by Sara Collins
She puffed out her cheeks, then plunged her fingers into her mouth as if to lick them clean. ‘You are a little savage.’
I bit my tongue.
‘It is my husband who has decided you should live in this house, Frances.’
‘Yes, missus,’ I mumbled around the bite I was trying to gulp down before she took any of it away.
‘What you and I have in common is that neither of us had any say in the matter.’
‘I happy to be here, missus.’
‘Well. Seems I must be some sort of mother to you now.’
What to say to that? I never knew my mother but here was the plain fact looking us both in the eye. Miss-bella was white and a very high lady. None such as herself had ever birthed the likes of me in the history of our hot little part of the earth. Brown and thick and strong as a horse I was then, though, being a mulatta, I was paler than any of the other blacks on that estate. With a great frizzled mess on top of my head, not like her own pale hair, which was so feathery the breeze stirred it and lifted it and played with it while it shunned mine.
She said something else, which I fancied was about her own life and therefore not my concern. She was gazing out the window when she said it too. ‘I’ve lived too many years in a place where the snakes lurk in the house as well as the grass.’
Because she had said she was to be my mother, I chanced a question. ‘How long am I to stay?’
She had a high colour on her throat, her hands flittered like a frog’s legs, and she looked at me and then away, as if I was the sun and gazing at me too long would hurt her eyes. I thought it strange that she should be so overcome when I was the rough creature brought up to her from the swamp and she the great lady of the house who was giving me pity surely as she was giving me johnnycakes. Miss-bella was frightened of me.
But then she said something that turned my attention sharp in another direction, as if a john crow had just flown into the room. ‘However long it is will be too long in the end.’
Chapter Three
That was 1812. Nobody told me why I’d been brought to the house and I was too busy burying my nose in clean cotton and kitchen scraps to puzzle about it. They said I was seven years old, or thereabouts. No one ever stirred themselves enough to be sure. I never had a birthday, or a mother. When I asked her, all Phibbah would say was my mother had run off. ‘You won’t magic one up by asking,’ she said. ‘You going learn. We not the ones ask the questions, we the ones answer them. And the answer always yes.’
When I close my eyes now, I see Phibbah swiping her cloth at the cane settee in the receiving room, tilting it to sweep under. I see the campeachy chairs put right in the middle to catch a breeze, the carpets sent to Miss-bella by her sister in Bristol that curled up in our heat like they were trying to rest. The dining room where the porcelain cups and platters and the blue and white teapot rattled in the sideboard. I hear Phibbah hissing, ‘Ga-lang, pickney, just get out of my way. Why you can’t just leave me be?’
It was my job to polish the brass and put the flowers out on Miss-bella’s breakfast table, fan the flies off her food. But mostly I trailed the house, thinking of ways I could stick to Phibbah, like an apron. She grumbled while she worked, complaining that her old bones were rattling like stones in a calabash, that whoever dreamed up the colour white never had to be somebody’s laundress, that white people’s furniture never did nothing except breed more furniture. I liked the way her every word was birdsong, through the space in her teeth. Four of them missing right where my own new ones had just come in.
She’d been the one to pull mine out, so I asked her, ‘Phibbah, who pulled yours?’ Oh, I worried at her like waves on sand. Children are all blindfolds and hammers. Cruel because of what they don’t know.
She told me it was none of my business. ‘You don’ remember it,’ she said.
‘Why?’
‘It happen before you born. Nobody remember a thing from then.’
Most days she did nothing but curse, but in the right mood she fed me scraps of hominy straight from the pot, or a slice of one of her corn cakes. When she sat outside the cook-room in the morning picking peas, and tapped her hand beside her in the dirt, it meant she’d set a few there for me, beside the washbasin. I’d creep over and scoop them into my palm, her arm tickling right beside mine. But she’d never turn, never look at me.
Peas snicking into pewter, Phibbah’s smell of coal, and the ley ash and aloe she mixed into soap. If I kept quiet, she might tell a story. But she had to work up to it, like a wave you can see coming from far out. First, she said, she had to find her story breath, which wasn’t the same as her living one.
My favourites were the ones about the house.
‘Only one reason white man ever build pretty-pretty house like this,’ Phibbah said. ‘You hooks worms to catch fish. After him come from England and finish him house, Massa send him letter to Bristol. We sabi sure as night going come, white woman going come. Sure enough Miss-bella come running ‒ bragadap! – same way guinea fowl come running when corn drop.’
Then Phibbah had a new mistress to learn. And she had to watch her the same way sailors watch the sky. Red sky at morning, sailor’s warning; red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Miss-bella came riding high on the driver’s bench in the mule-cart, as out of place as a white glove on a drying hedge, a teapot clinking on her lap, the blue and white pattern flocking the rim, like birds on a branch. She’d ripped up the cart cushions to make a little throne. Three nights Phibbah had stayed up sewing those cushions, finishing them off with a brocade leaf pattern good enough for the receiving room. Langton had said he wanted it to be like sitting on a god-damn cloud, the day he went down to get his wife. And here was Miss-bella, using them for her teapot instead of her backside! Oh, but she’d soon learn. This was Jamaica. Things were bound to crack.
Believe it or not, Phibbah said, there was a time Miss-bella and Langton used to ride out together, before she knew Jamaica was a thing she was supposed to be frightened of. Wearing her riding skirt that looked like a cut lemon and her straw hat with the blue feather, grey eyes shining with excitement and Langton mounted up beside her showing her everything he owned. Phibbah was supposed to keep watch, run down to swing the door the very minute they returned. She knew she’d pay if that door stayed closed even a minute longer. But there was a way of knowing when they were coming long before she could see them. ‘How?’ I’d ask her.
‘Same way you track him for any reason. Look out into the fields.’
‘Watch the bucks?’
‘Mm. Them all do the same thing when him draw near.’
‘They look up?’
‘Cha! Pickney!’ She kissed her teeth, air making its music through her gap. ‘Them heads go down. Watch. You see it every time, like a wave through grass. Whichever way that wave coming from, is there buckra coming from.’
Miss-bella had to be tended like a rose. She had the palest arms I ever saw. Her whole morning’s work was keeping them out of the sun. To top it all, she had a waist as narrow as a ching-ching beak, which she made narrower still with a whalebone corset that hooked around her, like ribs. Her bottom billowed under all manner of bustles and hoops her sister sent from the ladies’ catalogues. She said life in the colonies could only be survived by prayer and endured with tea, so Phibbah served it every afternoon on the back porch, grumbling: ‘Why we got the lone white in all of Jamaica mad enough to drink tea outside?’
We set out bowls of sugar water and cobalt poison to catch flies, brought out the orange-bough fan and the porcelain footbath. I hated that I had to wear my calico dress instead of my muslin (soft and white with a lace collar that always made Miss-bella’s guests look me up and down). But the muslin was for waiting at table, the calico was my foot-washing dress.
Phibbah stood behind her with the fan. I pushed up the hem of her grey skirt. Her toes flared like little eyelashes. I looked out towards the cane-piece. Scraps of osnaburg and muslin flapping, field-hands moving out
of line to dip rags in buckets of water, tie them around their brows. The nigger-drivers high on their horses under the tamarind tree, watching. I wiped the washcloth between Miss-bella’s toes. Her feet looked like something dug from a fire after it had died down. Dry, scratched. Not pretty like the rest of her. As the afternoon wore on she grew more and more red-faced. The fan turned a breeze, ship-sail slow. Her words sloshed around us, like the water in the tub. She bent forward over the cup, and sighed.
‘This whole god-forsaken place was designed for killing Europeans,’ she said.
Phibbah let the fan slap against her hip. ‘Kiiii! If it killing you, what it doing to us?’
Miss-bella stopped dead with the cup kissing her bottom lip. Then she laughed. ‘Well, it’s the Europeans I’m worried about, girl. Me in particular.’
Let me tell you, I saw Phibbah whipped for all manner of petty things: whenever a piece of china-ware went missing, after she let one of Miss-bella’s teacups slip and break, once when she was late bringing in the salted cod at breakfast, but never once did I see her whipped for talking back. I asked her about it once. ‘That the only entertainment the woman ever gets,’ she replied.
When you look back at anything, time caves into itself, like dirt running into a fresh hole. I see the three of us – the women of Paradise – like figures etched in glass. And it’s as if no time has passed, as if that girl knelt at Miss-bella’s feet, blinked, then woke up to discover she was the Mulatta Murderess.
From where I crouched, I could see out to the river. Oh, it would be a miracle to feel something soft as that water against my skin again, though I’d settle for lying on fresh-cut grass, or even just the chance to rub my fingers along a fresh-laundered shift. The air was sharp with the smell of cane trash burning out near the river, and the orange oil Phibbah used for polishing. ‘Go on in now, girl,’ Miss-bella said. ‘Fetch some of that pineapple tart you made yesterday. And is there any orangeade?’
Phibbah set the jug by the door. I’d kept my head down all that time, scraping at dirt under Miss-bella’s nails with the toe-picker, lifting first one foot, then the other. Heart still hard as a drum, but the rest of me gone soft as butter in a skillet. It was an ivory-handled picker I used, as if that could magic some dainty into Miss-bella’s feet. I lifted one out onto the towel beside her chair, to dry, and she and I both leaned back and admired it. Like it was marble in a museum. We used to pretend those feet were pretty as the teacups, same way we pretended the teapot wasn’t half full of rum.
She wasn’t done complaining. ‘I’m so tired of forever staring at these same old no-account hills.’
‘We could set out front, sometime,’ Phibbah said, ‘if you wasn’t so stubborn.’
‘Oh, no. I couldn’t.’
‘Get a view of the sea.’
‘That’s precisely why I could not.’ She flicked her a look, sharp, over the shoulder. ‘But you’d know about that.’
‘About what?’
‘Wanting a thing so much you can’t bear looking at it.’
Phibbah stabbed and stabbed with the fan, murdering air. ‘I thought it was the hills bothering you. Now you say it’s the sea.’
Miss-bella laughed into her cup. Then she paused, like she was giving thought. ‘Seems I can look neither ahead of me nor behind.’
‘Well, then, you can’ make no palabber about sitting where you put you-self.’
She waved her hand. ‘Do you really think I chose to put myself anywhere on this estate?’ We watched her slurp at her tea, set it aside. ‘If only my father or my husband would see sense, I’d be down there. On the next fast clipper to Bristol.’
Manso swung past us with his tin pail, crying, ‘Sook! Sook!’ calling in the cows, lifting his feet across the yard like the mad rooster that had only one rolling eye. Near the shed he shook salt into little mounds. The cows shambled over and licked at it with slow tongues.
To this day, I remember what happened then, because what happened then changed my life, for better and for worse. Miss-bella closed her eyes, rested her book on her knees, creeping her fingers across the leather cover. I saw a D nestled into it. A breeze tussling with the pages. Manso whistling his commands to the cows. Come in, come in. The book lay there, just another thing I wanted. Pages white as peeled apples. White as cleaned sheets. There came a wildness in me. How can I explain it? All went quiet, like when an owl flies overhead. Not even the ticking of the fan. I reached up for it, my hand flooding her lap, then realized what I had done, jerked back, snagged myself on Miss-bella’s skirt, scrabbled to my feet. She leaped up also. The book tumbled off her lap and into the water. My stomach pitched, like something tossed onto an ocean.
‘Frances!’
The fan stopped.
‘I’m sorry, missus,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’ I fished it out and swiped at it with a corner of my frock, fright rattling inside my head. She slapped me. My head like a fish on a line, her hand the hook. Legs flowing to the floor.
That whole island was sun-addled. Heat like biting ants. Light like blades.
I wiped and wiped and wiped. I used my hands, my skirt, shook that book like a mop-head, trying to coax it dry. I wanted to cry but dared not, not while Manso was watching. When I was small he might have given me one of his skewed winks as he passed by, or let me hold the salt on my palm, feel a cow lick, but not any more. House-niggers were the one thing they all hated worse than cane.
I sat by the stables, wiping. I could hear the horses and their whining breaths. Even after the others had gone in from the cane-piece and there was only the mockingbird’s kee-kee-pip to tell me I wasn’t alone, I was still there, wiping. My shadow in the dirt. She’d said I must sit there. ‘Make sure you don’t try to crawl into any shade. I’ll be watching.’
Would she?
She and Phibbah would be in the receiving room, Phibbah setting out the rum. Who knew where on that estate her husband would be?
Early on, in the days when she still rode out, Miss-bella had Phibbah make up the basket with breadfruit and cold turkey and shaddocks and some of the mangoes they’d picked that morning, saying she would take them out for her husband’s lunch. It was when she was trying to pour a pint of wine into a flask that Phibbah told her it wasn’t a good idea, and when she wouldn’t take no for an answer that Phibbah decided to go down with her. She felt sorry for the woman, with her corn-yellow hair and her wrong expectations. They found them under the cocoa-tree, the only place to get good shade that far from the house, Langton sitting like a cocked gun, back to his wife, facing the two girls he had out there. It was lucky he only had them dancing, Phibbah said. They moved easy as water, those two. Dark bodies, bright eyes. Nutmeg nipples waving like streamers. They cut their eyes at the new mistress, and went right on singing:
‘Hipsaw! My deaa! You no do like a-me!
You no jig like a-me! You no twist like a-me!
Hipsaw! My deaa! You no shake like a-me!
You no wind like a-me! Go yondaa!’
They’d probably still be right there under that tree, Phibbah said, because for a long time it seemed Miss-bella couldn’t move. Except that at last Langton heard the basket drop from her hand and finally turned around.
That had been the end of the riding out, the picnics, and the expectations. Though not the end of the dancing. Miss-bella just had to learn to do what everyone else did. Make sure to look the other way.
I glanced up towards the house, where Phibbah would be closing the shutters, lighting the candles with the taper, pulling the mosquito netting from its hook. Miss-bella settling herself on one of her silk stools, putting her feet up.
You will not leave that spot until my book is dry, she’d said. After a time, I gave up, stared down at the letters, small and black and sharp, like little claws. I tilted my head, as if I could hear what they were trying to tell me. They seemed trapped, each one shackled to the next one. Line after line. I snapped the book shut, sat back on my haunches. The old carthorse strained up along t
he sea road, cart loaded high with Indian-corn, the pickneys running beside, yelling and kicking the geese that jostled the wheels.
The back door opened and Miss-bella picked her way through the grass, puffs of dust kissing her feet. She crumpled her face down at me. ‘Dry yet?’
I shook my head, twisted my lips. I must have been the very image of misery, sure that now I’d be cast out. No more little head-pats, no more Turkish sweets, no more muslin frock. By then I must have been sun-struck, for I pointed to the D, asked what it was. She leaned over me. Her breath was hot and dry as the air. ‘That? Dee. Ee . . . Eff. This spells Defoe.’
Only then did I notice Phibbah had come out too and was standing on the porch, staring.
Miss-bella straightened, gave her a long look. Her voice sweetened to molasses. ‘I’ll teach you.’
Yes, I thought. Yes, yes, yes!
‘No!’ Phibbah stepped off the porch, looked like falling. ‘Miss’s . . .’
‘Why not?’ She nodded, tilted her head.
‘Because it’s enough,’ Phibbah said, tripping forward. ‘Enough.’
Once, after Miss-bella went in, Phibbah spat a thick stream into the dirt near the rose bush. ‘Where would I go? If I left here? Straight up them hills, first thing. First thing. Take me a musket. Then just wait. Wait, wait, wait, for the hottest part of the day, when nobody outside but slaves and lunatics. Then look for that spot of blue.’ The blue of a white woman’s eyes, the blue they called Wedgwood. ‘Then I be aiming straight for her heart.’
Now she just poked her tongue through her gap, stared at Miss-bella.
I stood looking from one to the other, dumb as one of the cows.
‘Is a whipping she deserve,’ Phibbah said. ‘For spoiling you book.’
‘A whipping? A whipping!’ Her eyes sharpened, gleamed wet. ‘What an idea. Do you want to be the one to give it to her?’
