James Miranda Barry

by Patricia Duncker

  ‘I sounded the alarm. We gathered men, boats, horses. Every inch of the shoreline was searched that night. The sand was a mass of shouts and torches. As the hours drew on I became desperate. But I could not believe that she would not be found, sunburnt and chiding, barefoot on the roadways. I heard her voice, soldier, in the night birds, in the lapping waves, in the gull’s cry over the spit in the early dawn.

  ‘They came to me at first light. The priest’s eyes were terrible with the news.

  ‘We hurried to the little port at the far end of the docks where the fishermen’s boats come in. It was the giant black fisherman she had always chosen, the man she had singled out, his huge frame bent over her in the bottom of his boat. As I looked down from the dock, he made space for her body among his lobster pots and the stirring claws of his creatures on the damp planks. His huge black arm was around her shoulders. He pushed the wet hair back from her face and gazed into her cloudy, drowned eyes.

  ‘ “Yoh woman, Massa?”

  ‘He looked up at me, the words whistling through his lost teeth, the gums skinned and pale in the fresh light.

  ‘ “Pretty-pretty woman.”

  ‘Her face was still hers, for it had been masked and covered by her full skirts, but her hands and arms were almost gone, eaten away to the bone. How long does it take to drown, soldier? How quickly would she have perished in that clear mass of translucent green? The boat was never found. The verdict was accidental death, based on the fisherman’s testimony. He said that he had pulled her up in his nets just as dawn was breaking. I believed him. He loved Mary Ann. He was telling the truth. I saw how gently he touched her dead body, his giant hands tender on her cold, white skin.

  ‘What was left to me then?

  ‘I knew that I would go back to Venezuela to end my life there. But first, I had to find you.

  ‘Turn over the drawing she made of Lewis Galdy’s tomb. Look at the back. That is the inscription I chose to be carved on her gravestone. She is buried in the cemetery at Port Royal, within hearing of the shouts from the port, the quiet rocking of the boats and the fresh sea wind.

  ‘On the last night we were together she talked about you. We sat there on the verandah in the coming dark and she talked about you. I know that she wrote to you, soldier, almost every day. But she hardly ever spoke about you, except to share her letters. And she never spoke about the past. That’s why I noticed the occasion. It was out of the ordinary. There is hardly any twilight in the tropics. Maybe ten minutes of dusk. Then the rush of darkness, with Tarquin’s ravishing strides. It is very sudden. When we were inland we drew the blinds at once, for the mosquitoes are drawn to the light. But there are fewer insects down by the sea. There is a fresh wind. There, we used to watch the night come. From our perch we could hear the creeping rise and slap of the sea. At first light we would sometimes go down to watch the fishermen unloading the night’s catch. We lived by the rhythm of the sea. It is eternal there. There are no great tides. There are no markers, no seasons, just the May rains and the October hurricanes to map out the year. I was afraid that she would miss the northern spring. But she never did. That was our last night together. And she talked to me about you.

  ‘ “I have had so little satisfaction in my life, Francisco. I think that, until now, I have never been completely happy. I have always wanted something other than what I had. I was never accepted, never acknowledged. What was I? A rich man’s wife, a drunkard’s poor widow, another rich man’s mistress. Always a man’s possession. No, don’t say anything. It’s true. I was always a man’s possession. Even yours. That’s why I asked you to do it. You were the three men I had every right to command. I asked you to give my child the life I never had. My child has a position in the world. She will be respected, remembered. My child will have the freedom I never enjoyed. My child will be a gentleman, well-educated, well-travelled. My child will see the countries of which I dreamed, but never saw, will eat foods I have heard of, but never tasted. What else can a woman desire for her child, but a larger, wider life than the one she has inherited? Oh yes, I wanted to give her happiness and joy, but more than that, I wanted her to have the power to choose. There was no other way to manage the affair.

  ‘ “You said it was a masquerade, a lie. How could anyone think that, Francisco? I have acted a part every moment of my existence. Even now. Even with you. No, don’t speak. For once, let me have my say. What is my role here? I am the famous general’s pretty mistress. Even you – with all your radical opinions – you couldn’t change what people think of a young widow woman who lives with an older man. Of course they are polite to me. They wouldn’t dare to behave otherwise. But out of respect for you, fear of you, not out of regard for me. It was always so. My life has been made safe by your money, and your fame. My child has protected herself, fought for herself, made her own life, earned her own name. And that was my doing. I set her free.”

  ‘I think that she was more honest with me then than she had ever been. There was love in her eyes, and passion in her face, in her gestures. She was thinking of you. Her whole heart was with you. She sent you to us on that damp midsummer night. She was the source of the plot, soldier. It was her idea. We all loved her so much. What was she asking of us? To give you the chance to live something other than a woman’s life. She gave you up to us, my dearest child, because she loved you more than anyone else in the world. More than she loved me, more than she loved any one of us. She was the woman who held all the cards and the dice. She set the rules of the game. It was a game worth playing, don’t you think so, soldier?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Barry.

  Part Five

  Tropics

  This is unhappiness. Sitting alone in the night, listening to the cicadas, the frogs and the great white owls, watching the moonlight move on the mosquito net, knowing that I have grown old. I hold a letter in my hands. I have read this letter again and again. There is now but one person in the world who remembers me when I was a child. The others are all gone, all gone. The first woman I loved, so cunning, duplicitous and brave, slipped away into this transparent sea. Hers was a kind of vanishing, an uneasy, ambiguous death. And my revolutionary General, for whom I imagined an heroic finale in battle, a grand public funeral, his horse following the gun carriage, the boots reversed in the stirrups, flags at half-mast and endless eulogies of praise? No cannon sounded at the last for him. He died of old age, under house arrest in his own country, decrepit and incontinent, in a sea of piss and dribble.

  Here, even at the most angry height of summer, I feel the sea wind on my cheek. I watch the lizards freeze on the mill wall, blending quietly into the lichen and the stone. I cannot hide. And no disguise is necessary now. I have no fears of discovery. What should I fear? The mask has become the face.

  Nothing is sadder than these men with their twisted hands, these women with their lined and silent faces, waiting for me, waiting for me. One of the women holds a child wrapped in a filthy cotton shawl. The thing is dying. Its skin is already grey and flies are gathering around the mouth. There will be nothing I can do. I will administer a pink tonic from Volpone’s bag and tell her that the Lord giveth and the Lord will very probably take away. She has ten children already, by several different men. She sits gazing at me, silent, waiting. She loves this child. This one. Bone of her bone, flesh of her flesh. As my mother loved me. The baby’s eyes are vacant, glassy, yellowing at the rim. Better dead, better dead, better dead.

  I stroke the child’s tiny ruff of hair. The woman breathes her blessing over me and I retreat to my surgery, hot, angry and ashamed.

  But don’t forget, these people whom you serve sell their children too, sell them – boys and girls of eight or ten – as workers, prostitutes, servants. There is not enough food in this place to feed them all. Sometimes I find the children brutalised, bleeding, cowering like animals in my surgery. A small boy was left before the door last week. He had no guardian, no clothes and no name. His collar-bone was fractured, his face cut
and bruised. He was bleeding from the anus, which I found to be rotting with venereal disease. He can have been no more than six or seven years old. The child shrinks from my touch. No white man has ever touched him gently. He has been beaten, raped, abused. His eyes are huge as he listens to me, talking to him softly. He understands nothing. I leave him sitting quietly, stroking Psyche, his arm in a sling, and cross the road in the boiling dust to call on the Augustinian sisters in their cool white corridors with their blue shutters, closed against the heat, and I beg them to take one more, just one more. When I come back into the surgery the child has his arms around Psyche and he has fallen asleep. She licks his face. I stand over them, my fists clenched.

  My hair is heavy with grey streaks and grey dust. My hands are covered with liver spots. What difference have I made? What difference have I ever made? I gather up the sleeping child in my arms. His elbows and knees project bonily out of his black skin. He snuggles his head against my neck.

  Why can I achieve so little here?

  If they live, they live. If they must die, then nothing I can do will save them. This place has defeated me, this sweating humid bush, jiggers in the dust, white nights drenched in stars and the clinging yellow fever. The colonists lie sweating beneath their silk mosquito shrouds.

  Only in the mountains does the air thin and chill. Here, in these beautiful steep, wooded hills I catch my breath in the night air. I stopped my guide so that I could identify a tree orchid, shedding its humid torrent of scent upon the overgrown dirt of the pot-holed road, one single track, wolfed down by green. The flower was nothing much, white spindly petals and coiling tendrils anchoring the plant to the damp bark. It was not there to be seen, but to be smelt, a gift handed down to a tired and lonely man.

  For this is unhappiness. But I will not shrink from my melancholy, nor from my loneliness. The letter falls from my hand. I will spend this night remembering. Sitting here alone in the shrieking white night and knowing that I will always be alone, no matter how long I watch at the open door, no matter how many nights there are to come.

  * * *

  The first days when I came to this place become more luminous and vivid with the ebbing years. I can remember the boat coming ashore in a rocky cove to the west of Montego Bay. The shouts of the blacks on the beach, and the men in straw hats rowing together, and the lap and splash of clear water against the coral reefs, rocking like planted gardens beneath the sea. I smelt cooking in the clear air. We drove into town aboard a rickety cart drawn by two mules, covered in fly-blown sores where the harness pinched. I gazed out at the hills sheathed in the slender bright green tapers of the bamboo forest. The colours were too bright and too close. There was no perspective, no distance. I made many studies of the vegetation during those first weeks. Behind my garden there was a morass of log-wood, prickly yellow broad-leaf and trumpet trees with the wild fig pushing a curtain of green against the grey branches of a dead cotton tree. In this place I bear witness daily to the resurrection. For nothing stays dead for long. The entire world appears to be in the grip of a perpetual metamorphosis.

  The vultures who assist this process of destruction and rebirth are protected by law. They gaze confidently back when you approach, their evil red eyes surrounded by hideous, wrinkled flesh, as they pick at the stinking carcasses of dead animals, thrown out on the rubbish mounds alongside the usual household waste. I have been unable to suppress the practice of abandoning dead animals in the open air and it is true that the John Crows pick them clean within a day. But the town waste pits are now situated at a healthy distance from the habitations, and the rubbish is regularly burnt under the supervision of my sanitation inspector. He once found a dead child wrapped in a sack, carefully stowed away in a wooden crate. The vultures, perched expectantly on the crate, alerted him to the dead flesh within, and upon kicking the crate aside, he discovered the child, which rolled out, its legs bent and shrivelled, unravelling its shroud. The poor thing was less than a year old, so I did not call for an official investigation.

  Life is of too little value here. The days are too hot, too bright, the rain too rapid and powerful, the vegetation renews itself too rapidly. The tropics may resemble paradise, at a glance, from a great distance, but living here I can never rid my nostrils of the smell of putrefaction. During the annual epidemics, too many die for me to investigate them all. In 1840 we buried the new regiments in mass graves. If Gomm had not seconded me, and thrown all his influence behind the plan, we would never have established this station in the mountains. Often it appears that I have passed my life here fighting a paper battle with the bureaucrats. Ah, but I shall never forget the thunderous tones of the Field Marshal, bursting into my hospital office with the wild cry of victory: ‘We have carried the hill, Barry, we have carried the hill!’

  And so I was able to build my airy fortress in the Blue Mountains.

  I have sat here upon my verandah in the early day, watching the mist thinning into damp drops on the cannons, and then seen the far, low lines of Kingston and the coastline, laid out beneath me, a painted map, delicate at my feet.

  We had the illusion of victory, of command. We are a nation of rulers. But no one holds this country. The land itself crouches, flexed and tense, opposing all I am and all I do. No one holds this country. Except perhaps that classic figure with the scythe and the hourglass, who, in the end, will cradle us all in his bony arms.

  When I first came here the planters in residence still lived in the grand style. Their huge balconied houses were covered in bougainvillea and deep purple wisteria blossoms. Their irrigated gardens flamed with hibiscus and poinsettia. When they sat down to dine their tables overflowed with meat and fish, land and sea turtles, quails, snipe, plovers, pigeons and doves, mangoes and guineps, pineapples, fresh oranges, plucked from their own groves. But the most excellent fruit is the grenadillo, reduced in its ripeness to a mulch of juice and seeds, well sugared and then scooped out with a spoon. I sigh to remember the exquisite deliciousness of all the meals I have ever eaten in this insect-infested paradise world, from which, for me, there has been no escape. It seems that the tree of life and death is no longer forbidden.

  Each white member of the planters’ households had a black servant: their personal, domestic slave, to attend upon them, to prepare their wardrobe, enhance their toilette, anticipate all their desires and clear out the shit from their chamberpots. There were no horses in all the King’s Stables that were better fed, watered, nourished and groomed than these spoiled and indolent people.

  I myself inherited an elderly Negro. His name is Abraham. He is only slightly taller than I. If we let out the seams to their limits and lengthen the sleeves, he can wear my cast-off clothes. He cannot read or write, but I am teaching his sons to do so. He is patient, discreet, white-haired. We stand side by side.

  The Creoles were deeply inbred. Inherited diseases were rife within their families. The women were addicted to pleasure and demonstrated a loose sensuality that was shockingly overt. I was once forced to retire from a late supper party by a beautiful lady from Haïti, resplendent in white lace, who deliberately persisted in brushing her fan against the front of my trousers in a vain attempt to arouse me. I was amused by her gesture, in itself flattering, but alarmed that she did not care who saw her.

  And yes, the balls and fêtes continue here, and there is a great splicing of patterns and studying of journals, including the latest designs in The Ladies’ Magazine. What are they wearing in Bond Street and Paris? We do not ape the fashions of the mother country here, we reproduce them with exaggerated excellence. The boats bringing cloth, already several months out of date, are eagerly awaited. I gaze at a pale mass of bare arms and shoulders, ferociously defended against the sun, drenched in powder, sweat and citronelle, to baffle the mosquitoes. I lead the ladies from the floor, their gloveless hands moist with dancing, and present them with softly opulent shawls and fans.

  The estate I came to know best was Montpelier in St James, which then belong
ed to the Ellis family. Charles Ellis was an absentee landlord, for he was much occupied with his parliamentary duties. But he was not an irresponsible man and his second brother, Edward, a man some twenty years younger than myself, was sent to take care of the estate, after an undistinguished career in an unfashionable regiment.

  Edward was a weak and languid man, given to an excess of lace shirts and Portuguese sweet wine. He was exceedingly effeminate and sought the company of ladies at every opportunity. In the hottest season he was unable to stir from a pale draught of warm air which traversed his bedroom and his study, where he lay on the sofa like a discarded damp handkerchief.

  I rode over to Montego Bay every six weeks at least, to inspect the hospital and see to the needs of the regiments garrisoned in the north of the island. If the interior was considered unsafe, I made the voyage around the coast, for spontaneous rebellions were, and are, frequent and violent. On each visit I did not fail to spend time with Edward and to observe the life on his estate. To my knowledge Edward never once entered the infirmary, constructed under my personal direction, in all the years he lived in such close proximity with the noble, yet often wretched, creatures upon whom his life, and theirs, depended. He assured me that his aversion to the stench of illness was insuperable and he had promised himself that he would faint at the merest drop of blood. Yet he was a kind, if idle, master, and would not tolerate the grosser punishments, which were freely administered on other plantations.

  I supervised the births of many Negro children born at Montpelier. I eased their passage into this world, and, all too often, their rapid departure into the next. One of Edward’s slave women, whose name was Jessica, a handsome girl with fine, high cheekbones, velvet black, with a face full of valleys and shadows, gave birth to eight children, only one of whom survived. Who the fathers were, I never knew. Lockjaw is the most common killer, and, as the midwife assured me, ‘Oh Massa, till de nine days over, we no hope of dem.’ My most rigorous régime of hygiene and cleanliness was followed at Montpelier. Yet still the infants died. Jessica told me that the souls of her children, liberated from slavery, fled back to Africa. She herself has never seen Africa. This land is her land, for she was born here. This is the only place she has ever known.