley thought about it, and then shrugged. “Where will you sleep tonight?”
“Don’t worry ’bout dat,” the boy replied. “Me will find a place.”
The driver ambled over with a paper on which he had scribbled something.
“Here’s you bill of sale, sah. You have de money?”
“You mean I can change my mind?” Hartley asked jokingly.
“We shake on de deal, sah,” the driver said dourly, “although I wouldn’t blame you, now dat you get to see what a wretch dis boy is, if you have a change of heart.”
Buying a slave and then changing his mind before he’d even paid for him would make Hartley look silly. Acting more decisive than he felt, he dug into his trunk, pulled out some pound notes, and carefully counted off fifty, which he handed to the driver. As the driver was walking off the boy hissed in a venomous voice, “One dark night, we’ll buck up again.”
The implied threat stopped the driver in his tracks, and he turned and approached the boy. Hartley jumped between the two of them.
“He’s mine now,” Hartley said sternly. “Leave my property alone.”
The driver glared at the two of them for a long moment. Abruptly, he turned on his heels and walked over to his wagon.
“What’s your name?” Hartley asked the boy.
“Cuffy,” the boy mumbled.
“Cuffy? Who gave you that name?”
“Is de name of a slave, Massa. And me is slave.”
“Stop saying that.”
“If me must be a slave, me must be a proper slave.”
Hartley chuckled as if the boy had told a joke.
A cool breeze fanned the dark trees, making them seem to whisper. Hartley ambled across the lawn, taking in the night, the expanse of fields, the dark patches of woodlands that surrounded the house, and the constellations and stars brightly glittering overhead. He thought he was alone, but when he turned he saw that Cuffy, almost invisible against the dark night, padded after him only a few feet away.
“Are you following me?” Hartley asked.
“Dere’s something white man can do in Jamaica and something him shouldn’t do. Him shouldn’t walk ’bout at night alone,” Cuffy said quietly, as if revealing a secret.
Hartley looked around him. He was in the back of the enormous house where no lights burned and where the shadows were thick and cloying and swaddled the whole yard in a cocoon of bottomless darkness.
“Why? Is it unsafe?” Hartley asked, glancing nervously around him.
“Jamaican night bring out thief,” Cuffy said. “Is better white man walk in daylight.”
Hartley, without replying, moved briskly toward the front door and disappeared into the dining room. The celebratory tone was now muted by fatigue, and yawns were breaking out among the six white faces that sat at the huge table. A few minutes later, the assembly wobbled to its feet and everyone went to bed.
* * *
His first night in the great house Hartley slept well. At daybreak he was blasted awake by a conch shell horn calling the slaves to work. He got out of bed and stumbled to the window, peering out into the dawn, and saw workmen and women streaming across the lawns and headed for the factory or the fields. Hartley dressed hurriedly, washed his face in a basin, threw open his door, and found the boy lying on the threshold, sound asleep. He stepped over him and was standing there wondering what he should do when the boy jumped up and rubbed his eyes frantically.
“Did you sleep there all night?” asked Hartley with perplexity.
“Yes, sah,” the boy muttered sleepily.
“But why?”
“A slave must be ready to serve at all times,” came the reply.
“It’s a wonder you don’t follow me into the toilet,” Hartley rejoined sourly.
“Me is a slave,” the boy said snippily. “Me is not out of order.”
Hartley walked away, headed for the stairway, wanting to miss nothing on his first day at the plantation. Behind him he could hear the scurrying footsteps of the boy, hard on his heels.
* * *
Cuffy was a boy only in designation, not fact. In reality, he was the same age as Hartley Fudges. But because he was a young slave with no particular skill or training, everyone called him a boy. He was dark brown, of medium height, and had the fat-free chiseled physique of a greyhound. From a life of hard labor, he had developed a muscular body with thick arms and broad shoulders. He was slightly taller than Hartley Fudges and had an intensity to his personality that hinted of an explosive temper. His nature was to have things his way, which was an impossibility for someone who was enslaved, and his approach to life seemed combative and stubborn. Most striking were his eyes, which were the color of polished emeralds.
He was a creature of insupportable pride and was especially sensitive to any disrespect, slight, or flippancy directed at his person. It seemed to Hartley that he was always sniffing around for the appearance or hint of disparagement. Everything for him had to be proper. It had to be the ideal that the world expected. He did not want to be a slave, and his hatred of his slave masters ran deep. But since he had been born into slavery, he was maliciously determined to play the role to the letter that life had assigned him. So he slept protectively at Hartley’s doorstep where he could raise an alarm in case anyone tried to break into his massa’s room.
It was a perversity in his character that made him think this way, and it was one of his traits that had alienated him from his former owner, the dray cart driver. The boy had resented being the slave of a black man, for that was neither the ideal nor the norm. Now that he was owned by a white Englishman, he felt properly enslaved.
Most of this speculation was in Hartley’s fevered imagination and based on snippets of opinion expressed by Cuffy. Hartley instinctively understood from his long acquaintance with servants that a line had to be drawn in the sand beyond which they dared not step. It didn’t matter where the particular line was or what topics and behaviors it forbade; all that mattered was that the line was symbolically present and visible to the servant. Hartley thought he knew volumes about the servant mentality, and he intended to apply this knowledge to subdue his rambunctious slave.
Yet there was something
sinister in Cuffy’s manner. He was always sullen; his attitude was smoldering and defiant. Hartley had no doubt that if pushed far enough, Cuffy was capable of flying into a rage and killing someone.
Cuffy had not made any threatening movements toward his new English master. In fact, Hartley thought his slave was proud of having a master who was both white and genuinely English, rather than some cast-off Irishmen or Johnny-come-lately Scotchman or whimpering Welshman. Yet there was something about Cuffy that bore watching or caution. Hartley could not say what he felt or why he felt it. He only knew that there was something peculiar, something twisted inside Cuffy, something that could one day detonate and blow everyone nearby to smithereens.
* * *
Over the next few days, Hartley learned much about the plantation, Mount Pleasant. It was owned, he discovered, by a wealthy English family whom it supported on a grand scale but who were longtime absentee proprietors. The patriarch of the family had visited some years ago, but he didn’t linger too long, claiming that the climate was too hot for his constitution.
The plantation had evolved throughout the years into a self-sufficient community. It had its own source of water, produced its own food, provided its own medical treatment through a clinic staffed by a doctor and two nurses. It raised its own livestock and did its own butchering. Its own system of aqueducts harnessed the flow of water to drive the mill that extracted the sugar from the cane stalks. Its own minister of religion resided on the plantation and tended to the spiritual needs of the slaves and freemen alike. However, this particular minister had serious doubts as to whether blacks had souls. He was not alone in this perplexity. Many ministers of religion turned their backs on the slaves and saw no point in trying to introduce them to Christianity and Jesus. One might as well try to convert the donkey in a manger or a wild beast of the field.
Its population, reflecting the racial breakdown in Jamaica, consisted of eight white men counting Hartley and Meredith, but no white women; 960 slaves; and 210 free black and brown people who held various jobs on the estate. This scarcity made white people stand out conspicuously, and wherever he went in public, Hartley had the feeling of being constantly stared at like an exotic migratory bird.
The Family Mansion Page 8
