The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  Phibbah said, ‘Yes.’

  Miss-bella’s buttocks were saggy as an old man’s mouth clawing around a pipe stem, and winked when she flipped herself over. Phibbah swiped a wet cloth into the crack, fluttered it out again, soiled. Her face thickened while she did it, like boiling cane juice after it pulls and pulls on itself until it slows to syrup.

  A sick, sour feeling tickled at my throat. I will never do that, I thought. Never! Not for anyone. Not so long as I draw breath.

  The Surgeon was a broad-bellied man, with a large nose that flamed red in the creases, who lived at Mesopotamia, tended the slaves on both estates. He’d made his own fortune selling yaws inoculations, then stayed on because he had nowhere else to go. At the foot of Miss-bella’s bed, he sucked his bottom lip, said, ‘Yes, thank you,’ to a tot of rum for himself, then spooned cocaine drops for her from his medicine chest. He’d bought it off a ship’s doctor who’d opened a public house near Montego Bay. There’d been a flood of them setting up shop, old doctors, boatswains, other men with skin tough as saddles. Those who could no longer make their living from the trade since it had been abolished, but nevertheless stuck close to the institution, leeches too bloated to drop off. He pecked a lancet at Miss-bella’s arm. Pink flowers of blood bloomed in the basin. Then he leaned forward, screwed his eyes to watch the drops quicken like footsteps. At last, he looked up at Langton, rubbed his hands down his breeches. ‘More mercury. That’ll do it.’

  Miss-bella had been taking mercury for months. Phibbah said she didn’t trust it. Too silver, she said. Nothing without colour had any good use.

  By nightfall, Miss-bella had twisted her sheets into a pile and sat brooding on them, like one of the yellow hens. The room was flanked by dark wood: the dresser, covered with an army of glass bottles and jars, and the night tables, lightened only by doilies Phibbah had crocheted for her. She clawed her fingers into her nightgown and lifted it over her head, her laughter ringing out. It was Phibbah who went over to her and yanked it back down.

  Three days later, Miss-bella lost a tooth. It came out yellow as an old pearl. Phibbah took it away, though Miss-bella tried to cling to it. ‘Now I’ll have a gap, like yours. Ugly.’

  Phibbah dropped the tooth into the bowl of water, stepped over a splash of vomit. ‘Ugly not the worst thing a body can be.’ She lifted a square of damp cotton, and held it as if it had taken her by surprise, like she’d forgotten what she wanted with it in the first place. ‘That man’s medicine making you sicker than dirt.’

  But Miss-bella wasn’t listening. She’d spied me. ‘Loitering?’ She lifted her head, her face red as beef. ‘Don’t watch me! Insolent girl!’

  Since Miss-bella was ill, Langton said, he’d take his breakfast in the inside dining room instead of out in the fields with his overseers. Keep an eye on things inside. I helped Phibbah serve, platters loaded wrist to elbow. Johnnycakes and butter to start with, and goat’s milk she’d got that morning. Langton took his time. Pulled out his chair, settled himself into it, snapped out his napkin, tilted his glass, and pinned his lips around his mouthful of milk. As soon as Phibbah came in, he cleared his throat. ‘You know . . . I been puzzling hard about the way things stand upstairs, girl.’

  Something about the way he spoke churned my insides. Phibbah must have felt it, too. Her feet hitched, like weeds in a net, and she left it too long before answering. That drumbeat of silence pounded into my own chest.

  ‘Well. Miss’s going be happy you thinking on her.’

  ‘No, no.’ He raised a brow. ‘I don’t think she will. You know why? You know what conclusion I came to? I’ll be buggered if what ails my wife isn’t a case of poisoning.’

  Phibbah moved to the table, around it, set down the platter of breadfruit, the bowl of fruit, the gold-rimmed plate that held the salted codfish and his slices of ham and his eggs, too, fried in pork grease the way he liked them. His eyes followed her, shot with blood, as if he’d sat up all night with a bottle of rum, as was sometimes his custom. As if he might in fact still be drunk. She set down the last plate, and turned, unsteady on her feet, said she’d go fetch the coffee.

  ‘Girl!’ he shouted. She stopped with her hand on the latch. The way her head whipped up and turned to where I was standing, I knew it was me he was shouting for. My whole body sagged.

  ‘Girl. I said, come here.’

  ‘Don’t bring her into it,’ she said.

  The laugh burst out of him. ‘It’s me who brought her into all of it!’ He pushed his seat back and reared up over me, brought his face right down close to mine, nostrils flaring wide as the walls.

  I stepped away, pasted my ribs to the sideboard.

  ‘You ever see this here girl put something extra in your missy food or drink? Tell the truth.’ He brought his face even closer. My heart jumped, but it was the only thing that moved. I didn’t even dare pull back. ‘Speak or take your chances, girl.’

  There was never any call for the truth in a place like that. But it could be there was already obedience bred into me, the same way Langton bred cows for milk and meat.

  ‘Yes,’ I blurted. ‘Seasoning.’

  Phibbah’s hand flew from the door handle to her mouth, left the little golden latch shuddering.

  Dust crumbled out of the grill and fell away when Manso moved the first loose stone. By the third, all Phibbah’s dried herbs came into view, black as biting ants, twisted into oilcloth. And mound after mound of cassava root.

  I’ve had to set this manuscript down for a time, still my pen, still my breath, shocked at finding myself for several hours quite unable to move my hand. But this is to be a true and honest account, which means I must include such sins as I remember, and can therefore confess. Yet writing it down has swung such a hammer of sadness through my head, forced me to face what was mercifully clouded for so long. Now, when all I want is for memory to betray me, to tell me lies, I scoop into it and find nothing but unvarnished truth.

  I face myself, as I was then. Young Frances. Word-struck. Thinking that Phibbah – gap-toothed Phibbah, fat, black ‒ was something she’d outgrown. Thinking that all she’d done was tell the truth, as she was bound to. She had seen the herbs, sprinkled in the orangeade. Her massa asked a question, she answered it. Thinking she had to tell the truth to save herself.

  Truth. Truth, truth, truth. What was the truth? Oh, by then I knew too much to understand that I knew nothing.

  I’ve since learned that cassava root isn’t a slow poison. It kills you in two shakes, unless you can get yourself to some salt of wormwood, quick. If Phibbah had been feeding that to Miss-bella, she’d have been dead before she could sit on that pot. But I didn’t know it then. Nor did I know why Phibbah didn’t speak up for her own self. I never will.

  None of this stems the vast, abiding tide of my shame.

  Everybody knew the very hour when she was hanged. From the top porch, I watched riders setting out along the road that led up from the harbour, bringing the news to Langton. Miss-bella still hadn’t left her bed, hadn’t said a word, so no one knew her feelings about any of it, yea or nay. Langton met them at the gates. I stood and watched, blood knocking into the top of my skull. He looked up and saw me, curled his lip, then went back inside, racketing the door back into its jamb so the walls shook. My belly flinched like a struck nail and a sob heaved its way up out of me. I wanted to shout, call him back, tell him there was no hiding place, no herbs. It was a mistake! It was a mistake!

  But, like all good intentions, that one came too late.

  What happened that morning is a dark cloth wiped across my entire existence. All my old sorrows sink into me when I remember it, though now I’m struck by terror as well. Terror that I’ll find nothing to persuade the jurors in my own defence. That I might meet the same fate as Phibbah. And that I might deserve it, if I do.

  Chapter Six

  Some of the anti-slavers visit me here, seeing what stories they can harvest out of me for their pamphlets. What makes them imagine I’d agre
e? They’d only make it into one of those slave tales. It doesn’t cross their minds that I might want to write it myself. Mr Feelon was the last to try it. It was hard enough having him here. He was there that terrible, murderous night, and I don’t like to be reminded of any part of it. I gave him my answer even before he had time to ask. ‘No, thank you,’ I said. ‘I think I’d much prefer the rope.’

  His lips swam away from each other. ‘You must suit yourself, of course, Miss Langton. But bear in mind that if you choose to write it yourself it will be necessary to season it. Your readers will need to understand. Show them why you had no choice.’

  I showed him a raised brow. ‘If people don’t know already what happens on a West India estate, Mr Feelon, you’ve wasted your life in the printing of all those pamphlets.’

  ‘But the slave tales we print shed light on suffering,’ he said, his own face running oil, like a lamp. ‘Which is the only way to keep attention on our cause.’

  All those good-doers, sniffing at the carcass of slavery, craving always to hear the worst thing. The worst thing isn’t that it strips the world to scraps and forces you to fight for them; the worst thing is that one of those scraps is yourself.

  Mr Feelon’s visit, and his talk of suffering, brought Phibbah to mind ‒ though in truth I’m always thinking of her. It set me wondering how I could write about what happened so you could understand. I can tell you I loved her, and that she was all I had. I was all she had. I never wanted to hurt her. That was the least of my intentions. I had no intentions ‒ there’s no other way I can think to explain it. There was nothing in my mind but that black terror. That quailing. That awful, shrinking, grasping, shaming need. To save myself.

  Despite everything that’s happened, and the terrible trouble I’m in, if you gave me the choice of one moment to undo, to take back, that would be the one. That moment is the heaviest thing I carry. How I long to set it down.

  I write this by tallow light, having now paid sufficient guineas to be moved to a cell of my own. No law says I can’t read and write here, but for all I know the turnkeys would throw these pages away if they caught me at it, same as they did with Madame’s letter when I was first brought in. One click of a key, one turn of the knob, and I’m ready to shove paper, pen and ink under my skirts. They’re always spying, which means I must speed my pen. Now, it’s a case of gobbling backwards. As if I spent my whole life putting those words in, and now I’m spitting them back out.

  It’s Moll Flanders that leaps into my head sometimes while I write. But Moll has always been a favourite, so it’s no surprise I should be thinking of it now. Oh, I know it’s the kind of smug nonsense that is always written by men when they write about women. A sermon in sheep’s clothing, Madame used to call it.

  A man writes to separate himself from the common history. A woman writes to try to join it. What are my own intentions in writing this? The simple answer is that it’s my life, and I want to assemble the pieces of it myself. Mr Defoe made a novel and a romance out of the adventures of a felon and a whore, so it must be possible that of my own life I could do the same. Though it’s only one part of the world that’s taken up with novels and romances, the other part being taken up instead with death and vengeance. It’s that part which crowds the doors of the Old Bailey at cockcrow waiting to see meat such as me tossed at hungry prosecutors.

  Some will ask why I address this manuscript to you. A man I’d never clapped eyes on before I was arrested. But there’s a simple answer for that also, which is that I want the same thing Langton wanted. English publishers. And I know enough to know that a white man is the only person on God’s green earth who can get me one of those.

  Miss-bella’s health improved after Phibbah’s death, which Langton took as a sure sign he’d been right. She and I were the only ones who knew she’d stopped taking the Surgeon’s mercury. It fell to me to empty her pot, with Phibbah gone, and I’d seen her let the silver pearls run into it, and it was then that I put two and two together, made an awful sum. ‘You never said anything. You should have said something. He would have listened to you.’

  Her eyes shrivelled. ‘I was sick as a dog, child. I scarce knew what was happening around me, let alone downstairs.’

  You weren’t too sick to speak. My mind rocked like a ship. ‘Tell him now.’

  ‘What good would that do?’

  ‘They killed her. They took her and you did nothing and now she’s dead because you never spoke.’

  ‘Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, child. She’s dead because you did.’

  No one ever spoke Phibbah’s name again, except me, late at night, when my head went quiet and I whispered it to the wall. I had to do the fan and the footbath by myself. Thoughts of Phibbah jumped into my head every time I did, and whenever I saw the new cook shelling peas. Two years passed in that manner, and then came the day I saw blood on the cotton drawers I’d sewn myself, on my fingers when I touched down there. One more thing to hide, washing rags in a pail behind the cook-room, walking crutch-legged through the house to keep the scraps of cloth from slipping down between my legs. All the small joys of my small life coming to an end. Time has its way with all of us, whether we like it or not.

  I was fetching the water one day when a group of the hands who were working near the porch, cutting rails for the front gate, picked that moment to strike up their chatter, their whispers following me across the yard, like dogs on scent: Massa wait long enough but him soon break her in. I kept going, head down, tramped up the steps. Miss-bella gave me a curled look. ‘Don’t you ever think to wag your tail at any man in that yard again.’

  Quick as she’d picked me up, she set me back down. Said she would do for herself on the porch, got the new cook to bring her tea. But by then she could do nothing but hate me. ‘Tell the yes girl to remove herself from my receiving room, Langton,’ she’d say. Or ‘Langton, I don’t want your yes girl in the house when the Copes are here for dinner Sunday next. I trust you to make sure of it.’ She could call me what she liked. A name is nothing but some old thing people use for you, or against.

  Miss-bella set me down. But just as quickly as she did, Langton picked me up.

  If you stood on the road facing Paradise, you’d see the old coach-house off to the left, beneath the silk-cotton tree. The only part of the estate Langton hadn’t rebuilt. Miss-bella never went in there. I’d seen him call the hands into it sometimes, one by one. He’d called Phibbah in to wash the floors and she’d come out afterwards with her skirts tied and her hand-cloth over her nose.

  When it comes to charting the course of my life, the coach-house is the place where the map would show a desert full of wild beasts. Here are lions, my mark would say. Hic sunt leones. How I wish I’d never entered it. The Surgeon − I never heard him called any other name than that – had been for dinner that night, and the pair of them came to me in the cook-room, where I was sitting staring at the grill. I’d felt the Surgeon’s eyes on me the whole time I was putting out their pork, plantains, yams and guinea corn, with their wine and the arrack and the Brazilian rum Langton was so fond of. ‘Frances,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to come with us.’

  ‘She’s young,’ the Surgeon said. I didn’t much like his voice. I heard a trembling in it. The rum bottle glinted like a jewel in his left hand.

  There were black rocks inside the coach-house that strained towards each other, cold silver rods, liquids belching in jars. That first time, I was afraid and didn’t want to go inside. But they only laughed at me and pushed me in, saying it was not magic but science, more powerful than scattered bones and blood and feathers. Langton said it was a room for experiments.

  ‘What are experiments?’

  ‘A way of proving a thing one suspects to be true.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘Any.’

  ‘But why prove it if you already believe it?’

  The Surgeon coughed. The tremor had jumped from his voice into his hands. The room stretched around us. Two high arche
d windows shrouded in old webs, a handful of dead flies spilled into one corner, like rice.

  I held up one of the rods.

  ‘Calipers,’ Langton said, taking them from me, like a knife from a babe.

  He told me they were doing very important work in there, sponsored by a very important man. ‘George Benham,’ the Surgeon said.

  Langton took the bottle from him, gave a bitter-sounding laugh. ‘England’s finest mind has taken an interest in our little colonial experiment.’

  I’d never heard him talk like this with any other slave. It made me bold. ‘Your own experiment? To prove what?’

  ‘That a man’s whole potential is seeded in his skull, and one can prove that by examining it closely enough. Europe tries to take the lead in the development of this knowledge − men like Linnaeus, Buffon . . . men like Benham – but I believe we can make the real advances here, where we’re better placed for once to take the lead on something. We can make our own names. Though we need Benham to attract a publisher.’ He glanced at the Surgeon. ‘Mind you, he needs us, too. He might have the name, but we have the specimens.’

  I’d soon learn. It wasn’t only bodies did Langton’s bidding, it was minds. While I stayed at Paradise he measured mine, watched how it bent, sized it as sure as if he’d gripped it with that cold tool he kept in the cupboard.

  ‘Make a long story short,’ said the Surgeon. ‘You’re going to help us.’

  ‘A great help,’ Langton said, lifting the bottle to his lips.

  ‘What must I do?’

  There was a short, low laugh from the Surgeon.

  I saw things in that coach-house that I can’t stop seeing now. But worse than the things I saw are the things I did.

  In the early days, I stirred indigo and goat’s blood into buckets of piss, to make their dyes, sharpened their nibs, pounced on geese for their quill feathers. I kept my head down to begin with, though I soon lost some of my fear. We were by that time forever cooped up together. And I became something worse than fearful. Grateful.