Middle Passage (21 page)

I blew my nose. Croaked: “Dry socks.”

She hung back, a little rattled to see me blubbering and biting my nails, her hair tucked under an African headwrap or
gele,
as their women called them. As with all Allmuseri children, Baleka never displayed her feelings directly. Frankness was a Western virtue that offended the blacks a time or two. She policed herself from doing or saying anything that might displease others. Thus Baleka could only be read at angles by paying attention to the subtlest of vibrational shifts in her voice, the slight emotional spin she put on
ceremonial action, the nearly imperceptible imprint her feelings left, like heat from hands on glass, upon Tribal behavior so ritualized, seasoned, and spiced by the palm oil, the presence of others it virtually rendered the single performer invisible—or, put another way, blended them into an action so common the one and many were as indistinguishable as ocean and wave. I wondered if she thought it weak for a grown man, a Westerner, to weep. Turning my back to her, I blew my nose on the hem of my blouse, and said, “Yes?” My voice croaked. “What is it?”

“It's your turn to feed it.”

Baleka looked at her bare feet. Instantly, I knew what she meant: the creature Falcon had captured had to be fed. Every day it had to eat. Heretofore, the more pious of the Allmuseri had done this, but eventually the duty fell to everyone. I was the first of the Americans luffed in for the chore. But on what did it feed? None of the Africans who went alow had been with it for more than fifteen minutes. None had taken food. It was a duty I dreaded. Still, I felt compelled to see what sort of cargo Falcon had believed would make his fortune shoreside and, just maybe, hasten the millennium.

Weakly, then, feeling unsteady in my spine, fearful that perhaps I, too, had the first signs of sickness, I descended into the chamber with a glim and rope tied at my waist. The darkness there was blacker than chimney soot. There, where the scuttles were closed, the smell rivaled stagnant water in a swamp. The air was stale, potted. The silence was so heavy I swear you could hear a maggot pump ship on sailcloth. No wind stirred within these walls, but the flame of my lantern swayed violently as if things were stalking to and fro. My chest began to ache. Feeling the urge to vomit, a backwash of fluids in my throat, I bent forward, but
nothing came, and now I was so weak I could neither stand nor sit, and simply lay still. About five paces to my right was the box. Otherwise, I saw nothing. Something was off, my nerves told me. I felt an edge on the air, a skin-prickling charge like that before an electrical storm, the chamber releasing an elemental whiff of something just spoiling to happen: catastrophe hunkering, fleetingly visible in the corner of the eye. And then, as if cued to the gathering chaos I felt within, the crate opened and from it stepped a dark man, his features striking in the stylized way of Benin sculpture, the bone in the bridge of his nose boldly cut, his cap of short hair a mosaic of burls. This, I knew without noting another detail, was the dangerous, shape-shifting god of the Allmuseri. And I knew the infernal creature—this being who delighted in divesting men of their minds—had chosen to present itself to me in the form of the one man with whom I had bloody, unfinished business: the runaway slave from Reverend Chandler's farm—my father, the fugitive Riley Calhoun.

Visiting the village of the Allmuseri, the Spanish explorer Rafael Garcia was driven mad. I now knew why. I glimpsed the creature, coal black and squatting on stubbly legs, as you might see objects through clouded glass. This blistering vision licked itself clean, as cats do, and had other beings, whole cultures of them, living parasitically on its body. Do I exaggerate? Not at all. It stood before me mute as a mountain, preferring not to speak, I suspected, because to say anything was to fall short of ever saying enough. (Within its contours my father's incarnation was trapped like a ship in a bottle, contained in a silence where all was possibility, perfection, pre-formed.) It was top-heavy. All head. Luscious hair fell past protruding eyes and a nose broad as a mallet, and framed a grin stretched in hysterical laughter, bunching skin on its cheeks into a hundred mirthful folds: a ceremonial mask from Gambia, I guessed, but it's safe to say I was hardly in my right mind. Nausea plummeted from my belly straight down to my balls, drawing tight the skin along my scrotum. I came within a hair's-breadth of collapsing, for this god, or devil, had dressed itself in the flesh of my father. That is what I mostly saw, and for the life of me I could no more separate the two, deserting father and divine monster,
than I could sort wave from sea. Nor something more phantasmal that forever confused my lineage as a marginalized American colored man. To wit, his gradual unfoldment before me, a seriality of images I could not stare at straight on but only take in furtive glimpses, because the god, like a griot asked one item of tribal history, which he could only recite by reeling forth the entire story of his people, could not bring forth this one man's life without delivering as well the
complete
content of the antecedent universe to which my father, as a single thread, belonged.

All my life I'd hated him because he had cut and run like hundreds of field hands before him. He was a dark man and fiercely handsome, to hear Jackson tell it, and even when he was tired after a day's work he could whip a guitar like nobody's business and sing until it made grown women cry. They liked him, the womenfolks, but Da wasn't so popular with the men who sometimes found his old, wired shoes next to their pallets. A couple tried to kill him, said Jackson, and lost because Da was big through his chest and could lift a cow his damnself, then afterward he'd bring stump whiskey to whomever he'd whooped, saying he was sorry for all the bedswerving and scrapping and gambling he did—that he couldn't help it, and besides, it wasn't really
his
fault he acted thataway, was it? “Looka how we livin',” he'd say. “Looka what they done to us.” You couldn't rightly blame a colored man for acting like a child, could you—stealing and sloughing off work when people like Peleg Chandler took the profits, and on top of that so much of their dignity he couldn't look his wife Ruby in the face when they made love without seeing how much she hated him for being powerless, even with their own children, who had no respect for a man they had seen whipped more than once by an overseer
and knew in this world his word was no better than theirs. Each time Da talked like this, checking off cankers and cancer spots of slavery on his porch in the quarters, the other men listened, even those who hated him for pestering their wives, their eyes rage-kindled and drifting away to old angers of their own. “We was kings once,” he would say, scrawling with one finger on the dusty porch a crude map of an African village he remembered vaguely (and neglecting to add that in his tribe his own family was not royalty but instead the equivalent of Russian serfs or Chinese coolies). “We lost a war—naw, a battle. So now we's prisoners. And the way I see it we supposed to keep on fightin'.”

Most of the time Da did fight. Never Reverend Chandler, though. Rather, he fought his family and others in the fields, chafing under the constraints of bondage, and every other constraint as well: marriage and religion, as white men imposed these on Africans. Finally, in the light of my slush lamp, I beheld his benighted history and misspent manhood turn toward the night he plotted his escape to the Promised Land. It was New Year's Eve,
anno
1811. For good luck he took with him a little of the fresh greens and peas Chandler's slaves cooked at year's end (greens for “greenbacks” and peas for “change”), then took himself to the stable, saddled one of the horses, and, since he had never ventured more than ten miles from home, wherefore lost his way, was quickly captured by padderolls and quietly put to death, the bullet entering through his left eye, exiting through his right ear, leaving him forever eight and twenty, an Eternal Object, pure essence rotting in a fetid stretch of Missouri swamp. But even in death he seemed to be
doing
something, or perhaps should I say he squeezed out one final cry where-through I heard a cross wind of sounds just below his
breathing. A thousand soft undervoices that jumped my jangling senses from his last, weakly syllabled wind to a mosaic of voices within voices, each one immanent in the other, none his but all strangely his, the result being that as the loathsome creature, this deity from the dim beginnings of the black past, folded my father back into the broader, shifting field—as waves vanish into water—his breathing blurred in a dissolution of sounds and I could only feel that identity was imagined; I had to listen harder to isolate him from the We that swelled each particle and pore of him, as if the (black) self was the greatest of all fictions; and then I could not find him at all. He seemed everywhere, his presence, and that of countless others, in me as well as the chamber, which had subtly changed. Suddenly I knew the god's name: Rutherford. And the
feel
of the ship beneath the wafer-thin soles of my boots was different. Not like any physical surface I knew, but rather as if every molecule of matter in her vibrated gently, almost imperceptibly, and the effect of all this was that from bowsprit to stern she seemed to
sing
like the fabled
Argo.

Then I fainted.

Or died.

Whatever.

A long, long interval passed in the most unimaginable quietude. Silence as deep, as pervading as the depths of the sea. There was stillness, the sweet smell of growing things, then their stench. I heard screaming, felt it barreling out of my bones. I was thrashing and two Josiah Squibbs were holding me down in the fo'c's'le—my sight was distorted, I saw everything in doubles—mopping my brow with his kerchief. Apparently he had been feeding me from a bucket by his left elbow. Feeding me the choicest cut of
medium-raw
steak,
unless the meat on the fork in his right hand was a product of my prolonged fever. Once he saw me awake, Squibb set down his fork and began fooling with my arm.

“Lie back now, bucko. Yuh need to bleed,” said he. “And pray.”

Beside him were instruments of venesection that made me cringe: fleams, thumb lances, and a copper bleeding bowl. I was not, I should mention, an advocate of bleeding, cupping, or leeches, though these medical practices still lingered on ship when all other methods had failed. I wondered: Was this necessary? And, more to the point, was Squibb capable of carrying it off without killing me? Nay, I was not eager for this, but I knew the cook, so tired, was ready to try everything he'd seen to save us. Squibb's cold hands rubbed my right arm vigorously; he consulted astrological charts to confirm that the hour was right for an incision and tightened a rag just below my elbow to enlarge the vein.

“Josiah, half a moment—”

“Don't talk. Ain't nothin' to say.” The cook's face was pale as a scrubbed hammock, his eyes as red as a pigeon's. He shoved a stick into my hand and demanded I squeeze it. “This'll balance the humors, though Gawd knows I don't know what happened to yuh. We pulled yuh hup from below. Yuh been out of yer head fer a long time. Christ, lad, yer hair's sugah white.”

“How long?”

“Three days full. Ever since yuh went below. But lissen. We spotted a
ship
this mornin', boy!”

“Whereaway?”

“Two miles to leeward in the southeast corner.”

“Her flag?”

“None. Leastways none I kin see, but I think she's American.
She's been following us hank fer hank, tryin' to eat our wind. I think her skipper knows we're in trouble. If she's British, we're sunk. They'll search us and charge you 'n' me with murder!”

“Peter hailed her, then?”

Squibb stiffened, shipped a long face, then looked at the bucket from which he'd fed me. “Yuh had Mr. Cringle fer supper, m'boy. We all did. Now, lie back, dammit! This was what he wanted. I was sittin' with him toward the end, which he knew was comin'. Yuh know, when a body goes the bladder 'n' bowels fly open—I seen it happen a hundred times—and yer mates have to clean yuh hup and all. He wanted to spare us that, so he asked the blacks to he'p him to the head. After he was done, he had a few mates gather round him. By that time we was eatin' our shoes, barnacles, 'n' the buttons off our shirts. The women and children had chewed every shred of leather off the pumps. So Cringle says, in a voice as calm as a chaplain's, 'My friends, I have no inheritance to leave my family in America. They'll not miss me, I'm sure, but I wish to leave you something, for no man could ask for better shipmates than thee. You're brave lads. The lasses have given their full share as bluejackets too, and methinks 'tis scandalous how some writers such as Amasa Delano have slandered black rebels in their tales. Of course, I fear you'll get ptomaine if you put me into a pot, but I've nothing else to give. I hope this will help. Please, leave me a moment to pray. . . .'

“He took mebbe fifteen minutes. After that he called me in and give me his knife. Cringle closed me fingers round the handle. He instructed me that if I preferred not to kill him face to face, he'd turn his back to me. Don't you know he told me to cover his mouth, plunge the knife between his
shoulder blades, then pull it free and cut his throat from behind. If that was too difficult for me, he said I should stab into the soft flesh behind his ear, pokin' straight through the brain. If not that method, then I was to grip the blade with both hands and strike just below his collarbone, workin' the knife back and forth so it wouldn't break when I withdrew it. He told me we was down to only four or five knives, so I couldn't afford to have this one snap off inside him when his body pitched forward.

“At first I couldn't do it, Illinois. I started to ask if it wouldn't be better fer us to die like men, but I checked meself before sayin' a thing so foolish, 'cause what could I mean? What was the limit of bein' human? How much could yuh take away and still
be
a man? In a kind of daze I done what he wanted, standin' back from meself, then unstringin' him, and it was in a daze that I lay back, short-winded and watchin' the Africans cut away Cringle's head, hands, feet, and bowels, and throw 'em overboard. Next, they quartered him. They skinned him and cut the meat into spareribs, fatback, bacon, and ham. It was then I reckon it hit me, that I'd killed a man.” Squibb's eyes darted toward the cabin door, as if the mate's ghost might be standing there. “I can't sink no lower, laddie, and I 'spect Mr. Cringle's won his wings. After what he done, I don't plan to lose yuh. Yuh kin count on that. . . .”