‘My stepfather, General Francisco de Miranda. He sends a regular parcel every three months.’
‘Your stepfather! Oh Lord, you know, Barry, my mother used to send me all the latest reviews. The last contact we ever had really, before she was called to her reward. Some years ago now. At least she never saw this place. The climate would have been the death of her.’
I sat silent for a moment, remembering. Francisco had given me precise instructions. I was to visit my mother’s grave on her anniversary. I was to lay the golden lilies she had loved on her stone blanket and to remember that our deaths are but a passage, not an ending, and that the love we bear within us for each other lives forever. I love Francisco, but I do not believe what he believes. I am too close to death on a daily basis not to know that his dark mystery cannot be fathomed and should never be underestimated. In the faces of those I have known, who have died calmly, I have never seen anything but an absolute indifference to all things. Death comes, whether we wish to live or not, at his appointed hour. But to those who are blessed, life and death are no longer in opposition. This is our final night, which makes the odds all even.
I had been working on the island for over a year before I made the decision to visit my mother’s grave. I rode out along the dusty, windy peninsula to Port Royal, alone in a small buggy, and was bounced rudely back and forth among the potholes. I saw few people, for it was late in the day. The road is rudimentary, for most of the supplies and, indeed, the visitors to Port Royal are transported across the bay by the regular ferry. But I wanted to drive that road, see the beaches where she had walked, put my hand on the warm pebbles where she had stood, her silk shawls tugged and jostled by the wind.
This was my sentimental journey, a punitive voyage, undertaken in solitude. For I had so loved this woman once. I had loved her lightness, her elegance, her wit, her bright hope. And when I stepped away from her, across the margins of my sex, I saw her anew and ceased to love what I saw. For she became smaller in my eyes. She became just another woman grubbing for money, flirting like a paid whore with a man who was already hopelessly in love with her. She could have robbed him blind. Perhaps she did. How she fought to keep her looks, her figure. She was still slim and light as a girl when she died. And suddenly my memories betray her. Here she is, hovering in damp English conservatories, whispering with Louisa, calculating every gesture. Everything that I once believed to be natural and charming became manipulative and callous. She never laughed with her whole heart. She listened to herself laughing. Why was James Barry so ruthless to his sister? Why did Alice Jones never relate any kitchen gossip about her? The servants talked about her, I know they did. But Alice would never be drawn, beyond the comment that she’s your mother and you should show some proper respect.
This woman had a double existence. She lived entirely in her own reflection. She waltzed before the mirror of her own life. Oh yes, she was beautiful. But she treasured her own beauty. It was a commodity, the only one she had to sell. It was her passage on the survivor’s ship, her voyage out of Ireland. I wonder if she ever really loved Francisco? Or did she simply set out to enthrall a rich man? Was she just a young widow, whose feckless husband had done nothing but fornicate and drink, trying to remake her wretched life? Was that man, the drunkard whom she married, really the man who was my father? She says so. But I do not believe her. Did she love my General? She played the child to him, all smiles, damp eyes and dancing. But did she love Francisco de Miranda with all her heart, as I did?
It matters to me that I should be certain of this. But I shall never know.
I have her to thank for who I am. ‘She sent you to us on that damp midsummer night. She was the source of the plot, soldier. It was her idea. 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.’ Well, every child owes his being to the mother who bore him.
She taught me to believe in fair play, generosity, openness. Yet she gave me an identity within which I could never be anything other than an imposter. Who is James Miranda Barry? No one but her mother knows. And she has gone to her grave without telling. I am alone on the grey beach, watching the great roll of the windy sea, remembering a woman without whom my life can never be disentangled. She remains unforgiven.
I ride on to Port Royal.
The graveyard is outside the town, to the left of the road. A woman tries to sell me melons and fresh fish as I pull the horse to a standstill. I look around for a water trough and my horse and I both stand restless, shaking our heads clear of the flies. The woman plucks my sleeve and lays out a brace of fine snappers on an oil cloth.
‘Janga, Massa,’ she cries, menacing me with a basket of crayfish. I give her money to guard the buggy and take refuge in the graveyard.
The gate clangs shut behind me and I fumble in my inner pocket for Francisco’s folded letter. There is no shade in this graveyard, only gravel and stone, and iron crosses rusting on the graves. Flowers lie dead and dried in the little vats near the headstones. I calculate the distances. There is a wall all round the graveyard with many memorial plaques, now mostly illegible, affixed to the crumbling brick. The gravestones fractured by the earthquake of 1692 are heaped together like a crazy puzzle all along the wall. I remember Francisco telling me one of the myths of Port Royal, that the graves were opened on that day when the earth heaved its heart into its mouth, and the dead walked. I pass by the broken stones. Fragments of writing in several languages are still legible. hic iacet, pray for the soul of . . . and most menacing of all, the sinister promise we shall meet again in heaven. There are no names written on this tombstone, but I can make out two hands clasped in a Masonic gesture of union. There is another gate on the far side leading out into nowhere, for beyond the wall there is nothing, nothing but the dunes and the sea. The wind smells strongly of the sea. My hat rises in the gust. I set off firmly towards the more modern part of the graveyard and almost stumble over her grave.
I stand staring for a moment, empty-handed. I have no flowers. I have brought nothing. The stone sarcophagus is cracked across. There is a huge fissure in the lid of her grave, as if the last day has already been announced and her spirit has escaped. I peer superstitiously into the crack, but see only lichen, earth and broken stone. The headstone, a plain white shield with a small black cross inlaid in jet, is untouched, as is the inscription.
MARY ANN BULKELEY
Née BARRY
1785–1823
DEARLY BELOVED NOW AND ALWAYS HER BEAUTY AND VIRTUE SHALL NEVER FADE
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange
DEEPLY MOURNED BY HER ONLY SON JAMES MIRANDA BARRY
&
F de M
WHO LAID THIS STONE
I take out my pocket book and note down the date, the time of my visit and the inscription. I include a few comments on the condition of the grave, simply to give myself something to do. For I know that I am being watched. I feel nothing whatever. Only puzzled curiosity that the grave should be so violently broken open. When I turn around two long-legged black children are sitting astride the graveyard wall, grinning wildly and banging their heels against its grainy surface.
‘Evenin’, Massa,’ they shout out in chorus, and a little shower of sand and red grit descends onto the gravel beneath them. Their feet drum the wall in rhythm. Their voices ring like the avenging Erinyes.
‘De erth she done move, Massa.’
‘De lady she drown.’
‘Duppy walk. Duppy walk.’
‘Dat grave never close. Dey close her. She open.’
‘Buckra man pretty woman drown. But duppy walk.’
‘She ol’ higue, suck yo blood, man.’
‘She duppy woman, but she pretty pretty duppy woman.’
‘She devil woman, Massa. She higue woman, duppy woman. Irri
night she walk.’
‘Irribody see her when her duppy walk.’
And there they sat, pounding the wall and grinning, like mad masks on All Hallow’s Eve.
I stayed in Port Royal that night with the Governor’s relatives, who informed me that one of the milder earthquakes, which regularly afflict the town, had indeed caused some damage in the graveyard. He promised to repair my mother’s grave. He told me that she had been very popular in Port Royal and that many people remembered her; for her generosity of spirit, her graceful slenderness and her remarkable red curls. Some people, and not only the Negroes, claimed to have seen her ghost walking the streets and the wharves, or, with her skirts pulled up to her knees, pushing her little boat out to sea. But he gave no credence to such stories.
I looked down at Edward, realising that I had been silent too long, remembering. His face was filled with anxious concern.
‘I say, old chap. Have I said the wrong thing?’
I told him that I had recently visited my mother’s grave.
‘I had hoped to lay my unquiet memories to rest, Edward. But I found that I was unable to do so. My feelings about my mother, who was a very secretive woman, are not resolved. I fear that now they never can be. I shall just have to live with them.’
‘Must have been damned upsetting. I never go on these pilgrimages. I just can’t face things. Fearful thing to admit, but there you are.’ Edward shook his head regretfully.
‘Pour me some more of that sherry, there’s a good chap. I say, you will stay on for Christmas, won’t you?’
The six months leading up to that Christmas had been extremely difficult. The early rains did not come and the island suffered an appalling drought. We were not so badly affected in the Blue Mountain district, but Edward wrote me miserable letters about the streams drying up, leaving a few stagnant pools in the hollows and the gullies, which were clogged with green weed and vibrated with mosquitoes. His Negroes had drained their wells dry to water their provision grounds with an endless chain of buckets. This land, from which the blacks feed themselves, apart from their usual rations of meat, flour, salt fish and sugar from the estate, is crucial to their well-being. They grow plantains, bananas, yams, coconuts and ockra. Ockra is the one native vegetable to which I am very partial. It tastes like asparagus. Ackee fried in butter is also delicious, if it is quite ripe and perfectly cooked. On Montpelier the crops failed in the provision grounds and the people went hungry. The planters suffered too, but, as always in these cases, the white masters tightened their belts and the blacks faced starvation.
Edward Ellis was prepared to break the locks on his stone stores to feed his people. Other owners, or their overseers, were not so generous, and there was unrest in St Thomas in the east, and in the area around Montego Bay. The troops were sent in to two estates and quelled the riots easily. How could they fail to do so? The people were armed only with pointed sticks and cutlasses and were easily dissuaded from their intentions. Eight men and one woman were flogged at Beaulieu, some twenty miles from Montpelier. I was concerned by this development and asked to be kept informed. A sequence of smallpox outbreaks among the troops stationed at Up Park Camp kept me busy and I feared that, were a rebellion on any larger scale to develop, there would not be enough men healthy and upright to defend the Crown.
The Maroons had indeed several militias, supposedly ready to answer the Governor’s behest, but, given their history of subversion and dissent, their loyalty could not be counted upon. One condition of their autonomy was that they should return runaway blacks to their estates forthwith. But I am not convinced that they always did so. Plato and his band survived many years in the bush and could not have done without shelter or sustenance.
Then in October the rains came with a vengeance. We were not forced to endure the excessive tempests which struck some of the other islands, but for six weeks together torrential rain washed away the roads, brought down huge trees in landslides of mud and rock, made the mountains impassable and destroyed the untethered land. Where there was no terracing in place, such as you often see in the Mediterranean, the earth was swept away. Entire crops were ruined, water supplies polluted and the cattle drowned. Many people faced ruin. Totty Kilman, our local storekeeper, suffered a disaster when the roof of his store gave way and all the contents, flour, seed, sugar, cloth, were wrecked. We set up a disaster fund to help those whose lives had been savaged by the extremities of this intolerable climate. An outbreak of dysentery detained me in Kingston for several weeks. Every population on the island was affected and my colleagues sent me gloomy tales of many deaths. Dr Cullinan, stationed in Port Antonio, warned me not to come. He had written so many death certificates that he was considering what he was pleased to describe as my medieval measures of lime pits and mass graves. Cullinan had a mordant sense of humour. My own report for the Governor made depressing reading. But fair weather came before Christmas and my projected visit to Montpelier, despite the state of the roads, was a pleasure I could permit myself.
Edward and his brother owned several hundred slaves, who worked the land on the Montpelier estate. They worked shifts so that the sugar mill was constantly fed with raw bundles of fresh cane. I went down to the mill to find Jessica, early on the morning of the day after my arrival, but her shift was finished and she was lying asleep and exhausted. I would not allow her sisters to wake her. Instead, I walked on in the heat, looking for the headman, who could give me a general report on the condition of the slaves.
The rulers in the slave hierarchy were often the offspring of the whites. The Montpelier headman was no exception. He was a handsome, aggressive mulatto with orange hair, tightly curled, and he sometimes claimed kin with ‘Brudder Edward’ when he had had enough rum. He was almost certainly the bastard son of Edward’s father, who had, reputedly, been magnanimous in all things. He had not only given freely of his supplies – flour, sugar, salted meat, herring and rum – on special holidays but had scattered his personal seed among the house slaves and upon any young woman in the cane gangs who happened to catch his eye.
This practice, although not common on the estates, was quite beyond me. The plantation owners regarded their slaves as animals, valuable livestock to be sure, and indispensable, but an inferior species nevertheless. Now that the slave ships were forbidden, the planters encouraged the slave women to breed with other slaves. Edward’s father, however, often entered into the most intimate relations with the African and Creole women. The headman’s mother used to wear her mistress’s clothes, once the lady of the household was safely underground. She lorded it over the other house slaves and sat fanning herself among the accumulated crystal and porcelain in the dining room. Her unlikely name was Waterloo. Her rise to power spawned some sharply satirical songs, which did the rounds among the plantation slaves. One told the story of a black woman who dressed up ‘like Frenshie’ and gave herself airs. The chorus of this song ran:
Ay! hey-day! Waterloo!
Waterloo! ho! ho! ho!
I myself heard the returning cane cutters singing this as they marched home through the dusk. Clearly, they were not praising the Duke of Wellington’s past victories.
The field workers led an appalling existence. Edward’s benevolent neglect of Montpelier meant that the management and control of the estate was left in the hands of the most unscrupulous sadists I have ever had the misfortune to observe at close quarters. What is it that turns a man of fair intelligence and some education into an unprincipled tyrant like Godwin’s Mr Falkland? The slave drivers in charge of the plantation gangs should, according to the law, administer punishment of more than ten lashes only in the presence of an overseer. But in fact they were as generous with the lash as old Mr Ellis had been with his sexual favours. And for the afflicted blacks there was neither retribution nor redress.
Montpelier was a tiny nation, sufficient unto itself. But it was not well governed. I loved Edward and he was not an evil man, but he was a careless one. The consequences were alarming
ly similar. I suspected that, in my absence, he was not above continuing his father’s tradition and taking his black women into his bed. I received several resentful glances from Hecuba, one of the serving girls, while we were sitting at table. Newton was so indiscreet as to reveal that she liked to sit upon the master’s knee and to cut his meat for him, but that she did not dare to claim her rights ‘wid de Doctor dere’. I imagined Edward’s affection for her. He probably regarded her as an amusing child, a pretty toy to play with in the evenings.
Edward was not sufficently responsible to govern his tiny nation. Yet it was a very beautiful place, lodged on the first slopes of the purple hills.
The mill was one of the few stone buildings at Montpelier, that and the infirmary. I stood on the steps and watched one of the gangs coming down the tracks. Their shoulders were bent with the weight of the cane. They carry the raw shoots directly into the cavern where it is to be ground, and feed it into the grinder. Once the juice has been extracted, the pulped trash is used for fuel. Sometimes the slaves carry it away to thatch their houses. Nothing is wasted. The white juice is propelled down the ducts in a foaming, thin liquid into the boiling house, where it is collected in the hotcock copper and slaked with lime. The pure liquid then flows through into the second copper. The boilermen work hard, but it is a skilled job, and they are usually privileged in the plantation hierarchy. Even the coarser parts of the fluid are re-used in the distillery, where they are mixed with molasses to make strong dark rum. The remaining liquid is finely skimmed, then skinned off, that is, transferred to the coolers, where it is left to crystallise into granules. This is raw sugar, which is then carried into the curing house, put into hogsheads and left to settle. The remains, which will not form sugar, are used in the distillery to form ‘low wine’ and, after the second distillation, real rum.
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