“Aye, might’s well. If you’re goin’ to wash, ’tis better to do a full load, wouldn’t you say? Saves on soap ’n’ water.”
He was one to save on supplies, I remembered, being the sort of man who mashed together slivers of soap left by others to make a new, lopsided bar. Watching him leave, I scolded myself for distrusting him and wished the others might be as helpful as Meadows, especially when it came to lightening the suffering of the Africans. As I said, the ship made a great deal of water. Night and day, Falcon kept the pumps working. Even so, the slaves still lay in a foot of salt water in a hold blacker than the belly of Jonah’s whale, forced below by the boatswain’s cat-o’-nine-tails. Some rested on the laps of others, down there in scummy darkness foul with defecation, slithering with water snakes. Chumps of firewood were given to each for a pillow, which later proved to be a mistake. Up above, the skipper had us cut apertures and grate hatches and bulkheads to provide better air for the Allmuseri, who only came topside (the men) for a few hours each day to have their hair and nails shorn to prevent them from injuring themselves during the fighting for space that inevitably broke out each night. At nine o’clock sharp each morning, when the weather permitted, a mate named Fletcher trotted them out, made them dance a little to music from the cabin boy’s flute for exercise, then hurried them below again. It was Captain Falcon’s belief that slave insurrections could be prevented if for every ten prisoners one was selected to oversee the others and keep them in line. He issued these shipboard major-domos, one of them named Ngonyama, whom I came to know well those first few weeks, old shirts and tar-splattered trousers, giving them the advantage of being clothed like the crew; they had greater freedom to roam the slippery deck, and Falcon also gave them better food and a few minor tasks such as picking old ropes apart. “The best way to control a rebellious nigger,” said he, “is to give him some responsibility.”
However, few slaving formulas worked with Ngonyama. Dressed he was now, in tarry breeches and a duck frock, which distinguished him from the others, despite the red bead in his right nostril, and he was quiet during our first fortnight at sea, notwithstanding wind that whipped the sails devilishly and the fact that sometimes the sea ran as high as five houses and our forward deck was invisible underwater, a thing that made the other slaves claw and wail all the more. But Ngonyama, I had the feeling, was waiting. He was so quiet sometimes he seemed to blend, then disappear into the background of shipboard life. Quiet and cunning, I’d say, because he was studying everything — everything — we did, and even enlisted my aid in teaching him a smattering of English and explaining how the steerage worked, in exchange for his teaching me Allmuseri. Of all the players who promenade through this narrative, he was easily the most mysterious. At first he could not distinguish any of the white crew individually, and asked me, “How do their families tell them apart?” I suppose he selected me because I was the only Negro on board, though the distance between his people and black America was vast — his people saw whites as Raw Barbarians and me (being a colored mate) as a Cooked one. And his depth perception so differed from mine that when he looked at a portrait of Isadora I carried in my purse, he asked, “Why is her face splotched with smudges?” by which he meant the shadows the artist had drawn under her chin and eyes, for his tribe did not use our sense of perspective but rather the flat, depthless technique of Egyptian art. (He also asked why her nose looked like a conch, if maybe this was a trick of vision too, then saw my anger and dropped the question.)
Sometimes he helped Squibb and me in the cookroom, and the way he carved one of the skipper’s pigs stopped me cold. Me, I never could carve. But Ngonyama, his shoulders relaxed, holding his breath for what seemed hours before he started, fixed his eyes as if he could see through the pig, his right hand gripping the cook’s blade as if it had grown right out of his wrist. It was eerie, you ask me. It seemed, suddenly, as though the galley slipped in time and took on a transparent feel, as if everything round us were made of glass. Ngonyama began to carve. He slipped metal through meat as if it wasn’t there or, leastways, wasn’t solid, without striking bone, and in a pattern I couldn’t follow, without hacking or rending — doing no harm — the blade guided by, I think, a knack that favored the same touch I’d developed as a thief, which let me feel safe tumblers falling a fraction of a second before they dropped, tracing the invisible trellis of muscles, tendons, tissues, until the pig fell apart magically in his hands. He left no knife tracks. Not a trace. The cookroom was as quiet as a tomb when he finished.
“Mirrors!” Squibb whispered to me, stunned. “It’s some kinda heathen trick!”
Yet there was no trick to it. In every fiber of their lives you could sense this same quiet magic. Truth to tell, they were not even “Negroes.” They were Allmuseri. Talking late at night, blue rivulets scudding back and forth on the deck, our eyes screwed up against the weather, Ngonyama unfolded before me like a merchant’s cloth his tribe’s official history, the story of themselves they stuck by. Once they had been a seafaring people, years and years ago, and deposited their mariners in that portion of India later to be called Harappa, where they blended with its inhabitants, the Dravidians, in the days before the Aryans and their juggernauts—“city-destroyers”—leveled the civilization of Mohenjo-Daro overnight. Between 1000 B.C. and 500 B.C. they sailed to Central America on North Equatorial currents that made the voyage from the west coast of Africa to the Caribbean only thirty days, bringing their skills in agriculture and metallurgy to the Olmec who, to honor these African mariners, stamped their likeness in stone and enshrined in song their prowess as warriors. Specifically, their martial-art techniques resembled Brazilian capoeira. Over time these elegant moves, which Ngonyama taught me when we had time for rest, had become elements in their ceremonial dance.
I must leave their fighting arts for later, because more fascinating than their globe-spanning travels in antiquity and their style of self-defense was the peculiar, gnomic language the Allmuseri practiced. When Ngonyama’s tribe spoke it was not so much like talking as the tones the savannah made at night, siffilating through the plains of coarse grass, soughing as dry wind from tree to tree. Not really a language at all, by my guess, as a melic way of breathing deep from the diaphragm that dovetailed articles into nouns, nouns into verbs. I’m not sure I know what I’m saying now, but Ngonyama told me the predication “is,” which granted existence to anything, had over the ages eroded into merely an article of faith for them. Nouns or static substances hardly existed in their vocabulary at all. A “bed” was called a “resting,” a “robe” a “warming.” Furthermore, each verb was different depending on the nature of the object acted upon, whether it was vegetable, mineral, mammal, oblong or rotund. When Ngonyama talked to his tribesmen it was as if the objects and others he referred to flowed together like water, taking different forms, as the sea could now be fluid, now solid ice, now steam swirling around the mizzenpole. Their written language — these Africans had one — was no less unusual, and of such exquisite limpidity, tone colors, litotes, and contrapletes that I could not run my eyes across it, left to right, without feeling everything inside me relax. It consisted of pictograms. You had to look at the characters, Ngonyama taught me, as you would an old friend you’ve seen many times before, grasping the meaning-and relation to other characters — in a single intuitive snap. It was not, I gathered, a good language for doing analytic work, or deconstructing things into discrete parts, which probably explained why the Allmuseri had no empirical science to speak of, at least not as we understood that term. To Falcon that made them savages. Just the same, it seemed a fitting tongue for the most sought-after blacks in the world.