“I guess, I don’t know—”
“Decide soon,” he said. “Falcon has friends here, but we will act as soon as we put out to sea.”
Then he was off, called away by Captain Falcon to help in the hellish work of inspecting the cavity-ridden teeth, shaved skulls, and stippled privates of four men for whom the skipper paid 100 bars each (a bar being worth half a dollar, a pound of powder, or a fathom of ordinary cloth); then the women over twenty-five (Bellah gave Falcon a 25 percent reduction on these); and finally the children who, like trout, had to measure four feet four inches or they would be thrown back into the bush. And Falcon was furious. Ahman-de-Bellah had passed at least one doctored black off on him, an old man medicated with some unknown drug that bloated his skin. He oozed oniony-smelling sweat from powder treatments. When Falcon pressed a finger against his teeth, bubbles of pus oozed from the man’s gums. Lemon juice had been swabbed along his body to give it a glossy appearance, but it made no difference. He died, delirious, before Falcon could get his money back. The captain, of course, was no paragon of honesty. The cotton bales he used for barter were hollow at their centers, the whiskey carefully watered down, and the gunpowder was of an inferior stock. Captain Falcon grew edgy, I guess, that this deceit might be discovered, and kept us busy most of the night transferring his cargo from the boats to the ship’s belly. In his “rough” log (the one a ship’s master edited to produce a more polished book for his employers), which I would see later, he wrote:
3,500 hides
$1,750;
19 large and prime ivory teeth
1,560
Gold
2,500
600 pounds of small ivory
320
15 tons of rice
600
40 slaves
1,600
36 bullocks
360
Sheep, goats, vegetables, butter
100
900 lbs beeswax
95
Total caravan value
$8,885
The skipper’s share or “lay” of the profits was a handsome 25 percent of the take. The crew received a pitiful twelve dollars per month, a thing increasingly offensive to most hands when talk of Falcon’s mysterious find — loaded last of all onto the ship in a crate big enough to carry a bull elephant, its price omitted from his log — moved, like an electric shock, from one mate to another. Added to which, and perhaps worst of all, our ship’s carpenters grumbled of water in the frowzy hold. Once the Allmuseri saw the great ship and the squalid pit that would house them sardined belly-to-buttocks in the orlop, with its dead air and razor-teethed bilge rats, each slave forced to lie spoon-fashion on his left side to relieve the pressure against his heart-after seeing this, the Africans panicked. Believe it or not, a barker told us they thought we were barbarians shipping them to America to be eaten. They saw us as savages. In their mythology Europeans had once been members of their tribe — rulers, even, for a time — but fell into what was for these people the blackest of sins. The failure to experience the unity of Being everywhere was the Allmuseri vision of Hell. And that was where we lived: purgatory. That was where we were taking them — into the madness of multiplicity — and the thought of it drove them wild. A one-handed Allmuseri thief attacked Cringle with a belaying pin and was shot by the mate. (I should explain that lopping off a thief’s right hand was this tribe’s punishment for stealing, because the Allmuseri ate with their right hands and wiped their arses with their left; by depriving this man of his right hand, they forced him into the indignity of eating and scraping off excrement with the selfsame limb.) A woman pitched her baby overboard into the waters below us. At least two men tried to follow, straining against their chains, and this sudden flurry of resistance brought out the worst in Falcon, if you can imagine that. He beat them until blood came. The male slaves he double-ironed, removing the ladder to the hold and lowering them by ropes so none could climb back up. Women he had sleep in the cabins, young children were jummixed on deck in the longboats beneath sheets of tarpaulin, and if any Negro even looked as if he was thinking of rebellion, that man was to be birched and taught the sting of noose and yardarm.
It was then my hair started going white. Unable to watch, I repaired to sit alone in the cookroom, my head in my hands and back against an oven of such antiquity it was usually hotter on one side than the other, so that Squibb’s tipsycakes (so called since he laced them with rum) rose crooked and once they were frosted the top layer would gradually slide off. Clearly, nothing on the Republic was as it should be, but it behooves me for the sake of my own character, shabby as this is, to explain how murderous my thoughts became after taking part in the captivity of the Allmuseri. I wondered if the blacks who’d traveled with Balboa and Cortez hated their leaders as much as I did Ebenezer Falcon, if Estéban, the legendary explorer from Morocco, felt as cool toward his companions, three Spanish officers, as I sometimes did toward Cringle, who would never in this life see himself, his own blighted history, in the slaves we intended to sell, or wonder, as I did, how in God’s name I could go on after this? How could I feel whole after seeing it? How could I tell my children of it without placing a curse on them forever? How could I even dare to have children in a world so senseless? How could. .
“Mr. Calhoun?”
“Here, sir.”
“There’s one hour till daylight.” Falcon stuck his head into the hatchway. “I’ve new orders for you.”
I stood, brushing off the seat of my trousers. “Sir?”
“We’re about to weigh anchor. You’re in charge of feeding the Africans in messes of ten at nine in the morning and four, and give ’em half a pint of water three times a day. Squibb handles the crew as before, but no one is to feed the new cargo, or come near it, except me.”
“No? Might I ask what it eats?”
“Don’t ask,” says he. “Nothin’ from your supplies, so you needn’t worry.”
That, of course, was a lie.
There was plenty of reason for worry. Captain Falcon revealed to no one the contents of the mysterious crate brought by raft and lowered below by Bogha’s servants into a storeroom behind the stemson through a hole cut into the deckbeams, then boarded over. Ere the skipper brought the Republic about and headed out to sea, a few of the crew, myself among them, wagered five bob on what his find might be. Squibb claimed it was the Missing Link between man and monkey; Cringle said it was most probably a nearly extinct lizard, maybe intelligent, that would have scholars from Cambridge to Queen’s College rewriting natural history; and Meadows, to frighten us all, reported that he had heard someone at the fort say it had fallen from the sky near the Allmuseri villages, which whilom were tucked away in the bush between Cape Lopez and the Congo River and had been protected by them for centuries. We drew lots to see who would be the first to sneak below while the captain slept and wrench open a plank to peer inside. Tommy O’Toole, the cabin boy, pulled the shortest length of string. He shinnied down a rope reef-knotted round his waist so we could pull him up. After ten minutes Squibb tugged and found the rope broken. We were about to lower him when the boy crawled back on deck with only half his mind — or could be it was twice the mind he had had before. His skin was cold, all one bluish color as if he had been baptized in the Deep. His face was blank as a pan. And his words, as his mouth spread and closed like a fish’s, were strange: a slabber of Bantu patois, Bushman, Cushitic, and Sudanic tongues, and your guess where he learned them is as good as mine. His eyes glowed like deck lights, less solid orbs of color, if you saw them up close, than splinters of luciferin indigo that, like an emulsion, had caught the camphor of a blaze once before them.