Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [71]
"Call it a quarterly allowance, then," I said.
He sighed heavily and began sharpening his pen.
A third wish, I thought, there has to be a third. And then I remembered what began it all. "One last thing. James Somerset," I said. "Let him go."
"Ah, now, my dear," said my great-uncle grimly, "that's a complicated matter."
"Don't I know it?"
"You meddle in what doesn't concern you."
Rage, like ink, spilled across my eyes. "Whom does it concern more than me," I shouted, "whose mother was a slave, your nephew's slave and whore? I wonder, did he free her before she died? Did he take the shackles off when she was giving birth to me?" Now I did not care if I could be heard all through the Inner Temple. "Whom should such matters concern more than me, your little dusky plaything?"
Lord Mansfield bent across the desk and seized me, then, enclosed me in his arms. I could smell the dust and sourness of his old robes. "Dido," he sobbed, "Dido Bell, my sweet girl, how can you say such things?"
I rested in his embrace for a few seconds, then pulled away. "Let James Somerset go free."
"But don't you see, my dear," he said, straightening his spectacles with one shaky hand, "I mustn't be swayed by personal loyalties. Faithful to Virtue Alone, don't you know."
"What virtue has a man with no loyalties?"
He winced. "But I have many. The very fact that I am known to have in my family—to be bound by every tender tie, to, to—"
"A mulatto."
"—to you, Dido, makes it all the more imperative that I should be seen to maintain objectivity in this most controversial case."
"I'm not asking a favour for myself," I told him coldly. "I ask justice for Somerset."
The old man breathed heavily. Finally he said, "I have always called American slavery an odious institution."
I waited.
"But the fact is, its effects are woven through our whole social fabric. To rule that a master mayn't put his own slave on a ship—well, it could bring on ruin."
"For whom?"
"For everyone, Dido. Agriculture, trade, the economies of many nations ... the consequences ... if misunderstood, if too widely interpreted," he said, almost babbling, seizing my hand, "such a ruling could lead to fifteen thousand slaves casting off their yokes in the morning! If no man may own and control another in England, some will argue, how may he do so elsewhere?"
I felt power like sugar in my mouth.
"At the end of an honourable career, Dido," the old judge said, clinging to my fingers, "I might stand accused of having brought down chaos on us all."
"Should I take my leave, then?" I asked him, at the end of a long silence. "Is it time for us to part?"
His mouth moved, but he could not speak.
"Are we not family, then, after all?"
He wept. He nodded. He called for the carriage to take us home.
Note
Dido Bell, aka Dido Elizabeth Belle, aka Elizabeth Dido Lindsay, was born in England to an African slave woman who had been on a Spanish ship captured by Sir John Lindsay (one of Lord Mansfield's nephews) in the West Indies.
My sources for "Dido " include the diary of Thomas Hutchinson (published 1886), who visited Kenwood on 29 August 1779. Zoffany's portrait of Dido and Lady Elizabeth Murray hangs in Scone Palace. I found much conflicting information on her in Gretchen Gerzina, Black England; James Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain; Julius Bryant, The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood; and Gene Adams, "Dido Elizabeth Belle: A Black Girl at Kenwood," Camden History Review 12 (1984).
On 22 June 1772 Lord Mansfield finally delivered what became known as the Somerset Ruling, which said that no master was to be allowed to take a slave abroad by force. Many abolitionists interpreted it broadly to mean that slavery was now illegal in Britain, and thousands of slaves left their masters or demanded wages. But black people continued to be bought, sold, bunted, and kidnapped in England, and sometimes shipped back to the West Indies, for many decades to come. It is not clear what age Dido was in 1772, or