‘It is not—it is of your life lived,’ him tell me.
‘Oh no, it is not.’
‘Oh yes, it is.’
We did step this fancy argument too long for my delicate stomach. And my son’s finger did wave upon me for the whole time. It is not for a son to wag his finger upon his mama, but the other way about! And he huffed and puffed to me that I needs tell why he was abandoned and that I must speak true.
Sometimes his demands upon me are as constricting as the corset they bind me in to keep me as a lady.
But I must do as my son bids. Else I may wake to find my valise—with my piece of lace and my cracked plate—placed outside the gates of this house, and my aging nagging bones cast out to join them. My son may shake his head upon this circumstance, but his old mama has now witnessed that possibility within his eye.
So I must upon this page affirm that a son was indeed born to July. After the grievous pain of birthing—for July was still a young girl who did not possess the width within her body to push out this child’s enormous head with any ease—Nimrod’s son was born in upon this world.
His legs did not bow (unlike those of the man who sired him), and up to now, that son has a good head of hair. But still, July, at that time, did look upon this tiny newborn and think him the ugliest black-skinned child she had ever seen. There, these words are true—so does my son find joy within them? He has a mama whose lip curled with disgust when first she saw that a child of hers was as black as a nigger. And even if my son now wishes to beg his storyteller to change this faithful detail, alas, it cannot be done.
July had no intention to suckle this misbegotten black pickaninny. But neither did she wish to leave him mewling upon a mound of trash, nor whimpering within the wood. She found no strength to smother him, nor will to hold him under the river’s swell. After two days of hiding her son from all that was this world, July fixed upon the notion of leaving him to the minister-man. For July had heard tell that minister-men did say that even ugly-ugly slaves with thick lips and noses flat as milling stones were the children of God. So she wrapped her pickney in a rough cloth, tied her red kerchief at his head and within a moonless night walked the stony trail to the baptist minister’s house. There was no hesitation shivering her breast as July placed her baby upon a stone by the gate. Preacher-man would shelter him—she knew. And that, reader, is what preacher-man did do.
So come, ask my son to tell you of those days. Will he drum his chest with maddening rage or wipe tears of lament from his clouded eye at the loss of his mama? No, he will not. Rather, he will sing you a joyous melody of the sweet life lived with the English preacher, James Kinsman, and his saintly, good-goodly wife Jane. Do you think that you will be able to go about your day before my son has told you all? Then think that no more.
My son will begin with how Mr Kinsman and his wife procured a wet nurse to suckle him. He will then state how this princely nourishment grew him strong (and doubtless add to this, the feature tall—but even to this day, my son is not tall). He was baptised Thomas—after one of Jesus Christ’s twelve apostles—in the chapel just outside the town. Although he was required to lay his bed within the servants’ hut of the Kinsman household, my son will assure you that he was considered as much a member of that family as their own two sons, James and Henry. Of course he was required to work for his board, but his chores—sweeping the yard, feeding the chickens—were no more burdensome than that of any houseboy. And on Sundays he was allowed to sup at the same table with the family. My son was not a slave, but a freeman from his second year.
‘The salvation of the savage’ was Mr Kinsman’s mission. He believed that even the blackest negro could be turned from sable heathen into a learned man, under his and God’s tutelage. My son was given a Christian education within his school and Mr Kinsman was pledged to write a paper upon the progress of his learning for the Baptist Magazine in London. On the first day of his schooling, my son received a pair of the finest leather shoes. Even today he has those shoes hung from a hook upon the wall in his study. Shoes upon a wall! He will not discard them, for those two tiny cracked-leather boots contain all the dear memories he has of the Kinsmans and his scholarship.
Oh, see my son’s eyes light with merriment as he recalls for you the time betwixt sunrise and sunset of each day that he did spend at that Baptist mission school. He read the scriptures with distinction and accuracy, and could write with considerable knowledge upon both civil and sacred geography. Every Wednesday he was tested upon his understanding of the biblical antiquities, followed by an interrogation—for his general examination—of the emblems, figures, parables and most remarkable passages of the bible. My son could recite every word of 238 hymns—indeed the whole number that were contained within the Sunday Scholar’s Companion. And his arithmetic was advanced as far as vulgar fractions.
A school feast was held every year in the chapel yard beneath the shade of the orange trees, where a gathering of people from about the parish came to observe the miracle of the little learned negroes of the Baptist mission school. Even July came once to stare. And my son—standing in white breeches with his shoes upon his feet, hands clasped at his front, head erect, mouth open wide as a toad and lungs swelling with tune—led the little black-faced choir in the joyful singing of the hymn, ‘Eternal God we look to Thee’.
When Mr Kinsman’s paper for the Baptist Magazine was complete, he published it under the title, ‘Tree of the Lord’s Right-Hand Planting: The Remarkable Effect of the Good Christian Education upon a Negro Foundling on the Caribbean Island of Jamaica’.
My son was that Baptist minister’s boast. Go ask him. With humble hesitancy (that will not linger long), my son will report how often times it seemed that Mr Kinsman and his good-goodly wife, Jane, found more delight in him than they did in their own sons. When it came time for James Kinsman and his family to leave Jamaica for London, after the completion of their mission work, none within that household could conceive of sailing from this island without my son amongst them. And when he journeyed to England with the family aboard a ship called the Apolline, it was not as a servant, oh no, it was as, ‘the remarkable negro boy, Thomas Kinsman’.
Not a snivel nor a moan, will my son send forth while singing the tale of his young life. Yet still, you may think to judge July harshly. But, reader, if your storyteller were to tell of life with July through those times, you would hear no sweet melody but forbidding discord. You would turn your head away. You would cry, lies! You would pass over those pages and beg me lead you to better days.
Shall I oblige you to read how many times Caroline Mortimer ordered that July be pinioned within the stocks as punishment for her wrongdoings after those riots? Should I paint a scene so you may conceive of how often the sizzle of the sun’s heat fried July’s skin to blisters and scorched her mouth so dry that she did not have spittle nor breath to shoo away any creature or beings that came to plague her within those long nights?
Or maybe I should find pretty words that could explain to you what befell Patience in those days? How, after the massa had been laid to rest in the churchyard, she walked from Amity in the hope of finding Godfrey in town, and returning him to his proper place; calming the fretful and arranging the duties within the kitchen. She was caught upon the road by the militia, who charged that she was a runaway rebel. She received fifty lashes for her crime. Would you like me to describe the lesions upon her back and let you hear the woebegone howl she emitted when the stinking cloth that had wrapped the wound was pulled off? Perhaps you would care to watch her die. Or see the anguish that so clouded Miss Hannah’s soul that she crawled into her grave two days after Patience. Shall we walk in the procession of these two burials? Perhaps to accompany Florence and Lucy as they hold up Molly—ragged and raging and screaming fearful that she will be sold away. Reader, would you like to hear Byron weeping?