hem of this glorious garment was so festooned with embroidered flowers that this lovely surely had walked through the garden of Eden and all that was pretty had attached itself there. Even the fringed parasol this fair-skinned maiden twirled could rival the sun for brightness.
No adjusting of July’s red kerchief upon her head made her feel worthy to linger within the wake of this fair-skinned beauty. In her ugly grey skirt, with the rip at the knee that was stitched so badly in black, her yellowing blouse with no button left upon the fraying cuffs, and her skin, of course, so nasty dark, July was shameful as a field nigger. But then as July, with her head bowed, stepped to pass that elegant miss upon that shabby street, she heard, ‘Ah, Miss July, you walking to town this day?’
It was with revulsion that July at once realised this coloured woman she was glorifying was Miss Clara. Come, if July had recognised her haughty figure before, there would have been no meeting. For our July would have dived into the cover of near bush, or stood skinny behind the pillar of a house, so Miss Clara could not find her.
Reader, you must remember Miss Clara? I have written of her before. Miss Clara, who was once the house slave at Prosperity? Who did feign to faint away at any rough word? ‘Is it me dress you like or me pretty fair face that make you stare so,’ Miss Clara. The quadroon whose papa was a naval man from Scotch land. Yes, that one! The dreadful Miss Clara. Come, let me tell you of her.
Miss Clara did grab her freedom before many others. Not because she continued to brandish those aging manumit papers that her papa did bequeath her within her missus’s face. No. Miss Clara’s missus was pleased to watch her haughty backside sashay out of her employ for, ‘But me be a quadroon, missus,’ was all she would say to each and every task required of her. Soon the choosing of her missus’s attire for the day—or for the evening—was all Miss Clara would deign to do. The thirty-one pounds compensation money for the loss of Miss Clara as her slave was of much more value to her missus.
Then, once free, Miss Clara proceeded to flounce into town to begin a little business. Like so many other women with tinted complexions varying from honey to milk and oft-talked of papas—from England, Ireland, Scotland or Wales, fine, upstanding, white gentleman all—the cooking and selling of jams and pickles became her employ.
Her ginger preserve and lime pickle were popular, but her guava jelly . . . ‘Miss Clara’s guava jelly—oh, have you tried it?’ soon became the call of so many white people within the parish. Caroline Mortimer sent July often to Miss Clara’s little shack upon Trelawny Street. (Oh, I must call it a shop, for Miss Clara may read this volume.) And every time July entered that shop, Miss Clara’s green eyes and delicate mouth would conspire to sneer pitifully upon her. ‘Oh, Miss July,’ she would say, ‘your missus send you all this way on this hot-hot day for me guava jelly? But you must be tired out,’ before inflicting one big-big jar upon July that could hardly be lifted as she said, ‘Me know your missus love it so. Me make this just for her.’
Her make it? Cha! You think you would ever see Miss Clara’s pretty fair face leaning over a steaming pot? ‘No, me is a quadroon. But me supervise the cook-up in every way,’ was her answer. And hear this, Miss Clara’s recipe for guava jelly was her secret, she proclaimed—she would allow no one to have it. It was to be her companion within her grave.
But why should my readers have to tarry so long? Here is that unsaid recipe for you to cook-up if you so wish: Take the basket of guava and cut and boil them in the usual way until they are soft; put the mush-mush in muslin to hang till morning so the liquor will drain; add as much sugar and the juice of a lime to the liquor; then (and here is Miss Clara’s big-big secret) fish out the flies and spice up with cinnamon and rum; and boil it, boil it, boil it, until the jelly forms.
There—Miss Clara’s grave need now only carry her pretty fair bones.
With the plenty profits Miss Clara made from her preserving, and a