The Confessions of Frannie Langton

by Sara Collins

  Now Phibbah took a step back. ‘No.’

  Kiii, how hate burned through me, then. How it made me wish that I’d never snatched at her dropped peas. Or craved her stupid stories.

  Miss-bella looked around, as if deciding where to put a picnic, her eyes squeezing like brass tongs. ‘You’re quite right. We mustn’t spare the rod. After all, we don’t want to spoil the child. Tell Manso call the others.’

  Phibbah shook and shook. ‘What?’

  ‘You heard me. Oh, you’ll do it, girl. Or Manso will. Quick. Light’s going.’ She turned to me, her face dripping sweat. ‘Phibbah wants you whipped, so whipped you’re going to be.’

  I don’t know which was worse, that it was Phibbah who gave me my first whipping or that the others gathered to stare at the pair of us. They had to come when called, of course. But most people will take a dose of those things happening to someone else so they know it’s not happening to them.

  Phibbah waited so long it was almost a shiver of relief when she started. It’s always the moment before that’s the worst. Your whole body waiting. Then I heard her shift behind me, heard birch whistling. Pain sank into my thigh like a claw. Cut hard grooves deep as nails. Whipped up a thin stream of blood, trapped my breath, buried it deep. Another high whistle. I pressed my forehead into the dirt and grass, tried not to cry, but she gave me ten, one for every one of my supposed years. She whipped until that whip was nothing but an echo in my own head, until, I’m ashamed to say, I screamed and screamed, and first the sky went black, then my mind did.

  All through it, Miss-bella stood silent, arms folded, face as smooth as milk. When I looked up it was Phibbah she was watching, not me. Her narrow smile stretched between them, tight as sewn thread. She nodded, made her eyes go small. It was as if some inside part of her travelled across that dirt while she herself stood still, went right out across the yard, and spoke something to Phibbah. In the end, it was Phibbah who cast her eyes to the dirt, looked away first. Swallowing and swallowing, though there was nothing in her mouth. Slowly, the others drifted away. Only Miss-bella still watching.

  But it was Phibbah who carried me to the cook-room, set me on my pallet, fetched one of the liniments she made with whiskey stolen from Langton’s drinks cabinet. She clattered down a plate of johnnycakes, but I only stared at them, hunger wrestling pride, then pushed the plate away. I’d trapped my anger, like a bird in a cage. She bent forward over the grill, shoulders going like bellows, held a slab of salted cod spitting into the flame. ‘Harder for me than you,’ she said. I said nothing. ‘She dress you like a doll, now she want train you like a pet. But if Langton catch the two o’ you at it, reading, it’s you going feel it. You hear? Listen, Frances.’ She spat out my name, like another loosened tooth. ‘Listen to me. Not one thing in this world more dangerous than a white woman when she bored. You hear?’

  I shrugged. Nothing in my world had been more dangerous than her that afternoon. I could see her fingers trembling on the cod’s flesh, but she didn’t lift them. She was going to blister her hands. Serve her right.

  ‘But you don’ –’

  I got up.

  ‘Where you going?’

  She followed me out. The dogs leaped up, trailed over, their backs curved like ship’s skeletons, looking for scraps. ‘Go on!’ she yelled at them. ‘G’weh!’

  She gripped my hand. There was a long silence between us while I let her hold me. When I looked up, I saw her cheek beating, like a heart. ‘You never stop to think why is you get pick. You think is luck? Only you could think is luck.’

  ‘What’s wrong with wanting to learn something?’

  ‘Learn to want what you’ve got.’

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked. ‘What I got?’

  She stared and stared and I stared back. A smile cracked her face, she started to shake, and then the shaking crawled slowly over her whole body, like molasses on the boil. She threw her head back and laughed and laughed. And then I laughed too.

  Chapter Four

  I’m trying to write this story as if it’s mine. Yet I look back over what I’ve set down so far and see how much of my own paper and ink I’ve spent on Miss-bella. The trouble is nothing ever happened to me except through her. That’s just how it was. So many in England have said that must have taught me how to hate. How you must have hated them, Frannie Langton! The pair of them! But the truth is not a cloth every man can cut to fit himself. The truth is there was love as well as hate. The truth is, the love hurt worse.

  Reading was the only promise Miss-bella ever kept. All that cutting season, I knelt at the table in the receiving room. Happiness soaked sweet as honey while she touched the page, my elbow, her warm breath on my neck. Her hands cool as sponges. If Phibbah happened to pass, she cut her eye, chattered her teeth at me, not caring if Miss-bella heard or saw. She was right, Miss-bella did grow bored of teaching, after a time, but I knew enough by then that I could lift out the books in the library when no one was looking, follow along for myself. Even Miss-bella said it: I had miracle-quick learning. Astonished her, and myself.

  Phibbah said she didn’t like having Langton’s name anywhere near her mouth. But she spoke about him all the same. ‘First thing I knew about him was when he refused to come when he was called . . . Just like the wayward cur he is.’

  His parents sent him to England as a boy, she said, to get his education, same as most of those colonial sons. He’d filled himself up on white people learning, then written them to say he wouldn’t be coming back, that he wanted to make a name for himself, to be a man of science. Mistress Sarah’s eye-water alone had been plenty enough salt for the porridge when she read that, thinking he must be ashamed: of Jamaica, of their failing estate. Many of those colonial sons got shame too, as well as education, when they got sent to England. Years passed. Then Mistress Sarah sent for him, after his father died, saying now he had no choice: I beseech you. A white woman cannot be left in Jamaica on her own.

  Letter after letter she sent, and got no answer. Three months later, she too was dead. Yellow fever. Death gave her the measurements of a grill poker, so it hadn’t taken long to make the burying dress, but Phibbah had to put it on her too. She found herself alone in the bedroom, with just the body and the washstand and the porcelain basin. She wanted to dash it to the floor. To see how that would feel. A chance like that might never come her way again. Instead, she set about fastening up the plain collar with the jet buttons Mistress Sarah had told her to use, but she was interrupted by the jangle of the old copper bell.

  She found Langton scuffing his boots on the mat she’d brushed that morning.

  ‘Why, pray tell, have I been kept waiting?’

  ‘I was tending to your mother.’

  ‘And where is she?’

  ‘Passed.’

  ‘I see.’ His eyes flicked like flies. ‘Then it would have behoved you to attend to the living before the dead.’

  ‘Then him have to come back,’ Phibbah said. ‘For good. Somebody needed to run the place. Though all him do at first was walk. Walk, walk, walk.’ Trampled around each morning with a twill-jacketed man, who’d come on the same ship, both dressed too hot. Langton pointed at something, the man nodded; within days it fell like a love rival after a dose of obeah. The old great house, busha’s house, the cook-room, the granary, even the sugar mill, one by one. That should have been a sign: Langton was an ill wind. Massa Hurricane. They didn’t know where he could have gotten money from. His father hadn’t had a half-dollar to spare for as long as they’d known him. One afternoon, Manso dared to ask new Massa his intentions. Langton gave a laugh, roughened by his pipe. Spat. ‘Used to be my father’s place, boy. I’m making it mine.’

  Inside the new house there was a room for every little thing a body could dream of doing in a single day. Eating, sleeping, receiving, tupping. But the library was best of all. Kii, your eye could travel all around that room and not run out of books to see.

  Reading was the best thing and the worst thing t
hat ever happened to me. I can still see all those spines: Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica, the Philosophical Transactions, Newton’s Principia, the Encyclopaedia. But there were novels, too, that Miss-bella ordered, though Langton kept those on the bottom shelves. Those were the books I loved. Holding one was like holding all the things that could happen in the world but just hadn’t happened yet. I had to wait until Miss-bella was finished with them, but then I could smuggle them behind the sideboards, read until I heard footsteps. I read with my mouth hanging open, like I could spoon sugar right out of all those books. I hid in the cook-room at night to read by the light of a tallow candle I made myself, beef tallow moulded in an old pewter bowl. Books answer questions with questions, but still I couldn’t get enough. And now that I think about it, it was the same all those years later, when I met Madame.

  One afternoon I found myself blessed with solitude and a book and a view. Langton and Miss-bella had taken the buggy over to the Copes. Phibbah was at her grill. There was nobody watching the porch but the cows, and they were busy nosing the long seep of river. I stole some of Phibbah’s rum punch and took myself outside with Candide. It was the kind of moment that pinches out happiness like salt into a cake, which meant, of course, that it couldn’t last.

  I didn’t hear the buggy; nor did I notice until I sat up that Langton was upon me, had been waiting for me to look up before he said a word. He squatted to his heels, slow as the river, looking like a thing you were supposed to dread. ‘You enjoying yourself?’

  The breath sawed into me. I felt something turn in my jaw, like the click of a lock. No right thing to do, other than to let him speak. ‘And will you look at my rules,’ he said, ‘lying broken all around us?’

  I almost twisted away, as if to see those poor broken rules, but he held my jaw fast. A pleading noise swam out of me.

  ‘No. I want you to read me a page. Oblige me. I suppose you know a fancy word like oblige. Since you’re a reading nigger. But what you mightn’t know is what’ll happen if you don’t.’

  Wet ran all down the back of my calico. I held myself tight against the urge to flee. He scrubbed his hands. ‘I’m going to put you on the horns of a nigger’s dilemma, girl. Though I know niggers aren’t used to choices. You listening? One. Read me a page, you keep your hands. Or two. Don’t read me a page, and then find out what’ll happen.’

  Words came sweeping out of me the same way I’d seen Miss-bella pray, loud and clipped and beaten. I can’t even remember now what I read, but I do remember that when I shunted the book onto the railing, he gestured at it. ‘That’s yours. To keep.’ I didn’t know what he meant, until he dragged me sideways like a lady’s hem, and said I must start tearing out pages.

  Swathes of time go dark on us, but it’s not as if we have a say which ones. This whole incident comes back in one long bright line, though I wish I could swallow it down the way he made me swallow Candide. Paper mashing to gristle in my throat. Him tapering above, wondering aloud who’d taught one of his niggers to read. As if there weren’t only two candidates on that whole estate. I ate until it felt the paper was digging a hole in me, then ate until all I wanted was to crawl into that same hole. But then he stopped short, as if something had pricked him, which he’d have to pull out and look at later.

  By the time he did, I’d eaten so many pages of Candide, I vomited down my chest. He let me off easy. It was only later I even thought to wonder why.

  Chapter Five

  Miss-bella was so terrified of sickness she was bound to get sick. On day one, Phibbah had told her the three things she had to do to survive Jamaica. Walk barefooted, so the ground could season her feet; wear cotton instead of wool; and bathe, like it or not. The English hated baths, but no white could survive Jamaica unless they bathed twice a day.

  ‘To survive in nigger territory,’ Miss-bella used to say, ‘one would be wise to take a nigger’s word.’ Phibbah burned smoke-pots that made all the rooms hazy with smoke and the smell of orange, to keep the mosquitoes at bay; she rubbed Miss-bella with salves and ointments she made herself, and dragged her kicking into the tin bath morning and night. All those years, she guarded Miss-bella’s health as if her own life depended on it.

  For Phibbah was a doctoress. She had the knowledge from her mother, old knowledge. So long as you carried it in your head they couldn’t take it away, she used to say. Not like weapons, or food, or clothes. Everyone came to her. Yaws to aching feet, she knew what to do for it. How to use capsicum peppers, prickly-yellow wood, guinea rush, John-to-Heal, which Miss-bella called ipecac. Dirt-scratch medicine, the Surgeon called it. Nigger cures. Barks and twigs and leaves. Simply a monkey scratching around in the dirt and finding something by chance to fix his monkey ailments.

  The year after I learned to read, a botanist paid a visit to Langton. A Mr Thomson. Hunched, thin, with a wisp of beard like a goat, a black ledger tucked under his arm. He wore a grey wool coat, even at noon, said he was travelling island to island. Someone next door at Mesopotamia had told him about Phibbah so he drove himself up in one of their mule-carts, said he’d come to see the magic Negress for himself. At dinner, he turned the pig ribs over and over in his hands as if he’d never seen the like, sucked seven of them clean to the bone in dead silence, and only after there was no meat left did the talk pour out of him, lips and fingers oiled by grease, about his travels in Cuba and Haiti, the specimens he’d gathered, the pharmacopoeia he was going to write when he returned to Dorset. ‘These Negro Doctors –’

  Langton interrupted, sucking in his cheeks. ‘Not a one of my niggers is a doctor.’

  ‘No. No. Bush doctors, then,’ Thomson corrected. ‘But they –’

  ‘You know, brutes are not botanists,’ Langton spat, folding his arms and sitting back. ‘Long said that.’

  ‘Actually, Long said they were botanists by instinct.’

  Langton snorted. ‘Same thing.’

  Phibbah and I watched each other, stuck in our own thoughts, at the sideboard. I could hear frogs clearing their throats, the dogs making piggish little noises outside, giving chase. I was sticky damp under my arms, didn’t dare wipe, or squirm. Langton slapped a mosquito into a black speck on the cloth. I peered up at her, wishing she would say something. Phibbah is not a brute! I wanted to shout. But she stayed where she was, and said nothing, quiet breaths singing in and out of her, face wide as a black moon.

  Langton kept on: ‘True, they might blunder now and then onto something useful. But all that voodoo can be a powder keg. At that very estate you’ve just come from – Mesopotamia ‒ one of the old-timers was reported last year. Her own daughter turned her in. They searched her cabin and found the whole lot, the usual rubbish. Thunder stones, cat’s ears, bird-hearts . . . bones. Bones! Imagine! Cope had her transported, and then bam! Not a drop of trouble down there since.’

  Mr Thomson licked forefinger and thumb, then looked over at us, eyes so dark they almost seemed sorry. And maybe he was. ‘Well, yes, but I believe we can harness their brute instincts. We can make adjustments, make something useful of their concoctions. Take the history of chocolate, for example ‒’

  ‘Chocolate! Let me tell you this, Mr Thomson. My grandfather came to Jamaica to make a fortune, not to turn apothecary.’

  ‘Nevertheless, we must follow the trail. Even if it leads to the Negro ‒’

  Langton cut him off again, with a wave of his hand. ‘If my girl knows anything useful, you’re welcome to it.’

  Next morning, Langton paid a visit to the cook-room, lifted the lid on the hominy, peered in. ‘No wonder you getting so fat, girl.’ He dipped a finger into the pot, spoke without looking up: ‘Thomson’s a buffoon, but he has something I want. Understand me?’

  Phibbah set down her knife, swept up onion skins, tossed them onto the trash pile, smacked the work-table with her hands, and stared down at it, like she was looking for another thing to chop. ‘What he have that you want?’

  He laughed. ‘Publishers. English publishers. Not
that you’d know the first thing about it.’ He rattled the lid back down, and I jumped. Then he turned to go. ‘So you better answer all his fool-fool questions.’

  ‘Or what?’

  He turned back, and laughed again, so soft you had to cock your ears to hear it that time. Stared at her. She stared back. ‘Or I’ll whip that girl right back into the womb.’ I scuttled my eyes back down to the napkins I was supposed to be scrubbing.

  After Langton left, I drew in a breath, watched Phibbah wipe the table, and bring down the jug she used for mixing the orangeade, feeling behind the loose brick under her grill for the seasoning herbs. She turned her back while she did, which was always a sign that she wouldn’t be in the mood to speak for quite some time, and that I’d better stay quiet until then.

  I saw the botanist’s book, once. In London. It was in a shop I visited with Madame. Aloysius Thomson’s Pharmacopoeia of the West Indies. A thick yellow volume, out on display beside the encyclopaedias and the natural dictionaries. Anger tore through me when I flicked through it. Everything Phibbah had told that man about was written in there. The next day I stole down to the same shop with a lead pencil tucked in my palm, hid myself behind the shelves with one of the volumes, and scratched her name on every page.

  Despite Phibbah’s attentions, Miss-bella took sick. She drooped like young cane and grew too fevered to sit on the porch. Phibbah drew the curtains and put her to bed, while I hid behind the door jamb, watching. Miss-bella’s face swelled against the pillows like a ready hog’s, all the bloom gone off it. She scraped at the bedclothes, screwed up her face. ‘Phibbah! I think I ‒ need the pot.’

  Phibbah helped her off the bed and leaned back on her haunches so she could make railings of her arms and give Miss-bella something to bear herself up with. She puffed out a laugh. ‘Least you remember to ask for the pot this time.’

  Miss-bella rolled her eyes, dropped her head onto Phibbah’s bosom. Into the hot, dark space, she whispered, ‘I need wiping.’