The slave ship
We had it to ourselves, save for a wagon drawn by four oxen with three
or four black men walking alongside that was disappearing into the
distance.
I said, “I considered it the right side. But now I think Tory and Whig
are just on the same side and that it’s not a particularly important
one!”
“_I_ think,” he answered, “that in another five minutes you might
have found yourself apprehended. What possessed you?”
“I don’t know, Colley,” I said, “except that I love Scotland. Listen to
the bees in all that yellow stuff!”
We rode on. “Mosquitoes!” he said. “How could it be mosquitoes?”
Leaving these trees, we came to a great planting of sugar cane, many
acres, breathlessly still now in the drop of the wind. Half-naked black
men were cutting, cutting, a large gang of them, dim and dimmer down
the rank field where the cane was head-tall. They felled the stalks
with curiously shaped knives, somewhat like a short cutlass. We made
out two armed white men standing watching, and in a moment a third, on
horseback, came along the road that seemed an unfrequented one, and
stopped at our greeting. I recognized an overseer, with some of the
marks of Barget, but harder.
“Good day!” quoth Colley. “The cane seems prime.”
“’Tis so, sir.” He stood in his stirrups and shouted something to the
nearest white man, who shouted it in turn to the next. In the distance
rose the tall chimney of a sugar mill, and there was a movement
toward it across the great field as of a monster serpent, a dragon of
antiquity. We seemed to catch a sight of oxen too, and of heaped wagons.
“New slaves?” said Colley.
“Just so, sir,” answered the man on the horse. “Out of the
_Silver_, no longer ago than Christmas. Coromantins, too. The
worst of the lot!”
“But they’re in demand.”
“They’re big and strong as an ox. That’s why,” replied the overseer.
“But, God! they’re hard to tame! And when they find that they can’t
kill you--unless they wish to be burned alive--they run off. Clear away
to the mountains and feed the Maroons! We’ve been breaking these in
for a month.” He had pistols, a knife and a great whip, and his white
helpers were similarly armed.
“Are they broken yet?” I asked, and he answered with satisfaction,
“Pretty well!” and I saw Eboe Sam who also had been fierce and haughty.
He departed into the field, following the line like a serpent. Colley
and I rode back to Kingston, to North’s house, to the verandah and
the hammocks and the bowl of punch. It was an easy, easy life and it
attacked with the power of a tiger. To lie and dream, to lie and think
that you were thinking!
Two days after Spanish Town we rode into the Blue Mountains, starting
before sunrise, our destination a “pen”, as their plantations are
called well up toward the clouds that hid the purple heads. The owner
was a Mr. Browne, a connection of North’s, and the latter had suggested
our going, but indeed Colley had been before. It was not a sugar
plantation, but Browne experimented with coffee. And as planters are
as hospitable as Highland chiefs, no need for forewarning. It had been
so in Virginia and was so in Jamaica.
When we left the plain and began to climb, the road grew profoundly
poor. But all around was beauty--around, above, below, where now the
plain and harbor spread, a shield all vert and argent. We saw the
ships, could make out the _Janet_.
“There she is!” quoth Colley, and “There she is!” I followed. Still
we climbed while strange trees pressed about us and rich and strange
flowers, and we heard water falling. From shoulder to shoulder we saw,
in an amber light, the plain and the mountains and the sea. I said, “It
is a beautiful island!”
He agreed. “A man might live here very well if he had means and place.”
“There would be forever warmth and light, even if you had neither.”
“Yes,” he said. “But toil. Warmth and light and toil.”
The day was well on when back among the hills we came to cleared land,
to growing coffee and to flat, stone drying-places called barbecues
and finally to a house of wood and stone that was Browne’s Folly,
where we were going. At once the great shady bloomy yard before it
seemed to swarm with Negroes. A great bell rang, we dismounted, a Negro
house servant, not at all unlike several I remembered at Amory Hall,
appeared to tell us with unction that “the Captain” was out but would
be in ere long and that we were at home. He showed us a big untidy
room, and a blowsy mulatto girl brought us water for our hands and
faces; and the butler, if that was his denomination, returned with
glasses and a squat bottle of rum. There seemed no hostess. “I don’t
know if he ever married,” said Colley. “He’s an old man now.”
We sat awaiting the Captain--Colley did not know how he got the
title--in deep and comfortable chairs on a verandah with a great view.
Some kind of quarter seemed to extend from the house at the back, or
some kind of cultivation to go on in the immediate neighborhood, for
numerous voices made themselves heard, rich Negro voices, men and
women. I said, “They sound mighty gay and cheerful.”
“This pen’s got the greatest name for good nature. Browne’s an oddity
with some notion in his head. North says he has money in the funds at
home or he could never do it. He says the place makes him nothing.
Rather he’s always putting in----”
“All these Negroes speak English after a sort. They don’t seem recent.”
“They aren’t. Browne believes in their breeding and so keeping up the
stock. Most planters go the other way about. When their number is
worked off and getting low, they buy more out of Africa. North says
Browne hasn’t bought for a long time. There are some here who were born
in Africa, but they’ve almost forgotten it. He doesn’t work them hard
either; there are always two or three to a one-man job.”
“How old a man is he?”
“Browne? Seventy, I imagine, though he doesn’t look it. He came out to
Jamaica young.”
“What does he do when the population grows too great?”
“Sells, I suppose,” said Colley. “Yes, of course. Junia at North’s was
raised here.”
I listened to the laughter somewhere beyond a thicket of fruit trees.
“I should think that they would miss it here when they’re sold.”
“Yes,” he answered dreamily, “I should think so.”
“They have no say in it,” I said. “This island is like Virginia, only a
deal more so. That’s the climate, I dare say, and the fact that it’s an
island, and the history of these seas.”
“These seas and these islands have a terrible history,” he said. “Well,
that is man!”
It seemed not to trouble Colley, or not to trouble him at that time.
And David Scott, upon this mountain shoulder, with the tropic day about
him, the light and the air and good-natured sound, with a long deep
chair in which to stretch his limbs, with drink at hand if he wanted
it, wrapped in leisure, wrapped in balm, said No! to his eternal
querying, said, “Don’t trouble me now--don’t trouble me ever, if you
can manage it!”
Browne came home and proved to be a white-haired, strong old man,
with a round face and a kind of perpetual beamy look not unmixed with
whimsey. He greeted us hospitably, the Negroes grinned when he spoke,
the dogs sprang up on him and a parrot flying down from a mango tree
perched upon his shoulder. “Universal Benevolence!” I thought. “Father
Christmas!”
We had supper of an untidy abundance but well cooked. One hardly
counted the attendance, but saw dark countenances come and go, and that
one and all seemed happy enough. After supper, we sat upon the verandah
in the warm, rose-shot dusk and smoked and talked. He had an easy, old
man’s loquacity. He wanted to hear about the _Janet_ and Daga and
Bristol, Liverpool and London, but with a touch of disinterestedness.
“I said to myself forty years ago, ‘This thing ought to be better
managed! Buy enough women--make them all, men and women, comfortable
and happy enough--and see what will happen according to Nature! In
short, raise your own Negroes and don’t be forever spending fifty
pounds for a raw Ashanti or Eboe stark from the Slave Coast!’ So I
began with this place and thirty odd, male and female, and a few
children. It’s paid. They’ll tell you, of course, in Kingston that
it hasn’t, that I make nothing. But I do. I make the satisfaction
of seeing a theory _work_--and as you know, young men, there’s
nothing in the world like that! If the Indies and the Continent, North
and South, would go about it my way--be indulgent to them and give a
feast for every baby--there’d be enough right in America in a hundred
years to cultivate all the fields we’re likely to want cultivated. Then
all the cost and worry and loss of bringing them from Africa might be
stopped for good and all. Turn the slave ships into spice and oil and
cotton ships. That’s a deal healthier trade for all concerned!”
I said, “You’d stop the warring and kidnapping and buying and bringing
them. But you’d keep those who are this side the ocean slaves forever.
Those that you have, and their children, slaves.”
“Yes,” he said. “Treating them always kindly. There isn’t any other way
to get the work done.”
“No, I suppose not,” I answered.
_Who would clear the land, who would tend tobacco and coffee, who
would make the sugar, who would make the rum?_
The rose dusk changed to violet dusk, with a beat as of wings and the
dry voice of an army and an army of insects. A white and glowing star
set itself above a palm tree. Voices throbbed from the hidden huts of
black men and women and children, mellow voices, voices that laughed
and sang.
I said, “Set them free and if they will work for you, pay them their
wages.”
The old planter knocked the ashes from his pipe. His face was round
and pleasant as the moon and on the whole as unenergetic. “That’s for
Utopia,” he said. “No, no, they’re children! Best to own and command
them like children. But children are not sent us to be harshly dealt
with. That’s my point. I like children and like to see them happy.”
He was a still more benevolent Colonel Amory.
One might live rather happily in an island within an island, with a
vast household of “children”, with a soft abundant Nature dropping
flower and fruit around. Be happy, lose edge, become rounded like a
pebble in a river bed. Be happy and at the same time pretty good,
making happy “children” around one, not over-working them or
over-punishing them, giving them their little pleasures.
After all, they were barbarians--as the Romans said we Scots were. God
knows how long we had been barbarians there in the northern forests
when the Romans came. White--black; black--white. Red, yellow, black,
white. If Great Nature loved the white so, why did she not make all
white? White marble is beautiful, and copper and bronze and ebony are
beautiful.
“No, no!” said old Mr. Browne, as though he had answered my thought.
“They are naturally inferior and of course we must recognize it. But
make them happy--make them happy!”
We soon went to bed. Colley said he was dog-tired and slept, but I lay
awake, and the tune in my head went, “When the _Janet_ sails, do I
sail with her? When the _Janet_ sails, do I sail with her?”
Had I money I could live like Browne, who had begun this life when
he was as young a man--live as kindly as one might, considering all
things--live in a Jamaica of wonderful colors and tumbled mountains and
forever summer--live with black folk around me whom I would buy and at
need sell, but whom I should treat kindly in the meantime--kindly, with
only just such hardness as would ensure their working. But I had not
money, so why dream of all that?
I might, through Bartram’s influence with North, obtain a situation as
clerk in the Company’s house, with the ledgers and the other clerks,