So, long before you desire it, you will be standing in front of a two-storey, wooden, lime-washed building, girdled within the hubbub of an inquisitive crowd of perspiring negroes, one mangy brown dog, and two fussing goats, admiring the painted sign for Messrs Kinsman & Co. being fastened above the four pillars of this new printing office.
Yet the clamour from outside this works is much greater than any din that comes from within it. The four presses, three frames, the reading closets and the office all lie idle, for no white men of business upon the island would condescend to employ Messrs Kinsman & Co. How does a black boy come to dress and speak like a white gentleman? these English merchants and planters asked while sipping coffee within their clubs. How does a Hottentot with not even one drop of white blood within him find himself a proprietor of a print office? A nigger might composite or work at press or even, with careful instruction become a reader, but no slave-son could ever run a printing establishment of any worth. This broad-nosed, thick-lipped devil does walk too tall, they concluded.
Although the Platen press did sometimes find itself employed when negroes from the dry goods store, the boarding house or the masons did eagerly request their small handbills printed by Messrs Kinsman above all other, it was the volume work from those wealthy white men who owned the wharves, the warehouses, the ships and the plantations that the teeth of his presses wished to bite upon.
So Thomas Kinsman attended St Peter’s Church upon Sundays. There those white men, outraged, bemoaning and under duress did have to greet him within a begrudging Christian fellowship. And during the long-long sermons Thomas sketched their faces and wrote their names secretly within a little book as he offered up a prayer to his creator God; ‘One,’ it began, ‘Let just one of these white men of business come with good work—just one—and I will see that the others follow.’
And Thomas will grin to tell you that the Lord then worked in a mysterious way. For, five weeks later, upon a rainy Friday morning, Isaac Cecil Levy, a Jew who had never once attended the church, entered in upon Thomas’s office. He required, he said, a press for the first edition of a newspaper he was to publish which was to be called The Trelawney Mercury.
And the compositors clicked, the readers read, and the pulling of the presses began. For the next edition Thomas Kinsman proposed to Isaac Levy, that they might print a supplement containing eight extra pages, on which people could pay to place their advertisements. And so The Trelawney Mercury and Advertiser was born. And, Thomas will joy to tell you—perhaps with the aid of a column of neat figures—that very profitable did it prove.
Soon newspapers, almanacs, legal blanks, auction catalogues, handbills—official printing of all sorts—flowed in and out of the print office of Messrs Kinsman and Co. upon Water Street. His workers even started a club for their mutual improvement, for which Thomas supplied the books, drawing materials, papers and candles. It met at sundown, cost a half-penny to join, with a farthing fine for any who strolled in so late that, ‘Cha, them miss the whole t’ing again.’
With six men compositing, two apprentices, eight at press, five readers, an overseer and clerk in the office, within two years Thomas was required to find bigger premises on which to hang his sign!
So here we have Thomas Kinsman—a gentleman, a printer of high repute, a wealthy black man of commerce who wears shiny shoes and a scarlet tie. When called to do his duty within a jury of the court, as was required of someone of his standing, he sat in quiet fury listening to one of the most feeble, unworthy and unjust cases—where a starving person was to be punished for trying to feed themselves with the food that lives abundant about them—whilst staring upon the most pitiable, begrimed and wretched negro woman he had ever beheld. When, all at once, he began to recall a long-ago essay written by Jane Kinsman concerning a July. A July of Amity. July, once a house servant upon the sugar plantation of Amity. July, a slave girl. July, a slave girl who abandoned her baby to a stone outside a Baptist manse. July! July! And it was then that Thomas Kinsman raised himself slowly from out his seat.
But of course Thomas Kinsman said nothing of any of this on that day that he first stood before his mama. He just tipped his hat and demanded to take July home so he might see her fed.
And that, reader, is what he did.
When first July beheld the house upon King Street where Thomas Kinsman did reside, she tried to run from that black man in a scarlet tie. She believed his charity to be a trick. He desired a servant to scurry and run. One morsel of meat within her mouth and for ever a broom held in her hand. No, no, no, she would never serve again. But the room he led her into was not the kitchen, nor the outhouse, but a withdrawing room that was lavishly lined with books; from the ceiling to the floor, the solemn hues of leather-bound volumes stamped with gold rippled along every wall of that place. He did not offer her some wobbling broken-down wooden chair upon which to sit, but a fancy padded seat with a soft red cushion about it. And the milk he ordered his servant to bring was handed to her in a glass; and the sweetest, creamiest drink of milk it was that passed July’s lips upon that day when Thomas Kinsman first sat down earnestly before her.
His breath was faltering, his fingers fidgeting—with the curve of his nails, his marriage band, his cuff—and his head was bowed when he quietly told July that he believed he was her son. He had longed for this day, but feared it would never come, he said. He had thought her dead. But now he wondered if he was, at last, sitting before the woman who had given birth to him. And then, with nervous searching, he looked upon July’s face to seek a response, as he asked if she had once left her pickney upon a stone outside a Baptist manse. It was then that July leaned to one side upon the chair and, for his answer, regurgitated that rich milk to splatter into a pool of curds and whey upon the polished floor.
Yet still my beloved son, Thomas Kinsman, looked upon me kindly. Why, I have never truthfully understood.
But I have lived within my son’s household from that day to this. Our first home was within that house in Falmouth where Lillian, my son’s very young wife, did attend upon both her husband and me with the flurry of a fusspot. It was there that those three mischievous girls, Louise, Corinne and May, were born—and every day of our lives turned suddenly from peace into raucous mayhem.
But the town of Falmouth soon began to wither. For the sugar that fed and fattened that port lessened with every passing year. It slowly starved. So Thomas Kinsman moved us—his cherished family—to Kingston, where he opened a further printing business. And very profitable it is, too. But do not take my word upon it, go ask my son—he will joy to take you upon a tour of his fine works, if you so desire.
But for me, reader, my story is finally at an end. This long song has come full up to date. It is at last complete. So let me now place that final end dot . . .
Reader, alas my son is not yet finished with me. Must an old woman endure this? Thomas Kinsman is shaking his head once more. No, says he, surely this is not where my tale will end? What of the life lived by July upon those backlands at Amity? He wishes to know of those years betwixt July’s stolen pickney and her shuffling starving in upon that courtroom.
So I have just asked him, you wish me to describe how July walked to find those negroes upon the backlands? How she collapsed before them and was tenderly nursed back into this life? Must I show you the trouble that those free negroes had to endure? Should my reader feel the fear of the harassment from planters that came upon that place almost daily? Shall we put out those fires, rebuild the huts, chase mounted white men from out the crops? Would you care to face a loaded pistol with a machete and a hoe? Or perhaps I should enlighten my readers as to how long a little piece of land can last until, lifeless and exhausted, it produces nothing but thistle? Shall I let the earthquakes rattle and the floods pour? Or shall we just sit throughout a drought—parched and dusty as the desiccated earth? Or feel as a fist is pressed into a starving belly so it might be tricked into thinking it is full? Must I find pretty words to describe the yellow fever that took so many? Or perhaps your desire is simply to watch as a large pit is dug for the graves?