Entry, the third JUNE 23, 1830

Forty-one days after leaving New Orleans, we coasted in on calm waters, a breeze at our backs, and the skipper set all hands to unmooring the ship, bringing her slowly like a hearse to anchorage alongside the trading post at Bangalang. It was a rowdy fort, all right. Cringle told me the barracoons were built by the Royal African Company in 1683—one of several well-fortified western forts always endangered by hostile, headhunting natives nearby, by competing merchants, and over two centuries residents at the fort had fought first the Dutch, then the French for control of Negro slaves. Lately, it had fallen into the soft, uncallused hands of Owen Bogha, the halfbreed son of a brutal slave trader from Liverpool and the black princess of a small tribe on the Rio Pongo. He was a sensualist. A powdered fop and Anglophile who dyed his chest and pubic hairs blond and, as did other men of the day plagued by head lice big as beans, shaved his pate and wore perfumed wigs. Educated in England, this man Bogha, who greatly enjoyed wealth and the same gaming tables played by Captain Falcon in Paris, returned to take advantage of his father’s property and mother’s prestige in Bangalang, overseeing from his great hilltop home the many warehouses, bazaars, harems, and Moslem caravans that crawled from the interior during the Dry Season. The skipper stayed at his home most nights, consuming stuffed fish and raisin wine, and giving Bogha news of “civilization” back in England and America — he was starving for news, claimed Bogha, in this filthy, Godforsaken hole. And Cringle, being an officer, was invited too, but said he couldn’t abide flesh merchants; in fact, he abhorred everything about Bangalang, and slept instead with the rest of the crew on deck in the open air to escape the heat below.

As for myself, I was simply glad to be ashore. It had been unsettling and claustrophobic, out there with the ship cleaving waves the color of root medicine, soughing wind that broke the spider-web tracery of rigging like thread, and the sky and sea blurred together into a pewter gray gloom without a stitch, without outlines, without a bottom to their depths, and sometimes, when we could not see the horizon and sailed through endless fog and shifting mist, I’d felt such dizzying entrapment — of being deprived of such basic directions as left and right, up and down — that I screamed myself awake some nights, choking on the rank male sweat that hung around my hammock like wet clothing. I ached from cleaning pots in the cookroom, and I’d grown tired of my clothes being so perpetually wet from deckwash, the slap of rainwind, and leaks in the orlop that once I had the feeling that the toes on my left foot were webbed. On top of that, Cringle had shouted at me so often for being slow, or asleep during my watch, that I could tell you which of his teeth had been worked on in Boston or Philadelphia, pulled in another city or by a dentist in New Orleans. I wished in vain for dry breeches, floorboards that didn’t move, a bowl of warm milk at bedtime, and sometimes — aye — for Isadora. Worse, I kept a light cold, and my incessant coughing gave me headaches. Even so, I could not join the others in their banter after we lowered anchor, or even drink with much gusto — stale beer gave me the johnnytrots — but simply lie quietly in my bunk, wondering if in a single fantastic evening I had become Captain Ebenezer Falcon’s shipboard bride.

I could express this fear to no one, and I beg you to keep it to yourself. His courtship of me, for so it must be called, began the night Falcon caught me rummaging through his cabin. This was not an easy situation to explain away. Especially after what I learned from his papers, ledgers, and journal. Somehow I’d miscalculated. According to his schedule, the skipper should have been at the fort all evening, unloading four skiffs freighted with clothing and beads, liquor, and utensils of brass and pewter for the notorious Arab trader Ahman-de-Bellah, whose first caravan of captured Negroes from eight, maybe nine tribes, was herded into Bangalang a few hours before. Falcon’s curtains were drawn. His door was padlocked. Of course that presented no problem for me.

Slipping away from my watch and into his room, easing his door shut with my fingertips, I felt the change come over me, a familiar, sensual tingle that came whenever I broke into someone’s home, as if I were slipping inside another’s soul. Everything must be done slowly, deliberately, first the breath coming deep from the belly, easily, as if the room itself were breathing, limbs light like hollow reeds, free of tension, all parts of me flowing as a single piece, for I had learned in Louisiana that in balletlike movements there could be no error of the body, no elbows cracking into chair arms in a stranger’s space to give me away. Theft, if the truth be told, was the closest thing I knew to transcendence. Even better, it broke the power of the propertied class, which pleased me. As a boy I’d never had enough of anything. Yes, my brother Jackson and I lived close to our master, but on the Makanda farm during the leaner years, life was, as old bondwomen put it, “too little too late.” At suppertime: watery soup and the worst part of the hog and so little of that that Jackson often skipped meals secretly so I could have a little bit more. If you have never been hungry, you cannot know the either/or agony created by a single sorghum biscuit — either your brother gets it or you do. And if you do eat it, you know in your bones you have stolen the food straight from his mouth, there being so little for either of you. This was the daily, debilitating side of poverty that no one speaks of, the perpetual scarcity that, at every turn, makes the simplest act a moral dilemma. On a nearby farm there lived a slave father and his two sons who had one blouse and pair of breeches among them, so that when one went off to work the others were left naked and had to hide at home in their shed. True enough, Jackson and I fared better than they, but in linen handed down by Reverend Chandler or by his pious friends — who no doubt felt good about the very charity that annihilated me — in their scented waistcoats and smelly boots I whiffed the odor of other men, even heard their accents echo in the very English I spoke, as if I was no one — or nothing — in my own right, and I wondered how in God’s name you could have anything if circumstances threw you amongst the had. Ah, me. The Reverend’s prophecy that I would grow up to be a picklock was wiser than he knew, for was I not, as a Negro in the New World, born to be a thief? Or, put less harshly, inheritor of two millennia of things I had not myself made? But enough of this.

On ship I decided against my usual signatures of defiance: pooping amiddlemost a local politician’s satin pillow, for example, or fabricating for his wife — some blue-blooded snob — a love letter from their black chambermaid that was worthy of James Cleveland, or simply scrawling on their parlor wall in charcoal from their hearth, as I often did, “I can enter your life whenever I wish.” No, I did none of this, there in Falcon’s quarters. All I wanted was to know his heart (if he had one) and to walk off, as was reasonable, with a tradable trinket or two.

I drifted from object to object at first, just touching things with sweat-tipped fingers as a way to taint and take hold of them — to loose them from their owner — but ever more slowly, for I soon found that Falcon’s room was ingeniously rigged with exploding, trip-lever booby traps. He’d filled ordinary rum bottles on his shelf with liquid explosives (each detonated by a pull-friction fuse in the cork), and two of his calabash pipes had stems packed with gunpowder. Also he kept all the ship’s weapons in his cabin under lock and key. These security measures (or perhaps they spoke of Falcon’s insecurity) I expected, but not what I found next. His biggest crates of plunder from every culture conceivable, which he covered with tarp at the rear of the room, were wrenched open, spilling onto the sloping floor bird-shaped Etruscan vases, Persian silk prayer carpets, and portfolios of Japanese paintings on rice paper. Temple scrolls I found, precious tablets, and works so exotic to my eyes that Falcon’s crew of fortune hunters could have taken them only by midnight raids and murder. Slowly, it came to me, like the sound of a stone plunked into a pond, that he had a standing order from his financiers, powerful families in New Orleans who underwrote the Republic, to stock Yankee museums and their homes with whatever of value was not nailed down in the nations he visited. To bring back slaves, yes, but to salvage the best of their war-shocked cultures too.

More carefully, then, I moved on, slipping a few doubloons down the front of my blouse, and even more into the crotch of my breeches. The moon’s pull on waves beneath us rocked the ship so suddenly I was thrown off balance and cracked my head on a crossbeam. Then I found his chart table with my kneecap. After striking a match, I saw his journal winged open to pages written in the cramped yet even script we associate with scriveners, each page more unusual than the last, revealing in this age of tepid personalities a Faustian man of powerful loves, passions, hatreds: a creature of preposterous, volatile contradictions. From what I was able to piece together, the nation was but a few hours old when Ebenezer Falcon was born, its pulpits and work places and pubs buzzing with talk of what the new social order should be. He was the only child of a close-mouthed Nantucket minister, one of the Sons of Liberty, and a pale, lonely woman of polite education who could discuss with her husband neither the books she loved nor theater, politics or her past in the colonies. Therefore, she poured stories about El Dorado and the Fountain of Youth, her feelings and fantasies into Ebenezer. She placed maps before him, and music boxes; like most doting mothers of this sort, she lived vicariously through her son. For his part, Falcon grew up determined to outperform his father (and most other men) and bring her gifts from all the lands she would never see. He was that sort of son. Aye, small enough to miss in a crowd, but with the bantam spirit for fighting and overcompensating that many men of slight stature possess. Her death when he was fifteen, off on his first stint as a cabin boy, changed nothing; he, like the fledgling republic itself, felt expansive, eager to push back frontiers, even to slide betimes into bullying others and taking, if need be, what was not offered. Needless to say, he made enemies. Under another name, one of his several aliases, he was wanted for murder or treason in three states. The first charge was produced by a duel at daybreak over gambling debts in Philadelphia; the second by a proposition he had made during the last war to Anthony Merry, the British minister in Washington, to divide the western region of the continent into empires separate from the United States, one of which the skipper hoped to shape himself, establishing there not a kingdom — for he hated men like George III — but a true American utopia, a dream nurtured by more than one man after the Revolution. By nature he was anti-British, and anti-Jeffersonian as well after the ill-planned Embargo Act that threw seamen and shipbuilders out of work, and he agreed more than any sane man should with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s devilish idea that social conflict and war were, in the Kantian sense, a structure of the human mind. These feelings he shared only with a few co-conspirators who had served with him under Captain William Bathbridge when their ship, the Constitution, engaged the British frigate Jaya off the coast of Brazil and battered her into submission. These were friends injured, as he was in that battle, and passed over for commissions. Embittered, they saw the war against England as mismanaged, an embarrassing study in military blunders so astonishingly stupid (the nation did nothing to upgrade its fleet, so merchantmen with muzzle-loading cannons strapped on their decks single-handedly took on the world’s greatest navy) that the only sane course for common sailors who valued their skin was to escape being used as cannon fodder and to profit as best they could from international confusion. As it turned out, the time for slaving was good, boosted by the South’s cotton boom after planters adopted Whitney’s cotton gin and the demand for Negro slaves doubled. No matter that in 1808 the trade was outlawed. Like so many others with a seaworthy ship and crew of grumbling tars disillusioned by their country’s inability to keep the seas free from piracy and British impressment, Falcon turned to piracy himself, then to a contraband market that many these days served clandestinely. In other words, in a dangerous world, a realm of disasters, a place of grief and pain, a sensible man made himself dangerous, more frightening than all the social and political “accidents” that might befall him. He was, in a way, a specialist in survival. A magister ludi of the Hard Life.

The man who emerged in these journal entries possessed a few of the solitary virtues and the entire twisted will of Puritanism: a desire to achieve perfection; the loneliness, self-punishment, and bouts of suicide this brings; and a profound disdain for anyone who failed to meet his nearly superhuman standards. He attributed his knack for survival in uncertain times to a series of exercises he’d developed, written in Latin, French, and Greek — for he thought simultaneously in all three languages — under the heading “Self-Reliance.”

Outside, shoe leather struck the deck near Falcon’s door. Someone coughed, then cursed the skipper safely since he was not there, and I recognized his voice as that of the boatswain, Matthew McGaffin. Long seconds passed while McGaffin pissed on Falcon’s door, expelling the sea within himself; then he moved drunkenly on, and I read of our captain’s personal regimen — training himself to read six lines of any book in one snap, to work while others slept, to withstand extremes of heat and cold in case of shipwreck, to find everything in his cabin blindfolded, to ignore pain, to live on as little as a single biscuit, and to do calisthenics to strengthen his eyes and make bifocals unnecessary. Culture, in his view, came from an Icarian, causa sui impulse I found difficult to decipher. Not surprisingly, he saw himself as profoundly misunderstood, his deeds as terribly underrated. According to one day-old notation, the demands he made on others had someone plotting to kill him — he suspected first Squibb, then Cringle — by dropping arsenic and thallium sulfate into his dinner, though this could simply be the mistrust of an unpopular captain who kept knives concealed in every cabin, and whose imagination, I swear on this, was artistically limited to the finely wrought workmanship of pistols, the blunt simplicity of well-balanced, hand-crafted weapons. Maybe the reason for this was his being a natural marksman. From birth he’d lacked binocular vision. All his life he’d been squinting shut his left eye, so that when someone put a pistol in his hand at eighteen, he naturally sighted his targets and began blowing them away effortlessly. Yet, for all this obsession with survival, he had the air of a man who desperately wanted to die, which made his position on ship — his power over the others — all the more frightening.

Few mates wanted to share his company. Some nights he would step up timidly behind a circle of joking men, there in Bangalang, and instantly feel them stiffen, grow silent, then shuffle off to other business. Or he would hover at the periphery of his foremast hands as they worked, fingers shoved into his waistcoat like a new boy at school, hoping they would invite him into their banter about work and women. But no one did. They knew better. They were common folk. Most could not read, in contrast to Falcon, a polyhistor who spent twenty hours a week pouring over old tomes when the weather was fair — this, because as captain he could not bear having anyone, especially his first mate, correct him. He and Cringle argued bitterly, of course, about his pushing the crew too hard. Some nights their shouting in Falcon’s quarters could be heard by all on watch. It became clear, by and by, that as in a house divided at the helm where both parents bicker, the crew benefited by keeping the officers at odds. If Falcon denied extra rations, Cringle might approve them. If Falcon brushed off a lighthand’s complaints of feeling poorly, the mate might let him lie abed. Still, the skipper needed an audience. Try as he might, he could not win what he wanted most once. We landed in Africa: the loyalty of his crew. Thus, he had few allies. Only hypocritical lickspittles like Nathaniel Meadows, who smiled in his face for favors and bad-mouthed him behind his back. As you might expect, the crew was perpetually angry and dissatisfied. What was odd in this was that it wasn’t their anger at all — it was Falcon’s. His emotions permeated the ship like the smell of rum and rotting wood, and these feelings — as is always true of groups confined together in small quarters, or of couples — the men picked up, believing the directionless rage they felt to be their own. All this explained (for me) Falcon’s web work of traps, the spring-released darts coated with curare. But little else, for in his concluding entry he spoke of plans to purchase forty Allmuseri tribesmen and something else Ahman-de-Bellah lost five servants capturing, a colossus he felt he could sell for a king’s ransom in Europe. Of this creature, he wrote no more, only noting he could not bring it aboard until the Republic’s carpenters reinforced leg-irons and planking in the hold.

Standing there, peering at these pages to make sure I’d read them right, feeling as though I had fallen into another man’s nightmare, and sweating in the heat of his locked room since no air was circulating, I was so absorbed I failed to hear the doorlatch turn and became aware of company only when air rushed in suddenly, altering the room’s pressure and clogging my left inner ear. My right had a ringing sound. The edges of my eyes felt blurred. Then just as suddenly the sensation was gone and I heard a shrill, adenoidal voice that swallowed most of its soft consonants say, “Whatever you’re lookin’ to steal, ’tis gone.”

“Cap’n,” says I, “this isn’t what it looks like. All I wanted was a lantern. I guess I made a mistake.”

“ ’Deed you have.”

Silhouetted as he was, his wild hair like rope yarn, skin drier than scales, and beard nearly an ell from top to bottom, his face looked, so help me, like five miles of bad Louisiana road. Rum came reeking, like a slap, off his clothing. A gun hung low in his belt. Yet his eyes were in-turned, icy, as he pushed by me into the room, swaying on his feet like a damaged rig, drunk and barely registering my presence at all. He lowered his rump onto the cushion of his chair, one hand squeezing the armrest, the other pressed against his chest; then he lifted his chin slightly, to the left and away from me, to let a belch of volcanic proportions bubble free. “Light a candle, please. And bring me that jug in the corner and a clean cup — bring one for yourself too.” Instantly, I felt ill, but hastened to obey, each step I took causing the doubloons in my crotch to jingle. By rights, he could have me birched or keelhauled or lashed to the capstan bar. But even worse than that, I realized he might lecture me again, beginning as he often did with a personal anecdote that might go on forever, embellishing each line of dialogue and taking every part in the story for my instruction. Even worse, he might decide to demonstrate esoteric Chinese jointlocks he’d learned while living for a year in King Miu village, using me as his hypothetical opponent in lessons that resulted in my neck aching for days thereafter. Carefully, I poured him a cup of merry-go-down. Then I took a step back, gauging my distance from the door.

“Shall I leave now, sir? I’ve found the lantern.”

“D’you now? A lantern, was it? And nothin’ else?”

“On my word.”

Color was climbing high in Falcon’s neck and face. His exhalations were loud, pursive, and again he pressed his palm against his middle, as though mashing down some deep, recurring pain or intestinal burn he’d somehow learned to live with. His face ritched left in a frown. “You weren’t heah to murder me in my sleep and jump ship?”

“No! Of course not, sir!”

“Six men tried that tonight on shore. Not an hour ago, Mr. Calhoun.” His glass empty, he took the jug from me, lifted it and splashed more rum straight down his throat, his whole body shuddering for a second; then his eyes gave me a rum-soaked glare. “I was unarmed, ’cept for these boots I’m wearin’. D’you like ’em?”

“Yessir, and fine boots they are, Cap’n.”

“Naw, you don’t truly see ’em, boy.” He lifted one foot, pointing the toe toward me. “You’re not supposed to! That’s the point of boots like these. The toes are reinforced with steel plates. I’m not a big man, as you may have noticed, and as a lad I was bullied by taller boys. ’Deed, I was. Nary a day passed in my childhood that somebody didn’t single me out for a beatin’ or some cruel jest. Nearly broke me mum’s heart, that did, but I’ll tell you true: Nowadays when I kick a swab’s shins he seldom walks again. I advise you to fix yourself a pair of such useful boots for the voyage back. Have you got a pistol?”

“Nossir.”

“Then we must find one for you.” From among the contents of his chest Falcon selected a 45-percussion Kentucky pistol. “Lovely, isn’t it? I’ve adjusted the sights, added precision rifling in the barrel, and damned if this beauty don’t feature one of my own concoctions. See how heavy the handle is? There’s a magnet inside. It locks down the trigger so no man kin fire it, or snatch it from you, who isn’t wearin’ magnetized rings such as I wear, even when I sleep.” Falcon unscrewed from his third finger, right hand, a metal band, pushed it on my finger, then snapped around my waist a holster of his own design. “You’ll notice,” says he, stepping back to study me, “that spare ammunition fits into three pouches on the sides and the small of your back. The holster has a thumb-break snap, so you kin draw back with one smooth motion to push away your blouse. From now on you’d do well to follow a formula I’ve developed. Every few seconds pat yourself: knife, guns, keys, in that order, to make sure you’ve got everything. A light touch now and then is all it takes; then it’ll become instinctive. I’d advise you not to let any of the blacks get too close when we bring ’em on board—’specially the women. They’ll get right up in your face — they love to do that when talkin’—so keep ’em at arm’s length, with your holster facin’ away from ’em. Don’t eat or drink anythin’ they give you. If you have to shoot one, use small shot ’stead of ball. ’Tis a wee bit more merciful. And when we bring ’em up from below for exercise, work in pairs — Cringle and Meadows, for example. Squibb keeps an eye on Fletcher. And you and me watch out for one another.” His eyes slid up, blinking. “You’re not gonna blow your damned foot off, are you?”

“I think I’ll get the hang of it. But, Cap’n, why do I need all this?”

He began to undress slowly, the moonlight and candles doubling his shadow against the wall. Falcon’s buttonless blouse gave him trouble when he tried pulling it over his enormous head; its collar caught under his beard, leaving him hooded for a moment (I believe I could have shot him then, and I even pointed the pistol at his head to see how this might feel) with both his arms helplessly in the air. “Give me a hand here, Mr. Calhoun. I hope you can see that I trust you. I need a colored mate to be my eyes and ears once the Africans are on board. Same with the crew. I want to know what each man’s thinkin’.” Against my better instincts to gun him down right there, I helped the skipper pull his shirt free. Now he was dressed for bed in his nightshirt and steel-toed boots. “Once weekly I’ll want a full report. If there’s any talk, you’ll tell me.”

“Be your Judas?” I asked. “A spy?”

His eyes filled with hurt, slipped to a corner of the room, as if the correct word he wanted was there. “Nay, a friend! I need someone to keep his eyes open and tell me of any signs of trouble.” He lay back on his bed, drinking straight from the jug now, and began bellyaching more to himself than to me about his officers, bitterly relating personal things about each I never dreamed of and did not wish to know. He was clearly breaking confidences, betraying every one of them in a voice so venomous I wanted to cover my ears. I felt uncomfortable. More: I felt unclean as he described in detail all the dirt and gossip, weakness and shortcomings, of every mother’s son on board. Everyone, it seemed, had a secret. A shadow. A buried past so scandalous that I was nervous for the rest of the night. Why was he saying these things? I could only speculate that something was seriously wrong with the ship — he never specified what — and his solution was the oldest and simplest in the world. Divide and conquer. Poison each man’s perception of the other. By making me hear of each man’s faults (I had no choice) he subtly compromised me, made me something of a betrayer too, and I sighed and shut my eyes, thinking of Isadora, who would say these things were sent to try us. Moments later he was asleep. I leaned over him, wanting to empty into his head the pistol he’d given me, but found myself transfixed by the crude ring twinned on his left hand and mine, as if, heaven help me, we were married, and the very thing I’d escaped in New Orleans had, here off the unlighted coast of Senegambia, overtaken me.

Sleep and I were strangers that night. All that evening, moaning and sharp cries such as only Negro women can make drifted on the wind from the warehouse, where Africans living, dying, and dead were thrown together. Hoping to steady my thoughts, twisted worse than rigging after a storm, I shook awake Squibb, there on deck, and asked him about our cargo. Sailors, I know, can be careless with the truth, but he told me the first caravan of Allmuseri were being separated for the morrow’s sale: husbands from their wives, children from their parents, the infirm from the healthy, each parting like an amputation or flaying of skin, for as a clan-state they were as close-knit as cells in the body. “First, Ahman-de-Bellah will have his people shave off their body hair. That’s the first humiliation, makin’ ’em smooth as babies from the womb, like mebbe they was born yestiday. He’ll have them bathed, soaked in palm oil to make their black hides glisten like leather, then they’ll get a feast to fatten ’em for tomorrow’s buyers.”

In the darkness I said to the shadowy lump he was on deck, “Like cattle?”

“Like Allmuseri,” he replied. “They’ll get what Africans are used to eatin’. Roots like, cooked green or else dried and made into flour, then mashed or stewed into porridge. They’ll get a tasty sauce with it too, and probably some honey beer made from maize to wash it down.” He lifted his hips a little, then broke wind gently, a faint ripple of sound as if he’d tightened his sphincters to soften the sound of it. “We should eat so well, darlin’.”

“Squibb!” shouted Cringle. “If you do that again, you pig, I’ll make you sleep below, or on the other side of the ship!”

“Pardon me, sir, but that’s Nature, yuh know. A man shouldn’t keep it inside, and that. ’Tain’t healthy, me wife Maud used to say. It’s bad for the heart, she says. Why, when we first got married Maud usta say—”

“I don’t care what she said! I’m not your bloody wife, man!”

“Aye”—he winked my way—“thank God fer that.”

Quietly, under his breath, Cringle repeated one of his Scriptural passages, then rolled over and slept, as did Squibb, flat on his back with his parrot on his belly, like a sea gull atop a whale in a tropical current.

Next day I joined them in the landing party that went ashore. The Republic lay at anchor a distance of ten cables from the fort, with McIntosh at the helm, and slip ropes on her cables, the ship ready to spread canvas and sail if for some reason Bogha betrayed us. By the time the last Allmuseri caravan arrived it was full dark. A balmy night. Squibb and I bloated ourselves on beer in the town square, tossed coins to beggars crippled at birth by their parents to make them better panhandlers, and watched one turbaned harem girl whose figure and veiled face filled me with such longing that I felt as if my life’s blood splashed to the ground each time she sashayed by, so fascinating was this girl, and so long had I felt coltish and unwillingly celibate at sea. I knew my hungry gaze must have burned her, for her brown fingers, long and thin with bones frail as a bird’s, gently brushed my hand the fourth and fifth times she refilled my mug. By that time my heart was bouncing off my ribs, and I barely saw two African boys sprint past us, announcing the approach of a caravan from the interior. I stood, felt unsteady, then sat again, hearing gunshots from afar. Behind us the fort’s many guns replied, so thunderously the air shook. Abruptly, all was confusion. Cries went out from every merchant. From every bazaar the coffle’s arrival was cheered. I looked around for the lass, but she was gone. I stood to see better. Squibb yanked me back to my seat.

“Better yuh keep your noodle down, Illinois.” He was instantly sober, his grip on me tight as a winch. “Or yuh’ll be sold too. Stolen right off ship, I’m sayin’, and pressed into a gang. It’s happened before.” He tugged a little at my sleeve. “These blokes don’t know you’re a sailor. And they don’t care.”

He needn’t have told me twice. I squeezed back a little into the shadows, watching Bogha’s servants light palm-oil lamps atop the fort’s walls. Cautiously I eased back into the crowd to see better, sweat streaming inside my blouse, puddling at the back of my spine above my belt. I sighted Cringle off to one side and, sidling up behind him, caught him talking to himself, tapping his chin with his pipestem and appraising the Allmuseri tribesmen shackled in twos at their ankles. As I’d heard, they were a remarkably old people. About them was the smell of old temples. Cities lost when Europe was embryonic. Looking at them, at their dark skin soft as black leather against knee-length gowns similar to Greek chitons, you felt they had run the full gamut of civilized choices, or played through every political and social possibility and now had nowhere to go. A tall people, larger even than Watusi; their palms were blank, bearing no lines. No fingerprints. But all Allmuseri, I had been told, had a second brain, a small one at the base of their spines. A people so incapable of abstraction no two instances of “hot” or “cold” were the same for them, this hot porridge today being so specific, unique, and bound to the present that it had only a nominal resemblance to the hot porridge of yesterday. Physically, they seemed a synthesis of several tribes, as if longevity in this land had made them a biological repository of Egyptian and sub-Saharan eccentricities or — in the Hegelian equation — a clan distilled from the essence of everything that came earlier. Put another way, they might have been the Ur-tribe of humanity itself. I’d never seen anyone like them. Or felt such antiquity in the presence of others; a clan of Sphaeriker. Indeed, what I felt was the presence of countless others in them, a crowd spun from everything this vast continent had created.

Past the barbican to the broad piazza of the receiving house, Ahman-de-Bellah, a froglike, vast-bearded Arab who was notorious for drawing out the brains of his enemies with an iron hook, herded the Allmuseri to stand before Bogha and Captain Falcon, who met Bellah with the cracking-fingers greeting of the coast. There, off to one side of the trees, his people put up their tents, then forced the Allmuseri toward the warehouses.

“Poor bastards,” said Cringle, seeing me squeezing my fists and unable to swallow. “Their villages were destroyed by famine.” He banged his large calabash pipe on the Bible he carried, bound in pressed pigskin, to shake loose the dottle. “Ahman-de-Bellah took them without a fight. Their rivers dried up. The drought’s lasted a decade, I believe, which means they’ll never survive the voyage back, if that’s what you’re wondering. The skipper won’t find three in ten healthy enough to spend two months in the hold. Better,” said he, “to be dead in a ditch than in their shoes.”

“Peter, what’s happening on ship?”

“How do you mean?”

“The captain, he gave me a talk I cannot untangle. He asks me to help him—”

The mate shook his head two, three times. “Stay away from him, Rutherford. He’s mad”—Cringle touched two fingers to his left temple—“and if you hope to see New Orleans again, the best thing is to separate yourself from Falcon now.” The muscles around his eyes knotted. “He will sink this ship and take us with him. He doesn’t want to return. Did you know that? That’s why he goes to sea. Haven’t you noticed how nothing is ever right for him? How even when he jokes, it is a jeering kind of humor? No one knows this, but he’s been married thirty years and he still plays with himself. His wife, Molly, a beldam if ever there was one, makes him wash his hands and dingus before they fornicate. She picks her nose when they make love, she’s that bored. Little wonder he doesn’t want to return to her. When she is angry, I hear, she sews all his clothing together. In their wedding portrait, which I have seen, she is thin enough to be a model for El Greco. Now she’s dumpled enough to pose for Peter Paul Rubens. And that’s the least of his complaints about life. He is vain. And therefore self-pitying. And vicious, lad. He keeps a list of personal affronts, insults and abuses he’s received, or believes he’s received, and dates them — he reviews them when he’s drunk, keeps them alive, and always watches for a man’s weaknesses once he’s signed on. He knows mine is Tommy, that I cannot stand his treatment of the boy.” Cringle stood pitched forward as if in a stiff wind, a habit he’d formed at sea. “Out there, on the ocean, in Africa, or during some ’adventure,’ he hopes something will do for him what he cannot do himself.”

“Then you’re saying we won’t get home?”

“Not with what he’s bringing aboard.”

“The Allmuseri?”

“No,” said Cringle, “the other thing. .”

“What?”

“I don’t know what it is! It has no name. All I know is that it belongs to the Allmuseri and has no business in our world.” He looked away, out toward the distant ships whose dactyloid masts favored a dark stretch of winter trees on the water, then away again. Ever since we’d come ashore he had been twitchy as a squirrel. So tense any clock he came close to ran, by my reckoning, forty seconds faster. “Are you with me and the few of our chaps who stand against him?”

“I guess, I don’t know—”

“Decide soon,” he said. “Falcon has friends here, but we will act as soon as we put out to sea.”

Then he was off, called away by Captain Falcon to help in the hellish work of inspecting the cavity-ridden teeth, shaved skulls, and stippled privates of four men for whom the skipper paid 100 bars each (a bar being worth half a dollar, a pound of powder, or a fathom of ordinary cloth); then the women over twenty-five (Bellah gave Falcon a 25 percent reduction on these); and finally the children who, like trout, had to measure four feet four inches or they would be thrown back into the bush. And Falcon was furious. Ahman-de-Bellah had passed at least one doctored black off on him, an old man medicated with some unknown drug that bloated his skin. He oozed oniony-smelling sweat from powder treatments. When Falcon pressed a finger against his teeth, bubbles of pus oozed from the man’s gums. Lemon juice had been swabbed along his body to give it a glossy appearance, but it made no difference. He died, delirious, before Falcon could get his money back. The captain, of course, was no paragon of honesty. The cotton bales he used for barter were hollow at their centers, the whiskey carefully watered down, and the gunpowder was of an inferior stock. Captain Falcon grew edgy, I guess, that this deceit might be discovered, and kept us busy most of the night transferring his cargo from the boats to the ship’s belly. In his “rough” log (the one a ship’s master edited to produce a more polished book for his employers), which I would see later, he wrote:


3,500 hides

$1,750;


19 large and prime ivory teeth

1,560


Gold

2,500


600 pounds of small ivory

320


15 tons of rice

600


40 slaves

1,600


36 bullocks

360


Sheep, goats, vegetables, butter

100


900 lbs beeswax

95




Total caravan value

$8,885


The skipper’s share or “lay” of the profits was a handsome 25 percent of the take. The crew received a pitiful twelve dollars per month, a thing increasingly offensive to most hands when talk of Falcon’s mysterious find — loaded last of all onto the ship in a crate big enough to carry a bull elephant, its price omitted from his log — moved, like an electric shock, from one mate to another. Added to which, and perhaps worst of all, our ship’s carpenters grumbled of water in the frowzy hold. Once the Allmuseri saw the great ship and the squalid pit that would house them sardined belly-to-buttocks in the orlop, with its dead air and razor-teethed bilge rats, each slave forced to lie spoon-fashion on his left side to relieve the pressure against his heart-after seeing this, the Africans panicked. Believe it or not, a barker told us they thought we were barbarians shipping them to America to be eaten. They saw us as savages. In their mythology Europeans had once been members of their tribe — rulers, even, for a time — but fell into what was for these people the blackest of sins. The failure to experience the unity of Being everywhere was the Allmuseri vision of Hell. And that was where we lived: purgatory. That was where we were taking them — into the madness of multiplicity — and the thought of it drove them wild. A one-handed Allmuseri thief attacked Cringle with a belaying pin and was shot by the mate. (I should explain that lopping off a thief’s right hand was this tribe’s punishment for stealing, because the Allmuseri ate with their right hands and wiped their arses with their left; by depriving this man of his right hand, they forced him into the indignity of eating and scraping off excrement with the selfsame limb.) A woman pitched her baby overboard into the waters below us. At least two men tried to follow, straining against their chains, and this sudden flurry of resistance brought out the worst in Falcon, if you can imagine that. He beat them until blood came. The male slaves he double-ironed, removing the ladder to the hold and lowering them by ropes so none could climb back up. Women he had sleep in the cabins, young children were jummixed on deck in the longboats beneath sheets of tarpaulin, and if any Negro even looked as if he was thinking of rebellion, that man was to be birched and taught the sting of noose and yardarm.

It was then my hair started going white. Unable to watch, I repaired to sit alone in the cookroom, my head in my hands and back against an oven of such antiquity it was usually hotter on one side than the other, so that Squibb’s tipsycakes (so called since he laced them with rum) rose crooked and once they were frosted the top layer would gradually slide off. Clearly, nothing on the Republic was as it should be, but it behooves me for the sake of my own character, shabby as this is, to explain how murderous my thoughts became after taking part in the captivity of the Allmuseri. I wondered if the blacks who’d traveled with Balboa and Cortez hated their leaders as much as I did Ebenezer Falcon, if Estéban, the legendary explorer from Morocco, felt as cool toward his companions, three Spanish officers, as I sometimes did toward Cringle, who would never in this life see himself, his own blighted history, in the slaves we intended to sell, or wonder, as I did, how in God’s name I could go on after this? How could I feel whole after seeing it? How could I tell my children of it without placing a curse on them forever? How could I even dare to have children in a world so senseless? How could. .

“Mr. Calhoun?”

“Here, sir.”

“There’s one hour till daylight.” Falcon stuck his head into the hatchway. “I’ve new orders for you.”

I stood, brushing off the seat of my trousers. “Sir?”

“We’re about to weigh anchor. You’re in charge of feeding the Africans in messes of ten at nine in the morning and four, and give ’em half a pint of water three times a day. Squibb handles the crew as before, but no one is to feed the new cargo, or come near it, except me.”

“No? Might I ask what it eats?”

“Don’t ask,” says he. “Nothin’ from your supplies, so you needn’t worry.”

That, of course, was a lie.

There was plenty of reason for worry. Captain Falcon revealed to no one the contents of the mysterious crate brought by raft and lowered below by Bogha’s servants into a storeroom behind the stemson through a hole cut into the deckbeams, then boarded over. Ere the skipper brought the Republic about and headed out to sea, a few of the crew, myself among them, wagered five bob on what his find might be. Squibb claimed it was the Missing Link between man and monkey; Cringle said it was most probably a nearly extinct lizard, maybe intelligent, that would have scholars from Cambridge to Queen’s College rewriting natural history; and Meadows, to frighten us all, reported that he had heard someone at the fort say it had fallen from the sky near the Allmuseri villages, which whilom were tucked away in the bush between Cape Lopez and the Congo River and had been protected by them for centuries. We drew lots to see who would be the first to sneak below while the captain slept and wrench open a plank to peer inside. Tommy O’Toole, the cabin boy, pulled the shortest length of string. He shinnied down a rope reef-knotted round his waist so we could pull him up. After ten minutes Squibb tugged and found the rope broken. We were about to lower him when the boy crawled back on deck with only half his mind — or could be it was twice the mind he had had before. His skin was cold, all one bluish color as if he had been baptized in the Deep. His face was blank as a pan. And his words, as his mouth spread and closed like a fish’s, were strange: a slabber of Bantu patois, Bushman, Cushitic, and Sudanic tongues, and your guess where he learned them is as good as mine. His eyes glowed like deck lights, less solid orbs of color, if you saw them up close, than splinters of luciferin indigo that, like an emulsion, had caught the camphor of a blaze once before them.

With Cringle’s waistcoat shawled over his shoulders for warmth, and holding a horn of rum in his hands, he found a space in his sporadic madness to tell how he’d come within three feet of forcing open a door in the crate after the rope broke but was stopped by the density of air around it, a natural defense of the thing inside, which did not so much occupy a place as it bent space and time around itself like a greatcoat. He could force his bare feet to go no farther. This was just as well, for dark coils of the creature’s defecation were everywhere, slithering with insects, worms, and sluglike beings that apparently lived inside its bowels. All at once, the crate rocked gently as something crab-walked from one side of the box to the other, scritching its nails on the walls, muttering to itself like a devil chained inside a mountain for a thousand years, its voice gently syllabled and honeyed, as sacramental as a siren’s, or peradventure its very breathing was a chant so full of love and werelight, vatic lament and Vedic sorrow, that the boy’s heart bade him listen more. He slapped his left hand over his mouth, clamped his right hand over the left, and bent down on one knee, this being a brain-rinsing song the boy somehow felt he knew. Down in that lichened chamber, down in this shrunken air scattered with galleywood and bosun’s stores, down in a vault swimming with imponderables, he forgot where he was and why he had come: a sea change nicer than any of us knew, he said; and then the creature’s lay whistled from his own lips like the sweetest of fluids whelming through his windpipes, and he was inside the luminous darkness of the crate, himself chained now yet somehow unchained from all else, sadly watching young Tommy O’Toole, sensing as if through the lotic skin of a stingray or crab, and they were a single thing: singer, listener, and song, light spilling into light, the boundaries of inside and outside, here and there, today and tomorrow, obliterated as in the penetralia of the densest stars, or at the farthest hem of Heaven.

When he had finished, his eyes ashimmer after peering into the heart of things hidden and his body swaying to music none but he could hear — after this, there was no sound forward and aft except the creaking of rigging loud as a bonfire. “Blimey.” A deck hand ran his fingers through his hair. “It eats people, that’s what it eats.” Squibb was tight as usual, trying to stand erect, weaving on both feet, tilting first left, then right. He lifted the cross from his neck and, his eyes closed, kissed it. “Saints preserve us.” A few chaps shivered, and not simply from the wind’s chill gnawing through our coats. All could see the ship’s boy would never come about. He was lost to us.

“You can belay that kind of talk,” said Cringle, buttoning his coat up on the boy. “I take it you’ve work to do, so be at it. Prompt, if you please.” His arm waisting Tommy, Cringle assured him he would come to no harm. He promised to erase his name from the work roster and, being the sort of quartermaster given to rising at night to pull back the covers on others who’d kicked them off when sleeping, fearing they might be chilled, he led him to his own berth, which the ship’s boy was to have for the rest of our voyage home.

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