Apprentice

On the first of August they were called to the works yard and told that they were free, and then they were told the conditions of it.

Rachael listened carefully, because she had learned young that the important part of any announcement comes after the good part.

Free, the overseer said, from this day. And apprenticed. Forty and a half hours in the week belonging to the estate, without wages, as before, until the year 1840. Any hour worked beyond the forty and a half to be paid for, or taken in provision ground time, by agreement. Children under six free outright. Complaints to be carried to the special magistrate, who was a gentleman sent out from England for the purpose and who would ride the district on a Wednesday.

“So we free,” said a man behind her, “but we working Monday.”

“You are apprenticed,” the overseer said.

“And if I don’t come Monday?”

“Then you will see the magistrate,” the overseer said, “and the magistrate will send you to the house of correction, and they have a treadmill there, and I will not have to lift my hand.”

That was the first day of freedom. Rachael walked back up to the huts and thought about the words forty and a half, which she had never heard put together in her life, and which she understood at once to be the whole of the thing.

· · ·

She got the book from the bookkeeper’s boy in exchange for four days of washing, and it was not a new book; it was the back half of a ledger that had been water-damaged at the front and thrown out.

She could not write. That was not an obstacle she intended to respect. Her sister’s son Thomas had been taught his letters by a Baptist man at the chapel and could do numbers, and for the price of her supper twice a week he sat with her on the step after dark and wrote what she told him.

She had him rule it in two columns, because she had seen the estate books through the office door her whole life and she knew what a ledger looked like and she knew what it was for. A ledger is not a record of work. A ledger is an argument, written in advance, for a day when there is a disagreement.

Left column, the date. Right column, the hours.

She began on the fourth of August and she did not miss a week for four years.

· · ·

The estate kept its own count, of course, and the estate’s count was not hers.

When the crop was in they worked past dark for eleven nights and the overseer wrote it as agreement to take in ground time, and no ground time came. When the aqueduct broke they were turned out on the Sunday and it was entered as nothing at all. When Rachael’s own week ran to sixty hours and she said so, the bookkeeper told her that the forty and a half was reckoned as an average over the season and that she would not understand the calculation.

“Explain it to me,” she said.

“It is not your business to have it explained.”

“Then it is not my business to be short,” she said, and went home, and had Thomas write the sixty down.

· · ·

She went before the special magistrate four times.

The first time, Mr. Bowen heard her out in the yard at Gordon’s with his hat off and sweat running into his collar, and he said the case was complicated and that he would look into the estate’s books, and nothing came of it.

The second time he did not let her finish, because there were nineteen complaints that day and eleven of them were from overseers about apprentices, and an overseer’s complaint is quicker to hear than an apprentice’s, and the sun goes down at the same hour for everybody.

The third time he took her book out of her hands and held it and turned the pages, and Rachael watched a change come into his face that she could not read and never forgot. He asked who had written it. She told him. He asked how she had counted, on the days she had no one to write, and she told him: she kept the days in her head, and she kept a stone in her apron pocket for each hour over, and she emptied the pocket on the step at night, and Thomas wrote what the stones said.

Mr. Bowen was quiet a moment. Then he said that he was satisfied she believed her account to be true, and that belief was not evidence, and that the estate’s book was the book of record.

“Then what is mine?” Rachael said.

“It is not nothing,” he said, which was the most honest thing any of them ever said to her, “but it is not enough.”

The fourth time, in 1837, he fined the estate eleven shillings for a matter concerning a different woman entirely, and Rachael understood that this was as near as the thing was ever going to come to her.

· · ·

They ended it early. The word came down in the spring of 1838 that the apprenticeship would finish on the first of August, two years before the term, and the district did not believe it until the week itself.

On the last night Rachael sat on the step with the book and had Thomas, who was twenty now and going to Kingston, read her the total.

It took him a long time. He had to carry it down the pages and the water-damaged ones at the back had to be worked around, and she made him do it twice because she did not want a number that was generous.

Then he told her the hours, and then, because she asked, he worked out what those hours came to in money at the rate the estate paid free laborers for the same work.

They sat with the figure between them.

“They are not going to pay it,” Thomas said.

“No.”

“The man in England get his money four years ago. For us. And you keeping a book for four years about a shilling and sixpence.”

“I know what the man in England get,” Rachael said.

She closed the ledger and put her hand flat on the cover for a while.

“It was never going to get pay,” she said. “I keep it so that it is written down. Them have it written down that we was worth so much a head. Now it is written down what them owe. Two books. Let whoever come after read both of them and work out which one is the true one.”

· · ·

She lived twenty-six more years and never got a shilling of it.

The book went to her daughter, and her daughter kept it in a tin with the baptism papers, and her daughter’s daughter kept it in the same tin, and nobody in the family could read it properly by then because the hand was faded and the back pages were rotted. It went into a box and the box went under a bed.

But they knew what it was. That was the part that carried. The knowledge moved down the line even after the writing stopped being legible, the way the important things do: an old woman telling a child, that is the book your great-grandmother keep, that have the hours in it, them never pay her.

Two books. One of them is in an archive in England, digitized, searchable, with a claim number and an amount in pounds sterling beside the name of the man who was paid.

This is the other one.

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