She was quieter when the talk returned to what was happening around them. She stopped midsentence. She worried the bracelet on her left arm. She gazed into the distance. Her voice caught.
There was enough food in the land to feed Ireland three or four times over, she said. It was being shipped across to India, China, the West Indies. The exhaustion of empire. She wished there was something she could do about it. The truth could not be preserved by silence. Her own family had warehouses full of food farther down the river. Bottles of vinegar. Stocks of yeast. Malting barley. Even crates of fruit jam. But it could not just be given away. There were laws and customs and issues of ownership. Other complexities, too. Business alliances. Extended contracts. Taxation. The demands of the poor. The creation of moral illusions.
It struck him that Isabel carried the wounds of privilege. Perhaps, then, he did also? He leafed through the New Testament. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded. And yet if he himself spoke out on behalf of the poor Irish, what would happen? What language could he create for this? To whom would he speak?
The politics still confounded him: who was Irish, who was British, who was Catholic, who was Protestant, who owned the land, whose child stood rheumy-eyed with hunger, whose house was burned to the ground, whose soil belonged to whom, and why? The simple way to see it was that the British were Protestant, the Irish were Catholic. One ruled, the other lay underfoot. But where did Webb fit in? And where did Isabel fit in? He would gladly have allowed himself to align with the desires of freedom and justice, but it was to his own known cause that he had to remain entirely loyal. Three million voices. He could not speak out against those who had brought him here as a visitor. There was only so much he could take upon himself. He had to look to what mattered. What was beyond toleration was the ownership of man and woman. The Irish were poor, but not enslaved. He had come here to hack away at the ropes that held American slavery in place. Sometimes it withered him just to keep his mind steady. He was aware that the essence of proper intelligence was the embrace of contradiction. And the recognition of complexity was to be balanced against the need for simplicity. He was still a slave. Fugitive. If he returned to Boston he could be kidnapped at any time, taken south, strapped to a tree, whipped. His owners. They would make a spectacle of his fame. They had tried to silence him for many years already. No longer. He had been given a chance to speak out against what had held him in chains. And he would continue to do so until the links lay in pieces at his feet.
He thought he knew now what had brought him here — the chance to explore what it felt like to be free and captive at the same time. It was not something even the most aggrieved Irishman could understand. To be in bondage to everything, even the idea of one’s own peace.
His body, his mind, his soul, had, for years, served only for the profit of others. He had his own people to whom he was pledged. Three million. They were the currency of his freedom. What weight would he carry if he tried to support the Irish, too? Their agonies, their ambiguities. He had enough of his own.
The barges passed.
A river of food afloat.
The sun went down over the slate rooftops of Cork.
THERE WAS A story he sometimes told his audiences. The slave masters in America used barrels. Bourbon mostly. Olive oil. Wine. Any sort of barrel that could be found. They drove large six-inch nails into the wood. Sometimes they placed crushed glass inside the barrel, too. Or thorny bushes. Then, he said, they would bring their slave—he always invoked this word on a deeper pitch — up to the top of a hill. For the most minor of offenses. Maybe she had forgotten to lock the stable door. Or perhaps she had dropped a piece of crockery. Or maybe she had looked askance at the mistress of the house. Or maybe she had left a dishcloth dirty. It did not matter. She was to be punished. It was the natural order of things.
Halfway through his story he would give the slave a name: Mary. He would hear a silence come over his Irish listeners. Mary, he said again.
And then the owners—this word volleyed savagely from him — forced Mary to take the barrel from the barn. It was rolled out into the dust, along the dirt road, to the top of a small nearby hill. They gathered the other slaves together and brought them, too, to the hilltop. To witness. The owners would often shout verses from the Holy Book. They forced Mary to step inside the wooden barrel. They pushed her head down, crushed her shoulders into it. The protruding nails ripped her body. The glass penetrated her feet. The thorns encircled her shoulders. Then the masters put the lid on and hammered it shut. They rocked it back and forth a few minutes. They read again from the Holy Book.
Then the barrel went down the hill, tumbling.
THE CROWDS WERE enormous. He had spoken alongside Father Mathew. He found a language in the temperance movement. The papers still called him the black O’Connell. Posters were pasted up all around the city. His fame spread, day by day. He picnicked with twenty-four women from the Cork Ladies Anti-Slavery Society: they delighted in the large lounge of him underneath a spreading oak tree, a dainty blue napkin at his throat, the gurgle of a brook behind him. The women unloosened the bonnets at their necks and raised their faces towards the sun. They hung on his every word. Later, the group walked together, carrying picnic baskets and parasols, out over the long grass and back towards a wooden bridge. Douglass dared to take off his shoes and socks and waded briefly in the cold water. The women turned away and giggled. The water darkened the cuffs of his trousers.
Newspaper reporters clamored to see him. Whole pages were devoted to his lectures. He had collected hundreds of pounds to be shipped back to Boston. He had sold over two thousand books. He would go on to Limerick next, then to Belfast. From there he would go to England where he would negotiate his freedom, buy himself back, return to America, a freeman.
There was a great welling inside him. His voice had always come from others, but when he stood to speak now, it felt more distinctly his own. There were times he wished he had a thousand voices and could throw them in so many directions, but he had just one, and it served a single purpose: to annihilate slavery. He was almost glad one afternoon when, walking past an ale house on Paul Street, he heard someone say that a nigger had just walked past, a filthy niggerboy, did he not have a home to go to, he wouldn’t find bananas in that direction, did he not know there were no trees to swing from in Cork, Cromwell had taken them all already, go on now, nigger.
He stopped, swelled his chest, held his ground, almost a fake fury, then walked on in his camel-hair vest. Nigger. Filthy nigger. For the first time, the word felt strangely welcome. An old shirt that he would have to wear in the future. Something to unbutton and tear off and rebutton again and again and again.
A FEW DAYS before he left Cork — a day that would stay with him quietly, a flag, a kite, a remnant — he heard a knocking at the door on Brown Street. He was in the midst of writing. His forearms were splattered with ink. His back ached from the bend over the desk. He pushed back in the chair and listened to the voices drifting up from below, then leaned into the work of writing once more.