James Miranda Barry

by Patricia Duncker

  But those things were still to come.

  The militia was powerless to stop the destruction and looting of the estates. We defended the town as best we could while awaiting the arrival of Sir Willoughby Cotton and his troops. The towns­people were terrified by rumours of atrocities and slaughter as the rebellion spread.

  The most common wounds were burns and cuts from machetes. Those who had been shot were usually beyond my help. We worked shifts at the hospital, to deal with the people who scrambled into the town from all sides. Edward was despondent concerning the fate of his estate and the loss of his sweetheart Hecuba. He drank heavily over the next few days. He stuck two muskets in his belt and reeled down the main street, but I doubt that he would have been able to shoot straight had he been confronted with a desperate battalion of insurgents. Newton was in the grip of a religious conviction that all was lost and Satan stalked the land. He spent his days in prayer at the Baptist chapel where we had heard the fiery black preacher, now known to be one of the ringleaders of the rebellion.

  The troops from Kingston arrived before the week was out and as we watched the man-of-war entering the harbour with her cannon at the ready there was little doubt of the conclusion to this violent episode in the island’s history.

  The following proclamation was issued forthwith.

  NEGROES!

  You have taken up arms against your masters.

  Some wicked persons have told you the King has made you free.

  In the name of the King I come amongst you to tell you that you are

  MISLED.

  All who are found with the rebels will be

  PUT TO DEATH WITHOUT MERCY.

  You cannot resist the King’s troops.

  All who yield themselves up, provided they are not principals and chiefs in the burnings that have been committed, will receive

  HIS MAJESTY’S GRACIOUS PARDON

  All who hold out will meet

  CERTAIN DEATH.

  I thought then, and I still believe, that Sir Willoughby Cotton was a humane and enlightened man. But the land was under martial law and we had not reckoned with the fury of the militia. When the troops entered the ruined and smouldering fields they often shot dead the first blacks they saw, regardless of their history or intentions. All blacks were potential rebels and deserved to die, as an example to the others. Those estates identified with the origins of the rebellion bore witness to the most brutal floggings and summary executions, often without trial. And at Montpelier, where I returned during the second week of January, I found the maggot-filled cadavers of the two men I had left lying helpless in the infirmary. Each man, almost certainly too ill to move, had been shot in the brains at close range. Elizabeth’s body was lying at a little distance in the bush. She had clearly been attempting to flee, for she had been shot twice in the back.

  Edward strode away, stormy-faced but quite grey, to protest to the brigade commander at this act of mindless barbarism. But other whites were indifferent to his tale and to what they regarded as his mistaken sense of outrage. The blacks were all potential rebels. And they had it coming to them.

  Newton and I were digging the graves of the unfortunates massacred in the infirmary when we were surprised by a mass of terrified black faces peering over the cemetery wall. These were Edward’s slaves, many of whom had fled on the night of 27th December and who only now dared to return.

  Montpelier had been ransacked and the stores had been looted. There was not a scrap of china remaining in the house and all the beds had been stripped. But the buildings were still standing and the fowls, which had been so cowardly on the night when the uprising had begun, now returned to the yard, cackling greedily and scratching among the trails of grain left by the plunderers. The cost of the damage was enormous. But even so, the house still stood, and the returning slaves resumed their work, largely in silence and watchful wariness. I do not know how many had gone with the rebels, and I did not ask. Neither did Edward. One of the house slaves came telling tales and offering names in the hope of favours or rewards. Edward, quite rightly, booted him straight down the steps. Neither would he listen to tittle-tattle or denunciations among the house girls. But some slaves never returned. Edward never saw Hecuba again. I assume that she was one of the slaves shot and buried under white lime in one or other of the mass graves across the countryside, for many of the bodies were not identified. And the circumstances of their deaths were never investigated. There was little singing on the estate at Montpelier for many weeks to come.

  I did, however, see Jessica once more. The court martial was a desperate affair, hastily constituted; and so anxious were the magistrates to liquidate the troublemakers that innocence or guilt was largely irrelevant. It sufficed sometimes that a particular slave belonging to the rebel estates had once expressed a desire to be free, or to till his own land, for him to be condemned to death. An offence that would have called for ten lashes in peaceful times now merited the gibbet. And the gibbet stood for many days before the courthouse in Montego Bay.

  Three or four men were hanged, and left hanging, their bodies turning slowly in the sea winds. They were only cut down by the hangman when he had fresh victims ready to replace them. The pile of corpses was left in the square to be sniffed at by passing dogs until the workhouse blacks appeared at dusk to take them away in carts to their communal pit, into which, without prayers or tears, they were unceremoniously flung. I supervised the digging of these unholy trenches and prescribed the level to which they should be dug so that no risk of infection should menace the population of Montego Bay.

  Over three hundred men were hanged.

  But sometimes the rebels were taken back to the estates from which they came, and there, under the vindictive eyes of the overseers and constables in the militias, they were executed among the ruins of their former masters’ wealth and power. I witnessed many of these executions and I was impressed by the cold courage with which the rebels went to their fate. Many were religious men, who died convinced of the justice of their cause and their role as martyred servants of the true God. They wore their white caps as condemned men with the pride of martyrs’ crowns. No criminal ever goes to the gallows fearlessly. But these men did. They believed that they had earned the right to die nobly in the struggle for freedom.

  It was at one of these plantation executions that I saw Jessica for the last time. The blacks on the estate were gathered in the yard to witness the doom awaiting all those who plotted insurrection. The method of execution was primitive indeed. Each condemned man was fixed onto a board placed over two barrels with his hands and feet tied and the noose about his neck. Then the plank was kicked away, and as the bodies jerked and struggled one of the soldiers would pass among them, drawing the noose tight and breaking the man’s neck. If this was not effective and the prisoners still shivered and wriggled at the end of the rope, another man laid hold of the legs and pulled hard. Thus, they died. It was a slow process and I often wished for the spectacular rapidity of the guillotine.

  At this particular execution, held at one of the neighbouring estates, I saw Jessica among the crowd of slaves who had been forced to watch. I did not recognise the young man who was about to die. He stood tall, head erect, as the sentence was read out. There was the Eboe woman, watching intently, her eldest and only surviving daughter at her side. They had not been seen at Montpelier since the beginning of the uprising and had been reported as missing blacks. I saw her cover her mouth with her hands as the plank beneath the young man’s feet was kicked away. Apart from a slight sigh from the watching crowd there was no sound. The men waiting to die rarely spoke or cried out and audible weeping was a flogging offence.

  I looked hard at Jessica. Her eyes bulged as she strained forward. Her daughter’s grasp upon her arm tightened. I followed her gaze to the swaying corpse and remembered him at last.

  ‘We wont be slaves no more. We wont lift hoe no more. We wont take flog no more. We free now! We free now!’

  Jessica
looked up. We recognised one another. Neither of us gave any sign of having done so. When I stared again into the dispersing crowd I could see her no more.

  * * *

  What is freedom? Who is free? In the years since the Emancipation the fall in the market for sugar has bankrupted many of the plantation owners and brought destitution and poverty to their former slaves. Now they must pay rent for their provision grounds and the rent collectors are hated men. The blacks believe that the land their fathers tilled is theirs by right. On some of the estates many have refused to pay and had their livestock confiscated by the bailiffs. Wages are often pitifully low. The people go hungry during the bad times. It is not often that the future is clear to me, but of this I am certain: a major rebellion will come again in this colony, gripped by an irreversible decline. We will see the return of the killing time and the hanging tree. When I read the words of so eminent a philosopher as Thomas Carlyle, maintaining that the blacks are an inferior race who are not worthy of their freedom, I wonder if I can ever return to England. All these years and nights in the islands of the great winds and the red dust have convinced me of the justice of Francisco’s simple faith in the inalienable, unchanging Rights of Man.

  Edward died of drink a year or two ago. He sank down the bottle gradually, and his company became intolerable. He still read poetry aloud, but it was interspersed with drunken meanderings. He is buried at Montpelier, in the very cemetery where Newton and I laid the murdered victims of the militias to rest. Hecuba’s successor ousted Newton and ran the household, very successfully and to her own advantage. If the master died poor, she was not going to do so. Nor did she. When I last saw the house, the sash windows at the end of the long corridor were broken and smashed and the rain had stained the wallpaper and the paintings.

  Newcastle Station, where I live now, is thriving, and I find myself less able, as I grow older, to endure the wet heat of the lowlands. I have bought some good land in the Blue Mountains for Abraham and his family, so that he will be able to retire in comfort and in peace. We signed the papers together and I vouched for Abraham’s teetering signature with my initials. He has never learned to read or write, but we spent a week practising his mark so that he should not be ashamed in the attorney’s office.

  Since then Abraham has grown a successful crop of Indian hemp, which has become very popular among the plantation workers. I have tried it myself, but found its soporific effects undesirable. Ordinary tobacco keeps me awake and has done so all through this long night.

  I can no longer see the peenie-wallies glowing against the bush. The outlines of the verandah railings are glowing more clearly in the damp cool. My coat hangs down behind me on the tiles, and my bones feel old and chilled. I hear the faint rustle of the dogs in their outside sheds. Psyche lies peacefully sleeping in her old basket at my feet. As the light outside suddenly, rapidly, shifts from black to deep blue, I relight the candle. One lone bird cries out in the half-dark. I take up the letter, which has precipitated this endless night of remembering.

  Part Six

  Alice Jones

  Lincolnshire, 22nd June 1859

  My Dearest James,

  I haven’t rewarded you very well for your refusal to forget me, have I now? But I have kept every single letter you ever wrote. They are all dated, ordered and wrapped in fine tissue. Layers of it! Some of those loving angry ones you wrote at the beginning are falling apart, with age and re-reading. I have ordered two of them to be repaired by the museum restorers. They were stitched onto a jute backing with a fine mesh, and now they can only be folded over once. Of course they are all locked in my desk, and I count them among my most precious possessions: love letters from the famous Dr Barry! But I will never part with them. Not unless I fall upon exceptionally hard times.

  Why did it irk you so much to hear of my success? I never ceased to hear of yours and bore the news with great equanimity, good humour and not a little pride. After all, I knew you when you were just a bright tiny child who didn’t look as if he’d live to be twenty. And be honest, without a bracing from me from time to time you might not have done. I still remember those summers we spent together when you taught me to read. But they were only my beginning. I was no one then. Nobody had heard of me. Well, they have now.

  You’ve been gone for thirty years, James. You’re like the Wandering Jew. But nobody forced you to go. I certainly didn’t. And you aren’t under a curse. You could come home now. Why don’t you come home?

  I have officially retired from the stage. You can’t go on prancing about dressed up as a boy forever. And although I wouldn’t admit it to anybody but yourself, my voice is not what it used to be. I gave a sequence of acclaimed farewell performances, one of which the young Queen herself attended. I received exceedingly flattering notices in all the papers, one especially charming account from Mr Dickens himself. He said that I was as fresh and charming as my reputation and that he had no need to imagine what I had been, for there I was! Or something to that effect. Did you know that he is exceedingly interested in the theatre and once wished to audition? He fell ill on the day. Is it not sad? I imagine playing alongside him. He is a most thrilling reader. Well, his kind words have pride of place in my Memoir Book, along with Adolphus’s pressed roses. The first he ever gave to me.

  My poor Adolphus is dead. But I expect you did know. It was in all the papers. He had a very handsome funeral, which I attended, sitting just behind the family. I was perfectly discreet. But his sister came right up to kiss me and to press my hand. The reporters had the insolence to wonder what would now become of the adorable Mrs Jones. As if I’d be put out in the streets! I would never have allowed Adolphus to be swept to his reward if he hadn’t left me well set up and comfortable. I have the house, of course – that was a gift – and a handsome annuity. But I can’t be idle. It’s not in my nature.

  I have a new profession. I’m telling you about it now so that you won’t be shocked or try to stop me.

  I have become a noted and fashionable medium. I won’t do it for just anybody. But I have my regular clients, all very respectable, and some from the very best society. It came upon me after Adolphus died. I so wanted to be in touch with him. After all, we had shared so much in the past. Death needn’t be the end. It’s only the end if you want it to be. And if I was feeling lonely and bereft then other people must be too. I made some discreet enquiries among the wealthy widows. There was one poor woman who had lost her baby boy to the smallpox and was utterly distraught, two years on. All she wanted to know was that her child was safe and happy. What harm could there possibly be in giving that woman a little reassurance? After all, if a two-year-old can’t get to paradise, there’s not much hope for the rest of us. So I can’t be doing any harm, can I? All I do is open the pearly gates, just a crack.

  I was always excellent at children’s voices. And sometimes I do feel that there is something speaking through me. If the mood is right. I don’t charge fixed rates, of course, or anything so vulgar and commercial. I just welcome donations. It’s a little embarrassing how much people are prepared to give. It’s as if I am involved in one long benefit performance. I have always made my audiences happier people. No one can say that I haven’t done that. They go away, down my wide staircases, comforted and reassured. I give them back their faith.

  I have no idea what lies beyond the grave. No more do you, James, for all your fashionable atheism. Very shocking, really. But if my work helps other people to believe that all shall be well and quenches their sorrows and their fears, I see no harm in it at all.

  I have all the machinery, of course. I do winds and lights and voices. Even in overheated curtained rooms the effects can be quite striking. And the table always bounces a treat when the loved ones acknowledge their summons from the other side. These details are very important. It puts the clients in a state of heightened anticipation. I want them to be on tenterhooks of expectation, ready to receive their message. It doesn’t much matter what the message is, it’s the
fact that they have spoken from the beyond that counts. I never allow daylight to enter the room where I hold my séances, and my maid ensures a musty smell of rose petals. The small upstairs parlour is a very suitable stage for my performances. I always wear black lace out of respect.

  Of course I ensure that the clients tell me a good deal about the dear departed in our first interviews. I’m always well informed about the details. Sometimes I think that this does them more good than anything else – to pour it all out to someone sympathetic and to tell me how guilty they feel. Why do people always feel guilty about being alive when other people die? There’s no need to blame yourself, unless you’re the murderer.

  I will not handle suicides.

  Did you know that my poor Haydon was one of that unfortunate company? You found him insupportable. Well, the abandoned creature came to be of your opinion and could no longer tolerate his own company either. He blew his brains out in front of his unfinished painting of Alfred. Oh, my dear James, it was a terrible business. I was playing at the theatre in Kew and was not in London. The weather was extremely hot and he had been unable to sleep. His exhibition was not a success and his affairs were very embarrassed. He had sent me a desperate note appealing for funds. What could I do? I sent him a draft for £50 by return. But £500 would not have solved Haydon’s debts. There was no limit to his needs. He had a wife and children by then, who did nothing whatever, but sit there, rapacious as baby pelicans, while Haydon tore his breast and painted yet another unfashionable historical monstrosity which produced not a drop of blood at all. Nor any cash either. It was thirteen years ago this summer. He went out to Rivière’s in Oxford Street and purchased a pistol. He arranged his studio and wrote numerous farewell letters to his family.