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For Mary Blake, from her mother, Fanny Rawlins Blake, who swears an oath to God that the following account is true and complete.
FRB, November 1804, written on the merchantman Marguerite.
An Account of my Birth and Childhood
My father, Edmund Rawlins, was born at Stoney Grove, on the island of Nevis, but considering himself an Englishman, he returned to that country upon his majority to find an English wife. This he did in the year 1757. The pair lived in the county of Essex, in the village of Thaxted, at Hundley Hall, the home of my father’s progenitors. I have not seen the house, being unwelcome there, but I recall my father’s descriptions of it, and am glad that I was fortunate enough to have been his daughter at Stoney Grove instead.
After he had been married some years, he grew impatient to return to the Caribbees. His wife refused the trip, and so he went out alone, spending the years 1762 and 1765 on Nevis, and returning to live out his days there after his wife’s death in 1770. His three English sons he surrendered to the care of his brother, my uncle, fearing that life in the Indies would not prove agreeable to ones so young.
I was born on the 14th of November, 1763, at Barrows’s Estate, on the windward side of Nevis. My mother named me for her mother, Fanny, who was brought to the island from Africa as a young woman. Though my grandmother remained a slave to the end of her days, her owner, my grandfather, freed my mother when she reached adulthood.
She went to work for Benjamin Barrows as a maidservant at his mansion, and it was there that my father met and bedded her. I never knew my mother well, for she died at the birth of my brother, Ned, when I was but an infant of three years. Mr. Barrows, though a great friend of the sire, was no friend of the progeny, and said he would be rid of us before my mother’s body was cold in the grave. And so we were taken to live at Stoney Grove, the estate of my father, a short distance from Charlestown.
By the time that I was born, Stoney Grove was already an old estate, having stood in the shadow of Nevis Peak for nearly 50 years. The first house, like most built by men of the 17th century, was of wood, and stood only a storey and a half high. In 1710, my grandfather Rawlins replaced this rude structure with one constructed of rubble walls faced with hewn stone, and roofed with slate brought from England by ship. The thick walls kept it cool within, whilst the windows above and below admitted a steady breeze at all but the stillest season of the year.
He furnished the house with polished mahogany tables, gilt looking glasses and leather campeachy chairs, and although it was neither fashionable nor well appointed, I still recall it as tasteful and elegant in its simplicity. It slumbered beneath the shade of an ancient silk tree, on a small hill surrounded by pleasant grounds filled with fragrant bushes and fruit trees.
A short distance from the house sat a number of buildings: kitchen, laundry, stables and further still, the mill and sugarworks where the cane was broken and boiled and the sugar formed in great earthen jars. These I was forbidden to visit during the harvest, for many slaves lost their limbs, and indeed their lives, to the great grinding wheels that crushed the cane, or to the scalding cauldrons of boiling juice from which the sweet sugar was derived.
As a child I was often alone, for my mother was dead and my father gone to England. At his insistence, I lived in the great house with Miss Craighill, an antique lady who had been nurse to him, and Sawney, my infant brother’s wetnurse. Three other women shared the habitation with us, Juba the cook, and Maria and Latitia, the washerwoman and maid. Like my grandmother, Sawney was an African, Guinea born, with country marks on her face and arms. In the heat of the afternoon, when Miss Craighill lay abed and my brother slumbered too, we often sat beside the cool stucco walls of the cistern and she told me tales of Annancy, the spider, and of jumbies, and of crossroads on moonlit nights. Each morning, Sawney took us bathing in the warm sea near Pinney's Estate, and under her tutelage, I quickly learned to swim. Indeed, so pleasant was the water and so gentle the current that Ned joined the play of the fishes long before his skills on land surpassed those of the crab. Following our bath, we would dry ourselves on the warm sand of the beach, and then make our way home, rambling along the roadside in search of a mango or papaya to ease our hunger until the noonday meal.These morning walks proved among the most valuable lessons of my childhood, for Sawney taught us about the world around us. She cautioned us to avoid the manchineel tree, whose fruits were poisoned and whose very shade was fraught with danger for, if wetted by a passing shower, the leaves dripped a caustic solution that blistered and burned the skin. She showed us the aloe plant that God had made to defeat the malice of the manchineel, and taught us to spread its gel on our faces and limbs if we had lingered too long in the sun. We learned how to cut cane and suck the sweet juices from it, how to break open a ripe coconut and scoop out its crunchy core, and how to avoid the centipede and the great spider that scurried through the wilderness.
Like all young girls, I was attracted to the beauty of the flowers that surrounded our house and grew wild along the roadside. Sawney taught me that these plants were put on earth not only to share their beauty, but to cure a variety of ills. We would gather leaves and flowers in great bunches, and she would carry them to the quarters to share this pharmacopoeia with mothers of ailing infants or adults crippled with years of hard labour. I learned to respect the mysteries of the earth, for like the aloe and the manchineel, she provided many things that a person adept in her lore could use to cure or to kill.
On Sundays, my grandmother came to visit me on her way home from the market in Charlestown. She kept grounds in the hills above Watkins’s Estate, and sold bananas and tamarinds, mangoes and shaddocks, cassava and yams in town. From time to time she would take me to visit the grave of my mother, and we would carry small presents to leave for her there. One day I asked her if she were to be buried beside her daughter.
"When my breath leaves me, daughter, I will fly across the sea to be with my people," she replied.
"Is that where my mother is now?" I asked.
Her face filled with sadness and she told me nay, my mother was Nevis born, and had the blood of an Englishman in her. "Just as I bear my country marks, you and your mother bear yours," she sighed. It was not until years later that I understood what she meant, for my skin was smooth and no one had yet scarred me.
Fanny Blake Manuscript, Part 2 When I was a girl of seven, my father came to stay at Stoney Grove. Though I did not remember him, for I had been an infant when last he had seen me, I heard of his coming, and solemnly prepared to meet him. The overseer, Mr. Grindle, took me and Ned to the harbour to greet his ship, and we rode back home together in a wagon piled high with goods from England.Upon surveying us, he cautioned Ned that he must work hard in life so that he should not be a source of disgrace to his brothers, and then laughing, lifted him into the air and perched him on his shoulder. He told me that I was to grow up to be an English lady, and that I must learn to read and write, to dance and play the harpsichord. I told him I could read and write, and penned my name for him. With this he was well pleased.
He engaged a tutor for Ned and me, a young Glaswegian lady from Wilkerton’s estate by the name of Stewart. She instructed us for many years, and I came to master French, Latin and Greek, history, literature, mathematics and the domestic arts. When I grew older, the dance master, Mr. Pierson, visited weekly, and taught Ned and I the steps fashionable in London.
At my father’s return, we were introduced to the Anglican faith. I had not known the English God before, as Miss Craighill was an indifferent church-goer, and Sawney and my grandmother kept their own ways. Each Sunday Ned and I would ride with my father to Fig Tree Church and pass the day within its walls. The first time we entered the church, I was afraid, as I had never witnessed such a congregation of pale countenances. It seemed as though all the jumbies on the island had gathered together, but as I looked more closely, I recognized Mr. Watkins, Mr. Barrows, and some other acquaintances of my father’s who had come to call at Stoney Grove. They greeted me courteously, and I soon grew accustomed to this new society.
My father wished us to be instructed in the ways of the church, and added theology to our school-room regimen. As a child I did not understand how the English God could promise everlasting life, and take my mother, or preach goodness to our fellow man, and countenance the cruelty of the sugar works on Nevis.
Sundays being Church days precluded the accustomed visits of my grandmother, who, like others of her station, spent the day on the streets of Charlestown with her countrymen. As it was customary for slaves to conclude their labour each week at Saturday noon, she asked my father if she might be permitted to visit Ned and me on Saturday evenings. He agreed, and ever after we passed the appointed time in each other’s company.
At my father's return, the solitude of my childhood lessened, and I began to take the first of many small steps into society. In earnest he set about reviving the acquaintances of his youth, adding to them the business associates he had contracted during his years in trade, so that most evenings our little circle welcomed a new member. After a brief courtesy I withdrew to my small chair in the corner of the veranda, and sat exploring the unknown territory of some new face as he engaged the visitor in lively conversation and shared a glass or two of rum.
For the most part, these evenings were masculine affairs, for, in lacking a wife, and the inclination to procure a new one, my father lacked that which society required of him to draw the company of ladies to our estate. He and his guests never tired of remarking on the latest price of sugar, the growing unrest between the colonies and Britain, and the state of the island's defenses.
On the occasions when our visitors had lately arrived from England, I was welcomed into their circle, for my father admonished that I would soon enough be a lady living in that country, and I must become familiar with its customs and fashions.
One evening, when I was a girl of ten, I asked him if I should live at Hundley Hall with my English brothers. "I think not," he answered. "Will I live with Ned in England?" I pressed, to which I received the same response. I urged him to tell me how I should be a lady if I had no home, but he would not, or could not, give me an answer. My tutor chanced to overhear the conversation, and later that night told me to pay no heed to my father's words. "I'm afraid you'll never be a lady, whether 'tis here or in England," she sighed. As she had not only contradicted my father, but urged that I should be disloyal to him, I resolved that I would prove her wrong.
Fanny Blake Manuscript, Part 3
During the summer of my eighth year, Nevis was visited by a series of dreadful storms. I had already learned to associate such events with death, as the only other hurricane in my brief existence had closely followed the loss of my mother. The word conjured up dim memories of screaming wind, of darkness, and of the infant-howls of Ned.
The storms of 1772, I can recall, even now, with crystal clarity. The first was presaged by a clear, bright, cloudless day. Waves, ever increasing in size, began to beat against the beach, and sailors reported seeing schools of fish darting just beneath the surface of the sea. The wind that began as a gentle breeze grew to a steady gust. By nightfall it had begun to carry the shingles off of rooftops and palm fronds across the yard. As darkness fell, the rain set in, pattering, then drumming, then beating down in great stinging sheets that blinded and choked us when we ventured outside to rescue a toy, forgotten in the stillness of the afternoon. Soon the wind began to shriek like the wails of the undead, and the air was filled with sounds like gunshots as tree limbs broke beneath the strain.
Though our house had weathered eleven such onslaughts since its cornerstone was laid, we feared for our lives, and took refuge in the wine cellar, with Miss Craighill, Mr. Grindle and his wife and children, Sawney and the remainder of the domestic staff. My father’s slaves were left to seek refuge from the storm in the windmill tower, the boiling house, the distillery or the ruins of the lime kiln. A few lingered in their quarters, rude huts made of woven sticks and palm thatch. Not one of these withstood the elements, and when the morning light dawned, the wretched inhabitants were left homeless, exhausted, and without a shred of dry clothing or a morsel of food. All had been consumed by the wind.
We had barely begun to address the wrongs that this storm had inflicted when, just three days later, a second hurricane, nearly as fierce as the first, vented its fury upon us. No lives were lost at Stoney Grove, but the roof was ripped from its mooring, the garden was flattened, and the misery of the slaves was, at last, shared by us all. Indeed, such misery engulfed the island, for scarcely a house was left standing, nor a ship left afloat in the harbour. Those that had not run aground, pushed relentlessly against the shore by the pounding waves and violent wind, sank at their moorings under the sheer volume of water amassed from the rain.
When later that season a third storm struck, we despaired. Our rude repairs could not hold the wind, the sea, and the sky at bay. Mercifully, the last storm did not equal the strength of her sisters, and we survived once more.
In the wake of the second storm, the antique custom of fasting on Sundays was reintroduced. As there was little food in its aftermath, the Sunday fast extended, without the sanction of the Church, to the rest of the week as well. The livestock had all perished in the hurricane, and though hundreds of fish lay washed up on the shore, the hot sun of late summer quickly rotted their flesh, and the stench could be smelled for miles. Our fruits littered the ground, battered and smashed, and the cane lay flattened in a dense mat across the fields. We lived on sailor’s fare: salt cod, biscuits, Madiera and rum, sharing with our neighbors when their stores ran out. During this time, my grandmother ceased to visit, needing the time to forage for food and begin to rebuild her home and replant her garden. Finally, by early November, the season ended, and ships began to return to the harbour, laden with supplies.
We were to experience three more hurricanes that decade, each bringing their share of misery to the island. The first two, in 1775 and 1776, left minimal damage to our estate in their wake. By then I had begun to leave the irrational fears of childhood behind, and was able to provide some solace to my brother and to Mr. Grindle's children who gathered around us as we took shelter in the cellar. In the aftermath of each, I helped my father to organize the clean-up and repair of the estate and the distribution of new provisions to the labourers who had lost their homes. In this way, and many others under less trying circumstances, I began to exercise the skills of domestic management requisite in a West Indian housewife.
Though far graver in its impact, the last great storm of the decade was providential, for in coming as it did on the 4th of September, 1779, it freed us from the grip of the French. Great Britain, our protector, being at war with the rebellious colonies to our north, had removed her fleet to northern waters, leaving Nevis and her neighbors vulnerable to attack from enemy nations. Seizing this opportunity, the French, under the leadership of Admiral Count d'Estaing, gathered a fleet of warships and laid seige. The hurricane broke the blockade, smashing her ships and sinking them without a trace. While we suffered greatly in the wake of the storm, our suffering was eased by our knowledge that our enemies had suffered more.
In that year I was a young woman, two months shy of my sixteenth
birthday. My childhood had ended, and the storm clouds of adulthood gathered around me.
Fanny Blake Manuscript, Part 4
As I reached womanhood, I became aware that Stoney Grove was at once a haven and a prison for me. Ned, always my charge, began to gain an enviable independence. Whilst my father insisted upon my diligent study and my seclusion from society, he gradually freed Ned from the classroom and set him to work as an apprentice to Mr. Iverson, a business associate who operated warehouses at St. George's Bay and in Charlestown.
My world continued to be populated by the same companions of my childhood; my father, my grandmother, Sawney, Miss Craighill, Miss Stewart and the others that operated the household and laboured on the estate. Whilst I met young women and their families at church, I was never invited to join them for tea or for outings organized by social-minded matrons endeavoring to promote the interests of their daughters. The sons of these same matrons often tried to engage me in conversation in the churchyard after services, or during chance meetings in the market, but my father forbade me to speak more to them than was considered civil, and their mothers ushered them hastily away if they evinced the slightest enthusiasm for my acquaintance.
My father conveyed every reluctance to engage in conversation upon the topic of my introduction to society, and so I turned to Miss Stewart to solve this puzzle. In spite of the efforts that he had made to shelter me from knowledge of the world, my father had not kept me in complete ignorance of Nevisian society, nor my part within it. Having grown up in so masculine a household, for example, I had not failed to learn that there were women within the community, who, like my mother, entertained male companions, and sometimes bore them children. These children, I knew, were of lesser standing than those born to the wives of married men, and were customarily unrecognized as their offspring. In this respect Ned and I were fortunate. My father, who took great pride in us, had given us his name and promised us a portion of his fortune upon his death. I was also no stranger to the term bastard, as on several occasions Mr. Grindle's children had addressed Ned and me by this pejorative. I did not, however, foresee the social consequences of such an identity in a society as conscious of wealth, rank, and birth as that of Nevis.
In clear terms, Miss Stewart laid out my future for me. I was a quadroon, she explained, one-quarter African. Neither my father's wealth and standing in society, nor my own beauty and accomplishments, could eradicate this essential taint in my blood. It was impossible that any Englishman, familiar with my circumstances, would marry me and elevate me to the station of lady. Indeed, no young men of respectable Nevisian families would woo me for a wife. By heritage, I was suited only to the role of mistress. Most of my kind, she stated, were kept by wealthy, dissolute planters who tired of their plain wives and noisy children. A few fortunate young women, of which she hoped I would be one, lived pure, solitary lives in the protection of fathers, brothers or uncles.
I related this conversation to my father, and to Ned, who grew angry and swore he would find me a reputable husband. My father was likewise angered by Miss Stewart's appraisal of my situation but had no ready answer in my defense. He had written to his sons in England, he admitted, apprising them of my existence and urging their assistance in the procurement of an eligible spouse. The shock of the discovery had proved beyond them, however, and he had not yet received an answer, though the query had been put forward nearly a year earlier. Had his health permitted, he would have sailed for England that very day and done the deed himself, but he had been afflicted by the gout in recent years and was not well enough to travel.
My father's health worsened, and within six months of this conversation, an attack of the bilious fever carried him off. We buried him in the churchyard at St. John's. The fever spread throughout estate, and three weeks hence, we returned to the churchyard, this time bearing the coffin of my beloved brother Ned. He was just fourteen years old.
I was truly alone in the world, with neither father nor brother to protect me. My father's solicitor advised me that I was in the possession of a small fortune, but that the estate itself had passed to my brother George in England. As I had not yet reached my majority, my future disposition was in his hands.
George Rawlins arrived on Nevis in November of 1780, a few days before my seventeenth birthday, impatient to settle the estate and return to Essex. He considered both the house and myself as great impositions thrust upon him by an unfeeling father. The facts of my parentage were repugnant to him, and he could not bring himself to utter a civil word in my company. I was a living stain on the good name of his family, a burden that must be shed as expeditiously as possible. Ironically, to be rid of me he entered into a bargain that was to result in my father's great ambition; he procured for me an English gentleman as husband, and, in so doing, made me an English lady.
Here then, was the bargain. A certain acquaintance, Mr. William Blake, had failed in a business transaction with George and his partners, and was indebted to them for a not inconsiderable sum. Upon learning of the death of his father, on the heels of the odious intelligence that he had in existence a negro sibling (for in this my father had not been honest, and did not burden his sons with Ned's history), my brother contacted the aforementioned Blake with the following proposal. If Blake were to agree to marry me, and to never introduce me to any of Rawlins's social circle, George would forgive his debt. This concession, in addition to my inheritance, could not be dismissed, and Blake readily agreed to the bargain. Whilst suspicious that his bride came to him tainted by some scandal, he was willing to accept the risk on the aforementioned terms. I was later to learn that my brother had not revealed the details of my parentage, but the telling of this part of the story must await its proper opportunity.
Upon leaving Nevis, I was allowed to remove a trunk of clothes, a few books, and the jewelry that my father had presented to me on my sixteenth birthday. From the time of my brother's arrival at the estate I was forbidden all connection with my grandmother, and so I quitted the place without the opportunity to bid her farewell, or the hope of ever seeing her again. I was also forbidden a final visit to Ned's grave, or that of my father. For these cruel acts, and others that followed, I have never forgiven my brother.
Fanny Blake Manuscript, Part 5On My Married Life
George Rawlins and I arrived in London in March of 1781, and I became the bride of William Blake that same month. My new husband was a man of fifty three years when I met him, of pale complexion and humourless countenance. Born of the merchant class and educated to take his part within it, he commanded neither the inclination nor the talent to explore the world beyond the bounds of accountancy and trade. He could decipher a ledger, and had he been a man of lesser fortune, that would have been enough. However, his betrothal to me had been followed by an unexpected upturn in other business ventures, and I found him to be in a state of greater wealth than I, my brother, or indeed he himself, had anticipated. An ambitious man, he quickly saw the advantages of his new situation, for not only had he acquired a wife on good financial terms, he had acquired one in possession of education and taste. With these attributes in his control, he was assured of a promising future in English society.
Having misjudged the nature of the scandal that compelled my brother to bargain me away, he took me to his marriage bed without a trace of the gentlemanly behaviour desired on such occasions. I thought him a brute, and did all in my power to evade his advances. This impression I held firmly until the day of his death, despite his attempts to see me comfortably situated.
In anticipation of finding a suitable partner for life, he had commissioned the building of an estate in the Sussex countryside near the South Downs. His nature tending to the conservative, and his tastes tending toward the antiquated, he favoured a style in house and landscape already a generation or two out of fashion. The construction of the great house began before he settled on a wife, but the resolution of that problem, and the fortune that followed the decision, greatly expedited the completion of the building, and we were ready to take up residency there at the turn of the New Year, 1782. To celebrate his good fortune, he named the estate Stoney Grove, and, in an effort to please me, furnished a suite of rooms within it in a style reminiscent of the West Indies. To the grounds he added a hothouse, and promised me my fill of fragrant blossoms and exotic fruits. I rebuffed the proffered olive branch with bitterness, for how could this unhappy place compare with the home I had know with my dear brother and father? The Downs were but poor reminders to me of the grandeur of Nevis Peak, the grounds sparsely furnished and dead, the sun a pale, washed out sister to the brilliant orb that had been the constant companion of my youth.
With the house itself, you are familiar. Though the skill of the architect and the fortune of my husband were united to secure tasteful appointments, the cavernous twilight of its interior afforded me little comfort. The rooms were draughty; the sun, when she showed her face, hidden behind leaden draperies. I kept to my rooms as often as possible, finding warmth by the fireside, and solace in books and in memories.
You were born in February of 1782, just short of a year after I wed Mr. Blake. I could not name you for my mother, Aminta, nor my friend, Sawney, so I settled on Mary in honor of my tutor, Miss Stewart. Your father was disappointed that you were not a son, and had little interest in your progress. In spite of the unwelcoming climate to which you were born, you thrived as an infant, and were a great source of happiness to me.