And Of Those Who Own Slaves

                                 Another Chronicle Of My Purely Fictitious But Perfectly Typical Ancestor



" Thump-ugh" all in a beat and a half. The sound of his bull-dog , Queen Mary, getting kicked for harassing little pigs. She might have squalled a bit more but it could not be told over the squeal of the pigs and the roar of the old sow.

But it was the 'thump-ugh" that stuck in his mind. Patrick was mesmerized when he first saw African slaves playing the dried gourd with a long wooden neck, that they called their banios. The music was completely unlike any thing he had heard on sea or land. "Thump-Ugh", the sound of a plucked string unfettered by fingers, left to ring free for half a beat until a finger slammed down onto it. The slaves called it a "hammer".

Before he saw Africans with their banios he had never seen an instrument "hammered" nor had he ever seen a string struck only with the back of a finger nail. Certainly he never saw a white balladeer hold his hand stiffly as the back of the nail struck strings soon to be "hammered" into the correct note.

No, nothing like it on sea or land, not as a Welsh child, nor as an indentured servant at his masters plantation. Such music was not even found at the center of this new land, King James, His Town. James, His Town was only about 11 miles away across King James, His River.

But it could not be farther from England. He looked around at his scrabble shack home, his hogs and their pigs, and considered his own clothing, part well spun, part of skins as the savages wore. The only thing English in all of his scrabble was Queen Mary, a pure of blood English bull dog.

Even the hogs were not as those of home. Small, squat, with long noses and rarely weighing over 100 pounds on their own account. Even their flesh was of a foreign nature. It was marbled with fat, like the fat of a stabled calf given its heart's desire of barley corn. These were not the hogs of home.

These hogs came from islands off the coast of Africa and  who were taken to the Spanish isle's to the south. There they were purchased by ship's captains and brought north to the English settlements that grew from nothing all around the Bay of the Chesopioc and the rivers that flowed into to it, particularly the biggest river, King James, His River.

He kept a few sows up in  a heavy log enclosure--strong enough to keep them in and strong enough to keep the bears out. Those sows were trapped. Their pigs would be released to the swamps around his scrabble after he notched their ears to show his claim to the. When the notion struck him, he and Queen Mary would slip off to the swamp, he with his knife in a long scabbard and Mary slinking  quietly through the mire.

First he would hear a growl, then a series of piercing screams. At that sound Patrick would break into a dead run, knife in hand. In short order he would find Mary with a young shoat, maybe fifty pounds, held tightly in her grip.  A left hand grabbed the hog's ear, a right hand drove the long knife deep, from the throat to the heart. Blood would spatter Patrick and Mary. At times he wondered which of them loved the blood the most. He would eat more good pork in two weeks in his scrabble than he could have afforded over two years in England.

Patrick understood those hogs in the swamp. They were like him--working hard to find the day's provender and knowing full well that they might have to fight for their lives with no notice at all.

He could not understand the sows in the enclosure. They were secured tightly, protected from the wood's beasts, and having everything they wanted--but to be free of the enclosure.

He did not fancy that a hog could see all that well, but he knew that he saw hate in the eyes of each sow that was in his servitude. Hate--never seen that in the eye's of any other animals. When it came time to muse of such things he wondered which the sows would love more, the satisfaction of tearing out of their pen, or the satisfaction of tearing his entrails out.

Some times he was awakened by horrid dreams of being torn by the tushes of the old sows, leg bones crushed, and his heart rooted from his body as the swamp hogs would root out an acorn.

Surely, he thought, the dreams of those who held men as livestock and called them their property, must bring even more terror.