Darryl Pinckney - Black Deutschland

The witness, an English wine merchant who would owe his life to black slaves, said in his letter that at about three minutes after nine o’clock in the morning, on the first of November, 1755, the earth began to shake. It was All Saints’ Day, his twenty-sixth birthday, and he was opening a bureau in the very bedchamber where he’d been born. He knew immediately what it was, recollecting the fate of Caleo in the Spanish West Indies. He ran upstairs and was soon hanging on to a window from the outside. Tall houses collapsed into narrow streets. He thought he saw all of Lisbon sinking.

He woke deep in rubble. Dust had turned the morning dark. He used his good hand to clear out his mouth. His body had been badly crushed. A German merchant thought his people — meaning, his slaves — could get them to the Terreiro de Paco, a large square before the king’s palace. Two servants — a euphemism for the enslaved — carried him in a chair down a steep hill while a third servant walked ahead with a torch.

He could hear voices begging for help. He saw dead bodies in the church doorways and lighted candles on the high altars. People loaded themselves with crucifixes and saints, surrendering to the Day of Judgment. They tormented the dying, he said. Though he’d lived in Lisbon his whole life, he feared what the Portuguese would do to an English heretic. All the while, fires slowly spread, driven by the gentle wind.

They took refuge in the square, between the king’s palace and the customshouse. The rumbling he heard beneath him was not more earthquake, but the river undermining the cellars of the palace. A gunpowder depot blew up. When the fires approached from one direction, the Blacks carried him to safety and laid him on bundles and when fires threatened their new position, the Blacks again conveyed him to a safe spot. The night was fine and clear and ablaze. The witness suddenly calls servants “the Blacks” in his letter, as if danger let him see his rescuers in a more human shape.

Mules on fire galloped over people running from the flames. Just when he was expecting the sort of death he most dreaded, the wind suddenly abated and the fire burning upright made no further progress. An Irishwoman gave him watermelon while soldiers plundered the houses that still stood and robbed people huddled with what they had left. The German merchant made his farewells and joined those trying to escape by water.

The injured Englishman said in his letter that he tried to buy a place in the boat of another Englishman, but the gentleman told him that most likely there would be only enough room for his family. The Englishman asked if the gentleman’s black servants were reckoned part of his family, and if not would he permit him to employ one of them to try to get a boat for him. The gentleman answered that he was welcome to send his servant wherever he pleased.

He sent a Black Boy to the waterside, promising to pay all the money he had. The Black Boy returned and told him he had arranged for a place that would cost half his money. Another Black Boy offered to help and the two carried him to a large boat full of people and laid him on a board in the middle of it. A priest trod on his lame leg. The watermen called him a heretic and the Blacks devils. They were put ashore at the edge of the city. They’d risked their lives for him. He paid them half of the gold he had. He hid in the countryside. Because so many were starving, he ate in secret. He made it to a ship and set sail at the end of November.

Thomas Chase’s house didn’t fall. It stood in a street called Pedras Negras, on a hill leading up to the castle. He soon returned to Lisbon and died three decades later, in the bedchamber where he was born. Death in every shape had become familiar to his eye, he said. Those not killed by falling stones during the earthquake were burned by fire; those who escaped fire drowned in the river or the harbor.

The fires in Lisbon burned for a week. Fresh troops pressed survivors into service to bury the dead, who were decomposing in the streets by the thousands.

* * *

I liked his Éditions Gallimard around my room, the soft, matte covers, especially the books only he and I would be into. Or so we liked to say, those books that offered glimpses of black people in the history of the continent. Like my footsteps, they approved of me, the black lover in Europe. And thou shall bring forth black Epaphus, Aeschylus said. I didn’t know what that meant or remember where I’d got it from, though it was the kind of thing that Irish American drunk I used to binge with would say. I liked the way Duallo liked me for saying it, the way he moved closer to me on the street.

Back at the Eagle , Ralston Jr. used as references the popular histories of the nutty old journalist J. A. Rogers— World’s Greatest Men of African Descent or 100 Amazing Facts about the Negro . Rogers believed that one of Beethoven’s grandfathers was black and one of President Harding’s grandfathers as well. I remembered amazing facts from these works — Alexander the Great had a black general, Clitus Niger, mentioned in Plutarch, for instance. I’d not studied Latin. Duallo had. But I knew about Joannes Latino, the slave in sixteenth-century Granada who ignored the Muslim uprisings around him and wrote Latin verse in praise of chinless Hapsburgs.

I was his first, he said. I believed he’d not had an open thing with a man before, because he was upset to have been shy when we passed Alma and Contestant Number 1 on the Co-op stairs one morning. Parma had a black saint, I told him. I held back telling him that one day I planned to search the back corridors of Rome’s museums for that Bronzino portrait of Alessandro de’ Medici, the son of Pope Clement VII by a black woman. What if he already didn’t want to come with me?

He never asked for anything. He would incline his head and lower his eyes in acknowledgment of dinner or a movie, but the age difference and my being American made my taking the lead right for us. I noticed fairly soon that he wore the same pair of shoes whenever we met. I took him to a whacked-out Kreuzberg 61 designer with blue hair and studs, her back courtyard studio smelling of leather. He wouldn’t really look at anything. But then days later I saw his glances at elegant men’s shops on the Ku’damm down by the Schaubühne, that temple of German drama that Erich Mendelsohn had designed in the 1920s as a bowling alley or cinema — I forgot which, in Duallo’s presence.

He didn’t mind my telling him facts about what we were walking by that anyone could look up. He knew six languages, but we lived in English, because Duallo was interested in black American music. He made sure to have some information to share in return, something that could not be looked up, because it was about him, his life, the inside of him. He explained what he was like, guilelessly, a Jesuit-taught youth carrying an armload of character traits and offering them to me arrow by arrow. He enjoyed clothes, because he also loved music and to dance. He loved to dance, because he worked very hard. My patent leather boots were corny. I went back to my Doc Martens.

Duallo disappeared every now and then into his African student/African exile world and I understood that I could not follow. I never picked him up at the Techno Institut, but I saw his meal card. He gave me to understand that great things were expected of him. Perhaps I imagined that Yao avoided us. But Duallo met Contestant Number 1 and Alma in a Neukölln world of black men employed below their education, near Hasenheide Park, I heard from her — her being a white girl was another story, she said.

I failed at not minding how long she would go on with Duallo in French. I was even jealous of the Bambara phrases he sang under Alma’s lyrical folksongs and zither. His orange scent, a cream that his mother mixed for him, slowly filled the space. No wonder he was getting looks — and me, too, the kind that said that if Duallo could be with me then he could be with the guy daring to cruise him right in front of me.