With little worry that anyone who could be believed (like July) would step forward to recount the events from some other view, Caroline Mortimer became, by the fifth delivery of her narration, the story’s resolute heroine.
Caroline then grew so convinced of her own audacity, so enamoured by her oft-conjured boldness, and persuaded by her imaginary competence, that when it came time for those planters and busybodies about the parish to give guidance to the missus upon what should be done with her brother’s plantation, the missus was so puffed with self-regard that she declared, ‘So help me, God, I will see the plantation of Amity prosper and grow that it may serve in absolute memorial for my dearly departed brother!’
Not even two surprisingly generous offers by her neighbours to the west and to the south—for the land, slaves, works, great house, and even to include the costs that should surely arise with the reinstating of the slave village and burnt-out hospital—did persuade Caroline Mortimer that withdrawing from Jamaica to England for quiet retirement in Islington, might be the better claim upon her resoluteness.
Nor did she approve the notion of an attorney handling her brother’s affairs. No. The fiction within her memory seduced her to declare that no one understood Caroline Mortimer if they believed these misfortunes and tribulations would see her broken. She alone would make Amity the most prosperous estate in the whole of Jamaica. Her brother would have expected no less from her.
However, it was not long before the firm nip of plain truth began to deflate the missus. Once she entered in upon the fetid dank room within the counting house to begin in earnest to peruse her late brother’s records of business, she soon realised that the fortunes of Amity were not as bounteous as she had always imagined them when dozing upon her daybed.
Within her first year as proprietor, she had to let the cane pieces of Virgo and Scarlett Ponds fall into ruinate, for she did not have the slaves to work them. Some had perished in the riots, others made feeble or limbless at the behest of justice and the law. Even after the seven slaves, carpenters mostly, who were loaned to Unity Pen by her late brother were begged return, she could not raise labour enough to keep the mill constantly turning and the teaches forever bubbling. And able black bodies could not be bought to replenish her stock with neither smiling friendship nor charmingly negotiated cash. For every planter within her circle pleaded that they were suffering from the same fate. Within that year of passing the ownership of Amity from deceased brother to deluded sister, the amount of hogsheads rolling out from the plantation works had dropped tenfold.
So the missus agreed with her then overseer (the third I believe, the second having fallen insensible to the pox), that he should decree to all those slaves who were idle, indolent and not working well, that their houses would be the last to be restored if their performance did not improve. She approved that her slaves should for a period, until the plantation named Amity was in the pride of health again, work without the break of their ‘off time’. In her second year she permitted a new dungeon to be created near the burnt-out hospital for the correction of those negroes who proved to be incorrigibly feckless. ‘What harm could it do?’ she said of these arrangements.
Then apprenticeship was finally forced upon our missus and all the planters of the Caribbean. Hopeful as the Hebrews leaving Egypt, the many slaves that toiled at Amity walked from their plantation to the town to listen to the white man, ‘de massa from a H’england’, as he explained to them, from the balcony of the courthouse, the details of the preparations for freedom.
Though they were still bound to the missus to work for six years without pay, after hearing their Moses-in-beige-breeches declare slavery at an end, the slaves believed themselves to be actually free. They refused to work no more than the forty hours a week now required of them by King William and the law of England. No call to orderly conduct and ‘obedience to all persons in authority’ had any effect upon Caroline Mortimer’s negroes. And forty hours a week was just not enough time to take off a sugar crop. No inducement, nor overseer (certainly not the two drunken Welsh ruffians who managed the fields through that time), could get