Chaneysville Incident (33 page)

“I didn’t come because I didn’t know,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. He sighed. “You were to be told on your eighteenth birthday. Your mother was to tell you. I assumed it had been done. But I was the executor. I should have made sure.”

“Why didn’t you?” I said.

He shook his head. “There was no reason to suppose you had not been told. “This”—he nodded at the folio—“was not to be given to you until you walked in here and called for it, of your own free will. There was no way for me to…” His voice trailed off. He looked at me for a moment, then dropped his eyes. “No,” he said. “No, that wasn’t it at all. I hoped that she hadn’t told you. Because I did not want you to have it.” He raised his eyes and met mine. “Have you come to call for your legacy, John?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“John…” Scott said.

“Be quiet, Randall,” the Judge had said. “Go arrange a funeral.”

Things look different in lamplight. That is a small fact, the kind of datum that escapes the notice of the average historian. He notes the sweeping changes in the American way of life that began when Thomas Alva Edison managed to make first bamboo, then tungsten, glow; probably describing the whole thing in terms of economics, or perhaps, if he is slightly above average, in terms of religion. But he misses the obvious—and therefore the significant—simply because he has never himself had to try and puzzle out the meaning of a text by the light of burning kerosene. And so he talks of longer man-hours or perhaps even an increased rate of information dissemination through reading, or perhaps even the effect of electric light on a religious matrix that had always revered fire and the sun. But he would forget the simple fact that things look different under lamplight. Edges are softer. The beginnings and ending of things seem to merge. Lines of print or handwriting on a sheet of paper are not stark black on white, but brown on gold. And the light flickers, so that anything seen is seen not only dimly, but elusively; inconstantly. And it is possible—for almost anything is possible, and the difference between logical cause and effect and magic is only a matter of which premises are chosen—that thoughts are different, too, in the soft light of a lamp. Not better, or nobler; just different. And one wonders—if one is a wonderer—if somewhere along the line things would not have been different if the electric light had come along earlier, or not come along at all. Could Franklin have written his “Essay on Populations” if he had had the unerring glow of incandescence showing up his bigotry? Could Lincoln have proclaimed Emancipation with the same glow highlighting his hypocrisy? Was the only difference between
Plessy
v.
Ferguson
and
Brown
v.
the Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas
the fact that the former was written by lamplight and the latter under—probably—a fluorescent tube? Could the Kennedys have changed from Commie-hunters to liberals in the age of whale oil? Could King have penned that hopelessly naive letter from the Albany jail with a nickering candle forcing him to stop and think while the words steadied before his eyes? Could I puzzle out truth better with a trouble light above my head, or perhaps even a flashlight? I wondered about this, and I answered myself as I had always answered myself when I wondered about it: things belong to their own time, their own place. Moses Washington had chosen not to wire his attic simply because there was no place for electricity. He had sealed his folio with candle wax; he had most likely written whatever was inside by the light of a lamp, or a lantern, or perhaps a glowing campfire. And I would open it by a similar glow.

The attic was warmer now—warm enough to allow me to move my hands, pausing only occasionally to hold them above the lamp chimney. And so I put my hands on the folio, feeling the leather cool and smooth and worn beneath my hands. I slid my fingers along the flap, watching as the wax seal crumbled, bit by bit by bit.

I
N THE YEAR OF OUR LORD
1441, a Portuguese sailing captain named Antam Gonçalvez permitted a certain light-skinned Moorish gentleman, who was then enjoying the captain’s hospitality, to ransom himself and two young male companions at the expense of ten dark-skinned gentlemen and gentlewomen from the sub-Sahara. This incident marks the beginning of the phenomenon known as the African Slave Trade.

In recent years the study of the Trade has become something of a
cause célèbre
, for a perusal of its grim details offers white historians a gold-plated opportunity to prove their liberality and objectivity, and at the same time offers black historians—the few who can get jobs—a chance to escape the paternalistic scrutiny of senior faculty members who do not quite believe that the darkies can say anything useful about anything that does not concern darkies. And so we know a great deal—perhaps too much—about the ins and outs of the Slave Trade; any historian worth his research assistant can shock the joviality right out of a cocktail party by saying, yes, between ten and twelve million Africans were brought to the New World between 1510 and 1865 (a small matter of a fifth of the Christian calendar), and that while losses sustained during the Middle Passage were much lower than is commonly believed (a mere 13 percent to 19 percent), those incurred during the capture, the march to the coast, and the sojourn in the “barracoons” (hence the term “coon”) awaiting transport were substantial enough to raise overall mortality to between 30.4 percent and 39.25 percent, indicating that between 14,367,000 and 19,753,000 Africans were actually kidnapped (in round figures, of course). If such dry business does not interest the ladies (who may be preoccupied with the concerns of the Women’s Movement), he can always point out that as early as 1538 the Spanish Crown directed that at least a third of the Africans taken be female—tokenism, to be sure, but at least it had an effect; by 1773 the brigantine
Ann
, a slaver out of New England, was selling women for sixty-two pounds and men for only two pounds more, surely a victory for sexual equality. Then, having grabbed their attention, he can trot out a few specific incidents. He can tell them about the
Zong
incident of 1781, in which English traders were accused of having dumped one hundred and twenty-three blacks overboard into shark-infested waters in order to claim the insurance (the charge, of course, was conspiracy to defraud). Or he can discuss the 1659 voyage of the Dutch slaver
St. Jan
, whose captain was so untalented as to have lost one hundred and ten slaves (fifty-nine men, forty-seven women, four children) to various causes (including suicide) during the Middle Passage and then, having reached the Indies, to pile his ship onto a reef and have to abandon her with the rest of his cargo (eighty-seven blacks) shackled below-decks. By that time everybody should need another drink (except the historian, of course; historians are used to such atrocities). The party may have become a bit morose, but never fear; the historian can simply tell the amusing tale of how captains in the employ of the famed patron of exploration Prince Henry the Navigator got so busy slaving they did very little exploring, and the Prince was forced to order them to refrain from actually kidnapping slaves, suggesting that they get them from native middlemen instead. Thus, in 1455, Prince Henry, always a visionary, became the first government official to issue regulations setting aside work for the sole profit of minority small business. That should get a laugh.

But what is really amusing is that even so knowledgeable a historian probably does not understand the African Slave Trade—certainly he does not understand it if he is white. Probably he thinks it has something to do with economics, or with greed, or with lust; most likely he thinks the effects of the Trade can be seen in the shifts of the worldwide balance of power, or the development of the British Industrial Revolution, or—if he is very honest and perceptive—the growth of the European Cultural Tradition. To an extent, he will be correct. But he will also believe that the African Slave Trade is over, that whatever its effects were, they are existing now in and of themselves, waves spreading across a pond, the stone that caused them having long ago come to rest. He will think this because to understand otherwise involves dealing with something so basic, so elemental, so fundamental that it can be faced only if one is forced to face it: death. For that is what the Slave Trade was all about. Not death from poxes and musketry and whippings and malnutrition and melancholy and suicide; death itself. For before the white men came to Guinea to strip-mine field hands for the greater glory of God, King, and the Royal Africa Company, black people did not die.

There was, of course, dying in Africa. It occurred in the proportion (one man, one dying) deemed by many appropriate for the apportionment of voting rights. But the decedent did not die—he simply took up residence in an afterworld that was in many ways indistinguishable from his former estate. Evidence for this is found in more recently observed African practices. Following an expiration, it is common for the living to report seeing the deceased, and carrying on conversations with him. It is also common practice to build him a house and to leave food about for his nourishment. Liquids, including alcoholic beverages, are poured out on the ground for the deceased to enjoy. Tools, such as hunting and fishing implements, are buried with him. The Kalabi fishermen of Nigeria rely on the deceased to enforce tribal kinship norms. In Dahomey, the folk tales report the existence of a “market of the dead,” which suffers from a chronic meat shortage, much to the delight of living purveyors, who take the opportunity to “make a killing,” as the European would say. The Nuer of the Sudan have an institution called “ghost marriage,” whereby a deceased man is the father of all children borne by his widow, no matter how long the delay and even if she should remarry.

One might protest that these are current beliefs, having little to do with those that held sway five centuries ago. It is difficult to counter this protest, since the Europeans were far too busy “trading” to make even the most cursory study of African belief; it was widely believed by them that heathenism was not the proper concern of a white man. There exist, therefore, few records. However, one can counter the protest by pointing out that the first major schism in Christianity did not occur until that religion had existed for over seven hundred years, and the second did not come about for another eight hundred; to postulate a similar stability for African belief over a mere five centuries seems therefore reasonable. One might also protest that these are the primitive beliefs of primitive people. This is beside the point. The simple fact is this: if, following his “death,” a man, never mind if he is accustomed to wearing breechclout or B.V.Ds, hangs about on the corner, talking to his friends, if he has an apartment, eats hoagies or hero sandwiches, drinks Pabst or Budweiser, goes on hunting or fishing trips as a means of relaxing from his job as a policeman or a judge, is vulnerable to price gouging, and can be slapped with a paternity suit, he cannot really be said to be, in the Christian sense of the term, dead.

But when the Europeans came, it was their avowed purpose to Christianize the natives. That avowal was not hypocrisy, or at any rate not purely so. Gonçalvez’ rationale for accepting the suggested exchange was that ten souls are more than three, even if the ten were black, and one of the reasons that few blacks were taken directly from Guinea to the Indies until the late sixteenth century was that transshipping them in Lisbon offered an opportunity to baptize them; when the matter of direct shipment was argued, it was argued by religious sects.

Of course, one must point out that the traders were probably not unaware of the pacifying effect Christianity had had on the slaves of the Roman Empire. And surely the effect in the case of European-style slavery was much the same; thus, in 1845, a group of South Carolina slaveholders published a pamphlet on “the practical working and wholesome effects of religious instruction, when properly and judiciously imparted to our Negro peasantry.” These wholesome effects, of course, would only be achieved so long as the more humane lessons of the Christian religion were not applied with too much zeal. (Such was the case; a manual,
On the Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the Southern States
, written for the enlightenment of missionary workers and published, in 1847, by the Presbyterian Board of Publications, advises that “civil conditions” be at all times ignored.) And so the Southern ministers and Northern missionaries, like the priests and vicars and whatnot who dealt with newly captured slaves, probably contented themselves with reading to the slaves the passages from the First Epistle of Paul (alias Saul the Enforcer) to Timothy, in which the Saint exhorts “as many servants as are under the yoke” to “count their own masters worthy of all honour, that the name of God and His doctrine be not blasphemed,” a prescription he repeated in letters to Titus (“Exhort servants to be obedient unto their own masters, and to please them well in all things”) and to the Church at Ephesus (“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ”). Probably, too, the masters made sure the slaves heard the exhortation of Peter, in which the Rock upon which Jesus, for want of better foundation, was forced to build His Church extended the doctrine of obedience to unkind masters (“Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but also to the froward”).

But even if there were ulterior motives, the fact remains: Africans were introduced to Christianity. And they embraced it. As to what the attraction of it could have been, one can only speculate. Perhaps it was that the notion of bodily dissolution was quite welcome to someone whose physical being was a mass of scars, sores, broken bones, empty guts, rheumy eyes, and the like. Or perhaps it was the belief that the European God must be greater than the African Great Sky God and his lesser companions, since otherwise how was it that only Africans were slaves? Or perhaps it was the idea that after all the suffering was over one went off to heavenly rest (probably being admitted through a side door), while those who caused the suffering were exquisitely tormented by a God so wise as to reserve the ultimate pleasure of vengeance for Himself. At any rate, they embraced Christianity and, consequently, became if not docile then more or less resigned. That they did so can be clearly seen in the negative example of the western end of the island of Hispaniola (what is now called Haiti), where the unenthusiastic efforts of a corrupt clergy allowed
υaudou
(or voodoo), an essentially African religion, to flourish, with the result that after a bloody revolution which cost the lives of most of the whites and a third to half of the blacks, France lost her most profitable colony and the world acquired its first black nation.