by Miss Rose’s tireless pestering that risking the massa’s wrath by every night taking that rutted path to climb the low stone wall and hide like a jumbie in the window of the great house was not wise. ‘Your pickney not sold away, Miss Kitty,’ Miss Rose had said. ‘She here seeing sun-up and sun-down in same sky as you and me. You wan’ be lock-up in the stock for seeing that? T’ink on it, Miss Kitty, and save your pity. You might chance you pickney any season.’
And it was true. Kitty had seen July on a few occasions during the eight or so years that had passed. Whilst pressing at the window of the great house, Kitty had first spied July tethered to a table leg by a long yellow ribbon about her wrist. Then once, from a distance, she thought she had seen July struggling a basket of wet washing into the house. More recently, upon her way to Sunday market, Kitty believed she saw July waving a long stick to chase some chickens home. But Kitty had never, since that day when she last stroked her daughter’s cheek with the soft pink petal of a flower, been close enough to touch, speak or trade a look with July.
Now, like your storyteller and the pressing of her petticoats, there were many jobs upon the sugar plantation named Amity that Kitty found grievous to perform. Come, the listing of tasks that she found agreeable would be a much, much, much shorter undertaking. But no work provoked such dread within Kitty’s heart as the pitiful task of manuring.
Canes, once planted in the regimented holes dug for their purpose, become one of the most indulged plants in the whole of the Caribbean. They must be fed like suckling babes if they are to grow tall with their cherished sweetness. For this purpose, the droppings that splutter and fall from the backside of any stock—be it cattle or mule—are hoarded and prized as steaming treasure. For months in any year, Kitty and the whole of the first gang are required to convey this dung from backside to cane piece. And there they must spread it about at the base of the growing canes, so the plants might sup upon the fetid goodness.
Some of this mess is taken from the pen to be shovelled into baskets and slung either side of a mule. The mule then, unaware of the load it carries, trots off as happy with this weight as with any other. But the wicker dung-baskets—overflowing and spilling—that Kitty carried to the cane pieces of Dover, Virgo, or even as far as Scarlett Ponds, were borne in the way of most slave burdens, upon her head. The weight was no sufferance, for Kitty could carry much heavier, much further. Come, it is true, the smell would see our white missus faint clean away with just one sniff. But the Lord, in making the nose, fashioned a shrewd organ; although so renk that upon Kitty’s first breaths the solid odour did choke her at the throat, after mighty coughing and a few strong inhalations, all the air about Kitty, be it sweet or bitter, came to smell like shit, so the offence was lost.
But for her poor tongue, there was no such accommodation. When, unwittingly, a piece would fall into her open mouth—which it did when she turned her head or a breeze blew or she struggled to catch her breath as she climbed the hill that led to Virgo—it would burn so fierce upon her tongue that she feared a hole was being bored right through it. For it was sharp as rancid lemon and did make her retch. Everything she nyam, be it food at the cane piece, or her porridge after her day’s work was done, come to taste not like a repast but like . . . well, the putrid splutterings that fall from the backside of a mule.
And if this dung did find its way into her eyes—for the brown juice from this waste matter did ooze through the weave of the basket to slip-slide all down Kitty’s face—then, oh! its sting did well up such tears as to leave her blind.
At the day’s end, Kitty would squat in the river—the water rippling over her shoulders, around her neck—and she would scrub with leaves of Bald-bush to rid this muck from her skin. But, reader, you see the dung did cling, so the stream would glide over her