Forty-six years old


Time away from one’s diary is as valuable as a little time away from one’s lover. Absence not only softens the tender feelings toward the belovéd other, it also provides the benefit of perspective, that renders the object of affection so much more precious and beautified. So, too, with quill, ink and leaf – I reunite my body with my mind and the pleasure this act gives me has grown rather than diminished. For I speak and write to purpose, now. I seek to lay forth a history that speaks of all the truths of my life up to this present day. To survey – like the architect of my own life – the line I have followed that brought me here – my history. Not chaotically rendered – as in my earliest diary entries – no, as I see them now – put together – to make sense of the whole.

This, for you, my son – William Leach Osborne Sancho – born last Friday the twentieth day of October – exactly at half past one in the afternoon – my second son – my only living son. I will speak to you as you will be – as I see you in my mind’s eye – when you will find these pages carefully concealed in my old room at Windsor Castle. I speak to Billy, the gentleman. The instructions for finding these will be given to you before I pass. I know with a certain knowledge that I will not live to see you at man’s estate. So, here am I – addressing the man, Billy Sancho.

‘Know thy father – and forgive him…’

I will not stint on necessary detail but have no time for flights of fantasy or anecdote not pertinent to my aim, neither. Which is no less than to render the truth of a complex web of a life – a life lived in many kingdoms – or so it seems to me presently. I am now a shop-owner. ‘But hold … enough.’ I gallop ahead and must grasp the reins of my memory more firmly.

Much of the following comes from my diary entries over the years – I will record my retrospective interjections – these may be useful in aiding my Billy to navigate the story of your father’s life thus far.

This rendering may benefit Older Sancho, too – when time has eroded precision in recollection of even the most momentous twists and turns of a long life. I began writing a diary in earnest at the age of seventeen – those entries will appear in these pages as I see fit. For the present, I will begin at the beginning.


1729

Origins


I had, on reflection, little right to survive. Born on a slave ship crossing the Atlantic Ocean on what is quaintly described as the middle passage. I now say a slave ship is neither in a passage nor does it navigate the middle of anywhere. It sails straight to the heart of hell.

My future articulacy would have astounded my master, standing a safe distance from the helpless African girl of unknown origin. A daughter of Eve, from somewhere along the Guinea Coast. Neither would it have occurred as a possibility to my terrified boy-father – traumatised by the last days’ events and near paralysed – emasculated – by fear of the unknown. In contrast, his wife – my mother – is simply – luckily – lost in the bewildered agony of a painful breech-birth. Lucky to be together at all, these child-parents, captured and sold as slaves, I would guess, by a rival tribe’s chief. The human spoils of war.

Lucky!

A charnel house of black flesh, this – cramped and rank with rat droppings and the spillage of a thousand filthy slop buckets. Filth – amassed over the fifteen years of this ship’s barbaric life. A life spent plying its brutal, unfeeling trade between the pestilential slaughterhouses of the Guinea or Slave Coast, and the slow death of plantation life in the Americas which awaited the cursed souls who were doomed to never return home. Neither they nor their offspring. A permanently lost tribe.

* * *

Let us roam. Leaving the child-parents to their agonies for a moment, let us venture to the next deck down. No – not that lower, mezzanine deck, that one is for the piccaninnies. They can really pack them in there. Conveniently small, these little ones; they hardly complain at all but simply lie in stupefied terror. All the better. Much less trouble that way. Quieter. No, we need to look at the lowest deck.

We find the men’s quarters, quite the largest space in the ship. Roomy. Or at least it would be, if three hundred men were not crammed head-to-toe so tightly that no room can be afforded for the slightest movement, without feeling the calloused skin of a stranger’s feet – or the tangled, woolly roughness of the hair of one’s neighbour – pungently ripe with sweat – and the acrid smell of fear and death. The rhythmic rolling of the ship, accompanied by the groans of hundreds of men who cannot speak or understand each other’s languages. Divide and rule starts early in the seasoning process. That shameless word for the conditioning for a life of slavery, that the white and black traders along this treacherous coast give to the slave apprenticeship. An apprenticeship that starts in earnest once the enslaved soul has reached their destination. Usually, a plantation of one kind or another. Cotton, sugar cane, tobacco: crops that bring ready money. Commerce – where will your cruelty end?

* * *

Let us hurry back up to the birth cabin. Our young mother-to-be is about to bring our main subject forth. Past the mid-deck with the women and young girls’ deck, half the area of that of the men, and made more uncomfortable for them by the fact that some are in stages of pregnancy akin to our lady above – who, now we see, has expired … There is the dumbstruck master – the Surgeon charged with midwifery duties, guiltily sullen – the near-catatonic gaze of the frightened boy-father – now without a soul who knew him free … He has the fleeting notion to bolt from the room – perhaps, to fling himself overboard – broken by the loss of his wife, his life’s companion. Futile. He will be shackled below with the rest.

What of the debris left in the wake of this storm of grief? The mewling, puking infant boy – soon baptised Charles Ignatius, after the father of the Jesuits, and growing strong and round – always round – in New Granada.

* * *

On arrival, Billy, when first my father – your grandfather – saw that the colour of the majority of labourers on that benighted dock matched his own, he set his eye on a dozing overseer’s unguarded scabbard – seized the man’s sword – then swiftly slipped the blade from his own guts to his heart, before any had time to register the act. He died in merciful seconds and my world contracted, yet again.

This – the story I have pieced together from the fragments I harvested from servants’ gossip – the indiscretions of my guardians – my own meditations – my nightmares. My story is just that – a story. Neither better nor worse than any enslaved orphan of Afric’s.

* * *

I have few recollections of life on the plantation in New Granada. I have meditated on this over time, and now believe that my owner shielded me from seeing the worst of that hateful world. Guilt, at his part in my status as orphan, may have caused him to keep me in the house with him. I cannot tell. There was some affection there, surely, as his next was an act of undeniable kindness towards a little black child. When I was three years old, he took me to England. I know him as Mr Henry – though I cannot remember if that was his name, or the name my mistresses later gave him – possibly to prevent me knowing my true origins. But eavesdropping is the art of necessity for the alien. Fragments of information may be gleaned in this way that may later save a life … I was sent to live with my master’s three maiden aunts in Royal Greenwich – near London. I will not name them, however, but give them false names.

Though these ladies were very particular about their household, they reckoned ‘the black’ would make a fine addition to their entourage. What household of any note was truly complete without a black pet to bring comfort and entertainment? And so, I quickly became Sancho, after a seeming likeness to the rotund servant of Cervantes’ hero, Don Quixote. A sweet and affectionate compliment in their eyes. In mine, an early intimation that my name – indeed my life – would not be my own with any great alacrity. Sancho – for that was how I would be known for ever after this casual renaming – grew to be a polite and witty child, Tilly tells me. Dressed up in, say, the garb of an Arabian prince one day, topped with gold silk turban – a swarthy pirate the next. Docile and malleable. What child does not enjoy make-believe? I recall little of these very early days. Tilly – my only ally in this strict and watchful household – told me much when I came of an age to ask. Tilly Grant. Sixteen or seventeen years old, then? A girl who sometimes confused terror with obedience. Easily done, as it was tricky negotiating the contrasting but uniformly demanding natures of these Sisters Three. Abigail – the unofficial leader – tall, imperious with an air of great superiority; Beatrice, plump, pale and cursed with a persistent sniffle; Florence, painfully thin, uncompromising and didactic, a walking stick permanently in her hand; though Tilly and I privately guessed she used it more for effect and to stand out from the other two.

One of the Sisters’ favourite turns was to have me play Sancho Panza in extracts from Don Quixote, alongside an aged, drunken buffoon of an amateur thespian, one of their acquaintances. This actor’s trick was to bring a well-worn hobby-horse as a prop and use it, suggestively, as Rocinante – his ass; placing it provocatively between his legs and making riding motions. Quite tedious. For my part, I always felt myself fortunate not to have been named after the beast rather than the servant. Despite panza in the Spanish meaning belly – and despite my ready acknowledgement that I was – I remain, yes – quite roly-poly, I also knew myself to be lucky to not have one of those daft names the other black servant boys I rarely met had been burdened with: Pompey. Caesar. Hannibal. Or worse, Mungo. Besides, it’s true to say that my appetite has been my Achilles heel, as well as stomach and legs, all my life.

* * *

Witness today: the Demon Gout, my constant – unwelcome – companion.

One momentous evening’s entertainment at the home of the Greenwich Coven cannot pass without some detailed attention in these pages, for it changed my life forevermore. I was no more than seven years old, and my story takes a dangerous twist, now.

But I must leave off for the night – Anne Osborne waits for no man. To bed.


1736

Seven years old


One night, when I was seven years old, the Sisters decided to turn theatrical impresarios, and had myself and that old, drunken fool of an actor – their acquaintance – play a scene or two before a group of select friends in their large, first-floor drawing room. The piano was pushed into the corner; the velvet drapes adorning the large window framed our stage (windowsill); the candles were lit. The guest-of-honour, newly arrived in London and known to few then: David Garrick. Soon to be, undisputedly, the greatest actor of our times, though I was only many years afterward told he was present – by the man himself. My part was conned by rote, naturally, hearing and repeating lines as Florence delivered them – they would not suffer me to learn to read.

* * *

Spoilage of Negroes through education is studiously avoided by many of our Enlightened European masters and mistresses, Billy. You will not grow so ignorant as I, my lad: this I vow by heaven.

* * *

This night, our amateur thespian, already the worse for several glasses of port and a very large supper, tangled himself up in a Gordian Knot of curtain, cloak, limbs and scenery. His battle with the windmills he had short-sightedly mistaken for giants, turned out to be a very physical battle with scenery, costume and, finally, gravity. Professional that I was, however, I did not speak extempore but used the very words of Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra to express my dismay:

‘“Did not I tell your worship, to mind what you were about for they were only windmills? And no one could have made any mistake about it but one who had something of the same kind in his head.”’

Strange thing. My genuine tears rendered the adults in the room pin-drop silent. Then, a wave of surprised and enthusiastic applause. Two strong gentlemen lifted me onto their shoulders – nearly tumbling over with me, as my bulk for such a small child caught them off guard – and paraded me in triumph around the salon, the crowd madly clapping. Coins were thrown at the stage, and even Mr Garrick raised his glass to me, he says. The Greenwich Coven were content to be lavished with so much unexpected praise and attention; they had ‘bred the little savage well’, I overheard several guests declare …

* * *

I found it impossible to sleep. The evening had been too exhilarating to embrace an abrupt ending. Tiptoeing, stealthily, from my room at the top of the house, I crept down the stairs. What was I intending? To stand in the window alcove, again, and relive my triumph? To find more of those coins thrown – against all social convention and, indeed, taste – by the enthusiastic crowd? A penny or two to add to my little box of treasures, perhaps?

* * *

In that precious old tea caddy, which I kept for many years under my bed, one would then have found a small, beautiful shell, from New Granada, my first home, its lapis lazuli-like surface a constant lure to my eyes; and the outsized ring Mr Henry took from his own finger to give to me – a memento, with a shining green gem set into it. Tilly had to palm it, like a cut-purse, for fear the Sisters would confiscate so valuable a thing given to a boy so young.

* * *

But I never reached the drawing room, or even the end of the staircase. For, on the landing, I saw a book. Mother Goose’s Tales. A book Miss Abigail had read to me whilst I was ill in bed with a passing fever. An incongruously pleasant – maternal? – memory. Ordinarily, Miss Abigail would take me into her bed at night. I was not to tell the others, she had warned me, for they could be jealous. So, she would come and fetch me in those days – when she felt the need of me. Not every night, but frequently. Not to embrace me – simply for her own comfort. It seemed to me, at those times when I was lying nervously beside that granite-faced woman, as if this were my employment. In many ways, it was. To bring comfort to three lonely ladies. Strange to say, but that bout of fever was like a holiday from my daily life. A break from my usual treatment in the household. I often – without a trace of guilt – longed to be ill. But – damn it – was I not cursed with the most robust of constitutions?

The brightness of the outer shell of this precious book caught my eyes, as it sparkled, red and gold, beneath the flickering candlelight. I caressed the cover lovingly – turned it over and – ‘words, words, words’ – mysterious signs and hieroglyphs – indecipherable to me, naturally, but fascinating all the same. I thought: If only I had the key to unlock this knowledge. These stories. How far could I travel? What could I not achieve?

These thoughts had no sooner entered my childish mind, when they were violently expelled from my imagination. I felt a rough hand on my nightshirt collar, and someone boxed me on the ear – hard. Looking up – my ears ringing with the impact – I saw Miss Abigail’s devil-eyes, in a face grotesquely deformed by rage. She threw me through the door of my room and slammed it after me. I leapt into bed and trembled beneath the covers, fearing that the Monster Sister would return with a switch – or worse. But despite my growing tension, I eventually fell into a fitful sleep, only to be awakened in the morning by Tilly shaking me, gently. The Sisters Three wanted to see me in the drawing room – immediately – for an interview … My trepidation palpable, I dutifully dressed and descended the stairs one by one, in a vain effort to postpone the inevitable haranguing.

The predictable gist of their jeremiad was one of patronage (matronage?) and general, false, racial thinking.

‘You will lose that calm docility of nature all your kind are blessed with by the Creator, were you to fill this head with knowledge…’

I rushed from the house, that demon, Rage replacing my more familiar angel, Caution. I flew through the streets of Greenwich – a red-faced white man swung a cane at my head in anger at being brushed past by a ‘fat little nigger’. My feet took me to the very banks of the Thames. I hid, Moses-like, among the thick bulrushes, and contemplated the water for so long that I did not note the time had passed from day till near evening. Every sound, every rustle in the undergrowth provoked terror in me. When I finally ventured to move from my haven, I found that my limbs had become benumbed, somewhat. I began to run once more, gathering energy that came more and more from a fear of capture; the consequences of which my childish mind imagined only the worst.


Copyright © 2022 by Paterson Joseph