I wished they’d take over if it meant we’d finally have peace. In huts like this with shutters made of cottonwood and roofs of coco palms and thatch, we feared nothing but the overseers’ whips. Nothing British could be worse.
“Dorothy, stay away from the window. All will be well.”
My ma’s voice found me in the dark; her tone, warm and brave and confident, wrapped me like a hug.
Guns belched and drove that feeling from my arms.
More screams, not the planters’ smooth tongues, but our men’s. The captives’ cries.
Part of me wanted to light the firepit to see into the night. My ma, Mamaí, thought smoke puffing out of the roof hole would attract the fight.
I didn’t think killers needed an invitation.
Hot air rising might signal a prickly iguana, one of those spiny big-eyed lizards, not men.
More drum-drum-drumming.
I capped my mouth before the fear in my gut dribbled out in sobs. I told Mamaí that I would be brave, but I’d be slaughtered in my fifth year.
Not fair, never fair.
This place wasn’t to be for war. An Emerald Isle Pa called Montserrat. It was meant for Irish jigs and songs between chores.
“Dorothy? You stayin’ away from that window?”
I bit my lip and peeked through the shutters I’d opened. I shouldn’t have; I had to squint at the sooty sky. Stars might be out. Seeing the distant shimmers would let me know all was well.
“Dorothy? I called to you.”
That wasn’t Mamaí’s angry voice.
I had a little more time to collect myself, and I rubbed my stinging eyes. That feeling of being cheated ripped at my lungs. Five small years wasn’t enough living. None of the dreams in my skull had been born. Please. I couldn’t die with dreams trapped in my head.
Water leaked down my fat mammee apple cheeks. Not fair to die tonight. Not fair at all.
“Dorothy?”
I couldn’t answer now. The tears would tell her I was weak. She’d be sad. I vowed to never rob her of any more joy. Mamaí didn’t laugh enough. Her smile was flat, almost a frown.
I swore I’d be brave when Pa was gone.
Don’t know how to do that anymore. How to be strong with the smell of death surrounding the hut.
“Dorothy, come here, girl. Now!”
My ma stood at my door with baby Kitty asleep on her hip. “Knew you were being too quiet, my chatty girl.” She pointed to the open red shutters. “Couldn’t help yourself. That sky is talkin’ to you. Readying you to fly away.”
Mamaí’s steady voice calmed the restless bits in my chest, but I couldn’t move from the window. I had to see the rebels coming and the smoke rising from the town.
Bare feet slapped against the creaking floor. My ma came and yanked me up.
Wincing for a strike, I caught love, a strong hug, pulling me close.
I stopped shaking as she hummed in my ear. She offered me the tune that she saved for my sister to get her to nap. I loved it. It made good dreams.
Deciding I could be five and not brave, I cried against my mother’s leg.
Her song had no words, at least none I knew, but Mamaí’s arms were soft. I nestled my cheek again against her hip. The new allotment of osnaburg cloth she used to make clothes was stiff and scratchy, but I cared not. I held her tighter and marveled at the orange and yellow leaves she’d stained for the print.
“You’ll be all right, Dorothy. The planters will put down the rebellion. The Irish and French always do. Poor Cudjoe. The fool will get everyone killed.”
The old man who begs in the square with a hat that covers his eyes, he was responsible for the fields burning? That feeble fellow convinced folks to take up their scythes and shovels to kill the overseers?
No. That couldn’t be.
“Pa should be here, Mamaí. He should be here to protect us. He always has when he’s here.”
She pulled away like I’d uttered something bad. The shadows in her eyes said I mouthed something very wrong.
Turning from me, she smoothed Kitty’s rumpled pink tunic. “Massa Kirwan is away. That pa of yours has his overseers stocked with guns. Guns are more powerful than anything the poor rebels have.”
My lungs stung. I looked up at her beautiful brown face and shook my fists. “Who do you want to win?”
“Numbers win, not right or wrong, numbers, Dorothy.”
I gawked at her blank look, one my mother often wore, like she’d disappeared inside herself.
I didn’t want to be sucked into that nothingness, where nothing mattered.
Couldn’t we have the fear gone?
Couldn’t we be on the side of good?
Couldn’t we have both?
Backing up, I looked out and hunted my stars. “I’m better, Mamaí. Call me Dolly. That’s what Pa says. I’m his little doll.”
“Your name is Dorothy.” The pitch of her hummingbird voice rose. “Dorothy.”
“Dolly.” My voice became harsh like a crow’s call. “I feel special with Dolly. Pa picked it. He’s always right.”
She put Kitty on my blanket and swaddled her. “You have a cockle-stuffed toy I sewed you, nothing of the fancy formed paper Kirwan describes.”
That was true.
Pa never brought me one from his travels, but that didn’t matter. It sounded nice and pretty, being his doll and different from what the women at the cistern whispered. They said my skin was dirty like tar. They put lies in the air that I wasn’t Pa’s.
Being Dolly, his Dolly, proved it. I was pretty and black, black like a black diamond. “Pa says I have doll eyes, too. Light like the sun, like a star. I like Dolly.”
“It’s important what they call you. You were named Dorothy. It means gift. You’re a gift of God.”
“I want Dolly. Dolly. Dolly. Dolly. Pa calls me Dolly. You are always mean to him.” My pout was louder than I wanted, but the guns had grown stronger, too. The fight was near our hut.
“Just turned five, and you talkin’ back like you’re big. You’re not grown, Dorothy.”
Mamaí’s face held the deepest frown, then Kitty started crying.
“Too much nonsense, girl. Come back from the window. You’ll sleep with me on my bedroll.”
She waved at me, but I was stubborn and searched the sky a little longer, looking for the brightest one. I pinched my fingers together as if I could measure distances in the shifting fog.
I gasped as an outline of a beast dragging limbs came toward us.
“Mamaí? Something’s out there.”
She closed up the window and put her hands to my shoulder. She shook me; the sleeves of my berry-red shift loosened and tightened as I tried to wiggle free. “You saw nothin’.”
A yelp blasted.
“Nothin’ made a noise, Mamaí.”
A strangled cry, the hurt clawing through my skin, made me knock open the shutters.
The fog parted. A man carrying a body staggered toward us.
“Help me!”
A woman’s voice yelping in pain—I knew it. “Mamaí, that’s Mrs. Ben. She needs us. They’re calling.”
My mother’s face was stone. She’d gone away again to that faraway place, but I needed her here. I needed her to tell me how to help.
“Please, Mamaí. What do I do?”
“Nothin’. You saw nothin’. It’s not safe outside these walls.”
But I did see Mrs. Ben, a woman in need. “She’s been good to me.”
Five-year-old me could help even if I was scared.
“Waaahhh!” Kitty awakened with a loud screech.
It was enough noise that Mamaí’s topaz gaze left me.
In that moment, my heart decided.
I crawled out and didn’t look back, didn’t listen to Mamaí’s yells.
I ran a hundred paces, straight toward the man holding up my damfo, my special friend.
“Mrs. Ben, is she much hurt?”
The lanky man drew a gun on me. The smel
l, the gunpowder slapped my face.
He’d fired that weapon tonight.
He’d fire it again.
Montserrat 1761: A Rosary
“Who are you?”
His hoarse voice sounded like a ghost’s.
He drew the barrel closer to my nose. “Who?”
“Not gonna say if you’re gonna shoot.”
He moved the gun back an inch, but the thing still stunk, still taunted of death.
“Who are you, girl? I’m only asking this once.”
“Dolly. Bring Mrs. Ben this way.” I drew myself up like I saw no gun. “Come to Mamaí’s hut. She works in the sick house. She knows the old ways, the herbs that heal.”
The fellow put the barrel into his white breeches. “Lead us.”
I started toward the hut.
With my back to him, I prayed each step, to whom I wasn’t sure. One of my ma’s gods—the saints or the Obeah spirits—had to keep me from being shot like a coward, like I’d run away. The overseers joked about those killings.
The man followed. His gangly arms wrapped about Mrs. Ben, not his weapon.
His slow steps seemed as if he’d walked miles. His waistcoat had rips and patches of blood. I wondered what his fog-gray eyes had seen this night.
“Not much farther to Mamaí, Mrs. Ben.”
I led them toward the front door and hoped my ma would let us in.
She stood there waving a pitchfork. The sharp tines reflected bits of moonlight that had punched through the fog.
“Mamaí, it’s Mrs. Ben. The nice woman who fed me ginger preserves that time Pa took me to the Cells’s plantation.”
“Please, ma’am,” the man said. “This woman is mighty hurt. Everyone knows Kirwan’s Betty knows healing.”
His tone was easy, and his eyes were large in the low light.
My mother nodded and put down her pitchfork. “Bring her in. Dorothy, go get a blanket and my box of ointments.”
I jumped over the bar meant to keep pickney dem, the little children like Kitty, from crawling out of the hut. In her room, I scooped up a blanket from the chest near Mamaí’s bedroll. Then I snatched the anis for stomach ailments, the agrippa for swelling, and a dozen other things my ma stored in bottles. Her rosary beads shone on her mat. Red-painted balls for good prayers and gold ones for long life, Mamaí had taken Ashanti beads and used them to talk to her Catholic god.
Touching what I wasn’t supposed to wouldn’t help. Arms full, I ran back to the main room. “Here, Mamaí.” I shoved the medicines into her hand, then spread the blanket by the coal pot.
She’d lit the chars. We used the pot for heat on nights with a chill. I guessed she didn’t care anymore about smoke puffing through the roof hole.
The fellow laid Mrs. Ben down, then planted his palms on his dirty breeches and long embroidered waistcoat. “No harm for anyone.”
Who would hurt him? He had a gun.
Maybe men were like boys, needing to say something that sounded like they had all the power. My half brother Nicholas did that, particularly when he was scared.
Mamaí took strips of cloth from her allotment, cloth she would have used to make new tunics for Kitty and me, and put them to the wounds on Mrs. Ben’s arm and her gut.
“They burned my hut, Betty.” The old woman winced as my mother put pressure to the places that leaked.
But none stopped.
This woman would die on our floor.
Mrs. Ben looked up at the man who leaned against our mud plaster walls. “Coseveldt, you’re going back to the fight?”
The man maybe age twenty, maybe less, nodded. He came forward, bent, and captured the old woman’s waving hand. “Yes, Merr . . . Ben. The rebels have scorched everything. My land, the Cells’s house, is in danger. I won’t lose it. I won’t fail my father.”
The gnashing of teeth sounded in his voice, but he didn’t know this battle was won for him. His side, those one-godders, they had the important numbers, more guns.
Mamaí’s candle lit his face. Dark loose hair, thin nose, cleft in his chin, and horrible bushy eyebrows shading eyes that now looked hazel. “Thank you, ma’am, Miss Betty—”
“And me, Dolly. I helped.”
“You are a doll. And brave. Mrs. Ben is with friends, because of you.”
Mamaí pointed to the big calabash of water. “Get that, Dolly. Bring it. Let’s give her something to drink.”
She used the name I liked. I sprinted, for I wanted to obey.
When I lifted the fat gourd and brought it to Mamaí, she’d stopped trying to hold cloth to Mrs. Ben’s wounds.
She put her hands to the woman’s face as if to shield her eyes from the candle.
I stood near watching my mother’s face change from angry, to something, to nothing.
“You a Cells, Kirwan’s neighbor, one his pickney dem?”
“Yes,” he said with no hesitation—he understood Mamaí’s Irish Creole—“one of Cells’s children, his only living one.”
She sat back on her knees. “Don’t go. Your business is not done. This woman needs to be on Cells land. Mr. Ben must know.”
“Mr. Ben died tonight. A neighbor said he knew the rebel leader’s name. They shot the poor man when he didn’t answer.”
“No.” My eyes became wet again. “He was nice, too.”
“Dolly, give Cells the water, then go into your room, be with Kitty. Make sure she’s safe. Stay there this time.”
Tall Mr. Cells hunched over Mrs. Ben, pushing on her cheeks.
Mamaí gripped his hands. “Stop, boy. The mask’s set. Go, Dolly.”
I obeyed. I wanted to be away from this. I’d used up all my bravery climbing out that window. It was wasted. The sadness on Mr. Cells’s face, on Mamaí’s, said so.
At the entrance of my room, I turned for a last glance. The stillness of Mrs. Ben’s eyes, the red tears—I’d never forget.
“Let me pray for her.” Cells’s lashes shut; I hoped he pictured Mrs. Ben smiling like she was a week ago when I snuck out and visited her.
“Sorry. Sorry, Mamaí.”
No one heard my low plea or even looked up. They wept.
I hurried into my room and held my sister tight, her snores warbling like a swallow. I wept long enough for my stars to disappear. Like a butterfly or moth, I’d invited death into our hut to stretch its wings. I wasn’t sure how to get it to leave.
Montserrat 1761: A Ruining
A week had crawled by like one-legger bugs, slow and painful. Every man left on the plantation buried their dead or plowed the burnt fields. In Mamaí’s trampled garden, I rooted for vegetables and used a pitchfork to turn over the rich black dirt to hunt yams.
Did the neighbors, like the Cellses, fare any better?
The lanky man by the name of Coseveldt, I didn’t see him after that night.
Whoop. Whoop. One of Pa’s overseers, Mr. Teller, blew a conch again. “We’ll finish up tomorrow, lads.”
The cheeky man with fire red hair brandished a pistol on his hip. “Go on back to your provision grounds and work on your own huts. We’ll start again in the morn.”
But Pa’s house wasn’t done.
I hit the hut’s wall, my fingers stinging against the rough mud plaster. They needed to nail up the missing roof sections. Pa’s house, the great owl house—large window eyes, shutter feathers sitting on spindly stilt legs to keep above the floodwater—looked abandoned, as if it’d been hit by another hurricane.
Why would Pa come back to this?
Mr. Teller watched the men leave, his fingers wrapping his pistol. He muttered, “Absentee planter.”
That was an insult to my pa.
Anger wound all about my hungry belly. I wanted to go to my bedroll, but sleep stitched Mrs. Ben’s face to my dropped lids. My gut growled. I’d only found two yams.
Two.
Folks ran off with the food Mamaí had grown. Thwack. I stabbed the ground with the pitchfork. Let it be an omen.
Entering the hut,
I bent my head and went past Mamaí to my room. Lying down I stared out my window at the owl house, hoping to see shiny stars.
My baby sister coughed. It sounded scratchy and dry.
Should I get her water? There was only enough for morning. I didn’t think Mamaí wanted me away from the hut even to fill the calabashes at the cistern.
My thin braids fell about me. I tried to right them, hide them beneath my favorite scarf, a red linen handkerchief.
Red wasn’t the color of repentance.
Time to make amends. Sadder than a lone oriole’s whistle, I moved to the main room. Mamaí, singing to Kitty, sat on the floor, very near the spot where Mrs. Ben . . .
The blood in my veins pounded. In my head, I heard the guns again, saw her red tears. “Sorry, Mamaí. Forgive me for bringing death here?”
Nothing.
No words.
No nodding of my ma’s chin.
Nothing.
Kitty snorted, the noise like a tiny reed flute. Did my own sister think I wasn’t sorry?
“Pickney no hear wah marmi say drink peppa warta lime an sarl.” Mamaí’s Creole was about little ones suffering, drinking fire and bitter salty lime water. “Suffering is for you, Dolly, if you keep on. I don’t want that.”
My ma knew many languages, the old ones from Twi and Kikongo to French bits from Grenada, and chunks of Pa’s Irish. The mix of them people called Creole. She’d vary her words depending upon whose ear she had, but she didn’t talk enough.
“Forgive me, Mamaí.”
She lowered Kitty into a pile of blankets and fingered the corset strings of her yellow tunic. Her beautiful brown hands glistened with the sweet-smelling coconut pomade she’d concocted. “You’re too bold, Dolly. Your father calls it misneach, or pluck. I call you minseach, his Irish for billy goat. I fear the goat strength in you.”
“Isn’t it good to be strong? Cudjoe, the leader you’ve sung about, was he not bold? Was he not strong?”
“The true Cudjoe was strong. The Maroon leader bested them all and freed many. The false Cudjoes die horrible deaths.”
Mamaí seemed tired, very weary though no women had yet returned to work. They were to stay safe on the right side of the plantation, in the huts and provision grounds.
Island Queen Page 2