The slave ship
The house, stone and fairly large, faced the sea, across a quarter mile
of cane that was bright green, that rippled like the sea, that sent up,
here and there, pale, purplish, feathery heads of bloom, ghostly in the
twilight. Along the sea ran a narrow beach of deep, soft, ivory sand,
and bordering the sand and the road went a ribbon of sea grape and
cocoanut trees; and where streams ran into the ocean, or it was marshy
and shoal, stood mangrove that is a desolate growth. The cane stretched
like the sea right and left of the house, but behind it a wood ran up
into hills and the hills into mountains. Palm and mango and allspice
and the cotton tree and mahogany and many others. The mountains had
beautiful shapes; a troop of them, joined at base but above sharply
separate, peaky, horned and rounded forms, clothed with an amethystine,
a dreamy light. The sea was superbly colored. An Italian painter could
give it there no hint, must take the hint from it. A highway ran
between the sea and the cane--the cane of My Fancy, for so was the
estate named. Diverging from this the plantation road struck through
the cane and then between thinly planted trees to the house, but there,
bending, went toward the sea again and found, halfway, the sugar mill.
The sugar mill had a tall chimney, and the smoke went out like a gray
plume and all day long it shredded away with the moving air. A stone
aqueduct of many and many an arch ran up into the hill and fetched
water thence to grind the cane. About the mill grew a cluster of long
and low buildings, and the whole did not lack of making a picture. The
heaped wagons and the empty wagons, the white, wide-horned oxen came
and went, to the mill, from the mill. At a stone’s throw, on either
side the dripping aqueduct, were strewn, haphazard, the huts that
sheltered at night the slaves who cut the cane and made the sugar.
These and the oxherds and stable men and boatmen and nondescripts
and the house servants in their own quarter back of the great house
constituted, men, women and children, the nearly two hundred out
of Africa owned by My Fancy. Out of Europe were eight indentured
white men, “servants” as against “slaves.” And there were three
“bookkeepers”, who in Virginia would have been called overseers, and a
manager and his assistant. Fifteen white men in all.
The owner, Mr. Godfrey North, a connection of North, the Company’s
agent, was gone with his family to England, his object to put his son
at school and to marry off his daughter. He purposed an absence of a
year. His old manager in whose charge My Fancy must be left did not
please him--there was a change--a new man must be sought. North in
Kingston brought him and Bartram together. I was spoken of.--At last I
came to supper with North and his kinsman.
I was the manager at My Fancy, engaged for the term of the owner’s
absence, with a fair salary, a free hand, the great house, emptied of
all its former inmates, to dwell in, between the hills and the sea.
The _Janet_, the blood stains scrubbed and holystoned from her
decks, the relation of misadventure, unforeseen and occurring despite
all care and good conduct on the part of officers and crew, duly
entered in her log, duly drawn up in a memorandum for the Company,
sailed for Bristol.
“Will you go or will you not, David? You know this thing makes no
difference to me. You’ve got a star, too, man.--And as for ill luck
continuing and some discovery of you being made, and its coming as a
back-blow upon me also--why, you see, man, William Bartram will risk
that!--I dinnae think,” he said in his reasonablest voice, “that after
almost ten years the danger’s mair than you can carry.”
But I had made up my mind not to involve him. I said that I would stay
in Jamaica and that I preferred it so.
The _Janet_ sailed. I watched her forth from Jamaica Harbor, and
then, walking back to North’s, found there two horses from My Fancy
and a mulatto boy--they are all “boys” though they are fifty--who was
to return with me. My belongings went into two pair of saddlebags. I
said good-by to North and two or three others in Kingston, and an hour
after sunrise started for the northern shore and the western end of
the island, for it was there lay My Fancy. It was like riding across
Scotland from Inverary to Dundee and then by ocean side from Dundee to
Dornoch.--It was not Scotland, but a sugar island of the West Indies,
and the sea the Caribbean.
The _Janet_ had sailed three months ago. I lived in the great
house alone save for Atkins the assistant and managed My Fancy. For the
sugar manufacture I was soon instructed there, and as for labor and the
handling of it, behind me lay five years in Virginia. Tobacco or sugar,
what was the odds? And though there I had been among the handled I knew
well enough by observation the other side. The sea and the _Janet_
also gave training. And to move among and be over Africans was no
novelty.
Atkins, a short, sturdy, curt, efficient person, five years my junior,
had the immediate supervision. I looked at affairs from two or three
steps above him, parcelled my time and gave or withheld my presence as
it seemed good. Yet I was not idle, and all matters of real dubiety
came before me. Atkins, fortunately, took a liking to me and I to him.
It was an old, long-established place--My Fancy--just as had been Amory
Hall in Virginia. Old, that is, according to colonial notions. All
things went on smoothly enough after the lavish, loose-end, colonial
system, lavish and loose-end at least in warm climates and where there
is slavery. A full two thirds of the My Fancy Negroes had been born in
Jamaica, and of the remaining third very few were recently from the
Slave Coast. In consequence there was little turbulence. And by and
large the treatment was kindly, just as I could now see that it had
been kindly at Amory Hall--“kindly” being a word of a high degree of
relativeness. Of course they must work, and not for themselves. Two or
three hours’ toil a day would have provided, in such a climate, all
that they, as yet, desired for themselves. But to make sugar for the
world and ease and luxury for one family, they labored from sunrise
to sunset. Of course, being property, they must not be idle and they
must not run away. Of course, if they were guilty of either, they must
be whipped as that was really the only way to teach them. If they
were incorrigible more and more pain must be heaped upon them, and if
they deserved death the law would see that they got it. But all this
provided for, there was not at My Fancy and there was not at Amory Hall
wanton cruelty, but rather, in the interstices of the system, kindness,
or what was meant for that; what, relatively speaking, was that. At
any rate, at My Fancy, one heard a great deal of genial Negro laughter,
of good-natured talk and singing.--But the thing rested slavery.
The eight white men likewise were enslaved, but for a term of years
only, and they had sold themselves, and were called servants, not
slaves.
The great house had cool, large, mahogany-floored and panelled rooms,
high-ceiled, slightly furnished and echoing, a wide lower and upper
hall, deep windows and a porch from which I saw the sea of cane, the
mill, and then the utter ocean. The whole was mine to wander in. Atkins
had a room that made a jut from the main building. The two of us
together were supposed to keep the house from damage or entry, having
abandoned for that purpose the manager’s cottage. There also slept, in
a small chamber next to Atkins, a powerful mulatto named Dick, who had
been born upon the place. And there were two strong and fierce dogs,
Nero and Cæsar.
Three months. When I had been at My Fancy something more than six
weeks, at twilight one evening, sitting smoking in the stone porch,
I spoke to Atkins of that periodic shift of mine to another level of
feeling, thinking and doing, warned him that it might begin in a day or
two, and told him what to ignore in me, what to acquiesce in and what
to override. “Mr. Godfrey North knew about this before we signed. For
all I know, you may know too.”
“Yes, Mr. North told me,” said Atkins. “But you see in this country the
difficulty is to get men who don’t drink all the time. He snapped at
you!”
Well, I drank, and for a fortnight became a crazed spirit moving among
dream landscapes. Then out I came, and found that Atkins and the
mulatto Dick had kept me from wreaking any especial mischief. When I
had ordered fantastic things they had said “Of course!” and when my
back was turned disobeyed or substituted. I always thought that I was a
kind of sultan.
Well, I came out one afternoon and took a great dip in the sea, and was
David Scott again.
The months slipped by, bead on bead.
All these “great houses” in Jamaica as in Virginia practised to their
own color and class a boundless hospitality. The inns were few indeed
and wretched. Who rode on the highway and found himself toward eve too
far from his destination, or who merely wished to break his journey,
noon or evening, turned, as a matter of course, into some plantation
road. He might be a planter or a merchant or a lawyer or a clergyman
or a doctor, or he might be of simpler estate, but if he were free and
white he had entertainment. To these lonely estates he was news, he
was society. Such a guest occasionally rode up to the great door of My
Fancy.
But they were not many. In all this island, which is a large one, there
were not, I suppose, eighteen thousand white persons. Strew these over
so great an extent and save in the towns there are few indeed in any
ten miles. Lonely, lonely, the plantations are lonely, each by itself,
a small world in space.
Yet they stopped at My Fancy, one alone or two or even three together.
Perhaps once in ten days I had company for dinner or for supper. All
the months together I saw the planter and the trader and the lawyer and
the doctor and the sea captain, and the clergyman and others--more of
the planter and the merchant, less of the others. And one and all they
had to me the mark of something less than the good, and David Scott had
and knew he had the selfsame mark. Yet many of them were what you call
amiable and honest.
They assumed the system upon which and in which they lived. They
assumed that it was Deity’s system, wherever Deity lived. Slavery
of dark Africans, benighted, childlike heathen! Servitude, over the
world, of white men and women if they were born by the sea of poverty
and trouble. And very strangely poverty and trouble were both God’s
good will that it were blasphemous really to try to overthrow, and the
error of the individual man or woman who must suffer for it--need not
be overmuch compassionated, seeing that they were but getting their
deserts. And the moral of it all, “Nothing can be really changed. And
why should it be? for on the whole it is a pretty good affair.”
So the planters, merchants, captains, lawyers, doctors and clergy.
But none that rode by My Fancy and asked for a meal or a night’s
lodging were in straits for either. None who rode by My Fancy had been
slave or servant, or if any one had come out from home as the latter,
he now strenuously forgot it.
But I had not forgotten. I had not forgotten the Tolbooth, nor the
_King William_, nor Amory Hall, nor Daniel Askew’s, and I knew
Daga on the Slave Coast, and I knew the slave ships. I had not
forgotten, and the mark of something less than good was upon me plain
and I knew it. Plainer than upon them, who were only unimaginative.
CHAPTER XXII
In a small room at My Fancy I found a few books, and among them “The
Faery Queen.” During these first months I read and reread and read
again this volume with a kind of desperate clinging to its beauty. It