Middle Passage (10 page)

“You can belay that kind of talk,” said Cringle, buttoning his coat up on the boy. “I take it you've work to do, so be at it. Prompt, if you please.” His arm waisting Tommy, Cringle assured him he would come to no harm. He promised to erase his name from the work roster and, being the sort of quartermaster given to rising at night to pull back the covers on others who'd kicked them off when sleeping, fearing they might be chilled, he led him to his own berth, which the ship's boy was to have for the rest of our voyage home.

Homeward bound on May 30, we left the fort with the
Republic
leaking like a sieve, hoping again to cross the Flood, but this time with the sides of the ship bloated, scorched by the sun, and with barnacles clotting her stern-piece. She reached the latitude of 20° south, and longitude 10° west, sailing full and by without serious mishap on North Atlantic trade winds until on the fifteenth day the weather turned squally. Pellets of rain hammered the sails so heavily Captain Falcon was obliged to shorten the main topsail and let the ship sail under bare timber. “Nothing for you to worry about,” he told me. “Just see that you and Squibb double-lash the longboats and secure the galley.” But his voice wobbled, and I knew he was not telling me the worst. It was the stormy season of the year off West Africa. And during the bleakest nights when curdling fog rolled in, obscuring the stars and sky, making precise calculations of our position impossible, when the wind wheeled unexpectedly from NW to NNW, twirling us like a matchbox or toy ship of balsa wood—those nights, Falcon and the few men still loyal to him stayed awake through each watch in the skipper's cabin, sipping coffee laced with rum, crimped foreheads tilted together over maps and compasses spinning
widdershins. Younger lighthands lost their appetites. Tommy, relieved of all his duties, couldn't hold down as much as a sea biscuit, and neither could I, mainly because Squibb and I cooked the slop and I saw him spit into it when he was angry with the crew. Older sailors swore, suddenly got religion (there are no atheists at sea, as they say), and fingered their crosses, whispering prayers for fair weather, and scheming all the time—anyone could see this—on ways to seize the ship and steal her cargo.

Dependent as we were on each other, hardship brought out small kindnesses as well as cruelty, even from the most unlikely people, among them Nathaniel Meadows, a barber-surgeon who looked, for all the talk of his being an ax-murderer, Biblically meek: a crankled little stretchbelly with fishy eyes and big scarlet ears, who kept his hair slicked back with seal's oil. He had no chin to speak of, his jaws dropping straight down into his neck. He smelled like the dogs on ship. He superstitiously carried a clump of Liverpool sod in his trousers when at sea, a habit shared by many old salts; but unlike anyone I have ever known he had the unsettling habit of blinking rapidly when he spoke. There was a space between his teeth, which gave his
s
's a faint whistling sound when he pronounced them, as if he'd swallowed a flute but got it only halfway down his trachea. Some deck hands said his mother had been frightened by a field mouse when she was carrying him. That wasn't hard to believe. He looked like a titmouse in human form. And Meadows had no chest at all—that is, in profile his body curved like a question mark, and you'd associate his tamed, quiet manner with, say, reformed alcoholics, or men who're recovering from a stroke. Meekness aside, I still gave him a wide berth.
“ 'Ello, mate. 'Bout to do my laundry, I am,” says he to me. “Just wonderin' if you need anythin' washed, Mr. Calhoun.”

His arms loaded down with the wash of others, he approached me by the spanker-boom, where I was biting into the last of my breakfast, a biscuit going bad, on the verge of molding, you know, visibly all right on the outside but, once I sank my teeth in, it tasted as if it was loaded with dust. I tossed it to one of the children in a jolly boat, then put down my kid (eating tub), and stood to the sound of sudden growling behind Meadows's legs. He'd brought one of the dogs with him, a half-starved mongrel who apparently wanted something dark to chew on. I drew back.

“ 'Ey, don't mind him,” said Meadows. “ 'E's just hungery.”

“I can tell.” His dog starting sniffling at my crotch, poking his nose between my legs, which convinced me it might be time to do my laundry after all.

“You want your shirt washed or wot?”

I slipped it off and placed it on top of his pile, noticing there one of Cringle's blouses and the ragged cloths a few of the Allmuseri used to cover themselves. “Meadows,” says I through clogged sinuses, “you're scrubbing clothes for the slaves too?”

“Aye, might's well. If you're goin' to wash, 'tis better to do a full load, wouldn't you say? Saves on soap 'n' water.”

He
was
one to save on supplies, I remembered, being the sort of man who mashed together slivers of soap left by others to make a new, lopsided bar. Watching him leave, I scolded myself for distrusting him and wished the others might be as helpful as Meadows, especially when it came to lightening the suffering of the Africans. As I said, the ship made a great deal of water. Night and day, Falcon kept the
pumps working. Even so, the slaves still lay in a foot of salt water in a hold blacker than the belly of Jonah's whale, forced below by the boatswain's cat-o'-nine-tails. Some rested on the laps of others, down there in scummy darkness foul with defecation, slithering with water snakes. Chumps of firewood were given to each for a pillow, which later proved to be a mistake. Up above, the skipper had us cut apertures and grate hatches and bulkheads to provide better air for the Allmuseri, who only came topside (the men) for a few hours each day to have their hair and nails shorn to prevent them from injuring themselves during the fighting for space that inevitably broke out each night. At nine o'clock sharp each morning, when the weather permitted, a mate named Fletcher trotted them out, made them dance a little to music from the cabin boy's flute for exercise, then hurried them below again. It was Captain Falcon's belief that slave insurrections could be prevented if for every ten prisoners one was selected to oversee the others and keep them in line. He issued these shipboard major-domos, one of them named Ngonyama, whom I came to know well those first few weeks, old shirts and tar-splattered trousers, giving them the advantage of being clothed like the crew; they had greater freedom to roam the slippery deck, and Falcon also gave them better food and a few minor tasks such as picking old ropes apart. “The best way to control a rebellious nigger,” said he, “is to give him some responsibility.”

However, few slaving formulas worked with Ngonyama. Dressed he was now, in tarry breeches and a duck frock, which distinguished him from the others, despite the red bead in his right nostril, and he was quiet during our first fortnight at sea, notwithstanding wind that whipped the sails devilishly and the fact that sometimes the sea ran as high as
five houses and our forward deck was invisible underwater, a thing that made the other slaves claw and wail all the more. But Ngonyama, I had the feeling, was waiting. He was so quiet sometimes he seemed to blend, then disappear into the background of shipboard life. Quiet and cunning, I'd say, because he was studying everything—everything—we did, and even enlisted my aid in teaching him a smattering of English and explaining how the steerage worked, in exchange for his teaching me Allmuseri. Of all the players who promenade through this narrative, he was easily the most mysterious. At first he could not distinguish any of the white crew individually, and asked me, “How do their families tell them apart?” I suppose he selected me because I was the only Negro on board, though the distance between his people and black America was vast—his people saw whites as Raw Barbarians and me (being a colored mate) as a Cooked one. And his depth perception so differed from mine that when he looked at a portrait of Isadora I carried in my purse, he asked, “Why is her face splotched with smudges?” by which he meant the
shadows
the artist had drawn under her chin and eyes, for his tribe did not use our sense of perspective but rather the flat, depthless technique of Egyptian art. (He also asked why her nose looked like a conch, if maybe this was a trick of vision too, then saw my anger and dropped the question.)

Sometimes he helped Squibb and me in the cookroom, and the way he carved one of the skipper's pigs stopped me cold. Me, I never could carve. But Ngonyama, his shoulders relaxed, holding his breath for what seemed hours before he started, fixed his eyes as if he could see through the pig, his right hand gripping the cook's blade as if it had grown right out of his wrist. It was eerie, you ask me. It seemed,
suddenly, as though the galley slipped in time and took on a transparent feel, as if everything round us were made of glass. Ngonyama began to carve. He slipped metal through meat as if it wasn't there or, leastways, wasn't solid, without striking bone, and in a pattern I couldn't follow, without hacking or rending—doing no harm—the blade guided by, I think, a knack that favored the same touch I'd developed as a thief, which let me feel safe tumblers falling a fraction of a second
before
they dropped, tracing the invisible trellis of muscles, tendons, tissues, until the pig fell apart magically in his hands. He left no knife tracks. Not a trace. The cookroom was as quiet as a tomb when he finished.

“Mirrors!” Squibb whispered to me, stunned. “It's some kinda heathen trick!”

Yet there was no trick to it. In every fiber of their lives you could sense this same quiet magic. Truth to tell, they were not even “Negroes.” They were Allmuseri. Talking late at night, blue rivulets scudding back and forth on the deck, our eyes screwed up against the weather, Ngonyama unfolded before me like a merchant's cloth his tribe's official history, the story of themselves they stuck by. Once they had been a seafaring people, years and years ago, and deposited their mariners in that portion of India later to be called Harappa, where they blended with its inhabitants, the Dravidians, in the days before the Aryans and their juggernauts—“city-destroyers”—leveled the civilization of Mohenjo-Daro overnight. Between 1000 B.C. and 500 B.C. they sailed to Central America on North Equatorial currents that made the voyage from the west coast of Africa to the Caribbean only thirty days, bringing their skills in agriculture and metallurgy to the Olmec who, to honor these African mariners, stamped their likeness in stone and enshrined in song their
prowess as warriors. Specifically, their martial-art techniques resembled Brazilian
capoeira.
Over time these elegant moves, which Ngonyama taught me when we had time for rest, had become elements in their ceremonial dance.

I must leave their fighting arts for later, because more fascinating than their globe-spanning travels in antiquity and their style of self-defense was the peculiar, gnomic language the Allmuseri practiced. When Ngonyama's tribe spoke it was not so much like talking as the tones the savannah made at night, siffilating through the plains of coarse grass, soughing as dry wind from tree to tree. Not really a language at all, by my guess, as a melic way of breathing deep from the diaphragm that dovetailed articles into nouns, nouns into verbs. I'm not sure I know what I'm saying now, but Ngonyama told me the predication “is,” which granted existence to anything, had over the ages eroded into merely an article of faith for them. Nouns or static substances hardly existed in their vocabulary at all. A “bed” was called a “resting,” a “robe” a “warming.” Furthermore, each verb was different depending on the nature of the object acted upon, whether it was vegetable, mineral, mammal, oblong or rotund. When Ngonyama talked to his tribesmen it was as if the objects and others he referred to flowed together like water, taking different forms, as the sea could now be fluid, now solid ice, now steam swirling around the mizzenpole. Their written language—these Africans had one—was no less unusual, and of such exquisite limpidity, tone colors, litotes, and contrapletes that I could not run my eyes across it, left to right, without feeling everything inside me relax. It consisted of pictograms. You had to look at the characters, Ngonyama taught me, as you would an old friend you've seen many times before, grasping the meaning-—
and relation to other characters—in a single intuitive snap. It was not, I gathered, a good language for doing analytic work, or deconstructing things into discrete parts, which probably explained why the Allmuseri had no empirical science to speak of, at least not as we understood that term. To Falcon that made them savages. Just the same, it seemed a fitting tongue for the most sought-after blacks in the world.

Compared to other African tribes, the Allmuseri were the most popular servants. They brought twice the price of a Bantu or Kru. According to legend, Allmuseri elders took twig brooms with them everywhere, sweeping the ground so as not to inadvertently step on creatures too small to see. Eating no meat, they were easy to feed. Disliking property, they were simple to clothe. Able to heal themselves, they required no medication. They seldom fought. They could not steal. They fell
sick,
it was said, if they wronged anyone. As I live, they so shamed me I wanted their ageless culture to be my own, if in fact Ngonyama spoke truly. But who was I fooling? While Rutherford Calhoun might envy certain features of Allmuseri folkways, he could never claim something he had no hand in creating. I respected them too much to insult them this way—particularly one woman and her eight-year-old daughter, Baleka, who'd caught a biscuit I tossed her one day when talking to Meadows. Her mother snatched it away. She studied it like a woman inspecting melons at a public market, her face growing sharp. She smelled it, she tasted it with a tiny nibble, and spat it out the side of her mouth into the sea. Presently, she stumped across the deck and dropped it back onto my lap. Sliding up behind her, half hidden behind Mama's legs, Baleka stuck out her hand. Her eyes burned a hole in my forehead. Her mother's finger wagged in my face, and in the little of their language I
knew she sniffed that her baby deserved far better than one moldy biscuit. I could only agree. To square things, that night I shared my powdered beef, mustard, and tea with Baleka: a major mistake. Her expectation, and that of Mama, for sharing my
every
pan of food became an unspoken contract no less binding between us than a handshake. By and by, we were inseparable. This was how Mama wanted it, having decided her child's survival might depend on staying close to the one crew member who looked most African, asking me to decipher the strange behavior of the whites and intercede on their behalf. Thus, the child stayed at my heels as I spun rope and, when I was on larboard watch by the taffrail, leaned against my legs, looking back sadly toward Senegambia.