Charles Johnson - Middle Passage

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.”

Twenty blacks were brought from below to dance them a bit to music from Tommy’s flute and let them breathe. They climbed topside and stood crushed together, blinded by the sun, for that morning the weather was fair, yet hushed. Meadows and Ngonyama searched the fusty spaces between decks for Africans unable to come up on their own. There were always a few of these since Ebenezer Falcon rearranged their position after the storm. He was, as they say, a “tight-packer,” having learned ten years ago from a one-handed French slaver named Captain Ledoux that if you arranged the Africans in two parallel rows, their backs against the lining of the ship’s belly, this left a free space at their rusty feet, and that, given the flexibility of bone and skin, could be squeezed with even more slaves if you made them squat at ninety-degree angles to one another. Flesh could conform to anything. So when they came half-dead from the depths, these eyeless contortionists emerging from a shadowy Platonic cave, they were stiff and sore and stank of their own vomit and feces. Right then I decided our captain was more than just evil. He was the Devil. Who else could twist the body so terribly? Who else could enslave gods and men alike? All, like livestock, bore the initials of the Republic’s financiers burned into their right buttock by a twisted wire— ZS, PZ, EG, a cabal of Louisiana speculators whose names I would learn soon enough.

Meadows snapped his head away, his nose wrinkled, and he splashed buckets of salt water on them, then told Tommy to play. The cabin boy, taking his place on the capstan head, had not stopped smiling since seeing the Allmuseri god. Snapping together his three-piece flute and touching it to lips shaped in that strangely mad, distant smile unreadable as a mask, he let his chest fall, forcing wind into wood that transformed his exhalations into a rill of sound-colors all on board found chilling — less music, if you ask me, than the boy’s air alchemized into emotion, or the song of hundred-year-old trees from which the narrow flute was torn.

One side of Falcon’s face tightened. “Methinks that’s too damned melancholy. Even niggers can’t dance to that. A lighter tune, if you will, Tommy.” The cabin boy obeyed, striking up a tune of lighter tempo. Falcon, pleased, tapped his foot, stopping only to stare as Ngonyama and Meadows carried an African’s corpse from below. As with previous cases like these, Falcon ordered his ears sliced off and preserved below in oil to prove to the ship’s investors that he had in fact purchased in Bangalang as many slaves as promised. This amputation proved tough going for Meadows, for the last stages of rigor mortis froze the body hunched forward in a grotesque hunker, like Lot’s wife. Hence, after shearing off his ears, they toted him to the rail as you might a chair or the ship’s figurehead, then found him too heavy to heave over.

“Lend us a hand here, Mr. Calhoun.” Meadows wiped sweat off his upper lip.

I stayed where I was. Beside me, a moan burst from a carpenter standing too close to the slaves. They danced in place like men in a work-gang, but one had slipped when the ship rolled, falling on his back and accidentally, it seemed, kicking the sailor in his stomach. And a good kick it was, knocking the wind out of him. The mate looked puzzled; he ran two fingers over his forehead.

“You should earn your keep, my boy.” Falcon nudged me toward them, then brought a handkerchief to his brow. “One hundred bars overboard. Gawd, I hate waste.”

Ngonyama was holding the boy — for so he proved to be when I stepped closer — under his arms. Meadows had him by legs cooled to the lower temperatures of the hold. Though he was semistiff, blood giving way to the pull of gravity, motionless in his veins, was settling into his lower limbs, purplish in color as he entered the first stages of stench and putrefaction. The young rot quickest, you know. The underside of his body had the squishy, fluid-squirting feel of soft, overripe fruit. If you squeezed his calves, a cheeselike crasis oozed through the cracks and cuts made in his legs by the chains. It was this side of him Meadows wanted me to grab, providing him and Ngonyama the leverage they needed to swing him past the rail. I cannot say how sickened I felt. The sight and smell of him was a wild thing turned loose in my mind. Never in my life had I handled the dead. It did not matter that I knew nothing of this boy. Except for Ngonyama, the males had generally been kept below, but I’d seen him among the others when Falcon made the Africans dance. Judging by what little was left of his face, hard as wood on one side and melting into worm-eaten pulp on the other as rigor mortis began to reverse, he was close to my own age, perhaps had been torn from a lass as lovely as, lately, I now saw Isadora to be, and from a brother as troublesome as my own. His open eyes were unalive, mere kernels of muscle, though I still found myself poised vertiginously on their edge, falling through these dead holes deeper into the empty hulk he had become, as if his spirit had flown and mine was being sucked there in its place.

“ ’Ere now,” said Meadows, “come about, Calhoun. I’m gettin’ tired of holdin’ him.” I gripped the boy from below, slipping my right hand behind his back, my other under his thigh, so cool and soft, like the purple casing of a plum, that my ragged, unmanicured nails punctured the meat with a hiss as if I’d freed a pocket of air. A handful of rotting leg dropped into my hand before I was able to push hard enough for the others to swing him, just before his limbs disconnected like a doll’s, to sharks circling the hull. That bloody piece of him I held, dark and porous, with the first layers of liquefying tissue peeling back to reveal an orange underlayer, fell from my fingers onto the deck: a clump from the butcher’s block, it seemed, and the ship’s dogs strained their collars trying to get it.

Ngonyama wrapped it in a scrap of canvas and pitched it as hard as he could into a wave. My stained hand still tingled. Of a sudden, it no longer felt like my own. Something in me said it would never be clean again, no matter how often I scrubbed it or with what stinging chemicals, and without thinking I found my left hand lifting the knife from my waist, then using its blade to scrape the boy’s moist, black flesh off my palm, and at last I swung it up to slice it across my wrist and toss that into the ocean too. “No.” Ngonyama placed his fingers on my forearm. He must have felt me wobble. His hands steadied and guided me to the rail, where I gasped for wind, wanting to retch but unable to. Saying nothing, he waited, and as always his expression was difficult to decipher. Weeks before I’d felt that no matter how I tried to see past his face to his feelings, the signs he threw off were so different at times from those I knew they could not be uncoded. It was said, for example, that the Allmuseri spat at the feet of visitors to their village and, as you might expect, this sometimes made travelers draw their swords in rage, though the Allmuseri meant only that the stranger’s feet must be hot and tired after so long a journey and might welcome a little water on his boots to cool them. Nay, you could assume nothing with them. But of one thing I was sure: There was a difference in them. They were leagues from home — indeed, without a home — and in Ngonyama’s eyes I saw a displacement, an emptiness like maybe all of his brethren as he once knew them were dead. To wit, I saw myself. A man remade by virtue of his contact with the crew. My reflection in his eyes, when I looked up, gave back my flat image as phantasmic, the flapping sails and sea behind me drained of their density like figures in a dream. Stupidly, I had seen their lives and culture as timeless product, as a finished thing, pure essence or Parmenidean meaning I envied and wanted to embrace, when the truth was that they were process and Heraclitean change, like any men, not fixed but evolving and as vulnerable to metamorphosis as the body of the boy we’d thrown overboard. Ngonyama and maybe all the Africans, I realized, were not wholly Allmuseri anymore. We had changed them. I suspected even he did not recognize the quiet revisions in his voice after he learned English as it was spoken by the crew, or how the vision hidden in their speech was deflecting or redirecting his own way of seeing. Just as Tommy’s exposure to Africa had altered him, the slaves’ life among the lowest strata of Yankee society — and the horrors they experienced — were subtly reshaping their souls as thoroughly as Falcon’s tight-packing had contorted their flesh during these past few weeks, but into what sort of men I could not imagine. No longer Africans, yet not Americans either. Then what? And of what were they now capable?