Respectable Trade (5 page)

“This is a mistake,” Mehuru said. “They should not have taken us. When someone in authority comes, I will tell him who I am. A Yoruban envoy cannot be so treated. When they realize who I am, they will let us go.”

Siko did not reply. He would not look at Mehuru.

When new men and women were brought in, Mehuru tried to speak to the jailers. Every time one of them came within shouting distance, he called out to him, first in Yoruban, then in Dahomean, then in Mandinka: “Tell your master that I am an obalawa of Yoruba, on the king’s business. Tell him the king will pay a high ransom for me. Tell him I demand to speak with him!”

They did not understand, or they would not listen. Mehuru knew he must be patient and wait until he could speak to their leader. Then he would be released, and he could demand that Siko be returned to him. His main fear was that they would try to keep Siko when they released him; and Mehuru’s duty to his slave, to offer complete protection in return for complete obedience, would be threatened.

He let himself worry about Siko, let his concern for Siko be the principal, the only thing in his mind. While he could think of himself as a master, as a man of property with obligations, he could pretend that he did not belong in the nightmare storehouse, soiled with his own mess, with dirty hands and matted hair. He thought his sanity depended on his remembering that he did not belong there, that he was not a slave, he was a Yoruban envoy on a mission for the alafin himself.

After about a month in which conditions in the storehouse grew worse and worse, there was a gathering, like some nightmare market. A new boat, a white man’s boat, had come upriver from the coast, bringing two white men. Mehuru readied himself to explain to the men that he must be released. All of the captives were dragged one at a time from their prison and brought out to a white man, who lolled on a chair under a tree.

It was Mehuru’s first sight of a white man, the race that was destroying his country. He had expected a towering demon or an impressive god—not this dirty weakling. His skin was pale, his clothes were gray and foul, and the stink of him as he sweated in the sunshine was so bad that he could even be smelled above the stench from the storehouse. The man was wet all the time. He
lounged on a chair in the shade, but he did not sit still and consider his purchases. He shifted all the time in his seat, getting hotter and hotter, and his terrifying pallor went an even more frightening flushed red color, and all his face grew shiny and wet with sweat.

When they pulled Mehuru forward by a twitch on the rope around his neck, he was so shocked by the corpse face of the man, and the disgusting thick clumps of stubble hair on his chin and at the open neck of the dirty shirt, that for a moment he could barely speak. But then he drew himself up to his full height and looked the man in the eye.

“I am an envoy of the Yoruban Federation,” he said clearly. “I must be released at once, or there will be severe reprisals.” He repeated the sentence first in Portuguese, the language of the slavers, and then in all the African languages he knew. “I demand the release of my personal servant and my own freedom,” he said.

The white man turned his head to one side, coughed, and spit a gob of infected yellow phlegm. He nodded to a second white man, who stepped forward. Mehuru forced himself not to flinch; the man was rancid with the stink of drink and a sharp, acrid smell of old sweat. Mehuru breathed in through his mouth and repeated the speech again in Portuguese.

The white man did not even reply. He put his filthy hands in Mehuru’s face and pulled back his lips to see his teeth. Mehuru jerked back and staggered over the chains at his ankles.

“How dare you!” he cried. At once two of the African slavers seized him from behind and held him in an unrelenting grip.

“Let me go!” Mehuru shouted. He bit off his panic and spoke clearly in Portuguese. “You are making a serious mistake,” he said urgently. “I am an envoy for the Yoruba federation.”

The white man nodded to the guard to hold him firmly,
leaned down, and pulled aside Mehuru’s loincloth. He pulled back the foreskin of his penis to see if he were infected and then nodded at the guard to make him bend over, to see if the flux had left blood on his anus.

Mehuru’s outraged shout was stifled in his throat. When he felt the dirty hands on him, he choked with shame. Siko was watching him, his eyes wide with horror. “It’s all right,” Mehuru called in hollow reassurance. “We will get to their leaders and explain.”

It was bravado, not courage. That night when Siko had wept himself to sleep and was lying with his limbs twitching with dreams of freedom, Mehuru sat quietly, dry-eyed and horrified. The fingerprints of the white men burned on his skin; the recollection of their washed-out stares scorched his memory. They had looked at him with their pale eyes as if he were nothing, as if he were a piece of meat, a piece of trade. They looked at him as if he were a nobody, and Mehuru thought that in their horrible, transparent eyes he had seen the death of his individuality. He thought that if he lost his sense of who he was, of his culture, of his religion, of his magic power, then he would be a slave indeed.

Only the god Snake was with him in that long, desolate night. Mehuru called on him to save him from the men who were as white as ghosts, and Snake laughed quietly in his long throat and said, “
All men are dead men, all men are ghosts.
” Mehuru did not sleep that night, though he was weary through to his very bones.

The next day the chosen hundred were herded into canoes and taken down the river. Mehuru no longer depended on his powerful status as a representative of the alafin of Yoruba. He kept a sharp lookout instead for a chance to escape and run, run like a slave, for freedom.

But even that could not be done. Not on the river journey, not when they were unloaded on the beach at the coast. The slavers had done this too often. Mehuru saw that they were
practiced in the handling of many angry, frightened people. They never came within reach; they whipped them into line with long whips from a distance. Mehuru kept watching for a chance to order the whole line of them to run—run in a great line toward the marketplace of the town—and in the confusion find hammers to shear the chains and spears to kill and then scatter. But there were too many too lame to run fast enough and too many little children crying for their mothers, chained in the line.

He waited, pretending obedience and waiting for his chance. They were herded through the little village at the mouth of the river and down to the wide, white-sand beach, where boats, white men’s boats, were drawn up with the waves washing around their keels.

When he saw the ship, the great ship, bobbing at anchor beyond the white breakers, his heart sank. It was the ship of his dreams come for him at last. The hot, humid wind that blew steadily on shore brought the smell of death as clearly as if he could already hear the widows crying. Mehuru stared at the water around the ship and saw the swift movement of a shark’s fin—just as he had seen it in his dream. He looked at the prow, which he had dreamed slicing so easily through the water, and knew that it would cut through miles of seas. Even the rope of his dream was stretched out tight as the ship bobbed on her mooring. It was all as he had known it.

Mehuru embraced despair then. The ship had been coming for him for months; he had seen it set sail, he had seen it arrive off his own coast, and now here it was at last, waiting for him. He closed his eyes as a man will close his eyes in death and let them herd him, like a sacrificial goat, on board.

F
RANCES
S
COTT, NOW
F
RANCES
S
COTT
C
OLE,
closed the door of what was to be her bedroom and looked around her. It was a plain room bereft of any trimming or prettiness. The bed was a massive four-poster in dark, heavy wood and had a small table beside it. The wash jug and ewer stood on another matching side table. There was a chest for her clothes and a mirror on the wall. It had been Josiah’s; now he would use the adjoining room, except for the nights when he might choose to sleep with her.

The room smelled. The whole house stank of the midsummer garbage of the dock. Only in a rainstorm or at high tide would the air smell clean to Frances, who had not been brought up on these fetid riverbanks.

Josiah still had not bought his house on Queens Square, but he had promised to find a house soon. As the date of the July wedding had drawn near, Frances had agreed to live for the first months of her wedded life over a warehouse on the Bristol quayside.

The room was in half darkness. Only a little cold moonlight found its way in through the casement window, obscured by the brooding cliff that towered over the back of the house. Even at midday the room would be dark and damp. Frances put her candle down on the bedside table, went over to the mirror, and unpinned her hair. Her reflected face looked impassively back at her. She had been a pretty child, but that had
been many years ago. She was thirty-five now, and no one would mistake her age. Her forehead was lined; around her mouth were the downward lines of discontent. Her pale skin was papery and dry; around her dark eyes were slight brown shadows. She suffered from delicate health, inherited from her mother, who had died of consumption. Her great beauty was her dark hair, which showed no gray. She looked what she had been only yesterday—a lady clinging on to fragile social status, of uncertain health, unmarried, impoverished, and aging fast.

But now it was all changed. Frances smiled slightly and picked up her silver-backed hairbrush. She was a married woman now, and an entirely new life was opening up before her. It seemed like a hard choice—matrimony at thirty-five—when many women were matrons already with a family around them. But anything was better than being a governess in a state of genteel servitude. Anything was better than watching her place move inexorably down the dining table until one day she would be asked to dine in the nursery with the children and disappear from polite society altogether. It had been a hard choice, but in the end no choice at all.

Frances started to plait her hair in a thick hank, ready for bed. The wedding dinner had been better than she could have hoped. Lord Scott had been as kind as always, although his cold, unfriendly wife had cast a cool shadow over the proceedings. Frances had dreaded that Josiah would be rowdy and jolly, but the evening had been as dignified as a funeral. Only Sarah and Josiah represented the Cole family, so Frances’s other great fear—that there would be dozens of vulgar relations emerging from the Bristol woodwork—was stilled. The dinner had been well cooked, a little lavish for just the five of them. The wines—as you would expect in Bristol—had been excellent.

Frances had sat at the foot of the table in the tiny, airless parlor and smiled without flinching. Everyone at the table knew that marriage to such a man as Josiah was not her first
choice. Everyone at the table knew that she
had
no choice. The coldness in her heart was reflected in the cool serenity of her face.

Her calm had been threatened only once. When Lord Scott took her hand on leaving, he had whispered to her, “God bless you, my dear. It’s the best thing you could have done . . . considering.” This tactful acknowledgment that she was orphaned and penniless sent a shiver through her. “I will pray it goes well for you,” he said.

There would be nothing he could do for her if it did not. Frances was owned by Josiah, body and soul. She had promised to obey him till death.

“But it will go well for me,” she whispered. She tied her nightcap under her chin and crossed the cold floorboards to the bed. She had wept the night her father died. She had wept the first night that she had slept in a strange house, far from the country vicarage and far below the genteel status of the vicar’s only daughter. She had raged then against the unfairness of a life in which a woman is dependent completely on a man. A woman who lacks a father must find a husband. Frances had not married when she should have done, in the brief bloom of her youth. She had aimed too high, and her father had been too proud. He had not understood that a man, any man at all, was better than spinster hardship. Her father’s death abandoned Frances to loneliness and to poverty and to the unending slights of the life of a governess.

She got into the broad bed and rested her head on the plain linen pillow. She would not cry tonight. She was a wife, and she had a dinner table of her own, even though it was only a small table and pushed to one side in a tiny parlor. The rest of her life would be spent accommodating her desires to her husband’s fortune. If Josiah rose in the world, she would rise with him; if he did not, she must bear it with patience and be glad to have found such a haven as this little house. She pulled the covers over her shoulders as if the coldness in her spirit had chilled her
very skin, despite the sultry night air. She felt as if tears or feelings would never touch her again. She was heartbroken and exhausted by heartbreak; and she mistook it for the calmness of old age.