The Secret Life of Winnie Cox

by Sharon Maas

  ‘What’s going on, Miss Wright? Why are they so angry?’ I cried out, and Yoyo too looked up at Miss Wright, her eyes pleading for an explanation.

  ‘Come inside with me and I’ll try to tell you,’ said Miss Wright firmly, and with that assurance we at last turned our backs on Papa. Back at the house we raced up the two flights of stairs to Papa’s room, to the only window in the house that offered an unobstructed view of the gate. We found all the house servants, every one of them, even the cook and kitchen maids, clustered round that window, and Mrs Norton, who should have known better, in their midst. Mrs Norton was a ghost-like creature who managed the household of countless servants with invisible efficiency. She was an Englishwoman, married to one of the overseers, and slept in the senior staff compound; apparently she had two children of her own, older than us; but we had never seen them, and she never spoke of them. Everything about Mrs Norton was businesslike and scrupulous. For Mrs Norton to be mixed up in the general excitement, to even show interest, was totally out of character and indicated something serious was at play.

  Miss Wright assumed responsibility and chased them all away, except Mrs Norton, and we three took their places. In silent shock we stared at the mayhem below: now the coolies were all scrambling against the gate trying to climb over, and the darkies were beating them back. Father had given up his shouting; he paced up and down the driveway, stopping every now and then to watch. The noise of it all! The chant of the coolies, the shouts of the darkies, the whacking of the staves against metal and flesh.

  ‘Tell us!’ begged Yoyo at last, and Miss Wright drew a deep breath before speaking the words that would strip us of our innocence.

  ‘There’s been trouble for some time,’ she said. ‘The coolies have been restless, agitating against your father. It’s happening in all the plantations up and down the coast. All the planters have to deal with it, not just us. Anger erupting in waves: threats and violence. Many of the planters have had to deal with revolts such as this one.’

  ‘But – but why?’ I asked, still safely cushioned in my little bubble.

  ‘Well – they want better working conditions,’ Miss Wright explained. ‘They believe they work too hard for too little pay. And then of course their living conditions are said to be distressing to them …’

  Yoyo and I glanced at each other, before turning back to Miss Wright. Yoyo spoke next:

  ‘But why doesn’t Papa simply raise their pay and let them work less and – and …’

  ‘And improve their living conditions?’ I completed her sentence.

  Miss Wright sighed, and pressed our hands. ‘Girls, you are both too young to understand. A plantation is a business, you see. A business has to make a profit, otherwise it falls apart, and the business owner is a failure. To make a profit the income has to exceed the expenditures. It’s quite simple arithmetic. Therefore, expenditures must be kept to a minimum. To – to make changes in the allocation of expenses, such as raising pay and spending more money generally on the running of the plantation means less profit. Less profit means more likelihood of failure. Failure would mean – why, for you girls it would mean your father would be compelled to sell the plantation and return in disgrace to England. You don’t want that now, do you? You’re so happy here.’

  ‘You mean it’s all about – about money? Our coolies? The way they work, the way they live?’

  ‘Well, basically, yes, actually. You could say it’s all about money.’

  And so it was Miss Wright who, with that single word, money, pierced the bubble of my childhood innocence, burst apart my little world of sunshine and rainbows.

  Miss Wright looked embarrassed. She was a tall, slim woman, with smooth brown hair knotted into a soft round molly in the nape of her neck; not too old, but not young either, perhaps 30, a spinster who had come to us eight years ago. Papa had employed her primarily for Kathleen’s sake. Previously, all three of us had attended school in the senior staff compound with all the other staff children: offspring of the managers and overseers and other British plantation employees. Yoyo and I had enjoyed it, for besides learning it meant making friends, after-school visits, and the like. There was a playground in the compound, a tennis court and a swimming pond; fun and games are better with many than with two.

  But as Kathleen grew older, the more she objected. She thought some of the children were common; their language was vulgar, their accents – most of them were the children of Scottish farmers – unintelligible. They were beneath us in status. Father gave in and got her a governess, and to make the expenditure worth its while he took Yoyo and me out of school as well, so that we could benefit from private tuition. Miss Wright, found by our relatives in England and imported by Papa, was perfect. She taught us English, Arithmetic, History, Geography, French, and German, as well as Music and Art. Yoyo had expressed an interest in Science, but Papa had rejected it, reasoning that girls had the wrong brains for Science, as indeed for any mathematics beyond basic sums. And Mama had insisted on a governess who could teach German; I needed formal lessons in her native language, and Kathleen and Yoyo should learn the basics, even if reluctantly.

  As a result of Miss Wright’s employment, our contact with the compound children weakened; we saw less of them and more of each other. For me, only Emily remained: Emily Stewart was a red-haired, outspoken Scottish girl just a month younger than me; but Emily and her mother now lived in New Amsterdam during term time, so that Emily could attend secondary school. And so we had drifted apart. We now saw each other only in the holidays and on occasional Saturday visits to New Amsterdam, when Papa would visit his own friends and drop Yoyo and me off at Emily’s. Mama would stay at home during those Saturday excursions, but Miss Wright would come with us and enjoy a day out without us. We often wondered where she went, but didn’t dare to ask. Yoyo and I suspected she had a gentleman friend.

  ‘I bet she kisses him,’ Yoyo whispered, giggling, to me one night, but I couldn’t imagine Miss Wright kissing anybody. Her amiability was of the cool, distant sort. We liked her; we did not love her. We showed her respect, not deference, and certainly not love. She taught us facts; she did not teach us principles. Certainly, though, on that morning she gave our illusions the stab of death. Money!

  Money was a dirty word in the Cox family. For us girls it hardly existed. We had no need to think of it. We hardly ever touched it. We had our weekly pocket money, with which we’d cycle down to the village and buy sweets, and that was the extent of our dealings with it. We dropped the change into our piggy banks, and forgot it. We certainly never spoke of it. Sometimes the word ‘wealth’ was mentioned, but more in a philosophical context. Wealth did not mean money; it meant status and importance. We knew we were wealthy, but we knew it in an abstract sense. All it meant was that this was our plantation and here we ruled supreme; that the servants were in our employ, our subjects, and had to do as we said; but that too was abstract because we took it all for granted; it was simply the reality we had always known. It was because it was; because there was nothing else beyond that reality. We had known no alternative. And it was this way in the plantations up and down the coast from the Berbice River to the Courantyne, and I assume along the Demerara coast and the Essequibo coast, as well: each planter a king in his own realm.

  ‘They want more money,’ Miss Wright said simply. ‘Money for food, for clothes and medicine. They want new houses.’

  ‘And Papa won’t give it to them?’

  ‘I just explained to you why not.’

  ‘But …’ to me it sounded most un-Christian. Weren’t we supposed to give to the poor? How could Papa –

  Miss Wright looked stricken, as if this revelation of the basic truth of our existence was far beyond the call of duty, as if every word must be wrenched from her.

  ‘Winnie, look! The overseers!’

  I turned back to the window. Three men were approaching, on horseback, galloping up the sand road behind the throng of coolies.

  ‘It’s Mr
Grant!’ cried Yoyo. ‘And Mr Stewart!’

  ‘Mr McInnes, too,’ I added.

  The men on horseback had reached the coolies, and that’s when the real horror began. Out of nowhere, a pistol appeared in Mr McInnes’ hand, and was pointed at the sky. Three shots rang out. The horses pulled up rearing and snorting and whips cracked and flew and snapped. Coolies screamed; the chanting stopped and they turned to face the overseers, suddenly silenced.

  We could not see from that distance what exactly was going on but it seemed that Mr McInnes was speaking to one of the coolies. And then the crowd parted and Mr McInnes rode through it, accompanied by a coolie. They reached the gate, and Papa. Another conversation. And then the smaller, side gate opened to let that one coolie in. He was a young man, half-naked like most of them; even from this distance his upper body glistened in the early morning sunlight. It seemed he and Papa were going to have a civil discussion. The pounding of my heart slowed down; peril had been averted; Papa had saved the day.

  But then, all of a sudden, the horror began again. Papa seemed to give Mr McInnes some kind of a sign and a whip passed between the gate-bars and two of the guards grabbed the young coolie and turned him around, struggling and fighting, and Papa whipped him. Whipped him like an animal, hurling the whip against the bare back again and again and again. Even from our upstairs window we could see red streaks appear on the young man’s back. He squirmed and writhed but the guards held him fast so that he could not escape.

  ‘No! No! Stop it! Stop it!’ Yoyo and I screamed, watching helplessly from above, but our words were useless and the beating went on. My own voice was frantic, desperate. I was blubbering like a baby by now, hammering the window-sill with impotent fists. Yoyo screamed, in fury: ‘Stop it! Stop it! No!’ and she leaned forward as if she would propel herself through the window and fly through the air to stop the madness. But the beating went on, interminably.

  Miss Wright seemed to wake out of a trance. ‘Come, girls, come away; this is nothing for you.’

  ‘No, no, I have to see!’ cried Yoyo, and I did too. We struggled physically as Miss Wright tried to pull us away, and finally she capitulated and let us watch; I suppose she did not want to miss the show herself.

  Papa was using was one of the whips the overseers carried with them when they went out to the fields; I always thought they were pretty things, with their long snaking thongs. This one cracked and snapped in the air and lashed at the writhing brown body that thrashed and struggled but could not escape.

  Then the man lay on the ground and Papa kicked him. Kicked him again and again and he tried to curl into a ball but Papa continued to kick and kick and kick until he lay still. And then the gate opened again and the man was thrown out, into the crowd.

  I broke down in tears. I let Miss Wright drag me away to my room, and then I collapsed in a heap on my bed in sobbing, spluttering anguish. I may have passed out, for I have no recollection of what happened next; except that, sometime later, we all three sat in the schoolroom while Nora served us the breakfast we had missed. We were all much subdued; but for me it was more serious. Something had shifted within me: a stone curtain of naiveté had rolled away; a veil of sentimentality had lifted. I had collapsed on the bed as a little girl, and stood up a woman.

  None of us ate much, and none of us spoke. Yoyo nibbled at a bake in sullen silence; Miss Wright looked more embarrassed than ever, and I – I was in a state of suspended shock, whose only outlet were the tears that continued to leak from behind my eyes no matter how much I forced them back. Miss Wright gave me her handkerchief and I snorted into it and dabbed my eyes but doing so brought out yet more tears.

  Nora carried away the remnants of breakfast and we settled in for morning lessons.

  ‘Girls, now let’s put that unpleasant business behind us and get down to work,’ said Miss Wright briskly, but unconvincingly, plonking a pile of textbooks down onto her desk. The words ‘unpleasant business’ made me howl out in outrage and evoked a new burst of tears. Yoyo, not understanding the epic shift of mood that I had undergone, looked at me with contempt.

  ‘Oh, don’t be such a snivelling baby! I told you he knew all about it! I told you Papa was …’

  ‘Girls! Stop arguing this minute!’ Miss Wright tried to put authority into her voice but I knew, I could tell, that she was just as distressed as we were. ‘And please control yourselves. Your father must not know that you saw – what you saw. Do you understand!’

  I looked at her through my tears and indeed, I understood. I understood more than she thought I did. Her distress had nothing to do with what we’d seen. She had known. What we had seen was no surprise to her, but it had been her duty to keep us away from it, and she had failed, and now she feared Papa’s reaction to that failure.

  ‘You don’t care, do you?’ The words slipped out; the outrage erupting like a burst ulcer. ‘You don’t care about those poor coolies … you don’t! You only care about your own hide – that Papa will be angry at you for allowing us to watch!’

  ‘I bet she enjoyed it!’ cried Yoyo. ‘Like Papa did! Papa enjoyed it! Did you see, Winnie? He liked it! And you did too!’ Jabbing her finger at Miss Wright’s face, Yoyo’s eyes were hard and cold with fury.

  ‘I saw!’ I agreed. ‘I hate Papa! I hate him! And I hate you too!’

  This to Miss Wright. Poor Miss Wright. She was not responsible for what had happened but now she bore the brunt of our wrath, a lightning rod in the teacup storm of adolescent rage. But what else could we do? We could hardly go down and rebuke the overseers, or our darkies who had watched, or Papa who had wielded that awful whip.

  Miss Wright held up both hands as if to push away the wave of fury unleashed on her, and said, quite calmly,

  ‘Girls, don’t be silly. You saw what the coolies were doing. What do you think would have happened if they had not been beaten back? What if they had breached the gate and come to the house? Do you know what would have happened to us? I can’t believe you’re taking their side against ours! It was clearly self-defence. Clearly. They had to be taught a lesson, and that’s what your father did. Teach them a lesson. A lesson they will never forget.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Do you know what would have happened if the coolies had breached the gate? Can you even imagine? Why, we would all have been dead! Or even worse – we women violated! By a horde of savages! What can you be thinking to defend them! How could they possibly have been stopped, if not by force? Now stop being silly and let’s get back to our lessons.’

  And then, as suddenly as it had started, we were spent. Emptied, limp, like balloons that have lost their air. The morning was half over. Miss Wright began her lessons: Arithmetic, and then French, and then History. Listless, distracted, we complied. But then, in the middle of History – which had always bored me, but today more so than ever – I snapped back into form. I slammed shut my book.

  ‘I don’t care!’ I cried. ‘I don’t care about these English and Scottish kings and queens, Henry the Fourth and William the Eighth or whatever! I can’t remember their dates and I don’t care! What has this got to do with me, with us? Why can’t you teach us proper history? Something real, something relevant? What are we doing here, for instance, we planters? If Papa is English why is he here in South America and not in England? Why did he get to own a plantation and plant sugar and get rich and have all these coolies and darkies working for him and what gave him the right to make them work for him, and make them live like pigs, and whip them? I don’t understand. I just don’t. Tell me. Tell us! You’re our teacher, so teach us, for goodness’ sake!’

  Miss Wright and Yoyo both stared at me. Miss Wright’s jaw dropped open. Yoyo smiled, and found her voice.

  ‘She’s right! I want to know as well!’

  Miss Wright could only stutter. ‘Girls, I – the curriculum! I don’t think – I don’t know …’

  ‘If you don’t know we’ll have to find out ourselves, won’t we, Winnie?’

  I nod
ded. ‘Yes. Let’s go to Papa’s library and look for books.’

  ‘Girls! Please!’

  But this time we would not be silenced. We were already on our feet and clattering down the stairs to the large dark study at the back of the house where Papa had his desk, where he did his private business and kept his books. We were not allowed in here unless summoned in by Papa. Papa had told us there was nothing that would interest girls in here. And indeed, it was dark and gloomy and smelled of stale tobacco and floor polish and dried men’s sweat and old rum. This was where Papa entertained his friends, the other plantation owners and senior managers from up and down the Courantyne Coast. Sometimes, even men from Georgetown; they came with their whole families, and while the wives and the children enjoyed the peculiar delights of a Courantyne sojourn, the husbands retreated to Papa’s musty cave with their cigars and their rum and talked about who knows what.

  One entire wall of the library was a fitted bookcase; the books were all behind glass doors, to keep the insects and the dust out. Yoyo and I stormed the bookshelves, breached the glass walls, grabbed the books, and blew away the dust that had somehow crept in through the cracks. Some of them, when we held them in our hands, almost fell apart for they had been attacked by termites, which had eaten tunnels into the pages. They smelt old, and musty like history itself. We searched their titles and tables of contents. We carted the most promising books to the table in the centre of the room where Papa and his cronies would sit with their drinks and talk away the night. We scoured those books for Truth, impatiently scanning the pages for mention of BG. We didn’t find it.

  Finally, though, we found a volume entitled History of the British Empire. Yoyo and I bent over it together, leafing through the pages to find some reference to our own country. Most of it was devoted to the continents of Africa and Asia. There were whole sections, several chapters long, on Canada and Australia. The West Indies were allocated a single chapter. In that chapter, three paragraphs were devoted to British Guiana.