The Ghost Apple (27 page)
Authors: Aaron Thier
Poor Pennington, or Codrington. Perhaps even then he felt the approach of
Death
, by the lowness of his Spirits, or the want of Bodily Vigour, for I, tho nearlie blinde, could see it writt’n in his face. Perhaps also he thot to frustrate God’s intension by draweing out his speach thus, and ne’er coming to the poynt.
I was muche distract’d now by two things, namely vomiting, for I was sicke, and, second, I had a grate desire to open a
Coco-nut
, of which the eatable part is secured within so strong a Magazeen that I could not, for all that I tryd each day, make a passage to the kernel. Yet now I thought I mite have recourse to a stratagem, viz. that I would go to a hill I knew, and from there jump into the See, clutching the
Coco-nut
, & would lande among the rocks belowe with my full weight an emasiated 9 stone upon the
Coco-nut
, and there burst it open. This wood have the double effect of ending my Life, which was all to the gud, and much desir’d, for this Frute the Ghost Appel does produce such a powerfull inclination to take one’s Self off to
Heaven
, or to
Hell
.
Pennington, or Codrington, now having left off talking, he propos’d we drink to the healths of those our friends in the old Continent, and so we did, each of us emptying a calabash, so that I quite forgott my desire to open the
Coco-nut
, and instead I was driv’n nearlie Madd, and wish’d very much to see my lovely
Yarico
. And as Pennington, or Codrington, was now suddenlie quite dead at my feete, there for I went off in search of her, intending to make her my
Wife
.
It was quite darke, & all alone in the nite I went downe to the
See
, where I could here voices, and singing, for indeede it was a lovely Musick. The Carwak some of them were sitting upon the sand, tho the sand flees which are there did not molest them on the account of the painte with whiche they cover’d themselves, as I have said. I watch’d threw the Coco trees, and wen I came among them they did not remark me, but only gave me to drink some Perino, so that it struck me, that, in all truthe I loved these people the Carwak, for there too was
Yarico
, and she
smyled
at me.
The Tripoli College Natural Sciences Newsletter (Approved Content)
March
2010
Findings:
Mosquito Masterminds
Professor Jana Brewster has just published a paper that may prove shocking to anyone who cherishes a sense of human exceptionalism. It details unequivocal evidence for intelligent community organization and sophisticated group decision-making in mosquitoes, focusing primarily on their use of malaria as a way of controlling the size and geographical distribution of human populations.
Malaria is a disease of the Old World tropics, and its importance in the New World—particularly its influence on the development of New World plantation slavery—has only recently been acknowledged by historians of the colonial period. Once it was established in the Americas, it wreaked havoc on both indigenous and white European populations, and the labor vacuum thus created in malaria zones was what motivated some colonists to begin importing enslaved Africans. Not only were slaves easier to replace, according to the cynical logic of early slaveholders, but people from West and Central Africa were much more likely to have some resistance to certain forms of the disease. Although early colonists did not understand the biological mechanism, the results were obvious: Planters with African slaves ended up with a larger and more vigorous workforce than planters who employed European laborers.
Physicians have known for more than a hundred years that malaria is a vector-borne disease spread by infected mosquitoes. Until now, however, those mosquitoes have been dismissed as little more than passive transport for the malarial plasmodium—in effect, a feature of the climate. But this summer, while doing research for an unrelated project, Professor Brewster made a shocking discovery. She learned that
Anopheles quadrimaculatus
, the species of mosquito that serves as North America’s main malaria vector, can’t be found in most northern states. The effective limit of its range is, incredibly, the Mason-Dixon Line.
“South of the line,” Professor Brewster says, “we used to see malaria and thus we saw plantation slavery as well. North of the line, there were essentially no infected mosquitoes, no malaria, and therefore no plantation slavery. What this means is that anopheline mosquitoes must have understood and respected this artificial human boundary.”
Mosquitoes, she argues, must have decided
as a group
to confine themselves to the Southern states, which means that they were complicit in the creation of a Southern plantation society.
But the reality may be even more extraordinary. If mosquitoes were capable of recognizing human political boundaries, might they also have been capable of helping to establish such boundaries and thus to engineer that plantation society? They had much to gain by doing so: Unprotected, closely quartered slave populations provide a reliable source of blood meals for female mosquitoes. Since females require mammalian blood for egg production, they would have had an interest in maintaining and reinforcing the slavery system. Professor Brewster has postulated that they “managed their human herds as we might manage our cows and sheep,” probably in order to keep slave plantations close to favored breeding sites.
This also means that the insect was instrumental in creating a situation that led to civil war. It is therefore reasonable to ask whether mosquitoes consciously brought about that conflict as well, just as they may have helped to create plantation society in the first place. Mosquitoes thrive in wartime for the same reasons they thrive on slave plantations. Large groups of people with inadequate clothing and little or no shelter provide a veritable buffet. Additionally, the deformation of the landscape tends to produce depressions that collect rainwater and provide breeding sites free of the fish and other predators that typically threaten mosquito larvae.
“I’ve always had a horror of bugs,” Professor Brewster says. “This just makes it worse.”
In the last hundred years, humans have developed many effective methods of mosquito control, but this doesn’t mean that these insects no longer pose a threat. Malaria is still hyper-endemic in equatorial sub-Saharan Africa, and there is no reason to imagine that we here in North America will be safe forever.
“They’re cooking up something dreadful,” Professor Brewster says. “They’re just waiting for their moment.”
the Antillia Liberation Army March 16, 2010
Brothers and Sisters:
The philosopher Hegel, who was himself no friend to the enslaved Africans of his day, nevertheless provides us with these words:
“Even if I am born a slave, and nourished and raised by a master, and if my parents and forefathers were all slaves, still I am free in the moment that I will it, when I become conscious of my freedom.”
We have willed it. We are free. But our protests have fallen on deaf ears. We know now that Big Anna and the United States will fight to keep us marginalized, dispossessed, disenfranchised.
The great Toussaint-Louverture wrote these words during the Haitian revolution, and we make them our own:
We have no other resource than destruction and flames. The soil bathed with our sweat shall not provide our enemies with the smallest aliment. We will tear up the roads with shot, we will throw corpses into all the fountains, we will burn and annihilate everything in order that those who have come to reduce us to slavery may have before their eyes the image of that hell which they deserve.
Commandant Kabaka, the Antillia Liberation Army
or
A Description of One Semester Spent in Tripoli’s Field Studies Program in Tropical Agriculture, etc.
PART TWO
Though I had all but given up hope of rescue, yet as soon as Mr. Monthan had delivered his news, namely that the maroons were on the plantation, and that they were burning the cane fields, I was certain that Professor Kabaka had come to set me at liberty.
But I was not yet a free woman. Indeed, I had a terrible fear that I was now in greater danger than I had ever been, for I did not know what fresh evil my tormentors might conceive, or how carelessly they might discard my life, now that their own lives were in jeopardy.
After Mr. Monthan had gone, someone picked me up by the hair and stood me next to Mr. Cavendish, who, though he looked as if he had just been startled from a lewd dream, grabbed hold of my arm and said nothing. It was the consummation of a fear that had pursued him, for all I knew, as long as he had been in the island, but now that his fear had become a reality, he was the very picture of self-control. Mr. Drax and the others went into the field office in order to arm themselves, and Mr. Cavendish began to walk in the direction of the longhouse, dragging me along beside him. At every moment I expected him to strike me or sink a knife into my back, or else throw me down and do what he had long been threatening to do.
Soon we came to the yard of packed earth where the other students had been cooking their evening meal, and we found them very much agitated by the shouting and the smoke, for they had not yet learned the reason for these alarms. Here, still holding my arm in his moist but irresistible grip, Mr. Cavendish seemed to become quite cheerful, and he commenced a species of oration on the subject of globalization, which he held to be a great good, though inevitably, as he said, there were disagreements such as that which was now being adjudicated in the fields. As he spoke, I felt one of his red eyes upon me, goggling, as it did, apparently free of regard for its fellow, in his large and misshapen head. Later I came to believe that he had gone quite mad, for he seemed perfectly insensible to the disaster that was unfolding around him, and of which the other students were just now becoming aware. He insisted once again, as he had so many times, that he could not trust the local labor force, for though they were “tinctured with the language and outward bearing of piety,” yet they remained capable of anything. Indeed, he said, if they purported to love the Bible, they loved it only “as a Roman Catholic girl loves the doll of a Madonna, which she dresses with muslin and ribbons.
“And yet what shall I do? Shall I set them at liberty? As two-thirds of them have been born upon the plantation, and many of them are lame, dropsical, and of a great age, to do so would, of all misfortunes that could happen to them, be the most cruel.”
We listened with a kind of awe to these absurdities. The infernal glow of the burning cane was now visible in the sky, and this in addition to the great quantity of sweet smoke, which had a very distinct smell, like burnt caramel, gave the night the appearance of a region of Hell.
But now, at last, Mr. Cavendish seemed to come to himself, for he turned suddenly and squinted into the smoke. Huge shadows rose up and flickered and died away again, so that it was impossible to say if there were men in the fields, or if these were only the fantastic shapes thrown up in the firelight by the dancing cane.
Now several things happened. First, Mr. Cavendish released me, and I retreated immediately to the edge of the yard. Next, Mr. Drax and Mr. Hertfordshire came around the corner of the longhouse, both of them now armed with rifles, and commenced firing into the smoke. Then Mr. Cavendish started toward the longhouse, no doubt to take cover, but he had not gone more than a few steps when he was lifted off the ground in a most peculiar way, as if tugged off his feet by a receding wave, and before my eyes, so slowly that I could watch every change of expression on his face, he was pulled gently apart, an arm now detaching itself from his trunk, and then an ear spinning slowly into the night. A moment later I realized that the noise of gunfire had alarmed my hearing, for now sound returned in a murmuring rush, even as Mr. Cavendish fell to the ground. His head was broken like one of the clay pots we used for cooling sugar, and blood covered all.
Mr. Drax and Mr. Hertfordshire had fled without my seeing them go, and suddenly there were men all about. I knew at once that these were the maroons, and indeed they were a dreadful lot, for they had wild hair, and were tattooed all over, and had no shirts upon their backs, nor shoes, and their speech was so rough that I could make out only one word in three.
So often, lying upon my worm-eaten pallet during my first weeks in the island, I had dreamed that Professor Kabaka might descend from the mountains and carry me off to freedom. Yet now, when I had every reason to believe that he was upon the plantation, and indeed when I might have expected to see him at any moment, I experienced a feeling closely allied with heartbreak. Indeed, I think I can say that I was quite heartbroken, for I had before my eyes the tangible proof that he was not the man I thought he was, nor indeed a man with whom I would have willingly spent even a moment of my time. My crucial realization was this, specifically that not until that moment had I allowed myself to believe that he might make so bold as to translate his thought, and his fiery speech, into bloody action. Now that he had done so, I saw that whatever love or admiration I had felt for him was based upon the fiction of his good nature, and now that my cherished image of him was extinguished, I was left, in a manner of speaking, bereft.
