Middle Passage, page 16
Not so with Ngonyama.
“This evil is visited upon us,” he said testily, stepping over his injured tribesmen, giving them water, which we had to ration closely, “for the crewmen we killed.”
“Do you think Diamelo sees it that way?”
He shot me a stare so fierce, like sparks from a blacksmith’s forge, that I had to look away. “Who else is there to blame? All well and good for you to blink at sin, Rutherford. You’re a Yankee”. His wide lips curled a little in contempt. “None of us were brought up to accept failure, or laugh it off, as you do.” Crabby, he rubbed his chin, then said an English swear word I never dreamed he knew. “I shall never understand you, Ndugu. We were forced onto this ship. Why have you wandered so far from your home?”
He really meant all that. As will happen with a man of his beliefs, he saw the sickness upon us as a moral plague and held himself responsible for our suffering. The aftermath of the mutiny stopped his spirit cold. Riveted it. Nailed him fast. He had slipped into relativity. He could not move forward, and thus lost ground to Diamelo day by day. (But I must add he kept us alive by not telling Diamelo all he had learned at the helm.) It all had to do with an old Allmuseri belief (hardly understood by one Westerner in a hundred) that each man outpictured his world from deep within his own heart. A fortnight ago he had thought murder and lo! the mutiny was manifest, as if a man’s soul was an alchemical cauldron where material events were fashioned from the raw stuff of feelings and ideas. That meant an orthodox Allmuseri, as he was, had to watch himself twenty-five hours a day and police his heart. As within, so it was without. More specifically: What came out of us, not what went in, made us clean or unclean. Their notion of “experience,” I learned, held each man utterly responsible for his own happiness or sorrow, for the emptiness of his world or its abundance, even for his dreams and his entire way of seeing, so that an Allmuseri pauper might be rich if his heart was clear, and their kings impoverished if they harbored within themselves hunger, grievances, or hatred, as Ngonyama had done toward the crew, wishing misery and death upon them. All that, it seemed, had flown back upon him like spit hurled at an enemy against the wind. And now Ngonyama grieved less over what lay ahead of us than what lay in the immediate past, this rift, this vast rupture he had caused within himself by permitting the execution of so many.
Never a night passed but I entered the quiet, disheveled fo’c’s’le—full of mildewed clothing and rusted weapons covered with fungi—and, standing at the room’s center, imagined I heard those murdered tars: McGaffin’s snarl; fetching music from Tommy’s flute; the yammering of Fletcher and Meadows; and the nerve-jarring Har! Har! of forty pirates in a gin-duel. As I struggled to describe every detail of our passage in the captain’s log, I longed for the crewmen lost to fill the ship’s room again, for our lonely drifting to disappear, and, as in a dream, delivering me back to Isadora’s sitting room, where I would set my teacup clicking down on her candlestand, cross the carpeted floor on my knees, and bury my face in her skirts, begging her to take me in and forgive my idiot blathering about wanting excitement and saying all the beautiful things I’d meant to tell her to balance how I’d hurt her sometimes. Like a wife she would watch me closely to see my reactions to the portraits of women in popular magazines, or on the street, faintly jealous if I stared at them too long, but never showing it, wounded but too proud to let on that I had brought her pain, this woman who, I knew, had paid my bills back home. And it came to me, there in the darkened room, that perhaps Papa was right and there were only two kinds of people in the New World: debtors such as I had been all my days and those who, like Isadora, paid the rent for all the rest. But the dream never doorwayed into her rooms, and the furnishings of the fo’c’s’le took on a grim finality or gave me such a feeling of there being nothing beyond these groaning timbers, this endless sea, that I wept shamelessly like a child.
“Ruth’ford,” said Baleka, catching me like this. “Can I get you anythin’?”
I blew my nose. Croaked: “Dry socks.”
She hung back, a little rattled to see me blubbering and biting my nails, her hair tucked under an African headwrap or gele, as their women called them. As with all Allmuseri children, Baleka never displayed her feelings directly. Frankness was a Western virtue that offended the blacks a time or two. She policed herself from doing or saying anything that might displease others. Thus Baleka could only be read at angles by paying attention to the subtlest of vibrational shifts in her voice, the slight emotional spin she put on ceremonial action, the nearly imperceptible imprint her feelings left, like heat from hands on glass, upon Tribal behavior so ritualized, seasoned, and spiced by the palm oil, the presence of others it virtually rendered the single performer invisible—or, put another way, blended them into an action so common the one and many were as indistinguishable as ocean and wave. I wondered if she thought it weak for a grown man, a Westerner, to weep. Turning my back to her, I blew my nose on the hem of my blouse, and said, “Yes?” My voice croaked. “What is it?”
“It’s your turn to feed it.”
Baleka looked at her bare feet. Instantly, I knew what she meant: the creature Falcon had captured had to be fed. Every day it had to eat. Heretofore, the more pious of the Allmuseri had done this, but eventually the duty fell to everyone. I was the first of the Americans luffed in for the chore. But on what did it feed? None of the Africans who went alow had been with it for more than fifteen minutes. None had taken food. It was a duty I dreaded. Still, I felt compelled to see what sort of cargo Falcon had believed would make his fortune shoreside and, just maybe, hasten the millennium.
Weakly, then, feeling unsteady in my spine, fearful that perhaps I, too, had the first signs of sickness, I descended into the chamber with a glim and rope tied at my waist. The darkness there was blacker than chimney soot. There, where the scuttles were closed, the smell rivaled stagnant water in a swamp. The air was stale, potted. The silence was so heavy I swear you could hear a maggot pump ship on sailcloth. No wind stirred within these walls, but the flame of my lantern swayed violently as if things were stalking to and fro. My chest began to ache. Feeling the urge to vomit, a backwash of fluids in my throat, I bent forward, but nothing came, and now I was so weak I could neither stand nor sit, and simply lay still. About five paces to my right was the box. Otherwise, I saw nothing. Something was off, my nerves told me. I felt an edge on the air, a skin-prickling charge like that before an electrical storm, the chamber releasing an elemental whiff of something just spoiling to happen: catastrophe hunkering, fleetingly visible in the corner of the eye. And then, as if cued to the gathering chaos I felt within, the crate opened and from it stepped a dark man, his features striking in the stylized way of Benin sculpture, the bone in the bridge of his nose boldly cut, his cap of short hair a mosaic of burls. This, I knew without noting another detail, was the dangerous, shape-shifting god of the Allmuseri. And I knew the infernal creature—this being who delighted in divesting men of their minds—had chosen to present itself to me in the form of the one man with whom I had bloody, unfinished business: the runaway slave from Reverend Chandler’s farm—my father, the fugitive Riley Calhoun.
Entry, the eighth
AUGUST 1, 1830
Visiting the village of the Allmuseri, the Spanish explorer Rafael Garcia was driven mad. I now knew why. I glimpsed the creature, coal black and squatting on stubbly legs, as you might see objects through clouded glass. This blistering vision licked itself clean, as cats do, and had other beings, whole cultures of them, living parasitically on its body. Do I exaggerate? Not at all. It stood before me mute as a mountain, preferring not to speak, I suspected, because to say anything was to fall short of ever saying enough. (Within its contours my father’s incarnation was trapped like a ship in a bottle, contained in a silence where all was possibility, perfection, pre-formed.) It was top-heavy. All head. Luscious hair fell past protruding eyes and a nose broad as a mallet, and framed a grin stretched in hysterical laughter, bunching skin on its cheeks into a hundred mirthful folds: a ceremonial mask from Gambia, I guessed, but it’s safe to say I was hardly in my right mind. Nausea plummeted from my belly straight down to my balls, drawing tight the skin along my scrotum. I came within a hair’s-breadth of collapsing, for this god, or devil, had dressed itself in the flesh of my father. That is what I mostly saw, and for the life of me I could no more separate the two, deserting father and divine monster, than I could sort wave from sea. Nor something more phantasmal that forever confused my lineage as a marginalized American colored man. To wit, his gradual unfoldment before me, a seriality of images I could not stare at straight on but only take in furtive glimpses, because the god, like a griot asked one item of tribal history, which he could only recite by reeling forth the entire story of his people, could not bring forth this one man’s life without delivering as well the complete content of the antecedent universe to which my father, as a single thread, belonged.
All my life I’d hated him because he had cut and run like hundreds of field hands before him. He was a dark man and fiercely handsome, to hear Jackson tell it, and even when he was tired after a day’s work he could whip a guitar like nobody’s business and sing until it made grown women cry. They liked him, the womenfolks, but Da wasn’t so popular with the men who sometimes found his old, wired shoes next to their pallets. A couple tried to kill him, said Jackson, and lost because Da was big through his chest and could lift a cow his damnself, then afterward he’d bring stump whiskey to whomever he’d whooped, saying he was sorry for all the bedswerving and scrapping and gambling he did—that he couldn’t help it, and besides, it wasn’t really his fault he acted thataway, was it? “Looka how we livin’,” he’d say. “Looka what they done to us.” You couldn’t rightly blame a colored man for acting like a child, could you—stealing and sloughing off work when people like Peleg Chandler took the profits, and on top of that so much of their dignity he couldn’t look his wife Ruby in the face when they made love without seeing how much she hated him for being powerless, even with their own children, who had no respect for a man they had seen whipped more than once by an overseer and knew in this world his word was no better than theirs. Each time Da talked like this, checking off cankers and cancer spots of slavery on his porch in the quarters, the other men listened, even those who hated him for pestering their wives, their eyes rage-kindled and drifting away to old angers of their own. “We was kings once,” he would say, scrawling with one finger on the dusty porch a crude map of an African village he remembered vaguely (and neglecting to add that in his tribe his own family was not royalty but instead the equivalent of Russian serfs or Chinese coolies). “We lost a war—naw, a battle. So now we’s prisoners. And the way I see it we supposed to keep on fightin’.”
Most of the time Da did fight. Never Reverend Chandler, though. Rather, he fought his family and others in the fields, chafing under the constraints of bondage, and every other constraint as well: marriage and religion, as white men imposed these on Africans. Finally, in the light of my slush lamp, I beheld his benighted history and misspent manhood turn toward the night he plotted his escape to the Promised Land. It was New Year’s Eve, anno 1811. For good luck he took with him a little of the fresh greens and peas Chandler’s slaves cooked at year’s end (greens for “greenbacks” and peas for “change”), then took himself to the stable, saddled one of the horses, and, since he had never ventured more than ten miles from home, wherefore lost his way, was quickly captured by padderolls and quietly put to death, the bullet entering through his left eye, exiting through his right ear, leaving him forever eight and twenty, an Eternal Object, pure essence rotting in a fetid stretch of Missouri swamp. But even in death he seemed to be doing something, or perhaps should I say he squeezed out one final cry where-through I heard a cross wind of sounds just below his breathing. A thousand soft undervoices that jumped my jangling senses from his last, weakly syllabled wind to a mosaic of voices within voices, each one immanent in the other, none his but all strangely his, the result being that as the loathsome creature, this deity from the dim beginnings of the black past, folded my father back into the broader, shifting field—as waves vanish into water—his breathing blurred in a dissolution of sounds and I could only feel that identity was imagined; I had to listen harder to isolate him from the We that swelled each particle and pore of him, as if the (black) self was the greatest of all fictions; and then I could not find him at all. He seemed everywhere, his presence, and that of countless others, in me as well as the chamber, which had subtly changed. Suddenly I knew the god’s name: Rutherford. And the feel of the ship beneath the wafer-thin soles of my boots was different. Not like any physical surface I knew, but rather as if every molecule of matter in her vibrated gently, almost imperceptibly, and the effect of all this was that from bowsprit to stern she seemed to sing like the fabled Argo.
Then I fainted.
Or died.
Whatever.
A long, long interval passed in the most unimaginable quietude. Silence as deep, as pervading as the depths of the sea. There was stillness, the sweet smell of growing things, then their stench. I heard screaming, felt it barreling out of my bones. I was thrashing and two Josiah Squibbs were holding me down in the fo’c’s’le—my sight was distorted, I saw everything in doubles—mopping my brow with his kerchief. Apparently he had been feeding me from a bucket by his left elbow. Feeding me the choicest cut of medium-raw steak, unless the meat on the fork in his right hand was a product of my prolonged fever. Once he saw me awake, Squibb set down his fork and began fooling with my arm.
“Lie back now, bucko. Yuh need to bleed,” said he. “And pray.”
Beside him were instruments of venesection that made me cringe: fleams, thumb lances, and a copper bleeding bowl. I was not, I should mention, an advocate of bleeding, cupping, or leeches, though these medical practices still lingered on ship when all other methods had failed. I wondered: Was this necessary? And, more to the point, was Squibb capable of carrying it off without killing me? Nay, I was not eager for this, but I knew the cook, so tired, was ready to try everything he’d seen to save us. Squibb’s cold hands rubbed my right arm vigorously; he consulted astrological charts to confirm that the hour was right for an incision and tightened a rag just below my elbow to enlarge the vein.
“Josiah, half a moment—”
“Don’t talk. Ain’t nothin’ to say.” The cook’s face was pale as a scrubbed hammock, his eyes as red as a pigeon’s. He shoved a stick into my hand and demanded I squeeze it. “This’ll balance the humors, though Gawd knows I don’t know what happened to yuh. We pulled yuh hup from below. Yuh been out of yer head fer a long time. Christ, lad, yer hair’s sugah white.”
“How long?”
“Three days full. Ever since yuh went below. But lissen. We spotted a ship this mornin’, boy!”
“Whereaway?”
“Two miles to leeward in the southeast corner.”
“Her flag?”
“None. Leastways none I kin see, but I think she’s American. She’s been following us hank fer hank, tryin’ to eat our wind. I think her skipper knows we’re in trouble. If she’s British, we’re sunk. They’ll search us and charge you ’n’ me with murder!”
“Peter hailed her, then?”
Squibb stiffened, shipped a long face, then looked at the bucket from which he’d fed me. “Yuh had Mr. Cringle fer supper, m’boy. We all did. Now, lie back, dammit! This was what he wanted. I was sittin’ with him toward the end, which he knew was comin’. Yuh know, when a body goes the bladder ’n’ bowels fly open—I seen it happen a hundred times—and yer mates have to clean yuh hup and all. He wanted to spare us that, so he asked the blacks to he’p him to the head. After he was done, he had a few mates gather round him. By that time we was eatin’ our shoes, barnacles, ’n’ the buttons off our shirts. The women and children had chewed every shred of leather off the pumps. So Cringle says, in a voice as calm as a chaplain’s, ’My friends, I have no inheritance to leave my family in America. They’ll not miss me, I’m sure, but I wish to leave you something, for no man could ask for better shipmates than thee. You’re brave lads. The lasses have given their full share as bluejackets too, and methinks ’tis scandalous how some writers such as Amasa Delano have slandered black rebels in their tales. Of course, I fear you’ll get ptomaine if you put me into a pot, but I’ve nothing else to give. I hope this will help. Please, leave me a moment to pray. . . .’
