“ ’Tis a god.” Falcon kept his voice low; he looked round furtively, as if the furniture might be listening. “We’ve captured an African god.”
I said nothing. Surely you can understand why.
“Oh, I’m not one to believe in heathen gods, but I know ’tis different from anythin’ seen back in the States. The Allmuseri have worshiped it since the Stone Age. They say it sustains everythin’ in the universe. It never sleeps. Night and day, it works, like a weaver — like rust, or an Alabama field hand — to ensure that galaxies push outward and particles smaller than the eye dance their endless, pointless reel. It is the heat in fire, they say. The wetness in water. Once a year the whole tribe stays awake all night so it can rest, then resume its labor of creating and destroying the cosmos, then creating it again, cycle after cycle. According to Allmuseri priests, it accomplishes this with only one-fourth of its full power. That alone is enough to, say, guarantee photosynthesis and keep the planet on its axis. Perhaps it uses the other three-quarters to sustain alternate universes, parallel worlds and counterhistories where, for example, you are captain of the Republic and I’m the cook’s helper. Naturally, they do not speak its name. That takes too long. It has a thousand names. Nor do they carve its image. All things are its image: stone and sand. Master and slave. When Ahman-de-Bellah raided their village two months ago, he found their Most High located in a shrine, for like the Old Testament god this one, far from receding into silence, delights in walking with and talking to its people. With me, it’s a witty conversationalist, I can tell you that, though prone to periods of self-pity and depression. Knows a little of everythin’, though not as we know things, of course, and seems slightly amused Ahman-de-Bellah put it in irons.”
“You can do that?”
“Quite right, m’boy. ’Twasn’t easy, of course. Sometimes it’s physical, you know, like me and thee. But only for a few seconds at a time. Mostly, it’s immaterial, the way gods and angels are supposed to be. Being unphysical means there can only be one of each kind of god or angel — one Throne, one Principality, one Archangel, ’cause there’s only a formal (not a material) difference amongst ’em, so the one below is the only creature of its kind in the universe—is the universe, the Allmuseri say.” He paused, cleared his dry throat, and lifted a teaspoon of coffee to his lips. “Another thing ’bout not bein’ physical most of the time is that it can’t understand any of the sciences based on matter, like geometry. Heh heh. It can’t do geometry, you see, ’cause it’s a god.”
“Are you saying even a god has limitations?”
“That I am. And not only limitations, lad. I daresay it has downright contradictions. For example, a god can’t know its own nature. For itself, it can’t be an object of knowledge. D’you see the logic here? The Allmuseri god is everything, so the very knowing situation we mortals rely on — a separation between knower and known — never rises in its experience. You might say empirical knowledge is on man’s side, not God’s. It’s our glory and grief both, a function of the duality of mind I mentioned a moment ago. Oh, ’tis a strange creature we have below, Mr. Calhoun. Omnipresence means it forefeits our kind of knowledge. Omnipotence means, ironically, that it can create a stone so heavy it cannot lift that same stone from the floor.”
None of this was clear. Aphasic, I nodded anyway. My brain had stopped functioning a full five sentences ago. Could it be that in a dimension alongside this one I was a dwarf sitting in a Chinese robe, telling a white mate I had captured a European god and, below us, the hold was crammed with white chattel? Preposterous! Considering thoughts of this sort was like standing on the edge of a cliff. “Cap’n,” I said, swallowing, “you’ve got a god on ship?”
“You shouldn’t goggle,” says he. “Makes you look weak-minded, Mr. Calhoun. We’re not only shipping Allmuseri on this trip, we’re bringin’ back their deity too. I’d wager this freight’s worth at least a footnote in the history books, wouldn’t you say? Better’n stumblin’ on Lemuria or findin’ the source of the Nile. Most nations will pay a pretty whack to possess a creature such as this. It’s a tricky rascal, though, if you ain’t careful.”
“Tricky, sir?”
“I mean what it did to Tommy O’Toole. Legend has it the Creature has a hundred ways to relieve men of their reason. It traps them, tricks them into Heaven. It’s Loki and Brer Rabbit together. That’s why no one goes near it but me.”
“You, I take it, are immune to Heaven?”
He gave me a look, then stood, placing his hand on my arm to bid me rise, then eased me outside. “Do as I said tomorrow. Tell no one we’ve talked — and, for Christ’s sake, see what’s spooked the dogs.”
I closed the door by leaning against the muntin, and frowned (I hated it whenever anyone used the word “spook”), my head on the frieze rail, listening to blood thrum in my temples. I waited for my second wind. It never came. Forth I went anyway through layers of mist toward the animal pens, holding Falcon’s tray close to my chest, squeezing it for no other reason than to have something concrete and stable to hold onto, and holding as well a key I’d taken off his table. I couldn’t help myself. Stealing was a nervous habit for me sometimes, a way to shake off stress and occupy my hands. And I had felt nervous in his cabin because so little on this ship seemed solid, reliable. If before my report to Falcon I had felt unsure whom to trust, now I distrusted my own eyes and ears. A godhead in the hold? Closing my eyes, I made myself consider the consequences of the being that sustained the world falling into the hands of an American soldier of fortune. No explorer could touch Falcon now. He had won his deepest wish. From the Vatican to political circles in Virginia he would be pursued, maybe given the presidency or the personal empire he had dreamed of since the Revolution. Once his cargo was in captivity, under lock and key at some college (or more likely a military camp), history would change. History, as we knew it, would end for there would be no barriers between the secular and sacred. I was starting to scare myself now and figured I’d better stop. Gods only appeared, Reverend Chandler had said, on Judgment Day. For my part, I wanted to live a little longer. I was only twenty-three years old. The Apocalypse would definitely put a crimp in my career plans. I needed the world as I knew it, as evil and flawed as it was, to be there for a while. On the other hand, if Falcon had not lied, there were easily half a dozen questions I wanted to put to who — or whatever maintained the cosmos second by second. Shaking my head to clear it, I pushed on to the pens, the trembling of my hands rattling silverware on his tray, for I could not imagine all the implications of Falcon’s discovery, or what shocks at sea awaited me next.
Instantly I got my answer.
The dogs were howling, a slobber like sea foam spilling from their mouths, because Meadows was beating them viciously with a sjambok. In the glow of a deck light, I could see he was wearing my clothes. The killing part was my blouse looked better on him than on me. Lashing the ship’s dogs, he spoke to them in an unerring imitation of black English, his accent passably southern Illinoisan, his speech sprinkled with my quirky, rhetorical asides, which I swore right then I would never use again. For a moment I was fascinated. It was like watching a voodoo priest manipulating a lock of your hair. Impaling a doll effigy of you with pins. Meadows even managed to mime a few of my physical eccentricities, like the way I tugged my right earlobe when perplexed — I caught myself doing it then, glanced back at him and gasped — or sometimes rubbed my nose with a quick flick of my thumb, boxer style: gestures that were quintessentially Rutherford Calhoun and delivered now to the frothing dogs with profound, heartless doses of pain. Meadows peeled off my clothing, let the hounds smell and snap at it one last time; then he pulled a pair of Cringle’s breeches over his own, rolling up the cuffs. Again, he whipped them, wrenching his voice toward higher registers to sound like the master’s mate giving orders. It laid me low, seeing Meadows vanish and a devastating caricature of Peter Cringle emerge, boiled down to his broad outlines. The barber-surgeon was a born thespian. Knowing each mate medically, I guessed, gave him this gift for brutal satire. After rubbing the crotch of Cringle’s smelly trousers into their noses to drive home his strongest scent, Meadows draped a few articles of brightly colored African dress — Abo Po and abada — around his broad waist, unleashed a new, stinging round of stripes, and spoke those haunting words the Allmuseri men and women used, like a fragrance, breathed into the air. For the dogs, though, these were hated words, intertwined with twenty lashes. They would throw themselves, fangs unsheathed, with no thought toward their safety upon anyone speaking Allmuseri, scratching his brow like Cringle, or blending the languages of house and field, street and seminary, as I often did.
Fingers of sweat dripped from Meadows’s face, his whipping arm was sore, and he rubbed it, then peered round in my direction. I pressed myself down between the topsail bitt and foremast, the skin on my back crawling. He shrugged, picked up his laundry basket, and headed for the fo’c’s’le. Long minutes passed before I moved. My head went turngiddy. I was unsure of what I had witnessed. But I knew what it meant. This was not a ship; it was a coffin. The morrow would bring catastrophe because Meadows was one step ahead of the Old Man, giving a living weapon to Falcon’s loyalists in case the mutineers seized the ship’s guns or the Africans could not be controlled. Targeting Cringle to be torn apart I understood. But why me? Were all loyalties here a lie? We would be sunk to the bottom of the briny unless unbeknownst to these camps someone played a trump, a hole card, none knew existed.
I realized that I held that card. Before doing anything, though, I needed to rest. To return to the galley I was forced to maneuver slowly aft over and around human and nautical debris sprawled at the ship’s waist, larboard side. The storm had flooded berths below. So several hands brought their gear topside to bed down in the open air beside slave women and the children. Cluttered with bodies, wooden crates blown apart earlier, their contents strewn every which way, and draped with dangling sheets of sail, the sunken portion of the Republic from tiller to stern felt like a makeshift refugee camp, a smelly, chaotic strip of shantytown where the injured and ailing were tossed helter-skelter together. In mist-softened light mutineers, Africans, and able seamen could not be distinguished. Brief as this moment might be, no stations were evident among the ship’s company. Could these people slay one another after sunrise, as some planned? It hardly seemed possible. Or necessary. On the water, leagues from culture or civilization, I saw no point in our perpetuating the lunacies of life on land. Just for a spell the sea had swept some of that away. No one had the strength to sustain idols of the tribe or cave. Even the caged chickens were tired. Every so often walls of spray faffled on deck, much in the fashion of showers I remembered in New Orleans during the spring that were refreshing and brief, and just as suddenly were gone. Our sails were asleep. Beneath a damp blanket McGaffin slept beside the cabin boy. A Chinese mate and Ngonyama, who was officer of this night’s watch, bandaged the arm of a boat-puller bruised during the storm. Cringle dozed with Squibb’s parrot on his left shoulder. His back was against the topgallant rail, both his eyes shuttered, and his head all on his right shoulder. I saw he was sweating. The armpits of his coat were stained, which was odd. Things were cooler now at eight bells and, since Meadows had left the pens, quiet but for an occasional cough and the sound of the ocean, spongelike in the way it absorbed, even trivialized, the noises we made. Crew and cargo, so exhausted — by events and their own fierce emotions — appeared content to lie together a while in various postures of fatigue, barely lifting a finger, as if they were frozen, or maybe soldiers who had fallen after a battle, too drained and dead of brain to do anything more than listen to their own lungs; and the frail, in-and-out sigh in each man’s chest was only the faintest of notes beside the brooling waves and wind of the Atlantic.
I came through the hatchway, holding the tray in front of me with one hand. Squibb, resting on the galley table, roused awake when he heard me, swung his feet over the side, and blew the overhead lantern back into brilliance. Stretching wide like a bear, then yawning, he placed his left palm over his lips. “Sounded like the storm put a scare into them dogs.” I decided to say nothing about the dogs; Meadows had not included Squibb in that. Then my eyes drifted to the corner and Baleka, beautifully disheveled in her sleep. In her left hand she was holding an empty wineglass, one of Falcon’s, from which she enjoyed drinking water or goat’s milk in imitation of the ship’s brain-sotten crew. As with other children I’d seen, she looked boneless in sleep, her body limp, one hand (the right) on her brow like a society woman about to swoon. But she wasn’t breathing right. When I bent to brush my lips on her brow, I saw dark spots on her cheeks.
“She’s a bonny lass,” said Squibb. “I didn’t want to put too many covers on her.”
“Guess not,” I said. “She’s burning up. Did she wake while I was gone?”
“Once. I give her a glass of milk. Listen, Fletcher come down heah a minute ago and gimme his sea chest. Said he wouldn’t need it anymore, seeing how it was the end of the world. He was scratchin’ a coupla spots on his arm like the ones on her. I think she give all them boys somethin’ when they was heah. How yuh feelin’, Illinois?”
“I feel I’ve been on this boat so long my toes are growing webs between them. .”
Squibb cautiously let his tone lighten to console me. “Sometimes the slaves bring their sickness with ’em. They won’t last that long. We’ll live to see worse and tell about it. Still”—he winked—“it wouldn’t hurt, I suppose, if you’ve made out yer will. Yuh got family back in Makanda?”
“A brother, if you can call him that.”
He noticed the wobble that came into my voice whenever I spoke of Jackson, and he paused. “Bad feelin’s between yuh, eh.”
“You could say that.”
“Well, that’s a shame, ’specially since yer kin’s liable to get anythin’ yuh leave.”
The thought made me laugh, painfully. “You don’t know him. Because of him I’ve got nothing to leave, Josiah.”
“He cheat yuh out of it?”
“In a way.”
When I said no more, he finally asked, “Yuh gonna tell me about it, or do I have to wait fer yer biography?”
“No.”
“Yuh’ll feel better, love. C’mon now. No point in carryin’ round old cargo like that. All along yuh been tellin’ people he betrayed yuh. Ain’t that so?”
“Me, yes — only me.”
“Didn’t treat yuh like a brother, yuh’re sayin’?”
“Yes. I mean, no! He treated everyone the same, and that was the trouble. Kin meant nothing to him. Do you remember that strange flower we saw in Senegambia? I forget what it’s called, but one of the chaps pointed out how lovely a scent it released when you admired it and held the petals close to your nose. And that when you didn’t notice at all and brought down your boot, it offered like a gift that same remarkable perfume. Do you remember?”
“Aye.”
“That’s Jackson.”
Squibb nodded. “Yuh think ’bout him a lot, don’tcha?”
“Too much. And each time it’s different. I go over what he did so often and from so many angles that it makes no sense anymore. He is like Ngonyama, or Baleka there. I didn’t know that until the skipper brought them on board. Hell, Squibb, he could be from their tribe, for all I know.”
“That’d make you one of ’em too, wouldn’t it?”
This I doubted. The more I thought on it, the Allmuseri seemed less a biological tribe than a clan held together by values. A certain vision. Jackson might well have been one of their priests. Against my better judgment, I let Squibb wheedle me into talking about Master Peleg Chandler, his will, and my day of manumission, which I remember right enough because we were the only family he had. He was a tobacco planter living on southern Illinois land his great-grandfather cleared himself, a painfully shy man from a long line of pious homesteaders, hardly a man to go in for politics, or even raising his voice in a conversation. His daughter, Maggie, died at seven from scarlet fever; his wife, Adeline, took a fatal spill from a horse. Thus, Jackson, who was Chandler’s nurse and aide since the time he could fetch and carry, and I stood to inherit everything he had. It was in the wind one morning — May 23, 1829—that he would be generous with his slaves for their years of devoted service. Among his holdings was a commodious, clean-timbered manor house, with sturdy pine furniture, heavy and square and still blond, and grounds that were beautiful in the springtime, bordered by berried woods and trees in bloom like half a hundred bouquets. Inside were glass-fronted bookcases, a quarter-turn stair with a landing space, and well-stocked cupboards in a kitchen full of DeGroot silverware. His stables were full of Morgan horses and Appaloosa; he had Berkshire and thin-rind hogs, and vast investments clear up to the state capital in Springfield. No, we hadn’t suffered all that badly, I’m almost ashamed to say, and Jackson was troubled by this too, for now it seemed we would never want, if he included us in his will, which I knew he would because my brother was all the good he thought there was in the world.
(Squibb squinted at me with one eye shut. “Yuh ain’t spinnin’ a cuffer now, are yuh?”
I assured him this was God’s own truth.)
We could tell he was dying — or damn near dead — that spring. He’d never been hale, of course, what with tuberculosis and a curious blood condition that sometimes gave his skin a faint grayish tinge. Cottonlike tufts of gray hair flecked his head, as if he had just rolled over in a field of dandelions. Also he was hard of hearing in his right ear and damned near deaf in the left, his voice an octave louder each year as his hearing failed. Master Chandler always kept an ear trumpet by his side. When he was annoyed at what you were saying, he would lift his trumpet not to his good right ear but rather to his left, effectively relegating you to silence as he smiled and nodded in seeming agreement. At his age, sexual imagery only made him melancholy. He could listen to Jackson play Bach’s St. Matthew Passion or Beethoven’s A Minor Quartet—that deep work of renunciation — downstairs in the parlor for hours. A funny old man, I’d have to say, with the soul of a celibate or contemplative. Yet he was, in most senses of the word, a fair, sympathetic, and well-meaning man, as whites go. In all North America, if you searched up and down, you’d not likely find a more reluctant slave owner than he — one who inherited us and hated the Peculiar Institution — and we knew fortune could have treated us far worse.
As so often happens with sick people who can get no satisfaction from quacks and country doctors, he turned to theology and found in Thomas and the Pseudo-Dionysus a solace that eased his pilgrimage through a broken world. Confined as he was to his sickroom and in nerve-racking pain, he suffered cheerfully, he read over and over Jan van Ruysbroeck’s Flowers of a Mystic Garden, taking notes on blank margins he’d clipped from newspapers and magazines (he hated waste of any sort). Long passages from these works he made Jackson and me read to him, as he made us reel whole cloth from our heads the words of the English mystic William Law: “Love is infallible; it has no errors, for all errors are the want of love.” What he didn’t know about theology was, I guess, not worth knowing. Still, he knew lots of queer arcana too — rags of dubious learning, like how many divisions were in Hell (four), the number of devils there (7,405,926), and all this he passed along to his servants, the Calhoun brothers, when we attended to him.
Needless to say, I set no store by these matters. But Jackson listened. Some of the old man’s aspects (but not all) he admired. He took the role of manservant seriously, but only after twisting it around, even turning it against the various definitions of the South until he became Chandler’s steadiest caretaker of things on the farm. He had, I remember, an uncanny way with livestock. With birds, it went beyond uncanny to downright astonishing. Jackson would toss a pan of hard bread crumbs into the backyard after we had eaten, then walk inside and sit at the window. Minutes later, the yard was blanketed with birds from God knew where, a whole aviary thick enough, I always believed, to walk on if he’d wanted to. They would let him lie down upon them — he was so gentle, so self-emptied — then take off in formation like a magic, feathered rug. Yes, he had a way with birds. And plants as well. They’d explode into bloom from the blink of Jackson’s eye.
He was, I should mention, eight years my senior, so we didn’t exactly grow up together, and to this day I can only guess at what made him tick. To a degree, he viewed me as one more child he must see feed and keep from killing itself by climbing trees or playing too close to the well. And who was our father? How I wish I could say; he ran from slavery when I was three. I have searched the faces of black men on Illinois farms and streets for fifteen years, hoping to identify this man named Riley Calhoun, primarily to give him a piece of my mind, followed by the drubbing he so richly deserved for selfishly enjoying his individual liberty after our mother, Ruby, died, thus leaving me in the care of a brother like a negative of myself. He was (to me) the possible-me that lived my life’s alternate options, the me I fled. Me. Yet not me. Me if I let go. Me if I gave in.
Let me explain.
My older brother, who was tall — maybe six feet three in his stocking feet — with a thick shoebrush mustache, a Julius Caesar haircut, and freckles that ran right across his forehead, had known our father and saw more deeply than I ever could into the rituals of color and caste. He spoke affectionately of our Da, wished him well wherever he had run to, but he could not forgive him for abandoning us to save himself. Riley sent no one to fetch us. As far as we knew, he wasn’t working to buy us out of bondage or living nearby with the Indians, as some black men did, descending on farms to raid and sniper slavemasters the way the colonists did the British. No, he’d cut and run. I know Jackson pondered long on this dilemma: Stay in slavery to serve those closest to you or flee. Run or do your best in a bad situation. To his credit, he stayed, thereby assuring me of having some family. Other bondmen, though, saw his choice as obsequious. On occasion, I saw it that way myself. Rightly or wrongly, he thought it possible to serve his people by humbly being there when they needed him — whites too, if they weren’t too evil, and he was incapable of locking anything out of his heart. There can be, as I see it, no other way to unriddle why my brother, more than any other bondman, was generally faithful to Reverend Chandler, laying out his clothes each morning, combing his dry, brittle hair, fetching his nightly footbaths, and just as regular in the performance of his appointed tasks for the other servants, standing there by everyone’s side through family death and sickness; Jackson was a Sunday preacher in the slave quarters, the model of propriety, and had twice the patience of St. Francis. As you might guess, I was his shadow-self, the social parasite, the black picklock and worldling — in whom he saw, or said he saw, our runaway father. He was ashamed of Riley Calhoun. And of me. Hearing our master was near death that Saturday in May, my brother called me from the grainbin in Chandler’s barn, where I had just managed to get my forefinger inside a gap-toothed, rather delicious-looking Negro girl named Dorothy, our laundress’s daughter. He gave me a sad, scolding preacher look. Scrambling into my clothes, then brushing hay off my calfskin boots and my yeoman’s cap, I pecked Dorothy on the cheek, then followed him up the footpath to the house.
On this day I speak of, Master Chandler was old and full of days. As pale as a parsnip. If I remember rightly, it was raining pitchforks. Isn’t it always on a day of gloom? And the climb behind my brother to the top-floor chamber was the slowest I have ever made. Some part of me loved my brother. Yes. But we couldn’t get along or see things the same way. If you are born on the bottom — in bondage — there are only two ways you can go: outright sedition or plodding reform. I chose the first, expressing my childhood hatred of colonization in boyish foul-ups and “accidents” (setting Peleg’s barn on fire once, breaking things, petty theft, lies, swearing, keeping bad company, forgetting to bathe, fighting, all the things “problem children” normally do), but in the context of the Old South, for a colored boy in Makanda, they were really small acts of revolt — blows against the Empire — though I was too young at the time to know them by their proper name. These things Master Chandler dismissed as youthful folly, then, later, as irredeemable parts of the “Negro character.” But Jackson went the other way: a proper Negro, he was, a churchgoing boy who matched my every irresponsibility with a selfless deed as if he wanted to shame me, or subvert each bigot’s lie about blacks by providing a countertext, saying to the slaveholding world, “Not even this can make me miss a step.” If that was what being a “gentleman of color” amounted to, then I decided I wanted none of it.
And let it be known that I hated that cramped low-ceilinged room. Nor was I eager to look into Chandler’s face as the light there flimmered, then failed. His chin hung like a turkey wattle. His mouth was fishlike, all collops and pleats, caved in, his dry lips sunk inward as if his gums had grown together. Seeing him, Jackson breathed a deep sigh. Half irritation, half fellow feeling. He went to his bedside, then poured water for him from a hobnail pitcher. Though my brother spent hours in this sickroom (Chandler had a bell on his night table, which he jangled to call Jackson, and to this very day the tang of every bell reminds me of the one in his bedroom), all I felt then was its oppressiveness. There were no windows. The air inside was yellow, the floor damp. It smelled violently of medicaments, lotions, and disinfectants. Outside the wind howled, shaking the latch and hinges on doors downstairs. Timbers in the room shook.
“Sir.” Jackson leaned toward Chandler’s iron bed, then turned his head away from the smell. “Do you know me?” He sat on a painted fiddle-back chair, his dark hands folded. Weakly, the old man took a deep-chested breath. He seemed touchingly glad to see my brother, who said, “Rutherford is here too.”
Reverend Chandler frowned at that, thinking perhaps of how I’d disappointed him, that I was and would always be pretty light timber. The look he gave me was severe. I stayed a respectful distance from his bed, watching them from one side.
“Did you want to see us?”
“Bring me the Bible. And something to write with. .” He coughed miserably. His breathing was noisy. Jackson came back from a trestle table in the corner, carrying the book and a goosefeather pen, which he handed to our master. Slowly Chandler began scrawling our names along-side those of Maggie and Adeline on the riffled pages of the book.
“I should have done this years ago, seeing how you’ve kept things going here for me and the others when I couldn’t. .”
Jackson bowed his head formally, his eyes on his spit-shined shoe buckles. “As the oldest, it was my duty.”
(For Christ’s sake, I thought, get on with the goddamn will! That very next morning I figured on starting off the day with a breakfast of egg bread; of sleeping until noon, hunting until dark, wearing a pair of skilts and a stylish cap, then dining on potted salmon from England and preserved meats from France.)
Master Chandler lay back. Jackson readjusted the old man’s nightcap on a skull that looked thin as eggshell. I shivered, the chill of the room taking hold of me. After several moments, Chandler’s breath rolled out again; “As of today, I release you both, if you wish to go.” I stepped closer, listening with every nerve as Jackson lifted our master’s head a little to adjust his pillow. “But Jackson — good Jackson — dear Jackson,” he whispered, “let us come down to cases. You are the oldest, and I daresay I am in your debt. Whatever you want for you and Rutherford is yours. Tell me how you wish to be rewarded and I shall see that you have it.”
I breathed a sigh of relief, believing all our burdens had lifted. But my brother looked pained. Never before had anyone asked him what he wanted. He hesitated. A knot gathered in my throat; I wanted to speak, but Chandler cut the air with the side of his hand to silence me.
“You have no requests, then, Jackson?”
“Oh, yes, of course,” said Jackson. “I’ve thought about it, sir. There’s so much my people need.”
“There’s a lot I need,” I said.
Jackson sent a scowl my way, then closed his eyes to help his words along. “I know Rutherford has thought about this too. But it don’t seem right to ask for myself. I could ask for land, but how can any man, even you, sir, own something like those trees outside? Or take that pitcher there. It’s a fine thing, sure it is now, but it kinda favors the quilts the womenfolk make, you know, the ones where everybody in the quarters adds a stitch or knits a flower, so the finished thing is greater’n any of them. Well, I been thinking on this, sir, and I wonder: What ain’t like that? Nothing can stand by itself. Took a million years, I figure, for the copper and tin in that pitcher to come together as pewter. Took the sun, the seasons, the metalworker, his family and forebears, and the whole of Creation, seems to me, sir, to make that one pitcher. How can I say I own something like that?” He scowled to stop me from interrupting. “I’m sure I speak for both of us, sir, when I say the property and profits of this farm should be divided equally among all your servants and hired hands, presently and formerly employed, for their labor helped create it — isn’t that so? — the fixed capital spread among bondmen throughout the county — I can give you their names — and whatever remains donated to that college in Oberlin what helps Negroes on their way north.”
“There’ll be less for you and Rutherford then,” said Chandler.
My brother nodded. “Our needs are small, sir, or should be.”
“Jackson!” My voice jumped. “You fool!”
“That’ll be enough, Rutherford.” A deep crease split Master Chandler’s wrinkle-grooved face. He patted Jackson’s hand, then twisted out a dour, disapproving look at me. “You’d do well, you young reprobate, to end this light-minded life you’ve been leading and improve yourself by listening to your brother’s counsel. He is wise for his years. Wealth, you know, isn’t what a man has, but what he is, Rutherford. Your brother, I daresay, has been an inspiration for me—”
“As you have been for me, sir,” said Jackson.
The floor beneath my feet seemed to fall away. Do what I would, I could not move. They sat there for the longest time, complimenting and smiling at each other. I could have strangled them both. I felt like smashing things. Instead, I shrank from the room, feeling sacked and empty, wondering if I would ever get on in this world. It took me five days to stop shaking. For the rest of my short stay on Chandler’s farm before I struck south for New Orleans, I felt angry at anything that moved.
It was nearly daybreak. Josiah Squibb sat staring, his eyebrows raised. “Great day!” He sucked his teeth. “Give it all away, did he?”
“Would I be here serving hardtack if he hadn’t?”
“What’d yer share come to, Illinois?”
“About forty dollars. Also, I got the family Bible and his bedpan.”
The cook snorted, one of those sounds impossible to decipher, then lay back on his table. Two or three breaths later he was asleep, somnambulized by my life’s story (I never knew it was that dull) and playing dueling snores — so they sounded — with Baleka. I reached to touch her hair, then drew back my hand from the heat enveloping her like an aura. I could not let her die, a dark pawn, caught between Falcon and the ship’s proletariat. I knew that now. I rose stiffly, stretched out the stiffness in my spine, and climbed back on deck where all slept except Ngonyama.
Leaning against the rough-tree rail, parts of him rubbed out by morning mist (his left arm, his legs), he stared back toward Bangalang. There was something in this, and the way he canted his head, that reminded me so of how my brother sometimes stood alone on the road leading to Chandler’s farm after our father left, looking. Just looking. Seeing me, Ngonyama turned and smiled.
“You couldn’t sleep, Rutherford?”
I shook my head. “Can I ask you a question?”
He waited.
“If you were captain of this ship, what would you do?”
“Me?” he laughed. “If I were master?”
“I mean, if your tribe could take the helm.”
He took a moment to think, rubbing his chin, as if this were a Yankee riddle. “Brother, my people have a saying: Wish in one hand, piss in the other, and see which hand fills up first. But if this could be, we would set sail to Africa. All that has happened in the last few weeks would be as a dream, a tale to thrill — and terrify — our grandchildren.”
“And the crew?” I asked. “Would you harm them?”
“What is the point in that? Once home, we would return their boat to them. Anger, we say, is like the blade of a sword. Very difficult to hold for long without harming oneself.”
Behind me, I heard the morning hack of McGinnis. A few of the children on deck were starting to awaken. From the pocket of my breeches I withdrew a few loose crumbs of hardtack and the key I hoped might open their chains. Like a magnet, it had clung to my palm when I lifted Falcon’s tray from his table the night before.
“Here,” I said. “This is for you.”