George Elliott Clarke

The Ballad of Sally Bassett (1730)

A hand punched a corkscrew through a lamb’s munching throat.
A Congolese hand—no measly fist—likely wrought the midnight
thrust of corkscrew into lamb’s throat—and three unlucky calves,

so that the creatures dumped, stumped, pumped, blood, jumped,
then slumped, vainly vexed to be slaughtered, to be so sacrificed
prior Easter, and then their hooves tottered, faltered; the animals

became gobbledygook strewing the farm, their hobbled throats
throbbing stitches of maggots; their orange-black eyes bobbing
up white. Vision gone blind as a slut’s slit.

Each carcass’s baroque Frigidity mandated a detective’s rational
Imagination, to un-dissolve inanimate meat back into live beings
slain by a lethal hand, so as to reveal the butcher:  Sally Bassett.

She’d squatted by the dumb, throat-cut creatures and mumbled
jungle juju, and didn’t bemoan the sanguine, triple destructions;
moreover, the mulatta hid a red-stained corkscrew in her shack.

Convicted, Sally was walked slow and whipped across Hamilton
Parish, til her back and butt were as scarlet as a cut-open throat,
til her black back and ass pulsed blood.

Next, she was sold, and commanded to grow her pickanninies and
grandchildren—two generations—to be then marketed, and breed
and re-breed, to compensate her witch-like savaging of sorry cattle.

Each Bassett female, once sprouting teats, was sold off to masters
who’d corkscrew each human-capital, livestock cunt, each triangle,
to transform mulattas into “octoroons,” or negresses one-sixteenth

negro.  Thus, Sally Bassett suffered such Damnation; to see her own
daughters and granddaughters assigned to Lechery, to lewd gents, as
payback for three throat-slit critters.

As Pembroke blacksmith Frank Dickinson’s slave, Bassett got used|
every which way:  In shop, in bed, smithing black iron and smithing
black flesh, until Dickinson found she’d become used up, a woman

now good for nothing but sipping cold chowder.  He threw her out—
like scrap metal, like maggot-possessed carrion, like a worm-sick rose.
Anyhow, now Bassett got purchased by a Christian, Mr. Tom Foster,

who wanted her and her granddaughter Becky to cook the household
meals, and their employ meant no hardship.  Their Slavery exemplified
Bermudan Slavery, more Leisure than Labour.

Bassett spooned oatmeal topped with fresh cream and slept under gold,
brocade silk; she donned a sumptuous wardrobe; Mr. Foster put flowers
in vases in her room.  Christmas staged her an orgy of furs and perfume

and bread and wine bottles.  Foster’s plantation was famed for its idyllic,
no-complaint slaves.  But Bassett was secretly brooding over her lashed
back and lost progeny.  She was scheming petticoat Treason versus Massa

Foster, his wife, and a slave, Anansi.  She distilled noxious poisons from
weeds to encourage a vile miracle:  Unsuspicious deaths.  Quick, Foster,
wife, and Anansi vomited Sally’s ale.

Indeed, while clucking and cooing gracious prayers, Bassett had secreted
in each Foster goblet the lethal juices from a wild, undocumented flower,
a strain impossible to fish out—as fishy—from the peppery ginger beer.

Soon, Anansi and her owners assumed a lavatory pallor and starved fast
To thinness.  Their ribs stuck out; they looked bleached, worn out linen.
A priest was summoned to help usher them on to Heaven.  But a doctor

accompanied, and surprised to see beings so young looking so withered,
he slapped his glasses to the wine glasses, and swirled liquids and tested
detritus, droppings, and found poison.

Now, Becky betrayed her grandma’s crime; confessed she’d been mixing
a drug from a strange flower’s syrup, and slinging it to the kindly Fosters
and the detested Anansi.  Arrested as the Fosters rallied, Sally giggled—

illogical as a tantrum—and testifed her Innocence—before Christ’s Cross.
Speedy was her trial.  Her dull defence was, “Becky and Anansi are liars;
the doc’s a quack.” But her Innocence was nonsense, her Guilt consequent.

Condemned to burn up at the stake like any crone, Bassett bayed instead
for the classical, Cleopatra suicide:  To nurse vipers at her dugs.  But the
Court was not so archaic.

Basically, Bassett had to blaze, to become a living faggot, to make other
slaves too fearful to contest Slavery, and to accept Heaven as their lavish
treat.  June 17, 1730, at Hamilton town’s Crow Lane, crowds did swarm

on that overheated day (such days are now dubbed “Sally Bassett day”),
to see a washed-up hag turn to ash in punitive fireworks—as if watching
a mop burn.  But Bassett showed bitter Wit as she was carted to the pyre,

the hoi polloi following.  She bellowed out:  “Don’t rush, y’all!  There’s no
excellent show for y’all—til I show myself in flames!”  Well, Bermudans
acted savages, had merciless fun,

mocking the crone as the fire jig-sawed her flesh, sluicing down to bone.
But Bassett’s final testament was most malevolent witchery:  She yelled,
“I’s wronged, and my proof is the vivid, magenta flower that’ll sprout up

from my ashes!”  Once she trimmed slim as a shadow, thinning down to
char, teeth, ash, her prediction was borne out as her ashes got borne off:
A mauve bloom—an iris of the genus, Sisyrinchium, rightly catalogued as

“Bermudiana,” startles eyes all about the isle, while demonstrating vividly
Sally Bassett’s categorical—allegorical—Innocence.  Slaves think this magic
Proves the case, and they mutter Treason.

Revolts are brewing—poison is brewing—all around these British West
Indies, where slaves now contemplate massacring we rightful masters, so
As to savour Luxury that even peasants—with white complexions—can’t.

Bassett—that murderoust slave, violently put down, with fire charring her
to a husk and heap of carbon, her womb split apart, her lungs wept open,
her heart bubbling tar—is now Bermuda’s black saint:  No contradiction.

This hussy—or impure missy, the bitch Sally Bassett, with her odious face
and tarnished heart, her hauntingly homicidal schemes and toxic witchery,
now flummoxes—harries—Sleep,

for she is harmfully, beautifully, escaped from our jailing frames; she has
won incandescent Fame that far out-blazes the brilliance that gobbled her
body, for her name now brands torrid weather and a wild, purple bloom.

 

Author’s note:

After Bassett’s death, spontaneous slave uprisings sprouted, twixt 1730
and 1739, in St. John, Antigua, Jamaica, and South Carolina.  Their one
symbol? Sally’s purple flower….

 

[Grotto Bay, Hamilton Parish (Bermuda) 16 décembre mmxiv]

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