“Oh, I see. Now I understand.”
Hartley was not at all sure from her tone that she understood. “You do? What is a gentleman?”
“A man like you.”
“What is a man like me like?”
“Him have a donkey hood. And him know how to read and write.”
“He has nothing of the kind!” Hartley snapped.
She recoiled as if she had been punched. “So what is him den?”
Hartley suspected that he was being mocked, but her expression was so serious and attentive that he believed she didn’t understand.
“A gentleman is a man who has good manners, speaks the King’s English, treats everyone with respect, reads and writes several languages, and overall is a good fellow.”
“And him have a donkey hood.”
“Stop saying that!”
“You see what my word say?” she asked waspishly. “You nuh see is a word you use in prayer.”
“Stop? A word you use in prayer?”
“De man who teach me to write dat word teach me what it mean too.”
“What does it mean?”
“Stop mean to cease and desist, to come to a halt,” she recited like a schoolchild rattling off a lesson. “Bet you never know dat me know so much word,” she said proudly.
Hartley was at a loss for words. He heaved a sigh and asked the only question he could think of: “Why would you use a word like stop in prayer?”
“Because is what you say to God when you pray.”
“Why on earth would you say that in a prayer?”
“You say, God, stop de rain, too much rain fall. Or you say, Lawd, stop de wickedness of de foe. Or you say, You, God! Stop wid de sun hot! Beg you, stop de king o’ England from mashing up we life.”
They picked up the drums and trudged up the cart track that connected the great house to the denuded stretch of yard where the dilapidated slave hovels were scattered like bones of a picked-clean corpse.
“Who taught you that prayer?” asked Hartley as they approached the stone wall that banded the great house.
“Why you want to know, Massa?”
“It’s almost seditious,” Hartley grumbled.
“What dat mean, Massa?”
“It’s nothing good, I promise you. It’s something very bad, indeed.”
Phibba didn’t speak for a long moment. Finally, she said, “Nobody teach me, donkey hood. Is learn me learn it on me own.”
“If you call me that loathsome name again,” Hartley threatened, “I swear I’ll have you flogged.”
“Donkey hood, donkey hood, donkey hood,” she chanted with malice, her face twisted in a reckless grin.
Hartley set down the three drums he was carrying and grabbed her by the shoulders and threw her to the ground. In a blink he was on top of her as she struggled and squirmed underneath his body weight.
“Get offa me, donkey hood,” she gasped, “or me goin’ scream bloody murder.”
He settled on top of her with his face buried deep against her neck. From a subterranean part of her body lifted a natural musk of rising sexual excitement that almost made him giddy. Glancing around, Hartley was feeling ridiculous and was about to stand up when he felt one of her hands squeezing him in a delicate spot and the other pulling down his pantaloons until his naked bottom was brushing against the coolness of the morning sky.
“Make me feel dat donkey hood,” she gasped, fumbling with his clothes.
And when she felt it, she shivered and cracked open her legs wide to receive him with a loud moan that reverberated throughout her body like a shudder of joyful welcome.
CHAPTER 13
Donkey hood, known in England as the Marquis of Fudges, and the slave girl Phibba had become lovers. No more unlikely pairing seemed possible, and in the beginning their relationship made them the butt of jokes and after-dinner chat. Among the slaves the union was considered an out-and-out victory for Phibba. In the popular analogy that likens a romancing twosome to a fish and a fisherman, onlookers had no doubt about who had caught whom. Phibba was a fisher of men; Hartley Fudges was the landed fish. Yet in her own way, Phibba had been hooked too. She was drawn to Hartley with an extraordinary passion that made her long for him by day and hunger for him by night.
They made an awkward pair, not because one was black and one white, one a slave and one a master, but mostly because a plantation in nineteenth-century Jamaica had no physical stage where lovers could meet and do their private whispering. The surrounding district had no bars or restaurants for socializing or dining out. The lovers could only furtively meet in the fields or in the commons—two very public places that fueled gossip. Every meeting of the two became a spectacle much talked about by gawking onlookers.
From the beginning, it was obvious that this was no ordinary affair of the flesh between a black woman and white man on the plantation, with all the lopsidedness of a relationship between master and slave. It was obvious because the lovers did not hit and run, did not jump up in postcoital embarrassment and flee the scene of lovemaking. Instead, they lingered in each other’s arms, talking quietly. And afterward, civility and playfulness existed between them as they walked away holding hands like they were bonded together with ties of domesticity.
For an overseer and a slave to have a love affair was neither rare nor unusual. But what was different about Hartley and Phibba was the incandescence of their relationship. As absurd as it may seem, the two of them carried on as though this intimacy were perfectly normal in spite of the gross differences between them, both physical and social. Hartley became the protector of his new love and used his influence as a backra to get her easy work assignments for the week.
One evening when they were together Hartley noticed an ugly welt on her shoulders made, Phibba said, by the driver’s whip. That night Hartley went over to the driver’s cabin, woke the man up out of his sound sleep, and warned him never to strike Phibba again or he would be shot down like a dog. After that, word got out among the other drivers that Phibba was under the protection of the newest overseer.
It hit like a thunderbolt, this love affair, and took everyone by surprise, including Hartley himself. But there was a wild freshness about Phibba that intoxicated the Englishman. Her dark skin felt to his touch as cool as a rose petal and as smooth as a river stone. She seemed to Hartley almost an ethereal presence, and he could not imagine for a second that in Plato’s attic of perfect forms there could exist a prototype of Phibba that was better than the copy he loved.
Practically everyone was against this particular affair, and many gloomy prophecies were muttered about its prospects. Aware of the consternation he was causing, Hartley tried his best to remain nonchalant when he was around Phibba in public, but it was a vain attempt because the gleam in his eye belied his feigned indifference. If Hartley had been one of the Irish overseers, he would have come in for some good-natured teasing. But being a young Englishman, he kindled the national antagonism between the English and the Irish, the spectacle of his dalliance with Phibba worsening an already troubled situation. Hartley walked the plantation dragging behind him an air of self-consciousness as if he expected to be upbraided at any moment by his Irish critics.
Mahoney in particular took vocal exception to what Hartley was doing. If the Englishman had been indiscriminately screwing the odd slave girl, nothing would have been said because nothing would have seemed amiss. But this ridiculous mooning over one slave girl by an Etonian Englishman seemed at best impious and at worst indecent. Why couldn’t Hartley be satisfied with picking off a woman or two from the plantation stock even if he used one more regularly than the others?
When a colonial Englishman becomes aware that his behavior has been indecorous, his tendency is to be superciliously civil, to pepper the air with “I beg your pardons,” and other elocutionary flourishes he hopes will elevate him above his offense. Hartley began to behave with cold, unwavering courtesy toward everyone around him as if holding hands in the late afterno
on when he and Phibba were out for a walk was perfectly acceptable behavior for a backra with a slave lover. The rest of his strategy was to pretend that disapproval of him and his behavior did not exist, as if when he entered the dining room the normal bantering did not immediately stop and the chilling silence of a church service not descend over everyone like a privacy curtain.
Over the next few months the affair between Hartley and Phibba grew even hotter and more blatant. Phibba had no past other than the jumbled memories of a childhood spent in Africa. She had been captured when she was twelve and put on a ship bound for the West Indies. The journey from the West Coast of Africa to Barbados was a nightmare so excruciating that it lingered in her personality more like a wound than a memory. Chained to strangers in the dark, stifling hold of a ship, sometimes sitting in her neighbor’s excrement, she saw people die every day. The stench surrounding her was so overpowering that months after the voyage, she could smell the foul odor of decomposition on her skin like the universal stink of corruption. She had survived by focusing all her might on the weekly airing out of the compartment in which she lay and savoring to the full the few hours of respite she took from being allowed on deck, albeit chained. She had struggled hard to stay alive because she simply could not believe that it was her destiny to be a lifelong slave. Within her heart burned the fevered conviction that her slavery was only a temporary setback from which she was soon recover.
One of the things the lovers liked to do was to go swimming in the river that crisscrossed the plantation and provided it with the motive power for its mill. They knew several spots where the river coiled like a placid snake and the surface of the water was a languid green that shimmered with an inviting iridescence. One particular stretch of the river on whose banks many years ago rebellious slaves had been slaughtered by the white militia became their favorite swimming hole. Most people kept away from this part of the river because local legends said that it was haunted by ghosts of the massacred slaves. Here Hartley and Phibba went skinny-dipping at least twice a week in the evenings when the sun no longer beat down on the earth like the hammer of an enraged blacksmith. Usually they would end up making love on the muddy riverbanks, and anyone snooping in the bushes would have beheld the spectacle of a white man whose flesh was puffy and airy like unkneaded biscuit dough writhing sometimes atop, sometimes beneath, a black woman, both of them giving off the wild grunts and passionate outcries of rutting beasts. And even when they rolled off each other, their passion temporarily sated, they still touched with their extended hands and feet like lovers sprawled out on a featherbed.
They should have had little to talk about. But the very opposite turned out to be true. Phibba was something of a chatterbox, and wherever she went, she seemed to be trailing behind her a long kite tail of sentences fluttering about this and that and the other. As for Hartley, he loved to hear her talk, and the sillier he thought her opinions, the more he loved to hear them. He was always asking her what she thought about this and that, as a way of priming the pump of her talkativeness, for once she was started he knew that she would be hard to stop.
Forget that Phibba had the ancestral past of a tumbleweed or that her African surname was Kati and that she had been named Phibba only because she had been born on a Friday (if she had been born on a Monday, she would have been named Juba); or that Hartley was the latest in a line of Fudges whose ancestry extended back to Adam and Eve (so, for that matter, did everyone else’s except that the world was too shortsighted to grasp that fact). There was also the difference of language—Phibba knew the patois that Jamaicans spoke but her mother tongue was Coromantee—while Hartley knew English, French, and German in the way a parrot knows how to squawk. He had also acquired at Eton a rote knowledge of Greek and Latin, enough for him to read the original classics. But, of course, he never did. As for Phibba, her world was strictly one-dimensional, her life and daily goings and comings closely regulated by her condition of enslavement. Hartley’s outlook, on the other hand, was crammed full of Greek demigods and effigies whose petrified forms haunted the gardens of his family mansion. This all meant that the two lovers were as unalike in their fundamental makeup as it was possible for two people to be who were members of the same species.
Yet they quarreled only occasionally and their little differences were only pinpricks on their relationship. One of the regular arguments they had was over other women. Phibba was jealous of any little flavor or attention Hartley might show another female slave and had to be reassured almost daily that his heart belonged to her and no one else. Years later a scholar would point out that in the plantation society black women produced, brown women served, and white woman consumed. What the writer might have also said was that the competition between all classes of women for the attention of the few white men was constant and unrelenting.
Hartley took Phibba to his own bed, occasionally at first, but then more and more regularly until it was understood that she would sleep at his side every night unless some extraordinary circumstance was prevailing. She was sharing his bed one night, for example, when a new slave went mad and ran amok in the slave quarters, slashing at the air with a machete, sending the slaves fleeing their dingy shacks. The backras woke to the clamor and Mahoney went into the slave quarters; when the man was pointed out to him, without saying a word, the Irishman shot him dead from a distance. He returned wearing a triumphant smirk like he had just destroyed a wild dog and openly boasted to the backras about killing the slave with a single shot. Phibba was angry at the outcome and complained bitterly to Hartley.
“Him shoot de man down like him was a dog. No word o’ warning. Nothing. Just bang, bang and de negar dead.”
“What else could he do?” Hartley asked. “The fellow had a machete. He chopped a woman earlier. Mahoney couldn’t afford to take the chance.”
“Chop what? You see him chop anybody?”
“No, but everyone says that’s what he did.”
“You show me de woman dem say him chop. Him don’t chop nobody. Dem just looking for excuse to shoot de man down like a dog.”
“I don’t particularly like Mahoney,” Hartley said stubbornly. “But I think he had every right to do what he did. I would have done exactly the same.”
“Dat’s because you’s a backra. Dat why you say so.”
“Now, look here, Phibba, I could say the same thing about you.”
“Say what? Dat me is a backra?”
“No, that you believe as you do because you’re a slave. I’m not saying that,” he added quickly, “I’m just saying that I could say that.”
“You better not say it,” Phibba scowled.
“We are what we are, we say what we are, and we do what we are. That’s how life is,” sighed Hartley, and as soon as he had finished this sentence, he felt proud of himself for being so philosophical, so Etonian.
Phibba, who was not philosophical, said airily, “You better shut up about it if you ever want me to drain dat donkey hood again.”
* * *
Love is as wild and as profligate as a weed. It grows where it will grow. It brooks no opposition. It makes men and women behave in ways that are alien and outlandish to their ordinary natures. It suffuses everything, every act and every deed, with the glow of plausibility. And to a thinking man like Hartley, it made life seem like an enigma.
Most mornings he awoke feeling entirely philosophical. He would lie in bed pondering some eternal and inscrutable paradox, feeling like a pilgrim staggering on the plain of ignorance where cruelty abounded and godlessness was the norm. Beside him Phibba would snuggle while his every heartbeat throbbed with a pulse of love for her. He would sigh with longing and marvel that he loved a woman who could neither read nor write and knew how to write and spell only the word Stop, which she often used in her prayers.
One morning she awoke to find Hartley staring at the ceiling because he could not sleep. She lay beside him, curled up cozily against his naked body.
“What you look at?” s
he murmured.
“I’m thinking about a problem,” he said huskily.
“What you think about?”
“I am wondering if we do what we are or are what we do.”
“What kind o’ trash is dat, donkey hood?”
“You know I don’t like that name.”
“Nobody in de room but me. And nobody know better dan me dat you have a donkey hood. Maybe you have a donkey brain, too, dat make you think foolishness.”
“It’s not foolishness. It’s philosophy.”
She began playing with his genitals. “What name philosophy?”
“It’s thinking about what we are and who we are.”
“I know de answer to dat. You a man name Hartley. You come from London. Me a woman name Phibba. Me come from Africa. What else you want know?”
“How did I get here?”
“By ship. Same way as me.”
“But why am I here?”
“Because you ride on a ship dat bring you here. Oh oh. Donkey hood growing big again.”
“You’d never make a good philosopher,” Hartley said with a sigh as she mounted him, making the bed springs creak hideously, setting his teeth on edge.
* * *
One morning Hartley and Meredith ended up alone at the breakfast table. It was shortly after Christmas and the shreds of jollity were still clinging to the plantation even though the annual outburst of festivity had disappeared like yesterday’s fog. Gone from Meredith’s mood was his usual sunny and optimistic outlook.
“Do you know what’s happening right next door?” Meredith asked bluntly.
“What next door?”
“In Hispaniola, the French side.”
“I get no news up here,” Hartley said as he took a bite out of a slice of bread.
“They’re slaughtering white people. Men, women, and children. Eyewitnesses say that some of the killing crews are carrying around with them the heads of white babies to remind the beasts to show no mercy.”
The two men ate in thoughtful silence.
The Family Mansion Page 14
