Soon all that Caroline beheld were negroes, like solid shadows prancing before her. Oh, how many besieged her there? And where could they all have come from? Chinks in some wall, holes within the floor? Did they reside one-on-top-the-other in some chest? Or scurry like galliwasps under the house? Where? Where? Caroline cursed that the lord only gave her two hands! For which should she do—cover her ears against the calamitous din or her nose? For the stench of their swirling bodies was malodorous as a begrimed mule in the heat.
Her brother, finally appearing, seemed to walk on through this confusion paying it no heed, ‘Come on, I’ll show you to your room,’ he said. Then, noticing the fright which sat upon his sister’s face as if sketched from a comical cartoon, he shouted, ‘Will you all be silent! Be quiet. Do you hear me?’ before guiding Caroline by the elbow through the fleeting breach in the bedlam.
After a few days upon the island, Caroline was moved to enquire of her brother whether all of his fabled upward of two hundred slaves did, in matter-of-fact, reside around and about them in the great house. Her brother had believed it not a serious question and therefore supplied no answer but that of a small smirk. But for Caroline, it was asked in earnest. For there seemed to be no place in that mighty house where solitude was to be found. No corner where she did not find a negro lurking. No room that was free of a negro affecting some task. No window that, when looked through, saw a view that was other than these blackies about some mischief. Even the cupboards, when opened, seemed to contain little more than black boys who, like insects caught in a trap, peered out at her from the inside.
And yet, for all these house slaves that swirled around her every day, Caroline found the summoning of any of them to do her bidding a toilsome task for which she had no skill. They just stared on her entranced, like children upon Bonfire Night before the pinwheel starts to spin.
The negro girl, Molly, the one with the bruised, swollen eye, was charged by her brother to act as Caroline’s temporary lady’s maid. And act she did. For this girl seemed to know nothing of the duties that were required of her. Why, every morning this dull-witted creature would attempt to incarcerate Caroline into her spotted linen spencer the wrong way round; no command in an English language Caroline knew could get this slave to place it about her shoulders in the right way. As for the tape ties at the seam of her dress, the girl merely played with them like a kitten with string, for she was unable to tie a simple knot, let alone a delicate bow.
She combed hair as if untangling some rogue threads on the fringe of a carpet and tipped a full bucket of cold water over Caroline as she sat naked in a bath believing warmed water about to be brought. When Caroline summoned her brother to protest her behaviour, this slave girl, with hair matted as carding-wool, threw herself at his feet, clutching his legs and begging, ‘Me make mistake, massa. Me no do it again, massa. Me learn. Missus gon’ smile pretty ’pon me soon,’ to avoid her punishment.
Caroline’s sister-in-law, Agnes, having been born upon the island a Creole, found no trouble in procuring the required help. Her clothing was pressed and presented to her in the mornings, a jug of water brought for washing, her night pot collected and cleared, her room swept when she was not present to choke upon the dust, and her shutters opened for her upon the daylight.
But Caroline observed that Agnes was able to command these slaves in their own strange tongue. She could bellow at those negroes with the same force that the negroes did bellow at each other. Agnes was heavy with child and although slight of frame, still she allowed no bulging protrusion at her waist to impede her when she was admonishing her slaves. Why, she jumped about as spiritedly as a mad hare—arms flailing, feet stamping, her thick red hair coming loose from its tie as she snapped, shouted, clapped and yelled to get her way.
After this exhausting work was done Agnes would lie upon her daybed with her arms dangling, too fatigued to lift them. She was then unable to answer even the simplest of Caroline’s enquiries without a weariness entering her tone or a gentle snoring commencing—sometimes when Caroline was still speaking.
In her first meeting with Agnes, in the cool drawing room of the great house, her sister-in-law had, in a blast of breath that left Caroline quite giddy, proclaimed that her family was from Scotland. Excepting Agnes’s flaming red hair, the profusion of freckles upon her face and neck (which she happily displayed instead of hiding with cosmetic preparations), and an abundance of tartan trimmings in and about the chairs in the room, Caroline detected nothing of the Scotch about this bouncy young woman.
‘You must show them who is master and who is slave. Leave them no room to fool you. Them is tricky, Caroline,’ Agnes said when instructing Caroline on the management of slaves. Using Molly as her example, Agnes called the slave girl to her and pointed her finger at the blackened eye. ‘She tie me shoe so tight me have to scream. She sitting at me feet so I give her one kick. You think she ever tie me shoe so tight again? No, no, no—for she learn.’ Pushing Molly forward so Caroline might better inspect the bruised wound for the imprint of Agnes’s shoe, she said, ‘Be firm. For these blacks be like children—all must be shown how is good and how is bad.’
And, every night since Caroline had arrived upon the island, she had been forced to listen to the panting, slapping, and giggling that crept over the walls from her brother’s room into her own. For this grand house, which had been lavished with so much vulgar finery—why, even the silver was gilded—nevertheless had bedroom walls that were not tall enough to reach all the way up into the wood of the eaves. The ridiculous din of the night creatures with their eternal screeching could not block the lusty sounds Agnes—oh yes, Agnes—made every night. Her brother, Caroline decided then, was quite prudent in never having brought Agnes to England, for his wife’s inelegant, beastly manners and ridiculous way of speaking would surely have seen her locked away.
After two weeks in Agnes’s company—where even a little light embroidery or the arranging of a vase of flowers seemed too much toil for her sister-in-law, who slept upon her daybed for so many hours of the day that Caroline began to believe that perhaps, like a bat, she was only aroused at night, Caroline was forced to admit to being bored. She even began to crave the company of Mary, her lady’s maid, who had never uttered more than three words of sense in the whole time she had been in her employ; she did, however, remain awake. But Mary was still quite sick; nursed in a darkened hut no bigger than a kennel by a large negro woman who guarded Mary’s feeble, sweating, panting body as fiercely as a dog with a bone. And as for the companionship of her brother John, he had begun to seem like a vision in the heat, for every time Caroline approached him he would simply vanish. Until one day, with the determination of a trapper, Caroline contrived to snare him upon the veranda of the house.
‘John, may we take a stroll around the grounds?’ she implored.
‘A stroll, Caroline! This is not England. In two steps the heat would claim you. No one strolls here,’ her brother replied.
‘A ride then, John—I still know how.’
‘The terrain is far too dangerous and, besides, I have no horse that could possibly take your . . .’ he said, prudently losing into a mumble the words which referred to Caroline’s robust dimensions.
‘Oh, John, please take me around, I wish to see my new home and understand all its workings,’ she said, her voice rising shrill enough to conjure that squeaking hinge anew.
So, reader, let me once more draw your eye to that road through the plantation named Amity—to the gig, to the single chestnut horse and the bumpy progress being made by John Howarth and his sister Caroline who sit within. Walking along this road in the path that the gig would eventually take, was a large black slave woman. Upon her head was a straw basket filled with unruly sweet cassava roots, poised so ably she looked to be wearing an ornate hat. Her skirt, once striped yellow and black was, from its years of being drenched in a river, pounded against rock and baked in the sun, only whispering its former lustre. But the child walking at her side was attired in a dress of the same fabric and, like a draper’s sample, this miniature displayed the cloth almost in its original hues.