Free Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl by Kate McCafferty

time, in my six years among the folks at Arlington, when quick excitement would wash through my chest, and I would want to steal to my sleeping shed where my father’s surcoat lay wadded, the brass ha’penny pipe deep in its pocket. I wanted, too, to be a girl making music and dancing. But I never did. For as soon as I imagined myself twirling out of that shed, whistling a reel, I would imagine someone searching my earthen bed under the mouldy rashers once I was in the fields, and stealing my whistle away. I never played my mother’s flute at Arlington until the night I left its sight forever.
    “The only music we heard at Arlington was caroling at Christmas. Jenks and Dora urged the Scots people to sing, lined up in their rags like beggars while all the others felt embarrassed for them, and turned away their eyes. The English rakes knew a good few tavern tunes and they would sing them on Sundays if Dora and the Scots maids were going for a walk around the place. Like proper ducklings they walked out, the fools. But these Englishmen ran off after a year, stowing on a vessel Cromwell had sent to subjugate the other islands of the Indies … please, I must pass my water.”
    Coote directs her to the garden and shakes out his wrists. In the background, he hears her meager stream. He draws out his pocket watch, queasy from the heat but in need of food to replenish him after the restless, moody night. It’s almost one. Surely Lucy should be coming with his dinner.
    “Enough news of the entertainments under your first master,” Coote says peevishly when she has resumed her stool. “What intercourse beyond the musical had you Irish with the Africans of Arlington, or of the other plantations which surrounded you?”
    “As I have said, we did not mix with them at all, unless we hoed the same row or helped in the felling of a tree or carting of a bale. We did not share a language. They had been given house-land on a different spot than the Irish lads, so that there was no commonage where their lives might cross on Sundays, as they tended their little gardens, or roasted the small birds we were allowed to snare.
    “On the big plantations it’s a more usual thing for slaves to visit others in the evening in the slow season. At the Glebe, the first-gang men and women were sometimes rented or lent to other sugar houses too, once our own crop was in. And trusted women workers there kept a Sunday market at a crossroads between the houses, having passes to do so. But at Arlington … by the time I came there, the only animal stock left on the place were fowl and swine: we had no need to bring the animals to stud at other farms, and no stock to sell at mart. We numbered only twenty-two at Master Plackler’s holding: twenty, once the English rogues ran off to join the navy. We were too few to work the land. There were thirteen hectares in tobacco, and some in indigo, and the master had us clearing more to try out cotton. Altogether there were fifty-eight hectares and only twenty folk; so the master never lent a soul to another harvest, nor had he silver to rent the slaves of others. It was ourselves who took the place of oxen and drays in ploughing land and carting loads around the place. For all these reasons we never met anyone from another place. And ’mongst ourselves—beyond the usual human clannishness—I have told you thrice now that our overseers kept us apart through inspiring fear and loathing. We were a little colony of suspicious factions there, in an Arlington that the ghost of ruin-to-come already lay over. Bad will hung thick, as if something angry was watching us, and just about to fly into our midst.”
    Coote stares at her.
    “It was like the siogue had been riled; yet we could not see them on this new island. Where I come from, although we may not want to, folks can see them. What you can see, you have a better chance to appease or foil …”
    Coote’s stomach rumbles. The Irishwoman rubs sweat from above her