John Lord was the tenth—no wait, perhaps the eleventh—overseer that had been employed at Amity since Caroline Mortimer had taken over the running of her deceased brother’s plantation. He had stayed a little longer than most—past a year.
It was six years since Caroline Mortimer had laid her brother’s body to rest within the hallowed ground of the churchyard, to the left of his wife Agnes, and on top of his short-lived pickney. After that sombre burying, a long parade of white people from about the parish—dressed from their top to their tip in the black of crows—had come to pay their respects to our missus. And every one of those guests that solemnly entered in upon that great house at Amity was treated to the ghastly story of what befell John Howarth upon that wicked night, when he was brutally and savagely slain. Come, there was even a guided tour included within the tale, directed by the missus, through the pertinent rooms.
At first her account was soberly enough conveyed; a nigger was waiting beneath the bed and shot her brother within the face; the murdering nigger was then pursued to the slave village where the nigger was captured by the overseer; but during the dreadful riot that had erupted, the overseer was attacked by a fearsome slave and died later of his wounds.
But the panting anticipation of her listeners, the clutched breasts and hastily sat upon chairs, the gaping mouths, the astonished wide eyes and the compassion—the, ‘Oh my dear . . . Oh, you poor, poor woman . . . Oh, good God in heaven, what you have suffered . . . Oh, you brave, brave woman, your brother (God rest his soul), would have been so proud of your fortitude . . . You, my dear, are a credit to the name of Jamaican planters . . .’—that caressed Caroline Mortimer’s esteem, gradually grew the story that exhaled from her into a tale worthy of the most flamboyant writer.
Soon, Caroline Mortimer, seeing the nigger shoot her brother, picked up her pearl handled pistol and gave chase. Mad with grief, though she was, she determined to bring that nigger to the gallows herself. And Tam Dewar, who at the start of her storytelling was just the overseer, who everyone knew as a rather vulgar, disagreeable and boorish Scotsman, gradually turned into her gallant knight. He took her into his arms to swear that he would move all within heaven and earth to bring the culprit of this heinous crime to justice. The nigger, Nimrod, needless to say became barbarous and bloodthirsty, cunning as a wild dog and base as a lowly worm. July made no appearance in any of the tellings, except once to spill a jug of water, like a buffoon, in fright. And as for the slave that attacked our gallant, brave and forthright Tam Dewar (that is Miss Kitty), she was a black devil woman, who with pitiless savagery, brutish fists and sharp teeth, hunted down white people upon this island to burn.
With little worry that anyone who could be believed (like July) would step forward to recount the events from some other view, Caroline Mortimer became, by the fifth delivery of her narration, the story’s resolute heroine.
Caroline then grew so convinced of her own audacity, so enamoured by her oft-conjured boldness, and persuaded by her imaginary competence, that when it came time for those planters and busybodies about the parish to give guidance to the missus upon what should be done with her brother’s plantation, the missus was so puffed with self-regard that she declared, ‘So help me, God, I will see the plantation of Amity prosper and grow that it may serve in absolute memorial for my dearly departed brother!’
Not even two surprisingly generous offers by her neighbours to the west and to the south—for the land, slaves, works, great house, and even to include the costs that should surely arise with the reinstating of the slave village and burnt-out hospital—did persuade Caroline Mortimer that withdrawing from Jamaica to England for quiet retirement in Islington, might be the better claim upon her resoluteness.
Nor did she approve the notion of an attorney handling her brother’s affairs. No. The fiction within her memory seduced her to declare that no one understood Caroline Mortimer if they believed these misfortunes and tribulations would see her broken. She alone would make Amity the most prosperous estate in the whole of Jamaica. Her brother would have expected no less from her.
However, it was not long before the firm nip of plain truth began to deflate the missus. Once she entered in upon the fetid dank room within the counting house to begin in earnest to peruse her late brother’s records of business, she soon realised that the fortunes of Amity were not as bounteous as she had always imagined them when dozing upon her daybed.
Within her first year as proprietor, she had to let the cane pieces of Virgo and Scarlett Ponds fall into ruinate, for she did not have the slaves to work them. Some had perished in the riots, others made feeble or limbless at the behest of justice and the law. Even after the seven slaves, carpenters mostly, who were loaned to Unity Pen by her late brother were begged return, she could not raise labour enough to keep the mill constantly turning and the teaches forever bubbling. And able black bodies could not be bought to replenish her stock with neither smiling friendship nor charmingly negotiated cash. For every planter within her circle pleaded that they were suffering from the same fate. Within that year of passing the ownership of Amity from deceased brother to deluded sister, the amount of hogsheads rolling out from the plantation works had dropped tenfold.
So the missus agreed with her then overseer (the third I believe, the second having fallen insensible to the pox), that he should decree to all those slaves who were idle, indolent and not working well, that their houses would be the last to be restored if their performance did not improve. She approved that her slaves should for a period, until the plantation named Amity was in the pride of health again, work without the break of their ‘off time’. In her second year she permitted a new dungeon to be created near the burnt-out hospital for the correction of those negroes who proved to be incorrigibly feckless. ‘What harm could it do?’ she said of these arrangements.
Then apprenticeship was finally forced upon our missus and all the planters of the Caribbean. Hopeful as the Hebrews leaving Egypt, the many slaves that toiled at Amity walked from their plantation to the town to listen to the white man, ‘de massa from a H’england’, as he explained to them, from the balcony of the courthouse, the details of the preparations for freedom.
Though they were still bound to the missus to work for six years without pay, after hearing their Moses-in-beige-breeches declare slavery at an end, the slaves believed themselves to be actually free. They refused to work no more than the forty hours a week now required of them by King William and the law of England. No call to orderly conduct and ‘obedience to all persons in authority’ had any effect upon Caroline Mortimer’s negroes. And forty hours a week was just not enough time to take off a sugar crop. No inducement, nor overseer (certainly not the two drunken Welsh ruffians who managed the fields through that time), could get her negroes to task any longer.
Yet Caroline Mortimer was required to care for those negroes in the same way—with lodging and food and clothing. The missus bemoaned that compensation from the government may soon start to tinkle within her pocketbook, yet still her crops would remain within the field. Sweet teeth in England just did not know the trouble she bore for them.