Ama (49 page)

“The white man asks if you are sick.”

“Of course I am sick. What does he think? I am sick in my head, in my stomach and most of all I am sick in my heart.”

Butcher saw him point to the parts of his anatomy as he named them. He smiled and went on to complete his examination of the last of the ten men.

“Now tell them to dance,” he ordered.

“Dance?” she asked him, uncertain whether she had heard him correctly.

“That is what I said. Dance. They need exercise to keep them healthy.”

“My father,” she addressed the overseer diffidently, “the white man says you must dance.”

“Dance?” he asked her incredulously. “Dance? Is he the Asantehene and I his clown that he tells me to dance? Shall I dance
adowa
? Or would he prefer
kète
?”

He turned his head and spat on the deck.

“Tell him I will dance at his funeral.”

Bruce, a tall, bony Scot, whose head was shaved just like the slaves', produced a fiddle and struck up a vigorous Highland fling. He danced a few steps by way of illustration. The slaves stood silently and watched. The overseer shook his head in disbelief.

“Is this what the white man calls dancing?” he asked Ama. “It must be the Dance of the Goats.”

Those who understood Asante laughed. One youth sent out a great guffaw. He slapped his naked thighs. Then he stepped out a grotesque, obscene parody of Bruce's performance. Tomba's men joined in the merriment. They had few enough opportunities. Ama could not suppress a smile. Bruce stopped his fiddling and looked at the surgeon.

Butcher was becoming impatient. He still had another ninety slaves to examine before he went ashore to inspect potential purchases. He called for reinforcements. They surrounded the slaves and began to flick their whips at their bare feet. The men danced.

“Play, you Scottish bastard, play. And let them dance until they drop! No chop for them until they've had their exercise.”

* * *

Ama was assigned to help Butcher to identify the sick. The cases which he adjudged to be most serious he transferred to the sick bay in the boys' hold.

She learned the drill quickly.

“Ask them,” Butcher ordered her.

“The white man wants to know if anyone is sick,” she told the men, “or if you have any other complaints.”

“My young sister,” the small Asante overseer with bulging eyes called out, “do not waste our time. You must get us tools to break these irons and you must show us where the white men keep their weapons. Then we shall overpower them and kill them all.”

There was a desperate cheer and a rattling of irons from the men who understood. The others, Tomba's people, joined in.

“Nana,” she replied, “Nananom, my grandfathers, my fathers. I am only one. I am a just one young woman. I cannot make a miracle. All the time I am watching and plotting. But the white men's eyes are not closed. As soon as an opportunity presents itself, I shall take it. Please believe me. And pray to our ancestors to give me strength.”

She felt they were accusing her.

“What are they saying?” asked Butcher.

“They are complaining about the crowding, the smell, the heat. They want water to bath. They are dissatisfied with the food,” she replied.

“And what did you tell them?”

“I advised them to be patient. I told them that you do not have the power to deal with general complaints like that.”

“My sister,” came the voice of a young man, “we hear that you are sleeping with the white man, the captain. Is it true? Are you not ashamed?”

Ama felt the blood rush to her head. She was angry.

“
Abrante
,” she replied, addressing the questioner as a young man, an equal, even an inferior, “I am sure that you are a brave warrior! But you speak with the wisdom of a foolish youth. What you have heard is untrue. But if it were true, if I were to decide to submit my body to the Captain, do you imagine it would be for pleasure? You would like me to steal the keys to their armoury. How do propose that I get access to those keys. Eh? I am asking you.”

“If you have no answer, I advise you to hold your tongue and let the men of mature years speak for you.”

“Well spoken,” came another voice. The men clanked their irons. Ama felt vindicated.

“What was all that about?” asked the surgeon, shaking his head in bewilderment.

“They are angry. The one who spoke holds me responsible for his predicament. He says I am the tool of the white man. I told him that I am also a slave, that you are only using me as your voice. I told them that it is only the King who holds the knife.”

Butcher was puzzled. What was she talking about?

“Only the King holds the knife?” he echoed.

“It is a proverb. They will understand. It means that on this ship all power rests with the captain.”

“My sister,” came a voice from the dark recesses of the hold, “I hope that you are not reporting what my brothers have said to the white man.”

“My brother,” Ama replied, “to you I speak only the truth; to him only lies.”

There were cheers and laughter. Ama was glad of the support but she was still aware of an undercurrent of mistrust.

“Pamela, I hope you are translating everything they say for me.”

“Of course,” she replied.

“You are doing well. I don't know how I would manage without you,” Butcher sighed.

Two of the guards unlocked the irons of the sick men and helped them up the ladder and onto the deck. There Butcher examined them one by one. Ama interpreted. Even Tomba's people seemed to understand her better than they did the white man, though she could only communicate with them in an improvised language of mime and signs.

“Where is the pain? Does it hurt when he presses you there? How many times have you shat since morning?” she asked.

Many of them were afflicted with an inflammation of the eyes.

“You see,” Butcher told her, “they are all suffering from the same complaint. The infection is spread by the miasma; it travels from one to the next through the air. There is little we can do to prevent it.”

The surgeons on slave ships were often incompetent charlatans. Many of them were driven to drink by the nastiness of the work. Butcher, however, had something of a vocation for medicine. He believed firmly in the new scientific methods. He had attended some of Dr. Hunter's lectures in London and acquired the elements of comparative morphology and pathologic anatomy. He had even observed some post-mortem dissections. He carried with him on board a copy of Dr. Lind's essay “On the Most Efficient Means of Preserving the Health of Seamen.”

The seamen themselves swore by the old remedies they had learned from their mothers, dung tea, crab eyes, the flesh of a viper and an owl; and for toothache, the eyes of a pike. Butcher humoured these archaic superstitions though he secretly despised them.

He hated this work. If it had not been for a financial disaster which had driven him deep into debt, he might have been conducting a successful medical practice in London, rather than confronting the impossible task of preserving the health of four hundred slaves until they could be sold in Barbados.

In spite of his knowledge of diseases and their treatment, he had at his disposal only a small stock of basic remedies. He used brandy and lime juice for most complaints of an internal origin. To the sores which afflicted the slaves' skin he applied palm oil, which was cheap. In the most serious cases, he made poultices containing the herb camomile.

He believed strongly in the prophylactic action of a liberal dose of malaguetta pepper added to the slaves' diet as a means of suppressing the incidence of the dreaded white flux.

The disease he feared most was small pox. He would have liked to have inoculated every slave but the procedure was new and dangerous and the ship's owners had not only decided against it but had strictly forbidden their surgeon to practice it. He would have to handle smallpox, if it chose to descend upon
The Love of Liberty
, with no more than quarantine, palm oil, a doubling of the patients' meagre water ration and a healthy dose of prayer.

Butcher's principal concern was the detection of infectious diseases. He pretended to no special expertise in health problems peculiar to women; so when it came to dealing with the female slaves, he was happy to allow Ama to handle most complaints. Calling for volunteers, she assembled two teams of experienced elder women, one for the Akan speakers and one for Tomba's people. But since these had to work without access to either the herbal remedies with which they were familiar or the support of spiritual healers, which was an essential component of their repertoire of medical arts and skills, they could do little more than comfort the sick and pray to their ancestors.

Fortunately for them, the women seemed more healthy than the men. Denied the females' regular access to light and fresh air, the males were afflicted with illness in disproportionate numbers.

Twice a day Butcher summoned Ama to join him on his visit to the sick bay. If there were new patients to be admitted, he led them in a dreary procession through the empty female hold. Those who could still walk were required to help their fellows. The others were dragged or carried by slaves in a better state of health, or, reluctantly, by white seamen. George Hatcher was the only one who regularly volunteered. His mates regarded this task as suicidal and the chief mate had to force them to it. Everyday conduct on board was governed by many rules and Arbuthnot had the power to exercise his discretion as to punishments for minor infringements. The threat of a week's attachment to the sick bay party was a considerable deterrent.

Ama observed Butcher carefully. He was a creature of habit. He carried a bunch of large keys on a chain fastened to a ring in his leather belt. With one key he opened the door from the main deck to the female hold; another unlocked the door to the steps which led down to the boys' room and the sick bay; others were for the hatch covers.

The surgeon tried to examine Tomba. But Tomba hated every one of the agents of his humiliation with a deep and abiding hatred. The man would just not co-operate.

Ama recognised him at once. She knelt by his side. She did not wait for his greeting but gave the customary respectful answer.

“
Yaa agya
,” she said in Asante.

He looked at her with a cold stare. She was not one of his people. He did not recognise her. Nor did he understand the words she spoke to him.

“Tomba. Do you not remember me?” she asked him. “My name is Ama. It was I who wiped your forehead after they had whipped you up there.”

She mimed the whipping and the wiping of his forehead. Then he knew her. The merest hint of a smile broke his features.

“So now you know me?” she smiled at him.

He raised his manacled hands and grasped her hand. Then he smiled broadly and nodded his head repeatedly. She saw again what a fine, handsome man he was.

Butcher had been watching them. Now put his hand lightly on her shoulder.

“Pamela,” he said, “you are a magician. For weeks now I have been trying to get through to this poor fellow, but he just ignores me. And in a minute you succeed in breaking down his resistance. Ask him, please, ask him if . . . ask him if, given his condition, I mean, you know . . . ask him if he is well or if any illness afflicts him.”

Tomba turned a blistering look on his oppressor and Butcher winced, almost as if he had been struck.

Ama said, “I do not speak his language.”

“Just do your best,” Butcher said and retired to occupy himself with the boys.

“He is not such a bad man,” Ama said to Tomba. “Sometimes I think that the good ones amongst them are as much prisoners as we are. Here let me see what damage these irons have done to you.”

The skin on his ankles and his wrists had been rubbed away by the rusty manacles.
Strange that beneath our black skins
, she thought,
we are pink, almost the colour of the white man
.

“Mr. Butcher,” she called, “may I have some of your ointment and bandages, please?”

She chatted away to Tomba as she worked on him. Not since Sami's abduction had he felt the gentle touch of a woman's hand. He warned himself not to permit this woman's kindness to undermine his stern resolve to have no part in his own oppression; but then he weakened. What choice did he have, after all?

Aware of the feelings she had aroused, Ama stood up. She fetched him water to drink and then turned to join Butcher, who was having more success with the boys, whom he was keeping amused by making a coin disappear and then pulling it from the ear of the youngest of them.

“Which of you is Kwaku?” she asked them.

Every day, when the boys were taken on deck for exercise, Kwaku's mother called out to him, plaintively.

A hand shot up into the air.

“Please, miss, it is I.”

“These other boys,” she asked him, “have you learned to speak to each other at all?”

“Small,” Kwaku replied, flattered at having been singled out for attention. “They are teaching us and we are teaching them, too.”

“You have done well,” she said. “Learn as much as you can from them. I need to talk to Tomba and I count on one of you to be my tongue and my ears. Do you understand? Now what message shall I give your mother?”

CHAPTER 27

By the time she had finished her work with Butcher, Ama was exhausted.

She found some shade on the quarter-deck, lay down and fell at once into a deep sleep. She dreamed of Itsho. He stood in the patchy shadow of a thorn tree. She could see that it was him, but when she called out to him he did not answer; and when she tried to approach him she found she could not move.

When she awoke, it was dark and she was alone. She had missed the afternoon meal and she was hungry. She leaned over the gunwale and looked out at the castle, its sordid secrets hidden deep in moon-shadows. The small beach to the east was lit up with the torches of the night fishermen. Not for the first time she considered escape. She could so easily let herself down a rope and slide quietly into the sea. If they had not missed her by now, they would not do so before dawn. She shivered. She could swim a little, flapping her arms around, but she had never before swum in the sea and the shore was far away. She thought of the sharks and shivered again.