Entry, the fourth JUNE 28, 1830

Homeward bound on May 30, we left the fort with the Republic leaking like a sieve, hoping again to cross the Flood, but this time with the sides of the ship bloated, scorched by the sun, and with barnacles clotting her stern-piece. She reached the latitude of 20° south, and longitude 10° west, sailing full and by without serious mishap on North Atlantic trade winds until on the fifteenth day the weather turned squally. Pellets of rain hammered the sails so heavily Captain Falcon was obliged to shorten the main topsail and let the ship sail under bare timber. “Nothing for you to worry about,” he told me. “Just see that you and Squibb double-lash the longboats and secure the galley.” But his voice wobbled, and I knew he was not telling me the worst. It was the stormy season of the year off West Africa. And during the bleakest nights when curdling fog rolled in, obscuring the stars and sky, making precise calculations of our position impossible, when the wind wheeled unexpectedly from NW to NNW, twirling us like a matchbox or toy ship of balsa wood — those nights, Falcon and the few men still loyal to him stayed awake through each watch in the skipper’s cabin, sipping coffee laced with rum, crimped foreheads tilted together over maps and compasses spinning widdershins. Younger lighthands lost their appetites. Tommy, relieved of all his duties, couldn’t hold down as much as a sea biscuit, and neither could I, mainly because Squibb and I cooked the slop and I saw him spit into it when he was angry with the crew. Older sailors swore, suddenly got religion (there are no atheists at sea, as they say), and fingered their crosses, whispering prayers for fair weather, and scheming all the time — anyone could see this — on ways to seize the ship and steal her cargo.

Dependent as we were on each other, hardship brought out small kindnesses as well as cruelty, even from the most unlikely people, among them Nathaniel Meadows, a barber-surgeon who looked, for all the talk of his being an ax-murderer, Biblically meek: a crankled little stretchbelly with fishy eyes and big scarlet ears, who kept his hair slicked back with seal’s oil. He had no chin to speak of, his jaws dropping straight down into his neck. He smelled like the dogs on ship. He superstitiously carried a clump of Liverpool sod in his trousers when at sea, a habit shared by many old salts; but unlike anyone I have ever known he had the unsettling habit of blinking rapidly when he spoke. There was a space between his teeth, which gave his s’s a faint whistling sound when he pronounced them, as if he’d swallowed a flute but got it only halfway down his trachea. Some deck hands said his mother had been frightened by a field mouse when she was carrying him. That wasn’t hard to believe. He looked like a titmouse in human form. And Meadows had no chest at all — that is, in profile his body curved like a question mark, and you’d associate his tamed, quiet manner with, say, reformed alcoholics, or men who’re recovering from a stroke. Meekness aside, I still gave him a wide berth. “ ’Ello, mate. ’Bout to do my laundry, I am,” says he to me. “Just wonderin’ if you need anythin’ washed, Mr. Calhoun.”

His arms loaded down with the wash of others, he approached me by the spanker-boom, where I was biting into the last of my breakfast, a biscuit going bad, on the verge of molding, you know, visibly all right on the outside but, once I sank my teeth in, it tasted as if it was loaded with dust. I tossed it to one of the children in a jolly boat, then put down my kid (eating tub), and stood to the sound of sudden growling behind Meadows’s legs. He’d brought one of the dogs with him, a half-starved mongrel who apparently wanted something dark to chew on. I drew back.

“ ’Ey, don’t mind him,” said Meadows. “ ’E’s just hungery.”

“I can tell.” His dog starting sniffling at my crotch, poking his nose between my legs, which convinced me it might be time to do my laundry after all.

“You want your shirt washed or wot?”

I slipped it off and placed it on top of his pile, noticing there one of Cringle’s blouses and the ragged cloths a few of the Allmuseri used to cover themselves. “Meadows,” says I through clogged sinuses, “you’re scrubbing clothes for the slaves too?”

“Aye, might’s well. If you’re goin’ to wash, ’tis better to do a full load, wouldn’t you say? Saves on soap ’n’ water.”

He was one to save on supplies, I remembered, being the sort of man who mashed together slivers of soap left by others to make a new, lopsided bar. Watching him leave, I scolded myself for distrusting him and wished the others might be as helpful as Meadows, especially when it came to lightening the suffering of the Africans. As I said, the ship made a great deal of water. Night and day, Falcon kept the pumps working. Even so, the slaves still lay in a foot of salt water in a hold blacker than the belly of Jonah’s whale, forced below by the boatswain’s cat-o’-nine-tails. Some rested on the laps of others, down there in scummy darkness foul with defecation, slithering with water snakes. Chumps of firewood were given to each for a pillow, which later proved to be a mistake. Up above, the skipper had us cut apertures and grate hatches and bulkheads to provide better air for the Allmuseri, who only came topside (the men) for a few hours each day to have their hair and nails shorn to prevent them from injuring themselves during the fighting for space that inevitably broke out each night. At nine o’clock sharp each morning, when the weather permitted, a mate named Fletcher trotted them out, made them dance a little to music from the cabin boy’s flute for exercise, then hurried them below again. It was Captain Falcon’s belief that slave insurrections could be prevented if for every ten prisoners one was selected to oversee the others and keep them in line. He issued these shipboard major-domos, one of them named Ngonyama, whom I came to know well those first few weeks, old shirts and tar-splattered trousers, giving them the advantage of being clothed like the crew; they had greater freedom to roam the slippery deck, and Falcon also gave them better food and a few minor tasks such as picking old ropes apart. “The best way to control a rebellious nigger,” said he, “is to give him some responsibility.”

However, few slaving formulas worked with Ngonyama. Dressed he was now, in tarry breeches and a duck frock, which distinguished him from the others, despite the red bead in his right nostril, and he was quiet during our first fortnight at sea, notwithstanding wind that whipped the sails devilishly and the fact that sometimes the sea ran as high as five houses and our forward deck was invisible underwater, a thing that made the other slaves claw and wail all the more. But Ngonyama, I had the feeling, was waiting. He was so quiet sometimes he seemed to blend, then disappear into the background of shipboard life. Quiet and cunning, I’d say, because he was studying everything — everything — we did, and even enlisted my aid in teaching him a smattering of English and explaining how the steerage worked, in exchange for his teaching me Allmuseri. Of all the players who promenade through this narrative, he was easily the most mysterious. At first he could not distinguish any of the white crew individually, and asked me, “How do their families tell them apart?” I suppose he selected me because I was the only Negro on board, though the distance between his people and black America was vast — his people saw whites as Raw Barbarians and me (being a colored mate) as a Cooked one. And his depth perception so differed from mine that when he looked at a portrait of Isadora I carried in my purse, he asked, “Why is her face splotched with smudges?” by which he meant the shadows the artist had drawn under her chin and eyes, for his tribe did not use our sense of perspective but rather the flat, depthless technique of Egyptian art. (He also asked why her nose looked like a conch, if maybe this was a trick of vision too, then saw my anger and dropped the question.)

Sometimes he helped Squibb and me in the cookroom, and the way he carved one of the skipper’s pigs stopped me cold. Me, I never could carve. But Ngonyama, his shoulders relaxed, holding his breath for what seemed hours before he started, fixed his eyes as if he could see through the pig, his right hand gripping the cook’s blade as if it had grown right out of his wrist. It was eerie, you ask me. It seemed, suddenly, as though the galley slipped in time and took on a transparent feel, as if everything round us were made of glass. Ngonyama began to carve. He slipped metal through meat as if it wasn’t there or, leastways, wasn’t solid, without striking bone, and in a pattern I couldn’t follow, without hacking or rending — doing no harm — the blade guided by, I think, a knack that favored the same touch I’d developed as a thief, which let me feel safe tumblers falling a fraction of a second before they dropped, tracing the invisible trellis of muscles, tendons, tissues, until the pig fell apart magically in his hands. He left no knife tracks. Not a trace. The cookroom was as quiet as a tomb when he finished.

“Mirrors!” Squibb whispered to me, stunned. “It’s some kinda heathen trick!”

Yet there was no trick to it. In every fiber of their lives you could sense this same quiet magic. Truth to tell, they were not even “Negroes.” They were Allmuseri. Talking late at night, blue rivulets scudding back and forth on the deck, our eyes screwed up against the weather, Ngonyama unfolded before me like a merchant’s cloth his tribe’s official history, the story of themselves they stuck by. Once they had been a seafaring people, years and years ago, and deposited their mariners in that portion of India later to be called Harappa, where they blended with its inhabitants, the Dravidians, in the days before the Aryans and their juggernauts—“city-destroyers”—leveled the civilization of Mohenjo-Daro overnight. Between 1000 B.C. and 500 B.C. they sailed to Central America on North Equatorial currents that made the voyage from the west coast of Africa to the Caribbean only thirty days, bringing their skills in agriculture and metallurgy to the Olmec who, to honor these African mariners, stamped their likeness in stone and enshrined in song their prowess as warriors. Specifically, their martial-art techniques resembled Brazilian capoeira. Over time these elegant moves, which Ngonyama taught me when we had time for rest, had become elements in their ceremonial dance.

I must leave their fighting arts for later, because more fascinating than their globe-spanning travels in antiquity and their style of self-defense was the peculiar, gnomic language the Allmuseri practiced. When Ngonyama’s tribe spoke it was not so much like talking as the tones the savannah made at night, siffilating through the plains of coarse grass, soughing as dry wind from tree to tree. Not really a language at all, by my guess, as a melic way of breathing deep from the diaphragm that dovetailed articles into nouns, nouns into verbs. I’m not sure I know what I’m saying now, but Ngonyama told me the predication “is,” which granted existence to anything, had over the ages eroded into merely an article of faith for them. Nouns or static substances hardly existed in their vocabulary at all. A “bed” was called a “resting,” a “robe” a “warming.” Furthermore, each verb was different depending on the nature of the object acted upon, whether it was vegetable, mineral, mammal, oblong or rotund. When Ngonyama talked to his tribesmen it was as if the objects and others he referred to flowed together like water, taking different forms, as the sea could now be fluid, now solid ice, now steam swirling around the mizzenpole. Their written language — these Africans had one — was no less unusual, and of such exquisite limpidity, tone colors, litotes, and contrapletes that I could not run my eyes across it, left to right, without feeling everything inside me relax. It consisted of pictograms. You had to look at the characters, Ngonyama taught me, as you would an old friend you’ve seen many times before, grasping the meaning-and relation to other characters — in a single intuitive snap. It was not, I gathered, a good language for doing analytic work, or deconstructing things into discrete parts, which probably explained why the Allmuseri had no empirical science to speak of, at least not as we understood that term. To Falcon that made them savages. Just the same, it seemed a fitting tongue for the most sought-after blacks in the world.

Compared to other African tribes, the Allmuseri were the most popular servants. They brought twice the price of a Bantu or Kru. According to legend, Allmuseri elders took twig brooms with them everywhere, sweeping the ground so as not to inadvertently step on creatures too small to see. Eating no meat, they were easy to feed. Disliking property, they were simple to clothe. Able to heal themselves, they required no medication. They seldom fought. They could not steal. They fell sick, it was said, if they wronged anyone. As I live, they so shamed me I wanted their ageless culture to be my own, if in fact Ngonyama spoke truly. But who was I fooling? While Rutherford Calhoun might envy certain features of Allmuseri folkways, he could never claim something he had no hand in creating. I respected them too much to insult them this way — particularly one woman and her eight-year-old daughter, Baleka, who’d caught a biscuit I tossed her one day when talking to Meadows. Her mother snatched it away. She studied it like a woman inspecting melons at a public market, her face growing sharp. She smelled it, she tasted it with a tiny nibble, and spat it out the side of her mouth into the sea. Presently, she stumped across the deck and dropped it back onto my lap. Sliding up behind her, half hidden behind Mama’s legs, Baleka stuck out her hand. Her eyes burned a hole in my forehead. Her mother’s finger wagged in my face, and in the little of their language I knew she sniffed that her baby deserved far better than one moldy biscuit. I could only agree. To square things, that night I shared my powdered beef, mustard, and tea with Baleka: a major mistake. Her expectation, and that of Mama, for sharing my every pan of food became an unspoken contract no less binding between us than a handshake. By and by, we were inseparable. This was how Mama wanted it, having decided her child’s survival might depend on staying close to the one crew member who looked most African, asking me to decipher the strange behavior of the whites and intercede on their behalf. Thus, the child stayed at my heels as I spun rope and, when I was on larboard watch by the taffrail, leaned against my legs, looking back sadly toward Senegambia.

Thus we were at five bells in the forenoon of June 11. The wind blew hard, the sea ran high, filled with thunder rumbles and white tendrils of lightning from the southeast. At my post I was for a time hypnotized by tumbling, opaline blades of ocean, by its vortices that were mirrored in me since we were mainly made of Main, by the way — as the mate said — it seemed to be some monster of energy, without start or finish, a shifting cauldron of thalassic force, form superimposed upon form, which grew neither bigger nor smaller, which endlessly spawned all creatures conceivable yet never consumed itself, and contained a hundred kinds of waters, if one could but see them all. . so hypnotized by this theater of transformations my head spun and eyes slipped after staring too long, my belly trembled, and this was the condition I was in when gusts of strong, skirling wind galed and swung the Republic broadside to windward, pointing her back the way we had come. Loose ropes, carpenter’s tools, and unfastened casks of beef flew everywhere like cannon shot, cracking more than a few skulls. The skipper, who’d been sprawled out, stewed to the gills on his cabin floor, clawed his way topside, shouting “Gangway!” and looked wildly around at those awaiting his orders. Said: “Secure all loose gear.” Cringle shouted back that the helm would not respond. “Mr. Fletcher,” ordered Falcon, “see if the cords are entangled.” The sailmaker checked them and made answer that they were not. “Damme,” said Falcon, “she blows hard.” His fingers clenched fishbelly white, then faintly blue, on the helm, and in his state he was a pitiful sight, hunched forward, pulling the wheelr so hard his temples bulged, barely able to stand. The men saw this. His movements were slower than a man’s submerged, like a mime mocking normality. He was that soused, that unsteady on his feet, and said, crestfallen, aware of his condition, “You have to help me here, Mr. Cringle.” And then it was full upon us: a sea hot with anger, running in ranges like the Andes or the Rockies, and be damned if in the topgallant sails I didn’t see forks of blue lightning. The forecastle was hidden behind curtains of spray. The bows were deep in water. At this point, screams came from the hold. With one hand I clung to the foremast, my head pressed in tightly against Baleka, squeezing her close enough to cut off her wind. And fairly windless was I myself. In this squall, some of the deck hands panicked. Ran from their posts, which was wrong, fell, scrambled below to their hammocks and pleaded with their shipmates to strap them down, screamed again. Others tied themselves to gratings, to the yawl, and to each other. “Hard alee.” The wheel spun in the captain’s hands. “Keep her hard to leeward.” Before long the swirling air and sheets of breaching water overwhelmed him. He relinquished the wheel to Cringle and shouted into a hundred-horsepower wind, “Heave to.” For five minutes nothing could be seen of the ship’s hull — only shaking masts rising like a forest above foamy meerschaum, the sky stretched above like a gridelin scar, and the Republic broaching badly in the wind, popping her nails, her boards creaking like those in an old house, a shrinking casket. Cringle’s lips were skinned back against his teeth. “Heave to it is, if you say so, sir.”

Falcon’s face was crabbed. “Are you makin’ sport of me?”

“No — no, sir!”

What came upon us next is not clear. The instant Cringle spoke, the ship swung around with her face to the west, plunging into a trench, as if into Hell, below water columns that broke over us to the height of the crosstrees — two solid walls on either side, held still as when Moses parted the Red Sea. The sun stood still. The moon stayed. My heart stopped. It has never worked exactly right since, because when the roily waves spanked back, shaking the ship to her ribs, I saw two boys catapulted overboard to drown instantly in the shoal. Therewhile, half the Allmuseri children and women — Baleka’s mother among them — five of Falcon’s sheep, his hogs and fowl, were swept from the deck. The larboard quarterboat was torn away to disappear into the swell.

Then—

Miraculously, the wind shifted to the old quarter, the storm passed away, and we were through it as though it all had been a conjurer’s trick. The ship labored back on course, the spell broken, though still the Atlantic thundered. Half the crew ran to the grog room and proceeded to get drunk. Our one Moslem on board dropped to his knees, banged his head on deck hard enough to break bone, and wept, “Inshallah! There is no Majesty and there is no Might save in Allah!” However that might be, three younger lighthands, too frightened to move, lost the power of speech and looked stupefied at the vacant stations where their lost mates had stood. Entangled in the twisted rigging above hung three bodies upside down. Matthew McGaffin, the boatswain, a pig-jawed former circus strong man with a walrus mustache, black eye patch, and a big, hectoring voice, swore the storm proved the ship was cursed by its black chattel and internal cargo. Nathaniel Meadows, shaking, one fist in his mouth to stanch a scream, fouled his breeches. Twice. Without speaking, we all clapped our hands together as one company — thirty-two sopping-wet cutthroats black-toothed rakes traitors drunkards rapscallions thieves poltroons forgers clotpolls sots lobcocks sodomists prison escapees and debauchees simultaneously praying like choirboys, our heads tipped, begging forgiveness after this brush with death in Irish, Cockney, Spanish, and Hindi for a litany of collective sins so long I could not number them. Besides, I was too busy peeking through my fingers and promising God I would be good forever if He would quit playing games like that one. Had it lasted a bit longer, we knew, the ship would have been torn to pieces. More: such storms induced madness in seamen; triggered acute appendicitis, respiratory attacks, and suicide in their aftermath — the sorts of gales you tell your grandchildren about, if you live to see them, when they visit on holidays. Yet, standing hard by me, watching the dripping crew cross themselves and offer their first-born whelps to the priesthood, staring with a calm, distant gaze, was the quiet, catfooted Ngonyama. He was dry. Not a drop had touched him. He was coolness itself. Like actors I’d known in New Orleans (all unemployed), he had the unsettling ability to stare at you, or deliver a long speech, without once blinking his eyes or looking away. Maybe this was a trick he’d cultivated, but it struck me that he’d known the storm was coming, and I flinched, afraid of him, as he caught me by my sleeve, and said in his cracking, high-register version of English:

“Lay yourself forward or below tomorrow at noon.”

“What?”

“If you have any friends on this ship”—he glanced at Baleka, who refused to release the fingers on my left hand—“tell them to lay below too.”

He was gone before I could draw sense out of him. After he left to join his tribesmen below, I stayed for a time by the gunport, the girl’s grip on me stronger than before. “We’ll be all right,” I said, though I didn’t believe a word and was troubled by what Ngonyama, that crafty bastard, had told me, and furious at the cryptic tone he used sometimes. Really, when he talked like that, with a wink in his voice, it put me in a mind to clobber him with a caulking iron for his own good. “Universal Native,” I’d call it, the high-flown, inscrutable way whites made the Cherokees talk in dime novels, or the Chinese in bad stage plays. It certainly wouldn’t serve him well back in the States, or endear him to the slave lords who awaited him in Louisiana. Nonetheless, his warning bothered me. I half believed him; half I did not. But we had only a few hours or so of daylight before the impenetrable darkness of the ocean sank over us. Accordingly, the skipper was lashing the crew to make repairs—“You men get aloft!”—hauling them one by one to their feet to secure all the sails with spare gaskets. “And keep a bright lookout.” Others to report on damages below, and double-breech the lower decks. And still others to make fast the boats and haul unnecessary cargo — but not his prized crate — to the rail and pitch it over to lighten us. Erewhile, his lighthands went feverishly to work at the pumps, but their hearts were hardly in it; they worked nervously, waiting for the sea to throw its next seizure. A few deck hands talked of quitting the ship, taking to the remaining boats, and abandoning the blacks who — the boatswain claimed — had caused this troublesome gale and boiling sea to turn us back to Bangalang.

“Steady up there,” said Cringle icily when he overheard them. “And you can stow that kind of talk right now. The captain says he’ll haze any man that tries to leave the ship.”

“Then”—the boatswain spat inches from the mate’s boot; he pushed his low-crowned black hat back on his head, its ribbon hanging over his left eye—“we’re dead already.”

“Maybe you didn’t hear me, McGaffin!”

Cringle’s right hand touched the owlhead pistol in his waistband. The boatswain only exhaled, then spat again, this time hitting the mate’s leg. “You’re the one who kin stow it, Cringle — or shove it mebbe, and that self-servin’ rummy Falcon too, cose water was me woman before you was in long pants, and I know trouble when I see it. Them niggers is weird. A tribe of witches and strangelings. They kin do things. And if you ain’t noticed, sir, there’s water under the keelson, one of the bloody winches is broken, sir, and the hand pumps are chokin’ up. You’re as good a shipmate as ever put a hand to sail, Mr. Cringle, I don’t doubt that, but sometimes I think you come to be quartermaster by crawling through the cabin-house window instead of through the hawseholes like the rest of us. God almighty, man, any tar on board’ll tell you the skipper can’t get this rotten piece of driftwood home — he’ll drown the lot of us — and it’s your business, I’m sayin’, to put things right before it’s too late. D’you know what I’m arstin’ you to do? D’you have enough skin for it? Cose if you’re too fish-hearted to do what you promised, some of us who’ve had enough will do it. See if we don’t!”

Cringle could not reply. This list of problems stole the mate’s wind. He looked flustered and put out, his lips pressed in hard. Like that, he spun away. Me, I had business of my own to tend to in the galley, and perforce hurried below, Baleka hanging onto my dripping shirttails like a barge in tow.


By nightfall Squibb and I had the galley in “shipshape,” if you’ll pardon the expression. The steward was feeling pleased with himself. Actually, he was probably squiffy from the genial influence of a tot of rum. Baleka had finally fallen to sleep in a corner, and the cook and I were on our knees, swabbing and squeegeeing when McGaffin, peeling off his oilskin coat, came through the hatch, followed by Cringle and five men as grim as any I’d seen, the terror of the storm still upon them. I saw their boots first as they slid past me, dirtying the floor. Silently, they took seats on the benches as a jury might, or men come for a hanging. I noticed immediately they were armed with cutlasses, knives, ship’s tools easy to convert to bludgeons. McGaffin sat on the edge of the galley dresser, a little higher that way than the rest, his big hands with curly black hair on the backs folded on his hips. Cringle closed the door, the quietest of clicks as wood kissed metal. Squibb dried his hands slowly on his apron, rose up on one knee, then the other, and gave me a glance, his whole air saying Careful! as he filled a mug of tea for each of them. “Illinois, I think mebbe yuh should leave.”

“No,” said Cringle. “We need every man we have here.”

“Do we now?” McGaffin paused with the mug just below his mouth. “Every man, I’ll agree, but this one ain’t no sailor, he’s a stowaway, remember? A workaway. I been watchin’ him since you found him in the longboat. I didn’t see him sign any articles. He ain’t got no stake in all this.”

“In what?” I asked.

“The ship, boy! You come along fer the ride, I reckon. But after you’ve gone back to farmin’ or fogle-huntin’, the rest of us got to think about our future and families, God love ’em, if we live to see land again, which I’m startin’ to doubt more ’n’ more every day.” He set his mug down. “You got a family?”

I thought of my brother and said, “No.”

“You got a gel?”

I thought of Isadora and said nothing.

“See, then? It don’t matter wot happens to you, does it?”

Right then, Cringle’s hand cutting through the air for McGaffin to stop made the candles affixed to the wall behind him flicker, casting his own face in shadow. He coughed, clearing his throat, and said, “Rutherford, we’re here to decide the best way to put this ship back on a steady course. A crew has to trust its captain. Those of us here don’t. We think it’s time to change leadership.”

“You mean mutiny?”

“I didn’t call it that.”

McGaffin frowned. “That bother you?”

Their eyes, full of hardness, bit into and held me to see if it did; stares aimed like shotguns, gazes so steady and critical I felt as if I were on stage or had the square frame of an oil painting around me. To my left, firewood crackled in Squibb’s oven, splashing an eerie coralline light on their faces, and a peculiar warmth on my legs, for my clothes were still damp, except there on my trouser legs, where the heat made the cloth stiff. All this time I stood motionless, unsure what to say. Silence, never doubt it, was equally a sin in their eyes — eyes I had seen before, I realized, under the sun-blackened brows of slaves: men and women who had no more at stake in the fields they worked than these men in the profits of a ship owned by financiers as far away from the dangers at sea as masters from the rows of cotton their bondmen picked. No less than the blacks in the hold these sea-toughened killbucks were chattel. McGaffin’s gaze drifted to my left hand.

“That queer ring he’s wearin’, d’you see it? I only seen one like it afore. It’s on the flipper of the scoundrel who almost sank us this evenin’. You know,” he said to the others, “I think I was wrong. This one ain’t no stowaway, he’s a blinkin’ spy.”

“No! I stole the ring.”

“Oho! Then you hold no brief for Ebenezer Falcon?”

“None at all.”

“You wouldn’t grieve none, or pour ashes on your head if, by some unexpected but nat’ral nautical accident at sea, the Old Man came to a sudden and tragic end?”

“No.”

“Or mebbe”—he leaned forward, touching flame to Kentucky burley in his potbowl pipe—“if you was the cause of that?”

“Hold your tongue,” sighed Cringle. “We must keep our heads. Rutherford is on our side.”

“Yes,” I said quickly. “How can I help?”

“Right, how kin you help? He’s driftwood, this one. A fugitive and a vagabond. He’s got nothin’ to lose. If we poach this ship, you, Mr. Cringle, or Fletcher there, or that bedswerver Josiah who got more wives than a Mormon elder — it’s plain we’ll swing for piracy. The brokers Falcon works for will have us hunted from Chesapeake Bay to the South China Sea. Our wives’ll be widowed. Our sisters, poor darlin’s, will have to go out on the twang to turn a coin. And our wee li’l ones? They’ll be orphaned, I tell you, or sold to the workhouse. But suppose he done it? Suppose we tell ’em a stowaway done in the skipper? Well, what abaht that? Huh? Once we reach New Orleans the rest of us kin sign on to other ships, and Calhoun’ll go his own way, like he’s always done, believin’ in nothin’, belongin’ to nobody, driftin’ here and there and dyin’, probably, in a ditch without so much as leavin’ a mark on the world — or as much of a mark as you get from writin’ on water.”

I said, “Now, just a minute—”

But the others were nodding. One said, “That could work, Mr. Cringle, if you’d take the helm—”

“And,” said another, “maybe the captain’s share of the cargo’d be spread amongst alla us. You could see to that, couldn’t you, sir, seein’ as you’d be captain when we got home?”

“Yes, I’d see to that.” He was rubbing his forehead, breathing deep through his nose. One nostril whistled, clogged by something best left unsaid. He took out his handkerchief, pressed a finger to one side of his nose, and blew. “But what about Calhoun?”

“What abaht him?” said McGaffin.

“Does he get a share?”

“Aye, if he does like I said. It’d prove where his loyalties lie. For once in his life he’d be doin’ somethin’ useful.” He looked sideways at me. “You ever cut a man’s throat, Calhoun?”

“Oh, all the time.”

“Leave him be.” Cringle blew again. “Nothing says we have to harm the captain. I’m not a bold man, but I despise him as much as all of you do. Mutiny”—he turned to the boatswain—“doesn’t bother me either. God knows, to be a Yank is to be mutinous. The goddamn country was born out of rebellion. But, to be fair, Falcon’s carried us this far safely.” He paused bleakly, folding his handkerchief. “That counts for something.”

“Give him a launch, then.” Fletcher stroked his long-chinned face. “I say put the bugger and a few provisions in a gig when we go by an island. Most likely he’ll land on his feet thataway, knowing him.”

“That’s what I was thinkin’ meself,” said a boy in the back, a carpenter’s mate generally quiet who brought this out only after stoking up the courage to speak. Their eyes coming his way made him color. More softly, as if taking back what he’d just said, he added, “Maroon him?”

McGaffin made a contemptuous snort. “Aye, and knowin’ the Old Man, he’ll come through, raise another crew, hoist the Jolly Roger, and track every one of us down. Naw, I don’t like it.”

“But it’s fair,” said Cringle. “At least he’ll have a chance. That much we owe him.”

The boatswain disagreed, but saw each man shift to Cringle’s side. “All right. If that’s how you want it. But I don’t see nobody volunterin’ to put him in that launch.”

Fletcher turned his head away; a few others looked at the floor.

Quietly, a catch in his voice, Squibb said, “There are seven of yuh.”

“Sure, Josiah, and twice as many blokes who’ll take his side, like Meadows, once the shit hits the orlop ceilin’.” McGaffin bent his brows deeply. “You’d have to disarm the bugger first, or draw him away from the rest, get him alone somehow, or when he’s sleepin’. Trouble is, he sleeps light. You all know that. And his cabin’s got more fykes and infernal traps than I seen red men lay down. Naw, he ain’t got this old and ugly and evil by bein’ stupid, not on your life.” For a few moments he sucked his pipe, blowing columns of smoke that collected in layers on the floor at his feet. Then: “Calhoun?”

“What?”

“You nicked that ring, you say?”

“That I did.”

“From where’d you nick it?”

“The Old Man’s cabin.”

There was silence, a collective shock commingled with suspicion, as though maybe they thought I was lying. Which I was. As a general principle and mode of operation during my days as a slave, I always lied, and sometimes just to see the comic results when a listener based his beliefs and behavior on things that were Not. But don’t judge me harshly; it was one of the few forms of entertainment bondmen had. However, if I’d known where this lie would lead, I’d not have said a word.

Cringle leaned forward. “You were inside? You got past all those locks? All those latches?”

“Yessir.” That much at least was true.

“So,” said McGaffin, “if he broached cargo once, he kin do it again. This time, though, let him unload grape from the captain’s guns when he’s out, dampen his powder, disconnect all them security wires, and our lads kin slip in as easy as you please. Mebbe Squibb kin put a li’l somethin’ in his dinner.”

“No.” The cook shook his head. “I believe in what you’re doin’, but don’t ask me that.”

McGaffin spat a string of tobacco onto the floor. “Josiah, you make me sick. You know that?”

“Say what yuh want. I ain’t doin’ it.”

“Half a mo’, guvnuh. Wot day we talkin’ ’bout?” asked Fletcher. “Needs to be soon, I’d say.”

“Tomorrow at six bells,” said McGaffin. “See, we find some bothersome task to keep Falcon aft, somethin’ he’ll need to supervise, like overseein’ the blacks when they’re brought up to give ’em air — he’s allas there fer that — then Calhoun has the time he needs. We kin put Falcon over the side that night. Cringle kin make sure we’re the ones on evenin’ watch tomorrow.”

Fletcher’s lips burst open in a goatish laugh. “Tell the others he fell overboard.”

“Drunk as the parson’s wife, eh?” McGaffin slapped his leg. “I like that. What say you, Mr. Cringle? Are you in this?”

“I’m in. But if Rutherford is caught. .”

“Aw, he’s a thief,” said McGaffin. “Nobody’ll think nothin’ if he’s caught. It’s his nature to be in places he ain’t supposed to be. Worst come to worst, he’ll get a few stripes, that’s all.”

Cringle’s eyes softened, the most sympathetic I’d seen them in days. Unlike the others, he did not drink, but moved among them with a mug in his hand, so as not to offend, lifting it to his mouth occasionally but never taking a sip. “Can you do it, lad?”

In a narrow room filled with grizzled, desperate sea rovers, all in agreement (and armed), except for Josiah Squibb, standing a little off to one side and behind the others, pulling at his fingers and swinging his head side to side for only me to see — encircled by conspirators such as these with the nerve tips of my index finger throbbing where I’d nervously torn off a nail, I could only do as they wished and say, “ ’Tis done.”


Thus things stood when the meeting ended. Each sailor cut a notch in his thumb, dripped blood into McGaffin’s mug, and drank from this, sealing the bond. Did I sip from this cup? Aye. Once they were gone, their lips and teeth stained crimson, Squibb and I set to fixing mess. We worked in silence. One thing I liked about the cook was that he knew when to shut up even when he was mubblefubbled and dying to talk. Occasionally, I felt his eyes, like fishhooks, try to catch mine as we squeezed past one another in the narrow galley, but he kept his thoughts untongued. Personally, I was too pitchkettled to trust my own speech. My eyes began to sting and steam a little; I wiped a sleeve across them, and kept my back toward Squibb, more than a little ashamed for not standing my ground earlier. But here, let it be said, that in waters strange as these, where any allegiance looked misplaced, I could no longer find my loyalties. All bonds, landside or on ships, between masters and mates, women and men, it struck me, were a lie forged briefly in the name of convenience and just as quickly broken when they no longer served one’s interests. But what were my interests? No question that since my manumission I’d brought a world of grief on myself but, hang it, I wished like hell I had someone to blame — my parents, the Jackson administration, or white people in general — for this new tangle of predicaments.

“Blame for what?” Squibb stared at me.

“Nothing. I was just thinking out loud.”

“Oh.”

He was very quiet, was Squibb. He finished carefully arranging a plate of fresh prawns, earthapples, and kale he’d bought special for Captain Falcon in Bangalang. No French chef could have better composed the meal to seduce a hungry man’s eye and mind. To my way of thinking, that’s pretty much what you paid for in fancy-dress New Orleans restaurants anyway: a skimpy meal that left you famished hours later but laid out oh so beautifully, as Tintoretto might prepare a still life in eye-catching colors and forms. Added to that, Falcon insisted on the best silver and a freshly lighted candle with his supper. The funny thing was that while he demanded, like the rich, meals served in ever more inventive aesthetic configurations that took the poor steward hours to prepare, the skipper, after a second of appreciation, approached the act of eating like a task, falling to it with silent, single-minded determination, seldom looking up from the table, glopping it down with efficient, steady forklifts that favored a farmer baling hay. In a trice he was finished, sprang up from the table, throwing down his soiled napkin, and was off to see to some shipboard chore.

“Yuh wanna carry this fish ‘n’ tayters over to him?” Squibb wiped his fingers down the front of his apron. “If yuh’re in with them others now, I guess bringin’ his chow’d give yuh a chance to look his cabin over a little. Better wipe that stain off yuh mouth first.”

I took Falcon’s meal and climbed through the hatchway, a clean napkin draped over my forearm. At his door, feeling like a waiter, I rapped three times on wood with my knuckles, the keel and bottom planks beneath me swaying on waves pulsing to the pull of the moon. I heard chair legs scrape on wood. Latches were thrown, a key turned in the lock, and when the door whipped open the Old Man stood before me naked except for his gunbelt and steel-toed boots. Instinctively, I swung my head away and took a step backward.

“Sorry, sir!”

“Don’t stand there, man.” He sniffed at his food. “Bring it in.”

I stayed in the doorway as he went, boat-necked and tattooed over half his body, back to his chart table, his quill, and his logbook. There was meat on this man. It dawned on me, as I waited outside, watching his bare, freckled shoulders hunched over whatever he was writing, that he threw off his habiliments and wrote naked as the newborn for purely literary reasons. I had known a poet in New Orleans who told me he did the same. Rumor had it that Benjamin Franklin was a nudist too. Something to do with inspiration and freeing themselves up. That sort of thing. Naturally, I understood nothing about these matters; I only knew that I had no interest in seeing an empire builder in the raw, and so I stayed in the doorway. Falcon saw my bewilderment, growled something under his breath, a barely audible oath about philistines; then he opened a bureau with swinging brass handles and lifted out a Tyrian robe of Chinese design. He fumbled into it, rolled the sleeves to his elbows, then came tripping back to me.

“Well, now will you come in?” His voice was crisp. “Close and lock the door as you do, Mr. Calhoun.”

I did as he bade me. “I’ve brought your dinner.”

“And a report, I hope.” He uncovered the food I set on his chart table beside a most curious glass container I’d not noticed before. Inside it was a 45-caliber ball flattened on one side. Falcon spread the napkin over his knees, used his fingertips to tweeze a strand of hair off a potato, and handed his fork to me.

“You first, Mr. Calhoun.”

“You want me to eat some?”

“Eat a little of everythin’, if you will.”

Actually, I was happy to oblige. I hurried from one item to another, then back again, trying to stuff myself before the skipper snatched the fork from me and said, “At ease.” He squinted at me for several moments to make sure I didn’t gag or change color or collapse face down on the floor, at last seemed satisfied and sat back, his head bent in prayer, then poured himself coffee. At some time in his childhood, I suspected, he’d learned to drink hot coffee the same way he ate soup, with a spoon, slurping up the black stuff like broth. So he did now; his father’s habit, most likely. In between steaming spoonfuls he asked:

“D’you think I’m overly cautious?”

“Well — a wee bit, yes.”

“I gather you trust, even like, other people, don’t you?”

I was a little startled by his question. Was he joking? I laughed a second too late. “Yes, I do, sir. Don’t you?”

“Not a bit. Never have. I suppose they’ve never been real to me. Only I’m real to me. Even you’re not real to me, Mr. Calhoun, but I think you like me a little, so I like you too.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Falcon broke off a hunch of biscuit. “Your report, laddie.”

Please don’t think poorly of me if I confess that during the next half hour I unbosomed myself. I withheld nothing. Did I lack liver? Touching my side I assured myself this organ was there. Perhaps I simply needed to talk. Perhaps I was, at heart, a two-faced coward as bad as my brother when it came to betraying rebellious slaves to Master Chandler. (I’ll tell of this treachery in my own good time.) However it may be, I outlined the mutineers’ plan to deep-six him, citing each rebel by name, and described the central role they had assigned me in the takeover, the whole account spilling from me in fits and starts, for I feared Falcon’s Jovian wrath more than theirs. More than once, his rages had sent men climbing to the crow’s-nest for safety, and he’d turn to one of his officers, chuckling, “They think I’m loony.” I told everything, talking louder toward the end because the ship’s dogs began a howling brangle outside louder than before, belike timber wolves or wild coyotes. When, finished, I looked up, Falcon was smiling and picking his teeth with his thumbnail.

“So that’s the way of it. They think settin’ me adrift will solve everythin’? Hah! Hark you now. I’m not an easy man to eliminate, Mr. Calhoun. Not even for me.” He tapped the container on his desk with his spoon. “I tried to kill myself once. That’s what come of it. The ball bent flat on my skull. Naw, the peace they want’s impossible, whether Cringle’s at the helm or McGaffin or me.”

“How do you mean?”

“I’m not the problem is what I mean.” Apparently he felt the tightness of his gunbelt after eating; he took it off, placing his pistol and keys down on the table between us, a presence that made me all the more uncomfortable. I tried not to look at the gun, fearful that if I stared it might suddenly go off. “Man is the problem, Mr. Calhoun. Not just gents, but women as well, anythin’ capable of thought. Now, why do I say such a curious thing? Study it for a spell. You’re a boy with some schoolin’, I can tell. Did it include the teaching of Ancillon, de Maistre, or Portalis? You recall each says war is divine, as much a child of the soul as music and poetry. For a self to act, it must have somethin’ to act on. A nonself — some call this Nature — that resists, thwarts the will, and vetoes the actor. May I proceed? Well, suppose that nonself is another self? What then? As long as each sees a situation differently there will be slaughter and slavery and the subordination of one to another ’cause two notions of things never exist side by side as equals. Why not — I put it to you — if both are true? Books live together in the library, don’t they, Teresa of Avila beside Aristippus, Bacon beside Berkeley? The reason — the irrefragable truth is each person in his heart believes his beliefs is best. Fact is, down deep no man’s democratic. We’re closet anarchists, I’d wager. Ouk agathón polykoíranín eis koíranos éstos. We believe what we believe. And the final test of truth is war on foreign soil. War in your front yard. War in your bedroom. War in your own heart, if you listen too much to other people. And in each battle ’tis the winning belief what’s true and the conquerer whose vision is veritable.”

“No — nossir!” says I, louder than I intended. “By my heart, sir, if something is true, it can’t be suppressed, can it, regardless of whether all the armies of the world stand ready to silence it?”

“You’re a smart boy. What d’you think? Is truth floatin’ round out there in space separate from persons? Now, be frank.”

“No, but—”

“Conflict,” says he, “is what it means to be conscious. Dualism is a bloody structure of the mind. Subject and object, perceiver and perceived, self and other — these ancient twins are built into mind like the stem-piece of a merchantman. We cannot think without them, sir. And what, pray, kin such a thing mean? Only this, Mr. Calhoun: They are signs of a transcendental Fault, a deep crack in consciousness itself. Mind was made for murder. Slavery, if you think this through, forcing yourself not to flinch, is the social correlate of a deeper, ontic wound.” He could see I was squirming and smiled. “Let ’em put me over the side. Before my dinghy’s out of sight, they’ll be arguing and pitching daggers till there’s only one tar left alive. Such are my views.” He pushed back from the table. “D’you still plan to help the rebels set me adrift?”

“No.”

“That means you submit, doesn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“See, ’tis always that way.”

On deck the dogs kept snarling, as if they’d cornered something. I sat for a moment in misery and methought myself outdone. I stank. I could smell myself, and stood, wanting a defense against Falcon’s dark counsel and arguments that broke my head. To my everlasting shame, I knew of none. As my fingers curled around his empty plate and passed over his keys, pausing there, then over his pistol, he pulled his robe tightly around him.

“Don’t think I’m not grateful for what you told me. You’ll be rewarded. Tomorrow break in that door, as you promised, but leave my things as they are. I’ll arm a few mates on our side and we’ll chain the rebels in the hold with the blacks.”

“That’s all? They won’t be harmed?”

“I’ll set them free. They’ll forfeit their shares, of course, and I might bastinado the bunch of ’em to teach the others a lesson. But aye, I’ll set ’em free. If all goes well, I’ll double your lay from the cargo. You’ll be in the lolly soon, I can promise. There’ll be a bonus — hatch money — for the find we’ve got below.”

“Can you tell me what that is?”

“I suppose I can now. We’re past keeping secrets from each other.” A soft burp forced its way to his lips. The hounds quieted some, leaving a silence in which I could hear only whimpering and Falcon’s voice, as he leaned toward me, beckoning with one crooked finger that I tip my head toward his own. “Sit down here beside me, Mr. Calhoun. You shouldn’t hear what I’ve got to say standin’.”

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