The Family Mansion

by Anthony C. Winkler

  “I wouldn’t be so hasty, if I were you,” Hartley said cagily. “You’re making progress. Good progress, indeed. And if you kill me before I’ve finished the job, who will teach you what you need to know to speak and act like a gentleman?”

  Cuffy turned grave. He sat down heavily on the dirt floor and looked morose. “All I wanted was a whipping every now and again. Why didn’t you just oblige me?”

  “Listen, Cuffy,” Hartley encouraged him, “did you hear what you just said? Oblige, now there’s a word you wouldn’t have used a month ago. But now you use it off the cuff. You’re learning to be a gentleman. Your vocabulary has grown immensely.”

  “I know,” Cuffy said. “Some people say they can’t understand me sometimes.”

  “They’re just jealous.”

  The lesson being over, Hartley tried to leave, but Cuffy stopped him with the motion of his hand.

  “I know that you don’t intend to ever say, Cuffy is now a gentleman. The time has come to fight the duel.”

  Hartley moved to protest but Cuffy silenced him.

  “I know that is what you intend to do. But it won’t work. I have made up my mind. When I think I’m ready, we’ll capture an Englishman. I will speak to him. He will tell me whether or not I’m a gentleman. If he says yes, we fight. If he says no, we work some more.”

  “But what if he doesn’t know?” Hartley protested. “He could be from Ireland. He could be a Scotchman. They’re both ignorant of the English. It’s not a fair test.”

  “It’s fairer than waiting on you to say if I’m ready.”

  The whole world had become a lunatic asylum, Hartley thought as he was led back to the tree where, his smock now grimy and soiled from continuous wear, he was tied up again like a trespassing goat.

  CHAPTER 17

  Life in the camp was hardscrabble and grim. There was little to eat—one starchy meal a day—and nothing to do. The renegade slaves, which was how Hartley regarded everyone in the camp, lived in a constant state of tension and jumpiness. Occasionally a sentry would sound a false alarm by blowing the abeng, a traditional instrument made from the horn of a cow and used by Maroons to warn of an approaching enemy. When that happened, with a brisk scurrying the campground would empty in a heartbeat as everyone would melt into the surrounding woodlands, leaving Hartley tied up at his tree, peering around with stupefaction. Even the dogs would disappear into the thick foliage.

  The first time it happened, Hartley thought he was saved, but since he could hear nothing but the soughing of the wind in the trees, he glanced around wildly, hoping to spot someone coming to his rescue. But no soldiers came and the occupants poured back into the camp chattering excitedly, making jokes about the stupidity of the watchmen who could not tell the difference between the footfalls of stalking soldiers and the scampering of wild boar.

  Cuffy himself came and examined Hartley at the tree. He walked around his former owner, looking him up and down carefully, and said, “You did not cry out for help. Dat’s what saved your life.”

  And to demonstrate his seriousness, he hurled his makeshift spear with a savage blur of his arm, sending the weapon flying across the campground and burying the blade into the trunk of a fringing tree, where it quivered on impact with a hollow thunk.

  Cuffy retrieved the weapon and walked over to where Hartley sat on the ground begrimed almost beyond recognition, his pajamas wrinkled and dirty and splattered with mud, making him resemble an animal that lived in a burrow. After another long searching look, Cuffy ambled off, turning to say over his shoulder, “This morning we work on th as in three.” And a little later on, one of the warriors came and took Hartley to teach Cuffy another lesson in the art of speaking like an English gentleman.

  As the days of ridiculous lessons passed, Hartley became impressed by Cuffy’s ear. He picked up the nasal pronunciations of a posh English accent easily, and after three weeks of intensive practice, the former slave began to sound like a stuck-up English gentleman. Among the camp word spread about Cuffy’s new accent and everyone marveled at how different the former slave sounded. He still did not look like an English gentleman, mainly because he was not dandified enough, having neither the proper clothes nor the accoutrements. Moreover, wig wearing was the hot style of the day, but Cuffy had no wig. And later, when a raiding party returned with a wig, it looked preposterous when perched on his head.

  Yet with all the refinements he attempted, Cuffy still seemed a sham Englishman. If one could not see him, he sounded—or had begun to sound—vaguely English. But when he showed himself, his clothes seemed slipshod and patchy, like the garb of an out-of-season John Canoe dancer.

  Meanwhile, the change that had come slowly over their leader made an impression on others in the camp, who began sounding English themselves by aping his speech. Phrases like “Jolly good,” “I beg your pardon,” “You don’t say,” “Old chap,” “Old bean,” and “I say” began spreading infectiously around the camp like hoof-and-mouth disease among cattle. Most of these Johnny-come-lately speakers sounded like caricatures of an Englishman. Only Cuffy sounded authentic.

  This daily tutelage between Hartley and Cuffy would begin with an exchange such as:

  Hartley would enter the shack after knocking on the frail door, and say, “Good morning, old bean. Are you quite ready to begin?”

  “Yes, I do believe I am. What shall we do today?”

  “I thought we ought to make a fresh run at the subjunctive.”

  “Capital idea. I simply haven’t quite gotten it yet, have I?”

  “It is one of the most difficult constructions to master. Even the experts have quibbles among themselves about it.”

  “By Jove! Do they really?”

  “Use of the subjunctive correctly is a critical measure of class in England. The common man doesn’t use it properly because he doesn’t understand it.”

  “Poor benighted chaps.”

  “Of course, speaking good English doesn’t help you be a better butcher or tradesman.”

  “Nor a better fishmonger.”

  “Exactly. Now, shall we get cracking?”

  “Yes, let’s.”

  Anyone eavesdropping outside the shack would have wondered if the source of this chitchat was a pair of lunatics. Anyone actually seeing the tatterdemalion white man and the curiously dressed black one, whose britches were overly snug and who wore no shoes, would have been convinced of it.

  * * *

  The better at sounding English that Cuffy became, the nearer drew the duel he was determined to fight with Hartley. It occurred to Hartley that he still had only one defense—finding fault with Cuffy’s mimicry of an English gentleman. No matter how much miscellaneous loot raiding parties brought back from the plantations they attacked, no matter how many pants and shirts for men, wigs and various pieces of jewelry, Hartley was always of the stated opinion that Cuffy looked ridiculous. Nothing Cuffy tried on, Hartley would insist, looked good on him or made him appear to be a realistic gentleman. The exchanges on the subject that they had went like this:

  “Now, how do I look? Like a proper gentleman?” Cuffy would ask, parading around in some of the latest clothes brought back from a plantation that the rebels had burned down last night.

  Hartley would smirk with obvious contempt and chuckle to himself loud enough for Cuffy to hear, which would cause the other to swell with anger.

  “What’re you trying to say now? That I don’t look real?”

  “No, you don’t. You look ridiculous.”

  “I don’t like to be told that I look ridiculous. I hate looking ridiculous. Find another word, because I don’t like that one.”

  “Preposterous, then. Outlandish.”

  “I don’t like those words either.”

  Hartley would stroll around the freshly bedecked Cuffy, like an art connoisseur appraising a new painting.

  “It’s just not right. You just look . . .”

  “Don’t let me hear you say that word.”

&
nbsp; “What word?”

  “The word you were about to say. I don’t like them word.”

  “You mean, I don’t like that word. Remember the lesson about using them as a demonstrative adjective?”

  “What’s wrong with how I look? I look like an English gentleman.”

  “Not to me, you don’t.”

  “But you can’t say what’s wrong. All you say is that I look ridiculous. What you need to say is why I look ridiculous.”

  Hartley sighed.

  “And I don’t like that sound either.”

  And then Cuffy would pout as they continued to bandy words and opinions back and forth about how authentic or inauthentic he looked.

  One day the truth came out. They had gone through the usual preliminary sparring about how Cuffy looked when the conversation took a new turn.

  “It’s because I’m black, isn’t it?” Cuffy asked angrily.

  “I’ve never seen a black gentleman,” Hartley said quietly. “And my family is hundreds of years old.”

  “In all of England there are no black gentlemen?”

  “None that I know about.”

  “How can that be? In all of England?”

  “I don’t know. I just know that there are no black gentlemen in all of England, Scotland, and Ireland.”

  Cuffy paced up and down. They were outside his small house. Everywhere around them the day’s work was being done. Some men sat around in the shade of trees, cleaning their weapons. Some others were preparing the meal for the day. Others were laboring in the ground provisions field, building the mounds for growing yam. Suddenly, Cuffy stopped and stared at Hartley as though it was the first time he was actually seeing the Englishman.

  “There’s nothing wrong with Cuffy,” he declared. “There’s something wrong with England.”

  “It’s you who are black.”

  “England is blacker than me.”

  “Than I,” corrected Hartley. “Remember, the unstated part of the sentence is than I am black.”

  “Go back to your tree,” Cuffy said contemptuously. And he waved for a guard to come and take Hartley away.

  As he tied Hartley to the tree in the middle of the camp, the man, who had been picking up the new way of talking, declared in a phony English accent, “What what? How are we now?”

  “Oh, shut up,” said Hartley.

  “A bit rude today, aren’t we?” the fellow said genially. He was humming “Rule, Britannia!” written by James Thomson and set to music in 1740 by Thomas Arne. Its chorus was:

  Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves:

  Britons never shall be slaves.

  It was a jingoistic jingle known to almost every Englishman in 1808. When he was bored, Hartley would occasionally hum it or sing the chorus. He didn’t know exactly why, but even in his pitiful condition, singing that chorus about the global hegemony of the English never failed to make him feel better. In his present predicament, the thought that he belonged to a nation that ruled the world bucked up his spirits. It was another of his habits that the escaped slaves around him picked up. And now, with no idea what the words meant, the slave tying this Englishman to a tree was humming the chorus of that chauvinistic song.

  Hartley squatted on the ground, resting against the trunk of the tree. It was only a matter of time before he would have to face Cuffy in a duel. But he was comforted by the thought that surely an Eton old boy, a university graduate, could figure out how to get out of his present fix. His best chance to slip away would be late at night when the camp was sleeping, with only posted guards dispersed around the perimeter against the rare possibility of a night attack. The English, like certain tribes of American Indians, did not usually fight at night. They preferred, in the European style, to line up in their dressy splendid uniforms and, during broad daylight, march within range to exchange volleys of lethal gunfire with the enemy.

  One day, after another lesson, Hartley again asked Cuffy why they had to go through the stupid experience of a duel.

  “It’s the principle of the thing,” Cuffy said airily, as if he could hardly believe his ears.

  “Principle? You got that from me. Even now, you can’t tell principle from a kangaroo.”

  “What’s a kangaroo?”

  “Precisely my point.”

  Cuffy did not get the point. The truth was that he didn’t exactly know why he wanted to fight a duel with Hartley. Men often want things without knowing why. All he knew was that he had been deprived of respect because of Hartley. If his master had been different and more understanding, Cuffy, the perfect slave, could have been the talk of the plantation. Generations would have remembered his name and perfection. But all that fame and applause had been ruined by Hartley and his heartlessness. Now no one could say that once there had lived an unmatched slave named Cuffy who was so perfect no model of him existed in Plato’s afterlife.

  The white man had ways of immortalizing his own. The books that talked if you knew how to read them, the scraps of paper that brought news from across the sea—these were the instruments that made the white man live forever, long after the memory of his deeds had been laid waste by the passing of the generations. What did Cuffy’s people have to preserve their own stories? The best they had were griots—whose songs about spectacular deeds and heroic men and women preserved the lore of the ages. But any memory that depended on one who breathed was frail and corruptible. When the griot stopped breathing, his song died. Books did not breathe; paper did not breathe. The white man lived forever on an endless plain of eternity; the black man appeared, lived, and vanished like an insect. What was fair about that, when the black man was more than equal to the white man?

  These were the ideas that Cuffy was pondering. Hartley, meanwhile, hadn’t a clue what the other was thinking.

  “I asked you,” Cuffy said sharply, “what’s a kangaroo?”

  “It’s an animal that lives in Australia.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “You don’t know where Australia is?”

  “Dat’s why I asked.”

  “It’s a country far away on the other side of the earth. Actually, it’s at the bottom of the earth.”

  “How can that be?”

  “The world is like this,” said Hartley, picking up an orange off the ground. “We’re here.” He pointed to the top of the fruit. “Australia is here.”

  “The people hang upside down? Why don’t they drop off?”

  Hartley sighed. “I don’t know why they don’t drop off. I imagine some do.”

  Hartley had decided to cut his losses. There was no way he could explain to Cuffy why Australians didn’t fall off the upside-down earth like overripe mangoes. To tell the truth, it was one of the axioms of modern living that often puzzled Hartley too but which he simply accepted.

  He returned to the lesson with a disingenuous vigor that belied his confusion.

  * * *

  All these contentious exchanges had done was to convince Cuffy that he needed to come up with some other measure of whether or not he had become enough of a gentleman to be worthy of being killed by one. What he lacked in formal education, he more than made up for in imaginative thinking. And over the course of the next few weeks, he came up with a scheme for verifying that he sounded sufficiently like a gentleman to pass for one.

  It occurred to Cuffy that a true test of how he sounded would be if a stranger who could not see him mistook him for English because of how he talked. He shared his thinking with no one. But what he had in mind was to capture a white man and have him listen to Cuffy and Hartley talk without being able to see either one. If he thought that both voices belonged to Englishmen, then Hartley would be forced to treat Cuffy as an equal and face him in a duel.

  Cuffy did not know it, but many years later Alan Turing (1912–1954), a gay English technology wizard, would propose a similar test to gauge the intelligence of a computer. The Turing test was based on an old parlor game called “Imitation” in which a man and a wo
man were locked in separate rooms and fed questions by guests to whom they gave typewritten replies. The object of the game was for the guests to tell the gender of a respondent by the answers. (In 1950, the Turing variation to this test placed a computer and a human in separate rooms. Guests were then prompted to ask questions and try to tell human and machine apart by their replies. If the questioners could not tell from the answers which was the computer and which the human, the machine was approximating human intelligence.)

  All Cuffy needed to put his plan into effect was a white man who could unknowingly be used as a judge. It took a raiding party three attempts to return with a suitable candidate. The escaped slaves were used to killing white people, not capturing them, and on the first two tries their prisoners died on the way to the camp from wounds they suffered in being abducted. The third time the party was returning from a raid empty-handed when like a godsend they came across an indentured servant, a white man newly arrived on the island. He was a coarse little man and reminded some of the slaves of a rodent, perhaps a two-legged coney, an animal resembling a rabbit and one that has been extinct on the island for years.

  No class other than the slaves in the plantation society was as wretched as the indentured servant, who was usually white. In exchange for free transportation to the foreign land where he would work, the indentured servant pledged his labor for a period of around seven or eight years. At the end of his servitude, he was usually given a lump sum of money or a piece of arable land on which he was encouraged to settle. The few who did could count on little more than a grubby subsistence from their small holdings.

  This particular indentured servant was a common man from Newcastle, who had little family in the world. If he had remained in England, he would have worked as a day laborer for the rest of his life, doing backbreaking work for a pittance. He was as far removed from being a gentleman as he was from being a brontosaurus.

  On the morning of his abduction, he had just landed in Falmouth the day before and had spent the night sleeping in the outdoors. This morning he intended to find out where his indentured master resided and to report for service. All this was on his mind when he had been wandering down a rutted marl road hoping to encounter someone from whom he could beg directions, his future master not having met him at the landing wharf as they had agreed many months ago. Instead of obtaining directions, he was abruptly seized and tied up and led toward the camp in the cockpit country.