Chesapeake (92 page)

The blockade continued, with the British grim-lipped, the Americans cursing, the Arab businessmen desperate over the costs of feeding their slaves, and the blacks in the barracoons trying in vain to protect themselves. Since those great pens had no roofs, when rain came, as it often did from clouds scudding in from the Atlantic, they could only huddle together and wait for it to stop. When it did, the sun beat down with tropical ferocity, and now Abu Hassan began to fret, for not only did some of the older villagers begin to die, but his prime stock in chains began to fall sick.

On no one did the degradation of the barracoon fall more heavily than on Luta. For more than thirteen weeks she had been chained between two young men only slightly older than herself; all her bodily functions were available for their inspection and theirs to hers. Beatings she did not have to fear; occasionally the Arab guards could bear no longer the tedium and the complaining, and they would go temporarily beserk, striking out at anyone, but intelligent slaves learned how to draw back from such short-lived assaults.

But against the terrible indignity of being close-chained in a waiting pen, Luta had no defense. She might have died from sheer surrender of spirit had not Cudjo watched her from his distance, lending her encouragement and strength. Sometimes he would shout across the chains to her, words of fire and assurance, until one of the guards poked him with a musket, warning him to be silent. Then, during the long rains, he would simply watch her, and gradually she let him know that she was now determined to survive this awful experience, and he shouted for all to hear that he loved her.

Six weeks had now elapsed since the various chains of slaves from the Xanga had been thrown into the barracoons, and Abu Hassan was beginning to suffer from the cost of maintaining his property. He was faced with a difficult dilemma: feed them less and save coins, or continue to feed them so that they would look better at the auction in Cuba. He rejected each alternative, retreating to a stratagem he had used once before: he sold the entire contents of his barracoon to the Jesuit fathers who owned it. ‘Let them take the risks,’ he told his assistants.

So the Arabs quit themselves of the Xanga slaves, pocketed a fair
profit, and went to the bazaars to collect trade goods for the subornation of other tribes south of the Congo. Abu Hassan knew of nineteen other rivers feeding into the Sankuru, each with a cluster of pitiful small tribes whose elderly leaders might be tricked into selling their best young people into the slave trade.

‘We’ll be back,’ he assured the Jesuits. He could foresee the lucrative trade continuing indefinitely into the future; the British might try to interrupt it, for reasons he could not fathom, but there would always be daring ship captains willing to take the risks attendant upon enormous profits. ‘I just wish one of them had hurried up,’ he said ruefully as he led his team out of Luanda. ‘We’d be leaving with bags of gold.’

The Jesuits to whom he had sold his consignment did not wish to be in the slave trade; it was just that they owned the barracoons and had found that quite often it was to everyone’s advantage for them to step in as middlemen, pay the Arab slavers a reasonable fee, and themselves assume the risk of feeding the blacks and eventually delivering them to some ship captain for a small but comfortable profit.

It was not this profit that the Jesuits sought; while they had the savages in their charge they Christianized them, and this was commendable because it meant that any blacks who might die on the long passage to Cuba would do so in the arms of Christ. Their souls would be saved.

So now the beatings stopped and kindly young clerics raised on farms in Portugal visited the barracoons daily, explaining in mangled African phrases how Jesus watched over everyone, even those in chains, and how in a later and better life the slaves would meet Him personally and see for themselves His radiant generosity. Cudjo braced himself against the earnest young Portuguese, but Luta started talking with Father João, and the honest compassion that glowed in his eyes made his words consoling; when she pieced together all that Father João promised, it made sense, for she had always believed that there must be some god who ordained the movement of the stars and of people and even of the animals in the forest. And that this god or collection of gods should have sent a special son as intermediary was not difficult to accept. That this son should have been born of a virgin posed no insurmountable problem for her; in recent weeks, chained to her two companions, she had often wished that she could be incorporeal.

So intently did she listen to the young priest that Father João reported enthusiastically to his superiors, ‘We are making many converts in the barracoon. The girl who calls herself Luta is ready to embrace the true religion.’

So in the late afternoon of a day which had seen both storms and blazing heat, two older Jesuits appeared in the barracoon, stepping gingerly among the lazing bodies until they reached the spot where Luta stood in chains. Moving her two companions aside as far as their chains
would permit, the priests addressed her and asked if she was prepared to accept Christ as her preceptor. When she nodded, they expressed true joy of spirit and told her that Jesus would now take her into His personal charge, and that she would know life everlasting. Her trials on earth she would be able to bear because of the paradise that would follow hereafter; in her new home she would find God’s love and attention.

They then blessed her and asked her to kneel, which she did with difficulty, since her chain-companions had to kneel with her. This in turn caused the slaves attached to those two to kneel, until at last all the surviving blacks of this chain were on their knees while the girl Luta was taken into the church. Cudjo, who had to get down with the rest, would have objected if the recipient of this grace had been anyone but Luta; he felt that if she needed this assurance, he would do nothing to distress her.

‘You are now a child of God, the beloved of Jesus,’ the older priest intoned, and after he left, the twenty-five slaves got up off their knees and the two men chained to Luta looked at her with special interest to see if the blessings of the priests had in any way affected her. They could detect only the quiet resignation she had always manifested.

A curious change now came over the blacks in the barracoon: they had grown so satiated with the mindless routine of storm and sun, they began hoping that the thing the priests called a ship might come to Luanda. No one in the pens could imagine what new terrors this ship might bring, but they sought it. Cudjo was actually hungry for change.

At dawn on the second day of August a ship of much different character arrived off Luanda. It was low and sleek. Its sails were rigged in the hermaphrodite manner—four very large jibs attached to the long bowsprit, four square sails at the foremast, two fore-and-aft at the main—which meant that it could exact the maximum advantage from any wind. The main thing, however, was the impression it created of meaning business; the slave dealers on shore told each other, ‘Now something will happen.’

By eight o’clock that morning a small boat let down from the ship, darted into a cove and deposited on shore an older man, stooped of shoulder and slow of gait, but his arrival reassured the slavers. ‘This one means to buy,’ they said as he walked purposefully along the shore.

‘Hello,’ he said as he came to the square, ‘I’m Goodbarn, from the
Ariel
Captain Turlock.’

‘We recognized you,’ the chief agent said.

The visitor fell into a rattan chair and asked for a drink. He seemed tired and much aged since they last saw him, so they were not surprised when he said, ‘This is our last trip. We’re going to load maximum and strike for a big profit.’

‘The barracoons are filled.’

‘We want no old, no sick.’

‘For you, Mr. Goodbarn, we have hundreds of strong young niggers.’

‘We’re going to load four hundred and sixty belowdecks. And we’ll risk fifty-seven topside. Those must be in chains so we can bolt them down.’

‘Large shipment,’ the agent said.

‘We intend to retire rich.’

‘How old is Silverfist?’

‘Well past sixty, but you’d never know it.’

‘When do you propose loading?’

‘Today.’

‘That would be impossible.’

‘You said they were waiting.’

‘Yes, but we couldn’t get the red chair set up in time.’

‘To hell with the red chair,’ Goodbarn said. He was tired and even more eager than his captain to be done with this last gamble.

‘Without the red chair, there will be no departure of slaves from this port, I can tell you that.’

‘When can we do it?’

‘Tomorrow, but what plans have you for slipping into shore?’

Goodbarn took a long drink of warm beer, held it in his mouth and looked out toward the bay. ‘We came here in 1814 to refit the
Ariel
for slaving … for that one trip. Eighteen years later we’re still slaving, telling ourselves this is the last trip.’ He looked about cautiously and indicated that he wished to speak alone with the agent. ‘You asked what our plans are? Captain Turlock reasons that some spy on shore is flashing signals to the British patrol. Don’t laugh. Nothing else explains the promptness of their reaction whenever we attempt a landing.’

‘Quite impossible,’ the agent said. ‘The Portuguese officials—’

‘So what we’re going to do is pay a Spanish captain to make a false run some miles up the coast. The
Bristol
will follow and we’ll sweep in.’

‘The English commander’s too clever for that trap.’

‘It won’t be a trap. Because today you will march three hundred slaves north to where the Spaniard might land. And if the
Bristol
refuses to follow, the Spaniard loads his slaves, sells them in Havana and splits with us. However, my good friend, we’ll make this so real that the
Bristol
will have to sail north.’

‘Who pays for marching the slaves … in case the
Bristol
trails them?’

‘I do. We have a great risk in this voyage, a great chance of profit. Captain Turlock is always ready to pay money to make money.’ And he poured onto the table a small pile of silver coins.

When the dealer hefted them, counted them and considered the complicated offer being made he nodded, then called to the others, ‘We can
move the red chair out tomorrow. The
Ariel
will load five hundred and seventeen at nine o’clock.’

At noon three hundred other slaves started marching north to serve as decoy; at one Father João spotted them and flashed a signal to the British; at two the
Bristol
sailed north.

In the barracoons the slaves from which the
Ariel
would select her cargo were carefully readied for shipment. Each received a bucketful of fetid water in the face, another in the middle of the back. Additional buckets were left standing in the center for those who wished to cleanse themselves further; Cudjo and Luta did so. While they were washing, priests brought in extra tubs of food, something that had never happened before, and Cudjo whispered, ‘They want us to look clean and healthy. Tomorrow we’ll be sold.’ That night the slaves went to sleep knowing that in the morning something of significance must happen.

At dawn they were marched out of the barracoons and down to the wharf, where Cudjo saw for the first time a burly red-bearded old man with a silver knob for his left hand; and the imperial way the man stood, shoulders stooped but eyes flashing, indicated that he was master. When Cudjo observed the manner in which other whites deferred to him, he whispered to the slaves on his chain, ‘Watch out for that one.’

Now the old man moved with precision down the long files of unshackled blacks, accepting some, rejecting others: ‘Yes, yes, yes, not that one.’ From the assured manner in which he made his decisions, Cudjo guessed that he had often engaged in this process.

When he had approved some four hundred blacks, he turned briskly to those in chains, but before he started down the line he called to another elderly man in a black suit—‘Goodbarn,’ Cudjo heard him say—and together they inspected the sturdy slaves. They accepted most, but when the big man came to the slave next to Cudjo, a big fellow who had been ailing since he reached the barracoon, he saw at once that this one was not a good risk, and he indicated that he must be removed from the chain, but Goodbarn, if that was his name, explained why this could not be done, and the big man shrugged his shoulders.

He now came to Cudjo, and for some inexplicable reason grabbed him by the chin, stared into his dark eyes and said something to his associate. He obviously did not like what he saw in Cudjo’s face, and again asked if both Cudjo and the ailing slave could be cut loose, but Goodbarn said no. With his hand still at Cudjo’s chin he growled some warning and thrust the slave back.

When he finished checking the chained slaves, he ordered Mr. Goodbarn to assemble all he had approved; he marched with them, nodding his head and saying short words to Goodbarn. Then he withdrew a short
distance, surveyed the mob and nodded. The purchase was agreed upon.

Now the spiritual part of the long voyage from the Xanga villages began. The five hundred and seventeen chosen slaves were herded into a small area, where they stood with their backs to the sea facing a handsome red chair which had been placed on bales of merchandise, forming a kind of rude open-air cathedral. To it came a procession of priests making way for a tall and somber man dressed in red. When he had been assisted onto the platform containing the chair, he raised his hands and the crowd fell silent.

‘You are about to start a journey to an unknown land,’ he said in Portuguese. ‘But wherever your fate takes you, God will be watching over you, for you are His children. He will guide and comfort you.’ He continued for some minutes, while Mr. Goodbarn fumed, always looking at the ocean. The bishop was of the opinion that the blacks were actually lucky to be making this journey, for they would be moving into areas where God prevailed, and there they would learn of His boundless charity.