The first thing one notices when one arrives in the West Indies from England is the light, and what it does to everything one sees. It is as if one has entered into a different world, where a veil has been removed, and the sky is suddenly more intensely blue, the sea the deepest turquoise, the buildings starker white, the flora more vibrantly colored. One is assaulted with so much at once: the dialects of the citizens, the screech of strange and brilliant-hued birds—even in the city—and the vast array of exotic fruits and vegetables laid out for purchase: pomegranates, pineapples, avocados, mangoes, coconuts; the sheer variety of it all bewilders the mind while entrancing the senses. And the smells! They were not the odors of an English summer: roses and strawberries and new-cut hay. Although I could not yet identify the ones that greeted me now, they were richer, more intense—well matched for the kaleidoscope of colors on the island. Only the smell of horse manure in the streets was the same, and even there, with the hotter sun, the odors were stronger and sharper. A passing shower struck—a downpour, really—but nearly as soon as it had started it was over and the sun shone strong and clear again. It was not at all like a gentle summer rain in England, and I could not have been more disoriented.
I had expected to see Africans on the island, of course, but I had not anticipated Chinese and East Indians as well, for there was at that time in the West Indies an unquenchable thirst for workers who could be paid near-slave wages, and shiploads of them had been brought in from East and South Asia.
I said hurried farewells to Stafford and Osmon, with vague promises among us to remain in contact. I gave them the address of my town house, and I watched them leave, making their ways in opposite directions. I did notice that they were nearly the only whites walking down the street, but it was only later that I learned how shameful it is to be a “walking buckra”—a white pedestrian—in Jamaica.
Harty’s Tavern was, as Whitledge had said, quite easy to find, but it was not yet noon, so I found myself a bit of shade and spent much of an hour just watching the bustle around me. Despite the August heat and humidity, which I found quite oppressive, negroes were hard at work on the docks nearby. They were as black as night, most of them, bare chested and dressed in only rough-cloth trousers, torn and faded. They wore no shoes, and yet they seemed to walk carelessly about without complaint. There was a gang leader, brown skinned instead of black, and wearing a sleeveless jacket and a hat, but still barefoot, holding a whip in his hand, but he seemed not to use it except to crack it above their heads to keep them moving, as one might do to a cart horse.
Few people were on the street at early midday, and those women who were in sight—nearly all of them negroes—carried parasols against the sun as any English lady would. Carriages that might have been seen in Maysbeck or Liverpool passed, carrying white passengers and driven by black men, and, strangely, there was generally a black man trotting along behind. I felt entirely disconcerted by these familiar trappings of English life exported to a world so different: the intense sun, the heat, the aromas, the constant reminders of slavery; and I wondered if I would ever get used to it all.
Shortly after noon Whitledge appeared with a dray, and he immediately set the driver to loading up my possessions beside Whitledge’s own pile of boxes and wooden trunks. He watched the operation for a few minutes, until he seemed satisfied that all was being done properly, and finally the two of us made our way into Harty’s. The dray set off toward Spanish Town ahead of us, its negro driver hunched over in his seat.
By way of conversation, I noted cheerfully that that was a good amount of baggage Whitledge had brought.
“Ah yes,” he said as we entered the indoor gloom. “My father is a magistrate in May Pen—that’s the central town of Clarendon. He requested me to bring a number of official papers and books of record.” We found a table in the crowded tavern. “And,” he added, “I have two sisters who of course desire the newest fashions from London. It will seem Christmas in August when I arrive home.”
“How long have you been gone?”
“Four years.”
“You never returned in four years?”
He smiled at that. “You have learned how lengthy a trip it is, I should think, and sometimes it can be quite dangerous. Of course,” he added with a sly smile, “there are charms in England that one does not want to miss.”
I ignored the implications, for I had more immediate interests. “You were at Oxford, were you not? What will you be doing now that you have returned?”
“I studied law there,” he said. “I shall begin as an attorney and see what that brings for me. It is how my father started and it has served him well.”
“An attorney who manages plantations for absent landowners?”
“Ah then, you understand,” he said with another smile. “There is money to be made in that capacity, as I am sure you know. And you? What are your prospects?”
“My father has a small plantation near Spanish Town, and some other business interests there, and here in Kingston. He owns the Badger Guinea, for example,” I could not resist adding. I had not revealed that to my other shipmates.
Whitledge’s eyebrows rose and another expression came upon his face. “Oh? In the slave trade—before it was outlawed?”
“What makes you say such a thing?” I asked.
“Badger Guinea. The name means it was a Guineaman—a slave ship. You did not know that?”
No, of course I did not. “And they could not change the name after the slave trade ceased, because it’s bad luck,” I mused.
He nodded. “You can count on it. If you had gone belowdecks you might have seen the remains of the fittings that had once held the shackles.”
I could not think what to say. My shock must have shown, for Whitledge leaned closer across the table. “We all have things we prefer not to think about, Rochester. Here, slavery is a necessary evil. It was slavery, after all, that built this beautiful island, and that makes life here so very pleasant for us. It no doubt helped pay for your education at Cambridge. It produces the sugar you have been putting into your tea all your life, and the rum that will be a staple of your life from here on. And speaking of rum, it’s high time to have a bit, is it not?”
“Indeed,” I murmured. I should not have been shocked, but I had not realized the degree to which slavery had infiltrated even my life in England. Sitting there in that busy tavern, I tried to steel myself to the reality that Whitledge took so casually: I could not avoid becoming dependent upon the work of slaves. It was an uncomfortable proposition.
The grog was brought soon enough, but I did not drink it right away. I had never been fond of rum, and that first taste of grog in Jamaica nearly gagged me, but in time I did get used to it. And to the way of life that produces it, I am not proud to say.
After a bounteous meal and more drink than I really wanted, Whitledge and I finally left Kingston on hired horses. It was only a short trip to Spanish Town, even at our slow pace and with occasional pauses as Whitledge pointed out views and characteristics of the island. One of the first things I had learned all those years ago at Black Hill was that escaped slaves, called “Maroons,” often fled to the mountainous center, which was a wilderness into which no white man ever ventured. Now, as we rode along, I saw that region for myself—it is background to everything on the island, in more ways than one—and it does indeed look forbidding: mountains thick with trees and vines, a bluish haze lying over them. But the rest of the island, from the foothills to the sea, is almost entirely domesticated into plantations and cattle pens.
At that time of year the cane stalks had grown higher than a man’s head, rustling and clattering against one another in the wind, and the air was filled with the sounds of hoes chopping weeds in the cane rows and the occasional work chants of the negroes. The fields needed to be weeded constantly, for the weeds benefit from the same conditions that enable the cane to grow so prodigiously. I paused occasionally to watch the backbreaking work, realizing that I would not last half a day working in such humidity and intense sun.
Whitledge was not well acquainted with any of the owners of the plantations we rode past, but he was able to point out each plantation’s great house—which the negroes called the buckra house. There was another new and unsettling experience on that ride: we were rarely out of earshot of the crack of whips. A negro driver strode behind each gang, snapping the whip over their heads every few minutes, and when his whip found a target, there was often a cry of pain, a sound that made my skin flinch in my first few days on the island. I never fully got used to that sound.
By the time Spanish Town came into view, I had become so attached to my friendship with Whitledge that I urged him to stay the night with me and continue on the following morning. But he was adamant, for he was anxious to return to his family and his own home. So we said our good-byes at the edge of Spanish Town, and I watched him go on his way, wondering if in the years ahead I would ever become as attached to Jamaica as he. I had not forgotten my father’s enticing description of Mr. Mason’s daughter, and I hoped that a happy future with a wife and children would transform this strange and exotic place into a home—despite that the word conjured, still, warm memories of Thornfield and its fields and woods and moors.