Voyage of Midnight (27 page)

“I’m—I’m leaving for New Orleans on a vessel come Tuesday. If you want, I can bring a message to someone, should you have a need. I can tell them where you are, if there’s anyone.”

Uncle divided the threads into three piles and began to braid them. The braid was sloppy and kept falling apart. I looked away as sorrow overwhelmed me. My throat squeezed painfully.
So it’s come to this
.

I released the bars. “I’m leaving now. Goodbye. I—I wish things could’ve been different between us. I never meant you harm.” From outside the barred window came the sound of a goat bleating. “Take good care, Uncle.” And I trod the prison corridor, leaving him behind with his threads and his milky eye, knowing I’d never see him again.

I did as promised and for fifteen years sent him articles for his comfort. Four of the crew eventually regained their vision, but my uncle never did, just as he’d predicted. Lately I’ve heard that he lives with a mistress on the island of Cuba, in a small dwelling by a river surrounded by lemon trees and fat goats. In an odd way, I don’t begrudge him his happiness, nor any peace he might find.

On my last day in Africa, I saw Oji again. Like the other captives of the
Formidable
, he’d been given his freedom. And though
some of the Africans had recovered their sight, Oji hadn’t. He’d settled in Sierra Leone, having been granted his own plot of land, as had the others.

It was a fine plot, the vigorous weeds promising good soil beneath.

“You can grow yams,” I said. The day smelled of soil, of goat droppings, of sun.

Oji felt one of the weeds with his hands, then yanked it up by the roots and tossed it away. “Yams are good,” he said. “A man with many yams is a man with much wealth.” He straightened up and gazed into the late-afternoon sun as if he could see it. “I will work very hard and provide much for my family.”

From inside his grass hut came the nonsense sounds of Onwuha, burbling like the healthy baby he was. I heard Onwuha’s mother, Nneka, as well, humming as she tended her household. After a while she came to the doorway and looked out at us, her eyes healed and whole. Next to her stood the girl who’d broken her leg in the great storm, Anyanwu, a name meaning “sunshine; dazzling beauty.” Anyanwu had her arm about Agim, the boy who’d broken his wrist.

“Someday I will return to my home village,” said Oji, resuming his attack on the weeds. “Someday I will see my mother and my brothers and sisters again.”

I knelt beside him and pulled a few weeds. “Then I wish you success in your journey. Wherever it takes you. And may your new family be blessed.”

Oji nodded. “You are not crying again, are you?”

I laughed. “Yes, I’m afraid I am. Can’t help it, I suppose.”

For a while we pulled weeds, sometimes in silence, sometimes chatting about this and that, until finally our shadows lengthened with the setting sun. I stood stiffly. “Well, I—I must go now, Oji. My ship leaves in the morning.”

He tossed away another weed and straightened up, gazing down at me, his clouded eyes shimmering. Groping for my hands, he found them, rubbing them with African soil; then he clasped them warmly. “Farewell, Ikeotuonye. Farewell, friend of my heart. The distance shall not separate us.”

To this day I can still feel the soil upon my hands, and smell it in the evening sun.

Bells jangled. A rush of air greeted me, hinting of yellow jessamine and camphor. I entered the shop, my brogans clicking on the hard-planked floor, and took my place in the queue behind a customer, a tall gentleman in a gray frock coat and silk hat.

“Give her two in the morning and two in the evening with plenty of milk,” the chemist was saying. His spectacles had slid to the end of his nose, and he pushed them up with a finger as he handed the package over the counter. “That’ll be twenty cents, please.”

The man stuffed the packet into his coat, dug in his coin purse, then dropped the money into the chemist’s outstretched hand.

“Let me know how she is come tomorrow evening, Mr. Dyer,” said the chemist as he rang up the sale. “She should be back to her usual activities in no time at all.”

“I’ll do that, Mr. Gallagher, that I will. Merry Christmas now!”

“Aye! A jolly Christmas to you and yours as well!”

And out the customer went, humming a carol, bells ringing.

Mr. Gallagher wiped his hands on a towel, smiled at me, and then said, “Well, then. What can I do for you, young man?”

All the months of waiting, all the dreams of home, the forever ache in my heart—all were distilled into this moment. I removed my cap. Kneaded it between my hands. I opened my mouth to speak, but couldn’t.

Mr. Gallagher’s smile faded. His eyes widened. The towel slipped from his hands. “My God, my dear God—Philip? Is that you, lad?” His eyes glistened with sudden tears and his lips trembled.

I nodded.

And out he came from behind the counter, hollering, “Mary! Mary! Come quickly! He’s
home!
My God! Our Philip is home again!”

With a cry of joy, he swooped me into his arms, pressing me against him. He smelled of balm and blackberry. I hugged him back, laughing. And then Mrs. Gallagher was there. “My little English boy, you’re home! Dear me, you’re home!” She wrapped her arms about us and I kissed her cheek, and soon all three of us were laughing and jumping up and down as if we’d just won the biggest, grandest prize in all the world. Which, I suppose, we had.

After a while we drew apart, gasping for breath, still gripping one another’s hands, me grinning till I thought my cheeks might split. I gazed from one to the other, drinking in the sight of them—their crowns of silver hair; their kind, gentle smiles; their eyes filled with love for me.

I squeezed their hands and said simply, “Mother, Father, I’ve come home at last.”

If you happen to wander into a bookshop in these northern United States, you might chance across a bestselling book
, Reflections Upon the Slave Trade,
written by one Philip Arthur Higgins, Physician
,
Poet, and Abolitionist. It is said he endured much upon a slave ship, the
Formidable,
once upon a time, even losing his sight, and then steered the craft back to Africa, where all the slaves were redeemed. But no one, not even the northerners, really believed every single word of it
.

But stretched truth or not, no one denied the power of his convictions, and many a person succumbed to his preachings, dissolving into flurries of tears and paroxysms of guilt over the peculiar institution of slavery. Dr. Higgins, graduate of the renowned Yale College Medical Institution, was a pale man of slight build, somewhat weak in the eyes. Nevertheless, he had moved entire crowds to tears by the end of his impassioned speeches. But some called him a liar. Others threw rotted tomatoes at him. Once, he had bared his chest, revealing a most hideous scar. Twice, he’d had to flee for his life, rushing out the back door to where a gray-haired couple waited with their carriage to hurry him safely home to his wife and newborn son
.

But if you were to ask Dr. Higgins himself of what accomplishment he was most proud, likely he would not say it was his poems, or his speeches, or his advancements in medicine, or even his bestselling book, exaggerated as it might be. No, likely he would remove his spectacles, polish them for a bit, and then tell you of the time he returned to Africa. Of the time he pushed up the Niger River with a small expedition, accompanied by one African companion named Oji and Oji’s adopted family. Dr. Higgins would likely relate how they had found a village, a small village of no repute, where a woman had daily watched the horizon for the return of her son, gone these twenty years. And how there Dr. Higgins had at last laid his guilt to rest, finding a sense of fulfillment that has never left him to this day
.

Originally, the hero for
Voyage of Midnight
was to be a midshipman in Nelson’s navy, stationed off the coast of West Africa during the era of the illegal slave trade (1807–1869). I imagined him cruising the coast of Africa, chasing down slaving ships and generally acting heroically. Or so I thought. I was neck deep in research when I stumbled upon a reference regarding some letters written in 1819 by a young passenger aboard a slaving ship. After some searching, I found the letters reprinted in their entirety within the book
Slave Ships and Slaving
, by George Francis Dow, published in 1927. What I read shocked me.

Twelve-year-old J. B. Romaigne was the son of a plantation owner from the French West Indies island of Guadeloupe. Having completed his education in France, Romaigne took passage aboard a slaving vessel,
La Rodeur
, bound for Guadeloupe via Africa. Headed over the Atlantic with a cargo of slaves, the entire crew of
La Rodeur
and all of the slaves were struck blind with ophthalmia. Romaigne wrote letters to his mother even as his own sight dimmed. Finally, some of the crew, including Romaigne, regained their sight, and
La Rodeur
staggered into Guadeloupe, but not before the blind slaves were jettisoned, for, as the captain explained, “… would you have me turn my ship into a hospital for the support of blind negroes?”

Lost in the dusty volumes of history, this was a story begging to be told. So I set my midshipman hero adrift and started over. Besides the obvious, many of the incidents and impressions in
Voyage of Midnight
were taken directly from Romaigne’s experiences, such as “The Captain is very fond of me and is very good-tempered; … he is a fine, handsome man and I am sure I shall like him very much.” And when the slaves were first brought aboard, Romaigne wrote somewhat irritably: “I wish the ignorant creatures would come quietly and have it over.”

One of the most telling incidents regarding the captain’s character occurred on a night when Romaigne could not sleep because of the sounds issuing from the hold: “… the sound froze my very blood;… jumping up in horror, I ran to the Captain’s state-room. The lamp shone upon his face; it was as calm as marble, he slept profoundly, and I did not like to disturb him.” And when the captain executed six slaves as a lesson to the other slaves—shooting three and hanging three—the distraught Romaigne thought he saw the six slaves “passing to and fro through the cabin.…”

Conditions aboard
La Rodeur
deteriorated, as did the captain’s good temper. “All the crew are now blind but one man. The rest work under his orders like unconscious machines; the Captain standing by with a thick rope, which he sometimes applies, when led to any recreant by the man who can see. My own eyes begin to be affected; in a little while, I shall see nothing but death.” Soon after, all blind, they suffered a storm in which “no hand was upon the helm, not a reef upon the sails.” That they survived the storm was remarkable. But perhaps even more remarkable was the incident of the two ships passing. Much of the dialogue between the two captains, as written by Romaigne, is reproduced in
Voyage of Midnight
. The
Saint Leon
of Spain was never heard from again. Eventually, the captain of
La Rodeur
lost an eye, and most of the crew remained irretrievably blind. Romaigne recovered his sight completely.

But a problem still remained for me. Who would be my hero? Rather than end the story with the jettisoning of the slaves, I wanted to develop a character who had the moral fiber to attempt a rescue. I felt I could not fashion my character after Romaigne, for although it was obvious that some of the events of his voyage
bothered him deeply, he was nonetheless the son of a planter and did not have the perspective to question what for him was a “fact of life,” a long-standing cultural institution that put the bread on his family’s table. Instead, I needed a character who could question the institution of slavery from an authentic viewpoint, a viewpoint that emerged from his own life experiences.

Enter Richard Drake, who supposedly dictated an autobiography called
Revelations of a Slave Smuggler
, published in 1860.
ⁱ
Drake was orphaned and sent to a workhouse, and worked at a cotton mill for upwards of eighteen hours a day until, as a self-described “feeble” and “sickly child,” he collapsed and nearly died of a fever. During his confinement, he was visited by a long-lost seafaring uncle, who promised to send money for his keep … You know the story, for I patterned my Philip character after Richard Drake. And just like my Philip, the young Drake searched for his uncle in New Orleans, worked for a pharmacist, ran across his long-lost uncle in a tavern while making a delivery, and eventually signed aboard his uncle’s ship as a surgeon’s mate. Here the similarities end, for Drake goes on to detail decades as a slave trader, whereas my young Philip cannot forget his abuses in the workhouse and is grounded with a moral integrity that shines through once he realizes the true character of his uncle and witnesses the horrors of the slave trade.