The buildings on the estate consisted of the main house, called the great house; a sprawling slave quarters; a storage structure where various tools and agricultural implements were kept; the mill where the cane was converted into sugar, molasses, and rum; a boiling house, a curing house, and the paddocks and stables where the horses were kept. There was also a butchering shed and an outbuilding where hogsheads of sugar and rum awaiting transshipment were stored. Every facility was relatively close together to make transportation from one to the other easy.
The plantation consisted of 1,500 acres cultivated mainly in sugarcane. Experience had taught the planters over the years that sugarcane, unless grown on a large scale, was not a profitable crop. Even on a large estate, growing cane was capital-intensive, requiring a huge labor force and expensive boiling and milling equipment, and it was only by large-scale manufacturing that the plantation was able to survive. Over the island’s history the consolidation of estates became an inexorable necessity, and at one point flyspeck Jamaica—all 4,411 square miles of it—had more jumbo estates in production than did the entire continental US.
* * *
Hartley had been in Jamaica about two weeks when he fell sick. The sickness began with a feeling of fatigue, which at first he blamed on a visit to the boiling house and its hellish temperatures that often reached 140° Fahrenheit. But by evening he was feverish and wracked with chills that the people around him quickly recognized as the onset of yellow fever. Meredith, on being informed of his companion’s illness, ordered him immediately to bed. Hartley needed no prompting and in the dim room, he crawled into bed under a sheet and a bedspread, chilled and trembling. Cuffy brought him a pitcher of lemonade and hung around his bedside, looking anguished and doing his best to be useful. Hartley was hardly aware of him for his mind was in that place of fragmented dreams and delirium that the feverish inhabit. When he was awake, which was seldom, he would hardly be aware of his surroundings, his consciousness flickering like a windblown candle.
He began to vomit. Since his confinement he had eaten no solid food but had taken in only liquids. The cook for the great house sent up a succession of broths with Cuffy, who sat on the edge of Hartley’s bed and tried to spoon the oily liquid down his master’s throat. For several days Hartley lay suffering in soundless agony—day passing into night, morning turning into afternoon—feeling more wretched than ever before in his life. Every white person in the great house sympathized with his suffering, for every one of them had either experienced it themselves or seen other newcomers ravaged by the sickness. Most of the people who were around him did not think that he would survive. On one visit Meredith said to Cuffy as they passed in the doorway, “You better make a coffin for your master.”
But by the fifth day, Hartley was stronger and apparently getting better. His fever abated, and he stopped vomiting altogether. What was an even better sign was his restiveness at being cooped up in the bedroom. Meredith and others in the great house observed these signs with alarm rather than hope, for they knew that he had now come to the crossroads where his sickness would either leave him or it would relentlessly return with a renewed virulence. Hartley, not understanding the nature of his illness, was eager to get to work and one morning appeared at the breakfast table, keen on beginning a full day, only to be excused from work and told to return to bed.
“But I tell you,” Hartley insisted, “I’m all well again. I feel almost up to my full strength.”
An Irish overseer by the name of Yates cautioned him gravely: “It’s the fever you had, and it is known to come back just when you think you’re getting over it. And the second time, it’s much worse.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Meredith said with exasperation. “It just seems to be over. But it isn’t over.”
“How do you know when it is over?” Hartley asked.
The cook, an old Ashanti woman named Delilah who rode roughshod over the Irish overseers, snapped, “It over when we tell you it over.”
For the next few days, the people around him watched Hartley closely for symptoms of the second stage of the disease to appear, making him feel like he was passing through the perilous strait between life and death. He felt more helpless than he ever had in his life as he awaited either a blow or a reprieve. What made it worse was his awareness of his condition and his recognition that nothing he thought or did or said or chanted would affect the outcome. So he reluctantly did as he was told and remained in bed long after he felt it necessary. Meredith lent him a copy of Edward Long’s The History of Jamaica and having nothing better to do, he began to read about the island.
He learned that history credits the start of the sugar industry to Sir Thomas Modyford, governor general of Jamaica from 1664 to 1670, who arrived from Barbados in 1664 accompanied by seven hundred planters and their slaves. In the years to follow, other groups of planter families and their slaves came from the Leeward Islands and Suriname. Jamaica, which the English took from Spain in 1655, initially struggled to survive and actually suffered a decline in population. The census of 1661, taken by the Spanish, showed a population of 2,956 (2,458 men, 454 women, and forty-four children).
In the early years of English colonization, Jamaica was a bigger producer of cocoa than of sugar. But in the summer of 1670 a cocoa blight hit the island, destroying all the trees. Jamaica turned to sugar, and the industry grew rapidly, from fifty-seven sugar mills in 1670 to 1,061 in 1786. St. Ann, Trelawney, and St. James became the mecca of growth with some fifteen new sugar estates being established between 1792 and 1799. With the growth of new estates came the flood of slaves from Africa until by 1805 they outnumbered whites by more than ten to one. And all this industry and effort was producing profits that immediately left the island and ended up in the pockets of unseen and often unknown absentee proprietors.
All this, and more, Hartley Fudges discovered during the week when he seemed to be getting better from the yellow fever. But then the second wave of the disease struck and overnight he was languishing on his deathbed, and there was nothing anyone or any science or any folk magic of 1805 could do to save him.
A healthy young man only rarely sees himself as part of a social pattern. If anything, he imagines himself and his individual destiny to be utterly unique. But the sick man is always trying to spot the cause and patterns behind his sickness, if only to take refuge from the belief that nature has singled him out for some special horrible death or infirmity. So as Hartley Fudges slipped into the delirium of his fever, he began to inspect the life patterns that had brought him to this sorry pass. He began to see himself as one of many migratory English men forced to leave their homes and risk their lives on some foreign shore where they were likely to die among strangers.
Oddly enough, he began to see the little stub of life he had so far lived as funny and irrepressibly comical. As he was enveloped and consumed by his fever and sickness, he would occasionally remember some episode from his earlier years and laugh uproariously over it. The people in the great house thought he was deranged from his sickness and expected him to die anytime now.
“Poor fellow,” muttered Meredith at Hartley’s bedside. “I thought he would fit right in.” He headed for the door. “Tell me when he’s passed,” he added over his shoulder to Cuffy.
“Me massa not goin’ dead,” Cuffy retorted in a voice that snapped like an overseer’s whip.
“Whatever you say,” Meredith said, wrinkling his nose at the reeking stench of sickness and death that wafted from the bed.
Hartley broke into another insane laugh.
CHAPTER 9
Hartley Fudges traveled to, and came back from, the doorstep of death. He turned yellow and stopped passing water and should have succumbed to either liver or kidney failure. But he did not. At the last minute he had a surge of strength; his fever abated; the ghastly yellow that his sickness had painted him with was gradually replaced by the more natural buff and reddish complexion of a white man in the tropics. He was laug
hing deliriously on and off for at least ten days, and on the eleventh he opened his eyes and looked at the world like a traveler returning home from a long voyage. He had survived the fever.
During his weeks of recuperation, Hartley Fudges spent long hours with only Cuffy for company. They were about the same age, which gave them something in common, and when Hartley was not sleeping off the ravages of his disease, he and Cuffy exchanged stories about growing up in the last decades of the eighteenth century in London and West Africa. Hartley felt deep inside himself that he was superior to Cuffy in virtually every way—given the monumental differences between the playing fields of Eton and the jungles of West Africa—but the sickness of yellow fever which the Englishman had suffered laid bare between them a relationship of dependence that almost leveled the looming barriers of class and race.
In telling Cuffy about his life in London, Hartley made the city sound better than it really had been. Homesick and recovering from a serious illness made him idealize his days there, forgetting such important details as the perpetual stench of the city, its suffocating crowds of laborers, hawkers and peddlers, pickpockets and cutthroats mingling daily among bustling shoppers, to say nothing of the insufferable conceit of Londoners with their smug conviction that theirs was the best of all possible worlds.
In return, Cuffy told stories about the hunting adventures his tribe required of boys entering their fourteenth year as proof of their passage into manhood. One of the requirements was for boys to organize themselves into small hunting groups and stalk and kill a warthog. This feat was not easily accomplished because a warthog is armed with sharp tusks and is a fearless foe that will hurl itself at any hunting party, slashing at bare feet and naked legs. Cuffy told the story of a boy who was lazy and sluggish and reacted too slowly to a charging warthog. Both tendons of his ankles were severed, making him a cripple for the rest of his life. So killing a warthog was no easy task, especially since the animals had a habit of digging burrows into the soft earth and covering themselves with dirt, which made them nearly impossible to see until the hunter was almost on top of them, when they would explode out of the ground in a ferocious rage.
Until they had killed a warthog and brought the body for the elders to inspect and approve, said Cuffy, the boys were not allowed to return to the village. During this time, the boys had to fend for themselves, living off the harsh ungiving land. Some hunting parties did not return and were never found. Whether they were themselves the victim of predators or of starvation or of slave hunters no one ever found out; all the tribe knew was that some boys were always lost. So it was essential that the hunting groups contain at least one boy who could track game and kill it.
Here Cuffy’s voice grew boastful as he declared that in all of his village, no one was better at throwing the spear with more deadly accuracy than he was and that all the other boys begged him to join their party and become their leader. He did eventually join a group, and on the third day of the hunt, they came across a family of warthogs living in a burrow they had dug in a dry riverbed. He deployed the boys in a circle so that the animals would be trapped. Then one boy began to beat a small drum until, unable to stand the noise, the boar exploded out of its burrow, shook itself off, and aimed its tusks at the drummer. But in that brief pause, before the boar could charge, Cuffy’s spear whipped through the air and buried its point deep into the chest of the animal, drawing from it a frantic squeal of agony as it collapsed on the ground in a ghastly death spasm.
When Cuffy was finished with his story, Hartley felt a little overmatched, having no English warthog whose ferocity he could exaggerate. He countered with a fox and a story about hunting it. As Cuffy listened with an expression of rapture on his face, Hartley described the rugged countryside over which the hunters chased their game to the baying of hounds.
But that was not the same thing, objected Cuffy. Riding a horse after some dogs chasing a fox was not as perilous as facing a warthog with only a spear for a weapon. Hartley jumped to the defense of his warthog-less English countryside.
“You have no idea how rough a fox hunt can be. The horse has to jump over obstacles, some man-made, some natural. People fall off all the time and hurt themselves badly. Why, there was a man in a nearby village who fell off his horse and died.”
“Killing a warthog makes a young man strong and fearless. It gives the tribe meat. It is better than riding after a fox.”
“I hardly need to point out to you,” said Hartley sarcastically, “who’s the slave and who the master.”
“Dat don’t matter,” the boy snapped. “You’re not de massa because you hunt de fox. Me not de slave because me kill a warthog.”
“Then why aren’t you the master and I not the slave?”
“Cuffy don’t know,” said the boy looking around the room gloomily. “But somebody know.”
It was to combat this perception of the English countryside as a worthless and sissified hunting ground that caused Hartley to play the only trump card he felt he had in his deck.
“Of course,” he said casually, “in London we have dueling.”
“Dueling? What dat?” asked Cuffy innocently.
* * *
Hartley himself had never fought a duel. He had never even come close enough to actually show up on the dueling fields. However, his illness had left him feeling vulnerable and weak, and under the intense gaze of his slave who was hanging onto his every word while trumping him with his African warthog, he began to picture himself in a more heroic light than was true. Without meaning to, he was soon telling the story of the duel between Bottoms and Alexander, putting himself in Alexander’s shoes.
He told the story that Bottoms had insulted him in public, which resulted in Hartley slapping his face in reproof.
“How you do that?” Cuffy wanted to know. Hartley stepped over to where Cuffy was sitting and demonstrated by giving him an effete, almost effeminate slap on the side of the head. Cuffy stood up to copy the gesture.
“Careful now,” he warned Cuffy, who looked as if he were muscling up to deliver a haymaker.
Cuffy, with an expression of concentration, delivered a light whiffing blow to Hartley’s head. “Like dis?” he asked.
“Yes, quite like that.”
Then came other embellishments. Hartley added details about the rituals of the duel, the naming of seconds, the choice of weapons, the selection of a dueling field, and other inventions of his imagination. Cuffy was duly impressed; this was so much better than the warthog.
“But why you fight dis man named Bottoms?” Cuffy wondered.
“Over a principle,” Hartley said, immediately regretting his use of that word.
“What a principle?”
“It’s something that matters. But it may seem not to matter, which is why it matters.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, of course you don’t. You’re too busy hunting hogs to grasp the important points in life such as a principle.”
“What was de principle?”
Hartley sighed, conscious of being dragged deeper and deeper into the murk.
“We bet a farthing on a horse race. My horse won, but Bottoms didn’t pay his wager.”
“Why not?”
“Because it was only for a farthing. He thought the amount was so small that it didn’t matter. But that was exactly why it mattered. It was the principle of the thing.”
“Den what happened?”
“I asked him for my farthing and he said I was cheap. People overheard. I slapped him and challenged him to a duel.”
“Which you won?”
“Quite so.”
“Over a farthing, a quarter of a penny?”
“No. Over a principle.”
“What principle?”
“That every bet, no matter how small, must be paid.”
Cuffy sighed with longing. As for Hartley, he was quite pleased with himself and imagined that the warthog had been driven squealing out of the room.
“Only gentlemen fight duels,” Hartley replied crisply.
“Then Cuffy will become gentleman.”
Hartley laughed. The boy’s face darkened with a shadow of anger.
“You laugh at Cuffy?” he hissed. “You no laugh at Cuffy.”
And for a tense minute, Hartley thought the boy would strike him. “I’ll laugh at anyone I please,” he said sharply. “Now get out.”
“Why I not become a gentleman?” the boy persisted, not moving a hair.
“Because you don’t talk like one.”
“So if I learn to talk like you, I become gentleman too.”
“Not bloody likely. Plus, you could never talk like I do. Now get out of here and let me sleep.”
Cuffy looked around the room, which was disheveled and littered like a recent battlefield.
“Dat not fair,” Cuffy said in the doorway, his face twisted in a look of disappointment.
“I said get out!” Hartley screamed.
* * *
During his recovery, Hartley also tried to explain the teachings of Plato to Cuffy. But the trouble was that he himself did not completely understand Plato. He merely accepted him and his teachings because he felt as a matter of principle that every aristocrat in England should subscribe to some philosophy or another. It was one more way of distinguishing himself from the rabble.
Hartley began by explaining to Cuffy that there once was this great thinker who lived hundreds of years ago and whose philosophy was based on the belief that for every object or life-form on this earth there was a perfect version of it in the next world of which the earthbound one was a mere imitation. Cuffy had great difficulty at first with the idea of imitation, and particular difficulty with imitation over such a large scale that included all of the earth and everything contained in it. He found it hard to believe that everything here was a copy of the perfect thing there, and like the Aristotelian critics, he kept asking where the original perfect thing was stored. How did the imitation of it manage to find its way on earth?
The Family Mansion Page 9
