Bound for Jamaica (Children's novel about the Atlantic Slave Trade)

 

Collins published my highly condensed 4,000 word version of the first part of this children’s novel in their reluctant readers series Read On. This is the full version.

The shocking Atlantic slave trade incidents described in it are by no means unusual – they happened every day for three centuries. Over that time, every country in Europe was involved except Germany and Russia (who got their serfs nearer home.) The Portuguese and then the Spanish pioneered the “trade in men”. Britain’s involvement began with the seizure of Jamaica from Spain in the 1650s and its outright leadership of the trade came later – first from London, then Bristol (1750-1770) and finally Liverpool. Britain imposed abolition throughout the Empire from 1807 and the Royal Navy – after a slow start – blockaded slave ports to prevent the shipping of slaves out of Africa. Whatever sins may be laid at door of the British Empire, slavery was not one of them. Slavery was a private enterprise of the colonial era.

Many Britons were passionately opposed the trade at the time – ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ was an article of faith to the eighteenth century Abolitionists. To say ‘times were harder then’ or that 'it’s sentimental to lament a necessary stage of world economic development' is a shocking evasion of that fact.  This novel looks the facts about the slave trade in the face. But it celebrates a spirit that overcame them.  

 

Bound for Jamaica 

or Blackboy Hill To Whiteladies Road

Chapter One

The white sailors say they are going to put our eyes out and then eat us. Then they make that jeering hyena sound.  Not the warm rumbling in the chest of my father. Not the breast-and-shoulder jiggling of my mother. White man’s laughter.

But why bring us all this way just to blind and kill us? They could have done that before we set sail. At least we would have died on dry land. So it might be a joke. They joke about such things. 

They buy us like meat, examine our parts like animals. They feed us on scraps and then laugh when we fight over them. We must have been taken by evil spirits. Or else we have all gone mad.

They brand us, like cattle, deep in our skin, hot as fury. 

I have no name now. No family. Just this man’s brand.

J.

 

They laugh. “You’re going to a hot island, at the burning centre of the world. You will be slave-pickers in fields that stretch further than sight. You will do this until you die.” 

“You belong to the planter now, that tall white man with the red face and hard glare.” 

‘The planter’ has richer clothes than the rest and a stranger hat but the same long hair. Their hair is dead straight and tied with strips of cloth at the back but the colour changes from sailor to sailor, from corn-yellow to earth-brown to black. The planter’s – which is dark and touched with iron grey - curls like a lion’s mane. The rhinestone skin of his face is mottled with angry blue-red showing the blood and the bad temper behind them. He places his fancy-shoed feet at a wide angle to each other to take up as much space on the deck as he can. He sometimes taps one like a mad pulse, but mostly studies everything in still silence, like a man-eating lion. His pig-eyes are dull and flat as glass and he is very tall - a head above other men. He brandishes a heavy cane and, as he swaggers swiftly forward, swings it so that all in his path (slave or free) must draw back to avoid being struck. I snatch a fearful sideways look at his face. His brow, nose and chin make one strong straight line. 

Every time I see him, I feel my flesh cook again. He asks me if the brand is still hot and when I nod he says I will find his plantation hotter. Only the strongest slaves can survive the plantation he is going to run, he says. 

I am stronger than he knows. And one day I will kill him.

*

There were slavers in Africa. There were temporary slaves and permanent ones – but they were cared for like family. Or at least like servants or cattle. What herdsman would care for cattle so hatefully as this? What cargo is let to rot in so foul a hold? It doesn’t make sense. They must mean to butcher us.

Nothing has made sense for weeks. We lie on scratchy planks of timber, chained, packed in like meat. It stinks. Our beds are where we live, gobble food, make our waste. I never thought there could be a smell worse than the sweat, urine, faeces, vomit of first few days. The reek of disease. The stench of constant fear. 

But there is a worse smell. It turns your mind as much as your stomach. And stays there, like an evil spirit. 

The smell of death.

*

I long for the clean upland air of my home.

Sometimes, when the maggots are running through the dead bodies and the lice torment the living, in between whippings and feedings that are little better than whippings, the white sailors drag out the corpses. Some of sailors are ill now too. Yesterday, one of them died. They said some words over his body and threw him to the sharks. 

Our dead they throw without words.

“How many have we lost, Captain?” demands the planter.

“One in eight. That’s normal, for forty days. But I expected to be in Jamaical by now. We’re still only half way out and more storms brewing. It could take forty more days yet.”

A sailor glares into me, to see if I’m breathing, if I am to be hurled overboard or left to lie in this stench. I am nothing to him. 

I am eleven years old, the youngest survivor, and at first my brethren protected me from the worst. They took beatings for me, shared scraps that might have kept them alive. But lately, each dwells in his own misery alone. 

One of the sailors regards me as his pet. He always feeds me first. When it is his turn to enter this hole, I am glad to see him. In my previous life, in my golden and green homeland, I would have spurned his charity. Now I crave his kindness. 

He's here. I all but wag my hindquarters. I have sores all over from the planks and the cramped shelf. I look up at him entering from the bright deck like a flower looks up at the sun.

“Africa,” he croons. That’s his name for me. I bury my real name where I hide my real face. “Are you alive boy?”

He does not know I understand him. That I could speak to him if I chose. He pats my head and, like a beaten dog, I fawn. 

He feeds me the grey mash. I keep some of it down. He tells me with gestures that I must. “That’s boiled horse beans, rice, a bit of corn or yam,” he says. We get it twice a day if we behave. Today it is flavoured with some scraps of meat or fish. He tells me it will save me. “Not much longer, boy,” he says. “We’re over half way. Smell that change on the wind?”

How could I, amid this stench? 

He inhales as he would on deck. The smell of trees and hills and a long sandy shore. "We’ll sight land by the next moon.”

He goes on to feed the others. Always feeding one and not the next, breaking hope or togetherness, crushing spirit. Men plunge up to the length of their chains to take slop from his filthy hands. Then bite and butt each other for the droppings. 

Before the sickness, they used to take us up on deck every evening, driving us from pitch dark into brilliant light, to make us dance to their whips. 

*

“Keep the beggars fit,” snarls the Midshipman, lashing the man next to me.

 

“That’s a J brand you’ve got there,” laughs a sailor. “Don’t damage one of Jardine’s prizes!”

“Fifty guineas of black gold each eh?” he laughs back. And he flicks an old worn coin in the air and makes to clasp it. He misses. It falls and rolls to my feet across the timbers. It glints in the sun.

“Old gold from darkest Guinea that is, boy, like you. Named for you. All you’re worth. ” He  snarls. “Pick it up!”

I do so, quickly. 

“Well?”

I look. A large head with flowing black curls, enormous pursed lips and a brutal expression gazes up at me above a small elephant. I wonder for a moment if he is African. He looks like the Africans who enslaved me.  

“That’s King Charles, boy. The Second. Cast in the Year of Our Lord 1666. Not long after Oliver’s Navy seized Jamaical from the Spanish. Worth a lot more’n a guinea now I reckon, antique coin like that. Know what year we are, boy?”

I look dumbly at him for the answer.

The Midshipman laughs. “Stumbling around in the dark, benighted brutes. Year of Our Lord means nothing to them. It’s the summer of 1766, you ape. A clear summer evening. And you’re bound for Jamaica! Ape class.”

The crew laugh. We stand in silence, hunched forward, waiting.

He gestures. “Bring me my coin.” 

I bring it. He pushes me down and puts his foot on my neck. He stands on my back. 

The one who calls me ‘Africa’ mutters something. The Midshipman leaps off and confronts him, nose to nose.

“Something to say O’Brien?”

“No Sir.”

“This poop deck is filthy, O’Brien.”

 

“I’ve just cleaned it, Sir.”

" And now it's got ape all over it. Clean it up! The rest of you shirkers” - he shouts at the crew – “Get these apes back below before the Captain sees them!”

I think it would be good to die. 

 

Chapter Two

Before the slavers came, I kept having the same dream.

In my dream, a lady as white as the moon was eating chocolate. Her mouth was a black hole with sharp white teeth. 

“Her lips were red, her looks were free,

Her locks were yellow as gold:

Her skin was white as leprosy-“

*

The Gift, our elders call it. 

It is my first memory. At an age before most children have speech, I could hear what my parents were saying. 

It should have been a joy. To hear, and understand, beyond my years. But what my parents were saying was fearful. The tribe was in danger: cattle-rich and warrior-weak. 

Far tribers from beyond the mountains came to trade the next day. They offered rich yams and palm oil and slaves. We lacked neither yam nor palm and, among us, slavery was forbidden. But they pointed at our cattle and then at our women. They waved machetes, annoyed at our incomprehension. 

One pointed at my mother and she withdrew into our family hut, afraid. My father stood up uncertainly.  A far tribesman kicked at our fire in anger and a log flew onto my arm. I screamed with pain. The far triber was yelling savage strangled sounds but the pain of the fire cleared my mind and I could hear what he was snarling. 

“Yams, pine oil, slaves – for your prettiest women.”

I screamed. “The goddess Ani damns you!” 

There was a shocked silence. A babe casting spells! And in the far tribers’ language. 

My father stood more certainly now. And others with him. The far tribers fled and I was lifted high among victory-dancing warriors

“What did you say to them?” they gasped. I translated.  

We feasted on the rich yams and the palm oil wine. They told me I had the Gift - lost to the tribe for two generations. They called me the Gifted One. My father was made an elder.

With the Gift they told me I could read the speech of all creatures, men, animals, trees and plants. They told me our tribe would read the minds of its enemies and prosper. The tribe was still happily dancing and whooping and praising me as the red sun rose over the great plain. 

But the witch doctor looked jealous. His silhouette stood out dark against the sun. And I was afraid. 

Chapter Three

The witch doctor watches me every day. 

“Father, that man hates us.”

“What’s that little man?” My father is happy, a great man in the tribe now. He doesn’t want to hear anything that would stop him being happy. “You are the Gifted One, my boy. All is well.” 

All is not well. My father is in debt to the witch doctor and cannot pay. He used to grovel to the witch doctor about this. Now he scorns him. The witch doctor nods, a man biding his time.

I hear the hills and caves and grass whispering, as they do before a storm. Beasts large and small go to ground. The storm comes and many of our cattle escape. 

Worse follows. Far away, I can see the far tribers as if through a wall of fire, approaching the village. They have terrible new weapons.

The witch doctor calls a council of elders and says I must be communing with bad spirits and bringing these storms.

“But the boy saved us!” they protest.

“Then why did the boy speak first in the far tribers’ tongue, when he had never spoken a word in our own? He is a witch!”

The elders debate this. In other tribes, witches are sold as slaves but slavery is forbidden among us. The medicine man says my eyes must be purged of evil with the juice of a chilli. The elders don't like this either. 

I tell my father the far tribers are coming with terrible weapons. "We must defend ourselves," I say. My father stands up but instead of passing this message on, he boasts about my gift.

The witch doctor seizes me by the arm and the old burn flares up with new pain. He opens a green chilli to rub into my eyes. 

“Enemies are coming!” I say. 

The witch doctor pours scorn on this. “He is just saving his own skin!” 

“You are a worthless medicine man,” I cry. “You cannot see danger. You only see debts.” 

This is too much. I have insulted the spiritual leader of the tribe. 

“There is no danger except him!” the medicine man yells. “Hold the witch down.”

They get the chilli as far as my cheek, the corner of my eye. 

I point through the doorway. The elders turn, wonder and then finally they see. Far tribers entering our village.

Everyone runs to their spears. The witch doctor dies of a great red wound that opens in his back. Many are captured and chained. A few get away into the bush.

We lie hidden for two days. What greed has made the far tribers attack again, stronger than their awe of a gifted one, a babe who speaks like a god? 

The far tribers fire our village, loot our goods, feast on our cattle, drink our palm wine, take our women. Then they chain the survivors together. My brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles stand hunched like beaten beasts.

My father is weak and foolish but he loves his children and will not see them kidnapped into slavery. He hurls his spear. 

There is a roar like thunder and my father spins round to face me. His heart bursts out through a hole in his chest.

“Father!”

“Throw down your spears and stand still or die like him,” shouts a far triber. 

“He’s saying throw down our spears,” I tell the others.  “We can’t fight thunder weapons with spears.”

My oldest brother, the hero of my childhood, is  crazed with grief for our father. He fights like a cat as they bind us. They beat him to the ground.

“Not too hard!” shouts a far triber. “They have a long way to march.”

We are chained and neck-braced, formed into a long line. I hear their name for it. A slave caravan.

Other captors from other villages join the caravan in chains or two-man neck braces. Not all are kidnapped. Many are criminals or born slaves or prisoners of war. Some have been sold to our captors as a punishment for theft or violence or witchcraft. Some are children who have been robbed from their beds when their parents were out!

My youngest brother cries out to rest. I strain my head round against the neck brace. My brace partner whispers, eyes forward. “Let him die, brother,” he says. 

A club across my head drives me forward. Lightning dazes my brain. I shake my head. By the time I am able to see again and look round, the vultures are gathering above my brother. 

I learn to stop thinking. Stop feeling. Just survive. 

“March!” yell our kidnappers.

The slave trail is well-beaten now and safe from ambush. We pass many other peoples and lands beyond the stories of our own. I note wise ways of tilling the earth I’ve never imagined. I see towns and vast armies. In some places, men and women farm the land together and there are women fighters. I see gums, cotton, redwood, cotton. We thought we were rich. But our land-yields are nothing to this.

We come to a well-guarded land of plenty. It is the land of the richest tribe I have ever seen. The far-tribers sell us for beads and thunder guns.  Then they run for the hills. 

We begin to forget our own land in this thronging market village with rich soil and ripe pumpkins and yams piled bigger than our village’s food for a year. 

I get work - respectable work for my age and status: a porter like the free porters employed by our new captors. I live like a free boy. 

Then we move on and I remember I am a slave. 

We arrive at last in a big town and stay for six months. I work as an apprentice to a goldsmith. 

Then I am sold again, in a busy slave market. This tribe is rich but it sells human beings and this makes them savages in our eyes. The gods will be angry. Slavery is forbidden among our own people. 

We march slowly now. There is no going back, no rescue for our captors to fear. The heavy air greases our skins. Our new captors have the same skin as us but the sodden air weighs on ours like a sorrow. 

Months pass and worse follows. They bring us down winding trails towards the dense rain forests of the coast. We hear the growl and feel the hot breath of a strange ocean. We can hardly breathe. And, here at the end of the world, we are sold again. 

And that’s where I get the biggest shock of my life. I thought I’d suffered everything on our long march down from the mountains, Now I see men without blood in their faces, faces of living skulls. 

White men. 

*

I try to run. I am dragged back by my chains. A skull-faced soldier strikes me a mighty blow with the butt of his musket. 

They drive us towards their great fort. Shining white, with crafted stone walls and marvellous flights of steps carved in rock. But with a ghostly grinning skull and cross bones painted on one of its ornamental walls. Ani protect us, these death-men are driving us alive into the Place of the Dead!

 

Chapter Four

Amelia's Journal.

Whiteladies Road on a Saturday morning! Wide pavements thronged with shoppers. Shop windows full of fashions! Bristol blue glass; copper pans; dazzling rainbows of American cotton and Chinese silk. Ornaments of African gold. Coffee shops selling chocolate and sugared cakes. Heaven!

Or it would be if only wish Papa were here with us. I have not seen him for three years. 

We live in a fairy tale castle in the Clifton clouds! The firnest of the new town houses that spread like elegant lilies across the brow of the hill all the way from Whiteladies Road to the Clifton gorge. 

Everything in our mansion is new: the white paint, the wallpapers, the carpets, even the furniture, paintings and ornaments. Even our clothes and linen seem to all be new these days and new parcels arrive daily. We are new. 

The sun streams into my room from the early afternoon until it goes down over the stately woods of Somerset on the other side of the gorge. The view is magnificent, steepling visions of Bristol to the left, the mighty river boring sea-wards in its mighty gorge below and to the right. Matthew (our gardener) warns me only to pick the bluebells nearer the house. Below the second wicket, our garden plunges suddenly over sheer cliffs a thousand feet into the river. My little brotehr James of course plays beyond the wicket at every opportunity. 

My room has a ceiling like fresh icing on a birthday cake. Its edges are graced with cornices – as fine as any in Bath - and at its heart is a pure white rose: petal, leaf and twig perfect in every detail. The craftsman objected to the lack of thorns but my father’s orders were clear: “no sharpness of tree, apple or serpent to haunt the Eden of my little Princess.” 

Dear Papa!

I sleep in a cloud of American cotton and Bath lace, on white cloud pillow surrounded amid the blue sky of my thick vellum wallpaper.

Why then, dear journal, am I not perfectly happy?

I miss Papa in our good old merchant’s house on the river: the smell of his outdoor coats, the warmth of his greeting at the end of the day.

Bessie says he will return with the summer tide, as handsome and fine as a swallow in his winged blue coat and black breeches and sun-reddened face. Even richer and finer than he went.

“But Bessie, you said that last summer” I wail.

“One of these summers, God willing, your father will return. Your father must be here to give away his Princess. ”

“Give away his Princess?”

Bessie smiles. “To her young Prince, when he comes. Now what is my minx nibbling there?”

She clucks her displeasure. “Chocolate! And after I have scrubbed your teeth and whitened them with salt too! The Lord forgive you – perhaps this is why your father does not come home!”

I am mortified. Bessie’s God is a lot sterner than mine!

 

She brushes my golden locks at the window – a hundred times each side, in the May evening light. 

She prays with me. As she says ‘Amen’, I notice the contours beginning to bloom under the bodice of my new night-dress and smile with secret pride. 

“I will say a prayer for your family Bessie.”

She nods but her eyes are moist. 

“Dear Lord, help Bessie in her trouble. There is illness in her home: a beloved brother has died and another is sick and she has been unable to leave her duties to visit him. Amen.”

“You are very good, Miss,” she sighs.

 

Chapter Five

The white soldiers are shouting, herding us into cells with the butts of their muskets. The roofs of the cells curve like white skulls. 

There is room for thirty or forty slaves in each cell. The soldiers count us in with harsh voices. Ten, twenty, fifty, sixty, eighty. Still the soldiers drive them in. We scream. No more! Mercy! A hundred, a hundred and twenty. We keep pressing to the wall, further away from the air of the door. A hundred and thirty, a hundred and forty. A hundred and fifty. They slam the doors shut. 

Men are crying to the gods like frightened children. The doors open again. We breathe in relief. 

But the doors only admit more misery. One hundred and sixty. One hundred and seventy. Still more  men are clubbed in through the door. 

They count two hundred into our cell. They force the doors shut again - and start filling the next cell with two hundred more. 

Our eyes adjust to the darkness. Men are shackled to each other or manacled to the back wall. We are a packed cargo of upright bodies. The cell reeks with fear.

My nose cannot adjust to the filth. There is nowhere to go to the toilet. We fidget, strain,  sleep and excrete waste where we stand. 

“What a stink,” I hear a white man say. “Worse than apes!”

“What happens to the women?” wails a young man named Uwozulu pulling at his chains. “I’m worried about my woman.”

“They are in dungeons just like this,” says my shackle partner, “Except for a staircase that leads down from the white governor's chambers. His men will stand on a balcony and look down on them. Is your woman beautiful?”

Uwozulu’s features soften. I see his heart in his eyes, heavy with love. “Yes.”

“Then she will be a concubine for a white man.”

Uwozulu strains towards the cell doors on his manacle, muscles bulging, butting furious slaves out the way as he does so. 

The other restrains him. “Better than where this dungeon leads.”

He is not listening. “Let me out!”  

“There is only one way out. Through the Gate of No Return.” 

Frightened faces listen in the dark.

“I have seen it. I was next in line to go through but a storm came outside and they brought us back. It is a grid of iron bars, with a tiny opening the size of man’s head at the top, a head with bars all round it. You go through it into the Dark. No-one comes back.”

The weather on that coast is as poisonous as a snake. Even the locals outside hate this endless jungle heat. We are inside a cramped dungeon, shackled, sweat-soaked, cheek to cheek, sick.

We listen to a great ocean thundering and roaring outside our dungeon walls. We do that for two days and nights.

The door bursts open like a tear of thunder. “Unsold slaves – out.” The soldiers wrench the manacles from one or two, including Uwozulu. 

“He will escape, that one,” I whisper. 

“You see it?” A boy near me speaks. He is younger than me, very tall, deep-chested, amazingly strong. The barrel of his chest is like a great tree.  He is the son of a tribal leader and there is also a natural leadership in his presence. He would have made a wise and valiant elder among his own people. 

His name is Ekwefu. During the long descent from the mountains he has become a man, settling disputes between slaves. Now the white soldiers, sensing his leadership, make an example of him. He has gentle eyes, full of sadness, and some of his great strength is wasting now in the disease-cauldron of our captivity.

“Yes,” I sigh. “I see his escape.”

“What is your name, brother?” Ekwefu asks.

“Africa,” I say. 

He looks at me curiously, then seems to understand. I have buried my real name. Everything else has been taken from me.

A few hours later, Uwozulu comes back in chains from the slave market, beaten, bruised, branded, broken.

“Some escape!” scoffs an older man. 

“Uwozulu?” Ekwefu speaks.

The young man shakes his head, as if disowning his own name.  

“What happened, brother?”

“They sold me for a musket and three bales of cloth. They have my woman. ” He weeps. We try to turn away our heads in the crush to give him some respect. 

 

“They stood me on a stone facing the ocean and two white sea captains bid for me. They took off my chains to show me off. I waited my moment – and ran.”

I began to see. “Then ...they caught you?”

“No. I was free.”

Silence. 

I saw all then. “You came back for your woman.”

“I found where they had taken her. I fought them about there were too many soldiers, too many clubs.” He hangs his head. 

A crash of chains and bolts as doors are opened again. “J brands!” the white soldiers call. 

“To the Gate of No Return!” whimpers the old man.

The soldiers push in, seizing anyone bearing the J brand. We are shackled together and pushed down through a dimly-lit stone tunnel. 

The Gift is with me.  Pain and suffering make it wax like a dark moon. But what use is it to me here?

The Gate of No Return grins at us with iron teeth. “I cannot go there.” I fight like a lion to escape. “It is The Gate of Death.”

“You’ll go through the gates of hell if we tell you to!” snap the soldiers. They drag and kick me towards it until I lie half-conscious on the rock floor. “This one’s trouble,” said a soldier, his skull-white face grinning above me. “But he’ll learn his lesson on Jardine’s ship, that’s for sure.” 

His companion laughs. “Jardine brands are they? Oh dear.”

I beg them. “I cannot meet my dead ancestors as a living boy. It is forbidden!” 

All they hear is the screeching of a brute. They drag me by my hide, kick me through. I scramble back.

“Slippery as a black panther,” One stops using his musket to bludgeon me and raises it instead to fire.  

They see me go still. My eyes disappear upwards, white globes in a glistening black face. They are transfixed “A demon!” they gasp.

I watch from above my body. 

The smell of evil: death-cold sand and sea wrack running with rats. A great pounding roar of ocean at the mouth of a tunnel… 

Five sailors with guns. White waves breaking across the backs of a black tide. Whips singing in the air and white snarls cursing our slowness. 

Our women emerge onto the sands and into the little boats like us.  But these are not women we recognise.  Eyes wide with disgrace and pain and the fear of more. Terrified ghosts of themselves. They would eat dirt if they had any.

Skull-faced sailors push us onto rowing boats. Locals row us onto a world that moves below. The sea. I rock on its great upturned belly for the first time, terrified.

I look down on a terrible unending story.

The life-blood of Africa rivering down from mountains, forests and plains, converging on a cluster of white ports, flowing through a fatal wound in a maimed continent. I count each West African one by one: ten, a hundred, hundreds, a thousand, a thousand thousands, all bleeding away into the sea – millions through four centuries of bleeding, five million, ten millions, twelve millions, clubbed and kicked through the “The Gate of No Return.” I stop counting.

Twelve millions rowed in quiet little boats onto tall ships of Death, leaving their souls behind in Africa. 

 

Chapter Six

The moon breaks suddenly through the clouds, like a hope in hell. A woman breaks free. 

The ghost-faced sailors are preoccupied with counting. But I see her tread water, ride the breakers, and then splash through the wild surf and back for her soul. She flies like a bird along the beach – on and on and on and on she flies, beyond notice or capture – all along the line of moonlit trees and up the low cliffs towards the bush. 

Her man looks up and sees her. The moon shines in his eyes. He calls a name and leaps from the boat. He makes the shore.

Uwozulu is dancing for sheer joy. Joy of his homeland and the woman he’d found again. Joy of his soul. He is in the throes of his joy when the sailors shoot him. 

Ekwefu groans. Two slaves howl in protest. 

They are shot too, in case anyone is thinking about following Uwozulu. No-one tries anything after that. It is the death of hope.

Many of us are sick even before we go aboard the ships. Savage new diseases of the African coast taking root like a verucca in our souls, sick in heart and body too. Diseases that  will flower into horrible life in the days and weeks to come. 

My thoughts are interrupted. “Perhaps Uwozulu is better dead,” sighs Ekwefu. He has waited nine weeks in the coastal camp to be sold and every week took its toll. I was luckier. Two weeks.

“They broke me, brother. Not just my body. Me.”

Through the planks above, I see huge anxious eyes looking down at me.

“Ekwefu?”

He points at his broken mouth. It is swollen, lop-sided, horrible to look at. It can hardly speak.

It is trying to express an ocean of pain. More than a continent can bear. 

“They force-fed me... I spat it out. It was their slop that was keeping me in this hole, making a slave of me. If I starved myself, I would be free.

“On the fourth day, two of them held my mouth open and a third came holding something. My eyes went wide when I saw it.

“A poker! Heated cherry-red. They rammed my mouth with slop as usual. I spat it out. 

“They clamped my jaws open again with their gloves and this time it was the poker they fed me. 

“My tongue felt like I’d swallowed a lamp full of burning palm oil. And they were shovelling slop into me again. I swallowed through the fire and pain. They kept ramming. I kept swallowing. Anything to cover that dreadful burning. They got their slave slop into my belly. 

“I awoke to a tongue of fire and a mouth that had eaten. Now I am a slave forever..”

Those most seasoned to the coast winds like Ekwefu, are also those most weakened by them. 

But I too grow sick now, waiting to embark in this evil hold, cooked in the heat, buffeted by the hot winds off the ocean. 

Each day as we wake we check each other’s survival.

“Ekwefu?”

“Yes brother.”

“You alive?”

“Is that body on the shelf above you moving?”

I looked up through the planks. “Yes.”

“Then I’m alive, brother.” 

Bolts of pain flicker across my brow and the white noise of the sailors’ language makes sense again. 

“They’re packed in like weevils as it is and you want to add more! What’s Jardine gonna say?”

“He’s gonna say that,” snarls Jardine himself, appearing from the deck.  

He stands tall and dark above us. “Keep the pallets jam full, lads. The first forty days at sea will see scores of ’em dead – or so sick they’ll wish they was. Plenty space enough when they goes overboard. So pack ’em in, like I told you!”

Ekwefu groans. Or I groan. I cannot tell which. 

Chapter Seven

I wake up on deck, with sea spray washing my face. Fresh air! “Let’s give him a bath,” laughs a sailor to his mate. 

And they lift something light.

A body. Is it mine? 

They count – grunting and chortling at the end of each swing – uh one uh two uh three uh four and – and they swing the dead weight of a slave overboard towards the waiting sharks. 

It’s not me. I do not fly through air or sink into water. There is still solid wood between the sea and my back. 

Africans do not joke about death like this. When kidnappers first came to Ekwefu’s village they abused the path of the dead. No children were born for a year. The dead haunted the living and the streams dried up. 

Now I see what they are throwing overboard! 

“Ekwefu!” 

He doesn’t know where he is either. 

Ekwefu swinging towards the sharks. And the white sailors laugh. 

*

Jardine is not laughing. “We can lose fifty slaves. At a pinch we can lose a hundred and fifty. Two hundred hard-working Africans will still make our fortunes. But we can’t lose them all!”

The crew have stopped moving out the black corpses. Twenty white sailors have also died.

“We have a London regulator aboard, gentlemen, assisting our regulation surgeon. Our gentle-born masters in England are helpfully impeding our work and also reducing the numbers honest tradesmen can carry in future - by one hundred. They want to ruin me, Captain. Do you want to ruin me as well?”

“No, Mr Jardine, we do not. For all our wages depend on it.”  

Jardine shouts. “A whole cargo of slaves dying! So much for the surgeon? I’ll thrown them all overboard and claim the insurance money!”

*

I wake up below, on a different shelf. The stench here is not my stench. They have decided I can recover, then. 

I am too alive. My veins are swollen rivers of pain, bursting their banks.

I race away into my thoughts. Mad thoughts, faster than a cheetah. A vulture swooping down onto dead black flesh. 

I let it eat.

Distant voices float down from aloft. “Brace yourself, shipmates,“ barks the surgeon, swigging a bottle. “This is the Twelve Days of Christmas for the bloody flux,” he spits, wiping at a trickle of saliva in his beard. “Three to five weeks out of Africa, it spreads like the plague.” 

The white sailors laugh. 

Someone is pouring liquid down my throat. 

My ears hear every sound in agonising detail, every creak and roll of the ship. I hear fish flicker between sharks below us, monsters of the deep talking. I hear Ekwefu wailing. 

“Is it fatal?” asks an educated voice. The assistant surgeon.

The surgeon swigs. “Not unless you’re speaking to a dead man, lad. I’ve had it twice.” 

A pause. I sense the surgeon waiting for an answer that never comes.

The ‘lad’ says. “We have to stop it polluting the supplies and the sanitation!” 

“It’s already polluted the supplies - and what our death-faced captain calls sanitation, boy.”

“How did it get on?”

“Like the rats. You’ll never stop them either, however much you shave a hundred slaves off the maximum load, or speed up the voyage or improve the food -”

“Food!” snorts the young assistant, thinking of the grey mash he’d watched doled out earlier. 

The surgeon laughs. “It ain’t dainty but it’s nutritious – has to be, to keep the cargo breathing. But it won’t stop coast-brewed dysentery coming aboard, in the slaves’ guts. Where it spreads like the devil it is.” 

The assistant surgeon consults his checklist of London regulations, warned in advance that Bristolians have always ignored directions from its great slave port rival.  He notes the obedient presence of ‘side lights and ventilation ports, with hatches to be closed in inclement weather inserted on the sides of ships between the gun ports and above the slave platforms creating air flow to force outside air into side rooms though the side lights along the bulk heads.’ He ticks the box.

Now he checks ratios and structures. ‘3:1:2 ratio of men: boys: women; warship-copper sheathing for speed and endurance in tropical waters; special accommodations in the building spec for the temporary slave decks’; ‘decks divided by bulkheads made of open grates’… He takes his hand from his mouth and ticks some more boxes.

The surgeon feels my brow. “This victim of the bloody flux has some life in him still. You call yourself a surgeon. What can we do for him?”

“…Another ration of lime juice?”

“What good is that going to do against the dysentery – except perhaps blow him so full of wind the ship will carry itself to Jamaica! I’m not even sure it helps with the scurvy.”

“Inoculate him again”

“That jab up the jacksie was against the small pox, lad, which is why only three slaves have died of it. It will do nothing against the flux, as any genuine surgeon’s assistant should know.”

The surgeon spits on the floor. It joins all the other fluids. 

The assistant has a choking fit. “Sweet Mercy, this fug will be the death of me. What on earth was slaving like before it was regulated by London?”

“Ha! When London led the trade, there were no regulations at all! Except African fort taxes lining London pockets. Bristol avoided them like customs charges of course. We had slaves hidden everywhere– cabins, lifeboats, galleys: little extras stowed away for the crew to sell, Those slaves were the lucky ones – living in luxury – until they were sold.”

The assistant surgeon made disapproving noises.

“Life was free and easy, boy. Except for the slaves of course. The regulations only started when London lost leadership of the trade. In the good old days slavers only had a merchant shipman’s common sense - and the logic of common greed – to be our guiding star through the murky waters of this wicked world.” The surgeon growls with laughter.  “And even when we came back empty from the Americas, because the slave ships were too small from the big cargoes, we still made so much profit from the Middle Passage it didn’t matter. No surgeons then. All we took on board was provisions and water for double the expected voyage time. You London busybodies can’t tell a Bristolian how to drink Africa’s blood.” He swigs. “I’m talking the 1750s, mind, Bristol’s heyday. It’s Liverpool that London will have to regulate now.”

“You show remarkably little respect for the regulations, Sir.”

“I’m a surgeon. What good are regulations against all this bacterial dysentery, fifteen cases measles, a score of yellow fevers, a dozen malarias- all coastal diseases the slaves brought on board from the forts and the camps.”

“But-?”

“No medicine can cure an organ this diseased. It  needs cutting out.”

“Forgive me, are you ..are you suggesting that the trade ...cannot be regulated?”

The surgeon grabs the assistant’s fashionable London lapels. “Who wants to know?”

The assistant looks frightened. “I’m merely curious.”

The surgeon’s boozy breath comes closer. “And curiosity killed the ship’s cat, lad. Being a London regulator is bad enough. If I find you’re gathering propaganda for one of these damned abolitionists. Well?”

The assistant looks terrified. “I wish only to help these wretches. Wouldn’t Mr Jardine benefit if we applied some of the new regulations more stringently?”

“Oh stow it, lad. What do you think this is – a hospital? For damaged cargo it’s a floating coffin. The only quarantine is overboard.”

“Please - what can we do?”  

“Nothing. The bloody flux has no cures but time and endurance. This poor beggar will live or die without us like all the others.” He looks around the wretched hold.  “The only cure to all this is,” the surgeon drops his voice “…abolition.” A pause. “That’s what you think, don’t you?”

The young man goes white as Death. “Yes, God help me. I’m an abolitionist and proud of it. This trade makes me ashamed to be an Englishman. Now do your worst.”

 

The surgeon looks up as footsteps come down a ladder. He lowers his voice. “You’re not dealing with curates, lad. This lot will slip you overboard along with the cargo at the slightest provocation. Are you collecting data for the campaign?”

A young officer named emerges down a ladder now, holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth. 

“Surgeon, Mr Jardine’s compliments and 

He wishes to speak to your assistant.”

But that is as far as the officer gets. His dinner – a fine one of seven courses and several wines at the captain’s table – erupts in evil-smelling stages over his fine coat. He crouches groaning near the filthy floor and inhales our misery.

The surgeon looks round at the sick officer anxiously. He hisses into the assistant’s ear. “God’s teeth, I gave you the password! Why didn’t you answer?”

“The password?”

“I said I’d had the bloody flux twice. No-one survives the bloody flux twice! You were supposed to say Ship shape and Bristol fashion.”

“I missed it – I was too upset.-”

“It’s no good being upset. If you want to help these wretches, and save the good name of England from the taint of African blood, serve the cause with a hard eye and keep your soft heart for the ladies ashore. Now they will send armed men for you in a moment. Protest your innocence. And tell Jardine you’ve been watching me, on behalf of the pro-slave lobby. Say you think my cabin should be searched. They will find my report.”

“But they’ll destroy it.”

“And trust you for telling them. And when you get ashore, you can make your own report to one of our agents. His codename is ‘Methody’. He will contact you and take your report to the Jamaican assembly. It will help to provoke a debate about the future of the slave trade.”

“But what about you?” 

“They will kill me of course. But my life is small price. Now harden your heart for the work.”

The assistant clasps the surgeon’s hand, tears in his eyes. “I honour you, Sir.”

“It is not so hard. I’m dying anyway. Of the bloody flux -”

The surgeon collapses. The assistant holds him tightly a moment and then begins yelling. “Help! Ho! An abolitionist! An abolitionist trying to kill me!”

The young officer looks up from his vomit and blows a whistle.

As armed sailors come below, the surgeon gives his final performance. He waves his bottle above his head and yells. “Behold, the vampires of Africa. The whole of England aboard the Mary. The money-crazed merchant, hoping to marry a duchess. The merchant of Bristol, here in triple evil as slaver and planter. The disgraced second son with his snout in the national coffers and his nib where it shouldn’t be. The ruffians of Bristol press-ganged into hell through the Hole in the Wall, the common criminals trading the transport ships to Botany Bay for a lost soul and treble the pay. The paupers kidnapped by bad fortune, in the wrong place at the wrong time. The star-gazing idealist blown thousands of miles off course by the prevailing wind. I toast you all, our national disgrace. And this Judas here too, who sells me to the devil!” 

A sailor clubs him over the head with the butt his musket.

They stop his mouth then. But by the look in the younger man’s eye, they won’t stop his assistant’s. 

And, Gift help me,  they won’t stop mine. 

 

Chapter Eight

SS Mary, May 25, 1770

To: Thomas Clarkson from 

Surgeon Jones will not get a hero’s testament in any official document that comes off the Mary. And I cannot do him justice here. Herewith the cold facts of the case, written with trembling hand.

He is dead – officially from amoebic dysentry (with the added but unmentioned complication of a soldier’s musket blow across the head prior to being thrown overboard) and his death is a great convenience to Captain Hill and his master, Jardine. Hill’s yellow-toothed smile and Jardine’s nod of approval as the body went overboard was sickening. 

Everything he wrote, including his detailed report to you, went overboard with him. It lives now only in the sea’s memory and this report.  And in the mute souls of these poor Africans.  

Mr Jones had a distinguished career with the Royal Navy on merchantmen and, as his health waned, on convict ships and finally on slavers. He had no truck with abolition until then. The blood of the African trade turned his wits, they say. I would rather say, they brought him to his senses. 

I began as an abolitionist – a position based on reading and religion in my father’s Rectory library, though Experience has since made me enough of a sea surgeon to spy on devils like Jardine. Mr Jones was so cleverly ‘under cover’ that I never realised we were brothers in the cause until the very end. Indeed, I spent most of the voyage loathing him for his complicity.  

Alas, now I myself am ill unto death with the dysentery. I may also be suspected of sympathy with the cause of abolition. This package is a detailed testament to the evil of the slave trade, to be smuggled off ship via a bearer they will least expect. If I die before we arrive in Jamaica, it may be intercepted or lost. But, with God’s will, you, reader, whoever you are, will receive it –

The cause lives on.

 

Chapter Ten

I wake to a man being flogged on the deck. 

“Ninety seven, ninety eight, ninety nine, one hund-red! Release the prisoner.”

They release him and he staggers into view above me. The heat of the deck and the smell of blood suffocate me. Captain Hill snarls that this is the price to be paid for ‘insubordination’. 

I stare in amazement. They are flogging the white sailor who called me Africa.

“Able Seaman O’Brien, you are so far beneath contempt that we are punishing you with the leaders of the slave mutiny, for in truth though of English blood and baptised in the Christian religion–” 

O’Brien spits. 

“You are no better than the beasts we ship.”

He looks at me as they drag him to my side. Or his eyes look. He does not see.

Twelve ‘leaders’ of an African ‘mutiny’ are flogged in the savage heat. A hundred lashes each, shared between twenty sailors. As an example to other slaves. 

The blood has tarred O’Brien’s skin black. His muscles stand out like hard rope. In his black pain, we are brothers.

“O’Brien?”

His eyes jerk open, stare at the forest of tight black curls around my head. His own long straight hair is tied tightly with a dirty ribbon into a tail behind. “Africa? You have learned our tongue - in that hell-hold!”

“It is my gift. Why do they treat you-”

“Like a Black? Ha!” He winces as a fly lands on his mangled flesh. “Bristol Irish are the blacks of England, boy!”

“You were kidnapped? Like us?”

“Aye. We herd you to keep ourselves one deck above the lowest.”

I am angry. “No. You sold yourself to death. We did not have that choice.”

O’Brien shakes his head. “No man should suffer as you in those holds, boy. But it is Jardine and his ilk who put you there, not I. I would rather tend horses with a kind hand than lord it over slaves in that hell. Ill winds govern this world – and one blew me here.”

I refuse to grant him his ill wind, his lie to himself.    

“One of the officers give me something. He paid me a princely sum to guard it, too. I was to give it to the Methody ashore, he says, who would pay me a sum to match it. Black Jack O’Brien I says to meself, you’ve the luck of the devil in ye. I’d the devil’s luck all right. They found the money and accused me of looting it from assistant surgeon West’s corpse. Witnesses proved otherwise. But they flogged me for it anyway.”

I lie in the savage heat watching Thomas and his ‘officer class’ move to and fro, ordering bodies overboard, movements of cargo. “And they took it back?”

“The gold yes.”

“And the story?”

He grimaces, then grins. “That would be telling.”

 

Chapter Eleven

The quarantine period stretches off like the equator itself, hot and endless.

Though tough as tarred rope, muscles bulging under tattoos and better fed than us, the sailors too are exhausted and ill. They have been feeding ‘cargo’, tending the sick, rooting out corpses, throwing bodies overboard, and weathering all the sea can throw at them, for two and a half months.

“It’s twelve festering weeks since we left Africa. I did my last slave voyage in two months, got paid off and I’d drunk half the ports of Barbados dry by now. What’s the delay?”

“Quarantine, Jack. It’s always longer here.” 

“I’m sick of these hell-holds. I want to forget myself - and all I’ve done - in Jamaican rum.”

They loll in the deadening heat and talk of their home city. 

“I could fancy one of these survivors as a little house slave meself, boys,” says Jack. “Paint ’em up a bit to cover the damage. I’d be proper Queen’s Square gentry then.” 

Jack makes his voice sound like one of the officers. “Ho! Put these togs on, damn you. I wants you done up in a white wig and blue silk suit – an’ this pretty yellow westcoat, white frilled front and snow-white stockings. And this adorable little gold collar with your name on it!”

“I’d prefer one of the gals meself!”

“’ark at ee! Like that advert we read in Bristol. ‘ealthy Negro girl about fifteen years, speaks good English, works at her needle, does household work, and has had the smallpox.” 

“A better deal than she’d get in Liverpool, eh Irish? They’re advertising slaves for factory work now. Blacks working for wages in Manchester factories! Taking our jobs! Whatever next!” 

“Our women, that’s what next.”

“Manchester factories. That’s real work, that,” says Irish. “Not like the gardening they get in Jamaica!”

“Ah stow it, Irish. A day on one of Jardine’s plantations would kill better men than thee.”

“It does,” says a black sailor. “I’ve done it.”

“You should run away, Abe. They’d put you in the paper like this one. Runaway Slave - Reward Offered.” The sailor reads in a gentry voice, making the others groan with laughter. “Negro boy named Will, aged about 22, he had a grey suit, and speaks English well. Whoever secures him, and gives notice to Mr Lloyd (the Insurer) at his coffee house in Tower St shall have a guinea reward.”

“And the boy shell heve a jolly good thweshing!” laughs a sailor. 

“Sure, but there’s always some soft hearted soul who’ll assist the runaways,” says Irish.

“Escaping isn’t a crime. Just an offence.”

“An offence! Sometimes I think the old country’s on the side of the slaves more than it is on the English!”

 

They pass a bottle of rum between them and laugh. Two go below among the ‘second rate slaves’ for a woman.

One comes over and checks me. 

“Is he dead yet?”

“Think so. Shall I dump him in the dock?”

“No! Can’t risk another rogue corpse in there– you know what the Company clerks are like.”

“Well Jardine won’t want to pay duty on a dead one.”

“See if he recovers first.”

“Beautiful island, Jamaical – shame about all the regulations.”

“A treasured island, mate.”

“A slave dock,” protested the black sailor.  “Think of all the poor Africans passing through this paradise on their way to plantation hell.”

“What are you whinging for – you got away didn’t you?”

“My brothers and sisters didn’t. I watched them sail out of this very dock. They’re in the goldmines of the Brazils now.”

“Relax, mate, we can go ashore and forget it all soon. You’ll go mad else.”

“I’d rather sup with the devil than set foot there.”

“Stop thinking about it. Stop talking about it.”

The black sailor’s eyes widen in terror. “Seasoning! Breaking men like horses. So that the masters can ride them to death. I’ve had it done to me once. The white masters catch me ashore there, mate, and they’ll season me all over again. ”

“They can’t – you’re a sailor now.”

The former slave stares at his ‘mate’ but he is seeing an earlier time and place. 

*

I play dead among the real corpses, listening, dreaming. So that sailor escaped. Maybe I can?

 

Chapter Twelve

I wake to a whip across my chest, a white man shouting and a dog barking. My eyes open wide. This is the living nightmare. All around my fellow slaves are being kicked out of their sleep and into the dark before dawn. 

I did not escape. I did not die either. And now, I am on Jardine’s plantation.

On my first night here – fearful of the toil and seasoning - I messed my bed, like an animal or an infant. I had to smuggle the mess out in the straw and then had no straw to lie on. But I could not bear the thought of the men laughing at me.

They were too fearful themselves to laugh at me. But I did not know that then.

I think this is my third day on the plantation, perhaps the fourth. It feels like the hundredth. 

I am being ‘seasoned’ among the sugar cane. It grows everywhere. Three in every four slaves on Jamaica are toiling in it. 

I cut the sugar cane until my hands blister. I hate it as much as the white man loves it. It buys the white man half the world. And it grows best in places that are too hot for his white skin. 

An old slave called Mad Jim shows me how to cut it. He is old and broken but he cuts it faster than I have ever seen anyone crop anything. “I’m the tropical African, I slave for the white man; I bleed at the speed of his hot white greed,” rhymes Jim as he works. “A free man will kill his bones to live, will spill his sweat and rack his breath. But only a slave can be worked to death. An army of slaves to feed the greed of the great white bitch. So Africa comes to Jamaica to make the white man rich.” 

 

An overseer snarls. “Shut up and work.”

We work. 

An hour before noon, Jardine passes with his savage dog. 

“Is there no cool place on this damned plantation!” he complains. 

He is jealous of other masters on hillier islands who have houses in ‘pleasant locations’. But he is all the richer for it. 

Today we are in full view of the sea all day. We hate that sea. It brought us here. The plantation stretches its acres of aching black backs along the coast and inland. I prefer the sea hidden by the sugar cane rising behind us. 

‘Who is your owner, boy?’ Jardine demands again and again, voice rising with heat and fury. He believes he is teaching me his language. The Gift already knows his language and despises him. I pretend I do not understand 

He snatches the whip from his driver. “Who is your owner?” he demands once more, through clenched teeth. The whip handle cracks across the back of my head.

I show him his brand and say ‘Master’ but not soon enough. The dog strains on its leash and snarls into my face.

Jardine nods at the whip man. The whip-man gives me a cut across the back. 

This is ‘seasoning.’

 

I am set to work digging holes in the fields, in a long line of other slaves. I am given a hat to cover my head and soon realise why. The midday sun would boil an elephant. 

The holes have to be dug very carefully and I keep getting it wrong. The heat makes me delirious.

Men and women in various headgear and colourful clothing that reminds me of Africa toil alongside me. 

After we’ve dug hundreds of acres of holes, we plant the sugar cane. It is a relief at first because the toil is different. I find something almost homely in planting root cane in the soil. The aches and blisters are in different places. But the relief does not last. I soon find out that planting is harder for me than digging.  

I faint several times through the long afternoon but am forbidden food and water until I have finished my quota. None dares to help me. 

My mind is seeing a white city on a green hill far away. It is very beautiful but I fear it is the vision of a dying man. 

*

I am housed with the other slaves in a dormitory. There are slaves from nations all over West Africa, and many languages. None speaks my own, which I am beginning to forget. We make ourselves understood in hard-learned English. They are surprised I have picked it up so quickly. It has taken them many months and beatings. I am too disheartened to tell them of the Gift.  We speak of Africa, of the customs and beliefs we remember, sometimes still practise. One young man arrives who even remembers my tribe. 

“Are my people still farming the Good Lands near the river?”

“Every day the slavers come with thunder guns.” He looks half-mad with terror. “How could this happen to us?”

I try to summon the Gift to answer the same question. But the Gift does not answer.

Out toil changes again after the planting. Now we have to manure and weed the growing fields, tending them constantly. If only it were not always on such a huge scale and at such a cruel speed with so little rest in such brain-numbing heat, this work would have suited me well. Many of us did similar work in Africa. And here the soil is richer, better yielding. 

But the earth moans with us at the greed of the white man. 

I hear Ani, the earth goddess, crying, like a woman repeatedly raped, endlessly yielding. 

There is no more manuring and tending to be done. I am sent to the plantation cattle mills, then to the stables for the mules and camels. These animals draw the carts full of our harvested sugar cane. 

Now I am sent on an errand to the carpenters. Several times I have to help the cooper fasten his metal hoops around the wooden barrels. Despite the heat of the metal, which burns me, this is a kinder work than the slavery in the fields. The carpenters and coopers are skilled white men who work hard but work free, enjoying their work. 

They treat me as a helper, not a slave, and when they order me to carry out tasks, they do so without the disrespect I’d learned in the fields. 

“Don’t soften up a Black like that – no good will come of it,” snaps the whip man. 

The carpenter does not agree. “A beast works better for a little kindness, let alone a boy-”

“Jardine shall hear of this,” says the whip man.

After the whip-man goes, the carpenter winks at me. I am sorry to leave his shop.

The crop is finally mature. Mad Jim tells me this means I’ve been on the plantation now about fifteen months, a long time for a boy. Like the crop, I have grown. A good deal taller and – though not well fed enough or rested enough to be handsome –lean and muscular with the hard labour in the fields. Some of the women in the line look sideways at me differently now, less like a mother clucking over my hurts, or a sister sharing them. They use a word in their language that describes a crop in its glory. I like the way they look at me.

Cutting the mature stalks is at least an upright job. You stand, leaning backwards with the leaves clutched in one hand and a blade in the other. Or you lean forward to clutch, cut and clear the cropped stalks out of your way. 

I like having a blade in my hand – it makes me feel like a warrior and I grin at the women and girls who say so – but the blisters it gives me are those of a drudge. After the first hour, most of us are too weary to talk to each other about anything. None of us can summon the energy to think about burying the blade in the overseer’s snarling face or whip-hand, let alone actually do it. The blisters break and sting and the next day’s labour will rub sweat in the wounds. 

So I move the handle and make new blisters in new places. Until I have no new places left and I have to shift the blade back to the original blisters. So I work through the stinging barriers of pain. My hands grow harder and harder as the weeks go on – though never quite hard enough for the work – and never as hard as my heart against my masters.

One day there is a lull in the harvesting at last. I breathe more easily. But I am spotted resting and sent over to the carts. They are always on the lookout for any sign of slacking or disobedience in a new slave. Once a slave is ‘seasoned’, the slave is his own slave-master: he drives himself to death, like Jim. 

Jim is broken, a slave in his soul. Except for his mad rhyming, out of a smiling face. The whip comes down from a man on horseback next to the cart. “Shut up you old fool” It is Jardine. He recognises me – “Aha! our little work-shy hooper.”

“O, he good worker, Master,” says a woman hurrying back to the line.  A girl about my age tags along behind her.

For once, the woman doesn’t receive a whip crack for insolence and Jardine is looking at her in a different way than whip-masters normally look at slaves who speak up for themselves. I wonder why, as the slave woman weaves in such a graceful way through the cut cane. Jardine is looking at her in the way that some girls and women have been looking at me. Surely, the masters didn’t… 

But a knowing look between the men and women around the cart tells me yes, there is a kind of love between this high white man up on the horse and that proud African woman enslaved before him.  Jardine sees me looking and snarls. “Get on with your work, monkey.”

The men, boys, women and girls are bundling together the sugar stalks, and lifting them up onto the men on the carts bound for the sugar factory. I am soon hard pressed trying to match the pace of their work. The carts race away and empty carts replace them immediately. 

The whipmaster tells me to stay on the cart instead. If I can’t work properly, I can go to the sugar factory and work there, he says. 

A girl hands me the pitcher to take with me on the cart. It is the girl I saw before, tagging behind her mother. She risks punishment for this - I press my hand to my heart in silent thanks. “Your mother… how can she?”

“What husband can protect her? My father is under the ocean. Jardine is my father now… Mother does what she has to…”

The Gift snatches at my heart. I am inside the mother’s eyes, reading her misery. The baby Jardine gave her is taken away at birth. They tell her it is dead to her. Why? she wails. They tell her plantation babies born of white fathers suffer, yes – neither slave nor free, neither black nor white – but they have a better life than slaves. 

I enter the shadows in front of the sugar factory. The brightness of the fields makes these shadows seem as dark as night. I stumble with weariness. But I still see the girl. I keep her in my mind’s eye through all the darkness that follows.

 

Chapter Thirteen 

I make my entrance into the glittering Whiteladies ballroom. Chandeliers shine like suns. Mirrors send candlelight and heat flashing along walls. White silk, white arms, white faces, white smiles pass before me in hot succession. My first Ball!

A crowd of lovely heads shine with gem-studded tiaras. But I am the Belle of the Ball. All eyes turn to me. My prince, the Beaux of the Ball, approaches.

“Madam, your shawl of fine printed American cotton, so elegantly turned, is inside out,” he laughs.

 

The room howls and hisses with laughter. 

“I am quite aware of that!” I snap. The musicians strike up a country dance. They are laughing too. Everyone is laughing - at me.

“Why has she come back?” they demand. 

“I think you should leave,” says the man, grasping my arm. 

“You’re hurting me!” I cry. My shawl slips from my shoulders. I give a dazzling smile and flaunt the snowiest, most angel-white shoulders in all England. 

They are stained, like coffee spreading through a silver dish of sugar, like the sun-lit muck of the River Avon exposed by the tide.

“Madam!”

Bessie is shaking my arm. She has brought my morning coffee and sugar. She is parting the drapes. 

Brilliant sunshine fills the room. 

“Another nightmare about your Ball, Miss?” she asks kindly.

 

 

Chapter Fourteen 

The head boiler is always in a panic. He fusses and fumes like a bucket of boiling cane. And when anything goes wrong he blames me.

He tells me to feed the sugar stems we’ve brought through mill rollers to crush out the juice. It smells sickly sweet and makes the air sticky.

He tells me to boil up the juice in the coppers. 

“Coppers, master?”

“Kettles, boy.” He is shouting now. “There. That row of kettles. Pour the juice into one kettle after the after. Quickly.” 

I am afraid of the hot mess scalding my hands. But I am more afraid of this restless, nervous, always angry man. I boil the juice in the coppers. It gets hotter and thicker and for a while I forget myself in the work. 

“What are you staring at that one copper for, you monkey! All the others are already boiling over.”

“But master, you never told me to-“ 

He smacks my face.

As the syrup cools, so does my anger. Sugar crystals form, a brown mass that the white men call muscovado sugar. And what I call brown sugar– The devil’s honey. 

“Boy!” yells the head boiler, his face red as a Jamaican sunset, “what you are waiting for? Pitch that muscovado into the hogsheads!”

“The molasses drain out in here,” says a friendly voice. A boy like me, only ‘seasoned’.

“Molasses?”

“Most molasses go on to the ships. Or they conjure a spirit from it, called rum, that makes a man happy for a while.”

I start lifting the cured sugar wearily. Over and over again. The heat seems to increase as the work eats away at my strength. The masters watch my seasoning from the shadows.

I will not be beaten. I keep lifting, lifting, lifting. Every hogshead feels heavier than the one before… 

A whip brings me upright again. I must have swooned. I rise, lift another hogshead. 

“That boy got the evil eye,” says an old slave woman, pushing her hair wearily back. “Is that why they work him to death?”

“It’s not the evil eye,” says Mad Jim. “It’s the Gift. I had it once but it died.” says Jim. 

“So will he here,” says the woman. “If he’s a Gifted one, he better try to find the Maroons.”

“The Maroons?” I ask. 

“Cimarrons – the unruly ones,” says Jim. “It’s the name the Spanish had for slaves and beasts they couldn’t control. Runaways into the wilds of Brazil who made a new life there, built free homes and had free children.”

“No hope of that here,” moans the woman, old before her time. 

“There is – a little Africa in the heart of this island,” says Jim. “ African leaders, African customs, African laws. Outlaws, murderers, men and women who will do anything to stay free. But if you find them - you could be a free African again. Keep the Gift alive.” 

I look at him.  “The Gift don’t show me the Maroons, Jim. It shows me a white lady in a white city on a green hill. And I must go there, wherever it is.”

Mad Jim shakes his head.  

 

Chapter Fifteen

 

A letter from Papa!

He has been in the West Indies for nearly two years this time. His sudden letters bring him back into our lives like a half forgotten joy. But they also frighten me. 

His present letter contains five pages of lectures for James who has already been expelled from two schools. “You are a young man of ten not a child of four and you must cease these daily mutinies you inflict on your tutor. If I were present in the house you would not dare behave in this unruly manner, and I will make you very sorry indeed if your behaviour does not improve. If you do not learn, how will you one day be able to oversee your Papa’s business?”

James announces he does not care about the business or his absent Papa. But he trembles as he says it.

Papa’s previous latter held a stern rebuke for me. And I do care. My girlish account of all the doings at my new school, Miss Hannah More’s School for Young Ladies (off Park St), displeased him. He was furious at what snobbish things I was being taught about his trade. 

I cried for days afterwards. Mama declared I was a girl without a sensible thought in my head. How could I report such nonsense about a trade that was enriching Bristol and our family? 

I said I did not realise how important and difficult Papa’s work is. 

There is a consolation. As a young lady too grand for Miss More’s, I now get my ‘accomplishments’ (Musical Instruments, Drawing, Embroidery) taught at home, by the very artists who taught dear Mama. Like a daughter of the nobility! Father has given instructions that I am to be taken away immediately from Miss Hannah More’s school until another more suitable school for young ladies was found. 

So I now receive my General Lessons from James’s new tutor, like a gentleman. And my brother’s new tutor is quite the handsomest creature in Clifton!  

His name is Charles Hundred. He has been at Cambridge University. He is the son of a baronet who relinquished his fortune for the love of an ordinary girl! 

They were lovers separated by a cruel father and a thousand miles of pitiless ocean! He was sent to the West Indies. While there, he heard his beloved was to be married to another man – a rich merchant’s son. So he stowed away on one of Papa’s sugar ships and was three weeks out of Jamaica with his thoughts moving towards Bristol when they found him. 

The Captain - Captain John Holmes, my great uncle - entertained him to dinner in his own cabin and was quite charmed by the young runaway. He enlisted him as a tutor to his own son. When Uncle John reported the incident to Papa, Papa asked to see the stowaway himself. Papa is a very stern man and no lover of ‘noble’ renegades with more blood than sense and Uncle John feared for him. But he charmed Papa too. He decided such spirit was exactly the thing to guide young James! So he came here. 

And now he is my tutor also! And, dear reader, this must be between ourselves alone, more than my tutor! To me at least.

“Today, James and Amelia, we will begin with my special passion.”

“Your special passion, Mr Hundred?”

“History!”

I smile at him from under my ringlets.

“Isn’t it bad enough that I must study with a girl!” sneered James. “But dead kings and silly mistakes. History is as much use as last season’s dresses are to Amelia.”

“Even so, until you go away to school, James, I am required to teach it to you. And you may even learn from the silly mistakes of past ‘fools.’” Mr Hundred pursed his lips. “ And so avoid becoming one yourself!”

That silences James for a bit. But after half an hour of scribbling his untidy letters and struggling with facts and figures, he grumbles,

“But what has all this to do with me!” 

“It has everything to do with you. If you are to follow your father.”

“I want to sail ships and fight pirates, not read about them! Or add and subtract their beastly cargoes!” 

“James, return to your place, please. We are wasting time – your sister’s, mine and, most importantly, your own -”

“Well, I’m going to Eton soon, so I won’t need to think about this horse manure.”

Mr Hundred purses those lips again and observes, “I wasn’t aware you had!” 

“No more history!”

James gets that look in his eyes that no-one can ever shift. A kind of mad blindness, the stubbornness of a mule. Mama says even Papa would have trouble with that look - if he ever returns to see it. “Indeed, “ she declares, “he is his father’s son .”

“Very well,” sighs Charles –“you will draft a reply to your father’s letter.”

Mentioning Papa subdues James, even at that distance. He returns to his stool, kicks it and writes - the messiest bramble of blots and crossings out that child ever wrote. He takes it to his pedagogue with something between a shrug and a flounce.

Mr Hundred looks it over with a shudder. “You’ll have to start that again.”

“I refuse.”

“I insist.”

James snatches the letter back. “You can’t make me. You’re – you’re just a servant.”

The love-ruined nobleman winces. “Your Father’s servant, James. And therefore your Master.” 

Their eyes lock. I stare fascinated. Who will win? James looks ready to strike out at his master and I hold my breath in fear and excitement. 

At last, James’s glares dropped and he curses foully. He tears up his letter and storms out. 

And that is how my father’s heir makes use of the famous scholar Charles Hundred! 

So I have Charles Hundred all to myself!

Mr Hundred takes a moment to recover his composure. Then sighs, “Well, as I cannot continue without James-“ 

“You can -  tell me why Miss Hannah More so deplores the trade in men. And why Mama’s family seem to agree with them!”

He turns in the doorway to answer me, though his mind is still partly with James. “Your mama is a lady, Amelia. The aristocracy despises any kind of trade. Your Mama chose a man they would deny the name of gentleman.”

“Why?”

“Because he is a merchant, a trader. There are some who would say even you are not a lady because your mother put … love before blood and breeding.”

I think of that face Mama makes when she speaks of James having his father’s look. Theirs is a magnetic attraction, certainly. An attachment to Papa’s driving force. Is that love? “But are not the merchants the very foundation stone of Bristol?”

Mr Hundred smiles. “The salt in that stone. The vein in that rock. The gold in that vein.”

“Then why does Miss Hannah More not show more pride in them?” I grow indignant. “Does she too not consider Papa a gentleman?”

Mr Hundred sighs. “Miss Hannah More’s objection to your father’s trade is different. It is not the trade she objects to – she is no sneering aristocrat – it is the trade in men.”

“But have not all great Empires have been built on slavery? You were said so yesterday.” I recounted my lesson. “The Roman Empire in Ancient times used the Slav peoples of Eastern Europe. Hence - ‘slave.’  The Muslim Empire in Mediaeval times used and use the peoples of East Africa, Asia and even Europe.” 

“Indeed, they were still taking white slaves from the Devon coast until the times of James I. I was supposed to be teaching that to James not you, Amelia, while you were practising your virginal. Would that he listened as faithfully!”

“And now, in modern times, the Empires of Christendom use the peoples of West Africa.”

“Yes, and mostly through Jamaica, which is why your Papa is striking gold there. Jamaica has been the jewel of our imperial crown since the days of the South Sea Company.”

“And it is very fortunate for the African that it is civilised Britain not cruel Spain who is conducting the matter? The Briton is a liberal and humane master. In 1738, the British Government even granted runaways from the old plantations their own land to build towns on!”

Charles Hundred is impressed.

“O Mr Hundred, the South Seas! How romantic it sounds! Blue skies, blue ocean, green tropical forests, golden sunshine!” 

Mr Hundred smiles.  “And golden investments. Jamaica was The South Sea Company. And the South Sea Company was Jamaica. You could say that Jamaica was – is - England and England is Jamaica: England and Jamaica chained together as one, as I should this very moment be telling James. Forgive me, Amelia, I fear I must leave our conversation – however agreeable – and seek my errant scholar.” He bows, lips curved in that sad smile.

I blush at the word ‘agreeable’ and meet his eye for moment from under my lashes. Then, realising he is waiting for me to give him leave to go, I curtsey. Rather clumsily. But if he notices that I am still not mistress of the curtsey, or, on this occasion, of my feelings, he does not show it. Thus - a true gentleman masks his feelings. 

He leaves me alone in the schoolroom with a confusion of feelings. Does he care for me? Does he think I am not a lady because my father is engaged in trade? Does he share Miss Hannah More’s dislike of the trade in men?

I take up his volume of history idly and find his notes. I am determined to win more of his praises in our next conversation.

Today’s chapter begins rather dully. “Four hundred and sixty two members of the House of Commons including the Speaker, had shares in The South Sea Company in 1720. And half the House of Lords, including Black Rod, the Lord Chancellor, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, the authors Alexander Pope, Sir John Vanburgh and John Gay, the King’s mistress, the Duchess of Kendal, and all the royal family including the bastards.”

I nearly drop the book at this sudden shocking word. I turn over the page.

“Bristol grew to its present enormous size and importance under the tropical heat and fertile rains of the West Indies. And the West Indies began – for England - as the place where she sold the slaves she took from Africa into the fields and mines of the Spanish Empire. Bristol is the great city she is – the second city of the British Empire – first because of Spain and then because of Jamaica-”

“What are you doing? Put that book down!”

I drop it, trembling. I come back from a magical world of exotic faraway places and great thoughts. “Oh. You startled me.”

Mr Hundred looks furious with me. His eyes dart dark fire. “That book is unsuitable for – a lady.”

“Not a tradesman’s daughter then?”

He is silent.

“I am sorry, Mr Hundred. I am not sure why I said that.”

“Certainly a lady.” he says. “The matter was never in question.” That thin sad smile again. “And, alas, a far more instructive companion in historical study, than my legitimate student, her gentleman brother. But I fear you may have read something in that book to distress you…” 

He picks up the volume and meets my eye. He seems oddly more anxious than angry now. But there is more notice in his glance than ever before. Reader, I bask in that notice!

“One coarse word, perhaps. But my fault-”

“What did you read?” he asks earnestly. Almost afraid, as if the book concealed some personal secret. Why should a volume of history matter? I wonder at his fear.

“Nothing that I can fathom very deeply. Something of the poet Alexander Pope and Black Rod Montagu and the roots of England in Spain and Jamaica? 

He smiles and looks relieved. “Nothing else?”

“Nothing else. You intrigue me, Sir. Pray, what can be there in that volume of our nation’s history that is so terrible?”

That sad smile again. And that deep look in my eye. “A tenderness of the feelings of the gentler sex, merely. Excuse me. I must seek James.” He is at the door, with the volume stowed safely in his coat this time.

“Yesterday we read Alexander Pope together and praised his elegance and polish. Today I read about his money. Is this the vulgarity of which you speak?”

Mr Hundred stops in his tracks. “Alexander Pope and all the other worthies would have agreed  - with Charles II and James I - that it was better for Blacks to be given work by Christians in the Americas than by godless princes in Africa.”

“And is he not right?”

“Who am I to argue with Pope? Thomas Guy the Philanthropist had £45,000 of the original stock of the South Sea Company one year. He sold his shares later at a high profit. Out of that profit, he left money for ‘the poorest and sickest of the poor’. If sixty four thousand African slaves had not been sold by The South Sea Company to the Spanish Empire between 1715 and 1731, most of them through Jamaica, Guy’s Hospital would never have been.”

“So any noble ladies and gentlemen of Bristol ‘society’ who condemn my father’s trade as ‘unrespectable’ must then also condemn such knights of the realm as Sir Thomas Guy?”

“Dear God, Amelia, your mind is sharp as a cutlass under that pretty head of yours. How can so fair a face conceal so-?” He stops.

I cover my blushes under pretence of smoothing the folds of my dress. 

He coughs and continues. “Yes those who condemn your father must indeed likewise condemn Sir Thomas Guy. And Sir Isaac Newton, who lost £20,000 when the company crashed. And all the ‘great men of London.’” 

“Is Papa a great man?” 

“Of Bristol, certainly. He is becoming the richest planter on the island of Jamaica.”

“You admire him very much, Mr Hundred, do you not?”

“Your father represents the Bristol phase of the triangular trade. The London South Sea Company went down – its bubble burst - and the leadership of the slave trade passed to Bristol. And, as London passed to Bristol, so Barbados passed its slave crown to Jamaica, twenty six times its size. And so Bristol and Jamaica swelled together, like black and white twins. And your father flourishes with it and makes himself the worthy heir of that swell.”

A shadow in the doorway.

“Ah James – so you are gracing us with your presence at last.”

“Your classes are worse than slavery!”

“Then they will prepare you for your future. Sit down and take up your slate. Work out the sum I have written on the board. It is about how the relative size of Bristol and Liverpool ships and many slaves can be accommodated in them. It will show you your future.” 

“Boo!” yells James. “Down with Liverpool!” Now it’s a competition, he gets to work, oblivious to all else.

After two or three minutes, I frown at Mr Hundred and hand him my slate. “Can this be right?”

“Exactly right. Liverpool has a larger harbour. And that means larger ships with room for more slaves. Men of industry and force like your  father are the future of Bristol of Bristol, if it has one. But this is the problem they must solve.”

“I fear he may be alone in it. When he was just a master mariner, I remember merchants coming to our house near the docks to discuss business. They all spoke like Papa then – full of force and ideas. They had great dreams and they made great celebrations of triumphs too. He rose to be a merchant and then a leader among them. Then they started getting daintier shoes and breeches. Except Papa. He wouldn’t wear that ‘new look’ the other merchants wore, even though Mama pleaded with him to do so. “I’m a merchant not a toff!” he said “And I’ll dress and talk like one until I die. Or until I have enough money to lord it over the nobles that mock me and call me a grocer.” He meant it too. He told her he was proud of the clothes he’d earned a Bristol fortune in.  

“But we moved up here to this new mansion all the same. And with Papa away Mama, started entertaining the merchants here. And then they even started bringing their wives – and their clothes and even their voices got finer and finer. Most of the old work was done by underlings. And then instead of doing business in the yard, they all went out to coffee houses for ‘conversation’. All the old stalwarts began to retire. Papa said that not a friend from the old days was like him now – they were all sitting on their fortunes in pretty breeches. Papa said before he went out to the Island again that he’d work until he could buy himself a title and a string of estates to go with his mansion on the Downs. Business and work talk - not fashion and society - was still his drive. The merchants Papa still works with from Africa and Jamaica never come here. And the old merchants he grew up admiring and working for are all gone.”

“Finished – and before Amelia!” shrieks James. He hands Mr Hundred the slate. “Bristol 456 Liverpool 245.”

“Correct – with the one vital omission that you have them the wrong way round, James… Your father’s heir and Bristol’s future hope is going to need a harder head than this!”

 

Chapter Sixteen

I dig under the hogsheads of sugar and try not to breathe. The work goes on around me.

“Where is that boy?” – yells the factory master. His face is wet in the numbing midday heat. There is no shade. 

“The boy bad sick, master,” says the old woman. Gone for medicine.”

The factory master looks worried. “Why are you people always so poorly? Every time I look round, there’s another one dying. You’re not even old – only one of those corpses was anywhere near forty – the rest of you had years of usefulness left to work out. I’ve already had my share of fatalities in last year’s rebellion as it is. Jardine is going to kill me!” 

Jardine himself gallops over on his horse suddenly. The factory master is distracted. And that is lucky for me.

“New slaves pulling their weight?” he snaps

“They need training.”

“£49 a head these cost me!”

“Just under the going rate-” 

“But I only get the very best. So I need the very best work out of them. How long before you’ve got them seasoned?”

“Five years. Three at best.”

“Do it in two. These slaves are earning me £10 a year, not fifty. I need at least five good years out of them before they die. And all your fatalities are costing me a fortune. Where’s that new boy I sent from the plantation?”

“Gone for medicine,” the factory master mutters.

“Medicine! I told you to work him to the bone, not kill him.”

“Yes. But there’s some spirit in him I can’t break. And he unsettles the others. Best sell him on, Sir. Too much spirit.-”

“The strong ones are the best workers and I am where I am today because I know how to bend the strongest African spirit to my will.” 

A young black woman approaches Jardine from one of the buildings. She says something about the latest new slaves and a shortage. 

“How many bags of Negro clothes have we collected from the dead?” he barks.

“Three bags full Sir.”

“Well, there’s your new supply.” 

The young woman hurries off. The factory master mops the back of his neck with a cloth.

Jardine fumes. “I don’t make the rules. It’s the law of the jungle. I am no work-shy aristocrat politely devouring my peasants, founded on steady earth and a thousand years of tradition. It’s not as if we live here in luxury, is it? Look at my house! The white wooden shadow of an English stately home – mounted on stilts, the white paint blistering in the sun almost before it’s dry. The only thing I can rely on is the work I get out of my slaves. So don’t tell me how to work them!”

Jardine rides off. The other two shake their heads. “Too much sun.”

“Jardine’s too impatient. He could buy more women from Africa for a start. They could breed here. Make a sight more slaves that way than having to buy them all the time.”

“But they won’t breed–”

He indicated the plantation. “Could you and your woman bring children into a hell like this?” 

“Oh don’t pretend you’re a better man than me for being kind to some boy and feeling sorry for the beggars. Kindness isn’t why he’s here and you know it. You’re a slave driver yourself, however you get the slaves to hoop your barrels. There’s no real difference. If you don’t like it, get a job with old Grimwood down the road.”

No-one checks to see if I really am in the sick house instead of hiding in the hogsheads. Good job I’m not dying. I lie still.

And wait. Ship loads of sugar are added to the cart. And after a long hot afternoon of waiting, the load is ready.  

I brace myself. The cart lurches forward. We trundle down the long hill towards the gate, in a storm of dust. 

“Get that gate open. This load needs to be on the road this afternoon, not tomorrow.”

There is the noise of a big gate being swung open and a whiplash at some slave not working hard enough. Then the cart picks up motion again. And we are moving through the gate. 

We stop again. More shouts. A hogshead has fallen off the cart and men are swarming over it to pack it again. An exhausted  slave is getting beaten for clumsiness. Surely I will be discovered? 

“Something to say?” demands a master on horseback, gripping his whip.

“No boss,” cringes the slave.

The gate swings to behind us with a crash. 

I am away. Outside the gate.

Free.

 

Chapter Seventeen

A heavy jolt of the cart wakes me. I’d fallen asleep – the sleep of exhaustion. I nearly fall out and cling on trembling. It is pitch dark now with brilliant stars. I stare up at them for a long time, listening to the mighty music of the insects and night creatures. I have rarely seen such beauty, not even in Africa.

The cart is not at the docks. But the sea is crashing somewhere within hearing distance, far off but all too close. And we seem to be somewhere higher than we were. The sea and the beach are somewhere below. I breathe in sharply. I can smell my fear and I can smell the sea now too. It fills me with dread.

It reminds me of my first voyage. I am not sure if I can face going out on its rolling surface again, even as a runaway. 

I creep out from my hiding place on the cart. No-one is nearby. Where are they all? 

I leap down, dislodging a hogshead of sugar and making much more noise than I can bear. A door of a nearby shack swings open and two white men lurch out. One has a gun. Both cradle tankards of liquor and there are African women crouching frightened behind them. In the light of the doorway, I see the work routine of slaves chained together on the ground, sleeping. One wakes and sees me, startled. I freeze. 

“Mas’r. Mas’r!” he cries to the white men.

I am about to curse him but he puts his finger to his lips. He waves me to run. 

“Mas’r! Mas’r. A beasty – on the cart. It killing us!”

The white man fires his gun in the air and both white men run over. One trips in his drunkenness and the other laughs. They shine a light and see the fear on the slaves’ faces. 

“Never known such a species for being spooked!” says the man with the gun.

“May have been a caiman though. Or a wildcat. Load’s been dislodged anyway. Maybe we should bring the slaves inside. Better not lose any more.”

Sleep overtakes me before I have gone half a mile.

Next day, I wake as a free man. I run inland, seeking forests. I find only plantations, everywhere.

I come to one with GRIMWOOD painted in faded white letters on the big gate. I count 200 slaves inside - and a mere dozen white overseers.

I hear the creatures talking. Insects, serpents, birds, caimans, wildcats. I can smell the voice of the air and sea. I can feel the trees and bushes speaking in whispers and moans. All say one word to me – danger. 

I bite a stalk of bittersweet sugarcane, sick of needing it.

I see an overseer beat to the ground a slave. I see them fasten metal around the neck and ankle of a slave who fights off the lash. I watch him work with the brand of the midday sun on him. “Hot metal!” laugh his white masters, red faces like demons in the heat. 

They are so few, if we weren’t all so cowed, surely we would rise and destroy them? 

I must find the Maroons.

*

On the third day, I see a slave rebellion. So many of us and yet I am completely alone. 

I am tempted to come out into the sunlight to join them. But I am afraid. I stay in the shadows. 

It is fortunate for me that I do. White soldiers in red uniforms come. The rebel leaders are tired and disorganised. They charge the soldiers A few shots settle the issue. The lucky ones die fighting. The leader escapes into the crops where his drowned body is found later. His woman is tied to a tree and raped. 

The soldiers untie her, laughing, and she falls to the ground. She crawls, bleeding and broken, across the earth. She stuffs her mouth with soil, her soul with shame. 

The rest are bound, cringing heads beaten down under rifle butts, pinned out in the midday heat, tortured. 

They are ‘taught a lesson’. Some slowly hang. Others are held face down in the midden ditches, by fellow slaves held at gunpoint until they choke to death in human dung. 

They stake the bravest out face up and with jaws held open. They force slaves to urinate and defecate into their mouths and eyes. The stench stays in my nostrils for days. 

It will stay in my mind forever. 

The whole earth is screaming at me. Run, run. Find the maroons. 

But I cannot run. I watch from the shadows fascinated.

The remaining slaves work very quickly after that. They bend their backs and grin at insults like whining dogs. The cringing eagerness to please turns my stomach. They will never hold up their heads again for fear of losing an eye. One is punched by a soldier for ‘dawdling’ and raises his arm in instinctive self-defence and they make another slave cut it off, saying that any limb raised against a white master will instantly be severed. 

“Isn’t that rather cutting off your nose to spite your face, Mr Grimwood?” asks a redcoated officer. He has just put down a slave rebellion with brutal force but even he looks sickened by some of the reprisals.

“Pah! What can you expect with ‘refuse’ slaves,” answers Mr Grimwood. 

“Exactly. Barbarous, wild, savage natures!” snaps Grimwood’s overseer. 

“Whoever bought this rubbish has cheated you, Sir!” adds another overseer. 

“How so?” Grimwood’s buyer bridles.  I bought these in good faith, from the same ship as Jardine. 

“Well I’ve seen both at work and these are unseasonable rubbish compared to Jardine’s, and you got them for the same price! A slave should earn its master £10 a year. These are costing Mr Grimwood a fortune in replacements and soldiers.”

“I can only buy what’s available.” 

“There are a hundred and seventy thousand black slaves on the island now, and always more on the way. That’s hardly a shortage.  You should be choosier.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” snaps Grimwood. “A hundred and seventy thousand! That’s almost half the slave population of the British West Indies.”

“With respect, Mr Grimwood, Jamaica is developing faster than you,” says the buyer. “She really does hold that many now. The old Barbados style small units are gone. You never had such large plantations to stock when you were buying yourself.  You could monitor everything. Everything’s enormous now, which is after all why you need me to buy for you. I admit this was a bad batch and Jardine got the better end of the boat on this occasion but then he went to Africa himself to fix it.”

“I think I know how big my plantations are, Sir. I built them. Every inch.  From wilderness. From sea-end to forest-end, there’s nearly a thousand acres of sugar cane on this one alone. All of it rich and half of it being wasted by your buying-”

“You need precisely 204 slaves for each thousand acres, right?”

“If you say so. I don’t buy a dog and bark myself-“

“This one now has 157. A few bad slaves have cost us forty seven. And the bigger the plantation, the more risk of ‘refuse’ slaves infecting the others. So, with respect Sir, don’t blame me. Blame the scales you’re asking me to work to.” 

“I do blame you, Sir. You are earning a constant salary just to balance those scales while I carry the whole enterprise. And live or die by the up and down profits.”

“Then scale down a bit – be realistic.”

“Jardine would ruin us in a year if we did that. Large plantations- large fortunes. Small plantations - ruin. Simple as that.”

“Then give me more money to be choosier with the slaves I buy. And give me tighter security to begin with. More soldiers. Fiercer guards. Bigger dogs. Keep the Blacks too scared to whisper. Have you ever asked yourself what would happen if one hundred and seventy three thousand slaves on this island of ours decided to turn on the ten thousand whites running it?” 

“There were no English plantations at all when I first sailed here. Now England rules the island – and who rules Jamaica rules the West Indies, the Africa trade and the world. I think I can handle a few blacks.”

“The trade is changing, Mr Grimwood. Getting bigger and uglier every day. And the world is changing with it. You need to change with it.”

Grimwood is losing his temper now. “I started out supplying African slaves to the Spanish Empire, under the asiento of Queen Anne, when you were still in nappies! That asiento gave England the sole right to do so and I was there, claiming the prize. When the situation changed again, I delivered Negroes to the Brazils as well. That’s right, I bought and delivered to the biggest slave-powered gold mines, coffee and sugar plantations you have ever seen. And I never once bought the rubbish you buy me because I didn’t have your salary to fall back on. I lived or died by the quality of the slaves I bought. Your cosy generation should try it some time. You’ve grown up in a slave trade where England has had it all her own way for a lifetime.  When I first came out, it was Portugal’s trade, not ours. So I-”

“You broke Company regulations then. I was always instructed that delivering Negroes to the Brazils was ‘prejudicial to the British plantations in America.’”

“And I did it anyway. I’m a man of Bristol. I never bowed to London any more than to Lisbon or Madrid. And I’m not giving in to a few bad blacks now. Or a bad buyer.”

“I resent that remark, Mr Grimwood.”

“Then take your salary and go.”

“This is a bad day for you, Mr Grimwood, if you let me go.”

If this is a bad day for Grimwood, then his good days must be good indeed. His ‘rubbish’ slaves look petrified. They were working themselves to death before they mutinied – they will redouble their efforts now.

 

Chapter Eighteen

I cannot find the Maroons. 

They are far inland, in the heart of the island, deep in bush and mountains. But it is no mere distance or secrecy that stops me finding them.

It is the Gift. And a white city on a green hill far away. 

The swift twilight of Jamaica falls, I find my way to the docks, pilfering scraps from squabbling birds. Slaves are unloading a cargo. A sailor is organising them in a familiar Bristol voice. 

I am crazy with hunger now. I skulk like the rats and gulls in the cargoes piled up on the quay. I find something sweet beyond belief under a sheet. Molasses. 

Molasses are dangerous. They taste good, almost too good. They sit in my empty belly like a sickness.

Why are these molasses unguarded? On the plantation, if I had dared to stretch out a hand to one, a whip would have beaten my hand away.

I shift another sheet aside. There are crates of rum here too. Rum is never left to chance like this. There are always guards. Taxes to pay. Controls and questions. What is going on?

I must get out of here. 

A file of soldiers arrive out of the dark into the lit quay now, guns ready. Of all the dangerous places to choose! They will arrest the sailors, search the cargoes and find - me. 

The soldiers take up positions around the dock. But the sailors continue packing the contraband rum and molasses on like a legal taxed cargo. The sailors don’t seem to mind the soldiers. Some official has been bribed. 

A sailor looks right through me. He calls to someone along the dock. He is bartering with him about an extra fifty pound slave for Virginia. As they talk, the sailor is looking around all the time for ‘Company spies’ ‘swabs’ ‘land lubbers’ and thre like. They exchange money, spit in their palms and shake hands.

It is then that I recognise him. 

He looks older, the worse for wear and whippings and rum, but as sharp and crafty as ever. 

O’Brien.

Hard hands grab me. Before I know it, I am in chains and then O’Brien – smelling strongly of tar and rum - is running me along the dock. I am bundled onto a ship. Not the ship I’d planned for. My feet are chained to other slaves and to the deck. A necklock is clamped on me, still hot from the day, burning my skin so that I have to draw myself away from it.

“You going to be still or d’you want this?” said O’Brien.

Chapter Nineteen

“Papa! Coming home at last? Ah! I cannot believe it! In a week!”

“A week can mean a month, Amelia,” warns Mama, rather sourly. “He was reported off the Canaries a month ago and becalmed in Montego Bay the week after! A ship is not a barouche and an ocean is not the Great Bath Road.” 

“The Great Bath Road is quite the wettest and roughest track I have ever travelled!”

“You should try the Atlantic Ocean!”

Why do I feel so nervous?

I cannot even picture him. I have hardly seen him. The family portrait shows a strong, fiercely confident man, smiling, handsome: his smile a little hard, sea-weathered and dark-skinned. Mama, with her snow-white skin and golden hair, jokes that Papa will be. “As dark as an African of the blackest sort now!”

“Senegalese,” I say quickly.

Mama sighs. “Charles Hundred and his geography! Papa should never have taken you out of Miss More’s school for Young Ladies, for all she was rude about his trade. If I’d known what Charles Hundred was doing to your pretty little head-!”

Never mind what he did to my head, mother. Mind what he did to my heart! 

“Your brother James was born swarthy,” she says now. “You, my dear Amelia, have the cream and peaches complexion of the Somersets, my side of the family, fortunately for you. What a scandal had the complexions fallen out the other way!” 

I study Papa’s portrait. His skin is dark red, though the shadow of a great bush of black hair, thick eyebrows and the dark eyes and overhanging brow add a blackness to his look. Is there a trace of the exotic, even of the savage, about him? Papa will not stand out over much among the weathered merchants and old tars around the docks. And, even among Mama’s noble cousins there is many a wine-dark complexion under the make up. Papa’s darkness comes from the sun. 

Papa is well dressed in the portrait. A returned planter will affect the latest European luxury, if only as a change from the years of plantation necessity. “It’s good to put some thick warm cottons and wools on my back against the cold!” he said last time. His elegant clothes in the portrait are ten years out of fashion, but they sit graciously upon his limbs. Not even his greatest admirer (and that is surely me) could say they quite go with his ruby face though. 

He will be older now, too, the black hair silvered. The worry, labour and long years under the strong Jamaican sun more marked. 

Some planters never see their children at all. At least Papa came home for my birth, and again when I was three years old. James was born then. And then again twelve years ago, when I was nine, when we moved to this gracious new house. 

Now I am almost ‘out’. My ‘coming out’ party is set for the month Papa returns. It is an expression that pleases me. Like a flower that is just about to bloom. It is how the ladies of Mama’s family tell the world I am eligible for courtship and marriage. 

I look from my window down at ladies shopping for gloves and hats; gentlemen taking constitutionals and navigating conversations. Mama calls me below.

She and I take cakes today in one of Clifton’s new coffee houses. I am already half way through my third cake when an august group of hatted noblemen and ladies enter. I recognise some of the oldest Bristol families. 

The gentlemen bow and the ladies curtsy to Mama, in a wonderful flutter of silk and satin, and mama knows exactly how much to bend the neck, incline the  bewigged head, in return. I am so excited that I forget to follow suit. I remain seated, like royalty! They all look at me. Mama sighs. 

I recollect my manners, rise with hem slightly lifted, let eye and dress fall. I carry it off rather well, I think. Mama whispers that I should have bowed to the dowager first. But she flushes with pleasure. There is a poet among them with breath as harsh as onions who flirts with her a little. 

Mama is only really happy nowadays when in such company. So when we return to our own table, the light of her countenance goes out. She devours the elegant white cakes even more hungrily than usual. 

I catch Papa’s name spoken softly. 

“Jardine’s wife, the divine Miss Somerset. Mrs Jemima Jardine now.”

“Married beneath her!” says the poet.

“What price a fortune. Ha!”

“She gorged a fortune and a fortune gorged her. Gentlemen, ladies! If I may entertain you!- ” He recites a rhyme, to catch the attention of the ladies and lords:

“A gorge depth below as the dirty river. 

In her Clifton-cake home, can Society forgive her?”. 

“Oh do not disappoint an old romantic,” protests one decaying lady in an ostrich feathered hat, reeking of foul odours, “surely they married for love?”

The poet smirks.

A lord with snuff hanging out of his nose sneers. “The old earl her grandfather, inherited a reduced fortune. Her father wasted the rest. The grandfather sold his best estates, speculated foolishly in India. His son was sent to the West Indies to rescue the family fortune and succeeded only in dying of the pox. The beautiful Jemima had no dowry. So she captured a grocer!”

Honks of laughter.

“That grocer will go into politics and make a stir, mark my words, if he returns,” says a baronet. “He will lord it over his class – aye, and some of ours too! ”

“A lord is a steward of England, Sir Toby, paid rent and respect by grateful farmers and peasants. Jardine farms a slave plantation. He is an adventurer, a pirate by another name…”

I glance at Mama. She is oblivious, cramming her mouth with cake. I blush like the strawberry on it.

“My dear chap, I have funds invested in Jardine’s sugar piracy myself. His ships and plantations make more profits than Grimwood’s, or West’s in Virginia. His handling of the African trade is masterful. Even when he loses ships and cargo, as they all do, he regains it elsewhere. The man’s a phenomenon. He puts more merchant and venture into the Merchant Venturers than the rest of that company of would-be nobles put together. His labours have enriched me more than any other.”

“And you would still cut him if he spoke to you.”

“Naturally. He is trade.”  

Charles Hundred was right. Why is it any different that the land is thousands of miles across the sea? 

“A trader in men, which is sinful” yawns the dowager. “But – much worse - a tradesman per se, which is vulgar.”

“The slave trade may have made Arthur Jardine as rich as a lord, but it will always stop him being one.”

I want to leap in the dowager’s face and scream – “You ruined castle, held together by flags and bunting. Your fine clothes cannot disguise the bloated pork of your figure. Your London hat cannot conceal your rotten mouth and death-white face! Vampire!”

Can it be that these Somerset aristocrats with their landscaped gardens and woods and lawns despise Papa because they are frightened of him? Is Papa the future they fear – the city and everything it drives – while they are the hobbled past, living off his noble toil. What a triumph if Papa really is richer than the dowager, richer than all of them!

When we leave, with Mama watching me, I ‘forget’ to bow and curtsey again. And this time I don’t bother to correct my error.

 

Chapter Twenty

We have reached land at last. 

We are charging between walls of rock at a frightening pace, tied behind a small convoy of barges. At the turn of the tide, as soon as river met sea in the ‘Bristol roads’, a pilot came aboard to guide us up the gorge. He is hard at it now. 

We are a poor cargo. I see other black men and boys like me, the ‘refuse’ of plantation labour. They have been adopted like pets, brought home as souvenirs, to work as drudges in their masters’ households. 

Jardine is barking orders. “Get this slave cleaned up for the reception party. His new livery awaits him in my cabin. Make sure he is fit to wear it.”

Two cliff faces tower either side of a narrow gorge. It makes me giddy to look up at them. On the right side, green trees seem to mount into a blue heaven.  And, along the left side, above the rock and greenery that clothes the valley side, like a row of gleaming white teeth, stands a crescent of fairytale castles and palaces.

The white city on the green hill!  

Master is pointing his cane upwards at these. “That’s where we’re going boy. Home at last! My new town house is there somewhere – that house in the middle, with the long strip of green and the trees. How very high up it is, and what a cliff it stands upon! A dizzy fall for the unsure of foot! I have risen you see, thanks to my labours in Africa and Jamaica! And I don’t intend to fall.”

My heart sinks. After a lifetime of dreaming of the white city, I remain an orphan soul, eyeing a Christian heaven from hell.

We disembark. There is a scandal when it appears that Lord Whitchurch has been assigned some luggage belonging to Jardine – it looked so fine the crew assumed it could not belong to a planter. Then Whitchurch and Lady Whitchurch not only appear wearing Jardine’s finery (and loading his servants with dresses bought in Jamaica for his wife) but insisting it is theirs. 

“I give you my word, as a gentleman,” he says, implying a contrast with the planter.

The lord’s word is of course accepted. 

Jardine fumes but here in Bristol he does not command – yet. The Whitchurch entourage rides off with a portion of Jardine’s bounty, and Jardine fumes on the cobbles amid the horse dung, outwitted by sheer noblesse. 

Which means I am dressed like a royal page in a French court while Jardine rages hunched in his travel rags. Not the homecoming impression he wished to create. Clearly he has a different battle on his hands here.

A carriage is waiting beyond the dock. The driver’s whip cracks over the horses as we begin the ride to Clifton. I wince at the sound and Jardine glares at me. “Don’t you dare imply ill treatment at my hand!” he roars. He raises his cane, “Do that again and I’ll-.” He stops, outwitted by his own pantomime.

I wake in a dark cellar. 

There is a bowl of food and water laid out for me like a dog. I cannot eat it.

The Gift has brought me to the white city. 

Chapter Twenty One

Mama has taken the barge down to Bath to buy yet more glassware for the new reception rooms and has doubtless got caught in the traffic that always migrates along the Avon from Hotwells at the end of the summer season.  “How can you bear to leave now, just as Papa is arriving from Africa?” I gasp.

“The watched ship never finds port. Indeed, Amelia, darling, after twelve years, I am excessively tired of waiting. So I will forget myself amid the fine carriages, sedan chairs and boats of Bath.“

“Bath Chairs for the dying, you mean.”

“Don’t be vulgar, my dear.”

“That glass is coal-fired a mile away and on sale in Bristol. Why must you buy it at such fancy prices in Bath, scratching around your cousins’ noble gravel for any scandal about Bristolians in general and its merchants in particular! We live in a palace above the greatest port in the world. Bath is a folly in a remote farm yard – for all the London society crowding its overpriced tea rooms and its retinue of extra servants, cabinet makers, tailors, milliners, dressmakers, chair-men, stationers and other shopkeepers not already living in the filthy hovels of the lower town.

“Amelia, darling, whatever is the matter with you today!”

*

 

Papa arrives, practically alone, “like a thief in the night.” 

“Amelia?”

“Papa!”

He does not embrace me. He seems almost shy of me now, as if shielding something from my gaze.

“Where is your mama - and James?”

“James is at Cambridge. Mama had to go to Bath.” 

“Oh.” 

He is silvered, wearied and worn out. Sun-darkened and weather-beaten ¬– still muscular but with the leathery leanness of an old tar, and with such a hideous mark across his brow from some injury - that I am sure I hardly recognise him!

An hour later, I still don’t. He is restless in this house he has never seen. 

“Lovely clean smell,” he says. “A proper lady’s house.”

The rooms are large and many and altogether free up here of the “Bristol fug” – the smog and stench – he remembers. But he looks cramped. I sense his thoughts are abroad, in the West Indies, on the sea, anywhere but here. 

We go out into the garden. It is easier for him there. There are views to the south over Somerset, the shining river far below, the many docks and harbours to the east, the ocean to the west. 

He stands on the middle terrace. “Can there be a finer view in all England than this?”

“I have not seen it, Papa.”

“Not even that precious Mayfair on Avon your mother evidently prefers to me!?”

“Bath Spa does not have a gorge as spectacular as this, Papa. Nor white crescents breasting the hills as nobly as Clifton. Nor a great city port in such easy reach. Nor do Mama’s lodgings in Bath have this view. And the pavements and dresses of Bath get as muddy in the rain as those of Bristol.”

“Let us hope so. Where is Hundred these days…Ah but of course, he is in the West Indies now.”

We halt by the hideous new steam pump James insisted on watering the garden with.

“This belongs in an iron furnace, not a garden.”

“Mama’s cousins in Bath all have them now – to keep their gardens green.”

Jardine muttered. “Ha! They’re more needed in the dust of my plantations.” He adds, half to himself. “ But slaves are cheaper and easier to get over there – and replace. I hear they’re selling these pumps to foundrymen all over Monmouthshire and Shropshire now. It’s the future.”

“Aren’t you the future, Papa?” I smile.

A small shadow of doubt crosses his face, like a cloud passing over the sun. “My plantations and ships are flourishing, even if other planters and their merchants aren’t.” He just his chin out. “There’ll be plenty more gardens yet – and the prettiest dresses.”

“A blue dress, Papa?”

“Blue..?”

“Oh Papa, a father should know these things. Speak to Mama! Blue for a bride’s purity. A wedding dress.” 

“I thought it was white for purity!”

“No girl marries in white, Papa! White is for vicars and death! She marries in joyous colours - and in blue if that joy is pure!”

“Then my little girl shall have the finest blue wedding dress a Bristol fortune can buy. How white your skin is… Amelia. Does it see enough sun? 

“Papa?” 

“No, I am forgetting, a snowy skin is considered ladylike is it not?”

“You have changed the subject, Papa! We were speaking of fortunes and marriages…”

“Forgive me. I am not quite arrived here from the Island yet. But yes, thanks to my long labours there, your dowry may take the pick of Bristol’s gentlemen – aye, and the Somerset nobility too, if you wished.”

I blush again. This is both too direct and not direct enough. He introduces my wedding – and then omits all mention of Charles. “And will you retire now, dear Papa?”

“I cannot retire, Amelia. It’s in my blood, racing up and down like the tides of this river. I have a great business to achieve in London, against the abolitionists. And then I will return to my first first adventure. Hardy little ships bound for the slave coasts of West Africa. Holds packed with brass, copper, wool and Bristol glass. Bristol glass seems all the rage in Africa at present. The African kings adore it.”

“It is rather horrid, hearing Africans being traded for Bristol glass. Still one must think of Africans as cargo – Charles Hundred always said so.”

“But there was a woman... a slave on the island. She wore nothing but those beads!”

“Papa?” I blush.

Papa gets flustered again. “I mean, she wore no other jewellery... But that was the colonies.” 

Colonia. To till. 

“Papa. Now you have joined Bristol society, we must teach you the arts of conversation. I have mentioned Charles Hundred and marriage several times. You are supposed to- ” 

“You won’t be marrying Charles Hundred.”

“Papa?” 

“A spoiled heir!”

“Papa!”

“We need someone whose reputation shines as brightly as his inheritance.”

“But you admired Charles for standing with you against all that!”

“And still do. But we cannot marry what we love. We must love what we marry.” He sighs, as if he knows this all too well.

I see it suddenly, like a Cassandra. “You are planning to marry the honourable Jane Eaton to James. And I am part of the bargain! Sir Ponsonby Eaton! Oh Papa!” 

“How the deuce did you find that out? Has Hundred-? No, how could he!” Papa stirs himself. “I am sorry. How complicated fatherhood is! You must make allowances for me as I learn the ropes again. I meant to explain before I told you the good news.”

The good news!

There is a small commotion up at the house.  

“Has Mama returned from Bath already?” I frown. “I am sure a woman is screaming.”

“Ah, that will be my little surprise from Jamaica,” says Papa enigmatically.

“A surprise?” 

There is a glint in his eye. 

 

Chapter Twenty Two

A Black ‘boy’ is living with us! A black boy in Whiteladies road. 

“Mama is supposed to avoid shocks, Papa””

“Very well.” He calls for Parkes and dictates a letter to his wife. “My dear Wife, I look forward to seeing you after twelve years and a three thousand mile sea voyage, when you are able to manage the arduous ‘pilgrimage’ from Bath Spa. There will be an African slave in our cellar. He will be sooty black all over except the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet. He will have curled bushy hair like a black sheep’s and eyes and teeth that bulge with whiteness out of a black face. Do not be alarmed. He is quite tame. Arthur.”

A messenger takes this charming billet doux to the post. 

I hide in my room sobbing and re-reading Charles’ old letters.

“Miss More has filled your head with white lies about slavery, Miss Amelia.  The Black will be grateful to you for saving his soul. Asia and Africa traded in slaves for centuries - the Chinese Empire had vast slave armies. They only exploited their slaves. The modern European – the English – bring them out of the brutal darkness. They restrain and civilise them. They bring them to Jesus....”

He enclosed a pamphlet written by Miss Moore, called The Benefits of Restraint.

‘An early habitual restraint is peculiarly important to the future character and happiness of women… They should be accustomed to receive but little praise for their vivacity or their wit… They should be led to distrust their own judgement.’ 

Miss Hannah – a lady - says slavery is sinful. But she also says a lady should distrust her own judgement!

Which is true? 

Miss Hannah says it wrong to restrain a Black but beneficial to restrain a lady.

Can both be right?

Bessie enters with some bedding. “Oh, excuse me, Miss. Only this old school room is so rarely used now. I thought Parkes could-.” She sees me kneeling in prayer and stops, flabbergasted. “Oh…” 

“No, come in, Bessie. I was looking for Mama’s Attic key.”

“It is with all the other keys, Miss. In the cellar.”

“Oh dear. Well perhaps you instead are the answer to my prayer. Do you have a moment? One cannot talk seriously to the curate Mr Woodcock. He is in love with my dowry, or with me - if he can tell the difference. A rich woman has little to tempt her to marriage in this world – except true love. And I am told that in this world one cannot marry what one loves.”

“That is heresy, Miss.”

“This church of yours in the Horsefair, what is it like?”

“A sober congregation, Miss, as, begging your pardon, Miss, they are not always in Clifton.” 

“You jest, Bessie?”

“I never joke about religion.” 

“Can one have a serious talk with God in your church?”

“That is what it for, Miss.”

“Not for flirtation and frippery!”

“Not at the New Room, Miss.”

“I am very frightened by … what Papa has brought home.”

Her hands tremble too. “God protect us, Miss.”

“Amen.”

“Amen, Miss.”

“Bessie, I will join you at your church tomorrow.”

Light spreads across her dear kind face. “But this is wonderful news, Miss Amelia! I will put out some black clothes for you directly. And Providence is surely smiling on you, Miss, because John Wesley himself is coming to preach to us this week. And his preaching could chasten the devil! - Not that you’re the devil- But, oh! “ Her face darkens. “I forgot - your father once attacked Mr Wesley in public, many years ago, for what he says about the African trade. ‘Corrupting my servants’ he said.”

“‘Corrupting’ you?”

“I have never forgot his word, Miss. And Wesley’s was a loner voice in those days. Master will not like me taking you, it could cost me my position – and my mother is sick. Master dislikes harbouring Methodys like me in his household as it is.”

“Then let it be our secret adventure, Bessie.”

Bessie looks worried. “Very well, Miss.”

 

 

Chapter Twenty Three

Jardine’s plans of taking me to London to give evidence have to wait all autumn and half the winter. I am sick and it is late January before I recover. 

*

A Bristol MP stands on a platform.  He claps his hands, inhaling the bracing air that swept over the docks from the distant channel. He clears his throat. 

“Gentlemen, Mr Jardine returned to us after long years in the West Indies only last September and has been working more directly for the economic weal of his home city ever since. We all owe him a debt. Mariner, merchant and planter, he knows more than anyone about the great African trade. He looks set to become a great servant – and in view of his vast experience – one day a great elder statesman of our Party. I have no doubt whatsoever that in the process of winning the argument against Abolition, he will become one of Bristol’s most distinguished Members of Parliament. And I ask you to listen to what he has to say now.” 

Jardine sets his face to the wind off the river.

“While merchants like me was away in Jamaical and Africal, Bristol has agonised like a boatload of landlubbers. Agonised over building new docks when larger ships was needed to carry larger numbers of slaves. Agonised over opening our mouth to receive what God was offering. The plantations are slave hungry – you have to pour them in by the fort load, and you have to lose one fort load to ship another. I know. I’ve been there.”

“And while we agonise, Liverpool seizes the moment. We should prize what we have been given. God gave us red gold. Red gold gave us Black gold.  Black gold gives us white sugar and white cotton and red rum. And white sugar and white cotton and red rum gives us a city of white - and gold!” 

A Methody puts his hand on my shoulder and leads me forward.

“And made this Man a beggar! This is one of your sugar slaves, brought back from Jamaica like so much booty. Look under the livery. Look at his face. Worn out long before his time. Let us ask him how Christian and humane it is to work for Mr Jardine.”

I am lifted onto the platform. 

I have a great fear of what I will say. The haunted face of Ekwefu, Uwozulu, Mgbafo, Onwumbiko appears there, and the two surgeons. The Gift rises. And the white city is waiting to hear its fearless truth.

The face of Nokuphilla and all the others implore me to tell the truth and I cannot listen to them because she will die for it.

“Speak! Speak!” The crowd chant, impatient now.

I cannot speak. 

Chapter Twenty Four

Last night, I had a horrid dream of haunted houses all over Clifton, all over Bristol, with mad white wives in the attics and lost black boys in the cellars.

In my dream, I climb a final narrow flight of stairs and reach the door of Mama’s Attic. And as I do I remember she is not here – she is in Bath. But I can hear her.

I act the servant and spy through the keyhole.

The Attic is brilliantly lit. My mother is there indeed! – why such secrecy? - and reclining on her couch. She is set in a scene from Athens, full of gold and ‘Attic grace’. She is dressed - from Juno-peacock and diamond tiara wig to white glass slipper - in white. If the moon could take a human form and enter the attic, the effect could not be less strange. Her limbs and their covering film of linens and silks shine, even in the bright chamber, like a half-misted half-moon. 

Or a ghost?

Why is Mother hiding under pretence of being in Bath when she should be greeting Papa back from his long sojourn? I turn the great key in her lock and push the door inwards.

“Mama! Why are you skulking here? Alone and at night?”

She looks straight at me and answers, smiling a little roguishly, in a strange language. French perhaps, or Italian? 

I stare and now I realise she is answering one standing behind me. She is not seeing me at all. I am still more angry than frightened as I swing round to see who has followed me in. 

A lover! Mama laughs and it is the tinkle of the brilliant chandelier above our heads in the sudden breeze I’ve made with opening the door. 

“Close the door. And lock it well, my beloved! We must not be disturbed! ” Then she makes flirtatious talk. 

“Mama!”

In her left hand dangles a long glass of champagne. 

She holds me out a plate of sugar cakes as she did so often whenever I needed her as a child. 

“Mamas are not nurses, Amelia, dear, go to Bessie!” she would say then. And float off to her guests like a swan.

The chandelier sends a blaze of white light and heat over her flushed, white-powdered face and half-naked fleshy samite-whitened arm. The powder and the samite deaden her flesh with white but she is not a ghost. She is alive and gorging her fleshy appetites to the full.

“Mama! How can you go on like this when your husband - when Papa - is in the house?”

She speaks. “I know it is hard, my dear sweet beau, but Arthur has returned from Black island. I must go to him soon and play the welcoming wife.” She empties her glass of champagne down her snow-white throat. 

My mother -  an idle coquette, like so many of her class. 

The clock of St Paul’s strikes one. You can hear it more clearly up here in Mama’s Attic.

 

And then I wake up and find it was dream. I am in my own fairytale bedroom, in clouds of Bath linen and white lace. My nightdress soaked. My pillows damp with sobbing.

 

Chapter Twenty Five

Jardine is all warmth and reasonableness. He addresses the crowd in an avuncular gush. “Please don’t torment the boy. He is too shy to speak and he has been ill. Our rainy cold winters do not agree with him. But he will nod or shake his head if you ask him a direct question.”

The cellar-iciness in his voice is hidden from all except from me. 

The questions rian over me. “Were you ill-treated on Jardine’s ship? On his plantation?”

A thousand eyes boring in to me. My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth. 

I shake my head and wait for The Gift to destroy me!

Jardine catches me as I faint.

*

His triumphal progress through the white city continues.

“Across from these warehouses, you see rows of fine residential houses built by Henry Tongue, Michael Becher and Robert Hollidge, merchants of this city. They invest in all aspects of our trade. – Come, let us return to the coaches and make our way across the Square”. 

When everyone is aboard again, we do so. The wheels on the cobbles accompany his raised voice.

“Let your eye run along the line from the warehouses past the houses and you will see the Africa Tavern, where the privateers auction their spoils. An unrespectable element but necessary-“

A few looks are exchanged in the coach. 

“I made my fortune from hard work, seafaring enterprise, danger, risk and a faith in God. Believe me, Sir, there is little else to help you on those lawless seas. But I paid for everything I shipped. As Abel, will testify…”

“Yes Master, you paid for everything.”

“I was never a privateer but I do not accuse them. The Atlantic is not ordered like the benches of Parliament. Stand a moment on the privateer’s deck. What looks like privateering in London seems more like life or death out there.” He waves out of the window. “Everyone and everything is against you. The tides, the winds, God, pirates, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch Even the monopoly board of the Royal Africa Company – that London club – was against us Bristol boys. Look at that river racing back out to sea now. Would you rather its wealth flow to the merchants and king’s officers of London? Or worse still the foreigners?”

A wigged politician makes a note.

“What a noble building!” exclaims another new face, a florid one that has been exclaiming over the view for some time.

“You Londoners don’t have the monopoly on civic grandeur,” growls the Merchant Venturer. “Even if you tried to have all the other kinds!”

“What is it?” the Londoner asks.

“The Assembly Rooms, a symbol of the refinement that the profits from trade and enterprise have brought to Bristol. These Rooms are grander and richer than anything in Bath.”

“And more tainted with the blood of Africa,” whispers the Methody.  

“Drive on!” 

Within a minute, we have left the bustling docks and great river behind us. The horses of all three coaches trot elegantly into Queen Square. There is a marble statue in the middle of a king in horseback.

“Who’s that black blighter?” asks a young gentleman in elegant shoes.

I still think he means me.

“William III. Sculpted in shining black marble by the Dutch sculptor Rysbrack. A suitable monument to the spirit of the age, what?”

I am thinking more of its flesh and blood.

*

“These houses – still sought after though a little past their first fashionable grandeur now - marked Bristol’s first regeneration,” declares the MP. “The first regeneration of any of England’s great cities. Clifton, as Mr Jardine will know, marks the next. As you leave, notice the symmetry of doors and fenestrations!”

Hoofs clatter pleasantly in the airy Square and the block of buildings mute the roar of noise from the nearby docks. 

“Such clarity and simplicity of line and space! It is the Enlightenment writ in stone.” 

“The apotheosis of the neo-classical style,” declares a politician warmly. 

“I would die for a house like this,” adds a young man of about thirty, a ‘bachelor’. 

I am thinking of those that did.

Jardine pontificates. “No less than eight of the families in this Square – including the distinguished Captain Woodes Rogers- have built fortunes in the slave trade, on commerce with Africa, the West Indies, Carolina and Virginia. That fine house opposite is even about to become the new  American consulate. Why? Because the chains of our enduring bond and mutual dependency with America –despite Independence - remain forged in Africa.”

We drive on.

“Look at this beautiful house, which belonged to Henry Bright. He liked to have a view of the ships on which he would ship slaves from Angola to St Kitts - in decks no higher than four feet two inches.”

“Monster!” hisses the Methody.

“A merchant whose riches helped build that fine new Theatre Royal behind you,  Sir, who built such fine private libraries and banks for his native city, whose eye for grandeur and glory makes Bristol a living monument to his trade?”

In Jamaica, I dreamed of the white city, refined and shining as fine white sugar. The sailors’ tales of Bristol are solid, living and true, solid as magnificent as Town houses and Squares. It really is a white city on and among green hills.

But it has a black heart. 

Ponsonby Eaton pokes his head into the Coach like a peacock nosing into some shrubs. He addresses the MP only, too important to acknowledge anyone else. 

“Intended for his Jardine’s pretty daughter, I hear?” whispers a merchant.

“Could any lady of discernment love Eaton? He has the brain of a cock-”

“Scratch any Bristol gentleman and you’ll find sea salt under the polish. Plenty of ruddy Adam under that smooth white Eaton skin even now. They all goes off to sea and comes back ready to start a dynasty, though rarely as exalted as Eaton’s. Hard to credit but the grandfather of that fop too proud to speak to any of us– once dreamed of being a mere mariner. Well, he was an even better merchant than a mariner. Started in wool and ended up in clover.”

“The Eatons own half the Mendips these days!”

“Eaton was a merchant yes, but he was no slaver.” 

“Eaton wanted Bristol to dominate the Africa trade. And he played his part in making her do so. He laded his ships with copper and glass. Who for? He sent his ships to the west coast of Africa. Why there? His ships sailed on to the English colonies of Virginia and the West Indies. Carrying what? The same ships then came back to Bristol loaded with sugar, tobacco and other such goods. Traded for what? And who picked the sugar and tobacco?”

I could answer all these questions, if my tongue had not been tied. By fear and exile and love. 

*

The Gift speaks. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.

“The black beast is raving!”

Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. I whisper. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. ‘Humans are made human by humans.’ Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu. I cannot conceal the truth any longer, whatever Jardine does to us. Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu!

“What is the brute saying?” snorts a merchant.

“I would translate it thus,” says the Methody, looking down at me and placing his hand on my shoulder. “‘Is not this a man and a brother?’”

 

 

Chapter Twenty Six

I spend the night locked in Jardine’s cellar again. The water in my trough is frozen.

He blames me for his failure with the gentlemen. He tells the servants, with a cold laugh, that I need more discipline and less food. He calls it my ‘winter’ seasoning. 

“Restaphile,” calls a haunting voice out of the darkness, using my African name. 

I cannot refuse the magic of that name. I open my eyes. 

“Ekwefu!” 

The voice is like a chill in my soul. “Why are you delaying, Gifted one? You have come to the white city, the heart of the slave trade. You were sent here to tell the story of Africa, break the spell of the great white lie. My story. Your story. The story of twelve millions. The great bleeding of Africa.”

“I will tell it when Nokuphillah is safe.”

“No slave is ever safe. You must free her now. You must free all of us now. With the truth.”

*

I wake in a patch of morning sunshine on the cellar floor and to an uproar above. My body has been washed and clean clothes put on me. 

The sun moves and darkness returns. It will not shine through that narrow gap again for twenty four hours. I lie listening in the dark to screams from the young mistress and shouts from Jardine, servants’ cries of distress and alarm. Eventually, the door of the cellar creaks open and a servant, a woman, calls me out in a very frightened voice. “Good morning, Abel.”

She waits a moment and then goes on in a slightly braver voice. “It is Abel isn’t it? I confess I am afraid to come in because there are cobwebs behind this door and where there are so many cobwebs, there will be spiders and spiders are a nightmare to me.” She gulps. “I am called Bessie. I have brought you some breakfast.”

“Does Master want me?”

“Oh! You speak English then. And well too. Yes, he does. He has gone for a surgeon for Miss Amelia.” 

Bessie, nervous, becomes chatty. “She has her Coming Out ball soon and- Oh!.”

I walk towards her into the light – she faces me like a nightmare - with touching faith. Her face and hands are ruddy with kitchen work. There are lines of weariness and woe, and her eyes are tired. But she looks nice. 

“I have seen Amelia grow from babe to woman and I have seen servants work until they retired. But I have never seen a servant look as worn out as you. How old are you? Fifty? “

“Twenty eight.”

She looks frightened. I bolt my food while she stares at me. 

“What is the matter?” I drink my ale.

“Master has taught you well – to speak I mean.”

“It was not Mater. It is a Gift.”

“Indeed?”

“What do you want from me?”

Miss Amelia has the toothache. A weakness for sugar, like her mother.”

I’ve already guessed what she wants. We plantation slaves get so much sugar cane to suck, there’s hardly a mouth in Jamaica that isn’t full of holes. So we learned to pull teeth. I even charged a white master at Grimwood’s once for wrenching an old molar from his head. He paid, chuckling and saved me from a beating more than once on the strength of that. 

“Miss Amelia has refused the surgeon. Calls him a barber. Well, he is. A barber. They all are. Master’s gone out in search of Lord Eaton’s surgeon, the most expensive in Bristol. But we think he’s in Bath.” 

“Miss Bessie, I-”

“The Ball is in four days. And her mouth will need to heal. And she’s in agony. It might do you some good with Master. He seems irked with you, even though you helped him.”

Amelia’s piercing scream floats down from upstairs. 

“She is frightened of me. She only saw me on the cellar stairs once and ran up to her chamber screaming.” I move towards Bessie on the end of my chains and see her struggle not to run. 

“She just needs to get.. used to you.”

“I will have to hurt her...” 

The screams are getting louder. Passers-by are peering up at our windows.

“Listen, Abel. Amelia cannot be marked. It is supposed to be a secret but all the servants know. She is promised to an English lord, an Earl one day. And English lords check their wives-to-be like they check their horses. An Earl’s wife must have good legs and good teeth.”  

“Like a horse?”

“Oh Abel, the Eatons are one of the noblest families in England. They hold the keys to the kingdom. And Amelia will be more or less queen of Bristol if Master marries his wealth to theirs. But …she would be a better Christian, if she said No.”

Ragged, penetrating screams. Bessie puts her hands over her ears. 

Is there no-one Jardine does not enslave? Even his daughter, though the chains are golden.  

“Are the maids strong enough to hold her?”

Miss Bessie flexes her muscles. She unlocks my chains. “I’m as strong as a man when I need to be. And I’ve had ten children without one forceps. Annie, Susan! Rum! Callipers! And the little poker from the kitchen range.”

“A poker!?”

I shout after her anxiously, rubbing my wrists and ankles. “And warm the rum. Keep the tooth that’s got the hole in it warm – not hot, not cold.”

What if the Master comes back to find his snow white princess with a bloody black gap in the middle of her smile?  The servants will save their own white skins by blaming me. Even that good soul Bessie. What will happen to Nokuphillah then? 

His daughter would be better off with a marred mouth and an unbroken heart anyway.

But the screaming is a plea for help from a fellow human being, the kind so routinely ignored on the Mary. 

I am in the great hallway. From the second floor chambers I see the doors and above them, light from outside. And I see something that a slave dreams of seeing all his life and sometimes never sees. Freedom. 

A chink of blazing sunshine at the end of a tunnel; a light beyond the forest, a crack in the prison wall.

I am through the gap, like a cat, swifter as thinking. 

I walk through the crowd, the natural light making me squint, but trying to look calm. I walk as if I have been sent on an errand but my heart is beating. 

“It’s the beast in the cellar!”

“In a pageboy suit!”

“Grab his tail!”

“Careful- he might bite you.”

“Is he tame?”

I break into a wild run up the hill and across some downs. Bliss! The downs are green and open and free as a flower under the white winter sun. Green as my lost rainy season childhood in Africa. 

But this sun is not the red ball of life that pours itself over Africa. Not the rays that pick out the brilliant colours there. It is bone-bleached white, without warmth. 

The trees and bushes are bare, black broken fingers thrown up against the blank white sky. Yet the green of the grass is life itself. Small red and grey animals scurry, colours of the plants and flowers open before me, rich in the light. The Gift opens my ears and my heart. They are all speaking to me. They are saying – Live! You were born to be happy and free. 

I run.

And then I stop, just in time. And at the end of this glorious living carpet of green are the sheer rocks of a giddy gorge. 

I stare into the abyss beyond the rocks. And beyond the mighty rocks is – nothing. Death. 

Freedom.

Why not? There has always been a Black Spot over my life. I am free now – to end it. All my life has led to this moment. Life is slavery. It chains you at every turn. Chains me even now to that white lady, the daughter of that maned lion who stole my life and who holds me ransom, chains me with my love of Nokuphillah. Chains me to the long chain of consequences of turning back now from this leap of death and putting myself back into her lion’s mouth. But now at last I can choose to be free of them all, forever. All I have to do is jump.

I choose life. 

 

Chapter Twenty Seven

I go back to the house of Jardine, fists clenched.

*

The great red doors atop the steps of Prince’s Buildings are standing open. A curious crowd is gathered below them, pointing up. One or two of the gentlemen in the crowd, and a nobleman too, and many ladies, and even some of the common people, are laughing and jeering. 

Amelia - the talk of Clifton, the beautiful only daughter of the great Bristol sea merchant Arthur Jardine, with a Coming Out Ball in four days and (it is whispered among the servants) an engagement to Lord Eaton in the wind - is standing behind the railings of the Jardine mansion, at the apex of the Crescent, like a princess in a tower. She is clad in a shining white, blood-flecked shift, soaked in rum. Her golden hair is falling all over her face. Blood is streaming from her mouth. 

And she is singing.

And a black man – the beast from the cellar - is pulling her inside.

*

“How much run did you give her.”

“Half a bottle.”

“Half a bottle! And why is half of that over her petticoats?”

“Trying to avoid her bite.”

Amelia sways on the steps blinking into the sunlight. Her face feels very wrong all down one side. 

She sings as she sees me. “Ba ba black sheep, have you any wool?” Her long white fingers tousle my hair. They fascinate her, those black bushy curls, so different from her own gold locks. 

And she fascinates me. Because my Gift eyes have seen her before.

She is the white lady of my visions.

“Take her inside,” I say. It is the first order I ever gave to a white person. They hesitate. “Take her inside before the feeling comes back!”

Bessie pushes them into action. They lead Amelia away from a cheering public and slam shut the door. “We won’t be able to shut out the consequences so easily,” says Parkes. “We shall all lose our positions.”

“And kill me,” I laugh.

“Not even Master can break the law,” says Bessie.

“He wouldn’t have to. I’m his property. Give me those callipers.”

They lie her on the bed. The fireside callipers are evil looking, jaws bristling with ugly iron teeth.

“I’m going to sleep now, on my swan white pillowsh. Night night.” Amelia giggles. 

“Will she die?” Bessie whispers to me bleakly. I can see how much Amelia means to her. “I am used to death. Doctors often make things worse. Just tell me.”

“She will die if you let her choke on blood like that. Turn her on her side.” 

They do so.  

I grasp the callipers. “Wash her mouth out.”

“The water isn’t boiled. It will give her the cholera.”

“Use gin then. Quickly.”

They wash her mouth. She is easy as a baby now. “Hold her mouth open”

“Is Shleeping Beauty going to be kished by her African prinsh?” she coos.

They servants have already loosened an incisor next to the molar by mistake. And the gum is like a smashed yam. I clamp the pincer onto what is left of the molar.

The pain brings her to her senses, as I feared it would. Her eyes come back from their drowse and harden, fix on me. A furious protest is forming in her brain when I pull, hard. There is half a rotten molar to clamp on, and a deep root to release. The rotten tooth stinks.

“Abel-” starts Bessie. 

“Quiet!” I snap. “I already have to undo your meddling!” 

“How dare you!” seethes Amelia through a mouthful of calliper.

The fury of the pull silences her. No-one has ever invaded her sweet white world like this. I am tugging for dear life at the root of her, the maids holding her down. 

“Keep her head to the side!” I growl.

In her enthusiasm to obey, Susan almost slaps Amelia sideways. “Ow!” gargles Amelia through a mouthful of blood and callipers and indignation. Her fury is reduced to a trickle of blood from the corners of her mouth. She looks like a Vampyr. 

I am looking at his daughter’s shocked white face but I am seeing Jardine. The spirit of the callipers possesses me. It makes me cruel. 

But my cruelty serves Amelia well. A tender hand would have fumbled and blundered. As Bessie’s had.

Amelia tries to pull away, clawing me like a cat. She bites the servants. She scratches my hand, tries to bite me. There is more fight in this fairytale princess than you would believe. 

The servants are really frightened now. They have been reassured by my blue livery, my white frilled ruff and yellow waitcoat and the good English I speak. I am no longer the savage of a few months ago. But under the livery I still have a black skin ‘of the blackest sort.’ like the black magic witch doctors of sailors’ tales. 

They slacken their grip.

“For the love of Christ – hold her! Or you’ll kill her.” The name of their God reassures them. 

“Sing!” I yell. 

“What?”

“Sing – a hymn.”

Bessie starts them off. 

He who would valiant be

Gainst all disaster 

Let him in constancy 

Follow the master.

And out of that singing knot of struggle – with elbows and heads bruising and chafing each other, and me pulling for my life, and blood spurting over the white linen of that chamber –I find myself, on a wing and a prayer, cruel as the grave and grim as death, holding the rotten remainder of Amelia’s long-rooted molar.

There is a hush. “Is that all of it?” whispers Bessie. 

“Yesh,” says Amelia, her tongue searching around in the gap. 

“I’m sorry I had to hurt you.”

“It doesn’t hurt now,” she says.

“It will.” 

“It feels lovely.” She is drifting into sleep. 

Then she opens her eyes wide. I have never seen eyes so blue, not even in the dreams of her the Gift sent me across the Atlantic. They are the blue of skies over Jamaica. She lifts her head towards my ear and sighs. “May God reward your kindness...” 

“The Master is coming!” yelps Tom running up the stairs. 

“Now there’ll be a reckoning!” says Parkes with a grim satisfaction not shared by the others.

And then, just as Jardine storms through the door in one rage about the crowd outside, and in another about the melée in his virgin daughter’s chamber, Amelia kisses me.  

“It were like a scene from ‘Monk’ Lewis!” he will say to his cronies later. “Only real! The beast in the cellar with his black chops all over our Amelial.” 

 

 

Chapter Twenty Eight

“It’s a bit late for tears. You only have yourself to blame. The spectacle you have made of yourself, the laughing stock of my Name. Words fail me.”

“I don’t want to marry that brute Ponsonby Eaton!” Amelia wails. “And now I am not even to have my Ball!”

Jardine’s bull eyes lower and his teeth clench. “You cannot have a Society Ball four days after appearing in a drunken pavement Pantomime in your shift! What daughter disgraces her father like that!”

“What father leaves his daughter in agony for four hours with the toothache!”

He almost charges at her, like a bull. And breaks a Chinese vase. “I was looking for a surgeon!”

“And Bessie found me one. In the cellar!” 

“Amelia, I’m warning you-“

“You warn everybody all the time. You warn them and then you shout at them and then you dismiss them, over the slightest thing. Who will you dismiss next? Mama? Me?”

 

Chapter Twenty Nine

Mama returns and finds Bessie has been dismissed. She promptly re-appoints her, throws Papa’s homecoming gifts at his screaming red face and then locks herself in the Attic. 

“Come out or I will flog you out!” Papa rages.

Flogging a wife is also legal of course. Mad wife in the attic. Black beast in the cellar! Gap-toothed harlot on the steps. It seems our Clifton pantomime is complete. 

He comes down the stairs and takes a bottle of rum into his smoking room. He is going to London and everyone is glad to see him go.

Abel is grovelling, like a cur readmitted to favour.  Papa pats his curly head. The Negro  seems to like it, to crave any show of affection. Why does he fawn like this? 

I certainly shall not!

“Travelling far, Jardine?” asks Pauling, our unpleasant neighbour. He is Harbour Master of Bristol now and grows more prosperous and more portentous every year. He eyes Abel warily.

Papa is laughing, as if he has trained a clever dog to do tricks. “ Parliament, indeed, Pauling. We go to parley with the great and the good of the land. Prince himself is speaking for me there. Yes, we go to London - to instruct the deluded Commission of Enquiry about the truth of the trade. 

Papa preened himself. “Sir Thomas Clarkson descended on us from the wings of academe in Cambridge. Son of a Wisbech schoolmaster and now lecturing the likes of me, about trade! God spare us such ‘angels’. ”

“I hear it’s a hotbed of abolition nowadays. I wonder you sent James there rather than Oxford?”

“Is Oxford any nearer reality?”

“Well it’s nearer the Atlantic anyway. Clarkson! Pah! Any friend of Wilberforce the Member for Hull is an enemy of ours - jealous of Bristol, the lot of them. Nosing around Bristol, trying to steal the pot of gold at the end of our American rainbow.”

“He’s had the publican of the Seven Stars, interviewing sailors about Bristol slave ships for months.” 

“Goodbye Papa,” I say, concealing my disgust. I retreat indoors. 

Mama and I enjoy an evening together for the first time in ages, attended by a happy Bessie and the other servants. Two white ladies under the chandelier, toasting each other. It is as if the house is our home again, not the one recently invaded by black monsters.

After dinner, I stand at my favourite gorge-view window, without a candle, thinking in the moonlight. The moon silvers the branches of the winter trees and chases the ripples of the evening tide on the river below. 

It is so beautiful. I watch the fairy ships Of Bristol gliding away west like moonbeams. But under that same moon, thousands of Abels are waiting now in Africa. Waiting for those very ships. 

At last I have time to think.

What kind of man is Papa? He was the white knight of my girlhood. Now he is an ogre. Has he changed – or have I?

What exactly has Papa done in the West Indies and Africa?  

I am going to find out. 

 

Chapter Thirty

Tom conducts me in the small fly to the Horsefair. Bessie is there. 

“You must prepare yourself. John Wesley’s sermons are not Canon Farthing’s, Miss Amelia.”

“I am glad to hear it. Canon’s Farthing’s are like watching paint dry!”

“I mean there may be danger. There may even be violence. John Wesley is not ‘respectable’ and you have to be careful with your name, especially now.”

“Miss Hannah More told me she used to attend Welsey’s sermons himself in the past. They cannot be so very disorderly.” After all, it’s a church.

“The pulpit itself is no refuge against attack at Wesley’s services. 

We take our earnest places with Bessie’s family whose whispered greetings tell me they know what spiritual stowaway Bessie has introduced. We stand, (kneel, pray and hymn) in ‘forms’. It is a much smaller church than I am used to. 

It has a double pulpit, the most peculiar I have ever seen. I am staring at it as Bessie’s brother leans over.

“That’s to allow the preacher a quick escape from a mob!” he whispers 

“What a strange congregation! Rich and poor mixing freely, Bessie!” I exclaim, forgetting to whisper.

“God is no respecter of persons,” says Bessie in my ear primly. 

“Canon Farthing never mentioned that.”

A fine greyed-hair man of handsome stature and erect bearing ascends the pulpit. He does not observe the usual ritual and ceremony. He just clasps his hands in prayer for a moment.

“What’s he doing?” I hiss.

“He is asking God what he should say,” whispers Bessie.

I remain with hands clasped and eyes closed long after I should. Bessie nudges me. Everyone is looking at me. I blush again. I could not be drawing more attention to myself if I tried. I am very glad of my veil.

Wesley is preaching now. He holds a Bible above his head in his right hand, as if letting it guide him. Several times I open my mouth to utter the liturgy then shut it again. Instead, people yell at random.

Hallelujah

Amen!

Praise The Lord! 

Balderdash! (laughter)

Wesley merely becomes quieter, more homely. “Welcome all to ‘our New Room in the Horsefair’. Though it has not been new for forty years, it is new I think to many here today. Welcome new and old. God is ever searching for new souls to save.” 

Then suddenly, with shining face and lifted eyes, the Cambridge graduate thunders, “Thou who hast mingled of one blood all the nations upon earth: Have compassion upon those outcasts of men who are trodden down as dung upon the earth!”

“The words of the King James Bible, Miss.”

“Pigswill!” howls a red-faced lawyer, hired to agitate. ”The Bible itself preaches slavery.‘Chattels’ and their regulation have been with us since the Old Testament. Did Jesus ever tell slaves to revolt? No. He told them to be good slaves rather than bad ones.” 

There are hoots of approval from a mob around him at this. “Render unto God what is God’s and to Caesar what is Caesar’s!” 

“And rotten tomatoes unto Wesley!” A rotten tomato splats across the pulpit. Laughter. 

“Good gracious, Bessie!” I clutch her arm. And instinctively move closer to her brother.

Wesley allows the laughter to subside, unafraid. Then he answers in a clear ringing voice. “I read Old and New Testament constantly, friend. The Book of Revelation promises a new world to the Just. It also rebukes slavery.” 

Many of his Bristol congregation, rich and poor, cheer at this. But Wesley seems as unaffected by the cheer as he is undaunted by the jeers. He believes.

“Did not Our Lord preach human brotherhood? And is not an African a man and a brother? When the Chosen People was enslaved in Egypt did God’s Prophet Moses bid them endure it? No. He said to mighty Pharaoh, Let My people Go.

“Did Our Lord live among Roman emperors, slave owners and kings? No. He was born to a poor carpenter, to the poorest and most wretched of the earth!”

Hallelujah!

“Did he own slaves? No, The Lord of Lords himself lived among slaves. He was even flogged and chastised Himself. Like a slave.”

Much cheering. And now I even notice black faces among those cheering!

“Baptists and Pentecostals,” explains Bessie. “But good souls - as much followers of Wesley as we.”

“Sublime mysticism and nonsense!” trumpets a farmer. 

“Do you even know what that means, Farmer? Or has someone just paid you to shout it?” shouts Bessie’s brother. 

This is certainly not like Canon Farthing’s sermons!

“You will ruin this city!” interrupts a merchant. “Will you find employment for those you ruin and put out of work?” 

Another, very nervous, Somerset voice. “I am a manufacturer of Negro clothes in Watchett. Honest tradesmen like me all over the county depend on the slave trade, and thousands more in Bristol-” 

It looks like the countryman’s first time out of Somerset. Some of the hecklers have been paid by the anti-abolitionists to come and shout and are really enjoying themselves.  Not he. He is a small village voice in the big city, worried for his future.

“You are a heretic, Wesley! The church is a communion,” declares a powerful voice. I see to my horror it is the Bishop of Clifton, vicar of my father’s own church. 

“Bessie, what if he sees me?”

“Keep your veil on!”  

The bishop is sneering now. “A minister cannot preach the Word however he sees it. Who told you to speak for God! Are you a Christ in the wilderness, Sir!”

“Yes, he is!” screeches a wild eyed woman.

There is uproar at this. 

“A voice in the wilderness of this city!” the woman persists. 

“Lactilla! Get yer dugs out for the lads!”

Did I really hear that… farmyard word? – in church!

Bessie puts her hands over my ears. “Ann Yearsley, The Poetical Milkwoman of Bristol, Miss. The vulgar calls her Lactilla.”

 “A woman raising her voice in public – above such low vulgarity and on such high matters! Has she her wits, Bessie?”

“She is filled with ‘enthusiasm,’ miss.”

Bessie’s brother is anxious for me. “Perhaps we had better go, Bessie?”

“Three quaRts of salvation, wench,” cries the farmer, hanging his tongue out and making unspeakable gestures with his hands. 

“Pull the UDDER un!”

Laughter.

“You fine gentlemen scorns me as the wife of a poor yeoman farmer, a milk seller in your grand metropolis. But you would ignore our Saviour Himself so if He came among you again.”

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhh! Ride my ass.”

“Hee haw, hee haw! Ha ha ha!”

“And He would accuse you of Preening Inhumanity to your brothers in Africa!”

There is a stamping in the chapel at this.

“Many of these slaves you buy and sell - and to whom you harden your hearts - are Better Christians than you!”

“Bristol, thine heart hath throbb’d to glory. – Slaves, 

Even Christian slaves, have shook their chains, And gaz’d With wonder and amazement on thee.”

“Has she gone mad, Bessie?”

“It’s just poetry, Miss. Her Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave Trade. She were destitute when your old Headmistress, Miss More, rescued her, nurtured her writing, and helped her become a circulating librarian. Now look at her!”

“Who’s that fine wealthy young lady – in the elegant cloak, supporting her?”

“That’s someone you knew very well once - at Miss Hannah More’s School for Young Ladies on Park St.”

“Sophia Lansdowne!” I lower my head in fear of recognition 

“Heathens!” calls that lady now, head held high.

“Shame!”

“A disgrace to your family!”

It is my old Headmistress! Hannah More. I have never in my life seen any female, still less a lady, speak out under barracking with such steely fervour. Ladies are supposed to keep their thoughts as secret as their journals and their linen. Not she!

“I am no disgrace to my family for caring for my brothers and sisters in Africa.” She lifts her voice above the clamour, “You have children, – go home and look at them. In Africa, they could be in the holds on your own slave ships!”

“Do you compare us to heathen monkeys?”

“You are not Christians who infest Africa’s shores but are rather white savages ruled by lust of gold - or lust of conquest.”

“Is she still Head of the school?”

“The Lady from Stapleton? Yes,” says Bessie proudly, “and the leading female member of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade. She works alongside the famous William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson. A credit to Bristol!”

There are scuffles between some of the forms. Bessie’s brother is rolling up his sleeves and about to join in when Bessie holds his arm.

Red coats are presenting muskets and moving in, in a place of worship! The uproar settles down as another abolitionist speaks. 

“Dr Eslin!” cries a pleased Methody in a bonnet.

She applauds so loudly he has to speak even louder. We drop our voices to whispers.

“All you young school ladies went to see Miss More’s first play The Inflexible Captive in Bath in the 70s. Do you remember, Miss?”

“Yes. And the planned visit to the Pump Room afterwards. I never went. My father removed me from the school because of what she was teaching me about his trade!” 

“Miss More writes religious works now,” whispers Bessie. “And works like a Trojan for Abolition. But now we have missed Dr Eslin with our talking.”

“I do not buy Negroes!” declares a smooth gentleman, and several around him nod. 

“No but your father grew rich on all the sugar, coffee, tobacco, rum, rice and cotton picked by poor Africans in the Americas. 

I look down at my fine dress, my own sugar- white skin. 

“I do not buy Negroes”

More uproar as this speaker tries to be heard. He has the resounding voice and sentences of a professional speaker so might be a politician. “I do not buy Negroes. So I do not trade in slaves. Can any man help what God has given him as his inheritance? Should we all behave like a deranged Apostle and give everything away? Who will gain by Bristol’s loss? Not the slaves I fear. Only Liverpool.”

Roars of approval from the pro-slave lobby.

“And every foreigner in Europe except Russia and Germany, the only countries not involved in the trade.”

Wesley goes on. “Perhaps you will say, ‘I do not buy Negroes; I only use those left me by my father. Would that satisfy the Jesus who pleaded with you that whatsoever you do to the poorest and most needy, you do to Him? Had your father, have you, has any man living, a right to use another as a slave? It cannot be, even setting Revelation aside. God should make people more human, not less.”

Miss Hannah More gets up again at this. Her voice rings out like martial music. “Many of you are filled with wrath and fear at our words. I recognise among you slave merchants, slave captains, members of slave crews. But I also see lost souls.”

Jeers.

“And lost wages! Will you pay them?” mocks a sailor.

“The wages of sin is death!” bellows Daniel right next to me, nearly bursting my eardrums. He is furious. Everyone stares in our direction. I draw back further into my veil. 

Miss More goes on more quietly. “All of us - even a slave captain - can be redeemed from Sin. A few years ago, I was given a copy of Captain John Newton’s published letters. He captained slavers, like many of you. He is now the Rev. John Newton. I do not ask you to listen to me, my writings poems or plays.”

“Good – because we ain’t gonna!” laughs a sailor.

“I only ask that you read the noble Captain’s letters. If you do so, even you merchants, and especially you slave crews, who know their truth from your own experience, will feel the same profound impact on your lives that these letters had on mine.”

There is a silence. Miss More has made her point. 

*

Bessie shows me a copy of Miss More’s poem.

“As the bright ensign’s glory she displays,

See pale oppression faints beneath the blaze!

The giant dies! No more his frown appals,

The chain untouch’d, drops off, the fetter falls.

Astonish’d echo tells the vocal shore,

Opression’s fall’n, and Slavery is no more!”

Bristol – England - this world - is not the garden of Eden Papa has built for me in the Clifton clouds. But perhaps it is not wholly a wilderness either? 

 

 

 

Chapter Thirty One

“Well, Samuel, was that worth the long journey down from Oxford?”

“I would have walked across the Alps for it, Robert. I feel inspired!”

“His application of Biblical precedent to the slave trade was masterly.”

“I would merely add this - No man is wicked without temptation, no man is wretched without a cause. That cause and temptation is money and profits. I have the firmest faith that all things work together for good. I believe that the slave trade will eventually be abolished.”

“Oh! to carry on Cowper’s noble work in that field.  

Forced from home and all its pleasures 

Afric's coast I left forlorn, 

To increase a stranger's treasures, 

O’er the raging billows borne…”

“A good and rational sentiment, Robert, but your own vision should add something more likely to speed the overthrow of the trade. A steady belief in man’s essential goodness- a passion for universal Liberty. The passion even now stirring in France:

Liberty the soul of Life shall reign,

Shall throb in every pulse, shall flow thro’ every vein. 

Bessie and I were divided in the melee in which the Sermon ended. I asked two gentlemen members of the congregation to escort me to safety. Being students, poets, they have brought me instead along the taverns and inns that line the harbour, with the tops of tall ships appearing above the buildings. Bessie will be frantic with worry. But I feel strangely at home. It is like revisiting my own roots – my father’s beginnings. Our first house was here, his first yard and his first ship. I am fascinated.

The poets have brought me into a salty timbered tavern Papa used to recruit crew in, though it has a room for gentler folk now too. The two young scholars show off for my benefit. I am enchanted. 

“Make sure you finish that fragment, Sam. Poetry is as much craft and persistence as inspiration.

“Cowper’s Pity for Poor Africans is very wittily done and it strikes the heart’s strings with a artist’s true hand. It is the poignant story of a man – a society - that knows slavery is wrong. And even though that society knows it to be wrong will not give up any of its benefits! Listen!

I pity them greatly but I must be mum 

For how could we do without sugar and rum?”

“A pleasing lightness of line. Though the couplet makes a jingle of it.”

“But is not its very lightness the point?”

But Samuel is staring at the specially adapted slave ships in the harbour “Imagine human cargoes and damned crews tortured by guilt, on that very vessel. In doomed Southern seas. Torment, thirst, a floating hell. I would describe it more thus:

Day after day after day, We stuck nor breath nor motion 

We could not laugh nor wail, through utter drought all dumb we stood 

With throat unslacked, with black lips baked…

A painted ship upon a painted ocean.”

“Write it down, Samuel, before you lose it!”

Samuel gives him a look of exquisite agony. “Wait there is more. The sight of those slavers has cast an evil spell over me. You write it. 

I look'd upon the rotting sea,  

 And drew my eyes away;  

 I look'd upon the rotting deck,  

 And there the dead men lay…  

 

Robert scribbles it down. A schooner of sherry appears before me but I can’t drink it without drawing aside my veil. Samuel almost foams at the mouth as he chants, staring as at a real horror before him.

 “An orphan's curse would drag to hell  

 A spirit from on high;  

 But oh! more horrible than that 260

 Is the curse in a dead man's eye!  

 Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse,  

 And yet I could not die.”

 

“Wait Samuel. I cannot-“

“Four times fifty living men

(And I heard nor sigh nor groan),

With heavy thump, a lifeless lump,

They dropped down one by one.”

The poet falls back on his bench exhausted. Other drinkers stare. I want to run away from these terrible visions. But I am fascinated by them. I stare at the visionary. That he should see such things in those tall ships. One would think he was drinking wild African potions not good Spanish sherry.

“It’s good, Coleridge, very good” said Robert, reading back what he’d written. But now let’s give it some reality and reason. How about this? -

I sail'd on board a Guinea-man 

And to the slave-coast went;… 

Would that the sea had swallow'd me 

When I was innocent!”

“Samuel are you listening?”

Coleridge opens his eyes, still lying on his back. “Yes, yes – and what happens then?” demanded Samuel. 

“The sailor is forced, by his captain, to flog a despairing African woman who refuses to eat.”

“He hears her suffering all night long until she dies the next day…” 

“They flung her overboard;… poor wretch 

She rested from her pain,.. 

But when… O Christ! O blessed God! 

Shall I have rest again!”

“It is well done, Robert.”

I can’t wait to tell Bessie of my adventures with visionaries in the docks. It is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me – and the most frightening. I lick my dry lips. “You are… scholars?” I ask through my veil.

“Yes. After we leave Oxford we will found a new society. Aristocracy is dead. We propose - Pantisocracy.”

“And what is Pant-isocracy?” I ask. I draw aside my veil a little and drink. The sherry is much rougher than Mama’s.

“A scheme Robert here and I are devising. We will marry three sisters and all live together in the virgin forests of the New World.”

“It will be a completely new society beyond all the corruptions and chains and cruel customs of the old. The lady fears our scheme is too good for this world?” I suspect a contempt in Robert’s view of women.

“Not at all!” I cry. “A world without slavers. It is music to my ears.” I thrust aside my veil completely.

“Oh wise and beautiful innocence. Do you have two sisters? I shall write a poem for you. What is your name? Is it Love? ” 

I sense an adoration of women and prefer it to the other’s condescension. Samuel Coleridge is a very beautiful young man and seems more so every moment. 

“Amelia.”

“Love. In the Latin. I knew it” He clasps my hand in a trembling passion. “Let us seal our pact with Pantisocracy…!” 

His full lips purse towards mine, sweet with sherry and poetry. Then a voice freezes me with its shrill question. 

“Amelia! What on earth are you doing?”

 

Chapter Thirty Two

They call him the ‘Nightingale of the Commons.’ A wig frames his face like a halo.

Jardine fumes, clenches, stamps, growls, glares all through. And breaks into the applause in which it ends.

 “A pretty speech, rWilberforce!”  - but merely a speech!”

William Wilberforce, the honourable Member for Hull, retorts Jardine. “Evidence, Sir, patiently collected over many years in your own city and in Liverpool and London and over many years by my honourable friend Thomas Clarkson. Evidence collected on your own slaver, The Mary. Every detail corroborated by witnesses.  You should bow your head before it in shame.”

Silence (in court). 

“But there is no need to take my word. Let us hear the words of one who was there.”

I think this means me but an old sailor enters. A strong smell of tar and tobacco fills the air. His hair and beard is grey and rat-tailed and his face is winter-pale, though mottled with years of drinking. His skin betrays the kidneys of a dying man. His voice is Bristolian. I know it like my own.

O’Brien. 

He speaks with great force of his treatment on the Mary. The Judge listens carefully.

“And you say the - illegal – flogging you received on the quay in Jamaica was at Mr Jardine’s behest?”

“Jardine was behind it. He drove all men beyond the limits of cruelty - slave, crew, captains, all.”

“But surely Mr Jardine was a considerate shipmaster in other ways? Did he not, for instance, provide an extra barrel of fresh Somerset apples for the crew when a rotten apple spread through the first?”

“Aye, like the moral rottenness spreading from that ship’s heart. And withdrew the apples from any who disappointed him.”

“Like you?”

“Aye, like me.”

Wilberforce helped him out. “How did this rottenness show itself in your treatment of the slaves.”

O’Brien’s voice breaks slightly. “I’ve thrown sick slaves overboard in mid ocean to stop disease spreading. Jardine’s law, we called it. An’ I’ve starved slaves in front of others we fed one day - and reversed that the next-“

“Why that?”

“To set ’em against each other, Sir, divide and rule see? And enjoy doing it. That’s the worst of the trade.“

“Why?”

“Because we was honest sailors once, ripe for adventure. We was husbands, sons, brothers, kidnapped from our lives – from our taverns and homes - just as these Africans was. By debt or violence or accusation or treachery or petty crime. By an evil chance. Mine was the mistake of drinking a week’s housekeeping in the Hole in the Wall.”

“The tavern in Bristol docks where the Royal Navy recruits?”

“Aye. Knew I’d be facing the wife’s wrath and the hungry eyes of my little boy when I crawled home. I’d been in prison for stealing a loaf of bread for the boy and work had been hard for me to get in Bristol after that. The next time I comes into port with a throat as dry as an African, the wife’s in the Llandogger asking me for the wages in front of my sea-mates before I can even reach the bar. Well, no man can stand that. I keeps drinking then until I don’t know where I am and don’t care.”

“And where were you?” 

“Sleeping it off on board Jardine’s slaver ship Mary. I wakes up with a head like a screeching parrot, already slipping out of port. And even though I’m death-sick I’m missing my boy like my own heart. I’m even missing my wife.”

There is some laughter at this. 

“You never saw either of them again?”

His voice goes quiet. “No.”

“What did you make of your new life?”

“That boy was the only thing that kept me human-”

“What was your boy’s name?” interrupts Wilberforce, perhaps trying to present his witness as a father rather than a criminal.

“Africa, Sir.”

“Africa?”

“Yes. His mother liked the name. We both did.”

“Was she connected with Africa in some way?”

“You never knows in a port.” He winks and gives a yellow leer.

“So that voyage to Africa had some sentimental meaning for you?”

“God, no, I knew about the slavers – you couldn’t miss the evil smell on them a mile off, even after they’d gone on to America and come back. No-one expected romance on a Africa ships. But on the middle passage, with the …cargo aboard, it give you a whip hand over someone a lot worse off than you, see. The Blacks. You wanted to flog em in the end, flog the black skin off their backs until they was screaming for you to stop. Except you didn’t stop. “ His voice breaks. “God help me.

“Jardine’s law, they called it. Get their minds set for the plantations, save ‘seasoning’ time later. Went wrong on one ship. Slaves mutinied and left a crew marooned on a desert island, no fresh water, slow starvation, the cruellest punishment of all. So the orders changed after that.” 

“And were the Slaves troublesome? Did they need grinding down?”

“No. They were ground down before they came aboard”

Is that a tear in O’Brien’s eye?

“Was Mr Jardine an unusually hard master – of crew and slaves?”

“He was the devil. But if you’re going to have a slave ship, Jardine’s law was logical enough. Among the slavers and planters, he set the standard. He was admired.”

“A model slaver and as cruel as the devil. And do you see this man you call Jardine here today?”

The pirate points. “There.” Jardine stirs impatiently.

“Why have you come here today?”

“I were a young man with dreams, even then, your lordship. Once I got to sea, I decided to make something of meself. All I wanted was to sail behind the mast instead of afore one day, be a Mate, perhaps, even a Skipper. And then come home to my wife and boy and see them right. Well the Mary – and all the other slavers I served on after that - turned those dreams to nightmares. Turned me into a devil. Now I seeks forgiveness. I wishes to atone for all I done.” 

“You call yourself a Christian?”

He stands a little straighter at last. “Yes Sir. I eard the hymns on a ship. The ope in em converted me from slaving and piracy. I were baptised in port by the one they calls the hymn priest.”

“The nonconformist Anglican priest, Charles Wesley, the abolitionist John Welsey’s brother,?”

“Aye.”

“And you have no other motive in coming forward today than a devout wish to atone?”

He has a fit of coughing. “I’m in hell, Sir. I’ve no other motives left.”

This has its impact on the committee, who are all Christians, in name at least. A lull occurs – a drink of ale is sent for - for the pirate. He has ‘taken the pledge’ though and refuses it, refuses gin too. They have to boil him some water. 

“It’s political correctness gone mad!” complains a gout-ridden member of the council. 

O’Brien sees some friendly faces on the committee. It is not all traditional slaver Anglicans, not any more. There are also evangelicals and dissenters. Wilberforce himself has recently converted to Wesleyism.

“Objection! How can we trust this witness? protests Jardine’s lawyer. “He is not just a common pirate. He is shortly to hang for mutiny, sedition and the murder of a British navy captain.”

Wilberforce protests, “I do not see a pirate. I see a condemned sinner who has thrown himself upon the mercy of God and this Council. A man dying - of the cancer - and for whom the hangman’s rope has few terrors now.”

But the tide is moving to Jardine now. The pirate has spoken true and well. A true-eyed pirate, but a pirate.

And worse is to come for Wilberforce, because I am next. 

“The black spot.”

I look up during a recess and O’Brien is standing there. He hands me a black oilskin package. 

“So you do know me.”

“Not by your actions, Africa. Why are you speaking for the devil?”

“It’s a long story.”

“Tell me the short version.”

“A woman?”

“There’s always a woman. Usually in a faraway port, like my wives. Well is this woman worth selling your soul for?”

“If anything is. She is my soul.”

“Well, if you ever change your mind. That package will help.”

“What is it?”

“It’s Surgeon’s Jones full report, as passed on his deathbed to his young assistant, and smuggled off the Mary by the last person they’d expect. O’Brien.

I hold out the package. “Then you use it. Show it to the Enquiry.”

“Ah, it’s worthless in my hands. They’re too blackened with Royal Navy blood. Wilberforce did his best but they knows what I was. A cut-throat and a traitor. I’m dead in the water now. No use to the cause.”

“Then give it to Wilberforce.”

“Needs an eyewitness like me. Or much better than me – you.”

I am read out a fairy tale description of my life on the Mary and am asked Yes or No if it is true. The package burns a hole in my pocket and the truth burns a hole in my tongue. But I simply nod, like a dumb beast and Jardine’s supporters cheer me to the rafters.

I’m not sure the truth would have made a difference anyway, after all. The merchants of Bristol and Liverpool have prepared their Privy Council defence with as much care and pains as Clarkson has amassed his. They mount a formidable defence. Wilberforce could spend another forty years of continuous political effort to breach it and still fail. 

The merchants have bribed, bullied or brainwashed key witnesses against the trade. Wilberforce’s hopes lie wrecked in the murky, shark-infested waters of a politics he is too noble to navigate.  

Wilberforce learns a lesson. The force of his ideals will need a hard copper lining against sabotage in future. 

The day is Jardine’s.

“Wilberforce can go to Hull!” laugh the Liverpudlians, the new leaders of the trade.. 

“You’re a good boy, Prince. You won’t suffer for this,” says Jardine.

I do suffer for it.

“You named me Africa after your lost boy!” I say to O’Brien as we part for the last time.

“‘Aye.” He coughs. “I always meant to come back for you, you know, just as I always meant to go back for him and the wife. But life always had a way of getting away from me.”

Aye, Cap’n. 

Me too.

 

Chapter Thirty Three

“James!” I find my voice at last. I notice the poets have disappeared into the crowd at the bar. “But you’re - in the West Indies - for five years! What on earth are you doing here?”

“I asked you first!”

“I’ve been at John Wesley’s Sermon.”

James raises an eyebrow. “A Sermon that leads to a dockside tavern?”

“By way of poetry, yes.” Coleridge is waving farewell now across the sea of heads. “ I - I can explain. I sent you a letter –yesterday - concerning Papa – Oh James! Nothing is as I thought. ”

“Amelia, nothing is as I thought. It defies words – it could not be written, even to you. Father is evil. Or else mad. Unless the evil I have seen has maddened me, or all three together-!”

There is a crash and a loud scuffle in the dark along the dockside. Loud yells. A drunken sailor is being robbed by beggars. 

“But this is not the place to tell you, Amelia. Come quickly. To the chaise..”- 

We hurry away. Our old coachman is very pleased to see James, whom he was astonished to receive a summons from, and just as surprised to see me. He helps us load. “Tom and Matthew are out looking for you,” he says, more relieved than put out. We pay the dockhands and set off over the cobbles. There are drunken scuffles everywhere. 

Bessie is in the chaise. “Miss! Thank God!”

She yawns. “With permission, I’ll sleep out the journey – I’ve been up since four.”

A man yells.

“Mercy, he sounds as if he has been killed.” 

“Perhaps he has.” James puts a protective arm around me.

“James, I am still more afraid of what you have to tell than anything happening out there.” 

James has two serving women in tow. They take their seats, resting a head on each of Tom’s shoulders. Tom grins at the favour. He is still grinning as the motion of the carriage rocks him to sleep.

Who are they I wonder? What is my gentleman brother doing with maids?

I look at him. “Oh it is so good to see you – and so unexpected!” I lower my voice. ”You got my letter about Mama?”

“Yes. Months ago. Is she better now?”

“She will never be better– in that mad house.”

“You mean our father’s house in Clifton?

“Papa has brought home a man slave of eight and twenty, whom he torments for the slightest fault, and who is terrified of him. This ‘boy’ – he is called Abel - cured me of the toothache. And Papa punished him for it! And then he punished me too.”

“I have heard much of this Abel,” says James grimly. “Punished him, you say? And you too? Why?”

“You had better know. I have disgraced the family. I sang in my nightdress to the neighbours…”

James starts laughing. “What!”

“It was the rum!”

“The rum! And in a nightdress! My father’s little princess! Things really have changed!”

“You’re not angry?”

“Amelia, I have seen terrors in Jamaica worse even than tipsy ladies exhibiting themselves in public! ...”

“Well, I doubt if milord Ponsonby would elope with me now, though he’d still take the dowry of course. And because of it Papa fears for your chances of marrying the titled Miss Eaton. But you’re not angry?” 

“I am not angry.” James laughs but then keeps laughing. Like a madman.

“I am not a silly girl any longer. I intend to persuade Abel to tell me the... dark truth of his enslavement. And if I can get it out of him, to publish it to the world.” 

“The world will not believe it.” 

He indicates the sleeping servant women. I look a little more closely. What new alarm has my tormented brother to show me. Already I begin to guess.  Their heads are swathed in shadows and scarves, their sleeping faces turned away from me, but their hands – beautiful because I can only see their shape not the calloused, toil-worn skin upon them - are visible in the moonlight. I stare at them.

“There sleep two women who could relate all the horrors of the Middle Passage your world could wish to hear – or not wish.”

“African hands...”

“Four among a thousand. Countless thousands of hands, most of them now dead. Those ‘hands’ survived an inferno on a ship fitted and financed by our father, who art in hell. And then cropped for their very lives, scrabbling like the beasts large and small who shared their soil, the damanable hell-plantation ruled by our father. And now their owners bring them here. Or rather I bring them here, because they do not own even their own hands.”

“But why have you brought them?”

His eye is full of dark intent. “To show Bristol itself in a dark mirror – in the women my father enslaves.”

“But why these women, James? What’s particular about them?”

“See for yourself. And look at them well. Because our father has.”

James leans forward and pulls at the women’s scarves. They wake, alarmed. James says “I am not going to hurt you.” 

He flings open the carriage door onto the Bristol night and jumps out, brandishing the women’s scarves above his mad head like flags. Now Bessie and Tom are awake too, and dreadfully alarmed. James keeps yelling. “There has been enough secrecy and darkness!” he explodes. “Let the truth come to light! Let it come home to Bristol!”

The carriage is halted under a bridge and a shadow has fallen over the faces. I steel myself. I lean forward to see. In a moment, when we move, any grisly torture done to those faces will be revealed.

Bessie wails. “It’s the sun, Miss, the rigours of the voyage,” she sobs, “the terrible things he’s seen. Do not listen, Miss Amelia. James is not himself!” 

James storms in at her, “Not myself? Was I ever myself?“

Bessie puts her hands over my ears. 

He dashes them away. “You tell Amelia not to distress herself? Her home is a white fairy tale built on black blood!” 

Bessie weeps. Tom blinks. The coachman asks in a trembling voice from above if all is well. 

James laughs. “Oh yes, dear old Matthew, all is well!” He swings back into the coach and throws the women back their covering. His voice breaks with emotion. “Drive on, Matthew. The dark truth is come. Drive it home!”

Before the women can re-cover their faces, I get a glimpse in the moonlight. The older one is gaping at James. A thousand female emotions chase across her face – cloud-shadows across an autumn field under a harvest sun. 

And I see Papa’s darkest secret there.

 

Chapter Thirty Four

The carriage glides smoothly over Bristol cobbles. The sudden contrast with the rattling country roads wakes me. Only Jardine and I and the last sack of mail remain. He is giving the exhausted driver a coin to add a detour. Even the guard has got down. The wheels grind against the strain of a hill.

“Whiteladies Road,” purrs Jardine. “Then Blackboy Hill - and home! ”

Home! 

Jardine is pleased with himself, with the world, and even with me. He and the slavers are home, and dry. The abolitionists, and slaves, are all at sea. 

“You remain a slave in law,” he swigs from his flask. “But ‘slave’ has a different meaning here in England than on the Island. And domestic service will be very different here.”

He has said all this already. Twice. But he is not used to so much rum. He tells me again. “In Jamaica, servants never announce arrivals. Visitors, dogs, negroes, cats, poultry wander higgledy piggledy up and down parlour and private rooms wherever they please. Here you will find order and ceremony. 

He becomes silly-serious, the Earnest Drunk. “You was once taken from your family, Prince. At my hand. You has served me long and well. I am giving you the opportunity to join my family, as a free servant. You’ll even have your own stall in the cellar, which is more than many of them get. Can’t put you in their dormitories - they’re worried what you turn into after dark! This evening, I will even introduce you to the Mistress.

“You will see little of the Mistress. I sees little enough of her myself! 

He coughs. “The Mistress knows nothing of my home life on the Island, naturally. It would not befit a lady to ask of it. But if she ever does…”

“Yes, Master.” I will keep your Nokuphillah a dark secret. And her mother, the wife you had before. I have to – or she will die.

“I’ve worked all my life,” he says, “to establish my family as a noble one. It’s how we do things in this country – slow but sure. I’ve known French planters in Martinique and St Domingo who would have achieved the same but for French snobbery. Good merchants whose merits should have made them gentlemen and their children aristocrats. It’s hard enough here in England even for a Princely-rich merchant like me. In France, the old guard in their white-face and finery won’t let them in at any price. Now the French colonies have gone mad. There’s talk of mass slave revolts. In Haiti they wants a slave to be king of the island!”

He takes a swig of finest French brandy. “The English toffs calls me a grocer. The ‘sans culottes’ in Paris would have my head.” He is no longer talking to me. “Well, no peer of this realm will stop me rising and no English ‘sans culottes’ will ever take my head.”

“You will find my town house magnificent, Prince. Abel. But it’s nothing compared to my new estates in Somerset. If Amelia still marries Eaton, my descendants will be knights. It’s taken a lifetime. It would be a fine mess if some pauper with a grudge chopped my head off now!”

His neck bulges with laughter. I look at it in the lamplight, noting the veins, the unhealthy blush across the pores that were not there even a year ago. He raps his cane to attract the guard’s attention. “What’s the delay, man?”

The coachman calls back. “We dropped the guard down in Bristol, Sir. I said we shouldn’t have. Runaway Black – a female. I fears for the mail.”

“Damn her eyes! We want to get home this day not the next.”

“And I needs to deliver this mail, Sir! I should never have come this way!”

Another coin changes hands. He gets sentimental again. “A wild runaway! Not like you, eh, Abe, good faithful boy.” There is actually a tear in his eye. Aghhh, he is slobbering over me. “You’ve always been there for me. The rock my house is founded on.” And his drunken bulk slumps across me. 

He gives a ghastly smile and groans, snuffles into sleep, like a pig, using my shoulder as his pillow. I eye him. I remember my promise. One day I will that man.

Now?

I suddenly see the runaway. She fills the window with a wild black face, stares at me madly, then runs on. 

With nowhere to run.

The coach jolts suddenly backwards, taking a long hill. At last, the hill steepens sharply. The carriage has reached the top of Whiteladies Road and its tired horses slow to a standstill. 

“Blackboy Hill,” calls the coachman. “You asked me to tell you.” 

I look at my hands. And his throat. Black hands, worn thin with toil. White throat, thick and coarse with roaring at black backs like mine.

Blackboy Hill. 

I don’t want his blood on my hands. I look round for a knife, a sharp edge. 

But I don’t want him on my conscience either. I just want him gone. Forever.

The moment passes. The whip cracks again and the black beasts nudge forward at last for the final effort. They breast the hill and turn left, smelling home and rest and stable. 

There are shouts. Attendants come for the horses. 

“Wake up Master,” I hiss into his ear. Get off me you monster. 

He wakes, that old alert look in his eye. If I ever did try to kill him, I think, I had better be quick. He snaps out orders, lively now. He is come home in triumph. He has plans – as always. 

So the conquering hero strides through the hallway, leaving coat, cane and hat for me to pick up. He accepts the nervous greetings of servants. “But where is Amelial? Is my princess not anxious to know her fate with Eaton? does she not wish to greet her doting Papa?” He walks in to the middle apartments. Parkes and Susan and other servants fuss round him. “Did the dear girl not wait up for me?”

“Yes sir.” 

Jardine glares at her, rememembering teeth.

Bessie bobs a curtsey. “She is not asleep, Sir.”

She will never ‘sleep’ again. She is very much awake. 

Something has changed.

Keyboard music interrupts Jardine’s enquiries. He hesitates. Perhaps some homecoming is prepared for him? It is impertinent if the surprise involves Bessie – doubtless the Mistress has interfered – but he can deal with that later.

He gave Amelia the instrument many years before, the first of these London-made instruments to appear in Bristol. He almost chokes at the memory now. He would give half his fortune to retrieve the moment he gave his shining-eyed Amelia that piano all those years ago...

Her keyboard teacher complained it “lacked the spirit of the family harpsichord and gained nothing in sweetness.” But Jardine overruled him like he overruled everyone. It was the instrument of a new age.

He listens. 

Then he frowns. 

Instead of the expected song from ‘Judith’ or some gentle flirtation with that arch-modern Haydn manipulated by Amelia’s graceful fingers, a discordant sound is emerging. And over it Amelia’s voice soar, almost barbaric. What wild notes are these?  And – impatient of waiting any longer for the servants - he throws open the doors of the family rooms.

 

Chapter Thirty Five

“Papa!” Amelia jumps up from the piano. 

Jardine was about to shout down the noise she is playing. But the words die on his lips.

 

On the elegant settle, every inch a lady, reclines his wife. Unusual at any time lately but unprecedented at this time of night. 

And then a much greater shock:

“Good evening, Father.”

“James! But…

“But?”

“ – you’re in the West Indies.”

“Am I?”

“Oh very polished. Very Cambridge. Why have you disregarded my orders and come back?”

“Because Cambridge gave me ideas above your station. The ideas of Rousseau and Wesley, for instance, who taught me to suspect there is a better world than this one.”

“Better than this?!” Jardine snarls, indicating the palatial white room. 

“Better than the black hell it’s built on.”

“I shall go to the Attic,” announces Mrs Jardine.

“You will stay here, Mama – it is time you came down out of your Anglican clouds and faced the truth. True Christians have been sending missions into Africa and petitioning Parliament against slavery for the past forty years. ”

“Well I never expected a Quaker to crawl out from my loins.” Jardine struck his chest. 

“Your England is dead, Father. A whole new class of dynamic men is coming into politics. They have clear and fresh solutions to the old problems of how to generate wealth - and how to distribute it. They grovel before no king or custom, they respect their fellows and they respect the common labourer. And they do not regard him as little more than a slave if he is white and as nothing at all if he is black.”

“A Jacobin by God! A Frenchie!”

“Will ye no come back again!” sings Mrs Jardine, with well tutored tunefulness and unexpected charm in one so decayed. “Will ye no come back again. Will ye no come back again?”

“Let us hope not,” says James. “But that’s Jacobitism, mother. I bring something plainer and more English. Truth.”

“Claptrap Clarkson! Hull-cat Wilberforce! The bottomless Pitt!” catechises Jardine, advancing on his son. “The most misshaped human being I’ve ever seen. No rear to speak of at all. Except the one he talks out of.” 

James holds his ground. “The future. And the sooner this enlightenment become reality, the sooner Britain can consolidate her new place in the world.”

“I like the old place.”

“You are out of date, Father. We must turn East. Our plantations in the West Indies cannot compete anymore. We must free the slaves.”

“Tea, I think, Bessie” orders Mrs Jardine solemnly. “Coffee is no longer the fashion.”

“The demand for sugar is always unsteady, so is coffee, so is cotton.” James frowns. “Prices are falling already.”

“Your time in Africa and the West Indies has not been entirely wasted, it seems, however absurd your conclusions. But we still get a ten per cent profit...”

“And it takes five years to turn such a profit. Start up costs are so high only huge firms can enter the trade.”

“There are two hundred and sixty operators in the West Indies still.” 

“Clarkson doesn’t think so.”

“Clarkson’s a fool! A do-gooding sheep in wolf’s clothing.”

“A do-gooder, not a fool. It is economic madness to waste so much British capital on such a limited return. Africa – and the Caribbean – would be better as markets.”

“Free trade! My God! What next? Catholic Emancipation! Universal suffrage! Votes for women!”

“What would they do with them?” asks Mrs Jardine.

“Without imperial preferences, a maritime nation like ours will be nothing more than a grocer’s shop!”

“Or a workshop, Father. The workshop of the world. The future is industry. And industry needs markets as wide and open as possible.”

“Out there on the high seas, in the African dark, in the heat of Jamaica, it is men who make the economy turn. Such men need Protection. Such men need abolition and free trade like a hole in their ships.”

“That’s not for you to rig any more. The Society for Abolition of the Slave Trade is not the old politics of wigged councils, Father. It’s thousands on the streets, taking action.”

“Like what?”

A crash from the keyboard. “A ladies’ boycott of sugar!” cries Amelia.

Jardine glares at her terrified. 

“I’ve imposed improvement after improvement in my ships. It’s costing I a fortune. What more do you want?”

“To close the trade down,” says James, “part by part if necessary. Wilberforce will squeeze and squeeze and continue to squeeze until you have nowhere else to go.”

Jardine takes a step back. “How can you work with such fixed malice against the interest of your own blood? I did it all – for you.” His lips tremble. “Your inheritance.”

“Not mine-”

“Explain yourself, Sir!”

“In my time, none shall work except in return for fair wages. None shall own men, only property. All men shall have the right to pursue happiness and there shall be no distinctions based on the absurdities of blood and birth, only of achievement and merit. The weak will not be exploited but given charity and succour. Christianity will become again what it always was: a rational and compassionate religion based on humanitarian principles.”

“Oh, James, my son, the world is as it is and all your enlightenment won’t change it.”

“Very well, Father. Let us see how you exploit your African trade. Let us see this world of yours - as it is.”

James suddenly exits, scattering servants listening at the door.

“He is darker than I remember,” says Mama. “I hardly recognise him. I fear excessively the Blacks have taken our little boy and given us a changeling?” She glances nervously at me.

The Gift seizes me. I see James’s future. He builds brave new roads that open up England; invents machines with Charles Hundred that increase the power of labour beyond anything even a Jardine plantation could. 

I cannot see Amelia’s future. The White Lady of my dreams, she is shrouded in fairy-white Clifton clouds. I wonder if she will write her own story from the heart with Charles or continue to live as the princess of her father’s fairytale.

*

James returns. 

“Father, may I introduce two of your plantation workers?” 

“How dare you bring slave women into my house!”

“You surprise me, Papa. I thought you more enlightened on the issue!”

“Not in this house! Get them out at once!”

The two startled women obey, glancing desperately around for a way out, arms lifted to protect themselves from Jardine’s raised cane.

“But they are my guests, Papa. After all, it is the grinding labour and humiliation of slaves like these - and poor Prince crouching there at your elbow – that built this house in Clifton, your other house in Bristol docks, all your plantations in the Americas, your estates in Somerset and finances everything and everyone in them. The least we can do is offer some hospitality.”

Everyone is staring now. Jardine, gripping his cane so tightly it looks ready to snap, casts a look of thunder at the cowering women - but no lightning falls.

“Abel, if you would be so good as to fetch Papa a glass and replenish everyone’s else’s – good – thank you – and now, if we are all comfortable in our places and our thirsts quenched, let us see Papa’s exploitation of African labour – what was his term? - as it is. Mama, may I introduce you to - Father’s wives?”

“Wives!” gasps Jardine. “Are you mad?”

“Mama, this is the young lady Father has lived with as his wife on his plantation in Jamaica for the past twelve years, one brief visit ‘home’ apart. Her given name there - among others - was Augusta –Father finds it easier to pronounce than her real name, Nokuphillah. Na-pill-ah. It has been a long and productive marriage. She now helps manage several of his businesses as well as overseeing some smuggling business of her own. And she is the mother of seven of his children.”

Aurora Jardine gapes at her husband’s very young – and very black – wife. “How do you do?” she asks automatically. 

“But where are my manners?” quips James. “I should first introduce to you Nokuphillah’s own mother, with whom Father lived as his wife in the four years before her, and before that first long visit home which Amelia remembers so fondly, during which I was born.”

“Charmed!” Mrs Jardine bows deeply. Her face elegant; her eyes completely mad.

“Nokuphillah, this is Mama, a daughter of lords and (she hopes) a mother of Earls and ladies, and through whom Papa has plotted the line of my inheritance. She is a mistress of many manors, Nokuphillah. Let her elegant manner serve as a model for you - as it has for Papa. She is not merely a lady but a lady of noble family – a greater asset here in England even than wealth. Though not, I fear, for very much longer.

Jardine looks wildly round at his wife. Her white wig is dishevelled. Strands of her own grey-white hair are unravelling beneath it onto to her turtle neck. 

“And now, Amelia, may I have the honour of presenting to you your Jamaican aunts?”

Amelia goes as white as a bowl of sugar. 

“Neither lady is Papa’s wife in the eyes of God, of course, if ‘God’ means the formal ceremony and trappings of the Anglican church. But each is very much his wife in the eyes of God, if God has anything to do with the human heart. And of course, the converse is true.”

Jardine tries to take another step back. But he is already against the wall.

“I think that completes the set. I am sure you will have so much in common and to talk about.”

Mama, the supreme hostess, is equal even to this. “How is the garden in Jamaica at this time of the year? We have planted rhododendrons from the Himalayas in ours to encourage the peacocks and pheasants with native plants but they are really nothing but weeds for eleven months – though a Paradise of pink in June.”

“Nokuphillah and her mother have little time for rhododendrons in their gardens, Mama. They are mostly occupied with Papa’s sugar cane and their own survival crops.  But you have other issues in common. For instance, the rather dark complexioned, curly-haired but still miraculously white little boy Augusta the first – this dear broken down old lady - bore to Father after a doctor told him you, Mama, would never be able to bear him an heir.”

“Oh God,” says Jardine.

“Whom he smuggled home from Jamaica for the wet nurse to raise as Mama’s own. A little black boy to inherit a white kingdom. A little black brother for her little white princess.”

“You,” says Amelia faintly.

“Yes. Augusta is my mother, Amelia. It’s all very confusing I know. But it is vital in a household that everyone knows his proper place. It may take you all some time to come to terms with it. It has taken me six months, so far. It may well take me the rest of my life.”

“So, Amelia, you are Papa’s only surviving legitimate heir. I wish you joy of it. I am Papa’s Creole son by the first Mrs Augusta. Augusta the Second here is my sister, or half sister, though quite as much my sister as you. Augusta the First is my mother whom I never even knew until I saw her being worked to death on our dear Father’s nightmare ‘estate’ in Jamaica.

“Enough,” says Jardine.

James laughs wildly. “More than enough. But it doesn’t end there, Papa.  I haven’t mentioned your beautiful niece – my half-sister - in Jamaica, Amelia, still living in some comfort and luxury with an overseer in Father’s white plantation house, a beautiful Creole girl, my mother’s daughter. Nomazwe. She is our blood link to the plantation.”

Amelia is white with shock. 

“Well. Will you not look at me, Amelia. Am I not a man – and a brother?”

 

Chapter Thirty Six

“More tea, I think,” announces the Mistress. She counts the remaining cakes “-and five more sugar cakes.” She rings a bell.

No servant dares come in. The fairy tale palace is at a standstill.

The Mistress chomps through another two cakes. And then, with her mouth full of their sugary delights, offers the last one to Amelia.

“Thank you, Mama. But I seem to have lost my sweet tooth.” 

Amelia stares, wondering if she can still believe his fairy story. And looking at James as if he might be mad. And at Nokuphillah and her mother’s black face, the strange faces of another continent. Dark and untrustworthy. 

And she can have her happy ending after all - with Eaton if not with Hundred - if she wants it. Fairy tale riches from both families, and palaces to live in. All she has to do is believe that James is mad, the Jamaican sun his undoing. That her fairytale father has been wronged, that she really is his little princess.

*

Nokuphillah is looking at me with those eyes deep and sad as Africa, wondering at my silence. In her eyes is everything that has been stolen from me.

I meet Jardine’s eye and the triumph checks back slightly. Something dawns. He is thinking through the chains of his plot. He has not quite reached the conclusion but he is getting there.

I no longer need to lie for him. 

Nokuphillah is alive. And she is here with me in this white city on a green hill. 

The Gift sees as it always saw, from the moment I was born, the moment I was kidnapped, the moment it showed me the white princess and the white city and the green hill, the moment I first saw Nokuphillah. I can speak out! And then she and I can run. 

*

All the white lies. That the times were more savage then; that servitude is a kind of slavery; that the reports are exaggerated; that there were regulations; that the free crews had it almost as hard; that the factories and mills of Manchester and Yorkshire and South Wales were as bad as the holds of Liverpool and Bristol and London; that the Africans did it to each other and they still do; that there is slavery in the Bible; that industrial wage-slavery is the same as being owned like a piece of property; that it’s a modern luxury to grieve over such things; that no-one did at the time; that it paid for British greatness and that Bristol is worth the price and that it’s no use crying now over spilt blood.  

*

We will have nothing - not even our freedom in law. We will have no freedom in law for another half a century. And if we have children, they will be born Jardine’s slaves, by law, and their children too. By law – but not by any law that binds us.

We will be runaways. But they won’t catch us.

I lift my head. like a lion, like an African. Like a man not a boy. “You want the dark truth?” I ask. “You want to see the Black Spot before your Eye, you want to see its mark of Cain on your father as clear as the figure fading off your mother’s heirlooms? You want to finally crack his devil code? 

You want your father as he is? The black Truth? Or the white Lie?

Amelia looks at me for a long time. Her tongue is poking the missing molar inside her cream-white cheek. Her lady’s journal is in her hand. A book with beautiful mother of pearl covers, the pages of pretty white lies written in black blood. 

And then slowly, but surely, she takes my hand and says. “The black truth. When I was a girl, I believed childish things. Now I am a woman, let me hear the real story. And if you will allow me, brother, I will help you write it.”

I hold out the Black Spot. The package from the Mary. 

And then I tell my story. 

© Gareth Calway 2016 

British abolition: basic timeline

1770s A growing dissidence/ unrest towards the slave trade evident (from 1771) notably in the person and campaigns of Londoner Grenville Sharp. Not formalised until-

1787 The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade formed (famously including Wilberforce, Clarkson, the eye witness and former slave Obadiah Equiano and Hannah More was formed.) Nine of its twelve committee members were Quakers. 

1788 The Committee of Enquiry into the Slave Trade

1789 Revolution in France. Slave riots in the French colonies follow. 

1790 Wilberforce presents his Abolition Bill to the Commons and gets a standing ovation. Liverpool Merchants in the gallery  “hang their heads in shame.” The British Parliament agrees to the abolition of the slave trade. The traditional Royal Family approval of the slave trade (dating from Queen Anne’s asiento declaration in 1714?) remains a decisive obstacle 

1791 The planters insert the word ‘gradual’ before ‘abolition’ in the bill and the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars delay matters 

1792A vigorous and successful campaign waged in the Jamaican Assembly to repeal the gradual abolition bill perceived as economically ruinous to the colonies. 

1807 The eventual success of Wilberforce’s bill to abolish the slave trade throughout the British Empire. (Napoleon had recently declared support for it on economic grounds.)  The passing of a ‘gradual’ abolition Bill in place of Wilberforce’s original ‘immediate’ and the long delay even of this by first (a) the Lords and then (b) war with Napaoleon. The victory of the British fleet at Trafalgar confirms Britain’s supreme position in the world, a position consolidated upon the imperial extraction of raw materials for British manufacture from the colonies rather than slaves. The slave plantation as a nightmare version of the aristocratic estate is replaced by industry-driven capitalism.

1833 Wilberforce’s lifelong campaign for the abolition of slavery itself finally succeeds (he dies shortly afterwards). From 1833, at the start of the Victorian period, Britain leads the fight to stamp out slavery throughout the British Empire, enforcing this with royal navy battleships. The country that led the slave trade for a century now pioneers its destruction. Planters receive twenty million pounds in compensation. Slaves receive noting. In fact, they remain ‘apprenticed’ to their former owners – effectively remaining their slaves until 1840. 

 

Bound for Jamaica (or Blackboy Hill To Whiteladies Road) Reading List

Archives, manuscripts  and specialist studies in the British Library

Report of the Committee of the Assembly of Jamaica on the Slave Trade (printed ) 1792

Proceedings of the Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica on the Sugar and Slave Trade, in a session which began 23 October 1792 

A Descriptive Account of the Island of Jamaica Beckford (1790)

African Voices of the Atlantic Slave Trade Bailey 

Academic studies:

The Slave Trade Hugh Thomas

The Atlantic Slave Trade Herbert  S Klein

British Slave Emancipation William A Green

Classics:

The Interesting Narrative Olaudah Equiano

Popular histories and pamphlets

Piro: The Life of a Slave in Eighteenth Century Bristol (but also excellent on the plantations) Christine Eickelmann, David Small

Britain’s Slave Trade S.I. Martin

Slave Trade Trail Around Central Bristol Bristol Museums, Galleries and Archives

Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery Bristol Museums and Art Galleries

The Bristol Slavery and Abolition Trail Drummond

Virginia tobacco plantations and the American Revolution

A Portrait of Britain 1688-1851 Lindsay and Washington

Encyclopaedia Britannica (Virginia, tobacco)

Emancipation of slaves and the position of women

Nineteenth Century Britain Anthony Wood

French West Indies /slaves’ revolt

The French Revolution Georges Lefebvre

Conditions of Servants in England 

Servants in the Eighteenth Century (Radio 4 programme)

A study of Eighteenth Century Bath (cannot locate this at present)

Literary

Black Heart Of  Jamaica Julia Golding

Pirates! Celia Rees

A Respectable Trade Phillippa Gregory

Sussex University undergraduate course material on Hanna More, Lactilla Cowper, Cowper

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Coleridge