The laughter in the front-house rose like fresh waves hitting against the rocks at the Crane Beach Hotel.
“Bellfeelus nec temere credendum nec asperandum ratus,” Sir G. then said.
“Oh God, oh-God!” the men screamed.
“Sweet-sweet!” the Vicar said. “Too-sweet!”
And the men roared. She could hear the ring of glasses tipped against one another, and the rattling of ice in the glasses, as the men toasted Sir G’s versatility and application of Livy, Book XXI to Mr. Bellfeels’ situation. They had all—except Mr. Bellfeels—studied this book in various Forms at Harrison College, or the Lodge School; most of them, however, had forgotten the passage . . .
It was a warm feeling. And some of this warmth, whether of anger or of passion, she could feel in her face, in the area round her neck, as she touched herself there, the way she does when she touches her neck with the back of her hand, checking her temperature for fever.
She did not, at this time, put her life under strict scrutiny, nor did she bend her behaviour under the critical eye of self-reproach and doubt. Years after this, after the riotous nights, when Mr. Bellfeels visited, as a parent and as paramour; on Saturday nights when he played the piano, and the three of them, father, son and son’s mother, sang and danced to the beautiful songs from the Amurcan South, songs she later came to know were Negro spirituals and Negro blues and Negro minstrels and Negro gospel music, she would throw her head back and laugh, and spin little Wilberforce, no more than five or six years old then, round and round, and watch his body flailing round, out from her own body, as if he was a merry-go-round; and his head would be thrown back in abandon, in security, in confidence that the woman holding his two hands, his mother, was not so reckless as to release her grip on his hands, in that merry turning world, in the security of the Plantation, in the front-house; and she would laugh as she swung him, and laugh as she heard the tantalizing yet mellow songs which Mr. Bellfeels told her were sung by “Nig-groes,” and by slaves; and she had no thought nor feeling for those Negroes and those slaves; for she was in Bimshire, in this solidly built Great House, square and tough, two storeys high, whose walls were built thick and redoubtable, “like a brick shithouse,” Mr. Lawrence Burkhart the Driver said; just like the walls of His Majesty’s Prison at Glandairy, or Dodds Reformatory for Boys; like the Sin-Anne’s Fort, near the Garrison Savannah, something like the toughness of the walls of Troy which the Greeks could not penetrate by force of arms, or catapults; this Great House, as it is called by everyone, standing, it seems, since time began; for it has been here, like a curse, like a smile, like an insult in the face, from the time people came to live and work on the Plantation; so, in this circle of love, and wealth, and sensuality, and violence and raw unadorned sex, Mary Gertrude Mathilda Paul (taking her mother’s maiden name) made her life with her only surviving child, Wilberforce, whom she worshipped from the time the midwife told her, “This one going-live, this time, darling!”; while the child’s father, Mr. Bellfeels, provided the means of her elevated status, condoned, though circumscribed, in his social circle; and he maintained her livelihood, servants to cook her food, servants to wash up afterwards; servants to wash her clothes; maids to iron her clothes and keep the house clean, and sew the blinds when they got ripped by hurricane winds, and darn the shirts Wilberforce wore to Harrison College, and iron the doilies and clean the cushions; and a boy to sweep the yard, and “mind the stocks,” and a girl to run easy errands. But when she got accustomed to this help, and realized that her servants ate more than they worked for in wages, she asked Mr. Bellfeels if she could dismiss all but Gertrude; and he surprised her, and said, “Man-yes! They does-only-thief the fecking food! I did-waiting to see how long before you catch on!”; and so she kept Gertrude. She loved Gertrude, and did not treat her as a servant: she assisted Gertrude in the kitchen, and round the house.
She did not know that Mr. Bellfeels was fooping Gertrude, too.
This is Mary-Mathilda’s life. Paid for by Mr. Bellfeels. But in a more serious manner, in a more deep and romantic way, her life is paid for by her body. Has always been. It is therefore her life; and her life only. She owns it.
Mr. Bellfeels took her, as his right, in his natural arrogance of ownership, as a part of the intricate ritual and arrangement of life on the Plantation—“if it wasn’t you, Mary-girl,” Ma told her, “it wouldda be somebodyelse daughter. And even though it is what it is, I still feel more better to see that is you getting some o’ the sweets that goes along with it, if you know what I mean!” Ma had told Mary-Mathilda this two years after she had introduced Mary-girl to Mr. Bellfeels that Sunday morning in the Church Yard, when he towered over her from the saddle of his horse.
Mr. Bellfeels had had Ma, too, for years; “taking what he want”; and their affair; no, not affair, for it could not be called that, since there was no bargaining power on her part; and even if she had thought of exchanging her body for power, or for privilege, or a simple thing, like having to work less hard, in exchange for “a piece o’ pussy”; or receiving an extra shilling in her brown wage envelope, when she stood with the other field hands in the large Planta- tion Yard, covered in white marl and loose gravel, under the tamarind tree, and heard how she was addressed by Mr. Lawrence Burkhart the Driver, “Eunomia Irene Paul, here?” and then have to hear the number of times she was marked late; and the number of times she “didn’t show-up,” including when her monthly sickness was too painful for her to walk the mile to work; and listen to the number of pence she was docked for this “blasted unpunctualness, too often, hear?” Ma knew, and would get to know even better, since she was a member of the field gang and the Plantation system, that this coming Friday afternoon late, Mr. Bellfeels would come and have it; rough and ready; and there was nothing she could do to make it not happen.
“Fair exchange,” Ma began to tell herself, as she limped home a little later than the other field hands, sore from the throwing up and down of her hands, like a machine, with the hoe in her hands; and driving it, with venom and hate, “I going-kill yuh, I going-kill-yuh . . . one o’ these good days . . .” into the ground which was hard as rock, sometimes; hard as a piece of coral from the sea; sometimes hard as soft mud; and her thighs sore from Mr. Bellfeels’ brutal prick which dug into her without mercy, without the lubrication of love.
It was a glance of his eye, a command of silent determination, threatening a flogging, if Ma had not seen the wink, or if she seemed not to have observed the signal. The large, chestnut-coloured horse, smelling like urine and straw mixed and left out in the sun, would tread on the thick black soil, with the pieces of corn stalk and ruts from the cut sugar canes, roots from the plants of sweet potatoes and eddoes, spread like a Persian carpet from the way the colours were arrayed on the ground, and the horse would shit on the stalks and on the ruts, and add to the smell of terror and of despair—with the smell of horse seeming to guide her behind him. Barely out of sight and hearing distance of the eleven other women in the field gang, Ma would see him standing just two rows from the edge of the growing canes. The canes were still young. They reached him to his waist. They reached Ma to her chest. The fly of his khaki jodhpurs was already unbuttoned. Ma saw the ugly brownish red head of his circumcised prick. She had seen it many times, and as many times had thrown it from her mind; or had imagined she would bite it off, hold it in her teeth, close her eyes even tighter than they were shut, at the touch of his hand on her breasts; and bite, and bite, and hope there was no blood; she couldn’t stand blood; and spit it out the moment it was severed from his high-smelling thighs . . . retaining only, more in her body than in her thoughts, the burning sensation of unfulfilled tension, and another burning feeling in her vagina, as if his semen was seasoned with hot nigger-peppers.
“Fair exchange,” Ma grew to tell Mary-girl, her daughter, “is no robbery. Get something for it. You are a pretty girl. With a lovely complexion. Nice hair. If I was the woman o’ means that I wish I was, you would have your own hairdressing pla
ce. Or a dressmaking place. Or even be a teacher. But this is our lot. I can’t even buy a second-hand, or a t’ird-hand Singer sewing machine for you!”
Ma had told him what she had wanted to tell him for years, from that time she stopped having her menses. The second time. The first time she found out she was pregnant, her own ma, Gran to Mary-girl, was too scared to try her hand at abortion, for Gran’s mother was poorly; lying on a canvas cot all day, waiting for God to call her home; but in her weak voice, she whispered the “ingreasements” of the portion; for only she, with this knowledge which she said she brought from Africa, knew what to do. Great-Gran had an apothecary’s brilliance with herbs. Great-Gran told them the right herbs and bushes to use. And she knew, from trial and error, the correct portion of engine oil—“. . . jest a drop to a drop and a half, two at the most”—to mix with the thick, bitter, black liquid that the bushes were boiled down to in a tea.
“Eunomia-girl, this going taste like hell, like p’ison,” Great-Gran told her, “but that is exactly what it suppose to be. P’ison-out the infirmities inside your system, girl. So, hold your nose, shut yuh two eyes and swallow hard. Good! Now, sit in this bush-bath . . .”; yes, she had gone through that.
But this Friday afternoon, about two, a few hours before she would assemble with the other hands, in the Plantation Yard, to answer to her name—Eunomia Irene Paul, here?”—and walk forward, take her brown envelope from the hand of the bookkeeper, and mark a mark that represented her name, her special Mark, her mark of identity and identification, in the large ledger, PLANTATION LABOURERS, that has a black cover, red vertical lines and black horizontal lines, and the names of everyone, man, woman, child, animal, who worked on the Plantation, written in it; with her mind full of the thought that she could reason with him, risky in itself; for her to seem to have a mind, this dangerous disposition, similar to the uppitiness her cousins in Southampton had seen in Nat Turner, this, this “blasted facetiness,” “this circumstance,” this rebelliousness, this talking-back . . ...Well, Ma had hardly got the words with which she wanted to negotiate out of her mouth when she felt the searing, tearing, biting tongue of the riding-crop across her back, whap!-whap! It was as if the two lashes were sewn into her flesh, like the two strings of cloth which served as braces that kept her skirt in place.
“You ever whisper that one-more-time, and I fecking kill you, like shite!”
“Sir,” Ma said.
“Don’t-fecking-sir-me! Or play with me! You hear me, woman?”
“Sir.”
“You really understand what I fecking.Well telling you, Eunomia Irene Paul?”
This was the first time he had called her by her full name. And hearing her name called by him shocked her into temporary dumbness; and he had to repeat his warning.
“You really understand what I fecking.Well telling you, Eunomia Irene Paul?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Feck-yuh-up! Shoot yuh, like-feck! Point-blank, too!”
“Yes, sir.”
And he flung the riding-crop at her, in a vicious lash. Part of the riding-crop caught her right breast; but the longer part, like a striking snake, ripped into her back.
“You heard me?”
Whapppp! it cried out again.
“Yes, sir.”
“You understand, now?
“Yessir . . .”
“Be-Christ, how it would look, for people to hear that I fooping my own daughter! You want to send-me-up to Glandairy? Or cause a fecking scandal pon this Plantation? You hate me summuch?”
“No, sir.”
“Good...Well, lemme tell you wha’ I going-do. I putting-in a’ extra piece o’ change in your envelope today.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you, very much, sir.”
And Ma, from that moment, knew that Mary-girl was fixed. Was saved. Taken-care-of. Just as—and Ma could not have known this—Mary-Mathilda had taken care of her wishbone; and of her hoe. And Ma knew that she herself would carry this damning, indigestible information within her heart, for who would believe such blasphemy, such, such wirthless behaviour; so she would carry it to her grave.
It is this thought, this nagging, raw supposition that comes up now, like the first .Welling on the arm that you watch after rubbing it with your hand, hoping it will disappear, or else stop hurting, but which becomes in three days, always in three days, an open festering sore, which brings pain; and you cannot any longer rub it with your hand, but have to lance it, or cover it with Elastoplast, or use the Village remedy, ordinary dirt that is dry, mixed with ashes from the coal pot or from the fireplace; but whether it is healed in three days after its bursting out, it leaves a scar. A little smooth roundish skin, darker and smoother than your normal skin, and for life, perhaps, or for a long time, but long enough to be a life, you walk about with this mark. This mark.
This is the mark that Mary-Mathilda would see when she walked up the stairs from the front-house, when she had sat in her favourite chair, reading the Bible, or letting her hands guide the bone needles, absent-mindedly, or “just studying”—for she had now mastered most patterns she had taken from Ladies’ Home Journal, the English edition—and would, when the light changed, or when Gertrude brought in the acetylene lamps and lit them, before the house was run with electricity, Mary-Mathilda would see, as if for the first time, the smiling countenance of Wilberforce, as a small boy, and then look at the face of Mr. Bellfeels, erect, formal, handsome, in a suit of black, with a high, stiff, white collar that looked as if he has been made breathless by its tightness, and see clearly the obvious fact of patrimony: who had fathered her son, her only living child. And then she would look at the photographs of herself, at age five, and seven, and nine, exactly the three ages of Wilberforce in the triptych in the oval-shaped silver frame, and see the resemblance which struck her always as the resemblance of the son “taking after his mother.” But when she looked at all three together, this is when the thought of a mark, of a silent sin, first entered her mind.
But who in this world, in this Christian world of such small space, but with so many souls living in it, would do a thing like that, and still remain living amongst the other Christians?
She had heard about it, from books and from stories told round the dining table, when Mr. Bellfeels brought his friends on Saturday nights, for relaxation. But these were stories that took place in the back-lands of the Amurcan South; and in the Amurcan Wild West; and in Canada on the Prairies, in the wilds, in the North, in the bitter cold of long winters, on winter farms, where farmers, as Sir G explained it, “needed the superabundance of hands to work the land, before the mechanization of tractors and ploughs, in that unredeeming cold which lasts nine months out of the year, what do you expect, to be reasonable, I put it to you, what do you expect nature to do, to accommodate this phenome-non? Of natural passion?”
Sir G answered his own question.
“The farmer fooped his own daughter, after having exhausted the limited usefulness of his poor loving wife, poor dear,” Sir G said. “I won’t vouch for the farmer’s moral obligation, however, in solving this predicament, but I put it to you.”
All the men roared with laughter, including Mr. Bellfeels.
“And the poor dear, the wife, overworked with the milk pail, the chicken coops, and baling, and at last relieved of her bounden duty, was placed in the position to supervise, to supervise at least, since she could no longer be a participant, the wife had knowledge of (the dark, cold bedroom where the wind howled through the comforters made of cotton) this act of deliberate economic contribution to the theory of employment, within the cemetery of her conscience.”
The men did not laugh at this . . .
Now, in this underground tunnel, where Sargeant and Mary-Mathilda are still walking, these thoughts which are now pressing upon her consciousness and her conscience, slides of her life, make her sad and very angry. But in her mind, now having to think about the act that she “had perpetrated,” as Sir G would say, she knows the reason
why . . .
She can feel the difference in the sound of her footsteps, in this section of the underground tunnel; and there is more hollowness in the sound of her footsteps, and this makes her feel that the tunnel is approaching the cellar of her house.
She walks with the hoe, putting it down a few inches ahead of each stride, step after step, just as she had seen the Vicar walk with his umbrella.
Sargeant walks slowly behind her.
At the sound of his sneezing, she emerges from her reverie.
“I have told you things you didn’t know existed before. And these things are things that will remain right here,” she says.
“You told me things, yes,” he says.
“The things I have told you, am about to tell you, I want you to forget, and have them remain here, in this underground passage.”
“You could trust me, Mary-Mathilda.”
“Okay, then. But did I tell you that Ma’s name was Eunomia Irene?”
“Close to one o’ the Bellfeels girls,” he says.
“I asked Ma the origin of Eunomia.
“‘How come you have this name?’
“And she told me that her Mother, my gran, saw it written-down somewhere, and liked it, and gave it to her, when she was christened. In Sin-Davids Anglican Church. And her second name, Irene, I don’t know what that means, either. A hundred women in this Village name Irene. My guess is that the English must-have-bring it here. But don’t you think Eunomia is a very nice name; and then, Irene?”
“Pretty like the Bellfeels daughters.”
“Ma never knew who her father is. In those days, on the Plantation, women didn’t pay much attention to thrildren bearing the names of the father—if the fathers were known, at all—excepting if the father was living under the same roof with the mother, and the child, which was rare.
“No. Ma didn’t know who her father was. Could be anybody. He could be dead, anyhow, before she born. That was Plantation life.
“She knew mine. But she never told me. She never told me who. She just drop hints. Always hints.
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