The Family Mansion

by Anthony C. Winkler

  “They say that some ten thousand white people have already been butchered. Men, women, and children. Hacked to death in public. Children ripped from their mothers’ arms and put to the sword. Awful. Reprehensible.”

  “I don’t think it’s likely to happen here, do you?”

  “We’ve come close. But the one thing that stops them is fear. Fear of what we’d do to them. I think it’s time to hang another head.”

  The two backras ate in silence for a few minutes.

  “That’s what I’ll do. I’ll hang a head today,” Meredith said with decision, daintily wiping the corner of his mouth with a napkin. “I’ll have it put where everyone going to the fields can see it.”

  “But how do you know anyone will do anything that deserves the death penalty?”

  “Here the death penalty is not deserved, it’s applied. And I’m the one who applies it.”

  Hartley was turning over the idea in his mind, trying to grasp the philosophical difference between “deserved” and “applied,” when Meredith abruptly changed the subject.

  “I know you’ve been taking your woman to your bed every night. There was a chap some years ago who did that on another plantation. One night they had a quarrel before they went to sleep. Know what she did?”

  Hartley shook his head and stared hard at the older man.

  “She cut his throat as he slept.”

  “Phibba would never do that to me,” Hartley said sharply.

  “That’s what this fellow used to think. Now he knows better, doesn’t he?”

  “I don’t know,” Hartley answered. “Does he?”

  On that disagreeable note, the two men parted. Hartley headed for the stables, his footfalls crunching against the stony road that coiled around the great house and flowed like a dried-up riverbed across the pastures and cane fields to lance into the thick, green woodlands and disappear into the foliage. It was such a still morning that a man could not help but ask himself what he was doing here and other philosophical questions about the meaning of life and where everything seemed to be headed.

  That was the sort of heavy thinking Hartley was doing as he strolled toward the stables where his horse should be saddled and waiting for him. No one who saw him that morning could guess how deeply he was thinking. Most likely they would think he was looking around him like an inquisitive cat, that the beautiful prospect he saw spread out against the skyline did not arouse him to a secret profundity. But that was where the ordinary onlooker who could see no deeper than the vest a man wore on his way to a soiree would be utterly mistaken. For inside the heart of a man like Hartley was intricacy and a bottomlessness of understanding—or so he believed.

  Really, a man of depth and substance was like an iceberg, showing only a frivolous white tip to the world while the vastness of his being and character lurked underneath unappreciated, unacknowledged, and known only to himself.

  By the time he reached the stables, he was feeling profoundly philosophical.

  That evening as he cantered home he passed a recently severed head impaled on a pole at the beginning of the trail the slaves used to reach the fields of the plantation. When he asked Phibba if she knew whose head it was, she said it used to belong to a Coromantee slave named Quamin who was always trying to escape.

  As he’d said he would, Meredith had applied the death penalty.

  CHAPTER 14

  Two years flew past.

  Although still a young man, Hartley Fudges had already learned that the years do not pass at a uniform pace, that some creep past like sickly turtles while others come and go with the thundering gallop of racehorses. But since his love affair began with Phibba, the time Hartley spent in Jamaica took wing like a bird. It was Phibba who made the difference. Nothing else had changed in his life. There was the usual turmoil in the breeze, and all throughout the passing years the same fretfulness of spirit and edginess of temper that Hartley found when he first landed in Falmouth was ever present like the smell of salt air from the distant girdling ocean. But his heart felt different. And although he still did not love the island, he no longer hated it.

  The years also passed without the abrupt climactic changes that a European such as Hartley expected with the passing of time. The land experienced only subtle changes in the blooming of certain kinds of flowers or fruits, and all throughout the island the days paraded past wearing the same green foliage all year, unglamorous and unchanging like a shopkeeper’s apron. There were some mild changes in the rains and in the nighttime temperature because of the altitude of the plantation, but these were so slight that they were hardly noticed.

  Then the inevitable happened: Phibba got pregnant. When she first told Hartley, he received the news with dread he tried his best to conceal. He took a long walk by himself the first morning after she told him the news, trying to sort out his true feelings, worrying what his father would say to having a brown grandchild and how such a one would look on the wall of the family mansion where the generations of dead Fudges, wearing the halters of gilt frames, peered out captiously at the living climbing the staircase. He had the oddest feeling that he had befouled the generations of his family. But by the end of the third day he was reconciled, and the love he felt for Phibba overcame the prospect of fathering a changeling child with her that would look absolutely nothing like the previous generations of Fudges.

  One night he and Phibba took a stroll through the grounds of the plantation and had a long talk about their feelings. It was an oddly uncomfortable moment between them and required him to say things he was not used to saying to a woman. He was beset by a feeling of utter absurdity as though he was reading lines belonging to a character in a bad play.

  At one point in the walk, she turned to him and asked bluntly, “You don’t want Phibba to have de baby?”

  Hartley was so taken aback by her directness that for a few seconds he had no answer and could only stare at a distant mountain as if he saw some expression on its inscrutable green face that mesmerized him.

  “Now, Phibba,” he said soothingly, “I didn’t say that. I didn’t even think that. What I said is that any child you have for me will look quite different from anyone else in my family.”

  “So you think our baby going look like monkey? A so you think?”

  “I think nothing of the sort! Stop trying to put words into my mouth.”

  Night fluttered over the fields and mountains that loomed in the distance. In this oceanic darkness, the only light visible was the phosphorescent wakes of swarming fireflies.

  “You always say dat. But dat make no sense. How can man stuff words into anyone’s mouth? Tell de truth. You wish dis baby never come.”

  “I never said that!”

  Phibba began to quietly weep, her chest heaving as if she were drowning. Leaning against his shoulder, she wept like her heart was broken. Hartley took her into his arms and rubbed her back, which is something she liked him to do, while she sobbed convulsively, her cries primordial and jumbled and with the inarticulateness found only in fresh grief.

  “Phibba,” Hartley whispered in her ear, “you don’t understand.”

  “Me understand,” she gasped with a shudder of self-revulsion. “Me is a black woman, a slave. You is a English lord, all high and mighty. You come to me like a god. Me come to you like a goat. You don’t love me. You say so, but you don’t mean it.”

  “I do mean it, Phibba,” Hartley said earnestly. “I wish I could prove it to you.”

  It was an ugly, emotional scene, and all throughout the melodrama, Hartley Fudges felt like he was floating disembodied and removed from himself even as he held her and whispered regrets and consolations. Eventually, she quieted down and the two of them embraced in the darkness as a puffy yellow moon glided over the mountains without a sound and dusted the fields with the color of saffron. Then the two of them, arm in arm as if trying to prop each other up, made their way in the soft moonlight, towing fuzzy intermingled moon shadows behind them as they headed toward the
great house.

  The baby did not last very long. Phibba miscarried in her ninth week and passed a bobble of blood presumed to be the child. The Scottish doctor said that the commingling of white and black blood was never healthy, and even if the child had come into the world, it would probably not have survived infancy.

  “It look to me dat all blood is red,” Phibba said waspishly.

  “That’s because you have no medical training,” the doctor snapped.

  “It looks red to my eyes too,” Hartley said.

  “I think I’m through with both of you,” the doctor said petulantly, standing up and opening the door for them to leave.

  * * *

  In the third year of his exile, a letter from England appeared on Hartley’s doorstep. It had taken three months to reach Jamaica and it seemed to Hartley a nearly miraculous artifact from another planet. He seized it like a starving man who hasn’t seen food in weeks and hurried to his room to read it in peace. Phibba was there, cleaning.

  “What dat?” she asked as Hartley tore open the envelope and extracted the letter.

  “A letter from England,” Hartley said.

  Taking it from him after a token resistance, she examined the letter upside down and sniffed the stylish copperplate hand in which it was written. Hartley took back the letter from her and stroked it as he would a kitten.

  “Who write it?” she asked.

  “My father.”

  “So read it so me can hear him talk too.”

  She settled on the bed and made herself comfortable while Hartley read the letter from the foreign paterfamilias. This was what it said:

  My dear Hartley,

  By now you know that the man to whom I gave you a letter of introduction has been killed and his place taken by another. No doubt this unfortunate succession has been of some inconvenience to you that I pray might have been made bearable by the high esteem in which the world holds the family name of Fudges. Confident in this belief, I hope to one day receive a letter from you confirming that you are settled in some office worthy of your ample talents and energetic temperament.

  However, that is not the purpose of this letter, which has far more somber news that I know you will deeply regret as much as many people do here in England.

  Your brother Alexander is dead, carried away by typhoid fever, leaving his young wife a widow whose immense grief is scarcely made tolerable by the family condition in which she now finds herself. Our physician estimates that she is in the third month of her pregnancy but calculates her prospects of delivering a live child to be excellent. Since the outcome of this issue affects your own family position so far as inheritance of title and holdings are concerned, I have been advised by our lawyer to notify you promptly of what has occurred and what, given the uncertain outcome of childbirth even in robust women, is likely to occur should some unforeseen consequence be visited upon the child and its mother. If perchance the issue of the birth is female or stillborn, your position in the succession of this family would rank you as my heir and your replacement of me upon my death be legally assured. However, that is an eventuality, which in spite of the advantage to you, I can only hope, for my benefit, is still many years distant. Of course, if the child is male, as the issue of your brother, he would be entitled to inherit everything I own and you and your possible future offspring would have no claim upon my estate.

  I do not know what to advise you to do or even how I would proceed if I were in your shoes. If I were settled well in Jamaica, I would continue in that position until I saw how matters turn out. Be assured that as soon as anything occurs that would affect your succession to my title and inheritance of my estate, I will immediately advise you. In the meantime, may God love and protect you and return you safely one day to England.

  “Me no understand,” Phibba complained. “What ’im say?”

  “He says my brother is dead.”

  “Me sorry. Who kill him?”

  “Nobody. He died of a fever.”

  Hartley felt a momentary urge to confess to her the truth about the duel he had arranged in a scheme to kill Alexander, but he thought better of it and said nothing.

  “What de last part of de letter mean?”

  “It means that perhaps I should consider returning to England,” Hartley said softly.

  Phibba looked at him with a flash of terror in her eyes. But she hung her head and said nothing.

  * * *

  It was a time of uncertainty and wild talk, the first few years that Hartley spent in Jamaica. Manumission was in the breeze, and from serving meals to the white man, the slaves picked up scraps of news at the dinner table and began to suspect that they had already been set free by the white man’s king but that Massa was keeping the truth from them. The talk among the white men openly at mealtime was of the agitators for emancipation in England who were clamoring for the abolition of slavery, and the slaves misunderstood the fragments of information carelessly scattered by their masters. Out of the discontent blew a murderous wind.

  Periodically, there were outbreaks of violence throughout the island, some noticeable enough to be a footnote in a history book, others involving incidental murders that warranted only local news among a people whose sensibilities had been hardened over the years to rampant cruelties. But every now and again would come an eruption of anger and brutality that would fizzle out but leave behind a terrible scar on the humanity of onlookers.

  In this troubled time, for example, there was the murder of a dray cart owner who delivered shipments from overseas that landed at Falmouth.

  Hartley and Meredith were riding the plantation grounds when a strange slave came rushing up to them crying murder. The two backras rode to the scene of the crime to see what the commotion was about and found the dray cart operator slumped on the ground in a widening pool of blood. His throat had been cut. Whatever goods he had been transporting were gone and the cart was empty except for splotches of blood splattered everywhere over its wooden seat.

  “Don’t you recognize him?” Meredith said. “It’s the chap you bought your slave from.”

  Hartley stared at the man, unable to wrench his focus from the lurid wound in the man’s throat which had been sliced open from ear to ear, giving the bizarre appearance of a clown’s painted mouth gaudily opening up in his neck.

  The two backras walked around the stranded dray cart, their hands on the pistols tucked into their waistbands, starting at every suspicious sound, while the man remained slumped on the ground where death had left him and the two mules munched on overhanging bushes with the abstracted air of library browsers.

  “Untie the mules,” Meredith said. “We’ll take them to the plantation.”

  “What about him?” Hartley asked, pointing to the dead man.

  “He’s beyond help. But we can always use good mules.”

  The two men bustled around the cart and soon had the mules tied to their horses and were trotting down the rugged hillside trail that trickled into the plantation property.

  “What’ll happen to his body?” asked Hartley.

  “If he has family, they’ll come and collect it. Otherwise nature will eventually swallow him up. Look, she’s already gone to work.”

  He pointed to the sky where the turkey vultures, known in Jamaica as John Crows, had begun the ceremonious circling waltz of death, dropping closer and closer to the ground where a fresh meal lay soaked in a gravy of blood.

  “That’s why it’s against the law to shoot John Crows,” Meredith explained. “They’re Jamaica’s undertakers. In a week, only bone will be left of the poor chap. The rest will be devoured by insects, rats, John Crows.”

  They rode on in silence.

  “This is a hard land,” Hartley finally murmured.

  “People die in Europe too,” Meredith said, “not only in Jamaica.”

  “They do die,” agreed Hartley, “but they die differently. And their dead bodies aren’t left lying on trails.”

  “Sometimes after a
big battle, the corpses lie untended for weeks,” Meredith said.

  They rode back to the plantation, leading the mules behind them. As they dropped off the mules at the stable, Hartley wondered aloud to Meredith, “Do you think Cuffy is behind this?”

  Meredith reacted with surprise: “Your former slave? Why on earth would you think that?”

  “He hated that man. He threatened to kill him.”

  “People are always threatening to kill someone here. It’s part of the island’s heritage.”

  They walked toward the great house, chatting amiably about how things were different in Jamaica and England.

  * * *

  Over time, Hartley Fudges became keenly aware that his relationship with Phibba appeared to others in the plantation society as a grotesquerie. Occasionally he would see himself and Phibba together as others did and he would wonder what on earth ever possessed him to dote so extravagantly on a woman who was obviously very different from him in every conceivable sense. What on earth was the Earl of Fudges doing with Phibba from West Africa? It was the variant of the baffling question that the French writer Marcel Proust would have one of his lovelorn characters ask himself in his lamentation at the end of a tumultuous love affair—how could he have become so passionately involved with a woman who was not even his style?

  It is an unanswerable question. The roots of love lie buried deep inside the psyche. True, Phibba was a statuesque woman with a compelling beauty and a lively manner that was captivating. But Hartley had met such women before and they had not affected him like Phibba. She had him in such a thrall that he simply could not stay away from her. Once or twice he tried to insert a wedge of time between his visits to the slave quarters or Phibba’s to his room on the second floor of the great house, but inevitably he would find some reason for hurrying to her side. And when he was with her, he wanted to be nowhere else.

  Meredith took Hartley aside one day and told him in a not unkindly way that women like Phibba were sometimes known to alter a man’s judgment with bush teas and herbs.