Deleted Scenes From My New Release!
Jamaica
November, 1667
Chapter One
The sun had not yet pierced the night when Dido put the heavy, wooden tray full of all she had gathered on her head and set out for Port Royal. As she passed the other huts sealed tight against night fevers and duppies alike, a rooster crowed in the darkness and she quickened her steps. If she kept a good pace she could be in the town by sunrise or just after and, with any luck, she could sell off the maiz, platanos, okras, cassava, ginger and, especially the carrots that she had so carefully tended, by mid-morning.
Dido scarcely minded the rutted dirt road beneath her bare feet as she hurried. She was preoccupied with how much she would make that day and what she would spend her earnings on. Already she had saved about twenty pesos or about three English pounds and, if she added to that what she should make that day she would be able to purchase some chickens and maybe even one of Old Philipa’s piglets. Yes, she thought to herself, that is what she would do. Everyone knew that the people in Port Royal loved to eat poultry and pork. She would care for the animals well, tending to their needs and encouraging them to have little ones of their own which she could then sell off. And if the goddess Oshun smiled on her, then perhaps in five or six years, she would finally have the ninety pieces of eight, Doña Theolinda said she would need to purchase her freedom. Libertad, the word rolled around in Dido’s mouth like a ball of molasses she could suck on forever.
She was not ill treated at Las Cañas. Don Guillermo and now Doña Theolinda were not harsh or cruel people. Not as bad, anyway, as many she’d heard about. And the overseer, Sr. Enriquito, knew not to overstep his bounds with the lash but didn’t Mimba’s daughter, Cubina, have to spend three days in the hole for taking one of Doña Theolinda’s oranges? And had not poor one-eyed Pablito been tied to the ficus tree for a whole week and given only bread and water for daring to run away? When Sr. Enriquito had loosed him from the tree, Pablito could not walk and his brother Miguel had had to pick him up like a child and take him to his hut where he fed him cassava pap and a tea made from soursop leaves. Two months on, Pablito, though fatter, was even stranger than before he’d left, talking only to Miguel and staring at everybody as if he saw them at night in the dreams from which he often awoke screaming, frightening people until they got used to him.
Treated ill or not, Dido’s deepest desire was to buy her freedom. Then, as a free woman, she would go find her mother and her siblings and buy them out of slavery. Her goal was for them all to live together in some far part of the island where no one would bother them; not the slave dealers, not the slave owners, and not even the marronas, those wild slaves the Spanish had freed years ago to fight the English. Dido turned her plan over and over in her mind as she walked, her back straight, her head held high, pretending she was already free of her bondage.
By the time she reached the fig tree just past Hamm’s Gully, the sun had risen behind the Blue Mountains and was a glowing orange disc in the sky. Dido heard a rustling in the treetops in front of her and tightened her fists but it was only a macaw taking flight into the new day, its feathers glistening, jewel-like, in the pink-gold light of dawn.
Gradually, the road before Dido began to widen and became more even underfoot and, here and there, more houses appeared until, finally, she was in Port Royal proper. To hear Hercules tell it, Port Royal was a raucous town full of drunken men, pirates they were called, carousing in the street with women, white women!, who were scantily clothed and often as drunk as they. The streets were almost impassable so crammed were they with vendors selling all manner of goods, men in loud debate with each other, children darting underfoot. But that was the Port Royal Hercules used to see on his trips into town with Don Guillermo during the week, it was not the Port Royal Dido knew. This early on a Sunday morning, the few people walking about were either cooks heading to market or, but more rarely, a furtive man heading home after an assignation or a late night in one of the town’s many brothels. Later, as the Christians gathered in their churches, the Jewish merchants of the town would open their doors and do a brisk trade with slaves from the interior who had things that Europeans coveted, cow horns, goatskins, castor oil and things of that nature.
“ Buen dia, Dido. Como esta?” A woman with a similar tray to hers hailed out to Dido as she emerged from a side street. The other vendor was from the Belle Vue plantation to the west of the town and carried coconuts, grapefruits, limes and the small red berries whose chewed remains would be all over Port Royal’s streets by the time the season for them was well underway. She and Dido were usually stall mates at the market.
“Still here by the grace of the ancestors, and how was the week with you, Catalina?” Dido asked, slowing so the older woman could catch up.
“Ay, m’hija. These bones are tired. I long for rest.” Catalina’s yellowed eyes drooped and the lines around her mouth seemed to have been etched even deeper than they had been the Sunday before.
“Eh, eh! You are too young to talk so,” Dido said, trying to cheer her up.
“The new people are hard, m’hija. Remember, I told you they took me out of the house and sent me to the field because they said my manner was too rough for them.” Dido nodded. “Now they have put me to dig the ratoons. By the time night falls, I feel as if someone has driven a carriage over my back, twice. In the mornings I am so stiff that the driver man comes to my hut cracking his whip to see why I am taking so long. He has some pity for me and a little respect for these gray hairs but these Ingles have no heart in them. The overseer threatens to whip him for not working me harder.” There were tears in her eyes and Dido didn’t know what to say. Like Don Guillermo and Doña Theolinda, Catalina’s Spanish owners had stayed on after the English captured the island but they had died of smallpox just a couple of years ago and their plantation had come under the ownership of an Englishman who had never visited the island. The estate was now run by a former salt miner. Several slaves had died or run away since he took over.
“Perhaps you could leave, Catalina. Have you not enough money to buy your freedom?”
“Heh. You have forgotten that I told you he takes half my earnings when I return. Now I hide some of the money about me but it cannot be too much or he will suspect something and have me beaten like he did William who used to come into town with me to sell his baskets to the Jews.”
With a start, Dido realized she had not seen the soft-spoken man in weeks.
“What happened?”
“After the first time when that devil took half his money saying it was the estate’s by right since William self belonged to the estate, William made a second purse and wrapped that one around his waist, inside his pants. I don’t know how much of what he made he hid there but when Sr. Duncan examined his earnings he said he didn’t believe that was all he’d made.” She sidestepped a squawking chicken. “Sr. Duncan told him to remove his clothes and, when William refused, Sr. Duncan called Phillipe and Hector to tie him to a tree and to whip him. They gave him twenty lashes before Sr. Duncan bid them stop and told Phillip to take off William’s clothes. That is when they discovered the second purse so Sr. Duncan had Phillipe give William twenty more lashes. A moon has come and gone but William makes no more baskets. When he’s not in the field he just lies on his bed. It is in my mind that he is plotting to run away like his older brother did the year of the great storm.”
“They will catch him and bring him back,” Dido said, thinking of Pablito.
“Maybe and maybe not. They say that Juan, that is the name of his brother, didn’t run to the marronas. They say he sails with that pirate, the one they call L’Olonnois. Now Juan lives on Tortuga, a free man.” She said the last words on an exhalation of breath like a whispered prayer.
They were near the market now and both women quickened their steps. The market consisted of a large square of covered stalls inside which was a smaller square accessed through any of the four corners of the bigger enclosure. Since most of the cooks were usually in a hurry to get back and begin preparing the traditional large Sunday lunch of the patrones, they rarely ventured in to the smaller square so everyone wanted an outside stall. Dido, like the other marketwomen, paid the town’s officials ten cents each month for the use of the market but they were not guaranteed any particular stall.
Dido’s early departure from Las Cañas paid off. Both she and Catalina were able to get a coveted position. Dido busied herself laying out her wares, arranging them attractively before her so they would catch the eyes of passersby.
“What are you asking for that cassava?” asked a fat-cheeked woman in a white head-wrap.
The buying and selling had begun and Dido’s goods went quickly. The cooks knew her well and though they fingered whatever they bought from her, they did it almost perfunctorily because nobody had ever caught her trying to sell off rotten or damaged produce. After the cassava went the carrots and before the sun had reached its zenith, everything she had put on her tray that morning was sold. Dido did not bother counting the coins clinking in the purse which she stuffed down between her breasts but she was sure she had made at least three dollars, maybe even more because the carrots had fetched a good price just as she had known they would.
Dido looked around to tell Catalina ‘good-bye’ but the older woman was surrounded by customers. Dido weaved her way through the people coming and going around the market and headed back the way she had come.
There were more people on the streets now. Jewish merchants hurrying to open their doors, planters coming in from the surrounding area to do business with the same Jews many scorned to sit at table with, church-goers answering the call of pealing church-bells. Dido wanted to make good time back to Las Cañas to rest before the coming week’s labors so she turned into one of the side alleys that led to another street where she would not have to contend with the carriages and the horses and the stream of people dodging both. As she had known it would be, the other street was quieter. Here there were only a few shops but these were owned by Christians and were barred shut as were the windows and doors of the neighboring houses.
Dido bowed respectfully to a white woman passing by with her two children in tow. She thought again of how much she longed to live far, far away from any town and from any other human beings who might remind her that once she had been a slave. Daydreaming about the small house she and her family would live in and the crops they would grow to feed themselves, she turned down another side alley that led to the road out of Port Royal.
“ Querida! Dame un beso, un beso para mi vida,” a man called, his words sounding strangled as if Spanish was not his first language or even one with which he was truly comfortable.
The words sent a shudder through her but Dido did not turn around. Should she run or just continue walking normally showing she had no concern? If she ran, he might think it weakness so she kept walking but a little faster. Maybe the man would trouble her no further. Some men, she knew, were all bark and no bite.
“She ignores you, Daniel.”
Dido’s heart beat faster. There was more than one of them but she was near the second entrance to the alley now. Holding her tray up before her like a shield she picked up her pace but it did not help.
***
Grabbing her calabash from the basket she slipped down the boulders to the pool and dipped the gourd in. The water was cool and fresh, sweet almost. She drank thirstily. Refreshed, Dido took a longer look around her. The night-witches flapped their wings in the tops of nearby trees to her right but even the noise they made hardly served to disturb the peace of the oasis she had found. Dido climbed back up to her perch, shading her eyes, but except for the trees all around her there was nothing to be seen, no sign of human habitation, no sign of Las Cañas and, more importantly, no sign of dogs leading the overseer and any slave-hunter he had hired to her hiding-place. The thought brought her up sharp. The pile of boulders on which she had spent the night could be called many things but a hiding-place they could not. The attention of anyone arriving at the pool would be immediately drawn to the huge rocks on which she stood. She had to find someplace else to spend the next few days. Dido stuffed her belongings in her basket and climbed back down to the shallows. Making her way into the woods behind the boulders, she took careful note of everything that could serve as a landmark leading her back to the pool. Above her she heard the “Urrroo,” “Urrroo,” she’d heard the day before. Looking up quickly, she caught a glimpse of a medium-sized gray bird coasting on the wind in the direction she had come. Dido wished she had Hercules’ skill with a sling. She thought it might have come in handy before she remembered that lighting a cook-fire was a risky proposition.
A short time after the sun had begun its descent in the sky, Dido came across a fallen tree on which she sat to eat. She was famished but again she restricted herself to a small piece of bread and some of the dried meat. Sitting on the log, surrounded by the stillness of the wood and the beauty of the wild plants, she could almost imagine she was not a slave running away from her mistress. If she tried really hard she could almost believe she already lived with her family far away from the plantations and that she had only come out in the woods for a walk before returning to the warmth and comfort of the home she shared with her family and her siblings. She hummed a lullaby she had often heard her mother sing to her and the younger ones. Would El Negro think she was brave now, she wondered, an image of the pirate coming to mind mid-hum. She remembered the way he had smiled at her and almost choked on her meat. Oshun herself would be pleased to have a man with his looks as her consort, even if only for one night. The goddess was notoriously fickle. Dido’s cheeks warmed at the turn her thoughts had taken. She tried not to imagine how El Negro would look unclothed. He was built well, that she had been able to tell even through his fancy dress but what was the use of these imaginings? She should be thinking of more serious things, like where she was going to sleep that night. Dido glanced about and that was when she saw it. Among some trees to her left was a dark recessed area. Stilling her excitement in case she was wrong, Dido sprang up to take a closer look. No, she wasn’t mistaken, the dark recess marked a hole in the hillside. Dido peered inside and realized it was impossible to tell from where she stood how deep into the hill the cave went. She should have taken some candles or maybe a lantern from the Great House but in her haste to get the clothes and steal away she hadn’t thought about it. Dido made a face at herself but didn’t waste time on regrets. She walked into the cave letting her eyes become gradually accustomed to the dimness. Walking slowly, to avoid bumping into anything or surprising any wild creature who might be making the cave their home she made her way further and further in until, around a bend, the cave suddenly forked in two.
“E-yeye! E-yeye!” she called. “Hola! Is anyone there?”
Her sounds bounced against the cave walls, echoing back to her. Dido peered into the darkness trying to make out something, anything, about the depth of the cave but it was impossible to see into a blackness as complete as the wings of a night-witch. A shadow crossed the mouth of the cave, briefly darkening the opening. Frightened by the thought that someone was observing her, waiting for a chance to do her harm, Dido spun around and hurried back to the entrance. She need not have worried. The sun had simply passed behind a heavy rain-cloud and this was what had made it seem that someone had crossed the cave entrance.
Dido looked up. She had not found the cave a moment too soon if she was reading the sky right. It should begin raining any minute now, she thought. As if Shango himself heard her, tiny thorns of cold rain began to prick her cheeks and forehead. Dido withdrew into the cave.
Over the next few weeks, she made her home in the cave and did her best to ignore the bats and the thin gray snake who emerged on her third day to slink over her belongings. Finding nothing of interest he slithered out of the cave. Dido never saw him again. She, herself, left the cave only to do her business or to drink at the mountain pool. On her trips she collected ripe custard apples from a nearby tree and took them back with her to add to her diminishing hoard of foodstuffs.
It was pleasant enough, this sojourn in the woods but Dido soon grew tired of pretending her family was nearby, within hailing distance. She was lonely for human voices. The only sounds she heard were those of the birds and animals among whom she had now made her home. Those and her own voice.
“Good-day,” she said. No, no. “Good-day.” Yes, that was better. “I looking a work on your ship, please.” No, she sounded like a woman making fun of the way men speak. Men spoke from the base of their throats. Dido tried again but began to cough. When she was calm enough she redoubled her efforts to get the sound of a man’s voice right. In time, she found that, by speaking in a low voice and with her head thrown back a little ways, she could make herself sound almost like William or one of the younger boys at Las Cañas. That had been the problem, she had been trying to sound like Hercules and Pablito, big, grown men, years older than her, whose voices had roughened with time and bitterness. When she forgot about sounding like them and sounded her age, her voice could pass for that of a boy just growing into manhood. Dido danced about in the cave, exhilarated at having worked it out to her satisfaction.
Days came and went but, away from the rhythm of life on the plantation, she had no way of knowing how long she had been in the hills. Maybe a month had passed, maybe more. But it could be less, an inner voice whispered and she heeded that voice, staying in her cave until finally her food ran out and she’d eaten almost all of the ripe custard apples she found in the woods. It was time to go, time to head across the hills and down into Port Royal. Dido felt as nervous as the day she had first arrived at Las Cañas, a thin, round-eyed child whose cheeks were wet with tears and whose chest heaved with sorrow. But she’d left that little girl behind a long time ago. Now she was a woman who had run away from her mistress, determined to seek a better life for herself and her family. Dido picked up her basket and grabbed the stick El Negro had given her. She took one last look around the cave. It had been her refuge from the rains and from the heat of the sun but she could not stay there any longer. Dido pushed her shoulders back and walked out one last time.