The boat could sail as far as La Felicité Plantation on the Cottica River, where they would have to wait for the tide. La Felicité’s owners were delighted to be able to welcome the assistant of the well-know administrator’s office as a guest on their plantation. When Alex was with Rutger that evening in the bedroom, he said that they would need to sail for only two-and-a-half hours the next day. He had seen how Masra Jeremiah had sent two of his rowers on ahead in a small boat to Jericho to tell the white supervisor that everything must be properly prepared to receive an important guest.
Jericho was a sugar plantation, very large, with more than a hundred slaves. When the tent boat arrived around noon the following day, everything was indeed ready and could easily have fed a company of ten. Grilled chickens, bread, bananas, roasted meats, many kinds of vegetables and fruit. After lunch, for which they had been joined by the white supervisor, Mr Vredelings, Rutger’s host insisted that he should take a rest. A nice slave-girl would show him to his room. That evening the gentlemen would play some rounds of cards. The director and white supervisor from a neighbouring plantation had already been invited. The following day would be soon enough for the inspection to commence.
After his rest in the afternoon and with his host still fast asleep, Rutger went for a walk outside. He took a look along the waterfront at the boathouse, then walked along the half-burnt-out warehouse and into the slave village. It struck him how quiet everything was. On the other plantations he had always seen children laughing and playing. Not here.
He was still walking in the village when the slaves returned home from working in the fields. An emaciated, gaunt group of individuals. No-one laughed, no-one talked. All silent. When he approached, the group stopped, shuffling along with bowed heads and mumbling, “Greetings, masra,” and waited until he had passed.
At cards that evening there was much drinking, shouting and laughing and the odds were amazingly high. The breasts and buttocks of beautiful slave-girls who had had to stay up to serve the masra and his company were pinched on several occasions, while the two boys got a regular kick up their backsides. Rutger said little and ensured that he drank little, and for the card games, with their high odds, he remained a patient onlooker. He was glad when the evening was over and he could go to bed. His host had said that he could choose one of the slave-girls for the night. When Rutger had answered, “Thank you, but no,” Daniel Jeremiah had laughingly asked whether he perhaps wanted a different one – there was enough choice on the plantation. He had only to say the word and overseer Vredelings would see to it. Rutger had amicably but firmly refused.
The next morning when Rutger awoke and opened the door to let Alex in, Alex wasn’t lying on his mat right next to the door where he always slept when they were travelling and staying the night somewhere. He was standing some distance away along the passage and was looking intently out through the window.
“Look, masra,” he said, and pointed into the distance when Rutger had come to stand next to him. There hung three naked figures on a large tree, hands bound together with the rope fastened to a branch. The overseer stood alongside and watched how the basya dealt out whip lashes to one of the hanging figures.
“Come, quickly,” said Rutger, and, still in his night attire and slippers, he ran down the stairs and into the open, followed by Alex.
“Stop!” called Rutger, when he had reached the spot. The basya looked at the overseer, who nodded briefly, and then stopped with the flogging.
“Release them,” ordered Rutger.
The basya looked again at the overseer and began, once he had nodded, to lower the hanging bodies and cut them loose. The overseer’s face was strained. He did not like this interference with his business and usually the owner let him have his way. But on this occasion the owner had said that every effort must be made to please Rutger.
“Why the flogging?” Rutger now asked the overseer.
“They deserve it. That one there,” and he pointed to the negro who had just been whipped, “has stolen dram, and that one” (pointing to the other) “is more lazy than tired; and this here,” poking his stick into the girl’s breast, for the third figure was a girl of perhaps sixteen, “has insulted me.”
“Insulted you?” asked Rutger, amazed. “How so?”
“She spat in my face.”
“Oh yes, and when?”
Rutger looked towards the girl, who, her hands still bound, was looking at her feet.
“Yesterday evening, uh, night,” retorted the overseer curtly.
“Hmmm, then your face was certainly very close to hers,” remarked Rutger calmly.