The Family Mansion

by Anthony C. Winkler

  CHAPTER 12

  Jamaica in 1805 was a nervous, fretful colony. Almost no trace of Spanish occupation, which ended 150 years earlier, was left on the island except the merest whiff that lingered in such names as Rio Bueno and Ocho Rios. But by 1805 an avalanche of typical English place names such as Fair Prospect and Williamsfield had effectively buried what little remained of the ancient conquistadors. Stewardship of the island was now in the hands of English and African descendents of a hardy and rugged group of men.

  Typifying the breed of Jamaican planters in 1805 was Simon Taylor, the richest planter on the island. Born in the eastern parish of St. Thomas in 1740, Taylor was a rash, stubborn man who was described by General Nugent, a former governor of Jamaica, as being “in strong opposition to government at present and violent in his language against the King’s ministers for their conduct toward Jamaica.” The portrait of Simon Taylor is softened by the ex-governor’s remarks that he “has had an excellent education [he went to Eton], is well informed and is a warm friend to those he takes by the hand.”

  Living in Jamaica as he did made Taylor the exception rather than the rule among plantation owners. Most of the plantations were under absentee ownership, the day-to-day running entrusted to local managers and overseers. One consideration that kept the owners and their families away from Jamaica was the high mortality rate of white people, including their own sons and daughters. One Jamaican planter had eighteen grandchildren born on the island, fifteen of whom died at an average age of 23.9 years.

  During these bad old days, life in Jamaica was tumultuous and unpredictable. By 1805 Jamaica had a disproportionately strong voice for its size in British parliamentary government. Its lobbyists were influential and cunning, and they fought hard to keep the present system of slavery. But the antislavery movement was a moral juggernaut that was impossible to stop. Many of the churches, the Baptists and Moravians particularly, were categorically against slavery and had sent missionaries to Jamaica to help in the fight for its abolition. Some of these missionaries preached openly against slavery and took the rabble-rousing position that not only did black slaves have souls, they would also end up in the same heaven as was in store for white men.

  Shifting alliances and allegiances among England, France, and Spain remained a problem as well as a fact of life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the Caribbean this rivalry was particularly intense as the big European powers, seeking to expand their West Indian holdings, probed the defenses of different islands. Guadeloupe, for example, was annexed by the French in 1674, captured by the English in 1759, and occupied until 1763 when it again passed on to France. The British took over the island in 1794 and again in 1810, the second occupation lasting six years. Some islands even ended up under dual ownership. St. Martin would eventually be half French and half Dutch; the island of Hispaniola, half Spanish and half French.

  By now the English were beginning to realize that no island was more important to their interests than Jamaica. During the Anglo-French War, the British secretary of war declared that “the loss of Jamaica would be complete ruin to our credit,” and that fifteen thousand French troops landing in Jamaica would be a greater disaster than if they landed in England. Before the abolition of slavery, Jamaica generated astounding wealth that made it more important to the English than all their combined possessions in Canada.

  * * *

  Hartley Fudges lived the little picture, his hours consumed every day with his duties as an overseer, having only a vague idea of the part he played in the big scheme of things. With every passing day and week, he found himself sinking deeper and deeper into an ugly, unsociable frame of mind that made him avoid the Irishmen and their constant bickering and pedantic arguments over nothing. Weekends were especially difficult for him because unless the plantation was in the middle of a harvest, there was little for all the overseers to do. Many of the slaves spent their Saturdays cultivating their small plots of land and Sundays lugging their surplus ground produce to sell in the market.

  This curious custom of slaves growing their own food was mandated by law as early as 1678. Saturday was the one day of the week when slaves were permitted to cultivate their own gardens, keeping and selling whatever produce they grew but could not consume. It was also the practice to occasionally give slaves a free weekend or Sunday to travel to nearby markets where they could sell their surplus goods. This temporary ticket to freedom was issued by an overseer who wrote down the particulars on a piece of paper that slaves had to surrender on their return to the plantation at the end of the free period. As the returning slave looked on, the overseer would then burn the expired pass, a custom memorialized in Jamaica today in the quaint idiom, “Your freepaper burn,” meaning your holiday is up.

  Granting the slaves an occasional respite from the merciless grind of hard labor they were expected to perform, however, also had at its bottom very practical economic reasons. Slaves were relied on as the main source of manual labor on the plantation; moreover, hungry or underfed slaves did not have the strength or energy to work hard.

  Yet feeding such a robust labor source meant a huge additional expense to the plantation. Various attempts to find a cheap source of carbohydrates for the slaves had come to naught, sometimes through sheer bad luck. The infamous mutiny on the HMS Bounty in 1789, for example, had taken place as the vessel made its way to Jamaica with a cargo of breadfruit shoots meant to feed the slaves.

  It was particularly hard on weekends when the fields were mainly empty of hands and only the occasional worker idling about the property on some unknown errand could be seen. Then the heaviness of time and the persistent feelings of wasting his life gnawed at Hartley with the virulence of physical illness. Everything he saw around him seem pointless and empty. The furled hills combed in pleats of green that poised in the sky all the way to the ocean held no appeal. Everything he saw was plain and humdrum and tawdry; day or night, nothing struck him as beautiful—not the uncut jewels of starlight scattered across the night sky like spilled treasures, not the Milky Way leaking luminescent stardust. On his days off he went nowhere but wandered around the property either on foot or on horseback. For the land he felt neither love nor respect. Everywhere he looked he saw the same opulent luxuriance of the tropics that he found cloying and overdone, and nearly every day he muttered under his breath the same bitter verdict about the surrounding landscape, “Too rich. Too rich.”

  If he had been a poet or had the heart of a poet he might have scribbled rhapsodies of appreciation to the beauty everywhere, and every day he would have had a different slice of loveliness to tantalize his imagination and send molten words and images bubbling out of his pen. But his heart had no poetry in it, and his imagination was a stark empty cupboard.

  * * *

  Every now and again the plantation would have a scare, which came mainly from the sea. Many Jamaicans saw the sea as the enemy. It was the sea that had brought marauding Europeans to Jamaica’s doorstep. It was the sea that had deposited shiploads of black slaves onto Jamaica’s shore and left them there like chattel to be bought and sold. And it was the sea that piped the clamor and confusion of distant foreign wars to Jamaica, unnerving the already jittery population. When manumission finally came, it was no wonder that many of the slaves fled into the interior of the island where they established townships and villages as far away from the sea as they could get.

  With Spain and France and England constantly jockeying for power in the Caribbean, the sight of any sail on the horizon was almost always cause for alarm. From the veranda of the Mount Pleasant great house the arc of the horizon was plainly visible, and anyone watching—with or without a telescope—could plainly see the occasional ship passing under full sail. With a telescope the flag of a vessel might even be glimpsed if the ship was not too far out. Because the plantation was up on a hill and miles away from the ocean, there was little danger of bombardment that some of the coastal plantations had suffered. Occasionally a ship would attac
k an island belonging to an adversary nation and burn its plantations to the ground. But Mount Pleasant was too high up on the hill and too hard to get to for any marauders to pillage.

  Yet once in a while there would be a flurry of excitement caused by passing ships. One day, for example, three ships were sighted sailing near to the coast, headed toward Montego Bay. They flew French flags and appeared to be men-of-war. The lead ship had her gun ports open, and the small armada sailing parallel to the coastline of Jamaica had numerous telescopes silently trained on them from the shore. But eventually the three sailing ships struck out a course for deep sea that took them away from the island. Whatever their intent was, whether to probe the defenses of the colony or to spread the disquiet and uneasiness of a distant war to Jamaicans, no one could say. But everyone was grateful to see the three interlopers disappear below the horizon as if they had sailed off the edge of the world as mariners once feared would happen when the world was flat.

  * * *

  Christmas came and went. Christmas Day was declared a day of rest and free passes issued to those slaves who wished to visit their ground produce gardens or to take their surplus crops to sell in the market. In 1805 Christmas was a quiet holiday, not the climactic revel the writer Charles John Huffam Dickens (1812–1870) would later depict and glorify. On this one occasion the slaves were allowed to disport themselves in their own way. Suspended was a prohibition against street dancing and many slaves, some dressed up in traditional homemade costumes, others carrying and beating drums, took to the streets in a John Canoe parade.

  Dancing in the streets at Christmastime was an ancient custom whose origin was shrouded in mystery. All throughout the plantation was heard the intoxicating throbbing of the drums as the revelries began at dusk and continued until darkness had fallen. The earliest reference to this custom—variously called Jonkanno, John Connu, and John Canoe—occurred in 1725, although the performers were not given a specific name until 1774 when historian Edward Long referred to the celebrants as John Canoe dancers. Costumes worn by the dancers were festive and colorful and consisted of some well-known John Cannu figures such as Horsehead, which referred to a dancer whose costume was capped with a movable jaw resembling a horse’s and whose zinc teeth, manipulated by the concealed dancer, made a hideous clacking sound. Cowhead was a similar grotesquerie but one whose handmade head, complete with real horns, was fashioned to resemble a cow’s. The sight of these two writhing, prancing figures, both of whom would shriek “John Canoe!” at intervals before exploding to the rhythms of the pounding drums, would cause children to cry and run screaming to their mothers. Also included among the costumed characters was Pitchy Patchy, a funny-looking figure clad in glued-together scraps of cloth and strips of paper who would whirl around in a blur as he gyrated to the hypnotic drumming.

  Parading through the slave quarters, followed by a semidrunken celebrating crowd, the procession eddied at the gates of the great house in a cataract of swirling bodies while the drums throbbed with the mesmerizing rhythm. Several of the backras strolled onto the veranda and peered out at the crowd that was in a boisterous, ecstatic mood as the revelers danced and stomped their feet joyfully.

  “This night would almost make you believe that there’s no slavery,” Hartley said wryly.

  “Right now there is no slavery,” Meredith replied.

  “Who was John Cannu?” Hartley asked.

  “No one knows for certain,” Meredith said. “I read somewhere that he was a cabocero or village head on the Guinea coast, a brave and faithful warrior. The Prussians left him in command of a village and he held out against a superior Dutch force for a long time.”

  The two men peered at the festive crowd that shimmered with cat paws of movement like the placid face of a lake crinkling to the breeze.

  “This is what happens to people who can’t read or write,” Meredith muttered sadly. “They can only dance to celebrate life. There’s no other way to memorialize anyone or any event.”

  Hartley was thinking, as he scanned the shadows and the teeming throng, that somewhere in Plato’s ether was a perfect dance of which this one was a pale imitation. If he allowed his imagination to run riot, he would have had to consider that the ensemble of the moment, in Plato’s world, would also include him and Meredith as perfect forms, which would make him an imperfect copy of himself. Since he was presently the only inhabitant of his body, he couldn’t understand who was in the perfect body that existed only in Plato’s world. It was a frivolous thought and one he quickly dismissed. But such abstract Platonic nonsense seemed to pop up in his consciousness with frightful regularity that would distress a weaker mind.

  The crowd wore itself out as the evening dragged on, and soon the drumbeat became erratic then sporadic, and finally with a flurry it died out altogether and the crowd crumbled into clumps and bunches that broke off from the main body and drifted listlessly to the slave quarters. Meredith came over to Hartley and told him to find the driver known as Watkins and collect from him the drums that had been used in the John Cannu dancing. There were six drums and Hartley was charged with getting every one of them and personally turning them over to Meredith.

  “Why?” wondered Hartley.

  “Drums are banned among slaves in Jamaica,” explained Meredith. “In Africa, people say that some tribes communicate by drumming. In the event of an islandwide revolt, we don’t want the slaves communicating with each other.”

  Early the next morning, Hartley wandered into the slave quarters looking for Watkins, whom he found sleeping under a tree. The shacks that slumped all around like a growth of wild mushrooms seemed even dirtier and more desolate than usual and a palpable sense of dissipation and waste hung over the huddled buildings. The air was sticky and damp, and every breath Hartley drew smelled as if infected with the exhalations of a sick bed. Aside from the man sleeping under a tree, no one else was in sight, not even a child. Next to the ragged sleeper were drums arranged in two clumps of three and two. Oblivious to where he was or to Hartley who stood over him, Watkins was snoring loudly and gave off the smell of old rum. Unsure of what to do, Hartley was about to rouse the man when he heard a soft female voice whisper, “What you want, donkey hood?”

  He turned and saw the slave girl he knew as Phibba looking him over saucily from the shadowy doorway of a nearby hovel.

  “Don’t call me that name,” Hartley said sharply. “I was about to wake him up and get him to help me carry the drums to the great house.”

  “I’ll help you,” she said. “Make him sleep.”

  “There are supposed to be six drums. There are only five.”

  She went over to the sleeping man and, using her fingers, calculated that there were indeed only five drums, not six.

  “Are you related to this man?” Hartley asked.

  “He’s my father,” she replied, walking away. “I’ll check the house.”

  Hartley wanted to ask, How can that man possibly be your father? You’re not the same color. Is your mother white? but he stopped himself when he realized that the mother must have been impregnated by a white man who, if he were even aware that he had fathered a child with a slave, had probably renounced paternity. He thought back to at least four women who had made the same accusation against him and how he had dismissed them.

  Well, he didn’t invent the system. He didn’t own a plantation. True, he was promiscuous with the slave women, but so were all the other overseers, Meredith included. And when you got right down to it, many of the women who he had screwed since he arrived in Jamaica had asked for it. He was no one extraordinary or exceptional. He was just a young man sowing his oats. Every day he had to run the gauntlet of lovely dark-skinned women. What was he supposed to do when a woman got up on his horse and then put her arms around his waist so she could feel him up and arouse him? There was only so much temptation a man could resist. He went over these rationalizations like a shopkeeper taking inventory of unsold goods.

  He was going on in this k
ey in his thoughts when Phibba emerged out of the dark shack with the missing drum. Each of them carrying three drums, Hartley and the woman walked toward the great house.

  “Massa, you like de John Cannu yesterday?” Phibba asked.

  “Rather a noisy affair, wasn’t it?” Hartley answered offhandedly.

  “De drumbeat never catch you?”

  “No, I can’t say that it did anything except give me a headache.”

  “You tek everything so serious. So de white man stay. Everything serious. Nothing fun. Everything plan out ahead o’ time.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of Plato?”

  “We have a few Plato on de property. Which Plato you mean?”

  “The Plato of books.”

  “Phibba can’t read books, Massa. Phibba can’t write except one word. You want see how Phibba write dat one word?”

  “Oh, all right,” Hartley sighed.

  They lay the drums on the grass and Phibba picked up a stick and walked over to a patch of clay in the roadbed. Bending down, she scratched Stop on the makeshift slate with the intense concentration of one who had repeatedly rehearsed doing so.

  When she was finished, she looked up at Hartley and asked proudly, “You know what dat say?”

  Hartley almost forgot himself and blurted out, Now, see here, woman. I went to Eton. But he remembered where he was and replied, “It says Stop.” Then, because his answer seemed to him to be so lame, he added, “I went to Eton.”

  Phibba looked up at him quizzically. “What name Eton?”

  “It’s a famous school that produces gentlemen.”

  “What is a gentleman?”

  “I am.”