No sooner had he asked that question when he was swamped by an overwhelming sense of absurdity. The boy was free, surely he wouldn’t continue sleeping in the doorway of his former master.
And on that disquieting note, Hartley Fudges fell into a fitful sleep.
CHAPTER 11
One morning Hartley woke up to a chilling outcry about a vicious murder at a plantation some twenty miles away. From the somber gabble at breakfast he learned the fragmentary story. The victims were a white overseer from Dublin and a slave woman who had shared his bed for the past five years. As was usually the case, the details were hazy and kept changing with every retelling of the gruesome tale. In the bloodiest version, the great house had been set afire, the overseer and his woman killed along with three white overseas visitors. It appeared to be the work of renegade slaves hoping that their grisly example would spark an islandwide uprising against the white man.
“I wish I could take off this bloody skin and walk about Jamaica like a free man,” Yates muttered in his coffee cup.
“What do you mean?” Hartley asked. “You’re a free man now.”
“Free!” Yates said scornfully. “How can you be free when every black man on the island is trying to kill you?”
“Isn’t that a bit overstated?” scoffed Hartley. “I mean, not every black man wants to kill us. If that were the case, we’d be dead by now.”
Meredith, who was sitting nearby listening to the clamor, intervened suddenly. “This is hardly breakfast fare. It’s too depressing.” That was Meredith’s usual attitude. Life in Jamaica was difficult enough; talking about it only made things worse. If you must talk about anything, talk about the rainbow you saw yesterday, not about the murder that happened last night.
So the two backras, the young English one and the middle-aged Irishman—both of whom had no opinions on rainbows—lapsed into a gloomy silence.
* * *
The next morning Hartley found Cuffy curled up against the closed door of his bedroom. Startled awake, the boy rubbed his eyes and looked around him as if he were lost. Seeing his former owner looming above him, Cuffy jumped to his feet.
“What are you doing here?” Hartley asked curtly.
“Sleeping, sah.”
“Don’t sleep in front of my door anymore,” Hartley snapped. “You’re a free man. You’re no longer a slave.”
A look of stubbornness jelled over the boy’s features. “Cuffy don’t wanna be free, Massa. Cuffy only want to be a perfect slave.”
“Now, see here, Cuffy,” Hartley said sharply, “I’m beginning to think that you’re out of your mind. I’ve turned you free. Your whole life is ahead of you.”
“When Massa was sick, who tek care of him? Cuffy. Who wash and iron Massa’s clothes? Cuffy. Who shine Massa’s shoes and boots? Cuffy.” The boy was raising his voice as he became more and more agitated about his unappreciated services. Embarrassed by the outburst, Hartley strolled past the boy and headed for the breakfast room, Cuffy trotting stubbornly in his wake with a doggish air. At the doorway that opened up on the dining room where the backras were already at breakfast, Hartley stopped and turned to face his former slave who also abruptly came to a halt.
“Stop following me around or so help me God, I’ll punch you in the nose,” Hartley glowered, making a menacing fist.
The boy did not flinch. Instead, he tilted his head as if to present his face for the expected blow. When it did not come his expression once again turned sullen and resentful and he began to taunt Hartley loud enough for the breakfasting Irish inside the dining room to overhear.
“Massa full of mouth and nothing else. All him do is talk ’bout how him going lick down Cuffy. But is pure mouth him have ’cause him don’t do nothing.”
Hartley reddened and turned on his heels and strode into the dining room where he knew Cuffy would not be allowed to enter. A house slave scampered out the door and shooed Cuffy away. Hartley heaved a sigh of relief and mumbled good morning to everyone.
“You should not allow your slave to talk to you that way,” Yates, who sat across the table from Hartley, scolded quietly. “You set a bad example that will affect the rest of us.”
A murmur of agreement and nodding rippled over the eating men.
“He’s no longer my slave. I freed him.”
Yates looked surprised. “So why is he following you around?”
“He doesn’t want to be free. He wants to be perfect.”
Yates chewed his food for a long pensive moment. “What do you mean perfect?”
“Just that: he wants to be the perfect slave.”
“Is he mad?”
“I think so,” Hartley mumbled. “It’s really uncanny. It’s almost like he has read Plato.”
“Who’s Plato?”
“You don’t know? He was a philosopher. I’m surprised you never heard of him.”
“We’ve got plenty philosophers in Ireland. What we need are more carpenters. Send your slave away.”
“I tell you, he’s not my slave.”
“If he’s free, he doesn’t belong here on the plantation. Send him away. If you won’t do it, I’ll do it myself. Why did you buy him in the first place?”
“It was an impulse. I’d just landed after being at sea for nearly two months. The boy was having trouble with his owner, who offered to sell him to me. So I bought him.”
“Now that you no longer own him, tell him he can’t stay on the plantation.”
“I’ve told him that a dozen times,” Hartley said sourly. “He doesn’t obey.”
“Better if you’d bought a dog or a horse,” commented Mahoney.
Hartley was bitterly stewing to himself about the obnoxious behavior of Cuffy and was preparing a broadside on the evils of primogeniture, that unfair law that had driven him from his homeland and deposited him in this island wilderness, but was restrained when the group of Irishmen started on a new topic—a sultry slave woman they suspected of giving all five of them a virulent strain of gonorrhea.
“If she did it deliberately,” Yates said savagely, “one of us should cut her throat.”
“I don’t think she even knew she had it. She’s pretty ignorant, you know,” Mahoney said.
“I really don’t know her,” Fitzgerald admitted. “I don’t believe I ever talked to her.”
“But didn’t you fuck her at least once?”
Fitzgerald, who had the old-fashioned Catholic squeamishness about sex, turned red-faced. “Yes, I did. But who talks to them at a time like that or afterward?”
The men sniggered, their mouths twisting into furtive, conspiratorial grins like a cabal of plotters sharing a lewd private joke.
* * *
After finishing breakfast, Hartley rode around the perimeter of the sugarcane fields, looking for malingerers and trespassers. Armed with two pistols and a dagger, he was soon bored to death. It was Meredith’s orders, however, that the backras make their presence felt by these horseback patrols, which were rotated among them. He trotted past a field that was being harvested, stopped under a shady mahoe tree, and watched as the cane cutters, slashing right and left with their machetes, reduced the stalks to stubble and piled up the cut cane into mounds that other slaves loaded into carts yoked to Brahman bulls and hauled away to the mill. The sun was scorching the land and ripples of heat shimmered in the air. When it was this hot the island wilted and all creatures sought respite in the scrap of shadows, but not the slaves, and especially not during harvest time. The cane cutters advanced steadily through the fields flattening the rows with their machetes. Every now and again the crack of a driver’s whip sounded like the snap of breaking bone.
Hartley was looking idly on when out of the corner of his eye, he noticed someone flitting behind a nearby tree. He rode over to it and found Cuffy trying to hide behind a bush.
“What are you doing here? Have you been following me?” Hartley asked testily.
“A good slave stay with him massa.”
“I’m
not your blasted master! You’re free. And you’re no longer allowed on the plantation premises. Now go away.”
“Cuffy don’t want no damn free. You can’t just dash ’way Cuffy like old shoe.”
Hartley stared at the boy, who he thought must obviously have gone mad. A few yards away in the cane field a driver, looking bored and hot, was snapping his whip for practice.
“You there!” Hartley called out, beckoning to the driver to come to him.
The man ambled over, still playing with his whip. Cuffy shrank away behind a bush.
“You see this man?” Hartley asked, pointing to Cuffy. “He doesn’t belong on the plantation. He’s no longer a slave. He’s free. If you see him anywhere around, run him off the grounds.”
The driver broke into an evil grin and flexed his whip. “Hey, boy!” he snarled. “Off de grounds.”
“Massa treat Cuffy bad,” the boy blubbered, backing up with his eyes fixed to the snapping whip. He back stepped to the cut-stone wall bordering the thick woods that encircled the grounds of the plantation with a scruffy collar of thick bush.
“Massa,” the boy shrieked, “don’t send Cuffy away!”
This plea was followed by the crack of the whip and the sound of scurrying footfalls. A few minutes later, the driver reappeared. “Him gone, Massa,” the man grunted.
“Good riddance!” said Hartley.
The backra nodded curtly and rode away, leaving the driver looking disappointed as if he expected some special favor in return. The man shambled back to the field being harvested, still snapping his whip for practice, making a sound like gunshots that bounced off the mountains with an ominous echo.
* * *
When he first landed in Jamaica, Hartley Fudges thought the island exotic and beguiling. The sight of a rugged mountain gorge being carved open by the rippling blade of a river flashing in the sunlight would occasionally elate his spirits and give him a glimpse of something inexpressibly majestic, making him feel like an intruder accidentally witnessing a master artist toiling away in solitude. But as time dripped past and with beauty so promiscuously scattered everywhere around him, he was soon struck only by a vast and incomprehensible emptiness, and no matter how picturesque or sublime the land appeared, he still felt that he was bleeding away the days and weeks of his passing life.
As the empty nights and dreary days passed, the strange story of Cuffy and his expulsion from slavery swept over the plantation. It was almost impossible to keep such a secret from circulating among members of this bizarre society, slaves or freemen. It was a preposterous enough tale to entice everyone, and against the gray sameness of hard labor and cruelty that was replicated day after wearying day in this isolated corner of Jamaica, the idea of a slave demanding harsher treatment and refusing freedom struck the regimented population of blacks, whites, and free colored as funny and drew from nearly everyone either speculation or a wry chuckling.
It was a curious place, the plantation, a world unto itself that was populated by black men and women in bondage who lived in dirt-floor hovels and were herded like animals through various menial jobs by a handful of white men who slept fitfully in a palatial mansion, its existence as ridiculously intrusive as an Egyptian pyramid. Paradoxically, the year Hartley Fudges landed as a dispossessed second son would turn out to be the most productive year for sugar in the history of Jamaica. That signal year the island produced 101,600 tons of sugar, the most of any country in the world. And Hartley was a small part of this record year. He didn’t know it, and if he had, that knowledge would have meant nothing to him. But he was part of it.
* * *
Among the backras in this troublesome time, opinion ran stormily against Hartley Fudges. And it seemed like every new sighting of Cuffy trespassing on plantation property brought renewed and boisterous arguments among the backras. One windless night, much to the irritation of Hartley Fudges, the subject of this bizarre behavior by his slave became the topic of dinner table conversation. It was the sort of unconventional subject that the Irish chatterboxes worried like a dog with a bone. Mahoney, a wiry baldheaded man, thought that Hartley had badly mishandled the whole affair.
“You should have flogged him when he asked you to,” Mahoney chided the young Englishman.
“So who is in charge, in that case?” wondered Yates. “If we allow slaves to tell us what to do to them and how to treat them, where does that leave us? It puts us on a ship where the crew gives orders to the captain.”
Hartley, who’d had too much rum with his dinner, was reeling over the table like he was aboard a ship in a tossing sea. When he was drunk, his normal baritone voice changed to the shrill level of a soprano. He was also likely to erupt in chuckling, guffawing, and cackling that, tinged with his drunken soprano inflection, sounded ugly and sarcastic.
“I think he’s off his head,” Hartley Fudges muttered. Then he laughed.
“What nonsense!” Mahoney blurted out. “The boy wasn’t asking for anything special. He just wanted to put on a decent show for his family and fellow slaves.”
“So let him take his show elsewhere,” Yates said. “A plantation is no place for amateur theatrics.”
“None of you seem to understand how perilous our place in Jamaica has become,” said Fitzgerald, a man who was generally subdued and quiet and only rarely expressed an opinion. “It’s not because we’re stronger than the Negroes that we’re able to enslave them. It’s because they believe we are. If they ever find out the truth, they’ll slaughter us for certain.”
“That’s why we shouldn’t treat them like anything else but slaves,” Mahoney said firmly. “Or they might find out our secrets and weaknesses and rise up against us. We want them to look at us with respect and fear.”
“Quite so,” seconded Fitzgerald. “If we tell them all our secrets, we’ll look ridiculous.”
And every eye turned to look accusingly at Hartley.
* * *
What does it mean to look ridiculous, and why was the slave master so fearful of this? The reason is not complex: what the European was doing to Jamaica and other countries was outright brigandage. But his shadow self went to a good deal of trouble to project not only an outcome of inevitability but the conviction that usurping the minds and hearts of alien peoples was righteous and proper. It was not. To have the opposite exposed was to be found out and shown to be something else than the pretense. It is the same lesson taught in the fable “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” His nakedness is not what brings down the emperor and subjects him to public ignominy. It is the fact that he believes he is properly clothed. A naked emperor is nothing more than a naked man, and all men, in the beginning and the end, are naked. But the emperor who mistakes nakedness for clothing is not only naked, he is deluded. What is worse is that he is wrong, but thinks himself right. This stark exposure of wrong pretending to be right is what creates the cruel impression of ridiculousness.
* * *
If keeping secrets from the slaves was really the aim of the overseers, they were living in the wrong abode. In the great house, keeping secrets from the slave staff was difficult if not impossible. The problem was that most great houses traditionally had too many slaves. Some had as many as thirty slaves to serve only five or six residents. The great house that Hartley slept in, for example, had nineteen female slaves and six males but only six white residents. To keep that many slaves around was to implant idle eyes and ears in every bedroom, toilet, and hallway, making secret-keeping a vain hope. But a great house with many servants had by 1805 become a traditional symbol of a plantation’s prosperity. Throughout the length and breadth of Jamaica it continued to be a time-honored symbol, until the collapse of sugar production after the slaves were set free in 1834. With the slaves gone, the houses were padlocked and abandoned, and these once majestic mansions were left to endure the fondling of obsequious vines and parasitic creepers.
Centuries later, the stone foundations of these great houses are scattered throughout the countryside of
Jamaica like the bones of Paleolithic beasts rotting in a merciless eternity.
* * *
There were no more argumentative people on the face of the earth than the Irish: as Christmas approached in 1805, Hartley came to this conclusion. The Irish overseers argued over everything, with passion and style. No matter what topic might come up, one of them would take the pro side, another would adopt the con side, and a clamorous exchange filled with similes and metaphors and noisy declamations would swell from the wraparound verandah of the great house and blow over the darkened fields where the cane stalks grew in disciplined rows like a military formation. These quarrels usually took place at night and were loud enough to be heard in the slave quarters some hundred or so yards away. Often, bewildered slaves trying to sleep in dimly lit hovels would hear the uproar coming from the great house like the sounds of snarling dogs.
It seemed to Hartley that not only were they argumentative, the Irish overseers were also nervous and fearful about their situation in Jamaica. The position of the white man, to even a casual observer, seemed perilous. So the Irish overseers fulminated among themselves about their unhappy predicament, cursing the day they’d first laid eyes on this island.
Here, among the stumps of Jamaican history, was being hatched an attitude toward the land that persists even to this day. It is an attitude that blames every human misstep and calamity on the innocent land, as if the island was not merely the indifferent stage of human misconduct, but its cause. Continents, however, do not come in for this anthropomorphic abuse, only islands. People do not walk around muttering curses at the continent of South America because they were robbed in Peru. But because they are so small, islands are often scapegoats for human wrongs.
Centuries later, long after Hartley Fudges’s footprints had been erased from the land, the descendents of the men and women of the nineteenth century would continue the tradition of blaming poor Jamaica for the stupidity of its people.
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