The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  From the journals of George Benham

  (Marked by George Benham as: NOT INTENDED FOR PUBLICATION)

  Langton’s mulatta. Her eyes have the green cast of ageing metal. A feline slant. She is tall for a woman. Forehead high, and nose sharp. Features (and a cranium) that would not be misplaced on a European. Her skin is not black as such, but burnished to copper. There is a cat’s stillness about her also, disturbed only when she clutches her hands suddenly together, as if staying herself from some dread impulse.

  That she’s comely is no surprise. Some men herald the beauty of the mulatto race and I can see why there might be something of a fashion for them, in certain circles. But it is her mind that surprises! Or should I say excites?

  Langton contended that it’s not intelligence. Nothing more than a facility for following instructions. ‘Black will not become white,’ he wrote, ‘no more than white will become black. The purification of the Negro is not an object that can be attained.’ Though he conceded, when challenged, the possibility of a higher intellect resulting from the mixing of white into black; the kind of racial bleaching first described by de Pauw. Whites being the stem of all men, to quote Bomare, but also the stern.

  White lymph mixing with black, like a cow’s milk into coffee!

  What he seems blind to is that the girl’s very existence contradicts his two principal arguments: firstly, that blacks are a separate species, and secondly, that the purification of the Negro is impossible. When I pointed this out, he asserted that black is purified only by becoming white, and never pure itself.

  He is as pig-headed as most colonists, and stores each of his thoughts in separate boxes. Trust him, to spawn his own counter-argument!

  I’ve told her I want the whole truth about his experiments. The very mention of his name spins her backwards. Langton won’t have spared her. I know him. No friendship can be closer than that of boys who’ve boarded together at school. Langton’s trouble has always been that he forgets the Earth is a divine creation. Nothing in it, above or below, is amenable to man, for man is bound by skin. To him, Ego and all that Ego does is interesting, as Cowper wrote to Lady Hesketh, but it is also in vain.

  Her response: ‘There is no such thing as truth.’

  Delightful!

  ‘You’d have it as Plato would,’ I replied.

  She asked me why I wanted to know about Paradise, and what I proposed to do with her answers. Her lips crimped up at the corners. A glimmer of that mulishness Langton wrote about: All of a mulatta’s lewd charms, but instead of their pallor and weakness, a nigger’s stubborn streak. A deuced strange way for a man to speak about his own by-blow, but John Langton is a strange man.

  When he first wrote, he said his starting point was to be a variation on the old Bordeaux question: What is the physical cause of variety in the species of humankind?

  No one had made a significant attempt at it since the last century, so I was attracted, of course. What subject could be more attractive to a natural philosopher than such an investigation? I was sure God would guide this enquiry into an aspect of His creation. To begin with, Langton and I shared a hypothesis: that the differences between men are rooted in the composition of the body itself, that they are physiological and not, as some would have it, due to the vagaries of climate and other external factors, and therefore can be deciphered by a careful study of anatomy. Langton offered access to an unparalleled collection of skulls, and it was on my advice that he first thought to measure internal cranial capacity, not just the angles and planes every other bump-reader concerns himself with. I suggested he could do it by using mercury, or shot, to gain an accurate reading of internal volume.

  I thought his examinations would be organized on the fundamental principles of phrenology, namely that the brain is the organ of the mind, its different parts perform different functions, and one can deduce certain characteristics of a man by its size and form. In this way, we proposed to compile a survey of the natural mental endowments of each race of men, as fashioned by their Creator. Each to match its own geography.

  But Langton always resisted even divine attempts at guidance, so I should have seen there was very little chance he’d follow mine.

  At the end of the first year, he wrote to inform me that he sought to go further than the original scope; to expand upon Maupertuis by proving that, if man is the product of the mechanical forces of conception, our traits, including race, are passed to us through sperm, and the Negro’s blackness is therefore innate, as well as the Negro’s other characteristics: inferior intellect and morality and ambition.

  I wrote asking him what had happened to the skulls. He was still taking measurements, he replied.

  He had done nothing with them! There was no catalogue. He had wasted all that time blistering corpses.

  Worse, his project now pulled towards the argument that the origins of man are profane, not profound, that man is fashioned by sperm and not by God. Heresy, in other words. I could not be part of it. There was very little left of the phrenological study I thought we’d embarked on (though I believe now that may simply have been a pretext, to draw me in). Good intentions should never attach themselves to bad means.

  Knowing that the greater name will always attract the greater tarnish, I told him I’d no longer sign my name to his project. I offered to purchase his skulls, since he had no idea how to examine them properly. I thought the matter would rest there, we’d go our separate ways. But instead he whitewashed his manuscript, excised all references to his doubtful experiments, and sought to persuade me that we could try again.

  But he’s retained all his misguided focus on skin and colouring agents. In any event, it is too late now for a further attempt. His old stables burned down before he left, and everything inside. The skulls cannot be retrieved. He has nothing that could interest me further.

  Except the girl.

  He seeks to curry favour by leaving her here, supposing it will amuse me. It does. But it’s also convenient for him. What else could he do with her? I saw how his hands trembled. He’s ill. He told us (in confidence) that his wife’s brother had cast him out. On her instructions! Meg showed the expected degrees of sympathy, and made soothing noises. I wanted to say, There! See what a truly rotten marriage looks like!

  Perhaps Langton didn’t think I’d interrogate the girl.

  So far, she’s told me only what I already knew. Had to twist her arm to get even that much. The first question she asked was whether I’d turn her out if she declined to answer my questions. By suggesting duress, she sought to shame me, of course, implying I was no better than him. Clever. Told her, yes, she should consider it duress, if that made it easier for her to answer.

  There followed a response containing as much emotion as a Latin declension: ‘I was only a scrivener, sir.’ As if it had been nothing to do with her; as if she’d been but an instrument, calibrated like a set of scales, then put to use.

  She said that he followed men like Littré, Meckel, Le Cat. When he could get a cadaver, he blistered the skin with boiling water, and soaked it in spirits of wine for a week. He copied Malpighi’s experiments; first, detaching the web of vessels that is the seat of colour in the skin – the Malpighian layer (tinged black in the African) – then examining the brains and pineal glands of a number of Negroes, noting their blue-black, ashy appearance. He extracted the black bile from those same corpses also, concluding that the stain isn’t merely skin deep but rather the Negro is black from skin to nerves to brain, and the stain is evident long before a Negro comes into the world, imprinted on the genitalia, fingers and toes and present also in the male sex organs, and in the sperm. He examined the scrota and labia of all the infants born or miscarried at Paradise over a period of three years. I remember well Sir Humphrey reading aloud his letter on the subject, his one and only paper to find its way into the Philosophical Transactions.

  She said it was she who copied his early papers. Replication of Quier’s investigations into the origin of b
lackness in the Negro and Elements of Phrenology in a study of plantation Negroes. A man she knew only as the Surgeon served as anatomist. I think she means Will Buckham, never in all his born days sober enough to hold a pen, let alone a scalpel. Most of those plantation quacks are drunks and, knowing Will Buckham, the greatest danger was that he’d sever one of his own bits. Hearing that he was dead didn’t surprise me, though I was surprised to learn it had been the smallpox and not the great one: he was always as chaste as he was sober.

  My series of questions, and the girl’s answers, below.

  Were you ever blistered yourself?

  No answer.

  Did Langton experiment on living subjects?

  No answer.

  (But I know he did, of course. I read his original manuscript. And I knew that in ’23 he’d written to the Society asserting that death should not be the limit of knowledge, that a body could tell us much more alive than dead. There was no reason, he wrote, that a man could not be kept alive through his experiments.)

  Were there experiments into the capacity to withstand pain?

  No answer.

  Were there experiments concerning reproduction?

  She answered my question with a question and asked what I meant.

  That trick. Explained that I wanted to know whether there were any instances of forced mating. In response, she laughed. Asked if I knew nothing about what happened on a West India estate. It is all forced mating, she said.

  Longer answer, verbatim:

  ‘I will tell you this, sir, I will tell you what abolishing the trade did. When a man cannot buy stock, he breeds it. Every woman at Paradise was a belly woman then! Lining up on Sundays, waiting at the front porch for their half-dollars and their maccarronis. “See, Massa! Me breed good new neger for Massa. Big, strong neger.” ’

  (I pictured Langton tapping each quickened womb in the way I sometimes imagine those colonials tapping coconuts before scooping out the flesh. It wouldn’t have escaped him that, like Daedalus killing two birds with his one stone, he could increase both his stock and his specimens thus.)

  Then she would not say more, and looked considerably downcast.

  Was an orangutan brought to Paradise for the purposes of the experiments?

  A look of mild surprise.

  (I know Langton was on the hunt for one. He had Pomfrey scouring the earth, which has never been a thing Pomfrey could do quietly.)

  After a long moment spent biting her lip, she told a story Langton had told her. An orangutan had been kept shipboard for eighteen months by a crew of slavers who entertained themselves by teaching the ape to dress himself in knee-high breeches and a cambric shirt, to ask for tea by pointing to his mouth, and to eat a dish the natives called fungee with a spoon and fork. The creature had suffered such distress on being returned to the coast whence he’d been kidnapped that he threw himself into the ocean to try to follow the vessel, and was never seen again.

  Asked her what she thought Langton’s object was in telling such a story. She replied that it was simply a thing that had happened. (Could very well have asked, what was her object in telling me?)

  Was an albino ever brought to Paradise for the purposes of the experiments?

  No answer.

  She grew skittish at the mention of albinos. Told her I didn’t imagine she’d had any choice about the things they’d made her do. Her eyes flailed, as if she’d been stung by something. Conscience, perhaps. She looked straight at me: ‘Of course I had a choice.’

  I want truth. She wants silence.

  Circumspection is a liar’s refuge. Nevertheless both truth and silence smother guilt.

  I’ve been advised by a group of the Fellows, who’ve asked to remain nameless for the time being, that I may persuade them I don’t condone Langton’s conduct if I expose it myself. By doing so, I may be assured of their support for putting forward my own proposals. Just like the Brookes slave ship: give people that impression of horror, and it will soften them up for compromise. The behaviour of some West India planters is a terrible scourge but, on the other hand, the problem of compensation drags the government’s heels. My own model eradicates the former, while avoiding entirely the latter headache. It all coheres, and gives rise to the perfect opportunity to make the case in support of legislation ensuring the protection of our Negroes, and, by extension, our livelihoods. An amelioration plan along Canning’s lines, but with the aim of preserving that which others would destroy.

  An account of what happened at Paradise would be just the thing for exposing Langton. But so far the girl only plays at co-operating. ‘I cannot remember most of it,’ she said, and then promptly contradicted herself: ‘I don’t wish to.’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mr Feelon once said to me, ‘Frances Langton, your body might have been currency once, but you own yourself now. In England, we know better than to trade men like barley.’ Oh, they’re fond of telling you things you already know. I swear they’d fish a man out of an ocean just so as they could shout at him, ‘Why, sir, I do believe that you have been drowning!’ It’s nonsense, but they think it’s true because they believe it.

  English newspapers had come to Paradise by ship, news of gaslights at Westminster Bridge, the campaign against Napoleon, King George’s funeral. And in them notices, advertisements, and handbills that were so very like the fly-sheets that had been passed around Montego Bay: ‘Black boy, twelve years of age, fit to wait on a gentleman. Talks English very well. To be disposed of at Liddell’s Coffee House, in Finch Lane, near the Exchange’; or ‘Run away from Mr Thomas Addleson in Richmond last Thursday, his middle-sized Negress, Harriet, about 30, in a grey cotton dress and a brown coat. About five feet two inches.’

  The same catalogue of people here as where I come from – the hunted and the sold – no matter what they say about English air. All my life I’d known that black bodies have no value, but a price above rubies. And here was a puzzle. A puncheon of sugar is still a puncheon of sugar after it crosses the Atlantic, but what had I become? How was I supposed to own myself, elbow-deep in soap, rinsing out Benham’s small linens?

  All I’d done was trade one master for another. And this one wanted to pick my brains, examine them for evidence of Langton’s sins. Whenever I asked him why, he said only that his purpose was his own business entirely, but I should make no mistake that I was there to serve both. Nor had he been satisfied with the scraps I’d fed him, my first lie – that I remembered very little of what had happened at Paradise – oiling the way for all the rest. Though I told myself I wasn’t lying, but rather telling only half the truth.

  On the seventh day, there was a bundle laid at my place at the table, wrapped in twine. When I tore off the paper, it unfurled into two dresses, made of rough linsey. ‘One to wear, one to change into,’ Linux announced, staring through the window. I could hear the soft crunch of boots, coal tumbling into next door’s chute. When she turned, her jaw clicked, like the lid on the pot. ‘Jamaican gowns might be flimsy, but English women are more modest.’

  I rolled up the fabric and set it back on the table. ‘I have a dress,’ I said.

  But she stared and stared until I rose slowly to my feet, and picked up the bundle. Then she followed me into the scullery, laid both dresses across the copper. ‘The brown for now,’ she said, nodding at it. ‘The green will keep for Sundays.’

  I’d dressed myself in my navy serge since leaving the Pride, when all of London had been spread in front of me like a picnic rug, and I’d just as soon have peeled off my own skin, but I swallowed, brought my fingers up to my chest, rubbed them along the bodice.

  ‘Too slow,’ she said, and swooped her fingers onto me quick as crows, unhooking me herself. Cold seeped around us, like the steam from the copper when Pru heated the bathwater in there. There was a smell of pork and caraway on her fingers from the sausages she’d been making that morning, and the usual scullery smells on top of that. The lye and piss we mixed up for the laundry, old sweat, damp. He
r fingers crept down my bodice. All the while she kept up a constant chatter, and I heard a snick-snick-snick that made me swing my head in search of a clock, or dripping water. ‘You dress for the use to which you’re put, here,’ she muttered, pinching my jaw to keep my face still. ‘Do you hear? And you will not be wiggling your tail all over Mr Benham’s house.’

  My throat clenched. You need this place, I told myself. You need this place. When she saw that I’d made no reply she snapped her head up, fingers stilled on my hooks. ‘Have you nothing to say for yourself? I saw you. With Charles.’

  Charles? It came back to me, then, that the afternoon before, I’d been in the front hall, shining the clock. Charles had crept behind me with no warning. ‘I’ve been wondering about something,’ he said. ‘Maybe you could settle it for me.’

  ‘Settle what?’ I’d asked.

  He sniggered. ‘How you sleep on white sheets without getting them mucked.’

  Anger made hairpin jabs in my skull. I’d set down the polishing cloth, turned to face him. He blinked and rubbed at his jaw, tottering like a new foal. I stepped close. My voice came out rough. I fancied a murderous tone crept into it. ‘Is that what you wondered?’ He laughed, but backed away, as if he’d heard it too, that killing note. I thought of the preacher, who used to sit in the heat at Paradise, red as a crab in a pot, calling out Bible verses. The way of an eagle in the sky, the way of a serpent on a rock, and the way of a man with a maid. ‘“Maid” is one of those words that can have many different meanings, Frances,’ he would say. ‘Servant, yes, but also girl, virgin, unmarried woman.’ A maid to a man, a serpent to an eagle. Just something to stick his claws into. Once a house-girl, for ever a whore.

  Linux finished unhooking my bodice and stepped back. A man and a maid. Perhaps it would have looked like seduction, if you were watching it from a distance. But what was the use in protesting? No doubt she would take his side, tell me she had similar questions herself. I stood mute. Didn’t say a word. She must have thought me dumb, frightened. Sullen. The noise came again when she looked at me. Snick. Snick-snick. She curled her lip, drew her face back, and I realized it was her tongue that made the noise, clacking like a builder’s hammer.