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Excerpted Inspirations #191

  • Writer: Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
    Linda Odhner, with photos by Liz Kufs
  • Aug 17
  • 0 min read
[The year is 1719; Jade is a 16-year-old colonial American girl who hates slavery and the oppression of women. Jade has accompanied her father and uncle to a slave market in Jamaica.] “Hardest to tame, these are,” murmured Uncle Augustus, feeling muscles and examining teeth and eyes with a practiced air. “But rather good specimens, all the same. Here, take a look at this fellow, Thomas. What do you think?” Mr. Lennox glanced sideways at his stone-faced daughter, wishing he hadn’t let her come. “They don’t really mind, you know,” he muttered, almost as if he were convincing himself as well as her. “No more than horses do. They’re only Blacks.” Jade looked at him, coldly accusing. Of course they minded! How could he lie like that? They minded just as wild horses minded, and William’s fox, and any other free creature in captivity – before their spirits were broken. She saw herself in all of them. She hated everybody! At her expression, her father tightened his lips and turned away to join his brother-in-law, leaving Jade to stand there near the door, poised to leave and determined not to be a coward. And then she saw the girl, standing with the four other women, but infinitely aloof, dwarfing them in size and spirit. She held herself like a queen: ignoring chains, ragged shift, her own bare satin flesh, and everyone in the courtyard. Her face was swollen from a blow – but beneath the swelling was great beauty. A slender black column of throat rose proudly to meet the curve of a long delicate jaw; the head was beautifully shaped; and between high cheekbones and a strong lovely arch of brow were clear intelligent eyes – eyes like William’s fox: proud and angry and unyielding. Except for those eyes, the face was a mask of composed indifference. Jade stood transfixed, her own eyes wide with shocked recognition. She knew that look! It was her very own after-a-whipping expression, and for a moment she had the dizzy sensation of meeting herself in someone else’s skin. Or meeting someone else in her own? Suddenly she was sharing the searing humiliation of being discussed and marketed like a farm animal ... the savage desire to kill her captors, or foil them by killing herself ... and the pride that kept her calm as a statue because the final degradation would be to show that she cared.... With a jolt she was alone in her own skin again, staring a startled question into the brown eyes in the mask. Had she felt it too? Such a thing couldn’t be one-sided – could it? But there was not a flicker of the black lashes. Sally Watson, Jade (1969), pp. 60-61

 
 
 
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