Middle Passage (5 page)

Cringle cleared his throat, coughing into one hand.

“We found this boy in the longboat, Skipper. He says he's Rutherford Calhoun, a friend of Squibb. I thought perhaps—”

“You've rung the bell to change watch?”

The mate paused. “I was about to when I discovered th—”

“See to it, then. And shut the door behind you.”

The mate left, glancing helplessly at me. Standing alone, looking at the back of Captain Falcon's sloping head, shining my boots on the back of my breeches to polish them, I thought that maybe racial savvy might see me through this interview. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but we all know it anyway: namely, that a crafty Negro, a shrewd black strategist, can work a prospective white employer around, if he's smart, by playing poor mouth, or greasing his guilt with a hard-luck story. At least it had always worked for me before. In my most plaintive voice I told the captain how desperate I was for work, that I'd stowed away because gainful employment was systematically denied black men back home, that New Orleans was so bigoted a Negro couldn't even buy vanilla ice cream.

“So?” said Falcon.

I told him about my mother's death from overwork in the fields of Illinois when I was three. (She died in bed, actually, but I could trade on this version and liked it better.)

“So?”

And then I related the hardships I'd received at the hands of my religiously stern master, Peleg Chandler, who gave all his slaves two teaspoons of castor oil
every
Saturday morning, whether they were sick or not, and called that “preventative
medicine.” (It may not seem like much to you, but to me, at age twelve, it was torture.)

“So?” he said again, this time swiveling full around to face me, his elbows splashed on the leather arms of the chair, and as his gaze crossed mine in the crepuscular cabin light, as I saw his face, I felt skin at the nape of my neck tingling like when a marksman has you in his sights, because the master of the
Republic,
the man known for his daring exploits and subjugation of the colored races from Africa to the West Indies, was a
dwarf.
Well, perhaps not a true dwarf, but Ebenezer Falcon, I saw, was shorter even than the poor, buggered cabin boy Tom. Though his legs measured less than those of his chart table, Captain Falcon had a shoulder span like that of Santos, and between this knot of monstrously developed deltoids and latissimus dorsi a long head rose with an explosion of hair so black his face seemed dead in contrast: eye sockets like anthracite furnaces, medieval lines more complex than tracery on his maps, a nose slightly to one side, and a great bulging forehead that looked harder than whalebone, but intelligent too—a thinker's brow, it was, the kind fantasy writers put on spacemen far ahead of us in science and philosophy. His belly was unspeakable. His hands, like roots. More remarkable, I'd seen drawings of this gnarled little man's face before in newspapers in New Orleans, though I never paid them much attention, or noted the name. He was famous. In point of fact, infamous. That special breed of empire builder, explorer, and imperialist that sculptors loved to elongate, El Greco-like, in city park statues until they achieved Brobdingnagian proportions. He carried, I read, portraits of Pizarro and Magellan on every expedition he made.

Now . . . yes, now I remembered those stories well.
Falcon, the papers said, knew seven African coastal dialects and, in fact, could learn any new tongue in two weeks' time. More, even, he'd proven it with Hottentot, and lived among their tribe for a month, plundering their most sacred religious shrines. He'd gone hunting for the source of the Nile, failed, but even his miscarried exploits made him raw material for myths spun in brandy and cavendish smoke in clubs along the eastern seaboard. He'd translated the
Bardo Thodol—
this, after stealing the only scroll from a remote temple in Tibet—and if the papers can be believed, he was a patriot whose burning passion was the manifest destiny of the United States to Americanize the entire planet. Really, I wanted to take off my hat in his presence, but I hadn't worn one. Never mind that his sins were scarlet. He was living history. Of course, he stood only as high as my hips, and I had to fight the urge to pat him on his head, but I was, as I say, impressed.

“Sit,” said he, motioning to the chair at his chart table. “I don't like people looking down at me.”

I could understand that; I sat.

Falcon toddled over to his washbasin, poured water from a bucket half his size, and began to sponge-bathe under his nightshirt, speaking over his left shoulder at me. “And, generally speaking, I don't like Negroes either.”

“Sorry, sir.” He was frank; I liked that. With bigots a man knew where he stood. “But I can't help that, sir.”

Falcon half-turned, his eyebrows lifting.

“I
know
you can't, Calhoun. It's one of the things I learned about Negroes after living with the Lotophagi on the African coast. You don't think too well, or too often. I don't blame you for stowing aboard.” He squeezed out his
sponge. “Poor creature, you probably thought we were a riverboat, didn't you?”

I fell back against the seat. “This
isn't
a riverboat?”

“I thought so.” Falcon wet his hands, then finger-combed his hair, shook off the water, and carried his basin to the door, throwing it out on a man who began cursing like . . . well, like a sailor until he saw the captain's face, and meekly tipped his hat. Slamming the door, Falcon fixed me again with both eyes. “ 'Tis a
slaver,
Mr. Calhoun, and the cargo awaiting us at Bangalang is forty Allmuseri tribesmen, hides, prime ivory teeth, gold, and bullocks, which comes to a total caravan value of nearly nine thousand dollars, of which the officers and I have a profitable share—quite enough to let me retire after this run or finance an expedition I have in mind to Tortuga or, if I've a mind, see my share tripled at the gaming tables of Franscatis in Paris. But if you sail with us to Guinea—that is, if I don't decide to nail your feet to the floor—it will have to be without pay. Do you see that, Calhoun?”

“Yessir.” I nodded. “Thank you, sir.”

“Good.” After toweling his hands, he took a shirt with frills down the front and a pair of pantaloons from a chest by the door. “I don't hold it against you for being here. Or for being black, but I believe in
excellence
—an unfashionable thing these days, I know, what with headmasters giving illiterate Negroes degrees because they feel too guilty to fail them, then employers giving that same boy a place in the firm since he's got the degree in hand and saying no will bring a gang of Abolitionists down on their necks. But no”—he looked pained—“not on my ship, Mr. Calhoun. Eighty percent of the crews on other ships, damn near
anywhere in America, are
incompetent,
and all because everyone's ready to lower standards of excellence to make up for slavery, or discrimination, and the problem . . . the
problem,
Mr. Calhoun, is, I say, that most of these minorities aren't ready for the titles of quartermaster or first mate precisely because discrimination denied them the training that makes for true excellence—ready to be mediocre mates, I'll grant you that, or middlebrow functionaries, or run-of-the-mill employees, but not to
advance
the position, or make a lasting breakthrough of any kind. O, 'tis a scandal on the ships I've seen, and hardly the fault of the poor, half-trained Negro who hungers like anyone else these days for the glamour of titles and position.” He was grimly quiet for a second, lost in thought, and though it troubles me to tell you this, I almost saw his point, yet only for an instant, for what he said next was enough to straighten a sane man's hair. “Now that I think of it, you remind me of a colored cabin boy named Fortunata who was aboard on my first trip to Madagascar.”

“He's aboard now?”

“Hell, no . . . Christ, no.” Falcon's brows slammed together. “We ate him.”

Slowly I sat forward in my chair. “Sir?”

“Don't look at me like that. I believe in Christian decency and doing right as much as the next man. I have a family, you know, in Virginia, and the man-eating savages I've seen, who make it a practice, disgust me. But there's not a civilized law that holds water”—Falcon's smile flickered briefly—“once you've put to sea.” He held the slow, hurt, sidelong look he'd given me, then began finger-stuffing his nightshirt into breeches that might have been tailored for a child. “We ran into a Spanish galleon and sank her, thank God—we'd have swung for smuggling if we hadn't—but
she left us damaged and with half the crew dead. The foremast was gone, the main yard sprung, and our rigging hung in elflocks. 'Twas an awful fight, I tell you, and we drifted for days without food or fresh water.” Falcon squirreled closer to me, his eyes brighter, wilder than I had yet seen them. “The sea does things to your head, Calhoun, terrible unravelings of belief that aren't in a cultured man's metaphysic. We ate tallow first, then sawdust, stopped up our noses and slurped foul water from the pumps before barbecuing that Negro boy.” Falcon added—sadly, I thought, “He was freshly dead, of course, crushed by a falling mast. He tasted . . . stringy.”

Shivering, I rubbed my arms, wondering if just maybe the crew list for this voyage and the menu might be the same thing for this man. “I'm sorry.”

“So was I.”

It was silent then, Captain Falcon peering back into his memory of deep-sea cannibalism, a faintly bitter smile twisting his lips and jaw to one side, and I saw something—or thought I did—of myself in him and hated that. Cannibalism at sea was common enough, I knew, but he
enjoyed
telling this tale—enjoyed, as I did, any experience that disrupted the fragile, artificial pattern of life on land. Once at home, I realized, he would probably boast of his “experiences” at sea, use them to pull rank on those more timid and less vital than himself, interrupting a dinner with his wife's parson—some psalm-singing milquetoast—to say, “I've no taste for chicken dumplings tonight after eating cabin boy, dear,” and they would be forced to look at him in both horror and fascination; yes, this above all else did Captain Falcon and his species of world conquerors thrive upon: the desire to be fascinating objects in the eyes of others.

Even then, as he quietly reflected and paced, tapping the end of his nose, he sneaked a look at me to see with how much reverence or revulsion—it didn't matter either way since both fed the ego—I regarded him. More of the latter, I daresay, but for a man like this—who was so full of himself that he could not speak slowly or without collapsing one sentence into another, the words spilling out in a rush of brilliant confusion—for an American empire builder even my revulsion was enough to make him feel singular, special, unique.

“Have that mama's boy Mr. Cringle find you a hammock,” said he, “and tell Squibb to put you to work in the kitchen. You'll be his shifter and keep the coppers supplied with water and clean. You won't turn a guinea on this trip, Calhoun, but I'll wager you'll be a man's man when we dock again in New Orleans.”

“Thank you, sir.” I extended my hand. “Like you, sir?”

“Like me?” It seemed to startle him. “Don't be silly.” He barely touched my palm with his fingers. “No, never like me, Calhoun.”

That was reassuring to me, though he would never realize it. I turned and walked slowly to where Cringle stood on watch, for I was still very weak in the knees, and my stomach had not stabilized either, continuing to chew upon itself as the mate led me through a hatchway on the main deck, then farther down, well below the ship's waterline, to a soggy pit that assaulted my senses with the odor of old piss riding on the air beside the sickly-sweet stench of decaying timbers. This wet cavity had a name: the orlop, an ammonia-smelling hold with little light and less air, where hammocks swung from mildewed beams and where cargo—sea chests and cable—was stored. He gave me a footlocker
and gear, and showed me how to fashion a hammock from sailcloth, but seeing these berths I felt sicker than before. Isadora's cat-ridden rooms were intolerable, no question of that, but in the
Republic's
orlop only an inch of plank separated my boots from the bottom of the sea. “It's bloody dangerous below,” Cringle said, and you didn't need a degree in maritime science to see why.

Down there, in the leaking, wishbone-shaped hull, the fusty hold looked darker than the belly of Jonah's whale; it was divided into a maze of low, layered compartments much like the cross section of an archaeological dig—level upon level of crawl spaces, galleys, and cramped cells so small we barely had enough room to turn around—and, once the forge was going, the forecastle cookroom, where I was to work, was hotter than the griddles of Hell. Cockroaches I saw everywhere. And rats. All this, however, was like a hotel suite when compared to the head. It consisted of twelve splintery boards in the bows—a shipboard
pissoir
impossible to use in a rough sea because the foul, malarial soup of human feces from intestines twisted by flux flew up round your feet and splattered overhead when the ship met a head sea. “Either this,” Cringle said, keeping his mouth covered with one hand, “or swing your black arse over the side, as the skipper and I do.” His eyes watering, he motioned me to climb back up. “After a month that side of the ship's so rank the authorities at Bangalang make us clean it before we can put to port.”

All in all, she was a typical ship, I learned those first few days from Cringle, and by this he meant she was stinking and wet, with sea scurvy and god-awful diseases rampant; but even queerer than all this—strange to me, at least—the
Republic
was physically unstable. She was perpetually flying
apart and re-forming during the voyage, falling to pieces beneath us, the great sails ripping to rags in high winds, the rot, cracks, and parasites in old wood so cancerously swift, springing up where least expected, that Captain Falcon's crew spent most of their time literally rebuilding the
Republic
as we crawled along the waves. In a word, she was, from stem to stern, a process. She would not be, Cringle warned me, the same vessel that left New Orleans, it not being in the nature of any ship to remain the same on that thrashing Void called the Atlantic. (Also called the Ethiopic Ocean by some, owing to the trade.) And a seaman's first duty was to keep her afloat at any cost.