Middle Passage (8 page)

Standing there, peering at these pages to make sure I'd read them right, feeling as though I had fallen into another man's nightmare, and sweating in the heat of his locked room since no air was circulating, I was so absorbed I failed to hear the doorlatch turn and became aware of company only when air rushed in suddenly, altering the room's pressure and clogging my left inner ear. My right had a ringing sound. The edges of my eyes felt blurred. Then just as suddenly the sensation was gone and I heard a shrill, adenoidal voice that swallowed most of its soft consonants say, “Whatever you're lookin' to steal, 'tis gone.”

“Cap'n,” says I, “this isn't what it looks like. All I wanted was a lantern. I guess I made a mistake.”

“ 'Deed you have.”

Silhouetted as he was, his wild hair like rope yarn, skin drier than scales, and beard nearly an ell from top to bottom, his face looked, so help me, like five miles of bad Louisiana road. Rum came reeking, like a slap, off his clothing. A gun hung low in his belt. Yet his eyes were in-turned, icy, as he pushed by me into the room, swaying on his feet like a damaged rig, drunk and barely registering my presence at all. He lowered his rump onto the cushion of his chair, one hand squeezing the armrest, the other pressed against his chest; then he lifted his chin slightly, to the left and away from me, to let a belch of volcanic proportions bubble free. “Light a candle, please. And bring me that jug in the corner and a clean cup—bring one for yourself too.” Instantly, I felt ill, but hastened to obey, each step I took causing the doubloons in my crotch to jingle. By rights, he could have me birched or keelhauled or lashed to the capstan bar. But
even worse than that, I realized he might
lecture
me again, beginning as he often did with a personal anecdote that might go on
forever,
embellishing each line of dialogue and taking every part in the story for my instruction. Even worse, he might decide to demonstrate esoteric Chinese jointlocks he'd learned while living for a year in King Miu village, using
me
as his hypothetical opponent in lessons that resulted in my neck aching for days thereafter. Carefully, I poured him a cup of merry-go-down. Then I took a step back, gauging my distance from the door.

“Shall I leave now, sir? I've found the lantern.”

“D'you now? A lantern, was it? And nothin' else?”

“On my word.”

Color was climbing high in Falcon's neck and face. His exhalations were loud, pursive, and again he pressed his palm against his middle, as though mashing down some deep, recurring pain or intestinal burn he'd somehow learned to live with. His face ritched left in a frown. “You weren't heah to murder me in my sleep and jump ship?”

“No! Of course not, sir!”

“Six men tried that tonight on shore. Not an hour ago, Mr. Calhoun.” His glass empty, he took the jug from me, lifted it and splashed more rum straight down his throat, his whole body shuddering for a second; then his eyes gave me a rum-soaked glare. “I was unarmed, 'cept for these boots I'm wearin'. D'you like 'em?”

“Yessir, and fine boots they are, Cap'n.”

“Naw, you don't truly
see
'em, boy.” He lifted one foot, pointing the toe toward me. “You're not supposed to! That's the point of boots like these. The toes are reinforced with steel plates. I'm not a big man, as you may have noticed, and as a lad I was bullied by taller boys. 'Deed, I was. Nary a
day passed in my childhood that somebody didn't single me out for a beatin' or some cruel jest. Nearly broke me mum's heart, that did, but I'll tell you true: Nowadays when I kick a swab's shins he seldom walks again. I advise you to fix yourself a pair of such useful boots for the voyage back. Have you got a pistol?”

“Nossir.”

“Then we must find one for you.” From among the contents of his chest Falcon selected a 45-percussion Kentucky pistol. “Lovely, isn't it? I've adjusted the sights, added precision rifling in the barrel, and damned if this beauty don't feature one of my own concoctions. See how heavy the handle is? There's a magnet inside. It locks down the trigger so no man kin fire it, or snatch it from you, who isn't wearin' magnetized rings such as I wear, even when I sleep.” Falcon unscrewed from his third finger, right hand, a metal band, pushed it on my finger, then snapped around my waist a holster of his own design. “You'll notice,” says he, stepping back to study me, “that spare ammunition fits into three pouches on the sides and the small of your back. The holster has a thumb-break snap, so you kin draw back with one smooth motion to push away your blouse. From now on you'd do well to follow a formula I've developed. Every few seconds pat yourself: knife, guns, keys, in that order, to make sure you've got everything. A light touch now and then is all it takes; then it'll become instinctive. I'd advise you not to let any of the blacks get too close when we bring 'em on board—'specially the women. They'll get right up in your face—they love to do that when talkin'—so keep 'em at arm's length, with your holster facin' away from 'em. Don't eat or drink anythin' they give you. If you have to shoot one, use small shot 'stead of ball. 'Tis a wee bit more
merciful. And when we bring 'em up from below for exercise, work in pairs—Cringle and Meadows, for example. Squibb keeps an eye on Fletcher. And you and me watch out for one another.” His eyes slid up, blinking. “You're not gonna blow your damned foot off, are you?”

“I think I'll get the hang of it. But, Cap'n, why do I need all this?”

He began to undress slowly, the moonlight and candles doubling his shadow against the wall. Falcon's buttonless blouse gave him trouble when he tried pulling it over his enormous head; its collar caught under his beard, leaving him hooded for a moment (I believe I could have shot him then, and I even pointed the pistol at his head to see how this might feel) with both his arms helplessly in the air. “Give me a hand here, Mr. Calhoun. I hope you can see that I trust you. I need a colored mate to be my eyes and ears once the Africans are on board. Same with the crew. I want to know what each man's thinkin'.” Against my better instincts to gun him down right there, I helped the skipper pull his shirt free. Now he was dressed for bed in his nightshirt and steel-toed boots. “Once weekly I'll want a full report. If there's any talk, you'll tell me.”

“Be your Judas?” I asked. “A spy?”

His eyes filled with hurt, slipped to a corner of the room, as if the correct word he wanted was there. “Nay, a friend! I need someone to keep his eyes open and tell me of any signs of trouble.” He lay back on his bed, drinking straight from the jug now, and began bellyaching more to himself than to me about his officers, bitterly relating personal things about each I never dreamed of and did not wish to know. He was clearly breaking confidences, betraying every one of them in a voice so venomous I wanted to cover my ears. I felt
uncomfortable. More: I felt unclean as he described in detail all the dirt and gossip, weakness and shortcomings, of every mother's son on board. Everyone, it seemed, had a secret. A shadow. A buried past so scandalous that I was nervous for the rest of the night. Why was he saying these things? I could only speculate that something was seriously wrong with the ship—he never specified what—and his solution was the oldest and simplest in the world. Divide and conquer. Poison each man's perception of the other. By
making
me hear of each man's faults (I had no choice) he subtly compromised me, made me something of a betrayer too, and I sighed and shut my eyes, thinking of Isadora, who would say these things were sent to try us. Moments later he was asleep. I leaned over him, wanting to empty into his head the pistol he'd given me, but found myself transfixed by the crude ring twinned on his left hand and mine, as if, heaven help me, we were married, and the very thing I'd escaped in New Orleans had, here off the unlighted coast of Senegambia, overtaken me.

Sleep and I were strangers that night. All that evening, moaning and sharp cries such as only Negro women can make drifted on the wind from the warehouse, where Africans living, dying, and dead were thrown together. Hoping to steady my thoughts, twisted worse than rigging after a storm, I shook awake Squibb, there on deck, and asked him about our cargo. Sailors, I know, can be careless with the truth, but he told me the first caravan of Allmuseri were being separated for the morrow's sale: husbands from their wives, children from their parents, the infirm from the healthy, each parting like an amputation or flaying of skin, for as a clan-state they were as close-knit as cells in the body. “First, Ahman-de-Bellah will have his people shave off their body
hair. That's the first humiliation, makin' 'em smooth as babies from the womb, like mebbe they was born yestiday. He'll have them bathed, soaked in palm oil to make their black hides glisten like leather, then they'll get a feast to fatten 'em for tomorrow's buyers.”

In the darkness I said to the shadowy lump he was on deck, “Like cattle?”

“Like Allmuseri,” he replied. “They'll get what Africans are used to eatin'. Roots like, cooked green or else dried and made into flour, then mashed or stewed into porridge. They'll get a tasty sauce with it too, and probably some honey beer made from maize to wash it down.” He lifted his hips a little, then broke wind gently, a faint ripple of sound as if he'd tightened his sphincters to soften the sound of it. “We should eat so well, darlin'.”

“Squibb!” shouted Cringle. “If you do that again, you pig, I'll make you sleep below, or on the other side of the ship!”

“Pardon
me,
sir, but that's Nature, yuh know. A man shouldn't keep it inside, and that. 'Tain't healthy, me wife Maud used to say. It's bad for the heart, she says. Why, when we first got married Maud usta say—”

“I don't
care
what she said! I'm not your bloody wife, man!”

“Aye”—he winked my way—“thank God fer that.”

Quietly, under his breath, Cringle repeated one of his Scriptural passages, then rolled over and slept, as did Squibb, flat on his back with his parrot on his belly, like a sea gull atop a whale in a tropical current.

Next day I joined them in the landing party that went ashore. The
Republic
lay at anchor a distance of ten cables from the fort, with McIntosh at the helm, and slip ropes on her cables, the ship ready to spread canvas and sail if for
some reason Bogha betrayed us. By the time the last Allmuseri caravan arrived it was full dark. A balmy night. Squibb and I bloated ourselves on beer in the town square, tossed coins to beggars crippled at birth by their parents to make them better panhandlers, and watched one turbaned harem girl whose figure and veiled face filled me with such longing that I felt as if my life's blood splashed to the ground each time she sashayed by, so fascinating was this girl, and so long had I felt coltish and unwillingly celibate at sea. I knew my hungry gaze must have burned her, for her brown fingers, long and thin with bones frail as a bird's, gently brushed my hand the fourth and fifth times she refilled my mug. By that time my heart was bouncing off my ribs, and I barely saw two African boys sprint past us, announcing the approach of a caravan from the interior. I stood, felt unsteady, then sat again, hearing gunshots from afar. Behind us the fort's many guns replied, so thunderously the air shook. Abruptly, all was confusion. Cries went out from every merchant. From every bazaar the coffle's arrival was cheered. I looked around for the lass, but she was gone. I stood to see better. Squibb yanked me back to my seat.

“Better yuh keep your noodle down, Illinois.” He was instantly sober, his grip on me tight as a winch. “Or yuh'll be sold too. Stolen right off ship, I'm sayin', and pressed into a gang. It's happened before.” He tugged a little at my sleeve. “These blokes don't know you're a sailor. And they don't care.”

He needn't have told me twice. I squeezed back a little into the shadows, watching Bogha's servants light palm-oil lamps atop the fort's walls. Cautiously I eased back into the crowd to see better, sweat streaming inside my blouse,
puddling at the back of my spine above my belt. I sighted Cringle off to one side and, sidling up behind him, caught him talking to himself, tapping his chin with his pipestem and appraising the Allmuseri tribesmen shackled in twos at their ankles. As I'd heard, they were a remarkably
old
people. About them was the smell of old temples. Cities lost when Europe was embryonic. Looking at them, at their dark skin soft as black leather against knee-length gowns similar to Greek chitons, you felt they had run the full gamut of civilized choices, or played through every political and social possibility and now had nowhere to
go.
A tall people, larger even than Watusi; their palms were blank, bearing no lines. No fingerprints. But all Allmuseri, I had been told, had a second brain, a small one at the base of their spines. A people so incapable of abstraction no two instances of “hot” or “cold” were the same for them, this hot porridge today being so specific, unique, and bound to the present that it had only a nominal resemblance to the hot porridge of yesterday. Physically, they seemed a synthesis of several tribes, as if longevity in this land had made them a biological repository of Egyptian and sub-Saharan eccentricities or—in the Hegelian equation—a clan distilled from the essence of everything that came earlier. Put another way, they might have been the Ur-tribe of humanity itself. I'd never seen anyone like them. Or felt such antiquity in the presence of others; a clan of
Sphaeriker.
Indeed, what I felt was the presence of countless others
in
them, a crowd spun from everything this vast continent had created.

Past the barbican to the broad piazza of the receiving house, Ahman-de-Bellah, a froglike, vast-bearded Arab who was notorious for drawing out the brains of his enemies with an iron hook, herded the Allmuseri to stand before
Bogha and Captain Falcon, who met Bellah with the cracking-fingers greeting of the coast. There, off to one side of the trees, his people put up their tents, then forced the Allmuseri toward the warehouses.