or under their huts for years. Oh, what a relief. It was not these ragged rebels that were terrifying the gallant Trelawny Interior Militia—it was popping bamboo!
Bang, bang, bang—and those few old slaves fell dead upon the ground.
Bang, bang, bang, silhouetted against the light, they were as easy to shoot as pots off a fence. Some slaves ran from their hiding places to lose themselves in long grasses, but were chased and felled like squealing wild boars. Others came grovelling to kiss the feet of any militia man who would spare them. Shivering, their eyes wide with fright, stinking of shit, and protesting that they were forced at the point of a nigger’s bayonet to enjoin this fight, they were put to work dousing their fire with pails of dirt.
But then they were shot anyway, those gutless black Moses, Cupids and Ebo Jims, for who would want them back after this? When slaves turn wild, they are useless to all but worms. And there would be compensation for the owners for the loss of their property.
The bamboo still smouldered lively, but those rebel slaves upon Castle Estate were quelled. And how they strutted—those gallant white men of Trelawny Interior Militia—not soldiers, not redcoats, but, oh, a force to be feared upon this island.
It was later, as John Howarth and Tam Dewar made their way back to the barracks for regrouping, that they found themselves split from the main body of their militia, riding the town road with two other men who were gossiping this Castle Estate episode into quite a heroic tale to tell. At the bend in the road, where it narrows to barely a path, they heard a woman screaming. A white woman. Most white men upon this island believe the sound to be quite different from that of a negress; the cry is softer, higher, and has a more melodious cadence, even when pitched with the same terror. Now the holler of a negress could go unmarked, but a white woman screaming must be investigated by the militia. So they turned off the road with some haste.
Soon, there before them, in front of a small house with a neat garden, was the white woman. A red-headed woman, whom Howarth often saw about the parish—indeed, a woman who so reminded him of his late wife Agnes, that on two occasions he was forced to acknowledge her when she caught him staring upon her.
Now she was raging, hollering, and jumping. This woman at once clutched at her loose and tangled hair, then fell to her knees, banging upon the ground with her fists, before she was back upon her feet, arms outstretched with imploring. In front of her, sitting tied to a chair, motionless, limp and slumping to one side, was her husband—the Baptist missionary of this parish—Mr Bushell. Usually quite blond and pink of face, now this man’s skinny naked body was black, for he was daubed with slimy tar. And the blood-dirty feathers that quivered over him, from his head to his toe, made him appear, at swift glance, like a freshly flayed negro.
The missionary’s two small sons, dressed in their stripey bed-shirts, clung together in the open doorway of their house, too astonished at the sight before them to cry. For encircling this scene upon horse-back were, it appeared, nine badly dressed, burly white women. And one of these women was attempting, with breathless panting, to lasso the seated man. The boys gasped every time the looping rope soared down to strike their father like a lash, before being pulled back for another clumsy attempt to capture him. When, at last, the rope finally caught, it tightened to topple the missionary, who thumped to the ground in a cloud of grit and dirt.
Howarth dismounted his horse. He ran to the missionary and pulled off the binding rope before he was dragged along the ground by it. ‘What’s happening here?’ Howarth yelled at the female riders.
Yet it was the bass tones of a male voice that answered him saying, ‘Leave alone, Howarth. He deserves this. All this slave trouble about us is his doing. We’re teaching him a lesson. This is our affair.’
The missionary’s wife fell to her knees in a faint. Suddenly Howarth, peering from one assailant to the other, realised that they were not women atop those horses, but white men bundled into skirts, bodices and bonnets for tricky disguise.
Now, by the entrance to Belvedere Pen, John Howarth and his companions had earlier that day