The Negroes bury their dead in their own gardens. I was puzzled by this practice at first, as they are an extremely superstitious people and live in terror of ghosts, or duppies as they are called here. But Jessica explained to me that she and her sisters had no fear of the beloved dead, but trembled before the menacing spectres of their enemies.
These people are deeply religious, and each corpse is accompanied to its grave by a whole community’s passionate singing and lamenting. I attended the ceremony for the last of Jessica’s babes, a child that was stillborn. The slaves were given permission to bury their dead at dusk, when the day’s work was over. Despite my advice that she should rest, the woman accompanied the coffin as the principal mourner. At the head of the cortège she sang the most heart-rending melody to the quiet grave in her own language. Her people are called the Eboes and their language is forbidden to them upon punishment by flogging or even death. They eat no meat and have been known to fall ill after eating the flesh of turtles. As she sang, the company stared at me, the only white man present, transfixed with alarm. I took her hand when she had finished, wiped her incessant tears away and cast the first handful of dust into the tiny grave. My shadow leaped across the earth’s opening. The company gathered round, crushing inwards. I realised that something was expected of me and so I spoke the Nunc dimittis as loudly and as clearly as possible.
‘Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: For mine eyes have seen thy salvation, Which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.’
A huge wail went up as I finished speaking and the rhythmic chanting began. I extracted myself gently from the crowd, gathered in the purple twilight, and left Jessica alone with her people and her dead.
But Death is my companion here, my fellow rider, perched beside me, silent and rattling on his pale horse. The numbers of the deceased in the army alone make my pen falter as I copy them out for my despatches. According to official records, one in nine of all the British soldiers stationed here between 1816 and 1836 was surely doomed to die.
The station at Montego Bay was notorious. The barracks were sited in the town, an evil position in a stone building, cut off from the sea wind. The sweltering temperatures never ebbed. At night the men sweated naked on their foul mattresses. Even the civilians who lived in that malodorous place scarcely passed a year without falling victim to some appalling disease. Ants and termites undermined the buildings. Everything rotted and festered, no matter how carefully it was wrapped or cleaned. Yet still the town grew, alongside its expanding graveyard. Sometimes the seamen entering the harbour emerged spotless and hopeful from their quarantine, only to succumb to the malignant vapours emitted by this unhealthy cauldron. On several occasions I closed the barracks down myself. How could the troops defend the planters when I had scarcely a man who could stand upright? Even the hospital, which was scrubbed daily and maintained with Prussian rigour and fortitude, on my orders, proved to be a lazar house. In 1832 I buried a third of the garrison, with minimal ceremony, in shallow graves.
Part of the solution, as in Spanish Town, was to rebuild the barracks; not on low, swampy ground ridden with mosquitoes and general pestilence, but up on the purple slopes of the volcanic hills, in the cooler air. I demanded buildings with large windows and airy balconies, a muslin mesh firmly fixed to the frames against the nightly armada of insects. We eventually won the station at Newcastle, when Field Marshal Sir William Gomm so memorably ‘carried the hill’ after ten years of persistent bullying.
The north coast was the most unhealthy place in all the world. At Buff’s Bay seven out of twenty-five men were dead within the year. In Manchioneal they were all dead, sick or dying when I arrived. There was not a man left in the guardhouse. I rode straight in, unchallenged, followed by a little mob of shrieking children in love with my uniform. The visiting killer is usually yellow fever: our notorious Yellow Jack, who hastens them away to a painful end. In the case of the barracks at Manchioneal, which could have been overrun in a matter of minutes, I took the precaution of sending Abraham out to the rum shop, to spread stories of the good Dr Barry battling with the recalcitrant duppies of the dead soldiers, who, having died so far from home, refused to rest and wandered the fort at all hours. I had the satisfaction of seeing members of the local population scuttling past at high speed, casting fearful glances up at the red brick fort. I’m afraid that Abraham half believed my stories.
In the hot months I could not leave the camp at Kingston. I was needed to fight yet another useless battle against these rapid, clammy fevers and to reconcile myself to inevitable defeat. It was in the cooler months when the stormy season of violent winds and rain, what Abraham calls ‘de big blow’, was safely past that I was able to travel the island without anxiety. I always visited Montpelier towards Christmastime. Sometimes, when the roads had seen little passage for many weeks, they were so overgrown with vines and creepers that Abraham rode ahead on his mule, slashing to left and right with a machete, forging a passage through the smouldering green like Moses faced with a thick green sea.
On one of these December expeditions, shortly before Christmas, on our way to Montpelier, while Abraham was attacking the vegetation some way ahead, I paused to stare at a palm tree, which was afflicted with a strange variety of blight. The large fruit, or rather vegetable, which had formed at the top of the tree, was crawling with a species of strange black roach, and the usually brilliant seeds, often scarlet and purple, were faded and dull. The feathery palm leaves were curling and brown at the tips, yet from its size the tree could not be more than twenty years old. My horse nuzzled the grass as I peered at the dying tree. Then I felt Psyche’s muscles tense and she let fly a low growl. Directly before me, uncannily close, inside the steaming, damp cave of bush, were several pairs of eyes, cautious and dark, surrounded by reddened white balls. I could make out a fine nose, then a pair of straight red lips, a jigsaw of black faces, watching from behind the green. I was certain that they were runaway slaves, but I could not pretend not to have seen them. I was armed, both with a sabre and with a musket, but I did not reach for either.
‘Step forth.’ I spoke calmly to the undergrowth, meeting the glare of three pairs of eyes without flinching. Three desperate, ragged-looking men obeyed, and stood, blocking my path, leaning on their ferociously sharpened sticks, cradling their machetes in their arms.
The tallest of the three was instantly recognisable. This was Plato, a runaway black, who had abandoned the Lewises’ estate in Cornwall and had then set about terrorising the neighbourhood with many thefts and beatings, and the occasional murder. He was exceptionally good-looking and was rumoured to have a harem of women living with him in the bush. He had robbed many carriages on the Blue Mountain roads and stolen jewels and rings to decorate his numerous brides. A fine fob-watch adorned his frayed waistcoat, underneath which he wore no shirt, so that his magnificent naked chest and shoulders were fiercely visible. We all stood looking at one another. Nobody moved.
‘Good morning, Plato.’
It was as if we were meeting one another, not for the first time, in perfectly congenial circumstances. Nobody flinched. Then I heard Abraham crashing back towards us through the bush. I could make out the unsteady gleam of his top hat, which he always wore on journeys, and which still bore the name of its maker in Bond Street on the rotted silk inside the brim. The runaways glanced quickly at each other.
‘Gud mawnin’, Dr Barry,’ replied Plato suddenly, and smiled. The upper teeth at the front of his mouth were disconcertingly missing and many others were black and loose, from sucking raw cane I supposed. Sucking cane was rumoured to preserve the teeth, but I never noticed that it did. Nevertheless, Plato presented me with a superb and generous smile, his upper lip curled in insolent defiance. We bowed to one another like visiting diplomats and they vanished rapidly away into the wall of green. Psyche set up a frenzied barking and would not be hushed. A
braham, grey with terror, arrived just in time to see them vanish.
‘Massa! Dat’s Plato!’ he hissed in dramatic tones, as if we had both already been murdered and were breathing our last in the dust.
‘It was indeed,’ I replied, ‘and he seems to know my name.’
‘Erribuddy know Doctor,’ snapped Abraham indignantly, as if he would have been personally insulted had Plato and I not recognised one another.
I never mentioned the incident to the military authorities. The poor fellow was caught soon enough. His weakness for rum drew him into the town at Montego Bay and he was betrayed by his regular supplier, the night watchman at the port cargo store, who was tempted into treachery by a handsome reward. Yet Plato went to his death as he had lived, cursing all those who had mistreated and betrayed him, promising them that his vengeful duppy would walk the earth until his blood was appeased. I did not witness the hanging, but I was told that, as he died, one arm shot up in a final salute, like a finger of doom, pointing out the guilty, who were now at his mercy forever.
And sure enough, the night watchman fell victim to a slow wasting disease before the year was out and spat blood as he died. Within a month of Plato’s unnatural death the October storms had laid waste a great part of the estate where he had been so brutally whipped and punished. The cane crop was reduced to pulp. There was a great nodding and shaking of heads as Plato’s curse took hold. Everyone knew who was responsible. And so Plato’s power increased tenfold in death.
The slaves were, on the whole, very cruelly treated. On many of the estates they were kicked and beaten for the slightest offence. In their master’s absence, the whites, that is, the attorneys and overseers, were transformed into petty tyrants with the first grasp of power. They were brutal, violent and crude. They took whatever women they wished to possess, often by force. One group of slaves from the Beckford estate was forced to fling themselves on the mercy of the magistrates after some monstrous incident when a young boy was so violently assaulted and flogged with a cartwhip for stealing food, that he died from a punctured lung, in a bubble of blood. The magistrates duly reprimanded the violent deputy, but he was so far departed down the rum bottle that I doubt he paid much attention to the authority of the law. In any case, Savannah la Mar was a long way away from the estate. The abuse continued and the overseer was found with his throat cut, a neat slick slice from ear to ear. There was a certain amount of scandalised murmuring and anxiety among the resident planters, who all expected to wake up one fine morning to find themselves murdered in their beds. There was even a move to arrange some exemplary lynchings on the Beckford estate. I pointed out that slaughtering every Negro the Beckfords owned was an unlikely route to justice, for the incident had taken place in the hills, where, at that time, Plato and his band were still on the loose. The overseer’s solitary returning horse had raised the alarm among his people and they had found him shortly thereafter. The body was not yet stiff, although already draped in a red shroud of ants, and the blood was scarcely blackened and congealed upon his collar. A band of runaway slaves, I maintained with some force, was almost certainly responsible. Other travellers had been robbed near the spot, although no white man had ever been murdered there.
But it was my private opinion at the time, and remains so to this day, that an intelligent conspiracy of slaves, for they were many more than one, had followed the tyrant up the bush trails, moving silently through the bamboo forest, and slaughtered him in the very manner he deserved. Justice cannot always be achieved by due recourse to the law. I cannot say that the emancipation has dramatically improved the living conditions of these people. But they are now able to negotiate their terms with the plantation owners and work longer hours upon their own land if they wish. Above all they hold their lives and deaths in their own hands.
Their deaths, ah, their own deaths. Some years ago a dead child was handed into my arms, wrapped in an old silk petticoat, the very garment in which it had been christened. There were no outward signs of illness or violence. And a woman stood before me, accusing her sister’s husband of murdering the infant. She claimed it was her sister’s child. I looked down at the small brown face, peaceful in death.
What motive could he have had for obliterating this defenceless fragile thing? It is an offence, punishable by death, to murder a healthy slave child. Their strong working bodies are the only things for which they are valued.
‘Him say chile no his, Massa,’ she shouted in grief and rage.
That is still no justification for murder, if murder is what we are here to witness.
‘Justiss, Massa, me wan justiss!’ she cries.
I look to Abraham for clarification. He recites the litany of prejudice as if it were written on the wall before him. The offspring of a white man and a black woman is a mulatto; the mulatto and the black produce a sambo, from the mulatto and the white comes the quadroon, from the quadroon and the white the mustee, the child of a mustee by a white man is called a musteefino and the children of a musteefino will be free by law and will count as whites.
‘Dat chile mulatto, Doctor,’ Abraham explains patiently. ‘If de mudder black, den she go wid white man.’
Well, even if she did she probably had little choice in the matter. I have already assisted at some of these dangerous and embarrassing birthings in the Cape. I have known the white wife of a Dutch farmer give birth to a dark child. A woman’s virtue can always be challenged and she can never be proven innocent beyond all doubt. But I have seen this often enough to suspect that the dark blood can lie dormant for as long as a generation, and then reappear with no warning, to the terrible consternation and surprise of everyone concerned. I kept these matters quiet as a matter of course and I have never accepted the money I was frequently offered to sign a false death certificate and to remove the child. I look sadly down at the perfect ears, the small round cheeks, of a healthy baby, who has almost certainly been smothered.
Bring the man to me.
But here he is, being dragged towards me by two constables, who empty a small sack on my front steps, a sack which has been found in his possession. Here indeed is a strange variety of objects: thunderstones, cat’s ears, the feet of various animals, human hair, fish bones, the teeth of alligators, finely polished.
‘Dis Obeah man’s magic, sah.’ Abraham retreats at once to the kitchen.
‘Ah so him kill baby,’ yells the weeping woman. I look up at the tall, fierce African, too dignified and ferocious to defend himself. He makes it clear, with a gesture of contempt, that he is seeing all these Obeah objects for the first time.
I organise a decent Christian burial for the baby and a hearing before the magistrate. Cause of death: suffocation. The pillow or a mass of rags, lightly pressed upon the sleeping face. And so our sleep becomes dreamless and we step lightly into the life to come. This is a woman’s way of killing, not a man’s way. Not this man’s, at any rate. But they are waiting for me to give the crucial testimony in a case that is too darkened to admit of any resolution. I cannot leave these incidents uninvestigated. Now that the importation of slaves has been stopped, each child born on the estates becomes precious. Another child, another slave. I make arrangements to visit the child’s mother, and find that her sister has walked, weeping, across fourteen miles of bush through the wild mountains, hoping to find me, because she has been told that I am a just man.
I used to consider myself a shrewd judge of character. I thought that my capacity to unmask the liars, tricksters and malingering soldiers was all but infallible. My own disguise made that of others so simple to detect. I was a master not only of masquerade but of revelation. Now, truth eludes me. There are no truths, there are only layers of lies, what should be and what is. I, who have lived so long inside a chrysalis of ambiguity, find that I no longer see clearly. Yet I see that not I but the world is murky with deceit. I took the part of this poor people, spoke for those who had no words with which to defend themselves, and found that freedom and justice, whose meanings
were so clear to me when I began, in the days when Francisco taught me to recite the Rights of Man, have become cloudy with power and divided interests, muddied with the lies of an Empire’s rule over an island that still teases us with its promise of paradise.
I have no idea why I was so fond of Edward Ellis. He was an indolent creature, hypochondriacal, terrified of fresh air and spicy food. He was at the mercy of Newton, a ruthless black servant who ran the household, and without whom the entire régime at Montpelier would have collapsed. Newton wore a gold signet ring which the old master had given him and held the keys to the storerooms and the armoury chained to his belt.
Edward lay upon moth-eaten satin cushions from which insects and dust occasionally spiralled upwards, ringing a bell and yelling as loudly as his enfeebled lungs would permit, ‘Newton! God help us all! Newton! Confound the man. Where the devil is Newton?’ He subsided, moaning. Then said, ‘Listen to this, Barry. Isn’t it beautiful?
Now more than ever seems it rich to die,
To cease upon the midnight with no pain . . .
Why, I feel myself sinking into eternity. And were it not for this damnable climate my descent would be quite blissful.’
I gazed down at the inert form of a handsome young man, whom all the ladies cherish.
‘A little sherry, Edward? To oil your forthcoming slither to oblivion?’ He held out his glass to receive the decanter.
‘Bless you, Barry. You’re the only man on the island who has heard of Keats. Who sends you the books?’
James Miranda Barry Page 32