Middle Passage (11 page)

Thus we were at five bells in the forenoon of June 11. The wind blew hard, the sea ran high, filled with thunder rumbles and white tendrils of lightning from the southeast. At my post I was for a time hypnotized by tumbling, opaline blades of ocean, by its vortices that were mirrored in me since we were mainly made of Main, by the way—as the mate said—it seemed to be some monster of energy, without start or finish, a shifting cauldron of thalassic force, form superimposed upon form, which grew neither bigger nor smaller, which endlessly spawned all creatures conceivable yet never consumed itself, and contained a hundred kinds of waters, if one could but see them all . . . so hypnotized by this theater of transformations my head spun and eyes slipped after staring too long, my belly trembled, and this was the condition I was in when gusts of strong, skirling wind galed and swung the
Republic
broadside to windward, pointing her
back
the way we had come. Loose ropes, carpenter's tools, and unfastened casks of beef flew everywhere like cannon
shot, cracking more than a few skulls. The skipper, who'd been sprawled out, stewed to the gills on his cabin floor, clawed his way topside, shouting “Gangway!” and looked wildly around at those awaiting his orders. Said: “Secure all loose gear.” Cringle shouted back that the helm would not respond. “Mr. Fletcher,” ordered Falcon, “see if the cords are entangled.” The sailmaker checked them and made answer that they were not. “Damme,” said Falcon, “she blows hard.” His fingers clenched fishbelly white, then faintly blue, on the helm, and in his state he was a pitiful sight, hunched forward, pulling the wheelr so hard his temples bulged, barely able to stand. The men saw this. His movements were slower than a man's submerged, like a mime mocking normality. He was that soused, that unsteady on his feet, and said, crestfallen, aware of his condition, “You have to help me here, Mr. Cringle.” And then it was full upon us: a sea hot with anger, running in ranges like the Andes or the Rockies, and be damned if in the topgallant sails I didn't see forks of blue lightning. The forecastle was hidden behind curtains of spray. The bows were deep in water. At this point, screams came from the hold. With one hand I clung to the foremast, my head pressed in tightly against Baleka, squeezing her close enough to cut off her wind. And fairly windless was I myself. In this squall, some of the deck hands panicked. Ran from their posts, which was wrong, fell, scrambled below to their hammocks and pleaded with their shipmates to strap them down, screamed again. Others tied themselves to gratings, to the yawl, and to each other. “Hard alee.” The wheel spun in the captain's hands. “Keep her hard to leeward.” Before long the swirling air and sheets of breaching water overwhelmed him. He relinquished the
wheel to Cringle and shouted into a hundred-horsepower wind, “Heave to.” For five minutes nothing could be seen of the ship's hull—only shaking masts rising like a forest above foamy meerschaum, the sky stretched above like a gridelin scar, and the
Republic
broaching badly in the wind, popping her nails, her boards creaking like those in an old house, a shrinking casket. Cringle's lips were skinned back against his teeth. “Heave to it is, if you say so, sir.”

Falcon's face was crabbed. “Are you makin' sport of me?”

“No—no, sir!”

What came upon us next is not clear. The instant Cringle spoke, the ship swung around with her face to the west, plunging into a trench, as if into Hell, below water columns that broke over us to the height of the crosstrees—two solid walls on either side, held still as when Moses parted the Red Sea. The sun stood still. The moon stayed. My heart stopped. It has never worked exactly right since, because when the roily waves spanked back, shaking the ship to her ribs, I saw two boys catapulted overboard to drown instantly in the shoal. Therewhile, half the Allmuseri children and women—Baleka's mother among them—five of Falcon's sheep, his hogs and fowl, were swept from the deck. The larboard quarterboat was torn away to disappear into the swell.

Then—

Miraculously, the wind shifted to the old quarter, the storm passed away, and we were through it as though it all had been a conjurer's trick. The ship labored back on course, the spell broken, though still the Atlantic thundered. Half the crew ran to the grog room and proceeded to get drunk. Our one Moslem on board dropped to his knees, banged his
head on deck hard enough to break bone, and wept, “Inshallah! There
is
no Majesty and there
is
no Might save in Allah!” However that might be, three younger lighthands, too frightened to move, lost the power of speech and looked stupefied at the vacant stations where their lost mates had stood. Entangled in the twisted rigging above hung three bodies upside down. Matthew McGaffin, the boatswain, a pig-jawed former circus strong man with a walrus mustache, black eye patch, and a big, hectoring voice, swore the storm proved the ship was cursed by its black chattel and internal cargo. Nathaniel Meadows, shaking, one fist in his mouth to stanch a scream, fouled his breeches. Twice. Without speaking, we all clapped our hands together as one company—thirty-two sopping-wet cutthroats black-toothed rakes traitors drunkards rapscallions thieves poltroons forgers clotpolls sots lobcocks sodomists prison escapees and debauchees simultaneously praying like choirboys, our heads tipped, begging forgiveness after this brush with death in Irish, Cockney, Spanish, and Hindi for a litany of collective sins so long I could not number them. Besides, I was too busy peeking through my fingers and promising God I would be good forever if He would quit playing games like that one. Had it lasted a bit longer, we knew, the ship would have been torn to pieces. More: such storms induced madness in seamen; triggered acute appendicitis, respiratory attacks, and suicide in their aftermath—the sorts of gales you tell your grandchildren about, if you live to see them, when they visit on holidays. Yet, standing hard by me, watching the dripping crew cross themselves and offer their first-born whelps to the priesthood, staring with a calm, distant gaze, was the quiet, catfooted Ngonyama. He was dry. Not a drop had touched him. He was coolness itself. Like actors I'd known
in New Orleans (all unemployed), he had the unsettling ability to stare at you, or deliver a long speech, without once blinking his eyes or looking away. Maybe this was a trick he'd cultivated, but it struck me that he'd known the storm was coming, and I flinched, afraid of him, as he caught me by my sleeve, and said in his cracking, high-register version of English:

“Lay yourself forward or below tomorrow at noon.”

“What?”

“If you have any friends on this ship”—he glanced at Baleka, who refused to release the fingers on my left hand—“tell them to lay below too.”

He was gone before I could draw sense out of him. After he left to join his tribesmen below, I stayed for a time by the gunport, the girl's grip on me stronger than before. “We'll be all right,” I said, though I didn't believe a word and was troubled by what Ngonyama, that crafty bastard, had told me, and furious at the cryptic tone he used sometimes. Really, when he talked like that, with a wink in his voice, it put me in a mind to clobber him with a caulking iron for his own good. “Universal Native,” I'd call it, the high-flown, inscrutable way whites made the Cherokees talk in dime novels, or the Chinese in bad stage plays. It certainly wouldn't serve him well back in the States, or endear him to the slave lords who awaited him in Louisiana. Nonetheless, his warning bothered me. I half believed him; half I did not. But we had only a few hours or so of daylight before the impenetrable darkness of the ocean sank over us. Accordingly, the skipper was lashing the crew to make repairs—“You men get aloft!”—hauling them one by one to their feet to secure all the sails with spare gaskets. “And keep a bright lookout.” Others to report on damages below, and double-breech the
lower decks. And still others to make fast the boats and haul unnecessary cargo—but not his prized crate—to the rail and pitch it over to lighten us. Erewhile, his lighthands went feverishly to work at the pumps, but their hearts were hardly in it; they worked nervously, waiting for the sea to throw its next seizure. A few deck hands talked of quitting the ship, taking to the remaining boats, and abandoning the blacks who—the boatswain claimed—had caused this troublesome gale and boiling sea to turn us back to Bangalang.

“Steady up there,” said Cringle icily when he overheard them. “And you can stow that kind of talk right now. The captain says he'll haze any man that tries to leave the ship.”

“Then”—the boatswain spat inches from the mate's boot; he pushed his low-crowned black hat back on his head, its ribbon hanging over his left eye—“we're dead already.”

“Maybe you didn't
hear
me, McGaffin!”

Cringle's right hand touched the owlhead pistol in his waistband. The boatswain only exhaled, then spat again, this time hitting the mate's leg. “You're the one who kin stow it, Cringle—or shove it mebbe, and that self-servin' rummy Falcon too, cose water was me woman before you was in long pants, and I know trouble when I see it. Them niggers is weird. A tribe of witches and strangelings. They kin
do
things. And if you ain't noticed,
sir,
there's water under the keelson, one of the bloody winches is broken,
sir,
and the hand pumps are chokin' up. You're as good a shipmate as ever put a hand to sail, Mr. Cringle, I don't doubt that, but sometimes I think you come to be quartermaster by crawling through the cabin-house window instead of through the hawseholes like the rest of us. God almighty, man, any tar on board'll tell you the skipper can't get this rotten piece of driftwood home—he'll drown the lot of us—and it's your
business, I'm sayin', to put things right before it's too late. D'you know what I'm arstin' you to do? D'you have enough skin for it? Cose if you're too fish-hearted to do what you promised, some of us who've had enough
will
do it. See if we don't!”

Cringle could not reply. This list of problems stole the mate's wind. He looked flustered and put out, his lips pressed in hard. Like that, he spun away. Me, I had business of my own to tend to in the galley, and perforce hurried below, Baleka hanging onto my dripping shirttails like a barge in tow.

By nightfall Squibb and I had the galley in “shipshape,” if you'll pardon the expression. The steward was feeling pleased with himself. Actually, he was probably squiffy from the genial influence of a tot of rum. Baleka had finally fallen to sleep in a corner, and the cook and I were on our knees, swabbing and squeegeeing when McGaffin, peeling off his oilskin coat, came through the hatch, followed by Cringle and five men as grim as any I'd seen, the terror of the storm still upon them. I saw their boots first as they slid past me, dirtying the floor. Silently, they took seats on the benches as a jury might, or men come for a hanging. I noticed immediately they were armed with cutlasses, knives, ship's tools easy to convert to bludgeons. McGaffin sat on the edge of the galley dresser, a little higher that way than the rest, his big hands with curly black hair on the backs folded on his hips. Cringle closed the door, the quietest of clicks as wood kissed metal. Squibb dried his hands slowly on his apron, rose up on one knee, then the other, and gave me a glance, his whole air saying
Careful!
as he filled a mug of tea for each of them. “Illinois, I think mebbe yuh should leave.”

“No,” said Cringle. “We need every man we have here.”

“Do we now?” McGaffin paused with the mug just below his mouth. “Every man, I'll agree, but this one ain't no sailor, he's a stowaway, remember? A workaway. I been watchin' him since you found him in the longboat. I didn't see him sign any articles. He ain't got no stake in all this.”

“In what?” I asked.

“The ship, boy! You come along fer the ride, I reckon. But after you've gone back to farmin' or fogle-huntin', the rest of us got to think about our future and families, God love 'em, if we live to see land again, which I'm startin' to doubt more 'n' more every day.” He set his mug down. “You got a family?”

I thought of my brother and said, “No.”

“You got a gel?”

I thought of Isadora and said nothing.

“See, then? It don't matter wot happens
to you,
does it?”

Right then, Cringle's hand cutting through the air for McGaffin to stop made the candles affixed to the wall behind him flicker, casting his own face in shadow. He coughed, clearing his throat, and said, “Rutherford, we're here to decide the best way to put this ship back on a steady course. A crew has to trust its captain. Those of us here don't. We think it's time to change leadership.”

“You mean mutiny?”

“I didn't call it that.”

McGaffin frowned. “That bother you?”

Their eyes, full of hardness, bit into and held me to see if it did; stares aimed like shotguns, gazes so steady and critical I felt as if I were on stage or had the square frame of an oil painting around me. To my left, firewood crackled in Squibb's oven, splashing an eerie coralline light on their faces, and a
peculiar warmth on my legs, for my clothes were still damp, except there on my trouser legs, where the heat made the cloth stiff. All this time I stood motionless, unsure what to say. Silence, never doubt it, was equally a sin in their eyes—eyes I had seen before, I realized, under the sun-blackened brows of slaves: men and women who had no more at stake in the fields they worked than these men in the profits of a ship owned by financiers as far away from the dangers at sea as masters from the rows of cotton their bondmen picked. No less than the blacks in the hold these sea-toughened killbucks were chattel. McGaffin's gaze drifted to my left hand.

“That queer ring he's wearin', d'you see it? I only seen one like it afore. It's on the flipper of the scoundrel who almost sank us this evenin'. You know,” he said to the others, “I think I was wrong. This one ain't no stowaway, he's a blinkin' spy.”