“There was a time when this Plantation owned three-quarters of all the land and property in the whole of Bimshire.”
Now she is before the second wooden gate. It is stiff. Its hinges swing inwards, towards her. There is a roughly made handle. The nails that hold it are now loose, from age and rust. She pulls, and pulls, and it seems as if the gate will hold its secrets and remain shut, and block her entry into the wider world that lies before her, buried in the darkness and the vast fields of sugar cane, wide as the Carbean Sea, vast as the Atlantic Ocean itself . . .
And, all of a sudden, the gate swings open. A new world outside this wooden gate opens and faces them.
There is the smell of the earth, after rain. The soil. Thick, wet, black soil. The fields planted in yams are like waves.
The smell that greets her is a smell she thinks is of flowers.
If it were not so dark, she would be able to see these flowers. That Sunday afternoon she had lingered over her lunch, and could find no appetite for the dry-peas and rice, boiled chicken, local sweet potatoes, pulped eddoes, cucumber sliced as thin as the pages from a book and pickled in lemon juice, fresh red hot peppers and generous amounts of fresh parsley; she had sat watching the steam from the other serving dishes rise like fingers of smoke she would sometimes see moving over the North Field, when the canes were on fire; sitting and “studying”; and she had found, sitting there, some solace from the thoughts that were interrupting her appetite for her Sunday lunch; thoughts that provided a temporary postponement of the suggestion that entered her head: that after all these years, she should choose this Sunday to correct the injuries she had suffered, swollen through the passage of the years themselves; find the motive, and prove to herself that he had, through the narrative of her mother’s life, and the tales handed down from her great-great-gran’s life from a time even before that; that in spite of the Great House in which she lives, the reward for his use of her body; giving him three children, two dead before they hardly saw the light of day; and all the gifts for which a woman would normally kiss the dirt on which the giving-man walks; or kiss his arse; but no; not she, after all these years of success, in the eyes of the entire Village of Flagstaff, in the eyes of Sargeant who always loved her, and who wants her now, but could not have had her then; not because of her circumstances, but because of her own decision—she could have sneaked him a foop even in spite of Mr. Bellfeels’ “following and reporting” eyes; no, nothing had erased from her mind, the way the riding-crop moved from her neck, from the neck of the cotton frock which belonged to his own daughter, Miss Euralie . . . She has been in this underground passage before. Mr. Bellfeels brought her here, once a week on Fridays, when he was repairing the green-painted gate she has just closed, when he had first promoted her to work in the kitchen of the Main House.
Here, in this underground tunnel, Mr. Bellfeels did not make love to her, if he could ever call his rapid “firing of blanks” making love; when he brought her here it was to foop her; but not foop her in the normal sense, the sense she knew by instinct, and by listening behind the cloth curtain in her house to the stories Ma and Gran told about women on the Plantation.
Mr. Bellfeels brought Mary-Mathilda here into this underground tunnel, and pulled up her dress, and pulled down her cotton panties, and pushed his index finger on the left hand as high into her pussy as it would go; sometimes beyond the second joint. And then he put the same finger into his mouth; licked it dry, noisily, regardless of her time of month; and then he took the flask of rum from his khaki jodhpurs, which he always carried, and held his head back, and let the strong, burning white liquid fall into his mouth. When he put the flask back into his side pocket, the silver in the flask gleamed; and she could see the initials, DARB, marked deep into the beautiful sterling of the flask. He drank only white rum. The rum he himself would learn to cure.
“Young pussy and mature white rum, the best anecdote for a man! Eh, Mary-girl? What you say?
“I grooming you for later. I waiting till you get more riper, girl,” he told her always, on these Fridays.
He would put the flask back into his jodhpurs, push the whip into his waist, and with his hand round her shoulder—she reached him to his chest—they would walk back through the one-mile underground tunnel, with him pressing her head against his strong virile body, not saying a word, just breathing; he with a more pulsating rhythm, as she could feel from her closeness to his body; she, in the rushed, uneven pulsation of fear.
“Good night, Mary,” he would always say as he locked the entrance, the trap door which led into what is now her kitchen, in the Great House.
“Next Friday again, hear?”
“Friday,” she would tell him.
“Don’t tell your mother.”
And he would smile. And she knew. She knew enough of life that she knew she could not tell her mother. And if she did, she knew what would happen.
“I forget,” he said one time. “Sorry, Mary-girl. Not next Friday. I seeing May.”
“Yes, sir.”
May was her mother’s name. Everyone who worked or who lived, except Mr. Lawrence Burkhart, on the Plantation called her Miss May.
“Friday’s May’s time. When you get home, tell May I want to see her. Hear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good night, Mary.”
“Good night, Mr. Bellfeels, sir.”
“I am taking you this way, leading you through this gate, to show you something you wouldn’t probably’ve seen before,” she tells Sargeant now, closing the gate behind them, but not latching it.
They are now walking in a passageway cut out like a deep trench at the side of a road, but much deeper; and covered. Their heads do not reach halfway up the sides. The sides are of concrete. It is plain, rough concrete. It has the toughness of a fortress. It is like the trenches described by the BBC as the place where English soldiers and soldiers from the British Commonwealth fought in the War.
It is dark in this trench. The path on which they are walking is hard, packed mud; hard almost as concrete.
“Field hands were lashed and tied to a stake out in the hot sun; and one afternoon I saw, with my two eyes, how Mr. Lawrence Burkhart the Driver brought a bucket of water and placed it three inches out of that poor man’s reach; and the Driver stood there, laughing and smoking a cigarette, with his whip under his right armpit; and every time that that man made a attempt to reach the galvanized bucket of water, Mr. Lawrence Burkhart snap his balata, plax!
“Ma say that when bad field hands were beaten, just for fun, and when they were no longer any use to the Plantation, this is the road the Plantation had them take, while waiting to be carried out in the sea, to feed to the sharks. Ma say this was the way things were, in my gran’s time, because for one thing, as damaged goods and spoil-property, it was more cheaper to throw them to the sharks than to pay a doctor, if there was one on the Plantation, or pay the gravedigger to dig-down six feet; or the carpenter to nail-together planks of deal board for a coffin, to bury them in. To-besides, the graveyard, christened Coloured Valley, was getting full-up too quick, during slavery, with dead black people.
“We had five great tragedies in this Island of Bimshire. The Typhoid Fever Outbreak. Was like a epidemic. Killed great and small. The firm and the infirm.
“Then the Hurricane. The weatherman out on the Hill didn’t have time, the hurricane lick-down summuch property so quick, to think of a name to christen it by. We did that ourselves. Darnley! What a brute-beast! It devastate practically half the Island. Flagstaff Village almost didn’t exist the third day. All the houses where the poor people live, were toss-’bout, and went flying all over the place, like dry leaves. Houses near the sea went in the sea like kites that pop their cord. And the waves from the sea left the sea, and came over the land and destroyed all that the hurricane winds had spared. Ma say it was as if God had-christen Bimshire by a new name, a Biblical name, and called it Sodom and Gormorrah.
“After the Typhoid Fever
Outbreak, and Darnley the Hurricane, there was the Hunger. Caused by foodstuffs becoming, all of a sudden, scarce; scarce-scarce-scarce. Churchill wanting all the food for the Allieds to fight the Nazzies on the beaches, in the lanes, on the high seas, in the air, and on the ground with; all over. Ma say all that effort took food to be successful with, so Churchill send the food up in Englund for the Allieds.
“We had to cut and contribe.
“Even the inferior salt fish that Canada, a member of the Commawealth of Nations, and as a consequence our Commawealth sister, sent down here was scarce. Lining up for three hours in Miss Greaves’ Shop to buy rotting, stinking salt fish, with such a awful smell to it that when you put it in a skillet to boil it, it was like cooking offal. But it showed, Ma say, what artists black people are. I don’t only mean in singing and acting, like Miss Ella Fitzgerald, and Billy Eckstine, Nat King Cole and Fat Swallow, Cab Calloway, Jesse Owens, Count Basie, Joe Louis and Duke Ellington . . . incidentally, I wonder if Duke Ellington is a real Duke like the ones up in Englund, or if he is using the Duke as a alias or a nomenclature, one of those names common in Amurca, amongst Negroes? Or Trinidadian Calypsonians. But we were artists in a lot of other ways, too.
“Sweet potatoes which we only boiled or roasted before, was now grated and made into flour. Flour remained on the merchant ships that stopped here, but was not off-loaded. Churchill ordered the ships to stop here, only to take-on fresh, clean water; and rum; and then run straight for Englund.
“Cassava, which we used only to make starch to starch clothes with; or cassava-pone, or cassava-hats, a local delicacy; or sweet-cassava boil and serve with dry food, we now realized we had the genius and had-possess the same stamina, ability, and determination as the English of Englund, and we could turn this cassava into flour, cassava flour.
“We turned poison-cassava into starch.
“And we turned ordinary sweet potato and the other variety of cassava, sweet-cassava, into flour.
“And had a hell-of-a-time eating ‘hats’ cooked in a iron buck-pot, yes! We ate to our hearts’ content! Forget Winston Churchill, man!
“The tamarind, gooseberry, puh-paw, all the fruits that we used to take a bite outta, and then throw-way,..Well, we now turned those fruits into preserves and preservatives, rivalling the best from Englund, Seville Orange Marmalade made by James Keiller & Son, Dundee, and them-so. Yes!
“How did I get on to this? The mind, Sargeant-boy, the mind going . . . Sometimes I sit down, and call-to-mind travelling on journeys; and then, the more I am studying, I afterwards realize that I could not have been on those journeys at all, because I don’t even know where the particular country is. But it is the mind. It is in the mind. My mind, when not occupied with Gertrude, would take me on these journeys, and then I would have to tell myself that it is purely imagination.
“I have never really left the shores of Bimshire.
“Uh lie! Once. Once, though, I travelled to Buffalo with Mr. Bellfeels. I remember landing in Miami-Florida, and travelling by train all the way up to the North. I remember the coloured women in the same comport—partment . . . compartment as me. Mr. Bellfeels, being a businessman, had to sit with other businessmen, to talk business. Sugar-cane yields, machineries for the Factory to get larger yields with. He taught me to look at life as a matter of yields. Everything have its yield. Or its possibility of yields.
“So, the businessmen sat in a different comportment, compartment, talking about yields; and smoking cigars. Apparently, cigars were not permitted in the compartment where I was, with the other coloured women. God, I loved the way those coloured women talked, though; so slow. We coloured people in this part of the world talk fast-fast.
“And when we reached Buffalo, we were serrigated in two different places again, because as I said, businessmen have a way of talking about yields long into the night, and I was a woman in-the-family-way, pregnant then, with my first child, and I needed my rest. And I surely didn’t want, through pregnant complications or something happening, to have to remain in Buffalo, and have a child of mine born under the Stars-and-Stripes! Oh-no!
“My child had to be English.
“So, Mr. Bellfeels went his way with his businessmen-people, and I spend my time in the place called a ‘bed-and-breakfast’; and at night I sat me down in a little restaurant to eat, and hear a coloured lady with a voice like Marian Anderson, singing ‘It’s Nobody Business,’ and other blues. From then on, I fell in love with the blues. Give me the blues any morning; for breakfast, for lunch and dinner; and before I go to bed at night, give me the blues as a nightcap . . . with a lil brandy. Give me the blues anytime, before I would listen to this hilly-billy music from the South, or to cowboys from out in Western Canada.
“I related this journey many times to Wilberforce. And Wilberforce tell me that I am imagining things, that I am conducting a psychological recall, spurn-on by certain things. I am conducting a journey of imaginary reality. I ask Wilberforce, ‘What the hell are you telling me? What language you speaking?’ That’s the trouble with having thrildren who are more brighter than their parents! They embarrass you all the time.
“Wilberforce tell me that there is a section of the mind, or the brain, that holds things that the person in question cannot control. He actually didn’t use the word person. He said patient, insinniating that something was wrong with my head, although he didn’t come right out with a diagnosis, and say that something was wrong with his mother’s head! That would be convicting him too, won’t it?
“A person can be anywhere she wants to, Wilberforce tell me, even if the person has never actually been there. And this is the kind of journey I am taking you on.
“We are at the end of the passage, and what you see in front of you is the field in which I started my life.
“Ma started her life here, too. My grandmother, Gran, started her life here, and before Gran, my great-gran, who was taken from a different place. And Ma never really found out if Gran came straight from Elmina-Africa, or was transship from Waycross-Georgia, and then here. I used to hear Gran sing ‘Steal Away to Jesus,’ and ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariots.’ And many a night, as I had occasion to tell the Constable, I sang ‘Ole Liza Jane.’ I told the Constable this.
“Ma always told me narratives about life in the barracks of the men and women who didn’t work in the fields, or in the sugarcane fields, the house servants, some of who were coopers and carpenters and blacksmiths; and Ma say that in the barracks of this very Plantation, Saturday night was the night that the master visited his slave woman down in the barracks, to get his weekly dose of his thing. Pum-pum time! Driver-time. Overseer-time. Bookkeeper time. Assistant Manager time. Manager time. White-man time . . .
“Ma’s time came. And she had to deliver. Either stanning-up behind the shack where she lived with Gran; or inside the house, with Gran inside the house, too, hearing every move, every push, every juck, every cry which was muffled, because the massa, the driver, the overseer, the bookkeeper, assistant manager, manager had-place his two hands to cover Ma’s mouth, as he did it from behind . . . and Gran pretending she wasn’t hearing nothing, nor her own history repeated; spend the hush, wet, soiled time pretending she wasn’t hearing nothing.
“Performing just like two animals.
“Every Saturday night, when things were sweet, and Wilberforce was at Harrison College, Mr. Bellfeels, as his habit was, as the custom was, would visit the Great House. And on these Saturday nights, there would be so much food. Good food. Rich food. Chicken fricassee. Long-grain rice that was clean, you hardly had to pick or wash it; not like what Demerara exported here. Ham. From that place I told you about, in the South. Smithfield. Bully-beef. If a ship hadn’t come in with beefsteak from the Argentyne, ’cause the Argentyne being Latin-Amurcan, was always a favourite of Germans. And fried pork chops. You wouldda thought we were having a feast. And that it was Easter or Christmas. Or Wilberforce birthday. Yes!
“Only the three o’ we. Little Wilberforce, M
r. Bellfeels and me. And Gertrude serving.
“I must confess that Mr. Bellfeels wasn’t a bad-looking man, being not pure-blood. He had the same body, that nice, strong, sexy —is that the word young people use nowadays?—mannish body that you and Golbourne and that I remember Pounce having.
“So it wasn’t all that bad, absolutely. It wasn’t a choice that I made. It was more like one of those Indian arrangements of marriage where the woman have no voice in the man she will get in bed with.
“Ma chose Mr. Bellfeels for me: and vice versa.
“On Saturday nights, you shouldda seen me and my son, with me holding my son’s two hands and we turning round and round, spinning; with our mouths wide open, laughing; at the top of our voice, doing these dances. Jigs, Wilberforce call them, after travelling in the South himself, to a conference in Tuskeegee. Tuskeegee was named after an Amurcan slave who told other coloured people to follow agriculture and learn how to grow crops, and that when slavery abolish, the very white people would come buying the crops that these same ex-slaves produce. But you know all this. Yes. Tuskeegee!
“I wasn’t even thinking of the man from Tuskeegee when I mention the habit of contriving, during the War years. It must be something in us, in we people, coloured people, Negroes, whatever you want to call us, that connects us together, no matter which Plantation we are to call home-prison, as Ma always referred to her life, on this Plantation, as.
“Dancing those Saturday night jigs caused Wilberforce to see the likeness of me and him in Little Black Sambo, a book he happen to buy in Tennessee.
“Wilberforce could not wait till he returned from Tennessee. He send Little Black Sambo by airmail, special delivery, with this note attach: ‘I have marked page 150 of this book to show you how we used to behave. Isn’t it ironical?’”
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