He woke and lay for a minute, panicking and alone, until the sounds inside and outside his head sorted themselves, and he knew he was not alone after all. Outside: Ann, breathing regularly beside him; a brief skelter of a mouse in the wall; Andrew, his son, coughing in the other room. Inside: animal screeches; sailors talking in strange tongues; some men arguing; another weeping. When he identified this last sound he bit his lip, put fingers to his face, found it wet. Again. Always, again. This was how it was with him.
It must have been two, three o’clock. A wee laddie had said to him yesterday, ‘Man, ye’re black as the howe o the nicht.’ He had laughed and said, ‘Ah, but whaur does the coal stop and me stert?’ And now here he was, in the howe o the nicht, and it was as black as himself coming home from the pit. It made no difference whether he had his eyes shut or open. Pit-mirk, and silent as a kirkyard.
He thought ahead to the day that would soon come. Again. Always. Years and years of howking away at the rock. As if somehow it would reveal something buried, hidden by other years, thousands and thousands of them. Down there where there was no light, the coal sometimes gleamed with a brightness that could be paradise breaking through clouds.
Paradise. Lots of the people in Jamaica, they believed when they died they would be going back to Africa. They said they wouldn’t mind dying. They looked forward to it, they’d welcome it. A good end to their bad story; going home again.
His story was different. He had no idea where he would be going when he died. That was another thing that had been taken from him – the end. Just as the beginning had been taken.
Just lately he had been getting glimpses of a beginning. Away back, another place. Dream sightings that woke him in the night, sudden flashes in the middle of the day; in the depths of the coal-dark day. There were huts with gardens, and low clay walls that separated them; fields where a boy stood scaring off birds; a hot dry wind huffing over grassland; a green river sliding through great trees thick with the screams of … birds, monkeys? He didn’t know, didn’t remember. For this was the beginning of a story that had never happened, that had come to a sudden and complete stop.
There was a woman who he understood must have been his mother. But he could not see her face, and that blindness coiled a deep pain in his belly, left him breathless with regret. His father was not there at all. He had often thought that his father must have gone the same road before him, the road that he himself was taken on. Because why else could he not remember the least thing about him?
But he would never know. His father was an empty space.
Africa. These glimpses, these dreams, sometimes woke him less gently than tonight. They could cause him to moan and thrash and shake with grief. He would come to with Ann leaning over him, trying to calm him. Africa was repossessing him after more than forty years. But he had no distinct sense of what Africa was like. For years he had had to lean on the memories of others, people taken when they were older than he had been. Now, away from them, he had only dreams.
This was what he thought: that place – home, whatever he’d have called it – could not have been too far from the coast. Far enough that he had never seen the sea until he saw it, but not so far that he, a young boy, could not be made to walk there. How many hours’ or days’ travel? He did not know. He had no recollection of making that journey – whether it started with him in a sack, whether he tried to run away, whether he was chained to others, whether he was beaten or starved or threatened with murder. The thing he did remember was the sea, and the ship like a great bony bird out on the water, the feathers of its many wings wrapped tight on the bones. Hot golden sand, and a boat that carried him out to the ship. But even this … he was not sure. Maybe he was not remembering at all. Maybe he thought he recalled these things because of all he had since heard and read.
Ann said he did not remember because he chose not to. It was blanked out of himself because what had happened to a boy of ten or eleven was too appalling for the mind to hold. She was maybe right, except that it was never a question of choosing, and except that others had not forgotten. Memory was not about choice. That was the time when choice was taken from him, from all of them, seemingly for ever.
And it was the time when life split for a while, between pictures and sounds. In his head, thinking back there, the pictures were disjoined from the sounds. He saw people speak but he did not hear what they said. White men. It was noise; noise that he had to make sense of by watching, guessing, by the interpreting and making of gestures. Many of the Africans were from different parts, different communities and peoples, and he could only understand a little of what they said. Most of them did not say much. It was the white men, whether they shouted or said nothing, who were in charge. When he imagined them now, he could hear the things they must have said.
One night recently he had had a very bad dream and Ann had been there to comfort him when he woke; then he could not sleep again. He had sat up in bed, calmed by the lie of her head on his shoulder, her hair greying but still fine, and the tiny kiss she had given to his collarbone before she drifted off. He felt that kiss there like a butterfly at rest. But even that, and her presence, had set him wondering: he loved her, he could not imagine having found his way to where he was without her, but would he have loved a black woman more? Or differently? This was a puzzle, something he thought about all the time. It made him feel guilty, and the guilt enraged him. That he should be made to feel guilty …
‘I love you,’ she had said, another night when the tears came. She said it often. ‘Ye ken that. I’ll never betray ye. I’ll never dae ye hairm. But ye’ve tae be strang for me tae, Joseph.’
‘I am strang for ye,’ he had said. He had heard his voice in his chest, the words that had once been new and were now old and familiar, that he had made his, that he spoke in his own distinctive way. ‘Hae I no been strang for ye thirty year? Jist in the nicht though, like noo, I dinna aye need tae be strang, div I?’
‘No, lad, no,’ she had said. ‘Greet awa. Greet aw ye want. Ye’re safe noo.’
‘It’s no jist me. It’s aw the ithers.’
‘I ken,’ she had said, holding him tight.
She was strong too; he could not fault her; sometimes he wished he could. Sometimes he wished she would burst out at him, ‘Dae ye think it’s been easy for me? Dae ye think I hinna suffered?’ Because ye’re a neger. And I stood by ye in spite o it. If she had flung that in his face just once, he might have got an answer to his puzzle. But she never had. Not ever.
A picture. The ship had moved further along the coast, and had lain at anchor in one place for weeks, along with two more ships, while more and more people were held in a stockade at the mouth of a river. White men rowed back and forth between the stockade and the ships, bringing boatloads of prisoners out to them. Two men in each longboat sat with guns trained on their passengers.
The black men were shackled together, and put below deck. He saw himself, a boy alone, and he saw the men going down through the hatch in awkward stumbling couples, then brought up again during the day, still in chains, and made to jump and stretch their limbs. The sun beat down relentlessly on the bright reflective sea and the blistering wooden ship. The women were kept apart from the men, both below and above deck, and were not shackled in the daytime, and any children went with the women. But there were few women and fewer children, and for a long time no other boys of his age. He was small for his years: had he been any bigger, or had there been more boys to cause trouble as a group, he would have been put with the men.
Overwhelmingly this was a world of adult males, of shouts, curses, blows, the surface brutality of the white men, the submerged threat of retaliation of the black men. The whole ship trembled with anger.
The sailors let the boy – in the picture it was him and yet not him – move around fairly freely in the daytime, so long as he did not go near the edge of the ship. Once he did this and looked over at the sea below and a sailor yelled at him, thinking that he was about to go overboard. This had happened before – pairs of men with such weight of misery on them that they would let the chains sink them to the bottom of the sea, rather than live in them. The boy did not want to die, nor did he want to live on the ship. But he could not swim. The water was too far down, the shore too far away, and his home too far from the shore. Only the ship was where he could be.
There was a white man who was old enough to be one of his grandfathers – two more people he did not remember. This white sailor was tall, thin, red-eyed, his mouth half hidden by a straggle of grey, coarse beard. He always carried a short, solid, leather-sheathed cosh, attached by a strap to his right wrist. He was indifferent to the boy, seemed hardly to notice him. His mind was on other things as he and a younger crewman approached the section of the deck where the two dozen women huddled, separated from the men by a wooden barrier. The older sailor had something in his left hand which he offered to one of the women, a young one, beckoning her over. She watched cautiously, drew a little closer, and so did the watching boy. One of the other women said something and the one the sailor wanted stopped, lowered herself and looked away.
The sailor spoke. What did he say? What had he, would he have said? Forty years on, Joseph heard the fleetching, coaxing voice. He imagined the words. ‘You come wi me, my darlin. It’ll be better for ye on the trip ye’re gaun, I swear.’ She did not move, stared down at the wooden planks on which she was squatting. His words to her were a jumble of sounds. His left hand opened and was full of colours, shining things. She crept a little closer, within reach, and the sailor smiled, leant over and let the colours fall into her lap while, quite gently, he cupped the hand under her breast. She started away and his other hand, dangling the cosh, came over and seized her shoulder. ‘Come, nae need tae be like that noo. You be nice wi me and I’ll be nice wi you. You needna fear naething frae me.’
He slipped his hand from her breast to under her arm, and pulled her to her feet. As he did so, the watching boy sensed a movement among the men, a shift in the atmosphere, and glanced over there. The sailor felt it too and turned quickly, still gripping the girl tight. One of the African men, across the wooden barrier, had half risen from the deck – as far as his chains would allow him. There was a low murmur of protest from those around him, but the boy could not tell whether it was caused by the action of the sailor or that of their companion.
The sailor let the girl go and took half a dozen paces across to the barrier. He stretched across till his face was an inch from the face of the half-standing man. ‘Dinna you flash your een at me, my son. Ye’re at sea noo, this is sailors’ country. My country. Ye better learn that. It’s the only way life’s gaun tae be worth the livin for ye, frae noo on. Ye dinna ken whit I’m sayin, div ye? But ye will, freen, ye will.’ He flipped the cosh into his hand and smashed it into the black face, sending the man crashing to the deck. ‘Aw white men’s your maisters noo. Aw richt, my son?’
Then he turned back to the women, among whom a soft crying had begun in the wake of the blow. He seized the girl, much more roughly than before, and pulled her out from among them.
That was the start, Joseph saw. That was where the taking, the smashing, the raping, the torturing, the killing started. It started there and it would go on for years, until every single person on the ship was dead. It had gone on for centuries so why would it ever stop?
‘Pick one for yourself,’ the sailor said to his young companion. ‘They’ll dae your biddin fair enough and it’s a lang haul ower the Atlantic so you may as weel get the benefit.’ He saw that the other sailor was watching the prone body of the man he had struck. ‘Dinna fash aboot that. That’s a lesson for you as much as for him. That’s whit they’re like, your African. They’re a kind o horse, or some ither animal ye can train up a bit. Your male neger’s a docile, daicent beast when he’s broke in, but ye must never forget the wildness lurkin at the back o him. When his ee lichts up like that, he’s like a horse aboot tae buck or kick. That’s when ye hae tae act, and act fast. It’s you or him at that point, mak nae mistake aboot it. There’s planters in the Indies let their negers get above themsels, they try tae treat them the same as us, and it disna work, it disna work at aw, and it makes problems for awbody – them, their neighbours and the negers. Teach them hoo tae see richt frae wrang and they’ll choose wrang every time. There’s a badness in them and ye canna get it oot, no wi books nor baptisin nor fine claes nor naething. Ye can tak them thoosands o miles across the ocean but ye canna get Africa oot o them, ye jist canna. It’s in them and if ye try tae get it oot like as no ye’ll get a blade in the back for your trouble.’
Joseph shifted his weight, trying to ease a slight pain in his shoulder without waking Ann. He had run that scene in his head so often that he heard the sailor like a bell now. Maybe over the years his dreams had put words in the sailor’s mouth. Maybe, but he knew they were not far wrong. This was how it had been: the start of very bad times; the start of a war. And now, in this bed in a tiny cottage on another, colder coast, he felt the truth held in the sailor’s evil words: Africa was in him, had always been in him.
This was a bed. No rough timber board, no bodies rank with sweat and shit fettered together in the darkness in the stinking belly of a slave ship. This was a bed. They were lying in a bed, their bed. He had slept with Ann, night after night now, for how long? Near on thirty years. And he would never get used to it, the sheer joy of the bed he shared with his wife.
This was a bed and he was Joseph Knight. He had not been Joseph then. He had been someone else. There was a time when he had hated that name, but he had made it his and no one was going to take it away now. But neither would they take away his other, older name. It was the one thing he had left from that other beginning, the one thing that was his and his alone. And he had never uttered it. Not since he was on the ship. Not since Captain Knight favoured him with his own name. He had known – a ten-year-old but he had known – that he must keep it from everyone. They could not take it if they did not know it. Not even Ann knew it.
She used to ask him, ‘Whit was your name? Whit is your real name? Ye must hae an African name.’ At last she wore him down, and he admitted it, he had. But it was his, and he would not give it to her. ‘Dae ye no trust me?’ she said. But it was not about her. It was about himself. He had to keep his name whole, away from others, away, especially, from white people. Even her. She thought hard about that for a day or two. It must have hurt her, because it surely hurt him to keep it from her. But it was necessary. Eventually she saw that. She never asked again.
He thought of a conversation he had once had, a long time ago now. A man had told him: ‘People don’t see you any more, because you are free.’ He hadn’t believed it then, and he didn’t believe it now. Freedom was the very opposite, it was being seen and recognised and acknowledged and still let alone. Being named and taken as a whole. He didn’t believe that this country he had ended up in was ready to dispense that kind of freedom. Not yet anyway.
Prejudice could have one eye closed, or it could be blind. Justice was sometimes depicted as blind. He wanted a country, a world, which saw with both eyes open.
That man he had met. He had forgotten his name but he had heard it again recently. Peter Burnet. Another black man. They had gone for a drink in the court house. Burnet had had on a fine velvet waistcoat and he had paid for what they drank. Joseph had told Burnet what they were – invisible – and he had been right about that too. He never saw an African face these days, not here. Even the Africa that was in his own son, Andrew, was diluted by the blood of his mother. His daughter Sarah was married and had given him a grandson who, apart from his tightly curled hair, seemed not to bear a trace of him. In another generation or two his blood would be swirling unseen and unrecognised through the veins of men and women who had never set foot furth of Scotland.
But although there were no other African faces around him he was not alone. He was surrounded by the faces of men who had also once been slaves, near as damn it. They were all around him, and when they went down to the shore and into the earth together there was a joining of their souls that was like no other feeling.
Where he had met with Burnet, that was the scene of what he used to call his triumph. The old men peering down at him and Wedderburn. Wedderburn’s counsel goading him, and Maclaurin – Lord Dreghorn, dead now – holding him back. ‘Steady noo, Maister Knight.’ It was that ‘Maister’ that had saved him. Maclaurin had always treated him with respect, right from when they first met. Sometimes he would call him Maister, sometimes sir, sometimes Joseph, but there had always been politeness and respect in the address. It was the way one man ought to speak to another, when they were equals.
He remembered sitting in that room, waiting for the judges to come in. And looking across at Wedderburn. There was, briefly, a crush of finely dressed white bodies that obscured his view. A strong smell of snuff was in the air, and wig powder, and somebody’s shirt or maybe their entire linen and person could have done with a thorough wash. But Joseph hardly noticed – it was the moment that was important. An ending; maybe also a beginning. And as he thought that, it became important to see Wedderburn again, before the judges entered and the moment changed. He leaned forward and with his right arm carefully but firmly pushed aside one particularly large silk-wrapped belly, clearing a line of vision.
And there he was: Sir John Wedderburn of Ballindean. Wedderburn was staring at the ceiling, and Joseph expected to be enraged at the sight of him, proud and cold and unyielding, but it was not like that. When he saw the weary lines on Wedderburn’s face, he was utterly amazed to discover in himself a feeling he never expected to have. He felt sorry for him.
Why? Because Wedderburn had lost his wife? Because he looked exhausted? No. Then why should he feel sorry for him? It flashed across his mind then: because Wedderburn had failed. Wedderburn had been planning ever since he got off the boat in Kingston: planning and scheming and preparing and building and becoming hugely rich and trying always to make everything secure. But nothing was secure. Life was a step, a second away from disaster. And he felt sorry for Wedderburn because he understood this, and Wedderburn did not.
But that feeling lasted for only a moment. For just then the court rose, and they were enemies again, one trying to beat the other.
It was a cold day but it grew hot in that courtroom. The place was thick with people, their combined breath and body heat and body smells rising to the beams under the gallery and filling up the whole room. And as Maclaurin and Dundas stepped clear to make their speeches, Joseph began to be revisited with memories of the slave ship – those same memories that he still had: the packed, chained filth and nakedness of the people; the rancid smell; the slittery mess of shit and piss and puke running back and forth with every shift of the vessel; the groans of men and the crying of women; the groans of the ship, the sounds of people dying. What terrible waste was that? – people taken for slaves who would never even reach the plantations, who would be thrown overboard, waste literally, when they expired. He tried to block those sounds out and concentrate on the speeches, the fine white words being uttered on his behalf, but they would not disappear. Maclaurin finished. Dundas began. Monboddo interrupted. Then there was a pause, while Wedderburn’s lawyers consulted among themselves. His own lawyers formed a huddle, discussing how they had done. Maconochie was complaining that Dundas had omitted some important point. Joseph was outwith their circle. For a minute, even Maclaurin had forgotten him.
And even Maclaurin, good and well-meaning though he was, could be insensitive. His Latin motto, designed to impress the court, hurt. His invitation to the old men to look on his client and see if he were a man or a thing, that hurt. The heat, the close air, the backs turned against him – Joseph had to get out.
He went right through the great hall, past the bookstalls and the coffee shop, out into the Parliament Close. Ann would have come down from the gallery, perhaps, would be back in there looking for him, but just now he didn’t want anybody, not even her.
Outside it was wonderfully, sharply cold. There was an empty spot in a corner formed by one of the buttresses of St Giles’. He stood there, eyes closed, breathing in the fresh air, regaining control. He realised how tired he was. Tired of everything.
‘Hello, Joseph.’
For a second he thought John Wedderburn had followed him out. He jumped forward, wide awake again. It was not John Wedderburn. It was his brother.
‘Hot, isn’t it?’ James Wedderburn said, smiling. He was blocking him, so that Joseph would have to push him out of the way to leave. Joseph did not wish to touch him. ‘I mean, in there,’ Wedderburn said. ‘Not out here. Brrr! But in there – almost as hot as Jamaica at this time of year. But it’s always hot there. You’ve not forgotten that, have you?’
‘Lea me alane.’
‘You’re getting a right Scotch accent, Joseph. You’d almost pass for a native.’
‘I dinna wish tae speak wi ye.’
‘But I wish to speak to you. And if I were you, I’d listen. For your own good.’
Joseph made as if to get past him but Wedderburn stopped him with a hand to his chest, pushed him back against the wall. And now he began to speak very hard and very fast, and there was not a trace of a smile on the handsome face any more.
‘You’re not thinking of going back in there, surely? That would be very foolish. Because you know what’s going to happen, don’t you? You’re going to lose. All the fine words of Maclaurin and his cronies won’t save you. They’re done, finished. All that’s left is the law. And that’s what they do in there – law. That’s all that matters. You haven’t a chance. But just to make sure, we’ve taken a gentle line with their lordships. We don’t want to alarm them. Even if they say you are not to be a slave here, we’ve asked them to accept that you were a slave there, as a point of principle. Of course my brother, your master, has said that he has no intention of sending you back to Jamaica, but he’d like to establish that he has the right to do so. They can’t throw over Jamaican law any more than Jamaica can throw over Scots law.
‘So my advice to you, Joseph, is to do what you’re good at. Start running. Start now. Don’t go back in that room. There’s a ship leaving Greenock in less than a week, bound for Savanna-la-Mar. You’re going to be on it if we catch you. And we will catch you. We’ve got your place booked already with the agents. I’d happily see you safe on board and bound for your old friends at Glen Isla. But as it happens, somebody else has volunteered to escort you.’
Now he stood aside. Across the close, standing below the statue of King Charles and staring over at them, was Aeneas MacRoy.
‘I’m going back inside now, Joseph,’ Wedderburn said, ‘to hear the arguments against you. It’s up to you whether you come in, or set off running. Maister MacRoy will keep an eye on you either way. Goodbye, Joseph.’
If it had been John Wedderburn, he might have struck him. He might have elbowed him out of the way and gone back to the court. But James Wedderburn was different. There was a fire in him. He held you with the intensity of his look. He did not pretend.
For a moment Joseph thought he was going to run. For more than a moment. He began to walk towards the High Street. At the corner of the kirk he stopped and turned. MacRoy was behind him, at a safe distance. Joseph took another twenty paces.
Then he stopped. This was exactly what the Wedderburns wanted. They wanted him to act like a slave, they expected it. Whereas Maclaurin expected him to act like a human being.
Joseph turned round. He broke into a run. As he passed MacRoy, heading towards the Great Door, he dropped his shoulder and caught him a glancing blow, sending him staggering to one side. Joseph was furious: with himself, with MacRoy, with the Wedderburns. Mostly, though, he was furious at the thought of the Court of Session deciding his fate without him. Which was why, when the judges looked askance at his reappearance, he had stared back at them without flinching, refusing to be cowed.
He did not see either MacRoy or James Wedderburn afterwards, when it was all over. He never knew if John Wedderburn had countenanced what they had done, and he did not want to discuss it with Maclaurin. Along with Dundas and Maconochie and Annie, and Mr Davidson down from Perth and a number of other well-wishers, Maclaurin insisted on celebrating the victory at Indian Peter’s, and raising a glass to him and to freedom. And Boswell was there too, Auchinleck’s son, fretting at the edge of the circle, and complaining to Maclaurin because in their pleadings none of them appeared to have used Dr Johnson’s argument, that Boswell had gone to considerable trouble to take down when last in London. And Maclaurin said, calmly enough, ‘Och, Jamie, we used some o it, I’m sure. Onywey, oor arguments had enough weight without bringin in the English, did ye no think?’ Everybody laughed except Bozzy, who thought that was a remark that did little honour to Samuel Johnson, who had been much taken with Maclaurin, did he not remember? At this Maclaurin grew quite short with his friend, and said, ‘Whit would ye hae had us say, James? Should we hae gien their lordships Johnson’s Oxford toast: “Here’s tae the next insurrection in the West Indies"? Dae ye think that would hae clinched it?’ Everybody else roared, and then Maconochie, seeing the other side coming out past them, raised that toast anyway, very loud: ‘Here’s tae the next insurrection in the West Indies!’ And of course several of them, Joseph and Annie the loudest, repeated it, and they all, with the exception of Henry Dundas, who looked embarrassed, drank.
John Wedderburn was subjected to this as he and his counsel went past, and he could not ignore it. He refused to acknowledge Joseph, refused even to look at him. Instead, he turned on Henry Dundas, who was nearest to him. ‘You are a rank hypocrite, sir. You attacked me, who never mistreated that Negro, and you attacked slavery, yet I do not see you move against it elsewhere, where it matters. Why are you not calling for abolition in the House of Commons? You accuse me of expediency, yet it seems you are one man here and quite another in London.’
Dundas tried to brush it off – ‘Mr Wedderburn, we had aw thae arguments jist noo in court’ – but Wedderburn would not move on. Cullen’s gentle attempts to persuade him only further infuriated him.
‘Mr Cullen, I am done with you, sir, apart from your fee.’ Cullen held up his hands, glanced at Dundas and shrugged, then walked off. Wedderburn stayed. ‘Well, Mr Dundas, are you to present a bill in the House to wind up the rest of my property?’
Dundas shook his head. ‘Mr Wedderburn, I am not blind to the situation in the West Indies. I am not unaware of the wealth that comes frae them, or the advantages they bring tae this country. But that is a different maitter frae whit we hae resolved this morning. I am a practical kind of man.’
‘As I said, you are a hypocrite.’
Wedderburn stormed out. Those were the last words Joseph ever heard from him.
All this was pouring through his mind as he lay in the half-light. Although the dreams of Africa came often to him, he seldom thought of Wedderburn these days, but he was thinking of him now because he had heard that he was dead.
Yesterday, Saturday, he and Andrew had come out of the pit as usual with the other men. Their bodies were aching and soaked from hours of toil; soaked, too, from the water they had laboured in up to their knees after the steam-driven pump broke down. The mine shafts were down by the shore: one of them, the main one, went down a hundred and eighty feet, out under the sea. This was the shaft Joseph, his son and another sixty or seventy men had been working twelve hours a day since the early spring.
Men had been howking coal out of the earth at Wemyss for hundreds of years; first scratching at it on the surface, then sinking bell pits and working them till the seam was exhausted or the pit flooded, then constructing deeper, more productive but more dangerous pits, with wooden walkways, ladders and stairs. Every year thousands of tons of coal were shipped from the little harbour across the Forth to Falkirk, to Germany and to England. There was enough coal down there, it was said, to fuel the Carron ironworks at Falkirk for a thousand years. At night the colliers could look far out into the firth and see the warning light flickering on the Isle of May. It was fuelled by coal they had howked. Night after night it burned, an emblem of their endless labour.
The women and bairns, who bore the coal up a wooden staircase that spiralled round the shaft, had finished a few minutes earlier and were already on their way home. The colliers, black and bent and exhausted, loaded with their picks and shovels and ropes, blinking at the bright, cloudless sky, must have looked like creatures emerging from another world, but nobody ever remarked on this because there was never anybody there who was not from that world.
They trudged up the hill in silence, towards the rows of cottages. At a certain point on the rough track, they became aware that there was someone unusual observing them: a fattish man none of them knew, sitting on the verge while his horse grazed the long grass in the sheuch. Some of the men were suspicious of the stranger. They glowered at him or turned their heads away and would not catch his eye. Others stared, resentful of a man who had the leisure to sit in sunshine while they had been crawling in darkness. One or two nodded and the man nodded back. He was watching them all very carefully. When Joseph and his son passed by it seemed as though he lifted his head a little more, even raised his hand slightly. No more than that, but Joseph saw it, and when he glanced back the man was still watching him.
At the cottage door a wee laddie, one of his neighbours’ boys, said, ‘Man, ye’re black as the howe o the nicht.’ He laughed and said, ‘Ah, but whaur does the coal stop and me stert?’ The laddie said, ‘Dinna ken. But there’s a man been speirin efter a black man like you.’ Exhausted though he was, Joseph became alert. ‘Whit man?’ he asked. ‘A man wi a horse,’ the boy said. ‘But I didna tell him ocht.’
Joseph Knight and Andrew went into the house and Andrew collapsed into a chair. Annie was dozing in another, catching a little rest before she made the evening meal. Joseph went to the water-butt at the back door. He dipped the tin in and splashed water over his face and neck. By the time he came back, Ann and the lad were asleep.
Joseph set off down the track again. When he came to the spot where the man had been he was still there, eating an apple while his horse grazed. Joseph stopped a few feet from him. They stared at each other. The man smiled and got to his feet. He threw the apple core to land by the horse’s mouth and held out his hand. ‘Mr Knight?’ he said.
Joseph did not acknowledge this. He did not take the hand. He did not like the fact that the stranger knew who he was.
‘My name is Archibald Jamieson,’ the man said. ‘I hae come frae Dundee.’ He paused, as if to see what effect this would have. ‘Ye needna fear. I dinna come tae cause ye trouble. I come wi news.’
‘I’m no feart,’ Joseph said. ‘Whit news?’ But he knew there were only two kinds of news that might come from Dundee: news about Annie’s mother, or news from his own past.
Jamieson let his hand drop. Joseph thought he looked tired. This was not surprising – the man would have ridden nearly forty miles. He would be saddle-sore. Nevertheless, it was hard to believe that he could be more tired than Joseph felt.
‘I hae been lookin for ye for weeks,’ Jamieson said. ‘Months, in fact. Since a year past January.’
‘Why would ye dae that?’ Joseph asked.
‘At first, I was employed tae search for ye by John Wedderburn of Ballindean.’
Joseph did not move. His heart began to pound but he did not allow the blank expression on his face to change.
Jamieson went on. ‘But that’s no why I’m here noo. I’m here tae tell ye that Wedderburn is deid.’
Joseph felt a jolt inside him, but still he said nothing. He was not willing to concede anything until he knew what all this was about.
‘He died twa weeks syne. He was buried yesterday. I was there. I thocht ye should ken.’
‘Why would I need tae ken onything aboot John Wedderburn?’ Joseph said cautiously.
‘Because o whit he did tae ye. It’s finished, ower.’
‘Whit is?’
‘Whit happened atween ye. The court case.’
‘That’s been ower a lang time.’
‘Ah,’ Jamieson said, ‘then ye admit ye are Joseph Knight?’
Joseph looked at the ground, then at the sky, then back at Jamieson. ‘Hoo did ye find me?’ he asked at last.
‘A number o coincidences,’ Jamieson said. ‘But in the end it was Kate Thomson – Ann’s mither – that tellt me whaur tae look.’
Joseph nodded. ‘How is she?’
‘Frail. But still workin awa. She canna stop.’
‘Whit did Wedderburn want wi me efter aw this time?’
‘Tae ken whit had happened tae ye. If ye still lived or no. I couldna find ye and that seemed tae satisfy him. But it didna satisfy me.’
‘How no?’
‘Because ye interested me. I ken hoo ye were brocht tae Jamaica, and frae there tae here. I ken aboot the Wedderburns, the fower brithers. They are aw deid noo, aw save James, the doctor ane. I ken aboot your case – Knight versus Wedderburn. But I didna ken you, and I wanted tae meet ye.’
‘And whit is it ye want?’
Jamieson said, ‘Naething. I want naething frae ye. I jist wanted tae see ye – and tae hear ye.’
This made Joseph think of the way he sounded. Although he had the words of the people around him he sounded some of them differently. The colliers did not care or comment any more. What did how he looked or spoke mean to this total stranger? He said, ‘I dinna believe ye. There’s aye something. Whitiver it is, ye hae wasted your journey.’
Jamieson held out his hands, palms upward. ‘I swear there is naething.’
Joseph said, ‘Then ye hae whit ye cam for. There’s your horse.’ He began to walk up the brae.
‘Wait,’ Jamieson said. ‘I hae a message for ye. Twa messages.’
Joseph turned back.
‘The ane is frae anither black man like yoursel. A Mr Peter Burnet, a weaver by trade. Ye had a drink wi him some years syne at the Parliament Close in Edinburgh.’
Joseph said nothing. He remembered Burnet and the conversation they had had. He remembered being annoyed.
‘Mr Burnet wrote a letter tae me,’ Jamieson was saying. ‘He spoke very highly of ye. He said if I should ever find ye, tae remind ye o your meetin.’
‘Ye didna come aw this way tae tell me that,’ Joseph said.
‘The ither message,’ Jamieson continued, ‘is frae a Perthshire gentleman that ye kent.’ He seemed to be stalling. Joseph felt himself growing angry. He knew no Perthshire gentlemen forby those that had had him arrested.
‘Mr Andrew Davidson, the lawyer.’
Joseph was astonished at the instant calming effect this name had on him. It seemed also to transform Jamieson in his eyes, as if a password had been uttered, a code that proved his good intent. ‘Mr Davidson,’ Joseph said. ‘Ye hae seen him?’
‘I confess,’ Jamieson said, ‘it was a year syne. When I met him he wasna weel. I dinna ken if he is alive yet.’
‘Mr Davidson,’ Joseph said, ‘was a gentleman. He never misdouted me or my cause. Never.’
‘That’s whit he tellt me,’ Jamieson said. ‘And he asked, if I ever did find ye, tae be remembered tae ye.’
Joseph recalled a large, serious man with intense eyes and a rapid understanding. A kind man. ‘He is remembered,’ he said. ‘I named my son Andrew efter him.’
‘That was your son I saw ye wi earlier?’ Jamieson asked.
‘Aye.’
‘A fine-looking lad. The work will be hard on him, though.’
‘He is paid for it,’ Joseph said. ‘He labours wi me but no because o me. When he is a man, he will labour for himsel. If he disna he’ll sterve, but it will be his choice.’
‘Ye had a dochter, if I mind richt.’
‘I hae. She bides in anither village.’
‘Of course.’
‘I’m sorry, I meant, does she still live?’
‘Whit is it tae you?’
‘I am a faimly man, Mr Knight. I hae sons and dochters and grandbairns, but my wife is deid.’
Something in the way Jamieson said this made Joseph less wary of the questions. Jamieson could keep neither the pride nor the pain out of his voice. Joseph relaxed a little more. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘she still lives.’
He felt the evening sun on his face, a soft breeze coming off the sea. He was no longer so suspicious of Jamieson, but he did not want to be having this conversation. He wanted to go home and eat, to sit outside with Ann and Andrew until the light went. He would tell them about this visitor, this man not of the past but bearing news of the past. Thinking of that, he was surprised to discover that Jamieson was right: that what he had thought was over years before had not been.
‘Mr Jamieson,’ Joseph said, ‘if ye should see Mr Davidson again, I hope ye would say that Joseph Knight wishes him weel. But I hope also that ye winna say whaur ye found him. I hae made mysel a new life here and I dinna want the auld ane disturbin it – no even Mr Davidson.’
‘Ye needna fash,’ Jamieson said, as he had a few minutes earlier. ‘Naebody will ken but mysel.’
Joseph went to the horse and clapped its neck, picked up the loose reins and passed them to Jamieson. He said, ‘If ye’re tae get back tae Dundee the nicht ye’ll need tae set oot noo.’
‘There’s nae rush,’ Jamieson said. ‘It’s settled weather and it hardly gets dark these nichts. On this beast I could sleep aw the way hame. But I micht turn in at Cupar. I’ll see.’
Leading the docile animal, they set off back to the rows of collier cottages. The track rose past these and on through thick woods till it rejoined the coast route from Kirkcaldy. At the first of the cottages Joseph stopped. ‘There’s your road,’ he said.
‘Aye,’ Jamieson said. He hesitated for a moment. ‘I said there was naething I wanted frae ye, and there isna. But there is something I would like tae ken. Was it worth it?’
‘Was whit worth it?’ Joseph asked.
‘Weel, ye gained your freedom but, forgie me, I’m lookin at ye and it disna seem that ye gained that muckle. Was it worth it?’
‘If ye had been a slave ye would never hae asked that question,’ Joseph said. ‘Dae ye no see why I am here? Because the folk here ken.’
‘Aye, that’s whit I thocht,’ Jamieson said. ‘I see that.’
Joseph spat on the ground. ‘No ye dinna. If ye saw it ye wouldna hae asked it. And noo I’ll ask ye the same question. Was it worth your while tae seek me oot?’
Jamieson said, ‘Mr Knight, I dinna expect ye tae understand this or tae believe it, but jist speakin wi ye these few minutes – ye hae gien me something in spite o yoursel.’
‘I hae gien ye naething.’
‘Ye hae shown me whit a free man looks like.’
Joseph spat again. But Jamieson seemed to mean it, whatever it might mean. He held Joseph’s disdainful stare and stared back.
‘Weel, and are ye disappointed?’ Joseph said.
‘No,’ Jamieson said. ‘Ye are exactly as Mr Davidson described ye.’
Whit did Wedderburn want wi me efter aw this time? Joseph’s own question, not one of Jamieson’s, was the one that had lingered. Jamieson certainly hadn’t had a satisfactory answer to it, either from Wedderburn or from thinking it through for himself. Wedderburn, even if he had really known what he wanted, had not told Jamieson, and now he was dead. The only person who could provide an answer was the one they had both sought: himself, Joseph Knight.
It wasn’t, Joseph believed, about the court case, or about slavery, or about revenge or recompense. These things were part of it, but it was about something much bigger. It was about life. Wedderburn had seen the life spirit in Joseph and it had consumed him with envy. It had stripped him to the bone. Only Joseph had ever seen him so exposed. That had given Joseph a strange power over him.
Another ship: the one in which they had crossed the Atlantic, from Jamaica to Scotland. Sailors’ country. Out there on the ocean, rules of behaviour – codes of ownership and obedience – reshaped themselves. Joseph, who had been terrified of going aboard, remembered this as they lost sight of land.
The cabin they shared was cramped, though luxurious compared with the conditions of the slave ship in which Joseph had made his only other sea journey. On opposite sides of the six-foot-wide space were wooden beds which in the daytime served as benches. A hinged table swung down from a third wall between the beds, filling half of the cabin. The table could be put away at night, but the midshipman who showed them the workings of various lockers, fitted under the beds and overhead, suggested that it was best left down, as it provided useful additional purchase in the event of rough weather, when they might be in danger of being thrown to the floor. There were various ropes attached to the beds for strapping oneself in, but these were apt to chaff in prolonged storms. ‘Let us hope,’ Wedderburn said to the midshipman, ‘that we are not called upon for anything too heroic, eh Joseph?’ But Joseph said nothing, for he was already feeling ill.
‘Well, sir,’ the midshipman said, ‘you know what they say – no man can ever be a hero to his valet. And if that be true on land, it be ten times more true at sea.’
‘Because you see me naked, Joseph, and you may also see me sick and helpless. That is the gentleman’s meaning – is it not, sir?’
‘It is, sir. But maybe I’m speaking out of turn. The saying might not hold good for a neger.’
‘Well, we shall see. Joseph and I are pretty close acquainted, but I expect we’ll be closer in the coming weeks.’
For the first few days of the voyage the weather was fine, the skies clear, the sun strong and the westerly winds steady. Wedderburn and Joseph spent as much time as possible on deck, stretching their limbs, watching the sailors at their tasks – anything that kept them out of the stuffy, dark cabin where the ship’s rolling motion seemed magnified. Wedderburn read from various books while Joseph shielded him from the sun with a large parasol. There were one or two other passengers on board, but none with whom Wedderburn wished to keep company. Most of the ship was given over to its cargo of rum and sugar.
In the evenings Wedderburn taught Joseph games – whist, rummy, draughts and backgammon. His motivation, Joseph guessed, was more about providing himself with a playing opponent than about educating his slave. But the games were levellers. They obliged them to be equals for as long as they played. Joseph was quick to learn, which clearly pleased Wedderburn. He even seemed to take pleasure in being beaten by him.
From reading the cards it was a natural progression to learning the alphabet. Wedderburn would read aloud from the Bible, then take a verse and write the words out on a sheet of paper, with space underneath for Joseph to copy them. It was a crude method of teaching, but it worked. When Wedderburn grew bored of it, Joseph took the Bible and copied passages directly. Then he asked Wedderburn to read out what he had written. In this way, reading and writing began to open themselves to him.
But after two weeks at sea, the first of a series of storms changed everything.
Even in fine weather the ship rolled and pitched unexpectedly. Joseph had fought to keep seasickness at bay, but the smell of caulk and salt-laden wood, the constant sawing of ropes and creaking of timbers, and the lurching motion, all reminded him too much of that other voyage. His stomach remained queasy at best. When the weather turned, and they were forced to keep below decks for days at a time, and every wave found a new way to angle and spin the ship, what had been a constant nagging nausea became violent and uncontrollable pain.
His bed became a prison. He could neither get up from it nor bear to be in it. He alternately boiled and froze. His head pounded. Sweat poured from him. He vomited till there was nothing left to come up but bile. The tepid drinking water did nothing to ease his thirst, and refused to sit in his stomach. His body was dehydrated and saltless. The cabin stank of his illness. He fully expected to be moved to another part of the ship, so as not to inconvenience his master. But there was nowhere else that he could go. Master and slave were bound together in the tiny cabin until either Joseph died or the storm abated.
He drifted in and out of consciousness. Sleep was fitful and filled with bad dreams, but it was a mercy compared with lying awake. He began to wish he would die. Never before had he experienced that wish, but the seasickness was overwhelming. It demanded relief. There was none, only a swirling hole of pain down which he seemed to be endlessly falling.
And then, after what seemed like weeks, Joseph began to piece together what had been happening to him. He had been sick, over and over and without any ability to direct what forced itself through his mouth. He had soiled himself. He had soaked his sheet with sweat. And each time he had done these things, someone had cleaned him. Someone had wiped his brow, sponged down his body. Someone had gently raised his head and helped him to drink. Someone had lifted his body from one bed to the other, and then, when he had wrecked the second, lifted him again to the first and laid him on a dry sheet. Someone had sat holding his hand, speaking to him, soothing words in a soothing voice. A familiar voice.
It was not always calm, though. He remembered it growing frantic at times when Wedderburn thought he was asleep. Through the darkness, close by his head, came the pleading: ‘Don’t die on me, Joseph. Do not die on me. Please God, do not die on me. Please God, do not let him die. Almighty God and Jesus Christ, do not take Joseph from me. Let him live. Do not die on me. Not you too. Please, Joseph, do not die.’ On and on, for hours, until Joseph really did sleep, and, waking, found Wedderburn still at his side.
Joseph felt something stir in his heart. That this other man should tend him, should so devote himself to his needs, was remarkable. Out there in the Atlantic, master and slave were reduced to this simple humanity: one man caring for another. Wedderburn the master did not chastise, did not curse, did not neglect: as if he were his father, the father Joseph did not remember, he cared for him. Lying unable to speak, Joseph saw that Wedderburn was desperate to love and be loved; but he was denied those things because of the way he was. And Joseph was touched, since it was the same for him: he had been torn from love, and he did not know how to give or receive it. For a moment there on the ship, they were two sides of the same coin.
Once, there seemed to be a space somewhere in the storm. The ship rocked rather than shook, and the waves slapped rather than crashed against the timbers. Joseph was strangely aware of his own serenity. It was as if he were clinging like a bat to the low cabin roof, looking down at his body. He was beyond exhaustion, beyond despair. And there was another man in the room, the ship’s surgeon, talking to John Wedderburn. ‘It is the calm before death, Mr Wedderburn,’ the surgeon was saying. ‘I have seen it often, and not just in negers. The body is defeated, and the mind gives up the will to live. When the sea fever has taken someone the way it has this fellow, it’s common enough.’
‘I agree he is very sick,’ Wedderburn said. ‘That is why I sent for you. But I do not wish him to die. I am taking him home to Scotland.’
There was a silence. Joseph felt the surgeon’s hands moving across his body, checking his pulse, pushing back his eyelids.
‘He cannot die,’ Wedderburn said. ‘I will not allow it.’
‘With respect, sir, there’s very little you can do to prevent it.’
‘I am a medical man, too, sir,’ Wedderburn said. ‘I have looked after him thus far. If you can do nothing for him, I will continue to do what I can.’
‘He’ll be dead in two days,’ the surgeon said. ‘I’m sorry to say it, for he looks a well-built lad, but I’ve seen it too many times.’
Alone again with Joseph, John Wedderburn got down on his knees, squeezed in between the table and the bed. Up above, bat-like, Joseph watched.
‘Joseph, can you hear me? No, don’t speak. Turn your head a little if you can hear me. Look at me.’
The neck of Joseph’s body felt as though it were bound in iron. With immense effort, his head turned to look at John Wedderburn. Joseph was shocked to see that Wedderburn was crying.
‘Joseph, I beg you, do not die on me. This is no place for you to die. There is nothing between us and God out here. If you die, I will die. He will not take you and let me live. He is watching us both on this cursed piece of wood. He is watching me with you. Joseph, if you die He will blame me. He will say it was my fault. Do not die, Joseph Knight.’ He took Joseph’s left hand in his two, brought it to his mouth, kissed it. Joseph was too weak to resist. But he felt the kiss.
And afterwards, when the tempest died away and he began to recover, he did not forget it. He remembered it and he understood it. He remembered it even as John Wedderburn distanced himself again, leaving him alone to sleep while he got out on deck for fresh air, rebuilding the boundaries between them as the ship approached landfall. He remembered the kiss when he looked in Wedderburn’s eyes and saw the weakness masquerading as strength, the fear behind the confidence. He remembered the kindness Wedderburn had shown all through the terrible time of bad weather and sickness, and he despised it.
He had come so close to rewarding that kindness. If Wedderburn had not kissed him, he might even have done so. But the kiss was a mark not of kindness but of guilt. And it flooded in upon Joseph that it did not matter whether Wedderburn was a good master or a bad master. It did not matter whether he was a good slave or a bad slave. Even though Wedderburn had helped him to read and write, had nursed him and perhaps even saved his life, these things did not heal the injury he continued to inflict. In claiming to own Joseph, he destroyed the possibility of goodness between them. Wedderburn’s kindness was conditional. Joseph, sick as he was, saw that, and made up his mind always to reject it.
And he knew now, lying in bed next to Ann, why John Wedderburn had tried to find him. Jamieson was right in saying that Wedderburn had wanted to know if he was dead or alive. But the reason: he had needed Joseph to be alive. When Jamieson had failed to find him, Wedderburn had called off the search. It was better that way. It was better not to know that Joseph was dead. That way he might yet be alive, and John Wedderburn could get to his God, or wherever he was going, before Joseph did. He needed Joseph to survive him; to survive the great wrong he had done him.
Life had been a trial to Wedderburn, a burden. How could that be? – that a man that had been a slave came to cherish every rotten moment of being alive, but a rich man with all he could want in the world looked at life as if it were going to jump up and bite him at any minute, as if it were something best kept at a safe distance? How could that be?
Because for a man like Wedderburn life was like a neger. If you once loosed your grip on it, it would rise up and overthrow you.
His mind was racing now. He would not sleep again before daybreak. The Sabbath was over and the new week’s labour was about to begin. Sometimes he did have pangs of guilt about having brought Ann here, about Andrew growing up to such a life. But they were here now. There was no going back. And they were alive.
He thought of James Wedderburn, his threat to send him back to his ‘old friends’ at Glen Isla. Nearly all those people now, they must be dead. He remembered the kindness he had had from Newman. How Newman used to tell him about Charlie, whom he had once been, and the great days of Tacky’s War, before Joseph was ever in Jamaica. Newman would let him trace with his fingers the scars of the terrible flogging he took for being out in the rebellion, and he would talk about his days on the run. They were the best days he had in Jamaica, he said, even though he was half-starved and faced death every day for months. But you were always hungry as a slave, and death was the overseer of all the plantations, so what was there to lose? Newman schooled Joseph. There were many ways of being free, he said, and none of them was easy. But they were all better than being a slave, so when you saw your chance, you had to take it. All your life before that happened, all your life was just waiting, and all your life after was thinking about it happening again. And they knew that too. If you looked in their eyes you would see it there. The fear. It was guilt in another form. They should never be allowed to rest easy in their beds at night.
That was before the other Wedderburn, the sick one, drove Mary from the house and Newman mad by killing her. The fear was in that Wedderburn, all right. It was in all of them except James. And he was the one that still lived, so Jamieson had said. But even James Wedderburn had found slavery clinging to his back and that it could not easily be shaken off. The black son, Robert, that he had had by Rosanna, had come to Edinburgh to haunt him in the year of Joseph’s triumph. Joseph had never met Robert but he had heard about him. A regular nuisance to his father’s family, and probably still was. Good luck to him, Joseph thought.
Robert’s grandmother was Talkee Amy, that came to Glen Isla once to cure the sickness in Alexander Wedderburn. She cured the sickness but not the weakness. While she was there she told Joseph stories about Anansi. Anansi was the spider, always outwitting the other animals, always getting himself out of trouble. He’d forgotten the detail of the stories but he remembered her telling them. ‘Anansi always win out in the end,’ she said, ‘because him clever and him patient. Him prepared to wait long, long time.’
Joseph thought of the toast they had raised at Indian Peter’s that day. He thought of Newman, and Tacky, and Apongo, and the Maroons. He thought of Toussaint L’Ouverture, whom the French had killed this year with cold and hunger because they could not defeat him in war. These men were heroes. The Scots had their heroes too: Wallace and Bruce and now the young chevalier, Charles Edward Stewart, the one John Wedderburn had fought for. But they were not Joseph’s heroes. They were nothing to do with him. And like all the others, they were dead.
He would go to the coal tomorrow, and Ann would walk with him and the lad too. They would go their separate ways, he and Andrew climbing down the shaft and then crawling deep into the earth while Ann and the other women bore the great creels loaded with coal to the surface. And the men and women he worked with would call him Joe and laugh and girn as always and treat him as one of themselves. It was a sair, sair life but it was true, he was one of them, a collier. Colliers. The only people who had never held out against him. They knew that life was only ever a second away from disaster, from death. They saw him black, they knew him black, and it didn’t make them hate him or love him, they just accepted him. And he understood why this was.
Slavery. It had set them together against their country, against the world. He remembered the time in Edinburgh, in a room in a tavern with John Maclaurin. Maclaurin said, ‘Joseph, there is a man here that wishes tae meet ye.’ A tiny, wizened man in threadbare working clothes had stood up and given him his hand. When Joseph grasped it he felt it rough and cracked and hard, and when he looked at it he saw it black, deep-grained with coal stour. That stour was never going to come out. The man said he was from the colliers at Wemyss in Fife, they had heard of his trouble and they had made a subscription for him. He said he was sorry for the smallness of the sum, but he hoped it might help. Joseph nearly wept at that. The collier said, ‘We aw ken, man, dinna be feart, we aw ken.’
It was true. They were all free now, he and the other colliers, but there was something in them, a deep buried part, that would be slave till the day they died.
Joseph would not welcome death. The men he got on with best, they would not welcome it, hard and grinding and rotten though their lives were. They lived with death every day so they knew its face was ugly and cruel, just as he did. Maybe it was because of that, because of all he had been through, that it made him mad to think of not being alive, of not being on the earth to breathe any more.
Sometimes on a Saturday night his friends would queue outside the cottage and he would draw out his old scissors and razor and trim their hair, make them nice for their wives. He would not take money for it. Some of the men had wee square-rigged yawls that they raced on the sea and caught fish from, and they would give him some fish in return. They offered to take him out fishing but they could never entice Joseph to join them on the great grey waters. Others would buy him a drink, or leave a few rabbits poached from the laird’s parks. That was life, that was heroism: friendship, and trust, and once in a while a little stolen delight.
No, Joseph would not welcome death. Whether it came underground, or here in the bed, or some other way he could not imagine. Whether it took him to Africa, or to Jesus, or just into a hole in the earth. He would not hold out his hand to it. He was alive and he did not want to die. It might not be much, life, but he wanted it all the same, all he could get of it, so death would have to wait. He had beaten Wedderburn and he’d beat death as long as he was able. He was alive and here and now. He was alive.