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

Ba arrives at Hope End Britain has passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807), but in practice the slave trade won’t be stamped out in the Caribbean until 1811.

Nothing mitigates her grandfather’s culpability. A strategic, hard-headed ex-militiaman from East Yorkshire, Graham-Clarke was neither young nor unworldly by the time he acquired his Jamaican estates. His single visit to that island, in the early 1790s, consolidated relationships with other planter families, but produced no gesture of remission or compassion for his enslaved labour. For nineteenth-century commercial ambition is shameless. Enormous wealth is already being generated for British industrialists, even those who own no slaves and pillage no colonies, by indentured and child labour in factories, mills and mines. Unlike plantation slavery, this on-shore exploitation offers no fig leaf of invisibility to those who profit from it: conditions in local factories and mills like the ones Graham-Clarke owns are starkly visible. Yet they persist. Seamen, including his own crews, routinely brave danger, floggings and near starvation, even though the Tyne dockside, where they tie up, runs right by the city centre. In 1810 this is still small enough for rich and poor to live within sight, sound and smell of each other. Even the vertical slums around Black Gate are less than half a mile from Graham-Clarke’s Pilgrim Street home. It’s in this brutally desensitising era that businesses like his are beginning to flex global muscle.

Since his alliance-building visit to the Caribbean, Ba’s dynamic grandfather has become a key English contact for many Jamaican plantation owners. Among them are the Barretts of Cinnamon Hill. Graham-Clarke became important to this family in 1792, when paterfamilias Edward Barrett saw his daughter Elizabeth’s offspring, Sarah, Edward and Samuel, off to England for their education. The grandchildren had become his responsibility when their father, Charles Moulton, left them. Elizabeth soon followed her children to London. But there – though her boys were under the legal guardianship of James Scarlett, the brilliant Jamaican-born lawyer and family friend who would become Lord Abinger – she was in effect a woman alone, since she was accompanied only by her best friend, Mary Trepsack. A family dependent whose father was an impoverished planter and mother a slave, ‘Treppy’ will remain a central, much-loved Barrett figure right through the lives of Elizabeth Moulton’s grandchildren – as her loving nickname indicates. But she’s a woman of mixed heritage and relatively poorly off, and in the world of men she has even less power than her friend.

By contrast, Graham-Clarke was well-placed to become de facto mentor to the wealthy Barrett boys. Edward, the elder son and so primary heir, fell into the habit of staying at Pilgrim Street. Perhaps he was already falling for the family’s eldest girl, Mary. Although four years her junior, before he even came of age he’d decided to marry her. His youth meant that the marriage needed family approval, but this presented no problem, for Barrett wealth represented a dynastic opportunity for Graham-Clarke. Indeed in some lights, Mary appears a bit like a honeytrap set for the young, fatherless heir.

Whatever the case, Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett soon proved himself no pushover. Realising his new father-in-law had stopped paying for sugar received from the Barrett plantations, in November 1807 he instructed Philip Scarlett, his attorney and the brother of his actual legal guardian, to refuse Graham-Clarke further shipments: ‘He has not for the last two years settled our account […] it is an unpleasant business and has given me great uneasiness but it is a duty I owe to myself […] I do not wish this to be known.’ A peculiarly intimate trust, in a man who must have been a kind of father figure to the youth, had been broken; and with it, perhaps, some vital faith in human nature. Just three months later, the twenty-two-year-old gave his County Durham landlord notice and moved his new family to the other end of England.

I do not wish this to be known. It is possible that this delicacy means Mary has no idea why her husband moved abruptly south. But she seems to have been raised biddable. As she grows up, Ba will find her mother’s apparent submissiveness infuriating, and even in maturity she’ll give no sign of understanding that it might have been strategic; recalling only something that sounds like passive aggression – ‘A sweet, gentle nature, which the thunder a little turned from its sweetness—as when it turns milk—One of those women who never can resist,—but, in submitting & bowing on themselves, make a mark, a plait, within, .. a sign of suffering’ – and certain that no such feminine ‘sweetness’ forms part of her own character. How ironic that by the time she writes this she’ll be making similar displays of tractability herself.

But perhaps our mothers are the people we understand least. Mary Moulton-Barrett is in fact a strong woman, physically able to bear twelve children and determined against the tide of the times to ensure the intellectual development of her eldest daughter – and indeed all her brood. Yet maybe it is a tendency to yield that causes her to appear sanguine about slavery, gossiping that ‘I rejoice to hear that Mrs T. has had a letter from James, giving an excellent account of himself, of the crops, & of his happiness in [the plantation at] Mont Serrat.’

Is this a domestic survival technique, in an era when women face economic, and so physical, destruction if they cease to comply with their menfolk? And what if it is – can there be a sliding scale of complicity? In 1810, more than 10 per cent of wealthy Britons are profiting from slavery: money that will never return to the enslaved people who created it, but remains in the British economy into the twenty-first century. Over two centuries on, the murky waters of the Atlantic slave trade lap at all our feet, whether as deficit or profit. Even four-year-old Ba is implicated, on that sunny hilltop where we