Black nightingale

Roy Kerridge

Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands Mary Seacole Edited by Ziggi Alexander and Audrey Dewjee (Falling Wall Press £7,50)

wonderful indeed are the true adven- tures of Mary Seacole, written by herself and first published in 1857. A brisk, jolly Creole lady of Jamaica, who bustled about the world curing the sick,

carrying victuals to soldiers and opening hotels

wherever she went, she was justly famous in her day. Her courage was first put to the test during the Kingston cholera epidemic of 1850. Mrs Seacole, whose husband died young, never remarried. She inherited her skill as a 'doctress' from her mother. Although versed in the use of medicinal herbs, she was no 'bush doctor' or semi- magical healer, but a cheerful combination of caterer, doctor and nurse. When the epidemic began, Mrs Seacole rolled tip her sleeves and worked tirelessly, expecting no payment and never shrinking from the fear- ful sights, the groans, blood and stench around her.

As a Creole, Mary Seacole occupied a middle place between black and white in the Jamaican social scale, and her indomitable personality endeared her to one and all. In her autobiography, she makes light of hard- ships she endured and of heroic feats she performed, but her pluck and her golden heart shine through the humour with which she seasons her stirring narrative. For a time, she was the only respectable woman working among the gold prospectors of Panama, a breed she describes vividly. A drunken, boasting horde of white

Americans straight from the pages of Mar- tin Chuzzlewit and Huckleberry Finn

poured into a republic where former runaway slaves from the American South had created a responsible middle class.

Mary Seacole describes the Americans' crassness of spirit and softens her descrip- tions of Southern bigotry with a merry

English sense of humour. As in Jamaica, Mrs Seacole ran a hotel and hospital com- bined, in the heart of a lawless gold camp where Wild-West-type shootings were com- mon.

Proud of being British, as are many Jamaicans today, Mary Seacole felt very motherly towards the young British officers stationed at Up-Park Camp, near Kingston, where she became an official nurse in 1853. She referred to her patients as her 'sons', and they in turn called her 'mother', only half in fun.

When the Crimean War broke out, and reports reached Jamaica of the sufferings of British and French troops outside Sebastopol, Mary Seacole felt an over- whelming call to be there helping them. She journeyed to London and applied, unsuc- cessfully, to join Florence Nightingale's team of nurses. Shunted from office to of- fice, and jeered at by London street- urchins, Mary Seacole was plagued with doubts about the English. Hitherto, she had always contrasted them with the bigoted Americans. 'Was it possible that American prejudices against colour had some root here?', she writes. 'Tears streamed down my foolish cheeks...'

Then, as now, England was both preju- diced and unprejudiced. Just as you decide that this is a segregated country, unselfcon- scious friendship between the old and new English seems to be everywhere. Then, just as you decide all is well, everyone seems to start talking about black and white again. Never one to stay undecided, Mrs Seacole formed a business partnership with a Mr Day, a rather shadowy character in the nar- rative, and set out for the Crimea at her own expense. Near Cathcart Hill, outside Sebastopol, she became mistress of the British Hotel, which she and Mr Day built from scratch. In this endeavour they were plagued by thieves of every nation who had arrived in the train of the pedlars and vic- tuallers who provided for the needs of soldiers neglected and starved by the army bureaucracy.

Soon Mother Seacole became a familiar figure, as she trotted among the sick tents with bundles of bandages and medicine, always well-dressed, with bright ribbons in her bonnet and a kindly word for all. Many soldiers who had known her in Jamaica greeted her with wild cries of amazement and delight. Her hard-won knowledge of cholera, a disease from which she herself had suffered, once more stood her in good stead.

Now comes the most extraordinary part of the narrative. When the British and French forces made their first great assault on Sebastopol, repulsed with enormous casualties, Mary Seacole calmly rode on horseback through the middle of the car- nage with her medicine and bandages following behind on two mules. Throwing herself flat whenever shots flew near her, she washed and bandaged the wounded, and eventually reached the field hospital, where she was welcomed as a saviour. For the remainder of the war she was to ride to and fro bringing food, medicine and com- fort to the wounded and dying. When Sebastopol's proud walls finally fell, she was one of the first civilians to enter the town. Amid scenes of riotous looting by the British, she calmly attended the wounded of both sides. However, true Jamaican as she was, she never felt quite the same warmth for the Russian soldiers as she did for the English.

Mary Seacole's last years were spent in London, where she was supported by a generous fund. Thanks to Russell of The Times and to Punch and many other papers, she had achieved a well-deserved fame in Jamaica's mother country. Her health never recovered from her Crimean exertions, but the attention paid to her by Queen Victoria and other eminent figures seems to have been a consolation. Her gravestone, with a sculpture of a palm tree, now adorns the Roman Catholic cemetery in Kensal Green.

However, a new and chilling modern note must now be introduced. Mary Seacole, perhaps because her burial place is now in 'multi-racial Brent', has become the key figure of a movement whose chief symptom I would describe as the Mary Seacole Syndrome. Sufferers grow wildly indignant if it is ever suggested that the overwhelming majority of London's pre- sent coloured population arrived here as immigrants in the 1950s. They cannot face the fact that the parents and grandparents of most of the 'Black British' came to England of their own free will in search of a better life.

'We blacks have been here since 1550!' is the cry. 'We have always been here, brought here in chains, the slaves who built up the country! Our presence has been con- cealed by the white capitalists! How dare you say that immigrants wanted to come here! Why would they want to come to a land of institutionalised racialism? Look at Mary Seacole!'

Indeed, it is hard to cross Brent without looking at Mary Seacole, whose clumsy portrait features in every Black Rights Cen- tre in the Harrow Road. Painted in garish colours, it appears on a school playground wall next to a portrait of Chairman Mao.

The revival of Mary Seacole's fame owes something to the urge to 'give black history to black children' so that they can 'identify' with figures from the English past. Why history, adventure and heroism need to have a colour at all is seldom explained. Many white children admire Mohammed Ali and my own boyhood hero was Uncle Remus. James Bond and Superman, who are white, and the Incredible Hulk, who is green, greatly appeal to many coloured children. In order to make Mary Seacole in- to a complete English Black History in herself, her life has been misrepresented. I have seen a school play, brilliantly acted, in which she invented a miraculous cure for cholera, a fact that was later 'suppressed' by white racists. Whatever would good Mother Seacole say if she knew that she had become a heroine of Black Power?