Middle Passage (7 page)

As for myself, I was simply glad to be ashore. It had been unsettling and claustrophobic, out there with the ship cleaving waves the color of root medicine, soughing wind that broke the spider-web tracery of rigging like thread, and the sky and sea blurred together into a pewter gray gloom without a stitch, without outlines, without a bottom to their depths, and sometimes, when we could not see the horizon and sailed through endless fog and shifting mist, I'd felt such dizzying entrapment—of being deprived of such basic directions as left and right, up and down—that I screamed myself awake some nights, choking on the rank male sweat that hung around my hammock like wet clothing. I ached from cleaning pots in the cookroom, and I'd grown tired of my clothes being so perpetually wet from deckwash, the slap of rainwind, and leaks in the orlop that once I had the feeling that the toes on my left foot were webbed. On top of that, Cringle had shouted at me so often for being slow, or asleep during my watch, that I could tell you which of his teeth had been worked on in Boston or Philadelphia, pulled in another city or by a dentist in New Orleans. I wished in vain for dry breeches, floorboards that didn't move, a bowl of warm milk at bedtime, and sometimes—aye—for Isadora. Worse, I kept a light cold, and my incessant coughing gave
me headaches. Even so, I could not join the others in their banter after we lowered anchor, or even drink with much gusto—stale beer gave me the johnnytrots—but simply lie quietly in my bunk, wondering if in a single fantastic evening I had become Captain Ebenezer Falcon's shipboard bride.

I could express this fear to no one, and I beg you to keep it to yourself. His courtship of me, for so it must be called, began the night Falcon caught me rummaging through his cabin. This was not an easy situation to explain away. Especially after what I learned from his papers, ledgers, and journal. Somehow I'd miscalculated. According to his schedule, the skipper should have been at the fort all evening, unloading four skiffs freighted with clothing and beads, liquor, and utensils of brass and pewter for the notorious Arab trader Ahman-de-Bellah, whose first caravan of captured Negroes from eight, maybe nine tribes, was herded into Bangalang a few hours before. Falcon's curtains were drawn. His door was padlocked. Of course that presented no problem for me.

Slipping away from my watch and into his room, easing his door shut with my fingertips, I felt the change come over me, a familiar, sensual tingle that came whenever I broke into someone's home, as if I were slipping inside another's soul. Everything must be done slowly, deliberately, first the breath coming deep from the belly, easily, as if the room itself were breathing, limbs light like hollow reeds, free of tension, all parts of me flowing as a single piece, for I had learned in Louisiana that in balletlike movements there could be no error of the body, no elbows cracking into chair arms in a stranger's space to give me away. Theft, if the truth be told, was the closest thing I knew to transcendence.
Even better, it broke the power of the propertied class, which pleased me. As a boy I'd never had enough of anything. Yes, my brother Jackson and I lived close to our master, but on the Makanda farm during the leaner years, life was, as old bondwomen put it, “too little too late.” At suppertime: watery soup and the worst part of the hog and so little of that that Jackson often skipped meals secretly so I could have a little bit more. If you have never been hungry, you cannot know the
either/or
agony created by a single sorghum biscuit—either your brother gets it or you do. And if you
do
eat it, you know in your bones you have stolen the food straight from his mouth, there being so little for either of you. This was the daily, debilitating side of poverty that no one speaks of, the perpetual scarcity that, at every turn, makes the simplest act a moral dilemma. On a nearby farm there lived a slave father and his two sons who had one blouse and pair of breeches among them, so that when one went off to work the others were left naked and had to hide at home in their shed. True enough, Jackson and I fared better than they, but in linen handed down by Reverend Chandler or by his pious friends—who no doubt felt good about the very charity that annihilated me—in their scented waistcoats and smelly boots I whiffed the odor of other men, even heard their accents echo in the very English I spoke, as if I was no one—or nothing—in my own right, and I wondered how in God's name you could
have
anything if circumstances threw you amongst the
had.
Ah, me. The Reverend's prophecy that I would grow up to be a picklock was wiser than he knew, for was I not, as a Negro in the New World,
born
to be a thief? Or, put less harshly, inheritor of two millennia of things I had not myself made? But enough of this.

On ship I decided against my usual signatures of defiance: pooping amiddlemost a local politician's satin pillow, for example, or fabricating for his wife—some blue-blooded snob—a love letter from their black chambermaid that was worthy of James Cleveland, or simply scrawling on their parlor wall in charcoal from their hearth, as I often did, “I can enter your life whenever I wish.” No, I did none of this, there in Falcon's quarters. All I wanted was to know his heart (if he had one) and to walk off, as was reasonable, with a tradable trinket or two.

I drifted from object to object at first, just touching things with sweat-tipped fingers as a way to taint and take hold of them—to loose them from their owner—but ever more slowly, for I soon found that Falcon's room was ingeniously rigged with exploding, trip-lever booby traps. He'd filled ordinary rum bottles on his shelf with liquid explosives (each detonated by a pull-friction fuse in the cork), and two of his calabash pipes had stems packed with gunpowder. Also he kept all the ship's weapons in his cabin under lock and key. These security measures (or perhaps they spoke of Falcon's insecurity) I expected, but not what I found next. His biggest crates of plunder from every culture conceivable, which he covered with tarp at the rear of the room, were wrenched open, spilling onto the sloping floor bird-shaped Etruscan vases, Persian silk prayer carpets, and portfolios of Japanese paintings on rice paper. Temple scrolls I found, precious tablets, and works so exotic to my eyes that Falcon's crew of fortune hunters could have taken them only by midnight raids and murder. Slowly, it came to me, like the sound of a stone plunked into a pond, that he had a standing order from his financiers, powerful families in New Orleans who underwrote the
Republic,
to stock Yankee museums and their
homes with whatever of value was not nailed down in the nations he visited. To bring back slaves, yes, but to salvage the best of their war-shocked cultures too.

More carefully, then, I moved on, slipping a few doubloons down the front of my blouse, and even more into the crotch of my breeches. The moon's pull on waves beneath us rocked the ship so suddenly I was thrown off balance and cracked my head on a crossbeam. Then I found his chart table with my kneecap. After striking a match, I saw his journal winged open to pages written in the cramped yet even script we associate with scriveners, each page more unusual than the last, revealing in this age of tepid personalities a Faustian man of powerful loves, passions, hatreds: a creature of preposterous, volatile contradictions. From what I was able to piece together, the nation was but a few hours old when Ebenezer Falcon was born, its pulpits and work places and pubs buzzing with talk of what the new social order should be. He was the only child of a close-mouthed Nantucket minister, one of the Sons of Liberty, and a pale, lonely woman of polite education who could discuss with her husband neither the books she loved nor theater, politics or her past in the colonies. Therefore, she poured stories about El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, her feelings and fantasies into Ebenezer. She placed maps before him, and music boxes; like most doting mothers of this sort, she lived vicariously through her son. For his part, Falcon grew up determined to outperform his father (and most other men) and bring her gifts from all the lands she would never see. He was that sort of son. Aye, small enough to miss in a crowd, but with the bantam spirit for fighting and overcompensating that many men of slight stature possess. Her death when he was fifteen, off on his first stint as a cabin boy,
changed nothing; he, like the fledgling republic itself, felt expansive, eager to push back frontiers, even to slide betimes into bullying others and taking, if need be, what was not offered. Needless to say, he made enemies. Under another name, one of his several aliases, he was wanted for murder or treason in three states. The first charge was produced by a duel at daybreak over gambling debts in Philadelphia; the second by a proposition he had made during the last war to Anthony Merry, the British minister in Washington, to divide the western region of the continent into empires separate from the United States, one of which the skipper hoped to shape himself, establishing there not a kingdom—for he hated men like George III—but a true American utopia, a dream nurtured by more than one man after the Revolution. By nature he was anti-British, and anti-Jeffersonian as well after the ill-planned Embargo Act that threw seamen and shipbuilders out of work, and he agreed more than any sane man should with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's devilish idea that social conflict and war were, in the Kantian sense, a
structure
of the human mind. These feelings he shared only with a few co-conspirators who had served with him under Captain William Bathbridge when their ship, the
Constitution,
engaged the British frigate
Jaya
off the coast of Brazil and battered her into submission. These were friends injured, as he was in that battle, and passed over for commissions. Embittered, they saw the war against England as mismanaged, an embarrassing study in military blunders so astonishingly stupid (the nation did nothing to upgrade its fleet, so merchantmen with muzzle-loading cannons strapped on their decks single-handedly took on the world's greatest navy) that the only sane course for common sailors who valued their skin was to escape being used as
cannon fodder and to profit as best they could from international confusion. As it turned out, the time for slaving was good, boosted by the South's cotton boom after planters adopted Whitney's cotton gin and the demand for Negro slaves doubled. No matter that in 1808 the trade was outlawed. Like so many others with a seaworthy ship and crew of grumbling tars disillusioned by their country's inability to keep the seas free from piracy and British impressment, Falcon turned to piracy himself, then to a contraband market that many these days served clandestinely. In other words, in a dangerous world, a realm of disasters, a place of grief and pain, a sensible man made
himself
dangerous, more frightening than all the social and political “accidents” that might befall him. He was, in a way, a specialist in survival. A magister ludi of the Hard Life.

The man who emerged in these journal entries possessed a few of the solitary virtues and the entire twisted will of Puritanism: a desire to achieve perfection; the loneliness, self-punishment, and bouts of suicide this brings; and a profound disdain for anyone who failed to meet his nearly superhuman standards. He attributed his knack for survival in uncertain times to a series of exercises he'd developed, written in Latin, French, and Greek—for he thought simultaneously in all three languages—under the heading “Self-Reliance.”

Outside, shoe leather struck the deck near Falcon's door. Someone coughed, then cursed the skipper safely since he was not there, and I recognized his voice as that of the boatswain, Matthew McGaffin. Long seconds passed while McGaffin pissed on Falcon's door, expelling the sea within himself; then he moved drunkenly on, and I read of our captain's personal regimen—training himself to read six
lines of any book in one snap, to work while others slept, to withstand extremes of heat and cold in case of shipwreck, to find everything in his cabin blindfolded, to ignore pain, to live on as little as a single biscuit, and to do calisthenics to strengthen his eyes and make bifocals unnecessary. Culture, in his view, came from an Icarian,
causa sui
impulse I found difficult to decipher. Not surprisingly, he saw himself as profoundly misunderstood, his deeds as terribly underrated. According to one day-old notation, the demands he made on others had someone plotting to kill him—he suspected first Squibb, then Cringle—by dropping arsenic and thallium sulfate into his dinner, though this could simply be the mistrust of an unpopular captain who kept knives concealed in every cabin, and whose imagination, I swear on this, was artistically limited to the finely wrought workmanship of pistols, the blunt simplicity of well-balanced, hand-crafted weapons. Maybe the reason for this was his being a natural marksman. From birth he'd lacked binocular vision. All his life he'd been squinting shut his left eye, so that when someone put a pistol in his hand at eighteen, he naturally sighted his targets and began blowing them away effortlessly. Yet, for all this obsession with survival, he had the air of a man who desperately wanted to die, which made his position on ship—his power over the others—all the more frightening.

Few mates wanted to share his company. Some nights he would step up timidly behind a circle of joking men, there in Bangalang, and instantly feel them stiffen, grow silent, then shuffle off to other business. Or he would hover at the periphery of his foremast hands as they worked, fingers shoved into his waistcoat like a new boy at school, hoping they would invite him into their banter about work and
women. But no one did. They knew better. They were common folk. Most could not read, in contrast to Falcon, a polyhistor who spent twenty hours a week pouring over old tomes when the weather was fair—this, because as captain he could not bear having anyone, especially his first mate, correct him. He and Cringle argued bitterly, of course, about his pushing the crew too hard. Some nights their shouting in Falcon's quarters could be heard by all on watch. It became clear, by and by, that as in a house divided at the helm where both parents bicker, the crew benefited by keeping the officers at odds. If Falcon denied extra rations, Cringle might approve them. If Falcon brushed off a lighthand's complaints of feeling poorly, the mate might let him lie abed. Still, the skipper needed an audience. Try as he might, he could not win what he wanted most once. We landed in Africa: the loyalty of his crew. Thus, he had few allies. Only hypocritical lickspittles like Nathaniel Meadows, who smiled in his face for favors and bad-mouthed him behind his back. As you might expect, the crew was perpetually angry and dissatisfied. What was odd in this was that it wasn't
their
anger at all—it was Falcon's. His emotions permeated the ship like the smell of rum and rotting wood, and these feelings—as is always true of groups confined together in small quarters, or of couples—the men picked up, believing the directionless rage they felt to be their own. All this explained (for me) Falcon's web work of traps, the spring-released darts coated with curare. But little else, for in his concluding entry he spoke of plans to purchase forty Allmuseri tribesmen and something else Ahman-de-Bellah lost five servants capturing, a colossus he felt he could sell for a king's ransom in Europe. Of this creature, he wrote no more, only noting he could not bring it aboard until the
Republic's
carpenters reinforced leg-irons and planking in the hold.