Middle Passage (24 page)

“Suh,” said Santos, “this is a private function.” He was as muscular and lumpy-looking as ever, dressed in a neckstock cravat and barrow-coat: the very portrait of misery. Modern styles in fashion clearly were not the best attire for a giant
afflicted with that rare disease—gaposis—where nothing fits right. Pulling at his collar, he tilted his head left, studying me. Recognition flickered and burst into flame. “Say, hold on heah! Just one fuhcockin minute! By Gawd, you's a pitiful sight, but underneath that wig, ain't you that thief from Illinois?”

Our commotion was attracting onlookers.

“Papa, looka what just pulled into harbor!” Santos reached with his right hand, planning to grab my left wrist, a move I'd seen McGaffin make during the mutiny, and something (I cannot say what) swept over me (I cannot say how), but I sidestepped as I'd seen Atufal do, snatched his wrist and allowed Santos's propulsion to pitch him forward whilst I took a half step closer inside his guard, dropped quickly to the ground directly below him, then scissored his waist with my legs and tipped him over backward, the back of his skull bouncing off the deck. I'd wager the deck was more damaged than Santos's head. Like the brontosaurus, snapping at something that bit it yesterday, it might be a full thirty minutes before the pain of that bump traveled from his skin to his central nervous system. Nevertheless, this elegant and unexpected eruption of
capoeira,
which now seemed as natural to me as lifting my arm, was enough to sting his pride and send him scurrying backward, startled, into a forest of legs. We were surrounded by spectators, among them Squibb, who had come running from our room when he discovered I was gone.

“Santos,” Papa snapped, stepping outside, “who is this?”

Santos was staring at me in bewilderment. “That's that boy the schoolteacher was seein'.” Deeply, he frowned. “Nigguh, how'd you
do
that?”

Isadora asked, “Rutherford?”

The captain peered over her and Papa's shoulders. “Mr.
Calhoun, I'm glad to see you're taking a little air after your misfortunes. However, we're in the middle of an important ceremony—”

“He was on that ship?” Papa stepped back from me, scratching his jaw. “Calhoun? I don't believe it, but if you was there, I wanna talk to you tout why that ship went down and whose fault it was. In my cabin, son. Right now. Santos, you bring him along—and don't lose the goddamn ring.”

His man sat where he was, leery of me. I used this second of uncertainty to pull Squibb to one side and ask him to perform one last duty for me, one my life and Isadora's depended on, then hurried her away from the others. Baleka kept following us, trying to listen. I shooed her away. And all the while Isadora gave me a once-over, pushing her head close to see if I'd switched my nose for a different proboscis, if I was the same person under my beard, and just as quickly she pulled back.

“Do I smell that bad?”

She shook her head. “You don't look or sound the same.”

Of course, she was right. Sometimes without knowing it, I spoke in the slightly higher register of the slaves, had their accent, brisk tempo of talk, and occasionally caught myself incapable of seeing things in general terms. In other words, when I wasn't watching myself, each figure floating past me possessed
haecceitas
but not
quidditas,
a uniqueness so radical I felt I could assume nothing about anyone or anything, or now—in the case of Isadora—generalize about her from one moment to the next.

She began squinting, and not simply to shut out the sun, although we were on the ship's western side afore the windlass. Rather, it was the squint of slowly remembered rage, and suddenly her voice was full of frowns. “Where
were
you, Rutherford! I waited for hours and hours after
everyone else left, except for him.” She pointed in Papa's direction. “Do you know—have you any idea—how
humiliating
that was for me?”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “If I could do it over, I would.” Cautiously, I touched her left arm, hoping she would not pull away. “I'm not the same, as you say. There's someone else, a girl . . .”

I could feel Isadora's arm tense beneath my fingers. Quietly, with her lower lip caught between her teeth, she waited for me to explain.

“She's one of the children orphaned by the voyage. And no, I'm not her father, if that's what you're thinking, but I might as well be. Whenever Baleka is out of my sight I am worried. If she bruises herself,
I
feel bruised. Night and day I pray all will go well for her, even after I am gone. Sometimes she drives me to distraction with all the things she shoves under my nose for me to see—Yankee things she wants me to explain, but I cannot
eat,
if you must know, until I am sure she has eaten first, nor sleep if she is restless and, to make matters worse, if she is quiet for too long, I worry about that as well . . .”

Isadora placed her right hand over my fingers. “My goodness, you
have
changed, Rutherford.”

“Aye, and what I'm saying is that in order to raise her I shall need your help.”

“Is that a proposal?”

“It is.”

“Then I'm sorry, Rutherford.” She lowered her eyes, her hand left mine, and for a moment I felt like a ship unmoored. “I can't accept your proposal now.”

“Why not? Is it because you accepted Papa's first? Isadora, how can you even consider marrying him?”

She hurried to the rail, gagged, her stomach unsettled by
either the rocking of the ship or her scheduled marriage to a man who made Cesare Borgia seem like a milquetoast. And abruptly she was angry with me again, so angry after gagging her voice came in sputters and a spray of spittle I felt too ashamed to avoid by turning my head or by taking a step away. “Papa and that goon of his were there when
you
weren't, Rutherford! He might be a criminal, but he saw how I was hurting, standing there in front of all those people Madame Toulouse invited, so
everybody
who's anybody in New Orleans would know
no
body wanted me.” I eased to one side, believing Isadora was drawing back her fist; instead, she pulled nervously at her earlobe, a new habit she'd developed since I'd been gone. “I could have died right there, really I could have. But then . . . he was
nice
to me. He took me home. The next night he came by with a whole carriage filled with my favorite flowers, and proposed, and then I didn't know what to do. You don't say no when you're being courted by a man who owns half the city, has underworld connections everywhere, and kills people for interrupting him.”

“You did that?”

“Once,” she confessed. “After that I was afraid to. He scares me, Rutherford! Sometimes I'm so frightened I can't eat or sleep. You don't know what kind of things he's been up to.”

“I think I do. And I'm not surprised he wants you. You're beautiful,” I said, to soften her anger, yet it was true. Her anxiety and loss of appetite had made her prettier. Up close, I could see she'd used the ash from matches to darken her eyes, the juice from berries to rouge her cheeks and lips. “You've twice as much education and culture as he has. Given the circles he moves in, marrying you might bring the lubber a little respectability.”

“I suppose that's why he took me on this trip, to
force
me to accept his proposal. I've been holding him at bay, really I have, Rutherford, for weeks. He hates animals, you know, even though he maintains a few as bodyguards and personal friends. He says I'll have to get rid of my cats. Well, I told
him
I couldn't let them go, not out into the cold, before I'd knitted sweaters for each of them, and I've been doing that every day for two months, stalling him, I mean, because at night I undo them.” She wanted something to dry her eyes; I offered the tail of my shirt. After blowing her nose loudly she said, “It was working until last month when Santos, that blot on the species, stopped by my room to deliver a present from Papa and saw me unraveling booties I'd made for one of the puppies. You remember Poopsie, don't you?” I nodded, the memory of dog fur on my clothing unpleasant, but I made myself smile, which prompted Isadora to lean into me so firmly I felt our bodies had been fitted at the factory.

“Rutherford, what am I supposed to do?”

I asked her to stay in her cabin for the next hour. After making sure she'd locked her door, I bade Captain Quackenbush direct me to Papa's quarters. Then I shook his hand, and turned to Squibb, who waited by the rail with Ebenezer Falcon's logbook.

“This is what yuh wanted, right?”

“Thank you, Josiah.”

“And yuh're goin' in there with them swabs by yuhself, mate?”

“Aye, but I'd appreciate your staying close by and keeping a bright lookout.”

With his good arm, Squibb gave a mock salute. “Whatever yuh say, Cap'n,” which belied the fact that if any gob
could be counted on during a storm it was he. And believe me, a storm was brewing. Poor Isadora! Papa now had her by the short hairs. Served her right, I thought, for bringing him into our lives in the first place. I knew I could not leave her in such a fix, that I had to confront him, much as David, his pitiful sling and shepherd's stick at his side, squared off with the giant of the Philistines. Whether Papa fit the image of Goliath best or Santos, I cannot say. Yet of one thing I was sure. I was not, nor could I ever be, his match. For some blacks back home, those who did not know the full extent of his crimes, Papa was, if not a hero, then a Race Man to be admired. His holdings were diverse (including a controlling share in the
Juno,
according to Isadora), and he carefully watched political changes in the country, even the smallest shifts in local government, so he could profit from them, sink a little cash into land here, a house there, which in twenty years would return his investment tenfold. Once he bought a business, he never—absolutely never—sold it back to white men, because he feared if it left black hands it might never return. Aye, for many he was a patron of the race, a man who lent money to other blacks, and sometimes backed stage plays written by Negro playwrights in New Orleans. Could evil such as his actually produce good? Could money earned from murder, lies, and slave trading be used for civic service? These questions coursed through me as I paused before his cabin, and I saw how a man such as Papa might hunger for an heir, particularly a son raised by a woman as refined as Isadora—a teacher, indeed, a nursery-governess by trade. As the boy matured, he might feel a twinge of shame at his father's bloody fortune, but he would toast his old man's portrait some nights, for those crimes had
carried their family from the fields to the Big House, from the quarters to the centers of finance. Oh, Papa's heir might occasionally complain like Peter Cringle (surely Papa would nudge him toward politics) but, like those blacks in awe of the giant Philistine, he would feel that freedom was property. Power was property. Love of race and kin was property, and if the capital in question was the lives of other colored men . . . well, mightn't a few have to perish, in the progress of the race, for the good of the many?

Before I could rap on the door it sprang open. Santos had been eavesdropping at the porthole. He kept a distance of twelve feet between us as I entered; his eyes never left me when he slammed the door, turned the key in its latch, and retired to a corner opposite Papa, who was seated at a table with carved cabriole legs bolted to the floor. It came as no surprise that these accommodations contained all the comforts Papa enjoyed on shore. He did not travel without enough packages—dozens of shoes, two changes of clothing a day—to fill the hold of a merchantman, and these were cast about on ornate furniture, thrown over tripod tables, across a heavily cushioned sofa, and on his heavily draped bed, heaped into piles awaiting Santos, who would wash, press, and sort them the way my brother had served Reverend Chandler. Surprisingly, Papa apologized for this disorder, and then he took a cigar from a tortoise-shell box on the table and offered me one.

“Calhoun”—he leaned forward in his fruitwood chair to give me a light—“I won't ask how you got on that ship if you don't ask why I'm interested in its cargo.”

“The slaves, you mean?”

He straightened, as if I'd poked his spine. “It was a slaver?
They're illegal, aren't they?” He pondered this, thumbing one of the straps to his suspenders. “How many slaves would you say it was carryin' before that storm off the coast of Guadeloupe?”

“Fifteen,” I said. “Before the storm and after the mutiny.”

“Mutiny? By who—sailors or slaves?”

“Both, or I should say the ship's crew was planning to set their captain adrift before the slaves broke free.”

“I see.” Papa ritched back in his chair, his mind racing ahead of me, judging by the evidence in his eyes, as chess masters leap two moves ahead of your own. “Then it was
his
fault, wasn't it? Your captain? If there was—uh, an inquiry into all this, if Mr. Quackenbush was to file a report on the shipwreck from which you was saved, thank heaven, would you be prepared to, uh, testify before a maritime court that your captain, being mad, lost control of his vessel, and was maybe even unfit before the voyage began, that he, a barrator, added African slaves to a simple expedition intended only for the transport of butter, bullocks, and rice? Could you say that, Calhoun, if someone—a nameless benefactor, say—was to come up with the currency to reward you for such a tirin' public speech?” While he talked I opened the logbook you presently hold in your hands. The smell of the sea came off these pages so strongly I had to blink away images of the ship's sails and mainmast. Papa's fingertips nervously drummed the edge of his table. “What're you playin' with there, boy?”