Trade Wind Read Free

good will ye get of it. And all your life ye’ll do what you have to do. Ye’ll make your own bed…an’ ye’ll lie on it…”
    The hoarse murmur died into silence and the old woman released Hero’s hand and backed away, shaking her head as though to free it from something, and looking dazed and stupid. The little brooch fell to the floor and Hero picked it up and held it out to her, but she pushed it away muttering: “Keep it, child. “Tis no manner av use to me. No use…wind and salt water and trees like broomsticks—and brown men and black a’ dyin’. Dyin’ in the sun and the rain…”
    She stumbled towards the door, hugging her rusty black shawl about her shoulders and mumbling something about “dogs and dead men,” and then the kitchen door shut behind her and Mrs Cobb said loudly and angrily: “There now!—didn’t I tell you it ‘ud all be lies? Black men and trees like broomsticks, indeed! Stuffin’ your head up with such nonsense. What your Pa ‘ud say—”
    She crossed quickly to the dresser, and lifting down the big blue and white crock where the sugar was kept, fumbled in it for the largest lump she could find. “Here you are, you just suck that and keep your little mouth shut.” Her voice took on a wheedling tone: “She’s a wicked old woman, that one, and I wouldn’t have let her put a foot inside my kitchen only she came begging to the door and I hadn’t the heart to turn the poor creature away: not without giving her a scraping of tea and a sit by the fire for the sake o’ Christian charity. But your Pa wouldn’t like it, and that’s a fact, so you be a good girl and don’t go tattling to him and gettin’ me in trouble. Just you forget it, see?”
    But Hero had never forgotten it.
    Sun and wind and salt water, and an island full of black men…
    “Are there really trees like broomsticks?” she enquired of her father next day.
    “Like broomsticks? Do you mean palm trees?” Barclay smiled indulgently at his spoilt only child: “Who’s been telling you about palm trees?”
    “No one. I just wondered. Where do they grow?”
    “Any place where it’s hot enough to suit them. They like plenty of sun. Places like Florida and Louisiana and the West Indies. And India and Africa.”
    “Not in Boston?”
    “No, not in Boston. Look, I’ll show you.”
    Barclay laid aside Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus , and taking her over to the low table by the library windows showed her the big softly-coloured globe that stood on it, pointing out the poles and the oceans, the cold countries and the hot: “This one is Africa, where the negroes come from. Zulus and Hottentots and men who are seven feet tall and pygmies who are no higher than your knee.”
    “Negroes?” Hero’s face fell. “You mean people like Washington Judd and Sary Boker?”
    “That’s right.”
    “But they came from Mississippi,” said Hero disgustedly. “I know they did, ‘cos Sary told me so herself, and Mrs Cobb says they’re just runaway niggers an’ one day they’ll be cotched and taken back to their master who’ll whale the livin’ daylights out of them an’ serve them right. What are livin’ daylights, Pa?”
    “Mrs Cobb is an old—” began Barclay hastily, and turned the word into a cough. “Well, maybe they did come from Mississippi, but their parents and their grandparents came from Africa.”
    “Why did they? Didn’t they like it there?”
    “I guess they liked it all right. But slaves were needed to work the plantations, so people caught the poor creatures and shipped them over here to be sold for good money to the planters. And now their children and their children’s children are born as slaves and have no country of their own.”
    “Then why don’t they go back?”
    “Because that would take ships and money and a lot of other things they haven’t got. Freedom, for one. Besides, how would they know where to go back to? Africa’s a pretty big country you know, Hero.”
    “How