Charles Johnson - Middle Passage

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.