Joseph Knight Read online

  Unlike some of the really fabulously wealthy planters, for whom such details were a reflection of their prestige, John Wedderburn did not care much about this casual attitude to job demarcation. It did not seem important in a place that, even though he had spent his entire adult life there, he still regarded as only a temporary home. When he went back to Scotland it would be different. He would want to do things right there: in Scotland, doing things right would matter. And with this in mind he intended, some day soon, to begin to train up a slave to take home with him as his personal servant. Not Jacob or Julius: they were too set in their ways. Someone younger, more pliant, who could look after his clothes and toilet, be a faithful companion, a memento of his Jamaican days to be admired by neighbours, friends and guests.

  By and large, the domestic work at Glen Isla did get done, for all six domestics were aware that they could be relegated to field labour in an instant. They were also kept on their toes by the tongue-lashings and occasional blows of John Wedderburn’s housekeeper, Phoebe.

  He could hardly think of Phoebe without prefixing her name, as James jokingly once had, with the word ‘formidable’. She was a creole who had come with the estate at Bluecastle, but James had quickly taken a dislike to her exacting sense of what was proper, and packed her off to work for his brother. Tall and thin, her face pitted with the marks of childhood smallpox, she was no beauty; but she had a head for economy and a nose for discovering theft or laziness, and though Jacob and Julius drove her to distraction at times, she managed them and the others well.

  Between her and John Wedderburn there was little affection, certainly no intimacy, only a mutual respect for each other’s cool style. The other slaves feared her, and she despised them: she had cut herself off from them, and did not join in their social life. She had learnt to read, and pored endlessly over an old Bible her master had given her, fancying herself a Christian, although she had never asked for instruction in the faith. She had a room to herself in the house, and probably expected to be given her freedom one day. John expected that one day he would probably give it to her. But if or when that day came, he knew she would not leap for joy, pack her bag and turn her back on the plantation. Where could she go? She would go on running the house, as though she had been free to leave all along but had chosen not to.

  The white men lounged in the porch for an hour, drinking Madeira to work up an appetite. Hodge, the only one of them tolerating a wig in the afternoon heat, had brought some books for John Wedderburn: two for him to borrow – Observations in Husbandry by Edward Lisle, and The Gardener’s Dictionary edited by Philip Miller – and one that he had ordered to buy, the shorter, octavo edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary, which, though not five years old, was already famous. The work was passed around, definitions read out and admired or disputed. Mr Hodge observed that it was a book all the more remarkable because its author, so he had it on good authority, was a slovenly brute who went for weeks without changing his shirt and was given to physical violence against any who offended him.

  George Kinloch arrived with some even more interesting literature: two rampant Parisian novelles – seized from a French ship captured sailing from San Domingo to Florida – which, from their ragged state, seemed already to have been read by a good proportion of both the French and British plantocracy. An etching on the title page of one, of a semi-naked courtesan spread over some cushions, looking invitingly over her shoulder and pointing her voluptuous derrière in the reader’s direction, showed what to expect; the other’s title page had been torn out. Peter gleefully seized the one with the picture; Sandy, although his French was rudimentary, made a show of licking his lips over the text of the other.

  James smiled at them smugly: ‘Those that can, do. Those that canna, read.’

  ‘Or they read and then do, wi a swollen imagination,’ Kinloch said.

  They sat down to eat at two. The marathon began with stewed snook and ketchup sauce. There was a dish of boiled crabs, a tureen full of mangrove oysters, the juices to be soaked up with cassava bread, and all to be chased with great pitchers of porter. Then came boiled salt beef with rice, spinach-like callaloo, green peas and yams; four varieties of bird – snipe, coot, teal and squab – shot by the Wedderburns and roasted en masse; a plum pudding; three kinds of cheese; plantains, pawpaws, oranges, pineapple, watermelon in honey, chocolate sauce. There was some excellent claret, also taken from the French vessel, which Mr Hodge had bought at the knockdown price of five pounds the hogshead and which he was bottling and selling to the Savanna taverns at five pounds a dozen; but he had generously supplied the present party with three dozen at cost. And John produced a very acceptable punch made up of rum, Madeira, claret and wild cinnamon.

  The courses merged into one another and by four o’clock the table was piled with half-empty plates and the debris of demolished wildfowl, fruit skins, stones and unfinished pudding. The maids removed what they thought was done with, and were bellowed at if they lifted a glass or a dish too soon. Eventually, having first ensured that there was plenty of drink still available, John dismissed them.

  ‘There’s one bonnie and two passable there, John,’ Peter said. ‘Peach is a peach. I suppose you’ll have sent her to wait for you in your bed.’

  ‘You know I have not,’ John said. ‘I told them they could go down to the dancing, and redd up in the morning.’

  ‘I can’t believe you keep her only for decoration.’

  ‘I don’t. I keep her to work, nothing more.’ There was irritation in John’s voice. He knew that Peter was needling him, and that James was enjoying seeing him look uncomfortable.

  ‘If we were at Bluecastle,’ Peter insisted, ‘James would have packed them off to bed the minute they’d finished waiting table.’

  ‘You had better take your dinner there, then, if I’m failing you as a host.’

  ‘If we were at Bluecastle,’ James said, ‘we might have fucked them on the table. But we must respect our elder brother’s sense of decorum, Peter.’

  George Kinloch roared with laughter. ‘I’m wi James on this matter, John, but of course I bow to your wishes. It’s not as if we canna restrain oorsels once in a while.’

  Mr Hodge coughed and squirmed in his seat. He was looking pale and sweaty. ‘I keep only the ugliest female negers about the house,’ he said. ‘I’m not like you fellows, I can’t afford to yield to temptation. Mrs Hodge wouldn’t stand for it.’

  ‘Well, sir,’ said Kinloch, ‘you are in the happy state of not requiring to be tempted. For a fellow without matrimonial ties in this climate, it’s a necessity. It’s simply unreasonable to expect him to behave himsel when he’s surrounded by half-clothed sable bitches like thae.’

  ‘Brother John behaves,’ Alexander said quietly, as if he were not quite sure whether he wanted to be part of the discussion. John looked at him sharply. Sandy was performing in his usual manner, trailing along in the wake of others.

  ‘Oh, why’s that?’ Kinloch demanded.

  ‘B-because he has the dignity of the family name to uphold.’

  ‘Do you not indulge yourself at all, sir?’ Hodge asked. ‘I’m certain, if it were I –’

  ‘No, I do not,’ John interrupted him, giving Sandy a thin smile. He was well used to this from his brothers, but he had no wish to explain himself to Hodge. James and Peter in particular, and Sandy increasingly, could not understand his abstinence. All the planters did it – took the best-looking slave women for themselves: there was no shame and little discretion about it, as the clusters of mulatto bairns running around every plantation proved. You took them willing or not, gently or by force, and that was all there was to it. But John had no interest in coupling with slaves he might be whipping the next day. In fact, the thought revolted him. How, though, did you explain this to your three brothers, who were sometimes to be heard comparing notes on the performance of a girl they had each had at different times?

  It was Davie Fyfe, the doctor, who came to his rescue: ‘Frankly,
I am sick of treating half the population in this island for the clap. There’s nothing like drawing a discharge of pus from another man’s member to encourage you to keep to the straight and narrow.’ He looked round the table, but was careful that his gaze did not linger on any one face. A few seconds’ silence proved too much for Sandy, though.

  ‘Who else here has been syringed by Davie?’ he said. It came out almost as a shout. John shook his head in exasperation.

  ‘Oh, Sandy!’ James said. ‘That’s the last time I congress with any of your past bedfellows.’

  ‘It’s no secret, is it?’ Sandy said. ‘We all get the clap sooner or later.’

  ‘Not I,’ John said.

  ‘The later ye are, the mair chance,’ Kinloch said.

  ‘It depends on who’s been there before you,’ James said. ‘Eh, Sandy?’

  ‘That’s why I always like to get in first,’ Sandy said.

  Again, John winced at his youngest brother’s forced bravado. He worried for him – that in his efforts to keep up with the pace set by James and Peter, he would burn himself out.

  ‘I hear Mr Collins flogged a girl almost to death for clapping him,’ said Peter. ‘But who’s to say she did not catch it from him, if Davie’s not pulling our legs. That would seem a trifle unfair.’

  ‘I never fash mysel wi the fairness or otherwise of another man’s use o the whip,’ Kinloch said. ‘Ye never ken all the circumstances. Ye see some neger greeting in the bilboes, or knocked senseless by her master, and ye feel it’s cruel. Then ye discover she was stealing, or feigning illness, or she wouldna do as she was tellt, in bed or oot o it. Mr Collins doubtless had another grievance forby the clap.’

  ‘There’s some men I would not have at my table, though,’ said John, ‘on account of the manner they treat their slaves.’

  ‘Such as?’ Kinloch sounded touchy.

  ‘Well, Tom Irvine.’

  ‘Auld Tom?’ said Kinloch. ‘What’s Tom done to upset ye, man?’

  ‘He’s a rough and ready kind of man,’ said Hodge, ‘fierce at times I’m sure, but he doesn’t strike me as anything out of the ordinary.’ The merchant suddenly pulled off his wig and swiped at a mosquito, then laid the wig in his lap. His bald head gleamed with rivulets of sweat.

  ‘He degrades himself,’ said John. ‘He does not care if the blacks see him as a brute. In fact he revels in it.’

  ‘Then Mr Hodge’s observation is correct,’ said Davie Fyfe. ‘There’s plenty like him.’

  ‘Sometimes it’s necessary,’ said Kinloch.

  ‘No,’ said John, ‘it is necessary to be strict, to punish where punishment is due. Of course we can all agree on that. But Irvine – no, I’d not have him at my table.’ He made a rasping sound in his throat.

  ‘What on earth is it he’s done?’ Hodge asked.

  ‘We were down there three weeks ago,’ James explained. ‘His crop was all in – you know he hasn’t as much land, and what he has is poor, badly drained – and we thought we might hire some of his slaves to help finish ours. But they were in such a miserable, wasted condition we’d never have got the work out of them to make it worthwhile. We went to see him and he was wandering about in just his shirt. Said he’d lost his breeks and couldn’t be bothered to look for them. The place was stinking. One of his lassies had asked if she could go to tend her garden as there was nothing to be done in the house, so he shat in the hall and told her to clean that up.’

  ‘Maybe he is demented,’ said Kinloch. ‘The heat, Mr Hodge.’ But Mr Hodge had gone rather quiet, and did not seem to hear.

  ‘Is Mr Collins demented?’ asked Fyfe.

  ‘Collins? Of course not. Why?’

  ‘I heard if he catches a slave eating cane, he flogs him and has another slave shit in his mouth. Then he gags him for a few hours. Or he has one slave piss on the face of another. Is that the behaviour of a sane man?’

  ‘It may not be pleasant,’ said Kinloch, ‘but it’s no mad. If it was him doing the shitting and pissing, I grant that might suggest an unbalanced mind. But he instructs another neger to do it. He maintains his ain dignity.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ John Wedderburn said. There was a round of more or less revolted laughter from the others, which he at last joined in. The story was neither new nor particularly shocking. They might not have stooped quite to good old Tom Irvine’s level, or Collins’s, or at least if they had they were not saying, but they had done other things – dripped hot wax into wounds opened by whipping, rubbed salt or hot peppers in them. Or, more to the point, they had not actually done these things: they had had others do them – white employees, other slaves – and watched. Or not watched. Like Collins, they had kept their distance, and thus their dignity.

  ‘In any case,’ Kinloch added, ‘eating shit is just a step frae eating dirt. I suppose some of them don’t mind it much.’

  There was silence around the table as they all considered this. Dirt-eating was one of the great mysteries of the plantations. Some slaves had a craving for the ground, clay in particular. Nothing was more likely to send a white man into a fit of revulsion than the sight of an African grovelling in the field, stuffing his face with soil. Nothing brought down the lash so fiercely. It was like watching some wild beast sniffing and scraping at a midden. It seemed to mark the distinction between the races more clearly than anything.

  ‘We have a case of that just now,’ said John, passing round a new bottle of claret. ‘A boy called Plato. We’ve had to strap him to a board to keep him from it. Did you see him today, James?’

  ‘On my way up. I’ve put him in a hut away from the others. He has a sore breaking out on his face that I fear may be the start of the yaws. I’ve told that old witch Peggy to look after him – nothing kills her, and her herbs and potions will not hurt him – may even be of help. I looked in his mouth. He has worms there.’

  ‘From the dirt, nae doubt,’ said Kinloch.

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ James said. ‘Davie and I have been giving this some thought. I begin to wonder if it’s not the other way round – if the dirt does not come from the worms.’

  Kinloch snorted. ‘That’s ridiculous!’

  ‘Well,’ said Fyfe, ‘why should the soil which gives us our good crops cause so many ailments among the slaves? A dirt-eater comes down with everything: the flux, dropsy, fatigue, stupidity –’

  ‘And there ye pit your finger on the nub,’ said Kinloch. ‘Idleness and idiocy. The only thing that will cure thae ills is a thrashing. A good sound Negro never came doun wi dirt-eating.’

  ‘But George,’ said James, ‘suppose for a moment that a good sound Negro did. What would be the cause of it? Suppose, for example, that he got the ground itch – you’ll agree any Negro can get that between his toes?’

  ‘We’d get it if we didna wear shoes. Ye’re no wanting to gie them all shoes, are ye?’

  ‘The ground itch is caused by hook worms,’ said James, ignoring the question. ‘You clean out the scabs, bathe the feet, and with time the itch is gone. But suppose the worms – some of them – get under the skin, and into the blood. Where do they go? They go through the blood to the lungs. Your good Negro coughs to clear his lungs. This brings the worms to his mouth. He takes a drink. The worms are carried into his gut. They feed there. The slave, consequently, is constantly hungry. He has a craving for whatever will fill his belly. The cane, or the ground it grows on. The worms grow inside him. They lay their eggs. The good Negro shits in the cane field. His shit is full of eggs. Need I go on?’

  ‘I see,’ said Kinloch. ‘Ye mean getting one slave to shit in another’s mouth may spread the worms?’

  ‘For God’s sake, man,’ said Fyfe, ‘forget about that. The ground is covered in hook worms. All we’re saying is, if Plato is infested with worms, maybe that’s the cause of his dirt-eating. Not the other way round.’

  ‘It’s the same with the yaws,’ James went on. ‘It never seems to come on its own. And you’ll grant that not even the most devious mal
ingerer can feign it.’

  ‘He’d be a magician if he could,’ said John. ‘And mad.’ The raspberry-like sores and eruptions on face and body, the weeping tubercules and ulcers, the swellings and blisters on soles of feet and palms of hand, the obvious and intense pain caused by all this – nobody could, or would want to, fake the yaws.

  ‘It’s their foul habits,’ Kinloch said decisively, reaching for a third slice of cold plum pudding. ‘If they didna live such filthy lives we wouldna lose so many o them. Ye never see a white person wi the yaws.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because our houses are bigger, airier,’ said Fyfe. ‘We die of all the other things they have, though. Yellow fever, the flux, dropsy. And then we have our own diseases: I never saw a Negro with the gout, or the dry belly-ache.’

  ‘Ye’re contradicting yoursels,’ said Kinloch. ‘First ye say that we’re like them, then that we’re no. I ken where I stand. I’m as like a neger as a – as a thoroughbred horse is like an Arab’s camel.’

  ‘I only wonder,’ said Fyfe, ‘if we exchanged places with them, if we’d exchange diseases too. As you said yourself, if we took off our shoes …’

  Charles Hodge, who had been sitting, eyes closed, trying to contain a growing disagreement between his stomach and either the oysters or the topic under discussion, suddenly startled everyone with a drawling laugh. ‘Haw! Exchange places, sir? Haw! Take off our shoes! That’s the kind of metaphysical … perprosal you’d expect from a Scotchman. It’s a impossibility. Mr Kinloch is right. We are horses, not camels!’

  He stood up, knocking his chair over, and swayed out of the room to be sick. The others watched him go, only vaguely interested in seeing if he made it outdoors. If he did not, it would just be one more mess for the maids to clear up in the morning.