A Place Called Freedom (1995)

There were about forty field hands altogether. Apart from the new intake of convicts, most were black slaves. There were four indentured servants, people who had sold four years’ labor in advance to pay for their transatlantic ticket. They kept apart from the others and evidently considered themselves superior. There were only three regular waged employees, two free blacks and a white woman, all past fifty years old. Some of the blacks spoke good English, but many talked in their own African languages and communicated with the whites in a childish kind of pidgin. At first Mack was inclined to treat them as children, then it struck him that they were superior to him in speaking one and a half languages, for he had only one.

They were marched a mile or two across broad fields to where the tobacco was ready to harvest. The tobacco plants stood in neat rows about three feet apart and a quarter of a mile long. They were about as tall as Mack, each with a dozen or so broad green leaves.

The hands were given their orders by Bill Sowerby and Kobe. They were divided into three groups. The first were given sharp knives and set to cutting down the ripe plants. The next group went into a field that had been cut the previous day. The plants lay on the ground, their big leaves wilted after a day drying in the sun. Newcomers were shown how to split the stalks of the cut plants and spear them on long wooden spikes. Mack was in the third group, which had the job of carrying the loaded spikes across the fields to the tobacco house, where they were hung from the high ceiling to cure in the air.

It was a long, hot summer day. The men from the Rosebud were not able to work as hard as the others. Mack found himself constantly overtaken by women and children. He had been weakened by disease, malnutrition and inactivity. Bill Sowerby carried a whip but Mack did not see him use it.

At noon they got a meal of coarse cornbread that the slaves called pone. While they were eating Mack was dismayed, but not completely surprised, to see the familiar figure of Sidney Lennox, dressed in new clothes, being shown around the plantation by Sowerby. No doubt Jay felt that Lennox had been useful to him in the past and might be so again.

At sundown, feeling exhausted, they left the fields; but instead of returning to their cabins they were marched to the tobacco house, now lit up by dozens of candles. After a hasty meal they worked on, stripping the leaves from cured plants, removing the thick central spine, and pressing the leaves into bundles. As the night wore on some of the children and older people fell asleep at their work, and an elaborate warning system came into play, whereby the stronger ones covered for the weak and woke them when Sowerby approached.

It must have been past midnight, Mack guessed, when at last the candles were snuffed and the hands were allowed to return to their cabins and lie down on their wooden bunks. Mack fell asleep immediately.

It seemed only seconds later that he was being shaken awake to go back to work. Wearily he got to his feet and staggered outside. Leaning against the cabin wall he ate his bowl of hominy. No sooner had he stuffed the last handful into his mouth than they were marched off again.

As they entered the field in the dawn light, he saw Lizzie.

He had not set eyes on her since the day they had boarded the Rosebud. She was on a white horse, crossing the field at a walk. She wore a loose linen dress and a big hat. The sun was about to rise and there was a clear, watery light. She looked well: rested, comfortable, the lady of the manor riding about her estate. She had put on some weight, Mack noticed, while he had wasted away from starvation. But he could not resent her, for she stood up for what was right and had thereby saved his life more than once.

He recalled the time he had embraced her, in the alley off Tyburn Street, after he had saved her from the two ruffians. He had held that soft body close to his own and inhaled the fragrance of soap and feminine perspiration; and for a mad moment he had thought that Lizzie, rather than Cora, might be the woman for him. Then sanity had returned.

Looking at her rounded body he realized she was not getting fat, she was pregnant. She would have a son and he would grow up a Jamisson, cruel and greedy and heartless, Mack thought. He would own this plantation and buy human beings and treat them like cattle, and he would be rich.

Lizzie caught his eye. He felt guilty that he had been thinking such harsh thoughts of her unborn child. She stared at first, unsure who he was; then she seemed to recognize him with a jolt. Perhaps she was shocked by the change in his appearance caused by the voyage.

He held her eye for a long time, hoping she would come over to him; but then she turned away without speaking and kicked her horse into a trot, and a moment later she disappeared into the woods.

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