Middle Passage (14 page)

Fingers of sweat dripped from Meadows's face, his whipping arm was sore, and he rubbed it, then peered round in my direction. I pressed myself down between the topsail bitt and foremast, the skin on my back crawling. He shrugged, picked up his laundry basket, and headed for the fo'c's'le. Long minutes passed before I moved. My head went turngiddy. I was unsure of what I had witnessed. But I knew what it meant. This was not a ship; it was a coffin. The morrow would bring catastrophe because Meadows was one step ahead of the Old Man, giving a living weapon to Falcon's loyalists in case the mutineers seized the ship's guns or the Africans could not be controlled. Targeting Cringle to be torn apart I understood. But why me? Were all loyalties here a lie? We would be sunk to the bottom of the briny unless unbeknownst to these camps someone played a trump, a hole card, none knew existed.

I realized that I held that card. Before doing anything, though, I needed to rest. To return to the galley I was forced to maneuver slowly aft over and around human and nautical
debris sprawled at the ship's waist, larboard side. The storm had flooded berths below. So several hands brought their gear topside to bed down in the open air beside slave women and the children. Cluttered with bodies, wooden crates blown apart earlier, their contents strewn every which way, and draped with dangling sheets of sail, the sunken portion of the
Republic
from tiller to stern felt like a makeshift refugee camp, a smelly, chaotic strip of shantytown where the injured and ailing were tossed helter-skelter together. In mist-softened light mutineers, Africans, and able seamen could not be distinguished. Brief as this moment might be, no stations were evident among the ship's company. Could these people slay one another after sunrise, as some planned? It hardly seemed possible. Or necessary. On the water, leagues from culture or civilization, I saw no point in our perpetuating the lunacies of life on land. Just for a spell the sea had swept some of that away. No one had the strength to sustain idols of the tribe or cave. Even the caged chickens were tired. Every so often walls of spray faffled on deck, much in the fashion of showers I remembered in New Orleans during the spring that were refreshing and brief, and just as suddenly were gone. Our sails were asleep. Beneath a damp blanket McGaffin slept beside the cabin boy. A Chinese mate and Ngonyama, who was officer of this night's watch, bandaged the arm of a boat-puller bruised during the storm. Cringle dozed with Squibb's parrot on his left shoulder. His back was against the topgallant rail, both his eyes shuttered, and his head all on his right shoulder. I saw he was sweating. The armpits of his coat were stained, which was odd. Things were cooler now at eight bells and, since Meadows had left the pens, quiet but for an occasional cough and the sound of the ocean, spongelike in the way it
absorbed, even trivialized, the noises we made. Crew and cargo, so exhausted—by events and their own fierce emotions—appeared content to lie together a while in various postures of fatigue, barely lifting a finger, as if they were frozen, or maybe soldiers who had fallen after a battle, too drained and dead of brain to do anything more than listen to their own lungs; and the frail, in-and-out sigh in each man's chest was only the faintest of notes beside the brooling waves and wind of the Atlantic.

I came through the hatchway, holding the tray in front of me with one hand. Squibb, resting on the galley table, roused awake when he heard me, swung his feet over the side, and blew the overhead lantern back into brilliance. Stretching wide like a bear, then yawning, he placed his left palm over his lips. “Sounded like the storm put a scare into them dogs.” I decided to say nothing about the dogs; Meadows had not included Squibb in that. Then my eyes drifted to the corner and Baleka, beautifully disheveled in her sleep. In her left hand she was holding an empty wineglass, one of Falcon's, from which she enjoyed drinking water or goat's milk in imitation of the ship's brain-sotten crew. As with other children I'd seen, she looked boneless in sleep, her body limp, one hand (the right) on her brow like a society woman about to swoon. But she wasn't breathing right. When I bent to brush my lips on her brow, I saw dark spots on her cheeks.

“She's a bonny lass,” said Squibb. “I didn't want to put too many covers on her.”

“Guess not,” I said. “She's burning up. Did she wake while I was gone?”

“Once. I give her a glass of milk. Listen, Fletcher come down heah a minute ago and gimme his sea chest. Said he
wouldn't need it anymore, seeing how it was the end of the world. He was scratchin' a coupla spots on his arm like the ones on her. I think she give all them boys somethin' when they was heah. How yuh feelin', Illinois?”

“I feel I've been on this boat so long my toes are growing webs between them . . .”

Squibb cautiously let his tone lighten to console me. “Sometimes the slaves bring their sickness with 'em. They won't last that long. We'll live to see worse and tell about it. Still”—he winked—“it wouldn't hurt, I suppose, if you've made out yer will. Yuh got family back in Makanda?”

“A brother, if you can call him that.”

He noticed the wobble that came into my voice whenever I spoke of Jackson, and he paused. “Bad feelin's between yuh, eh.”

“You could say that.”

“Well, that's a shame, 'specially since yer kin's liable to get anythin' yuh leave.”

The thought made me laugh, painfully. “You don't know him. Because of him I've got nothing
to
leave, Josiah.”

“He cheat yuh out of it?”

“In a way.”

When I said no more, he finally asked, “Yuh gonna tell me about it, or do I have to wait fer yer biography?”

“No.”

“Yuh'll feel better, love. C'mon now. No point in carryin' round old cargo like that. All along yuh been tellin' people he betrayed yuh. Ain't that so?”

“Me, yes—only me.”

“Didn't treat yuh like a brother, yuh're sayin'?”

“Yes. I mean, no! He treated everyone the same, and that was the trouble. Kin meant nothing to him. Do you remember
that strange flower we saw in Senegambia? I forget what it's called, but one of the chaps pointed out how lovely a scent it released when you admired it and held the petals close to your nose. And that when you didn't notice at all and brought down your boot, it offered like a gift that same remarkable perfume. Do you remember?”

“Aye.”

“That's Jackson.”

Squibb nodded. “Yuh think 'bout him a lot, don'tcha?”

“Too much. And each time it's different. I go over what he did so often and from so many angles that it makes no sense anymore. He is like Ngonyama, or Baleka there. I didn't know that until the skipper brought them on board. Hell, Squibb, he could
be
from their tribe, for all I know.”

“That'd make you one of 'em too, wouldn't it?”

This I doubted. The more I thought on it, the Allmuseri seemed less a biological tribe than a clan held together by values. A certain vision. Jackson might well have been one of their priests. Against my better judgment, I let Squibb wheedle me into talking about Master Peleg Chandler, his will, and my day of manumission, which I remember right enough because we were the only family he had. He was a tobacco planter living on southern Illinois land his great-grandfather cleared himself, a painfully shy man from a long line of pious homesteaders, hardly a man to go in for politics, or even raising his voice in a conversation. His daughter, Maggie, died at seven from scarlet fever; his wife, Adeline, took a fatal spill from a horse. Thus, Jackson, who was Chandler's nurse and aide since the time he could fetch and carry, and I stood to inherit everything he had. It was in the wind one morning—May 23, 1829—that he would be generous with his slaves for their years of devoted service.
Among his holdings was a commodious, clean-timbered manor house, with sturdy pine furniture, heavy and square and still blond, and grounds that were beautiful in the springtime, bordered by berried woods and trees in bloom like half a hundred bouquets. Inside were glass-fronted bookcases, a quarter-turn stair with a landing space, and well-stocked cupboards in a kitchen full of DeGroot silverware. His stables were full of Morgan horses and Appaloosa; he had Berkshire and thin-rind hogs, and vast investments clear up to the state capital in Springfield. No, we hadn't suffered all that badly, I'm almost ashamed to say, and Jackson was troubled by this too, for now it seemed we would never want, if he included us in his will, which I knew he would because my brother was all the good he thought there was in the world.

(Squibb squinted at me with one eye shut. “Yuh ain't spinnin' a cuffer now, are yuh?”

I assured him this was God's own truth.)

We could tell he was dying—or damn near dead—that spring. He'd never been hale, of course, what with tuberculosis and a curious blood condition that sometimes gave his skin a faint grayish tinge. Cottonlike tufts of gray hair flecked his head, as if he had just rolled over in a field of dandelions. Also he was hard of hearing in his right ear and damned near deaf in the left, his voice an octave louder each year as his hearing failed. Master Chandler always kept an ear trumpet by his side. When he was annoyed at what you were saying, he would lift his trumpet not to his good right ear but rather to his left, effectively relegating you to silence as he smiled and nodded in seeming agreement. At his age, sexual imagery only made him melancholy. He could listen to Jackson play Bach's
St. Matthew Passion
or Beethoven's
A Minor Quartet
—that deep work of renunciation—downstairs in the parlor for hours. A funny old man, I'd have to say, with the soul of a celibate or contemplative. Yet he was, in most senses of the word, a fair, sympathetic, and well-meaning man, as whites go. In all North America, if you searched up and down, you'd not likely find a more reluctant slave owner than he—one who inherited us and hated the Peculiar Institution—and we knew fortune could have treated us far worse.

As so often happens with sick people who can get no satisfaction from quacks and country doctors, he turned to theology and found in Thomas and the Pseudo-Dionysus a solace that eased his pilgrimage through a broken world. Confined as he was to his sickroom and in nerve-racking pain, he suffered cheerfully, he read over and over Jan van Ruysbroeck's
Flowers of a Mystic Garden,
taking notes on blank margins he'd clipped from newspapers and magazines (he hated waste of any sort). Long passages from these works he made Jackson and me read to him, as he made us reel whole cloth from our heads the words of the English mystic William Law: “Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.” What he didn't know about theology was, I guess, not worth knowing. Still, he knew lots of queer arcana too—rags of dubious learning, like how many divisions were in Hell (four), the number of devils there (7,405,926), and all this he passed along to his servants, the Calhoun brothers, when we attended to him.

Needless to say, I set no store by these matters. But Jackson listened. Some of the old man's aspects (but not all) he admired. He took the role of manservant seriously, but only after twisting it around, even turning it against the various definitions of the South until he became Chandler's
steadiest caretaker of things on the farm. He had, I remember, an uncanny way with livestock. With birds, it went beyond uncanny to downright astonishing. Jackson would toss a pan of hard bread crumbs into the backyard after we had eaten, then walk inside and sit at the window. Minutes later, the yard was blanketed with birds from God knew where, a whole aviary thick enough, I always believed, to walk on if he'd wanted to. They would let him lie down upon them—he was so gentle, so self-emptied—then take off in formation like a magic, feathered rug. Yes, he had a way with birds. And plants as well. They'd explode into bloom from the blink of Jackson's eye.

He was, I should mention, eight years my senior, so we didn't exactly grow up together, and to this day I can only guess at what made him tick. To a degree, he viewed me as one more child he must see feed and keep from killing itself by climbing trees or playing too close to the well. And who was our father? How I wish I could say; he ran from slavery when I was three. I have searched the faces of black men on Illinois farms and streets for fifteen years, hoping to identify this man named Riley Calhoun, primarily to give him a piece of my mind, followed by the drubbing he so richly deserved for selfishly enjoying his individual liberty after our mother, Ruby, died, thus leaving me in the care of a brother like a negative of myself. He was (to me) the possible-me that lived my life's alternate options, the me I fled. Me. Yet not me. Me if I let go. Me if I gave in.

Let me explain.

My older brother, who was tall—maybe six feet three in his stocking feet—with a thick shoebrush mustache, a Julius Caesar haircut, and freckles that ran right across his forehead, had known our father and saw more deeply than I
ever could into the rituals of color and caste. He spoke affectionately of our Da, wished him well wherever he had run to, but he could not forgive him for abandoning us to save himself. Riley sent no one to fetch us. As far as we knew, he wasn't working to buy us out of bondage or living nearby with the Indians, as some black men did, descending on farms to raid and sniper slavemasters the way the colonists did the British. No, he'd cut and run. I know Jackson pondered long on this dilemma: Stay in slavery to serve those closest to you or flee. Run or do your best in a bad situation. To his credit, he stayed, thereby assuring me of having
some
family. Other bondmen, though, saw his choice as obsequious. On occasion, I saw it that way myself. Rightly or wrongly, he thought it possible to serve his people by humbly being there when they needed him—whites too, if they weren't too evil, and he was incapable of locking anything out of his heart. There can be, as I see it, no other way to unriddle why my brother, more than any other bondman, was generally faithful to Reverend Chandler, laying out his clothes each morning, combing his dry, brittle hair, fetching his nightly footbaths, and just as regular in the performance of his appointed tasks for the other servants, standing there by everyone's side through family death and sickness; Jackson was a Sunday preacher in the slave quarters, the model of propriety, and had twice the patience of St. Francis. As you might guess, I was
his
shadow-self, the social parasite, the black picklock and worldling—in whom he saw, or said he saw, our runaway father. He was ashamed of Riley Calhoun. And of me. Hearing our master was near death that Saturday in May, my brother called me from the grainbin in Chandler's barn, where I had just managed to get my forefinger inside a gap-toothed, rather delicious-looking
Negro girl named Dorothy, our laundress's daughter. He gave me a sad, scolding preacher look. Scrambling into my clothes, then brushing hay off my calfskin boots and my yeoman's cap, I pecked Dorothy on the cheek, then followed him up the footpath to the house.