The Master of Dragonard Hill.
Rupert Gilchrist.
PROLOGUE:
A Background of Fire.
Dragonard Plantation, 1791.
St. Kitts, the Leeward Islands, West Indies.
Naomi lingered in the center garden of the greathouse this morning, sitting at the breakfast table and studying the breeding list that had been sent up to her from the slave quarters.
The breeding list told Naomi what black wenches were pregnant and what Negroes had planted the seed in those women.
Naomi herself was black; she had full lips and a slight flare to her nostrils.
But unlike the slaves of Dragonard, Naomi was a free black. She was a white man's mistress. She lived hi the greathouse with an Englishman called Richard Abdee, and among her many privileges, Naomi had a room hung with silken gowns and a European toilette consisting of creams, oils, and powders . . . and a secret lotion for taming the natural kinkiness of her hair, turning it into a flowing mane of loose curls, transforming her from a common Negress into an exotic jemme de salon.
This morning, though, Naomi's hair spread carelessly around her prune-colored face as she studied the breeding list. Her long red fingernails toyed with a piece of almond bread on a Limoges plate as she read the names of the pregnant Negresses.
Suddenly Naomi dropped the bread morsel. She jerked up her head and snatched for a crystal bell sitting on the round table, and quickly beating it in the air, she shrilled, "Nero! Nero!"
Waiting for the servant to answer her call, Naomi looked back to an entry on the, list: Seena. Cookhouse 4.*wench. The X that meant pregnant. But there was no name for the sire.
She rang the bell again.
The servant Nero finally appeared between the swags of gold brocade hanging in the doorway of the center garden.
Nero was a handsome young Negro with broad shoulders, a flat stomach, and well-muscled legs. Although he wore his livery of white breeches and white cotton shut with an air of propriety, he was unable to keep his God-given huskiness from bulging beneath the thinness of these constricting clothes. Nero was like a child given the physique of a man.
Leaning on one arm of her chair, Naomi held the list of names toward Nero and spoke to him as she spoke to all the blacks on Dragonard-as her inferiors. "How many Seenas we got here, boy?"
Nero wrinkled the tobacco-colored skin of his broad forehead and blinked at his slim mistress. He scratched his skullcap of woolly black hair and asked, "How many whats, Miss Naomi?"
"Seenas!" Naomi repeated louder. "It says here that Seena is pregnant. But yesterday I saw the only Seena I know, and she don't look knocked-up to me."
Nero shrugged uninterestedly. He was a house servant, and the details of the slave quarters had little to do with him. He only knew that there was an old black woman in the slave quarters who was in charge of birthing. He answered hi his usual drawl, "If Grandma Goat puts it down there, Miss Naomi, then it must b'e so."
Naomi studied her houseboy. Nero had worked for her before she had moved here. He had been with Naomi in a brothel that she had owned at the south end of this island. She spoke to him honestly. "Boy, it don't say on this list who's responsible for this sucker that Seena's supposed to be having. If it's Manroot's git, why don't it say so here?"
Nero hesitated at the implication of Naomi's question. It was true that the black overseer, Manroot, had been allowed to marry Seena. Nero remembered that Manroot and Seena had gone through the crude ceremony called "jumping the pole." But he also re- 5.membered hearing rumors that Seena was pregnant by another man.
Dipping his head, Nero answered softly, "Like I say, Miss Naomi, I don't really knows about these breeding things of Grandma Goat's."
Naomi impatiently sat on the edge of the gilt chair and demanded, "Talk, Nero. You know more than you're telling me about this. Is Seena pregnant or not?"
Nero tried again, "If Grandma Goat. . ."
Springing from the chair, the wide marabou sleeves of her dressing gown trailing behind her, Naomi screamed, "Damn Grandma Goat! I don't care what that old nigger woman says. Let her run that stud farm for Abdee. I want to know whose baby Seena is having."
Nero still hesitated. He had heard the plantation gossip about Seena spending nights with Abdee, but he did not want to be the one to break this news to his mistress. Nero still could not comprehend the kind of affair that Naomi was having with her Englishman. He only knew that she was his lover and that they were happy together, Naomi read Nero's eyes, and narrowing her own, she said, "Abdee's been fooling around with that Seena, hasn't he?"
She had guessed the facts immediately. Of course. But as it was often difficult for Nero to be loyal to both this black woman who owned him and the white man who owned Dragonard, he tried to hedge his predicament by saying, "Some things here I just don't understand, Miss Naomi."
Naomi said snidery, "You don't have to understand, boy. Abdee and me have the understanding. It's between us. About our screwing. He might be white, but he's nigger at heart. He's all nigger excepting the fact he don't go in for marrying anymore. He just lets his black niggers do that now."
Nero moved uncomfortably from one foot to the other. "Yes, Miss Naomi. I knows that. I knows that Seena went through the marrying ceremony with Man-root."
Naomi slapped the table. "Exactly! With Manroot. And Abdee made Manroot his overseer. Manroot is good, too. But if one thing would kill Manroot-or turn 6.him mean-it would be if some man starts screwing Ms woman. Even Abdee himself."
Nero asked guardedly, "Miss Naomi thinks Manroot causes troubles for somebody if that happens?"
Naomi blurted, " 'Miss Naomi' don't want nobody causing trouble here over nothing. There's too much nigger troubles boiling in these islands already. Boy, niggers are starting to think about themselves. They're putting the torch to crops. They're burning houses. They're killing masters. But this nigger," Naomi said, thumbing her chest, "this nigger is living in one of those big houses with one of those masters, and I don't want no niggers driving me out. Do you understand that, boy? I don't want no flames licking at my little ass!"
Nero looked in horror at Naomi. "You think Man-root do troubles like that at Dragonard, Miss Naomi?"
Naomi relaxed, confessing, "I don't know what that big son-of-a-bitch will do if he gets mad. He worships Abdee. Abdee is one of the few white planters who thinks about niggers. Helps niggers. But if Abdee is helping himself to some of that Seena pussy . . ." She tensed again.
"Who you going to ask about that, Miss Naomi?"
"Ask? Ask what?" She stared blankly at him.
"Who you going to ask if Master Abdee is helping himself to... ?"
Naomi shook her head. "I ain't going to ask nobody nothing, boy. You are! You are going to trot your ass down to Grandma Goat's right now and find out what you can about Seena having this baby."
Nero stood staring at her. Naomi had been his mistress for many years, and he would do anything for her. Nevertheless, he still had to admit to himself that Naomi was a busy nigger, busy protecting everything that she owned, and busy wanting to get more. So, rather than dare question her further, Nero nodded his consent.
Before Nero left to run the errand for Naomi, he bent over the table to begin gathering the breakfast dishes.
Naomi asked sharply, "Why you picking up these dishes, black boy? We got girls to do that!"
7.Continuing to pull the plates and crystal tumblers across the damask cloth toward him, Nero answered truthfully, "It don't hurts me none, Miss Naomi. I'm here so I can do this job, and then I goes down to Grandma Goat's for you."
Naomi flared at him, "The trouble with you, boy, is that you're too goddamned good! You're too goddamned kind! You've got to be selfish to keep your place in this world. You've got to be mean! If you're a nigger like me-and you are, black boy-you've got to be double mean. And double selfish. That's the only way a nigger's going to survive."
Nero listened quietly to Naomi's harangue as he calmly proceeded to stack the plates on the edge of the round table. The harsh words that Naomi was saying to him were true to a certain extent-true for some blacks. But Nero hoped for the day to come when black people did not have to talk this way. He was waiting for the day when black people could all be the good people he knew that they were in their hearts.
When Nero had finished piling the dishes, he looked at Naomi, who was still standing next to him by the table. He said softly, "I sends somebody in to fetch these, Miss Naomi, and then I go down to Grandma Goat's to finds out about that Seena wench."
Putting her hand on Nero's strong forearm, Naomi said softly, "Boy?"
"Yes, Miss Naomi?"
Her red lips began to lift into a 'smile. "Boy, do you go with wenches? Or do you . . . are boys your specialite?"
Grinning widely, Nero nodded at the birthing sheet on the table. He said, "You keep reading that list, Miss Naomi, and you comes to Pinkie. That's me who knocked up Pinkie, Miss Naomi. I'm doing my part for Dragonard, too."
Turning, Nero walked from the center garden.
Naomi watched him leave, looking at the taper of his broad back and the tight chew of his round buttocks. She had owned Nero for eight years now and had never sampled him once. She thought about all the pretty 8.black boys in the world to try and how she still had not got her fill of her white man. She wondered what Nero would look like when she got ready for him.
The morning air outside was hot, thick with the heavy perfume from the oleanders growing hi profusion at the back of the greathouse, and as Nero walked down the back steps to expedite Naomi's demand, he sniffed the rich fragrance and listened to the voices drifting up the grassy slope from the slave quarters.
Nero liked being at Dragonard. He loved the fresh air, free from the stench of the town. He also had grown to appreciate the nearness of the soil, the activity in the fields, the busyness in the slave quarters, the whole world here that was detached from the rest of the island.
St. Kitts was a sixty-five-square-mile island of rich volcanic loam that the colonials had found was ideal for growing sugarcane. The white people on St. Kitts were outnumbered now ten to one by the blacks. The white islanders were mostly English, and it was they who had changed the island's name from St. Christopher to simply St. Kitts.
St. Kitts had a bloody history. The English and the French had been fighting for dominance here well over three hundred years. But now that the French were having a revolution hi their homeland, the English were certain that they could stay hi power on this fish-shaped speck of land located in the Leeward Islands of the West Indies.
Like the island of St. Kitts, this plantation at the north end of the island also had a past of French ownership. But that was in the days before it was flourishing as well as it was now, prior to the time that Richard Abdee had come to be master of this plantation, long ago when Naomi still owned her brothel at the south end of St. Kitts and Nero worked for her there.
Looking back at those old days at the brothel in Basseterre, it seemed only natural to Nero that Richard Abdee should have found his way to Chez Naomi. It was in that busy house on Barracks Lane that Abdee had discovered a soulmate and a friend in Naomi. After all, there was not much difference between a whore like 9.Naomi and a whip master like Abdee, was there? They had both sold themselves for money.
Whip master was the job that Abdee had done when he had first come to St. Kitts, a slave master for the government. In fact, it was from that job of whipping that Abdee had got the name for this plantation. Dragonard. "Dragonard" had been the title for the man who flogged the slaves in the main square-the Circus -of Basseterre. The word "dragonard" had come from the name of the splayed-tip whip that the original French mercenaries had used on the blacks, the whip that reputedly had the bite of a dragon's tongue. But the English government had long since abandoned that post of discipline in Basseterre-the dragonard-and it was only Abdee who kept the name alive here on this plantation, which used to be called Petit Jour.
These memories about St. Kitts and the plantation slipped from Nero's mind now as he saw the bulky shape of Sugar Loaf standing on the edge of the vegetable garden.
Sugar Loaf was the cook at Dragonard, and in the two years that Nero had worked in the greathouse with her, he had never seen the ebullient black woman without her enormous white-folded turban bobbing on her head and the two silver-star earrings dangling from her fat brown lobes. Sugar Loaf and Nero had come to be good friends.
Standing now with her chubby brown hands anchored on her wide hips, Sugar Loaf called to Nero, "Boy, you looking for work to do?"
"I'm doing work," Nero answered cheerily. "I'm running an errand for Miss Naomi."
At the mention of the name, Sugar Loaf pushed her flat nose to the air. The towering folds of her turban shook like the stiff petals of an enormous white gardenia. She said, "Miss Naomi! Ha!"
Nero called to her, "When you going to be friends with Miss Naomi?"
Sugar Loaf held her head at a proud angle, answering, "Miss Naomi, she a free nigger. How's I ever going to be friends with a fine lady like ycfur Miss Naomi?"
10.Nero smiled. "You just don't like niggers putting on airs, do you, Sugar Loaf?"
Folding her arms, Sugar Loaf shouted, "I just don't like niggers, boy. Niggers is lazy. Now you gets on your errand or comes here and sees what you can do about this garden patch. Look at these weeds! Just look at these weeds! I asks you, is the cook meant to weeds the garden patch, too?"
Nero could see that the garden did not need weeding. But he knew that Sugar Loaf liked to complain. Griping and complaining, she always said, that was what kept her young.
Waving good-bye to his fat friend, Nero continued to saunter down the hill from the greathouse.
Now, walking with a happy lilt, Nero began to feel warm. He was warmed not only by the sun but also by the wonderful feeling of living in a home with black people he knew, in a place where there were vegetables growing in the garden, regular meals to devour every morning, noon, and night, and people working the earth.
Nero heard many black people saying bad things about being owned by white people, but judging from what he saw at Dragonard, Nero thought that living like this was the same as living in an all-black community that supported itself. Dragonard, it seemed to Nero, was like a village that had no visible dependency on the outside world. Dragonard made its own laws, and as far as Nero knew, the black people here benefited from most of them.
Nero slowed his gait at the bottom of the grassy hill when he saw three black men sitting in the shade of the washhouse. He recognized two of the men as Shorty and Puck, the two painters whose job it was to keep the outbuildings of Dragonard whitewashed and sparkling clean.
Now both Shorty and Puck lounged on the steps of the washhouse with their wooden buckets sitting at their bare feet. They were talking to a stranger. He was a Negro dressed smartly in tight white breeches, a white shirt, and a wide-brimmed panama hat. He must be a town nigger, Nero thought at first glance, a free black man.
11.The coal-faced stranger turned his head toward the hill, and shading his eyes against the sun, called to Nero, "Morning, Nero! How you like living up here?"
Nero stopped and looked quizzically at the black stranger in the panama hat. Then, recognizing the tribal marks slashed into his black cheeks, he gasped, "Calabar!"
This slim man named Calabar called back to Nero, "You only know me from those nights down at Naomi's whorehouse. But I used to live on this place myself. I used to ride down from here when I came to Naomi's ... Now, what name did Naomi call her special parties? Her . . . what she call them . . . her soirees!"
Nero stood dumbstruck, staring at Calabar. His mind went back to Chez Naomi, to the candlelit basement where Naomi had held those masked gatherings where white people could pay money to watch other people performing strange acts. And remembering why Naomi had hired Calabar to perform at her entertainments in the cellar, Nero's eyes went directly to the crotch of Calabar's tight breeches.
Raising both hands from between his legs, Calabar bragged, "Still got my old pecker there, boy. Still got it. But like me, my old pecker is free to poke where it likes."
Nero said coldly, "If you and your pecker so free now, Calabar, why you poking it back here?" He was also remembering what a troublemaker that Calabar had been.
"I came to look around, boy. And I sees a lot of things changed around here since Mistress Honore gave me my freedom papers. But you didn't know Mistress Honore, did you, boy? Mistress Honore was my mistress here. But Abdee came along and married her and then kicked her white ass off the place. He didn't even take no mercy on her being pregnant. Pregnant by him." Calabar laughed.
Nero stared at Calabar. He knew for certain that he was up to some kind of trouble.
Calabar did not take long to begin. "That man Abdee, he's not all he seems to be, you know, boy. No white people's what they seems to be. I comes now from 12.an island called Santo Domingo, and I knows. I sees white people there doing terrible things to us black people. But I also sees, boy, what us black people do for ourselves ... if we tries."
Nero remembered Naomi telling him about Negroes rebelling and burning houses. He asked, "You comes here to make trouble, Calabar?"
Calabar smiled at Nero. "Miss Naomi, she used to pay me to make trouble, pretty boy."
Nero knew enough about those facts to argue with Calabar. "But that was just showing off in her cellar. That was just games. Spanking white ladies and poking little girls with your big pecker. That was just doing games for white people to see whiles they're drinking French wines!"
Calabar bragged, "I made some trouble for Abdee once, too, boy. I made some big trouble for Abdee right up there in that fine white house on that hill behind you. You ask your master about that trouble sometimes, boy. Or you go find some of those Fanti niggers and see what they have to say about Abdee and me and some slaver called Captain Geoff Shanks."
As Calabar chuckled now, Nero suddenly saw that all of his white teeth had been filed to sharp points. Nero remembered Calabar having tribal marks and a poker-sized prick, but he did not recall his teeth being as pointed as a shark's.
He asked Calabar, "What you come back here to do? You trying to turn our people against Master Abdee, Calabar?"
Still chuckling, Calabar shook his head. "Friend! Friend! 1 thought a couple years of life here might makes you grows up to be a man. But you still gots those stars in your eyes, boy. You've still got big hopes shining hi those soft eyes of yours."
Then, suddenly, Calabar changed the subject. He asked Nero brightly, "How's Manroot? I hears Man-root's overseer here now. That makes him thinks Abdee is a real good master, I bet. Being overseer keeps Manroot busy, too, I bet. Probably too tired at night to notice..."
Calabar paused, turning to his two companions on the 13.steps beside him, and asked, "What's the name of Man-root's woman? They call her . . . what they calls her ... Seena?"
Nero's mind suddenly became confused with facts and obligations. He knew that Calabar had somehow discovered the secret about Abdee knocking up Seena, and realizing that, Nero remembered the errand on which Naomi had sent him.
But the visit down to Grandma Goat's shack would just have to wait. Nero had to go quickly back up the hill to tell Naomi who had come back into their lives. Calabar had always meant trouble.
It was night now, the end of the hot day, and a change of light had come over the island. As the daylight hours at Dragonard had the fierceness of the sun to show the rises and dips of its tropical terrain, at night it was the moon, the glowing phosphorescent moon, which illumined the fields and the lush creeping foliage of the surrounding jungles.
The greathouse sat high and proud in this stark blanket of moonlight, its white walls reflecting the glow like a mirrored Kashmir! box, the double surround of windows spilling their own contribution of light out onto the circular driveway in front of the house and over the bulky border of oleanders on the other three sides.
Unlike the blaze of the daytime hours, the slave quarters in the valley behind the greathouse lay silent in the moon rays. Down there it had become the routine of the Negroes to go to bed at the sound of the nine-o'clock bell, and by midnight they were fast asleep, only four hours away from the morning bell for another workday. This early-to-retire, early-to-work routine was all part of the discipline that Richard Abdee had imposed on the plantation since he had become master here.