Ama (55 page)

When Ama re-appeared on the quarter-deck, he moved his chair to where she was sitting. He was shocked at her appearance. During his year at Anomabu he had learned to distinguish one black face from another. He rather fancied himself as a connoisseur of African beauty. This girl had been quite pretty. Now her appearance was grotesque.

He tried to engage her in conversation.

“Well, miss, I am pleased to see that you have recovered sufficiently to be coming up for fresh air again,” he said.

Surprised at being spoken to, Ama looked at him. Then she averted her eye.
Now what can this one's business be with me again?
she thought wearily.
These white men have given me more than enough problems. I will have nothing to do with him.
She moved so that her back was turned towards him.

“Well, now, that's not a particularly polite reply to my expression of goodwill,” said Williams junior, “but I suppose, in the circumstances . . . ”

He settled down to read his book. Ama looked out at the little town which lay between the beach and the forested hills behind. The only islands she had seen before were in rivers, in the Oti and the Daka. This one was enormous by comparison, with its own mountains, forests, rivers and towns. And all alone, isolated in the middle of the great ocean.
Just as we are alone and isolated, with no one to turn to for help. While we were close to the mainland, there was still some small hope: to rebel, to drive the ship onto the shore, to escape and hide; perhaps, perhaps to return to one's family without being captured. A slim hope, but still hope. Now there is none. Or is there some indeed? The men are now allowed out on deck and without their shackles. If they could overpower the guards and somehow run the ship aground on the island, we might all disappear into the forest and make a new life there for ourselves.
She interrupted her own daydream.
Ama, Ama,
she told herself,
haven' you caused yourself enough trouble? There must be four hundred black men on this ship. Men! Let one of them take the lead.

Williams junior suddenly laughed out loud. Startled, Ama turned to look at him. He was slapping his thigh.

“Oh, marvellous stuff!” he exclaimed. “Marvellous stuff! Have you read it?”

He held the frontispiece and title page up for her to see. Ama looked away. It seemed an age since she had idled her time away in Mijn Heer's apartment reading novels.

“Do you read as well as you speak?” he asked.

There was no reply. All he saw was the ugly geography of lacerations on Ama's tortured back, welts criss-crossed with weals.

“Tell you what,” he continued. “Shall I read aloud to you? I'll start again at the beginning if you like. I've only read a few pages so far. Shall I? No answer? Well, they say that silence means consent.”

And so he started. He read well. Ama considered moving away so that she would not hear him. But what would that achieve? She felt her good resolutions dissolving. She quickly became absorbed in the story, escaping from the harsh reality of the present into a different world. She looked out towards the island but what she saw was something else.

When he came to the end of the fourth chapter he said, “Well, I think that is enough for the present.”

She looked around and for a fleeting moment he caught her eye. She turned away quickly.
This fiendish fellow has discovered a weakness in my armour
, she thought.
I was so immersed in the story that I completely forgot myself. Yet . . . What, after all, will I achieve by depriving myself of this small pleasure? At least it provides an hour's escape from dwelling upon the filth and smell of the holds and the hopelessness of our predicament.

* * *

He came and read again in the afternoon. When he had been reading for an hour and his voice was beginning to show signs of hoarseness, Butcher appeared, his day's work finished.

He observed the reader and the listener but said nothing.

“Just a few more paragraphs, Doctor. Please don't go away,” Williams junior told him.

Ama turned and silently acknowledged the doctor's nod.

Butcher brought two stools, sat on one and placed the board on the other. Then he poured the pieces out of a velvet bag. He shifted black and white pawns from fist to fist behind his back and held them out for the other man to make his choice. Then they arranged the pieces.
It is only your own stubborn pride,
Ama told herself,
that dissuades you from indulgence in the small pleasures on offer. So what if the others brand you a collaborator? Haven't you suffered enough already on this accursed ship?
She shifted her position to give her a view of the game.

“So,” Williams junior asked her as he made the first move, “you are a chess player too?”

Ama said nothing and concentrated her attention on the board.

“Awuraa Ama,” a young male voice addressed her.

She turned.

“Kwaku,” she replied in Asante, “how are you?”

Butcher looked up. Kwaku bowed his head in greeting.

“I am well. My mother says to greet you. She will come herself when you are less busy.”

“Busy?” Ama asked. “What do we have to keep us busy?”

Ama noticed that he found it difficult to look at her directly. She fingered her face. It must be her missing eye. She must really look a sight. Resolutely, she redirected her thoughts.

“Have you ever seen this game before?” she asked him.

“The board looks like a draughts board, only smaller,” he replied, “and the pieces are different.”

“The white men call it chess. Would you like to learn to play? Do you know oware? Of course you do. Well, if you can play oware, you can learn chess too.”

“But the white men . . . ?” Kwaku asked.

She laughed.

“Do you think they can do worse than they have done already? Now the first thing to learn is the names of the pieces. There are two armies, do you see, one black, one white.”

He looked at her to see if she was serious, but she went on, translating the name of each piece into Asante. The king was
ohene
and the queen
ohemmaa
; the bishop was
okomfo
and the horse
oponko
; the castle was
aban
and a pawn
akoa
.

Butcher looked up from time to time, pleased that his patient was talking again. He wondered what she could be telling the boy.

“Do you think the wench knows how to play chess?” Bill Williams asked him, knowing full well that she would understand.

She looked at him with contempt. She had played chess with Mijn Heer practically every evening. She was not impressed with what she had seen so far of this young man's game, though Butcher seemed even less competent. He had just made an unnecessary sacrifice of a knight. Ama picked up the discarded piece and showed the boy the moves it was allowed to make.

“Two steps forward, one step sideways; or one step forward and two steps sideways. And it can jump over the other pieces. Have you ever seen a real horse before, Kwaku, one with four legs?”

Kwaku shook his head. Horses were rare beasts in Asante.

“My father told me that the Dagomba soldiers ride on them. My father fought in the Dagomba War,” he volunteered with pride.

The Dagomba War. The Asante, Kwaku's father amongst them, defeated the Dagomba. The victors demanded an annual delivery of slaves. So the Dagomba went hunting. And that is how I come to be here on this ship.

Ama was lost in thought. She was tempted to ask Kwaku how he and his mother came to be slaves, too. Perhaps, like Esi, they had been pawned. She decided it would not be proper: his mother might be offended.

“Now the castle,” she told him, “can only travel in straight lines and it cannot jump. It must capture any enemy piece that comes in its way and take possession of its square. Do you see?”

Kwaku nodded. Butcher lifted his remaining bishop. Before he could put it down, Ama stretched out her hand, caught his hand in mid-air and forced him to put the piece back on the square it had come from. The doctor turned to her, astonished at her action. Somewhat abashed, without saying a word, Ama explained with signs. That move would leave the doctor's single knight defenceless. Bill Williams would be able to announce his customary “check mate!” in not more than three moves if he were to make that move with his bishop. Butcher understood. However he lacked Bill Williams' will to win; he was too tired or too lazy to try to figure out his opponent's future tactics.

“Well, miss,” he asked her, “what would you do?”

She leaned over and castled, moving Butcher's threatened king two squares sideways and bringing his rook into a position in which Williams' queen was in danger of attack. The two white men looked at the board; then they looked at each other; then, together they turned to look at Ama.

“Please, what did you do?” Kwaku asked her.

“That is a special, secret, magic move. You are only allowed to make it once in every game. But before you learn it you must learn all the others.”

“Sister Ama,” he asked, “can real horses jump?”

* * *

Williams picked up the south-east trades. With a full head of sail, he made steady progress.

But he continued to sleep badly and his waking hours were afflicted with disabling headaches. Butcher bled him but the relief was transient. His temper was unpredictable and even his nephew steered clear of him. Williams senior consoled himself with rum and daydreams of a quick sale of his cargo and an early return to England.

In spite of herself, Ama was exhilarated by the speed of the small ship. She lay on her back, watching the great, taut, sweeps of canvas and the clouds scudding across the sky. Sharks were their constant, sinister companions but there were also grampuses, dolphins, whales. The boys would wait for the flying fish to break the surface of the water and then cry out in a single chorused breath, lifting the tone of their voices as the creatures rose to the zenith of their trajectory and then letting it fall as they re-entered the water with a splash; and they would laugh in delight.

Then the wind dropped and the sails drooped limply from the yards. The long flag which only a few days before had danced from the very top of the queen gallant mast, now hung lifeless. One day followed another. Even in the shade of the awnings the heat was oppressive. The crew began to fight among themselves and Williams had to threaten Knaggs that he would put him in irons again. They fashioned large fans from scraps of old canvas and at night had the slave boys stand over them, fanning the air to make a feeble breeze while they tried to sleep.

The male slaves became increasingly irritable. Fights were common. The Asante fought amongst themselves, but if one of them became involved in a quarrel with one of Tomba's people, they would stand together. Now that they were no longer manacled, small incidents could flare up rapidly into brawls, drawing in more and more of the despairing men. The crew kept constant watch, brutally suppressing any incident, treating violence with violence. The heat and humidity and smell in the holds became unbearable. During the day they might manage to doze. But awake in the darkness, the nights seemed interminable. Even the daily intervals on deck gave them little relief since, unlike the women and the boys, they were not provided with a canopy to protect them from the overhead sun.

The drinking water in the butts began to taste peculiar. Stocks dropped to danger levels and Williams reduced the ration. The crew were worse off than the slaves. Williams kept their container sealed so that it was only possible to suck water from it through the barrel of an old musket inserted through the bung hole. This straw was kept in the crow's nest and any sailor wanting a drink had to climb the mainmast, retrieve the straw and, when he had finished with it, return it to its place.

The bloody flux spread amongst the slaves and from them to the crew.

There was little to distinguish one day from the next. Williams appeared on deck from time to time and scanned the horizon for evidence of a change in the weather, but there was none. He cut the crew's weekly food ration to three pounds of bread and three pounds of meat, mostly fat and bones. He could not afford to starve the slaves by reducing their miserable allocation of corn mush, or even the twice weekly supplement of salt beef or pork. The hungry seamen swallowed their pride and begged rations from the Africans.

The incidence of the bloody flux increased. Butcher was overworked looking after his patients. He thought of asking the captain's permission to add Pamela to his small team of auxiliaries but he feared the violence of the man's language. Hardly a day went by without a couple of corpses being unceremoniously splashed overboard. Sometimes they would float beside the ship for hours before the sharks arrived for their obscene meal. The Chippy began to run out of wood and the white men were no longer accorded the dignity of burial at sea in a coffin. Now the English corpses had to make do with sailcloth.

The Love of Liberty
floated idly in mid-Atlantic. Every day at noon, the captain brought out his chronometer and sextant and took a sight on the sun.

“We have not moved half a degree from the equator during the past two weeks,” he told his nephew, “and we're just thirty degrees west of Greenwich. That puts us two thousand five hundred miles from Barbados.”

Ama borrowed the chess board and pieces and taught Kwaku to play. Bill Williams' challenge she rejected. She also refused his offer, his request, that she should read to him. But he continued to read to her. Chess and stories apart, she had plenty of time to think. She stood at the gunwale and looked all around her.
The Love of Liberty
lay at the centre of a perfect circle. She recalled Mijn Heer's telling her that the earth was a sphere. She had wondered whether he was pulling her leg. Now she could see the evidence, the proof.

She explained it all to Kwaku, but he was unconvinced. If the earth is like an orange thrown up into the air, why does it not come down, as the orange does? And why does the water, the sea, not fall off the bottom? It was too difficult. She could see that it might require an act of faith to accept Mijn Heer's theory. She decided to try something less complicated. She would teach Kwaku and Mara the elements of English. Life in Barbados might be easier for them if they could understand the language of their masters. So the time passed: on the one hand the death and pain and suffering, the ever present humiliation, the longing for home, the fearful speculation about an unknown future; on the other the peaceful, idyllic ocean all around them, the beautiful sunsets, wonder at the enormity of the whales and the wanton play of the grampuses, the surprises of literature, the challenge of chess and the rewards of teaching.