They hanged them by twos and threes in the public market-place and left them hanging there till another lot were due, when they cut down the bodies and left them lying on the ground till the workhouse negroes came out with carts in the evening and took them away, to cast them into a pit dug for the purpose a little distance from the town.
When the tropical day drew swiftly to its ending, and the sun sank gorgeous into the sea, when the purple and gold changed to bands of seashell pink and delicate nile green, and the shadows swept up and the stars, gleaming crystals, came out in a sky of velvet, then for me those dead-and-gone slaves, trapped in a web of circumstance, rose from their graves and walked along the shore. Ignorant, toil-worn, insolent, cringing by turns, with all the vices of their unwilling servitude upon them, they cry to high heaven for vengeance. And avenged they have been, for surely Jamaica is the land of wasted opportunities.
There is an old house high on the hills above Montego Bay. It is beautifully situated, looking away over the hills and over the lovely bay. It has two-foot thick stone walls built by slave labour, the pillars that uphold the verandah are of solid mahogany—painted white by some Goth—and the windows are heavily shuttered.
It is haunted, they say.
“Knock, knock, knock!” comes a sound against the shutters of one room every night, a passionately appealing knock that will not be stayed. Only some people can hear it, but when they do, it wrings their hearts, so importunate is it. One man I know of sitting there reading at night, used every prayer and exhortation he could think of to still that uneasy ghost—he was a priest of the Church of Rome—but it would not be stilled, and at last he—practical, middle-aged man as he was, fled away from the sound of it to some friends who lived the other side of the town, and refused ever to come back to that haunted house. Was it some unhappy woman begging and praying her master who had been her lover to intercede for her son caught in the slave revolt? Whoever it was prayed there, prayed in vain, and now sensitive souls hear the knock, knock, knock, “for God's sake have pity and help me!”
Oh, most of the houses of the old slave town could tell pitiful stories.
Bleby tells ghastly ones of what happened to the unfortunate slaves when the whites had recovered themselves and got the upper hand. In reading them, we must always remember that this is always the case when a handful of people holding a very much larger class by fear has been thoroughly frightened itself.
There was a negro named Bailey who had hidden his master's silver for safety in a cave, and after the rebellion was over he took one of the women belonging to the estate and went to the cave to bring back to the house the property which he had hidden. He sent off the woman with a load upon her head, and remained behind to get out the rest. A company of militia came upon him thus engaged. They paid no heed to his explanations, and when the woman returned for another load he had been hanged as a man taken red-handed!
But the case that Bleby dilates upon is that of a negro named Henry Williams. Now Henry Williams appears to have been a very decent, respectable man, far advanced from the wild savage who was his progenitor. He was wickedly treated, but I do not think he was exactly the martyr Bleby makes out.
“He was a respected and useful class leader in the Wesleyan Society at Beechamville,” says Bleby. Can't we imagine him? He was a driver when he wasn't in religion, a slave on Rural Retreat, and the adjoining estate belonged to our friend the Rev. George William Bridges. This was extremely unlucky for Henry, for evidently the attorney who managed Rural Retreat and Mr Bridges got talking together, and doubtless agreed on the unfortunately growing tendency of the slaves to think for themselves. More particularly did they object to this chapel-going, and the attorney of Rural Retreat instanced Henry as a particularly virulent specimen of the genus Black Baptist. They concocted a plan which holds them both up to contempt. The manager of Rural Retreat sent for Henry, and though he was not in the habit of going to any place of worship, told him that he was going to church at Mr Bridges' house and desired the attendance of all the slaves on Rural Retreat. None were to go to Bellemont chapel, which appears to have been the place they affected. But none came to Mr Bridges' house save and except Henry. Even his wife and children had gone to Bellemont as usual. On his master asking him why he had not obeyed his order and brought the people to service, he answered meekly enough that the people were not under his direction on Sunday.