TESTIMONY OF AN IRISH SLAVE GIRL

Surefire dramatic material and a hauntingly exotic setting are the most striking features of this debut historical about an Irish girl kidnapped, sold into slavery, and later involved in a failed rebellion against the “plantocracy” that exploits black and white victims alike.

The time is the later 17th century, and she who “testifies” is middle-aged Cot Quashey (born Daley), under interrogation by Peter Coote, an “Apothecary-Doctor” also employed as an investigator by the governor of Barbados. As the priggish, thoughtlessly elitist and racist Coote prompts her impatiently, Cot relates the details of her abduction (when she was only ten years old), passage to the West Indies on an overcrowded, stinking “slaver,” and twenty-plus years at two sugar plantations, where black African and “dispensable” white slaves labored together, cutting cane and enduring forced cohabitation (“The breeding was an extra duty after a full day in the fields”). Cot’s piecemeal tale rises frequently to rhapsodic heights as she recalls the births and losses of her children, and particularly her unexpectedly happy marriage to “Quashey the Coromantee,” a black African Muslim regarded as “a man of rank among the bondsfolk” whose elaborate plan to liberate the slaves is brutally put down—yet not before Cot is implicated in the “crime,” for which she’ll never stop paying. It’s an engrossing story, bolstered by an impressive wealth of carefully researched period detail. But it all flashes by too quickly, and McCafferty’s very pointed references to Cot’s descent from a family of “seanachies” (i.e., bards) do little to dispel the reader’s growing sense that the character’s voice is an unconvincingly literate stand-in for the author’s, doling out exposition and compacted narrative as if conducting a history lesson. And, once Cot’s story reaches the events of the revolt itself, they’re presented in inexplicably abrupt summary form.

As McCafferty’s preface declares, “The Irish perspective is important to the history of resistance to colonialism.” For that reason alone, Testimony is well worth reading—though it’s not nearly as wonderful as it might have been.