THE BOOK OF NEGROES (43 page)

“I have not seen his account,” I said.

Anna Maria said that she had brought along a modest personal library. “I have no one to share it with, Meena. Most of the Company men know no more of reading and literature than asses know of astronomy. I would be pleased to let you have my copy.”

Outside, Temne builders were putting a new roof on my friend Debra’s house next door. I saw Anna Maria eyeing the sweat glistening on their chests, and said, “Better that they be building houses than rowing slaves.”

Anna Maria chuckled. “I’m for humanity and all that rot,” she said, “but many people more intelligent than I have argued that the slave trade saves Africans from barbarity. Are you aware of that?”

“The English just say that to justify their own devilry,” I said.

“What about you?” she said. “Worldly. Intelligent. Literate.”

“So the fact that I can read justifies the theft of men and women?”

“Theft? The traders on Bance Island pay dearly for their acquisitions.”

“It is theft nonetheless.”

“But, Meena, theft begins right on this continent with the Africans, stealing and plundering each other.”

“For whom do you think they are stealing each other?”

“Africans were dealing in slaves long before the first ones were sent to the Americas,” she said.

“We had an expression in my village. ‘Beware the clever man who makes wrong look right.’”

“I can just imagine how the Liverpool businessmen would reply to that,” she said.

“Liverpool?”

“It’s where many slave-traders run their affairs in England. They would ask if you could be debating with me or if you could have read hundreds of books, had you not first been taken as a slave. Was that not your salvation? And are you not a Christian?”

“Not really,” I said, welcome for a change of topic. “I go to church to be with my people, but I can’t say that I’m a Christian.”

Anna Maria fell into an uncomfortable silence. I expected her to praise the civilizing influence of Anglicanism, but she leaned forward, touched my hand and said, “I don’t believe there is a single senior Company man here, or a senior officer at Bance Island, who does not have his own African mistress. Or two. Or more.”

“I have noticed,” I said.

Leaning against my shoulder, she said, her voice barely audible, “Of course, for the Company women it never works that way. You have no idea how complicated it is.”

“When it comes to understanding others,” I said, “we rarely tax our imaginations.”

Anna Maria sighed and touched my arm.

It seemed that I would disagree with her often, but I liked the way she spoke so openly and sought my opinions.

Before Anna Maria Falconbridge could go on, a Company messenger came around to say that a rower was ready to take her back to the
King George.
On her way out, she took another look at the Temne roof workers next door.

FOR ANOTHER YEAR, I TRIED IN VAIN to find a Temne who would agree to talk to me about travelling inland. And then, finally, I accepted Alexander Falconbridge’s offer to take me to Bance Island. All the while, I dreamed of Bayo, my memories more brilliant than on the slave ship or during my earliest days in the Colonies. I felt that I would give anything at all to be home.

I put on my best clothes for that trip—a yellow hat with a peacock feather, an English dress instead of my usual African wrap, and my red shoes with gleaming silver buckles. The clothing helped me feel as far removed as possible from the skinny, naked girl who had been penned and branded in the Bance Island slave pen some forty years earlier.

I was told that the best time to visit was just after the rainy season, when the traders from inland started bringing their goods to market. Falconbridge arranged for a team of Temne oarsmen to row us to the island.

It took us all morning to row eighteen miles upstream. The water was
as smooth as glass, and they pulled us, steadily and unerringly, to the place I had never wanted to see again. We didn’t talk much. While the sun beat down and the rowers strained against the current, Falconbridge said only one thing: “Sometimes a deal with the devil is better than no deal at all.”

As the white castle came into view atop the hill, I noticed how small the island was—only a few hundred yards long, and oval. A whiskered, big-bellied man dressed all in white greeted us on the wharf. In his left hand, he held two polished canes of solid wood, each about four feet long with a thick club at the foot. They looked like tools for a beating, but the man held them like toys. The same hand held a wooden sphere, a little smaller than my fist.

With his free hand, he shook hands with Falconbridge. I made a point of extending my hand, onto which I had slipped one of the gloves I’d borrowed from Anna Maria.

“William Armstrong,” he said. He had a firm shake. He did not seem like the sort of man who would press a band of red-hot metal into my chest.

“Armstrong is second-in-command of the forts,” Falconbridge told me.

“Aminata Diallo,” I said. The formal name made me feel safer.

“Armstrong, old boy,” Falconbridge said, “this is the woman about whom I sent you the message. Brilliant. She is African, American, and Nova Scotian—a cocktail of travel lies in her wake, and not all of it voluntary. And let me tell you, she is better read than nine out of ten Englishmen.”

I had imagined that Falconbridge would see this trip to Bance Island as something of a chore. It bothered me to see him so relaxed in Armstrong’s company.

Armstrong smiled. “I like a woman who’s a bit of an enigma. I’ve had my boys get some lunch together. Hungry? That’s a long ride upriver, isn’t it.”

Falconbridge gave Armstrong a bottle of rum from Barbados. “Good man,” Armstrong said, clapping him on the back. “A round of golf, just for a few minutes before we sit down to eat?”

“Why not?” said Falconbridge.

“Come along to watch?” Armstrong asked me.

It didn’t seem that I had any choice, and for the time being, I wanted to stick close to Falconbridge.

We walked up the many steps to the fortress. Six cannons faced the sea. The Union Jack waved in the wind. There were guards on the docks, on the roof, and at the door, keeping an eye out for strangers and ships appearing on the horizon.

Behind the castle, the men took turns using the clubs to bash a small wooden ball back and forth between two holes. Each time the ball fell in a hole, one of the men would fish it out and knock it back to the other hole. Englishmen amused themselves in the strangest ways. I thought back to my own time on the slave ship, and of how the medicine man had loved his parrot. Lucky for me, Armstrong and Falconbridge tired fast of their game. They gave the clubs to a little Temne boy dressed in a cap, shirt and breeches, and we stepped into the castle.

In its size and ornamentation, the Bance Island castle rivalled Government House in Halifax. We ascended marble steps and entered a dining hall on the second floor. It had a table made of the red-tinged camwood, and gleaming chairs of the same construction, and paintings of King George III and Queen Charlotte on the walls. I paused to look at her for a minute. I couldn’t understand why anyone had called her black: her skin looked light, and her features white. I turned away from the painting. Candles in elegant silver holders sat on tables throughout the room. There were large, shuttered windows on two opposite walls. On one side, the windows were opened and gave a view of the Sierra Leone River. There were windows on the other side too, facing the back of the building, but the shutters were drawn and I couldn’t see through them.

Armstrong gave Falconbridge some sherry.

“Does she drink?” he said.

“Ask her,” Falconbridge said. “She has a mind of her own, that one.”

Armstrong turned to me. “A drink?”

While I considered an answer, the two men clinked glasses. Something about the sound reminded me of tapping chains. I fell into a moment of utter dread. Here on Bance Island, these two men could do whatever they wanted with me. Had I been insane to come in the first place? If for any reason they turned against me, within days or hours I could find myself chained in a slave vessel.

“Are you quite all right?” Armstrong asked.

“Yes, thank you,” I said. “And I will please have that drink.”

Armstrong nodded to a Temne dressed up as an English butler, who brought me some sherry. It came as a relief to put my hand around the stem of the glass. I took a deep breath, and then a tiny sip.

It tasted like what I could only imagine to be a mixture of molasses and urine. I did my best not to frown, and held the glass steadily. It cost me a great effort to appear so calm.

I was seated next to Falconbridge, and opposite Armstrong. African servants brought us bread, cheese, fruit, wine, water and steaming platters of cassava, fish and pork. The food was fresh and it smelled delicious, but I barely touched mine. My appetite had disappeared. I wanted to tend to our business and leave the island as soon as possible. But Armstrong and Falconbridge lingered over their drinks.

“Would you look at this?” Armstrong showed us a silver coin. It was a Spanish dollar, also known as an eight reales piece.

I remembered them well, from the years that I worked for Solomon Lindo in Charles Town. But this coin looked a little different. The back of the coin showed the head of King Charles III of Spain, but stamped into his neck I could make out the tiny image of King George III.

I looked at Armstrong and decided that speaking a little more to him
would help restore my confidence. If he heard my voice and witnessed my mind at work, it would be difficult for him to see me as a potential slave.

“I know the eight reales piece,” I finally said. “But what is King George doing on the neck of King Charles?”

“One of my men brought this over from London,” said Armstrong. “They’re short of silver coins, so they’re using Spanish currency too.”

“But making it English,” Falconbridge added.

Armstrong said he had heard a silly limerick on the subject. When Falconbridge asked to hear it, Armstrong sang out:
“The Bank, in order to make its money pass, stamped the head of a fool on the neck of an ass.”

Falconbridge laughed, but then said, “Do you really think he’s such a fool? Could he allow the American Colonies to just declare independence and walk away without a war?”

“He fought too long,” Armstrong said. “And yes, he’s a fool. Didn’t you hear about what he did to his son?”

“I know, I know,” said Falconbridge, shaking his head. “In one of his mad spells, he tried to smash the prince’s head against a wall. They say he was foaming at the mouth, like a racehorse.”

“I rest my case,” Armstrong said. “Head of a fool on the neck of an ass.”

While the men smoked and debated about whether the King was truly mad, I excused myself from their company and wandered over to look once more at the portraits of the King and the Queen. I stroked the candle holders, sat in a comfortable chair and read an article in an English newspaper about the composer Mozart, and finally approached the shuttered windows giving onto the back of the building. The men were still busy drinking and smoking and laughing. I touched the shutters, saw they were not locked, and cautiously opened them. I looked up at the blue skies, but heard the sounds of human groans. My gaze dropped. On the grounds behind the stone fortress, inside a fenced pen, I saw forty naked men. They sat, crouched and stood. They bled and they coughed. Each
man was shackled to another, at the ankle. For a moment, I forgot how long it had been since I lived in Bayo, and I strained to see if I could recognize any of the faces of the men. I shook my head at my own foolishness, but could not stop staring down at the captives.

A Temne who was dressed properly and who had a large clubbing stick tied to his hip brought out a cauldron of watery gruel and dumped it in a trough. Some captives hobbled toward it and had to kneel in the mud and lower their faces to sip and slurp at the trough. These men were divided, by a stone wall some seven feet high, from a group of ten or so women who were not shackled but who were also captives. Two men lay motionless in the mud while others walked around them. One woman lay just as still on the other side. I hated myself for doing nothing to help the captives escape their wretched confines. I tried to tell myself I was powerless to free them, but in truth, the mere sight of them made me feel complicit and guilty. The only moral course of action was to lay down my life to stop the theft of men. But how exactly could I lay down my life, and what, in the end, would it stop at all?

Fingers touched my shoulder. I turned to see Falconbridge.

“Don’t torment yourself,” he said. “We both know what goes on here.”

Armstrong came from behind and gently closed the window shutters. “So sorry about that,” he said. “I hadn’t intended for you to see that.”

I could not bring myself to speak.

“Falconbridge tells me you are an amateur of books and maps,” said Armstrong. “How about if we retire to my study?” He led me to a room lined with shelves and books.

“Tea?” Armstrong asked. “Shall I ring for a servant?” Before I could answer, he rang a bell.

A Temne man appeared, and made a point of not looking at me. He took Armstrong’s orders and returned minutes later with a tray. I didn’t want to drink it, taste a bite of food or spend another minute in the castle,
but I was trapped. I took the tea and tried to hold the saucer steady in my lap.

“Falconbridge told me a bit about you—hope you don’t mind,” Armstrong said.

“Not at all.”

“And are you quite all right just now?”

“Yes,” I said. But my hands were shaking and the cup rattled against the saucer. “I mean no. But I will be fine.”

“Is it the sight of the slaves?”

I gave him a steady look.

“Falconbridge told me that as a child, you were taken from a village far inland.”

“That’s true.”

“Hard to believe, really. That you were there, and taken overseas, and are back here now … You must understand, it’s unusual.”

I let him chew on his own thoughts.

“He says that you want to go back home.”

“I do.”

“May I speak candidly?”

I nodded.

Armstrong sipped his tea, then placed his china mug on the polished side table, and said, “Fat lot of good it would do you.”

“It’s not about whether it will do me good. It’s that I want to go home.”

“You’ll be sold back into slavery,” he said.

“How do you know that?”

“Because men are wicked.”

I couldn’t sit any longer in the chair. I got up, walked over to Armstrong’s shelves, and picked off a book:
Journal of a Slave Trader (John Newton), 1750-1754.
I put it back on the shelf and turned back to Armstrong. “I was born here, but not here. I was born to the northeast,
one long journey by foot. I have crossed the ocean to go home. Do you think I’m going to stop because you say it’s dangerous?”

“How do you know that you were shipped from here?”

“A slave owner told me, in South Carolina. But I remember this place.”

“What do you remember?”

“During night storms, after the lightning flashed, thunder echoed out of the mountain caves.”

“There are storms all along the coast,” said Armstrong.

“I remember this castle and the slave pens. I even remember that ridiculous game you play with those sticks and the ball.”

“You remember golf?”

I nodded.

“When you were shipped from Bance, where did you go?”

“Charles Town.”

“And where, precisely, did you arrive in Charles Town?”

“Sullivan’s Island. We stayed a week or two in quarantine.”

“You certainly have the details right.”

“There is no need to test a woman about her own life,” I said.

“And this was forty years ago, you say?”

“I arrived in Charles Town in 1757, and I was about twelve at the time.”

“And now you want to go home?” he said.

“It’s what I have always wanted, from the moment I was taken.”

“What on earth for?”

“Before you die, do you want to see England again?”

“When I sail home, I will arrive in England. But if you travel inland, you will not find your village. You either won’t find it, or you will find it destroyed. Thousands of slaves have been pulled from the interior. Whole communities have been sacked. I doubt your village still stands. Take my word for it.”

“I cannot take your word for it. I have to find out for myself.”

“The traders are rough men.”

“They are the only ones who know the routes inland.”

He sighed, sipped his tea again and said that he hoped I wouldn’t object to staying the night. I raised my eyebrows.

“There are no traders here today, but I expect them tomorrow.”

Armstrong said that he would see to it that I was made comfortable. He glanced at a watch on a chain, and stood. He seemed to want to go. But a question burst from me before I could contain it.