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Johnnie nodded.
“Have another, eh?”
Johnnie accepted a glass and diluted it again.
“The trouble with this place,” Samuel told him. “You won’t know, coming as you do from London, not yet seasoned, knowing nothing but the old country… The trouble with this place is…” He had lost his thread. He blinked owlishly at the punch glass in his hand. “Bowl’s dry,” he announced, and raised his voice and bellowed for Bonny to bring more rum and lemons and sugar.
“Do you have a very large plantation?” Johnnie asked politely, and Mr. Peabody explained that it was his wife’s dowry and not nearly big enough for a man of his ambition, but that he would buy more land whenever there was any to be had. He would buy a new mill with triple rollers as soon as he completed the design. The rich old families, like his father-in-law, might sell up and retire to England, but the new men, the brilliant young men like himself, had to compete for land on a small island and speed up the harvest to make a profit.
“They’ve got to go faster,” he insisted. “Faster.”
“How I should like to see it,” Johnnie hinted.
Samuel Peabody declared that nothing was easier. Nobody in England had manners anymore, but Johnnie would find that in Barbados the traditions of old England—he waved his hand to indicate some fabled time—possibly Good Queen Bess—were maintained, and any man was given a great dinner at any man’s door.
“White men,” Johnnie confirmed.
“Rich men,” Samuel agreed. “Not scoundrels…” Again he lost his complaint in the bottom of the punch bowl. “Good health.”
“I may visit you?” Johnnie pressed.
“You go to any house, any house in Barbados, and you’ll find awelcome,” Mr. Peabody told Johnnie fondly. “Glad to see a new face. We don’t stint…”
He poured another cup of punch. “There’s so few of us,” he said thoughtfully. “We have to stick together.”
“Few of you?” Johnnie thought of the crowded street, the babel at the quayside, the sweat of all the bodies crushed together and the churn of men running after profit.
“Few of us planters,” Samuel Peabody explained. “Few of us masters.”
Johnnie realized he meant white men, and that living with hundreds of people he was lonely; drowning in wealth, he thought himself hard done by.
“There’s so very many of them…” Samuel complained.
“But it’s you who bring them in? You buy them in? More and more every year? They would not be here if you did not order them to be kidnapped from their homes?”
“I don’t think anyone realized how terrible it would be,” Mr. Peabody confided damply, his eyes watering.
“For the slaves?”
“For us. For us! My God—trying to live like this? Live like it, and make it last forever? Setting the laws so they’re never freed, can never escape. Setting the punishments so we can kill them rather than they endanger us? Always looking behind, never anyone you can trust…”
“It’s bad?” Johnnie queried, seeing his host dissolve into tears of self-pity.
“It’s the finest life in the world,” Samuel Peabody contradicted himself with drunken insistence. “It’s England as it was! As it ought to be. The most beautiful houses, and the most beautiful women, there’s nowhere that people live better, there’s nowhere richer—nowhere. It’s the richest country in the world! And it’s tradition. It’s natural that one race should rule another.” He drank deeply. “But it’s like eating children,” he said, mumbling without meaning. “It might be the sweetest flesh in the world but sickening. Sickening!”
“You eat children?” Johnnie asked horrified.
“We eat sugar. And sugar eats them. We eat up the children of Africa.”
Johnnie waited in case he said more, but Samuel Peabody was fastasleep. Johnnie went to the parlor door and opened it. Mr. Peabody’s black slave woman was sleeping, propped up against the doorjamb. She leapt to her feet, rubbing her eyes, when she felt the door move. She saw Johnnie standing in the doorway.
“He’s asleep.”
She nodded and turned to go towards the kitchen to fetch slaves to lift the big white drunk man into bed.
“He invited me to the plantation. Will he remember that? And then he was unhappy,” Johnnie told her.
“He’ll remember he asked you,” Bonny told him. “He’ll forget he cried.”
