After a bounteous meal and more drink than I really wanted, Whitledge and I finally left Kingston on hired horses. It was only a short trip to Spanish Town, even at our slow pace and with occasional pauses as Whitledge pointed out views and characteristics of the island. One of the first things I had learned all those years ago at Black Hill was that escaped slaves, called “Maroons,” often fled to the mountainous center, which was a wilderness into which no white man ever ventured. Now, as we rode along, I saw that region for myself—it is background to everything on the island, in more ways than one—and it does indeed look forbidding: mountains thick with trees and vines, a bluish haze lying over them. But the rest of the island, from the foothills to the sea, is almost entirely domesticated into plantations and cattle pens.
At that time of year the cane stalks had grown higher than a man’s head, rustling and clattering against one another in the wind, and the air was filled with the sounds of hoes chopping weeds in the cane rows and the occasional work chants of the negroes. The fields needed to be weeded constantly, for the weeds benefit from the same conditions that enable the cane to grow so prodigiously. I paused occasionally to watch the backbreaking work, realizing that I would not last half a day working in such humidity and intense sun.
Whitledge was not well acquainted with any of the owners of the plantations we rode past, but he was able to point out each plantation’s great house—which the negroes called the buckra house. There was another new and unsettling experience on that ride: we were rarely out of earshot of the crack of whips. A negro driver strode behind each gang, snapping the whip over their heads every few minutes, and when his whip found a target, there was often a cry of pain, a sound that made my skin flinch in my first few days on the island. I never fully got used to that sound.
By the time Spanish Town came into view, I had become so attached to my friendship with Whitledge that I urged him to stay the night with me and continue on the following morning. But he was adamant, for he was anxious to return to his family and his own home. So we said our good-byes at the edge of Spanish Town, and I watched him go on his way, wondering if in the years ahead I would ever become as attached to Jamaica as he. I had not forgotten my father’s enticing description of Mr. Mason’s daughter, and I hoped that a happy future with a wife and children would transform this strange and exotic place into a home—despite that the word conjured, still, warm memories of Thornfield and its fields and woods and moors.
Chapter 3
Spanish Town is a pleasant enough city, bustling as a capital usually is, but not in the same frenetic way as a port city like Kingston, which itself is a mere shadow of Liverpool or London. Spanish Town’s government buildings overlook a wide and placid square, and nearby was my father’s small and utilitarian town house. As in Liverpool, he had clearly seen little need in Spanish Town to entertain lavishly. Yet, once I had dropped my portmanteau in the entrance hall and surveyed the place, I was struck by how comfortable it seemed. I felt pleased with what had been provided for me, and I could not wait to go over once again the papers that he had sent with me, for they contained all that my life was to be, and I was in a great hurry to get on with it.
I had barely turned around when a young mulatto woman appeared from belowstairs and introduced herself as Sukey. She had been accustomed to running the household when my father was in residence, she said, and I recalled my father mentioning something of the sort. But it was not until I began quizzing her as to what her duties had been and what she expected in the way of payment that the realization struck me: she was a slave and she was mine.
It is an uncomfortable thing to discover that one owns slaves, but I managed to hide my discomfort and forced myself to see her merely as a servant. Indeed, I realized, in Jamaica, where everything was so unfamiliar, she could serve as a guide in my ignorance. “Tell me, please,” I asked her, “what was my father’s daily routine when he was here?”
“Your father rose early, because buckras do not like the heat,” she said. “And after breakfast he goes to his office—you know where that is?”
“I have not yet been there, but he gave me directions.”
“I’ll show you the way. Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow would be good. Thank you.”
She lifted my portmanteau to carry it to my room, but I wrested it from her. “I can manage,” I said, mounting the stairs.
“I show you around the house?” she said from behind me.
I turned, realizing she was as unsure of her position with me as I was. “That would be kind,” I said, though I was perfectly capable of exploring the place myself.
While she was showing me the house, a young man by the name of Alexander appeared and carried the rest of my baggage up to my room, but instead of unpacking immediately, I left the house to explore the city that was to be my new home. The sun was low in the sky, but the air was still quite warm, and I spent the waning hours wandering. All was so different: the way the sunlight pierced a path between the buildings and heated their surfaces so that they radiated its warmth, the way the sky could be cloudless one moment and dropping buckets of rain the next, the calls of the street vendors, the sounds and colors of strange birds. I could not have felt less at home.
When I returned to the town house it was late, and a pitcher of grog had been set out for me, along with the calling card of one Richard Mason, with a handwritten note saying that he would come the next morning to make my acquaintance and to offer whatever help I needed to accustom myself to my new life. I could only assume that my father was behind this kindness, and I went to bed that night overwhelmed by all the strangeness that surrounded me.
*
Richard Mason taught me one of my first lessons of Jamaica that next morning by arriving almost before I had risen from bed. I was learning that Creoles indeed make the most of early mornings, because the heat and humidity enervate a person within only a few hours after rising. Sukey provided us enough breakfast for an army: potatoes, plantains (to which I had to be introduced), yams, turtle steak (also a new delicacy), pickled salmon, and bread—and coffee, of course—more like an English dinner than a breakfast, but one the English Creoles believe will fortify them against the strain of the heat. It seems that so many Europeans die within their first few years from the inhospitable climate or the various fevers that afflict the place that it is called “the graveyard of Europe.” My father had never warned me of that.