The Polished Hoe (60 page)

And it did come to her aid, on another afternoon, when her teacher Miss Blackett was hearing Standard Two in oral Mental Arithmetic:
“Class, listen good! A breadfruit and a half cost a penny and a half, hommany breadfruits I will get for three cents?”
She put up her hand high up in the air, indicating she knew the answer.

“Well, Mary, then?”
Miss Blackett said.
“Yes?”

“
T’ree!”

“
Tree?”
Miss Blackett said.

“T’ree, ma’am! They cost t’ree cents!”

“You bright as a new shilling, Mary-child!”
Miss Blackett told her.

And afterwards, the girls in her class branded her “
the most brightest girl in the whole class, among all of we.”

And Miss Blackett singled-her-out, for the balance of that week, telling the class,
“Mary-girl is going far; far in life.”

No, she did not forget much; not Mary; and she did not forgive much, either.

Here she is, in her white dress that was so.Well pressed by Gertrude, which she wore at lunch one day ago now, the Sunday afternoon, sitting at the table covered by a lace cotton tablecloth that she herself had crocheted; the sterling service set precisely and in proper arrangement by Gertrude, whom she had trained in manners and in the art and etiquette of table setting. And at that time of Gertrude’s first engagement as a servant, Mr. Bellfeels would bring his friends to the Great House on Friday nights; and they would eat and laugh and sing bawdy songs and the Blues; and then play poker until all hours of the night, until the sun started to peep over the green cane fields the next morning; and she wanted so much at that time to please Mr. Bellfeels, and make Mr. Bellfeels look good in front of his friends; to be proud of her; and how she looked and contributed to his status, in the presence of his powerful friends: the Solicitor-General, the Vicar, the manager-owner of the Crane Beach Hotel, the Commissioner of Police and managers of the Aquatic Club and of Cave Shepherd & Sons, Haberdasheries, down in Town; and the Chief Justice, to make them like her; and on those merry nights, not always happy nights for her, a guest would wander into the kitchen where she was standing beside Gertrude, showing Gertrude how she wanted the edges cut off the enriched white bread, to make Fray Bentos corn beef sandwiches with, and cucumber sandwiches; and this guest would come up to them, ignoring Gertrude’s presence, and place his hand on Mary-Mathilda’s bottom, and squeeze her.Well-spread bottom, until it seemed his thumb met and touched his index finger, beneath her soft perfumed flesh; “
Mary-girl, lemme feel-you-up a lil, girl, nuh? Yuh feel good, girl! Sweets! Thanks”
; and in her pain and agony, caused as much by the suddenness of the assault as by the pain from it, Mary-Mathilda would not utter a sound, but would smile pleasantly, and remove the man’s hand. And Gertrude, who saw trouble setting up like rain, by the man’s approach, would of her own will, for the sake of self-preservation, leave the room. But Mary-Mathilda, in her silent disgust, masked her anger and her promise of vengeance in a blank visage as if she were sitting with them, at the table, poker-faced; clutching her wishbone, she wanted Gertrude to remain, and bear witness; to cause the guest to shorten his assault. “
Looking good, and feeling more better, girl!”
; and the guest would himself take the platter of corn beef and cucumber sandwiches, and another of fish cakes, covered with a damp linen cloth, with him back into the front-house, for the other men to devour.

In all these times, she hosted these parties, which could not be held in the Main House, because Mistress Bellfeels, his wife, disapproved of his gambling, and of his friends. She herself told Mary-Mathilda on the one occasion that they spoke, Mary-Mathilda, telling her, “Mary, for too long I have endured his crude manners, and the uncivilized behaviour of
those
men. It’s despicable, the way those men treat women, including me,
and in front
of my girls!” And Mistress Bellfeels added, “I hope that for your sake, Mary, you will never be exposed to their
lawlessness.
” This was soon after Wilberforce won the Bimshire Scholarship in Classics; when the Plantation and the Village were rejoicing; and everybody was friendly. But Mary-Mathilda did not have the same legitimate excuse as Mistress Bellfeels. She was not the Mistress. She was plain Mary. Mary Gertrude Mathilda.
Not
Mistress Mary-Mathilda Bellfeels.

One night Mr. Bellfeels himself came into the kitchen.

“Give we a minute,” he said to Gertrude.

Gertrude took off her apron; wiped the sweat on her face with it; the oven was filled with joints of pork, to be served in a few minutes, so she checked the pork in the oven first; and then left. The back door slammed two times, and then it became very quiet, and Mary-Mathilda thought she could hear Gertrude’s bare feet striking the cement steps that led into the yard, and then moving over the wet grass; and she could picture Gertrude standing beside the garden bed that held the Rachelle Rose; and it was at that moment, hearing Gertrude’s retreating footsteps, that Mr. Bellfeels came right up to her, beside the large iron oven, giving off the smell of delicious pork and heat; and raised her dress, lifting the delicate white sea-island cotton material from her ankles up her shins, past her thighs, over her waist, exposing her.Well-shaped legs and round belly with the sunken navel, tearing apart the cord of her short delicate camisole . . . and when the minute was up, he told her, “Tell Gertrude she could come-back-in.” And he returned to the poker game; and she heard him laugh, with a deep-throated joviality; and then she heard his voice say, “I raise two hundred!” She did not know the poker game of Five Card Stud.

Standing beside the hot iron stove, she heard the other men laugh; and Sir G’s voice speaking in a foreign language; in Latin: “
Missus Hannibal in Hispaniam adventus primo statim adventus omnem exercitum in se convertit; Hamilcarem iuvenem vigorem in vultu vimque in occulis, habitum oris lineamentoque intueri.”

“
. . . and I see that you still remember yuh Six-Form Latin, eh, Judge Jeffreys!
” she heard the Vicar say to Sir G.

The laughter in the front-house rose like fresh waves hitting against the rocks at the Crane Beach Hotel.

“
Bellfeelus nec temere credendum nec asperandum ratus
,” Sir G. then said.

“Oh God, oh-God!”
the men screamed.

“Sweet-sweet!”
the Vicar said.
“Too-sweet!”

And the men roared. She could hear the ring of glasses tipped against one another, and the rattling of ice in the glasses, as the men toasted Sir G’s versatility and application of Livy,
Book XXI
to Mr. Bellfeels’ situation. They had all—except Mr. Bellfeels—studied this book in various Forms at Harrison College, or the Lodge School; most of them, however, had forgotten the passage . . .

It was a warm feeling. And some of this warmth, whether of anger or of passion, she could feel in her face, in the area round her neck, as she touched herself there, the way she does when she touches her neck with the back of her hand, checking her temperature for fever.

She did not, at this time, put her life under strict scrutiny, nor did she bend her behaviour under the critical eye of self-reproach and doubt. Years after this, after the riotous nights, when Mr. Bellfeels visited, as a parent and as paramour; on Saturday nights when he played the piano, and the three of them, father, son and son’s mother, sang and danced to the beautiful songs from the Amurcan South, songs she later came to know were Negro spirituals and Negro blues and Negro minstrels and Negro gospel music, she would throw her head back and laugh, and spin little Wilberforce, no more than five or six years old then, round and round, and watch his body flailing round, out from her own body, as if he was a merry-go-round; and his head would be thrown back in abandon, in security, in confidence that the woman holding his two hands, his mother, was not so reckless as to release her grip on his hands, in that merry turning world, in the security of the Plantation, in the front-house; and she would laugh as she swung him, and laugh as she heard the tantalizing yet mellow songs which Mr. Bellfeels told her were sung by “Nig-groes,” and by slaves; and she had no thought nor feeling for those Negroes and those slaves; for she was in Bimshire, in this solidly built Great House, square and tough, two storeys high, whose walls were built thick and redoubtable, “like a brick shithouse,” Mr. Lawrence Burkhart the Driver said; just like the walls of His Majesty’s Prison at Glandairy, or Dodds Reformatory for Boys; like the Sin-Anne’s Fort, near the Garrison Savannah, something like the toughness of the walls of Troy which the Greeks could not penetrate by force of arms, or catapults; this Great House, as it is called by everyone, standing, it seems, since time began; for it has been here, like a curse, like a smile, like an insult in the face, from the time people came to live and work on the Plantation; so, in this circle of love, and wealth, and sensuality, and violence and raw unadorned sex, Mary Gertrude Mathilda Paul (taking her mother’s maiden name) made her life with her only surviving child, Wilberforce, whom she worshipped from the time the midwife told her, “This one going-live, this time, darling!”; while the child’s father, Mr. Bellfeels, provided the means of her elevated status,
condoned,
though circumscribed, in his social circle; and he maintained her livelihood, servants to cook her food, servants to wash up afterwards; servants to wash her clothes; maids to iron her clothes and keep the house clean, and sew the blinds when they got ripped by hurricane winds, and darn the shirts Wilberforce wore to Harrison College, and iron the doilies and clean the cushions; and a boy to sweep the yard, and “mind the stocks,” and a girl to run easy errands. But when she got accustomed to this help, and realized that her servants ate more than they worked for in wages, she asked Mr. Bellfeels if she could dismiss all but Gertrude; and he surprised her, and said, “Man-yes! They does-only-thief the fecking food! I did-waiting to see how long before you catch on!”; and so she kept Gertrude. She loved Gertrude, and did not treat her as a servant: she assisted Gertrude in the kitchen, and round the house.

She did not know that Mr. Bellfeels was fooping Gertrude, too.

This is Mary-Mathilda’s life. Paid for by Mr. Bellfeels. But in a more serious manner, in a more deep and romantic way, her life is paid for by her body. Has always been. It is therefore
her
life; and her life only. She owns it.

Mr. Bellfeels took her, as his right, in his natural arrogance of ownership, as a part of the intricate ritual and arrangement of life on the Plantation—“if it wasn’t you, Mary-girl,” Ma told her, “it wouldda be somebodyelse daughter. And even though it is what it is, I still feel more better to see that is you getting some o’ the sweets that goes along with it, if you know what I mean!” Ma had told Mary-Mathilda this two years after she had introduced Mary-girl to Mr. Bellfeels that Sunday morning in the Church Yard, when he towered over her from the saddle of his horse.

Mr. Bellfeels had had Ma, too, for years; “taking what he want”; and their affair; no, not affair, for it could not be called that, since there was no bargaining power on her part; and even if she had thought of exchanging her body for power, or for privilege, or a simple thing, like having to work less hard, in exchange for “a piece o’ pussy”; or receiving an extra shilling in her brown wage envelope, when she stood with the other field hands in the large Planta- tion Yard, covered in white marl and loose gravel, under the tamarind tree, and heard how she was addressed by Mr. Lawrence Burkhart the Driver, “
Eunomia Irene Paul, here
?” and then have to hear the number of times she was marked late; and the number of times she “didn’t show-up,” including when her monthly sickness was too painful for her to walk the mile to work; and listen to the number of pence she was docked for this “
blasted unpunctualness, too often, hear?”
Ma knew, and would get to know even better, since she was a member of the field gang and the Plantation system, that this coming Friday afternoon late, Mr. Bellfeels would come and have it; rough and ready; and there was nothing she could do to make it not happen.

“Fair exchange,” Ma began to tell herself, as she limped home a little later than the other field hands, sore from the throwing up and down of her hands, like a machine, with the hoe in her hands; and driving it, with venom and hate, “I going-kill yuh, I going-kill-yuh . . . one o’ these good days . . .” into the ground which was hard as rock, sometimes; hard as a piece of coral from the sea; sometimes hard as soft mud; and her thighs sore from Mr. Bellfeels’ brutal prick which dug into her without mercy, without the lubrication of love.

It was a glance of his eye, a command of silent determination, threatening a flogging, if Ma had not seen the wink, or if she seemed not to have observed the signal. The large, chestnut-coloured horse, smelling like urine and straw mixed and left out in the sun, would tread on the thick black soil, with the pieces of corn stalk and ruts from the cut sugar canes, roots from the plants of sweet potatoes and eddoes, spread like a Persian carpet from the way the colours were arrayed on the ground, and the horse would shit on the stalks and on the ruts, and add to the smell of terror and of despair—with the smell of horse seeming to guide her behind him. Barely out of sight and hearing distance of the eleven other women in the field gang, Ma would see him standing just two rows from the edge of the growing canes. The canes were still young. They reached him to his waist. They reached Ma to her chest. The fly of his khaki jodhpurs was already unbuttoned. Ma saw the ugly brownish red head of his circumcised prick. She had seen it many times, and as many times had thrown it from her mind; or had imagined she would bite it off, hold it in her teeth, close her eyes even tighter than they were shut, at the touch of his hand on her breasts; and bite, and bite, and hope there was no blood; she couldn’t stand blood; and spit it out the moment it was severed from his high-smelling thighs . . . retaining only, more in her body than in her thoughts, the burning sensation of unfulfilled tension, and another burning feeling in her vagina, as if his semen was seasoned with hot nigger-peppers.