Middle Passage (18 page)

Squibb stiffened. “Sir?”

“There'll be none of that,” says I. “Only Falcon speaks of eating flesh, and he's under lock and key in his own cabin.”

Squibb's belly rumbled. He looked down the deck to where Nacta stood with a rifle outside the skipper's door. “Who's gonna be captain, then?”

“Cringle, I guess. He's next in line. And one of their people to watch him.”

The mate looked straight at me.

“Would to mercy I
do
get my hands on the helm,” said he, rocking his head, “then I plan to steer us to America, so help me. We could steer the ship toward Africa during the day, as the blacks want, then toward the States at night when they're sleeping.” Again, he sucked his long pipe. “We'll be docking on Long Island before the Negroes know what hit them.”

“Can we do that?” asked Squibb.

I left a silence.

“What if we
don't
find land?”

Again, I could vouchsafe no reply.

“Mr. Calhoun . . .”

“Rest
easy,
Josiah. Whatever we do, the Allmuseri have the next move.”

Which was now, I saw, to complete their peculiar cleansing ritual. From what I could understand, the blacks were not simply offering the skipper's goat to their god; they were begging him to wash the blood of the
Republic's
crew off their hands. Perhaps even more important to them than freedom was the fact that no leaf fell, no word was uttered or deed executed that did not echo eternally throughout the universe. Seeds, they were, that would flower into other deeds—good and evil—in no time at all. For a people with their values, murder violated (even mutilated) the murderer so badly that it might well take them a billion billion rebirths to again climb the chain and achieve human form. Ngonyama wondered, I could see, if it had all been worth it, this costly victory in exchange for their souls, for that indeed was what was at stake. Ironically, it seemed that Falcon had broken them after all; by their very triumph he had defeated them. From the perspective of the Allmuseri the captain had made Ngonyama and his tribesmen as bloodthirsty as himself, thereby placing upon these people a shackle, a breach of virtue, far tighter than any chain of common steel. The problem was how to win
without
defeating the other person. And they had failed. Such things mattered to Ngonyama. Whether he liked it or not, he had fallen; he was now part of the world of multiplicity, of
me
versus
thee.

And so they placed their foreheads on deck in shame and supplication, praying that the killing would not be carved
forever into their nature, and that some act other than the traditional payment for murder—their own deaths in exchange—might be accepted to balance out their world again; that the
Republic
would be a ferryboat to carry them across the Flood to their ancestral home. When they were done and Ngonyama walked quietly to where we sat, his voice splintered as he spoke, his eyes hardly focusing on me at all.

“We are finished,
Ndugu,
my brother.” He wiped his forehead with his fingers. “All is in order and ready for the return. We should start at once. My people have decided to sail for Senegambia. You must convince your captain to plot a new course for us.”

Cringle sneered, “Good luck.”

“If he does not,” said Ngonyama, “I can guarantee that all of you will die.”

This was no idle threat. Therefore, twenty paces found me at the skipper's door. Nacta would not step aside, his wide-legged stance a challenge of sorts as he jiggled in his left hand the ring Falcon wore to unlock his firearms. Down the deck Ngonyama ordered him to step aside. As Nacta moved away, I entered, limping a little on my left side, for the last interview anyone on this earth would have with Ebenezer Falcon.

In the shrunken air of Falcon's cabin there were secrets too scandalous for me to share with the ship's company. This was not a knowledge I wanted, but it waited to ambush me, like the Old Man himself, amidst sacks of drachmas, nuggets and bars of gold, and church boxes from sacked coastal towns, strewn along the floor. Anything not destroyed by the explosion, Atufal and Diamelo smashed because it windowed onto the savage world of their enslavers. Where-soever my eyes ranged, aft toward the enormous upended bed, forward to his broken inventions by the larboard wall, his lodgings recalled abandoned manor houses raped and harried by brigands, and thus for a brief moment nothing here was familiar to me. A post-Christian roomscape, it struck me—me whose head was half full of Allmuseri words. The room swirled so for a second I had to plop my hands on my knees, put my head down, and wait until the ship's hull stabilized. But even then I felt culturally dizzy, so displaced by this decentered interior and the Africans' takeover, that when I lifted a whale-oil lamp at my heels it might as well have been a Phoenician artifact for all the sense it made to me. Yet in the smoking debris there was movement, a feeble
stirring of Icarian man, the creator of cogs and cotton gins, beneath contraptions that pinched him to the splintery floor.

I found his legs trapped under timber. Therewith, I gripped wood with one hand, pushed aside with my other his torn sea charts, lire, egg-sized rings, almanacs, and his log, which he often sat upon to reach his table, then tried raising the beams off him without wrenching my own back. Falcon gave a gruntlike
oof.
Alow and aloft he was scuppered. When he crawled a few inches by grabbing the base of a bookcase and dragging himself forward, cartilage in his shoulder crackled like worm-addled wood—or, on deeper planes, the unhinging of his atoms. I saw half the ribs on his right side were broken, that he strained not only to deny a physical pain involuted and prismatic but deeper wounds as well. What were these? I could see that all he valued would perish from the indifference of Allmuseri who would no more appreciate the limits and premises of his life than he would theirs, whereby I mean his belief that one must conquer death through some great deed or original discovery, his need to soar above contingency, accident, and, yes, other pirates like John Silver and Captain Teach, his pseudo-genius—to judge it justly—which could invent gadgets but lacked genuine insight, which rained information down on you like buckshot, but in the disconnected manner of the autodidact, which showed all the surface sparks of brilliance—isolation, vanity, idealism—but was adrift from the laws and logic of the heart. All at once I found that I was still ensorcelled by a leader who lived by the principle of Never Explain and Never Apologize. But I pitied him too, for his incompleteness. I pitied him, as I pitied ourselves, for whether we liked it or not, he had changed a people simultaneously
for the better and worse, made himself the silent prayer in all their projects to come. A cruel kind of connectedness, this. In a sense we
all
were ringed to the skipper in cruel wedlock. Centuries would pass whilst the Allmuseri lived through the consequences of what he had set in motion; he would be with them, I suspected, for eons, like an ex-lover, a despised husband, a rapist who, though destroyed by a mob, still comes to you nightly in your dreams: a creature hated yet nevertheless at the heart of all they thought or did.

“Cap'n, this is Rutherford. Do you know me?”

“The galley swab?” His mouth opened horribly in a face as flat and foul-looking as a sea boot.

The skipper's nervous system, that deep structural mechanism none of us can reason with or
talk
to, was so damaged from the percussion of falling beams he could not control his bowels or the spastically dancing muscles of his face. Thus, smiles followed morose expressions. These were replaced by petulance, surprise, delight, then grief, as if behind the tarp of his skin several men and women were struggling to break free. I suffer you, then, to consider my shock at seeing him this way, fighting to the end to appear singular and self-reliant when, inly, all Nature in him was seditious. Although dazed by this reel of involuntary emotional masks, I'd seen enough of shipboard surgery to know his only hope was a stiff shot of rum, a sterilized knife to hack off everything below his knees, and henceforth precisely the sort of dependency on others a swashbuckling sea rover—a man so
fixed
and inflexible in his being—would find intolerable. “Aye, I know you. Is it the end of the world, Mr. Calhoun?”

“Sir?”

“It came to me as I lay here, a nightmare that this was the last hour of history. Nothing else explains it. The
break-down. I mean, how
thorough
it is, from top to bottom, like everything from ancient times to now, the civilized values and visions of high culture, have all gone to hell in fine old hamlets filled high with garbage, overrun with Mudmen and Jews, riddled with viral infections and venereal complaints that boggle the mind and cripple whole generations of white children who'll be strangers, if not slaves, in their own country. I saw families killing each other. People were living in alleyways. Sexes and races were blurred. I saw riots in cities and on clippers. Then: the rise of Aztec religion and voodoo as credible spiritual practices for some, but people were still worshiping stage personalities too. On and on it came to me. Crazy as it seems, I saw a ship with a whole crew of women. Yellow men were buying up half of America. Hegel was spewing from the mouths of Hottentots. Gawd!” His whole body shuddered from stem to stern. “I was dreaming, wasn't I?”

“Maybe, Cap'n. Things'll never be that way.”

One or two moments went by as he creased on his left side, still as the ship's figurehead, his skin paggly and scabbed, one of his sock suspenders broken (he had invented, I should record for this record, suspenders that ran from your shirttail to your socks so you never had to pull them up and always had a shirt that looked crisp, smartly starched, and capable of passing military inspection, including after a battle), his face relaxed and voice low, calm as island currents.

“You're uncommonly quiet 'n' calculating tonight. Is it 'cause you betrayed me, Mr. Calhoun—”

“Nossir. I did exactly as you asked.”

“True?”

“Your plans, and those of the mutineers, got on the wrong side of the buoy and beached. I'm sorry, sir.”

“Then we underestimated the blacks? They're smarter than I thought?”

“They'd have to be.”

He nodded, wrinkling his nose at, I presumed, his own fierce odors. “Mr. Calhoun?”

“Here, sir.”

“What's not changed is that I still need you to be my eyes and ears. I cannot write, so you must keep the log. No matter what becomes of me, I want others to know the truth of what happened on this voyage. Will you do that?”

“Cap'n, I'm no writer. I don't know how a ship's log is done.”

“Doesn't matter. You're a bright lad. Do your best. Include everything you can remember, and what
I
told you, from the time you came on board. Not just Mr. Cringle's side, I'm saying, or the story the mutineers will spin, but things I told you when we met alone in secret.”

To this I reluctantly agreed. I took his logbook from the ruins. But I promised myself that even though I'd tell the story (I knew he wanted to be remembered), it would be, first and foremost, as I saw it since my escape from New Orleans.

“Now, then,” he said, satisfied that I would be his biographer, “can you tell me how the situation stands?”

“The Africans have the ship. We're steamin' blind. They want us to lay a course for Senegambia, whereupon the remaining crew will be released, if you can guide us there.”

As I spoke, color faded out of his face. His fists, small-knuckled,
squeezed open and shut at his sides. “They don't own this ship.”

“Captain, they
do.
You can't change that.”

“Naw,
you
don't understand. Neither do they. The slaves think they've wrested the
Republic
from the crew, is that it?”

“So it would seem.”

“They're wrong.” Muscles round Falcon's eyes tightened. “She wasn't
our
ship from the start, Mr. Calhoun. Every plank and piece of canvas on the
Republic,
and any cargo she's carrying, from clew to earring—including that creature below—belongs to the three blokes who outfitted her in New Orleans and pay our wages. See, someone has to pay the
bill.
I'm captain 'cause I knew how to bow and scrape and kiss rich arses to raise money for this run. I didn't come up in the last bucket, you know. I knew how to reach 'em, which wasn't easy, 'cause they don't like to be seen. Each one of 'em expects his investment to be returned. Mebbe tripled, like I promised. If we fail, they won't be forgiving. These are the men we have to appease, not them whoresons and rowdies outside. Oh, I know what you're thinking. We suffered the unexpected. Surely they'll understand. But I'm telling you they won't see nothing 'cept that I took their money—a lot of money, lad—and they'd just as soon see us drown, if I sail home empty-handed, as hear me report their fixed capital seized control of this brig and swung her back to Bangalang.”

The ship's finances was a field where my ignorance was complete. On economic matters my heart was simple, my mind slow. I kept quiet. But was Ebenezer Falcon telling me that he, at bottom, was no freer than the Africans?

“A month before we left I visited one of these brahmins, my hat in my hands. Oh, I grinned and all but gave him my backside to pat. If any of the hands'd seen me I'd never be able to show my face in public, let alone raise a crew that wouldn't laugh at me. But it worked, Mr. Calhoun. I was just the crab he wanted, says he, to bring back blacks as valuable as the Allmuseri. I remember going over the crew list with him in his parlor. A simple room, you understand, but long as the main top bowline, filled with pale, eastern light in early morning and simple furnishings such as men of modest means might select. He came to breakfast in a waistcoat cut deep in front, not a wrinkle in his breeches, and his hair combed in a négligé style. A perfect gentleman of taste and proportion is what his toilet told you. All that was to hide the fact he'd made a bloody fortune running slaves and supplies for the British during the last war. See, only poor men put on a show. Which is what I did, 'cause I wanted this contract bad enough to beg for it. I figured this run'd be money for old rope. That easy, you understand? He let me do most of the talking, complimented me on my Latin, my expeditions down the Nile, my schedule for self-improvement, my travels and diverse translations, a few of which (unread) were on his bookshelf behind us 'cause he had a controlling interest in the Boston publishing house that produced them. He let
me
talk—get it—'cause even though the lubber could barely write his name he didn't have nothing to prove in this world. He could buy men such as myself with his pocket change. Buy beauty, if he couldn't produce it. Buy truth, if he was too busy to think. Buy goodness, even, for what blessed thing on God's earth don't have its price? Who ain't up for auction when it comes to it? Huh? Tell me that? All the while I gabbed, squirming in my seat beneath his family's
coat of arms (the head of a Negro), sipping hot coffee from a cup that kept shaking in my hands, he was just smiling and studying me. Not as one man studies his equal—and I was
more'n
his equal on water or in the wilderness—but the way I've seen Ahman-de-Bellah appraise blacks fresh from the bush. I did not like the feeling, Mr. Calhoun. Nor did I like him. He ain't been at sea for half a dogwatch. I felt closer, if you must know, to the illiterate swabs and heathens I'd gone through hell with on ships and in the heart of stinking jungles. Thing is, he made this voyage possible.” The Old Man was quiet for a long time, his eyes like bits of ice, his complexion paly, whiter than lamb parchment. When he spoke again, his voice was hushed, like a man in church. “His name is Zebediah Singleton, and a third of this tub is his.”