p. 348; Cassidy, 1961). ${ }^{2}$ Selling this forage would have allowed her to subsist on her own, as indicated by the word 'nyam' (Cassidy, Le Page, 1967, p. 325), meaning to eat - the term is also used in various regions of West Africa - but according to the narrator, Richard Poor, that was not her mistress's intention. Philip, Juddy's son, 'a kind of idiot, but more knave than fool', might, like his mother, attempt to mislead his interlocutors: one can imagine his unfettered language in incoherent Creole, at least from the point of view of anyone who questioned or arrested him. For if Philip was playing the idiot, the clown or the fool, most of all he was a joker, a 'knave', unprincipled and dishonest just like his uncle Ned, another good-for-nothing, 'an artful rascal' and 'a great rogue', or Harriet, who called herself Kitty, and who could see much better than she let on: 'she has the full faculty of her sight'.  
A rare and singular combination of fugitive lives, bound together in a theatrical game. Juddy, Philip, Ned and Harriet are clearly much more than just simple slaves 'on the run'. Each of them is playing a role they have freely chosen, and each is keeping up an appearance. None of them seems really to be on the run, but rather to be living in the interstices of some great human comedy, that of Jamaican slavery and its contradictions. It is also a rare example of a notice in which the arrogance and exasperation of the narrator blend so well with the description, coming so close to the slaves through the medium of the text. Lastly, this notice is one of the rare examples where the voice of the runaway is reported in direct speech, and one of the rare specific references to Jamaican Creole.