The Family Mansion

by Anthony C. Winkler

  But Hartley somehow overcame this objection the same way Plato had, by simply insisting that this was how it was. After a turbulent start, Cuffy began to see some advantages in thinking that everything on earth was an imperfect copy of everything perfect in heaven. He was particularly excited at the idea that there was a perfect version of him somewhere in the great beyond. And it gave him an idea: why not make the imperfect version of him that he was into the perfect version of which it was a copy?

  He explained the idea to Hartley, who was unmoved by it.

  “But if dere is a perfect me, why can’t I be it?” he grilled Hartley.

  “Don’t be ridiculous. This is philosophy. You can’t simply wake up one day and say, From today, I shall be the perfect me. Philosophy doesn’t work that way.”

  “Why not?” Cuffy rejoined. “Just because I’m de first person to think it up don’t mean it can’t be done.”

  “You’re not the first person to ever think that,” protested Hartley.

  “Name de man who think of dis before me!”

  Hartley was beginning to sputter. “Now, look here, Cuffy. I don’t know the name of any specific person who’s thought of this before, but there must be somebody. Plato lived from 428 to 347 BC. That’s a thousand years or more ago. You mean to tell me that no one in all that time has ever thought of being the perfect person he’s supposed to be?”

  Cuffy wasn’t sure what year this was and Hartley decided that to explain to him the meaning of 428 BC would be a nightmare. So he held his peace, hoping that Cuffy would forget about the discussion and move on. But throughout the days that followed, Cuffy continued to say, “I’m going to be de perfect slave,” until Hartley told him to shut up, which he did without an argument just as a perfect slave would. And at the end of the day, Cuffy said to Hartley, “Massa, wasn’t I de perfect slave today?” to which Hartley replied pompously, “From what I’ve been able to observe, you seem to have been.”

  “From now on,” vowed Cuffy, “dat is what me’ll be: de perfect slave.”

  Hartley did not hear this last remark. Or if he heard it, he didn’t believe Cuffy. What could he possibly mean that he’d be the perfect slave? There was no such thing. And if there were, why would Cuffy or anyone else want to be the perfect slave?

  It was obvious that trying to grapple with the deep thinking of Plato had maddened up the African’s brain.

  * * *

  All this drama was being played out in the great house—the dominant structure of the entire plantation. Built on the edge of a dense and impenetrable woodland, it differed from other houses in that it was enormous and surrounded by a grim cut-stone wall capped with pointed iron bars and interspersed with gun ports.

  There were six white people living in the great house—four Irish overseers and Meredith and Hartley. There was a Mahoney, an O’Hara, a Yates, and a Fitzgerald who had been with the plantation for years. They were typically short, sinewy men, on the scrawny side, fair complexioned, and with green or blue eyes.

  Yet in spite of these backras, the plantation could not exist without the labor of the slaves, who did everything. They cleared the land and dug holes for planting; harvested the mature cane, binding the stalks into movable bales; transported the bales to the mill, which ground up the stalks so that the cane juice flowed through lead-lined sluices into the boiling house. Slaves boiled the juice in a series of cast-iron “coppers,” skimming off impurities and adding lime as a catalyst to help it crystallize. It was a slave who supervised the boiling in the room where the temperature could reach 140°F. When the juice was ready to crystallize, slaves transferred it to vats that used constantly circulating water to cool down the slurry and help it precipitate. The entire process of making, storing, and shipping sugar was handled completely by slaves.

  All this industry involving 1,297 acres of land and 480 slaves produced 258 hogsheads of sugar and 170 puncheons of rum, making an annual net profit of £5,000—around $1,500,000 in today’s dollars—for an absentee owner who had been to the plantation once in twenty-five years and whose children had never seen the property that put food in their mouths and clothes on their backs. To put this profit in perspective, consider that the highest-paid person on the plantation was Meredith, the general manager, who earned the lavish sum of £300 per year, more than any other overseer on any of the other five-thousand-plus sugar-producing properties in Jamaica. Hartley Fudges, the newest backra, earned half that.

  * * *

  Backra, linguists believe, is a word of African origin that comes from the Ibo or Efik language where its original meaning was one who governed or was in charge. In an 1805 sugar plantation in the West Indies, the backra was a human flag that symbolized ownership by the English. Some of the more experienced backras knew how to make sugar and supervised the process in its various stages. But a new backra like Hartley was as much a trainee as a new slave, except that being white he was presumed able to more easily master the intricacies of sugar manufacturing than could a slave. The backra hovered over everything and everyone, embodying in his person life, death, and favoritism. His every judgment carried the finality of eternity.

  One morning Yates was showing Hartley around the boiling house when a couple drivers appeared with a captured runaway slave in custody. The drivers stopped Yates and asked what should be done with the man, who was a chronic escapee.

  Yates ordered that the man be bound fast and his mouth wired shut after it was stuffed with cow dung, or, if the drivers preferred, with human or horse feces. The drivers were grinning with delight, for the escapee had caused them a lot of trouble over the past few months.

  “How long we leave him tie up wid him mouth full of cow shit, Massa?” one of the drivers asked.

  “Overnight,” said Yates blithely.

  The two backras rode off while the man screamed at them, “You can’t put cow shit inna man mouth, slave or no slave! Massa, come back!”

  “I say,” said Hartley, “aren’t you being a bit harsh?”

  “It’s harvesting season,” Yates snapped, “and I’ve got five days to bring in five hundred acres of sugarcane before it begins to rot. He needs to be made an example of, to be taught a lesson.”

  “Well,” said Hartley not wishing to make an enemy of the Irishman, “I’d say he should learn something from that punishment. Ugh! How did you think of that?”

  “I just had an inspiration,” Yates chuckled.

  * * *

  The slave women were a hardened bunch, and while generally not as muscular or as strong as the men, they still had to take their place on the cutting line during a harvest. Pregnancy was no excuse to not work, and many women had dropped a new baby in the grass and gotten up to immediately resume cutting the sugarcane. Women were punished as severely as men and encouraged to breed and multiply but not to form families. In fact, children were separated from their mothers at an early age, usually six, often by being sold to other planters. Some mothers, in turn, committed infanticide rather than have their children grow up to become slaves.

  Toward the backras many slave women were openly flirtatious since having a child for a white man would give them a hold, however tenuous, on him. Sex between master and slave was often spontaneous and immediate with no foreplay except the most rudimentary and crude kind necessary for workmanlike lubrication. Kissing under such circumstances was a rarity; copulation occurred typically outdoors on the ground.

  Once Meredith and Hartley were riding across a field about to be harvested when a shapely young woman suddenly appeared out of the cane and waved at Meredith.

  “Excuse me, my young friend,” Meredith said hastily, “but I have some old business to take care of.”

  Meredith rode over to the woman, got off his horse, and disappeared with her into the cane thicket. Hartley was left sitting on his horse, looking on with bewilderment.

  The sun beat down on his head like a fist and his horse drifted toward a tree that provided some shade. Hartley stood in the stirru
ps and spotted Meredith mounted atop the woman, her dress furled up to her waist, his breeches drawn down to his knees, his exposed buttocks puffy and white as freshly kneaded bread dough, pumping her furiously. Hartley discreetly withdrew.

  A couple of minutes later Meredith reappeared, climbed on his horse, exclaiming, “I feel like a new man!” As the two backras rode away, the woman slipped out of the cane piece, gave a saucy wave, and continued on her way. “One of the advantages of being the backra,” Meredith added with a grin.

  The whole episode had taken perhaps a minute or two, about the time it took for a bee to pollinate a flower.

  * * *

  Hartley Fudges adapted quickly to plantation life. He was no saint, but a young man with a young man’s hot blood. He was daily surrounded by a sea of black women, and aside from the magnetic draw of his superior position over them, he was not a bad-looking man. He had been on the estate for over three months before he took his first woman. He encountered her on the road leading from a field being prepared for planting. As he rode past, she called out to him, “Hi, Massa, beg you a ride, nuh, sah.”

  At first he didn’t understand what she said, but he gathered her meaning from her gestures. He helped her up on the saddle behind him. Once she was settled, instead of wrapping her hands around his waist, she encircled his hips so that both her hands were resting playfully against his cock. Hartley, who had not been with a woman in months, was instantly aroused.

  “Lawd Jesus,” the woman moaned, feeling a huge tumescent muscle swelling in his pants, “what is dis?”

  They were riding past a hedge of shrubs shaded by a towering mango tree whose thick trunk provided a shield from the road. Hartley rode the horse behind the tree and dismounted, helping the woman off and lowering her to the ground. She lay on the grass, and in a blink he had his pants down and was climbing on top of her. She wore no panties.

  “Easy now, Massa,” she squirmed as he prepared to penetrate her.

  But he was not easy with her. Her sudden fearfulness goaded him on and made him swell with an intoxicating surge of power. He plunged into her with a savage thrust of his hips. She received him with a shriek and a gasp, digging her fingernails into his back as he drove deeper and deeper inside her until she was so filled with him that she felt sure that she would be ruptured.

  “Sweet Jesus!” she bawled, undulating her hips in an attempt to expel or behead the thick monstrous serpent that burrowed into her belly.

  With a final explosive thrust, he impaled himself as deep as he could get inside her and hung there shuddering. She felt the head of the serpent pulsating as it spat its seed into her womb. Hartley slumped against her with a feral grunt, and they were joined in a brief moment of intimacy.

  Then he remembered himself, and springing up, he pulled up his pants, jumped on the horse, and galloped away.

  “Where you a go?” she yelled after him. “Where you get dat big donkey cock from?”

  But he was long gone, leaving behind a plume of dust.

  * * *

  Not all the slave women were willing playthings to the white overseers. Some said no and refused to be used sexually. In that event, the white man could enforce his will on her without worrying about legal retribution. A slave woman could no more say no to a backra than a cow refuse to give milk.

  The first time Hartley saw an overseer racing after an unwilling woman he was reminded of a scene from Greek and Roman mythology where an eager Pan would chase a nymph through the fields of Arcadia, eventually catching her and dragging her back to his lair to party. But Pan and his bucolic antics were so far removed from the grounds of the Mount Pleasant plantation in Jamaica that it took an act of lunacy for anyone to confuse them.

  Hartley himself forced several women to open their legs for him. He did not physically strike them but he wrestled them to the ground and held them securely while he finished the deed.

  In one particularly ugly episode, Hartley Fudges was on his way back to the great house when he came across a slim black slave girl walking toward the slave quarters with a basket on her head. Hartley trotted toward her, which made her stop and glare at him. He gave a halfhearted salute of greeting which she made no effort to return.

  “I know what you’re after, Massa,” she sniped, “but you come to the wrong woman. Me don’t want no donkey hood.”

  “You’re very impertinent,” Hartley said, enchanted in spite of himself. “Stop and talk to me.”

  She stopped and raked him up and down with a hostile glower.

  “Massa, you can ride me down and catch me and hold me down and get what you want from me. But me going fight you all de way so it going feel like work instead o’ enjoyment.”

  Hartley got off his horse and approached the woman. She put down the basket she’d been carrying, bent over, and picked up a hefty rock which she brandished as a weapon. Hartley hesitated, for she appeared deadly serious in her intent to use it. He turned as if to remount his horse, then spun and hurled himself at her, knocking her flat on the ground where he pinned her under his body weight. She began to scream—not an ordinary scream, but a shriek that was ear-splitting and haunting like the wail of an animal being devoured. Hartley tried to put his hand over her mouth, but she bit him savagely on the palm. Meantime, her deafening shrieking brought two slaves scampering over to see what was wrong. They found Hartley and the woman writhing on the grass.

  “Me no want no donkey hood!” the woman bawled.

  “She don’t want no donkey hood, Massa,” scolded one of the intervening slaves.

  “Donkey hood?” Hartley sputtered, feeling suddenly ridiculous.

  “Donkey cock, Massa. She say you big like a donkey, and she don’t want it.”

  Hartley was about to deny that he had a donkey cock when an ignominious feeling of being utterly debased swept over him.

  “Why don’t you mind your business,” Hartley snapped, getting off the girl and standing up. The woman staggered to her feet.

  “You do have a donkey hood,” she muttered waspishly. “Dat’s what everybody call you behind you back.”

  “Shhh,” hushed one of the men. “You chat too much.”

  “I could have all three of you whipped,” Hartley growled, mounting his horse and trying his best to save face.

  “You’d still have a donkey hood,” the woman snapped.

  “Hi, Phibba,” one of the men said, “you only going make him mad.”

  Hartley rode off feeling very small and absurd. He could kick himself for making such as scene where he was not only wrong but belittled.

  That was the only time he tried to take a woman against her will. He decided that there was too much risk of making a spectacle of himself, that casual roadside rape was neither sporting or dignified.

  And it definitely wasn’t cricket.

  CHAPTER 10

  There was nothing to do in the remote Jamaican countryside where the plantation was located: there were no elegant dinners to attend, no lively dances that dragged on until dawn, no brilliant glittery parties. The property was bounded on all sides by dour forested mountains or densely wooded undeveloped acreage known locally as government land. It was land like this that the founder of the plantation had hijacked through patents many years ago when Jamaica was just captured by the English. There were no towns nearby, not even villages, and beyond the reach of the overgrown land unfurled the ever-present, empty sea. Days were frenzied with work on the production of sugar, but nights were lazy and empty except during the harvest when the factory operated around the clock. The white men kept to themselves and, without white woman to entertain them and keep them presentable, soon became disheveled and grimy. Blacks and browns did not mix outside of their own groups. Yet it was the plantation that gave focus and meaning to the lives of those who worked on it. The plantation was like an aged relative whose children did not love her but took care of her out of duty.

  Feelings differed widely among the various groups about Jamaica. The blacks rese
nted the island as a prison to which they had been abducted and stranded. The browns felt that they did not belong in Jamaica but had been marooned there by miscegenation. To the whites, Jamaica was a stray animal they would opportunistically milk but did not love. Without love for the work there was no meaning to the lives of those who labored on the plantation. The continual cycle of planting, harvesting, boiling, and cooling became an endless, futile, and repetitive exercise that was done mechanically and dutifully for abstruse reasons that made life itself seem ridiculous. And all this madcap expense of energy was performed to keep some unknown Englishman rich and well fed.

  The Irish overseers were practical men to whom abstract reasoning about purpose and meaning was a useless exercise in self-provocation like picking on an aching tooth that is temporarily quiet. Many Irishmen were romantic and poetic, but not these O’Haras and Mahoneys and Yateses and Fitzgeralds. Men of the soil, they did not trouble themselves over what they could not see or touch or hold. The chatter among them during mealtimes was about this animal or that Negro or this upsetting incident. It was unspeculative and grubby talk like the chitchat of merchants or fishmongers. They did not concern themselves with why but only with what and whom. Absurdity did not trouble them, for it was the substance and grain of their lives.

  So the days fluttered past in this setting of picturesque loveliness that no one particularly cared for. Among the inhabitants, few, if any, would call themselves Jamaicans. These Irishmen and Englishmen and tribal Africans and other assorted Europeans occupied the island as a fiefdom of emptiness they did not even pretend to like, to say nothing of love.