Hyacinth: A Costly Jamaican Slave

By John Charlton

Hyacinth is the daughter of a Jamaican plantation owner and one of his slaves and is married to a sailor who deserted the British Navy and settled in Jamaica.
The story is set in the early 19th century.
Hyacinth incurs the hostility of her half-brothers who see her as a threat to their authority on her father’s sugar plantation. Her life thus becomes one of great complexity with trials and triumphs amid travel and adventure.
Lives and relationships unfold before the reader as lived by real people who either endured or benefitted from slavery. Historical context and descriptions of locations are real.
Feisty Hyacinth and her faithful Albert await your pleasure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AG Books
• Release date: Aug 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781785389597

John Charlton

John Charlton is a lecturer in Politics at the University of Leeds and lectured in History and Politics at Leeds Metropolitan University for 25 years. He is one of Britain's leading experts on the multitude of primary texts on the Chartists.

Book preview

HYACINTH

A COSTLY JAMAICAN SLAVE

by John Charlton

First published in 2018 by

AG Books

www.agbooks.co.uk

Digital edition converted and distributed by

Andrews UK Limited

www.andrewsuk.com

Copyright © 2018 John Charlton

The right of John Charlton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1998.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Any person who does so may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. This book is set in a historical context. As such, it contains language and portrays situations and events that could be seen as culturally insensitive or offensive to a reader in a modern context. This is done entirely for reasons of historical authenticity and is not intended to offend.

Chapter 1: Capture land

Albert went to the back of the house and as he splashed his feet, it washed off some red dirt.

Dawn was coming up fast as it does in Jamaica. Like the weeds. He thought as he faced another day like the last and the one before that.

The sky lightened. Only the sun ever hurried here, seeming determined to rise above the gunga peas before he returned to Hyacinth who still slept. He looked at her sleeping face and small body tangled in the sheets which he had just left.

Albert chided himself for not being totally happy. She was as lovely now, approaching 25, as she had been at 16 aboard the Bellerophon lying in the hammock next to his.

Albert had been an able seaman on the British warship Bellerophon which had intercepted a French ship on which she was a prisoner. Hyacinth had been travelling to England with her father, Charles Beresford, who owned a large sugar estate in Jamaica, and the French had previously captured the British ship on which she and her father had been travelling. Hyacinth’s father was taking her to England with him on a visit to his brother Leonard in Liverpool to discuss family business. Her father had not survived. She, though his daughter, was a slave as she had been born to one of Beresford’s slaves but brought up as his daughter in his plantation great house. Beresford was aware that she would become free as soon as she set foot on English soil and intended this but had died before this could take place. Her low status, as a slave, had resulted in her being given an ordinary hammock on the gun deck.

The Bellerophon captain, Captain Maitland, had granted her freedom in Kingston as the alternative of selling her was repugnant to him.

She had sprung Albert from the naval hospital where Albert had been taken with yellow fever, and they had escaped together into the interior of Jamaica. This had been 8 years ago. They lived by subsistence farming on capture land now and had 3 children.

Hyacinth opened her eyes, startled at leaving her dream, warmed by his face and touched in turn by perceiving his mood.

He forced a smile but after nearly nine years together she read him as clearly as the dawn.

Young Jocelyn padded silently into the room and snuggled in with her mother. Albert felt guilty again at his own mood and this made him angry.

Where’s breakfast, he said? Hyacinth turned away. She knew that his dissatisfaction was not with her. Both he and she were of the same mould. They needed change. This itch was overriding the joy which children had brought them.

Charles, the youngest, was already up and had taken down the model ship from its shelf.

Put it back, said Hyacinth, reading Albert’s mind. Charles refused and earned a cuff from his father. Charles was too young to respond to his father’s dissatisfaction regarding their situation or understand his father’s feelings so he cried. He was so proud of his ship, which his father had made for him, and took the blow as a rejection of the many hours spent recently listening to his father talking about the sea. Hyacinth perceived Charles’ fragility but would not undermine Albert’s authority with even a gesture or a look. She saw the communication on a face, the slump or straightness or a body whereas Albert looked around and saw a rough built wooden board house and a table bought with many hours of labour in the sun.

Doris, his youngest girl, appeared dragging a rag doll across the floor as red with the dirt of the parish of St Elizabeth as Albert’s feet had been. He smiled a real smile, which was returned, and picked her up. She smelled of wood smoke and dog. This mingled with the smell of fried plantain and Johnny cakes.

The sun now streamed through the glassless window space where the rags had been pulled aside.

The sunbeams seemed to carry in the smells from outside cooking and the damp odour of steaming boards and wet vegetation.

It was rainy season. A dog barked as it disturbed a bird which scattered droplets from the damp grass as it rose. There was a little time for some work in the early mornings before the rain started. The rising clouds would grow sprouting white tops which puffed up and toiled to draw fast moving rounded shapes until the noise and touch of heavy drops began and drove people to hunch back to shelter.

The roof had leaked yesterday. At least a temporary repair of the thatch must be done today before Hyacinth began to complain. Albert was proud of his house, built mostly from boards with his own hands. He had been paid by the navy before being sent ashore with yellow fever. It had been a significant amount as he had not been paid since before the battle of Trafalgar. Much was now gone. The land could support them but a life of poverty makes one dream.

What would life be for his son Charles? To toil in the red dirt until he too grew old? Charles was the most dark skinned of Albert’s children. Since the Atlantic slave trade had ended in 1807 slaves had become more valuable. Charles had no papers to prove that he was free born and Hyacinth worried about him constantly.

She had her papers, arranged by Captain Maitland in Kingston, which declared her free. For Charles she had only a piece of paper from the preacher saying that he was baptised and giving her name as his mother. She smiled to herself when she thought of the preacher calling it his baptismal solfiticket. It really would count for very little and having a white father wouldn’t help when he was just a sailor who had deserted the navy.

Hyacinth was thinking as she worked. What would she teach the children today?

As the favoured illegitimate daughter of a rich planter she had been well educated.

There was no school in Junction. A few other children were sent to her each morning to learn to read, write and do sums. She was paid in kind such as with the plantain that she was cooking which sizzled over the open fire.

She would like to have taught them history and geography as well but had no books. It all had to come from her now fading memory and The Bible which she taught them to read.

A spit of fat, from the frying plantain, on the back of her hand, jumped her back to the present. She took the food inside and served it on plates. Hard work had gained these replacements for the large leaves which her children had grown up with. The children didn’t like them as plates had to be washed. How could she make them more refined like herself? They’ve got no broughtupsy, she thought, chiding herself for thinking in the patois which was the only language in which her children were fluent.

Like Albert she was displeased with herself for not being satisfied with life and felt guilty that she was not contented.

She had a husband who loved her and whom she still loved, even though she was not blind to his faults, and they had three lovely children. The downside of this was that she did not want to go through another pregnancy and was beginning to avoid Albert’s body.

Life ran on into the future like a cart track through unchanging country and a spark in her wanted the horse to bolt and take the cart bouncing down a hillside even to destruction.

She would teach the children long multiplication today. Some would never grasp it she knew. She didn’t really care but it made them seem even less like her thus deepened the gulf which Hyacinth felt existed between her and the people with whom she was now surrounded.

Albert was on his way out to his ground to work in the cool of the morning. There was something about the muscles of his back which awoke again the need for him and put her mind and body to facing up for a fight.

She must finish washing the children and herself. She would ask Jocelyn to wash the plates. Jocelyn would read her mood in the way that she herself would have done and not refuse.

As predictable as Sunday follows Saturday the rain began in the early afternoon and Albert returned wet through, his hair plastered down and drops of water tumbling from his bushy eyebrows. Life as a seaman had inured him to being wet such that he still took pleasure in the rain being warm. Working barefoot too was as natural to him on the red earth as on the deck of a ship and his soaked shirt revealed the contours of his slim but muscular torso built by years as a topman on sailing ships.

How often even rain now could make his mind stray. In his mind’s eye he was never choking on the smoke of the guns or seeing men die. He was never shipwrecked or clawing up a beach with lungs heaving. Always he was aloft; he was Able Seaman Albert. He closed his eyes and his mind’s eye could see into the distance to a watery horizon instead of just as far as the gunga peas.

I can do mul’plication, said Doris. She couldn’t but knew that he would one day because Jocelyn could do it. She had Hyacinth’s blind confidence in herself.

Hyacinth was tidying up, her slim frame moving fluidly, amid the whooshing of rain outside and dripping inside. I wonder if your grandma is still alive, she said half to herself, looking at Charles.

Albert knew that she was thinking of her mother as his was long dead. He remained silent.

Jocelyn really could do long multiplication and showed Albert proudly on a paper worn thin and with lots of crossing out. He pretended to check her work.

How old would she be now? he said to Hyacinth, referring to her mother.

Nearly sixty, said Hyacinth.

She might be then, said Albert. Do slaves live that long? I suppose they do.

Doris was standing with her hands in the air. He responded without thought and picked her up. She still smelled of dog.

Doris looks like my mother but not so dark, said Hyacinth with her voice displaying the tenderness which linked them in her mind.

Chapter 2: Hyacinth’s mother

Sunday followed Saturday as it usually does.

Hyacinth worked on the children’s hair thinking why couldn’t they all have good hair like Jocelyn?

Tightly curled hair is a lot of work. Jocelyn could wash and tidy herself now and helped to braid up her little sister who would squirm and squeal as the comb pulled and picked.

Albert watched, thinking about putting on his Sunday clothes. Thinking was tiring. Sunday was not for tiring things except the walk to the chapel in Junction.

They hoped to get back before the rain started again.

Only the visit to the church broke up the week and gave reason to pause from work unless Albert had money for a rum and met his friend Speaker at a bar or Hyacinth found an excuse to chat with a neighbour.

Church was to sing praises to Di Lard which could only be done with exuberant clapping and swaying in the joyful Jamaican way. Albert clapped and swayed like the black Jamaicans around him without the need for any theology.

Most really did love The Lord. They certainly loved to tell him that they did.

The music rose from men and women as from within, rising shared as if from one creation. Everyone felt this and called it God. Anyone really blessed was especially respected when dey in de spirit.

It was a mystery how so many could share an outside bed or take food from another man’s ground in the night and still love the Lord so much and yet they did.

It was a community which loved its children too without much concern for which bed they were conceived in and the children largely loved the church where the girls could wear frilly dresses and have coloured bows in their hair and boys wore clean shirts and trousers and wandered in and out or played when the preacher talked. It is a mystery to this day how children can emerge from rough shacks looking like freshly painted pictures in a story book yet all their mothers new the secrets of this transformation.

No-one timed the start of the praising which was often before the preacher arrived. It would often last the morning unless the end came when those hoping to reach shelter before the rains started began to leave.

Wet good clothes would be carefully hung inside and hoped to dry before they smelled of the damp. It could be hard in the rainy season.

My mother loved her church, said Hyacinth, referring to the slave church on the Beresford estate, reminding Albert of so much which had been shared in their hammocks in the Bellerophon as they lay side by side. Hyacinth’s father had also taken her to an Anglican Church, where she had been baptised, but which would be forever tainted by its association with the plantocracy as the slave owning ruling elite were called.

Albert picked up wordlessly Hyacinth’s yearning but was powerless. He was concerned that he could not travel to her dead father’s estate, no matter who he pretended to be, without too many questions being asked and even though years had passed he could still be returned to the navy where he would be flogged at a grating for desertion and lose his freedom again.

Hyacinth, as a free woman, could travel alone or with a friend but Albert would not even allow her to consider this.

The roads were dangerous, especially for a woman without protection, they had little money and he would have to look after the children. He reminded her that her half brothers were powerful men and still considered her one of her father’s slaves. She could not even be sure of being allowed to see her mother. The best she could hope for was to see her in secret.

Neither she nor Albert had any idea that her father had left a will in Hyacinth’s favour and they greatly underestimated the danger from half-brothers who now owned the large estate after having her declared dead.

Hyacinth had, as Albert knew well, never run from any danger which she understood and she reminded Albert how she could play the lady and had papers to prove that she was a free woman.

No firm decision was made to go. She did not want to leave the children. Albert’s strategy was to keep a low profile whenever her yearning surfaced. He became an expert at distracting Hyacinth and would often find a need to spend time with the children when conversation turned to travelling. He knew her strength of will and that he would be powerless if she once decided to travel.

The cart of life trundled on. There was yet some joy in it if only Hyacinth had been a person to be satisfied with the small pleasures.

On her 25th birthday the horse bolted in Hyacinth’s head and she only found her life tolerable by planning a break.

Her friend Daisy had lost her husband when one day he could no longer pass water and so died in pain. The fragility of life seemed to Hyacinth to demand that she did something. It could almost have been anything but travelling to see her mother was on her mind. Her friend Daisy had no children and was prepared to leave Junction having reached a point in her life when she really didn’t care about anything.

You are not going and that is final said Albert looking at Hyacinth. Her face was alive and her eyes bright.

She was going.

How am I to manage the pic’ny?

Sally will come to look after Doris and Charles. Jocelyn is seven and growing up now. She can keep herself clean and do her own hair.

Sally was a fifteen year old girl. She was physically very unattractive which made her Hyacinth’s ideal choice.

So I have to feed Sally?

That’s why she will come. With her father gone to rum her mother cannot manage and no-one wants her.

Can she comb hair?

Of course, she can.

Albert had never understood how to comb frizzy hair and feared to try. He knew that he would not be able to stop Hyacinth and could only hope that a visit to Hanover, which need not take more than a few days, would bring his wonderful woman safely back to him.

You can’t walk all the way to Hanover. It was his last gambit.

That’s why you are going to get me a horse, smiled Hyacinth.

This was the girl he loved. He began to think about how to find a horse. They had arrived in Junction with a horse nearly eight years before but had bartered it for boards to build the house. It had been too much trouble to feed and would be old now any way.

It will take the last of our money, he grumbled, but Hyacinth knew that this was not true. She sidled up to Albert, placed her face below his, opened her brown eyes wide and said... It didn’t matter what. He was as helpless as a puppy held by its tail.

Daisy will have to walk.

Yes said Hyacinth who planned to take turns on the horse.

Several weeks went by and Albert had still not found a horse.

There ain’t none for sale. He told his increasingly incredulous wife. Eventually a man with a horse for sale appeared outside their house. Hyacinth had put the word out at the Saturday markets. It was a thin creature and not young but could be safely ridden.

Two women travelling alone was indeed dangerous but Hyacinth was a fair skinned mulatto and could play the part of a lady well as she had been brought up in the plantation great house by her indulgent father even though she had remained technically a slave.

Few that she would meet on the road would dare to rob a white lady. The penalty was death.

Albert had also been busy in the market. When the time came to leave they not only had a horse but a strapping youth called Joshua to travel with Hyacinth. Joshua had not needed any persuasion. He wanted adventure and proudly carried a very sharp machete. Joshua was the son of an escaped slave and had no papers which meant that he risked enslavement by any slave owner unscrupulous enough to bribe a magistrate to produce a false bill of sale with Joshua’s name on