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Authors: Kate McCafferty
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sparked between those of the different Christian faiths. But the greatest differences which lay between those of us who shared that one lot in life, seemed instinctive—natural and therefore insurmountable.”
After a pause Coote drawls with boredom, “Kindly yield up its nature to me.”
“I remember those first mornings in the field,” the prisoner muses, “how hard it was to stay bent to my work—although the air was cooler near the ground—because the Africans were dressed, both lads and girls, in only a brief canvas skirt tied between the legs. And their long gleaming muscles, the bareness of their dark chests and backs and thighs—these were both mesmerizing and alarming to someone from the Christian north. Yet did many masters believe it was the black man’s disposition to go about naked in his native forests; and so the cloth across their loins was first thought an over-nicety, like covering a sheep’s bum with a nappy.
“Of course, as you know, time has revealed the error of this. Because you gentlefolk now each float thousands of fresh, frightened, handcuffed Africans across the sea each year—Africans who have been proved to bleed and chill and die as fast as any farm hand from the northern lands—masters have learned that Africans too want covering, both for health and modesty.”
There is something almost instructional in her tone which Peter Coote does not appreciate. He teeters between amused logic—most assuredly she’s mad—and a deep resentment, when her speech is less than subservient. Still he holds fast to the Governor’s goals: one must be tricky in extracting subtleties. “You wander, b … Mistress Daley. It is, perhaps, useful to hear you state the inborn differences you perceived between yourself and savages. For this natural difference, created by God himself, seems to have been perversely set aside several times by your race and other Christian blackguards in Barbados.”
“No,” she answers thoughtfully, “the difference you are wanting me to speak about was not natural. I had been trained to see it. And so at first I thought their colors and their features unrefined, being not narrow, pale, and bright.” Coote notes the Irishwoman frowning to find apt words. Her hands rise from her lap, and draw apart and around, as if trying to form a little globe. “It was like,” she says, “that last time I saw the Captain. As he walked away there was this flooding in my breast as if he was my dearest friend. But all it meant was my fondness for the familiar, the fondness we are trained from our mother’s apron to feel for a clan we learn to recognize as ours. This is … well I suppose it is indeed a lesson the world over. For as I first stared at the huge black eyes and short stiff hair of the Africans, so did they stare at me. And at the Glebe, where I spent twenty years and there were many children, the babes of Africans howled at my smile and smell—which they found unnatural and ugly—and buried their faces in their mothers’ necks. So I believe that every tribe of people think themselves the yardstick of Creation, and feel fear and distaste and suspicion of outsiders. But still, I tell you this is learned.”
“And you unlearned it?” Coote asks in honeyed tones as he ends one full page and sprinkles sand across it. He sweeps a clean sheet toward himself.
“In right circumstances, things like that melt away like morning haze,” Cot Quashey tells him. “We revive them only if we fear some harm, or as a weapon if we have nothing fair to fight with.”
The new morning sings as it passes the Apothecary’s office window. The cicadas begin their anxious chant. Cot Quashey tells the Governor’s surgeon-scribe, Peter Coote, about her first years on the plantation of Henry Plackler, married to Eugenia, eldest child of the Earl of Orkney.
“As I have said, I rarely saw the master during my first three years at Arlington. My days were spent with the second gang—the
After a pause Coote drawls with boredom, “Kindly yield up its nature to me.”
“I remember those first mornings in the field,” the prisoner muses, “how hard it was to stay bent to my work—although the air was cooler near the ground—because the Africans were dressed, both lads and girls, in only a brief canvas skirt tied between the legs. And their long gleaming muscles, the bareness of their dark chests and backs and thighs—these were both mesmerizing and alarming to someone from the Christian north. Yet did many masters believe it was the black man’s disposition to go about naked in his native forests; and so the cloth across their loins was first thought an over-nicety, like covering a sheep’s bum with a nappy.
“Of course, as you know, time has revealed the error of this. Because you gentlefolk now each float thousands of fresh, frightened, handcuffed Africans across the sea each year—Africans who have been proved to bleed and chill and die as fast as any farm hand from the northern lands—masters have learned that Africans too want covering, both for health and modesty.”
There is something almost instructional in her tone which Peter Coote does not appreciate. He teeters between amused logic—most assuredly she’s mad—and a deep resentment, when her speech is less than subservient. Still he holds fast to the Governor’s goals: one must be tricky in extracting subtleties. “You wander, b … Mistress Daley. It is, perhaps, useful to hear you state the inborn differences you perceived between yourself and savages. For this natural difference, created by God himself, seems to have been perversely set aside several times by your race and other Christian blackguards in Barbados.”
“No,” she answers thoughtfully, “the difference you are wanting me to speak about was not natural. I had been trained to see it. And so at first I thought their colors and their features unrefined, being not narrow, pale, and bright.” Coote notes the Irishwoman frowning to find apt words. Her hands rise from her lap, and draw apart and around, as if trying to form a little globe. “It was like,” she says, “that last time I saw the Captain. As he walked away there was this flooding in my breast as if he was my dearest friend. But all it meant was my fondness for the familiar, the fondness we are trained from our mother’s apron to feel for a clan we learn to recognize as ours. This is … well I suppose it is indeed a lesson the world over. For as I first stared at the huge black eyes and short stiff hair of the Africans, so did they stare at me. And at the Glebe, where I spent twenty years and there were many children, the babes of Africans howled at my smile and smell—which they found unnatural and ugly—and buried their faces in their mothers’ necks. So I believe that every tribe of people think themselves the yardstick of Creation, and feel fear and distaste and suspicion of outsiders. But still, I tell you this is learned.”
“And you unlearned it?” Coote asks in honeyed tones as he ends one full page and sprinkles sand across it. He sweeps a clean sheet toward himself.
“In right circumstances, things like that melt away like morning haze,” Cot Quashey tells him. “We revive them only if we fear some harm, or as a weapon if we have nothing fair to fight with.”
The new morning sings as it passes the Apothecary’s office window. The cicadas begin their anxious chant. Cot Quashey tells the Governor’s surgeon-scribe, Peter Coote, about her first years on the plantation of Henry Plackler, married to Eugenia, eldest child of the Earl of Orkney.
“As I have said, I rarely saw the master during my first three years at Arlington. My days were spent with the second gang—the
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