The Long Song - By Andrea Levy Page 0,14

wall which, during the day, gives you a clear view over the lawn to the horizon, but at night shines so black that your reflection is caught as clear as if in a mirror. No, only concern yourself with the small window. See how the leaves of the plant life crowd out any view but that of the dense foliage that is piled and pushed up against it. With a quick glance some of the palms can appear like fingers pressing against the glass. Come, look closer still, for amongst that unruly undergrowth, if you search with a careful eye, you will see that there are indeed fleshy fingers splaying there. The fingers of Kitty’s right hand as she leans against the window in anguish to glimpse her only child, July, there within.

‘No look so downcast, for your pickney will do her pee-pee ’pon a throne,’ Miss Rose trilled to Kitty when she had returned to her hut without July. ‘In the great house them have chair made of fine wood and them sit ’pon it—straight back and all—and them let them doings drop. And it tinkle like rain ’pon a calabash as it splash into a bowl. And when all is done them close a wooden lid ’pon the waste—so there be no odour to foul up them day. Them be so fine up in the great house. It be where Miss July belong. She knows she be overseer Dewar’s pickney but never does him even look ’pon her. But in the great house she will at last feel to be a white man’s child. Come sit ’pon this bowl to pee-pee, them will tell her. Is merriment you mus’ be feel. Miss July at the great house! Come, she will get shoe!’

Yet every night Kitty would creep along the rutted path, sneak through the cultured garden, scale a low stone wall to crawl through that matted vegetation. At that glass she would strain to keep her leaf shape and not be revealed as an ugly negro field slave who was so out of her place that the cat-o’-nine-tails would surely be sent for if she were caught. And there she would wait—staring in upon a room so sublime that she dared not take a breath for fear the air would prove too noble for her.

PART 2

CHAPTER 6

I BELIEVED MY HAND to be improving. ‘Too crabbed, Mama, you must take more care,’ was the complaint from my son, Thomas. ‘Look at the stains of ink upon your fingers. See then how your soiled hand prints smudges all across the paper.’

‘It is the pen that drips so,’ I informed him.

‘It is not the fault of the pen that you place too much ink upon its nib,’ said he.

‘Do you resent me the ink?’ I asked him.

‘No, of course not.’

‘Then is it the quantity of paper I might use that is vexing you?’

‘Nothing is vexing me, Mama. I am just cautioning you to take a little care and tap the nib of the pen upon the inkstand to shake off the excess that might otherwise drip across the paper.’

‘But this dripping and staining is not my offence—this ink be inferior,’ I told him.

‘There is nothing wrong with the ink,’ he answered back to me.

‘Then why it drip so?’

‘Because you must tap the pen nib to shake off the ink before you put it to the paper.’

And so this argument went around. Reader, I am not a woman to stay within a household when all welcome is gone. I stood up from my desk and departed the room. Taking up my valise I placed within it only those few possessions that I first brought into this house those many years before—my square of lace and my blue and white plate. I would take nothing away with me that was given by my son. No feathered Sunday hat nor new Common Sense Oxford shoe, not even a spool of embroidery silk would he find about me.

Thomas, seeing me firm in my resolve to leave his house, at once began calling for Lillian. Always when he has wronged me, he calls for Lillian. All his battles his wife must fight for him, like she be his mama and he her pickney.

She entered in upon my room like a howling wind to grab the valise from my hand. How we struggled there we two! I am an old, old woman and she has not more than forty years, yet still she fought me like a