Charles Johnson - Middle Passage

Ngonyama touched the pocket of his trousers, patting the key I’d given him. After that, he handed it back to me and turned down his thumb. As far as I could tell, the key was wrong for their leg-irons. Yet something in his look said keys and conventional means of escape did not matter anymore, that the mills of the gods were still grinding, killing and remaking us all, and nothing I or anyone else did might stop the terrible forces and transformations our voyage had set free.

He turned his back when Cringle, pretending to inspect a bracket on the topsail halyard, moved behind me. Along his neck I saw three bumps the size of berries. His voice, a hoarse whisper, said, “Go! We’ll give you twenty minutes before we take them back down. Be prompt now.” I proceeded on to Falcon’s door. There I took a moment to steady the twitchy fingers on my left hand by stretching them until each popped. In my waistband I carried a six-inch length of wire. This I wormed slowly into the lock face, letting it clear barriers I could see only in my mind until I felt it push against the pins of the bolt, thus releasing the bolt from the jamb. In less time than it takes to tell, I was inside.

Falcon’s cabin was as I remembered it from my previous visits. Perhaps a little messier. Closing his door I bent down on all fours and began feeling with the tip of my knife for the hair-thin wires closest to the entrance. And then suddenly I could not breathe. I felt caged. Wrong if I did as the first mate asked. Wrong if I sided with Falcon. I began hiccuping uncontrollably (my body’s typical response to dilemmas that had no solution), a worse fit of this than when Isadora and Papa tried to blackmail me into marriage: a palpable feeling of dread I cannot describe unless you have been, say, in the hayloft of an old Illinois barn during an earthquake and feel the rafters tremble, and wonder how near it is to crushing in and the loft collapsing and beams raining down upon your head. That is how I felt. With so many men at odds, each willing something so different from the others, like the factions at war during the French Revolution (my own velleities included), and some not even fully aware of their will, the result could only be something unforeseen that no one willed or wanted. A change not in the roles on ship but a revolution in its very premises. On my knees, I did nothing, though it felt as if the room, and ship even, fell away. Some part of me was a fatherless child again. Alone in an alien world. Wanting to belong somewhere and to someone. Five minutes passed. Maybe fifteen before I could move. Then, involuntarily, my hands clamped together in a bedside, precynical posture I’d not taken since boyhood, one of surrender and bone-felt frailty in the face of troubles so many-sided my mind trembled to think of them. “God,” I asked, “is this some kind of test?” My worldly wits were gone, and I knew, there on my aching knees, the personal devastation that was my brother’s daily bread: burning for things to work out well, knowing the lives of his loved ones depended on this, but having no power or techniques or strategies left except this plea for mercy flung from an inner wasteland into the larger emptiness, the vast silences, the voiceless shadows out there. But no answers came. Only an inexplicable calm, as if I were the sea now, and the dam of my tears — the poisons built up since I left southern Illinois — burst, and I cried for all the sewage I carried in my spirit, my failures and crimes, foolish hopes and vanities, the very faults and structural flaws in the blueprint of my brain (as Falcon put it) in a cleansing nigh as good as prayer itself, for it washed away not only my hurt after hurling the dead boy overboard but yes, the hunger for mercy as well. My hands were moist from this hoarse weeping. My face was swollen and, searching myself, I discovered I no longer cared if I lived or died. The passion for life in me, that flame, was dead. Such was my position, and the windless state of my soul, when the Old Man’s door flew open, flooding light into the darkened room, and I looked up, and through stinging eyes saw:

The mate named Fletcher. One side of his head was battered in. The bone of his nose was broken. Nailing me with his gaze and noticing only that I was a Negro, he raised his fist and started to swing.

“Fletcher, it’s me, Calhoun!”

He stayed his arm in mid-swing. “The cook’s helper?”

“The same.”

He drew a great breath and, snorting, sent columns of blood cascading down the front of his blouse. I could see he was about to keel over and steadied him. “You’re too soon,” I said. “Cringle set the takeover for tonight, didn’t he?”

He shook his head, then tried to swallow. “Me’n Daniels was in the storerooms, just went down for one bloody minute, when eight of ’em come pourin’ in the slop chest like roaches when you open a wall—”

“Falcon’s men?”

“Daniels was skivered from navel to nose quick as a butcherin’, but I run up here and—” He gagged. His eyes flew wide to take in the semidark room. “Are the guns in that cabinet?”

“Aye, but—”

Before I could finish, Fletcher shoved me aside, behind the door, which saved me when he lurched toward the cabinet, caught his foot on a wire no more than an inch from the floor, and set off two explosions fainter than the pop of firecrackers. Still, I was splattered with bits of his scalp and a thousand needles of splintered glass from the cabin windows. He gave a cry I heard from a great distance, as if I’d gone deaf. Nay, I was deaf after the explosions. And blinded by the smoke, the smell of black powder flung like soot onto the broken furniture and Fletcher himself. Heavy as he was for me, and unable as I was to hear, I dragged him toward the door, and bumped into someone in the entrance. Turning, I looked straight ahead and saw no one. Then down, and there was Captain Falcon, cursing silently (since I was deaf), holding a saber in his right hand and, in his left, a bloody scalp of hair. Like Fletcher, he shoved past, dodging round his own traps, and it was then, as I stood trying to read his lips whilst he shouted, that the Republic must have run onto half-hidden rocks, or struck an isle, or the father of all waves fell upon us, for the walls buckled from a tremendous, rolling crash and rumbling that smashed the beams of the ceiling and threw us to the floor. The impact laid back strips of skin on my arms. Outside: the confused noise of men on deck. Then gunshots. Heavy feet thundered forward, some aft, and now and again something fell to the deck. I called to the skipper, “Have we run aground? What was that?”

Faintly, as if from far away, he said, “There’s something ’cross my legs!” For the first time since I’d known him, the captain’s voice sounded frightened. “They lit a cannon, Calhoun. Fired right into us. Kin you hear me? Give me your hand!”

From where I lay, he was impossible to reach. I knew only that I must find Baleka and Squibb. Two pistol reports, like the work of a whip, rang out— crack! crack! — and my stomach froze solid. There was heavy thumping on deck. A creaking of the blocks. Tacks and guys, sheet and braces rang loud against the wind. I pulled myself free of debris in the cabin and collapsed on a deck boot-deep in blood. As my sight sharpened, I saw through the curtains of smoke a squat, broad-shouldered slave named Nacta, who sprang toward me, cleaving the air with a marlinespike. A foot from my head he checked his swing. His chest was heaving. He kicked me aside, then disappeared into the skipper’s quarters. Backing away, I sensed then that not Falcon’s loyalists but the Africans had overcome Fletcher and Daniels, though how in God’s name I could not guess. I skidded over shattered barrels, the carcasses of dogs ripped open like charnel-house swine, and cedarwood blocks floating in deckwash. There was damage to the lower rigging and jigger staysail, which hung in rags from the mizzen lower mast. In disfiguring smoke that stung my eyes, someone from the world below, the hell of the hold, hunched over a sailor, who lay on his side like a body washed onto the shore, beating him about the head with a deckscraper, and when this blotched and spectral figure saw me, he faded back into the smoke. The ship swung, pitching me forward. I fell, flopped around, and rolled. Righted myself. Briefly, in the corner of my eye, I caught movement by the lifeboats, what seemed in those fibrous seconds to be two men — one black, one the barber-surgeon — working quietly, single-mindedly at the uphill chore of killing each other. The African, still in chains, was stone still, holding at waist level a rusty saw. As Meadows moved, bringing his sword down in an overhead strike, the other brought his saw straight up, his fingers steadying the handle, guiding the teeth straight into the barber-surgeon’s belly in a clean, swift, diagonal stroke that left Meadows frozen in mid-swing before his bowels spilled at his feet. I swung my head away. When I looked back they were gone, or had turned into two barrels. Impossible!