‘It is not the fault of the pen that you place too much ink upon its nib,’ said he.
‘Do you resent me the ink?’ I asked him.
‘No, of course not.’
‘Then is it the quantity of paper I might use that is vexing you?’
‘Nothing is vexing me, Mama. I am just cautioning you to take a little care and tap the nib of the pen upon the inkstand to shake off the excess that might otherwise drip across the paper.’
‘But this dripping and staining is not my offence—this ink be inferior,’ I told him.
‘There is nothing wrong with the ink,’ he answered back to me.
‘Then why it drip so?’
‘Because you must tap the pen nib to shake off the ink before you put it to the paper.’
And so this argument went around. Reader, I am not a woman to stay within a household when all welcome is gone. I stood up from my desk and departed the room. Taking up my valise I placed within it only those few possessions that I first brought into this house those many years before—my square of lace and my blue and white plate. I would take nothing away with me that was given by my son. No feathered Sunday hat nor new Common Sense Oxford shoe, not even a spool of embroidery silk would he find about me.
Thomas, seeing me firm in my resolve to leave his house, at once began calling for Lillian. Always when he has wronged me, he calls for Lillian. All his battles his wife must fight for him, like she be his mama and he her pickney.
She entered in upon my room like a howling wind to grab the valise from my hand. How we struggled there we two! I am an old, old woman and she has not more than forty years, yet still she fought me like a fever. It was fear of cracking my plate further that made me stop.
‘Miss July, please put down the bag,’ said she. ‘This is your son’s home and you are welcome here. And you know this. Thomas meant no ill by you.’
Now, reader, although I have suffered hardships much greater than wrestling with Lillian—who would, let me assure you, have been no match for me if our ages had been equal—still I ache. All of my bones have voice to speak to me. Even the smallest of them chats the language of pain. But I bear it as best an old woman can. Yet that quarrel sent me to my bed with a head sore as an aching heart. Even my son’s apology just throbbed at my ear. I believed my deliverance had come; that my maker, be him deity or devil, desired to hear my tale not written as some fool-fool book but spoken close into his ear.
But a little callaloo soup and a few mouthfuls of stewed goat, saw me much improved. Now, back at my desk, I am fitter than when I was taken.
As I write, I can see that if I tap the nib of this new pen—a fine instrument with an ebony holder which my son sent away for from Montgomery Ward in America—against the side of the inkstand that contains the new bottle of glossy-black ink, then no drip occurs across the page. Come, it makes it much easier to read.
‘Marguerite, Marguerite!’ That is Caroline Mortimer calling out for July. She had resolved to call her slave Marguerite, for she liked the way the name tripped upon her tongue like a trill. Yet it was only Caroline Mortimer who did look upon July’s face to see a Marguerite residing there. And so we must return to my tale.
Caroline Mortimer was reclining upon her daybed too limp from the midday heat to raise her hand to ring the bell. ‘Marguerite,’ she screeched once more, before collapsing with the effort that such bellowing demanded. Reader, many years have passed within my tale and it was now eight, maybe nine, years that Caroline has been living at the great house of the plantation named Amity. Nowadays, the heat from that Jamaican sun made Caroline floppy as a kitten from sun-up to sundown. She no longer had spirit to fight its languid thrall. A little light embroidery or the arranging of a vase of flowers were just too much toil for her.
She lay upon her daybed, wishing that the long window—with its clear view over the lawn to the horizon—was carrying into the room a cooling breeze and not, what she could always hear, the tiresome commotion of negroes. The rhythmic drone of the field slaves’ work songs, a mule braying, the pounding of walking feet, the crack of a lash, the gallop of a horse, a piercing yell, the squealing of a slow moving cart. And, so close about her that it was like a nagging worry within her own head, the clatter and jabber as the indolent house slaves went about . . . well what did they go about? ‘Marguerite,’ she yelled once more.
In the kitchen, the headman, Godfrey, aroused from his nap, licked his top lip to moisten his dry mouth, before gently kicking his foot toward July and saying, ‘Missus calling you.’
July, looking up from her sewing replied, ‘Soon come, me busy.’
When the calling came again, sharp enough for the cook, Hannah, to say ‘Cha,’ from her drowsy sleep, Godfrey leaned forward upon his chair to inspect what July was doing.
‘What you have there?’
‘Missus’s dress. She want it,’ said July.
‘Then go give it.’ said Godfrey.
‘Me can’t, it not ready—it still have three button on.’
The kitchen, like in all great houses upon the island, was a large, dark hut with a wide chimney and wooden jalousies upon the open windows, that was set apart a short distance behind the main house. It took three long strides for Godfrey to go from the kitchen to the house, for he was a tall man with long legs. It was six steps for the less gangling July and the two other chamber girls, Molly and Patience. It was a long, long wearisome trudge for the cook, Hannah. Being summoned into the house to listen upon the list of foodstuffs those big-bellies wished to chew on was her torment. At the great age of sixty Hannah resented all motion but that of round and round her kitchen. But for any white missus, like Caroline Mortimer, the reverse of that journey which would see her taken from the house to the kitchen was a voyage of the most substantial distance—like the moon be from the earth.
‘Miss July, you can take off that lace for me?’ Molly asked. ‘That will look pretty ’pon me dress.’ She had turned from the window where she was staring out with her good eye, watching four chickens pecking at the dusty ground.
‘Missus will see it gone from the bodice,’ July said.
Molly sucked her teeth. She did not care for July. I could say that it was because July had robbed Molly of easy work; for July had gone from being a filthy nigger child—used only to working in the fields—into the missus’s favoured lady’s maid, who boasted her papa to be a white man even though it was Molly that had the higher colour. And, at sixteen years, July had grown into an excitable young woman with crafty black eyes, a skinny nose, and narrow lips that often bore a smile of insolence; a troublesome dusky-skinned negro girl whom Nimrod (the once-upon-a-time groom at Amity but now a freeman) was always affecting not to notice, yet talked of all the time. But, in truth, Molly just despised anyone who possessed two good eyes within their head.
‘Well, me mus’ have some of the button you take off then,’ Molly said, before resuming her staring.
Patience stepped into the kitchen with three eggs caught up careful in the fold of her apron. ‘Missus calling,’ she proclaimed into the air. Patience was a woman who so resembled her papa Godfrey that you need to look upon her twice. For the first glance might have you think she was Godfrey dressed in the clothing of a woman.
Godfrey had been a fine handsome man in his youthful days, and that charm was still draped about him like the fading colours on a once glorious flower. Now his hair was white, his back stooped, his gait slower, yet still he was rakish. For his eyes ever blazed with merriment, no matter what prank or cruelty they be gazing upon. His broad back had lived forty-five years as a slave and he had ministered unto white men for thirty years as a house servant. But there was one part of Godfrey that through relentless toil had aged more hastily than any other—his male organ. Come, it was worn out. Pert, alert and ready for action from his tenth year, through demanding employ night and day for nearly thirty-four cane seasons, it now dangled limp and exhausted. No firm wide buttocks upon a bending female could arouse it to its former life. Even within its other function it remained tardy. Once his squirt could sizzle a fire out. But now Godfrey no longer had strength to stand as a man should to wait for his pee-pee to fall; he had to sit forbearing upon a pan, for his lifeless organ dribbled out water fierce as a pickney with its first tooth.