“You are right, old massa,” he observed, “if y’u put your hand on a hedgehog, he stick you with his porcupines, an’ that’s like me. I am a word and a blow all the time. If any man interfere with me, he get the worst of it.”
“But nobody going to interfere wid you,” Sue insisted. “Y’u will mind your own business, an’ leave everybody else alone.”
Given Jones’s temperament, this was highly improbable. But he agreed with her.
“Besides,” he added, “it is quite true that they can’t do what they like with a British subject. That’s undiscussable.”
“I wonder why dat is so?” asked Mr. Proudleigh. “I always hear so, but I don’t understand de reason.”
“It is the King,” explained Catherine. “Them ’fraid of the King. If y’u do one British subject anything, an’ the King hear about it, him send ships to fight for you. Him ’ave sojers an’ ships, an’ nobody can beat them. And as Jamaica belongs to him, him protect us.”
Catherine’s display of political knowledge deeply impressed her father. “I see!” he remarked. “It’s like what Queen Victoria used to do. I hear dat when she come to the throne she get up one day an’ say, ‘I don’t want any more slave in Jamaica,’ an’ the moment she say so, them send an’ free every slave! That was a good ooman. An’ that is why she live so long that I was beginning to think she would never dead. An’ her children take after her, or them wouldn’t protect us when we go foreign.”
“It’s not only the King,” said Jones, anxious to show that he knew much about such matters. “It’s the Parliament as well. The Parliament look after British subjects wherever them go to.”
“Yes, eh?” said Mr. Proudleigh, still more deeply impressed; “what is de Parliament?”
Jones thought for an instant, then answered, “It’s something like our Legislative Council. A lot of dukes; an’ they all discuss an’ argue. I hear, too, men are elected to it; big men, like lords, and that sometimes them fight, but them don’t fight often. They are all white, for in England y’u never see a black man. But if a black man go there an’ just say he is a British subject, they do anything for him. They love him, y’u know, because he is born under the British flag.”