Chesapeake (90 page)

Paul, not fully aware of the hideous thing he had done, listened to her fall and then, with an impetuous cry, leaped after her. He did not clear the fence. His toe caught; he stumbled, slammed down hard on the slates of the sloping roof, tumbled for some feet, then pitched over the edge and down to the ground.

It is not easy to kill a human being. A would-be murderer stabs his target six times and fails to strike a vital organ. A crazed woman, run amok, shoots a man three times at point-blank range and punctures him in different places but with little damage. The two Steeds, tumbling from their widow’s walk, had caught momentarily on rainspouts edging the roof, and then fallen heavily into flower beds.

Herbert Steed, hearing the commotion shortly after reporting for work, ran out from his office and called to his nephews, ‘What are those damned fools doing now?’

Then Tiberius came running from the porch, shouting, ‘Sir, sir, they done suicide.’

This brought all the slaves running, and by the time Uncle Herbert and his nephews reached the scene, Eden was cradling Mrs. Steed in her arms and saying softly, ‘You not goin’ to die. You not meant to die yet.’

When the situation was unraveled, and it became obvious that neither Paul nor Susan was fatally injured, the problem arose as to what should be done with them. Herbert Steed summed it up when he said, ‘That damned fool never did anything right. Now he leaves it to us to see they walk again.’ And he supervised carrying them up to the big bedroom, where a slave woman cared for them till a doctor could be fetched. When he arrived, by sloop from Patamoke, he found that she had set the bones and washed the cuts with warm soapy water.

‘Not much more I can do,’ he said, but he did inform Uncle Herbert that he need not worry about Paul. ‘His hip’ll mend. Leg’ll be a bit short, but no harm. The one to watch is Mrs. Steed. Seems to have a badly twisted spine.’

His prognoses were correct. Paul did heal, but with a short left leg and a permanent crick in the neck that caused him to look at life sideways. Susan, however, was left an invalid; critical bones in her back were
permanently affected, and although she could manage a few steps about her room, she was quite incapable of sustained movement.

Uncle Herbert, to the surprise of his family, had developed a willingness to make large decisions on everything. ‘That pair can’t possibly bring up their children. I’m sending the two oldest to that school Mrs. Paxmore runs at Peace Cliff.’ When Susan protested, he said sternly, ‘Quakers are a sorry lot, but they know how to teach. Your Mark seems to have a brain, and she’ll cultivate it, God help the lad.’

Susan was not demanding, but she did require constant attention, and Eden provided it; indeed, she cared for Paul too, and as the pair grew more crotchety, she grew more understanding. She still had no husband, no children; she adopted the crippled Steeds as her family and treated both with equal compassion. Paul could become quite ugly, making preposterous demands, but she ignored him for the weak, sad thing she knew him to be, and when he pestered her, she lightly dismissed him and went about her chores.

Her affection centered on Susan, whom she dressed with care and tended with the forgiving love a mother bestows upon a sickly child. It was she who insisted that Susan return to the roof. ‘If’n it pleasures you, the way it used to, you oughta go. We can carry you.’

‘I don’t want my wife on that roof… ever again,’ Paul blustered, but Eden told him, ‘Hush.’ She summoned two slaves to carry the crippled woman to the widow’s walk, and there she rested during three seasons of the year, and even in winter when soft days came she sat in the wicker chair, using a new telescope Uncle Herbert had bought her, watching the tall ships as they passed up and down the bay.

And on certain days, when strength returned, she would draw herself upright, and grasp the pickets, and follow the ships intently. Then the phallic symbolism of the masts would possess her, as it had long ago, and she would scour the southern portion of the bay and cry, ‘Bring him back!’

She was in this mood one October day in 1825, her eyes fixed on the south, when she heard a distant rustling over her shoulder, and without changing the direction of her sight she whispered, ‘They’re returning. The geese are here again.’ And she stood there, looking to the empty south, as the first flock flew overhead, their noisy cackling announcing with joy the fact that they were home.

BY THE END OF THE THIRD DECADE OF THE NINETEENTH
century the black nations bordering the Gulf of Guinea in western Africa were a highly sophisticated group. The Ibo, Benin, Yoruba and Fanti had come to understand the tragedy of slavery and were able to take imaginative measures to protect their people from it. The old days when ruthless gangs could swoop down upon an unsuspecting village to carry off its best young men and women were largely gone.

But since the trade remained highly profitable, there continued to be daring slave-collectors willing to run the risk of capture by British patrols assigned to stamp them out, and these predators were now forced to trap their blacks in remote villages far south of the Congo, where native leaders were often ignorant and susceptible to subornation. Here companies of cruel businessmen prowled the jungles, forcing their way far upstream to the headwaters of little-known rivers to track their prey.

One knowing trader, Abu Hassan by name, followed a complicated route to catch his slaves. He entered the Congo River where it debouched into the Atlantic, far south of the Gulf of Guinea. Ignoring the bordering lands, for they were held by the Kongo peoples, as sophisticated as the Ibo or Yoruba to the north, he traveled three hundred and sixty miles up the Congo to where an enormous river came in from the south, the Kasai, but he took no slaves here, either, for these lands were held by the clever Kuba. However, after paddling three hundred and fifty miles up the Kasai, he came upon a gigantic river called the Sankuru, but even here he did not try to capture slaves, for this river was guarded by the Luba nation. But after traveling five hundred miles up the Sankuru, he found his target, the Xanga River, enormous in breadth and length, but
so remote that no captain of a slaving ship had ever heard of it. Along the upper reaches of the Xanga many small villages clustered, their people unaware of slave markets.

It was to these villages that Abu Hassan came in the spring of 1832. He was a tall, sad man, wearied by forty-seven years of difficult and dangerous African trading. He dressed in Arab robes, covered by a glowing white burnoose, and he was always the gentleman, cleansing his hands after any unpleasantness. He spoke many languages—Arabic, French, English and, especially, Portuguese and the various Congo dialects—and was able to conclude business deals with either a Xanga chieftain or a Boston slaver. He had been born on the opposite side of Africa, in an Arab settlement north of Mozambique, and had worked at first in transporting slaves down to the Indian Ocean for shipment to Arabia, where the demand was constant, but when the catching of blacks became increasingly difficult he had been drawn deeper and deeper into the heart of the continent, until the day he discovered that it would be simpler and more profitable to march his slaves west to the Portuguese seaport of Luanda, where ships intended for Cuba, Brazil and the United States clustered.

In 1832, as he slowly made his way up the rivers in canoes containing an amalgam of cheap trading goods, he did not know that he was heading into confrontation with a gifted young Xanga named Cudjo, who lived in a village close to where that river flowed into the larger Sankuru. Cudjo was in trouble.

For some time his own people had been suspicious of him. Spies had watched his movements, reporting anything unusual to the village headman, and in the tribal councils his advice had been ignored. Even more alarming, the family of the girl Luta, whom he had chosen to be his wife, suddenly refused him permission to buy her.

He was being driven to the conclusion that he might have to quit this tribe which had done everything but proscribe him publicly, for he had often watched what happened to men declared outcasts and was determined to escape the penalties they had suffered.

Despite his perilous position, he had no desire to leave this lovely river along whose banks his ancestors had been so happy. Vaguely he knew that the Xanga ran into larger rivers and they into still larger; to live in his village was to see the quiet traffic of a continent and to be in touch with a multitude of tribes north and south.

And in addition to the river, there were the associations in the village. His forefathers as far back as memory recorded had been primal figures, strong in war and voluble in peace. They had governed their portion of the river, dispensing justice to their people and assuring adequate food
supplies. In the normal course of affairs he would take their place and become the dispenser of government.

The trouble which had mysteriously arisen to threaten him started not with opposition in his own village but from quite another quarter. In the old days Arab traders had come up the Xanga in leisurely fashion, stopping perhaps for a score of days to exchange goods and gossip, but recently a new type of trader had appeared, the man named Abu Hassan, for example. He arrived with canoes, talked secretly with the headman, traded in a jiffy and was gone. He also introduced unfamiliar goods: rifles and beverages and cloth of a different make. He was arrogant and gave commands, and those porters who enlisted to help him get his goods to market did not return to their villages.

Cudjo had taken a quick dislike to Abu Hassan; the older traders had accepted whatever the villagers offered for barter, but this new breed stated in strident terms what they required, and the black people felt obligated to provide it. Cudjo tried to persuade his people that they must oppose such domination, but he was only twenty-four years old and the sager heads would not listen. He sometimes wondered why they were so insistent upon defending Hassan when his total effect was so negative, and he persisted in his opposition.

Indeed, he made himself something of a nuisance, a troublemaker who would not long be tolerated, and some months ago, when Abu Hassan came up the Sankuru with his canoes, Cudjo had been prepared to oppose him when the trading commenced, but to his surprise the Arab did not stop. He continued right up toward the headwaters of the Xanga, pausing only long enough to confer quietly with the three headmen and give them presents.

‘He will trade with us on the way back,’ the village leaders explained, and the convoy passed on.

‘We should not trade with him,’ Cudjo protested, and the elders looked at each other knowingly.

It was now that he became aware of plots against him. The tribal leaders began to meet surreptitiously, refusing to admit him to their discussions, and he was particularly disturbed when Akko, a young man no older than himself, was accorded preference.

This Akko was a shifty manipulator, more given to clever tricks than to hard work, and Cudjo knew that the tribe would find itself in difficulty if it followed advice from this man. But Akko was adroit in managing things to his advantage, and it became clear throughout the village that the elders had determined to elevate him into a position of leadership that should more properly have gone to Cudjo.

Now, when word came that Abu Hassan was coming down the Xanga with his men, Cudjo saw that the decision had been made: Akko was put in charge of assembling the village’s goods for trading, a position of trust, while Cudjo was isolated from any important task. He had to sit in bitter
idleness as Akko collected the ivory, the feathers, the partially cured leather and the powdered horn of the rhinoceros, so valuable in trade to the east: it enabled old men to marry young girls.

In his idleness Cudjo decided upon a curious stratagem. He would on his own recognizance journey up to the headwaters of the Xanga to ascertain what trade goods Abu was demanding this time, and he would then come back and alert his tribesmen as to what items were of particular value, so that they might have on hand substantial supplies of these preferred goods when the Arabs arrived. This would prove his willingness to serve, even though Akko had been promoted over him.

He was a powerful young man, able to paddle his river craft up the Xanga or run for long spells after he had beached his boat and started overland. He had strong legs, a very thick neck and shoulders more solid than most. If the contest between him and Akko had come down to fighting or wrestling, he would have won easily.

So he found no difficulty in ascending the river, and on the sixth day hid his canoe and walked through the deep forest, peering through leafy protection to observe what was happening in the village where the Arabs traded. There stood the huts, the piles of ivory, and the striped tents from which the traders conducted their business and in which they slept at night.

The first thing he noticed was the unusually large number of Arabs accompanying the expedition. In the old days, when some wandering tradesman reached the village, he brought at most one assistant, relying upon black porters to carry out the elephant tusks. Even Abu Hassan, on his two earlier trips, had brought only two white helpers; this time he had nine. Cudjo peered around to see what enormous mound of trade goods justified such a company, but he could detect nothing.

The second inexplicable thing was a substantial fire that was burning near one of the tents, in front of which sat two white men, their faces smeared as if they were playing at being black. Of this strange behavior he could make nothing.

Because of his uncertainty over what was happening, he slept that night in the woods, and when he wakened before dawn he saw to his surprise that the fire had been allowed to die down. As he watched, the Arabs came out of the striped tents to start the fire again. This was indeed mystifying; in his village fires were tended at night to keep animals away, and allowed to die at daybreak.

When the sun rose, two events took place in rapid order, and the peaceful world he had known was shattered. From the south, where there were only the poorest villages with little to trade, came a doleful line of twenty-two black marchers, each bound to the other by chains and bands of iron about the neck. They moved in silence, guarded by three new Arabs bearing long guns and whips.