Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl

I'm not a historian, but I found this book very interesting about 1600 plantation life in the tropics.

Born in London and being of Irish decent myself; also having suffered living in Barbados for almost 10 years, I found this book very readable indeed. I'd truly love to meet the lady that wrote this masterpiece. I don't have any fancy words to add here - just my sincere thanks... thanks very much Kate McCafferty for turning me onto a whole aspect of my heritage I knew nothing about. After this I read "To Hell or Barbados" by Sean O'Callaghan and it's a historical account (not a novel) of the "ethnic cleansing of Ireland" and truly a shocking read. Thank you.

I ask three things of historical fiction: an authentic, memorable voice, a vivid sense of place, and a story so well told that I want to learn more about the historical events on which it is based. Testimony of an Irish Slave Girl delivers admirably on all three counts. Cot Quashey's voice and her description of Barbados is so well written that it seemed as if I were sweating in that stifling room with her and Peter Coote, the character who records her spellbinding narrative. And before the day is over, I hope to own a copy of To Hell and Barbados by Sean O'Callaghan, a nonfiction work about Irish slavery in Barbados. The pace of Testimony reminds me of Cold Mountain, in which the reader walks every step with a soldier painfully making his way back home. Like Inman, Cot Quashey takes the reader on a journey through time and misery at a pace that perfectly matches the geographic setting of her tale. When Coote grows impatient with the ramblings of a dying woman--indeed, is annoyed by the putrefication of her rotting flesh--readers are reminded that stories of slavery are always discomfiting. We wish they had never happened; we long for them to end. But Cot has her way. Coote, and the reader, must hear every beautifully-phrased, horrific word. I particularly like the deposition device that the author employs. She stretches it to suit her purpose--this is fiction, after all--but it's historically accurate and calls to mind Thomas Gray's actual interview of the enslaved Nat Turner while he was waiting in his cell to be hanged. I also liked the cultural commonalities that the Irish Cot and her African husband discover between them. Quashey is distressed because his enslavement means that "ancestors could no longer guide" him and his people. Cot remembers that she said "many holy charms and tales; but the heart has gone away from them. My saints can no longer find me." Kate McCafferty bravely and imaginatively addresses a subject often ignored by historians who focus solely on the tragedy of Irish-Black relations: as much united these oppressed peoples as separated them. In "A Conversation with Kate McCafferty" at the end of the book, the author notes, "There's been a recent trend against histories in the genre of a novel. I think it's a kind of postmodern stance . . . " I agree. Shame on postmodern academics who sniff at McCafferty's book while using it in a classroom setting. They would be better off sticking to the dry, lifeless prose written by their colleagues. A writer of historical fiction does not spend years researching and crafting a story so that teachers incapable of writing such a work can then turn it into instructional material. At its best, literature can motivate, inspire, entertain, and change the heart of a reader. Its potential should never be destroyed by using it as a textbook or comparing it to one.

In this extensively researched historical novel, author Kate McCafferty uncovers a little-known area of history: the 'trepanning'(forced immigration into slavery) of Irish and other whites to Barbados in the 17th C. Cot Daley, who is kidnapped at the age of 11, endures a 'middle passage' similar to that taken by African slaves to her new, 'hellish' home in the New World. The novel is written in the form of a deposition that the now elderly Cot Quashey delivers to Peter Coote, an apothecary charged with unearthing evidence from an aborted slave-servant revolt on the island in which Cot played a minor role. Cot promises information, if only Coote will take down her entire life story (which he does with increasing frustration). We learn of Cot's endless suffering, both in her work on sugar cane plantations and in her personal life. There are only fleeting moments of happiness, some with her eventual 'husband', an African named Quashey, who becomes the leader of a thwarted rebellion (there were several unsuccessful attempts by enslaved whites and Africans during the 17th C). There are few joys in Cot's life -- the novel is depressing in its realism -- yet, by the end of the book, she has gained a certain nobility of purpose. McCafferty provides an in-depth character study of a flawed woman who only wants her personal freedom...and is denied such by circumstance and the men in her life. Well worth reading.

This book is interesting because it tends to broaden an issue that has been narrowly covered. The history of slavery of course crosses all racial and ethnic boundaries. In America that story has been suppressed. The afrocentric view of American scholarship has created a polarized and fractured society in which the issue of slavery has been crafted into solely a racial issue in which an endless cycle of guilt and hate and rage continues. In the real world, oppression and challenges have faced all groups depending on time and place. This book reveals the universality of issues such as this and for that reason is highly recommended.

Wow! Is all I can say. Kate McCafferty draws you into a world that many Western readers could never fathom. A world in which Irish men, women, and children are sold, alongside African slaves, as nothing more than cattle. This is a brilliant book that tells a story that has been given very little or no attention by mainstream history--and hence, it is all the more compelling. Lyrically written, I suggest that anyone interested in the lives of women, or the Irish, read this book!