The Family Mansion

by Anthony C. Winkler

  The captured man, who said his name was Eugene Price, did not know that he had landed by bad luck in what was an unacknowledged no-man’s-land in the undeclared war between the slaves and plantation owners. So when he was surrounded by an armed party of twelve warriors looking for white people, he felt a mixture of terror and astonishment. And when he was taken roughly into the makeshift camp of shanties and huts that provided an outpost of refuge for the escaped slaves to wage guerrilla warfare against the English, he could hardly be blamed for thinking that he had blundered into an outlandish game whose rules he didn’t understand.

  The strange ritual this Englishman was put through mystified him. He was blindfolded and taken to a section of the camp in which there were two houses side by side. He was curtly asked to listen to the way each man talked and say which one was English. After he listened for a few minutes, Eugene Price scratched his head and mumbled, “I dunno, governor, they sound a bit alike to me.”

  “You mean we sound the same,” one of the English voices cried ecstatically.

  Price figured from the reaction that he’d said the right thing. He asked to listen again, and after hearing several more sentences spoken by both voices, he confirmed that there were two lords, one in each house.

  “I bet I can tell you where they went to school too,” said Price loftily. “I’m not exactly sure about this, but I think they both went to Eton, and afterward, to one of those high-and-mighty universities such as Oxford.”

  Both men emerged from the houses and Price saw with a sinking heart he had been wrong: one of the men was a savage African, the other was a proper aristocratic bugger. He was about to begin a litany of apologies for his mistake when he inferred from the situation and the chatting men that the black one, who was obviously the guv, was very pleased with the answers he had given.

  Then the oddest of all things happened: the black man slapped the white one across the face and snapped, “Choose your weapons, sir!”

  “It doesn’t matter how you sound,” the white bloke squirmed. “I told you before, there are no black gentlemen.”

  “There most certainly are!” insisted the black chap. Turning to Price, he asked in a friendly voice, “Aren’t there, sir?”

  And the whole argument seemed to crash to a halt with everyone staring hard at Price.

  For a long indecisive moment, Price had a creepy feeling that everything was hanging in the balance, that his next few words would make the difference between life and death. He looked from one face to the other, fumbling for a clue to the antecedents of this quarrel. Then he took the plunge.

  “Why,” Price squealed ingratiatingly, “there certainly are black gentlemen. I never met one meself, mark you, but my cousin’s wife’s sister said her ’usband, poor chap now dead and gone, used to work for a black pooh-bah by the name of Lord ’igginson as his equerry—that’s the name they give the man that takes care of a lord’s ’orses, and this ’igginson was one of those big muckety-mucks and black as the ace of spades.”

  “See!” the black lord cried triumphantly.

  Hartley looked at Cuffy and said evenly, “You don’t understand, do you? A man is not a gentleman because he tells the world that he’s a gentleman. He’s a gentleman because the world tells him that he’s a gentleman.”

  A look of anger ignited Cuffy’s face. “Tomorrow,” he said venomously, “you either meet me on the field of honor or I’ll shoot you down like a dog.”

  Hartley shrugged and muttered defiantly, “I’ll meet you. But you still don’t sound English.” He sat on the ground, still tied to the tree, as the evening thickened over the land, and wrote letters of the alphabet with his finger in the dirt.

  Price did not know it then and never did afterward, but he had unwittingly made the right guess. By saying what he did, he saved his own life while dooming Hartley. That same night as the raiding party departed in the twilight, Cuffy ordered them to drop off Price in some impenetrable woodland and spare his life. Before they left, Price came over to where Hartley was tied.

  “Sorry, guv,” he whispered. “I think I might have said the wrong thing. Did I?”

  “You certainly did. What could you have been thinking?”

  “I wasn’t thinking anything in particular,” Price squealed. “They always told us at the agency we should give the savages what they want. That’s what I was doing.”

  The raiding party beckoned to Price and he scurried after them, throwing a furtive wave to Hartley and whispering, “God bless you, sir. Good luck!”

  Then he was gone and the gaping silence swallowed the camp whole.

  The communal fire that was lit every night burned down to a sputter of glowing embers, losing more and more of the people who usually came and warmed themselves. No one paid Hartley any mind, no one asked him to read from Clarissa. Occasionally someone stumbled without talking past the tree to which he was tied. Hartley would not even look up to see who it was.

  The new moon made its appearance late and cast only a faint pearly glow over the matted countryside. Hartley would periodically snap awake and rise up off the ground to peer around him. He was doing this for the third time when he suddenly heard a voice whispering from behind a nearby bush.

  “Donkey hood, can you walk?”

  CHAPTER 18

  When Hartley heard the voice of Phibba calling his nickname from behind a bush, he nearly went mad with joy. The camp was desolate and dark, dimly lit by a single ship’s lantern on the ground whose serpent’s tongue of flickering light made love to the enormous darkness. Everyone and everything was so still it was as if the world had been turned into stone.

  Phibba, her dark figure moving like an animated lump of night, darted from behind the bush and cut the rope tied around Hartley’s neck.

  “Phibba!” he cried.

  She put her finger to her lips and cautioned him to be quiet. Then taking him by the hand, she led him into the woods, pausing to allow their eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. He stumbled after her but they did not speak.

  Eventually the woods seemed to thin out and soon they were slipping through the darkness as stealthily as two snakes, their breath coming in short gasps from the excitement and tension.

  “How did you find me?” Hartley asked at one point.

  Phibba put her finger to her lips and shushed him again. “Dere’s a watchman here someplace. We don’t have time to talk. Just follow me.”

  And with that she slunk through the woodland, still clutching his hand as he followed behind her.

  He did not know how long they walked. All he knew was that the exhaustion he felt and the lack of exercise over the period of his captivity made him noisily gasp for breath. Phibba squeezed his hand, warning him to be quiet. After what seemed like hours, they came to a section of the woods where the trail was more clearly tamped down by footsteps and their progress was easier. By then his breathing sounded like he was being strangled, and Phibba stopped while they both sat down in a clearing that branched off the trail. She warned him not to talk louder than a whisper. The night around them rang with the cries of insects and the gargling intestinal sounds of croaking lizards. Fireflies threaded the branches of trees and bushes with strings of lights, and overhead they could barely make out the lidded cyclopean eye of the new moon.

  The days and nights of his captivity had come and gone and left no footprints, so he asked Phibba how long he’d been there. She told him that she had been looking for him for over six weeks. When he asked how she’d found him, she replied hastily that she had some friends who’d helped her and had taken an oath to not say who they were.

  “Dey say Cuffy want you to fight a duel,” she said innocently.

  “How did you know about that?” Hartley cried.

  “Slaves know more dan you know dey know,” was all she would or could say.

  She suddenly stiffened and put her hand across his mouth and drew him down onto the ground until they were both clothed in the thickest sheets of night. The
n he heard it, the distinct sounds of footsteps approaching, and a few heartbeats later a group of shadows flowed past them on the trail, no more than a few feet away. The raiders passed so close to where Phibba and Hartley were hiding that he could hear the belly of one man rumbling from hunger. Within a moment or two, the gang had ghosted past and disappeared into the woods.

  Phibba immediately leapt to her feet, took Hartley’s hand, and started off in the opposite direction down the trail. They walked steadily for the rest of the night, and daybreak found them on the edge of the area marked on maps as The Land of Look Behind and headed toward the distant high country of the plantation property. Soon Phibba stopped, and leading Hartley in the dawn light, she settled the two of them down in the shade of a flowering bush, where they made breathless love on the ground.

  “Me miss me donkey hood,” she whispered during lovemaking. Hartley was about to repeat his usual rejoinder, “Don’t call me that,” but restraining himself, he declared with a touch of bashfulness, “Me miss it too.”

  Phibba chuckled and they hugged one another. Within a blink, the two fell fast asleep, their bodies a tangle of black and white limbs that from a distance resembled a sleeping zebra.

  * * *

  Although the ground made an uncomfortable bed, the two slept through the hot belly of the day when the sun burns fauna and flora without mercy, slows down bees and speeds up flies and the only creature likely to be seen moving around the torrid countryside is the sly mongoose. But in 1808 there was no mongoose in Jamaica; this soon-to-become pest would not appear in Jamaica until 1872 when a man by the name of W. B. Espeut, in a stupid ecological miscalculation, introduced four males and three females to Spring Garden, Portland, intending the newcomers to check the growing population of brown rats. What Espeut apparently did not know was that the mongoose hunts by day while the brown rat prowls by night. The two consequently seldom crossed each other’s paths and today compete, along with the mosquito, for the unique distinction of being the worst national pest.

  They woke up as the sun was setting, and as soon as the darkness had regained its grip on the countryside, they set out again on their journey. On the way, Phibba whispered news about the plantation. Three of the Irish overseers had been killed in the attack, one had been badly wounded, and one had since fled the country. Meredith had survived and had killed one of the intruders with a pistol shot; after that, he crawled under the large canopy bed with a sagging mattress and into a great pocket of darkness underneath that hid him from the attackers.

  At first Phibba thought that she would find Hartley dead on the property, but when daybreak brought no sight of him, she assumed that he had been taken prisoner—why, she did not know. The operation of the plantation had suffered a crippling hit with the killing of Mahoney, O’Hara, and Yates. Years of experience in sugar plantation management had died with them.

  The couple trudged through the night, stopping only once to rest. Then morning broke and they settled down under a tree to sleep through another hot day. It was then that Phibba dug into her dress pocket and handed him a crumpled letter that she said had come for him.

  Meredith, she explained, had given it to her for safekeeping in case Hartley should return alive. The handwriting on the envelope told him the letter was from his father, and sitting under the shiny limbs of a guava tree, Hartley read it in a whisper. It was a short and blunt letter, obviously written and posted in haste.

  My dear Hartley,

  I have some somber news to give you. Your nephew-to-be has been stillborn, leaving you the sole and true heir of all my property, possessions, and titles. I can add nothing to this revelation except to say, as many others in this vale of tears have previously noticed, that Providence works in mysterious ways. Come home quickly, I beg you.

  When Hartley was finished reading, he and Phibba sat under the tree without talking while the dawn light oozed over the woodlands like egg white. Finally, Phibba asked, “What dat letter mean?”

  “It means I must go home, and quickly.”

  “But what about Phibba?”

  At first he did not know what about Phibba. As he sat there with the runny dawn breaking all around them, he was momentarily stunned and confused. Everything had happened so quickly. The whole world seemed to him to be topsy-turvy, untrustworthy, unreliable, and capricious. Phibba was sitting no more than two feet away from him, glancing around anxiously.

  “Phibba will be all right. You don’t need to worry ’bout her,” she eventually said.

  And she lay down nearby, squirming to get herself comfortable, when he came to a sudden decision.

  “You can come with me,” he declared bravely.

  “Phibba live wid lords and ladies?”

  “It’d be a constant war,” he muttered, lying beside her. “But we’ll fight it to the bitter end. And we’ll fight it together.”

  “If you say so,” she said sleepily with no conviction.

  “I do say so,” he replied firmly.

  * * *

  The plantation and its sloping grounds looked the same as always and seemed to Hartley to be unchanged when they emerged from the final stretch of woodlands, climbed over the cut-stone wall, and stepped onto the property. In the great house Hartley surprised Meredith, who was in his office doing some paperwork.

  “You’re alive!” Meredith exclaimed, jumping out of his chair and rushing over to greet Hartley.

  The cantankerous cook beamed at him with a toothless smile and fed him the first good meal he’d had in weeks. As he shoveled down the food, Hartley described his captivity and the way he was treated while Meredith listened studiously, interrupting every now and again to ask a question. Hovering near the table, the cook was pretending to be fussing around with dishes.

  Hartley was immediately assailed by an overwhelming feeling of revulsion and hatred for the great house, the plantation, himself and everyone who played a part in it, and wanted nothing more than to get away from this incomprehensibly heartless and ghastly dungeon of hell. He saw everything to do with slavery and manufacturing sugar as evil and wicked beyond measure, and the sight of the walls of the banquet room crowded with ornately framed and stilted portraits of the detestable generations of absentee owners peering out at the phantom birdie of portraiture with an unconscionable smugness gave him the urge to set fire to the house and burn it to the ground. He shuddered with a feeling of loathing that had no equivalent in words or expression, and Meredith, who was sitting across from him, seemed to be reading his mind because he said quietly, “It is what it is, no more, no less.”

  “It is what we’ve made it,” Hartley countered. “God will call us to account.”

  “David Hume says there’s no God. There’s only us.”

  “Someone will call us to account, then.”

  “Wha’ ’appen, Massa Hartley,” the old cook intruded, “you don’t love we food anymore?”

  Hartley looked at her for such a long tenuous moment that she turned away with embarrassment. He had no reply to make, so he simply said nothing.

  “Things are bad right now because we are shorthanded. But we’ll come back, you’ll see. Don’t abandon ship. We need you.”

  “Yes, Massa Hartley,” the cook intoned. “Don’t dash we away.”

  Then she shuffled off into the kitchen, muttering to herself about the ingratitude of this new generation of backras.

  “I have to go back to England,” Hartley said. “I’m the new Duke of Fudges.”

  Meredith seemed genuinely pleased. He leaned over the table and shook hands with Hartley. “Congratulations, my boy,” he said warmly. “I’m sure you’ll bring honor to the title. I’ve always thought that if I weren’t in charge of a Jamaican plantation, I’d like to be an English duke.”

  Hartley digested this revelation. “But you’d rather be doing what you’re doing.”

  “I’d hate to be enslaved. But, God forgive me, I rather like being the enslaver.”

  Hartley finished his breakfast
.

  “I’m sorry, my boy,” Meredith said coolly after a while. “I didn’t make this world. I just live in it. I didn’t make me, either. I can’t help what I like.”

  “Neither can I,” said Hartley.

  An awkward pause intruded on their conversation.

  “I just think we can do better,” Hartley muttered, with a shrug. “I’m not sure what I mean, but that is the way I feel.”

  “I’m sure we can. But this is a very hard world and a very big one. It’s impossible to fight it.”

  Hartley tilted his head to one side like a man deep in thought. Finally he said, “I’d like to take Phibba with me.”

  “You can have her for fifty pounds. We can settle up accounts if you really want to leave.”

  “I have to leave.”

  “I know, I know. You want to claim your throne while you can. And I don’t blame you a bit. Let’s settle up accounts.”

  The account ledger told a bare-bones story of the life of Hartley Fudges as an overseer on a Jamaican plantation. He had been in the employ of the plantation for a little over three years, during which time he’d earned close to £400. Altogether, by the time he paid for Phibba and for what he owed the plantation for miscellaneous services, he had about £200 left, just enough to buy him and Phibba a passage to England.

  When he emerged from Meredith’s office, Hartley was in a jubilant mood, feeling the exhilaration of a young man on the verge of overthrowing the circumstantial drabness of his life. Already his heart was softening not only toward Jamaica and the plantation, but toward the whole rogue world at large where people often ran amok over bagatelles and skin color was the overwhelming determinant of a person’s future. He was in this lighthearted mood as he headed for the slave quarters to find Phibba. Night was falling like a feather and he could feel and taste the wind-blown tang of the distant sea.