“Throughout their torture,” remarks Bridges, “they evinced such hardened insolence and brutal insensibility that even pity was silenced.” What did he expect them to do? They could not expect any mercy, so why should they express regret except for having failed?
But did Bridges really believe, “that their condition was gradually rising in the scale of humanity and the tide of Christianity, which in the wilds of Africa never could have reached them, was here flowing with a gentle but accelerated motion.” God save us from the Christianity preached by some of its advocates.
Here I may put it on record that the slaves, no matter to what torture they were subjected, never betrayed each other. In all the tale of conspiracies and rebellion seldom are we told of a slave having betrayed the secret of the proposed rising, and when one did there was generally strong reason for it. Once a girl begged that the life of her nursling might be saved. The man of whom she begged the baby's life refused—all the whites must die. So she saved the baby she loved and its mother and father by betraying the rebellion. Then again, sometimes I think a girl might tell to save the life of her white lover, the book-keeper or the overseer of the estate.
One would think that living amidst a hostile people every white man would be most careful in his comings and goings, careful even of what he said, for though at first the negroes did not understand English, the house servants soon learned it, and we may be very sure that the doings and sayings of the people up at the Great House were reported daily in the slave village and listened to with as great avidity as to-day we read the news of the world in the daily papers.
Besides, all the slaves were not hostile. The Creoles, born to the conditions in which they found themselves, were more contented. They regarded slavery as their natural lot, and it was only by slow degrees that the talk of emancipation grew. But it did grow and the rebellion of 1882, a very devastating one, which ran like wildfire through Westmoreland, Hanover, and St James', was caused mainly because at the Great Houses and the “Buckras'” tables the white people talking carelessly before the black servants, to whom they never gave a thought, declared emphatically that all this talk of emancipation was so much rubbish.
And at Christmas time, the angry, disappointed, misguided slaves rose. I have always taken particular interest in this rebellion, because I once enjoyed the hospitality of Montpelier, one of the loveliest pens in Jamaica, where much money has been spent, and beneath the trees on the green grass rest white Indian cattle bred for draught purposes. Mr Edwards, the owner, told me that he used to hear stories in his youth of how the slaves burned the houses, and mills, and cane pieces, and the night was alight with blazing fires. Major Hall and his wife, high in the hills at Kempshot, received warning just in time, and through the darkness made their way to Worcester, lying far below.
It must have been terrible, stumbling down that stony mountain path through the darkness, with the dread fear that the enemy might reach Worcester before them. Neither husband nor wife returned, nor was the house rebuilt, and not till nearly fifty years afterwards did Mr Maxwell Hall, seeking through the country for a site on which to build an observatory, choose a hill on Kempshot Pen just above the place where the old house had stood. Where the country was not dense jungle it was occupied by negro cultivators, the most destructive cultivators perhaps in the world, of the old house there was not one stone left upon another, nothing remained but the Mango Walk. It stands there still, the only monument to the white people who once lived on that spot. The trees have long given over bearing, but the avenue is a thing of beauty, and to the very tops has grown a lovely creeper which strews the ground beneath with heavily scented white bellshaped flowers.
It has nothing to do with them, of course, but in my mind that beautiful Walk stands for the slave rebellions, the terrible times that are past and gone but hardly forgotten. In judging the relations of the white man and the black, in weighing the causes of discord between them, in considering the shortcomings of both, we must always remember that past when they lived together bound by a tie galling to both which has left behind it a legacy of bitterness that only time and success on the part of the black man can sweeten.