Here the log of the Republic—and my life — might have ended. Stouter men than myself, even eighteen stone, might have proven more buoyant, but seeing how thin I’d become, and weakened by bloodletting, I found myself floundering until, miraculously, I was fished from the sea. Arms stronger than mine pulled me over poop-deck beams. Someone’s hand seized me by the hair, and my half-drowned body was hauled aboard what looked like the deck of a ship built for Andrew Jackson himself. Fingers on both sides of me pushed forward, forcing water through my lips, and unless I was deceived there were crewmen and elegantly dressed passengers gathered round me, the cook, and three children yanked from the waves — a ring of pale, insubstantial faces, one of which peered through a lorgnette and asked in Creole patois, “What kind of fish are they?” for our condition was so horrible our own mothers would not have known us. By contrast to these spectators, we must have seemed like wharf rats and wretches. We smelled worse. Our scalps were full of worms. Although these passengers appeared to be polite society, I had no inkling of the sort of vessel we were aboard, which was just as well, as I shall soon explain, and my gratitude at being rescued was so great I would not release their captain, a kindly old shellback named Cornelius Quackenbush, for nigh half an hour, and once he uncoiled my fingers from his cuffs I clung, legs and arms, to the cathead until I slipped into a swoon.
When my senses returned or, if that is saying too much, when I again opened my eyes, I discovered Captain Quackenbush’s crew had carried Squibb and me to a comfortable berth, and the children to another nearby. Little by little, I learned that this ship, the Juno, was a floating gin palace, as some sailors called them, with gold plates in the galley and Royal Wilton carpets that cost five dollars a yard, and that when she sighted us during her return to New Orleans from the West Indies our wreck was adrift only a few leagues southwest of Guadeloupe. Captain Quackenbush received us with a welcome that spoke well of his sympathy for all sailors, closing his eyes as Squibb recounted the tale of our misfortunes, then bowing his head to thank the Author of All Things for selecting him to be the agent of our rescue.
So yes, Quackenbush fed, bathed, and treated us kindly for days after our deliverance, but I still felt myself to be thousands of miles from anything I felt sure about. Furthermore, I never dreamed how the full weight of all we’d endured would hit me like a falling masthead: I felt like a foot soldier home from a foreign campaign. As a crew member on the Republic, I’d learned to live each day as if it might be my last. Anyone who served under Ebenezer Falcon woke each morning with a prayer on his lips, preliving his final hour and different ways he might die. During a storm, you could never relax, be overconfident, or let fear show upon your face. You developed what Cringle called a “flood mentality”—that is, you were always prepared to have water high as your waist. During each crisis, every action had to be aimed at helping your fellow crewmen. You could not afford to tire. Your duty was always to insinew your ship; if you hoped to see shore, you must devote yourself to the welfare of everyone, and never complain, and constantly guard against showing weakness. Looking back at the asceticism of the Middle Passage, I saw how the frame of mind I had adopted left me unattached, like the slaves who, not knowing what awaited them in the New World, put a high premium on living from moment to moment, and this, I realized, was why they did not commit suicide. The voyage had irreversibly changed my seeing, made of me a cultural mongrel, and transformed the world into a fleeting shadow play I felt no need to possess or dominate, only appreciate in the ever extended present. Colors had been more vivid at sea, water wetter, ice colder. But now. .
Ah, now, I felt shock waves long postponed. I could not stop shaking. I wept easily, and found this involuntary exercise so refreshing I promised to empty myself and wet my handkerchief this way every week, say, at elevenish on Sunday evenings, so don’t bother to call on me then. Yet the simplest tasks defeated me. When called upon to select from bedclothing volunteered by the passengers and brought by the ship’s boy, who asked, “Do you prefer white bedspreads or blue?” I was paralyzed, first because he reminded me of Tommy, and second because I could see no difference between the two choices after our travels, or how the distinction mattered in the Grand Scheme of things, and I pondered this astonishing question for a quarter-hour, incapable of choosing until Squibb said, “Blue,” and bailed me out. These embarrassments did not abate. Trays of food brought to our room each morning — all those culinary options — gave pause to a man who had lately dined on his first mate and quartermaster.
But that was not the worst of it.
I could not sleep for more than four hours at a stretch, not after being trained to catnap by Falcon, who kept me up for midnight watches. Nightmares of the African god pestered my sleep. Now and then I felt the Juno was sinking, and I fell to the floor, forcing a laugh when I got to my feet so Squibb wouldn’t worry, but he saw the state I was in all the same. Saw it when I fabricated excuses for not leaving our cabin the first week, and the week after that. Saw it when I stood naked, having forgotten to dress, behind the long curtain at our porthole, which I kept drawn, peeping out at carefree people dining and courting on deck and, Lord help me, I wondered how they might taste — people, I heard, preparing for a shipboard wedding; people who hungered and hated, plotted and schemed over a thousand inconsequentials. Hardly trivial to them, I knew, because not all that long ago such matters as getting a good-looking woman into bed and making a Big Killing and keeping up with the latest stage play and buying clothes and cutting a swell figure had consumed my energies as these activities did theirs; but I simply could not do this now. None of it made sense after the Middle Passage. And I wondered: How could I ever live on land again? Often the depression was so great I felt guilty simply for being alive. By surviving, I sometimes felt I’d stolen life from Cringle, or was living on time belonging to Ngonyama and the other mates; I felt like a thief to the bitter end. Sometimes late at night, after Squibb, his arm in a sling, went rummaging outside for a horn of rum, I considered how easy it would be, and perhaps just, to join my drowned shipmates by hanging myself. And of course it didn’t help that passengers, partying after the storm passed, chose to sing a chantey called “Have You Ever Been in New Orleans.”
“. . If not you’d better go
It’s a nation of a queer place; day and night
a show!
Clergymen, priests, friars, nuns, women of all
stains;
Negroes in purple and fine linen, and slaves in
rags and chains.
Ships, arks, steamboats, robbers, pirates,
alligators,
Assassins, gamblers, drunkards, and cotton speculators;
Sailors, soldiers, pretty girls, and ugly
fortunetellers;
Pimps, imps, shrimps, and all sorts of dirty
fellows;
White men with black wives, et vice versa too,
A progeny of all colors — an infernal motley
crew!. .”
Only the hours I spent hunched over the skipper’s logbook kept me steady. Along with his sea chest, it had been salvaged after the shipwreck, and once its pages dried I returned to recording all I could remember, first as a means to free myself from the voices in my head, to pour onto these water-stained pages as much of the pain as I could until at the end of each evening, after writing furiously and without direction, I at last felt emptied and ready for sleep. Then, as our days aboard the Juno wore on, I came to it with a different, stranger compulsion — a need to transcribe and thereby transfigure all we had experienced, and somehow through all this I found a way to make my peace with the recent past by turning it into Word. Consequently, when I wrote I was incapable of venturing forth into the social world, so Baleka did this for me, begging passengers for things I needed, such as a wig.
Because I’d lost most of my hair, you see. Where once I had had a thick, bushy helmet that only a dogbrush could unkink, I was now almost as bald as Martin Van Buren, though a damned sight less tubby: a kind of old kid I seemed in the cabin’s mirror as I squeezed on a raven-black headpiece, one tight at the temples like a stocking cap. My beard was Biblical in length, my joints Job-like in their creaking. Each morning when I rose, my ribs felt like iron rods. Our travels through several time zones had played badly with the metabolic cycles of my body, according to the ship’s surgeon, causing a loss of nitrogen and sulfur, and confusing my inner ear. And, given the diseases I’d lived through, I feared I was probably sterile. No matter what I did — hairstyling, mud facials, or fancy perfumes — I could not hide what I was: a wreck of the Republic. The girl, as dear to me now as a daughter, brought fresh clothes for me, a cane I needed badly, plus a set of wooden teeth so I could smile without looking like the Grand Canyon or the Kali Gorge.
“Ruth’ford,” she said two Saturdays after our rescue, “you can’t stay in this room writing forever! Please go out with me — we don’t have to walk far, or stay out very long.”
“Tomorrow maybe.”
“But you should thank the rich gentleman who gave us these things, shouldn’t you?”
She had a point there. Among the women on board, Captain Quackenbush found the loveliest linen for Baleka, round-toed shoes fastened with bright ribbons, and a turbanlike bonnet very French in design. “I suppose you’re right. Did he tell you his name?”
“Uh-huh.” She nodded. “Mr. Zeringue.”
Suddenly I could not breathe. I fumbled with the cabin window until it flew open, and hung out my head. Old fears flooded back, particularly when my gaze fell again on the girl, because if she had not misspoken herself, and if the wig I wore — burning my scalp — belonged to Papa, then Baleka and the other children were legally his property, pure and simple, which was a thought I could not abide. But was it he? Had Providence hurled me to Africa, then pulled me from the Drink, only to place me — and these innocents — again at his mercy? “Baleka”—I threw on my jacket—“you’re sure he said Zeringue? What did he look like?”
She puffed her cheeks, poked out her belly, and, with her right hand, flicked ashes from an invisible cigar. There could be no mistaking the model for this pantomime.
“And tell me, child, where is he now?”
“There’s a big room on the ship. He was going there.”
“Can you show me the way?”
It was now Baleka who skiffled me along the well-scrubbed deck, but I soon slowed, weaving from the bite of cold wind. Every few feet I listed to port, supported only by my cane and the girl who, after such excruciating progress, at last brought me to anchor at a huge messroom abaft the mainmast. From just left of the door, I heard someone at a piano, practicing a wedding march. In the room’s quiet, planked interior, embellished for some festive occasion, the noise on deck did not intrude. Toward the rear, Captain Quackenbush stood on a makeshift platform with a Bible, consulting in whispers with — yes, by crimus, below him was Papa, looking, if you can believe this, profoundly sad, beat down around the ankles like a man loaded with chains. He seemed to me poorer in both pocketbook and spirit, and doubtless shaken by his devastating losses when the Republic went down right before his eyes. His face was pasty, his posture a little stooped, and about him was the air of a man confused by his barrister, his lover, or both. He was involved in some kind of rehearsal. Wedding flowers were everywhere. Yet I sensed something else, an internal signal that once warned me shifting winds bore watching, and — as Papa’s fiancée walked toward him in a blue silk dress, beneath a Kitty Fisher bonnet — it was blasting away. Her legs were wobbly from motion sickness; Papa and the captain seemed worried she might bring up her last meal on the lush carpet leading to the altar. She did not fully turn, but in my bones I knew this was Isadora. But an Isadora I could not believe. In the messroom’s hushed light, which created soft overtones on her lips and a warm cast to her skin, her beauty was heart-stabbing. Added to that, she had lost about fifty pounds. (Soon I would know why.) I started to speak, but could not; I wanted to enter, but my will began to wither. For an instant I must have gone blank, the room blurring and turning soft at the edges like the effect of four fingers of whiskey. Rubbing my face with both hands, my cane in the crook of my arm, I looked again, saw her step shyly beside Papa, and then I could stand it no longer. I was about to barge inside and separate them when a hand fell heavily upon my shoulder.
“Suh,” said Santos, “this is a private function.” He was as muscular and lumpy-looking as ever, dressed in a neckstock cravat and barrow-coat: the very portrait of misery. Modern styles in fashion clearly were not the best attire for a giant afflicted with that rare disease — gaposis — where nothing fits right. Pulling at his collar, he tilted his head left, studying me. Recognition flickered and burst into flame. “Say, hold on heah! Just one fuhcockin minute! By Gawd, you’s a pitiful sight, but underneath that wig, ain’t you that thief from Illinois?”
Our commotion was attracting onlookers.
“Papa, looka what just pulled into harbor!” Santos reached with his right hand, planning to grab my left wrist, a move I’d seen McGaffin make during the mutiny, and something (I cannot say what) swept over me (I cannot say how), but I sidestepped as I’d seen Atufal do, snatched his wrist and allowed Santos’s propulsion to pitch him forward whilst I took a half step closer inside his guard, dropped quickly to the ground directly below him, then scissored his waist with my legs and tipped him over backward, the back of his skull bouncing off the deck. I’d wager the deck was more damaged than Santos’s head. Like the brontosaurus, snapping at something that bit it yesterday, it might be a full thirty minutes before the pain of that bump traveled from his skin to his central nervous system. Nevertheless, this elegant and unexpected eruption of capoeira, which now seemed as natural to me as lifting my arm, was enough to sting his pride and send him scurrying backward, startled, into a forest of legs. We were surrounded by spectators, among them Squibb, who had come running from our room when he discovered I was gone.
“Santos,” Papa snapped, stepping outside, “who is this?”
Santos was staring at me in bewilderment. “That’s that boy the schoolteacher was seein’.” Deeply, he frowned. “Nigguh, how’d you do that?”
Isadora asked, “Rutherford?”
The captain peered over her and Papa’s shoulders. “Mr. Calhoun, I’m glad to see you’re taking a little air after your misfortunes. However, we’re in the middle of an important ceremony—”
“He was on that ship?” Papa stepped back from me, scratching his jaw. “Calhoun? I don’t believe it, but if you was there, I wanna talk to you tout why that ship went down and whose fault it was. In my cabin, son. Right now. Santos, you bring him along — and don’t lose the goddamn ring.”
His man sat where he was, leery of me. I used this second of uncertainty to pull Squibb to one side and ask him to perform one last duty for me, one my life and Isadora’s depended on, then hurried her away from the others. Baleka kept following us, trying to listen. I shooed her away. And all the while Isadora gave me a once-over, pushing her head close to see if I’d switched my nose for a different proboscis, if I was the same person under my beard, and just as quickly she pulled back.
“Do I smell that bad?”
She shook her head. “You don’t look or sound the same.”
Of course, she was right. Sometimes without knowing it, I spoke in the slightly higher register of the slaves, had their accent, brisk tempo of talk, and occasionally caught myself incapable of seeing things in general terms. In other words, when I wasn’t watching myself, each figure floating past me possessed haecceitas but not quidditas, a uniqueness so radical I felt I could assume nothing about anyone or anything, or now — in the case of Isadora — generalize about her from one moment to the next.
She began squinting, and not simply to shut out the sun, although we were on the ship’s western side afore the windlass. Rather, it was the squint of slowly remembered rage, and suddenly her voice was full of frowns. “Where were you, Rutherford! I waited for hours and hours after everyone else left, except for him.” She pointed in Papa’s direction. “Do you know — have you any idea — how humiliating that was for me?”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “If I could do it over, I would.” Cautiously, I touched her left arm, hoping she would not pull away. “I’m not the same, as you say. There’s someone else, a girl. .”
I could feel Isadora’s arm tense beneath my fingers. Quietly, with her lower lip caught between her teeth, she waited for me to explain.
“She’s one of the children orphaned by the voyage. And no, I’m not her father, if that’s what you’re thinking, but I might as well be. Whenever Baleka is out of my sight I am worried. If she bruises herself, I feel bruised. Night and day I pray all will go well for her, even after I am gone. Sometimes she drives me to distraction with all the things she shoves under my nose for me to see — Yankee things she wants me to explain, but I cannot eat, if you must know, until I am sure she has eaten first, nor sleep if she is restless and, to make matters worse, if she is quiet for too long, I worry about that as well. .”
Isadora placed her right hand over my fingers. “My goodness, you have changed, Rutherford.”
“Aye, and what I’m saying is that in order to raise her I shall need your help.”
“Is that a proposal?”
“It is.”
“Then I’m sorry, Rutherford.” She lowered her eyes, her hand left mine, and for a moment I felt like a ship unmoored. “I can’t accept your proposal now.”
“Why not? Is it because you accepted Papa’s first? Isadora, how can you even consider marrying him?”
She hurried to the rail, gagged, her stomach unsettled by either the rocking of the ship or her scheduled marriage to a man who made Cesare Borgia seem like a milquetoast. And abruptly she was angry with me again, so angry after gagging her voice came in sputters and a spray of spittle I felt too ashamed to avoid by turning my head or by taking a step away. “Papa and that goon of his were there when you weren’t, Rutherford! He might be a criminal, but he saw how I was hurting, standing there in front of all those people Madame Toulouse invited, so everybody who’s anybody in New Orleans would know nobody wanted me.” I eased to one side, believing Isadora was drawing back her fist; instead, she pulled nervously at her earlobe, a new habit she’d developed since I’d been gone. “I could have died right there, really I could have. But then. . he was nice to me. He took me home. The next night he came by with a whole carriage filled with my favorite flowers, and proposed, and then I didn’t know what to do. You don’t say no when you’re being courted by a man who owns half the city, has underworld connections everywhere, and kills people for interrupting him.”
“You did that?”
“Once,” she confessed. “After that I was afraid to. He scares me, Rutherford! Sometimes I’m so frightened I can’t eat or sleep. You don’t know what kind of things he’s been up to.”
“I think I do. And I’m not surprised he wants you. You’re beautiful,” I said, to soften her anger, yet it was true. Her anxiety and loss of appetite had made her prettier. Up close, I could see she’d used the ash from matches to darken her eyes, the juice from berries to rouge her cheeks and lips. “You’ve twice as much education and culture as he has. Given the circles he moves in, marrying you might bring the lubber a little respectability.”
“I suppose that’s why he took me on this trip, to force me to accept his proposal. I’ve been holding him at bay, really I have, Rutherford, for weeks. He hates animals, you know, even though he maintains a few as bodyguards and personal friends. He says I’ll have to get rid of my cats. Well, I told him I couldn’t let them go, not out into the cold, before I’d knitted sweaters for each of them, and I’ve been doing that every day for two months, stalling him, I mean, because at night I undo them.” She wanted something to dry her eyes; I offered the tail of my shirt. After blowing her nose loudly she said, “It was working until last month when Santos, that blot on the species, stopped by my room to deliver a present from Papa and saw me unraveling booties I’d made for one of the puppies. You remember Poopsie, don’t you?” I nodded, the memory of dog fur on my clothing unpleasant, but I made myself smile, which prompted Isadora to lean into me so firmly I felt our bodies had been fitted at the factory.
“Rutherford, what am I supposed to do?”
I asked her to stay in her cabin for the next hour. After making sure she’d locked her door, I bade Captain Quackenbush direct me to Papa’s quarters. Then I shook his hand, and turned to Squibb, who waited by the rail with Ebenezer Falcon’s logbook.
“This is what yuh wanted, right?”
“Thank you, Josiah.”
“And yuh’re goin’ in there with them swabs by yuhself, mate?”
“Aye, but I’d appreciate your staying close by and keeping a bright lookout.”
With his good arm, Squibb gave a mock salute. “Whatever yuh say, Cap’n,” which belied the fact that if any gob could be counted on during a storm it was he. And believe me, a storm was brewing. Poor Isadora! Papa now had her by the short hairs. Served her right, I thought, for bringing him into our lives in the first place. I knew I could not leave her in such a fix, that I had to confront him, much as David, his pitiful sling and shepherd’s stick at his side, squared off with the giant of the Philistines. Whether Papa fit the image of Goliath best or Santos, I cannot say. Yet of one thing I was sure. I was not, nor could I ever be, his match. For some blacks back home, those who did not know the full extent of his crimes, Papa was, if not a hero, then a Race Man to be admired. His holdings were diverse (including a controlling share in the Juno, according to Isadora), and he carefully watched political changes in the country, even the smallest shifts in local government, so he could profit from them, sink a little cash into land here, a house there, which in twenty years would return his investment tenfold. Once he bought a business, he never — absolutely never — sold it back to white men, because he feared if it left black hands it might never return. Aye, for many he was a patron of the race, a man who lent money to other blacks, and sometimes backed stage plays written by Negro playwrights in New Orleans. Could evil such as his actually produce good? Could money earned from murder, lies, and slave trading be used for civic service? These questions coursed through me as I paused before his cabin, and I saw how a man such as Papa might hunger for an heir, particularly a son raised by a woman as refined as Isadora — a teacher, indeed, a nursery-governess by trade. As the boy matured, he might feel a twinge of shame at his father’s bloody fortune, but he would toast his old man’s portrait some nights, for those crimes had carried their family from the fields to the Big House, from the quarters to the centers of finance. Oh, Papa’s heir might occasionally complain like Peter Cringle (surely Papa would nudge him toward politics) but, like those blacks in awe of the giant Philistine, he would feel that freedom was property. Power was property. Love of race and kin was property, and if the capital in question was the lives of other colored men. . well, mightn’t a few have to perish, in the progress of the race, for the good of the many?
Before I could rap on the door it sprang open. Santos had been eavesdropping at the porthole. He kept a distance of twelve feet between us as I entered; his eyes never left me when he slammed the door, turned the key in its latch, and retired to a corner opposite Papa, who was seated at a table with carved cabriole legs bolted to the floor. It came as no surprise that these accommodations contained all the comforts Papa enjoyed on shore. He did not travel without enough packages — dozens of shoes, two changes of clothing a day — to fill the hold of a merchantman, and these were cast about on ornate furniture, thrown over tripod tables, across a heavily cushioned sofa, and on his heavily draped bed, heaped into piles awaiting Santos, who would wash, press, and sort them the way my brother had served Reverend Chandler. Surprisingly, Papa apologized for this disorder, and then he took a cigar from a tortoise-shell box on the table and offered me one.
“Calhoun”—he leaned forward in his fruitwood chair to give me a light—“I won’t ask how you got on that ship if you don’t ask why I’m interested in its cargo.”
“The slaves, you mean?”
He straightened, as if I’d poked his spine. “It was a slaver? They’re illegal, aren’t they?” He pondered this, thumbing one of the straps to his suspenders. “How many slaves would you say it was carryin’ before that storm off the coast of Guadeloupe?”
“Fifteen,” I said. “Before the storm and after the mutiny.”
“Mutiny? By who — sailors or slaves?”
“Both, or I should say the ship’s crew was planning to set their captain adrift before the slaves broke free.”
“I see.” Papa ritched back in his chair, his mind racing ahead of me, judging by the evidence in his eyes, as chess masters leap two moves ahead of your own. “Then it was his fault, wasn’t it? Your captain? If there was — uh, an inquiry into all this, if Mr. Quackenbush was to file a report on the shipwreck from which you was saved, thank heaven, would you be prepared to, uh, testify before a maritime court that your captain, being mad, lost control of his vessel, and was maybe even unfit before the voyage began, that he, a barrator, added African slaves to a simple expedition intended only for the transport of butter, bullocks, and rice? Could you say that, Calhoun, if someone — a nameless benefactor, say — was to come up with the currency to reward you for such a tirin’ public speech?” While he talked I opened the logbook you presently hold in your hands. The smell of the sea came off these pages so strongly I had to blink away images of the ship’s sails and mainmast. Papa’s fingertips nervously drummed the edge of his table. “What’re you playin’ with there, boy?”
“Oh, dates,” I said. “Nothing important, just the ship’s manifest, with names for each Allmuseri slave on board, payment rates for the ship’s principal investors, including your whack, Papa.”
“Naw, I can’t be in that book.” He frowned and bent closer, trying to look, and swallowed. “Can I?”
I tilted the book so he could see. “Naval authorities will find this document very interesting. Captain Falcon’s logbook, I’m thinking, would be Exhibit A for any investigation into the loss of the Republic. On the other hand, it would be tragic, don’t you think, if it fell into the hands of William Lloyd Garrison. Or maybe the runaway slaves living among Indians, up in the mountains, who periodically raid plantations and, dear me, kill slave owners.”
“Santos,” barked Papa, “take that book from him!”
As with pain, so too did thought travel slow as slugs in winter through the inner wiring behind Santos’s brow. You may have noticed that he could not think and move at the same time. So he stood perfectly still, like statuary in the corner, and thought furiously, and finally brought out, “Papa, is he sayin’ you was dealin’ in slaves?” Big as he was, the man was preparing his face to cry over this betrayal. “What was that name you used, Calhoun? All — museri? My grand-daddy use to call hisself that.” He thumped a step toward Papa, his tread shaking the floor, then realized it was too hard to talk, think, and perambulate all at once, and stopped alongside me, his voice cracking and hands flat at his sides. “My people on my grandpa’s side is from that tribe.” He wanted to think again, thus was silent for two minutes as we patiently waited. “Calhoun, why would Papa do something like that.”
“Ask him,” I said.
“Papa?”
If anyone knew the untapped power in Santos’s top-heavy body, it was the man who had hired him. He never got sick, couldn’t get drunk, no matter how he tried, and had such a high tolerance of pain he often injured himself accidentally. With each step his man took, Papa backed toward the corner behind his table, and was now squeezing himself against it, as if literally trying to force his way through the wall into the next room. “All right, lissen. Let me put my cards on the table. I made a mistake. Anybody kin do that, right? At first I didn’t know that ship was carryin’ anything more’n vegetables and hides. You got my word on that. Zebediah Singleton come to New Orleans to play at one of my tables, and told me ’bout a business investment he said was straight-up legal — an opportunity for a cullud man closed out of the shippin’ industry. I thought it’d be a good thing for me’n my people, a chance to diversify, get a foot in the door, go up one more stairway into somethin’ legitimate instead of bein’ stuck in the kinda business — gamblin’ and gun-runnin’—I been limited to all my life.” Papa’s scalp was rivering a screen of perspiration over his brow, causing him to rub both palms over his eyes. “I didn’t mean no harm. But once I got in that was it. You kin see what I’m sayin’, can’t you? Sometimes the biggest curse in the world kin be getting exactly what you want, or think you want, ’cause there’s no way to see all the sides when you sign your name or give a handshake. You don’t always know what yo’ business partners are doin’, if they plan to cut yo’ throat, or use yo’ money — unbeknownst to you — for purposes that’ll make you wish you was dead. Calhoun, if I’d known up front the real freight we was smugglin’, I wouldn’ta had anythin’ to do with it.”
“I don’t believe you, Papa.” I turned, pitching my voice toward Santos. “And the Africans who survived this business venture of yours won’t either. They only number three, all children ranging in age from eight to eleven. As cute as they can be too, like Santos here. You could ease your conscience a little, I guess, if you provided something for them — a full endowment, say, for each — until they come of age.”
Santos said, “Damn right.”
“Done!” The muscles in Papa’s face fell loose, hanging in folds. “And you’re gonna destroy that book, ain’tcha?”
“I’d rather keep it as insurance.” I did not want to hear any more. Possibly, he was lying to me about his involvement in the slave trade. Possibly, he still had deep pockets and a web of criminal connections in Louisiana and planned to have me and the logbook conveniently disappear once we were on shore (I decided it would be best for me to return to southern Illinois); but possibly, too, his equating of personal freedom and racial pride with fantastic wealth and power had gotten the blighter in over his head. Needless to say, I had little sympathy for him. I wanted to give him a good drubbing, but I felt too weakened after learning that Santos might be Baleka’s distant cousin, and that meant he might be my in-law and come to visit for family reunions. Santos, though, who knew nothing of these backroom dealings, seemed eager to volunteer for the chore. “You bought slaves, Papa? After all I told you ’bout how Ruffner treated me, you did that?” I had to stick out my cane, like a tree limb, to keep him on our side of the table. But yes, it felt good to have his 280 pounds on my side for a change.
Papa had one hand mashed over his heart. “What else is it you want from me, Calhoun?”
“For now, that you leave Isadora and me alone.”
He stood glaring at the logbook, and I put it behind my back, thinking he might leap any second to grab it. Suddenly, the point of my proposition struck home. “Wait a minute.” His eyes snapped level with mine. “That’s blackmail!”
“Bloody right,” says I. “I’m sure you’re acquainted with the technique, Papa.”
I was also sure he had no alternative but to accept. Because there was no reason for me to hear his reply, I closed the logbook and limped toward the door. His man tossed me the key. Neither Papa or Santos had changed position. However, as I closed the door behind me, I did hear, ever so softly, the former dirt-pit wrestler say, Papa, I’ma kick yo’ natural ass.
Squibb, hearing this too, shipped a smile. “Musta gone all right, eh?”
“Aye.”
“Whatcha gonna do now, Illinois? The captain tells me he kin use a coupla hands fer his next voyage. He’s makin’ a run to the South Seas. You interested?”
“Depends,” I told him, looking aft to where Baleka, brandishing a pot, was chasing a cat; I wondered where the animal had come from. “Might go back to Makanda and look for some land to settle on — solid ground for once, you know?”
“Aye, but if yuh plan to raise kids ’n’ chickens, it’d he’p if yuh had a wife, wouldn’t it?” I could not have agreed more.
Five turns around the deck, intended to walk off my worrying and my tendency to hiccup during times of stress, brought me to Isadora’s door, in my hands a brilliant bouquet of roses I’d “borrowed” from Papa’s arrangement in the messroom. My hands trembled. I felt precariously balanced between my old life in New Orleans and the first rung of another with Isadora, if she would still have an old, broken-down sea dog like me. But why should she, I wondered. She did not know me, as I was now. What was worse, I could not explain myself in a single day. Telling her all I’d endured since I’d seen her last would take a thousand more nights than Scheherazade needed to beguile King Shahryar. Darkness was coming on, the sea trembled as evening shaded down gently over far-reaching waves. I took a breath, then knocked, and Isadora called out, “Come in. It’s unlocked.” Anger flared in me again. Hadn’t I asked her to keep her latch bolted? Entering, I was prepared to scold her, but when I saw Isadora, there from the doorway, I was certain I had come into the wrong cabin, and rubbed my eyes. Seated on her bed, she wore only a thin cotton gown designed for sleeping. I don’t mind telling you this was a shock. I was even less prepared for the birdcage, two smelly dogs, and a cat, lightweight and doubtlessly warm, stretched across her knees like a comforter. The cat and dogs all wore mittens and mufflers. All watched me like bored deck hands waiting for something rich to happen. Quickly, as I shut the door so no one might see her, I realized she had prepared herself not for the man I was now but for the rogue in need of reforming I had been months ago.
“I asked you to lock this. Are you expecting someone?”
“Just you.”
“But you look ready for bed. Are you feeling well?”
“Oh, a little tired, I suppose.” She smiled. “Until you showed up I was worried, but I feel good now.”
I started to ask her to let me feel some of it too, then stopped, knowing that was what the old Rutherford would say. I struggled for a few seconds, feeling my former ways tugging at me. This was the me Isadora remembered, that she was responding to, but in a way that struck me as contrary to her nature. Truth is, she simply wasn’t all that good at acting seductive. Her model, now that I think about it, was a temptress in a play we had seen a year ago, and as Isadora tried to imitate that actress’s come-hither expression I could only answer by covering my lips to smother a sudden urge to laugh. But I thought, God bless her for trying.
“Isadora, I spoke to Papa. There won’t be any wedding, so you needn’t worry.”
“I’m not.” She spanked a spot on the bed for me to sit, which sent her animals flying to the floor. “And my answer is yes, Rutherford. I will marry you and help you make a home for Baleka. I’m sure Captain Quackenbush will perform the ceremony. I mean, everything is ready for a wedding.”
I stood where I was, relieved and smiling, but I wondered what to do next, where to begin, how to close the physical distance of the last few months. Furthermore, how could I tell her that Santos might stay overnight if he came to visit? How could we keep him away? More importantly, how in heaven’s name would we feed him?
“Are those flowers for me?” she asked. Again, she flashed that foolish, fetching, teasingly erotic smile. “Bring them here.”
I sat down beside her, kissed the cheek she turned up toward me, then sat twiddling my thumbs. Meanwhile, Isadora took a whiff of the flowers strong enough to suck a few petals into her nose. She let the bouquet fall to the floor and turned to me after moistening her lips with the tip of her tongue. Placing her left hand on my shoulder to hold me still, she used her right to grip the top of my slops, and pulled. Buttons popped off my breeches like buckshot, pinging against the bulkhead.
“Isadora,” I asked in a pinched voice, “are you sure you want to do this? We can sit and read Scripture or poetry together, if you wish.”
She made answer by rising to her bare feet, shoving me back onto the bed, and tugging off my boots and breeches. By heaven, I thought, still water runs deep. Who’d have dreamed these depths of passion were in a prim Boston schoolteacher? She was so sexually bold I began to squirm. I mean, I was the sailor, wasn’t I? Abruptly, my own ache for detumescence, for a little Late Night All Right, took hold of me, beginning at about my fourth rib and flying downward. Soon we both had our hands inside each other’s clothes. How long it had been since someone held me, touched me with something other than a boot heel or the back of their hand! And she, so much slimmer — pulling the gown over her head — was to me a figure of such faint-inducing grace any Odysseus would have swallowed the ocean whole, if need be, to swim to her side. I kissed the swale by her collarbone and trailed my lips along her neck. Then, afraid of what I might do next, I slid my fingers under my thighs and sat on my hands.
Isadora twirled slowly on her toes, letting me see all of her. Now that she had my undivided attention, she asked, “Well, what do you think?”
“I’m not thinking.”
“Good.”
“But the animals. Can’t you send them outside?”
“Rutherford!”
“At least cover up the birdcage.”
“Don’t worry, he’s blind.” Her voice was husky. “Just lie still.”
Knowing nothing else to do, I obeyed. Isadora climbed over my outstretched legs, lowered herself to my waist, and began pushing her hips back and forth, whispering, “No, don’t move.” I wondered: Where did she learn this? Against her wishes, I did move, easing her onto her side, then placed my hand where it wanted to go. We groped awkwardly for a while, but something was wrong. Things were not progressing as smoothly as they were supposed to. (“Your elbow’s in my eyeball,” said I; “Sorry,” said she; “Hold on, I think I’ve got a charley horse.”) I was out of practice. Rusty. My body’s range of motion was restricted by the bruises I had taken at sea, yet my will refused to let go. I peeled off my blouse, determined to lay the ax to the root like a workman spitting on his palms before settling down to the business at hand; but, hang it, my memories of the Middle Passage kept coming back, reducing the velocity of my desire, its violence, and in place of my longing for feverish love-making left only a vast stillness that felt remarkably full, a feeling that, just now, I wanted our futures blended, not our limbs, our histories perfectly twined for all time, not our flesh. Desire was too much of a wound, a rip of insufficiency and incompleteness that kept us, despite our proximity, constantly apart, like metals with an identical charge.
I stopped, and stared quite helplessly at Isadora, who said, “I thought this was what you wanted?”
“Isadora, I. . don’t think so.”
She studied my face, saying nothing, and in this wordless exchange felt the difference in me. It coincided, I sensed by slow degrees, with one in herself, for in her disheveled blankets we realized this Georgia fatwood furnace we were stoking was not the release either of us needed. Rather, what she and I wanted most after so many adventures was the incandescence, very chaste, of an embrace that would outlast the Atlantic’s bone-chilling cold. Accordingly, she lowered her head to my shoulder, as a sister might. Her warm fingers, busy as moths a moment before, were quiet on my chest. Mine, on her hair as the events of the last half year overtook us. Isadora drifted toward rest, nestled snugly beside me, where she would remain all night while we, forgetful of ourselves, gently crossed the Flood, and countless seas of suffering.