Free Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl by Kate McCafferty Page A

lip. Is it the heat? Her narrow cheeks have taken on the faintest flush. For the first time he notices the small soft cleft in her chin.
    “Nor was anybody sent off the grounds for breeding,” she adds. He tips the nib of his quill to the side: a neat man, he wants it to last the morning; and his letters are already becoming wide and slightly blurry. Where is Lucy? “The first year I was at Arlington, one of the Scots girls died. It was consumption. Dora said the lass brought it with her from the highland croft they took her from, for Barbados air is warm and soft. But I have known many, including Africans, who succumbed to the consumption, and they fine and hearty their first years here. At any rate, once that girl had died, there was only Dora, exempt from childbearing by her overseer rank; myself, a young slip not yet in her courses; and the other Scots girl, to breed between four men. In those days they only bred Christian with Christian unless a master or an overseer made a by-blow.
    “The surviving Scots girl was named Ardiss. She would have been fifteen or so at the time. After the second harvest of tobacco had been taken and the indigo was in the ground, the master and Jenks decided to increase the Plackler stock by breeding two females—the Scots girl and Salome’s daughter. A man among the single Africans was chosen, and he moved into Salome’s cabin with the daughter. Those people test the way of things between a man and woman anyway before they build a hut, even in their own nation. The Scots girl, our betters determined, would best be mated with the Scots carpenter, who now served as joiner, cooper, and cobbler as well. Wheels he mended, and a gate; he made forks and locks, such things.
    “I see him now, that Scotsman. Every Christmas we were given lengths of simple undyed canvas. The Africans were given less, to wrap around the waist and through the legs, the tag-ends hanging down. But Dora and the Scots lasses and I would stitch new breeches and jerkins, and petticoats and waists, for those who had been brought out from Europe. I myself, I only got a skirt, not yet being formed like a woman. The Scotsman, who had come over in a suit of stiff black wool, did his work like all the other northern men in bare chest and canvas breeches. But he had kept his black surcoat, as raveled and mouldy as it was. At the harvest feed and holidays he would don this jacket. He was a slight fellow, and he grew slighter on our rations, for he was not much at hunting birds, and he would not taste the lizards the Africans cooked as victuals.
    “He was smaller and shorter than Ardiss, the Scotswoman they bred him to. But once when he stood at a fire eating roast, the fat dripping down his poet’s wrists, his hair and eyes as black as his suit coat, he smiled at me with all his teeth and I found him right handsome. Dora said, ‘He keeps that surcoat for the day his time’s worked off. He says he’ll walk free in it, the eejit.’
    “When girls were old enough to breed, they were also considered strong enough to join the heavy workers, the first gang. Jenks took the Scots girl from the ox shed and put her, alone, into another. I was in the yard one night, getting water for helping Dora with the loblolly, when Ardiss came in from the field. Her step was jaunty! The shed she had been given, she said, had a floor of dry planks to lie on. The first gang seemed a real promotion to her; ‘my own housheen,’ she laughed. She had lovely dimples when she smiled, that one.
    “Then one evening Jenks told the Scots carpenter to get his things and billet with the lass. I saw the two men walking down the hill from where the slave cabins stood, through the yard past the big house and Jenks’s cottage—which the master stayed in for the few days of auctioning the crop—to the work sheds. In one of them, Ardiss, unwitting, waited.
    “Each day before dawn, when the morning star hung over all,” Cot Quashey tells Coote, “the Scots