A brief beat of pity pulsed within July for this forlorn white woman—her fat-batty missus—but then was gone.
‘Tell overseer-man,’ July began again, with cautious authority, ‘tell that man him must close up that dungeon and use it no more.’
And that is exactly what Caroline did. ‘Close it up. Close it up,’ she commanded the overseer, ‘and hope the magistrate never heard tell of it.’ She made Henry Reed not only empty its chambers of all the captives but also, at July’s suggestion, fire the dungeon to smoke out its callousness. Henry Reed may soon have left her employ bewailing that he now had no inducement that could extract more effort from the idle, the indolent, and the not working well, but that dread dungeon was no more.
And so puffed did our missus become after that splendid resolution that she proclaimed that, from that day onward, her house-maid July (or Marguerite as she still insisted upon calling her), should serve her also in the administering of the plantation. For when her brother was alive, was it not July who stood at Caroline Mortimer’s side to sift the skulkers from the sick upon Monday mornings? ‘No. Him jus’ have sore head from too much rum,’ July would tell her or, ‘That black tongue not be sickness, it can be wipe off,’ or, ‘Caution, missus—yaws!’ If July could assist her then, when she was no more than a child, what better help could she be now? There was the register of slaves to be taken, compensation to be claimed, always overseers and bookkeepers to be found . . .
‘Me can’t, missus,’ July told her.
‘Nonsense. I say you will, then you will,’ the missus twittered. ‘We will bring the negroes in a line and they will tell their name and you will put it in the ledger. I will need it for inspection for the compensation.’
‘But me can’t, missus,’ July repeated, ‘Me can neither read, nor write.’
Her missus was nearly felled by the force of that sudden understanding.
‘Oh, Marguerite,’ she said with exasperation, ‘why ever not!?’
Name, sex, age. These were the earliest words that July could draw—although her tongue poked from her lips to follow every stroke. When, with faltering breath, she at first enjoined the sounds of the letters into the word, her missus jumped upon her feet and clapped, ‘Yes, yes, oh yes, Marguerite.’
Caroline Mortimer proved a very able teacher—come, she had a blackboard, chalk and pointer brought from town. She took July’s hand within her own to trace out all the letters of the alphabet. She wrote simple words upon the board, commanding July to make her own, rather clumsy, copies. She even read loudly and deliberate from books while moving July’s finger along the words, before demanding her pupil, ‘Repeat . . . repeat . . . repeat.’
But long after the missus had tired of these lessons—the dusty blackboard taken away to be used as table top within the kitchen—July was still eager to continue that learning. There were many papers and books that lay about the great house—papers covered with a grey print of letters dense as stains—that July commenced, out of cussedness, to study, one slow word at a time, until their jumble danced with meaning. Head, tradesman, inferior, field, domestic—soon July began to read those words fast as conversing, and to write them without the aid of her tongue.
July was now a young woman, tall but not with the colossal bearing of her mama, Kitty. Her hair was no longer that picky-picky-head tangle of her youth but braided neat and always wrapped within a clean, coloured kerchief. Her full mouth still had that mischievous turn upon its corners, where a wry tale or tall-tall truth looked about to escape it. But within her spirited black eyes a keen observer might sense the anguish that stalked her. For her dreams were so tyrannical, so pestering with tormenting episodes, that July contrived to rest no more than four hours within any night. In unguarded moments, a droop within her eyelids, a sag at her jaw, could dull her features to morose, swift as a doll with two faces.
But so important was July to Caroline, that her missus had received thirty-one pounds in compensation for the loss of July as her property. Florence and Lucy were worth much less—nineteen pounds and ten shillings—being inferior slaves that could only wash, launder and thump the missus’s dresses to rags. Byron—now the fervent young groom at Amity—raised only thirteen pounds and four shillings