* * *
Hartley Fudges, like all newcomer whites, was soon bored to death by the isolation and social primitiveness. He received just one letter from his father, informing him that Alexander had married the widow Bentley and settled down quite nicely in her home where they seemed to be happy. Once again, Hartley thought bitterly, fate had given to his brother what was rightfully his own. For days after he received this letter, Hartley moped around feeling glum and ill-used. None of his pub friends wrote him, for he had left London so suddenly that most of them did not even know where he had gone. He felt himself to be in miserable exile, yet he also felt the pressure of having to set an example before the vast horde of blacks among whom he was living.
It was a paradoxical state of affairs, but now that Hartley was in Jamaica and being gawked at from every quarter by black and brown faces, he found himself exaggerating those traits that were stereotypically regarded abroad as English. His accent became exaggerated and proper. He dressed for dinner every night and observed traditional teatime as often as he could. He wracked his brain trying to see exactly what made him seem English to others, and he decided that to be English was to be well mannered, distant, grammatically correct, and to carry oneself with an imperturbable sense of dignity. Whenever he appeared in public, he did his best to reflect these signature characteristics with an icy demeanor. But mainly he remained aloof from everyone except Meredith. It seemed that the farther away he was from England, the more ridiculously English he became.
He was not unaware of what was happening to him but he was powerless to prevent the transformation. Being the backra had made his life theatrical, and not a day passed when he did not feel that he was onstage and playing to a fickle audience.
He suffered some setbacks as would be expected for a young man living in such rough-and-ready circumstances. The worst was that he came down with gonorrhea. It was perhaps inevitable, given the fact that he indiscriminately lay with scores of slave women who themselves had lain with umpteen other men—backras and slaves alike—making an ideal daisy chain for transmitting the bacteria Neisseria gonorrhoeae. In 1805 there was not only no cure, there was no effective treatment for it.
Nevertheless, ever hopeful of some relief, Hartley Fudges went to see MacDonald, the plantation doctor, a gruff Scottish man who had scraped his way through medical school, boning up on the medical mythologies of the day and absorbing a lot of nonsense that passed in 1805 for science. The doctor prescribed the preferred medical dosage of mercury salts applied as a paste, which did absolutely no good, and told Hartley that if his condition did not improve, he would treat him next with doses of sandalwood oil, and if that was not effective, he would try a dosage of zinc salts. To ease the discomfort Hartley was suffering, the doctor gave him opium and instructions about how to use it.
“If I were you,” the doctor advised Hartley, “I wouldn’t fornicate with anyone until you’re no longer discharging. We don’t know how, but we think you’re just passing on the disease by doing that.”
That very night Hartley spitefully lay with a slave woman on the ground behind the mill, telling himself grimly that someone had given the disease to him and he was therefore jolly well entitled to pass it on. A couple of weeks later, when the woman began to show symptoms, she blamed the infection on the too-cold river in which she had taken a bath one night against the advice of a girlfriend. Slave lore of the day knew no more about causation than did medical science.
Without intending to, Hartley began to populate the island with his seed. All his indiscriminate coupling would soon bear unwanted fruit. He was not the only one accused of breeding the slave women—all the overseers were similarly guilty—and it seemed that every second child born in the slave quarters was fairer than its dark-skinned mother. In 1805, no way of proving paternity existed other than specious claims of a resemblance between the child and the supposed father, and Hartley had quickly absorbed enough of the uncaring mentality of the backra to simply walk away chuckling. By the end of his first year, he had fathered over twenty children to as many women. Many of the infants died in the first months of life and were buried in unmarked graves. Others were taken away from their mothers and sold in slave auctions. Hartley made no attempt to get to know any of the surviving children. He felt no paternal affection for any of them and made it clear through his neglect that he cared no more about them than he did for the farrow of the plantation’s sows.
In the initial weeks Hartley had had trouble with the language spoken by the slaves. It was a patois dialect based on an amalgam of English and various African tongues such as Ashanti and Swahili. Spoken very rapidly and in a singsong lilt, it was the lingua franca of the island and the linguistic bridge between the races. Hartley never learned to speak it, and in fact held it and its speakers in contempt. But after a few months of hearing it spoken around him everywhere he went, he acquired a basic understanding of its meaning, enough for him to communicate. But he never even made an attempt to speak it. Clinging to his received pronunciation, he persisted always in expressing himself crisply and exactly like a good Etonian.
* * *
But there were events that occurred on the plantation that brought out in him, if not Eton, then certainly his Anglicanism that lay buried under the rubble of a life lived primarily by secular principles. Like most members of his generation, Hartley was neither religious nor irreligious. He rather liked the pomp and circumstance of the High Mass, and when it came time to bury, he readily conceded that no ceremony could match the ponderous gloom of a church funeral with its tolling bell and promise of the resurrection. Death, sudden and unexpected, worked its black capricious magic all around him.
One night Hartley was in the mill checking on the particular gang of slaves working as feeders. Feeding stalks of cane through the rollers of the mill was dangerous work. The slave who worked as a feeder guided several stalks of cane between enormous rollers that were propelled by water flowing through an aqueduct. The force of this water turned the vertical rollers that crushed the cane and extracted the juice which, boiled, cooled, and particulated, would become sugar. To stop this grinding action, the water flowing through the aqueduct had to be diverted or stopped up, which was not easy to do.
When Hartley entered, the noisy mill was badly lit by a greasy flicker of light thrown off by oil lamps. At two a.m. everyone was weary of the constant rumbling of the giant rollers that dominated the badly lit room and made hearing another’s voice difficult. The feeders were pushing the stalks between the rollers when one man said something to another, distracting him. The distracted man was trying to listen to his companion while feeding stalks of cane into the grinder when his fingertips were caught between the rollers. He tried to snatch his hand free, but it was too late. His fingers were being pulverized, popped open like pulpy cherry tomatoes. The man began to scream for his hand was disappearing between the grinding wheels, pulling him into the mechanism. From out of nowhere came a slave wielding a razor-sharp hatchet, and with one blow he cut off the man’s arm just below the elbow. The severed arm, bone and all, was crushed flat by the grinder and disappeared with an off-key crunch into the mouth of the rollers. Writhing in a pool of blood on the floor, the man was shrieking at an unnatural pitch, his agony ringing above the constant rumble of the mill.
The slave who had cut off the hand knelt down and pressed a rag against the stump through which bone jutted and tried to calm the injured man down.
“Did you have to cut off his hand?” Hartley asked peevishly.
“Yes, Massa. If me don’t do dat, him grind up like porridge and de mill must shut down because o’ all de blood,” the slave said. “Is de third hand me cut off dis harvest.”
“Get him to the doctor,” Hartley ordered.
“Is too late fe doctor, sah,” the man mumbled. “Him is a dead man. Plus, de doctor not going come outta him bed dis time o’ night to treat slave.”
Yates, who was supervising the boiling house next door, came into
the mill to see what was happening and took control. He ordered three of the gawking slaves to carry the wounded man outside, directed two others to clean up the blood on the floor and the onlookers to get back to work. For the rest of the night, the slaves were sullen and lethargic and went through the motions of working while muttering among themselves.
Hartley stepped out of the noisy mill and found the injured man lying on the ground while nearby a slave who had been ordered to stay with him lay sleeping. The severed arm was still bleeding and lying grotesquely atop the man’s chest, which was heaving as he drifted deeper and deeper into shock. When he saw Hartley approaching, the wounded man tried to raise himself up but didn’t have the strength. Collapsing in the dirt, he began to jabber at Hartley in some unknown tongue.
Hartley kicked the sleeping slave. “Wake up!” he snarled. “What’s he saying?” he then demanded.
The other slave, now awake, listened for a few seconds before saying, “He calling on his ancestors to help him die bravely.”
“Ancestors!” Hartley said scornfully. “Tell him to call on Jesus.”
Thinking the backra was making a sick joke, the watchman yawned widely and stretched out his limbs as if preparing to once again sleep.
“Tell him!”
“Massa, he is Ashanti. He calls out to the god of Bosumtwi because dat is his god. He no understand Jesus.”
“Tell him he’s making a mistake! There is only one god, and that is the god Jesus. If he calls on Jesus, even at this late hour, he will be saved.” Without realizing it, Hartley had raised his voice into an almost hysterical pitch.
“Massa,” the man said with another yawn, “is him dying, not you. He knows which god he wants to call to.”
“Do as I say,” grated Hartley furiously.
The watchman was swelling up to deliver another argument when the injured man gargled the rattle of death, shuddered, and fell still. Hartley lost his temper and gave the watchman a swift kick to his rump, nearly toppling him over.
“Massa!” the man squealed, spinning around confrontationally. Hartley, who was armed with a pistol tucked in his pants, glared at the man, hoping he would attack. The idea flitted across the man’s face like the shadow of a passing moth but quickly disappeared.
“Kick Samson, Massa?” the man blubbered abjectly. “Why you kick Samson? Me only do what you say.”
And looking suddenly like someone broken, he limped back into the mill and disappeared. Not five feet away from where Hartley Fudges stood, the dead man lay staring at the night sky, the severed stump still seeping blood over the splintered bone.
* * *
During the first year of his stay at Mount Pleasant plantation, Hartley was accompanied practically everywhere he went to by Cuffy. Sometimes the boy was useful in keeping Hartley looking as resplendent as possible under crude living circumstances by tending to his master’s laundry or keeping the shine on his shoes or making sure that his clothes were properly ironed. But as time passed the boy was turning into a nuisance. He became particularly aggravating by his constant complaints that Hartley was not treating him like a proper slave and was therefore causing him to lose face among his own people.
The first time Hartley heard this complaint, he crossly said to the boy, “What do you want me to do? Beat you?”
A light went on in Cuffy’s eyes. “Yes, sah! Beat me and leave mark. People respect a slave with whip mark on him back. When me tek off me shirt, people will say, Yes, sah! Dis is a proper slave.”
Hartley stared at him with disbelief. “I’m not going to beat you,” he said crisply.
“So I must walk round de grounds wid no respect,” Cuffy said bitterly.
“As a matter of fact, I’ve been thinking about freeing you,” Hartley said.
“Freeing me! Freeing me, sah? Wha’ me do dat make you want treat me so bad?”
“Most slaves want to be free. Why wouldn’t you?”
“Free, sah? Free fe do what?”
“Do anything you like. That’s what being free means.”
“Free to be you slave?”
“Don’t be absurd. Being a slave and being free are opposites. You can’t be both. That’s trying to have your cake and eat it too.”
“What? What cake me have fe eat?”
“It’s just a manner of speaking. It means if you eat something, you no longer have it. And if you have it, you haven’t eaten it.”
“Eat what, sah? Wha’ me eat?”
“Never mind. Just leave me alone.”
That conversation, or a variation of it, took place repeatedly over the next few days and provoked Hartley to the point that he very nearly succumbed and gave the boy a whipping. But he hardened his heart like a biblical pharaoh and would not give Cuffy a fashionable beating. Who was the master and who the slave, anyway? Hartley was determined not to let his own servant bully him into acting conventionally. So the subject came up again and again like sprouting overnight mushrooms but Hartley would not budge no matter how Cuffy pleaded.
One evening a weary and begrimed Hartley rode in from the fields where he’d spent the day supervising a galley of cutters. He was on his way to the great house after turning in his horse to the care of the slaves in the stable when he heard the sound of someone being whipped. There was no mistaking the rhythmic slash of the cat-o’-nine-tails or the ripping noise it made as its tongs cut into flesh. Accompanying this were grunts from the person being flogged. Curiosity got the better of Hartley and he followed the sounds until he came to a tree to whose trunk Cuffy was tied, his back crisscrossed with the welts.
“Enough now?” the beater asked, panting for breath because he was an older man who no longer did any physical labor.
“How it look?” Cuffy asked, craning his head to see the ugly marks the whip had deposited on his skin.
“It look good, man,” the old man said, nodding his approval like a craftsman proud of his own handiwork.
“You bring de looking glass?”
“Yes, man,” the old man said agreeably, taking a small mirror out of his pants pocket and holding it up to give the boy a glimpse of his torn back.
Hartley slipped away without being seen. Cuffy was paying the old man to beat him! That way he could brag about being the perfect slave and have whip marks on his back to authenticate it. Behind that deception lay a twisted and deranged way of thinking that stunned Hartley and brought home to him a somber truth: he simply did not understand Cuffy or his warped mentality. Hartley sneaked away like one who had blundered into an obscene private ceremony.
That very night at dinner he asked Meredith, “How do you free a slave?”
“You give him his freedom paper, signed and witnessed,” Meredith said.
The two men were silent as they chewed their food.
Finally, Meredith asked, “Tired of owning Cuffy?”
“Sick of it,” Hartley said sourly.
“I thought it strange the way you bought him.”
“It was an impulse,” Hartley said.
“I tell you what, I’ll buy him from you for the estate. He’s clever. He’d make a good feeder.”
Hartley thought about it for long moment before shaking his head. “I’ll just set him free.”
“That’s throwing away fifty pounds.”
“There’s nowhere to spend the money anyway,” Hartley replied.
After breakfast that morning, Hartley accompanied Meredith to his makeshift office in the great house. Meredith drew up the bill of freedom and Hartley signed it with a flourish.
* * *
Hartley picked his spot carefully for the announcement of Cuffy’s manumission. He knew that the slave quarters were a hotbed of rumor and gossip, that in the drabness of their daily life of servitude the slaves were constantly swapping speculation and hearsay about the backra and his goings-on. So he waited until dusk when most of the slaves were gathering for the evening meal, sitting in clumps joshing with each other. In the middle of this chatter, Hartley rod
e up asking for Cuffy, causing a sudden and unnerving silence to settle over the company. Everyone denied seeing Cuffy; a couple of men who had the same name stood up as he were asking for them.
“Why you want Cuffy, Massa?” one old man dared to ask.
“Him want beat him again,” muttered someone furtively.
Hartley was about to leave when Cuffy, unaware that his massa was looking for him, came striding boldly into the slave quarters. He was wearing no shirt, and the welts on his back were plainly visible. By the time he realized that the man on the horse was Hartley, it was too late for him to run away or to pretend not to see him. He looked around nervously at the onlookers.
“Ah, Cuffy,” Hartley declared loud enough for everyone to hear, “I’m glad I found you. I brought your free paper for you. As of now, you’re no longer a slave, but a freeman.”
And Hartley handed him the free paper. The other slaves surged forward to peer at the document, to touch it reverently, and to ask Cuffy if it was real or just for show.
Hartley turned around and cantered off toward the great house without looking back. He was thinking to himself that not only was Cuffy free, but so was he.
Yet the boy was not happy, and he trailed Hartley to the great house.
“You shame me before me brethren,” he hissed venomously when he caught up with the backra at the main entrance of the great house.
“You have your freedom!” Hartley snapped. “What else do you want?”
“Respect,” the boy said. “You take dat away from me.”
“Would you rather have respect than freedom?” Hartley asked.
“Without respect, dere is no freedom,” the boy said bitterly.
“Rubbish,” Hartley shot back, riding away and leaving the boy standing forlornly in the shadows of the slave quarters.
But that night, as Hartley lay down to sleep, he heard the discreet noise of a body settling against the door of his bedroom. He listened intently and then called out, “Cuffy? Is that you?”
The Family Mansion Page 11
