Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl Read Online Free PDF Page A

cloth. But I did not move. The sun had languored me. I squatted underneath my hair, which in that crouch hung to my ankles, and willed myself invisible, by all the power of Our Lady of the Seas.
    “The Captain sat him down. He bade Spaniole to keep without; and to the men who paused in their work, whose heads we saw lifted toward us as the curtain closed, he called in a dry voice, ‘Carry on there, gentlemen, no sense to draw the lash or pistol when so near the fleshpots of the shore.’
    “The Captain made each of us come near him, one by one. The second lass cursed him in our tongue, and though he knew not her words he took her by the wrist and twisted it up behind her back until she squealed for mercy. The Captain examined each in her nakedness, gripping the arms and the thighs for muscle. He looked into our mouths and up our noses. ‘The black-haired wench is with child,’ he called out to Spaniole as he regarded her nipples.
    “ ‘Wet nurse then, sir, shall she go for,’ the cheery reply came on the tangy breeze.
    “I was the last. The Captain held his hand forth with a smile and bade me rise. He pulled me close, parted my hair, and passed his hand down the front of me from crown to knee. He squeezed my kneecap hard; and I laughed, startled, for it tickled. Under his powder in that scouring sun I could see the purpley marks of pox. He grinned. His teeth were slick and yellow in that powdered mask.
    “ ‘Ah, but you, you are the prettiest of all,’ he murmured. ‘Bend down.’ He checked my head for nits. ‘Better. This is lovely hair. You speak English too, do you not?’
    “I nodded yes. The Captain took me on his knee. One arm about my waist, lightly, he raised the other to unbuckle his short cape. He swung this around my shoulders. ‘Translate,’ he ordered. All the while that, through me, he ordered the women to wash their garments in the bathwater and turn them to dry quickly now, he ran his hand idly up and down beneath the cape. The woman who had bathed me stared at him with hot malice all the while she rubbed cloth at the tubs. But I willed her not to do so. As I tell you this, my heart remembers: it pumps in guilt and fear again. For I looked toward shore and all the lovely strangeness there, then I looked at the Captain’s face so close to mine. And I willed him to keep me, just me, and not send me off to that broad strand where hundreds like him, like Spaniole and the crewmen and the men below held off with ropes and chains, could get at me. This is why I smiled up into his chalky face and yellow teeth.
    “The Captain murmured ‘Mmmmm? Mmmmmmm? My filthy little mouse?’ And then he set me down. With a smack against my buttocks he lifted his cape and pushed me toward the others round the tubs.
    “Our clothes dried quickly. At the end, to hurry us along, the Captain sent Spaniole inside the nook to watch us, with his heavy breathing. Spaniole took us back down to the hole. Our sun-stiff petticoats scratched against our sunburnt legs as we went down the stairwell. In the cabin’s close darkness, the bile and blood and slops and tears and phlegm of the journey were conjured up again by the high heat of Barbados. Later we heard the men taken out and walked. Along toward evening the sea shifted beneath us; and later all among us stopped our frenzied unsuccessful prayers and speculations to listen to the faint but clear strains of some sailor’s concertina, above us on the deck.
    “I have heard that on the night before great battles soldiers often do not sleep, but under the eye of death take on a last wondrous animation. That was not so with us. We slept. We tossed and snored and spluttered; whether in exhaustion from the unaccustomed sun, or in hiding from the shame of prying hands and the memory of the crew’s eyes, glimpsed through a slit in the canvas drape, which shone with the same empty muscular hunger as a bucketful of living eels. We slept until Spaniole thumped a longboat oar