Visiting the village of the Allmuseri, the Spanish explorer Rafael Garcia was driven mad. I now knew why. I glimpsed the creature, coal black and squatting on stubbly legs, as you might see objects through clouded glass. This blistering vision licked itself clean, as cats do, and had other beings, whole cultures of them, living parasitically on its body. Do I exaggerate? Not at all. It stood before me mute as a mountain, preferring not to speak, I suspected, because to say anything was to fall short of ever saying enough. (Within its contours my father’s incarnation was trapped like a ship in a bottle, contained in a silence where all was possibility, perfection, pre-formed.) It was top-heavy. All head. Luscious hair fell past protruding eyes and a nose broad as a mallet, and framed a grin stretched in hysterical laughter, bunching skin on its cheeks into a hundred mirthful folds: a ceremonial mask from Gambia, I guessed, but it’s safe to say I was hardly in my right mind. Nausea plummeted from my belly straight down to my balls, drawing tight the skin along my scrotum. I came within a hair’s-breadth of collapsing, for this god, or devil, had dressed itself in the flesh of my father. That is what I mostly saw, and for the life of me I could no more separate the two, deserting father and divine monster, than I could sort wave from sea. Nor something more phantasmal that forever confused my lineage as a marginalized American colored man. To wit, his gradual unfoldment before me, a seriality of images I could not stare at straight on but only take in furtive glimpses, because the god, like a griot asked one item of tribal history, which he could only recite by reeling forth the entire story of his people, could not bring forth this one man’s life without delivering as well the complete content of the antecedent universe to which my father, as a single thread, belonged.
All my life I’d hated him because he had cut and run like hundreds of field hands before him. He was a dark man and fiercely handsome, to hear Jackson tell it, and even when he was tired after a day’s work he could whip a guitar like nobody’s business and sing until it made grown women cry. They liked him, the womenfolks, but Da wasn’t so popular with the men who sometimes found his old, wired shoes next to their pallets. A couple tried to kill him, said Jackson, and lost because Da was big through his chest and could lift a cow his damnself, then afterward he’d bring stump whiskey to whomever he’d whooped, saying he was sorry for all the bedswerving and scrapping and gambling he did — that he couldn’t help it, and besides, it wasn’t really his fault he acted thataway, was it? “Looka how we livin’,” he’d say. “Looka what they done to us.” You couldn’t rightly blame a colored man for acting like a child, could you — stealing and sloughing off work when people like Peleg Chandler took the profits, and on top of that so much of their dignity he couldn’t look his wife Ruby in the face when they made love without seeing how much she hated him for being powerless, even with their own children, who had no respect for a man they had seen whipped more than once by an overseer and knew in this world his word was no better than theirs. Each time Da talked like this, checking off cankers and cancer spots of slavery on his porch in the quarters, the other men listened, even those who hated him for pestering their wives, their eyes rage-kindled and drifting away to old angers of their own. “We was kings once,” he would say, scrawling with one finger on the dusty porch a crude map of an African village he remembered vaguely (and neglecting to add that in his tribe his own family was not royalty but instead the equivalent of Russian serfs or Chinese coolies). “We lost a war — naw, a battle. So now we’s prisoners. And the way I see it we supposed to keep on fightin’.”
Most of the time Da did fight. Never Reverend Chandler, though. Rather, he fought his family and others in the fields, chafing under the constraints of bondage, and every other constraint as well: marriage and religion, as white men imposed these on Africans. Finally, in the light of my slush lamp, I beheld his benighted history and misspent manhood turn toward the night he plotted his escape to the Promised Land. It was New Year’s Eve, anno 1811. For good luck he took with him a little of the fresh greens and peas Chandler’s slaves cooked at year’s end (greens for “greenbacks” and peas for “change”), then took himself to the stable, saddled one of the horses, and, since he had never ventured more than ten miles from home, wherefore lost his way, was quickly captured by padderolls and quietly put to death, the bullet entering through his left eye, exiting through his right ear, leaving him forever eight and twenty, an Eternal Object, pure essence rotting in a fetid stretch of Missouri swamp. But even in death he seemed to be doing something, or perhaps should I say he squeezed out one final cry where-through I heard a cross wind of sounds just below his breathing. A thousand soft undervoices that jumped my jangling senses from his last, weakly syllabled wind to a mosaic of voices within voices, each one immanent in the other, none his but all strangely his, the result being that as the loathsome creature, this deity from the dim beginnings of the black past, folded my father back into the broader, shifting field — as waves vanish into water — his breathing blurred in a dissolution of sounds and I could only feel that identity was imagined; I had to listen harder to isolate him from the We that swelled each particle and pore of him, as if the (black) self was the greatest of all fictions; and then I could not find him at all. He seemed everywhere, his presence, and that of countless others, in me as well as the chamber, which had subtly changed. Suddenly I knew the god’s name: Rutherford. And the feel of the ship beneath the wafer-thin soles of my boots was different. Not like any physical surface I knew, but rather as if every molecule of matter in her vibrated gently, almost imperceptibly, and the effect of all this was that from bowsprit to stern she seemed to sing like the fabled Argo.
Then I fainted.
Or died.
Whatever.
A long, long interval passed in the most unimaginable quietude. Silence as deep, as pervading as the depths of the sea. There was stillness, the sweet smell of growing things, then their stench. I heard screaming, felt it barreling out of my bones. I was thrashing and two Josiah Squibbs were holding me down in the fo’c’s’le — my sight was distorted, I saw everything in doubles — mopping my brow with his kerchief. Apparently he had been feeding me from a bucket by his left elbow. Feeding me the choicest cut of medium-raw steak, unless the meat on the fork in his right hand was a product of my prolonged fever. Once he saw me awake, Squibb set down his fork and began fooling with my arm.
“Lie back now, bucko. Yuh need to bleed,” said he. “And pray.”
Beside him were instruments of venesection that made me cringe: fleams, thumb lances, and a copper bleeding bowl. I was not, I should mention, an advocate of bleeding, cupping, or leeches, though these medical practices still lingered on ship when all other methods had failed. I wondered: Was this necessary? And, more to the point, was Squibb capable of carrying it off without killing me? Nay, I was not eager for this, but I knew the cook, so tired, was ready to try everything he’d seen to save us. Squibb’s cold hands rubbed my right arm vigorously; he consulted astrological charts to confirm that the hour was right for an incision and tightened a rag just below my elbow to enlarge the vein.
“Josiah, half a moment—”
“Don’t talk. Ain’t nothin’ to say.” The cook’s face was pale as a scrubbed hammock, his eyes as red as a pigeon’s. He shoved a stick into my hand and demanded I squeeze it. “This’ll balance the humors, though Gawd knows I don’t know what happened to yuh. We pulled yuh hup from below. Yuh been out of yer head fer a long time. Christ, lad, yer hair’s sugah white.”
“How long?”
“Three days full. Ever since yuh went below. But lissen. We spotted a ship this mornin’, boy!”
“Whereaway?”
“Two miles to leeward in the southeast corner.”
“Her flag?”
“None. Leastways none I kin see, but I think she’s American. She’s been following us hank fer hank, tryin’ to eat our wind. I think her skipper knows we’re in trouble. If she’s British, we’re sunk. They’ll search us and charge you ’n’ me with murder!”
“Peter hailed her, then?”
Squibb stiffened, shipped a long face, then looked at the bucket from which he’d fed me. “Yuh had Mr. Cringle fer supper, m’boy. We all did. Now, lie back, dammit! This was what he wanted. I was sittin’ with him toward the end, which he knew was comin’. Yuh know, when a body goes the bladder ’n’ bowels fly open — I seen it happen a hundred times — and yer mates have to clean yuh hup and all. He wanted to spare us that, so he asked the blacks to he’p him to the head. After he was done, he had a few mates gather round him. By that time we was eatin’ our shoes, barnacles, ’n’ the buttons off our shirts. The women and children had chewed every shred of leather off the pumps. So Cringle says, in a voice as calm as a chaplain’s, ’My friends, I have no inheritance to leave my family in America. They’ll not miss me, I’m sure, but I wish to leave you something, for no man could ask for better shipmates than thee. You’re brave lads. The lasses have given their full share as bluejackets too, and methinks ’tis scandalous how some writers such as Amasa Delano have slandered black rebels in their tales. Of course, I fear you’ll get ptomaine if you put me into a pot, but I’ve nothing else to give. I hope this will help. Please, leave me a moment to pray. . ’
“He took mebbe fifteen minutes. After that he called me in and give me his knife. Cringle closed me fingers round the handle. He instructed me that if I preferred not to kill him face to face, he’d turn his back to me. Don’t you know he told me to cover his mouth, plunge the knife between his shoulder blades, then pull it free and cut his throat from behind. If that was too difficult for me, he said I should stab into the soft flesh behind his ear, pokin’ straight through the brain. If not that method, then I was to grip the blade with both hands and strike just below his collarbone, workin’ the knife back and forth so it wouldn’t break when I withdrew it. He told me we was down to only four or five knives, so I couldn’t afford to have this one snap off inside him when his body pitched forward.
“At first I couldn’t do it, Illinois. I started to ask if it wouldn’t be better fer us to die like men, but I checked meself before sayin’ a thing so foolish, ’cause what could I mean? What was the limit of bein’ human? How much could yuh take away and still be a man? In a kind of daze I done what he wanted, standin’ back from meself, then unstringin’ him, and it was in a daze that I lay back, short-winded and watchin’ the Africans cut away Cringle’s head, hands, feet, and bowels, and throw ’em overboard. Next, they quartered him. They skinned him and cut the meat into spareribs, fatback, bacon, and ham. It was then I reckon it hit me, that I’d killed a man.” Squibb’s eyes darted toward the cabin door, as if the mate’s ghost might be standing there. “I can’t sink no lower, laddie, and I ’spect Mr. Cringle’s won his wings. After what he done, I don’t plan to lose yuh. Yuh kin count on that. . ”
Cringle’s death silenced me. By any measure, he had been the best mate among us, the most magnanimous and gentle during our ordeal, the most generous in the face of hopelessness — in fact, a sailor who gave hope, steadied the ladder for others, and solved more problems than he created. I could not long straddle the thought that Providence had taken him so brutally. I wanted Squibb to deny it, but as I watched him work I saw, as he could not, how thoroughly his own life had been altered by our voyage. As our mates perished, Squibb was pressed into service not only as the ship’s cook but also as our surgeon, and was often obliged to search his rum-pickled memory for nautical knowledge when a helmsman was needed. More than anyone, I think I knew how these demands and duties, all in the face of probable death, tested him. Now, what I am about to say must go no farther than the pages of this logbook. Five or maybe six days after the mutiny Cringle caught Josiah Squibb stealing rations reserved for the children. He was that hungry. That afraid. When the mate called him on the carpet he cried. His parrot too. It behooves me to explain how great a crime this, more than murder and man-eating, seemed to him. Until those days of sin, the darkest for him in the calendar of our cruise, he had believed the Almighty would safely deliver us to shore. But no longer. Distinctly, I remembered the Old Man saying, “A ship is a society, if you get my drift. A commonwealth, Mr. Calhoun,” and Squibb, after snatching food from the mouths of infants, felt too ashamed to speak to me or anyone for a few days after Cringle caught him stealing. What was the use? Every day since leaving the fort we had lost something. Now there was nothing more to lose. Being that far down he was no longer afraid to fall. In this new condition, the concepts of good and evil, sinner and saved, even of life and death, falsified the only question of significance aboard ship, which was this: What must he do next? If asked to double-breech the lower decks or batten hatchways, he quietly did so, lifting himself above likes and dislikes, dwelling on the smallest details of his chores to deflect his mind from brooding — a Way, perhaps, to solder that deep schism Falcon believed bifurcated Mind. When someone had to fit a strap around the main topmasthead, it was Squibb who swung the block, a coil of halyards, and a marlinespike round his neck and, oblivious to the ship’s swinging hard to starboard, to the fact that he had a bad foot and might fall from the crosstrees, climbed aloft and finished the job in Bristol fashion. Whatever was needful he did, including the learning of a little conversational Allmuseri when Diamelo demanded his former captors ease back from English. It would have been helpful to know if he still sought perfection in women who looked like his late wife. . Don’t care about that? Okay, we shall push on. .
The result of Squibb’s sea change was that his touch, as he worked the lancet, reminded me of Ngonyama’s (or that of a thief), as if he could anticipate my pain before I felt it, and therefore move the other way. His breathing even resembled that of the Allmuseri, the proportion of inhalation, retention, and exhalation being something like 1:4:2, like oil slowly flowing from one vessel to another. I felt perfectly balanced crosscurrents of culture in him, each a pool of possibilities from which he was unconsciously drawing, moment by moment, to solve whatever problem was at hand.
“Josiah, that ship. .”
“Ah was the one signaled her. I cried, ‘Ho there, the ship, ahoy,’ then Diamelo stopped me with a cat. He’s afraid she’s a man-o’-war that’ll put the blacks back in irons. Things are bad. I have to tell yuh that. Ngonyama can’t help us now. He’s pissin’ blood, bleedin’ inside, I figure, so I don’t give him much time. I don’t give any of us much time. We’re comin’ into dirty weather again. The ship won’t wear. This boat’s mebbe our only chance to get home. Diamelo wants to fire on her, then abandon this tub — and us — fer that one. Y’know, I’d say that boy’s a li’l slack in the stays. .”
“No question, but has he convinced the others to become corsairs too?”
The cook sighed. The lines of his face were all vertical, those on his forehead flat, like currents. “Can’t say. It’s all touch ’n’ go from heah, Illinois.”
“Josiah—”
Squibb shushed me. The telling of this left him looking squally and shivering so badly, like a man lost in snow, that he took himself duckfooting from the room, splashing through water, after removing the tourniquet from my arm, and I cannot say I heard him rightly through the natter and babble of voices in my head. More weakened than before from bleeding — he had drawn a pint of purplish blood — I could only rest quietly, thinking of the ship that might be our savior, my heart whamming away like a drum as our own boat convulsed.
I slept. Deeply at first, then in pools of my own milky perspiration. Slept through the passing of light and patches of darkness in the portal above my head, and came awake into a conscious nightmare. Never ill a day in my life, thanks to Master Chandler’s Saturday morning doses of castor oil, I now found that my gums were bleeding. I could not stop the flow. Rags of bedclothing stained with blood began to pile up beneath the berth where I lay. Crisp pain coursed through all parts of my body — stomach, head — and I would have felt pain in my spleen and pancreas too, but I wasn’t exactly sure where they were. There came a knock at my door. Twice, I think, but I was unable to answer. The catch was turned. The door eased open. Someone looked in, saying nothing, then passed on. In the cavity of my chest a fire burned like camphor. I lay sprawled in purging fever. A quivering mass of jelly. My eyes felt filmy, and so I tried to keep them closed, sleeping again and shivering violently, though, as I say, I felt that I was on fire.
When I opened my eyes again — I do not know the day — the cabin had a twisted feel, the surface of objects warped, the planes and lines of the room falling away to a point in the corner millions of leagues away. I closed my eyes, only to experience a vertigo like the vortices that suck ships to the bottom of the briny. Slowly I pulled myself to the floor, feeling nothing under my feet, though I knew well enough I must be standing, feeling, in fact, no physical tie to the other objects in the room at all. Then I gave at the knees and keeled over.
How long I lay at the foot of the berth I cannot say. Again, daylight burned from ruby to blue in the portal, then shaded down into night. I wobbled to the door, intending to call for help, sideswiped a table, which caused me astounding pain, and fumbled with friction matches to light the lantern, burning myself several times, I could see, but I felt nothing in my fingers. I stumbled into my trousers, then made my way outside onto the deck, a slight paralysis pinching my left side, so that I dragged that leg a little, then stumbled down to the orlop, its tainted air filled with buzzing insects like floating plankton, burning my lungs. As I squatted there, my head swung into this cesspool of swishing fecal matter, I brought up black clumps I can only liken to an afterbirth or a living thing aborted from the body — something foul and shaped like the African god, as if its homunculus had been growing inside me — and voiding this was so violent a thing I was too weakened to rise again, and lay jackknifed for a long time with my face flat against the splintery hollow rind of the hull, listening to the swash and purl of waters below me.
Then, as before, I desperately dreamed of home. I’m sure the Allmuseri did the same, but home was a clear, positive image to them as they worked on the ship. As I remembered home, it was a battlefield, a boiling cauldron. It created white rascals like Ebenezer Falcon, black ones like Zeringue, uppity Creoles, hundreds of slave lords, bondmen crippled and caricatured by the disfiguring hand of servitude. Nay, the States were hardly the sort of place a Negro would pine for, but pine for them I did. Even for that I was ready now after months at sea, for the strangeness and mystery of black life, even for the endless round of social obstacles and challenges and trials colored men faced every blessed day of their lives, for there were indeed triumphs, I remembered, that balanced the suffering on shore, small yet enduring things, very deep, that Isadora often pointed out to me during our evening walks. If this weird, upside-down caricature of a country called America, if this land of refugees and former indentured servants, religious heretics and half-breeds, whoresons and fugitives — this cauldron of mongrels from all points on the compass — was all I could rightly call home, then aye; I was of it. There, as I lay weakened from bleeding, was where I wanted to be. Do I sound like a patriot? Brother, I put it to you: What Negro, in his heart (if he’s not a hypocrite), is not?
I was lying where I had fallen when Baleka came below, saw me, then rolled me upon my back like a beetle. She was speaking, I knew that much, but my ears were stopped completely. Her face seemed fathoms away, or perhaps it was that my own eyes had shrunk back into my head, receding inward to some smoking corner of the brain. Try as I might, I could not remember my full name. She and one other I did not know lifted me up the gangway to the deck, and dropped me back on the bed in the fo’c’s’le. I tried to sit. The room spun. I fell back again, lying half off the bed, and wept at my helplessness. I had not known before that everything, within and without, could break down so thoroughly. For all I knew I had already lived through many afflictions and survived them, too busy at ship’s business to know I was afflicted. And then they were gone. No, they did not walk out. One second they stood beside me, then they dematerialized like phantoms. All that day and night I lay in a dissolving, diseased world, unable to find a position comfortable enough to remain in. My bowels ran black. The pain was quick. Everywhere at once. Then, at some point in this river of sickness, I saw Ngonyama crack open the cabin door. He was alone, his eyes like sea mist, a breath of ice in his matted hair.
For a moment he stood above me, keeping his own counsel. He cupped my hands together in his to warm them. He was feverish too. A blue tinge stained his lips. And, more’s the pity, he could not straighten out the fingers on his right hand or stop shivering, as if someone stood upon his grave. He was in pain, but tried not to show this, because he was disassociating himself from the misfortunes of his body, as he’d done when the Old Man put a brand to his backside, going out to meet his suffering, you might say, as a proud African king meets a king. With him sitting hard by, I could not help but remember the practice his people had of setting aside one day each month for giving up a deep-rooted, selfish desire; the Allmuseri made this day a celebration, a festive holiday so colorful, with dancing and music and clowning magicians everywhere, that even their children were eager for the Day of Renunciation, as they called it, to arrive. Would such a four-dimensional culture perish with him and the others? During all this time I tried to speak, but felt my throat to be phlegmed, my lips soldered together, a crusty material caking my mouth. Ngonyama put his hand on my chest, urging me to lie back, and I did, feeling another flicker of panic. Even though we had come through much together — mutiny, storms, meetings with gods — my friends could help me no more than a man who falls overboard during a gale, the sea taking him instantly. I gave myself up for lost. Even as he watched me, I sank farther away, his face dislimning, the room fading in a frightening way that made me realize how dependent its appearance was upon the workings of my own nervous system, how in this sickness my faculties that gave it shape were loosened, shut down, switched off, and for all purposes nothing in my sight could sustain itself without me, how I was responsible for all of it, the beauty and ugliness; and I thought of how the mate was righter than he knew, and of Blake, a poet Master Chandler had me read, his beguiling, Berkeleyesque words, “I see the windmill before me; I blink my eyes, it goes away,” and so did the cabin, and so did the world. In the black space behind my eyelids I saw nothing, and knew I was dying, no doubt about that, and I did not care for myself anymore, only that my mates should survive.
At six bells Ngonyama left, and I lay, as in a chrysalis, until I could hear no longer, then fell again through leagues and leagues of darkness, the paralysis of my legs spreading upward toward my groin, deadening and numbing as it went. There came tremors, as if I were bursting or splitting apart. For a few seconds I was blind. Huge, frosty waves pitched the Republic, rolling her so prodigiously the floor shook and the cabin walls panted. Thrown open by deckwash blue as floodwater, the cabin door banged loudly against the wall. The storm outside, for certainly it was that, changed pressure inside the cabin and further troubled my breathing. I lay eager to question Ngonyama again, and lifted my head when I heard footsteps enter the room.
“Ngonyama,” I said too quickly, for it was not him but Squibb, looming over me, knee-deep in water, his face pooled in wet hair.
“Kin yuh stand, Illinois?”
I pushed myself up. “Help me get dressed.”
“No time fer modesty. We’ve got to use this storm as cover till we gets a boat over the side.”
“How many are left?”
“Twelve, countin’ us. I’ve already got the gel in one of the longboats. Smack it about now, ’less yuh plan to follow this bastard into the briny!”
Furniture was floating as high as Squibb’s hams. He guided me through the door, but no sooner did we reach the deck than an explosion rocked the ship: I was stunned, thrown back against a bulkhead, Squibb falling beneath me. The ceiling caved in, raining planks and boards that buried us and broke the cook’s left arm. Somehow, with a strength I cannot explain, he shoved them aside and, upon gaining the deck again, stepping over a body I recognized as Diamelo’s, we found the foreyard broken in its slings, the larboard railings torn away, and the orlop deck fallen into the hold. From what I could tell, clinging to the remains of the masthead, Diamelo had gone the wrong side of the buoy by popping off one of the cannons, unattended for weeks, and with unstable powder. The ball ignited but failed to fire, and moments later when it eventually blew, spraying the deck with bricks and burning metal, not a man, African or American, in the line of fire was left standing. Smoke was burning my face, blinding me again, but I was able to make out Ngonyama at the wheel. There on the flaming bridge he seemed preposterously alone, black flesh and wood so blended — he had lashed himself to the wheel and now could not break free — it was impossible to tell where ship ended and sailor began or, for that matter, to clearly distinguish what was ship, what sailor, and what sea, for in this chaosmos of roily water and fire, formless mist and men flying everywhere, the sea and all within it seemed a churning field that threw out forms indistinctly. I tried to make my way to the helm and add my hands, weak as they were, but Squibb restrained me. The wind was high. I could not hear his voice, but knew he was saying the ship was hogged, falling to pieces around our heads. The mizzenmast had snapped. The ship began bilging at her center, a heart-stopping grind of timber as her waist broke in half, the decks opened, her beams gave way, her topsides broke from the floor heads, and heavy sea swamped all the forward compartments. With a knife Squibb cut off his boots, stripped away his stockings, shirt, trousers, and, naked as a fish, pushed me toward a jolly boat where he had earlier sent three of the children. Judging this to be their last hour on earth, the little ones wailed. Every new wave lifted the ship, which again dropped so low water combed forward, then aft, dragging yet another hand away. And it was as I fought to keep the children in the boat that I felt the deck slam upward suddenly, pitching all of us into the sky, then dashing us into a feather-white sea.
You cannot know the feeling, nor words deliver the fact, of how I felt once flung into the Cupboard. My eyes were logged, full of freezing water. Still, I was able to make out the ship rolling onto her beam ends. Her stern sank foremost. I slipped underwater, the sea filling my throat, ballooning my lungs — it was a feeling of inversion, as if I’d mistakenly touched a harmless-looking wall, thinking it solid, then tripped, falling through into a shadowy realm of mist and specters on the netherside. Drowning, I saw my past spool by me, a most unsettling experience, there being in my case precious little of value to review. My lungs were bursting. I found myself following the broken ship; she was clearly before me, only ten cables below, her carcass suspended like an antique bark hung from a museum’s ceiling, as were my shipmates, their lips bubbling ribbons of air. I batted my hands frantically to get back, my fingers scratching at the bottomside of the Atlantic and, surfacing, shaking water from my eyes, I saw chests, water casks, and debris crowded with quaking bilge rats floating near me and threw myself upon a hammock lashed in the orthodox way, with seven hitches. Likewise, some of the Allmuseri were gripping loose deckboards, furniture, and shrouds awaft round the hulk of the Republic. But not for long. The speed of the ship’s descent quickly dragged them down at the rate of knots. Husbands, fighting to keep afloat, called their wives, but in the black bowl of sky, and blacker sea, no one could identify another, and soon their chins flipped up and disappeared in a sparge of foam.
In principle, the hammock should have kept me floating for a full day. It did not. During the night, the shipwrecked went under, one by one. Who lived, I could not say, for the hammock beneath me grew heavy and at last, filling with salt water, surrendered its weight and mine into the Atlantic’s dancing, lemon-colored lights.