Ace, King, Knave (29 page)

30

‘Titus?’ Eliza says. ‘What’s it like, being a slave?’

Surprised, he looks up from polishing the spoons. When he first came to England, people talked to him more kindly than in Annapolis. Since they seemed sympathetic, he thought they might ask about his family: whether they were people of importance, what language they spoke together, if he felt loneliness at being taken from them. He soon realised that they had little interest in that. What they most liked hearing was how he had been enslaved by his fellow blacks: they wanted tales of savagery, full of cannibalism and sacrifice, and to know how England seemed to him – didn’t London fairly knock him sideways, at first? Wasn’t it the finest place in the world? Then they would look pleased with themselves, and say, ‘Well, we won’t eat you
here.
’ As his speech improved, matters only became worse: if he spoke of what he had witnessed in Annapolis, they would fidget and say things like, ‘My brother was there on business, and found them extremely civil,’ and one man even told Dog Eye that no Maryland gentleman would behave so, and that the boy was a liar and deserved a whipping. They asked, but they did not want to know. So now he has stopped talking about Annapolis.

‘Launey said you get wages, like a servant,’ Eliza goes on. ‘Why’s that?’

He shrugs. Dog Eye always paid him something, even before the marriage. The Wife thinks that he eats too much and does too little, but he did not ask to come here.

‘Were you a slave in Africa?’

Now it starts. ‘No. My father was an important man.’

Her face lights up. ‘From Ethiopia?’

This, too, he has been asked before. Dog Eye explained to him that a famous Englishman wrote a story of an Ethiopian prince; even some ignorant people – like Eliza, who cannot read – have heard of it, and take it for truth.

‘That’s another country.’

‘Not Africa?’

‘Another part of Africa.’

Her face falls. He is secretly glad to displease her; it is an effort to remain patient with a woman who pretends to be interested in you, but is really only puffed up at the idea of mixing with princes. He says, ‘Some men took me and sold me for a slave.’

‘Which is a better master – an Englishman or an African?’

For an instant he considers taking the question seriously, before replying, ‘Englishman, of course.’

She smiles. ‘I thought so. But the Abolitionists say it’s all the same! You’ve heard of the Abolitionists?’

He has heard of the Abolitionists. Every time he meets with the word, so long and slithering and alien, it catches him out for a second, but he knows what it means. He waits for Eliza to tell him that they are a race of meddling busybodies, as he has heard elsewhere, but it seems he has exhausted her meagre stock of interest: she is content to smile and go on grinding sugar.

What does it mean,
master
? Not the kidnappers. He would not dignify them with such a name: they were devourers of human flesh. He remembers being found, struggling in their sack: someone slit the top of it, pulling the fibres away from him where they had stuck to his skin. The rescuer was a man he had never seen before, who at once pushed him to the ground. Fortunate held his arms up over his head for protection, looking down at the sunburnt grass and the man’s scarred and dusty feet.

He heard another person shaking out the girl child from her sack. Between splayed fingers Fortunate saw her fall to the earth, folding upon herself like cloth. The man who had taken the sack from her turned up her face, then with a disgusted noise let her drop back. It was the first time that Fortunate had seen the girl. He did not think she was from his village.

Both men now stood staring at him. One of them bent to untie his feet, leaving his hands tied, then dragged him upright. Fortunate made a little coughing sound and the man understood: he felt in Fortunate’s mouth for the cloth and threw it away but did not speak to him.

Leaving the dead child, they began walking towards the sun. Very soon they passed one of the kidnappers. It was the man, lying with his face to the ground and an arrow sticking up from his back. Where the blood was, the body glittered with flies. The man who had taken the girl from her sack went to pull out the arrow and the flies rose in a cloud. He listened for a while, then called out something. The other man went to him, Fortunate following behind.

The woman kidnapper was lying on her back. The arrow had pierced between her breasts. Her breathing bubbled and rasped: she looked at the men with half-closed eyes. The men talked to one another, seemingly unsure. In the end they left the woman where she was and set off at a slow pace that told Fortunate they would be home before sunset.

It was not so very far, but by the time they arrived he was staggering from hunger, thirst and fear. The men indicated that he should sit down while a woman sent a small boy up a tree for mangos. Fortunate’s hands were still tied, so the boy came to feed him. The sweet pulp of the fruit cleaned the dust from his lips and ran from the corners of his mouth. He looked around and saw a green country, greener than his father’s and seemingly close to a river.

His family would know by now. Everyone would search for him, the women wailing. A slave would be sent to the next village to ask if strange men had passed that way, and if anyone had been taken from there. The younger ones would cry, and Father would say to them: ‘You see what happens when children stray too far from home!’ Most likely nobody had seen the man and woman enter the compound. It grieved him that his father would never know of it, and would die thinking him a foolish, disobedient boy.

After eating three of the fruits, he bent forward and lost consciousness, his weariness mastering him even in this dangerous situation. He dreamed of the evil woman lying in the grass. Vultures and pigs broke her open, ants hissed in her bones.

He woke to the smell of cooking fires. Some distance away a young girl was seated on a log, stirring a pot. He was given rice and something strange and hot-tasting, which he ate in the company of two older men. From their poor clothing and humble manners, he understood that they were slaves, even before one of them, who could speak his language, told him he should always eat with them, never with anyone else in the compound.

That was when he understood. The rule was the same in his father’s house: slaves do not eat with the freeborn. He had been rescued from the kidnappers in order to become a gift elsewhere.

Even Dog Eye, sitting late over his wine, once called to Fortunate to come and sit by him, demanding to hear the story of his life. Fortunate could see that Dog Eye thought of this as a kindness, though he himself spent much time pushing the memories into darkness and did not want to bring them out into daylight for the pleasure of Dog Eye or any other white person. With a man of his own race, who knew what such sufferings were, he might speak more freely.

Dog Eye, however, knew nothing of these feelings and was not accustomed to be checked in his desires, so Fortunate told him quickly, squeezing weeks and months into a very short time: that he was seized by kidnappers, then taken from them and made a slave in a village near the west coast.

‘Were they cruel to you?’ Dog Eye at once asked. ‘I’ve heard the natives trepan each other as easily as they take a bird.’

Fortunate did not know the meaning of
trepan.
He said, ‘African master is not cruel.’

‘Not so cruel as a white, you mean.’

‘My father having slaves. It was ―’

He lacked the words to explain that inferiors were given good food and not overworked. ‘Not cruel,’ he repeated.

‘And
your
master wasn’t so bad?’

Fortunate shook his head. The women were especially kind: one of them had dealt with him in a motherly way, patting him when he cried. Yet Fortunate never felt safe in their compound, especially when one of the older slaves told him that further downriver lived evil, red-faced people who had no pity and who bought slaves from the local chiefs.

‘Will they sell us?’ Fortunate had asked.

‘Perhaps,’ the slave said. ‘Men are taken downriver from here and put into boats.’

‘To row them home?’

‘The red-faced people have no houses. They have no crops. They live on the water.’

‘What do they eat?’

‘Human flesh. They take hundreds of men and come back for more.’

After about a month, the same slave told him that he was indeed to be sold on. Fortunate went to the master, the slave translating, and begged with tears in his eyes not to be given to the red-faced cannibals. The master said he should not be sold to them but to a kinsman, who would treat him well.

This was the sort of lie told to children, to make them go meekly. When the time came, Fortunate was taken downriver to an island the cannibals called
James.
It was here that he at last saw one of the ships he had been told about, as big as an entire village, and its red-faced monsters. It was riding in the river below the island, but they were not to enter it, so, along with hundreds of others, Fortunate was chained in a suffocating room until the ship should be ready. A man who spoke his language told him he was lucky. He had arrived shortly before sailing, whereas some of those waiting in chains had been rotting in that room for weeks or even months.

He wondered if he would ever tell Dog Eye the story of the cannibal monsters. He knew now that the people were not cannibals, and was almost used to their ugliness. They seemed not to see their own red faces, but called themselves white. They thought pallor was beauty, even when it came with twisted bodies and bad teeth. None of this could be said to an Englishman.

‘You made the middle crossing, did you not?’

‘Middle ― ?’

‘You went by boat to Annapolis.’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve heard philanthropists say it’s an earthly hell. What’d be your word for it?’

Fortunate ignored the puzzling word
philanthropists.
He was astonished at Dog Eye: a word to call the voyage! How could he imagine one word could convey it?

After two days they were herded on board. The ship gave off a loathsome smell, as did the men whose faces resembled those of evil spirits. Fortunate was amazed to see that they behaved almost as viciously to one another as they did to the Africans, punishing accidents with blows and whippings. There was one good thing, however: they kept blacks with them who could speak various languages and who were sent among the people for reassurance. For the first time, Fortunate understood that the monsters had fields and crops. He would not be eaten but put to work, growing tobacco.

Then came a time he would gladly have been killed, a time he cannot keep out of his dreams but never willingly remembers when awake. At Annapolis he came off the boat like a mad animal, cringing and half blind.

‘Well?’ said Dog Eye.

He looked into his master’s face and said, ‘Death.’

‘Indeed! If it’s so bad, why don’t they all kill themselves?’

‘The masters,’ was all Fortunate could say. Again he saw the nets spread to stop people from flinging themselves over the side, but though his eyes filled, he lacked the words to make Dog Eye understand. ‘Maryland. Cruel there.’

‘To you?’

In the elegant house near Annapolis he saw whites sitting back to be fanned in the summer heat, while black men and women went about their labour hampered and tortured by metal contrivances: chains, muzzles. This was done for the least fault, perhaps the oversetting of a pot.

‘Chains in mouth,’ he said. The words are inadequate for the hideous thing he saw screwed into the cook’s face, but Dog Eye stares.

‘Whose mouth, in the name of Christ? Yours?’

‘For a woman not to eat.’

Yet when Mr Watson sailed for England, bringing Fortunate with him, Fortunate’s terror was greater than before: each time he had changed masters, it had been for the worse. When he first understood his position – that because of a game, he now belonged to Dog Eye – Fortunate could have gone on his knees to Mr Watson and begged not to be left behind. He had seen so many tricks played on Africans that he sweated with fear of this laughing man who put wine and gold in his hands while those around watched and also laughed.

‘You were glad, then, to come into my service?’ Dog Eye said.

He nodded.

‘You didn’t look it.’

‘Afraid. Afraid hurt.’

‘O no,’ Dog Eye assured him. ‘It was Mr Watson I hurt.’

Fortunate could make nothing of this, but then many of Dog Eye’s sayings and doings were hard to understand. The master sometimes treated him with such indulgence that they dined together at the same table. At other times he was taken among hard-faced men who frightened him, or women who fed him sweetmeats and patted him as one might pat a child. He was taught to make punch and was sick after drinking it. He learned the loading and firing of pistols, something of the games of cards, and a couple of dances. It did not escape him that Dog Eye often went among people who were drunk, or that the women who came to the house were of the lowest kind. Fortunate puzzled over that mysterious thing, the honour of an Englishman. His father would not have liked to see him the master, let alone the servant, of such a man as Dog Eye.

Yet in all this disorder and unseemliness were moments of joy, as when one of the women taught him an English dance. All three of them laughed so heartily that he saw tears run down Dog Eye’s cheeks. A man grows accustomed to strange, even shocking things, if they ease his loneliness. After a few months Fortunate thought of Dog Eye as a kind master and protector, almost a friend.

Since the marriage there has been more bickering than dancing. Still, what has changed once can change again, and in ways impossible to imagine: how could Fortunate have understood, before leaving his father’s house, what lay in wait for him? Why should Dog Eye not go back to the old ways one day, taking Fortunate with him, and their life together begin anew?

31

Betsy-Ann steps away from Haddock’s and hails a pair of chair-men who promptly size her up.