Somewhere through the Gulf of Florida, sea air tasting like salt-fish and clouds white as bolls of cotton, I’d dared to ask, ‘Will I be free there?’
‘Where?’ He pretended impatience but he knew full well. Every nigger in Jamaica, whether driver, carpenter, seamstress, cook or buck, could tell you. It’s why I asked.
Soon as any man breathe English air, he free.
‘London.’ First time I’d let myself say the word out loud.
He’d sniggered. ‘You will be under my jurisdiction. There, as anywhere. That’s all you need to know.’
Jamaica was a sum, a calculation. His life, and mine, had been built on the same. What is the yield in guineas of a tally of Africans, plus cane seeds plus overseers, added to God-given dirt and water and sun? Freedom was a sum, too, one that yields as many answers as men who’ve set their minds to it. I puzzled over it. I went sick to my stomach thinking about it. I’ll confess it.
By the time ropes swarmed the decks, and the order came to drop anchor, freedom was my biggest fear.
How well I remember stepping off the ship at the West India docks, like the shock of stepping into a river, cold water coming over your head.
I’d never seen my own breath before. Hanging off my lips, thick and white as the clouds. Just one of many things I could hardly credit. The rain on my face, for instance, light as feathers. English rain weighs nothing. It’s the air that’s heavy, and always has the seep of water in it. The streets were wet, and seemed to be tumbling under some giant peggy-stick. I stood there amid the dizzying clatter of hammers and scaffolds and barrows moving piles of bricks that were either crumbling out of buildings or being plastered into them, so it seemed to be a city building itself and eating itself at the same time. Waiting carriages lined up along the high wall, horses shying under the dark bulk of warehouses. A crossing-sweeper was knocked down and the line of foot passengers just curved around him, like a river around a rock.
Everything seemed within reach. I lifted one gloved hand, held it out, palm forward. Then jerked it back in. Stupid. There I was, queasy and ship-stale, lost in my own thoughts, the wind slicing my ankles. But inside I felt warm as coals, and my heart swelled like a sail. For I’d done what no other house-girl at Paradise had ever done. I’d improved myself.
Arms and elbows crashed into me, swaying me off my feet.
‘You new come?’ said a gruff voice close to my ear. I spun around, straight into an old seaman. Swollen, wishbone knees, and a greasy, sun-blackened nose. It was plain to see what he thought I was, rubbing one hand down the placket of his breeches. I almost dropped my eyes, but lifted my chin instead. Gave him a cold shoulder. A white man! Such a peculiar feeling brewed up in my chest, then. Unease and happiness, mixed into one.
Then we were clattering along in our own hired carriage. Sweat-stains ran dark against the leather, the stink of all the bodies who’d been there before. On the bench opposite, Langton fretted his fingers along the neck-cloth I’d smoothed on for him that morning, asked for the third time: ‘You have it?’
‘I have it.’ I patted the papers next to my hip. ‘All seven copies.’
My own little portmanteau lay alongside. Two twill dresses, my own copies of Moll and Robinson Crusoe, the black shawl around my shoulders, with Vandyke edging and a pattern of vines and hummingbirds in bright mustard. Everything I owned.
‘Good,’ he said, staring out. His own hands danced across his lap, shivering the loose fabric of his breeches. I bit down the urge to reach out, press them still. ‘Good.’
The sky was thickening, empty save for a peppering of birds. ‘Could it really still be daytime?’ I said. ‘And yet so dark?’
By way of answer, he kissed his tongue against his teeth. In his bad spells, the words fumbled out of him, so he refused to speak, but I knew what he wanted before he wanted it. Now that we were off the ship, he wanted me cowed, quiet. I folded my arms, like clean towels, felt my spit rise, clogging and sharp. I looked down at them, twisted and twisted at the grey cloth I held in my hand. I’d told myself I would forget Paradise, and everything that had happened there. Scrape it off and cast it aside, gone ‒ like slave speech, like slave manners. Make myself new.
I couldn’t keep still. My hands smoothed my dress, serge slick as cat fur, and I sat forward, looked up at Langton, looked out. Daring him to tell me not to. My new skirts sighed against the leather. The distance between poor cloth and fancy is all in how it speaks, and it’s the same for people, Miss-bella used to say. But rich people’s noises are as rough as anyone’s, except that they can buy thicker walls.
I pulled aside the small drape at the window. When Langton said nothing, I pulled it back the rest of the way. It was raining, the streets thick with water and filth. Muddy drops speckled the glass.
I hadn’t expected London to be crumbling like a stale loaf. Or the streets to be crowded with people in their hundreds! Faces pale enough to vanish into fog, then float up like curds in milk. Langton was brown here, his skin cracked, like ageing leather. And so many of them were poor. Whites toothless and dirty; whites fluttering, like sorrowful little flags, as they pissed into the street. Whites with skin grated raw, and pocked as orange peel. Hard, hungry faces. The children were the worst. Hands quick, eyes slow. The first tingles of fear drained through me when I saw those children. I knew only too well that eyes have only two choices. Open or shut. When they go too wide, too black, it’s because they can’t make space for all they’ve seen. The sight of those children sparked a memory, the one other thing I carried that I couldn’t set down, though it wasn’t in my portmanteau. It slammed into me then, whether I liked it or not, made my stomach jump.
In a world of his own making, any man can be God. Langton had made his own world, and then he’d brought me with him when he fled it. I thought it was because he was a member of that race of men who cannot be men without their slaves.
A copy of his letter to George Benham lay across my lap. I’d been the one to copy it twice onto vellum, one copy to send and one to keep, but then I’d been the one to write every word Langton had put in ink for years.
My dear G,
I enclose the amended manuscript. Crania. It saddens me that the work became the wedge between us. But I’ll admit that you were right, about one thing at least. A good scientist merely searches for the answer to the question posed, but the one whose name history will record reaches for the question no one has even thought to ask. There couldn’t be a better moment for proof that the differences between the varieties of men are not mere flukes of nature but purposeful design. It is even more important than ever, now that England seems hell-bent on destroying the colonies with the prospect of emancipation, so soon after abolishing the trade.
Her politicians need reminding. A mother doesn’t eat her young. Not a tender mother at any rate.
I thought that was where we started. How did our paths diverge? Be that as it may, I still believe a careful reading of the final corrected version will lead you to reconsider your stance. With your name attached again, the work would grow wings. There must be publishers in England (though I know they can seldom be counted on to see beyond their own noses) who will recognize the commercial and scientific merit in this.
Pressing matters will keep me here for some time, and it seems that it will take me longer to reach you than even the infernal post. Therefore, this must be entrusted for now to the impersonal medium of paper and ink.
I will follow it as soon as I can.
Yours &c.,
John
George Benham. The important man. The one who’d started the work on Crania, then written to say he’d changed his mind. The thought that my path was likely to cross his sent a shudder through me. Crania itself nudged my leg, lying beside me on the bench. Langton’s magnum opus. I’d written that too, in my best curling copperplate. Yet I had to fight the urge to haul it out into the muck.
‘You’re as eager to try your new London manners as you were to put on that dress.’ Langton’s lips peeled into a grimace, his words choked to a halt. His illness sometimes stopped them entirely.
I sprang out of my seat, pressed his hand in mine. ‘Cramp?’
‘I need rum.’
‘No. You don’t.’
‘What the devil do you know about anything?’ He jerked his hand away, knuckled it to my breastbone, pushed me back. But then the trembling came over him again, fingers, wrists, shoulders. ‘This isn’t Paradise, girl. You can’t just . . . clatter out things that have been . . . private between us . . .’
‘There are so many things private between us. I won’t be able to say a word.’
He looked away, mouth narrowed. His hands, curled in his lap, twitched like sleeping dogs and his shoulders curled too.
Dying men don’t just dwell on the past: they invent it.
‘I never touched you,’ he said.
I moved back to my own seat, rested my head against the cushion, held myself stiff as the leather, taking care not to look at him. When he told me not to get too snug, I paid him no mind.
‘This blasted traffic,’ he said, peering out. ‘That’s London for you. Everything moves fast, until you see it’s moving in circles. Not a single thing has taken a forward step in two hundred years.’
He decided we’d get out near London Bridge, find a waterman, elbowing through the crowd. I had to trot so I didn’t get swallowed in it, nerves stirred raw, thinking of all the things that could go wrong. He might fall, lose his footing, suffer an attack, or simply turn a corner without me, and vanish. There were a hundred ways I could lose sight of him. And then what would become of me?
The cold seemed to carry its own smell, like raw meat, and came on me sudden as a cutpurse. London air, wet as a kiss. I shivered and reached up to tug on my shawl. ‘Only way to get used to it is to be out in it,’ Langton shouted back. Heads turned. They stared here, same way the sailors had stared on the Pride, when there was no risk of being caught. I felt watched as a clock. To be black in a sea of whites is to wish to be invisible.
I kept my eyes fastened to Langton’s back, his new black coat stretched tight as a cheek, lifted my feet between mounds of dung, and fat, slithering puddles. Each time I came too close, forgetting to slow my pace to his, he snapped his teeth. ‘Keep some space between us, girl.’ As if there was any distance that could magic the two of us into gentleman and maid, instead of what they thought they saw: a slow Creole, his mulatta whore.
I didn’t have my land legs back, stopped to lean against a wall and let the wave in my head build up and die down. Then I had to run to catch up with Langton again. Three times I chased, not once did he look back. A heavy feeling poured into me.
But it lifted when we reached the river, and my heart took flight. I felt a wind inside me gathering speed.
The Pride’s captain had had a map tacked up in the galley; many a morning I’d traced the crooked seam of the Thames along to its bucket-shaped dip, reading the names aloud. Southwark, Bermondsey, Wapping. On paper, it looked like a meandering curve stitched through the city’s chest. But maps never tell the whole truth. For London is a river with a city around it. People milled along the bank, leaning over the railing to watch the ships and the building works, which Langton said were for the new bridge. I forgot about the awful smell, found myself wishing I could linger. Across the water, I could see the arches of the old bridge, the clawing spires and rooflines. The wooden hulls clacked against each other like oyster shells in a bucket. The watermen reminded me of nigger-drivers, the way they rode high on their rowboats, spat out from under their hats. Langton said he’d go down to haggle a ride, told me I’d better stay right where he left me. Fragments flew back to me: ‘. . . to the Strand . . . me and my . . . my wife’s serving girl.’
I was black as a fly in butter, and had no choice but to stand out ‒ and stand there too, pinned to the street, as if my own legs were stuck. Spittle flew at the back of my neck. When I turned I saw one of the barrow-women duck her head and fidget a potato back onto the pile, counting on her fingers, like they were an abacus. I lifted a gloved hand to wipe my neck. Told myself my dress was serge. She was the one who looked slovenly, and low, dressed in linsey with a dirty kerchief. I told myself I looked like a lady. At the very least a higher class of maid. Even if Langton only let me dress as such so no one would see what I was, while I travelled with him.
I told myself it was my head that was filled with learning. I’d read Mr Defoe’s Essay on Literature the week before, settled under the skylight with water tapping at the hull and night creeping above, thinking how confident a man must be to write down his own musings, expecting anybody else to be interested in reading them.
Sometimes I picture all that reading and writing as something packed inside me. Dangerous as gunpowder. Where has it got me, in the end?
I brushed my skirts down again, set my shoulders back, glanced towards Langton. A pair of girls climbed off the back of a cart, slowed to a stop when they saw me, gawping, looking as if they’d reach out and tug at me. The river shook itself out like a sheet. Dark as pewter. Everything in the whole world seemed to be on its way in or on its way out of London, the water waltzing cargo. For a moment, I wondered what it would be like to plunge, skirts flying, heart in full sail, flow myself through all that silvered water. Let it take me somewhere.
A thread of wind shivered through the ships’ flags.
One small step. Another. Forward, forward. I stared down at my feet. How much time passed, while I stood there? Then noise came flooding back. Birds’ cries. Scuffling breaths of carriage horses. Slowly, the world fell back into place. You can knock the world down, smash its teeth, kick it to pieces, and still it will click back into its remembered habits, like any seasoned slave.
When I looked up, the girls were clambering away, down a street that twisted into darkness. I wanted to follow. A picture came into my head. Me, flying down the blind street, finding a stone cottage, like a coin tucked up a sleeve. Shelves of books, a crackling fire. Nothing else inside it but time. And a woman, though I couldn’t see her face. I’d live there. And I’d write. There’d be no law against it. I’d write a novel. The house would be sturdy around us. Plain and clean and warm.
But no one like me has ever written a novel in the history of the world.
‘Get!’ Langton said suddenly, crept up against my ear. ‘Girl, get!’ I felt a squeeze at my temples, cold as Langton’s calipers, and looked up and saw that a boat was waiting. I leaned forward, sucked in the breath that hammered back into me, and followed him into it.