The Cost of Sugar(8)

After this traditional ceremony, dishes were brought by the slave-boys and slave-girls from the houses and the feast could begin. Rutger had as a matter of course come to sit next to Elza, and when father Levi had taken a place at the same table and had made Rutger’s acquaintance, a congenial round of conversation arose among all those seated there. Elza looked around once to see where Sarith was, but she wasn’t at any of the tables. Was she perhaps still busy changing? She really didn’t know what the matter was with Sarith, but, all right, perhaps she didn’t feel like eating at the moment and would come along later.

The conversation at the table was not always congenial, for there soon arose talk of the colony’s problems. The attacks by the escapees. Only recently they had raided several plantations. They had made it as far as the Temptatie, where they had killed the Jewish owner and his wife, as well as the overseer. They had freed the slaves, who had immediately joined them, and they had set the plantation house on fire as well as the sugarcane in the field.





Some weeks earlier they had raided the Jukemombo Plantation on the Boven16-Commewijne River. The owner, Master Biertempel, was away at that moment. His wife was murdered and his three children were wounded. The raiders had taken everything, even the children’s clothes. When the father had hastened back home the following day, he had found his children, half-naked, weeping over their mother’s corpse. The colonists were now well and truly frightened. A stop would have to be put to this!

Rutger remarked that in his opinion it would be better for the government to make peace with the Maroons and not persecute themany longer. Suriname was so large, and nobody used the hinterland. That could be the free negroes domain. Many of the guests turned on Rutger. He was still new in the colony and didn’t know what he was talking about. The government had already made peace with the bush-negroes. Some years ago there had been a huge fuss because the government had made peace with the escapees on the Boven-Suriname River. Did Rutger perhaps think that peacemust bemade every time a wild group appeared in the hinterland? Then you could just keep on doing that and very soon the whole of Suriname would be portioned off to those devil’s children.

A corpulent women in a dress of black silk declared that she believed that an uprising wasn’t far off. Everyone could surely remember the terrible uprising in Berbice a few years ago. Well, they could expect something like that here. An uprising in which all the whites would be murdered or forced into slavery by the negroes.

“Would it not then be better if all slave owners treated their slaves well?” Rutger asked, “Without the terrible punishments that are handed out. Is it not the fear of these brutalities, such as being hung on a meat hook, a hand or a foot being hacked off, a savage beating, burning alive, that makes slaves run away?”

Pa Levi nodded in agreement when Rutger made this remark, but most of the guests at the table laughed heartily. Rutger really was a naïve newcomer. Punishment was the only way to treat slaves: they were stupid and lazy. If you didn’t terrify them with heavy and cruel punishment, they would get the idea that they could do what they liked. And in any case, were they not created by our Lord to sweat and toil for the whites? Rutger wanted to remark that he would gladly like to hear how it was so unequivocally known that negroes had been created to this end, but Elza whispered to him, “Oh, Rutger, say nothing now. These folks are real fanatics. You’ll fall so out of grace with them if you share your opinion that slaves must be treated well.”

So Rutger had said nothing further. He was after all a guest there.





SARITH


But Sarith was not resting in her grandparents’ house. She had seized an opportunity that had presented itself as everyone was leaving the synagogue, had sidled up to Nathan and said, “Come now, I must talk to you.”

“Must that be now?” Nathan had asked apprehensively.

“Yes, now,” Sarith replied, “And if you don’t come this minute, I will scream, and I will do it right here and loudly.”

Nathan then told Leah that she should carry on to the tabernacle because he had to go and fetch something, and he walked off in the other direction with Sarith, to the back of her grandparents’ house where the garden overlooked the valley.

“Nathan, you said that you loved me! I was really the one you wanted to marry. And then I suddenly hear that you are engaged to Leah. How can you, Nathan?” Sarith almost stumbled over her words, so quickly did she utter them.

“Oh, Sarith, Sarith.” Nathan held both her hands. “I really do love you, but I have no choice, don’t you see. This was decided long ago by my parents.”