Does not the effect of unlimited power and the frequent witnessing of such severe punishment tend to harden the heart? Yes, I found, it does, although the whites of the West Indies would have said it is an unfortunate truth that must be accepted, for there is no way to grow and harvest sugar without it. But there is also no doubt that such power destroys the souls of those who wield it every bit as much as it destroys the bodies and spirits of those who suffer under it, and I was no exception, for I too easily slid into acceptance of the way of life of a Jamaican planter.
I followed Daniels around, watching his dealings, learning the routines of a sugar plantation: the planting season, which involves the most difficult work of holing for the new canes; the rainy season, when the canes and the weeds grow most vigorously and the weeds need constant chopping lest they—and the vermin they harbor—get entirely out of control; the autumn and winter months, when the temperature grows cooler and the plantation manager needs to keep an eye on the cane and on the dampness of the soil and when the final repairs to the mill must be completed, so that sometime in the first few months of the year, when the cane is ready to harvest, all is prepared for the long, mad days of harvest and of sugaring.
At that time I was so intent on all that the plantation involved, I often did not see Bertha from dawn until evening, and when we were together there were frequently sharp words between us. “You care nothing for me!” she would scream. “It’s only the stupid, idiotic, bloody harvest that you care for.”
“You know that’s not true,” I would respond, forcing my voice into calmness. I had gotten used to her foul language and had come to think that if I ignored it she would stop using it, as if she were some kind of child who was only trying to shock.
“You’re worthless!” she screamed once. “Ugly! Stupid! You know nothing of women! You can’t even fuck right!”
That jolted me into silence, and I stormed out of the room.
*
Crop time was almost a relief. The pressures are heavy on all involved, because sugar is a finicky crop: it must be harvested at just the right stage, for a day or two in one direction or another can ruin the crop and mean the loss of a year’s work and thousands of pounds of income—the difference between the life of a prosperous planter like Jonas and that of the poorest landholder in the county.
Although the work of a plantation like Valley View is highly regimented, everyone having his or her own responsibilities, at crop time all work is focused on chopping and transporting the canes to the mill, and on boiling and distilling and curing the sugar that will someday grace the tables of the wealthiest and noblest Europeans, and on the production of the rum that warms many a man the world over.
The harvest lasted about a week, the black smoke rising day and night from the boiling-house chimneys. Book-keepers took twenty-four-hour spells overseeing the work gangs and catching a few moments of sleep wherever and whenever they could. People grew tired and snappish but carried on until the work was finished. I did not see Bertha at all during those crop time days. I was in the fields or the sugar mill or the distillery all day and half the night, and when I did return to the house, I fell into bed, sometimes not even bothering to take off my clothes. Bertha was occasionally absent from the bed, but I assumed she was sitting somewhere in the dark with Molly.
For me, for that brief time, my mind and body were so occupied with all the fury and activity around me that I could not possibly think of anything else. And that was a blessing.
Chapter 8
The end of the harvest—“crop-over time”—was always an occasion for great celebration. The negroes received an allowance of sugar and santa—a mix of fruit juice, sugar, and rum. First there would be a dinner at the buckra house and a black ball and an overabundance of rum punch. Negro fiddlers would play and drummers drum, and all the negroes came dressed in their finest. They danced with the buckras, and when, sated with rum and dancing, they left to sleep it off, the white neighbors arrived for more food and dancing and rum. Crop over could last for days and days.
I had assumed that Bertha would be in attendance at Valley View’s crop-over celebration, for she always attended the neighborhood balls in her usual fashion. But she did not appear at the black ball, nor did she attend the white one that succeeded it. By that time I had not seen her for two weeks and I had become concerned, but I hardly knew where to turn. None of the servants could answer my questions regarding her, and Molly had disappeared as well. I could not bring myself to admit to Jonas that after only a few months of marriage I had lost my wife. After another day, I took myself to Spanish Town to speak with Richard, but he merely shook his head and said, “Bertha is like that. She’s probably with one of her Obeah women. She’ll be back.”
Bertha had become obsessed with Obeah, a kind of religion, or mysticism, or magic—I hardly know what to call it—that some of the negroes practiced. It involved attempts to control events or to secure good luck for oneself or bad luck for others, or put curses on others or remove them from oneself, and included the use of the bones and feathers and strange concoctions of blood and herbs that I had seen Bertha with on a few occasions. I did not know how to react to this or what to say, and whenever I mentioned it she laughed at me as if I were a fool to take any of it seriously, and yet I saw how much time she spent on it and how far she would go to meet with an Obeah woman or man. I had asked her father about it once, but he had laughed it off as a childish obsession that she had not yet outgrown. “Give her a child of her own, and she will forget all that nonsense,” he had said, taking another drink of his grog and looking off over his cane fields.
I stayed over in Spanish Town for a few days, Sukey’s calm presence a comfort, and when I returned I found Bertha in our bedroom, as if she had been there all along. She was playing, I thought, with a doll. I had not seen it before, and I assumed it was some precious thing from her childhood, but on closer examination I saw that it was roughly made from old fabric, patched in the arms and body, and with hair cut from some animal. Bertha glanced up at me when I arrived and grinned. “We shall have a baby!” she announced.
“Really!” I exclaimed, flooded suddenly with conflicting emotions, for while I was keen to have a family, I worried about Bertha: I was not as convinced as her father that a baby would bring her back to her former self.
“You will give me a baby,” Bertha said.
“Oh,” I said. Not yet, then.
“Now,” she said. “It must happen now.” She rose and kissed my mouth, her teeth biting my lips as they often did when she was strongly aroused.
I meant to step back, for I had great reservations regarding the act of love with her, for in fact, she was not in her right mind and I had come to understand that she ought never to become a mother. But before I made a move, she suddenly began to weep. “What good does it do to have a baby when they just take it away from you?”
I stared at her in confusion. She seemed to be talking gibberish.
Still, I asked, “Who takes babies away?”
“They do!”
“Who?”