Respectable Trade (39 page)

Frances stepped back, their hands parted. “Thank you,” she whispered, and slipped from the room.

M
EHURU CHOSE NOT TO
ask for permission to go out on the Monday night, a few days after the funeral. Instead he put his arm around Cook’s broad waist while she was bolting the back door and whispered in her ear. She slapped his hand away. “Impertinence!”

“I’ll be in by midnight,” he cajoled. “And I promise to lock up safely.”

“And what if we are all murdered in our beds between now and then?” she demanded. “With the back door left open for any passing thief?”

“I’ll ask Kbara to sit in the kitchen and wait up for me,” he said. “You’ll be safe enough.”

“And what if Master comes down and finds you gone and Julius out of his bed and waiting for you?”

“He never comes down to the kitchen, Cook. You feed him too well for him to hunt for food in the night. Such a wonderful cook that you are.”

She slapped him again. “That’ll do. Where d’you want to go anyway?”

“Just to a coffeehouse for some talk,” Mehuru said. “You get a night off, why not me?”

She nodded. “All right, then,” she agreed reluctantly. “But mind you don’t get press-ganged or kidnapped. The slaver captains will steal anyone away to serve on their ships, remember! And the press-gangs for the navy are not choosy! And don’t get drunk! And don’t go with a woman—half of them are diseased, and the other half will take you ’round a corner and hand you over to be beaten.”

Mehuru threw up his hands, laughing. “I will go to the coffeehouse and come straight home. I swear it.”

She opened the back door a crack for him to slip through. “You have no money,” she said. “Here.” She rummaged under her apron in her pocket and drew out a purse. She offered him a sixpence.

“I cannot repay you.” Mehuru hesitated. “I have no money at all, and no chance of earning.”

“I know,” she said. Her powerful sense of dissatisfaction with the Coles made her push the coin, and then another, into his hand. “It isn’t right. It can’t be right to work a man all day as hard as you do and then him not even have the price of a drink in the evening.”

The coffee shop was noisy and crowded, a pall of smoke hung at head height, the windows running with condensation. When the door was opened, steam and smoke billowed out into the dark street. Mehuru paused in the doorway, uncertain. But
then he saw that a number of the men inside were black-faced like him. With a surprised exclamation, he stepped over the threshold and saw Dr. Hadley seated at a table with four other men, one of them a Negro.

“Dr. Hadley,” he called. “I have come.”

“Cicero! Sit down,” the doctor said. He looked rumpled and informal with his jacket off and his hair tied carelessly back and unpowdered. “Here is a countryman of yours, Caesar Peters, and Edgar Long, and James Stephenson.”

Mehuru hesitated. For a moment he could not believe the sudden joy of meeting men as an equal, of being among men who looked him in the face and nodded a casual greeting. For long months now, he had been invisible, a piece of cargo, an animal to be tethered and fed and trained. Only among his fellow slaves and the women—Cook and Frances—was he seen as a man, a real man. What he had missed was the casual company of strangers, the easy conviviality of freemen. The constant pain of homesickness and the constant ache of injustice were suddenly lifted from him. He felt that he stood taller, his shoulders square. He remembered that when the weight of the slave collar was taken off, he had learned to walk again, to free himself of the slavish shuffle.

He pulled up a stool to the table and smiled around at the men. “Good evening,” he said. “I am glad to be with you. My name is Mehuru; Cicero is a slave name.” He glanced at the black man. “Are you Mandinka?” he asked.

The man smiled. “I am Jamaican,” he said with a little irony. He spoke with a lilt to his voice, a rhythm almost like music. Mehuru found him hard to understand. “I was born and bred on a plantation and taken from my mother when I was small. I have never seen Africa. I cannot speak any African language. I’m told I look like a Mandinko—but it means nothing to me.”

“Are you free now?”

He nodded. “I was press-ganged onto a ship. They didn’t care whether I was a slave or free; they needed crew. I was paid
off at the end of the voyage in London, and I now work there for a printer. I have brought these gentlemen some pamphlets.”

“Are there many free black people?” Mehuru was trying to adjust his view of England. He had thought it a country inhabited solely by white people.

“Thousands,” the man said. “There are more than ten thousand in London alone. I live in a house owned by a black landlord with black neighbors.”

“Thousands?” Mehuru was astounded.

The man nodded.

“But what are they—what are
we
all doing here?”

The man chuckled, a deep, rich chuckle. “Some are slaves, brought from Jamaica and the West Indies when their owners came home to England. Some are freemen, who have bought themselves free. Most have escaped. A good many are American slaves, freed or escaped during the war.”

“Don’t you want to go home?” Mehuru asked incredulously.

“Home? My home is Jamaica, and there’s nothing there for a black man but beatings and labor. I’d rather stay here and earn a living.”

Mehuru shook his head, and Dr. Hadley laughed at his bewildered expression. “Did you think yourself the only black man in England?”

“Very nearly,” Mehuru said ruefully. “I have seen one or two men working at the docks, but only from the window of the warehouse.”

“You must have been very lonely.”

Mehuru nodded.

“Well, you’re among friends now. We’re a radical society.” He lowered his voice, but no one could have eavesdropped above the hubbub of the coffeehouse. “Mr. Stephenson here is a wheelwright, and Mr. Long writes for a newspaper. We are the Bristol Society for Constitutional Information—committed to the reform of Parliament. We’re in touch with societies all around the country. We’re collecting names for a petition to
Parliament. The time has come for the suffrage to be widened; every man should have a vote to choose his government. The laws are made by the landed gentry, and they oppress the workingmen. And”—he nodded at Caesar and Mehuru—“we
must
abolish slavery in Britain and in the British colonies. How can we progress toward true liberty when we are a nation of slave takers and slave users? Black or white, men must be free.”

“The pace of the abolition campaign is increasing,” Caesar said. “They are holding meetings everywhere in the country and preparing petitions. The debate has been postponed once, but Wilberforce will bring a bill before Parliament on the eleventh—next week. Pitt, Burke, Fox all support it.”

“But the government is very fearful,” Edgar Long cautioned. “We will have to take care to stay inside the law. First the Americans and now the French have grown so radical—they are making our masters uneasy.”

“We are outside the law already,” Dr. Hadley said briskly. “With so many offenses on the statute books, just being in company with more than two other men is a crime if you criticize the government.”

“The London Society is being watched,” Caesar said. “There is no doubt that our letters are opened.”

“It is not the government I fear, but the mob.” Edgar drained his pot of beer and called for another round. “The gentry call out the mob against us, get them drunk, and set them on us. These are dangerous times.”

“They are times of opportunity.” Dr. Hadley disagreed. “America, France, change is in the air, and we are in the thick of it. The world is changing, and we are at the head of it. I am not afraid of the mob. More and more the people will come to see that reform is the way ahead. Proper wages, proper conditions will follow the vote. Look at France! It is a fine and noble thing they are doing there, bringing the power of the people to bear on a dissolute and tyrannical regime. I tell you, the work I do in the City Hospital would make a radical out of the king himself.”

A servingman came over and dumped five pint pots of ale down on the table. Mehuru realized that it was the first time anyone had served him since he had lost Siko. For a moment the warmth of the coffeehouse and the cheerful noise faded away. He thought of Siko, and his quick smile and his impertinence. Mehuru grimaced, then took up the tankard and tasted the beer. It was warm and watery, but it made a pleasant change from the slop of the small ale of the kitchen and Cook’s unending pots of weak tea.

“And the bill for the abolition of the trade?” demanded Edgar Long. “What do they say are the chances of the bill?”

“It must come,” Caesar said. “It cannot fail. The mood of the country is with us, the leaders in the Parliament are with us. Wilberforce has twelve resolutions to put to the house to ban the capture and shipping of slaves.”

“They will oppose,” Edgar Long warned. “There is a lot of money in this country tied up in the trade. The opposition is hidden because it is ashamed—but it is there nonetheless.”

“It is not ashamed,” Stuart argued. “I meet these people, Edgar, as you do not. They are shameless. They live off the profits, and they dine off gold, and they manage to forget that every penny they earn is paid for in torture and blood.”

“It cannot fail,” Caesar repeated. “There is a majority in favor. We have canvassed the members of Parliament, and they have faithfully promised their support. Slave trading will be abolished, and then we can go on to abolish the whole business of slavery, and my people”—he glanced at Mehuru with a smile—“
our
people, brother, will be free.”

Mehuru had no reply, the man had taken his breath away. “I did not know . . .”

“You shall see your home again,” Caesar said. “And have an African son.”

Mehuru’s face suddenly crumpled, and he put his hand over his eyes. “Forgive me,” he said softly. “I had almost given up hoping.”

Stuart slapped him on the back. “We are on the turn of the tide. You will be free to come and go as you please.”

At the thought of coming and going, Mehuru glanced at the clock. “I cannot stay now,” he exclaimed. “Though for the first time in this country, I feel that I am among friends. I promised the woman who works in the kitchen that I would be home to bolt the back door before midnight, and I will not break my word to her.”

“Can you come out again?” Edgar Long asked him.

“It is difficult,” Mehuru said. “I would take the risk willingly, but the cook is responsible for locking the doors, and she is a good woman. If they found I was missing, she would be in grave trouble.” He downed his beer in four greedy gulps. “But I will try. You can be assured that I will try. Are you here every week?”

“They are here every week,” Caesar confirmed. “I am here once a month or so.”

“I’ll walk home with you,” Dr. Hadley said. “Gentlemen, I’ll see you next week, when we have had a chance to read Caesar’s pamphlets. And we will meet on Tuesday night for news of the debate.”

The night air was cold when they stepped out into the street. Mehuru shivered and drew his cloak closer around him.

“I brought these for you.” Dr. Hadley produced a handful of pamphlets from under his cloak. “Abolitionist pamphlets. One of them is written by a countryman of yours, Equiano—a freed slave.”

“How did he gain his freedom?”

“He bought himself out. He is married to an Englishwoman. He has written a fine book, which I can lend you, if you wish.”

“He is married to a white woman?” Mehuru demanded. “I had not thought it was possible.”

“There’s no law against it. Most of your countrymen marry white women. How else are they to find companions?”

“There are no freed African women?”

“Most of the slaves brought back from the Sugar Islands are page boys or footmen. And of course only men are press-ganged, or serve as soldiers. So only a few black women come here to England. But your countrymen marry well enough with white women. They have very pretty children, of a pale color.” Stuart Hadley gave a short laugh. “In a couple of hundred years, you will not be able to trace the African descendants. But every Englishman with black hair or black eyes will have to wonder if his great-grandfather was a slave. Perhaps that will be your revenge on us—by the year 1900 there will be no pure white men at all.”

“I don’t want revenge,” Mehuru said softly. “I want to go home. I am needed at my home, and if I wanted to marry, the women of my nation would be my first choice.” He thought for a moment of the line of Frances’s pale cheek and the way her skin gleamed like buttermilk.

“There is a scheme to take men back to Africa,” Dr. Hadley said. “Some land on the coast has been bought and named Sierra Leone. There are many black men in London who feel as you do, who want to go home to Africa. They are pioneers, they have grants of land to farm.”

“No,” Mehuru chuckled. “You misunderstand me. I am not a farmer, I am not a pioneer. When I say I want to go home, I did not mean that I wanted to camp out in the bush. I want to go home to my house, to my work, to my own country.”

Dr. Hadley hesitated. “Forgive me,” he said. “I had thought of all Africans as living off the land, in . . . er . . . I suppose mud huts.”

Mehuru thought of the high stone walls of Oyo and the architecture of the great houses and the palaces. “I might as well suppose that all Englishmen lived in warehouses beside stinking rivers,” he said bitingly.

They were at the back of Queens Square. The Merchant Venturers’ immense crane threw a shadow like a giant gibbet over the quayside.

“You are right to correct me,” Stuart Hadley said. “It is hard for white men to imagine your country.”

“That’s all right,” Mehuru replied bleakly. “Sometimes it is hard for me to remember it, too.”

K
BARA WAS DOZING IN
the chair when Mehuru slipped in through the back door. He started awake, and Mehuru clapped his hand over his mouth. “Sshhh! Fool!” Mehuru said swiftly in Mandinka. “Is everything quiet?”

“The little boy is sick.”

“Like James?”

“The same.”

“Is he as bad?”