Roaring Girls by Holly Kyte

Author:Holly Kyte
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-11-21T17:00:00+00:00

A VERY INDECENT MAN

In 1805, when she was about 17, Mary swapped one hell for another. She was joyful at first when Captain Ingham sold her off to a new master on Turk’s Island,[11] but that joy soon drained away. So far, she had been a domestic slave, attending mostly to household chores, but she was about to experience life as a plantation slave. Now the property of a Mr D— of Grand Quay – since identified as Robert Darrell[12] – she was handed a half-barrel and a shovel on arrival and immediately put to work knee-deep in his salt-water ponds. The slaves worked from 4 a.m. until 9 a.m., at which point they were given a little maize boiled in water, before being sent back into the ponds to work through the heat of the day, ‘the sun flaming upon our heads like fire’. Such conditions bred horrendous physical side-effects: the unrelenting heat caused ‘salt blisters in those parts which were not completely covered’, while ‘our feet and legs, from standing in the salt water for so many hours, soon became full of dreadful boils, which eat down in some cases to the very bone.’ They endured this all day, until dark, when they went to sleep ‘in a long shed, divided into narrow slips, like the stalls used for cattle’.

As for Mr Darrell himself, Mary soon realised that she had merely gone ‘from one butcher to another’. His torments varied in nature. To humiliate her, he made a spiteful joke of her name, calling her ‘Mary, Princess of Wales’ – it being a ‘common practice with the colonists’, Pringle tells us, ‘to give ridiculous names of this description to their slaves’ as a means ‘of expressing the habitual contempt with which they regard the negro race’.[13] And of course the floggings continued, though by now, Mary says, ‘there was nothing very remarkable in this’ – it was the ‘common usage’ of slaves on that ‘horrible island’. Just as Captain Ingham had done, Mr Darrell ‘often stripped me naked, hung me up by the wrists, and beat me with the cow-skin, with his own hand, till my body was raw with gashes’, although Mary noticed one chilling difference between the two men: ‘my former master used to beat me while raging and foaming with passion; Mr D— was usually quite calm. He would stand by and give orders for a slave to be cruelly whipped, and assist in the punishment, without moving a muscle of his face; walking about and taking snuff with the greatest composure.

‘Nothing could touch his hard heart,’ Mary adds, ‘neither sighs, nor tears, nor prayers, nor streaming blood.’ If Darrell’s slaves got sick, they were given hot salt water to make them sicker. If they couldn’t keep up with the others, they were put in the stocks and flogged. Even the old and infirm were not spared. Mary tells of Darrell’s barbaric torture of an old man named Daniel: he beat him with a ‘rod

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