The slave ship
certain information. He was going to get this, and then return the
length of the island to Kingston in time for the sailing of the _Mary
Pembroke_ for Liverpool. I asked him why he had not bought or hired
a horse, and he answered that in the first place he was a city man,
little used to horseback, and that when they talked of mountains and
rough paths instead of roads a voice within had said, “Thee knows two
feet. Rest content without six.” In the second place he was short of
money and must save where he could in order to spend where he must. The
enterprise in which he was engaged, he said, had been more expensive
than he and others had reckoned. “That does not matter,” he ended. “But
I must skimp between here and Liverpool.”
“What is the enterprise?”
We were seated, just us two, at the mahogany table in the hall. Atkins
was gone to the mill. We had eaten and drunk, and a boy that we called
Puck was taking away the dishes. My guest waited till he was out of
the door at the back, then he said, with his bright, dark eyes very
full and quiet upon me, “David, we who are Friends are at many points
not of one mind with the world around us. One of those points is the
propriety of that very slave trade in which thee has been engaged. Two
years ago our Society resolved to send a member into North America and
another to this island to the end that it might have certain first-hand
observations. I was chosen for Jamaica, and I have been going about the
work with quietness for a year and more.”
“My wonder is,” I said, “that being so free-spoken, you are not
spending your time in some gaol.”
“I am not always so free-spoken,” he answered serenely. “There was
a little trouble at Spanish Town where I was accused of preaching
sedition and inciting slaves to rebellion. But the Lord’s hand was over
me and I escaped.”
We rose from table, and I showed him a room where he might rest. It
was next to mine. We paused together by a window. “Will thee go again,
David, on the slave ship?”
“Yes. In a few months’ time.”
“Things are strangely written,” he said. “Perhaps it is to some good
that thee goes.”
“Do you Quakers think to end human slavery?”
“It is the Light Within, not us ‘Quakers’ that will end it. It may
be a long time, David. There are instruments, of course. And times
and seasons. As for African slavery it may continue a long, long
time. Where it is established. The parents and the children and the
grandchildren and their grandchildren. Those who are already brought
and the born in the land, and they who shall be born. But it is borne
in upon Friends, David--and others, too; and others too--that the Slave
Trade itself might cease. The making and bringing more across the sea,
continually and forever. The tearing them from their land and forcing
them here. It might cease, and cease in our day, David. The Light has
grown that much, it seems to us. It will grow further, of course, but
not for a time.--So, David, thee may not be chained to thy slave ship
forever.”
“Am I chained? It is said to be the Negroes who are chained.”
“Oh, thee is chained!” he answered cheerfully. “Thee and thy ship
captain and crew. Thee is chained here, my poor David. Can thee not see
and hear thy manacles? _I_ can. Thee wears thy manager’s chains,
and the owner here wears his chains.”
I said, “This is the first time I have ever heard it determinedly said
that the traffic with Africa for slaves should and must stop. I know
men who would secretly welcome that, and I know men who would rouse the
dogs and beat you forth.--Yes, I am chained, but to something else and
more than My Fancy and the _Janet_. Something larger and darker. I
am chained to living, and the devil and myself.”
He jerked his hand toward the shining cane and the sea and the road
between. “The Voice said back there, ‘Lo, a poor, chained one!’ So I
came with thee, David.”
I broke into laughter. “So I and not you are the fed? Well, let your
pride have it so!”
He put out his long hand and touched me and his dark, bright eyes came
again fully into mine. “Both of us are fed, David, both, both! Thee has
done unto me and I have done unto thee. The chain is in thy laughter
and thy slavery is deep, including as it does all slavery. But thee
will come forth, David! Thee will lift the gravestone and come out and
up.”
With that he made a strange, wide gesture and turned from the window to
the cool quiet room and its bed. “I was walking the most of the night,
and yesterday too was tiring unto me.”
I left him to his repose and went to the mill. Things there proceeded
as usual. I caught up the threads of work neglected or done awry by
David Scott during his two weeks. I was busy, and so partly buried my
Quaker and his errands, and Daga and the _Janet_, and that dark
idleness inside me where I sat with the Sphinx. The conches and horns
blew for dinner. I returned to the house and found him still sleeping.
Atkins and I ate together, and I told him just that I had sheltered
a Quaker who seemed a good and harmless man and would depart if not
to-night then in the morning.
Atkins looked at me shrewdly. “Aye, they seem harmless, but to most
of our folk, Mr. Scott, a pirate appears the luckier guest! They’re a
curious lot, with their ‘thees’ and ‘Call no man master’ and ‘Go not to
war’ and their ‘Voice’ and ‘Inner Light.’ Mr. North can’t abide them.
Not that there are many in Jamaica!”
“This man came from England and is going back on the _Mary
Pembroke_.”
“And that’s a good thing for him to do!” said Atkins, and pushed back
from table. “Of course he can’t poison the house while he is here, and
I just wouldn’t say anything about him in the letter to London this
month.”
He was cautious, liking My Fancy and meaning to abide there. David
Scott did not intend abiding, but he recognized responsibility. “He
will go in the morning at latest,” I said, and went to my own room
for the afternoon rest, then to the mill, then again, an hour before
sunset, to the house, and found him sitting in the porch, his bundle
beside him, his staff across his knees and his eyes upon the very
splendid clouds in the west, above the sea. “There will be a good
moon,” he said. “I will eat with thee, David, and then thee shall set
me on the road and I will trudge to the town and ere midnight knock at
Friend Thomas’s door.”
I said, “If you care to pass the night----” but he shook his head, and
I did not press it. Puck gave us supper in the hall, Atkins absenting
himself for his own reasons. He told me certain things that I had not
known, having to do with his Society and with individuals out of it.
I had not known there was any conscious attempt anywhere putting out,
however faintly, force against the Slave Trade. But he said there was a
growing feeling, that it would come to a head, and some day the whole
matter would be brought before Parliament. He took from his pocketbook
a slip of paper and laid it under my eyes. It was the copy of a
Resolution passed by the Yearly Meeting of Friends.
“We fervently warn all in profession with us that they carefully avoid
being any way concerned in reaping the unrighteous profits arising
from the iniquitous practise of dealing in Negro or other slaves;
whereby in the original purchase one man selleth another as he does the
beasts that perish without any better pretension to a property in him
than that of superior force, in direct violation of the Gospel rule,
which teacheth all to do as they would be done by and to do good to
all, being the reverse of that covetous disposition which furnisheth
encouragement to these poor, ignorant people to perpetuate their savage
wars, in order to supply the demands of this most unnatural traffic,
by which great numbers of mankind, free by nature, are subject to
inextricable bondage, and which hath often been observed to fill their
possessors with haughtiness, tyranny, luxury and barbarity, corrupting
the minds and debasing the morals of their children, to the unspeakable
prejudice of religion and virtue and the exclusion of that holy spirit
of universal love, meekness and charity which is the unchangable nature
and the glory of true Christianity. We therefore can do no less than,
with the greatest earnestness, impress it upon Friends everywhere that
they endeavor to keep their hands clean of this unrighteous gain of
oppression.”
I read and gave the paper back. “It is enwound in every civilized
country with commerce and revenue and private interest, ambition,
pride and gain. It is like back and front--I don’t know the thunderbolt
that will split them!”
“Yet God will launch it,” he answered and put up the paper and said no
more at all upon this subject. Nor did he question me upon conditions
at My Fancy, but put the whole aside and turned, it seemed to me, in a
strange and intimate fashion, to the inner plains and keeps, mountains,
tarns and sea of David Scott. At first, moving from the house toward
the high road, we moved in silence. The night was quiet and beautiful
with a half-moon riding high, and golden Venus in a west still flushed
with color. We heard the sea and the forever-ever slight rustle of
cane and frond. We walked in silence, he with his bundle and stick,
and with his thoughts, whatever they might be; I with mine. I say that
and yet, strangely then to me, still we seemed to be conversing. We
walked so to the great cotton tree and stepped upon the gleaming coast
road that should take him to the town. Across from it ran the thin belt
of sea grape and cocoanuts and the white sand and the blue water. I
said, “Let us go through and look at the sea.” He nodded agreement and
presently came upon the beach. Before us streamed and flowed and held
the enormous sea.
_This ae night, this ae night.
Every night and alle._
I said, “There’s a slave ship that I am upon--beneath the gratings, in
thick hot darkness, with All That Is pressed against me.--It’s not the
_Janet_, and this is not the sea, and color of the skin does not
come into it.--I was there at times in Virginia where I was a bought
servant. I think I may have been there at moments when, so young a
man, I lay in prison in Edinburgh. But I was there, too, when I ranged
free. Then it was at moments, but now almost all the time. And if I
were in London or Paris or home in Scotland, it would be the same. If I
had never come upon the _Janet_, or seen Daga on the Slave Coast;
if I had hardly seen a Negro or a formally named slave in my life; if
I thought not of them, if I were lawyer or schoolmaster or tenant or
laird, all now would be the same. There is a Great Ship of slaves, and
slaves are in the shrouds and on the poop deck, and I am a slave in the
depths of the ship.”
“Aye, aye,” he said. “Aye, aye! Such is the perception and the
emotion--and neither do I speak of physical enslavement, though that is
of it, too.”
He stood leaning on his staff, his bright eyes upon the sea. “David,
the slave both cannot and must free himself, and there is your
paradox----”
I laughed and it was dreary and mocking laughter.
“To find in the dark, without fingers, a catch or spring that may or
may not be there--there being everywhere!”
“That is just it,” he answered quietly. “There is everywhere.”
“I am tired of riddles that are never answered.”
“Never is a long word.”
He turned upon me in the moonlight, with the voice of the sea about us.
“You cannot be helped further at this time. But I say unto you, You
will find the way.”
With that he turned from the sea back to the road, and presently I
parted with him, and have never, with my bodily eyes, seen him since.
With the other eyes I have.
CHAPTER XXIII
The _Janet_, her second voyage after refitting at Bristol, carried