alas, losing his life for merely staring open-mouthed, upon the flames.
When the flap finally dropped on that straining scaffold July, hidden within a corner of the square, watched as Kitty, kicking and convulsing at the end of her rope, elbowed and banged into the two men that dangled lifeless as butchered meat beside her. Her mama struggled. Her mama choked. Until, at last stilled, her mama hung small and black as a ripened pod upon a tree.
PART 3
CHAPTER 16
THE COFFIN WAS BORNE through Falmouth, high upon the shoulders of six men. July and Molly walked within this procession in the company of black negroes and fair-faced coloureds—the ragged, the coarsened, the garish, the dressy, the gaudy, the haggard, the tattered and the careworn of the parish. This motley crowd were led in muffled solemnity by a white Baptist minister and his family. At the chapel yard all came to a stop as the minister raised his pointed finger to the moon, then let out a grave and strident cry of, ‘The hour is at hand. The monster is dying.’
Some in this congregation fell upon their knees, others mumbled prayers on halting breath, or rocked within the rhythm of a softly sung hymn. Until suddenly, the minister raising both arms heavenward shouted, ‘The monster is dead. The negro is free!’
Although the hour was midnight, the elation that rose from all glowed like a sunrise to light this splendid occasion. As the coffin with the words, ‘Colonial slavery died July 31, 1838, aged 276 years’, was lowered into the ground, a joyous breeze blew. It was whipped up from the gasps of cheering that erupted unbounded. When the handcuffs, chains and iron collars were thrown into that long-awaited grave to clatter on top of slavery’s ruin, the earth did tremor. For at that moment every slave upon this island did shake off the burden of their bondage as one.
As the minister bid that the thanks to almighty God for this deliverance be raised louder than the trumpets of Jericho, and that the ‘hoorah’ for the new Queen of England who had freed them, should shake the buildings in London Town, Molly did do the strangest thing; she threw her arms about July and hugged her fiercely. And then . . .
CHAPTER 17
I CAN GO NO further! Reader, my story is at an end. Close up this book and go about your day. You have heard all that I have to tell of a life lived upon this sugar island. This wretched pen will blot and splutter with ink no more in pursuance of our character July. I now lay it down in its final rest.
Within this hot-hot and dusty day your storyteller has suffered an anguish and an indignity that she just cannot endure. My son, Thomas, has come to me in a state of great agitation—the pulsing vein upon his head throbbing and wriggling as if about to be born from within him. (But his face remaining as composed as a man wishing to enquire my favourite colour—be it red or blue? For that is my son’s character; he will not breathe words upon you to speak what he intends—he must give you some other sign.)
I did not worry, for I believed this vexation had its cause in the noise and fuss that has recently blared within our household. Lillian and her daughters, Louise, Corinne and May, have of late taken to quarrelling over any and every little thing that does occur. You never will have heard the like, reader.
This morning, those three mischievous girls greeted me at the table, each with their big lip pushed out so far in sulk that it turned me from my porridge. And the cause? Their mama requires them to wear pink ribbon within their hair, when yellow is the fashion. So wear yellow, I tell them. They have not yellow, they weep, before them bang, slam, crash every door within the house. Come, it is not only the floors that do shake when there is such commotion. So I believed my son to have had rough words with Lillian and his pickney about the carry-on.
Upon entering my room, my son produced the pages that you have just read and commenced to wave them in front of my face. The realisation that the person who was rousing my son to feeling was me—his old and frailing mama—was my first surprise. The second, was the question he required me to answer: ‘What of the son that