Sweetest baby I ever had
What troubles I now have dear daughter. When the day done and I weary and sit by the window looking into the harbour thinking of you I get my paper out and I write to you. I tear a page off the nail. I write across I write down with all the things I have to say. If I lucky I find a captain who will post this in London town. I very weary this day. All morning I am caught up with the terrible tale of the older woman who must separate from her husband. They both slaves of a Mr Edwards…
Elizabeth interrupted the reading of her mother’s letter to speak to Mr Bridges who had just arrived back from school with the boys.
‘Boys, boys, keep your voices down, I must talk with Mr Bridges. Homework, games in the garden?’ Billy wanted to perform a speech from Julius Caesar. Charles was happy to get down to his geometry.
‘Billy, can we wait with your performance? What about visiting Mrs Halifax? Straight there, nowhere else, and then straight back. Her nephew is staying from Nottingham and wants to play. Listen, you know how anxious I am, even just down this street…’
‘I know, Mama.’
‘Mrs d’Aviniere? You were saying?’
‘I want to show you this. Maybe it’s a letter you might use. I need to think about it and speak to Mr d’Aviniere. Here’s a story in my mother’s inimitable style…’
All morning I am caught up with the terrible tale of the older woman who must separate from her husband. They both slaves of a Mr Edwards and he insist that he must sell one of them and separate the two — the husband to go far away up rivers to a plantation which brings horror into the heart for what we know go on there on plantations under the sun and the whip. I cannot afford to buy the husband. I persuade Mr Edwards to sell me the older woman. I buying slaves now. He open her mouth to inspect her teeth to think to put up the price. I sit there and watch the scoundrel, even old Mr Edwards let himself become. He needs the money so he agree. The husband was too expensive for my pocket if I am to keep going — his wife cheaper — must be her teeth. Imagine that. She is a gentlewoman who looks to me and towards her husband already out the door joining some coffle to go north guarded by men with whips and some grotesque in mask of iron and rusty bits on their tongues protruding from their mouths. Is not to terrify you child I tell you this. Is your mother everyday life, even if on an evening the sunset so beautiful that you must believe and hope for a better world. Even if the waves so gentle on the shore paint by the dying sun bring peace and comfort in colour. And she the gentlewoman and myself spend the evening like this one writing letters. Only thing she does get letters back from that dear husband who learn himself to write hide away. She tell me the story of him under a dim lantern every night to learn to read and write to free his mind and body to write his wife. How the letters passing between them is a secret trail. She cries when his letters come but they do come. He who gone to live somewhere in Louisiana writing her letters — such letters of love and concern that it is a most tender moment to see her. Her name is Sarah or so she want me to call her. She and I go together to the wharf to find stray girls throw away after a voyage of misuse with some sailor or captain or her own negroes as they call them these men like I know a boy so far back. My memory is only of a child like me in a village among women pounding yam and men returning from a hunt so I wonder what they teach those boys now men to do to girls like I was. It can only be the terrible passage of abuse where the stronger learn to abuse the weaker one. She beginning to talk about the ship she come on which has enlivened my memory to those things I never tell you daughter in London. Now why I should come to tell you this tale child, only that as you there in London and hear talk in the fine castle you living in you will know that trees bear fruit here you would never want to pick.
‘Mrs d’Aviniere what atrocious things are going on…’
‘Mr Bridges, I want you to look at this one also. The vivid account is most distressing but so informative in its detail.’
This man he get warn. Sam John is his name. He get warn by his master not to lose the implements he give him for ploughing and he swear he wont. Only one morning he wake to find them all gone stolen from the barn break open. He so frighten to tell his master. So instead he sling a rope upon a branch of a willow tree seen his master do it many times. He know how to tie a rope for a man to hang not too far from the brim of water by a stream where the branches hanging low upon the flow. He can reach so he hang himself the way others do. So many does get hang by masters. Poor child to get this sad tale. They let him drop in the stream and go down to meet the big river to the sea. Sam John too terrified to say he lose a plough. But he revive. Must be the water. They lift him out again. Is not some bad behavior. Sam John say, master please — the master already with the rope around the poor man neck to hoist him up to hang him again himself so his toes don’t touch the waters brim. He feel out done by Sam John try take he own life. He making sure his toes don’t touch the silver stream. Sweet child what things I telling you to terrify your enlightened mind. We keep asking we self how to bury slavery in the ground and give we people freedom.
‘Mrs d’Aviniere, I’ve heard terrible accounts, but this at first hand in a letter to you, a daughter, is so immediate, so real, not in any way tampered with for publication. So raw…’
‘This maybe one of those letters you want to publish…’
‘Definitely.’
‘My mother’s mind runs away with her. Her meanings are clear to me though they do tumble one upon the other. She has outdone herself with work and worry about her daughter whom she enlightens.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Mr Bridges, you must help me with my fragments, the story that I’ve been writing. I need your help. My fragments and my mother’s letters you must help with the book.’
‘You must give me what you’ve written and I will also look at the letters, these that you have suggested and the others. What an honour.’
‘Thank you, my boys, my husband…?’ She could not help her tears.
Elizabeth entered into her own questions. What would she have done with such stories when she was younger? She could imagine Lady Betty wondering how to pass such a letter on. Would she have understood it, a bulletin from the front in some war, from places of torture? What did she do with these stories? Did she tell them to her husband? She would not have wanted to give Beth nightmares. How did they sound being read in her dressing room, folded, each small parcel hidden away? Did she open them again, whisper them in conversation to her sister, Mary? That she kept them, that they were saved from the fire in 1780. Not that by that time she was going to change her mind and let Dido read her mother’s mind. Did she, Lady Betty, give the word odious to her husband upon reading such tales, taking the time with patience to keep reading her mother’s hand?
Then her mother arrived, walking up from the garden. She emerged from a long distance, from the sea, the smoke of battle through stories of islands and stories of separation. Her mother in her skirts trailing in the mud…
‘Madam, are you feeling well? You went away from me there.’
‘My mother was just here.’
‘Madam?’
‘It’s all in the mind Mr Bridges. Thanks for your concern.’
‘Madam, we must think of stirring the hearts of many more people.’
‘We must, Mr Bridges.’
‘Instructing, informing, changing minds with your mother’s life.’
Elizabeth wanted to let her mother know that here in London she was working like her, for freedom. She wanted to tell her of the pamphlet they were planning.
‘Let’s hope that can happen soon,’ Mr Bridges concluded. ‘Maria Belle’s name must be there on the cover. And your own story, Madam, that too must be published…’
‘Mr Bridges, your projects are running away with you. Your ideas… There is though a project I would like you to consider apart from our work. My boys. You must assist my husband after my death with their futures, their professions. Do assure me of this.’
Mr Bridges looked surprised at first that Elizabeth should talk in this way, but he understood. She needed his reassurance. ‘I’m honoured to be of assistance to Mr d’Aviniere. I knew his foster father at the Meeting House and I am acquainted with his sister. Yes, indeed, I will advise about the boys. They are bright and the world is changing. Charles is already showing an interest and an aptitude for printing and publishing. There is time for Billy to choose his direction. The world is expanding, hopefully it will be a free world.’
‘Mr Bridges. You’re a man of vision. Thank you, Mr Bridges.’
Elizabeth could not bring herself to reply to Miss Anne. Then she relented with a note:
Dear Miss Anne
Thank you for writing. You are correct. My mother’s continuing to write all those years without a reply from me is indeed proof of her love. I’m grateful to have the letters now, to have that proof. My hope is to have her here soon with me, to heal the separation that should never have been.
Elizabeth d’Aviniere
Elizabeth’s recent good health took a turn for the worse. The continual waiting for news of her mother had begun to tell on her. She had been up all the last night coughing. Dr Featherstone had prescribed complete rest but she would be allowed to come downstairs. She insisted that she and Mr Bridges must be allowed to complete their work.
Lydia would run the house.
Billy was thriving at school and Charles was not complaining. Her husband was getting home earlier so that he would have time with his sons. They would have to look after the garden, now overgrown with the warm, wet weather, Seamus having little time now from his apprenticeship in Peckham.
Loveliest
This morning the loveliest yellow girl I find sitting on my stoop. She sleep there all night. Some other girl down by the wharf tell her to come by my house if she want freedom. Like I am some major abolitionist in the country. How will your mother survive but I must do my best for this girl. She is call Glory she tell me with a smile — imagine with a smile. She will be abused sooner than most for the yellow skin girls are wanted so wretchedly not that the black girls are overlooked. I think of you my yellow daughter. They fetch good prices from those abusive masters who make them their belle. I will keep her here illegally for as long as I can hide her. She escape from some brute who will be needing to have her not just to work some everyday labour but to satisfy the illness of his mind and the lechery of his body. I not list his abuses for your gentle mind my child. I think that we need a doctor to heal minds before we see any liberty in this world. What a way it is for a mother to write a daughter to say I loves her beyond imagining. But these are matters that fill my mind day in day out. I must get money to buy her. For Glory I must save. For what might she do with that child she carrying. We must save each one and forgiveness for the mothers who throw away their children, rather than have them in bondage.
Elizabeth went silent, speaking to herself: A yellow girl? Glory? The girl Captain Richardson had met? I’m a yellow girl. I’ve had Hal’s hands all over my body for his use, before I knew to speak it out, to spit it out and to be saved by the tender hands and feelings of my husband, John. But still I know even today the ghost of those acts are still on the footsteps of the stairs, knocking at the door of my comfort, are still standing at the side of my bed to fool me that I have not escaped entirely that time when I did not understand what was happening to me. I had had to take some joy in some of what felt like pleasure in order not to be vanquished forever. It was a risky strategy that frightened me. Could I have been his slave? I imagine my mother’s girls under tannia leaves and hidden in bamboo patches. It frightens me now when I think upon those dark moments caught in a passage way, on a path through the woods, in the enclosure of a hedge where the branches have made a small room for two to take part in dark secrets that leave shame smeared all over me and I am too scared to take the stairs to the bathhouse for fear that he who stalks me will be standing there waiting, even that close to the steward’s room. I must hide in a shadow. There was so little protection, I do not know now how I scrambled through to take flight and save my body, or indeed, my soul, as some call that other part of ourselves.
Elizabeth looked out on her garden where Billy had been pulling up weeds but had then abandoned that task for a game.
Look at that child of mine, she thought, that small boy. What would he make of the state of his mother’s mind? How will he be formed? What world lies ahead for him at this time of wars abroad? A soldier? Away in Empire’s lands, deserts plentiful and dark forests that drip with rain all day, islands in an arc, an archipelago?
‘Billy.’ He looked up from his game. He waved.
‘Your brother Charles will be home soon.’ Elizabeth did not think he had heard her. He was lost in his own obsessions, forts and soldiers, slaying tyrants.
Child
This time of year is mosquitoes. Between them and the sand blown by the wind there is much to deal with keeping house here in Pensacola. And now there is talk of a war coming. War is never far away. This land has been bounty of war passing hands between the Spanish and the British and they say the Spanish want this place the French want a piece of it too. They want this whole stretch of land that they say get take from them so the old Spanish lady on the corner speak.
It was a wonder that Captain Richardson had found her mother. In another letter she had said, This land is vast they say more than any can imagine from this here south to that far north breadth of east to west, extravagant and enormous. America.
There was this letter, which Elizabeth had not read before and she put it aside to show Mr Bridges. It had escaped her till now. It had not looked like the others, written down and across the pages filling the margins as she did lines fitted in vertical and horizontal. There was that recognisable method in her writing but as well utterly fragmented and not as easy to read, the writing as if a rook had stepped in ink and hopped and smeared the white page as they did upon a winter’s day upon a snow-driven field at Caen Wood.
Elizabeth read slowly to decipher the calligraphy.
Dearest child
Is Glory the girl who living with me she tell me the story of her name
I lie down next to the child to listen all night I listening
I try to understand the way the journey write itself in her mind
Each night she dream it
How you get such a name I ask the dear child
She say a woman on the ship call her so
She tell me that story upon the ship
She whisper like someone else who whispering to her
That woman lips who tell her a tale upon the ship
She have to be near the woman lips
as she try in that fettered place to sleep
in that stench to wake wake to when the woman so slowly pass piss
down she leg so she feel such a friendly warmth
in that already stifling room
the knock of waves beneath the floor boards
the hot shit follow the stench to stay with her
till they take them to the air above
to wash them down with the brine
She tell Glory that she will soon be leaving before the morn
before the sunrise before the force feed
before the coals upon her lips before the chain gall her ankles
no skin no flesh only bone
You must go where I can’t go I come too far I come far enough
You will make it child the woman say call her Glory
Then she pass over her head upon Glory lap
All broken were Glorys words
Elizabeth was forced to re-read slowly, and to decipher, to catch the story of Glory and the old woman upon the ship.
This was Glory who Captain Richardson had met.
It seemed weeks now that Elizabeth had had her old strength. She had been laid so low, the lowest ever. Her husband told her that he thought he had lost her. Both he and the boys told her this. ‘We thought you had died, Mama,’ though he tried hard to guard the children from the worst of the coughing, the evidence on the linens and the visits from the doctor.
Lydia helped to clear up the mess, and made several visits to the apothecary. How did Lydia carry on, so long in service? She had to believe that Mr d’Aviniere would make her settlement firm, if it ever came to that point that he must attend to her prospects, arrange for her future after the death of his wife.
Charles of course was most aware and was at times demanding. Elizabeth found it easiest to talk about how nature taught these matters of the last things. She used what she had learned from her Master’s Cicero: There must, however, of necessity be some end, as is the case of berries on the trees and the fruits of the earth. She spoke of nothing directly, protecting his young mind and heart. Though she knew that her boys understood a great many things, having parents like herself and their father.
There was a lesson about a vixen with her cubs abandoned without reason, and recently a friend of theirs down the street had had their dog die and it caused much sadness in that household, and together Charles and Billy had helped bury it at the end of the garden under a weeping willow. They talked of these things without talking directly about her leaving.
The boys with their father went to put flowers on Johnny’s small grave. Elizabeth was ill that day and stayed at home with Lydia.
Was that Lydia back? She must have slipped away and then woken now when it was quite dark. Was it Mr d’Aviniere just back? ‘Mr Bridges? Is anyone there?’ Elizabeth asked in a whisper and then continued reading, the letters scattered over the floor. Eventually, she packed the letters away in their linen-lined box. There were a number that could be published. She would discuss them with Mr Bridges and ask her mother’s permission.
Days and weeks had passed. Elizabeth woke with a start. She thought it was her mother calling. It was a dream, not altogether clear. But she remembered a window looking onto the sea and some fine lace curtains moved by the breeze.
Such a warm July and the roses were so thick on each bush that the scent was intoxicating. Lydia had picked some before they were overblown and arranged them in a bowl and rested it on the table next to her.
Both boys were seldom out of her sight now during the break from Mr Bridges’ lessons.
‘Come, come and let me read to you…’
In the evening she and her husband sat at the open French windows. The air was warm and the light seemed to go on and on and they sat and watched the swifts circling. They talked of the money that Miss Marjory had left to her and was to be used for the boys. Education was all that was necessary for their passage through life, with that they could fight for their own and the freedom of others.
‘Remember how they called me a blackbird in the street just beyond Holborn…’
‘Rest, my darling.’
‘The boys. What will become of them? I fear for Charles in particular with his black skin. I don’t think anything will restrain Billy. He’s got such confidence. I want you to stay together as a family.’
‘We will, dear. Should you be worrying yourself?’
‘And you, my sweet. You will have to take another wife, won’t you?’
‘Lizzie, how am I to imagine this? You know I can’t.’
‘A tincture of laudanum will do no harm.’
Her husband administered the dose.
The blackbirds were singing into the darkness. ‘So sweet, they pretend that they’re nightingales.’
Such an early memory arose out of a story from her mother, of a coast with black rocks washed with white water, breaking beneath a gleaming white castle built upon the rocks; white castles along the coast, a name, an echo, Elmina. There was white water and then of boats all narrow and pointed like canoes and putting out, and her mother looking over her shoulder, a young girl named Abenna, Tuesday. Then she disappeared into the dark till she reached the end of a tunnel and the blinding light and the roar of the sea, way ahead, and the slaver waiting out in the bay, moored and waiting for the voyage.
Weeks had gone by and still there was no news from Captain Richardson. Elizabeth had nearly given up hope. Her work with Mr Bridges had kept her going. She was alone and there was a knock at the front door. It took her sometime before she could reach the door. She used a stick now. She called out in the hall that she was coming but her voice was so low. She was anxious to open the door. ‘Wait, wait,’ she called. She opened it and it was the post and she had to return to get the money that she had been keeping for this purpose in the bowl on the small gate-table. She stood with the front door still ajar, the warm draught filling the house and a carriage passing in the street. She stood and listened, holding a letter in her hand not daring to look too closely, or to open it. She glimpsed the stamps and seal upon the letter, Pensacola, and the name of a ship she did not recognise, Orion. Above all she recognised how the letter was folded, how sealed and stamped. It was one of those little parcels.
Elizabeth sat and settled herself with the letter on her lap and looked out into the garden of roses and savoured everything she saw. Sounds were loud and distinct, the wasps and bees, the robin at the edge of the path, the thrush with a worm, and high in the blue, the swifts, and nearby on a branch, a blackbird was singing with a full throat. She began to unfold and to press the paper out on her lap. She now had spectacles, which were resting on the table where her books were kept next to her chair. She put them on and read the familiar opening that she had learned from the other letters in the box:
My Dearest Daughter
I can hardly stand up without falling down when Glory give me your letter. What a puzzle. What a dirty trick. What a deception laid upon us. But I must be wise like you woman of forty-three years mother of two boys — already buried one small child and a husband so tender by your side. As many people here say now Praise the Lord. I don’t know about that but I giving praise to who ever want to take it loud and clear. I call I call to the women and they right out in the yard. Look I tell you I tell you I have a daughter in London England and one day I must hear from her. I must. Look here what she write. Look where she asking if I still here. What has happened in the world to bring this about. What am I to say. Where am I to start to fill the years since I stop writing but not ever not ever forget you or think ill of you. I know there has to be some reason. Not this that you tell me. But as you say no rancour. No rancour but like you I must bundle that rage and put it down. All I desire now is to see you is to come to you and tell you everything where I sit with you and fold my grand children into me. I must find a way to come to you — how in this world. I have ways. I must come to you and you must hold on. I bring you potions for that cough. I know it since you young. I know they will help. Yes I strong. Well why going into the ailments when it is all the strength I need to make a passage on some ship to reach London. I watch the Orion there in the harbour. It must be going back and then come back again and by then I will have a passage to come to you. But I know people who will help. I am coming. I am coming to you my child. You hold on hold on. You mother say so. I go by the ocean with the women who live with me and we throw flowers on the water and cry — A re A re Yemanja! Olomowewe. We thank her mother Yemanja, goddess of the ocean for bringing your letter so safely on the sea and ask her take this one for you. You hold on — hold on. Only thing child I don’t want to hear you talk of master again. No word like master must pass your lips. You are a free woman always was — never slave of any man though man enslave you. Done with that.
Your mother
Elizabeth wept herself to sleep.
Her mother’s letter was on the floor when she awoke. She had read and reread it many times. She did not know how much time had passed. The room was full of the scent of roses. She heard herself whispering, Hold on, hold on. She seemed to keep saying that phrase over and over, hold on. She kept telling herself this for days, for weeks, till time passed. She had no idea how much time had lapsed.
Her children’s voices were loud and clear, Charles and Billy calling
their mother, ‘Mama, Mama, hold on.’
Lydia was calling, ‘Ma’am, hold on.’
John was at her side, whispering his love into her ear, ‘Sweet, my darling.’
Elizabeth kept on saying to herself, ‘Hold on, hold on, hold on.’
Then she heard her mother calling, Is me Lizzie, your mother, your mother, child.
‘Mammy? Is you? Is really you?’
She saw her mother sitting with her grandsons folded into her. They were all smiling, her sons and her mother, her husband and Lydia.
Is me, your mother, hold on still longer and then rest, she told her, reaching for her hand.
The room was full of the fragrance of roses. Then Elizabeth swore she heard a peal of bells as clean as any air of freedom was clean, like that rinsed out cleanness after a shower of rain, coming from across the hills and the rivers across the land, across the marshes and the meadows. The voices were crying, the bells were ringing, freedom, with each toll.
It was some months later that Mr Bridges came to the house in Ranelagh Street with the outcome of the work that he and Elizabeth had been working on before her death. This was work she had entrusted to him, the making of a book compiled of fragments of her story put together with the letters to and from her mother. Charles had assisted his tutor back at his printery, where Seamus was also now working. They were all labouring for the cause of abolition. Mr Bridges offered John d’Aviniere his wife’s book, where he stood with the ever curious Billy. Seamus and Charles came into the house with a stack of the volumes carrying the title:
The Story of Elizabeth d’Aviniere
&
Her Mother, Maria Belle
Concerning the story of Abolition
&
Freedom from Capture
‘What a grand book,’ Lydia said, coming into the room and opening the pages of one of the volumes. ‘Let me go now and spread the word down the street, call Mrs R and Mrs Halifax to come and see what a birth this is, so long in the making.’