Eulie and Me

Make mi tell you bout Eulie, mi frien who is like mi sister. The two of we born on Belleview Estate in St Thomas East, me Verna, in March 1828, and Eulie not long after. Belleview owner was old Roger Deakin and he owned we too. We grew up in the quarters behind mi granny Nana Mina’s cookhouse, and when we was pickni, we played in the yard between the quarters and the cookhouse. Eulie’s mother Miss Susan and Nana was good frien from the old times when the two of them used to work in the cane fields.
            If it wasn’t for Nana we would have grown up slaving in the cane field like them other pickni in the quarters. Nana put us to work around the cookhouse garden and the great house farmyard; that was how she kept us out of the cane field. Eulie loved to play in the dirt, to run around chasing chickens and laughing at them when they hopped and sqwaked. She was fool-fool but she was pretty and she used to stick to me like mud on clothes. I didnt understand it then, but now I know it was cause the other pickni was jealous of her looks. Them didnt like her because she had smooth skin, not light, not dark, big eyes, bright like clean water and curly hair so thick Miss Susan had to tie it with thread to make it hold a plait. To tell the truth, people didnt like me either, though I’m not pretty at all, but they was fraid of Nana and her old African ways. Though Nana go to church, she still respects her old African spirits. She makes medicine from plants and tree leaves, and so people think she is an obeah woman who can harm them as easy as heal them.
            When we was about seven years old and slavery still had people living and working like beasts, a terrible thing happen to a field hand name Isaac. Him ran away from the estate and him reached far, almost to Clarendon, but the overseer Simmonds and his dogs catch him and bring him right back to St Thomas. News of Isaac’s capture spread like fire in dry bush. It was a big thing; from before daylight the people was chatting and the women was bawling and clapping hand pon head and the whole place was loud with wailing and lawd have mercy, cause Isaac was going to get a flogging. Then when day bright, it seemed like every person on the estate was running towards the north field—everybody except Nana Mina, who stayed in her cookhouse, like she was keeping guard over it. Eulie and me should have stayed in the yard; Nana Mina warned us time and time again that the sight of a flogging was a terrible thing and the bakra love do it to break the spirit of black people. You cyaan watch the flogging of a black man or a woman and not feel it like it was you under the whip, she said. Over and over again she told the house and yard workers that they shouldn’t go watch their own people get punishment, as one day, it could be their back under the whip.
            Eulie and me was just curious and when Nana Mina wasnt looking, we ran to the north field, following the big people like puppies racing after a pack of full-grown dogs. There was a place at the edge of the field kept clear for floggings, and when we reached it we had to push and jab people with our elbows to get to the front, so we could see. The dutty bakra overseer stripped Isaac to his waist, and his men tied him to a wood frame. It wasn’t Simmonds doing the flogging, a small mercy since Simmonds was Eulie’s daddy. I was glad for her sake; I would have dead with shame to see mi father take a cat-o-nine tail and flog a man till his arm get so tired another man had to take over. They flogged Isaac till pieces of his skin hung in strips and his back was a stream of blood; till every lash caused blood to spurt and fall like red rain. One red drop fell on my forehead, hot like a splash from a cooking pot and I bawled out. A woman standing beside me cuffed my head; You have to learn to see it and take it, she said. But I couldn’t take it. The vicious bakra with the whip, the blood pouring out of Isaac’s back, the people standing around watching made something go off like gunshot in mi ears. It made me angry, the kind of angry like a red fog in mi head. I pushed mi way out of the crowd, lashing out with mi elbows, bawling like a baby.
            I thought Eulie would follow me but when I got clear of the crowd, she was nowhere in sight. I ran back to the cookhouse where Nana Mina caught hold of me and dropped one bitch blow ’pon my headside. You never hear me? She yelled in my face, one of the few times in my whole life she raised her voice that way. It not enough that you live in this misery? You have to take suffering make show? She shoved me into a corner with a big bucket of dasheen to peel, the chore I hated the most, even more than singeing hog skin. I labored over the dasheen, weeping streams of tears. The mist in my head cleared but the image of Isaac’s bloody back stayed in my mind, imprinted in red. The smell of his blood filled my nose, thememory of the drop that fell on my forehead so vivid, I kept brushing my forehead, brushing it away. I was in the cookhouse when Eulie came back but she steered clear of Nana. But later we hid in the banana grove behind Miss Susan’s hut and I asked her:
            How could you stay and watch that bloody beating for so long?
            Poor Isaac, she said, tears welling up in her eyes. I had to stay by him. Everybody just go ’bout their business and left him bleeding out there. I started bawling all over again and Eulie did too, sobbing Isaac’s name over and over until she was hoarse and our tears dried up.

When I was small, I used to follow Nana Mina when she went into the bush to gather plants to make her medicines. Even when we still lived under slavery, when I was in the forest I felt more free than I ever felt anyplace else. Though not far from Belleview, the tree-shade and the birdsong made the forest seem a whole world away from the cane fields. I was twelve the first time Nana Mina let me go to gather plants alone. She told me to stay close to the estate, but left to myself, I would wander into the thick forest beyond Belleview’s borders. Eulie came with me sometimes, to help me, she said, but really it was the cool and shade of the forest that she liked, not searching for wild herbs. We loved the smell of the damp earth, the different trees and their leaves, even the sickly-sweet stink of rotten fruit. Eulie dug up ants’ nests and giggled as hundreds of them scurried around, desperate and confused. I listened to the birds, I hummed to the music of swarming insects and buzzing flies. The forest was the only place Eulie and me could escape from the stern eyes of Nana Mina or Miss Susan, from the jibes of the dutty yard boys and the red-eye stares of the grown men we did our best to avoid. We could play and act stupid to our hearts’ content. We never felt fraid, not even when a fat glassy-eye toad jumped out of the bush and landed bam! on Eulie’s foot. Not even when I stepped on the sharp bones of a dead rat and cut up my heel and had to rub it with a wild lily leaf to stop the bleeding. We picked bird of paradise flowers and stuck them in our hair, we raided guava and mango trees when we were hungry, and we risked getting scratches on our hands and arms to pick bitter sussumba berries to take back for Miss Susan to cook. Going back to Belleview after one of those carefree mornings in the forest was like walking into a dark place where you knew bad-minded people were watching you, whispering bad things about you and waiting to see if those bad things would come true.
            Emancipation proclamation set we free in 1838 and we didnt belong to dutty Masa Deakin any more, but we still lived and worked on his estate and he and his sons still felt they own we. One time the younger son Roger came over from England to look for land to buy for cheap, since Masa Deakin was leaving Belleview to Percy, the older son. You could look at dutty Roger and know he was no good, with his big belly and rotten teeth and the way he strutted round the house and yard like he was the masa. That was when Eulie and me was thirteen and he was more than twice that age. One night he and his henchmen kidnapped Eulie and took her out of the estate to a house up in the hills behind Belleview. It happened in the dark but I still cant believe nobody in the yard saw or heard them pick Eulie up and carry her away. But like I already said, a whole heap of people were jealous and bad-minded; they wanted something bad to happen to Eulie.
            Dutty Roger Deakin kept Eulie lock up for over a week doing all kinds of things to her, things so terrible that up till now she cant tell me what. But I can imagine. The overseers all knew ’bout it, old Masa Deakins knew ’bout it because there was no alarm about dutty Roger, who went missing for a whole week. Only people close to Miss Susan were searching for Eulie, looking in every corner of the estate, in every hut, in the banana walk, the coconut grove, the north and south cane fields. The maids searched everywhere in the big house, when the Masa and Missus were sleeping. When dutty Roger brought Eulie back, it was night time and his men just dumped her outside Miss Susan’s hut like she was a sack of cane trash. She could hardly walk and she had fever; she could only lie down on her mother’s bed and cry. It was Nana Mina who took care of her and brought her back to herself. She gave Miss Susan leaves to soak in hot water to bathe Eulie’s hurt parts. She showed her where to find the right kind of plants, how to make Eulie squat over a bucket of the healing water to steam her wounds. When the fever left her, Nana took Eulie to the river in the early morning and I went too. She held Eulie in the river water, chanting prayers. She make the river water wet Eulie’s head and run all over her body. Then she rubbed Eulie down with leaves of holy herb, rum, and coconut oil, all the while saying prayers to Mami Wata. This is not the worst thing to happen, Nana Mina told Eulie. You have yu limbs, you have life. Mami Wata will heal yu body. But you have to gather strength in yu spirit and heal yu own mind.
            Eulie got over the fever; her body healed. If she did ketch a baby, Nana’s medicine made the baby drop out. Over time she put on a little weight and started work around the yard again but she didnt make jokes or laugh like she used to. She had a dull, empty look in her eyes, like her spirit had gone away and was resting somewhere else. And she was fraid of everything. Even a lizard dropping beside her would make her bawl out. Later she told me that when Nana Mina dipped her in the river she felt like Mami Wata was holding her. Everybody know stories about Mami Wata, the spirits of the river water, the seawater and the rain, waters that give life to all of nature. Now Eulie knew that the Mami Wata were real, not just story. She felt grateful, she said, and she made me go with her to the Baptist church in Hopewell ’cause she felt she was baptized in the river, that she had truly been saved. And although Nana Mina quarreled that it was not man-god that saved Eulie but woman-spirits, she was still glad we joined a church. You have to believe in something and you have to pray to the spirits, she said.

Growing up we spent so much time avoiding lustful and harassing men around the yard, only to find that church was full of them. Young men, middle-aged men, old bent-up men. Black men, brown men, and some low-class bakra too. Men of all occupations; we could tell their station in life from their Sunday clothes, from the state of their boots, from whether they came to church on foot, as we did, or in donkey cart or on a horse. At first, after church Eulie and me made sure we walked the distance back to Belleview with people from the estate but before long we began to linger after the service and talk with other congregants. We turned away from any eager youths in mashed-back boots; we favoured the more mature church members, women mainly, but also the men who looked decent and respectable. Maas Hector Brown was one of those men, an elder in the church who owned five hundred acres of sugarcane fields, people said. He drove a horse-drawn cart, wore a starched white shirt, dark breeches, and well-shined boots. We didnt mind him gray hair; him mouth, like him voice, was soft and he smiled when he wished me good morning.
            I wasn’t sure at first if him was interested in Eulie or in me, for when him offered to drive me back to Belleview, him invited Eulie as well. One Sunday after service him asked if we would take a drive out with him and him drove all the way to Port Morant. Him pull up by a blacksmith shop him said him owned and him tied up the horse behind it. We’re taking a walk, him said, so you can see a little bit of life beyond the plantation. I liked the sound of those words: Beyond the plantation. The word beyond made me think of far places across the sea, of other lands. That was the first time I thought about travel and felt curious to see some of the places beyond.
            Maas Hector took one of us on each arm and we strolled through the center of town, down to the harbor to look at the ships. That was the first time I set eyes on a ship, and I figured that was the way to reach beyond. It was the first time I saw so many different people dress-up nice and walking easy. Black people, brown people, even bakra people and some foreign-looking men. When I asked him about those men, Maas Hector said they were sailors, from Trinidad, or from Cuba, maybe even Spain.
            Spain? Where’s that? I asked.
            Far, far, beyond England.
            I want to go to Spain one day, I said, and him laugh.
            Have you even been over those mountains? He pointed to the Blue Mountains rising high in the north sky.
            I shook my head.
            You need to know your own land first. You cant call yourself free if all you know of the place you come from is a plantation.
            Crossing mountains wont make you free, said Eulie. Not if people wont leave you in peace when you come back. You dont need to go nowhere to be free, she said. You just need to live in peace where you are.
            Maas Hector had nothing to say to that; him keep on walking and smiling, like it was sweet to him to be out and about with the two of we. Him buy cut-cake and lemonade from a roadside vendor and we stopped by an open place where men played music on banjo and flute and drum box, while two women sang and danced. People watching clapped and sang along; I did too and I learned the words of the songs so I could sing them to Nana Mina later on. We stayed there a long time, till the dancers grew tired and the musicians took a break. It started to rain and we hurried back to the forge and sheltered till the rain blew over. Eulie didnt say much and neither did Maas Hector, which made me wonder what him wanted from us, him so mature and prosperous and we, just two young black gyal, one pretty enough to interest him, the other with nothing but her shiny face. When the rain stopped, him drove us back to Belleview and when him dropped us off at the gate, him asked:
            Would you like to do that again?
            Yes, I said, no hesitation. Eulie said nothing.
            And you Eulie? What do you want?
            Silence.
            Have you no preferences, no desires? Him talked like him was well educated.
            Pastor tells us desire is a sin, said Eulie. Him tell us so just this morning.
            Not all desire is sin, Eulie. Some desires lead us to joy. With that, Maas Hector tipped him hat to each of us in turn, no hint of a preference, and drove away.
            So is you him like or is me? I asked Eulie.
            Verna, how you so fool? Him want the two of we!
            But that would be dutty nastiness!
            I’m glad you realize, said Eulie. She knew more, much more bout the nasty ways of men than me. Once we faced up to what Maas Hector was trying to do, we did not want to see him again. We did not go to church the following Sunday nor the Sunday after. When we did go back, we made sure to leave after service with a crowd of people walking in our direction.
            Eulie and me went back to Port Morant some weeks later, sent by Nana Mina to buy turtle meat for Masa Deakin’s dinner. Go straight to the seafront where you see the fishermen, buy the meat, an come straight back, she told us. Finding the fishermen and buying the turtle meat was easy, but when we were ready to go back home, could we find a donkey-cart going towards Belleview? It was Friday and the town was busy with people going to market, selling food by the roadside, or just going about their business. Nobody was dressed-up and fine-looking like they were on the Sunday we strolled around with dutty Maas Hector. People in a hurry jostled us and pushed us. A group of boys circled us and would have robbed us of our purchase if a brown gentleman hadnt stepped in, cuffed them heads and cursed the small thieves till them ran away.
            The gentleman was young and slim, not much taller than me. Him wear shirt and jacket, breeches and boots. Him smiled at us and though him was a mulatto him talked like a bakra.
            Where are you young ladies heading? Him was looking at Eulie.
            We looking for a cart going towards Belleview Estate, I said.
            You’ll find one over there, he said, pointing. I’ll make sure you get on the right one.
            Him put us on a cart that was almost full, but him ordered the people to small-up themselves, to make room for two nice young ladies. The people grumbled but they made space and after we climbed on Eulie gave the man him reward, her sweetest smile.
            The next Sunday afternoon, that same gentleman rode up to the gate at Belleview and asked Sam the gatekeeper for the pretty black girl with curly hair. That was how him came to Miss Susan’s hut bearing a basket full brimming with naseberries, june plums, and mangoes. I dont know what Miss Susan said to him but him went away and came back again the following Sunday afternoon. This time Eulie was waiting for him, dressed up in her best frock.
            Two months later, Eulie moved out of Miss Susan’s hut and into a cottage on the edge of Port Morant that the gentleman—Robert Taylor—rented for her. Him was a clerk in a shipping office, a decent employment but not one that paid enough to make him rich. Him thought himself fine enough to have a concubine but too fine to marry Eulie, yet Miss Susan carried on as though an angel had come down from the sky and carried Eulie off to heaven. When I asked Nana Mina how Miss Susan could let Eulie go like that, Nana folded her lips in a thin line.
            I know it don’t look so to you, she said, but to everybody else, Eulie bring bad luck and crosses. After what Roger Deakin did to her, that’s how people look at her. The man she’s with not from here so him dont know. That’s lucky for her. But crosses or not, with her kind of looks, she still have more chances in life than you.
            But it didnt look that way to me. Especially not after Taye came into my life. I say him came into my life, but that’s not strictly true. Taye was always part of my community; him used to work on a child gang on the estate when we were pickni, and when him was grown, him lived just up the hill at Bellefield village with his mother and three sisters. By when slavery was over, him used to do seasonal work at estates all over the parish, planting, cutting, and crushing cane. Easter when I was eighteen, we buck up on one another at a brukkins party in his village. Him was tall and strong-looking, but him talked quiet and when him glanced at me, him eyes looked like a naseberry split in two, shiny black in the middle of soft brown. Him had a small tin bottle of white rum and him offered me a sip. The rum burned in my mouth and it put fire in my belly. That night between dances and sips of rum, Taye set him own fire in my heart.
            Nana Mina didnt like any man much but she seemed to like Taye well enough. Him look like him would last, she said, not like those good-for-nothing man who just use up a woman then dash her away. We started going together and by Easter the next year we had a baby coming. Taye must have touched Nana Mina’s heart, ’cause she helped us get a hut in Bellefield with a good-size garden to grow provisions, just up the hill from the big house. We made just enough money to live on, me as maid in the big house and Taye from whatever work he could get in the cane fields or sugar factories around the parish. We moved into the hut together and living was easy, sweeter by far than living with Nana. We talked about getting married and when I told Nana Mina, she wasn’t pleased. She grabbed my shoulders and stared hard into my face.
            Marriage? she said, eyes wide like I told her I’d seen a flying pig. Bind yuself to him for life? Breed and feed pikni till yu body bruk down? She shook me, then let me go with a sigh.
            Marriage have teeth and bite hot! she said. You ready for that?
            The first love I ever knew was the love of Nana; the second was Eulie. Eulie had moved away and Nana was old; I didn’t want to go through life just me one, alone. Taye was a chance to have someone else in mi life, andI wanted to hold him tight. I wanted marriage.
            Nearing the eight month of pregnancy I stopped working at the big house ’cause mi belly was so big it upset Missus Deakin. I just rest myself in mi hut or tended the garden as best I could and waited for mi baby, due around Christmas time. On a Saturday when I was cooking dinner, mi neighbor Peg and her man Mycah came to my door. I knew from the way Mycah stood in the doorway shifting from foot to foot and breathing hard that they brought news of something serious, a sickness or a death. I started to tremble, thinking it was bad news about Nana. Mycah stammered when him told me; an accident happened in the cane field. An ox-cart laden with cane tipped over and dropped its load on Taye. Him didn’t see it but he heard the cane fall, sudden and loud like a thunder-clap. The load rolled over Taye and crushed him so flat, when the cutters lifted the cane back onto the cart, they had to send for shovels to scrape up the pieces of Taye.
            I didnt hear myself, but Peg told me later that the way I bawled out made her heart jump. She told me I fell to floor before Mycah could catch me and lay there jerking like an evil spirit was riding me. Somebody ran to fetch Nana Mina. She came as fast as she could but before she reached me the shock to mi body forced mi baby girl into world before she was ready. She was born into Peg’s hands, too soon to stay alive.
            People told me Peg cleaned me up and Mycah took the baby away. Nana rubbed bay rum on mi head, white rum on mi mouth. She made tea to calm mi mind and I drank it. When she left she begged Peg to look in on me. Nana’s tea brought me sleep as deep and silent as death must be. I slept and woke, slept and woke, and lay listless in mi bed for five days, only lifting my head to eat a little of the soup Nana brought me to give me strength.
            On the sixth morning I got up early, put on a frock, and walked to the river. Heavy rain had been falling, and the river flowed strong and high. I walked into it in all of mi clothes, and I lay back in the water like I was lying down to rest. The current carried me along and I floated on it for a while before I started to sink. Two women taking their bath in the shallows saw me drifting; them waded in and pulled me out of the water. Them lay me face down on the bank and pumped mi back to get the water out of me. One of them held me to warm up mi body, the other one rubbed my feet, the two of them still half naked. I knew them by sight; them was from the village up the hill from Bellefield. Them knew me because them knew Nana Mina, and they had heard about Taye’s death. Them dressed themselves and took me back to Belleview, straight to Nana’s hut, where them left me.
            I was sick for weeks. I couldnt rest for the ache in mi head, in mi chest, in mi soul. Eulie came up from Port Morant to sit with me, but her belly was big with her second pikni and looking at her made mi own belly hurt. We sat in Nana’s hut on two old stools, stiff as strangers, me struggling with grudgeful feelings, Eulie shamed that her pregnancy was causing me pain. It was a short, sad visit.
            When I felt better, I tended Nana’s garden and learned more from her about using plants and leaves to make medicine. It was Nana’s care that brought me out of misery and her medicine that helped me back to peace of mind. When I thought about the way Eulie’s visit stirred up mi angry feelings, I asked myself if she ever stopped hurting from what dutty Roger Deakin did to her. Ever since the kidnapping there was times her eyes would go dark, like somebody snuffed out their light. Even these days, sometimes when we sit together in her pretty parlour gossiping about Belleview people or chatting about her life with Mr Taylor, her eyes would suddenly go blank and empty.
            Now I know about how pain and bitterness can burn you up inside, I understand that blankness. Nana thinks concubine living is easy; you would have a roof over your head, nice clothes and things for your house, and your children would know who is their father. I didnt need Nana to tell me that apart from marriage, the best thing for a black woman like Eulie is to be with a bakra or a well-off mulatto like Mr Taylor. But what happen when the man gets tired of you? You lose the house, the parlour, the nice things. I pray every night this wouldnt happen to Eulie, my sister, my friend. Life hurt we enough already. I pray to the church god, even though Nana Mina says he no good for black women’s private things. I pray as well to the Mami Wata, the river spirits, to shield the two of we from harm and disaster. I pray for Taylor to treat Eulie well and kind, even if him get married or leaves her. Having no man at all is not a bad thing if a woman can manage, if she can live well enough and be free. I know the best time for Eulie and me was when it was just we two together in the forest with only mosquitos to bother we and only the birds and trees to watch we.