Read Online Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl by Kate McCafferty - Free Book Online Page B

of the Falconer desired? Why had Henry Plackler looked beyond the fine flanks of the earthy African women? The latter are to Coote’s anticipating tastes. Somehow Lucy’s quietude swells the effect of her voluptuousness; he catches himself thinking of the seductiveness of silence.
    “That is what slavery will do, at first,” she interrupts, looking beyond him to the garden. “You search for something to belong to that is high—that can make you mean more than on your own you do mean to the world around you. Which is nothing. And does that not seem a way of looking for a new tribe, once one’s own has been ripped away?”
    The question catches Coote unawares. For a second he almost considers it. The next evening it will return on scented breeze, through a lace curtain.
    Cot Quashey tells him that every year after the crop sale there would be a feed: the master would buy a sheep or a fine heifer from a neighboring herd, and Jenks would have it slaughtered. It was Salome who knew best how to pit-roast the meat: which stones should line the earthen tunnel and not crack when baked in flames. Which leaves to lay over and under the carcass so that it stayed moist, rather than singeing dry and bitter. Cot and the other young folk dug the pit, following Salome’s pointing fingers. Then, while the meat was roasting, they gathered twigs and boughs and fallen branches of the palm, and built a high bonfire against the twilit sky.
    “At Arlington the master never attended the feast days of his bondspeople. Jenks would appear with a little barrel of spirits which he handed over to Salome’s husbands. In spite of her moralizing, Dora could not be trusted with drink; and the rumor was the Irish and low sort of English servers would guzzle till insensate. But I tell you,” said Cot Quashey, “Salome’s men liked the spirits well enough. They would not part with the little keg, I remember that. If the two Paudis went to beg to take it up and pour a measure, they would shrug their shoulders as if they didn’t understand, and sit upon it. There were at that time eleven African men, and only five Christian bondsmen. Salome’s men shared the liquor fairly among the first gang; we of the second gang were judged not to have earned, yet, such a pleasant gift.
    “At Arlington there was no fist-fighting among the people, which was somewhat unusual, for we were as different from each other as Clydesdales from Arabians from Kerry ponies. Five languages were present, and a great hibber-jibber and rolling of the eyes and waving of the hands when people needed to communicate. The quirt of Jenks stood between raised fists. Still, while there were no blows, at the feeds on holidays, people pulled as they will into little factions. Voices dropped and eyes peered at each other across the flames as night grew late and the keg sank low.
    “There was no music there at Arlington,” she wandered. “If the Glebe was a place of sudden, unexpected violence, it was also a place where people’s liveliness rose up from time to time. At Arlington once, one of the Africans had built a drum out of a fallen tree and the skin of a creature that had been roasted. But Jenks had hacked the drum up with a small axe. Abomination, he called it, saying it would call to serpents and other things of Satan.
    “On one occasion, Salome and her older daughter sat on the ground swilling palm juice they’d distilled, from a calabash. That daughter was only after her conscription to the first gang. They began to sing. It was a song that sounded much like taunting, and the new husband and the single men not of Salome’s clan answered it melodiously. Then the other daughter rose and shuffled in the shadows. With her back turned she made her legs stiff and twitched her rump quickly, like a peacock will in May. Salome growled something and they laughed among themselves. I sat alone, admiring that language between them—the mood they’d entered, all with music. Many was the