The Drifters (90 page)

Gretchen, watching the effect of the new religion on Cato, thought it strange that he had been able to reject his father’s Christianity and immediately accept old Hajj’s
Islam, for although it was true that Christianity had defrauded the black man totally in one of the great deceptions of history—almost as if Christianity had been devised and held in reserve for this peculiar purpose—Islam had treated him worse, and it was ironic that this religion should now be thought of as the savior of the Negro race when for so long it was the principal destroyer through its sponsorship of slavery.

It was in this very field of slavery that Hajj’ had his deepest influence on Cato and generated those emotional storms of which I spoke earlier. Cato himself told me how this happened. ‘I had gone to the mosque one Friday with Hajj’, and after services he invited me to his quarters, where we sat on the veranda looking over the bay in which ships were docked for the night, and he used a word I had never heard before. He said, “In the old days—well, in fact, even when I was a little boy—the barracoons were over there,” and he pointed toward the dark jungle opposite the island. I asked him what they were, and he looked at me in surprise. “You don’t know what barracoons were? Your ancestors did, of that we may be sure.” And he explained how in the days of slavery, which lasted on this island till the early 1900s, blacks were caught in the center of Africa and driven in herds to the port areas, which ships would visit periodically in order to load up with the precious cargo. In the waiting period between the time when the slaves arrived at the shore and the boats sailed in to pick them up, they were kept in large stockades guarded by riflemen and fierce dogs, and these were the barracoons.” I suppose the word
coon
came from this. The man from the barracoon.

‘Well, Hajj’ was so surprised that I hadn’t known about this that he showed me several books he thought I should read. He’d gotten them from ship captains or from visitors who had studied about Moçambique on the long trip out from Europe, and I used to leave the pop-top right after breakfast and go over to his place and sit on the veranda all day long, reading those terrifying books. They dealt with slavery.’

As he told me this, he shivered, for although like any schooled Negro he had known of slavery, its full horror had been blanked from his consciousness, as if it were too heavy a burden for the mind to bear. ‘But now I became steeped in it. In Hajj’s books I would read: “From
Moçambique Island so many slaves were loaded into the ships that a marble seat was erected on the shore in front of the palace, and here, when the slaves were assembled in their chains, the bishop would come and with a wave of his hand convert them all to Christianity, so that if they died on the Middle Passage their souls would go to heaven, and this was prudent, because the ships were packed so tightly that thirty or forty per cent of the slaves would perish before the ships cleared the island, and their bodies would be thrown into the sea, but all died as good Christians.”

‘I remember one phrase I’ll never be able to erase from my mind. It hides there like a cancer. I came upon it by accident, and the author was not trying to make any special point. Just trying to be complete in his reporting. He said, “The Jesuits kept their barracoon on the mainland opposite the island and hauled their slaves to the ships by barge.” Ponder that one.’

But the passage that Cato remembered most often, he never mentioned. I think he knew he could not trust himself to speak of this lest his voice break, but he had copied it on an old typewriter owned by Hajj’, and it was this copy he showed me:

The more Cato read in Hajj’s books, the more grisly became the true story of Africa, and no part had been more bloody and terrible than that played by this benevolent island, for it had been the
entrepôpe
where the market value of slaves was determined for the east coast; it was here that slavers from all the civilized nations of the world convened to pick up their valuable cargoes. How many slaves had been transferred from the barracoons on the mainland to the ships at anchor off the island? Two or three million, perhaps, so that many Negroes in Brazil and Cuba and the United States had known the profile of this marvelous island, had known its slave market, its barracoons, its chains and, at the end, the benevolence of its bishop’s blessing as he sat in his marble chair, dispatching his new Christians into the holds of the waiting ships.

Cato told me, ‘While the others were exploring the fort or getting to know the Portuguese traders or arguing under the awning at Bar Africa, I was either reading at Hajj’s or walking along the waterfront, visualizing those endless streams of black people being marched out of the jungle. I could see them being thrown into the holds while the rich Portuguese watched from the shore, from right where I was standing, and I began to feel a kind of bitterness in those days that will simply never leave me. It was your economic system, your church that did this, and I doubt that the debt can ever be repaid.’

So during that long and peaceful stay on Moçambique Island, Cato Jackson underwent a spiritual upheaval composed of one part Islam, one part history, one part racial memory, and he began to formulate the ideas that would motivate him as a man. His instructor was Hajj’, an Arab who had seen a vision in his twenty-fifth year and had found it sufficient to guide him the rest of his life. He explained many things to Cato, admiring the young black’s quick intelligence and keen desire, but when all the lessons were finished, and Cato thought he now comprehended what before had been obscure, Gretchen heard him railing one day against the Christian church which had permitted the system of slavery, and she grew irritated and said, ‘You know, of course, that almost every slave delivered to Moçambique Island was brought here by Arab slavers who were devout Muslims?’ When Cato stared at her, she added, ‘The last big batch smuggled out of here was in
1902, and was handled by Hajj’s father. The last big group to hit the coast anywhere was in 1952. More than three hundred slaves herded together by Arabs and sold to Arab dealers who smuggled them across the straits to Arabia.’

‘Who told you that?’ the black man stormed.

‘I can read, too.’

Of course there was an Indian trader rumored to be selling drugs and of course Monica tracked him down within an hour, but in a whining Irish-type voice he said, ‘Heroin? Who ever heard of heroin on Moçambique? I would be insane if I touched heroin. Please go away.’

Joe and Gretchen then witnessed for the first time the panic that overcomes a heroin user when his supply is threatened. Monica became a woman with a single purpose, for the Beira stock was almost gone and she could foresee that morning when she would awaken to an empty purse. She had to locate a source on the island, but even after repeated visits to the Indian, he put her off in his lilting, singsong way: ‘It’s all very well for you rich women to come here asking a poor Indian to help you out, but do you ever stop to think about my problems?’

‘Who sells it?’ Monica demanded desperately.

‘It’s all very well for you to stamp your foot and make demands …’ This continued for some time, until finally he said, ‘You go along the waterfront to the garage run by João Ferreira Dos Santos’—he pronounced this in the Portuguese manner,
Jow Fer Shantzh
, which Monica could not understand—‘and in the small house beyond you’ll find a half-caste seaman. Give him my name.’

She picked her way along the waterfront, unusually conspicuous if anyone had been tracking her, and came to a garage whose name she could equate to Jow Fer Shantzh, and beyond it she saw with expanding relief the small house, and in it she found a fat seaman who spoke no English. Reciting the Indian’s name, she waited, and after a moment’s inspection, the seaman produced a mediumsized bundle of untreated marijuana. In despair Monica whispered, ‘No, no!’ using the thumb and fingers of her right hand to make the sign of a working hypodermic. Unperturbed, the half-caste took back the grass and went
into a back room. Much later, with Monica fidgeting the while, he returned with a small packet of heroin. ‘More, more,’ Monica pleaded, but on this day he would allow her only the minimum ration. It was priced at nine dollars, more than twice what she had paid in the south.

Six more times she came back to the half-caste, until she had put together a satisfactory cache, but when she felt herself secure, there rose the question of Cato. What about his needs? She asked him one afternoon as he returned from Hajj’s, and he said, ‘Don’t worry about me. I think I’ve about had it.’

This abrupt information shocked Monica and she began challenging him: ‘You discover something as big as snow and you reject it? Haven’t you any self-respect?’ This seemed ridiculously irrelevant, and Cato tried to explain that he had not been impressed with heroin: ‘Also, I don’t know whether I could handle it in the long run.’

This so infuriated Monica that her questions turned to accusations, and it was at this point that Joe and Gretchen returned from a swim. Joe told me what happened next: ‘Monica became enraged to think that a black man would dare to tell her what she should or should not do, and when Cato tried to explain that he was judging his own character, not hers, she flew into a rage and began shouting so loud she could be heard throughout the park. Gretchen tried to quiet her, and after a while Monica and Cato had a big reconciliation. They made love and she persuaded him that if a person kept his head—if you stayed in the driver’s seat—heroin could produce an endless rainbow. In the end she gave him a brutal ultimatum: “If you want to sleep in my bed, buster, stay with me.”

‘Next day he sought me out to talk it over. He was so damned unsure of himself. “Joe,” he said, “twice I’ve had the feeling that maybe it was going to prove too big for me to handle. Real premonitions.” So I said, “If there’s even a possibility of that danger, why not stop?” and he said, “But I’m in love with her. You can’t even imagine what it’s like to be in bed with her.” I figured that this was a topic on which he was the expert, so I said nothing, but then he grabbed my arm and said with his old-time cockiness, “I’m the guy who’s gonna keep his head. I’m sure that if I stay in the driver’s seat, I can handle the stuff.” So I told him, “You do that, son, and they’ll write you up in the medical books,” at which he got mad,
growling, “All right! When we were just sniffing, she tried it every day and I sniffed maybe once in three. Now that she’s popping, I use the needle only every fourth or fifth time. And if she starts to mainline, I get off the train. I call that keeping things under control.”

‘But Monica kept the pressure on. She even applied the heat again to Gret and me. “It really is super,” she assured us. Said she’d picked up an extra supply from the half-caste. Her main argument was that until you’d tried it, you’d never discover your true potential. She said your perception of beauty was enhanced and that you could never understand sex without heroin. Then Gretchen said, “That’s what you told us about LSD,” and Monica said, “Revelation comes in steps, darling,” and Gretchen asked, “So what’s your next big step?” and for a minute Monica stared off into space, as if she had caught an unwanted glimpse of some dark corridor she might not wish to travel.’

Of the various books that Hajj’ loaned Cato, one was to have a lasting impact on all the Americans. It was a history of Portuguese exploration and had been brought to the island as a summary of events in Moçambique, and after Cato had read that dreary account of how the Portuguese had seduced and bullied the original black inhabitants and had sold a large part of them into slavery, he looked by chance at the section dealing with the Atlantic Ocean side of Africa, and there he came upon the story of King Afonso I, who had ruled the Congo basin from 1505 until his death in 1542.

It was a story of gripping force, the equal of anything that had unfolded in Europe or Asia during that period. It told of how Afonso’s wily father, ruling an area larger than most European countries, had reacted to the arrival of the white men, how he had fenced with them and tried to select from their confusing ways the good while rejecting the bad. The old man had turned his favorite son, Afonso, over to the care of a group of Catholic priests, who then spent ten years instructing him in what was best in European culture. They had been remarkable men, devoted servants of God and the Congo, and in Afonso they produced a black man who would have both the knowledge and the sophistication to guide his people from primitivism to a place of equality in the world’s councils.

They showed him how to trade the untouched riches of the Congo for the skills of Europe, how to protect his
nation by judicious alliances between the powers that would one day want to absorb it, and above all, how to make the transition from tribal gods to Christianity, so that the civilized nations of the world would accept the Congo as an equal. They taught him much more, and at the age of twenty-two he was well prepared to govern his huge kingdom.