As I spoke, color faded out of his face. His fists, small-knuckled, squeezed open and shut at his sides. “They don’t own this ship.”
“Captain, they do. You can’t change that.”
“Naw, you don’t understand. Neither do they. The slaves think they’ve wrested the Republic from the crew, is that it?”
“So it would seem.”
“They’re wrong.” Muscles round Falcon’s eyes tightened. “She wasn’t our ship from the start, Mr. Calhoun. Every plank and piece of canvas on the Republic, and any cargo she’s carrying, from clew to earring — including that creature below — belongs to the three blokes who outfitted her in New Orleans and pay our wages. See, someone has to pay the bill. I’m captain ’cause I knew how to bow and scrape and kiss rich arses to raise money for this run. I didn’t come up in the last bucket, you know. I knew how to reach ’em, which wasn’t easy, ’cause they don’t like to be seen. Each one of ’em expects his investment to be returned. Mebbe tripled, like I promised. If we fail, they won’t be forgiving. These are the men we have to appease, not them whoresons and rowdies outside. Oh, I know what you’re thinking. We suffered the unexpected. Surely they’ll understand. But I’m telling you they won’t see nothing ’cept that I took their money — a lot of money, lad — and they’d just as soon see us drown, if I sail home empty-handed, as hear me report their fixed capital seized control of this brig and swung her back to Bangalang.”
The ship’s finances was a field where my ignorance was complete. On economic matters my heart was simple, my mind slow. I kept quiet. But was Ebenezer Falcon telling me that he, at bottom, was no freer than the Africans?
“A month before we left I visited one of these brahmins, my hat in my hands. Oh, I grinned and all but gave him my backside to pat. If any of the hands’d seen me I’d never be able to show my face in public, let alone raise a crew that wouldn’t laugh at me. But it worked, Mr. Calhoun. I was just the crab he wanted, says he, to bring back blacks as valuable as the Allmuseri. I remember going over the crew list with him in his parlor. A simple room, you understand, but long as the main top bowline, filled with pale, eastern light in early morning and simple furnishings such as men of modest means might select. He came to breakfast in a waistcoat cut deep in front, not a wrinkle in his breeches, and his hair combed in a négligé style. A perfect gentleman of taste and proportion is what his toilet told you. All that was to hide the fact he’d made a bloody fortune running slaves and supplies for the British during the last war. See, only poor men put on a show. Which is what I did, ’cause I wanted this contract bad enough to beg for it. I figured this run’d be money for old rope. That easy, you understand? He let me do most of the talking, complimented me on my Latin, my expeditions down the Nile, my schedule for self-improvement, my travels and diverse translations, a few of which (unread) were on his bookshelf behind us ’cause he had a controlling interest in the Boston publishing house that produced them. He let me talk — get it—’cause even though the lubber could barely write his name he didn’t have nothing to prove in this world. He could buy men such as myself with his pocket change. Buy beauty, if he couldn’t produce it. Buy truth, if he was too busy to think. Buy goodness, even, for what blessed thing on God’s earth don’t have its price? Who ain’t up for auction when it comes to it? Huh? Tell me that? All the while I gabbed, squirming in my seat beneath his family’s coat of arms (the head of a Negro), sipping hot coffee from a cup that kept shaking in my hands, he was just smiling and studying me. Not as one man studies his equal — and I was more’n his equal on water or in the wilderness — but the way I’ve seen Ahman-de-Bellah appraise blacks fresh from the bush. I did not like the feeling, Mr. Calhoun. Nor did I like him. He ain’t been at sea for half a dogwatch. I felt closer, if you must know, to the illiterate swabs and heathens I’d gone through hell with on ships and in the heart of stinking jungles. Thing is, he made this voyage possible.” The Old Man was quiet for a long time, his eyes like bits of ice, his complexion paly, whiter than lamb parchment. When he spoke again, his voice was hushed, like a man in church. “His name is Zebediah Singleton, and a third of this tub is his.”
“And the other two-thirds?”
“Elihu Griswold, a Georgia planter, owns a big slice, but I don’t expect you’d recognize these names. Like I said, these blokes don’t like to be seen. For good reason too, given all the crimes they’ve committed. The last one is a Creole speculator named Philippe Zeringue.”
“Ngonyama won’t listen to any of this, Captain. There are fifteen Africans now, but only four Yanks. They have the arms and we do not, nor any chance for regaining our course if you—Philippe Zeringue, did you say?”
“You know him?”
“No, but — uh, I believe I’ve heard the name.”
“Well, three of these rebellious Allmuseri are his”
“Which three?”
The Old Man shrugged off my question, talking on about an invisible economic realm — a plane as distant from me as the realms of religion and physics — behind the sensuous one I saw. Suddenly the ship felt insubstantiaclass="underline" a pawn in a larger game of property so vast it trivialized our struggles on board. My months on the Republic seemed to dissolve, delivering me back to Papa Zeringue’s smoky restaurant, which I’d never left, and then it was he talking in front of me and not Falcon, laughing at my Illinois country-boy ignorance of how the world worked, telling me there was no escape from the webs he had woven in New Orleans, across the sea, and even into the remotest villages of Africa. But how could he do this, I wondered? Buy and sell slaves when he himself was black? Was this not the greatest betrayal of all?
“Of all what?” asked Falcon.
I’d spoken in my reverie without knowing it. “Nothing,” says I. “Captain, I think I’d better go to my bunk and lie down. But you must promise to do as the Allmuseri say. Our lives depend on it.”
“I’ll tell ’em what I told you. But first I must ask you for one last favor. Have you the gun-ring I gave you at the fort?”
I held up my left hand.
“Give it to me, please.”
He waited, pensive, staring past me to Nacta’s back in the doorway, his features like fog, remembering his nightmarish dream of things to come. I could not tell whether he accepted the Africans’ conditions or if he was hatching some new treachery and, frankly, after learning that Papa was my real boss, that his reach extended this far, that I still had to answer to him, I felt too defeated to say more. I handed over the ring. He shipped a face suddenly full of scorn, one that told me Get Out. I did, glancing at the brand on Nacta’s shoulder, then at the others as I went, perplexed and perversely fascinated by which of the blacks belonged to a black. Making my way aft, I saw Ngonyama and Diamelo enter the captain’s room. Part of me knew Falcon was sifting through the wreckage for a weapon. I knew if he found one he would shoot them, but I thought this possibility slim until, as Cringle leaned over the rail near me, his Protestant stomach perpetually knotted and belly full of wind from Squibb’s baking, we heard a single shot like the crack of doom on Judgment Day. I felt that shot in every fiber. My scalp began to crawl. The mate spun on his heels and sprang in four steps to Falcon’s door. Nacta pushed him back. Then I couldn’t see clearly as the other Africans clewed up at the entrance. Someone, Akim said, was dead. I clawed through the crunch of bodies, hoping it was not Ngonyama, that Falcon, in his stupidity, had shot Diamelo instead. Inside the room I was restrained by Ghofan. He held me with both hands. Said, “This one gave him the gun.” He was shouting at Ngonyama, who made answer that “Rutherford came in unarmed. Let him go.”