Outside its open door, a broken-down chair lay upturned beside a dutchy pot that was crushed almost flat.
As the cart moved along, July saw that all was devastation within the village. The blackened ground was strewn with a debris of tables, stools, mattresses, cooking pots, fragments of cups and plates, branches of trees, smashed and rotting fruit. Wisps of smoke rose here and there, releasing a woeful stench of scorching. While many of the huts that were still where July knew them to have always been, now stood forlornly crippled by missing walls, windows, roofs. And apart from a brown dog—whimpering and lame, dragging its useless bloody back legs along behind it, and some chickens pecking heedless about, there was no one to be found there.
Where were the women cooking outside their homes or steadfast pounding at their grain within a pestle? Come, where were the pickney chasing their goats? The men? Why were no tired-eyed men sitting smoking their pipes in the shade? Always eager faces came to stare when the massa’s cart rode by. Where were they, those busybodies keen to get some chat-chat of what the missus be wearing today? As July and her missus rode on to pass through the peculiar silence of a deserted mill works, her missus’s face began to shrivel with frown. For the missus finally deemed something amiss enough to ask, ‘But . . . But . . . But where are all the negroes?’
When the cart reached the edge of the cane piece the missus, suddenly sitting up straight, remarked, ‘But look, Marguerite, there is a negro. Go and enquire of the whereabouts of his master.’ July rode the cart in closer.
He looked like a negro, this figure standing small before a louring barbed wall of yellow-parched cane. Ragged, filthy, black. He was stripped to the waist and clasped a machete, holding it high above his shoulder. But only when he struck it down and slashed the cane in the middle of the pole did July realise she was staring not upon a negro—who would have felled that cane skilfully at the base and be casting it away by now—but upon the frame of Robert Goodwin.
Grunting loud, he began slashing the cane from side to side like he were scything guinea-grass, cursing with the effort of every swipe. July jumped from the cart, ignoring her missus’s plea for assistance. And she caught Robert’s arm as he raised it once more to cut pitiable at the cane. He twisted to look upon her. Snorting fierce as an overworked beast, his mouth gaped as he gasped for breath. His eyes, at first wild with anguish, soon filled with spite. Until he stared such hate upon July that she shrank from him.
‘What you be doing?’ July asked, with a voice more tremulous than she had ever believed herself to be.
He snatched himself from out her grasp. ‘Do not touch me. Get away from me,’ he said. Then he seemed to soften before her. He sighed and wiped his arm across his forehead while quietly saying, ‘The negroes are all gone.’ His blue eyes were red. ‘All of them have taken their belongings and gone. There is not one left upon Amity. Not one. There is no one left to take off the cane. Nor to turn the mill. No one is at the coppers in the boiling house. No one filling hogsheads, nor delivering to the dock. They have all deserted me. So . . . So . . . I have decided that I will bring in the cane myself.’
‘Come, you cannot cut cane!’ July said.
But he shouted loud over her, ‘I’ve no need of niggers, I will do everything myself.’ He turned to slash at the poles of cane once more—feeble as a small boy at play with a stick. The disturbed barbs upon the leaves flew to sting in July’s eyes. She seized his arm again, but he shouted, ‘Get away from me, nigger, get away.’
She would not let him go. She struggled to hold him—grasping tight at his arm while he twisted and turned in an effort to shake her away. She would not leave him. But then he caught her throat so tight within his hand that her tongue protruded under the grasp. July wrestled to free herself from his hold as he raised his machete high above her. And, all at once, July heard herself crying, ‘Mercy, massa, mercy,’ as she cringed away from him.