a good while. He greeted them with the words, ‘I know why you have come, and I intend to give you a good explanation for my actions.’
Now, although James Richard had been rehearsing a speech—muttering the lines to himself that pleaded for fairness and mercy—he only managed to draw a breath before the massa silenced him by raising his hand to say, ‘Listen carefully to me, all of you. I have taken this measure of increasing the rents upon your provision grounds for your own good. All of you lived too long as slaves. All of you were too long in shackles to really understand what is now in your best interest.
‘I do not blame you for wishing to feed upon the first fruits of your freedom, but as your master and as the master of this plantation, I am the one who understands how you will best be served. Some of you believe that the Queen of England has granted you your lands to do with as you will, but this is not the case. Your provision grounds belong to me, and I can rent them to whomsoever I choose. The Queen, and indeed all the people of England, agree with my actions. Working for the common good is what will prove to be right for every one of you over the course of time.
‘I know you hold your lands dear, and I know that you have laboured upon them long and hard for the time you have been living at Amity. But you must now relinquish those lands so that your labour will be confined to the tasks required to be performed upon a sugar plantation. You will now all agree to work upon Amity for good wages.
‘I understand that it is the same work that you formerly performed under the dreadful tyranny of slavery. But you are no longer slaves, you are freemen, and all freemen in England—yes, white men—work for wages. It is the way of the world. And, thanks to the grace of God, you are now free to take your part within that world. You must labour for wages upon Amity with the same enthusiasm as you have worked upon your lands.
‘I have been driven to this action by your refusal to listen to my reasoning and by your defiance to work as I require. But let that all now be at an end. Let us work together to make the plantation named Amity once more the pride of Jamaica, of England, and of her Empire.’
Not one word did James Richards manage to utter of his practised argument before the massa strode in upon the house and closed the door. And all who had marched to parley, then stood in dumbfounded silence before the massa’s sealed home.
Only Dublin, sucking upon his teeth, then saying, ‘Slavery. Slavery has just returned to Amity,’ destroyed their mute reverie. Come, Cornet ran to find the shackle that had once secured him to the wall of the dreaded dungeon. His intention, he said, was to bind his wrists before this white man, whose demands had seized his freedom once more. But Dublin and Giles held him back. There was another way, they told him, a better way.
So upon a heavy, dismal night, a palaver was called within the negro village. It gathered before Peggy and Cornet’s hut, but so many did arrive that the crowd soon pressed into Betsy’s garden. James Richards began by repeating massa’s speech as best he could remember it. But disbelief at Robert Goodwin’s words soon had his congregation chanting, ‘Wha’ him say? . . . No! . . . Him lie . . . no, sah . . . me will not . . . cha . . . me is slave no more . . . it be changy-fe-changy . . . me work what suits.’
While Benjamin, standing upon Peggy Jump’s three-legged stool, begged all to listen to his talk. The minister at his Baptist chapel intended to purchase lands that negroes might work, he told them. Fanny, sucking upon her teeth, said that the minister-man was a white man too. But a man of God, said Benjamin, before the stool did topple him.
Giles then spoke very long about some lands just outside the borders of Amity that could be squatted—lands that were there for anyone to take. And as Giles detailed the trees, the grasses, and the slopes and dips of this soil, Elizabeth Millar repeated over this droning sermon, ‘Massa not