Two-Way Mirror by Fiona Sampson (jenna bush book club txt) 📗

brought to London as a domestic, had run away after ten years, found shelter with the Moravian Church, and started working for Thomas Pringle, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. He transcribed and published her The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, an excoriating testimony that sold out three editions in a year:

How can slaves be happy when they have the halter round their neck and the whip upon their back? and are disgraced and thought no more of than beasts?—and are separated from their mothers, and husbands, and children, and sisters, just as cattle are sold and separated? […]—women that have had children exposed in the open field to shame! There is no modesty or decency shown by the owner to his slaves […]. Since I have been here I have often wondered how English people can go out into the West Indies and act in such a beastly manner. But when they go to the West Indies, they forget God and all feeling of shame […]. They tie up slaves like hogs—moor them up like cattle, and they lick them.

Despite such raw home truths, the 1833 Act still doesn’t liberate people already enslaved. No one will actually be freed until 1838, after a five-year transition designed to ease the financial shock to the planters. The British government also announces a fund of £20 million – to compensate slavers, not the people they’ve exploited. Even when 1838 does arrive, the indentured ‘apprenticeships’ – low-paid work on inescapable contracts – to which enslaved people are moved don’t constitute genuine freedom.

September 1833 sees Elizabeth grumbling at the same time as virtue signalling:

Of course you know that the late bill has ruined the West Indians. That is settled. The consternation here is very great. Nevertheless I am glad, and always shall be, that the negroes are—virtually—free!

That ‘nevertheless’ sums up the dilemma of being born a Barrett. By now twenty-seven, Elizabeth is adult and intelligent enough to recognise that her own interests are opposed to those of the people her family enslaved. Whigs and progressives, the Barretts would be natural abolitionists – but for their own plantations. Uncle Sam’s impossible solution to this paradox replaces it with another one. Trying to be a kind slave ‘owner’ is a contradiction in terms, since slavery is in its very nature a crime. As Elizabeth herself will put it a dozen years from now, when she has finally become a true abolitionist, ‘a philanthropist & liberal who advocates the slave-trade, can scarcely be thorough […]. Call it a philanthropic veneering.’ The government’s misdirected reparations compound the moral problem, ensuring that Barrett family money remains dirty; and there’s a practical problem too. The alternative to complicity is to walk away into extreme poverty. None of the Barretts display this level of self-sacrificing integrity. But then in nineteenth-century Britain – as in twenty-first – nobody does.

It’s autumn 1835 when Bro finally arrives home from Jamaica; in 1836 second brother Sam travels out to replace him. By now the men of the family are grappling not with the ethical fault line that runs through their fortunes, but with huge, continuing financial fallout from a more intimate threat. Before Papa had even attained his majority, the property he inherited from his grandfather Edward Barrett was being contested by a cousin, ‘Handsome Sam’ Barrett, who claimed a historic misattribution of holdings. This case rumbled on, finally seeming to have been settled in 1824 by order of the Council of George IV. But when Handsome Sam died in Cheltenham that very month, his younger brother Richard, a trained lawyer, took over the estate as executor and trustee and dug up paperwork allowing a fresh attack, on similar grounds, upon Papa’s inheritance.

This is the same Richard who as custos tried in 1832 to have Uncle Sam arrested. (He is known to the family back in England as ‘RB’: initials that will acquire quite other significance in years to come.) The case won’t be resolved until ‘RB’ dies in 1839. As one of Elizabeth’s friends will summarise it, at Hope End Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett was ‘a man of £15,000 a year’ until, out of the blue,

A cousin came to him & showed him a will dated 60 years before under which he claimed £75,000. Mr Barrett, who had never heard of the claim showed the will to a lawyer who advised him to dispute it.—He did so; & after the cause had been driven from court to court it has been given against him with enormous costs & interest, so that his place in Herefordshire is sold.

By the family’s third year in Sidmouth these costs, both financial and emotional, are accumulating exponentially. Papa, who has become profoundly depressed, disappears frequently ‘to do his London business’. On one such trip in October 1834, he falls seriously ill with ‘water on the lungs’ – in other words, pneumonia. He makes a good recovery, but it’s a scare. ‘Without him, we should indeed be orphans & desolate’, frets Elizabeth.

Papa’s nurse in London is his late mother’s best friend and companion, Mary Trepsack – now living alone in Marylebone on the £2,000 Grandmama left her. Treppy’s mixed heritage means that she is ‘black’ by her own definition, though she doesn’t describe herself this way – reserving the term for others. Much loved – ‘She has nursed .. tossed up .. held on her knee—Papa when he was an infant’ – she personifies the family’s ambivalences about race. Treppy’s mother was enslaved, and though her white planter father, William Trepsack, gave the child his name and probably manumitted her at birth, she has achieved the decent comfort of her present life only paradoxically, through the lottery of bereavement. The death of her mother – herself of mixed heritage, in other words similarly the child of a white man – meant that Treppy escaped sharing her fate, an upbringing in slave quarters. When her father died she was rescued from his failing household to became a