Scott Dangerous Freedom

1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-9997768-8-6
Verlag: Papillote Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

'They tell you one thing but you are not free.' London in 1802 is a dangerous place for black people, unsure of their legal status and threatened by slave catchers. Elizabeth d'Aviniere, the mixed race great-niece of the Lord Chief Justice, who had spent her childhood in his home, now fears for her own children's safety and yearns for her mother, an African-born enslaved woman. Why did she no longer write? Was she dead? Had she been recaptured? Dangerous Freedom weaves fact with fiction to reveal 'the great deception' exercised by the powerful on the child known as Dido as seen through the eyes of the adult Elizabeth. This magnificent and radical portrayal of a known historical character adds to our understanding of a trauma that continues to exist just below the surface of contemporary life.

Lawrence Scott is a prize-winning novelist and short story writer from Trinidad & Tobago. He was recently inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, 2019. He was awarded a Lifetime Literary Award in 2012 by the National Library of Trinidad & Tobago for his significant contribution to the Literature of Trinidad & Tobago. His first novel, Witchbroom (1992) was read as a BBC Book at Bedtime, and republished by Papillote Press (2017). His most recent book, the collection of stories, Leaving by Plane Swimming Back Underwater, 2015, was longlisted for The Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2016, the Grand Prix Littéraire de l'Association des Ecrivains de la Caraïbe from the Congrès des Ecrivains de la Caraïbe, Guadeloupe, 2017 and the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award, 2015. His other novels are Light Falling on Bamboo (2012), Night Calpyso (2004) and Aelred's Sin (1998). He lives in London and Trinidad.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Scott, Lawrence

Leseproben

1

AT THIS TIME of her life Elizabeth d’Aviniere was living in a modest house on Ranelagh Street. It was the winter of 1802 and the last of autumn lingered in the fallen leaves. Another war was stirring. She felt that she was in a fortunate state, though not with all her freedoms. Many of those had been threatened or never given. But, nevertheless, she was satisfied now with her husband and her sons, and mostly occupied with her memories, which on evenings came gently, as evenings could.

She recalled when she was a small girl swaying in a hammock in a different climate with its brief sunset, her mother telling her the story of her life. Is four years since you born on your father ship. We up and down the islands. Remember the year, child, 1761. You go have to write it down one day. The ribbons of light then were mixed with the shadows on the pitch-pine floor of the porch. They swung to and fro in a silence filled with the breaking of the waves on the nearby shore and the scratching sound of palm branches in the breeze; a long long time ago, as her mother would say in her singsong voice. That was in Pensacola, the British port in Florida. It was a geography her father had taught Elizabeth with his maps, pointing to where he had bought her mother from the auction block and then put her in his house, which was on the front with the tall ships moored between the shore and Santa Rosa Island.

Light was different here on Ranelagh Street, not far from the banks of the River Thames where the creeks, water meadows and marshes lay just beyond the streets of Pimlico, choked in spring and summer with nettles. It had been her home for these last eight years. What was even more different now was her name, that she was called Elizabeth, or Lizzie, by her husband, John. He would keep to formalities in public, calling her Mrs d’Aviniere. But he called her Lizzie when he greeted her with kisses and cuddles, whispering, Lizzie, Lizzie, Lizzie darling, like a young lover. How sweet it was now to have his name in marriage, a proper surname, a real name, a free name, not that silly name, Dido, not that slave name. Her sons called her Mama. She was fortunate, she had to keep telling herself, despite the loss of her mother. Was she like Mr Olaudah Equiano, the African, a particular favourite of Heaven as that author’s narrative so elegantly described his circumstances? She hoped that her pen would work a similar magic in the telling of her tale.

Her mother’s voice was talking of rivers as Elizabeth settled down to write her story: far over there and so long. She traced the distances on her father’s map, which he had given her during one of his last visits, long ago when she was a child in London. She pressed out the creases where it lay upon the table, travelling with her fingers from the hinterland of the large continent to the coast where they had lived at that time. Is an eternity they take, oui, girl. She remembered her mother teaching her to pronounce the name Mis sis sip pi.

Elizabeth’s tongue had been straightened out to fit into England though she always felt that she had never quite achieved what was expected. People still turned and looked at her, even now, and sometimes asked her origin, though they could always see it plainly, she thought. This left her feeling uneasy.

Some of her more gentle memories and her mother’s stories of Pensacola were filled with names, just sounds now, like those of the birds that sang in the trees, Creek and Chickasaw, Choctaw and the name that made them laugh aloud, almost falling out of the hammock, Chief Cowkeeper. Her mother would go on to talk to her of the rivers: Apalachicola, Yazoo, Matanzas forming thoroughfares to reach the north by ship and canoe, paddling on and on. Far, far away, they say, her mother said. She had once asked her father if she might ever go there on a canoe. He had smiled as he often did, shaking his head, No, my pet, his favourite expression when talking to her then.

Elizabeth listened more intently when her mother started to tell a harder story.

We find them people here when we reach by boat and they drop the anchor in the harbour, we so exhausted, so starved and thirsty and not daring to think that we might step upon land again, them chains such a part of we limbs that not to have them shackled to each other, to our ankles and to the boards, don’t seem usual and ordinary at all when we come to stand upon the dry ground and have to walk, stumbling like we accustom on the deck of that terrible ship.

Elizabeth enjoyed making up her mother’s voice. She wrote it as she heard her speak. To find her on her tongue was to keep her close, to try it on the page was to keep her even closer and not to lose her, ever.

She had promised to keep on writing and to send for her. Elizabeth never found out why her mother had stopped writing, after only one letter, despite all the letters she herself had written: Dearest Mammy… Had she been recaptured? It remained a mystery, despite the many inquiries Elizabeth had made over the years. When she had asked her father on his infrequent visits he always answered, Soon, my pet. Then she had asked her Master the Lord Mansfield, and his wife Lady Betty, and then, above all, Beth, her Master’s great-niece, her sometime childhood companion. They had all evaded her questions.

Elizabeth used to wonder if they — to whom her father had given her on arriving in England — had ever really understood her and her loss. For while she grew up seeming so obliging and grateful, as they said she was, of such an amiable disposition and so accomplished, as they saw it, gaining her Master’s highest respect and that of his relations and visitors to the house, they, nevertheless, were always so surprised, eyes growing larger, eyebrows so raised. There was no knowing what they had really expected to see. She is so black, they would say in consternation. What had they imagined? What had they been told about her? At the same time, she kept the loss and the sadness hidden. While it had not destroyed her, maybe even made her who she had become, her whole mind and body were still filled with longing, her longing for her mother.

Time will not wait for me now, she said to herself. How much longer did she have? She pondered this question more than ever, her illness being so unpredictable as Dr Featherstone would say. Would her mother ever write after all this time, Elizabeth not writing either? Where was she now? The world was constantly being altered with the changing geography and boundaries of countries belonging to this one here and then to another there, people in their thousands captured and transported each day from one place to another.

Where Elizabeth sat looking through the French windows she was already anticipating the first intimations of the spring with the snowdrops, looking forward to the crocuses and the other bulbs that she had planted with the bluebells. Christmas, a quiet one for her, had come and gone so quickly. Her illness had forced the lack of celebrations at home. Mr d’Aviniere had taken the boys to his twin sister, Martha, at Isledon, where she lived near the wells. She did not have children of her own. Poor Martha, with all she had gone through with her brother, was pleased to have the twins and William Thomas; twins ran in the family, it seemed. With her they had enjoyed the jugglers and other circus acts. Then no sooner was the festive season over than it was January with February approaching. Where was her time disappearing?

She drifted off to the sound of Lydia’s sweeping; Lydia who had come with her from Caen Wood, her Master’s residence. Elizabeth was imagining the yellow of the increasing sunshine which would get filtered through the willows and eventually light up all the new colours: the fresh green of the weeping silver birch, the patchwork of her different plants so well looked after by Seamus, Lydia’s brother and their new lodger.

Lydia now called her Ma’am. That was very different from long ago when she had called her, Miss Dido. There she was, a good ten years older than herself, a kind of mother once, a kind of nurse, walking along the garden path after sweeping up the leaves, still with flame in her hair, now tied into a bun and constantly doing everything in the house and looking after the boys. She looked up from her sweeping and waved to Elizabeth, smiling with that broad smile which so often broke into laughter and a story, making the most ordinary things extraordinary.

In warmer weather Elizabeth would sit outside constantly following the sun’s journey to find the strategic warm patches around her garden — the rose-covered arbour was her favourite spot outside for writing, once it was not too cold — till eventually the evening brought the shadows to her sequestered spot. She would sit there with her sloping, Japanned writing-box with its lacquered inlays. It had been a gift from her Master when she had begun in earnest to do his secretarial work, reading to him and writing his letters. You are my amanuensis, he had said then, such a long time ago.

Elizabeth knew that she had to reconcile herself to the truth that she had not heard her mother’s voice for the last twenty-eight years. How old would her mother be now? Fifty-seven? Would that be correct? She counted. She had hardly been a girl of sixteen when she had given birth, she had told her. She must have been fourteen or fifteen when Elizabeth’s father bought her off the...