Compared to other African tribes, the Allmuseri were the most popular servants. They brought twice the price of a Bantu or Kru. According to legend, Allmuseri elders took twig brooms with them everywhere, sweeping the ground so as not to inadvertently step on creatures too small to see. Eating no meat, they were easy to feed. Disliking property, they were simple to clothe. Able to heal themselves, they required no medication. They seldom fought. They could not steal. They fell sick, it was said, if they wronged anyone. As I live, they so shamed me I wanted their ageless culture to be my own, if in fact Ngonyama spoke truly. But who was I fooling? While Rutherford Calhoun might envy certain features of Allmuseri folkways, he could never claim something he had no hand in creating. I respected them too much to insult them this way — particularly one woman and her eight-year-old daughter, Baleka, who’d caught a biscuit I tossed her one day when talking to Meadows. Her mother snatched it away. She studied it like a woman inspecting melons at a public market, her face growing sharp. She smelled it, she tasted it with a tiny nibble, and spat it out the side of her mouth into the sea. Presently, she stumped across the deck and dropped it back onto my lap. Sliding up behind her, half hidden behind Mama’s legs, Baleka stuck out her hand. Her eyes burned a hole in my forehead. Her mother’s finger wagged in my face, and in the little of their language I knew she sniffed that her baby deserved far better than one moldy biscuit. I could only agree. To square things, that night I shared my powdered beef, mustard, and tea with Baleka: a major mistake. Her expectation, and that of Mama, for sharing my every pan of food became an unspoken contract no less binding between us than a handshake. By and by, we were inseparable. This was how Mama wanted it, having decided her child’s survival might depend on staying close to the one crew member who looked most African, asking me to decipher the strange behavior of the whites and intercede on their behalf. Thus, the child stayed at my heels as I spun rope and, when I was on larboard watch by the taffrail, leaned against my legs, looking back sadly toward Senegambia.
Thus we were at five bells in the forenoon of June 11. The wind blew hard, the sea ran high, filled with thunder rumbles and white tendrils of lightning from the southeast. At my post I was for a time hypnotized by tumbling, opaline blades of ocean, by its vortices that were mirrored in me since we were mainly made of Main, by the way — as the mate said — it seemed to be some monster of energy, without start or finish, a shifting cauldron of thalassic force, form superimposed upon form, which grew neither bigger nor smaller, which endlessly spawned all creatures conceivable yet never consumed itself, and contained a hundred kinds of waters, if one could but see them all. . so hypnotized by this theater of transformations my head spun and eyes slipped after staring too long, my belly trembled, and this was the condition I was in when gusts of strong, skirling wind galed and swung the Republic broadside to windward, pointing her back the way we had come. Loose ropes, carpenter’s tools, and unfastened casks of beef flew everywhere like cannon shot, cracking more than a few skulls. The skipper, who’d been sprawled out, stewed to the gills on his cabin floor, clawed his way topside, shouting “Gangway!” and looked wildly around at those awaiting his orders. Said: “Secure all loose gear.” Cringle shouted back that the helm would not respond. “Mr. Fletcher,” ordered Falcon, “see if the cords are entangled.” The sailmaker checked them and made answer that they were not. “Damme,” said Falcon, “she blows hard.” His fingers clenched fishbelly white, then faintly blue, on the helm, and in his state he was a pitiful sight, hunched forward, pulling the wheelr so hard his temples bulged, barely able to stand. The men saw this. His movements were slower than a man’s submerged, like a mime mocking normality. He was that soused, that unsteady on his feet, and said, crestfallen, aware of his condition, “You have to help me here, Mr. Cringle.” And then it was full upon us: a sea hot with anger, running in ranges like the Andes or the Rockies, and be damned if in the topgallant sails I didn’t see forks of blue lightning. The forecastle was hidden behind curtains of spray. The bows were deep in water. At this point, screams came from the hold. With one hand I clung to the foremast, my head pressed in tightly against Baleka, squeezing her close enough to cut off her wind. And fairly windless was I myself. In this squall, some of the deck hands panicked. Ran from their posts, which was wrong, fell, scrambled below to their hammocks and pleaded with their shipmates to strap them down, screamed again. Others tied themselves to gratings, to the yawl, and to each other. “Hard alee.” The wheel spun in the captain’s hands. “Keep her hard to leeward.” Before long the swirling air and sheets of breaching water overwhelmed him. He relinquished the wheel to Cringle and shouted into a hundred-horsepower wind, “Heave to.” For five minutes nothing could be seen of the ship’s hull — only shaking masts rising like a forest above foamy meerschaum, the sky stretched above like a gridelin scar, and the Republic broaching badly in the wind, popping her nails, her boards creaking like those in an old house, a shrinking casket. Cringle’s lips were skinned back against his teeth. “Heave to it is, if you say so, sir.”
Falcon’s face was crabbed. “Are you makin’ sport of me?”
“No — no, sir!”
What came upon us next is not clear. The instant Cringle spoke, the ship swung around with her face to the west, plunging into a trench, as if into Hell, below water columns that broke over us to the height of the crosstrees — two solid walls on either side, held still as when Moses parted the Red Sea. The sun stood still. The moon stayed. My heart stopped. It has never worked exactly right since, because when the roily waves spanked back, shaking the ship to her ribs, I saw two boys catapulted overboard to drown instantly in the shoal. Therewhile, half the Allmuseri children and women — Baleka’s mother among them — five of Falcon’s sheep, his hogs and fowl, were swept from the deck. The larboard quarterboat was torn away to disappear into the swell.
Then—
Miraculously, the wind shifted to the old quarter, the storm passed away, and we were through it as though it all had been a conjurer’s trick. The ship labored back on course, the spell broken, though still the Atlantic thundered. Half the crew ran to the grog room and proceeded to get drunk. Our one Moslem on board dropped to his knees, banged his head on deck hard enough to break bone, and wept, “Inshallah! There is no Majesty and there is no Might save in Allah!” However that might be, three younger lighthands, too frightened to move, lost the power of speech and looked stupefied at the vacant stations where their lost mates had stood. Entangled in the twisted rigging above hung three bodies upside down. Matthew McGaffin, the boatswain, a pig-jawed former circus strong man with a walrus mustache, black eye patch, and a big, hectoring voice, swore the storm proved the ship was cursed by its black chattel and internal cargo. Nathaniel Meadows, shaking, one fist in his mouth to stanch a scream, fouled his breeches. Twice. Without speaking, we all clapped our hands together as one company — thirty-two sopping-wet cutthroats black-toothed rakes traitors drunkards rapscallions thieves poltroons forgers clotpolls sots lobcocks sodomists prison escapees and debauchees simultaneously praying like choirboys, our heads tipped, begging forgiveness after this brush with death in Irish, Cockney, Spanish, and Hindi for a litany of collective sins so long I could not number them. Besides, I was too busy peeking through my fingers and promising God I would be good forever if He would quit playing games like that one. Had it lasted a bit longer, we knew, the ship would have been torn to pieces. More: such storms induced madness in seamen; triggered acute appendicitis, respiratory attacks, and suicide in their aftermath — the sorts of gales you tell your grandchildren about, if you live to see them, when they visit on holidays. Yet, standing hard by me, watching the dripping crew cross themselves and offer their first-born whelps to the priesthood, staring with a calm, distant gaze, was the quiet, catfooted Ngonyama. He was dry. Not a drop had touched him. He was coolness itself. Like actors I’d known in New Orleans (all unemployed), he had the unsettling ability to stare at you, or deliver a long speech, without once blinking his eyes or looking away. Maybe this was a trick he’d cultivated, but it struck me that he’d known the storm was coming, and I flinched, afraid of him, as he caught me by my sleeve, and said in his cracking, high-register version of English: